A federal appeals court in Philadelphia Tuesday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Afro-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been under sentence of death since 1982 for the fatal shooting of a policeman. The court gave the state of Pennsylvania six months to select a jury and hold the hearing, or otherwise agree to a life sentence. The ruling increases hopes that the almost 30 years that...
Alfredo Hurtado, 45, a cameraman employed by the privately-owned TV station Canal 33, was gunned down in bus in the town of Ilopango, near the capital, Monday evening as he was on his way to work. The motive is not yet known. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) expressed its support for Hurtado’s family and colleagues and the entire Salvadoran media, now in mourning...
The number of journalists in jail in Peru rose to two when Paul Garay Ramírez, a programme producer for Visión 47 TV and a correspondent for Radio La Exitosa, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in the east-central region of Ucayali on April 19 for allegedly defaming a prosecutor. The other journalist currently detained is Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno of Radio Macarena, who was sentenced...
A leaked US defence department cable released Monday by WikiLeaks reveals that part of the US government’s motive for holding Sudanese cameraman Sami Al-Haj for six years at its Guantanamo Bay prison camp was the information he could provide about his employer, the Qatar-based satellite TV station Al-Jazeera. Arrested by Pakistani security forces on the Afghan-Pakistani border in December 2001, Al...
New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Bahraini authorities to disclose the whereabouts of Haidar Mohammed al-Nuaimi, a columnist for daily newspaper Al-Wasat. Roughly 30 uniformed and plainclothes police raided al-Nuaimi's family home in Manama April 25, dragging him into the street and beating him, local journalists told CPJ. Al-Nuaimi was then...
Anton Hammerl, a freelance South African photographer who was detained in early April, has appeared in government custody in Libya and is apparently in good health. Global Post told CPJ that the South African government has received information from Libyan authorities that Hammerl is well and will be permitted to speak to his family soon. Clare Morgana Gillis, an American freelancer for The...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has deplored an attack on Pakistani journalist Naveed Kamal, of Metro One TV, who is in a coma after two motorcyclists shot him in the jaw as he was going home from work in Karachi on April 20. The attack was a shock and had put all journalists under pressure, said Pervaiz Shaukat, secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of...
To mark International Copyright Day on April 23 the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on media organisations to put an end to rights-grabbing contracts that deprive journalists of a major part of their income and influence over the use of their work. "The increasing abuse of buy-out contracts whereby media employers require the total ownership of journalists' authors' rights...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed mixed feelings over the Guinea Bissau government’s decision not to go ahead with a threat to suspend newspaper Última Hora as it seems to be no more than a stay of execution. At a news conference on April 20, presidency minister Maria Adiatu Djaló Nandigna issued a “vibrant appeal to the media, especially newspaper...
Increasingly direct death threats have been made against Gorka Zamarreño, an investigative reporter for PRNoticias.com, since he began covering the “Malaya Affair” trial in the southern city of Malaga. The case involves an allegedly vast network of corruption centred on real estate operations in nearby Marbella. “We are concerned not only for Zamarreño’s safety but also because such threats...
