Tunisian judge releases prominent journalist Mohamed Boughalleb
TUNIS, Feb 20 (Reuters) - A Tunisian judge on Thursday released prominent journalist Mohamed Boughalleb, a critic of President Kais Saied, his lawyer told Reuters, a move the opposition hopes will lead to the release of other jailed opposition and media figures.
On Wednesday, Sihem Ben Sedrine, a veteran politician and head of the Truth and Dignity Commission, was also released after months of detention. Riadh Mouakhar, a former minister, was also freed on Thursday.
The move comes two days after the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights urged Tunisia to end the arrests, arbitrary detentions and jailing of humans rights defenders, lawyers, journalists and politicians
Dozens of senior politicians, including Abir Moussi, leader of the Free Constituonal Party, and Rached Ghannouchi, the head on Ennahda's party, two of Saied's most prominent opponents, remain in prison since 2023.
Boughalleb, was jailed last year, on charge of insulting a public official, which the journalists union said was aimed at silencing the voices of journalists.
Saied seized extra powers in 2021 when he shut down the elected parliament and moved to rule by decree before assuming authority over the judiciary.
Since Tunisia's 2011 revolution, press freedom has been a key gain for Tunisians and its media has become one of the most open of any Arab state.
However, politicians, journalists and unions say that freedom of the press now faces a serious threat under Saied's rule. The president, who came to power in 2019 in elections, who has rejected such accusations, saying he will not become a dictator.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
Frederick Forsyth: Life as a thriller writer, fighter pilot, journalist and spy
Frederick Forsyth, who has died at the age of 86, wrote meticulously researched thrillers which sold in their millions.A former fighter pilot, journalist and spy, many of his books were based on his own wove intricate technical details into his stories, without detracting from the lightning pace of his research often embarrassed the authorities, who were forced to admit that some of the shady tactics he revealed were used in real-life espionage. Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was born on 25 August 1938 in Ashford, Kent. The only child of a furrier, he dealt with loneliness by immersing himself in adventure his favourites were the works John Buchan and H Rider Haggard, but Forsyth adored Ernest Hemingway's book on bullfighters, Death in the was so captivated that - at the age of 17 - he went to Spain and started practising with a cape. He never actually fought a bull. Instead, he spent five months at the University of Granada before returning to do his national service with the spent years dreaming of becoming a pilot, Forsyth lied about his age so he could fly de Havilland Vampire 1958, he joined the Eastern Daily Press as a local journalist. Three years later, he moved to the Reuters news Tonbridge School, Forsyth had excelled in foreign languages but little else. Fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Russian, he was a born foreign correspondent. Posted to Paris, he covered a number of stories relating to assassination attempts on the life of France's President Charles de Gaulle, by members of the Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS).The group of ex-army personnel were angered at de Gaulle's decision to give independence to Algeria after many of their comrades had died fighting Algerian called the OAS "white colonialists and neo-fascists".And he decided that, if they really wanted to kill de Gaulle, they would have to hire a professional assassin. Forsyth joined the BBC in 1965. Two years later, he was sent to Nigeria to cover the civil war that followed the secession of the south-eastern region of the fighting dragged on far longer than had been expected, Forsyth asked permission to stay and cover it. According to his autobiography, the BBC told him "it is not our policy to cover this war"."I smelt news management," he said. "I don't like news management." He quit his job and continued to cover the war as a freelance reporter for the next two chronicled his experiences in The Biafra Story, which was published in 1969. He later claimed that, while in Nigeria, he began working for MI6, a relationship that continued for two decades. He also become friendly with a number of mercenaries, who taught him how to get a false passport, obtain a gun and break an enemy's these tricks of the trade would be incorporated in a tale of an attempted assassination of President de Gaulle, The Day of the Jackal, which he pounded out in his bedsit on an old typewriter in just 35 spent months trying to get it published but faced a string of rejections. "For starters, de Gaulle was still alive," he said, "so readers already knew a fictional assassination plot set in 1963 couldn't succeed."Eventually, a publisher risked a short print run and sales of the book, described once as "an assassin's manual", took off, first in the UK and then in the US. The Day of the Jackal showcased what would become the