2005-2014

Pressure is mounting on the outlawed Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP) to substantiate its charges after the insurgent outfit claimed to have attacked a senior journalist in Manipur for having part of an extortionist gang. QUICK DENIAL: Militant organisations like the Revolutionary People's Front (RPF), United National Liberation Front (UNLF), Peoples Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK)...

WASHINGTON, Feb 16 (Reuters) - U.S. communications regulators should quickly relax ownership restrictions on the radio and broadcast television industry, Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on communications, said on Thursday. Upton, a Michigan Republican, cited the proliferation of broadcast stations, cable, satellite television and radio and the Internet as...

BEIJING - China on Thursday defended its right to police the Internet, one day after four American technology giants appeared before Congress on charges that they collaborated with Beijing to crush free speech online in return for market access. "It is normal for countries to manage the Internet in accordance with law and to guide its development in a healthy and orderly fashion," Chinese Foreign...

The decision by Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (Centre) to issue an apology for the appearance on a Finnish website of the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad was Vanhanen's own. In his statement, issued on Tuesday while the Prime Minister was attending the Winter Olympics in Torino, Vanhanen used stronger language than many Foreign Ministry civil servants would have considered sensible...

The trial of two men charged with killing Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov has been postponed again – this time following a bomb alert, news agency RIA Novosti reported. "The hearings adjourned after a bailiff announced a bomb threat," defence attorney, Ruslan Koblev, said. He said the alert came when Public Attorney Dmitry Shokhin began presenting the charges. The trial has been postponed to

The giants of the Internet have been hauled up and accused of colluding with China's secret police and censors to wield a "cyber sledgehammer of repression". At a hearing of the US House international relations subcommittee, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Google were repeatedly accused of collusion with an oppressive regime, and of selling out the principles of democracy and free speech for...

Jill Carroll, a 28-year-old freelance reporter on assignment for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted on January 7, 2006 in Baghdad. Carroll received her bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1999. In 2002, Carroll moved to Jordan — six months before the Iraq war started in March 2003 — "to learn as much about the region as possible before the...

China has decided to allow the re-opening of an investigative newspaper shut down last month, its editor has said. The Bingdian (Freezing Point) will hit news stands on 1 March, Li Datong said. But he said Communist Party officials in charge of the weekly would not allow him and his deputy to work there. The news comes two days after prominent Communist Party elders issued a rare open letter to...

STRASBOURG, France, Feb. 15 – In the face of attacks against foreigners in the Muslim world by violent critics of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the European Union's chief executive said Wednesday that Europe had to fight for its core European values, including freedom of speech. "We have to stick very much to these values," said José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission....

A GERMAN newspaper has published a cartoon depicting the Iranian football team dressed as suicide bombers, opening up a new front in the row over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Denmark. The Iranian embassy immediately demanded an apology from Der Tagesspiegel. The German cartoon showed four Iranian players at this year's World Cup in Germany with explosives attached to their...