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On 24 June 2007, the Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Njabulo Mabuza, banned the media from entering the Mbabane Government Hospital, Swaziland's biggest hospital, in search of news. This followed a series of media exposés on the alleged perpetual negligence of hospital staff that resulted in the recent death of a young girl who had been bitten by a rabid dog.The media alleged the child...

The Victorian Government will consider recommending a pardon for two journalists convicted of contempt of court if it receives a petition from them, Premier Steve Bracks said today. Herald Sun reporters Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus had pleaded guilty to contempt of court for refusing to disclose the source of a leaked story about a Federal Government proposal to slash war veterans' benefits...

(SEAPA/IFEX) - Police in the Sibu district in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, have introduced restrictions on media coverage of crime stories, threatening journalists with arrest should they breach the new rules. Journalists were told that police permission must be obtained before a crime story could be written or published. In addition, the police were to be the sole source of...

(BIANET/IFEX) - A case in the district town of Gerger, in the province of Adiyaman, southeast of Turkey, illustrates how the Turkish government has been indecisive and contradictory in dealing with freedom of expression. Public Prosecutor Sadullah Ovacikli dismissed a case against journalist Haci Bogatekin, who wrote an article about a flea epidemic, in which he criticised the government. The...

(FMM/IFEX) - The FMM is shocked and dismayed by attempts by the present government to bring back the criminal defamation law, which was repealed by the UNP government in June 2002 as a result of campaigns by national as well as international media and press freedom organisations. The FMM has credible evidence that, on behalf of the president, an emergency Cabinet paper was submitted to the Cabinet...

Reporters Without Borders today called on the human rights section of the national police to protect Rubén Valencia, the editor of the Cali-based regional daily Q’hubo, who has been getting death threats since reporting drug baron Olmes Durán Ibargüen’s arrest and who is on the point of fleeing the country. He would be the third journalist to do so this year. “Threats against the press from...

LONDON (Reuters) - The family and colleagues of Alan Johnston, a BBC reporter kidnapped by Islamists in Gaza, urged his captors on Monday not to harm him after he appeared in a video wearing what he said was an explosive belt. Johnston's father said he and his family were "most concerned and distressed" about the video, in which the 45-year-old Briton said his kidnappers had threatened to blow up...

Reporters Without Borders condemns the decision, announced yesterday, that Andrzej Marek, the editor of the regional weekly Wiesci Polickie, will have to serve a three-month prison sentence for allegedly libelling an official in the city of Police in a February 2001 article headlined “Encouraging sharp practices.” The three-month jail term, passed in November 2002 and upheld on appeal in November...

JOHANNESBURG, 26 June 2007 (IRIN) - A Lesotho radio journalist charged with subversion told IRIN he was forced to broadcast a letter, on pain of death, denouncing the country's leader on his early morning radio show. Thabo Thakalekoala, a freelance reporter and talk show host at Harvest FM, was arrested on the steps of the private radio station's offices in the capital, Maseru, after his broadcast...

NEW YORK It is quite a big deal for any reporter to get Page One stories in both The New York Times and The Washington Post during their careers. But how many have done so on the same day? Jo Becker has. Although Becker has only been at the Times for less than a month, she may well have accomplished a feat few in the paper's history ever will. On Monday, she had a front page byline in both the...