News

Two resident district commissioners (RDC) arrested Red Pepper Publications Ltd photojournalist Tony Kizito over the alleged publication of a defamatory story by Kamunye newspaper, a vernacular sister paper of Red Pepper, Kampala-based Human Rights Network for Journalists(HRNJ) has reported. Kizito, 28, was arrested on August 30. He was on his way to the Mukono town council when he was intercepted...

Journalist AS Mani has been release on bail on an order that his lawyer managed to obtain from a Tamil Nadu appeal court on Thursday last. The publisher and editor of the Chennai-based magazine Naveena Netrikkan, Mani will however have to remain for the next month in Chidambaram, which is 250 km from Chennai. Arrested on the orders of Police Commissioner SR Jangid on July 19 after publishing an...

A prominent Afghan television news journalist and political activist has been murdered near his Kabul home. Sayed Hamid Noori, who was also deputy head of Afghanistan's National Journalists' Association, was found dead of knife wounds late Sunday. "Someone called him and asked him to come down from his apartment last night. His body was found later by police in a tree-covered area near his home,"...

Two TV employees have been killed in Quetta and an investigative journalist has been abducted in Islamabad. A cameraman and a TV station driver were killed and six other journalists seriously injured in a suicide bombing on September 3 in Quetta and the ensuing acts of revenge violence by demonstrators who were targeted by the bombing. The overall death toll was 59. In Islamabad, an investigative...

Africa’s leading press freedom advocates met in Kenya this week to support the Declaration of Table Mountain, a freedom of expression campaign organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) to repeal criminal defamation and insult laws across the continent. The inaugural meeting of the campaign’s steering committee, held in Nairobi on September 1 and 2 , brought...

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. He is now reportedly being held by the Public Security Department in Beijing. Much has been written about this dam, a major source of environmental damage and human...

There has a new surge in cases of harassment and censorship of Honduran journalists working for radio stations that have been outspoken in their criticism of the government since the June 2009 coup d'état, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Radio Uno, an educational station in the northern city of San Pedro Sula that has repeatedly criticised the regime...

Russian police, some armed and masked, raided a prominent opposition magazine on Thursday as part of an unspecified investigation. The three-hour raid on the New Times, an independent Moscow-based weekly, was carried out by armed and masked police officers led by Col Stanislav Pashkovsky, the head of the General Directorate of Internal Affairs (GUVD) for the Moscow region, who wanted to identify...

More than two weeks have gone by without any news of reporter Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae and cartoonist Kamal Sharaf since their arrests in Sanaa on August 16 and 17, which have been followed by an increase in cases of violence against journalists. An Al-Qaeda specialist who works for the Saba new agency, Shae was arrested at his home at the end of the daily Ramadan fast on the evening of August 16...

A Japanese journalist who was abducted by militants in Afghanistan five months ago has been freed by his captors and left the country, Japan's Foreign Ministry said. Kosuke Tsuneoka, a freelance journalist and veteran of war zones, was abducted on April 1. He was released Saturday night to a Japanese embassy and appeared tired but otherwise unharmed, the ministry said in a statement. "Thank you to...