Al Jazeera 500 million Qatari riyals (US$137 million) from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa. By securing its funding through loans or grants rather than direct government subsidies, the channel seeks to maintain independent editorial policy. The channel began broadcasting in late 1996, with many staff joining from the BBC World Service's Saudi-co-owned Arabic-language TV station, which had shut down on 1 April 1996 after two years of operation because of censorship demands by the Saudi Arabian government. The Al Jazeera logo is a decorative representation of the network's name written using Arabic calligraphy. It was selected by the station's
Al Jazeera in its coverage of the Syrian crisis, Al Jazeera America cable news channel provided viewers with content that often resembles what Americans saw on other U.S. cable news outlets. The Indian government banned the Al Jazeera TV channel in April 2015 for five telecast days as it repeatedly displayed disputed maps of India. The Surveyor General of India (SGI) had observed that in some of the maps displayed by Al Jazeera, "a portion of Indian territory of Jammu and Kashmir (i.e. PoK and Aksai Chin) has not been shown as a part of Indian territory." According to the statement, the