Africa

  
CPJ

Spreading the security message

Video streaming by UstreamOn the frontlines of global reporting, knowledge is safety. CPJ’s event series to promote our new Journalist Security Guide continued Wednesday in Washington, D.C. where we teamed up with Internews for a panel discussion on journalist security on-site and online. 

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Abdiweli Farah and Mohamed Abdi Jama, chief editors of Ogaal and Waheen, respectively, say the government has not lived up to its promises. (CPJ/Tom Rhodes)

Mission Journal: Somaliland’s press harassed, disappointed

“I’m free but I don’t feel free,” said Mohamed Abdi Urad, chief editor of Yool, a critical weekly published in the semi-autonomous republic of Somaliland. Mohamed had just been released on May 22 after a week in detention at Hargeisa Central Police Station. His crime? “I have no idea,” he said. Mohamed had attempted to…

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Ugandan journalists protest on World Press Freedom Day in 2011. (Edward Echwalu)

Amid assaults on press, Uganda police promise reforms

Joseph Mutebi, a photojournalist for the popular vernacular state-owned daily Bukedde, spent his afternoon trying to file a complaint with the police in the capital, Kampala. “First they told me the officer who assaulted me was based at another station, so I went there and now they are telling me he is based at the…

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Defining role of the press in genocide prevention

Talking about genocide prevention in the shadow of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps brings an intense and unique gravity to the discussions. The academic presentations cannot extract themselves from the looming presence of the barbed wires and grim towers surrounding the Nazis’ most infamous death factory.

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A screen shot of a graphic released by City Press' parent company that samples tweets from around the country. (Media24/Andrew Trench)

South Africans clash on Twitter over #Zumaspear

South African journalist and arts critic Charl Blignaut made what turned out to be an excellent prediction. “Of all the work on show, it’s this depiction of the president that will set the most tongues wagging and most likely generate some howls of disapproval,” he wrote on May 13 in a review of an art…

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Computer crime laws belie Thai claim to modern society

At online discussion sites all over the world, comments are posted on the Web as soon as they are written. People argue, inform, express anger, and voice fears. Some say things in the heat of the moment that they might go on to regret. Others are elliptical and obscure. The enabling of such conversations is…

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CPJ

Free expression in Americas goes beyond left or right

On Sunday the general assembly of the Organization of American States will convene in Bolivia in the verdant, highland valley city of Cochabamba. The 35 member states (every nation in the region except Cuba) are expected to vote on a measure that, if passed, could curtail free expression and press throughout the hemisphere and put…

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Selma Lomax. (FrontPage Africa)

Liberia university suspends student journalist over article

A private university in Liberia has suspended a journalist studying there for publishing a newspaper story critical of the institution’s management. On May 8, private Cuttington University in Suacoco in central Liberia suspended Selma Lomax, a reporter with independent newspaper FrontPage Africa and a third-year student in agriculture at the institution, for four months over an April 26…

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CPJ
Visitors look at an exhibit displaying the bloodstained clothes of the Jesuit priests murdered by the Salvadoran military in 1989. (AP/Luis Romero)

Solidarity, a key to security, eludes Salvadoran press

No other journalists are remembered quite like this. Visitors looking through the glass display at the Monsignor Romero Center & Martyrs Museum in San Salvador see the pajamas and other clothes that three Jesuit university priests were wearing when they were shot down by automatic rifle fire. A series of clear containers are filled with…

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CPJ
Sebastian Junger, left, introduces fellow journalist Jeffrey Gettleman at the Half King. (Nicole Schilit)

At CPJ Debrief, Gettleman cites Somalia danger, reward

Jeffrey Gettleman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent, says he travels with “a small militia” whenever he reports from Somalia, the East African country afflicted by armed insurgency, poverty, and hunger. As intrusive as the security detail might be, he feels far more fortunate than the local reporters who face sustained and often deadly…

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