Police on Friday raided a major private radio broadcaster, seizing key studio and transmitting components after the station defied a government order to halt newscasts, an official said.
Kantipur Radio channel -- which belongs to the country's largest private media group -- was raided by dozens of police on Friday, said Amit Dhakal, news editor of the Kathmandu Post, the English daily published by the Kantipur group.
Dhakal said police took away an incoder, a satellite modem and digital audio recorder, among other things, at the station, which broadcasts from the capital, Kathmandu.
The raid came hours after hundreds of journalists demonstrated in Nepal's capital on Friday to protest a the law that allows the station to be shut down and imposes a two-year prison sentence for publishing or broadcasting any criticism of absolute ruler King Gyanendra.
"We have decided to defy the law and challenge it in court," said Shiva Gaunle of the Federation of Nepalese Journalists, which organized the protest. "We have taken to the street to force the King to repeal the black ordinance," Gaunle said.
Since the king seized absolute power on Feb. 1, criticism of the royal government and security forces has been banned, along with independent reporting on the country's insurgency. Dozens of reporters have been arrested since then, and six are believed to still be behind bars.
The new law provides for a 10-fold hike in the maximum fine on newspapers and journalists to 500,000 rupees (US$7,000) if they criticized the royal government. It gives the government the power to revoke journalists' press accreditation.
Friday's demonstration was also joined by doctors, lawyers and teachers, who said the clampdown on media was a violation of constitutional rights.
"We still urge the king to revoke this draconian law," said Sudha Sharma, chairwoman of Nepal Medical Association.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS