News

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) on Wednesday accused the Jordanian government of stifling calls for democratic change after the country's intelligence service disabled a news website and removed a letter to the King demanding political reforms. IFJ backed protests by journalists' leaders and others who joined a protest after the country's biggest news website http://www.ammonnews...

Laurent Gbagbo’s government in Côte d’Ivoire has launched a crackdown on the media, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The leadership of the National Press Council (CNP), which regulates the print media, has just been replaced by Gbagbo’s supporters. The UN radio station, Onuci FM, has had its permit withdrawn. And many journalists are still exposed to...

Jean Richard Louis-Charles, a 30-year-old journalist working for Radio Kiskeya, one of Port-au-Prince’s most popular radio stations, was fatally shot twice in the head Wednesday near the capital’s central Champs-de-Mars square, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Another man at the scene, named as Jean Wilner Duperval, was shot dead on the spot by a plain...

The regional bimonthly Tribune d’Afrique’s appeal hearing opened Thursday in Lomé but was immediately adjourned at the request of the lawyers representing Mey Gnassingbé, the president’s half-brother and a member of the president’s office, who brought a successful libel suit against the publication last year. Accepting the claims of Mey Gnassingbé’s lawyers that they had not had enough time to...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has urged Florida’s new Governor, Rick Scott, to explain his handling of the media since he has been brought into office on January 4, 2011. RSF is worried that his media policy has been skirting with press freedoms. For example, during his post-inauguration ceremony, on the 22nd Floor of The Capitol, Scott carefully “cherry-picked”...

Yet another Burmese journalist has been given a long jail term, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Burma Media Association (BMA). A Rangoon court sentenced video reporter Maung Maung Zeya on February 4 to five years in prison for two violations of the Unlawful Association Act, one year under the Immigration Act (for crossing the border illegally) and...

A far-right wing group in Uruguay has mounted an Internet attack of intimidation on a journalist who specialises in investigations into the crimes of the dictatorship that ran the country between 1973 and 1985, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The group, calling itself “Freedom and Concord Forum” (Foro Libertad y Concordia), to be found on the social...

There was modest progress at the latest hearing in the trial of 19 people charged with the murder of Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was gunned down outside his office in Istanbul in January 2007, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Prosecutors announced at the hearing, held on February 7, that a preliminary investigation has been...

Influential radio and TV anchor Carmen Aristegui was suddenly fired by the MVS media group on February 6, two days after referring in her weekday news programme on radio MVS and cable channel Canal 52 to claims by opposition legislators that President Felipe Calderón has an alcohol problem, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “The speed with which she was...

Gustavo Azócar, a journalist based in the western Venezuelan state of Táchira who has been prosecuted with varying degrees of success in the past, appeared on February 7 before a Táchira court again on a charge of libelling an army officer in 2004, when one of his jobs was correspondent for the national daily El Universal. A new hearing has been set for March 15, according to Paris-based press...