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MIAMI, Florida (April 27, 2006) - The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today called on newspaper readers throughout the Western Hemisphere to add their signatures to a public letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inâcio Lula da Silva seeking his collaboration to help solve the January 14, 1998 murder of journalist Manoel Leal de Oliveira. Six bullets took the life of the editor of the...

NEW YORK, April 27, 2006 - Despite overall improvements in press freedom in the Middle East and North Africa over the last several years, the region continues to rank the lowest for press freedoms in the world, according to a major study released today by Freedom House. However, there are a number of countries that are close to an upgrade from Not Free to Partly Free status, if a few key reforms...

London/Phnom Penh, April 28th, 2006 - The Alliance for Freedom of Expression in Cambodia (AFEC), a network of 28 Cambodian civil society organizations, and ARTICLE 19, an international human rights NGO, welcome last week's decision of the Council of Ministers to amend Article 63 of the UNTAC law by removing imprisonment as a penalty for defamation. "This is an important step on the way to...

Independent media in the countries of the former Soviet Union, already operating under extreme duress, came under further assault over the course of the last year. The political, legal, and economic environments in most of the non-Baltic former Soviet countries remain distinctly inhospitable to independent journalism. This reality is reflected in "Freedom Of The Press 2006," the latest edition of...

PRAGUE, April 28, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- "Journalists, like human-rights defenders in some of the countries of Central Asia, work in conditions of tremendous adversity because many of the governments in Central Asia want to do everything to avoid public scrutiny of government policy, public scrutiny of government processes, of government budgets of any kind of government work," said Rachel Denber...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has protested against the 22 April 2006 ban imposed by the federal government on TV coverage of the return of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. On the evening of April 25, the media were not allowed into the military airbase at Trenton, near Toronto. "The Canadian government is following the bad example set by the U.S. administration if it thinks it can hide...

New York, April 26, 2006 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by reports that Israeli soldiers have attacked Palestinian journalists covering unrest in the West Bank city of Nablus on at least two occasions this month. On April 17, soldiers fired at a group of cameramen and photographers covering an Israeli army raid on a house in the Old City of Nablus. Nasser Ishtayeh and Abdal...

New York, April 26, 2006 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the vicious beating by 10 unidentified assailants of a journalist from a suspended opposition newspaper in Kazakhstan. Kenzhegali Aitbakiyev of Aina Plyus was beaten unconscious as he was walking in the financial capital, Almaty, late Sunday, local and international press reported. Aitbakiyev, who has worked at Aina...

CAIRO, April 27 (Reuters) - Egyptian police released on bail Al Jazeera television's Cairo bureau chief after he was accused of spreading false information while reporting on the recent Sinai bombings, the Al Jazeera office in Cairo said on Thursday. An Egyptian Interior Ministry spokesman said earlier Hussein Abdel Ghani had been taken in for questioning after reporting an explosion in the...

The Taiwan High Court fined a United Daily News reporter NT$30,000 for a third day in a row yesterday after he again refused to identify his sources for a news story that is part of an insider stock trading case. Kao Nien-yi remained silent on the question of who gave him the information that he reported on March 16. The story related to an insider trading scandal in which senior government...