News

The house of Loksatta editor Kumar Ketkar was attacked in Thane on Thursday morning by a pro-NCP group Shivsangram Sangathan protesting Ketkar editorial criticising the Maharashtra government's plans to erect a statue of Maratha King Chhatrapati Shivaji. The activists pelted stones damaging windowpanes of Ketkar's house and also tried to ransack it. Ketkar and his wife were in the house when the...

Three Somali journalists have been awarded the prestigious Hellmann/Hammett award in recognition for their journalism while risking their lives and suffering terrible hardships in the midst of Somalia’s worsening armed conflict. Abdullahi Mohammed Hassan, founder of the Ayaamaha newspaper; Mohamed Amiin Sheik Adow, of Radio Shebelle; and Abdi Dhaqane Ciye, a cameraman for HornAfrik media, were...

Afghan journalist Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, editor of the monthly Haqoq-e-Zan (Women’s Rights), has been released after being held for 86 days in an intelligence ministry prison in the holy city of Qom (150 km southwest of Tehran). “Nazab was held arbitrarily for three months,” Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) reported. “The conditions were difficult and he was in solitary confinement for most...

There has been an upsurge in legal proceedings against members of the Algerian news media as the trial of three journalists on the daily Liberté ended with the state prosecutor making an outrageous call for jail sentences against them. The prosecutor on Sunday called for two months imprisonment for editor, Ali Ouafak, managing editor, Farid Alilat, and cartoonist Ali Dilem for “defamation” under...

Six-month prison sentences have been passed by a court in the southwestern city of Bulawayo on three South African drivers for “unauthorised possession of TV broadcast equipment.” “The Zimbabwean authorities stop at nothing to control and punish foreign news media and anyone else who is liable to draw attention to the disastrous situation in the Zimbabwe,” Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the methods being used by the Sudanese government to censor Khartoum-based newspapers. In the latest case early Monday, members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM)—the political wing of the former rebel group in the south that is now part of a unity government—participated in a raid on the privately-owned Arabic-language daily Ajras Al...

Lawyers for a Canadian television journalist being held as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing the Bush administration of holding him illegally and demanding his release, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. Afghani native Jawed Ahmad, 22, has been held in Bagram, Afghanistan, for more than six months without being charged, according to the complaint filed in US...

Chinese media is still forbidden to refer openly to the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. Censorship is also extremely severe on the Internet. "The Chinese authorities are trying to use the Olympic Games to make people forget what happened on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square," Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said. "But the sports events and the festivities that will take place in this...

A cameraman employed by public television station Al-Iraqiya, was seriously injured Tuesday in the bombing of a musical instruments shop in the old part of Basra, 550 km south of Baghdad, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Odai Sabri was rushed unconscious, with multiple injuries to head and body, to a hospital where he underwent an operation to remove some of the bomb fragments....

The abduction and torture of two Brazilian journalists investigating paramilitaries in Rio de Janerio's sprawling slums have brought to the fore the increasing threats to lives of journalists in the city's favelas (shanties). A reporter, a photographer and their driver working undercover for the paper in Batan, a shantytown located in the western outskirts of the city, were abducted from a local...