2005-2014

More than 140 civil society organisations, including 13 IFEX members, have urged UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to launch an investigation into attacks on freedom of expression and other human rights during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which ended more than a week ago in Tunisia. The groups, in a letter to Annan, said that in the run-up to, and during, the summit, attacks...

Nepal's Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the government not to close a radio station after police raided its premises to prevent it from relaying a BBC interview with Maoist leader Prachanda. More than 500 journalists organised a public meeting to express their solidarity for Radio Sagarmatha in nepal capital Kathmandu on Monday. © Dinesh Wagle/United We Blog A single-bench of justice Badri Kumar...

WASHINGTON -- As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor...

The US department of justice has approved New Times Media's purchase of Village Voice Media. The new company, to be called Village Voice Media, will publish free weekly papers in 17 of the largest US markets, the companies said Monday in a statement. The merger is expected to close in the first quarter of 2006. In a routine notice on the website of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the merger...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the many attacks, threats and other abuses against journalists in several provinces on November 20 and 26 in a continuation of the abuses being committed by the police with impunity since staggered polling in the ongoing Egyptian legislative elections began on November 8. National Democratic Party sympathisers armed with knives fight supporters of the

A policeman has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Philippines journalist Edgar Damalerio in May 2002. Three and a half years after the murder of Edgar Damalerio, the justice system has finally cleared a major hurdle in this case, marked by the murder of three witnesses and impunity for those who instigated the killing. The Cebu regional trial court on Tuesday gave weight to the

The story is this: Yahoo vs. The New York Times . . . or any major newspaper, for that matter. The most visited Web site has steadily morphed from an online directory/search service into a newspaperlike content provider. Eventually, the story line likely also will be Yahoo vs. broadcast media, but for now word content carries the day online. Yahoo has hired its own exclusive columnists and writers...

NEW YORK, Nov 29, 2005 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Lazard Ltd. (LAZ) and the Icahn Group announced today that the Icahn Group has retained Lazard to further analyze various strategic alternatives to maximize the value of all Time Warner Inc. (TWX) shareholders' interests. The Icahn Group is comprised of Icahn Partners, Icahn Partners Master Fund, certain other affiliates of Carl C. Icahn, Franklin...

It's come to this: A single wealthy investor is able to threaten the civic vitality of 32 American metropolitan areas by forcing the sale of their newspapers to new owners in order to satisfy his demand for larger profits. Because those higher returns almost certainly will come at the expense of investigative reporting, independence from advertisers and adequately staffed and skilled newsrooms...

Bruce Sherman, the money manager who has forced the Knight Ridder newspaper chain to put itself up for sale because its stock performance has been crummy, has performance issues of his own. In an irony that's simply wonderful, Sherman and his associates, whose firm is Knight Ridder's biggest shareholder, are virtually certain to get a $300 million performance bonus next summer even though their...