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Alfred Egbegi, publisher of the weekly newspaper "Izon Link", who was arrested by the police in Yenogoa, the Bayelsa state capital in the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria on 12 April 2006, has been released from custody, but is now facing criminal charges in court. Egbegi was released on bail in the evening of 12 April, hours after his arrest and detention, but was charged by the police before a...

DHAKA, April 17 (Reuters) - Nearly 300 local media representatives took to the streets in Dhaka on Monday to protest against a police attack on colleagues covering the second test between Bangladesh and Australia. At least 10 reporters and photographers were injured on Sunday when police beat them with batons at the divisional stadium in Chittagong. Monday's Bangladesh newspapers carried neither...

Cricket took a back seat on the opening day of the second Test between Bangladesh and Australia as police swung into an uncalled for action against the on-duty journalists, injuring at least 20 media-men of different national dailies and satellite televisions at the Chittagong Divisional Stadium yesterday. Of the injured, Anurup Titu of Dainik Purbokon was admitted with a serious head injury to...

ST. LOUIS – The publisher of a Spanish-language newspaper has been deported, ending a five-year legal tussle over her immigration status. Cecilia Velazquez was escorted into Mexico on Friday and will be barred from re-entering the United States for 10 years, said Carl Rusnok, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency. Velazquez, 36, is publisher of Red Latina, a Spanish...

BOGOTA, Colombia – It was a most unpresidential spectacle: President Alvaro Uribe upbraiding the editor of Colombia's top news magazine on morning talk radio for rekindling a corruption scandal just weeks before he stands for re-election. The magazine Semana had doggedly reported on allegations of fraud in Uribe's 2002 election victory, a conspiracy to assassinate leftist and union activists, and...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (UPI) -- Under Saddam Hussein, political cartoons were little more than state propaganda, but press freedom has unleashed a wave of pointed political cartooning. With few restrictions on speech now, dozens of newspapers have blossomed in Iraq, and all the major ones seem to run one or two cartoons a day, The New York Times reported. A deep cynicism -- about politicians in general...

When Congress Party boss Sonia Gandhi announced last month that she was resigning her parliamentary seat only to seek re-election in the by-election her resignation triggered, India’s corporate media all but unanimously proclaimed her a master political strategist. Once again, Gandhi had confounded her political opponents, or so the story went, while bolstering her credentials as a politician...

Freedom of speech in Bulgaria took one of its most serious hits last week after on April 6, a bomb detonated in front of the flat of Vassil Ivanov, an investigative journalist from Nova Television, one of the three national broadcast stations. The bomb was planted in front of the entrance to Ivanov’s flat in a seven-storey apartment block in Sofia’s Banishora neighbourhood. Miraculously, no one...

THE controversy over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was reignited yesterday after an Italian Catholic magazine printed one on its front cover. Studi Cattolici carried a drawing of the Prophet in Hell, with the Italian writer Dante Alighieri asking the poet Virgil: "That man divided in two from his head to his feet - isn't that Muhammad?" Virgil replies: "Yes, it is him and he is in two because...

NEW YORK: At least five of the winning Pulitzer Prize entries this year included an online component, Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler said Monday after the prizes were announced. In the first year that Web elements were allowed to be entered in every category, he called that significant. "It played a significant role," Gissler noted during comments after the announcement press conference at...