NOT IN OLD HONG KONG Newsday (New York, NY) November 24, 2002 Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc. By A. Lin Neumann. In many ways Hong Kong looks as good as ever. The soaring Bank of China building and its many gleaming neighbors in Central, the downtown business hub, still have the air of cocky optimism that…
New York, December 9, 2002—Liberian authorities released journalist Hassan Bility, whom authorities had held incommunicado since June 24 as a “prisoner of war.” According to news reports, Bility, editor of the independent weekly The Analyst, was released without being charged or tried. He left the country this weekend for an undisclosed location. On December 1,…
New York, December 3, 2002—Colombia’s Constitutional Court has overturned sections of a government decree requiring foreign journalists to obtain authorization from the Interior Ministry before entering state-run security zones. On November 25, the country’s nine-member Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that the earlier decree requiring that foreigners traveling to the zones get permission first from the…
New York, December 2, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about growing threats against Haitian journalists in the wake of anti-government protests in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien that began on November 17 and continue to rattle the country. On November 21, seven journalists from four private media outlets—including the director and…
New York, November 26, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the arrest in Bangladesh yesterday of three journalists working on a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 “Unreported World” series. Reporter Zaiba Malik, director and cameraman Bruno Sorrentino, and Priscilla Raj, a free-lance journalist working for the documentary team as an interpreter, were taken into…
New York, November 26, 2002—Islamic authorities in the northern Nigerian state of Zamfara issued a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Isioma Daniel, a writer for the private daily This Day, whose November 16 article about the Miss World pageant sparked deadly riots across the country. According to sources in the southern city of Lagos, the…
New York, November 25, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) welcomes Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision today to veto restrictive amendments to the Law on the Struggle with Terrorism and the Law on Mass Media that were passed by Parliament earlier this month. Putin announced his decision during a meeting with media chiefs. He also…
New York, November 25, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is alarmed that Irada Huseynova, a correspondent with the Azerbaijani weekly Bakinsky Bulvar who currently works for the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES), was detained today in Moscow and could be extradited. CJES director Oleg Panfilov told CPJ that Moscow police arrived…
New York, November 20, 2002—The Kaduna offices of the Nigerian private daily This Day were burned down today by Muslim protesters who were angered by a news report the paper published about the Miss World pageant, to be held in the country early in December. Local sources said the protesters were reacting to an article…
New York, November 20, 2002—On Friday, November 15, an explosion destroyed the offices of the independent weekly National Pilot in Ilorin, the capital of Nigeria’s west central Kwara State. Five people were seriously injured in the blast—which local sources suspected was a politically motivated bomb attack—including the paper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Mudasiru Adewuyi. The explosion occurred…