Media News - Thursday, April 10, 2008

Slovak parliament passes media legislation, opposition threatens to block EU treaty

The Slovak parliament passed a contentious new media law Wednesday — sparking a threat by opposition parties to block major EU reform. The law was passed by 81 votes to 62 in the 150-seat legislature despite complaints by the Slovak opposition that the move would limit press freedoms. Opposition parties threatened to respond by blocking the ratification of a new EU treaty, which needs to be passed by all member states for it to come into force. It said the new media law would give readers, state institutions or politicians excessive rights of reply, even if critical articles about them were true. Europe's largest security organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the bill would ‘severely restrict’ the freedom of the press and had asked the Parliament to withdraw it. The government responded by removing a contentious provision, which would have allowed it to decide if a report broke the law and impose fines of up to SKK 200,000 (EUR 6,175), but pressed on with the vote. In protest at the legislation, Slovak opposition lawmakers walked out of Parliament three times when votes on the new EU treaty were scheduled. (AP via International Herald Tribune)

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Indonesia: Hezbollah-owned TV begins broadcasts

The Hezbollah-owned Lebanese television channel Al Manar has begun broadcasts in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Sunni Muslim population. The transmissions are broadcast via the Palapa C2 satellite owned by the Indonesia Telkom company, in which the Indonesian government holds a majority shareholding, BBC Monitoring reported. It quoted information published by Lyngsat Satellite website. Al Manar, Arabic for ‘The Beacon’, has been broadcasting from Beirut since 1991. The self-proclaimed ‘Station of the Resistance’ is a key player in what Hezbollah – a Shia Muslim militia organisation - calls its ‘psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy’. It is also considered an integral part of Hezbollah's plan to spread its message to the entire Arab world. Al Manar was designated a 'terrorist entity', and banned by the United States in December 2004. It has also been banned by France and Spain, and according to several reports it has also runs into some service and licence problems abroad, making it unavailable in the Netherlands, South America, Canada and Australia. In Southeast Asia, Al Manar TV launched on the Thai Shin Corporation's Thaicom satellite in January 2008, but transmissions were halted after a few days when the channel's links to Hezbollah were revealed. (AKI News)

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AP photographer granted Iraqi amnesty

An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him released nearly two years after he was detained by the U.S. military. Hussein, 36, remained in custody at Camp Cropper, a U.S. detention facility near Baghdad's airport. A decision by a four-judge panel said Hussein's case falls under a new amnesty law. It ordered Iraqi courts to ‘cease legal proceedings’ and ruled that Hussein should be ‘immediately’ released unless other accusations are pending. It was unclear, however, whether Hussein would still face further obstacles to release. U.S. military authorities have said a U.N. Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The U.N. mandate is due to expire at the end of this year. Also, the amnesty committee's ruling on Hussein may not cover a separate allegation that has been raised in connection with the case. The amnesty committee — or any Iraqi institution — cannot force the U.S. military to release or turn over any of the estimated 23,000 detainees it holds in Iraq. But a provision in the amnesty law states that the Iraqi government ‘is committed to take the necessary measures to move the arrested people’ from U.S. control. (AP via ABC News)

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Google and Yahoo to share web ads

Yahoo and Google, the world's two biggest search engines, have announced a two week experiment that will see them share advertising space. During the pilot, Google will be able to place ads alongside 3 percent of search results on Yahoo's website. Analysts say the move is designed to frustrate Microsoft, which has offered to buy Yahoo for USD 44.6bn (EUR 28.3bn), or extract a higher offer. Microsoft said any lasting deal would not be in the consumers' interests. ‘Any definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google would consolidate over 90 percent of the search advertising market in Google's hands. This would make the market far less competitive,’ Brad Smith, Microsoft's General Counsel said. But Yahoo said the testing did not necessarily mean that ‘any further commercial relationship with Google will result’. Investors reacted positively to the announcement with Yahoo shares rising 7 percent. (BBC News)

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Mexican investigative reporter scoops UN press freedom prize

A Mexican reporter who has been a target of death threats, sabotage and police harassment because of her work uncovering prostitution and child pornography networks was Wednesday designated the laureate of a press freedom prize by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, will award the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to Lydia Cacho Ribeiro in a ceremony to be held on World Press Freedom Day, 3 May, in Maputo, Mozambique. A freelance reporter based in Cancun, Mexico Ms. Cacho is a contributor to the daily newspaper La Voz del Caribe, frequently covering organized crime and corruption. In 2006, she reported on the violent death of hundreds of young women in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. The USD 25,000 prize, financed by the Cano and Ottaway family foundations, is named after Guillermo Cano, the Colombian newspaper publisher assassinated in 1987 for denouncing the activities of powerful drug barons in his country. (UN News)

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Flickr to offer video sharing

Photo-sharing website Flickr has confirmed months of speculation and responded to demands from its users to introduce video sharing. Announcing the new service on the Flickr blog Wednesday, community manager Heather Champ said that videos would be limited to 90 seconds and 150Mb in size. The Yahoo-owned photo site will be keen to differentiate its service from the video-sharing market leader, YouTube, and has been careful to integrate the service with the more cohesive Flickr community. Videos appear alongside photos in a Flickr user's photoset, but the video service will only be available to ‘pro’ users of the site who pay USD 24.95 a year for more features and a bigger upload allowance. Champ also announced that the site is doubling the upload allowance for free accounts and for pro accounts. Flickr was bought by Yahoo for USD 35m in March 2005 and is one of the web company's strongest web 2.0 propositions. The site topped 2bn photos in November and between 3m and 5m images are uploaded every day. (The Guardian)

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