ATR

It was well past mid-day in Eastleigh, a shanty district on the east side of Nairobi, Kenya. The billows of dust rising from the rock-scarred road showed a government that had long lost interest in the neighborhood. A young man, struggling with horribly dry conditions, was fighting with his patrons. “Welahi, today’s khat is so…

Cape Town, South Africa, June 18, 2013–All parties in Zimbabwe’s government of national unity must respect the responsibility of journalists to document events and report the views of citizens, especially in the run-up to the country’s elections in July, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. In four different cases this month, reporters have been…

The media landscape in Burma is more open than ever, as President Thein Sein releases imprisoned journalists and abolishes the former censorship regime. But many threats and obstacles to truly unfettered reporting remain, including restrictive laws held over from the previous military regime. The wider government’s commitment to a more open reporting environment is in…

Journalists are back to work at Uganda’s leading privately owned daily, The Monitor, after a 10-day siege of their newsroom by police. But that does not mean it is business as usual for the nation’s press. The paper’s owners at the Nation Media Group evidently begged and negotiated for its reopening–signaling to other media houses…

The coverage of the Taksim Square protests will not be remembered as a moment of glory for a number of Turkish mainstream media. While demonstrators were being tear-gassed and beaten by police a week ago, CNN Türk was airing a documentary on penguins and Habertürk had a debate on mental illness. 

Singapore’s Internet community is in backlash since the government announced on May 28 a new licensing scheme for “news websites”–a term it did not define–arguing that digital news platforms ought to be regulated on par with offline media. The government said the scheme would take effect June 1.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A court in Thailand ruled today that Italian photojournalist Fabio Polenghi was shot and killed by a bullet fired by a soldier during a government crackdown on street protesters on May 19, 2010.  The inquest ruling established the circumstances surrounding his death but failed to apportion blame to any individual military commanders or…