News

(FMM/IFEX) - The FMM is shocked and dismayed by attempts by the present government to bring back the criminal defamation law, which was repealed by the UNP government in June 2002 as a result of campaigns by national as well as international media and press freedom organisations. The FMM has credible evidence that, on behalf of the president, an emergency Cabinet paper was submitted to the Cabinet...

Five Malian journalists who covered a high school essay assignment — and the teacher who commissioned the lesson — have been convicted of insulting President Amadou Toumani Toure, according to news reports and local journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned the verdicts, which stemmed from a classroom exercise about an imaginary presidential sex scandal, and called for the...

Reporters Without Borders today called on the human rights section of the national police to protect Rubén Valencia, the editor of the Cali-based regional daily Q’hubo, who has been getting death threats since reporting drug baron Olmes Durán Ibargüen’s arrest and who is on the point of fleeing the country. He would be the third journalist to do so this year. “Threats against the press from...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc. plans to launch a test of its overhauled news portal on Tuesday, drawing influences from the uncluttered design of popular Internet blogs. The online division of the world's largest media company said it aimed to keep readers returning and to introduce a new generation of media consumers to the site by offering more interactive features such as polls and...

LONDON (Reuters) - The family and colleagues of Alan Johnston, a BBC reporter kidnapped by Islamists in Gaza, urged his captors on Monday not to harm him after he appeared in a video wearing what he said was an explosive belt. Johnston's father said he and his family were "most concerned and distressed" about the video, in which the 45-year-old Briton said his kidnappers had threatened to blow up...

Reporters Without Borders condemns the decision, announced yesterday, that Andrzej Marek, the editor of the regional weekly Wiesci Polickie, will have to serve a three-month prison sentence for allegedly libelling an official in the city of Police in a February 2001 article headlined “Encouraging sharp practices.” The three-month jail term, passed in November 2002 and upheld on appeal in November...

JOHANNESBURG, 26 June 2007 (IRIN) - A Lesotho radio journalist charged with subversion told IRIN he was forced to broadcast a letter, on pain of death, denouncing the country's leader on his early morning radio show. Thabo Thakalekoala, a freelance reporter and talk show host at Harvest FM, was arrested on the steps of the private radio station's offices in the capital, Maseru, after his broadcast...

NEW YORK It is quite a big deal for any reporter to get Page One stories in both The New York Times and The Washington Post during their careers. But how many have done so on the same day? Jo Becker has. Although Becker has only been at the Times for less than a month, she may well have accomplished a feat few in the paper's history ever will. On Monday, she had a front page byline in both the...

Parliament's press gallery is meeting in an attempt to get politicians to think again before they change the rules over coverage of the debating chamber. Proposed new rules would see a contempt of Parliament if what happens in the debating chamber is satirised, or if MPs are ridiculed of denigrated. Press gallery chairman Vernon Small says the contempt aspect is a worrying trend. He says in the...

Rupert Murdoch appears to be a step closer to acquiring The Wall Street Journal, a move that would set off what promises to be culture shock at the venerable financial news institution. The Journal’s parent, Dow Jones & Co., and Murdoch’s News Corp. have agreed in principle on a set of editorial protections for The Wall Street Journal, according to a report on WSJ.com. Protecting the editorial...