Ethics and Freedom

(APN) ATLANTA – The US military has dropped the controversial subpoenas of two journalists, independent journalist Sarah Olson, who interviewed Lt. Ehren Watada for Truthout.org, and Gregg Kakesako of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, after Watada signed a stipulation agreement with the military. Olson still won’t say for sure whether she was going to refuse to testify, but it appears she would have...

WASHINGTON -- Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the identity of a CIA operative to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus during a 2003 phone call, Pincus testified today as the first defense witness in the CIA leak trial. Pincus was one of the first reporters to learn the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson...

NEWSPAPER articles accusing a NSW prison chaplain of having links with terrorists were "highly inflammatory," a Sydney court has heard. Muslim cleric Anwar Al Barq is suing Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph over a series of articles accusing him of having links to terrorists. In 2005, the NSW Department of Corrective Services banned the cleric from working as a prison chaplain after it was...

The editor of a Cambridge University college newspaper is in hiding after his attempt at religious satire backfired. The 19-year-old student and aspiring journalist, who has not been named, is under investigation by the authorities at Clare College who described the satirical issue of the student newspaper Clarefication as "abhorrent". Most inflammatory, the college said, was the reproduction in...

The Supreme Court has stayed an Assam government order cancelling accreditation to the North East Television (NETV) correspondents to cover the 33rd National Games in Guwahati which began Friday, news agencies reported. A bench of Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan and Justice DK Jain stayed the February 6 order of the state government's Media Accreditation Committee after hearing NETV's counsel and...

A court in Riga awarded a top Latvian journalist over $185,000 in damages Friday after recordings of her telephone calls were leaked to the media. Ilze Jaunalksne, presenter of Latvian TV's top current-affairs programme, De Facto, was awarded 100,000 lats ($185,185) in moral damages and 243 lats in expenses from the finance ministry and inland revenue department. Jaunalksne's mobile phone was...

A Swiss military court has indicted three Swiss journalists working for the weekly SonntagsBlick for publishing a leaked document last year “dealing with supposed places of detention and interrogation methods used by the US foreign intelligence service (CIA).” The SonntagsBlick scoop came just three days after European human rights watchdog, Council of Europe, launched an investigation into a...

The UN war crimes tribunal on Wednesday sentenced a Croatian journalist to three months in prison after finding him guilty of contempt for revealing the the names and personal details of confidential witnesses who had testified in one of its cases. Croatian journalist Domagoj Margetic awaits the verdict of his case at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, February 7...

The Supreme Court has issued notices to Zee News and its reporter Vijay Shekhar for carrying out a sting operation purportedly to expose corruption in lower judiciary, news agencies have reported. Zee News and Shekhar were issued notices Tuesday for carrying out sting operation in 2004 showing how non-bailable warrants can be procured against any person by paying a hefty amount in a court. A three...

Two French Muslim organisations are suing magazine Charlie Hebdo for printing cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed. The trial began in Paris today in a civil lawsuit by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France. Charlie Hebdo’s decision to reprint the Danish cartoons was taken at an especially fraught moment. Some 10 news media had been banned or suspended in...