Venezuela’s telecommunications agency, Conatel, ordered Televén to immediately stop broadcasting the Colombian telenovela soap opera “Chepe Fortuna” for promoting “political and racial intolerance, as well as xenophobia and crime advocacy,” Reuters and BBC Mundo report.
The government-run Cuban website Cubadebate denounced Google for closing its YouTube channel for a supposed copyright “infraction” in a video related to the trial of anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles.
The new communications minister, Paulo Bernardo, said he supported a rule that bars a company from owning a radio station, newspaper, and TV station in the same region, Folha de S. Paulo reports. He made the statements in an interview with TV Brasil (see the video below).
A home-made bomb exploded Wednesday at the headquarters of Channel 9 in Asunción, Paraguay, but no one was injured, reported Paraguay.com. The explosive detonated near the station's antenna and left a hole in the wall of the building, according to the newspaper ABC Color.
The mayor of Santa Branca, São Paulo, Odair Leal da Rocha Júnior (PMDB), threatened a crew for the Record TV network that was trying to interview him about alleged corruption in his administration, the station reports. Later that day, the mayor was arrested under suspicion of dealing drugs.
Journalist Carlos Torres, correspondent for Panamerican radio in the city of Sucre, in the south of Bolivia, received anonymous death threats via text message on his cell phone, reported the National Press Association (ANP).
Early in the morning of Jan. 11, an armed group fired shots and threw a grenade at the offices of El Norte newspaper in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Milenio reports. No one was wounded in the attack, but the grenade broke windows and damaged the exterior of the building, El Universal adds.
In a Jan. 9 column, the ombudsman for the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo said the paper’s case against the Falha de S. Paulo (São Paulo Failure) parody blog was more harmful than the blog itself.
While in a boat covering former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s vacation in the coastal city of Guarujá, two reporters for Folha de S. Paulo newspaper were stopped by a government-run security team and had their equipment confiscated, Folha reports.
Two of Panama's government-allied deputies have announced a draft law that would jail those who “offend, insult, or vilify” the president or other government officials, prompting criticism from members of the opposition, journalists, and the Panamanian ombudsman, Telemetro and AFP reports.