2005-2014

A daily paper that was widely rumoured to have been taken over by Zimbabwe's secret service has stopped publishing, it emerged on Friday. The Daily Mirror, originally a semi-private paper that was owned by moderate ruling party member and intellectual Ibbo Mandaza has not published an edition since Tuesday. Jonathan Kadzura, the board chairperson of the Zimbabwe Mirror Newspapers Group, told the...

New York, March 8, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is troubled by the arrest of Atiqullah Khan Masud, editor and publisher of the popular Bengali-language daily Janakantha, in a military raid on the Dhaka newspaper’s office Wednesday night. Bangladeshi police today accused Masud of corruption, criminal activities, and “tarnishing the country’s image abroad” through his newspaper’s...

Just when US journalists are debeating the issue of protection of sources, a chequebook journalism scandal — the concept of paying sources — is going to make matters worse. The New York Times acknowledged Tuesday that a reporter who wrote an award-winning article in 2005 about a teenage Internet pornographer helped gain the boy's trust by sending him a $2,000 cheque. Former New York Times reporter...

The International Institute for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Journalism Penplusbytes has announced a three month (April 20 to July 20, 2007) online training opportunity for journalists in the area of ICT Journalism. Participants will be exposed to the wider context of ICTs assisted journalism including its history, how these technologies are impacting on the world of journalism...

Blogger Colleen Caldwell rants and riffs about whatever strikes her fancy — a run-in with her child's school principal, the rising price of Girl Scout thin mints, an upcoming movie that caught her eye. "Has anyone out there read a book called 'The Ultimate Gift'? I just heard that a movie is being made of the book (which sold 4 million copies)," she wrote in a recent post on her site, Simple Kind...

(MFWA/IFEX) - On 5 March 2007, the Bamako Commune II County Court sentenced managing editor Diaby Makoro Camara, and editor-in-chief Oumar Bouaré, of "Kabako", a privately-owned, monthly newspaper, to a four-month suspended sentence for defaming Mariamantia Diarra, Minister of Planning and the Interior. Camara and Bouaré were ordered to pay an amount of 50,000 FCFA (approx. US$99) in damages. The...

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, March 9, 2007 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is disappointed that a freelance video blogger will remain in jail after a court-appointed arbitrator was unable to mediate a settlement that could have led to the journalist's release. Joshua Wolf has spent 198 days in jail, the longest incarceration of a journalist in U.S. history, for refusing to provide the court with...

Two journalists were bruised by Israeli stun grenades at an Israeli military checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah Thursday. Rami al-Faqih, a correspondent for the local Al-Quds Educational Television, and Iyad Hamad, a cameraman for the Associated Press, were each hit as Israeli border police fired at journalists covering a peaceful protest marking International Women’s...

(MISA/IFEX) - On March 7, 2007 the High Court of Swaziland dismissed a E750,000 (approx. US$100,000) lawsuit against the "Times of Swaziland" newspaper filed by the Minister for Education, Themba Msibi. The case was dismissed on grounds that the wrong parties were cited in the particulars of claim. Msibi, ex-Minister for Public Service and Information, was suing the "Times" for alleged defamation...

As more women work as journalists, the number of women journalists being killed for their work is also rising rapidly. Of the 82 journalists killed worldwide in 2006, nine (11 per cent) were women. Nearly 13 per cent of the journalists killed in the course of their work in 2005 were women, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. Atwar Bahjat of the Al-Arabiya TV station was killed after being...