News

A Seoul court Friday dropped criminal charges against a television news reporter who broke the story on the spy agency's illegal eavesdropping on civilians during previous governments last year. Lee Sang-ho, a reporter from television station MBC, had been indicted for violating the country's privacy law by publicly revealing evidence obtained by illegal methods. In July last year, MBC reported...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned the death of Ayfer Serçe, a young Kurdish journalist and militant, during an army operation against Kurdish rebels on 24 July 2006 in Keleres, in the northeastern province of Azarbayjan, and called on the Iranian authorities to provide an explanation. A Turkish national, Serçe worked for the Firat Haber Ajansi (Euphrates News Agency - FHA) using...

(IAPA/IFEX) - MIAMI, Florida (July 28, 2006) - The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today announced that it is awarding its Grand Prize for Press Freedom for 2006 to a disappeared Mexican journalist, Alfredo Jiménez Mota from the Hermosillo daily newspaper El Imparcial. The award will be presented to his family members in October. As a consequence of publication in April 2005 of the series...

The managing editor of CJRDaily.org, an online adjunct of The Columbia Journalism Review, and his deputy both quit yesterday after the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism told them he was cutting the site’s budget nearly in half. The dean, Nicholas Lemann, said in an interview that the amount of money raised for the Web site could not sustain the online staff, and he was...

TOTAL newspaper readership in Australia has declined by just 0.8 per cent in the past 12 months despite intensifying competition from other media. News Limited, publisher of about 70 per cent of the nation's newspapers, said the decline appeared mainly due to readers shifting from printed newspapers to websites. News chairman and chief executive John Hartigan said: "Despite often quoted concerns...

(SEAPA/IFEX) - Vietnam filtering, monitoring Internet more, says study The Open Net Initiative (ONI), in a recently released study on Vietnam, is reporting an increase in Internet censorship in the country. The research finds that Vietnamese officials are particularly bent on filtering content that questions the country's one-party system. ONI also says that, apparently paying close attention to...

(FNJ/IFEX) - The Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists, in their written suggestion to the Interim Constitution Drafting Committee, stressed the need to guarantee freedom of the press and expression. The Nepali Congress, in its proposed draft Constitution, has suggested that, keeping in view the special role that the press played during the people's movement, the press should be established as the...

(IFJ/IFEX) - The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today demanded the release of 20 journalists who have been jailed during the last nine months in Ethiopia for political reasons and called on other world leaders to pressure the Ethiopian government for their release as well. Seventeen journalists were arrested during the violent suppression of anti-government riots that followed the...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web...

It is amazing how some people in our society are perceived not to be entitled to speak on matters that affect all Zambians irrespective of ethnicity, religion, race or social status. For some time now, we have looked in awesome wonder how some people in the Mwanawasa Government see it fit and logical to attack clergymen and women whenever they give their objective views about any given situation...