News

Police auxiliaries assaulted Rafael Marchante, a Spanish photographer employed by the British news agency Reuters, while he was covering a demonstration by jobless university graduates outside parliament in Rabat on May 21. "This is not the first time the security forces have attacked a journalist while dispersing demonstrators," Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières said in a statement. "The fact...

A policeman on horseback struck photographer Víctor Salas several times with a metal riding crop while he was covering a protest Wednesday in Valparaíso, a city to the west of Santiago, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Salas, who works for the Spanish news agency EFE, has been hospitalised and risks using the use of his right eye as a result of the blows. “Unfortunately this is not...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has hailed a new ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that urges Argentina to void a criminal defamation sentence against a local journalist and reform its defamation laws. The decision by the international court, based in San José, Costa Rica's capital, was made public on Tuesday by the Argentine human rights organisation Centro de...

Three men accused of killing Congolese journalist Serge Maheshe in 2007 were convicted and sentenced to death, while two others were acquitted in a retrial that ended Wednesday. The trial failed to establish a clear motive for the crime, according to news reports and local journalists. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) expressed concern that key aspects of the case remain...

Two Iraqi journalists were killed in separate incidents this week. Wisam Ali Ouda, a cameraman for the Afaq television station, was shot as he walked home in the Obaidi district of Baghdad on Wednesday morning, Reuters reported. The station’s public relations head Bushra Abdul-Amir told Reuters that witnesses said Ouda was shot by an “American sniper.” Station secretary Ghufran al-Bakri told the...

An Iraqi television station accused US troops Thursday of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home. The body of a second journalist, Haidar Hashim al-Husseini, a reporter for Al-Sharq newspaper, was found dumped in a field with nine other corpses in Diyala province, police and colleagues said. A spokeswoman for the Afaq television channel, according to a Reuters report...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the death threats made in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal on May 16 by members of the Communist Party of Bhutan Marxist-Leninist Maoist (CPB-MLM) against journalists working for the Bhutan News Service, www.apfanews.com, a website operated by the Association of Press Freedom Activists (APFA), a Bhutani exile organisation. The incident took place during...

Bright Chibvuri, the editor of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Union's bi-weekly newspaper The Worker, has been convicted of contravening section 83(1) of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), which criminalises practicing journalism without accreditation. Chibvuri is appealing to the High Court against both the conviction and the sentence. On 29 April, Chibvuri, who...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) expressed concern over the safety of television host Juan Bonilla Martínez, of the privately-owned station Mega Visión 43, whose car was fired upon in front of the television station in the northern Dominican Republic city of Santiago de los Caballeros on May 21. RSF has called on the government to protect journalists better. The attack came five days after...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has expressed concern over the decision ot Chinese authorities to suspend publication of a magazine and forced the dismissal of its editorial staff over coverage of last week's earthquake in Sichuan province. New Travel Weekly, published in Chongqing, was reportedly suspended from publishing on May 20 after failing to carry mourning messages in the...