A letter found in Singh’s pocket said he had been killed because he was carrying out government work without the PLFI’s permission. Singh also ran a construction business in the area. The letter, which was allegedly signed by members of the People’s Liberation Front of India (PLFI), a breakaway Maoist faction, said: “No one can work in the area without approval of the PLFI,” according to news reports.

The Hindu reported that Singh was allegedly killed in a dispute over collection of a levy on a road-building contract.

News reports said Singh had written about activities of the rebels for the past 16 years. M Taleem Vannan, the superintendent of police of Khunti district, said police were investigating the murder.

Chenh’s blog is very popular in Vietnam although it is blocked by the authorities and can be accessed only by using censorship circumvention software. Reporters Without Borders has described it as “an example to follow” in a country where freedom of information is openly flouted.

The Act can send a person to jail for three years for sending an email or other electronic message that “causes annoyance or inconvenience”

Before her arrest, Ms Vindhyalaya had alleged that Mr Mohan was targeting her due to “political enmity” and had “threatened the local people against deposing before a team of PUCL which had gone on a fact-finding mission against the legislator”.

One of Ms Liu’s lawyers went to Xinyu City in China’s south-eastern Jiangxi province to see her, but police denied the request, citing national security reasons.

Myo Zin had served less than a year of his original sentence- handed down during the Junta’s rule for writing for various exiled media outlets before being granted amnesty under the new government in January 2012. He served less than a year of a decade-long sentence,

Organized via Facebook, the picnics were due to take place in Saigon, Hanoi, Nha Trang and other cities. In Nha Trang, the public security department quickly blocked access to the designated venue in a park. Barbed wire was deployed around the park and the police hit participants with sticks and steel bars.

The police were present in large numbers in Hanoi but did not prevent the participants from gathering beside Lake Hoan Kiem, in the city centre.

Pham Thanh Nghien, a blogger who has been under house arrest in Hai Phong since her release in September 2012, after four years in prison, tried to show her support for the movement by organizing a picnic in her garden with her mother.

But when she began reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights out loud, she and her mother were attacked by the police officers responsible for keeping them under surveillance.

In Saigon, the bloggers Nguyen Sy Hoanh (“Hanh Nhan”) and Nguyen Hoang Vi were able to organize a gathering in a public park and distribute copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Vietnamese. They were allowed to talk in small groups for an hour until evicted by municipal employees in civilian dress on the pretext that the grass needed watering.

The municipal employees used force when they objected to being made to leave. Hoanh and Vi were badly beaten and arrested. The police held Vi at a police station until 3 a.m. on 6 May and confiscated her smartphone and tablet computer without issuing any receipt.

Police officers also beat Vi’s sister, Nguyen Thao Chi, and mother, Nguyen Thi Cuc, breaking three of Chi’s teeth and causing Cuc to lose consciousness. A policeman then stubbed a cigarette out on her forehead. The blogger Vo Quoc Anh was also arrested, questioned and beaten by the police.

Other bloggers such as Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh (“Me Nam”) whose homes are closely watched were prevented from attending these gatherings. Their Internet and phone connections were disconnected in advance.

Some 50 security personnel including police and plainclothes agents surrounded the pagoda on Sunday, the Paris-based UBCV-affiliated International Buddhist Information Bureau rights group said in a statement Tuesday.

That morning, the head of the pagoda Thich Vien Hy and UBCV deputy leader Thich Vien Dinh were pushed back inside by a “gang” of plainclothes agents who surrounded their car when they tried to leave the monastery.Security agents refused to provide a police warrant or explanation for why the monks were not allowed to leave, except to say they had “orders from above.”

The local Mongolian herders said that more than 400 square mu (67 acres) of grazing land was leased to the Chinese farmers in 2003 for a term of 10 years, and that when the herders tried to reclaim the land on expiry of the lease, the Chinese land tenants refused to return the land.

The farmers proffered a 20-year lease contract but the herders said it was a fraudulent document.

The nearly 50 farmers insisted on continuing their use of the land and when the herders attempted to stop them from cultivating, they gathered more than 100 personnel with batons and sticks and attacked the local herders.

Seven herders were seriously injured—one suffering brain injury and two left with broken bones. It is alleged that the Chinese local police who arrived at the scene not only refused to stop the violence by the Chinese but participated in severely beating up and arresting the Mongolian herders.

Activists had planned to take to the streets on 4 May in protest at a newly built paraxylene (PX) plant in the Pengzhou suburb of the provincial capital Chengdu, using the anniversary of May Fourth student demonstrations in 1919 and the fifth anniversary of a local movement against the plant.

The plant, owned by state-run PetroChina, has been halted amid safety concerns in the wake of last week’s magnitude-7 earthquake near Sichuan’s Ya’an city that left more than 200 people dead or missing and reignited concerns about the plant’s potential health hazards.

Authorities in Beijing also stepped up surveillance of activists and petitioners, ordinary Chinese who pursue official complaints against the government in the capital, ahead of the sensitive May Fourth Movement anniversary.