A criminal court in Baghdad has dismissed the charge of incitement to terror against 11 current and former employees of the independent Iraqi production company Wasan Media, acording to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Wasan Media general manager Shaker Mahmoud Khalaf al-Falahi (above) and broadcast engineer Omar Luqman Mahmoud remained behind bars for a separate charge of possessing...
Israel's attorney-general has asked Britain for more information about an analysis of an audio recording which may shed new light on the killing of British journalist James Miller in Gaza in 2003, the Guardian has reported. Britain's former attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, wrote to his Israeli counterpart Menachem Mazuz in June, presenting the analysis and asking him to begin legal proceedings...
Most newspaper stories during the 2o06 Israel-Hezbollah war used Israeli sources more often for quotes and attributions, a new study has found. The overall coverage of the fighting sides (Israel and Hezbollah) was highly critical of both, although Israel received more sympathetic coverage than Hezbollah. An overwhelming majority of articles (55 per cent) explicitly blamed Hezbollah for starting or...
Iran has closed down prominent pro-reform daily Shargh (East) three months after it was allowed to resume publicaiton following a ban, its director said on Monday. Shargh is the second publication critical of the government to be shut down since July. The closure of Shargh coincides with what rights groups and diplomats say is a broad crackdown on dissenting voices in the Islamic state, which is...
Reporters Without Borders condemns the government’s confiscation yesterday of the latest issues of the Arabic-language weekly Nichane and the French-language weekly TelQuel for “failing to respect” King Mohammed. “Press freedom violations are mounting dangerously in Morocco,” the organisation said. “The political and judicial authorities must abandon this archaic practice of systematically...
The victims of last year's war between Hezbollah and Israel –on both sides– were treated as statistics not people. Although human victims of the war were mentioned in one out of every five articles, they were mostly covered as mere facts and figures. Almost 91 per cent of the articles covered killed and wounded civilians in a very or somewhat impersonal manner, a new study has found. Civilian...
Reporters Without Borders called today for the release of Farshad Gorbanpour, who was arrested yesterday along with fellow journalist Masoud Bastani on the orders of Tehran prosecutor Said Mortazavi. Bastani was freed after several hours but Gorbanpour was transferred to Evin prison. This brings the number of journalists and cyber-dissidents detained in Iran to 11. Also yesterday, a Tehran...
Hamas militiamen Monday prevented distribution of three Fatah-affiliated newspapers in the Gaza Strip and briefly detained the local agents of the dailies. This is the first time that the newspapers published in the West Bank were prevented from being distributed in the Gaza Strip, according to reports. Palestinian journalists said thousands of copies from the three newspapers were seized by Hamas...
Reporters Without Borders condemned judicial harassment of the Arabic-language daily “Al Watan Al An” on 24 July 2007, after the Casablanca prosecutor’s office released its editor, Abderrahim Ariri, but sent one of his reporters, Mostapha Hurmatallah, to Okacha prison pending trial. Arrested on 17 July after publishing a leaked internal security memo, both have been charged with “receiving...
Authorities in Iran's northwestern Kurdistan Province have condemned two ethnic Kurdish journalists to death for acting against the country's national security, according to delayed reports. Journalists Adnan Hassanpour and Abdolvahed “Hiva” Botimar were sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal in Marivan, in Iran’s Kurdish northwestern region, on July 16. Hassanpour worked for the magazine...
