Features & Analysis

  

Independent Cuban journalist details four-day detention

Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, a Havana-based independent journalist, sent an e-mail message this morning to his “brothers, colleagues, and organizations that protect and watch over press freedom around the world” announcing that he had been released from police custody after a four-day detention. In his e-mail, titled “Thanks to you and to your demands,…

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Sri Lankan Embassy denies press freedom crisis

January 6, 2009: The main control room of Colombo’s TV Sirasa is bombed. January 8, 2009: Prominent independent editor Lasantha Wickramatunga is killed by a hit-squad that attacks his car while it is blocked in traffic. January 23, 2009: Pro-government editor Upali Tennakoon is attacked under similar circumstances by a similar hit-squad. He is injured, but…

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Ethiopia lifts filtering of critical Web sites–at least for now

Journalists in Ethiopia informed CPJ over the weekend that our Web site, which was blocked to Internet users in the capital, Addis Ababa, since August, was accessible again. 

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Petition for Roxana Saberi, held in Tehran

CPJ will be collecting signatures until midnight tonight on a Facebook petition in support of Roxana Saberi, an American journalist who is being held without charge at Tehran’s Evin prison.

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Gabon media silent on French freezing president’s assets

News that a judge in France froze the private bank accounts of Gabon’s President Omar Bongo was all over the international media but barely a word appeared in the national press.

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Of journalists’ arrests and Senate hearings

Yesterday’s arrest of Nadesapillai Vithyatharan in a suburb of Colombo was a continuation of the killing, jailing, harassing, and intimidating of Sri Lankan  journalists–and the feeling is that it if it hadn’t been for the quick response of the international community, Vithyatharan’s situation could have gotten a lot uglier.

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Honoring the fallen and the brave

“If nobody goes, then somebody has to go.” That, according to his editors at APF News, was the personal motto of fallen Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai, who until his tragic death had reported from conflict zones around the world. That journalistic drive put Nagai in the line of fire during Burma’s 2007 Saffron Revolution,…

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Yahoo France reacts to Burkina Faso e-mail death threats

A week ago today, CPJ sent a letter of concern to President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso urging his government to investigate a series of death threats sent in the past year or so via e-mail to independent journalists there. Using Yahoo France accounts, senders have boasted about intimidating the press in impunity by referencing…

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A glimpse of the hidden war in Sri Lanka

“The government has barred independent journalists from travelling to the war zone”–the description of the Sri Lankan conflict has been among the most often-repeated for almost two years. News outlets want the latest pictures of the war in Sri Lanka and its civilian refugees. But displaced civilians who do manage to leave the war zone…

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Swazi reporter gets apology amid allegations of sexism

This week in the mountain Kingdom of Swaziland, the state-owned daily Swazi Observer reported that an official has apologized for summarily dismissing a female reporter from Parliament nearly two weeks ago. It was the latest in a controversy sparked by allegations of gender discrimination against Mantoe Phakathi, an award-winning journalist with the private monthly The…

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