News

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has voiced dismay at the action of Indonesian immigration officials in denying US journalist William Nessen entry on 19 April 2006 and it called on foreign minister N. Hassan Wirajuda to ensure that he will be allowed to enter Indonesia freely in future. Nessen was arrested in 2003 in the troubled province of Aceh after covering an army offensive against the...

(JED/IFEX) - Fortune Bemba, editor of the Brazzaville-based weekly "Thalassa", was charged on 21 April 2006 with defamation, attack on the honour of the head of state and propagation of false news by the public prosecutor Dinard Moubanga Mokonji. The journalist was arrested on 20 April and imprisoned in Brazzaville before being released the following day. He was questioned on the subject of an...

(Adil Soz/IFEX) The International Foundation for Protection of Freedom of Speech, Adil Soz, is alarmed by the general trend in media legislation in Kazakhstan. An analysis demonstrates that Kazakhstan has the strictest media legislation in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Many of the provisions set out under this legislation are in conflict not only with international documents...

During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called for people who ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad to be killed, weighing into the furore that erupted after a Danish newspaper ran cartoons lampooning Islam's holy messenger. "Heretics and atheists, who denigrate religion and transgress against God and His Prophet, will not stop their enmity towards Islam except by being killed," the Saudi...

Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD) cadres severely beat up Minar Baidya, staff reporter of Dainik Ajker Kagoj, and pushed him off his room window on the second floor of Jagannath Hall in Dhaka University (DU) Friday night. The victim Minar said the JCD attacked him because he sat in the front row of the dormitory's TV room on Wednesday night. Minar, also a fourth year student of Department of Mass...

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should...

CHANDIGARH: If an ISB passout earns the fattest pay package in the country, it ensures that the country is revolutionising the benchmarks of not only salaries but also integration of business education and industry. Perhaps this is quid pro quo for the industry that is currently facing a shortfall of nearly 80 per cent with only 46,000 workforce specialising in marketing and corporate...

New Delhi, March. 21 (PTI): Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, today assured journalists and non-journalists employees of newspapers and news agencies that the Government would look into their demand for setting up of new Wage Boards. Singh gave an assurance in this regard to a delegation of Confederation of Newspaper and News Agency Employees Organisations, the umbrella body of apex media trade...

(RSF/IFEX) - Another Tunisian journalist is on hunger strike. It is Shéhérazade Akacha, who began her hunger strike on 19 April 2006 in protest against her dismissal from the pro-government daily "Al-Chourouk" for revealing details of her interrogation and harassment by the newspaper's management after she refused to let others "dictate" an article she wrote for the 7 November 2005 supplement. A...