Paul Steiger’s challenge: Double your donation to CPJ
We want to thank all of you who responded to the challenge set out by our chairman, Paul Steiger, calling on individuals who care about independent media to support CPJ. His e-mail has already generated an unprecedented response, but we still have a ways to go before reaching our goal. Paul has offered a $25,000…
CPJ condemns assault, harassment of Cuban bloggers
We issued the following statement in response to reports that Cuban bloggers Yoani Sánchez, Claudia Cadelo, and Omar Luís Pardo Lazo were detained, assaulted and harassed by state security agents on their way to a peaceful march in Havana. Details of the incident were published on the Web site of Global Voices.
Toronto’s Citizen Lab uses forensics to fight online censors
A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and…
Chinese authorities detain Uighur Web site managers
New York, October 30, 2009—Chinese police have reportedly arrested two Uighur journalists who published online about Uighur issues in Xinjiang, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Chinese authorities blamed local and international Uighur Web sites for fueling July’s ethnic violence, according to international news reports.
In Iran, a blogging insurgency challenges regime
I’m a cartoonist so even when writing a story or working as radio correspondent, I’m checking out the empty half of the glass. As blogger it’s no different; my inner cartoonist lurks in the dark. I’ve followed the Iranian “Bloggistan” since day one, and started my Persian blog after learning how to type. Funny? Not…
A Tunisian blogger speaks out: ‘The candles are lit’
My country’s government brags unabashedly that it has not passed any laws that require government authorization to establish an electronic publication or a Web site or a blog on the Internet. Those that cheerlead for this government rely on this point to propagate the lie they call “the freedom to publish electronically” in Tunisia.
An Egyptian blogger crosses red lines
When the Gulf War broke out in 1990, the world watched the horrors of conflict on live television. It caused a massive leap in media. When the Internet became widely accessible later that decade, the exchange of information in a single second signaled the dawn of another new age. News not only proliferated, it could…
Gabon’s bloggers struggle to take hold
It’s been a couple of weeks since I left Gabon, and a month since elections to pick a successor to Omar Bongo, who ruled Africa’s fourth-largest oil producer for 41 years. There are unresolved questions about the ballot count and the number of people killed in post-election violence.
Online journalist harassed, threatened in Moscow
New York, September 30, 2009—Moscow police must immediately investigate and bring to an end a campaign of harassment orchestrated in part by a pro-Kremlin organization against online journalist Aleksandr Podrabinek, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Honduran radio station goes online after suspension
Early Monday morning, military and police personnel forcefully shut down the Tegucigalpa-based Radio Globo under a decree by the de facto government that suspends civil liberties, CPJ reported. Today, Honduran and international media outlets said the radio station was being broadcast online.