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Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, is in active discussions with General Electric about a possible joint offer for Dow Jones in response to Rupert Murdoch’s $5bn attempt to buy the Wall Street Journal. Neither Pearson nor General Electric would comment, but people familiar with the situation said that Pearson had made contact in recent weeks with the US conglomerate, which controls the NBC...

Washington -- The Bush administration, which opposes legislation to shield journalists from revealing their confidential sources, warned lawmakers Thursday that the measure's broad definition of journalists could protect the media wings of terrorist groups. But House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., challenged the Justice Department's claim, calling it "totally absurd." The...

A Bucharest court yesterday sentenced Syrian-Romanian businessmen Omar Hayssam in absentia to 20 years in prison on a charge of “terrorism” for organising the kidnapping of three Romanian journalists - Marie-Jeanne Ion, Sorin Miscoci and Ovidiu Ohanesian - in Iraq in the spring of 2005. He was also ordered to pay them 6 million euros in compensation for the 55 days they spent as hostages. Their...

Few in the public view the media as the champions of their cause. Yet it is the press which time and time again is forced to bear the legal costs of ensuring the public has a right to know. The most recent examples were two rulings last week, ironically by the same judge on the same day, in completely unrelated murder cases. Court of Queen's Bench Justice Scott Brooker allowed the media -- and the...

GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian Islamist faction Hamas called on Friday for the release of an abducted British reporter the day after the group took control of the coastal territory and ousted rival secular faction Fatah. Alan Johnston, the kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent, was seized on March 12. His abductors issued a video of him on June 1 in which he said he was in good health and being treated...

Just one week before Iraqi journalists marked the 138th anniversary of the founding of Al-Zawra', the nation's first newspaper, Sahar Al-Haidari, a reporter who worked for the Voices of Iraq news agency, was shot dead on Thursday as she waited for a taxi in the northern city of Mosul. Al-Haidari, 45, a mother of four who covered political and cultural news, was the second employee from the...

ISLAMABAD: Another constitutional petition was filed in the Supreme Court (SC) on Thursday against incidents of harassment and intimidation of journalists. Filed under Article 184(3) of the Constitution by Shakil Ahmed Turabi, a journalist, the petition seeks a court order for the executive authorities regarding prevention of untoward incidents against journalists and provision of a protective and...

The Philippine President, Gloria Arroyo, has promised to end a series of killings of local journalists, asking prosecutors and police to solve such crimes speedily and bring the guilty to justice. Fifty-two journalists have been killed since 2001 when Mrs Arroyo was swept to power after an army-backed revolt. Hundreds of leftists and opponents of the Government have also been killed in what rights...

After spending the night in a Fiji detention centre, Fairfax journalist Michael Field has this morning been put on a flight back to New Zealand. Field was separated from other journalists arriving in Nadi last night and told he had been blacklisted. Photographer John Selkirk, whom Field was travelling with, was allowed through and is today at work there. Fairfax group editor John Crowley told NZPA...

THE Commonwealth Press Union (CPU) is keeping international groups informed of the situation in Fiji following the detention and deportation of New Zealand journalist Michael Field. CPU secretary of the Media Freedom Committee, Lincoln Gould, said the body was keeping international groups such as the World Association of Newspapers in Paris and the CPU's British counterpart informed. ''Just in...