Asia

Taipei, August 22, 2018–The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to renew the visa of BuzzFeed’s China bureau chief, Megha Rajagopalan, according to a tweet from Rajagopalan and news reports.

Bangkok, August 21, 2018–Two former Radio Free Asia journalists were granted bail in Cambodia today by Phnom Penh’s Municipal Court, according to news reports. Uon Chhin, a videographer, and Yeang Sothearin, previously a news editor at the U.S. Congress-funded station, were arrested on November 14, 2017 and held in pre-trial detention until their release today.…

Washington, D.C., August 20, 2018–Nepal’s government must repeal or amend the new criminal code that came into effect on August 17 to remove provisions that severely threaten press freedom, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Bangkok, August 20, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the recent abuse of imprisoned Vietnamese videographer Nguyen Van Hoa, and called on Vietnamese authorities to stop beating and harassing jailed journalists.

In 2010, after four years of offering Chinese users a heavily censored version of its search engine, Google decided it would no longer block search results at the request of the Chinese state. “Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism,” Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, told The New York Times at the time, adding that…

Washington, D.C., August 16, 2018–The Malaysian parliament today repealed a law imposing criminal penalties for “fake news” that had been enacted earlier this year by the previous government of Prime Minister Najib Razak, according to news reports.

Voice of America Mandarin Service correspondent Yibing Feng and his Chinese assistant, Allen Ai, were detained for about six hours on August 13, 2018, by security personnel after they tried to conduct an interview in Jinan, Shandong Province.

New York, August 13, 2018– Mohammad Daud Anwari, a media technician for the state-run broadcaster Radio Television Afghanistan, was killed on August 10 during an attack by the Taliban on Tape-e-Television, an area of Ghazni city where many local media antennas are located, the Afghan Journalist Safety Committee (AJSC) reported.

New Delhi, August 9, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned a brutal attack on photojournalist Pravin Indrekar by police in the Indian state of Gujarat, and called on the state authorities to withdraw charges of looting and rioting that police filed against him.

New York, August 9, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Maldives authorities to withdraw fines against and stop targeting the opposition-aligned broadcaster Raajje TV. The Maldives Broadcasting Commission yesterday fined Raajje TV 2 million Maldivian rufiyaa (US$130,000)– the largest amount it can impose– for airing a politician’s statement made at an opposition demonstration…