Suspect freed as deadline for charges over death of Daphne Caruana Galizia approached
Yorgen Fenech, a prominent businessman arrested on Wednesday in connection with investigations into the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, has been released on bail, police sources said.
He will be under round-the-clock police surveillance as investigations continue.
Continue reading...Murdoch was responding to a question at AGM about time given to ‘climate deniers’ by News Corp outlets in Australia
News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch has said “there are no climate change deniers around I can assure you” after he was asked at the corporation’s AGM why his company gives them “so much airtime” in Australia.
Murdoch was speaking in New York on Wednesday when he received a question from a proxy for Australian activist shareholder Stephen Mayne.
Continue reading...Prosecutor says country will not proceed with investigation into WikiLeaks founder
Swedish authorities have discontinued an investigation into a rape allegation against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, after a review of the evidence.
The deputy chief prosecutor, Eva-Marie Persson, said the complainant’s evidence was deemed credible and reliable, but that after nearly a decade, witnesses’ memories had faded.
Continue reading...Riot police have swooped on pro-democracy activists trying to flee a university they had set ablaze in one of the most violent confrontations in nearly six months of unrest. Hundreds of demonstrators clashed with officers who had threatened to use deadly force, as tensions flared elsewhere in the region
Continue reading...Appearance was secured after six months of negotiations and royal’s team referred decision upwards
As television interviews go, it was one of the most excruciating – and most sought-after – in British history. But when Prince Andrew’s painstakingly negotiated head-to-head with Emily Maitlis in Buckingham Palace finished, the royal appeared oblivious to the damage that had been done. In fact, he was so pleased with how things had gone that he gave the Newsnight team a tour of the palace afterwards.
On Sunday, as the prince’s team picked up the pieces from an interview widely perceived to have been disastrous for his reputation, the remarkable story of how it came about emerged – from the departure of a key aide to drawn-out discussions and a last-minute message to the Queen.
Continue reading...Prince speaks publicly for first time about paedophile financier found dead in prison
Prince Andrew has said that he failed to uphold the standards of the royal family when he visited Jeffrey Epstein after the paedophile’s release from prison, admitting: “I let the side down, simple as that.”
The prince made the statement in an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the first time he has spoken publicly about his friendship with Epstein, to be broadcast on Saturday night.
Continue reading...PM makes false statements about Brexit being ‘blocked’ and his record as London mayor
Boris Johnson is facing criticism over a series of inaccurate statements made in a flurry of live broadcast interviews during a difficult day of campaigning.
The prime minister was challenged on Friday on subjects as varied as crime, Brexit, the abandoned London garden bridge project and the number of children he has fathered.
Continue reading...Activists warn muzzling of press under President Buhari could herald return to dark days of military rule
Fisayo Soyombo was eating an evening snack in Lagos in late October when a colleague called to warn him about a plan hatched by Nigerian government officials at a clandestine meeting to arrest him.
Hours earlier, the second in a three-part undercover series by the Abuja-based investigative journalist on corruption in Nigeria’s criminal justice system had been published.
Continue reading...At least 11 media workers have been murdered in the country since President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office
Mexico’s new human rights commissioner has questioned if journalists are actually killed in the country, which has become a cemetery for reporters over the past two decades – and has not become any safer since the arrival of a leftwing government late last year.
After being elected commissioner on Tuesday night, Rosario Piedra Ibarra blithely responded to reporters’ questions on the murder of reporters in the country by asking, “They’ve killed journalists?”
Continue reading...Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist – a multiple award-winner for documenting life in Australia’s offshore detention system – has left Papua New Guinea
•The story behind Behrouz Boochani’s flight to freedom
Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist who became the voice of those incarcerated on Manus Island, has landed in New Zealand and says he will never return to Papua New Guinea or Australia’s immigration regime.
“I will never go back to that place,” he told the Guardian, shortly after leaving PNG. “I just want to be free of the system, of the process. I just want to be somewhere where I am a person, not just a number, not just a label ‘refugee’.”
Continue reading...Detaining of Ahmet Altan, who denies alleged links to failed coup in 2016, called a ‘disgrace’
Turkish police have rearrested the journalist and novelist Ahmet Altan, just a week after his release from prison over alleged links to the failed 2016 coup.
