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25 March 2011

Center for Public Integrity to launch daily investigative newspaper

The Centre for Public Integrity is launching a daily digital investigative newspaper that will go live in about a month. The new product, likely to be called iWatch or Integrity Watch, will feature 10-20 original investigative stories per day about corruption, political ethics, corporate accountability, “truth watching,” and waste, fraud and abuse. Excerpts: [ Link] The nonprofit Centre for Public...

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25 March 2011

Ukraine indicts Kuchma in Gongadze murder

Eleven years after the brutal murder of online journalist Georgy Gongadze, Ukrainian prosecutors on Thursday indicted former President Leonid Kuchma on abuse-of-office charges in connection with the slaying, local and international news reports said. According to the online news outlet Ukrainska Pravda—which Gongadze founded and edited before his murder—prosecutors indicted Kuchma on charges of...

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25 March 2011

Yemen shuts Al-Jazeera offices; journalists beaten

Yemeni authorities on Thursday ordered Al-Jazeera's offices shut and its journalists stripped of accreditation, escalating a week-long series of reprisals against the station that has included beatings, expulsions, raids, and death threats. New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the government's decision to shut Al-Jazeera and urged authorities to reverse the...

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25 March 2011

Kazakh investigators cast Pavlyuk murder as robbery

New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Kazakh authorities to thoroughly investigate journalism as a motive in the murder of Kyrgyz journalist Gennady Pavlyuk. Pavlyuk, better known by his pen name, Ibragim Rustambek, died in the hospital on December 22, 2009, after having been thrown from an upper-story window of an apartment building in Kazakhstan...

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25 March 2011

On notorious anniversary, Philippine journalist shot

Manila police must thoroughly investigate the murder of radio anchor Maria Len Fores Somera, who was shot Thursday near her home in Malabon City, a suburb of Manila. An unidentified man shot Somera, a DZME station host, in the back of the head before fleeing in a Jeep, according to the Associated Press. Some local news reports said there were two assailants. Somera, a 44-year-old mother of three...

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25 March 2011

Belarus: Increased harassment of journalists on eve of Freedom Day

Journalists Aleksandr Lomashkin and Ales Asiptsu were arrested in separate incidents Thursday, on the eve of “Dzen Voly” (Freedom Day), an event that is traditionally celebrated by the Belarusian opposition, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. A Russian journalist and founder of the human rights website Svoboda, Lomashkin was forced to get off a train from...

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25 March 2011

Syrian authorities impose news blackout on crackdown in Deraa

Syrian authorities have imposed censorship on national and foreign news media seeking to cover events in the southern city of Deraa. The security forces have blocked access to the city so that there is no one to witness their ruthless crackdown on the protests that have been taking place there during the past few days, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...

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25 March 2011

Mexico: Newspaper reporter missing in Veracruz state

Noel López Olguín, a journalist based in Mexico's eastern state of Veracruz, has been missing for the past two and a half weeks., according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). López works for local weeklies Horizonte and Noticias de Acayucan and the daily La Verdad. Gerardo Perdomo, the head of the Veracruz State Commission for the Defence of Journalists, told the...

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25 March 2011

Facebook user in Zimbabwe jailed for message supporting Arab revolutions

Internet user Vikas Mavhudzi has been detained for the past month on a charge of advocating the government’s overthrow in a message he posted on Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Facebook page. He is to remain in prison until his trial, for which no date has yet been set, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported Mavhudzi, 39, posted a message...

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25 March 2011

Death threats followed by shooting attacks on journalists in Iraqi Kurdistan

Two Kurdish opposition journalists have escaped murder attempts in the past three days in Erbil and Dohuk, places controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, while other journalists have been briefly detained or have been the target of a kidnap attempt. Many report that they are continuing to receive death threats by SMS, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières...

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