Features

The many twists and turns in the Anna Politkovskaya case since last week’s announcement of the arrest of ten suspects in the October 2006 murder of the Russian journalist are feeding doubts over the capacity and determination of the Russian authorities to solve it, nearly a year after the brutal killing of the journalist. “Attempts to discredit the case, orchestrated since Prosecutor-General

The decapitated body of a Sudanese newspaper editor accused of insulting Islam was recovered Wednesday, a day after he was kidnapped by masked gunmen. MOURNERS ALL: Sudanese mourners carry the body of the chief editor of a Sudanese independent daily, Mohammed Taha Mohammed Ahmed, who provoked a furore by publishing an article denounced as blasphemous and was found dead a day after being abducted

A Comombian radio station director was found stabbed to death at his home Wednesday in Cartago, a city in the western Valle del Cauca province. Javier Dario Arroyave was killed in the town of Cartago, the base of Colombia's most powerful cocaine cartel, but authorities said there was no immediate evidence of a connection between the attack and his work. Arroyave, news director for the Cartago

Media rights groups have called for the end of the death threats against Ali Moallim Isak, a leader of the Somali journalists union after he received anonymous threatening telephone calls and two armed men went to search for him at the union office in the capital Mogadishu. A Somali journalist, stringing for Reuters, bleeds from the head after he survived a roadside bomb ambush that killed another

Iranian authorities have allowed an Iranian-American journalist for the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) to leave Iran, after keeping her in the country for months, the broadcaster said Tuesday. Prague-based Parnaz Azima, who works for Radio Farda, RFE/RL's Persian service operated jointly with the Voice of America radio broadcaster, arrived in Tehran on January 25 to visit her

A Port-au-Prince court has sentenced to life two men, Alby Joseph and Chéry Beaubrun, for the abduction and murder of Jacques Roche, the head of the Le Matin newspaper’s arts and culture pages. Roche was kidnapped on 10 July 2005 and was found dead four days later. Hundreds of mourners attend the funeral of Haitian journalist Jacques Roche, at the St Pierre Roman Catholic church in Petionville

Dozens of Sri Lankan journalists took to the streets to condemn censorship and support a columnist who exposed alleged corruption in the purchase of second-hand supersonic jets. Reporters, cameramen and editors carried placards and chanted slogans outside the main railway station in Colombo Thursday, expressing solidarity with Iqbal Athas of the Sunday Times, news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP)

A military court in DR Congo has imposed death sentences on two suspects and two witnesses for the murder of UN radio journalist Serge Maheshe at the end of a trial that was seen to be riddled with absurdities. Two of the four people sentenced to death Tuesday were close friends of Maheshe who were with him when he was gunned down on a Bukavu street on June 13. Serge Maheshe, a political

Radio Farda broadcaster Parnaz Azima, who has been trapped in Iran since January, is now facing a charge of acting against Iran's national security by working for the US-funded broadcaster. Azima is already facing charges of working with Radio Farda and spreading propaganda against the Iranian state. Azima and her lawyer, Mohammad Hossein Aqasi, have rejected the charges as baseless. Aqasi told

South Korean newspapers warned of fierce resistance if the President Roh Moo-hyun's government does not withdraw its ongoing press "reform" measures. "The government is ignoring the unanimous objection of the media, the National Assembly and civic groups, thereby endangering the public's right to know," the Korean Association of Newspapers (KAN) said in the statement. "Such anti-democratic and