News

Owners of independent Tajik newspapers are complaining that a new ban on selling newspapers on the streets of Dushanbe is hurting sales, RFE/RL's Tajik Service reports. Zafar Sufi, the owner and chief editor of the weekly newspaper Ozodagon, told RFE/RL on February 23 that most people buy newspapers on their way to work or when they walk in the city center, and the ban curbs those purchases. The...

ARTICLE 19 has welcomed the High Court decision Thursday to dismiss the defamation claim brought by the Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash against the Kyiv Post, an independent Ukrainian newspaper. Firtash complained about an article published in the Kyiv Post in which the outcome of an international arbitrage concerning a dispute between RosUKrEnergo, of which Firtash is a major shareholder...

Cameroon's government is obstructing journalists from reporting on issues of public interest. Security forces detained a journalist without charge for six days after he interviewed a jailed former official. They also seized footage from reporters covering the brutal repression of a banned opposition march on Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Late on Wednesday...

The Committee to protect Journalists documented additional attacks Friday in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya as journalists tried to cover anti-government protests. Iraqi authorities cracked down on media: Security forces stormed a satellite TV office, detained dozens of journalists, and confiscated equipment, according to local journalists and news reports. In Yemen, at least four journalists were...

The International Federation (IFJ) has called for media reforms and respect of press freedom as journalists have come under fire over coverage of anti-governments protests sweeping through the Arab world and the Middle East. The call follows reports of bans on free movement of journalists and new attacks on media in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Iraq Kurdistan. The authorities have imposed a media...

Some local courts in Brazil are permitting the use of multiple lawsuits and other abusive judicial procedures to censor journalists, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Carlos Santos, a freelance journalist and blogger based in Mossoró, a town in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, was ordered this month to pay 6,000 reais (2,600 euros) to...

Death threats have been made against Nicaraguan investigative reporter Luis Galeano in the lead-up to the publication of a series of articles on official corruption. Galeano and his colleague José Adán Silva, reporters with the Managua-based daily El Nuevo Diario, had been investigating allegations of embezzlement within Nicaragua's Supreme Electoral Council, El Nuevo Diario reported. On Saturday...

Iván Hernández Carrillo, a Cuban journalist imprisoned since March 2003, was released on parole Saturday and permitted to remain in the country, bringing to 19 the number of reporters and editors freed after an agreement between the President Raúl Castro and the Catholic Church. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Cuban authorities today to lift all conditions on Hernández Carrillo's...

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) in calling for an investigation into the drive-by shooting death of Abdost Rind, a 27-year-old part-time journalist in the Turbat area of Balochistan province in Pakistan's southwest on February 18. According to the PFUJ and local media reports, Rind—a reporter with the Daily Eagle, an Urdu-language...

The Sunday Tribune, the Irish quality newspaper partly owned by Independent Newspapers, has closed shop, less than a month after a receiver was appointed. Jim Luby, the receiver, wrote to the 43 staff on Tuesday telling them they would be made redundant at the end of the month. It brings to an end a chequered 31-year history for a paper that attempted to inject new life into a newspaper sector...