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GABORONE, 26 October (IRIN) - Media watchdogs have criticised attempts by the Botswana government to control state media coverage of a controversial programme to relocate the San community from their ancestral land in a game reserve. The San were relocated to settlements outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in 1997 as a result of government plans to set aside the protected area for...

MOSCOW -- Investigators are focusing their inquiry into the killing of a Russian investigative reporter on former police officers linked to crimes against civilians in Chechnya, a newspaper reported Wednesday. Anna Politkovskaya, who had exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building Oct. 7. The...

MOSCOW: Investigators are focusing their inquiry into the killing of a Russian investigative reporter on former police officers linked to crimes against civilians in Chechnya, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday. Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building Oct. 7. The...

MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Prosecutor's Office has sent Sweden additional evidence in support of its extradition request for Mahomed Uspaev, suspected of killing Itar-Tass photojournalist Vladimir Yatsina in Chechnya, the office's Web site reported Wednesday. Yatsina was abducted while on assignment in the troubled North Caucasus republic in the summer of 1999, and murdered on...

(CJES/IFEX) - Vasily Melnichenko, a journalist and human rights activist, was beaten in the village of Galkinskoye, in Sverdlovsk region, on 22 October 2006, by a former public servant whose illicit activities the journalist has criticised. Melnichenko said the attack occurred during a meeting addressing the bankruptcy of one of the village's farms. The assailant was Alexander Gaan, a former...

(FLIP/IFEX) - Otoniel Sánchez, a journalist with local television station CNC in Cartago, a city in Valle del Cauca department, was obliged to leave the region after unidentified assailants fired upon his residence on 19 October 2006. Sánchez told FLIP he began receiving telephoned death threats after doing a report on misuse of the municipality's roller-skating rink. In the first call he was told...

WASHINGTON, October 24, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Turkmenistan remains among the six countries with the worst records on press freedom, according to the Worldwide Press Freedom Index published on October 24 by the international advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The organization -- known by its French initials, RSF -- said the worst offenders remain the same as in the past four years. The index also...

(LIP-wb) -- Peruvian journalist Cesar Hildebrandt complained he is being harassed after he broke the stories on President Alan Garcia's affair which resulted in fathering his sixth child, and presumed irregularities in the current vaccination campaign against rubeola (measles). Hildebrandt, one of Peru's most prolific journalists, announced his resignation as columnist for newspaper "La Primera"...

New York, October 24, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed that a Colombian journalist has been forced into hiding following threats. Television host Otoniel Sánchez became the sixth journalist this year in Colombia to flee after being threatened or intimidated. Unidentified gunmen fired six shots at Sánchez’s house in the town of Cartago, Valle del Cauca province, southwest of...

PARIS – Restrictions on civil liberties due to the 'war on terrorism' have undermined media freedom in the United States and Russia over the past year, journalists' rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said. RSF's 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Index released on Tuesday, a survey of censorship, intimidation and violence against journalists, found Finland, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands...