News

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on authorities in Dubai to allow for due process in the criminal defamation trial of Mark Townsend, a freelance journalist and regular contributor to The Washington Times. The trial is set to begin on Wednesday. Townsend, 49, a former business editor of Khaleej Times, a 30 percent government-owned daily, was detained for several hours in August...

Alaa Mohsen, the host of the programme “Liqa Sakhen” on state-run Al-Iraqiya television, was badly injured by a bomb placed underneath his car as he was about to leave his home in the Baghdad suburb of Saydiya on the morning of September 27 to go to work. Rushed to the Yarmouk district hospital, he was reported to be in a critical condition Tuesday, according to Paris-based press freedom group...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has urged the authorities to immediately free cartoonist Kamal Sharaf, who is still being held despite a ruling by a special state security court on September 22 ordering his release. The press freedom organisation also calls for the release of reporter Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae although the same state security court ruled that he should...

Malaysian authorities have arrested cartoonist Zulkifli Awar Ulhaque, also known as Zunar, a contributor to the popular news site Malaysiakini and author of a new collection of political cartoons, New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Police raided Zunar's Kuala Lumpur office and arrested him under the Sedition Act on Friday, just before the scheduled release of his...

Imprisoned Cuban journalist Miguel Galván Gutierrez was released from jail and flown to Madrid on Saturday as part of a July agreement between the Havana government and the Catholic Church. Sixteen journalists jailed in the 2003 Black Spring crackdown have now been freed and exiled as part of the agreement. "Although I am currently fighting with some health issues resulting from a seven year-...

The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned by cyber-attacks against three exile-run Burma news outlets, Irrawaddy, Mizzima News, and the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB). The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have shut Irrawaddy's main website while temporarily blocking access to Mizzima's site. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the Internet-based...

Vietnamese authorities have arrested blogger Le Nguyen Huong Tra in the latest episode in a mounting crackdown on bloggers leading up to a crucial Communist Party congress scheduled for January 2011, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Tra, who writes under the penname Do Long Girl, was taken into custody at her Ho Chi Minh City home on October 23, according to...

An enquiry ordered by Cameroon's president into a journalist’s death in prison last April has come to exactly the same conclusions as to the cause of death as the explanation originally offered by the authorities, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The findings of the investigation into the death of Cameroun Express editor Ngota Ngota Germain (aka Bibi...

Radio Kapisa FM director Hojatullah Mujadadi is still being held by the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Kabul, although both Afghan officials and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) announced on September 24 that he had been released. “My son is still being held by the security forces,” Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) was told by...

On the eve of a high-profile conference on press freedom in Rabat, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reiterated its call to King Mohammed VI to use his constitutional prerogatives to bring Moroccan legislation in line with international standards for freedom of expression. CPJ also urged the monarch to end the use of the judiciary and other government agencies to harass...