Americas

The Director of Venezuela's National Commission on Telecommunications (CONATEL), has announced that 29 unidentified radio stations will soon be forced to cease operations. the move, which will bring the number of closures in the last couple of months to 63 radios and TV stations, was announced Saturday last by Minister Diosdado Cabello. CONATEL has said that all the cases involve stations whose...

An American fugitive, accused of murdering an aide to the late Shah of Iran in the United States, was made an editor of Iran’s English-language television network in Tehran, a report in the Times newspaper has revealed. Hassan Abdulrahman, who is wanted by the FBI for shooting dead Ali Akbar Tabatabai in Maryland, worked for Iran’s flagship broadcaster Press TV. A Press TV journalist who resigned...

A US federal judge has ordered the Cuban government and the ruling Communist Party to pay $27.5 million in damages to the mother of a journalist jailed since a 2003 crackdown on dissent. US District Judge Alan S Gold on Wednesday ruled in the case of Omar Rodriguez Saludes, who is serving a 27-year sentence in Cuban prisons that the judge described as "deplorable and degrading" in his 13-page...

The publisher of La Presse, Canada's second largest French-language newspaper, threatened on Thursday to permanently stop the presses unless its 700 employees agree to deep salary cuts before December, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). "We have three months ahead of us, enough time to discuss and sign a negotiated agreement allowing us to cut labor costs," Guy Creview, publisher of the...

For the second time in less than a month, the lead federal investigator in the case of a journalist murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has been shot and killed in the streets of that city, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. The second investigator, Pablo Pasillas Fong, was shot 13 times on August 26. In addition, on August 28, the head of the office in charge of investigating...

The editor of a weekly in the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico has gone into hiding after a shootout at his residence, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The police and judicial authorities investigating a the attack on the home of Guillermo Soto Bejarano, the De Opinión’s editor, on August 30 in Salina Cruz should work on the assumption that it was linked to his journalist activities...

The bullet-ridden body of journalist Christian Poveda, whose new documentary on a violent Salvadoran street gang was scheduled for wide release this month, was discovered Wednesday afternoon just north of the capital, San Salvador. Salvadoran police found Poveda's body sprawled near his car on an isolated road in the town of Tonacatepeque, about 10 miles (15 kilometers) from the capital, the New...

The US military is cancelling a contract with a public relations firm after coming under flak for using the company to rate the output of journalists reporting on the Afghanistan war, a Pentagon spokesman has said. "The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the media analyst contract ... for the convenience of the US government," military spokesperson Lieutenant...

Many embedded journalists are being screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the US military in a positive light, the Stars and Stripes newspaper has reported. Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper partly funded by the Pentagon but editorially independent, said private contractors had been...

Masked assailants on Monday stormed a radio station and a television outlet critical of the country's interim government, forcing the broadcasters off the air in the latest attack on the Honduran media, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. At 8 p.m., eight individuals wearing ski masks forced their way into the Tegucigalpa offices shared by Radio Globo and Canal 36, local press...