2005-2014

When Arianna Huffington announced plans two-and-a-half years ago to publish a blog, she was greeted with derision by many of the vocation’s purists. The archetypal blogger, after all, was supposed to be a solitary outsider who worked from home – preferably in pyjamas – railing against the arrogance and excesses of the so-called mainstream media. Ms Huffington, on the other hand, was a multi...

(FLIP/IFEX) - On 27 September 2007, a crew of journalists from the television news programme Caracol Noticias was assaulted by two people as they were investigating a case of alleged fraud in the sale of homes for low-income families. The journalists were pelted with stones and threatened with a blunt weapon. The incident took place in the capital city, Bogotá. Amparo Bernal, a victim of the fraud...

LONDON, Oct. 1 — The Financial Times, preparing for a fierce battle with The Wall Street Journal over business readers and online advertising revenue, will give casual readers free access to its Web site this month, according to executives at The Financial Times. The Web site of the London-based business newspaper, which currently charges for much of its content online, as of mid-October will...

Reporters Without Borders condemns a month-old wave of press freedom violations in Honduras including a shooting attack on TV journalist Geovanny García on 7 September, threats against newspaper reporter Martín Ramírez after he wrote about organised crime, and lawsuits by the head of the state telecommunications company Hondutel on 28 September against six journalists who repeated corruption...

Reporters Without Borders calls for the release of reporter Ahmed Aadan Dhere, who was arrested four days ago in the city of Berbera, in the east of the northern breakaway state of Somaliland, and has been held ever since at Berbera police headquarters. Dhere is the correspondent of Haatuf, a privately-owned daily based in the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa. “The Somaliland authorities have a...

Reporters Without Borders urged President Pervez Musharraf to react firmly after at least 30 journalists were wounded by police trying to stop them covering a crackdown on demonstrations in Islamabad and Peshawar by lawyers opposing the president’s candidacy at upcoming elections. Police set about the lawyers and journalists with clubs and threw stones at them in Islamabad on 29 September. Twenty...

ISLAMABAD, Oct 1: The executive director (ED) of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) on Monday initially refused to admit an injured journalist, referred there by the Poly Clinic Hospital. However, on the directives of the Supreme Court, the Pims administration took the patient from the court premises and admitted him to the hospital. According to details, the Poly Clinic...

IT was a beautiful late-summer morning. The sky was that slightly sinister September blue, nobody had attacked me on the subway, my daughter Billie had eaten breakfast and even the dog was behaving. Really, there didn’t seem to be much to upset me. I could drop Bill off at school, pick up a coffee, breakfast and the papers and start my day. Then we stopped at the newsagent. Beneath the counter and...

(CMFR/IFEX) - The class action suit filed by 40 journalists and three media organizations against presidential spouse Jose Miguel "Mike" Arroyo for his alleged abuse of the right to litigate and violation of press freedom had not even reached the pre-trial stage a year after it was filed. Both sides had been locked in an argument over legal technicalities. But in a decision dated 24 September 2007...

(CJES/IFEX) - The editor-in-chief of the Internet publication "Novy Fokus", Mikhail Afanasyev, risks imprisonment, the interregional human rights association AGORA has reported. The journalist received a suspended prison sentence for slander in May 2006. All in all, ten criminal cases (all connected to his professional activities) were opened against the journalist over the past three years. On 21...