News

Officials shut down the office of the Association of Iranian Journalists in Tehran on Wednesday night, just after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Director Badr al-Sadat Mufidi, told the BBC Persian service that agents stormed the office with a warrant from Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general. The...

A Gambian court has sentenced six journalists to two years in jail and imposed heavy fines on them on six counts of sedition and criminal defamation. Failure to pay the fines will lead to an additional two years in jail. The six journalists, working for two private newspapers—the Point and Foroyaa—had republished a June 11 Gambian Press Union statement criticising President Yahya Jammeh's comments...

CNN has asked cable operators in the US that carry its channel to block a commercial, produced by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which critiques CNN's Lou Dobbs, the New York Times has reported. CNN managers said in a morning staff meeting on Tuesday that the channel had invoked unspecified agreements with operators to stop the ad from running. The ad accuses Dobbs of “promoting the...

The news editor of Zambia's largest newspaper went on trial Wednesday on charges of distributing pornographic images. Chansa Kabwela, 29, a news editor at the Post newspaper, distributed the photos of the woman giving birth in the car park outside Lusaka's University Teaching Hospital in June. The trial commenced with the state prosecutor complaining about comments by Reporters sans Frontières...

Uzbek authorities should immediately free the independent journalist Dilmurod Saidov, sentenced Thursday last to 12 1/2 years in prison following a flawed trial brought on politically motivated charges, Human Rights Watch has said. The trial was riddled with procedural violations, and several witnesses ultimately withdrew their testimony, saying they had given false evidence, rendering his...

A journalist from China Central Television was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison with a four-year reprieve for accepting a bribe in northern Shanxi province, China Daily has reported. The Xinghualing District Court in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi, convicted Li Min of accepting 37,000 yuan ($5,400) and using her job to lobby for a suspect in a case being investigated by the Xinghualing...

The Guardian Media Group is reported to be considering options for the future of its Sunday newspaper, the Observer, as part of a strategic company review. The company – parent of Guardian News & Media, which publishes the Observer, Guardian and guardian.co.uk – is said not to have ruled out closing the Sunday title. Some details from the Guardian itself: [ Link] GMG has reportedly floated the...

It was a project doomed to failure: a newspaper written, produced and sold by poor, “low-caste,” rural and barely literate women – in a local language. Now, it has won international recognition through the award of the 2009 UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize. Khabar Lahariya (the name means “News Waves”) was launched in May 2002 and today the 8-page fortnightly newspaper, published in local...

Three suspects in the murder of journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya went on trial for a second time in Moscow Wednesday, according to news reports. No one has been sentenced for the October 2006 killing of Politkovskaya, who published scathing exposes of official corruption and rights abuses. The three alleged accomplices, the only people so far charged in connection with the murder...

Slovenia has charged Finnish journalist Magnus Berglund with two counts of criminal defamation after a documentary he produced quoted unnamed sources as saying that members of the former Slovene government – including former Prime Minister Janez Jansa – accepted bribes in arms deals with Finnish arms maker Patria. Berglund made the allegations in a September 2008 documentary produced by Finland’s...