2005-2014

A reporting team of "SAMAA TV", a private news channel, was attacked by unknown armed individuals who detained the crew for over two hours on January 1 in the industrial town of Faisalabad in Pakistan's largest Punjab province, according to delayed reports. The reporting team included reporter Mannan Ashraf, cameraman Salman Ashraf, trainees Muhammad Sajid and Muhammad Saeed, satellite engineer...

Freedom Forum has expressed concern over the treatment suffered by journalists in Sarlahi Sarlahi, Mid-Terai district, on January 2. Earlier in the day, sugarcane farmers had organised a protest across the East-West highway to demand a non-reduction in the minimum price of sugarcane over the previous year. The farmers had erected barriers on the highway to prevent entry of any vehicle during the...

Esdras Amado López, the editor of the Canal 36 news programme "Así se informa", reported that a member of the Honduran Armed Forces threatened to kill him on January 5, near the Honduran Institute for Social Security (Instituto Hondureño de Seguridad Social), just south of the capital Tegucigalpa, according to Comité por la Libre Expresión (C-Libre). In a phone interview with Radio Globo, López...

Britain's ITV News was on Wednesday banned from a police press conference after running a report criticising the police's handling of an investigation into the murder of Joanna Yeates, a landscape architect whose body was found on the outskirts of Bristol last month, the Guardian newspaper reported. Avon & Somerset police have complained to Britain's broadcast media regulator, Ofcom, about what...

Hungary's newly-instituted media council (NMHH) took over an inquiry into Tilos radio station launched in September, according to a letter from the council on the station's website. The inquiry relates to the station's broadcast of two songs by American rapper Ice-T in its 17:30 programme. According to the letter from the NMHH, the songs' lyrics were objectionable, and violated sections 5/B. (3)...

As leading European Union (EU) officials prepare for a mission to Hungary, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the European group of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), has urged President Manuel Barroso and his team to analyse and change the country's controversial new media law which the Federation claims is a breach of European law and violates principles enshrined in...

Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunga, a courageous, talented and iconoclastic journalist, was shot dead in Colombo by a death squad two years ago. His murder is still unpunished. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) saysit is appalled by the fact that the Sri Lankan government is doing nothing to solve this murder and in fact is clearly preventing the truth from

The year 2010 ushered in a number of major setbacks for the media across the globe, says the International Press Institute (IPI), from the numerous journalists murdered in Pakistan and Honduras to the oppressive media laws passed in South Africa. But what did IPI consider to be the number one press freedom event of 2010? The January 12 earthquake in Haiti claimed nearly 300,000 lives, including...

The former editorial manager and concessionaire of the Kurdish newspaper Azadiya Welat, Emine Demir, received a prison sentence of 138 years on charges of "spreading propaganda for the PKK", the militant Kurdistan Workers Party. The sentence is based on articles Demir accepted for publication in the paper, according to IPS Communication Foundation (BIANET). The 24-year-old journalist was convicted...

The Zimbabwean government on Thursday warned journalists and media organisations operating in the African country that they could be prosecuted if they fail to immediately comply with new registration fees that have soared by as much as 300 percent, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA). The Zimbabwe Union of Journalists has condemned the new fees as 'shocking and retributive,' arguing that...