2005-2014

Reporters Without Borders today condemned escalating kidnappings of journalists after three were snatched in less than a week, two of whom were later freed. The organisation has joined the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) to urge the government to launch an all-out search for Birendra Sah, who was abducted in Bara district. Sah, 34, correspondent for Nepal FM, Dristri Weekly and Avenues TV...

The European Union said yesterday that the Thomson Corporation’s plan to buy the Reuters Group raised competition concerns for the supply of financial information. The European Commission, Europe’s antitrust authority in Brussels, told the companies it needed more time to study the £8.7 billion ($17.7 billion) acquisition. Thomson and Reuters said in a separate statement that they would work with...

Chicago real estate magnate and Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell said Tuesday he had no plans to sell the Los Angeles Times to any of the moguls who previously expressed an interest in buying the newspaper. "I said it to Eli Broad. I said it to Ron Burkle. I said it to David Geffen, and I'm saying it to you," Zell said during a talk at a conference on corporate growth. He then quipped: "Now, if you have...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Associated Press is suing VeriSign Inc to stop its online subsidiary Moreover Technologies Inc from publishing AP news reports without permission. The AP lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks unspecified damages and a permanent injunction against VeriSign and Moreover. A VeriSign official was not immediately...

Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not. That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue. Purists may sniff at these online liaisons...

The BBC is poised to cut at least 12 per cent of its workforce, with the brunt of more than 2,000 redundancies falling on factual programming, senior staff have been told. The final tally of job losses, which will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, could approach 2,800, according to one person familiar with the situation. Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, is seeking cuts...

The prosecution in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case has claimed before a Delhi court that the deceased journalist intended to expose prime accused RK Sharma of leaking classified documents to her in violation of the Official Secrets Act (OSA), according to the Indian Express. Arguing before Additional Sessions Judge Rajender Kumar Shastri, Special Public Prosecutor SK Saxena said Shivani, who, at...

Reporters Without Borders today welcomed the release of journalist Soheil Assefi, who spent more than two months in preventive detention in Tehran’s Evin jail, but stressed the poor state of press freedom in Iran where four other journalists have been given jail terms and a daily paper shut down. Assefi, a contributor to a number of publications and websites, was freed on 6 October 2007 after...

Senior officials have threatened independent news media and investigative journalist Iqbal Athas in recent weeks, and the government is reportedly planning to increase restrictions on coverage of the security situation as fighting rages in the north, Reporters Without Borders said today. A foreign TV crew was prevented from working in the northern city of Jaffna at the end of last week. "Although...

Reporters Without Borders today voiced grave concern about the safety of Sailab Mehsud, working for the newspaper The News and for Al-Jazeera in Dera Ismail Kahn, south of Peshawar, after an officer in Pakistani military intelligence insulted and threatened him with death. Mehsud, who is also editor of the regional news website Karwan-e-Qabial ( www.karwan-e-qabial.net) and formerly chaired the...