News

Radio journalist José Luis Romero’s body was found on January 16 alongside the road from Los Mochis to El Fuerte, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, just over two weeks after gunmen grabbed him while he was out shopping in Los Mochis on December 30 and bundled him into a pickup. Sinaloa state judicial officials said Romero, 40, journalist of Línea Directa, was tortured and then shot in the head...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed concern about a ruling by Jordan’s highest appeal court, published on January 13, that news websites and electronic media are subject to the country’s press and publications law. Media and communications minister Nabil Al-Sharif told the Jordan Times that the court’s decision was reached independently and should therefore be applied. The ruling poses a...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) is setting up a centre of operations for Haitian journalists in Port-au-Prince in order to enable them to cover the earthquake situation and thereby assist the process of providing assistance to the population. Due to be operational by the start of next week, the centre will be equipped with laptops, mobile phones and generators provided by the leading Canadian...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Friday called on Uzbek authorities to immediately cease their campaign of intimidation against the handful of independent journalists remaining in the Central Asian country. From January 7-9, at least six journalists were called in for “an informal talk” at the Tashkent prosecutor’s office, and at least four of them were interrogated about their work...

Jean-Bosco Talla, the editor of the privately-owned weekly Germinal, was released from Yaoundé’s Kondengui prison on January 13 after paying the fine imposed by a court on December 28 on a charge of insulting the president, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Talla, who described himself as “calm,” told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Germinal would continue to be published “without any...

Jaime Flete García, a businessman based in the northern city of Santiago de los Caballeros, was charged on January 12 with hiring two men to murder Normando García, a cameraman employed by Santiago-based TV station Teleunión, on August 9, 2008. The two alleged hit men, José Amauris Santiago and José Agustín Espinal, were also charged with his murder. “In a country where impunity has often been the...

Freelance journalist John Grobler was assaulted by four men at a bar Friday evening in Namibian capital Windhoek, cutting his face with a broken glass and kicking him repeatedly in the head. Grobler was taken to MediCity Emergency Clinic, where he was treated and released, the journalist told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Grobler was able to identify three out of four...

The editor of a Peruvian weekly newspaper in the Amazonian city of Bagua, Utcubamba province, was sentenced on Tuesday to one year in jail on defamation charges, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local news reports. Alejandro Carrascal Carrasco, editor of the Bagua-based weekly Nor Oriente, was convicted of charges that stemmed from a series of articles he wrote in...

Press freedom groups have condemned the detention and imminent expulsion of US journalist Jared Malsin, who has worked for the past two years as an editor with Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency based in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Malsin, 26, was arrested and placed in a detention centre on arriving at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on the afternoon of January 12 on a flight from...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) on Thursday urged the Kuwaiti prime minister and parliament not to back amendments to the publications law that it said would pose a threat to freedom of the press. Parliament is due to vote in the next few days, according to the website Alqabas.com, on amendments proposed by the information minister, Sheikh Ahmad Abdallah al-Sabah. “The adoption of these amendments...