News

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The widow of a Pakistani journalist, shot dead last year after reporting that an al Qaeda leader was killed by a U.S. missile, was killed in a bomb blast on Saturday in a northwestern tribal region, a family member said. The bomb planted outside the family house in the town of Mir Ali, in the North Waziristan region near the Afghan border, went off early in the morning...

News channels on the Pakistani networks GEO TV and ARY Digital were ordered by authorities to halt transmission Friday from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after they refused to sign a Pakistani government-mandated “code of conduct.” Pakistani journalists hold placards at a protest camp against the media crackdown by the government in Islamabad, Pakistan on Tuesday, November 13, 2007. Authorities...

On October 7, 2006, after a six-month trial, the three hired assassins who killed Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a Filipino newspaper columnist and radio commentator who probed government corruption, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Marlene Garcia-Esperat was an accidental journalist. A chemist for the agriculture department on the southern island of Mindanao in the early 1990s, she was scrounging to...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and UNESCO will collaborate on global efforts to forge universal standards towards building a multilingual cyberspace. The three agencies organised a workshop on this subject during the second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 12-15, 2007...

(IAPA/IFEX) - Miami (November 16, 2007) - The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today qualified as inhumane and repressive the Cuban government's refusal to grant exit visas to independent journalists who have resident permits in other countries. IAPA's chairman of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Gonzalo Marroquín, called on the government in Havana "to halt the...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - International news agencies have ended their boycott of Australian cricket after reaching a deal over media coverage rights. Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse had all been refusing to cover the series between Australia and Sri Lanka in protest at Cricket Australia's (CA) demands. But they reached a provisional agreement on Friday, allowing the agencies to start...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders condemns the arrest of Abolfazl Abedini Nasr of the weekly "Bahar Khozestan" by ministry of intelligence officials in the southern city of Ahvaz on 13 November 2007. It is not known where he is being held. In a separate development, three newspaper journalists have been given prison sentences in the north of the country. "We urge the authorities to provide...

(NUSOJ/IFEX) - The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) expresses its deep concern over the increasing dangers confronted by Somali journalists and the growing clampdown on the operations of the media in Mogadishu. The shutdown of three well-known, privately-owned radio stations - Shabelle, Simba and Banadir - by the security forces of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG)...

Mogadishu mayor Mohamed Omar Habeb’s demands that news media and journalists must register with the authorities in order to be able work in the capital are a violation of the Transitional Federal Government’s undertakings, Reporters Without Borders said today in a letter to President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. Mayor Habeb said on 14 November that “all the media” including “representatives of foreign...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned an order issued on 12 November by a military court in the eastern city of Van banning any media reports, comments or criticism of an investigation into eight soldiers held on suspicion of “persistent insubordination,” abandoning their positions and failing to fight as ordered against guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The soldiers were...