Yemen
News sites blocked by governmentPosted Apr 2 2008
Three Yemeni news web sites were blocked by a government-controlled internet service provider Jan. 19. YemenPortal, YemenHurr and Hour’s News became unavailable to domestic readers, while the sites remained intact outside of the country, English weekly newspaper The Yemen Times reports.
YemenPortal.net, a popular Yemeni news aggregator, displayed the following message on its page: “YemenPortal.net is currently blocked by the authorities and hence is not accessible to the public in Yemen.” YemenPortal founder and administrator Walid Al-Saqaf told CPJ he believes the site was blocked because it posted video footage of national security forces firing at a crowd of protesters in Aden Jan. 13.
The Ministry of Telecommunications denies blocking the web sites, but has not given possible reasons for the incident.
YemenPortal was the first news crawler and search engine in the Arab world, according to the Yemen Times, designed to search and present governmental, international, Arab, and independent news.
Al-Saqqaf has gathered support from other web sites to begin a campaign to pressure the government to stop blocking web sites. The group has set up alternative links to blocked sites that can be accessed in Yemen, for the time being.