2005-2014

Major newspaper editors have now got together in opposing the British government’s proposed changes to the Freedom of Act Information that would cut down the number of access to information requests and save money. “I can’t remember any time when regional and national editors and broadcast and print are all completely at one,” said the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, said. “I think my sense is...

Liberian Tuesday banned the Independent newspaper from publishing for one year after it published, on its front page, a photo of a state minister involved in a sex scandal. Information Minister Lawrence Bropleh said the paper exposed Liberian children to pornography by publishing the nude photograph of former minister of state for presidential affairs Willis Knuckles having sex with two women. â

Reporters Without Borders voiced scepticism today about a claim made by Chechnya’s acting President Ramzan Kadyrov at a news conference in Grozny on 20 February that Boris Berezovsky (a Russian businessman and former politician now living in exile in Britain) ordered the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. Kadyrov claimed that he was personally present...

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) arrested a local television director and harassed several journalists during a military operation in the West Bank city of Nablus on Monday, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. An Israeli soldier gestures towards the camera during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank City of Nablus February 26, 2007. Israeli forces continued...

An Egyptian appeals court on Tuesday overturned a one-year jail term on newspaper editor Ibrahim Issa, convicted of defaming President Hosni Mubarak, and substituted a fine of 22,500 Egyptian pounds ($3,950), according to news reports. Ibrahim Issa, editor-in-chief of the independent Al Dustour weekly newspaper, speaks to the media after an Egyptian appeal court overturned a prison sentence...

The Associated Press (AP) has entered into an agreement with Voxant Inc to distribute a selection of its news stories, videos and photographs to blogs and other websites through Voxant's advertising-supported syndication network. Voxant, a startup company based in Reston, US, has deals in place to syndicate news from a number of major outlets including Reuters, Agence France-Press, the Canadian...

New York, February 27, 2007— The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a three-month prison sentence and heavy damages handed down by a court in the southeastern city of Boma against a journalist over a story alleging corruption by the municipal treasury. Popol Ntula Vita, a correspondent at the private weekly La Cité Africaine in the capital Kinshasa, was sentenced on February 16 to three...

MAGAZINES AND OTHER PERIODICALS DISTRIBUTED via mail are facing higher costs and potentially thinner margins as a result of new postal rate increases, but the hike is not nearly as bad as some publisher industry executives might have feared. "As postal rate cases go, this has been a tough one, with even more varying points of view than in recent cases," Gordon Hughes, president-CEO of American...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the Sri Lankan security forces’ improper use of the anti-terror law to arrest people working for the media. Dushantha Basnayake, financial director of Standard Newspapers Private Limited (SNPL), which publishes the Sinhalese-language weekly Mawbima, was arrested in the capital Colombo on 26 February 2007. Officers of the Terrorist investigation Division (TID...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the action of the Tunisian authorities in banning issues of two French publications, the daily Le Monde and the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, and blocking the website of a third, the daily Libération, because of articles by Tunisian journalist Taoufik Ben Brik critical of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “After three years of silence, Taoufik Ben Brik...