News

Media practitioners and journalists from all over Afghanistan have adopted a historic National Charter for Media and Democracy. This charter, enshrining the values of free speech and the right to information of all citizens, will constitute the basis for action by professional media unions and associations in the years ahead. The charter was adopted at a summit meeting in Kabul on July 31. The...

An Iraqi photographer working for the Associated Press (AP) was kidnapped in Diyala province on Tuesday, while another journalist working for state-run al-Sabah newspaper has been reported missing, acording to reports. An armed group intercepted the car of AP photographer Talal Ahmed Abdullah in central Baquba, 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, and took him to an unknown location, the independent...

An Iranian journalist has been arrested after he presented himself to a Tehran court in response to a summons. Neither Soheil Assefi's family nor his lawyers know where he is being held or with what he is charged. Officials from the prosecutor's office searched his home on July 31, taking personal documents and his computer's hard disk. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the release of...

The editor of the Arabic-language weekly Nichane and its sister French-language weekly TelQuel, has been charged with “disrespect for the king” under article 41 of the Moroccan press law. Ahmed Benchemsi received a summons from the Casablanca judicial police for the first time on August 4 after the latest issue of Nichane had been seized from news stands on the orders of Prime Minister Driss...

A criminal court in Baghdad has dismissed the charge of incitement to terror against 11 current and former employees of the independent Iraqi production company Wasan Media, acording to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Wasan Media general manager Shaker Mahmoud Khalaf al-Falahi (above) and broadcast engineer Omar Luqman Mahmoud remained behind bars for a separate charge of possessing...

Israel's attorney-general has asked Britain for more information about an analysis of an audio recording which may shed new light on the killing of British journalist James Miller in Gaza in 2003, the Guardian has reported. Britain's former attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, wrote to his Israeli counterpart Menachem Mazuz in June, presenting the analysis and asking him to begin legal proceedings...

New York, August 7, 2007—Intelligence agents in central DRC have jailed a reporter for failing to air an interview with a local politician, according to news reports and local journalists. Manda Mutombo of Radiotélévision Nationale Congolaise was arrested Friday by Congo’s National Intelligence Agency in the diamond-rich city of Kananga, 674 miles (1,085 km) southeast of the capital, Kinshasa...

(BIANET/IFEX) - Aris Nalci, news director of the "Agos" weekly newspaper, said although there has been a drop in e-mail threats received by the newspaper, the threats are still continuing. In a recent case, a student identified only as R.D., who is in his last year of high school, has been arrested for sending a threatening message to the newspaper one day after its editor-in-chief Hrant Dink was...

The Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai ( www.tiss.edu/cmcs) has announced a new one year full-time post-graduate Diploma in Media and Cultural Studies. Admissions open on July 17; last date for applications is August 29; course runs from November 26, 2007 till July 25, 2008. More details, including the information brochure and application form, are...

Most newspaper stories during the 2o06 Israel-Hezbollah war used Israeli sources more often for quotes and attributions, a new study has found. The overall coverage of the fighting sides (Israel and Hezbollah) was highly critical of both, although Israel received more sympathetic coverage than Hezbollah. An overwhelming majority of articles (55 per cent) explicitly blamed Hezbollah for starting or...