Americas

US freelance journalist Joe Sharkey, who covered a 2006 plane crash in Brazil in which he was a passenger, is facing an onerous civil defamation suit for comments he said were wrongly attributed to him. On the third anniversary of the accident, the Committee to Protect Journalists called on Brazilian judicial authorities to dismiss the case, which is based on the tenuous claim that the comments...

Turning its words into actions, the Honduran government Tuesday followed up its decree suspending civil liberties by closing Radio Globo and Canal 36 television, two Tegucigalpa-based stations that had already been assaulted and suspended several times in the past three months for their opposition to the June 28 coup d’état. In both cases, the police evicted staff and confiscated all the equipment...

Honduran officials, acting under a new decree that suspends civil liberties, shut down Radio Globo and Canal 36 television early Monday, the Committee to Protect Journalists has said quoting news reports.. “Honduran citizens have the right to be fully informed about what’s going on in the country at this very sensitive moment,” said Carlos Lauría, CPJ Americas senior programme coordinator. “We...

Norberto Miranda Madrid, a harsh critic of local crime, was shot to death on Wednesday in his office in Nuevo Casas Grandes in northern Chihuahua State of Mexico, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Around 11 p.m., two unidentified men wearing ski masks burst into the offices of local Radio Visión, where Miranda and his brother José were working, local reporters told CPJ. The...

Veteran Colombian television journalist Diego de Jesús Rojas Velásquez was gunned down Tuesday outside the central city of Supía, according to interviews and press reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Colombian authorities to thoroughly investigate the killing. Rojas, a reporter and cameraman for the Supía-based community station Supía TV in central Caldas province...

Peru's Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTC) has maintained its arbitrary ban on Radio La Voz de Bagua, a station based in the country's northern Amazonas region, refusing on September 15 to allow it to resume broadcasting. The station has been stripped of its licence since June 6. Radio La Voz de Bagua was accused of inciting violence in June during an outbreak of protests and rioting by...

Contravía, a TV current affairs programme that was forced off the air by threats eight months ago, resumed broadcasting on the Canal Uno public TV channel Thursday. Produced by freelance journalist Hollman Morris, Contravía has long occupied an important place in the Colombian media, above all because of its coverage of the country’s nearly half-century-old civil war. Reporters Sans Frontières...

The New York Times Company still intends to sell the Boston Globe, but the newspaper's finances have improved enough that the company does not need to sell it, the New York Times daily reported after top executives met Globe employees first time Wednesday since the company threatened to close the paper. Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the company chairman, and Janet L Robinson, the president and chief...

Four suspects, including a policeman, have been arrested over Franco-Spanish journalist Christian Poveda's murder in El Salvador, police said, indicating the killing was ordered by a jailed gang member, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. "After an investigation, four people have been detained for involvement in the murder of Mr Poveda," assistant police director Mauricio Ramirez said. Poveda...

Internet giant Google is planning to roll out a payment platform for newspapers that would allow them to charge for content online. The Google plan, which was revealed by the Nieman Journalism Lab, was elaborated in a document that company sent to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies...