News

One of the largest Chinese-language newspapers in the US has been ordered by a federal judge to pay $5.19 million to 200 employees who were denied years of overtime pay and subjected to other labour law violations, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. The Chinese Daily News, based in Los Angeles and New York, must pay more than $3.5 million in damages and penalties in addition to more than $1.5...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed concern at a crackdown against the media which criticised the Cameroon government following an outbreak of rioting in Douala in the southwest part of the country. As the communications minister called on newspapers to be “responsible”, the unrest has left the privately-owned press in crisis after security forces raided the studios of Magic FM radio...

Iraqi authorities have vowed to hunt down the killers of journalists, days after the head of the country's biggest journalist organisation became the latest media worker to meet a violent death, Reuters has reported. The interior ministry said 270 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the “ban” imposed on a daily newspaper, Asomiya Protidin, by a political party in Assam. According to information received from an IFJ affiliate, the Indian Journalists’ Union (IJU), armed vigilantes belonging to the Bodo People’s Front (BPF), intercepted a delivery van belonging to the newspaper on February 25 in Kokrajhar...

A correspondent of an English-language newspaper was one of the at least 40 people who were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral of a slain police officer on February 29 in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The journalist was identified as Siraj Uddin. No organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack on the...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has protested at the arrest two days ago of Aboubacar Gourouza, editor of the independent bi-monthly L’Eveil Plus, by judicial police in Niger's capital Niamey in connection with two articles, one relating to an alleged plot against the former prime minister. He was brought to court Thursday, after being held by Niamey police, charged with “defamation” and “contempt...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) is very worried about imprisoned journalist Slim Boukhdir’s state of health after he staged an eight-day hunger strike in protest against the conditions in which he is being held. Arrested on November 26, the Al-Arabiya website’s correspondent is serving a one-year sentence in Sfax prison (230 km south of Tunis). “Preventing a prisoner from seeing his family or...

The Zimbabwean government is cracking down on independent media with barely one month to go before presidential elections on March 29. Journalists have been arrested, summoned and ordered to reveal sources, charged with “publication of false news” and newspapers threatened with closure if they fail to comply, in an upsurge of harassment that seriously threatens press freedom ahead of polling,”...

Security guards at Domodedovo International Airport in Moscow continued to hold Natalya Morar and her husband Ilya Barabanov, both reporters with the independent newsweekly the New Times, for a second consecutive day, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Authorities have denied Morar access to her lawyer while pressuring her to buy a return ticket to her native...

The police in the Cameroon's capital, Yaoundé, Thursday forced a popular radio station off the air and confiscated its equipment over commentary critical of the government during a call-in programme, according to local journalists, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Magic FM is the third broadcaster summarily closed by authorities within a week in response to...