Uncategorised

CARTAGENA, Colombia: Press freedom in Latin America is being hurt by leftist governments' intolerance of criticism and a spate of drug mafia-ordered murders of journalists in Mexico, according to reports issued Saturday at a newspaper industry meeting. In country reports presented to the InterAmerican Press Association, representatives from Uruguay, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia said the...

HANNOVER: In 1980, the aspiring global media baron Rupert Murdoch turned to the president of his U.S. newspaper operations, Donald Kummerfeld, and, as he was wont to do, made a bold prediction. "Someday, Don," Murdoch said, according to Kummerfeld, "all news — and advertising — will be delivered digitally. There will really be no need for paper and ink." More than a quarter of a century later, the...

Pakistan has banned a leading prime-time television programme because of negative coverage of President Pervez Musharraf’s fight with Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, news reports have said. A Pakistani protester throws a tear gas shell towards police during fierce clashes in Islamabad. Police fired rubber bullets at protesters and arrested dozens of people as they tried

The media across the United States are celebrating Sunshine Week with all smiles. This is because of the freedom of information, which is entrenched in the Constitution of the United States. However, the picture in Africa remains somber and bleak for journalists and independent media. The reporters from the continent have nothing to celebrate. Several decades after most African governments...

Police officer Monzart Castro Brasil, 53, convicted of the murder of a Brazilian journalist, was rearrested by the Brazilian police last February 28. Brazil had been convicted and sentenced in September 2003 for the murder of Manoel Leal de Oliveira, the editor and founder of the daily newspaper "A Região". The murder took place in 1998 in the state of Bahia, in the country's northeast. A popular...

Reporters Without Borders today called for the release of two freelance journalists, arrested while covering an opposition demonstration two days ago in the capital Harare. It also protested against a brutal beating police meted out to a former editor. Nothing has been heard of Tsvangirai Mukwazhi, a freelance photographer working for the US-owned Associated Press (AP), since Zimbabwean police...

(CMFR/IFEX) - An unidentified individual on a motorcycle bombed the service vehicle of dxCC (828kHz), a radio station of the Radio Mindanao Network (RMN), while it was parked in front of the station in Cagayan de Oro city, Misamis Oriental, on 13 March 2007, at around 2:45 a.m. (local time). Cagayan de Oro is in northern Mindanao, the Philippines' second largest island. No one was reported hurt in...

MOSCOW — A Russian journalist is seeking asylum in the United States after being beaten and suffering kidney failure in a suspected poisoning attempt, London’s Sunday Times reported. The award-winning journalist, who has reported on events in the Caucasus, has been “promised political asylum” in the United States, the newspaper reported Sunday. The Sunday Times did not disclose the identity of the...

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, March 13, 2007 - The leader of a local group of private press editors was jailed on Monday in the capital Bangui over statements critical of the governmental High Communication Council (HCC). Editor Michel Alkhaly Ngady of the private weekly Les Temps Nouveaux and the president of GEPPIC, a local organization of publishers, was summoned and jailed in a police station near...

As Russian prosecutors continued last week to investigate how Ivan Safronov, the respected defence correspondent of Kommersant newspaper, was found dead in the snow having apparently fallen from his high-rise apartment, it was another Moscow paper that made an apposite observation. "For some reason, it is those journalists who are disliked by the authorities who die in this country," noted the...