Reporters Without Borders is having difficulty establishing whether Cameroonian mobile phone operator MTN’s Twitter via SMS service has finally been restored after being blocked for about 10 days at the government’s behest. Contradictory statements are being made. Many Tweets suggested the service had been restored in practice. But an MTN representative said the contrary.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has said the killing of Mohammad 'Mo' Nabbous in the city of Benghazi highlights the increasing risks to the safety of journalists covering the Libyan conflict.
Nabbous, who ran the Voice of Libya channel (Libya al-Hurra), died on Saturday during the attack of forces loyal to Colonel Moammar Gaddafi on Benghazi. The IFJ is also concerned over reports that staff of the AFP news agency and the international broadcaster Aljazeera are missing or in detention. Nabbous became the second journalist killed in Libya after the murder of Aljazeera cameraman Ali Hassan Al Jaber who was shot dead by unknown attackers while returning to Benghazi from reporting on an opposition protest.

The Libyan government should release all Libyan and foreign journalists detained because of their reporting and allow them to cover the crisis in Libya freely, Human Rights Watch has said. Since anti-government protests began in Libya on 15 February 2011, the government has harassed, detained, and beaten journalists trying to cover the story. A Libyan journalist and a Qatari cameraman have been killed by gunfire in unclear circumstances.

Google has created a way for it’s users to continue chatting with friends via Gmail, even when they’re away from their computers. As a Gmail user, you can send SMSes to your friends for free, and when your friends reply, they will be charged the same as a regular SMS.

Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, 6 HTC Wildfire mobile phones, energy, expertise in training citizen journalists, Small World News is working to share stories from Libya with the larger world. Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other main stream media outlet has been able to get.

Publishing US diplomatic cables helped shape uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has said. The computer expert, who infuriated the US government by publishing thousands of the secret cables, said the leaks may have persuaded some authoritarian regimes that they could not rely on US support if military force was used on protesters.

The Defence and Security Forces (FDS) loyal to Laurent Gbagbo on 15 March renewed their threats and attack on L’Intelligent d’Abidjan, an independent daily newspaper. The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that the Anti-Riot Squad (BAE) wing of the FDS surrounded the neighborhood of the newspaper’s head office in Angré (Cocody). This affected the operations of the newspaper and movement of the journalists within and outside of the premises.

‘In a country where the opposition isn’t strong and structured enough to provide a counterweight to a repressive regime which flouts the principles of democracy and good governance, the media provides a rare space for some amount of freedom of expression. But now, the media have also become part of the Togolese regime’s blacklist,’ writes Bernard Bokodjin.

The United States helped to investigate allegations and prepare corruption charges against a former Bank of Tanzania director of personnel and administration, Amatus Liyumba, according to leaked diplomatic cables. In the latest Dar es Salaam cables released by the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks, US deputy ambassador D. Purnell Delly revealed how a team of investigators from New York City’s Department of Investigation helped Tanzanian authorities to prepare the groundwork for the high profile prosecution two years ago.

Recently WikiLeaks revealed that Swaziland had tried to acquire arms from the UK. It was reported by The Guardian - and later local newspapers - that Britain had blocked a $60 million sale of helicopters, armoured cars and machine guns to Swaziland, fearing the weapons could end up in Iran, at least according to US diplomatic cables.

Benin’s media regulatory body, the Higher Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAAC) on 10 March suspended, for a week, nine privately-owned newspapers in the country over false and abusive publications. The newspapers have been barred from publishing since 14 March.They are, however, expected back on the newsstands on 20 March.

Since the unveiling of the 2011 political campaigns, the Nigerian media landscape has been very busy. Nigeria comprises 36 states and Abuja, and there is at least one television station each, as well as a handful of privately owned television houses. Lagos State, being home to almost every ethnicity in Nigeria, has the biggest share of these stations, more so considering its status as the former capital. To avoid political conflicts in campaign strategies, most politicians prefer to go to the private television stations for their television commercials, otherwise known as TVCs, says this article from Free African Media.

'Although the Internet is certainly used by dissidents, it is also used by the authorities to relay regime propaganda and enforce a police state,' says this report from Reporters Without Borders on the use of Twitter and Facebook in recent popular uprisings. 'The Internet remains above all a tool used for the better or the worse. In the most closed countries, it creates a space of freedom which would not otherwise exist. Its potential to disseminate news irritates dictators and eludes traditional censorship methods.'

The government of Swaziland has banned the daily live transmission of BBC Focus on Africa programme after one of the news clips, broadcast through the English channel of the state radio, Swaziland Broadcasting and Information Services (SBIS), was critical of government. The programme broadcast daily in the mornings, mid-day and evenings has been off air for the past week. The state radio has been running apologies to listeners of the programme for its absence, stating that it was due to technical problems.

Amidst the ongoing debate of the role of social media in revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa lies another question: to what degree does Internet access matter in determining the role of the Internet and social media in these revolts? In Egypt and Tunisia, many attribute an important role to online tools while others debate their worth; most observers fall somewhere in the middle, recognising the value of the Internet but remaining realistic about its limitations. This blog post assesses various aspects of the debate.

Google is recording record growth in sub-Saharan Africa, benefiting from 50 per cent annual growth in search requests coming from the region. At a conference in Senegal hosted by the search engine giant, Business Development Associate Ayite Gaba also revealed that four out of every 10 Google search requests come from a mobile phone.

A press freedom watchdog took Egypt and Tunisia off its online censorship blacklist following their recent revolutions and awarded a web media award to Tunisian news bloggers. In Egypt, 'the heavy filtering (of Internet sites) at the height of the revolution has reportedly ended,' said Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in an annual report on the eve of its World Day Against Cyber-Censorship.

At the top of a tarred road in this tense Abidjan district, forces loyal to internationally recognised president Alassane Ouattara man a roadblock. At the other end, troops backing strongman Laurent Gbagbo stand guard. In between lie two bodies, the latest casualties of a bloody stand-off between the rival camps.

The presence of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels has led to deteriorating security conditions for aid workers and civilians in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo’s two Uelé districts, where 31 attacks took place in January alone – as many as in the last three months of 2010. On 6 March, six World Food Programme (WFP) trucks were ambushed by a group of 30 men a few kilometers south of Banda, on the road to Ango, in Bas Uelé district. The vehicles were part of a 17-strong convoy. The attackers made off with sacks of flour and drivers’ personal effects.

Unidentified gunmen killed an Al-Jazeera cameraman and wounded his colleague near the eastern rebel-held city of Benghazi in an ambush on Saturday, according to the Qatar-based satellite station. This is the first confirmed death reported in the Libyan conflict, the Committee to Protect Journalists has said.