Environment

In China, state control over the media hasn't become more lax in recent years. Each year brings a new excuse for Communist Party censors to tighten the screws. The year of the rabbit brought the Arab Spring, and fears of a Jasmine Revolution. The year of the dragon brings a major political transition. 

Mikhail Beketov can walk now--using an artificial leg and propping himself on crutches. He's moving around his house in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. It was here, in his front yard, where the newspaper editor was attacked two years and seven months ago. It was in this yard where assailants left him for dead. The fact that Beketov can stand on his own again is testament to the sheer strength of the man, whom friends describe as a born fighter. He could be obstinate, they say, and that's why he would never turn away from what he believes in.

The Japanese government upped the danger rating for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to its highest level, 7, on Tuesday, a month after an earthquake and tsunami devastated the country. It was not yet clear whether the administration or the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, withheld the extent of the risk. But the local media's habitual allegiance to officials who arrange press conferences and companies that buy advertising makes it hard to tell, and freelancers who are eager to probe deeper say their questions have been suppressed.

New York, November 11, 2010--Russia's top investigator, Aleksandr Bastrykin, today ordered the reopening of a probe into a near-lethal November 2008 attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda. Bastrykin's order comes a day after a court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki convicted Beketov of criminally slandering local mayor Vladimir Strelchenko. The conviction, coming at a time when Beketov's assailants are walking free, drew international condemnation.

New York, November 8, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces two attacks on journalists in the Moscow region and calls on authorities to end impunity in crimes against reporters in Russia. Both victims, Oleg Kashin of the business daily Kommersant and Anatoly Adamchuk of the independent weekly Zhukovskiye Vesti, have covered a contentious highway project that would go through a forest in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. Kashin worked on a number of other sensitive subjects as well.

In Moscow, progress is often followed by heartbreak. So it was on the day after our meeting with Russia's top investigator, when we hit the wall of Russia's dysfunctional criminal justice system.

New York, July 27, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists joins with our colleagues in Indonesia in calling for a swift, thorough investigation into the death of Muhammad Syaifullah, the Borneo bureau chief for Kompas, Indonesia’s largest daily newspaper.

He's young, unemployed and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn't spent much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk's description of chemical dumping into a brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air. That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.

Those familiar with Mikhail Beketov’s ordeal describe his survival as nothing short of a miracle. The once fit, towering 51-year-old who campaigned on environmental issues and criticized his city government’s policies through the pages of his newspaper is now gone. But the former editor of Khimkinskaya Pravda, an independent publication that exposed the blunders of the Khimki administration headed by Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko, has a fierce desire to return to normal life, or at least some semblance of it. He has a long way to go and he needs our help.

We issued this statement on the first anniversary of the brutal attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor-in-chief of the Khimki-based independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, who was beaten nearly to death and left in his backyard. Beketov had criticized the Khimki administration’s decision to cut down a vast area of the region’s forest in order to build a highway. As a result of the attack, Beketov underwent a series of surgeries, had a leg and several fingers amputated, and is still hospitalized...