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UNITED NATIONS - Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech. Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year...

A journalist of a leading Axomiya daily was Saturday shot dead by miscreants in Lower Assam's Kokrajhar district. Jagajit Saikia (35), the Kokrajhar district local correspondent of the Guwahati-based daily Amar Asom, was shot at near a pharmacy in the heart of Kokrajhar town, official sources said. The gunmen fired six rounds, they said. Saikia was immediately rushed to the Rupnath Brahma Civil...

A Burmese court sentenced entertainer, blogger, and activist Maung Thura—known by his stage name, "Zarganar"—to 45 years in prison on November 20 for violations of the Electronics Act, according to Burmese rights groups and international news reports. Sports journalist Zaw Thet Htwe, and two other defendants were also sentenced to at least 15 years each in the same trial. All four still face...

A Bogotá judge has ordered the arrest of Colombian journalist Alejandro Santos Rubino, the director of weekly newsmagazine Semana, for failing to follow the court's instructions in a defamation suit, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Judge Amanda Vargas de Norato of the Penal Circuit of Bogotá issued an arrest warrant for Santos on Thursday after Semana did not follow the...

A court in China's southwestern Sichuan province sentenced Chen Daojun, a writer critical of the government, to three years in prison on charges of inciting subversion of state power. His wife Zeng Qirong told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that she was present in the courtroom in the provincial capital, Chengdu, when her husband was sentenced after 30-minute trial...

A member of the Anna Politkovskaya murder trial jury has denied that the jury had asked for the press and public to be excluded, saying it was the clerk of the court who asked them to sign a statement to this effect which they had not drafted. The jury member said this in an interview to independent radio station Echo Moskvy, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Juror Yevgeny Kolesov told...

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have released five journalists of privately-owned Raga TV, after they were arrested on November 19 and held for 24 hours at an undisclosed location, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “We were all released this evening. We were in trouble over the broadcast of an interview with an opposition figure who made comments seen as offensive...

Press freedom groups have called for the release of two local employees of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Kabul who were arrested a few hours after CBC reporter Mellissa Fung’s abduction on October 12. Fung was freed four weeks later but the two are still detained by the National Directorate of Security (NDS). “If there is evidence against Shokoor Feroz, a fixer, and Qaem Feroz, a driver...

Adolfo Cerrudo, a leader of the radical pro-government Popular Civic Committees, alleged to have taken part in physical assaults on journalists, has been placed under house arrest since November 14. Cerrudo took part in physical assaults, along with 200 other committee members, against a score of journalists outside San Pedro de La Paz prison, who were there to cover the investigation into the...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and the Journalistic Freedom Observatory (JFO) have renewed their call for the release of photographer Ibrahim Jassam of Reuters news agency, who has been detained by the US Army since September 1, 2008. A contingent of US and Iraqi forces took Jassam from his home in Mahmudiyah in the south of the capital, seizing four cameras, his phone and his laptop computer. He...