After repeated death threats, journalist Misri Khan was shot dead Tuesday by unidentified gunmen outside his office in Hangu, in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. No one claimed the killing but his son thought a religious group could have been involved. Khan was the correspondent of the dailies Mashriq and Ausaf and ran a newspaper distribution agency. Khan’s 25-year-old son, Umer...
The International Partnership Group for Azerbaijan conducted a three-day freedom of expression mission to Azerbaijan from September 7-9, during which they met journalists and other media workers, civil society activists, and government officials, and collected testimonies of violations of freedom of expression. The participating organisations were: ARTICLE 19, Freedom House, Index on Censorship...
France's newspapers are kept in a state of "permanent artificial respiration" by the annual billion euros in state aid they get and badly need to shake themselves up to survive, a report said Thursday. The government-commissioned report lamented that the massive subsidies had failed to create the "emergence or the presence of political and general press titles that were strong and not dependent on...
Two journalism organisations in the US are joining forces to promote stronger international news coverage. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University said Tuesday that it is forming a partnership with the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting to support international reporting initiatives. The collaboration will include a special focus on global health coverage. Journalists from the...
Even as the Indian home ministry issued an advisory urging the Indian media to help maintain communal peace and harmony in the wake of reports of a pastor in the United States threatening to burn the holy Koran, PoynterOnline.org has recommended guidelines on how to report the incident. Union Home Minister P Chidambaram had issued a statement on Thursday saying, "While we await the action of the...
Iranian free speech defender Nasrin Sotoudeh, a lawyer who has represented many imprisoned journalists, has now herself been arrested. She was arrested on September 5 on charges of anti-government propaganda and conspiring against the regime after responding to a summons from a revolutionary court prosecutor's office located inside Tehran's Evin prison. “Nasrin Sotoudeh has for the past year been...
China's colossal Sanmenxia dam has a new victim – Xie Chaoping, a journalist who was arrested without a warrant in the northeastern city of Weinan on August 19 after writing a book about the fate of those displaced by the dam, according to delayed reports. He is now reportedly being held by the Public Security Department in Beijing. Much has been written about this dam, a major source of...
Jullson Eninga, the editor of the daily Le Journal in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was released Tuesday, one day after the Kinshasa/Kalamu high court acquitted him of treason on the grounds that neither the facts of the case nor the legality of the charge had been established. “We are delighted that Eninga is finally free, especially as there was no basis for the charge on which he was placed...
Belarusian authorities must thoroughly investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Aleh Byabenin (Oleg Bebenin), founder and director of the Minsk-based pro-opposition news website Charter 97, press freedom groups have demanded. Byabenin's brother and several friends found the journalist hanging from a stairway in his summer house outside the capital city of Minsk on Friday at around 5...
Safa al-Din Abdel Hamid, an Al-Mosuliya television presenter who was shot Wednesday morning in front of his Mosul home by gunmen firing from a speeding car, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Abdel Hamid was the second Iraqi television anchor to be killed in as many days. Riad al-Saray, an anchor for Al-Iraqiya was gunned down in Baghdad on...