traditional hallmarks of a Forsyth thriller. It wove together fact and fiction, often using the names of real individuals and Jackal's forgery of a British passport, using the name of a dead child taken from a churchyard, was perfectly feasible in the days before electronic databases and tale was made into an award-winning film in 1973, staring Edward Fox as the anonymous gunman. Forsyth followed up his success with The Odessa File, the story of a German reporter attempting to track down Eduard Roschmann - a notorious Nazi nicknamed the "Butcher of Riga" - who is protected by a secret society of former SS men known as part of his research, Forsyth travelled to Hamburg posing as a South African arms dealer. "I managed to penetrate their world and was feeling rather proud of myself," he later said."What I didn't know was that the (contact) had passed a bookshop shortly after our meeting. And there, in the window, was The Day of the Jackal, with a great big picture of me on the back cover."The film of the book led to the identification of the real "Butcher of Riga", who was living in Argentina - after one of his neighbours went to see it at the local cinema. He was arrested by the Argentinian authorities, but skipped bail and fled to book also mentioned a hoard of Nazi gold that was exported to Switzerland in 1944. Twenty-five years after publication, the Jewish World Congress discovered this passage and, eventually, located gold valued at £1bn. According to the Sunday Times, Forsyth's third novel, The Dogs of War, drew on his experience of organising a coup in newspaper reported that Forsyth had once spent $200,000 hiring a boat and recruiting European and African soldiers of fortune for a raid designed to oust the President of Equatorial Guinea in plan was said to have failed when the arrangements broke down and the soldiers were intercepted by the Spanish police in the Canary Islands, 3,000 miles from their came Devil's Alternative, in which Britain's first female prime minister, Joan Carpenter, was firmly based on Margaret Thatcher, a politician Forsyth greatly admired. She later appeared, under her real name, in four Forsyth was a move into biography in 1982 with Emeka, the life story of Forsyth's friend Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of state of Biafra during that country's brief independence. In 1984, he returned to the novel with The Fourth Protocol: a complex tale of a Soviet plot to influence the British general election and install a hard-left Labour book so impressed Sir Michael Caine that he persuaded Forsyth to allow a film version, in which the veteran actor starred alongside Pierce the late 1980s, Forsyth separated from his first wife, the former model Carole Cunningham and was photographed alongside the actress Faye Negotiator, published in 1991, continued the successful run while The Deceiver, the tale of a maverick but brilliant MI6 agent, was made into a BBC two more thrillers, The Fist of God and Icon, Forsyth took an abrupt detour with The Phantom of Manhattan: a sequel to the Phantom of the Opera, which had been a successful was not a great success but, in 2010, Andrew Lloyd Webber took elements of it for his musical follow-up to Phantom, Love Never Dies. A second set of short stories, The Veteran, also had mixed reviews but Forsyth bounced back in his usual style with Avenger, a 2003 political thriller and, three years later, The Afghan, which had links with the earlier Fist of now, Forsyth had established a reputation as a broadcaster and political pundit. He was a frequent guest on the BBC's topical debate programme Question Time, as someone who held views on the right of the political spectrum.A committed Eurosceptic, he once derailed former Prime Minister Ted Heath on the programme - after proving that he had indeed, despite his denials, once signed a document agreeing to transfer UK gold reserves to Frankfurt. On turning 70, the pace of his writing began to slow. The Cobra, published in 2010, saw the return of some of the characters from 2013, Forsyth published The Kill List, a fast-moving tale built round a Muslim fanatic called The Preacher, whose online videos encouraged young Muslims to carry out a series of wrote all his books on a typewriter and refused to use the internet for his research. Ironically, his 18th novel, The Fox - published in 2018 - was a spy thriller about a gifted computer announced it was to be his final book, but he later came out of self-imposed retirement after the death of his second wife, Sandy, in said he was writing another adventure, and even suggested a raffle might give someone the chance to name a character after sold the film rights for £20,000 in the 1970s, Forsyth received no payment for Eddie Redmayne's version of The Day of the Jackal when it was re-imagined for television last year on into his 80s, he had long since agreed to stop research trips to far-flung parts of the world - when a trip to Guinea-Bissau left him with an infection that nearly cost him a leg."It is a bit drug-like, journalism," he admitted. "I don't think that instinct ever dies."It was an instinct that made his life as full and exciting as his thrillers.
