News

The Delaware Valley News will print its final edition this week after serving 10 New Jersey and Pennsylvania towns along the banks of the Delaware River for nearly 130 years, the mycentraljersey.com website has reported. The weekly newspaper's four staffers were notified of the shutdown on Monday as they continued to produce the paper's last issue, which is scheduled to hit newsstands Thursday...

Iraq's largely autonomous northern Kurdistan region has passed a modified media law aimed at protecting journalists' rights, abolishing jail terms for offences such as defamation, Reuters has reported quoting parliamentary deputies. An earlier version of the law passed by parliament last December carried tough sanctions for journalists including imprisonment, fines of up to 10 million Iraqi dinar...

Australian federal police raided the house of a Canberra journalist Tuesday seeking to identify the source for a story quoting classified material from the top-secret Defence Intelligence Organisation, the Age has reported. Seven officers searched the home of Canberra Times national affairs correspondent Philip Dorling at 8.30 am. They took Dorling's laptop computer, the hard drive from a second...

Stanislav Glukhov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Khabarovsky Express, has been convicted of slander (a crime under Article 129 of the Russian Criminal Code), for disseminating false information and defaming Dmitry Rozenkov, a member of the local parliament, according to the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES). The court found that Glukhov knowingly allowed the...

A journalist has been arrested in Somaliland following a complaint by the Somali Red Crescent over a news report on SRC's food distribution that the journalist published on the Internet. In The journalist, Abdiqani Ismail Goh of Radio Las Anod, had cited residents protesting how the food was distributed. The arrest of the journalist on September 17 was ordered by head of Somaliland police division...

Repeated death threats have been made since May against Juan Parada, contributor to regional daily Río Negro and radio FM Patagonia, in Chos Malal, Neuquén province in the southwest, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The threats appear linked to his exposure of corruption involving local officials at the courts and the municipal authority as well as police excesses. Parada also gave...

Burma's longest-serving political prisoner, journalist Win Tin, was freed Tuesday after 19 years in detention. He emerged from Yangon's Insein prison still dressed in light-blue prison clothes after benefiting from an amnesty announced by the military government for thousands of detainees ahead of the elections promised for 2010. "I will keep fighting until the emergence of democracy in this...

A top Saudi cleric has issued an edict saying writers who challenge or criticise religious sheikhs should be fired from their jobs, flogged, and jailed. This comes close on the heels of another top cleric calling for the death of owners of satellite TV stations that air “immoral” soap operas. Sheikh Abdallah Ben Jabreen, a former member of the Saudi Arabia’s Establishment of Fatwas, told Al-Majd...

Nigeria's National Broadcasting Commission restored Friday the broadcasting licence of Channels Television, two days after it was revoked for mistakenly reporting a fabricated report that the president may resign due to his health. NBC said the station apologised and accepted responsibility for the false report, according to Reuters. NBC director-general Yomi Bolarinwa said the commission was...

Turkish journalist Cengiz Kapmaz, editor of pro-Kurdish daily Alternatif, has been sentenced under the Anti-Terror Law to ten months in jail for “making propaganda” for the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in an article published in June 2006, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The Court of Assizes in Istanbul also sentenced the paper’s publisher Hasan Bayar and its owner, Ali...