The Constitution and Justice Committee of the Brazilian Senate on Wednesday, March 14, approved a bill that would regulate the right of reply in the news media, reported the newspaper O Globo.
In the early morning of Tuesday, March 6, a communications tower of a community radio station was destroyed in Santo Antônio do Leverger, roughly 20 miles from Cuiabá, capital of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. The journalist in charge of the radio station, Júlio Pedroso, said he suspected that the vandalism was tied to political reasons, reported the news site Gazeta Digital.
A journalist was abducted by armed kidnappers the night of Wednesday, March, 7, while he was waiting for his girlfriend at a university in Aracaju, capital of the state of Sergipe in Brazil, reported the news site G1.
A Brazilian court in São Paulo ordered the company responsible for the news site 24HorasNews to pay roughly $28,400 in damages to the newspaper company Folha da Manhã, which publishes Folha de São Paulo, for violating authorship rights, reported the site Prosa e Política.
On Thursday, March 1, a São Paulo court ruled that the newspaper publishing company Folha de Manhã does not have to pay damages to the Universal Church of God's Kingdom, reported the newspaper O Globo. Folha de Manhã publishes the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.
A judge in Curitiba, Brazil, ordered the Atlético Paranaense soccer team to allow journalist Osmar Antônio to do his job, otherwise the team faces a $29,000 fine for each act against the reporter, who works for Banda B, according to UOL Esporte. The decision was published Wednesday, Feb. 29.
A Brazilian reporter was arrested and booked for contempt of authority on Tuesday, Feb. 28, while gathering information about an airplane accident in the Amazonian city of Manaus, according to the news site Portal Amazônia.
A reporter denounced aggression by the president of the local city council of Matozinhos, in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, after a meeting on Monday, Feb. 27, in which the council approved a 34 percent hike in members' salaries, reported the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
Lúcio Flávio Pinto, four-time winner of Brazil's most important journalism award, the Esso, said he would no longer appeal the libel lawsuit in which he was sentenced to pay roughly $4,600 in moral damages for articles accusing the owner of a company of landgrabbing in Pará, a region in northern Brazil, according to the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo.
After speaking with the victim's friends and relatives, investigators into the death of Brazilian journalist Paulo Roberto Cardoso Rodrigues have found stronger evidence that the reporter was killed because of his journalistic activities, explained the news website Midiamax. Paraguayan reporter Cándido Figueiredo said he was warned by the Brazilian police of a plan to kill the journalist, known as Paulo Rocaro, because of his coverage of drug trafficking on the border between the two nations.
The Brazilian news website Congresso em Foco was acquitted of defamation in the first of one of many lawsuits brought against the site, which published a series of reports on the existence of salaries higher than the constitutional ceiling for politicians, authorities and civil servants in the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, reported the Forum for the Right to Access Public Information.
In an article titled "Will the land grabbers win?" and published Saturday, Feb. 11, the editor of the Brazilian newspaper Jornal Pessoal, Lúcio Flávio Pinto, reported that the Supreme Court denied his appeal to a lawsuit filed by one of country´s largest construction companies and ordered the journalist to pay roughly $4,600 in moral damages, according to the website Socioambiental.