Recently inaugurated President Dilma Rouseff’s new communications minister, Paulo Bernardo, defended the need for a new regulatory framework for the sector, during his speech at the Jan. 3 handover ceremony, Terra reports.
The Inter American Commission on Human Rights presented a complaint against Argentina before the Inter-American Court of the Organization of American States for violating the freedom of expression of two journalists who 15 years ago revealed that ex-President Carlos Menem had a child out of wedlock.
Bolivia has finalized the rules governing its new "Law to Fight against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination", and the final bill will be enacted by decree on Jan. 8 by President Evo Morales, Los Tiempos reports.
The Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color reports that two of its journalists were interrogated and had their documents photocopied by police in Tarija, the largest city in the Bolivian state of the same name that borders Paraguay and Argentina. The reporters were in Bolivia to investigate the case against the governor of Tarija, Mario Cossío, who fled to Paraguay after being removed from office on corruption charges, EFE explains.
This year, Honduras was added to the list of most dangerous countries for journalists and the killing of HRN radio correspondent Henry Suazo the morning of Dec. 28 was one more on a growing list of crimes against journalists that remain unpunished.
Journalist José Luis Galdámez and his family deserve protection by Honduran authorities, according to an order from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, reported the Associated Press.
Freedom of expression activists spoke out against the island’s Legislative Assembly for trying to prosecute Brent Fuller, a journalist for the Caymanian Compass, for an article criticizing a plan to review the country’s information access laws in closed-door committee hearings.
Because of a Knight Center blog post titled “Brazilian court upholds censorship of title of parody newspaper site,” social media editor of Folha de S. Paulo, Marcos Strecker, sent the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas a note denying that the newspaper had censored any blog.
Editors of Ecuador’s Vanguardia magazine have petitioned a court to order the return of 40 computers confiscated during a police raid on the magazine’s Quito headquarters. See reports in English by the Inter American Press Association and the local NGO Fundamedios.
Ciudad Juárez has been characterized as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. However, this border city also is home to more than 1 million people who are witnesses to positive actions and extraordinary acts that deserve to be told and recognized, according to a project started by the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States.
Brazil’s National Newspaper Association (ANJ) and Google have established new rules for how Google displays and indexes Brazilian news content, O Globo reports. Now, users of Google News will only see one line of each listed story instead of three lines.
A court's decision to shut down an online parody of Folha de S. Paulo has drawn international criticism. The site’s name and address parodied Folha de S. Paulo (The São Paulo Journal) with “Falha de S. Paulo” (The São Paulo Failure), which featured criticism and humorous fake headlines from the newspaper. It was taken offline by a September court order, and last week, a São Paulo court upheld the ruling, Portal Imprensa reports.