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An American reporter's account of the surreal world inside Baghdad's top security Green Zone has been named as winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, billed as the world's richest award for non-fiction. The prize was given to the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran for his "Imperial Life in the Emerald City", which took readers into a bubble of startling Americana....

When it comes to accusations of Left-liberal bias, the BBC is a bit like an alcoholic. People have been sniggering about his drinking for years; he pretends not to notice. There have been complaints; he brushes them aside. Throwing up at that wedding reception? Someone spiked the punch. Propositioning the boss's wife? That was a joke. But, deep down, the drunk knows he has a problem. More to the...

Only days after the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) was joined by journalists’ organisations around the world in demanding the Pakistan government take action to address the appalling press freedom and journalist safety situation, the IFJ is shocked to learn of the murder of a journalist and kidnapping of another in Pakistan. “The news keeps getting worse and worse. The Pakistan...

Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip said they were pressing the kidnappers of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston to free him by Monday and hoped they would secure his release without the use of force. "The last appointment given for the kidnappers is today," senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said. "If they are not going to free him smoothly, we are going to use every way in order to set him free...

An appeal court in Andijan reduced human rights activist Gulbahor Turaeva’s sentence from six years in prison to a suspended three-year sentence on 12 June after she promised the court to turn over a new leaf and criticised several independent journalists by name. It was the second time in a month that an Uzbek court has suspended an activist’s jail sentence after a public confession. A doctor and...

The International Federation of Journalists today renewed calls for urgent action to protect Palestinian journalists after an armed raid at the weekend on the Gaza offices of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate by militants linked to Hamas. Gunmen entered the offices of the Syndicate, which is affiliated to the IFJ, on Saturday and seized documents and computers according to a statement issued...

Sri Lanka's Military commander for Jaffna region, Major Gen. G.A. Chandrasiri Sunday accused Somini Sengupta, a senior reporter for New York Times for "shameful falsification of facts...depraving the true spirit of professional journalism," for quoting him as saying that "certain members of the Security forces are involved in Human Rights violations in Jaffna." The Major General said in a report...

A São Paulo state court banned the Folha de Vinhedo weekly on 15 June from publishing an interview in which Paulo Cabral, the Vinhedo municipal government’s former legal secretary, accused various local officials and businessmen of corruption. The ban was requested by two businessmen named in the interview, Rogério Sanches Cunha and Osias Daudt, and a local judge, Herivelto Araújo Godoy. Their...

Suresh Chandra Adhikary, the editor of the weekly Chure Sadnesh, and Dinesh Kumar Thapaliya, the editor of Kayakairan National Daily, were beaten by police on 16 June when the went to Mahendra Adarsha Hospital in the central district of Chitwan. The police used force to disperse a crowd of local residents who had begun to demolish the hospital’s perimeter wall in order to build a road. When the...

A Channel One television reporter said he was shot in the shoulder by an unidentified gunman outside his apartment building last week in an attack that might be linked to a book he is writing about the 1990s aluminum wars. Andrei Kalitin, 37, said he was shot at around 9 p.m. Wednesday in the courtyard of 4 Vysokaya Ulitsa in southern Moscow, Kommersant reported Friday. The attacker fired a...