News

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned Wednesday's shooting attack against Mexican newspaper El Sur in the port city of Acapulco, Guerrero state. Unidentified armed men fired at the paper and then stormed into the newsroom and threatened to set it on fire, according to local news reports and CPJ interviews. Around 10:30 p.m., gunmen aboard two trucks fired at the paper's premises...

Azerbaijan’s highest court on Thursday upheld a April 22 decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), ordering the immediate release of Eynulla Fatullayev, an Azeri journalist who was sentenced in 2007 to eight-and-a-half years in prison for defamation and “fomenting terrorism” through his articles. As IPI reported at the time, the Court voted six to one that Azerbaijan had violated...

Zimbabwean police have issued an arrest warrant issued last week against exiled editor Wilf Mbanga concerning a 2008 story about the murder of an election official, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Zimbabwe Republic Police Chief Superintendent Andrew Phiri told CPJ on Wednesday that Mbanga, publisher of the The Zimbabwean newspaper, which is edited in London...

Russia's top investigator, Aleksandr Bastrykin, has ordered the reopening of a probe into a near-lethal November 2008 attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda. Bastrykin's order on Thursday comes a day after a court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki convicted Beketov of criminally slandering local mayor Vladimir Strelchenko. The conviction, coming at a time...

Egyptian authorities must immediately release blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman, known online as Karim Amer, who completed his four-year prison sentence on November 5, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. CPJ also called on authorities to investigate and punish a security officer who reportedly assaulted Amer on Tuesday. The government's continued imprisonment of Amer...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Journalist in Danger (JED) have written to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) justice and human rights minister Luzolo Bambi Lessa about two separate cases on November 2 in which journalists were given jail sentences in absentia on defamation charges. The two organizations said they did not oppose the fact that defamation actions...

A court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki on Wednesday convicted Mikhail Beketov, the editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, of criminally slandering Khimki's mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko, in a 2007 television interview. Beketov, who is in a wheelchair and unable to speak two years after a near-lethal attack, was wheeled into the courtroom for the verdict. Judge Arkady Khalatov...

There has been an increasing climate of hostility for Spanish journalists in Morocco, highlighted by official measures to prevent Spanish journalists from covering clashes in the Western Sahara, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. On Monday, 10 Spanish journalists were prevented from reaching the Saharan city of Laayoune, which is part of an ongoing territorial...

Hungary's parliament last week passed another element of a controversial media reform package which will force journalists to identify their sources in stories involving national security and public safety. The law comes into effect on January 1, 2011. If faced with judicial action, journalists would only be able to keep their source secret if such secrecy is ruled to be in the public interest...

Burma must immediately release Toru Yamaji, a reporter with Tokyo-based APF news agency, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) hasdemanded. Yamaji, 49, was detained Sunday in Myawaddy, on the country's eastern border with Thailand while trying to cover the country's first elections in two decades, according to international media reports, which quoted Japan's embassy in Rangoon...