News

NEW YORK - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Monday it fired a former systems technician who allegedly recorded phone conversations between the company's public relations office and a newspaper reporter. Wal-Mart said the technician, who it did not identify, also intercepted text messages using his own personal equipment. The retailer said he was acting alone, but declined to say what his motive may have...

LONDON: In one corner, media titan Rupert Murdoch with his tight grip on pay-TV in Britain. In the other, airline and music entrepreneur Richard Branson, keen to expand his empire by taking some of Murdoch's territory. In the middle are millions of pay-TV viewers who have been deprived of some of the most popular programs on TV. The battle between British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC — 39 percent...

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) says it will pay the costs of a Bhutanese newspaper after the paper appealed for international financial aid to allow it to continue publishing. The Bhutan Reporter has been produced and financed since 2004 by a handful of journalists living in seven refugee camps in Nepal who work for no pay. The journalists said they could no longer afford the 2,000...

New York, March 7, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists today urged Mexican President Felipe Calderón to sign new federal legislation decriminalizing defamation, libel, and slander. Voting 100-0 with one abstention, the Mexican Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that effectively directs all such cases to civil court. The measure, already approved by the lower chamber of Congress, seeks to make...

Over 1,000 news media personnel around the world have been killed trying to report the news in the past decade, with Iraq and Russia topping the list as the deadliest countries for the profession, according to a report released Tuesday. India stands sixth. The uncle (left) and father of Reuters journalist Waleed Khaled cry over his his body at Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital after he was shot in the...

NEW YORK: Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who spent more than 80 days in captivity in Iraq last year before being freed following an international call for her release, has retuned to the Middle East, currently reporting out of Cairo for the paper. Monitor Editor Richard Bergenheim confirmed that Carroll had been working out of Cairo following her leave of absence last fall to...

(IMI/IFEX) - The General Prosecutor Office has closed the investigation on the violent death of former minister of internal affairs Yuriy Kravchenko, a key figure in the Gyorgy Gongadze case, Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko told a press conference in Kyiv on 28 February 2007. "Within the criminal case instituted over the fact of death of Kravchenko, the decision was taken to close the...

(MISA/IFEX) - On March 2, 2007, controversial church pastor Justice Dlamini threatened two journalists with death through divine intervention. Dlamini shocked a church gathering, which also included Cabinet Ministers, when he declared from the pulpit that he was praying for the death of two journalists, "Times of Swaziland" Managing Editor Martin Dlamini and reporter Nhlanhla Mathunjwa, whom he...

New York, March 6, 2007 — The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the Thai government’s decision today to take control of iTV, Thailand’s only privately owned and managed television news station. The takeover was expected after the government announced last week it would terminate iTV’s license on Tuesday – the deadline for paying nearly 100 billion baht (US$2.8billion) in fines...

The Village Voice named its fifth editor in chief in a little over a year yesterday after abruptly firing David Blum from the position on Friday afternoon. Tony Ortega, 43, the editor of The Broward-Palm Beach New Times, an alternative weekly, will take over as editor in chief this week, said Maggie Shnayerson, a spokeswoman for The Village Voice. “I’m just very excited about going to The Voice,”...