2005-2014

Reporters Without Borders called today for the immediately release of Yasin Yetisgen, the owner and editor of the Kurdish newspaper Coban Atesi, who was detained by a police court on 14 August in Gaziantep (in southeastern Anatolia) for publishing an article that said Gaziantep was located in “northern Kurdistan.” “As the crime of ‘separatist propaganda’ in article 8 of the anti-terrorism law was...

NEW YORK: An op-ed raising troubling questions about the U.S. effort in Iraq -- and off-kilter press coverage -- is nothing new. But this one, in The New York Times today, was different, and will possibly be more influential than nearly all that came before. For one thing, consider the authors' blurbs at the end of the article: "Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a...

An Israeli journalist was forcibly ejected from press conference in Jordan at the weekend for daring to identify herself and ask a question. The reporter, from Israel's Yediot Ahronot daily newspaper, was attending a music festival in the northern Jordan town of Jerash. During the press conference following the festival, the Israeli reporter tried to ask one of the popular entertainers a question...

NOIDA: The 38-year-old reporter, Mahesh Vats, who had gone into a coma after he was brutally attacked by some persons, allegedly at the instance of Prayag Hospital owner Dr B P Singh, is dead. He passed away at 6.55 pm on Saturday, at Noida’s Metro Hospital, where he had been placed on life support systems since the attack on Thursday morning. The police will on Sunday take Dr Singh on remand...

NOIDA: After questioning orthopaedic surgeon Dr B P Singh, owner of Noida's Prayag Hospital through the night, Noida police arrested him on Friday for "criminal conspiracy" to kill reporter Mahesh Vats. Vats had been abducted by three goons from his house and beaten up very badly. The goons had been allegedly sent by the doctor who wanted to settle scores with him, as reported earlier. Vats, who...

The staff at a fledgling weekly newspaper in Yemen accused of damaging national security face death sentences if convicted. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Thursday warned that the recent charges brought against Al-Shar’a (The Street) and a raid on the newspaper’s office signalled a disturbing attack on independent media in the country. IFJ condemned the Yemeni government for...

IN A REVERSAL OF THE hyper-local formula, which last month saw Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) start rolling out narrowly targeted news sites in communities already served by regional print editions of the daily WP, the Chicago Tribune on Thursday launched two weekly print editions spawned by its four-month-old venture in hyper-local citizen journalism, triblocal.com. The new papers...

Every six months, a huge set of numbers descends like confetti on the good people of medialand showing the audited circulation figures for every UK magazine. Time was, not so very long ago, when the publication of those figures was a pretty cheerful event. Sure, there were winners and losers, but the prevailing mood tended to be of a buoyant industry sailing serenely through the choppy waters that...

Kazakhstan is supposed to stage model legislative elections tomorrow as it aspires to hold the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s rotating presidency in 2009 with the support of most European countries. But no election held in this central Asian republic since independence in 1991 has been considered free and fair, and this campaign has been marked by interference in both state...

The BBC World Service has lost its last FM radio outlet in Russia today, adding further substance to claims of a clampdown on foreign media by the country's authorities. Russian station Bolshoye Radio today notified the BBC World Service that it plans to stop transmission of BBC programming in Russian as of this afternoon. Bolshoye Radio was due to air BBC content at 5pm but was ordered by its...