Americas

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has called on the government of Venezuela to allow for the restoration of on-air broadcasting by Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). The channel's transmission equipment was seized after its shutdown on May 27 last year and this action would be "one way of beginning to re-establish freedom of the press in the country," the organisation declared in a...

An Iraqi television station accused US troops Thursday of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home. The body of a second journalist, Haidar Hashim al-Husseini, a reporter for Al-Sharq newspaper, was found dumped in a field with nine other corpses in Diyala province, police and colleagues said. A spokeswoman for the Afaq television channel, according to a Reuters report...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has hailed a new ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that urges Argentina to void a criminal defamation sentence against a local journalist and reform its defamation laws. The decision by the international court, based in San José, Costa Rica's capital, was made public on Tuesday by the Argentine human rights organisation Centro de...

A policeman on horseback struck photographer Víctor Salas several times with a metal riding crop while he was covering a protest Wednesday in Valparaíso, a city to the west of Santiago, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Salas, who works for the Spanish news agency EFE, has been hospitalised and risks using the use of his right eye as a result of the blows. “Unfortunately this is not...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) expressed concern over the safety of television host Juan Bonilla Martínez, of the privately-owned station Mega Visión 43, whose car was fired upon in front of the television station in the northern Dominican Republic city of Santiago de los Caballeros on May 21. RSF has called on the government to protect journalists better. The attack came five days after...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has voiced serious concern after it was confirmed that Jesús Lemus Barajas, editor of the daily El Tiempo, in La Piedad, Michoacán state in south-west Mexico, is being held in preventive custody in a drugs case. Paris-based RSF on Tuesday called on the federal authorities to produce clear and compelling reasons for his detention and expressed anxiety that he had...

Google has surpassed Yahoo to become the most popular website in the United States, according to comScore Inc's rankings by the number of unique monthly visitors, says an Associated Press (AP) report. Google Inc has long been the Internet's leader in search, but its audience has trailed Yahoo Inc's when counting other services such as e-mail and photo sharing. April's numbers, which Internet...

A Venezuelan court has convicted a former police officer for the 2006 murder of photojournalist Jorge Aguirre, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. The Caracas 14th Mixed Trial Tribunal convicted Boris Blanco, a former police officer in the Chacao municipality of Caracas, of Aguirre’s homicide, according to reports in the Venezuelan media. The court gave Blanco a 15-year prison...

The Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Journalists is looking into the killing of two radio journalists from the Triqui indigenous community in Oaxaca. This welcome development inspires hope that impunity will not prevail in this case, unlike the way it has in the murders of so many other journalists in Mexico, ARTICLE 19 and Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social (CENCOS) have...

Two masked men fired at reporter Edson Ferraz of TV Diário (a station affiliated to the privately-owned Rede Globo network) on May 15 in Mogi das Cruzes, an outlying suburb of São Paulo in Brazil. Ferraz escaped unhurt. The 25-year-old journalist had been covering a case of corruption and money-laundering involving 19 local policemen and had been warned of possible reprisals. “In some respects...