News

The NewYork-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern about the health and detention conditions of Tunisian journalist Taoufik Ben Brik and the flagrant and recurrent violations of his right to see his wife and lawyers. The health and detention conditions of Ben Brik, one of the most critical journalists of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who is currently serving a six...

No ransom demand. No news at all. The official investigation has not progressed in the month since María Esther Aguilar Cansimbe, a young journalist employed by the Diario de Zamora and Cambio de Michoacán newspapers in the southwestern state of Michoacán, disappeared on November 11. Nonetheless, there are reasons for thinking her disappearance was linked to her reporting and that drug traffickers...

Political analyst and columnist Alexander Knyazev was attacked near his home in Bishkek Wednesday evening by four men who punched and kicked him repeatedly and took his computer and briefcase, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. It was the second physical attack on this well-known political and media personality in the past two years and the eighth this year on journalists in Kyrgyzstan...

Death threats have been made against Iryna Khalip, Belarus correspondent for the Moscow-based independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. In a memo to Novaya Gazeta, Khalip said she received threatening email, phone calls, and a telegram from anonymous senders who warned her not to publish the investigative report she wrote and...

On the 100th day after the sentencing of journalist JS Tissainayagam, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to use his constitutional powers to release him from the 20-year prison sentence that was given to him on August 31. Tissainayagam, also known as Tissa, was one of dozens of ethnic Tamil journalists who were swept up...

The time that Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak has spent in a jail in Eritrea, without a trial and without any visits from his family or lawyers, on Thursday reached 3,000 days. “It is a disgrace that he remains in prison and it is remarkable that the Swedish government does not try harder to get him released,” said Jesper Bengtsson, president of the Swedish section of Reporters Sans...

Asos Hardi, the Editor-in-Chief and founder of the Awene newspaper in Iraqi Kurdistan, has been awarded the 2009 Gebran Tueni Award, the annual prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) that honours an editor or publisher from the Arab region. Hardi, who has gained a reputation as a newspaperman with exceptional leadership skills and high professional standards in...

Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the prosecution of a man accused in the 2007 murder of Alisher Saipov, editor of the Uzbek-language weekly Siyosat, can proceed, the independent news website Ferghana reported. Saipov’s family and colleagues have called the case bogus, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The ruling came in an appeal filed by the...

Police in Nepal should thoroughly investigate reports that journalist Tika Bista was brutally attacked on Tuesday in reprisal for her work, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Wednesday. Bista was discovered unconscious near her home in Rukum district, western Nepal on Tuesday afternoon, with serious injuries to her head, legs, and arms, according to local press freedom...

Imad Abadi, the Al-Diyar TV host who suffered serious gunshot injuries to the head and neck in an attack on November 23 in Baghdad, was flown to the German city of Munich on December 3 for brain surgery, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. RSF said it was relieved to learn that the operation went ahead without any problem in Munich’s Grosshadern Clinic on December 7. Abadi’s brother...