News

Six of the world’s leading newspapers dedicated to sports have come together to form the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN), to defend and promote the interests and freedom of the sports press. The founding members of the IASN are the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo Deportivo and Marca in Spain, L’Equipe in France, Olé in Argentina, and Lance in Brazil...

Press freedom groups in the Philippines have called on the Senate to withdraw its invitation to a reporter to appear before the inquiry into the alleged corruption in World Bank (WB)-funded road projects, saying doing so might be “undue interference” in his work as a journalist. The Senate Committee on Economic Affairs headed by Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago has summoned Newsbreak senior writer...

The police in Gabon arrested two European journalists on Tuesday, accusing them of posing as tourists to dig up a story on French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. "They arrived on February 5 as tourists.... They must answer (charges of) bypassing procedure," Gabon Communication Minister Laure Olga Gondjout told Agence France-Presse (AFP). The two were named on Gabon television as French...

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has confirmed the new dates for its World Newspaper Congress, World Editors Forum and Info Services Expo, the global meetings of the world’s press, which will now be held in Hyderabad, from November 30 to December 2, 2009. WAN announced last month that the events, originally scheduled for March, would be postponed until later in the year due to the impact...

Shepard Fairey, the artist whose “Hope” image of President Barack Obama was added to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, sued the Associated Press over the news company’s copyright challenge to the artwork. The lawsuit Monday in US District Court in Manhattan said Los Angeles street artist Shepard Fairey did not violate the copyright of the April 2006 photograph because he dramatically...

French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which helped launch the 1950s New Wave, has been sold by Le Monde to international arts publishing house Phaidon Press. Founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and edited by Eric Rohmer, Cahiers du Cinéma was a crucible for writers-turned-New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and a vocal...

Four female journalists were in a state of shock on Monday after reportedly being attacked, forced to strip and marched through a Sierra Leonean town by a pro-female genital mutilation (FGM) group, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. Witnesses said the four were accused of reporting on an anti-FGM campaign last Friday, which marked the international day of zero tolerance to female...

Newsstand and retail sales of US magazines fell 11 per cent in the second half of 2008, with celebrity and women's titles taking a hit as supermarket and drugstore shoppers cut back on their spending. "Single-copy" sales of magazines in figures released by the US Audit Bureau of Circulations on Monday performed worse than paid subscriptions, which were up less than 1 per cent. Total paid and...

Sudan has expelled a foreign journalist for reporting on the country's Darfur crisis and arms industry. Canadian-Egyptian reporter Heba Aly, who wrote for US news agency Bloomberg, Boston-based Christian Science Monitor newspaper and the United Nations news service IRIN, left the country last week. She told colleagues that officers from Sudan's security service contacted her and ordered her to...

Seven people were arrested on Sunday after taking part in a tribute to slain human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasia Baburova in which flowers were lain at the spot where they were gunned down in the centre of Moscow on January 29. Interior ministry Omon anti-riot police arrested them on the grounds that they were holding an “unauthorised” demonstration. Human...