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DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group has claimed responsibility for the killing of an Iraqi journalist who it said "distorted the reputation of the mujahideen". Sahar al-Haideri, a mother of three, worked for the independent Aswat al-Iraq news agency in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where gunmen killed her on Thursday. "When she arrived at the area of the ambush the brothers rained her...

Sami al-Haj spends his days alone, thinking of his wife and the son he barely knows. He spends his time thinking of the world beyond the razor wire, of the world away from the walls and bars, the orange jumpsuit he is forced to wear and the military guards that oversee him. He thinks too of his fellow prisoners incarcerated along with him at Guantanamo Bay and the anguish they endure. And when he...

According to a report released by Amnesty International this week, the Internet as we currently know it could change “beyond all recognition” unless urgent action is taken to counter what the human rights pressure group worryingly refers to as the “Virus of Internet repression” that’s spreading with increasing regularity via online monitoring and censorship. More pointedly, Amnesty’s warning came...

(PPF/IFEX) - On 7 June 2007, the Speaker of the National Assembly barred journalists from Pakistan's lower house of Parliament. According to press reports, journalists who had come to cover the budget session were refused entry to the Parliament building. This is viewed as a retaliatory measure by Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain against the 5 June incident in which journalists chanted slogans from...

(IPYS/IFEX) - A newspaper's journalist has been threatened over its coverage of the non-renewal of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) station's frequency concession, and the newspaper itself has suffered a series of power outages. As well, President Hugo Chávez has warned that the frequency concessions of other television stations may be cancelled. On 30 May 2007, the newspaper "Correo del Caroní" of...

BOGOTA, June 8 (Reuters) - Colombia must do more to protect a reporter working for the Spanish-language sister paper of the Miami Herald after he received threats from paramilitaries, a U.N. panel said on Friday. The U.N. High Commission for Human Rights said Gonzalo Guillen of El Nuevo Herald had been intimidated by paramilitaries. It provided no details, but Human Rights Watch said in a letter...

The photographer was a seasoned operator in South Asia. So when she set forth on an assignment in India, she knew how to guard against gropers: dress modestly in jeans secured with a thick belt and take along a male companion. All those preparations failed, however, when an unruly crowd surged and swept away her colleague. She was pushed into a ditch, where several men set upon her, tearing at her...

MOSUL, Iraq, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Gunmen on Thursday shot dead a female journalist working for an independent Iraqi news agency in Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source said. "Gunmen attacked Sahar al-Haidari, a female journalist, in front of her house in the al-Hadbaa neighborhood in Mosul and showered her with bullets," the source from Nineveh province told Xinhua by...

(MEAA/IFEX) - The Media Alliance welcomes the Prime Minister's intervention to prevent journalists being subjected to police checks as a victory for common sense. The Alliance and Press Gallery Committee strongly objected to the proposal, which vested the discretionary power to knock back gallery licence applications with the Department of Parliamentary Services. Such a precedent would have...

(SEAPA/IFEX) - The Singapore High Court has rejected a regional periodical's application for a Queen's Counsel from the United Kingdom to represent the magazine in a defamation lawsuit brought against it by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his father, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. The Hong Kong-based "Far Eastern Economic Review" had sought to hire libel specialist Gavin Millar, but Justice Tan...