Asia

Chinese authorities have, unusually, welcomed foreign reporters to Xinjiang since ethnic rioting broke out on Sunday in Urumqi between the Uighur minority and Han Chinese. A Beijing-based agency has even offered to facilitate travel, according to one writer who blogs from Shanghai. (CPJ hasn’t confirmed his story. Have any other reporters been approached in this…

Security forces were protecting, rather than harassing, international journalists covering riots in northwestern Xinjiang this week–a welcome change. A few have reported official interference since Sunday. But during previous outbursts of ethnic unrest in China’s Tibetan and Uighur autonomous regions, security forces have repeatedly antagonized and expelled the foreign press corps. Foreign reporters this week…

Tahir Ludin, David Rohde, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, were kidnapped on November 10, 2008, after Rohde was invited to interview a Taliban commander in Logar province outside Kabul. Ludin, an Afghan journalist, was acting as Rohde’s translator. Rohde was on book leave from The New York Times at the time of their abduction. According…

New York, July 2, 2009–The Committee to Protect Journalists rejects the politically motivated lese majeste charges filed on Tuesday by a private citizen against board members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT). Violations of lese majeste laws are a criminal offense in Thailand, punishable by three to 15 years in prison.

China’s Internet censors have blinked. In the face of opposition ranging from PC makers abroad to bloggers at home, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has backed away, at least for now, from a hastily conceived directive that all new PCs sold from July 1 should carry filtering software. 

Sri Lankan Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa ordered Britain’s Channel 4 News Asia correspondent Nick Paton-Walsh, cameraman Matt Jasper, and producer Bessie Du, to leave the country on May 10, 2009, according to Channel 4 and international news reports. 

U.S. troops arrested radio journalist Noorajan Baheer on June 2, 2009, and detained him for two nights, according to Pajhwok Afghan News agency and Agence France-Presse. 

New York, June 29, 2009–Police in the Philippines must step up investigations into journalist killings following the shooting death of radio commentator Jonathan Petalvero on Saturday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Petalvero is the fourth Philippine journalist killed this month, the third to be targeted for murder.

A self-styled army of Internet users, Anonymous Netizens, has announced its intention to wage war on government censors, starting July 1. Global Voices Online has the text in English; it’s also here in Chinese. Whether their scheduled attack (its nature is not specified) will be felt or not, the irritation of the document’s drafters is…