News

Journalists in Manipur have defied the rebels diktats as the state's press and local channels decided to resume operations after closing down for a week following threats from a banned outfit, says an Asia News International (ANI) report. The offices of many newspapers and ISTV channel were shut down on March 21 after threats to four journalists from Omar Farooque’s faction of the People’s...

Tajik police have detained two men suspected of murdering a Russian television reporter who was found stabbed in a Moscow apartment with a belt around his neck, news agencies have reported. The detained men are Tajik nationals, Interior Ministry spokesman Khaidar Makhmadiev said, according to the Associated Press (AP) . He said he could not identify them by name. Interfax and ITAR-Tass news...

Al-Jazeera is quite badly hit—it is facing mass departures owing to its English channel's alleged anti-American bias. Three three senior journalists have quit in recent times, more are said to be in the queue. Dave Marash, the most high-profile US journalist on Al-Jazeera's English language service, left the channel last week, attacking its narrowing world view and increasingly anti-American...

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, plans to start an online TV channel to improve the image of the Western military alliance. NATO TV will be launched April 2 at a summit in Bucharest, Romania, alliance spokesman James Appathurai said Wednesday last. The new TV channel is the result of close cooperation between the NATO Public Diplomacy Division and the Danish Government to improve...

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday, his former colleague said. Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague...

A freelance journalist in Vietnam has been handed a five-year prison sentence on charges of “taking advantage of democratic rights to act against the state’s interests” and “receiving money from abroad to support complaints against the state” under article 258 of the criminal code. He has 15 days to appeal. A court in Vinh Thuan in the southern province of Kien Giang imposed the sentence Friday on...

The South Asia Media Commission (SAMC) has condemned the harassment of journalist Iftikhar Gilani, reportedly by intelligence agents disguised as officials of the income tax department. SAMC also demanded that the Indian government conduct a fair investigation into the harassment. According to a press release Wednesday, SAMC condemned the Indian government’s actions, which it said had been under...

The six-month jail term handed down to leading Egyptian editor Ibrahim Eissa has come in for worldwide condemnation. The Boulak Abul Ela Court of Misdemeanor, on the outskirts of Cairo, sentenced Ibrahim Eissa, editor in chief of the independent daily Al-Dustour, to six months in prison for “publishing false information and rumors” about President Hosni Mubarak’s health. The court said the...

On the second anniversary of a police raid on the privately-owned weekly the Independent, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called on the government to lift the illegal and unofficial ban that has prevented the newspaper from publishing for the past two years. “By suppressing a newspaper that was often very critical, the government broke the laws that it requires Gambians to respect under pain...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) provided financial support for the publication Friday in N’Djamena of a “newspaper of newspapers,” a single issue combining most of the independent Chadian weeklies that have not appeared since a state of emergency was proclaimed on February 15. It calls for the repeal of a press law imposed by decree on February 20. “The independent N’Djamena-based press is showing...