News

Amnesty International is turning up the pressure on Yahoo! to change directions in China. Amnesty International USA, the American branch of the international human rights group, is sending an official to Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting on May 25 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. Anthony Cruz, the San Francisco-based Amnesty official who plans to speak at the meeting...

ANKARA, 24 May (IRIN) - Iranian journalist and political dissident, Akbar Ganji, has been awarded the annual Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders (MEA). "He stood out in the eyes of the jury, composed by members of 11 different human rights organisations, in terms of the sacrifices he has made and the fact that he refused to compromise [for freedom of expression] in any way," Hans...

BOGOTA, Colombia - It was the sort of scoop any ambitious journalist would jump on. But reporting it could have cost Jorge Quintero his life. With the help of local officials, a bank manager in the small southwestern Colombian town of Florencia allegedly funneled $11 million in public funds into the foreign bank account of a convicted drug trafficker. Despite sitting on a pile of incriminating...

THE Chinese media is using fewer characters and to understand 90 per cent of the content in publications people need only know about 900 of the thousands of pictographs that make up the script, a new study has revealed. The findings of a survey conducted by the education ministry and language commission were based on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files chosen from newspapers...

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 21 May 2006, Panamericana Televisión journalist Janet Mori and "El Comercio" newspaper photographer Enrique Cúneo were assaulted by Daniel Abugattás, recently elected to Congress for the political alliance Unión por el Perú (UPP). The incident occurred as the politician attempted to enter, although he was not invited, the premises where a public debate between presidential...

(RSF/IFEX) - The Public Security Bureau's formal refusal on 17 May 2006 to allow detained blogger and documentary filmmaker Hao Wu access to a lawyer on national security grounds is "absurd," Reporters Without Borders has said, as Hao began his fourth month in detention. "Hao's case is emblematic of the PSB's methods," the press freedom organisation said. "It is farcical to treat this blogger as a...

New York, May 23, 2006 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the closure today of an Iranian state newspaper, and the arrest of its editor-in-chief and a cartoonist who published a cartoon that sparked riots by ethnic Azeris in the northwestern city of Tabriz. Tehran's chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, ordered the arrest of Mehrdad Qasemfar, editor-in-chief of "Iran Friday", the...

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 22 May 2006, several journalists denounced the fact that unknown persons had hacked into their e-mail accounts and distributed lists of the e-mail passwords of at least 20 reporters. The accusation comes only a few days after the surreptitious monitoring and private information theft from the e-mail account of "Clarín" journalist Daniel Santoro was made public. The information in...

New York, May 23, 2006 - The Ivanovo regional prosecutor's office in central Russia has opened a criminal libel investigation against Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor-in-chief of the news Web site Kursiv, for allegedly insulting President Vladimir Putin, according to Russian press reports. On Thursday, Kursiv published an article headlined, "Putin as Russia's phallic symbol," in which Rakhmankov...

(IPI/IFEX) - The summary of a review examining payments made to the Iraqi media by the US military has concluded that such operations should be re-examined. Prepared by Rear Admiral Scott Van Buskirk, the review was requested after media reports in the Los Angeles Times during late November 2005 showed that the US military was writing pro-American stories, translating them into Arabic and then...