News

Mexican police botched the murder investigation of a journalist working near the US border in 2004 by torturing suspects and mishandling evidence, the country's human's rights commission said, according to a Reuters report. Roberto Mora, editorial director of El Manana newspaper in Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas, regularly wrote columns about drug trafficking and corrupt...

The editor-in-chief of the opposition-aligned, Khmer-language daily newspaper Moneakseka Khmer in Cambodia has been arrested. Dam Sith was arrested on Sunday by plainclothes police at a car wash and interrogated for several hours at the national military police headquarters in the capital, Phnom Penh. A criminal court charged Dam Sith the same day with defamation and disinformation in connection...

One of the Philippines' top TV reporters and her two assistants have been abducted, the ABS-CBN network said on Wednesday, after the team went missing on an island that is a hotbed of Islamic radicals linked to Al-Qaeda. The country's largest television network said that Ces Drilon, cameraman Jimmy Encarnacion, and assistant cameraman Angelo Valderama had been abducted for ransom on Jolo island...

Nsimba Embete Ponte, editor of the privately-owned twice-weekly newspaper "L'interprète", and his assistant, Davin Ntondo Nzovuangu, were transferred June 6 from the National Intelligence Agency (ANR), on the bank of the Congo River, near the prime minister's office, to the court of Matete, in Kinshasa, according to Journaliste en danger (JED). The two journalists were held incommunicado, for 90...

A new 90-day extension of a detention order has been issued against Sri Lankan journalist J.S. Tissainayagam, who has been held without charge since his arrest on March 8. Tissainayagam is being detained under the Emergency Regulations (2005) Act. The latest detention order was issued by the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) of the Sri Lankan police force on June 5. TID has refused to provide...

The appointment of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's alleged ex-girlfriend to the country's most prestigious TV news position has taken the country's media landscape by storm. Fortyone-year-old Laurence Ferrari is to replace France's most popular and influential news reader, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, as the host of France's most-watched news programme, the evening news on TF1. Liberation and Le...

The European Court of Human Rights has found Greece guilty of violating freedom of expression by convicting the daily I Avgi and its editor, Konstantinos Karis, of libel in 2003 for describing former journalist Kyriakos Velopoulos as a “known out-an-out nationalist” in a June 2000 article, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Velopoulos, who was elected last year as a parliamentary...

A new study on the media habits of young people in three countries found that television continues to be the most important source of news and information for the young, despite the rise of the internet—and newspapers can win their attention as well. The survey of 3,500 young people between 15- and 29-years old in the United States, the Netherlands and Finland found that young people get their...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the news media that have been closed in the Palestinian territories since the start of the clashes to be allowed to resume operating. "No fewer that 17 news media have been forced to stop working since June 2007, when Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority withdrew to the West Bank," the press freedom organisation said....

A six-year jail sentence has been handed down to an outspoken Yemeni journalist accused of conspiring with anti-government rebels. A state security court in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, Monday sentenced Abdel Karim al-Khaiwani, editor of an opposition news website, to six years in prison for being an alleged member of a cell of anti-government rebels and conspiring to carry out attacks on government...