Follow-up

An elected New York state official is being prosecuted for his alleged attack on a photographer who was trying to take his picture, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. New York State Senator Kevin Parker, who represents Brooklyn's District 21 in the Albany-based legislature, was arrested May 8 in Brooklyn and charged with felony criminal mischief, according to the New York...

Khawar Shafiq, the Daily Waqt (Daily Time) correspondent in Faisalabad, told colleagues he managed to escape from abductors on April 11, 2009, four days three bearded men grabbed him by his home near Faisalabad and shoved him into a car. He said the men made him inhale fumes from a liquid that made him lose consciousness, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported...

Freelance journalist Roxana Saberi has been released from prison in Iran. Saberi, who was initially sentenced to an eight-year prison term for espionage on April 18, was released from Tehran's Evin Prison Monday after an appeals court reduced her punishment to a two-year suspended sentence. Although exact details about the charges against Saberi remain unknown, BBC reported that the initial charge...

The Brazilian Supreme Federal Tribunal's decision to strike down the 1967 Press Law, a measure that imposed harsh penalties for libel and slander, is a crucial step forward in the campaign to eliminate criminal defamation laws in the Americas, the Committee to Protect Journalists has said. CPJ and other groups had long urged that the anachronistic law be removed from the books. Brazil's highest...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has hailed the provisional release of French photographer Jean-Paul Ney, who had been held in Abidjan since late December 2007 in connection with a conspiracy to overthrow the Ivorian government known as the “Christmas in Abidjan” affair. The provisional release of Ney on Wednesday and all the other persons held in connection with the case was ordered this afternoon...

Santa María El Oro Mayor Martín Silvestre Herrera denied any connection to Sunday's murder of local journalist Carlos Ortega Samper in the northern Durango state, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting Mexican press reports. Unidentified assailants shot and killed Ortega near his house in Santa María El Oro , 320 km (200 miles) north of the state capital, on Sunday...

There has been an alarming wave of politically motivated criminal lawsuits in Iraq's Kurdistan filed against mostly independent journalists as well as blatant violations of the region's new press law. The law has no provisions for jail terms for journalists, but journalists are still being imprisoned, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. In a letter to the prime minister of the...

Journalists in Pakistan have come under rapidly escalating pressure as the military confronts Taliban militants in the northwest region of the country. Threats and attacks from both sides have made reporting from Taliban-controlled areas more dangerous, according to Bob Dietz, Asia Prorgamme Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On Wednesday, the military harassed and fired

The media have become part and parcel of Thailand's intensifying political conflict: Two privately held satellite television news stations are openly aligned with competing political street movements, and state-controlled outlets are under opposition fire for allegedly misrepresenting recent crucial news events, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). As the conflict escalates and

Indictments came down on Wednesday in the murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was shot on an Oakland street in August 2007. An Alameda County grand jury indicted the leader of the now-closed Your Black Muslim Bakery, Yusuf Bey, on charges that he ordered Bailey killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The Associated Press (AP) reported that Alameda County...