News

Reporters Without Borders today condemned yesterday’s heavy-handed raid by Nigeria’s domestic intelligence agency, the State Security Service, on the Abuja studios of African Independent Television (AIT), a privately-owned station. “With several elections due to be held this year, the federal government is violating the law with impunity in order to control news and information and to silence...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the jailing of Oscar Sánchez Madan, a Matanzas province correspondent of the Miami-based Cubanet website. Arrested on 13 April and summarily tried the same day, Sánchez was sentenced to four years in prison as a “pre-criminal social danger.” His imprisonment brings the number of independent journalists currently held in Cuba to 26. “The total of 27...

afrol News, 18 April - A military tribunal in the Congolese capital Kinshasha condemned the two main defendants - Joël Munganda and Papy Munongo - after they were found guilty of assassinating a Congolese journalist, Franck Ngyke and his wife, Hélène Mpaka. A third defendant,Didier Awatimbine, was sent to prison for life. Franck Ngyke was a political editor of the daily ‘La Reference Plus’ in...

New York, April 18, 2007—A court in the capital, Dakar, handed a prison sentence and heavy damages against a tabloid director on criminal defamation charges over a story trumpeting an alleged high-profile corruption scandal, according to local journalists and news reports. Ndiogou Wack Seck of the private, pro-government daily Il Est Midi was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to pay...

As the attack by a deranged gunman unfolded at Virginia Tech on Monday, one thing became increasingly clear: In many ways, and for a growing number of people, blogs and wikis -- and Facebook and MySpace -- are the new CNN. In the same way that reporters for the TV news network became a symbol of a new age, as they crouched on the rooftop of the Baghdad Hilton with their satellite phones while...

The Associated Press has launched a weblog aimed at younger audiences. Far And Wide provides signposts to the news stories flying across the AP's global news wires, from the agency staff's own perspective. According to the debut entry, it will be "a fresh way into the news, one that puts you squarely in the places where news is happening, and in the newsrooms where reporters' stories go out to the...

(Adil Soz/IFEX) - Adil Soz has expressed its alarm over the disappearance of Oralgaisha Zhabaktaikyzy, a journalist with "Zakon I pravosudie" newspaper. The journalist was last seen getting into a sport utility vehicle on 30 March 2007 by a friend. According to another "Zakon I pravosudie" reporter in Almaty, Mukhit Iskakov, the journalist began receiving telephoned threats shortly after the...

Website server logs that count unique cookies to measure unique visitors are likely to be exaggerating the size of the site’s audience by a factor as high as 2.5, or an overstatement of 150 per cent, a study has found. comScore released the results Tuesday of a study analysing the validity of using cookie-based data to measure the number of unique visitors to individual websites or to gauge the...

Reporters Without Borders today called for a rapid response from the federal authorities to last night’s abduction of Saúl Martínez Ortega, the editor of the Diario de Agua Prieta Sonora newspaper, in Agua Prieta, in the northwestern state of Sonora. He is the second newspaper journalist to disappear in suspicious circumstances in Mexico this year, following Tabasco Hoy reporter Rodolfo Rincón...

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic: A panel of Dominican judges has upheld decades-long prison sentences for three men convicted in the 1975 murder of journalist Orlando Martinez. The judges upheld maximum 30-year sentences for former Sgt. Mariano Cabrera Duran and Rafael Alfredo Llubere, who have already spent a decade in prison since their arrests. Former Gen. Joaquin Antonio Pou Castro's...