New York, August 29, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urges the U.K. Financial Services Authority (FSA), a banking and investment watchdog agency, to respect the confidentiality of sources in its discussions with news organizations over leaked documents pertaining to Interbrew, the Belgium-based brewing group. The discussions follow Interbrew’s July 26 decision to stop legal…
New York, August 29, 2002—Unknown persons bombed the offices of the Voice of the People (VOP) Communications Trust yesterday morning. The private news production company, which has been producing shows since June 2000, was housed in a suburb of the capital city, Harare. The explosion is the fourth such attack on the independent media in…
New York, August 27, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) protests yesterday’s statement by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, a professional press association based in the Gaza Strip, barring Palestinian and foreign journalists from photographing images of Palestinian children wearing military uniforms or carrying weapons. It is unclear how this ban will be enforced and whether…
San Pablo, Philippines, August 27, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the murder of journalist and broadcaster Sonny Alcantara in the city of San Pablo, south of Manila, and calls on the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to ensure a thorough and impartial investigation into the slaying. Alcantara, 51, was…
New York, August 26, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) mourns the death of our colleague Alistair McLeod, 41, a freelance reporter on assignment in Afghanistan for The Australian newspaper. McLeod, a New Zealand citizen, was killed over the weekend in a car accident outside Kabul. Luis Alvarez, a reporter for the Spanish news agency…
New York, August 26, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the brutal murder by Maoist rebels of Nava Raj Sharma, editor of the Nepali-language weekly Kadam, published from Kalikot District in Nepal’s remote Midwestern region. News of Sharma’s murder earlier this summer surfaced only last week, after a team of journalists and human rights…
Xiao Qiang, a 2001 MacArthur Fellow, is executive director of Human Rights in China, a monitoring and advocacy organization based in New York and Hong Kong. Sophie Beach is Asia research associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists. NEW YORK — Last month, the Chinese government announced that some 45.8 million of its citizens had…
New York, August 19, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned by the recent attack on Artur Platonov in Almaty, a city in southern Kazakhstan. Platonov is a well-known host of the weekly television program “Portrait of the Week” on the private station KTK. Three assailants brutally assaulted Platonov as he was driving…
New York, August 19, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is alarmed that Mexican journalist and author Isabel Arvide has been charged with criminal defamation. Judge Armando Rodrígues Gaytán of the Second Penal Court in the district of Morales, Chihuahua, in north central Mexico, confirmed to CPJ that Arvide has been charged with criminal defamation.…
New York, August 15, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is pleased to announce that a Kenyan journalist who was serving a six-month sentence in a maximum-security prison just outside the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, was released yesterday by presidential decree. Njehu Gatabaki, an opposition member of Parliament and the publisher and editor-in-chief of Finance magazine,…