2005-2014

The interior ministry of the Republic of Khakassia (in southwestern Siberia) has withdrawn the charges of spreading false rumours that were brought against Mikhail Afanasyev, the editor the Novy Focus news website, on August 20 in connection with his coverage of an explosion at a hydro-electric plant. “We welcome this decision but we nonetheless regard this case as indicative of the hostility that...

Rangoon-based weekly Phoenix has been closed down for an indefinite perdiod by the military government’s censorship board, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and the Burma Media Association (BMA) have reported. The weekly is edited by Mar-J, a writer who has been subject to bans in the past for his satirical comments. The authorities have not given any specific reason for Phoenix’s closure. Mizzima...

A Vietnamese reporter, Huy Duc, has been dismissed by the governmental daily Sai Gon Tiep Thi for posting criticism of the Cold War-era Soviet Union on his personal blog, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). One of the newspaper’s editors, Tran Cong Khanh, said Huy Duc was fired on August because of what he had posted online. Huy Duc confirmed in his blog that he had been dismissed and...

For the second time in less than a month, the lead federal investigator in the case of a journalist murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has been shot and killed in the streets of that city, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. The second investigator, Pablo Pasillas Fong, was shot 13 times on August 26. In addition, on August 28, the head of the office in charge of investigating...

The editor of a weekly in the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico has gone into hiding after a shootout at his residence, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The police and judicial authorities investigating a the attack on the home of Guillermo Soto Bejarano, the De Opinión’s editor, on August 30 in Salina Cruz should work on the assumption that it was linked to his journalist activities...

A magistrate in Zambia issued a summons for the entire editorial staff of the southern African country's largest independent newspaper to appear in court on Wednesday on contempt charges, according to local journalists and news reports. The ruling was prompted by an op-ed commenting on the prosecution of the paper's news editor. The Post published on Thursday an op-ed by a US-based contributor...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over the health of imprisoned editor Abdoulaye Tiémogo after his transfer from a hospital in Niger's capital, Niamey, to a prison in a remote town on Monday. Tiémogo, editor of the weekly Le Canard Déchaîné, is suffering from malaria and is no longer receiving adequate medical attention in a prison in Ouallam, 55 miles (88 km) to the...

The Russian supreme court Thursday ordered that the case against three alleged accomplices to journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s murder should be returned to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation, overturning a lower court ruling on August 7 blocking this possibility. A representative of the prosecutor general said the investigation into the accomplices would be combined with the...

The bullet-ridden body of journalist Christian Poveda, whose new documentary on a violent Salvadoran street gang was scheduled for wide release this month, was discovered Wednesday afternoon just north of the capital, San Salvador. Salvadoran police found Poveda's body sprawled near his car on an isolated road in the town of Tonacatepeque, about 10 miles (15 kilometers) from the capital, the New...

The Vietnam government has launched a crackdown against online journalists and political bloggers for criticising the ruling Communist Party’s policies towards China. The move comes as Web-based journalists and bloggers' independent reporting challenges the tightly censored state-run media's traditional monopoly on local news and opinion, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. On...