VIETNAM: Media Seen as Watchdogs but Get Bitten

As in other communist-ruled countries, newspapers in Vietnam are expected to support the ruling party and government while also playing the role of watchdog against such evils as corruption in high places.

VIETNAM: Global Markets Are Fine, Not Cyberspace

Vietnam is doing everything it can to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO) this year but at the same time its communist government is doing its best to restrict cyber cafes - the main window to the rest of the world for ordinary citizens.

MEDIA: Hiroshima, the Top News Story That Wasn’t

The atomic bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima 60 years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, may have been the most crucial event of the 20th century. But it was not the top news story.

MEXICO: Press Freedom Under Attack from Numerous Quarters

The disappearance of a reporter and fear of reprisals from drug trafficking rings prompted El Imparcial, a newspaper in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, to cease any further investigations into the illegal drug trade and related police corruption.

CHILE: Demanding the Media Admit Role in Cover-Up of Killings, 30 Years On

Thirty years after the Chilean dictatorship mounted "Operation Colombo" to cover up the forced disappearance and murder of 119 leftists, the newspapers and reporters who helped spread the regime's disinformation still refuse to admit their share of responsibility.

POLITICS-US: Anti-Chavez Broadcasts May Be Hot Air

As some Latin American analysts complain that Washington has declared "electronic war" on Venezuela with a plan to target the country for special radio and television broadcasts, it remains uncertain whether the project will ever get off the ground.

POLITICS-US: Airwaves Off-Limits to New Propaganda Tsar

One of the most experienced broadcast experts in the United States believes that Karen Hughes - the high-profile confidante of Pres. George W. Bush nominated to help the State Department do a major makeover of U.S. public diplomacy - may not be able to lay a glove on one of its key programmes: international broadcasting.

MEDIA-LATIN AMERICA: Telesur Goes on the Air Under Fire from US

Sunday will be the first day of broadcasting for a new Latin America-wide TV network aimed at competing with U.S. and European international news stations.

POLITICS-US: Spreading Diplomacy 101

As the U.S. faces increasingly negative attitudes around the world, the previously arcane subject of public diplomacy has become a serious issue in the George W. Bush administration, Congress, universities, think-tanks and with ordinary people.

POLITICS-THAILAND: Muzzling the Press Could Backfire say Editors

A showdown between Thailand's often feisty print media and the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is looming up as a draconian decree to quell the escalating violence in the country's south came into effect this week.

VENEZUELA-US: Looming War of the Airwaves

The Venezuelan Congress approved a resolution opposing a decision by the U.S. House of Representatives to finance radio and TV broadcasts to Venezuela with the aim of countering Telesur, a new pan-Latin American station.

MEDIA: Censored, But Not Silenced

When Nigerian reporter Isioma Daniel heard that a fatwa (Islamic ruling) had been issued against her, she "felt calm... then realised that there was no going back."

BRAZIL: Agency Seeks More and Better Media Coverage of Children and Youth

A news agency that neither writes nor distributes news is nonetheless responsible for promoting more comprehensive media coverage of issues related to children and youth in Brazil, and has even contributed to the adoption or improvement of social policies.

MEDIA-MEXICO: Demonstrators Storm Local Opposition Newspaper

Masked men armed with sticks forcibly occupied the building of the Noticias newspaper in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where 31 of the publication's employees had been trapped in their offices for a month by a group of demonstrators claiming to be workers on strike.

POLITICS-US: "PlameGate" Is Hardly a Summer Squall

While to people living outside the Washington "Beltway," the current affair over the disclosure by top White House officials of the identity of a covert intelligence officer may seem somewhat esoteric, the stakes could not be higher.

RIGHTS-THAILAND: Thaksin Company Courts Controversy

In the weeks leading up to a court battle over her rights as a citizen, Supinya Klangnarong has grown philosophical, in a Buddhist way, at least. Twice a day, she prays for her adversary, Thailand’s most powerful business empire.

POLITICS-US: Welcome to RightWorld

It's always difficult to play defence and offence at the same time, but when the geo-political ground is shifting beneath one's feet and damaging leaks are spurting out of the White House and Downing Street plumbing like Fourth of July fireworks, it's more difficult than usual.

HEALTH-SWAZILAND: A Message to Teenagers – Take Charge!

A new advertising campaign aimed at curtailing teenage HIV rates by promoting abstinence is using a combination of traditional and modern values in its appeal to Swazi youth.

MEDIA-EGYPT: By Law, Some Editors Retire At Last

In what has been called the biggest shake-up to Egypt's state-run print media in recent history, the Higher Press Council in early July appointed a host of new chairmen to the biggest government-owned publishing houses, and replaced longstanding editors-in-chief of the most widely distributed national newspapers.

POLITICS-US: "Bush’s Brain" Besieged

Battered by sagging poll numbers, new doubts in the aftermath of the London bombings about the effectiveness of its war on terrorism, and no let-up in the bad news out of Iraq, the White House has found itself this week embroiled in yet another controversy, one that threatens the credibility, if not the tenure, of the man widely known as Pres. George W. Bush's "brain."

MEDIA-US: Michael Jackson Easily Trumps Darfur on Nightly News

U.S. broadcast media are failing to provide even minimal coverage of the ongoing crisis - some say genocide - in Darfur, Sudan, according to a new report, which concludes that media fixation with celebrity, as well as the Iraq war, is crowding out news of important events that deserve global attention 10 years after the genocide in Rwanda.