For India, celebrations not in order on Singh’s birthday
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.
With new focus on sedition law, India poised at juncture
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.
Danlambao: We will not be silenced
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…
Japan’s independent journalism on trial with Tanaka
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…
China’s Xi Jinping unseen, unsearchable
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…
Shooting investigation stalls in India
CPJ has been monitoring the investigation into the shooting attack on Arunachal Times journalist Tongam Rina outside her office in Itanagar, capital of Arunachal Pradesh state, which left her hospitalized in critical condition this July. Her recovery is progressing, slowly but surely. The police inquiry, however, is not.
Thorning’s chance to press China for media freedom
Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is in China this week to meet with top leaders, according to international news reports. CPJ’s Advocacy and Communications Associate Magnus Ag and Senior Asia Program Researcher Madeline Earp co-wrote an op-ed calling on Thorning–as she is called in the Danish press–to raise the issue of press freedom. An edited…
In Cryptocat, lessons for technologists and journalists
Alhamdulillah! Finally, a technologist designed a security tool that everyone could use. A Lebanese-born, Montreal-based computer scientist, college student, and activist named Nadim Kobeissi had developed a cryptography tool, Cryptocat, for the Internet that seemed as easy to use as Facebook Chat but was presumably far more secure.
Sandhya Eknelygoda speaks for Sri Lanka’s disappeared
When I first met Sandhya Eknelygoda in May 2010 in her home outside Colombo, she was a distressed mother of two young boys whose husband had gone missing. He was last seen four months earlier, just prior to the elections that returned President Mahinda Rajapaksa to power after the end of the decades-long war with…