Tunisian authorities have arrested Fahem Boukadous, a correspondent for the satellite television station Al-Hiwar al-Tunisi. The police arrested Boukadous Thursday at Farhat Hached Hospital in Sousse. The journalist had been discharged Wednesday after being treated for respiratory problems, according to news reports. His wife told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that he...
A Kuwait City appeal court on Monday overturned Kuwaiti writer and journalist Mohamed Abdel Qader Al-Jassem’s conviction on a charge of defaming Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Al-Sabah, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Monday's ruling overturned Al-Jassem’s conviction on April 1 for criticising government policy and calling for the prime minister’s resignation. Convicted in other case...
An Egyptian court has sentenced a jailed leader to a year in prison for defaming a former minister more than 14 years ago, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). A Cairo appeals court last month sentenced Magdy Hussein, who served as editor of the long-banned opposition newspaper Al-Shaab, to a one-year jail term in a defamation case filed in 1996 by the family of then-Interior...
The Security and National Intelligence Service in Sudan has barred publication of the daily Al-Intibaha. Authorities suspended the newspaper last week because of the newspaper’s supposed role “in strengthening separatist tendencies in the south and the north,” a security official told local reporters. The suspension stemmed from a July 4 article by Editor-in-Chief El-Tayeb Mustafa that criticised...
Syrian authorities are till pressing criminal defamation charges against investigative journalists Bassam Ali and Suhaila Ismail. The journalists co-wrote two investigative reports in 2005 and 2006 on corruption and the misuse of public funds in the Public Company for Fertilisers in Syria. They concluded that almost 2 billion Syrian pounds (US$43 million) were misappropriated in one year. The...
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on authorities in Gaza to allow three pro-Fatah Palestinian papers published in the West Bank to be allowed entry into the territory. The newspapers say they were told they had to sign an agreement stating they would not criticise the government before they’d be allowed to distribute in Gaza. The West Bank-printed newspapers had been banned...
The better a politician looks, the more his chances of appearing on television, says a new study. Dr Yariv Tsfati, Dana Markowitz Elfassi and Dr Israel Waismel-Manor surveyed the coverage of all members of the 16th Israeli Knesset on Israeli television channels 1, 2 and 10. In parallel they had the appearance of each member of Knesset -based on their official website photos - rated by Dutch...
The deposed government of Hamas movement still bars the circulation of the three major West Bank-based Palestinian dailies in the Gaza Strip for the third day after Israel allowed their entrance into the costal enclave on Wednesday, the dailies' circulation agents said Friday, according to Xinhua. Shukri Shublaq, one of the circulation agents in the Gaza Strip, told Xinhua that officers from the...
CNN has fired a senior editor for Mideast news after she published a Twitter message that said she respected the late Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, branded a terrorist by the US, American and UK media said Thursday. Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah, one of Shiite Islam’s highest religious authorities and an early mentor of Hizbullah, died in Beirut Sunday. The Guardian reported: [ Link] The...
Spain's Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reopening of a probe into the death of a Spanish journalist who was hit by US tank fire in Iraq in 2003, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. A spokeswoman said the Supreme Court had accepted an appeal by the family of cameraman Jose Couso and ordered the lower National Court to reopen the investigation into his death. Couso was one of two...
