News

Eleven years after the brutal murder of online journalist Georgy Gongadze, Ukrainian prosecutors on Thursday indicted former President Leonid Kuchma on abuse-of-office charges in connection with the slaying, local and international news reports said. According to the online news outlet Ukrainska Pravda—which Gongadze founded and edited before his murder—prosecutors indicted Kuchma on charges of...

Yemeni authorities on Thursday ordered Al-Jazeera's offices shut and its journalists stripped of accreditation, escalating a week-long series of reprisals against the station that has included beatings, expulsions, raids, and death threats. New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the government's decision to shut Al-Jazeera and urged authorities to reverse the...

New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Kazakh authorities to thoroughly investigate journalism as a motive in the murder of Kyrgyz journalist Gennady Pavlyuk. Pavlyuk, better known by his pen name, Ibragim Rustambek, died in the hospital on December 22, 2009, after having been thrown from an upper-story window of an apartment building in Kazakhstan...

Manila police must thoroughly investigate the murder of radio anchor Maria Len Fores Somera, who was shot Thursday near her home in Malabon City, a suburb of Manila. An unidentified man shot Somera, a DZME station host, in the back of the head before fleeing in a Jeep, according to the Associated Press. Some local news reports said there were two assailants. Somera, a 44-year-old mother of three...

Journalists Aleksandr Lomashkin and Ales Asiptsu were arrested in separate incidents Thursday, on the eve of “Dzen Voly” (Freedom Day), an event that is traditionally celebrated by the Belarusian opposition, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. A Russian journalist and founder of the human rights website Svoboda, Lomashkin was forced to get off a train from...

Syrian authorities have imposed censorship on national and foreign news media seeking to cover events in the southern city of Deraa. The security forces have blocked access to the city so that there is no one to witness their ruthless crackdown on the protests that have been taking place there during the past few days, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...

Noel López Olguín, a journalist based in Mexico's eastern state of Veracruz, has been missing for the past two and a half weeks., according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). López works for local weeklies Horizonte and Noticias de Acayucan and the daily La Verdad. Gerardo Perdomo, the head of the Veracruz State Commission for the Defence of Journalists, told the...

Internet user Vikas Mavhudzi has been detained for the past month on a charge of advocating the government’s overthrow in a message he posted on Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Facebook page. He is to remain in prison until his trial, for which no date has yet been set, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported Mavhudzi, 39, posted a message...

Two Kurdish opposition journalists have escaped murder attempts in the past three days in Erbil and Dohuk, places controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, while other journalists have been briefly detained or have been the target of a kidnap attempt. Many report that they are continuing to receive death threats by SMS, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières...

The findings from the official investigation into Japanese cameraman Hiro Muramoto’s death during clashes between government forces and anti-government “Red Shirts” in Bangkok on April 10, 2010 are being seen as “utterly unsatisfactory.” The provisional conclusion one year after the event that the security forces did not fire the shot that killed Muramoto, who worked for Reuters, betrays a...