News

“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.” The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following...

Activists are urging Home Depot, which recently unveiled an environmentally conscious marketing program, to withdraw advertising from Fox News, whose hosts and commentators dismiss global warming as liberal hysteria. But Home Depot is unswayed, and the environmentalists appear to be doing something they generally discourage: wasting energy. A short video by Robert Greenwald, “Fox Attacks: The...

Stockton and Darlington may seem an unusual place to begin exploring the potential pitfalls of the digital revolution, but as the birthplace of the railway revolution, it provides a context for some alarming parallels to be drawn. September 1825 saw the first passenger steam train chug along the Stockton & Darlington railway line. In the period that followed, entrepreneurs flooded the market with...

(CJES/IFEX) - Larisa Arap, a member of the opposition movement United Civil Front, has been forcibly hospitalized in a Murmansk psychiatric clinic. Yelena Vasilyeva, the head of the movement's Murmansk division, told CJES Arap's hospitalization occurred following the publication of her article on the city's psychiatric clinics in a special edition of the movement's newspaper. In her article, Arap...

(BIANET/IFEX) - The Ankara 13th Civil Court of First Instance has accepted part of the court case filed by retired ambassador Sükrü Elekdag against the "Agos" weekly newspaper and historian Taner Akcam. Akcam wrote an article entitled "Gündüz Aktan and the Saik Problem in the Genocide". It was published by "Agos" on 6, 20 and 27 January and 3, 10 and 17 February 2007. Elekdag filed a suit for 20...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned the continuing detention of journalists Vincent Hata, Michel Shango and Eugène Risasi Tambwe of the public broadcaster RadioTélévision Nationale Congolaise (RTNC), who were arrested for union activism on 26 and 27 July 2007. Reporters Without Borders partner organisation in Democratic Republic of Congo, Journaliste en Danger (JED), said a fourth...

(CJES/IFEX) - The 20 July 2007 edition of "Mordovia Segodnya", an independent weekly newspaper published in the city of Saransk, the capital of the central Russian republic of Mordovia, was devoted to the recent arrest of the paper's founder, editor Anatoly Sardayev (see IFEX alert of 19 July 2007). On the front page, the words "There is no free press in Mordovia!" were written in large letters...

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- It took a little while, but most magazine and newspaper publishers eventually accepted the need to establish web versions of their cherished print properties; it was pixelate or risk perishing. But now those same publishers are demonstrating a growing belief that while those companion sites are necessary, they are not sufficient. Hearst Corp. acknowledged as much last week...

New York, July 30, 2007— The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by reports that a Gambian reporter, arrested a year ago and since held incommunicado without charge or trial by the government, was briefly admitted last week to Gambia’s main hospital in the capital, Banjul. “Chief” Ebrima B. Manneh, the State House correspondent for the private, pro-government Daily Observer, was arrested...

A new, free daily Hebrew newspaper, Israel Hayom (Israel Today), is set to launch today, with 150,000 copies slated to be distributed in bus and train stations. While Israel Hayom officials have maintained extreme secrecy regarding the paper's editorial bent, going so far as to ask reporters not to speak publicly about the paper, the paper is bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson, an American casino mogul...