News

The Belarus Information ministry on April 25 requested the Supreme Economic Court to shut down two prominent weekly newspapers, Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya, under article 51, subsection 2.2, of the mass media law. This article says that any media organization can be closed after receiving two warnings from the information ministry in a single year. “The closure of Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya...

One of the leaked US defence department cables released this week by WikiLeaks reveals details about Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s abduction and murder in Pakistan in January 2002 and the divisions it caused within Al-Qaeda. According to the cable, Al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks) told his interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay...

An independent daily newspaper critical of Zimbabwe’s president said Wednesday thieves raided its offices and stole computer hard drives and the editor’s laptop, the Associated Press has reported. Raphael Khumalo, chief executive at NewsDay said components and hard drives from 11 reporters’ computers were removed in the raid Monday night, along with the editor’s laptop used to write a weekly...

Belarusian authorities must immediately stop harassing independent media outlets in retaliation for their critical reporting on the recent lethal bombing on the Minsk subway, New York-based press freedom group Community to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Following the blast, authorities--including the Information Ministry, the general prosecutor's office, and the Belarusian security...

New York-based press freedom group Community to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned Thursday's arson attack on Haitian community radio station Tèt Ansanm Karis and called on local authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice. The blaze destroyed the station's offices and all equipment and left the northeastern city of Carice without a local radio station. According to news reports and CPJ...

A dozen community radio stations linked to the opposition “Red Shirts” were shut down in a major police operation on April 26 in Bangkok and the surrounding provinces, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). An exact list of the radio stations raided by the police is not yet available. “Coming just a few months before general elections, this crackdown is very...

Haider Mohamed Al-Noaimi, a blogger and journalist who works for various media including the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat, was arrested by about 30 men who came to his home on the evening of April 24 and confiscated his computer and cameras before taking him away. They reportedly hit him during the raid. His Facebook profile, where he posted his articles, has been blocked since April 3. Another...

Security forces surrounded the home of Akhbar Al-Youm reporter Mohammed Al-Louzi for three hours on April 25 because of his coverage of current events in Yemen. Members of the Republican Guard stopped Abdel Aziz Al-Majidi, the editor of the newspaper Al-Shahid, at a checkpoint the same day, preventing him from entering Taiz province. Copies of his newspaper were seized at the same checkpoint the...

The European Commission’s decision to investigate the impact on net neutrality of the practices of Internet Service Providers, especially those offering mobile phone access, has been taken too late and the basis on which the investigation is being initiated is wrong, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. The press freedom organisation called on the Body of...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the recent arrests of Mohammad Seifzadeh, a human rights lawyer who has defended several imprisoned journalists, and Alireza Rajai, a journalist who writes for several reformist newspapers. A founder member of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi’s Centre for Human Rights Defenders, Seifzadeh managed to tell his family on...