News

Palestinian cameraman Imad Ghanem who was badly injured in gunfire by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip last month is still waiting to be allowed to leave Gaza and go to Egypt to be fitted with artificial legs. One month after asking Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak to investigate the circumstances in which Israeli soldiers fired on Ghanem on July 5 in the Gaza Strip, Reporters sans Frontières...

MOSCOW -- A popular Kazakhstan newspaper owned by the former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev was forced to close last week, its editors said, and was replaced with a new, similarly styled weekly run by a man close to the president. The switch is the latest chapter in a murky family feud that has brought Kazakhstan's commitment to democracy under increasing foreign criticism. Several...

New York, August 10, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release this afternoon of four Mexican journalists who had been detained on Tuesday night by the army while covering a drug raid. Charges of possession of a firearm and marijuana are still pending against them. The reporters told their lawyer that the weapon and drugs were planted and that the soldiers had beaten them....

(BIANET/IFEX) - Journalist Ayse Önal of the "Star" newspaper has been sentenced to three months imprisonment and payment of compensation to Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer with of the Great Lawyer's Union, after he filed a suit against her. Her imprisonment has been converted into a fine. Önal has been sentenced to paying Kerincsiz compensation by a penal court in Istanbul for "insulting" him. The...

(SEAPA/IFEX) - On 4 August 2007, amid political tensions arising from the controversial formation of the new government, an unknown group of men attacked the office of a major newspaper, "Suara Timor Lorosa'e" (STL). STL managing director Francisco Belo Simoes Da Costa said most of the windows in the office have been destroyed. "It is really an attack against freedom of the press. People who don't...

Reporters Without Borders condemns the parliamentary human rights and media committee’s decision on 3 August to reject a request from the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) that it should consider whether article 10 of the media law violates articles 33 and 34 of the constitution. Article 10 of the media law requires news media to register with the local authorities where their premises are...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Haiti has created an independent commission to speed up stalled investigations into the slayings of journalists in the impoverished nation. Eight journalists have been killed in the Caribbean country since 2000, and the notoriously weak and corrupt justice system has yet to convict anyone in the deaths. The nine-member body, made up of Haitian journalists, will review each...

Reporters Without Borders today reiterated its call for the release of Munir Mengal, the head of the Baloch Voice TV station, who was arrested by police in Qalat, in the southwestern province of Balochistan, on being freed on 6 August by the intelligence agency that had been holding him at a secret location for the past 16 months. He is now being held in Khudzar prison under a 30-day custody order...

Global pree freedom advocates have expressed alarm at the deteriorating conditions for journalists in Manipur. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has expressed alarm over the fact that an adverse situation for media workers in Manipur has turned markedly worse in the space of a mere week. By all credible accounts, this has happened on account both of militant groups operating in...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has urged the Pakistan government to release journalist Munir Mengal, who was just released from 16 months’ military detention only to be put back in jail under a 30-day custody order. According to reports Mengal, the head of the Baloch Voice TV station, was released by intelligence agencies on August 6 but was arrested soon after by police in...