News

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, October 9, 2007 - A private radio station in southwest Uganda was knocked off the air for several days after armed assailants poured acid on its transmitter last week in an attack believed to have been prompted by a program critical of the local government, according to local journalists and news reports. Life FM, one of two radio stations in the town of Fort Portal, 160...

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, October 9, 2007 - Colombian reporter Gonzalo Guillén has been forced to flee his home in Bogotá after receiving more than 20 death threats following comments made by President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the journalist said today. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Uribe today to personally ensure that Colombian authorities conduct a prompt investigation into these...

(CEPET/IFEX) - Mexico, 9 October 2007 - Three vendors of the newspaper "El Imparcial" of Oaxaca were killed on the afternoon of 8 October 2007 as they were driving in a media vehicle on the Istmo de Tehuantepec highway. Agustín López, Mateo Cortés Martínez and Flor Vásquez López were on their way to Salina Cruz in this southern area of Mexico when they were fired upon by men with high caliber...

(CENCOS/IFEX) - Mexico, 9 October 2007 - Luis Téllez Kuenzler, secretary of communication and transportation, took care of the issue of media monopolies in one fell swoop by merely denying the existence of the problem. In doing so, he contradicted his - and then-president Felipe Calderón's - promises to address this issue when they come to power less than six years ago. He denied the existence of...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned escalating kidnappings of journalists after three were snatched in less than a week, two of whom were later freed. The organisation has joined the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) to urge the government to launch an all-out search for Birendra Sah, who was abducted in Bara district. Sah, 34, correspondent for Nepal FM, Dristri Weekly and Avenues TV...

The European Union said yesterday that the Thomson Corporation’s plan to buy the Reuters Group raised competition concerns for the supply of financial information. The European Commission, Europe’s antitrust authority in Brussels, told the companies it needed more time to study the £8.7 billion ($17.7 billion) acquisition. Thomson and Reuters said in a separate statement that they would work with...

Chicago real estate magnate and Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell said Tuesday he had no plans to sell the Los Angeles Times to any of the moguls who previously expressed an interest in buying the newspaper. "I said it to Eli Broad. I said it to Ron Burkle. I said it to David Geffen, and I'm saying it to you," Zell said during a talk at a conference on corporate growth. He then quipped: "Now, if you have...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Associated Press is suing VeriSign Inc to stop its online subsidiary Moreover Technologies Inc from publishing AP news reports without permission. The AP lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks unspecified damages and a permanent injunction against VeriSign and Moreover. A VeriSign official was not immediately...

Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not. That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue. Purists may sniff at these online liaisons...

The BBC is poised to cut at least 12 per cent of its workforce, with the brunt of more than 2,000 redundancies falling on factual programming, senior staff have been told. The final tally of job losses, which will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, could approach 2,800, according to one person familiar with the situation. Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, is seeking cuts...