Ethics and Freedom

T'PURAM: The CBI sleuths from New Delhi, who are on a mission to find the culprits in the Sister Abhaya murder case, visited this website's newspaper office at Sasthamangalam here on Friday morning for an interaction with the journalist who broke the recent report over the tampering of the chemical examination result in the case. CI Subhash Guddu and SI Vinod from the CBI special unit, New Delhi...

A journalist with Ontario-based Pakistan Post newspaper was assaulted by two men who had warned him to stop writing against Islam. Jawaad Faizi was attacked in Mississauga, Ontario on the evening of April 17, according to the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). Faizi described being attacked by two men in his car outside the home of his editor, Amir Arain. Two men, one armed with a...

A military court has acquitted three journalists of publishing a leaked document that was intercepted by the Swiss intelligence service. The case, commonly known as the “CIA fax affair”, had been widely followed both in and outside Switzerland because of its implications for press freedom and the role of military justice. A military tribunal ruled that SonntagsBlick reporters Sandro Brotz, Beat...

The premises of Mizzima News Agency were reopened Wednesday on orders of the Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee looking into the sealing issue in Delhi. The office was sealed by Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) on April 16, 2007. The decision to reopen Mizzima's office was made by the MCD Deputy Commissioner and member of the Sealing Monitoring Committee, Deepak Hastir, following a...

Mexico has become only the second country in Latin America to repeal defamation as a criminal offence. Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa signed the legislation that effectively eliminates criminal defamation, libel, and slander at the federal level last week. Mexico's president Felipe Calderon speaks during the opening of the Plan Puebla Panama summit in Mexico, April 10, 2007. “I welcome...

Launching his speech by displaying the controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the Chairman of JP-Politikens Hus, a Danish media conglomerate, defended his paper’s decision to publish the caricatures, while criticizing U.S. papers for failing to republish them. Chairman of JP-Politiken Hus, Joergen Ejboel, speaking at the National Press Club vspace= Joergen Ejboel, speaking at the National...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on the United States to release Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi photojournalist for The Associated Press, who has been held in a U.S. prison in Iraq for a year without charge. Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was taken by U.S. forces on April 12 in the western city of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, and held in a U.S. prison in Iraq for...

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse. Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0...

Punitive judicial sanctions are threatening Morocco’s independent press. Over the last two years, Moroccan courts have levied stiff criminal penalties and civil damages against independent news publications, effectively banishing two of the country’s most outspoken journalists from their profession. In January 2007, a Moroccan court handed down three-year suspended prison sentences to Driss Ksikes...

Some members of the so-called old-media establishment may no longer be able to wag a finger at what they say is questionable ethics among bloggers. Two weeks ago, ABC News video blogger Amanda Congdon's appearance in online infomercials for chemical giant DuPont was widely criticized. Now an editor at financial news site MarketWatch, owned by The Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones, has...