media freedom

International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has quit her role as Britain’s special envoy on media freedom in protest at the country’s intention to break international law over Brexit-related legislation.

The United States and Israel officially quit of the U.N.’s educational, scientific and cultural agency at the stroke of midnight, the culmination of a process triggered more than a year ago amid concerns that the organization fosters anti-Israel bias. The withdrawal is mainly procedural yet serves a new blow to UNESCO, co-founded by the U.S. after World War II to...

Media freedom group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday it has recorded an increase in the number of journalists killed and imprisoned worldwide so far this year. The Paris-based group, also known by its French acronym RSF, said 63 journalists died in relation to their jobs from Jan. 1 to Dec. 1, 2018, compared to 55 in 2017, as well as...

A year before federal prosecutors accused Maria Butina of operating as a secret agent for the Russian government, she was a graduate student at American University working on a sensitive project involving cybersecurity. Butina’s college assignment called for her to gather information on the cyberdefenses of U.S. nonprofit organizations that champion media freedom and human rights, The Associated Press has...

Russian President Vladimir Putin scoffed Thursday at allegations of collusion between U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, saying the reports have been “invented” by Trump’s foes and have hurt the U.S. political system. He also mocked his most visible critic, Alexei Navalny, who is barred from challenging Putin in the March 18 presidential vote due to an embezzlement conviction,...

The United States is pulling out of UNESCO because of what Washington sees as its anti-Israel bias and a need for “fundamental reform” of the U.N. cultural agency. While the Trump administration had been preparing for a likely withdrawal for months, the announcement by the State Department on Thursday rocked UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, where a heated election to choose a...