Brazilian senator Delcídio do Amaral, elected by the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, is suing the news website Terra and reporter Italo Milhomem Santos for roughly $63,000 for publishing supposedly untrue information, according to Portal Imprensa.
A judge in the Dominican Republic has ordered TV reporter José Agustin Silvestre de los Santos held on $5,250 bail pending a trial for allegedly defaming a La Romana prosecutor in a report accusing the official of ties to drug trafficking, Diario Libre reports.
Journalists from Argentine media outlets like Clarín, La Nación, Perfil, Telefé, TN, DyN, El Trece and others were thrown out of an event organized by the association Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, reported Clarín. A woman with the organization of mothers whose children were disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War, told a photographer with Clarín: "These are the rules of the game, you are not welcome here."
Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa canceled his column in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio in protest of its "information manipulation" during the ongoing presidential election campaign, according to the news agency EFE. The protest is part of various critiques against the newspaper for supporting candidate Keiko Fujimori and for its impartial election coverage.
A week before the second round of presidential voting between Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala, a Calandria Social Communicators Association study says that the El Comercio media company has taken Fujimori’s side in the race, the Inter Press Service reports.
Press groups in Bolivia criticized the “hasty” and “incomplete” reform of the Electoral Systems Law, which will continue to bar media outlets from reporting on or airing opinions about judicial elections, Los Tiempos reports.
In September 2010, Folha de S. Paulo (The São Paulo Journal) used the courts to shut down the Falha de S. Paulo (The São Paulo Failure) parody site for infringing on Folha’s copyright in its name, website address, and graphics. Eight months later, lawyers for the newspaper have said the site can return in its original form if it does not use the visual aspects of the paper’s brand, explains the parody site’s blog, "Sorry for our Failure."
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and Brazil’s National Newspaper Association (ANJ) will hold the "International Forum on Freedom of Expression and the Judiciary” Friday, May 27 in Brasília. Participants will meet in the offices of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) to discuss the relationship between press law and press freedom in Brazil and abroad.
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has said several existing and proposed laws in Bolivia could reduce press freedom in the country.
Just days after announcing a national dialogue on freedom of expression in response to increasing reports of incidents against the press by the authorities, Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli accused media owners of having a "shadowy agenda," TVN Noticias reports.
Reporters from Vive TV told prosecutors they were attacked by allies of Henri Falcón, the governor of the northeastern Venezuelan state of Lara, while covering a protest against the state’s water utility company, Hidrolara, Radio Nacional de Venezuela (RNV) reports.
Bolivian media outlets are applauding President Evo Morales’s plans to change a law that severely restricted coverage of judiciary elections, Bolivia’s National Press Association (ANP) reports via IFEX.