Americas

The jagged mountains ringing Rio de Janeiro descend to a temperate valley with two storied beaches on the Atlantic. Here is the city that gave the world a new, eclectic musical beat with the Bossa Nova, the South American jewel that will host the summer Olympic Games in 2016. Yet Rio has also been the setting for violence against journalists, a trend that is on the upswing again throughout this nation. 

New York, July 11, 2012--Unknown assailants using explosives, grenades, and guns attacked three news outlets in northern Mexico on Tuesday, causing property damage but no injuries, according to news reports.

More than a year after he left office, Álvaro Uribe Vélez confessed that "it was not in him" to live as a former president. And in fact, having dominated Colombian politics for eight years, it has been impossible for Uribe to fade from the public eye since leaving office in August 2010. Instead of retiring to his ranch in Antioquia, he has lived in a heavily protected compound in the capital, Bogotá, with his wife and two sons. He spends his time traveling abroad for speaking engagements, has been a scholar at Georgetown University, and more recently announced the creation of a new political platform to oppose current President Juan Manuel Santos.  

Prominent Mexican journalist Sanjuana Martínez was arrested on July 5, 2012, in the state of Nuevo León under unclear circumstances related to a civil custody dispute, and was released from jail the following day, according to news reports. Martínez was detained by armed police, which is unusual in a civil case, the reports said.

New York, July 10, 2012--Brazilian authorities must investigate the murder of radio journalist Valério Luiz de Oliveira and apprehend the perpetrators, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Luiz was shot and killed on Thursday afternoon in the western city of Goiânia, according to news reports.

If May's NATO Summit in Chicago is any indication, journalists covering events outside the national political conventions in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., later this summer can expect that everyone--mainstream media, bloggers, citizen journalists, protesters, and bystanders--will have a camera of one kind or another. With the widespread proliferation of cellphone cameras, capable of recording high-quality images along with audio and video, it seemed like everybody was documenting everything and everyone.

New York, July 6, 2012--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the arrest of prominent Mexican journalist Sanjuana Martínez Thursday in Nuevo León under unclear circumstances related to a civil custody dispute. The judge who ordered the detention was the subject of critical reporting by Martínez in 2008.

Bogotá, Colombia, July 3, 2012--Ecuadoran photographer Byron Baldeón was shot dead Sunday in front of his home in El Triunfo, about 60 kilometers (100 miles) north of the city of Guayaquil. The photographer had become a witness in a criminal case involving alleged police corruption, according to news reports. 

Well, that didn't take long. Just days after The New York Times' soft launch of its Chinese-language edition and accompanying microblog accounts, Berkeley-based China Digital Times website reports that the @nytchinese Sina Weibo feed is no longer accessible in China, along with two accounts hosted by Netease and Sohu. We couldn't pull them up this morning from New York, either.