News

The Gabonese government indulged in censorship and imposed restrictions on media coverage of Sunday's presidential elections, including denials of accreditation to at least four international journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Three front-runners have emerged in the fiercely contested election to determine a successor to Omar Bongo, who died in June after a 41...

The US military is cancelling a contract with a public relations firm after coming under flak for using the company to rate the output of journalists reporting on the Afghanistan war, a Pentagon spokesman has said. "The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the media analyst contract ... for the convenience of the US government," military spokesperson Lieutenant...

Tamil journalist JS Tissainayagam has been sentenced to 20 years hard labour on charges of supporting terrorism and inciting racial hatred, becoming the first journalist to be convicted under Sri Lanka's draconian anti-terrorism law. An English-language columnist for the Sri Lankan Sunday Times and editor of the news website OutreachSL, Tissainayagam was arrested on March 7, 2008. He spent five...

A Ugandan newspaper's critical caricature of President Yoweri Museveni led police to interrogate three journalists on allegations of sedition, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting a defence attorney and local journalists. For four hours, 10 officers of the Media Crimes Department of Uganda's Criminal Investigations Directorate questioned the editorial decisions of...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has deplored the conditions in which dozens of Iranian journalists are being held and is concerned about the health of many of them, particularly that of Ahmad Zaid-Abadi. The columnist, who worked for Rooz Online, a Farsi and English-language reformist news website, was arrested in mid-June after the contested presidential election. Mahdieh Mohammadi, Zaid...

An Istanbul criminal court has ordered the closure, for one month, of Günlük newspaper – which is known for raising issues related to Turkey’s Kurdish minority - over an article considered by the court to constitute propaganda for a terrorist organisation. The article was published earlier this month. The verdict, handed down on August 22, did not specify why the article was deemed to be of a...

Iraqi authorities prevented the news media from covering bombings in Baghdad and the southern province of Babil on last week, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “We wonder why the Iraqi authorities forbade journalists to approach the scenes of the bombings and interview victims,” RSF said. “Was it to reduce the broadcasting of shocking images? Was it to conceal successful terrorist...

Radio Bethlehem 2000, a radio station located near the West Bank city of Bethlehem, was shut down Tuesday evening by Israeli soldiers, who seized its equipment, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “The summary closure of an independent Palestinian radio station and the arbitrary seizure of its equipment constitute outright censorship,” RSF said. “The station’s management was given no...

Anibal Dos Santos Junior, also known as Anibalzinho, the fugitive killer of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, has been recaptured in South Africa. Mozambican police travelled Thursday to Pretoria to bring Dos Santos back to finish serving a 30-year sentence for Cardoso’s November 2000 murder. Dos Santos has escaped three times since he was first arrested for Cardoso’s murder. His most...

Many embedded journalists are being screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the US military in a positive light, the Stars and Stripes newspaper has reported. Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper partly funded by the Pentagon but editorially independent, said private contractors had been...