News

Fiji's interim government has asked the court to jail the publishers and editors of two of the country's daily newspapers for six months each and impose a fine of $1 million (approx. US$539,000) over their publication of a letter that criticised the High Court's validation of the 2006 military coup. The Fiji Times and Daily Post newspapers have published statements acknowledging their guilt on...

Unidentified persons threw tear gas bombs and pamphlets and fired into the air outside the Caracas home of Venezuelan journalist Marta Colomina on December 1, the Peru-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) has reported. Colomina presents an editorial program in Unión Radio and is a columnist for the newspaper El Universal. In the pamphlets, which were signed by members of the group known as La...

The 2008 SEEMO Award for Human Rights has been awarded to Slovenian journalist, writer and human rights advocate Spomenka Hribar. The award is given by the Vienna-based South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO), a network of editors, media executives and leading journalists in South East Europe and an affiliate of the International Press Institute (IPI). Hribar received much publicity in the...

The World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC) has created an annual award for press freedom champions, the Dana Bullen Press Freedom Advocacy Prize, in honour of the organisation's first Executive Director. The committee also announced that the first prize would be bestowed on veteran free press activist Leonard R Sussman, Senior Scholar of Freedom House and its Executive Director for 21 years (1967-88...

Nazif Iflasoglu, a reporter from the daily Radikal, has been acquitted of the accusation of "securing and spreading secret documents". He had faced the charges for publishing an article about the strategy of the Follow-Up Committee at the Prime Ministry regarding its fight against the radical Muslim Hizbullah Organization, the Istanbul-based IPS Communication Foundation (BIANET) has reported. The...

A controversial businessman has been arrested in Bulgarian for blackmailing a journalist and assaulting her son. The Sofia District Prosecutor's Office has ordered a businessman from the town of Dupnitsa, Plamen Galev, his accountant Krasimir Okov and his bodyguard Georgi Gradevski, to be detained, the prosecutor's office said on Friday, according to Sofia News Agency. Galev and Okov have been...

Citing the examination of “classified” material evidence, the presiding judge in the Anna Politkovskaya murder case trial again barred on Thursday the press and public from the hearing. The trial was re-opened for both on Friday. A witness testifying in the trial said on Friday that a bounty of $2 million was paid to carry out the killing. Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, who had previously served 12 years in...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the judicial harassment of Freddy Aponte Aponte, a journalist based in the southern city of Loja who works for privately-owned radio station, Luz y Vida. After being given a six-month jail sentence on September 25 for allegedly slandering a former mayor of Loja, he has just learnt in prison that the ex-mayor is now suing him for a million dollars in...

Hamas security forces have freed three Palestinian journalists who they had arrested last month and accused of fabricating news critical of the Islamist group, agency Reuters has reported. The journalists, freed on December 3, worked in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for the Palestine Press, a local news agency with ties to the group's main rival, President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction. The...

The Union government has issued guidelines for foreign news and current affairs magazines publishing Indian editions, requiring them to have Indians in all key editorial and executive positions. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has also mandated that 75 per cent of the boards of directors of the publishing companies should be resident Indians. The magazines have been allowed to...