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IN EARLY 1990 I visited Eastern Europe for the first time, traveling in Hungary, Romania, and what was then Czechoslovakia just a few months after the revolutions that had freed them from Communist dictatorship. One indelible lesson from that trip was the remarkable role that had been played by the US government's broadcast services -- Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty -- in...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders said it was baffled by an appeals court decision to uphold a six-month suspended prison sentence against Hrant Dink, managing editor of the weekly "Agos", for referring to the 1915 genocide against the Armenians. On 12 July 2006, Dink was sentenced on appeal in connection with a 13 February 2004 column in "Agos", for which he was found guilty of "insulting...

(IFJ/IFEX) - The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has expressed its deep concern for the safety of journalists in Pakistan after news of another journalist's disappearance, possibly at the hands of authorities. Sindhi Daily Kawish correspondent, Mehruddin Mari, was last seen in Thatta on June 27, and according to the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ), an IFJ affiliate...

CAIRO – In recent years Egypt's press has been allowed more room. A feisty independent newspaper began publishing last year and politically partisan weekly papers have launched one broadside after another against President Hosni Mubarak. But Egyptian journalists allege a government backlash is under way and they're pushing back. Sunday, at least 24 daily and weekly papers withheld publication, and...

When Russian journalists describe Vladimir Putin as the country's chief newsmaker, they're not exaggerating. It's not just that he's the president and attracts the expected attention--he also rules a Kremlin bureaucracy able to decide what is news. Under Putin, Russia has experienced a dramatic rollback of media freedom, a sensitive issue as his fellow leaders of the Group of Eight major...

CAIRO, 9 July (IRIN) - The ongoing battle over local press freedom came to a head Sunday when some 300 opposition journalists and their supporters gathered in front the parliament building in Cairo to protest a new press law, expected to be ratified Sunday. In solidarity with the journalists, 28 opposition and independent newspapers refused to publish their Sunday editions, saying the new law...

The journalism watchdog group Reporters Without Borders on Friday called for the leaders of Russia and the United States to request a U.N. investigation into the killing of journalist Paul Klebnikov, The Associated Press reports. The American, who was editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian edition, was gunned down on a Moscow street on July 9, 2004. Two men were brought to trial on charges of...

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, July 7, 2006 - Two years after the contract-style killing of Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov, his assassins remain at large and judicial secrecy and procedural issues have crippled his family's quest for justice. Klebnikov, a 41-year-old U.S. journalist of Russian descent, was shot outside his Moscow office on July 9, 2004, in direct retaliation for his investigative...

New York, July 7, 2006 -- The editor of an opposition daily has been jailed in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, for more than two weeks without bail. Arman Babadzhanian, editor-in-chief of Zhamanak Yerevan (Yerevan Times), faces up to five years in prison for allegedly forging documents to avoid military service, but the Committee to Protect Journalists and others are concerned that the charge was...

New York, July 7, 2006 — The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a bomb attack on the office of the Bangladeshi magazine Weekly Blitz whose editor is on trial for sedition after writing about radical Islam. Editor Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury told CPJ that two small devices exploded Wednesday outside the Weekly Blitz office in the capital, Dhaka, causing minor damage. No one was injured. He...