News

Freedom of expression and human rights organisations have called on the Moroccan authorities for all criminal charges facing Moroccan journalist and editor Ali Anouzla to be dropped at the Rabat court hearing scheduled on February 18. Anouzla, journalist and editor of the Arabic edition of the news website Lakome, was arrested on September 17, 2013 in connection with a September 13 news article...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned well-known Yemeni human rights activist and blogger Feras Shamsan’s detention since February 1, when he was arrested while covering Cairo’s International Book Fair. According to the information obtained by Reporters Without Borders, Shamsan was interviewing someone attending the book fair when a passer-by objected to the interviewee’s comments on the...

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the murder Thursday night of Brazilian journalist Pedro Palma and calls on authorities to fully investigate the crime and bring those responsible to justice. Palma was gunned down by two unidentified men on a motorcycle outside his home in Miguel Pereira, a suburb to the south of Rio de Janeiro, and died at the scene, according to news reports. Palma...

Mehdi Karoubi, a dissident theologian, former parliamentary speaker and owner of the closed newspaper Etemad Melli, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the owner of the closed newspaper Kalameh Sabaz, and Mousavi’s wife, the writer Zahra Rahnavard, are spending their 1,100th day in detention today. They were placed under house arrest in February 2011. “The arbitrary detention of Karoubi, Mousavi and...

The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned by reports that two radio directors in the capital, Mogadishu, were arrested and held without charge for two days by Somalia's National Security Agency. Somalia authorities detained two radio directors for two days and threatened to kill them if they continued to air news critical of the government upon their release, local journalists told...

Venezuelan authorities took a Colombian news station off the air on Wednesday after the station aired coverage of anti-government protests that have left three people dead and dozens injured, according to the station and news reports. Claudia Gurisatti, director of the 24-hour cable news station NTN24, said that the station found out on Wednesday afternoon that CONATEL, Venezuela's...

The South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO), an affiliate of the International Press Institute (IPI), has expressed alarm at the February 13 arson attack against a vehicle owned by the Montenegrin daily Vijesti. At 2:30 a.m., a car marked with the name of the daily was set ablaze on a street in the Podgorica, the latest of several attacks against Vijesti’s journalists and property over the...

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Mexican authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into the murder of Gregorio Jiménez de la Cruz and hold the perpetrators to account. Jiménez was abducted on February 5 and his body was found buried along with two other people in the municipality of Las Choapas in Veracruz state on Tuesday, according to news reports. Armed men intercepted JimÃ...

There has been a steadily mounting violence against media personnel in Libya, including the February 11 abduction of four journalists in two separate incidents in the capital, Tripoli. In the first of two incidents, three journalists with state-owned Al-Wataniya TV who are normally based in the southern city of Sabha – photographers Faddan Hussein Al-Sakit and Ibrahim Saeed Abdelda’im and...

Sudanese authorities on February 4, 2014, confiscated the editions of three independent daily newspapers from the printing press, according to news reports and local press freedom groups. A spokesman said that the papers-- Al-Sahafa, Alwan, and Al-Ayam--had been confiscated because they had published stories on February 3, 2014, that used the word "Janjaweed" to describe the militias that had...