2012

In a notoriously litigious country like the Philippines, it’s bewildering that the government coupled a law targeting so-called cybercrimes like cybersex, child pornography, identity theft, and spamming with the hoary and over-used concept of libel. And no matter how abusive those crimes may be, it’s an even bigger mystery why the government felt it should suspend…

On September 11, a Cambodian journalist named Hang Serei Odom was found dead in an abandoned vehicle. Missing since September 9, the reporter with the local Vorakchun Khmer Daily newspaper had suffered several axe blows to the head.

This week, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh marked his 80th birthday. He spent the day, Wednesday, in the company of family and at public events, according to news reports. “There are no celebrations. He prefers to be with his family in the morning–then work as usual,” Singh’s spokesman told the media.

Although it is the world’s largest democracy, India has retained its colonial-era sedition law. But with a national debate ensuing after the arrest of 25-year-old political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi on the antiquated sedition charge and others, members of the Indian government have been forced to do some soul-searching.

On September 12, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung issued an administrative order–number 7169–accusing us, Danlambao, of “publishing information that is false, fabricated, and untruthful to slander the leadership of the nation, to agitate the people against the Party and the State, to cause doubts and create bad publicity reducing the people’s trust in the…

It doesn’t take a baseball bat to silence a reporter in Japan–increasingly the blunt weapon being wielded by corporations, power brokers, and politicians is the court gavel. In May of this year, a writer for the weekly magazine Shukan Kinyobi was sued by one of Japan’s most powerful nuclear industry figures, for a total of…

It was only a matter of time before Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s physical absence from the public view was accompanied by his disappearance from cyberspace. The characters “Jinping” from his name were censored today from searches of Sina’s microblog service Weibo, according to the Fei Chang Dao blog. Where else but China does a…