News

(FMM/IFEX) - The FMM has been informed by the Polonnaruwa Provincial Journalists Association that B. A. Wijerathna Podibanda, the Aralaganvila correspondent for the broadcasting station MTV/SIRASA, was threatened and assaulted by officials from the Mahaweli Authority. The incident occurred on Saturday, 14 July 2007. Wijerathna was assaulted when he went to the Araganvila Children's Park to capture...

Reporters Without Borders appealed for the release of Michel Kilo, Muhened Abdulrahman and Habib Saleh today, on the eve of President Bashar Al-Assad’s swearing-in tomorrow for a second seven-year term. “Assad’s first term as president was marked by many arrests of Syrian journalists and activists,” the press freedom organisation said. “The state of emergency that has been in effect since 1963 is...

July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., owner of the world's most popular search engine, said it will address privacy concerns by reducing the lifetime of ``cookies'' installed on the computers of people who visit its Web site. The cookies, files planted on personal computers to track Internet use, will automatically expire two years after the last visit to Google's site, Peter Fleischer, the company...

NEW YORK Reuters on Monday asked the U.S. military to conduct a full and objective investigation into the killing last week of two of its staff in Iraq after evidence emerged casting doubt on explanations given for their deaths. Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in Baghdad on Thursday in what witnesses said was a U.S. helicopter attack and which police in...

(July 13, 2007) Meeting at an Internews Europe workshop for editors last month, over 40 media leaders from across Vietnam agreed to work together to reduce stigma and discrimination in HIV reporting. They also agreed to promote more frequent and responsible coverage of HIV/AIDS by their journalists. “Media play a pivotal role in HIV/AIDS prevention in our country,” said Vietnamese Deputy Minister...

Jubilation would be premature. The fragmented, multimedia world in which quality newspapers must fight for attention is too new and confusing for that. But the initial evidence contradicts every doom-laden forecast by rivals. The Independent on Sunday's June relaunch has been rewarded with a 17 per cent year-on-year sales rise and a month-on-month increase of 17.45 per cent. Following the move to...

Most journalists in Canada feel the conditions that they work in are dangerous. More than 80 per cent of TV camera operators and half of broadcast reporters have been assaulted or threatened with injury at least once while doing their current job. In the print sector, more than 75 per cent of photographers and almost 30 per cent of reporters have been assaulted or threatened with injury. Of those...

The leader of a nationalist party has been acquitted of calling Islamic leaders traitors after they had sought support in the Middle East against a Danish newspaper, which first published controversial cartoons of prophet Mohammed. In December 2005 and January 2006, nine imams from Denmark travelled to Egypt, Syria and Lebanon to seek support from religious and political leaders to protest the...

(MFWA/IFEX) - Seedy Bojang, a journalist working for the Banjul-based, pro-government "Daily Observer" newspaper, was on July 9, 2007 dismissed by the newspaper's management. The reasons for his dismissal are not clear. Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) sources attributed it to some changes he allegedly made to the caption of a recent editorial in the paper. The sources quoted the newspaper...

(Adil Soz/IFEX) - Journalist Gennady Benditskiy and the newspaper he works for, "Vremya", have to pay a total of 1.7 million tenge (approx.US$14,000) to Justice Ministry officer Raikhan Useyev and lawyer Valeriy Alefirenko, following the courts' affirmation of their lawsuits. On 29 June 2007, the Zhetesu district court in Almaty ordered "Vremya" and Benditskiy to pay 200,000 tenge (approx. US$1...