News

The head of news at the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has been accused of acting arbitrarily in unofficially blacklisting eight journalists and commentators. Among the banned journalists is Israel-based freelancer Paula Slier, a Jerusalem Post contributor, who has been barred from reporting because she is a Jew. SABC management set up a commission under former SABC head...

GABORONE, 26 October (IRIN) - Media watchdogs have criticised attempts by the Botswana government to control state media coverage of a controversial programme to relocate the San community from their ancestral land in a game reserve. The San were relocated to settlements outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in 1997 as a result of government plans to set aside the protected area for...

NEW ORLEANS - Online journalists warned a meeting of newspaper editors Thursday that their industry's survival depends on how well they can engage and excite the masses of readers on the Web. While delving into the digital age may seem daunting, "it's not nearly as frightening as what will happen to journalism if we don't embrace it," Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, said during...

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is brushing off a request for more information and a decision on an Associated Press photographer held for six months in Iraq without formal charges. In a letter to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, does not provide details about why Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein remains at a U.S. run prison camp. The letter repeats the military...

MOSCOW -- Investigators are focusing their inquiry into the killing of a Russian investigative reporter on former police officers linked to crimes against civilians in Chechnya, a newspaper reported Wednesday. Anna Politkovskaya, who had exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building Oct. 7. The...

China's leaders have hauled in 450 of the nation's media chiefs to order them to more closely toe the government line and step up their allegiance to the Communist Party, state press said on Wednesday. Chinese President Hu Jintao and other party leaders, including propaganda czar Li Changchun, met with the media chiefs at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday to reinforce the message...

MOSCOW: Investigators are focusing their inquiry into the killing of a Russian investigative reporter on former police officers linked to crimes against civilians in Chechnya, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday. Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building Oct. 7. The...

MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Prosecutor's Office has sent Sweden additional evidence in support of its extradition request for Mahomed Uspaev, suspected of killing Itar-Tass photojournalist Vladimir Yatsina in Chechnya, the office's Web site reported Wednesday. Yatsina was abducted while on assignment in the troubled North Caucasus republic in the summer of 1999, and murdered on...

(CJES/IFEX) - Vasily Melnichenko, a journalist and human rights activist, was beaten in the village of Galkinskoye, in Sverdlovsk region, on 22 October 2006, by a former public servant whose illicit activities the journalist has criticised. Melnichenko said the attack occurred during a meeting addressing the bankruptcy of one of the village's farms. The assailant was Alexander Gaan, a former...

(FLIP/IFEX) - Otoniel Sánchez, a journalist with local television station CNC in Cartago, a city in Valle del Cauca department, was obliged to leave the region after unidentified assailants fired upon his residence on 19 October 2006. Sánchez told FLIP he began receiving telephoned death threats after doing a report on misuse of the municipality's roller-skating rink. In the first call he was told...