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In a 22 September 2003 letter to Indian Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the IFJ expressed deep concern over the murder of Parmanand Goyal, a journalist and Kaithal Unit president of the Haryana Union of Journalists. It is the IFJ's understanding that at 7:00 a.m. (local time) on 18 September, Goyal, a reporter for "Punjab Kesari", was called outside his home by three unidentified persons...

Aljazeera is standing by its star reporter Taysir Alluni, who faces charges in Spain of links with Usama bin Ladin's al-Qaida network. "This decision is extremely regrettable but we will continue our contacts and mobilise support to obtain Taysir Alluni's freedom," spokesman Jihad Ballout said in Doha on Friday. The spokesman made it clear that Aljazeera was in no doubt about the innocence of its...

The International Federation of Journalists today condemned the arrest by Spanish officials of an Al-Jazeera Television journalist for alleged ties to al Qaeda members in what it warned "looks like developing into an international witch-hunt" against Arab-language media. On September 5, Tayseer Alouni, an Al-Jazeera reporter who had worked as a war correspondent in Kabul for the Qatar-based...

The Rs 1,002-crore Dainik Bhaskar group has its heart set on Gujarat. Buoyed by the success of Divya Bhaskar - an AC Nielsen ORG-Marg study in Ahmedabad in August showed Divya Bhaskar is the largest read newspaper with 11.83 lakh readers, followed by Gujarat Samachar (9.79 lakh readers) and Sandesh (8.12 lakh readers) - the media group has decided to launch three more editions in the state. To...

Come September and Media Transasia, publisher of the Indian Airlines in-flight magazine Swagat, will launch two new monthly magazines - Golf Style, which, as the name suggests, is a golf magazine, and National Review, a magazine on political news. While the cover price of Golf Style will be Rs 150, that of National Review will be Rs 50. To begin with, Media Transasia is looking at a print run of...

As the war in Iraq has turned into a grueling occupation, the question of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction persists. To investigate that question, there would seem to be no better-qualified reporter on Earth than Judith Miller of the New York Times. Miller is a genuine expert on weapons of mass destruction or, in Washington parlance, WMD. She has written important books about Saddam...

A color management seminar is scheduled for September 16 in Bangalore, India, a day before the main conference of Ifra India 2003. Ifra, an international association for media publishing, has scheduled its 11th annual conference, Infra India 2003, on September 17 to 18 in Bangalore. The pre-conference seminar on Color Management Systems is aimed at providing a comprehensive view of the current...

Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has ordered the release of two journalists accused of defaming Islam, but says they must stand trial for blasphemy. The men, who write for the weekly newspaper Aftab, were arrested last week after the publication of an article headlined Holy Fascism, which attacked what it described as "crimes committed in Islam's name." It also criticised some members of the...

International pressure is mounting on the Afghan authorities over the arrest of two journalists accused of defaming Islam in the country. Both the United Nations and Reporters Without Borders have voiced concerns about the Kabul supreme court's order to close the weekly Afghan newspaper Aftab and arrest its editor, Sayeed Mirhassan Mahdawi, and his Iranian deputy on counts of blasphemy. A column...

Reading a print newspaper every day involves a standard exchange: Before wading through the stories, customers buy the paper. There's nothing standard, however, about reading news online. Everybody who wants to read the Wall Street Journal's cyberspace edition (online.wsj.com/public/us) must pay, whether or not they're print subscribers. At the Albuquerque Journal (www. abqjournal.com), print...