On Sunday, May 27, the Brazilian newspaper Estado de São Paulo launched an exclusive app for tablets that focuses on municipal electoral coverage that will take in October, reported the Portal Imprensa. The app gathers news, videos, and analyses about the elections in the main Brazilian cities.
Brazilian construction workers who have been on strike for several weeks threw stones at the headquarters of the newspaper Diário do Nordeste, in Fortaleza, capital of the Brazilian state of Ceará, in the northeast of Brazil, during the morning of Tuesday, May 29, reported the Portal Imprensa. The workers are on strike protesting a salary adjustment.
After more than one month in captivity, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in Spanish) released the French journalist Roméo Langlois in the middle of the jungle in the Caquetá Department to the Humanitarian Mission led by Human Rights activist Piedad Córdoba on Wednesday, May 30, the news site Telesur reported.
A Guatemalan subsidiary of the Spanish hydroelectric company Hidralia Energía released a warning that it would take legal and criminal actions against those who spread defamation and libel against the company, reported the Center of Informative Reports of Guatemala.
Succumbing to pressure from the Mexican student movement “Yo Soy 132,”, or "I am 132," the president of the TV station Televisa, Emilio Azcárraga, agreed to nationally broadcast the next presidential debate, reported Noticias MVS. Then, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, president of the second largest TV station, TV Azteca, announced that it, too, would nationally televise the debate, according to El Informador.
An Argentine journalist received a death threat by an unknown gunman while trying to enter the radio studio where the journalist works, in the city of 9 de Julio, in the province of Buenos Aires, reported the newspaper Perfil.
A Honduran court ordered the arrest of three more suspects in the kidnapping and killing of radio journalist Alfredo Villatoro, reported the newspaper El Heraldo. The suspects arrested are Marvin Alonso Gómez, Osmán Fernando Osorio Arguijo, and Edgar Francisco Osorio Arguijo, who are accused of conspiracy and illegal arms possession, according to La Tribuna. Their arrests make a total of eight suspects detained for the crime against the journalist, who was the news director for HRN, one of the most influential radio s
The mayor of the Brazilian city Barra dos Bugres (in Mato Grosso) grabbed a reporter by the neck when she was trying to interview him for the TV channel Independência, which is affiliated with the station Record, on Thursday, May 24, reported the newspaper O Dia. The attack happened during a City Council event that took place in a stadium of that city.
As a consequence of complaints made to the Journalists Association of La Paz by a former commander of the National Police of Bolivia, a Bolivian journalist denied being guilty of extortion and said that he was threatened, reported the newspaper La Razón.
Heading towards the Mexican presidential elections on July 1, voting surveys are done on Facebook; candidates have cell phone 'apps' and YouTube channels, and citizen journalists are the protagonists of new digital media that have refreshed electoral coverage to meet the demands of a younger and more informed public. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas interviewed the directors of Mexican digital and independent media about this tendency.
A day after the organization Amnesty International complained in its annual report about freedom of press restrictions in Venezuela, the U.S. government said that the Hugo Chavez administration has been persecuting the Venezuelan press, in a Human Rights report published on Thursday, May 24, reported the portal Terra.
Miguel Ángel López Solana, son of the Mexican columnist brutally killed in the state of Veracruz along with his family in June 2011, described to participants of the 10th annual Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas the ordeals he faced to flee Mexico because of fear that his life was in jeopardy.