How to support injured photojournalist Joao Silva
New York Times photojournalist Joao Silva lost both his legs when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine in Afghanistan on October 23. “Those of you who know João will not be surprised to learn that throughout this ordeal he continued to shoot pictures,” wrote New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller in a memo to…
Gunmen attack newspaper in Acapulco
New York, November 12, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned Wednesday’s shooting attack against Mexican newspaper El Sur in the port city of Acapulco, Guerrero state. Unidentified armed men fired at the paper and then stormed into the newsroom and threatened to set it on fire, according to local news reports and CPJ interviews.
Chinese hackers targeting human rights news sites
Nart Villeneuve has published a detailed summary of recent malware attacks on media and human rights groups who work on Chinese issues. He highlights a disturbing new trend. On Wednesday, Amnesty Hong Kong’s website was repurposed by hackers to infect visitors with a wide variety of nasty malware. The Nobel Prize’s website was also defaced earlier…
Russia reopens investigation into Beketov attack
New York, November 11, 2010–Russia’s top investigator, Aleksandr Bastrykin, today ordered the reopening of a probe into a near-lethal November 2008 attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda. Bastrykin’s order comes a day after a court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki convicted Beketov of criminally slandering local mayor Vladimir Strelchenko.…
Mayor Strelchenko, drop your cruel complaint
Dear Mayor Strelchenko: While leading a delegation to Moscow from the Committee to Protect Journalists in late September, I had the opportunity to meet with Mikhail Beketov in the Moscow hospital where he was being treated. Today, I was outraged to learn Beketov is now a convicted criminal because you have pursued a cruel complaint.
Beketov convicted of defamation, his assailants still at large
New York, November 10, 2010–A court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki today convicted Mikhail Beketov, the editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, of criminally slandering Khimki’s mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko, in a 2007 television interview. Beketov, who is in a wheelchair and unable to speak two years after a near-lethal attack, was wheeled into the courtroom for…
Moroccan authorities impeding Spanish journalists
New York, November 9, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by an increasing climate of hostility for Spanish journalists in Morocco, highlighted by official measures to prevent Spanish journalists from covering clashes in the Western Sahara. CPJ calls on Rabat to allow journalists to do their work unimpeded.
Help journalists in need: An appeal
Mikhail Beketov is lucky to be alive, although I’m sure there are days when he doesn’t think so. On November 13, 2008, the environmental reporter who campaigned against a highway that would have destroyed a forest in Khimki, a town outside Moscow, was beaten nearly to death by men with metal bars. The attackers made…
Russian reporters beaten; both covered highway project
New York, November 8, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces two attacks on journalists in the Moscow region and calls on authorities to end impunity in crimes against reporters in Russia. Both victims, Oleg Kashin of the business daily Kommersant and Anatoly Adamchuk of the independent weekly Zhukovskiye Vesti, have covered a contentious highway project…