Afghanistan

At least 42 journalists are killed in 2010 as two trends emerge. Suicide attacks and violent street protests cause an unusually high proportion of deaths. And online journalists are increasingly prominent among the victims. A CPJ special report

Relying heavily on vague antistate charges, authorities jail 145 journalists worldwide. Eritrea, Burma, and Uzbekistan are also among the worst jailers of the press. A CPJ special report

New York Times photojournalist Joao Silva lost both his legs when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine in Afghanistan on October 23. "Those of you who know João will not be surprised to learn that throughout this ordeal he continued to shoot pictures," wrote New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller in a memo to staff.

One of two surviving members of the Bang-Bang Club, a group of photographers who covered the unrest in South Africa in the 1990s, Silva, 44, has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, southern Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. He is a father to two young children, Isabel and Gabriel.

Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier, two journalists from the public television channel France 3, along with their Afghan translator, Mohamed Reza, and two assistants, Ghulam and Satar, have been held hostage for 300 days in Afghanistan.

This morning, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that British aid worker Linda Norgrove, who died in a rescue attempt after she was taken hostage in Afghanistan, may have been killed by a U.S. grenade rather than by her Taliban captors, as originally reported.

Until recently, Afghanistan's Internet has been notably free of government censorship. That stems largely from the limited impact and visibility of the Net domestically: The Taliban banned the Internet during its rule, and despite a recent boom in use, the nation has only a million users out of a population of about 29 million. But the Afghan government finally got around to imposing national filters in June, when the Ministry of Communications instructed local ISPs to blacklist websites that promote alcohol, gambling, and pornography, or ones that provide dating and social networking services.

New York, September 24, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes today's release of three journalists detained in Afghanistan over the past week. 

New York, September 22, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the detention of two Afghan journalists seized by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in early-morning raids at their homes this week.

Today we will report another murder of a journalist. This one was in Argentina. The last one we documented was a couple days ago--Alberto Graves Chakussanga was shot in the back in Angola. These tragedies are part of our daily work at CPJ, but this week was different. There have been eight killings of journalists around the globe since September 3, an unusually high number during my three years as an editor here.

New York, September 7, 2010--A well-known TV anchor was found stabbed to death outside his home in Kabul on Sunday, according to international news reports. Sayed Hamid Noori worked for the state network Radio Television Afghanistan and was active in the National Union of Afghan Journalists. In 2004, he served as the spokesman for an opponent of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and remained allied with political opposition groups.