2005-2014

READERS of a weekly newsmagazine will soon be getting a bonus issue, but they will miss it if they look in mailboxes or on newsstands. The magazine, The Week, will publish the extra issue online, rather than in its regular printed format. The special issue will feature articles on the environment — hence the decision to spare trees by publishing it just on the Internet (theweekmagazine.com)....

NEWSPAPERS' ONLINE CLASSIFIED AD NETWORKS are booming in the first quarter of 2007, and Cars.com is leading the way, with all-time highs of 9 million unique visitors and 15 million total visits in March--the latter representing 17% growth over the previous month. What's more, the visits weren't just casual browsing. A record number of visitors contacted car dealers during that period, with email...

(CJES/IFEX) - Vladimir Voloshin, editor-in-chief of the Salekhard newspaper "Krasny Sever", and Pavel Razuvayev, a journalist with the newspaper, have been forced to resign. They resigned shortly after the elections to the Yamal region's parliament, which were held on 28 March 2007. According to Razuvayev, the journalists were asked to resign by officials from the information department of the...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: A wealthy businessman once considered a suspect in the assassination of Haiti's best-known journalist was shot to death near his house in an apparent contract killing, police said Thursday. Robert Lecorps, who also was implicated in the 1993 assassination of a Haitian justice minister, was killed Wednesday in the upscale Port-au-Prince suburb of Pernier, police spokesman...

The judge presiding over the trial of a fired astronaut temporarily sealed court documents that were to be released soon and asked the layers to limit mass media contacts. Lisa Marie Nowak's case has drawn international media attention. "I'm just trying to keep the media frenzy down to a dull roar," Orange County Circuit Judge Marc L. Lubet said. Lubet stopped short of issuing a gag order, but...

Reporters Without Borders called today for an independent investigation into the death of freelance cameraman Edward Chikomba, a former employee of the state-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH), who was found dead on 31 March, two days after being kidnapped in Harare by men suspected of being members of the intelligence services. “We are utterly dismayed by this murder, which comes at a...

In a continued effort to suppress reform-minded critics, the Iranian government has sentenced yet another prominent journalist, Ali Farahbakhsh, to three years in jail and slapped him with a huge fine, partly due to a typo in the court documents. Farahbakhsh was convicted of spying in a trial held behind closed doors on Mar. 26. He was first imprisoned five months ago on his return to Iran after...

An Indonesian court has cleared Playboy Indonesia's editor-in-chief of distributing indecent pictures to the public and making money from them after a high-profile trial that exposed deep divisions in the Muslim-majority nation A group of Indonesian hardliner Muslims shout slogan after trial of editor-in-chief of Playboy Indonesia Erwin Arnada, Thursday, April 5, 2007, in Jakarta Indonesia...

The story of some violent historic earthquakes may need to be revisited, says a new study. Seismologists rely on written accounts, mostly local newspaper articles, to judge how strongly the ground shook during earthquakes that predate the use of current instrumentation. Those news accounts have proven to be misleading, say scientists, and reliance upon them must be tempered when evaluating the...

When Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf moved to contain the judicial crisis engulfing his regime, the country's mainstream media were among the first casualties. But no threat was directed at Pakistan's radical jihadi press, which has been just as critical of the president's decision to suspend Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry three weeks ago. Critics say the discrepancy underscores how...