Altan and another veteran journalist, Nazlı Ilıcak, were released on 4 November despite having been convicted of “helping a terrorist group”.
Continue reading...Family and friends recall ‘her powerful ability to turn around people’s lives for the better’
The award-winning journalist and broadcaster Tazeen Ahmad has died, her family have said. Ahmad was praised for her work in shining a light on important stories with “care, sympathy and integrity” across her extensive career.
She worked for the BBC and was part of the Channel 4 Dispatches team that won an RTS television journalism award and was nominated for a current affairs TV Bafta for the documentary The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs.
Continue reading...British Indian Aatish Taseer believes move is intended as a warning to other writers
A British Indian author and journalist has been stripped of his Indian citizenship after he wrote an article criticising the regime of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Aatish Taseer, who was born in the UK but raised in India and spent a further decade living there from the age of 25, was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status on Thursday.
Continue reading...Dan McGarry believes visa was rejected because of his paper’s critical coverage of government
The Vanuatu government has refused to renew the work permit of its largest newspaper’s long-serving director, Dan McGarry, in what he said was a “straight up attack on the media”.
After 16 years in Vanuatu, McGarry’s application to renew his work permit was refused on Thursday, meaning that McGarry, whose spouse and children are from the country, will have to leave Vanuatu.
Continue reading...Greenwald has faced backlash from far right after series of articles damaging to Jair Bolsonaro’s government
Brazil’s bitterly divided politics reached a new low on Thursday, when a rightwing columnist smacked the US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the face on a live radio program.
Greenwald and Augusto Nunes are prominent figures on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but Thursday’s physical violence – which was being livestreamed – left Brazilians stunned.
Continue reading...The new streaming service may offer the best British dramas in TV history – but it seems hamstrung from the start. We dig into its offering to spare you the bother ... and another subscription
One of the best offerings on BritBox – the new archive streaming site officially launched by ITV and the BBC today – is arguably the greatest single-series British TV drama ever made: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s espionage novel.
But the opening of another digital bank of programming will confront even the most assiduous viewer with a new parody of the children’s counting song – Netflix, Amazon, Apple, BritBox, Disney, Why?
Continue reading...Former presidential candidate criticises Facebook’s decision to let politicians lie in adverts
Mark Zuckerberg “should pay a price” for what he is doing to democracy, Hillary Clinton has said, as she expressed doubts about whether free and fair elections were even possible in the wake of Facebook’s decision to not factcheck political advertising.
Speaking in New York at a screening of The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate cited the threat to upcoming elections in both the US and UK as she made the damning remarks about Facebook’s decision to allow politicians to lie in adverts posted to its platform.
Continue reading...Activists speak out after being warned of alleged cyber-attack to infiltrate mobile phones
More than a dozen pro-democracy activists, journalists and academics have spoken out after WhatsApp privately warned them they had allegedly been the victims of cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones.
The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have been hacked using malware sold by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company.
Continue reading...The delay to Brexit plus strict pre-election guidelines left few chances for trenchant jokes in David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s sketch show
In the many risk assessments of the possible consequences of Brexit happening on Halloween – lorry queues, drug shortages, street violence – scant attention was paid to a significant victim of its not happening: broadcasting specials timed to coincide with departure from the EU being forced to go out, even though the UK actually hadn’t.
The special Brexit edition of Little Britain, bringing David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s sketch show back to Radio 4, where it started in 2000, was at a double disadvantage. Having been denied its calendar reason for being, it also now found itself broadcast in the run-up to a general election, when the BBC’s already contorted attempts at political impartiality become even stricter.
Continue reading...US president claims on LBC Radio that Jeremy Corbyn would take UK to ‘such bad places’
Donald Trump has intervened in the UK’s nascent election campaign, calling on Boris Johnson to team up with Nigel Farage to form an “unstoppable force” and claiming Jeremy Corbyn would be “so bad for your country”.
Speaking to Farage on LBC Radio, the US president also said Johnson’s Brexit deal could prevent the UK from agreeing a trade deal with the US.
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