Europe - Central Asia

Russian President Vladimir Putin has decreed the creation of a new Soviet-style agency to regulate the media and the Internet. This has sparked fears among many Russian journalists of a bid to extend tight publishing controls to the relatively free Web. A customer looks at TV screens in a shop in Moscow during the broadcasting of Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual address to Russian and...

The second jury trial of two men in the July 2004 murder of Forbes Russia Editor Paul Klebnikov had to be postponed again Wednesday after one of the defendants went missing. It was the second time that Kazbek Dukuzov, who is 32 or 33, failed to turn up at the Moscow City Court. Dukuzov missed a February hearing. Musa Vakhaev, accused of murdering U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov, speaks to...

The Turkish military has been classifying journalists by their perceived attitude toward the military and using that classification to grant or deny press accreditations. Leaked reports published in the Turkish press last week show that the news media is classified according to support for government policies and that the procedures for issuing press accreditation are used to undermine critical...

Ivan Safronov did not die immediately, despite falling four floors from a window in his Moscow apartment block. Witnesses say he tried to get to his feet after hitting the ground, but then collapsed for the final time. The police say the death of the well-respected journalist, who worked for the daily Kommersant newspaper, has all the hallmarks of suicide - though they are willing to consider the...

Reporters Without Borders voiced scepticism today about a claim made by Chechnya’s acting President Ramzan Kadyrov at a news conference in Grozny on 20 February that Boris Berezovsky (a Russian businessman and former politician now living in exile in Britain) ordered the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. Kadyrov claimed that he was personally present...

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has rapped the security services on the knuckles for searching the offices of a political magazine to identify who leaked a confidential police report. In what media are hailing as a significant reaffirmation of press freedom in Germany, the court ruled that the search had breached the constitution which enshrines the right of journalists to protect their...

The Russian police raided the offices of a British organisation that supports journalists in conflict zones on Wednesday as part of a probe into alleged financial irregularities. The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) is a nongovernmental organisation which seeks to support objective journalism in some of the world's most hostile regions, from Iraq to the Caucasus and Afghanistan. IWPR...

London’s freesheets are now engaged in rubbishing each other over the litter they have been indirectly creating in the city. News International said the attacks on it showed that Associated was “rattled” by the success of thelondonpaper, which recorded a January circulation figure of 436,435 – a rise of 6.19 per cent on December – compared to 400,997 for London Lite, which was up just 0.07 per...

Russian news agency RIA Novosti will be entering the print media segment with the launch of an English-language weekly newspaper on Friday, the agency's editor-in-chief said on Thursday. The Moscow News, one of Russia's oldest English language periodicals, will now be relaunched in a new version, with considerable changes in both content and design. "The project to create a new version of the...

A Swiss military court has indicted three Swiss journalists working for the weekly SonntagsBlick for publishing a leaked document last year “dealing with supposed places of detention and interrogation methods used by the US foreign intelligence service (CIA).” The SonntagsBlick scoop came just three days after European human rights watchdog, Council of Europe, launched an investigation into a...