The Torch is a weekly newsletter from the Committee to Protect Journalists that brings you the latest press freedom and journalist safety news from around the world. Subscribe here.
Freelancer Mohamed Ben Khalifa was killed during clashes south of Tripoli, Libya, on Saturday. Mexican reporter Rafael Murúa Manríquez was found killed in Baja California Sur on Sunday despite being enrolled in a federal protection program for human rights defenders and journalists. On Monday, Sudanese authorities revoked the credentials of at least six journalists working for international news outlets.
Global press freedom updates
- Blog: For local female journalists in U.S., rape threats, stalkers, harassment can come with the beat
- The South Sudanese media regulator barred a newspaper from covering the ongoing protests in its northern neighbor
- Digital Safety: Using security keys to secure accounts against phishing
- Journalists assaulted by far-right demonstrators in Greece
- Egyptian TV presenter sentenced to prison for interview with gay man
- Prominent journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro flees Nicaragua after threats, newsroom raid
- Four Kashmiri photojournalists hit by pellet-gun fire from Indian security forces
- CPJ joined more than 30 regional and international rights organizations expressing concern about a proposed law in Venezuela that would expand the powers of the government to control and monitor internet use without institutional checks
- Palestinian security forces arrest journalist Yousef al-Faqeeh
- Read the latest Turkey Crackdown Chronicle, CPJ’s weekly round-up of press freedom violations in the country
Spotlight
(Columbia Global Reports)
We Want To Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages and Ransom by CPJ’s Executive Director Joel Simon came out this week. The book explores hostage policy around the world and the question of whether governments should pay ransom to terrorists.
Learn more about the book in Joel’s latest appearances on Morning Joe and 1A on WAMU and read the latest review in The Wall Street Journal.
What we are reading
- “I spent almost a month on a floor”: What it’s like to be imprisoned on false news charges — Daniel Funke, Poynter
- Saudi Arabia’s violence against journalists unsettling — Justin Shilad, CPJ Middle East and North Africa researcher, Houston Chronicle
- A magazine’s unlikely rebirth in Sri Lanka — Kelsey Ables, Columbia Journalism Review
- World Report 2019 — Human Rights Watch
- Oppression with a Taste of Emergency: The sixth annual report on the status of freedom of expression in Egypt — Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression
- Why US intelligence should release any Khashoggi files — Joel Simon, CPJ executive director, and Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, CNN
- He Reported on Facebook. Now He Approaches It With Caution. — An interview with Times reporter Nick Confessore — The New York Times
- More Important, But Less Robust? Five Things Everybody Needs to Know about the Future of Journalism — Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Meera Selva, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
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