The editors of the Turkish magazine Nokta are facing up to 12 years in prison for two magazine covers the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deemed to be “spreading terrorist propaganda” and insulting the president, both federal crimes.
Two pro-choice law professors call the prosecution of citizen journalists “a stunning act of legal jujitsu,” and say they are “deeply disturbed” over a Harris County, Texas grand jury’s decision to indict the makers of the videos who exposed Planned Parenthood’s apparent practice of selling the body parts of aborted babies.
Google has censored hundreds of thousands of links to comply with European “right to be forgotten” regulations. A new transparency report reveals that the search giant has complied with 348,508 of the 1,235,473 URLs that users have requested be removed from search results.
A former Canadian Liberal legislator is calling for a permanent ban on political television and radio ads in Canada, citing the status quo of restrictions on political messaging in Britain as his model. In Britain, John Milloy says, “major political parties” are each apportioned an equal amount of time by on government-licensed television stations to make their pitches.
AFP News reports that a paper called the 9th Dey Weekly has been shut down by Iran’s “Press Supervisory Board,” which also issued warning notices to the Kayhan Daily and a news website called Raja–all critics of the nuclear deal Iran brokered during the P5+1 talks.
Turkey opened its trial against two journalists on Thursday for publishing the cover of French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo following the terrorist attack that took the lives of 11 people at the magazine’s headquarters. Hundreds of plaintiffs are alleging that, as Muslim readers, their personal offense at the images of Muhammad constitute a crime by the publishers.
The Turkish government’s uneasy relationship with freedom of the press led to another bit of unpleasantness on Tuesday, when four journalists made the mistake of asking the governor of a border town if he was concerned that ISIS militants fleeing a defeat at Kurdish hands might cross into Turkey and cause trouble.
The former head of Al Jazeera America’s documentary team is suing the network for millions of dollars, alleging that the Doha-based organization has extreme anti-women, pro-Arab, anti-Semitic biases, and promotes 9/11 truther conspiracy theories.
On Sunday, Egypt’s minister for Religious Endowments, Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa, called for an “international law to criminalize contempt of religion,” which would make it a crime to publish articles or cartoons showing disdain or ridicule of religions.
It apparently took the Chinese Communist government a while to decide how to handle Gao Yu, a 71-year-old journalist prosecuted on what her supporters describe as trumped-up charges for “leaking state secrets.” After five months of deliberation, a court sentenced her to seven years in prison on Friday.
A new report from the group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) finds that in 2014 freedom of the press saw a “dramatic decline” as wars, terrorism, high-handed security measures, and the rise of radical governing parties have grown all across the globe.
The body of a kidnapped journalist from the Mexican state of Veracruz has been found after weeks of searching, and the former police officer accused of killing him is claiming that the mayor of an area town ordered the murder.
On Wednesday, Islamic terrorists murdered 12 people at the leftist French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, including the editor-in-chief and three cartoonists. The motivation was clear: the terrorists shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” during the attack and screamed “We have avenged the prophet!” as they left the scene.
