Censored

New York, July 13, 2009–Chinese police should halt the detentions of journalists reporting on ethnic violence in Xinjiang and reveal the whereabouts of a Uighur academic and Internet commentator who is missing and reportedly detained in Beijing, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Dear Mr. President: We are writing to express our alarm at your administration’s increasing restrictions on the Nigerien private press. We are concerned by the ongoing censorship of stories about the public opposition to your plans for a constitutional amendment that would scrap presidential term limits.

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…

New York, July 6, 2009–A criminal court has suspended a newspaper that reported on a horse-racing scandal, upholding a 2008 ruling. Its editor and publisher were also fined.

New York, July 2, 2009–At least 24 journalists remain jailed in Iran, according to the latest CPJ research, while the government has instituted a broad and intrusive censorship regime.

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. 

New York, June 30, 2009–Honduran military personnel briefly detained seven journalists, temporarily shut down several local broadcasters, and intermittently blocked the broadcast signals of international news channels in the aftermath of the weekend coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya. The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on those in power in Honduras to allow the…

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…

There should be no doubt that the government is continuing its offensive against the media following its military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). On Wednesday, Media Minister Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena confirmed what had been rumored for more than a week: The defunct Press Council, which was put to rest in 2002,…