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WASHINGTON - A young teen riding his bike at dawn reaches into his shoulder bag, grabs a tightly folded newspaper and deftly throws it to the front steps. It's an image as American as apple pie, but the paperboy has gone the way of the milkman. Today's papers usually arrive by anonymous drive-and-toss. For reasons including the demise of afternoon papers, a shift to centralized distribution and...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (caribbeannetnews) - Six years after the double assassination of renowned Haitian journalist Jean Dominique and his guard, Jean Claude Louissaint, the investigation is still in deadlock. The judge of instruction, Jean Ostrict Hercule, has been in charge of the affair since August 4, 2005, but withdrew his participation in the investigation citing personal reasons. According...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has voiced dismay at the action of Indonesian immigration officials in denying US journalist William Nessen entry on 19 April 2006 and it called on foreign minister N. Hassan Wirajuda to ensure that he will be allowed to enter Indonesia freely in future. Nessen was arrested in 2003 in the troubled province of Aceh after covering an army offensive against the...

(Adil Soz/IFEX) The International Foundation for Protection of Freedom of Speech, Adil Soz, is alarmed by the general trend in media legislation in Kazakhstan. An analysis demonstrates that Kazakhstan has the strictest media legislation in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Many of the provisions set out under this legislation are in conflict not only with international documents...

(JED/IFEX) - Fortune Bemba, editor of the Brazzaville-based weekly "Thalassa", was charged on 21 April 2006 with defamation, attack on the honour of the head of state and propagation of false news by the public prosecutor Dinard Moubanga Mokonji. The journalist was arrested on 20 April and imprisoned in Brazzaville before being released the following day. He was questioned on the subject of an...

Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD) cadres severely beat up Minar Baidya, staff reporter of Dainik Ajker Kagoj, and pushed him off his room window on the second floor of Jagannath Hall in Dhaka University (DU) Friday night. The victim Minar said the JCD attacked him because he sat in the front row of the dormitory's TV room on Wednesday night. Minar, also a fourth year student of Department of Mass...

(RSF/IFEX) - Another Tunisian journalist is on hunger strike. It is Shéhérazade Akacha, who began her hunger strike on 19 April 2006 in protest against her dismissal from the pro-government daily "Al-Chourouk" for revealing details of her interrogation and harassment by the newspaper's management after she refused to let others "dictate" an article she wrote for the 7 November 2005 supplement. A...

(CJES/IFEX) - The Agency of National News (ANN) announced on 19 April 2006 that its correspondent Alla Tuchkova's accreditation card to the Moscow City Duma (the city legislature, MCD) was siezed on 18 April by employees of the press service of the MCD. According to ANN, from the comments posted on its website, Alla Tuchkova reported on 5 April that "deputies of the Moscow City Duma did not want...

(RSF/IFEX) - The conviction on 19 April 2006 of "Minivan" journalist Abdullah Saeed and his sentence to life imprisonment was engineered by the authorities in order to harm the country's only opposition newspaper, Reporters Without Borders has said, calling for his retrial by an impartial court and urging President Gayoom to keep his promise to allow more press freedom. Saeed's colleagues also...

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 11 April 2006, Mireya Zurita, current editor of "El Siglo" newspaper, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for authorizing, in 2003, the publication of a press release which suggested that Deputy Police Inspector Terry Rojas, head of investigations at the Institute for Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations (Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas...