Ethics and Freedom

The Russian interior ministry has carried out raids on news media and journalists as part of its investigation into an attack on an administrative building in Khimki, a satellite town on Moscow’s northern outskirts, by hundreds of protesters on the night of July 28, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Representatives of the interior ministry’s Moscow region investigating...

Nearly five years after publication of the Mohammed cartoons, the threat of reprisals against the newspaper that carried them remains significant enough that it has constructed a security fence around its buildings, the Copenhagen Post has reported. The Viby, Jutland-based Jyllands-Posten took the advice of domestic intelligence agency PET and encircled its offices with a kilometer long metal...

A Pakistani court has ordered the federal and provincial governments to restore the transmission of Geo News and three other channels whose programmes have been blocked after they aired reports about a man hurling shoes at President Asif Ali Zardari. The ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP) has said it had not ordered cable operators to block these channels and described reports about their...

A journalist and a senatorial candidate got into a fight while appearing on a regional television program, trading punches and kicks on the air, Brazilian media reported Wednesday. Former Congressman Joao Correia, who is running for a Senate seat from the Amazonian state of Acre on the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB, ticket, was being interviewed Tuesday on TV5 by journalist...

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, has been waging a hate campaign for the past week against Lvin magazine, accusing it of besmirching the memory of Barzani’s father, the late Kurdish nationalist leader Mullah Mostafa Barzani. The offending article in Lvin magazine, published on August 1, consisted of an interview...

The mayor of the Serbian city of Zajecar, Bosko Nicic has decided to prevent all directors of companies and public institutions in the city from making statements to the media without his prior consent, according to the South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO). Directors of companies and public institutions now feel that they must fear for their jobs if they do not comply with the directive...

The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) has sued magazine Rojname for $1 billion. A report published in the magazine on July 20 had accused the KDP and its ruling coalition partner, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), of helping smuggle refined petroleum products into Iran in violation of the international sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic by the UN Security Council. The article accused the...

Burundian police on Tuesday arrested Thierry Ndayishimiye, chief editor of the private weekly Arc-en-Ciel, on defamation charges related to a story about alleged government corruption, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Ndayishimiye is the second Burundian editor to be jailed in less than a month. The state prosecutor summoned Ndayishimiye to a...

The transmissions of Pakistan's two leading private TV news channels were blocked, and copies of two newspapers were burnt in Karachi and some other parts of the country. The incidents were carried out Sunday by activists of the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP) in reaction to the airing and printing of news about the hurling of shoes at PPP Co-Chairman and President of Pakistan, Asif Ali...

Authorities have passed a restrictive order that has stopped journalists from going to report on Sunday's deadly mudslide in north-west China. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has learnt that a restrictive order was sent by China's Central Propaganda Department on August 8 which stated that no journalists should be sent to the vicinity of the mudslide in Zhouqu County, Gannan...