Americas

Ecuadorian journalist Milton Chacaguasay Flores, editor and owner of weekly newspaper La Verdad, was sentenced to ten months in prison for committing libel against Judge Silvio Castillo. The sentence was issued by a criminal court in the province of El Oro on November 15, the Peru-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) has reported. The journalist was arrested on November 30 and imprisoned at...

Justice still eludes Radio Echo 2000 journalist, Brignol Lindor, who was murdered in the southwestern town of Petit-Goâve, Haiti in 2001. Two men implicated in the murder were given life sentences in December 2007. Seven others, convicted in absentia of Linder’s murder on January 23 this year, are still on the run. Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) hopes the appointment of Lindor’s

The Tribune Co, owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other US dailies, has filed for bankruptcy. The Chicago-based company said it was forced to seek bankruptcy protection Monday because of a sharp drop in revenue and a 13-billion-dollar debt load but has enough cash to sustain operations while it restructures, news reports said. The Tribune's eight newspapers, 23 television...

The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honour the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organisations that publish only on the Internet, the Pulitzer Prize Board has announced. The Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories. While...

The Christian Science Monitor and the McClatchy Co, which owns 30 US dailies, have agreed to share foreign news coverage in the latest cost-saving move by the ailing US newspaper industry, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. The Monitor and McClatchy, the third-largest US newspaper chain, said in a statement that they would share stories by Monitor correspondents in New Delhi and Mexico City...

Media coverage of clinical trials does not contain the elements readers require to make informed decisions. A comparison of the coverage received by pharmaceutical and herbal remedy trials, reported in the open access journal BMC Medicine, has revealed that it is rarely possible for the lay public to assess the credibility of the described research. Tania Bubela from the University of Alberta...

Unidentified persons threw tear gas bombs and pamphlets and fired into the air outside the Caracas home of Venezuelan journalist Marta Colomina on December 1, the Peru-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) has reported. Colomina presents an editorial program in Unión Radio and is a columnist for the newspaper El Universal. In the pamphlets, which were signed by members of the group known as La...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the judicial harassment of Freddy Aponte Aponte, a journalist based in the southern city of Loja who works for privately-owned radio station, Luz y Vida. After being given a six-month jail sentence on September 25 for allegedly slandering a former mayor of Loja, he has just learnt in prison that the ex-mayor is now suing him for a million dollars in...

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has urged newspaper readers throughout the Americas to sign an open letter to Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva calling on him to have light shed on the death of television programme host José Carlos Mesquita on March 10, 1998 in Ouro Preto do Oeste, Rondônia, Brazil. Mesquita had exposed drug trafficking and misuse of funds intended for the...

A new report to Canada's Human Right Commission says the law should be changed so the federal agency no longer investigates complaints relating to hate speech. Richard Moon, a professor at the University of Windsor, Ontario, who authored the report, says the section of the Canadian Human Rights Act that prohibits communication that exposes people to hate should be repealed. The commission launched...