Conflict Journalism

PESHAWAR: The widow of murdered tribal journalist, Hayatullah Khan, has alleged that her husband was “trapped” by the country’s secret services. “One intelligence agent called Hayatullah to file a story and gave him the pictures of a Hellfire missile used to attack a compound in the tribal areas to expose the US atrocities against Muslims,” Mehrunisa, Hayatullah’s widow, said while talking to the...

King Gyanendra and Maoist rebel leader Prachanda, the instigators of many killings, attacks and arrests of journalists, were removed today from the Reporters Without Borders list of Press Freedom Predators because the king has ceded power to parliament and government, and Prachanda signed a political accord with Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala on 16 June undertaking to respect democracy and...

One of several journalists sent packing by U.S. military authorities at Guantanamo Naval Base last week has come out with her story of what happened when she and others were forced to leave. Carol J. Williams of The Los Angeles Times wrote in Sunday morning’s edition of the newspaper. The reporter complained of what she called “a Pentagon power play that muzzles already reluctant sources and an...

(CEHURDES/IFEX) - The Center for Human Rights and Democratic Studies (CEHURDES), a Kathmandu-based freedom of expression monitoring group, condemns the threat against journalist Binod Tripathi by Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) - Maoist rebels. Maoist cadres threatened Tripathi over a news report published in "Kantipur", a leading private-sector daily, on 11 June 2006, which said the rebels had set...

More than 1,000 journalists have visited Guantanamo Bay since the U.S. military began locking up suspected al-Qaida and Taliban militants there 4 1/2 years ago. But access has been severely restricted: Journalists could not talk to detainees, they had to be accompanied by a military escort and their photos were censored. Now, the Pentagon has shut down access entirely - at least temporarily -...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has voiced its condolences to the family of TV sports presenter Jaafar Ali, who was gunned down on the morning of 31 May 2006 in Baghdad. He was the third journalist to be killed in Iraq in the space of 48 hours and the eleventh employee of the national TV station Al-Iraqiya to be killed since the start of the war in March 2003. Alarmed by the surge in...

(CEHURDES/IFEX) - CEHURDES condemns the act of burning of copies of a leading newspaper by a religious group and the manhandling of a photojournalist by police personnel. On 24 May 2006, a group of protesters stopped a vehicle belonging to Kantipur Publications Ltd. at Parawanipur, some 15 kilometres from the southern town of Birgunj. They took out all 1,700 copies of the newspaper and burnt them...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has welcomed a Supreme Court ruling on 18 May 2006 suppressing article 8 of the 1992 National Broadcasting Act and article 15 (1) of the 1991 Publications and Newspapers Act as incompatible with a constitutional provision guaranteeing press freedom. The first article gave the government the right to cancel the licences of radio and TV stations that broadcast...

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - As a backpack journalist traveling solo across the world in dangerous regions, Kevin Sites' load just got a little lighter. Not that the 60 pounds of digital equipment he totes on his back has lessened any. But Sites has made it to the halfway point of a global trek that has found him documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Syrian government -- and...

NEW YORK -- The United Nations is proposing a voluntary code of ethics for journalists that would ban interviews with terrorists and discourage press and broadcast reports that generate sympathy for terrorist causes. The code would be part of a U.N. global strategy against terrorism, which member nations began debating in the General Assembly yesterday. Secretary-General Kofi Annan earlier...