Asia

  
A police officer stands guard as protesters gather in the city of Shifang. (Reuters/Petar Kujundzic)

Shallow victory for China’s journalists, protesters

Shi Junrong, Xi’an Evening News bureau chief in the city of Wei’an, ran into trouble recently after he reported on the costly brand of luxury cigarettes favored by local officials. He announced on his microblog that the paper suspended him soon after, according to the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia.

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The New York Times takes on China’s censors

Well, that didn’t take long. Just days after The New York Times’ soft launch of its Chinese-language edition and accompanying microblog accounts, Berkeley-based China Digital Times website reports that the @nytchinese Sina Weibo feed is no longer accessible in China, along with two accounts hosted by Netease and Sohu. We couldn’t pull them up this…

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In China, Internet users have been blocked from accessing the website of the Bloomberg news agency. (AFP/Ed Jones)

China blocks Bloomberg for political report

New York, June 29, 2012–Chinese censors should unblock the website of the Bloomberg news agency, which became inaccessible today following a story on the vice president’s family and its financial assets, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

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Can Pakistan’s corrupt media be checked?

With ratings driving the profits of media channels, journalists and political talk show hosts are being motivated to stir up controversy at any cost. Meanwhile, the professionals who believe in credibility, objectivity, and honesty as essential parts of ethical journalism are becoming sidelined.

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Sri Lankan police raid offices of two news websites

New York, June 29, 2012–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in Sri Lanka to immediately stop harassing news outlets. Police in Colombo raided the offices of two opposition news websites today, arresting nine people and confiscating equipment, according to news reports.

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What China’s Weibo censorship does, and does not, reveal

A flurry of research on Weibo censorship underscores what we already know about the Chinese company Sina’s microblog service–with a few surprises thrown in. 

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Armed men shoot at the offices of Pakistan’s Aaj TV

New York, June 25, 2012–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns today’s attack on the offices of a Pakistani television outlet and calls on authorities to immediately investigate the attack and bring the perpetrators to justice.

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(Google)

What to do if Google warns of state-sponsored attack

Some journalists continue to receive the warning from Google about state-sponsored attacks that we mentioned last week. The message appears on top of logged-in services like Gmail. Occasionally it will disappear for a few hours and then reappear, but there is no way to remove it.

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Patients suffering from malaria crowd a ward of a government hospital in India. (AP/Rafiq Maqbool)

Dangerous disease–the unexpected threat

Last week, Tarun Sehrawat, a 22-year-old Indian photographer for Tehelka magazine, died from cerebral malaria and its complications, according to several of his colleagues and media accounts. He had returned, ill, from a shooting assignment with Tehelka’s reporter Tusha Mittal in May. The team had been covering the ongoing Maoist revolt in Chhattisgarh in central India and…

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Don’t punish Chinese restrictions with more restrictions

The Committee to Protect Journalists is watching with concern the progress of H.R. 2899, the Chinese Media Reciprocity Act of 2011, which is under discussion Wednesday in front of the Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement. The bill seeks to reduce the number of visas available to journalists (and their families) working in the United…

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