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Swedish Parliament passed Wednesday evening a controversial bill allowing the government to monitor all SMS, email and other data traffic crossing Swedish borders with 143 in favour, 138 opposed and one parliamentarian abstaining. Faced with powerful criticism from the opposition, international experts, and from within its own ranks, the government sent the bill back to a parliamentary committee...

Two Liberian journalists working for the New Democrat newspaper were arrested and detained for several hours on June 16 by officers of the Liberia National Police in Monrovia. According to the police, news editor Othello Garblah and staff writer Festus Porque were arrested at the request of the Monrovia Transit Authority for "unprofessional photography." The two journalists had gone to the...

New York-based political blog Talking Points Memo (TPM) has been honoured with the 2008 IPI Free Media Pioneer award. David Kurtz, Managing Editor of Talking Points Memo, received the prize on behalf of TPM at the award ceremony in Belgrade on June 17. Created and run by the U.S. journalist, Joshua Micah Marshall, Talking Points Media ( http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com) is the flagship blog of TPM...

Odnei Fernando da Silva, the civilian police inspector who is accused of heading the militia that kidnapped and tortured two O Dia journalists and their driver in Rio de Janeiro's Batan favela on May 14, surrendered to the authorities on June 16. Also known as "01", "Dinei" and "Águia", Da Silva went with his lawyer to the headquarters of the Department for Repression of Criminal Actions and...

The main owner of Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos and the daily's editor have been acquitted of charges of “trying to obstruct a fair trial” by publishing an editorial that criticised the one-year suspended prison sentences imposed on three of its journalists. Serkis Seropyan, the main owner of Agos and editor Aris Nalci were Wednesday acquitted by a criminal court in the Istanbul district of...

The adoption by the Belarus chamber of representatives of a media bill that would reinforce media registration procedures and, for the first time, extend media regulation to the Internet has free speech advocates a worried lot. The Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) had asked parliament’s human rights and media committee to examine whether articles 33 and 34 of the proposed new law violate...

The conviction for “electoral propaganda” against daily A Folha de São Paulo and magazine Veja after they published interviews with a prospective candidate to municipal elections in São Paulo in southeast Brazil has been described as "absurd". Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said Thursday that the verdict placed an unacceptable limit on press freedom and that reform of the current...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called on the authorities to reinforce the protection they are providing to Pedro Cárdenas, the editor of the magazine La Verdad, after two men hit him and threatened him with a gun on June 14 in Bogotá in an attempt to dissuade him from distributing the latest issue in Tolima, a department west of Bogotá. Attempts have been made to intimidate Cárdenas in the...

Leading Taiwan daily China Times plans to lay off nearly half of its 1,200 staff due to financial problems, union and newspaper officials said Wednesday, according to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) report. "In the face of a widening deficit and streamlining of the newspaper, a largescale redundancy in terms of people and facilities is inevitable," publisher Chou Sheng-yuan said in an internal...

The International Herald Tribune announced Tuesday a plan to expand its reach in a fast-growing market in a partnership with Deccan Chronicle Holdings, the publisher of a new business newspaper in India. The IHT, published by the New York Times Co, will create a branded business section in Deccan's Financial Chronicle. The section will be a version of the Business Asia with Reuters section, which...