The police has shut down Radio Galkayo and arrested journalist Hassan Mohammed Jama, the director of the radio station in the Mudug region of Puntland, the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has reported. The commander of the Puntland police in the region, Colonel Abdirisak Ismail, who is known as Darwish, along with a team of well-armed police officers raided Radio Galkayo at 2:00 p.m....
Two publications in Pakistan's Sindh province, the daily Islam and the weekly Zarb-e-Momin, have been banned for the alleged offence of spreading "anti-state feelings". Although the order was made by the Sindh provincial government under an article of the Criminal Procedure Code dealing with forfeiture for spreading "anti-state feeling", the action appears to have been initiated by the Federal...
Four men went on trial Monday in connection with the murder of Russian journalist and outspoken Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, despite the failure of the authorities to catch the masterminds. The four have been charged with helping organise the October 2006 shooting of Politovskaya at her apartment block in central Moscow. In a victory for Politkovskaya's lawyers who had feared the process...
Two journalists were shot and wounded on Friday in Peshawar. The city is the capital of the North West Frontier Province, which adjoins Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas and has been the scene of a number of attacks on foreigners and government officials in the last few weeks. From his hospital bed in Peshawar, Sami Yousafzai, Newsweek magazine's special correspondent in the region...
A Canadian journalist was abducted this week while gathering materials for a documentary in the Bannu district in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, on the border with Afghanistan, officials said Thursday. The English-language Pakistani paper the News International, citing unnamed sources, first reported the story on Wednesday. Beverly Giesbrecht, 52, also known as Khadija Abdul...
Russian newspaper Arsenyevskiye Vesti has received an official warning from the prosecutor's office of the Vladivostok Frunzensky district, which accused it of disseminating materials containing elements of extremism. The warning was issued over an article titled 'One Nation - One Constitution' published in the 3-9 September 2008 edition of Arsenyevskiye Vesti. The article dealt with the killing...
Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip for a week. The move is being seen as a serious violation of press freedom. According to media reports, military officials in Israel said only humanitarian aid workers and Palestinian patients are allowed to enter or leave Gaza as a result of the resumed shelling of rockets into Israel by Palestinians militants from Gaza. Israeli...
A Somalian freelance journalist has been arrested for reportedly filming two bombings last month, the Mogadishu-based National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has reported. Hadis Mohammed Hadis was arrested on November 3 at Igal International Airport in Hargeisa city by officers from Somaliland's Criminal Investigations Department (CID). According to local journalists, the arrest came after...
A Spanish prosecutor has recommended five-month prison sentences for two journalists— reporter Asier Velez de Mendizábal of the daily Gara and photographer Lánder Fernández de Arroyabe of the Argazki Press agency—who covered a demonstration by a radical Basque nationalist group in Pamplona, in the northern region of Navarre. The sentences were requested on November 3 by prosecutor Edilberto...
The shooting down of a Pakistani journalist by security forces in a case of mistake identity in the country's Swat Valley region has come in for widespread comdemnation. Pakistani security forces shot Qari Muhammad Shoib, a Mingora-based print journalist on Saturday night when e failed to stop his car for a military convoy enforcing a curfew at Nishat Chowk of Mingora city in the restive Swat...
