In exile in the U.S., Ethiopian journalist struggles forward
After almost a year in exile in America, an icy ocean away from his home in Ethiopia, journalist Samson Mekonnen, left, only recently received his work permit in Washington. In the interim, like most journalists undergoing the emotionally and financially grueling resettlement process, he has relied on friends, family, and international organizations like CPJ to…
Press Club honors jailed Iranian Kouhyar Goudarzi
The National Press Club next week will honor an Iranian journalist who is languishing in prison. Kouhyar Goudarzi, an online reporter and human rights activist, was pursuing an aerospace degree at Sharif Industrial University when security agents put him behind bars, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Goudarzi, left, was an…
Cuban deadline passes for dissident releases: What next?
Sunday marked the end of the four-month deadline Cuban President Raúl Castro had agreed to with representatives of the Cuban Catholic Church and the Spanish government to free 52 prisoners of conscience who remained in jail since the March 2003 crackdown against dissidents, known as the “Black Spring.” The Spanish foreign minister at the time,…
Alfredo Corchado: ‘Trust No One’
On Monday, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington hosted a panel discussion on the press freedom crisis in Mexico. Carlos Lauría and I spoke about CPJ report “Silence or Death in the Mexican Press” and the results of our meeting in September with President Felipe Calderón. Dolía Estevez described the event in a blog she…
Mexico no different than Iraq, reporters tell Wilson Center
On Monday, before a large audience of government officials, representatives of NGOs, reporters, and students, CPJ’s senior program coordinator for the Americas, Carlos Lauría, said that the level of crime violence, and corruption facing the press in Mexico, where more than 30 journalists have been murdered or have gone missing since Felipe Calderón took office…
That Nobel invite? Mr. Malware sent it
This weekend, staff at CPJ received a personal invitation to attend the Oslo awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The invite, curiously, was in the form of an Adobe PDF document. We didn’t accept. We didn’t even open the e-mail. We did, however, begin analyzing the document to see was really inside…
Program to protect reporters raises doubts in Mexico
The Mexican government is currently putting together a program, it says, that will help reduce one of the most brutal problems for journalists: their lack of protection from death threats from drug cartels, government officials, and ordinary criminals. Senior officials at the Ministry of Interior told CPJ that they expect to offer at-risk journalists a…
Internet Blotter
Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube and then re-asserted it within the same week. Digital technology is helping get news out of North Korea. Small digital cameras and tiny SD memory cards make it easier to smuggle images out. In China, meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle 3G e-reader is reportedly being used to get the news in.…