2005-2014

MOSUL, Iraq, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Gunmen on Thursday shot dead a female journalist working for an independent Iraqi news agency in Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source said. "Gunmen attacked Sahar al-Haidari, a female journalist, in front of her house in the al-Hadbaa neighborhood in Mosul and showered her with bullets," the source from Nineveh province told Xinhua by...

(MEAA/IFEX) - The Media Alliance welcomes the Prime Minister's intervention to prevent journalists being subjected to police checks as a victory for common sense. The Alliance and Press Gallery Committee strongly objected to the proposal, which vested the discretionary power to knock back gallery licence applications with the Department of Parliamentary Services. Such a precedent would have...

(SEAPA/IFEX) - The Singapore High Court has rejected a regional periodical's application for a Queen's Counsel from the United Kingdom to represent the magazine in a defamation lawsuit brought against it by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his father, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. The Hong Kong-based "Far Eastern Economic Review" had sought to hire libel specialist Gavin Millar, but Justice Tan...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the defamation suit which a controversial retired general, Veli Küçük, has brought against Erdal Dogan, one of the lawyers who represent the family of murdered Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink. “This lawsuit against one of Dink’s lawyers in the run-up to the start of the trial of Dink’s alleged killers on 2 July in Istanbul is worrying,” the press...

Amid government measures reinforcing censorship of television and telecommunications, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has appealed to President Pervez Musharraf to heed the appeals of Pakistan's journalists, the public and the international community to respect press freedom. "Gen Musharraf, it is not yet too late to rescind the new electronic media ordinance and to put an end to the arbitrary...

Reporters Without Borders today called on the Nigerian authorities to protect the staff of The Punch daily newspaper after two gunmen on 5 June burst into its offices in Port Harcourt, in the southeastern state of Rivers, looking for an employee. “This region of Nigeria is particularly dangerous and political kidnappings are becoming more and more frequent there,” the press freedom organisation...

(FLIP/IFEX) - Demobilised paramilitary leader Juan Francisco Prada Márquez, alias "Juancho Prada", has confessed his responsibility for the 2004 murder of Martín Larrota Duarte, director of La Palma Estéreo radio station in the municipality of San Alberto, Cesar department, in northern Colombia. Prada Márquez's admission was made on 16 May 2007, during his second "spontaneous declaration" (version...

A newspaper in southwest China has sacked three of its editors over an advertisement saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. A young clerk with no knowledge of the Tiananmen massacre allowed a tribute to victims to slip into the classifieds page of the Chengdu Evening News, a newspaper in south-west China, the South China Morning Post reported. The tiny ad on...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called on Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai to do his utmost to ensure that the killers of the head of Peace Radio, Zakia Zaki, who was regularly threatened by warlords, are tracked down and punished. Two armed men broke into the family home of the head of radio Sada-e-Sulh (Peace Radio) in Jabalussaraj, in the northern province of Parwan, and gunned her down...

Online news and information will supplant television network news as the leading news source over the next five years, but newspapers will remain a vital source on their own, and can become dominant if they successfully integrate online delivery as a part of what they offer the public, a new poll has revelaed. The findings are from a Harris Poll conducted last month by Harris Interactive in...