News

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal supervisory agency for communications, information technology and mass media, has announced a contest for the design of software that it could use to monitor online media outlets for “extremist” content, according to Lenta.ru. The deadline for submitting designs is August 15 and the deadline the agency has set itself for testing submissions is December 15...

Security agents with Somalia's Interim Transitional Government arrested the director and news editor of Radio Shabelle on Sunday after the independent station aired a report saying the president was unable to visit areas recently captured by government and AU forces due to security concerns, according to news reports and CPJ interviews. The Ministry of Information deemed the March 22 report...

There has been no let up in the harassment of journalists that began on the eve of on March 25, which the Belarusian opposition celebrates as Freedom Day. President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s apparently panicked government is deploying all possibly means to silence its critics, with growing success. The country’s independent journalists have more need than ever of support from their colleagues abroad...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reiterated its support for LankaeNews, a Colombo-based online newspaper that has made a major contribution to media pluralism and independently reported news and information in Sri Lanka, and for its journalists, who are unable to work normally because of the many threats and attacks against them. Their safety is no longer assured...

Syrian journalist Rana Akbani has been missing in the east of Libya since March 28. In an interview with her that was broadcast by Al-Libya TV, a presenter accused her of spying. A resident in Libya for the past 15 years or so, Akbani works for the arts and culture section of the Libyan newspaper Al-Shams. In the Al-Libya TV interview, which has been posted online, presenter Hala Misrati accused...

Ecuador's President Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado has filed a lawsuit against Juan Carlos Calderón and Christian Zurita, investigative journalists and authors of the book Gran Hermano (Big Brother). The lawsuit is based on the book's content, a journalistic investigation into contracts signed between the president's brother, Fabricio Correa, and the State. According to the Pichincha Judiciary's...

A mayor who was named and shamed in a free expression report by the Centre for Media Studies and Peace Building (CEMESP) is threatening to sue the organisation for libel. CEMESP's annual report, "Strengthening Freedom to Further Democracy in Liberia: Attacks on Freedom of Expression 2010", released last week, singled out Monrovia Mayor Mary Broh as the only high government official that unleashed...

A particularly shocking attack was carried out last weekend on Seymour Khaziyev, a journalist with the opposition newspaper Azadlig, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Khaziyev was set upon by six masked men as he was returning to his home in Jeryanbatan on the outskirts of Baku on the night of March 26. Taken in a minibus to an unknown location with a...

Organised crime seems to have been responsible for the murders of two journalists on March 25 in Monterrey, in Mexico's northern state of Nuevo León – José Luis Cerda Meléndez, 33, a programme host on the national TV channel Televisa, and Luis Emanuel Ruíz Carrillo, 20, a reporter for La Prensa, a daily based in the neighbouring state of Coahuila, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans...

A court in Cameroon has handed an editor a suspended prison sentence and banned his newspaper for reporting on alleged mismanagement of a transportation company, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. A panel of three magistrates in the commercial city of Douala convicted Editor Jean-Marie Tchatchouang of the weekly Paroles of defamation on Friday...