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The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has demanded the immediate release of two Yemeni journalists who have been held without charge since August 16 and accused the Yemeni government of broken promises for backtracking on pledges to allow journalists in the country to work freely. Abdelelaah Shaie, a reporter working for the official Yemeni News Agency (SABA), and Kmal Sharaf, a...

More than 2,000 journalists working for the BBC at centres across the UK have voted in favour of strike action in protest at planned reforms to their pension scheme. Figures released Wednesday night by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) reveal the extent to which its members are angered by management proposals to cap their pension contributions. Of around 3,500 NUJ members at the BBC, 2,251...

Kurdish publications have again been suspended or seized under the Anti-Terrorism Law (Law 3713), which allows the Turkish courts to impose harsh penalties on journalists and media when they allude to Kurdish armed separatists and fosters a repressive climate for the Kurdish media. Although the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly condemned Turkey because of the Anti-Terrorism Law, the...

A hardline Iranian newspaper has called the French first lady a "prostitute" and recommended she be put to death for supporting a woman sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for adultery. Under the headline "French prostitutes enter the human rights uproar," the Kayhan daily newspaper referred Saturday to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as a "prostitute" after she released an open letter in support of Sakineh...

A Norwegian journalist has been granted unprecedented access to the Taliban army for the first time. The journalist, Norwegian Paul Refsdal, says Taliban leader Commander Dawran granted him the access and allowed him to film the enemy soldiers while they attacked a US convoy. The Taliban leader also allowed Refsdal to film him with his two children. The children were later allegedly killed in a US...

A Twitter experiment that went awry has landed a sportswriter for the Washington Post with a one-month suspension. Mike Wise, a respected Post columnist, was suspended by the newspaper on Tuesday, a day after he posted a fake report on his Twitter account. "Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told," Wise wrote on his Twitter feed, @MikeWiseguy, on Monday in a reference to the length of the...

A Somali journalist working for a private radio station was stabbed to death by unidentified attackers in the war-torn country's central Galkayo region, colleagues and witnesses said Wednesday. Abdulahi Omar Gedi, who worked with Daljir Radio, was attacked when he left work late on Tuesday and later died of his injuries in hospital, his colleague Abdulkadir Mohamed told Agence France-Presse (AFP)...

An attempt has been made on the life of Dunya TV reporter Hafiz Muhammad Imran Shehzad in Sialkot, in the northeastern Pakistan province of Punjab. This followed his coverage of the lynching of two brothers in the presence of police officers in Sialkot, which shocked Pakistani public opinion. Aged 27, Imran has been hospitalised with the injuries he received when he was attacked and badly beaten...

Since the start of the economic crisis, up to 6000 journalists and media workers in Romania have lost their jobs, journalists are being forced to renounce their contracts in favour of royalty payments, and the main journalists union in the country is fighting over 50 cases against illegal and indiscriminate dismissals. "Romanian journalism is under siege from the country's economic woes and...

Bahrainian prosecutors have banned journalists from reporting on the detentions of dozens of opposition activists. Authorities detained Shiite opposition activists in a series of arrests that began on August 13, according to Bloomberg and other news reports. The New York Times reported Thursday that as many as 159 people had been detained, and that later detainees included people not known as...