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(MISA/IFEX) - Zimbabwean E-TV reporter Peter Moyo, who is based in South Africa, has been fined Z$40,000 (approx. US$160) under the controversial Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) for practising journalism in Zimbabwe without accreditation. Moyo was convicted and fined together with Trymore Zvidzai, who is based in Zimbabwe, when they appeared before Mutare magistrate...

Reporters Without Borders today called for the immediate release of 25 women journalists and feminist activists held in Tehran’s Evin prison, who, on the eve of International Women’s Day, began a hunger strike to protest against their continued detention. Thirty-three women were arrested on 4 March while demonstrating outside the Revolutionary Islamic Tribunal in Tehran in protest against criminal...

(RSF/IFEX) - Detained journalist and writer Michel Kilo was taken before a military prosecutor in Damascus on 6 March 2007 and accused of inciting fellow inmates in Adra prison, near Damascus, to sign the "Beirut-Damascus, Damascus-Beirut" joint statement, which he himself signed in May 2006 and for which he is being prosecuted by a criminal court. "The Syrian regime is hounding Kilo while trying...

Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who fell to death from his apartment building window, had faced threats while reporting on a highly sensitive story that Russia planned to sell sophisticated missiles to Syria and Iran. Had Safronov’s story been right, it would have caused enormous embarrassment to President Vladimir Putin, who had assured Israel and the United States that the arms deal had been

New York, March 7, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists today urged Mexican President Felipe Calderón to sign new federal legislation decriminalizing defamation, libel, and slander. Voting 100-0 with one abstention, the Mexican Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that effectively directs all such cases to civil court. The measure, already approved by the lower chamber of Congress, seeks to make...

(IMI/IFEX) - The General Prosecutor Office has closed the investigation on the violent death of former minister of internal affairs Yuriy Kravchenko, a key figure in the Gyorgy Gongadze case, Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko told a press conference in Kyiv on 28 February 2007. "Within the criminal case instituted over the fact of death of Kravchenko, the decision was taken to close the...

(MISA/IFEX) - On March 2, 2007, controversial church pastor Justice Dlamini threatened two journalists with death through divine intervention. Dlamini shocked a church gathering, which also included Cabinet Ministers, when he declared from the pulpit that he was praying for the death of two journalists, "Times of Swaziland" Managing Editor Martin Dlamini and reporter Nhlanhla Mathunjwa, whom he...

New York, March 6, 2007 — The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the Thai government’s decision today to take control of iTV, Thailand’s only privately owned and managed television news station. The takeover was expected after the government announced last week it would terminate iTV’s license on Tuesday – the deadline for paying nearly 100 billion baht (US$2.8billion) in fines...

Iran's Intelligence Ministry detained several journalists and women activists outside the capital city of Tehran for allegedly receiving money from abroad, the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported Sunday. A woman walks past a mural on a wall at Palestine Square in Tehran March 4, 2007. Women in Iran, who must respect the Islamic dress code of contour-hiding gowns or long coats

A Kommersant journalist who covered military affairs and had more than once angered government officials fell to his death Friday from a fifth-floor window of the apartment building where he lived. Prosecutors said suicide was the likeliest explanation for the death of Ivan Safronov, a retired colonel who was a columnist at the daily newspaper for more than 10 years. But Safronov's colleagues and...