The National
12 hours ago
- The National
Riots in LA as Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom call each other 'liars'
They blocked off a major road and set self-driving cars on fire as law enforcement used tear gas, rubber bullets and flash bangs to control the crowd. Many protesters dispersed as evening fell and police declared an unlawful assembly, a precursor to officers moving in and making arrests of people who do not leave. Some of those remaining threw objects at police from behind a makeshift barrier that spanned the width of a street and others hurled chunks of concrete, rocks, electric scooters and fireworks at California Highway Patrol officers and their vehicles parked on the closed southbound 101 freeway. Officers ran under an overpass to take cover. (Image: Kevin Lamarque, REUTERS) Sunday's protests in Los Angeles, a sprawling city of four million people, were centred in downtown several blocks. It was the third and most intense day of demonstrations against Trump's immigration crackdown in the region, as the arrival of around 300 Guard troops spurred anger and fear among many residents. The Guard was deployed specifically to protect federal buildings, including the detention centre where protesters concentrated. Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell said officers were 'overwhelmed' by the remaining protesters. He said they included regular agitators who appear at demonstrations to cause trouble. Several dozen people were arrested throughout the weekend of protest. One was detained on Sunday for throwing a Molotov cocktail at police, and another for ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers. Trump responded to McDonnell on Truth Social, telling him to arrest protesters in face masks. 'Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!' he wrote. (Image: AP Photo/Eric Thayer) Starting in the morning, the troops stood shoulder to shoulder, carrying long guns and riot shields as protesters shouted 'shame' and 'go home'. After some closely approached the guard members, another set of uniformed officers advanced on the group, shooting smoke-filled canisters into the street. Minutes later, the Los Angeles Police Department fired rounds of crowd-control munitions to disperse the protesters, who they said were assembled unlawfully. Much of the group then moved to block traffic on the 101 freeway until state patrol officers cleared them from the roadway by late afternoon. Nearby, at least four self-driving Waymo cars were set on fire, sending large plumes of black smoke into the sky and exploding intermittently as the electric vehicles burned. By evening, police had issued an unlawful assembly order shutting down several blocks of downtown Los Angeles. Flash bangs echoed out every few seconds into the evening. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom requested that Trump remove the guard members in a letter on Sunday afternoon, calling their deployment a 'serious breach of state sovereignty'. He was in Los Angeles meeting local law enforcement and officials. READ MORE: Israeli army boards Freedom Flotilla ship trying to reach Gaza as 'connection lost' The deployment appeared to be the first time in decades that a state's national guard was activated without a request from its governor, a significant escalation against those who have sought to hinder the administration's mass deportation efforts. Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass blamed the increasingly aggressive protests on Trump's decision to deploy the Guard, calling it a move designed to inflame tensions. They have both urged protesters to remain peaceful. 'What we're seeing in Los Angeles is chaos that is provoked by the administration,' she said in an afternoon press conference. 'This is about another agenda, this isn't about public safety.' But McDonnell, the LAPD chief, said the protests were following a similar pattern for episodes of civil unrest, with things ramping up in the second and third days. He pushed back against claims by the Trump administration that the LAPD had failed to help federal authorities when protests broke out on Friday after a series of immigration raids. His department responded as quickly as it could, and had not been notified in advance of the raids and therefore was not pre-positioned for protests, he said. Newsom, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that California authorities had the situation under control. California governor Gavin Newsom (Image: Mike Blake, Reuters) He mocked Trump for posting a congratulatory message to the Guard on social media before troops had even arrived in Los Angeles, and said on MSNBC that Mr Trump never floated deploying the Guard during a Friday phone call. He called Mr Trump a 'stone cold liar'. The admonishments did not deter the administration. 'It's a bald-faced lie for Newsom to claim there was no problem in Los Angeles before President Trump got involved,' White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. The arrival of the National Guard followed two days of protests that began Friday in Los Angeles before spreading on Saturday to Paramount, a heavily Latino city south of the city, and neighbouring Compton. Federal agents arrested immigrants in LA's fashion district, in a Home Depot parking lot and at several other locations on Friday. The next day, they were staging at a Department of Homeland Security office near another Home Depot in Paramount, which drew out protesters who suspected another raid. Federal authorities later said there was no enforcement activity at that Home Depot. The weeklong tally of immigrant arrests in the LA area climbed above 100, federal authorities said. Many more were arrested while protesting, including a prominent union leader who was accused of impeding law enforcement. The protests did not reach the size of past demonstrations that brought the National Guard to Los Angeles, including the Watts and Rodney King riots, and the 2020 protests against police violence, in which Newsom requested the assistance of federal troops. The last time the National Guard was activated without a governor's permission was in 1965, when President Lyndon B Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Centre for Justice. In a directive on Saturday, Trump invoked a legal provision allowing him to deploy federal service members when there is 'a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States'. He said he had authorised the deployment of 2000 members of the National Guard. Trump told reporters as he prepared to board Air Force One in Morristown, New Jersey, Sunday that there were 'violent people' in Los Angeles 'and they're not going to get away with it'. Asked if he planned to send US troops to Los Angeles, Trump replied: 'We're going to have troops everywhere. We're not going to let this happen to our country.' He did not elaborate. About 500 marines stationed at Twentynine Palms, about 125 miles (200 kilometres) east of Los Angeles were in a 'prepared to deploy status' on Sunday afternoon, according to the US Northern Command.
Scottish Sun
20 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Prince William gives emotional plea to world leaders urging them to act to save the planet
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THE Prince of Wales said watching humans destroy our oceans was 'simply heartbreaking' as he urged world leaders to act by thinking big yesterday. William's call came in a speech to the Blue Economy and Finance Forum on ocean preservation at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco after meeting France's President Emmanuel Macron. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 Prince William said watching humans destroy our oceans was 'simply heartbreaking' as he urged world leaders to act 2 Prince William meets France's President Emmanuel Macron Credit: Reuters The prince, whose opening and closing remarks were in French, said those attending were 'united by our deep connection to the ocean and our concern for its safety'. William, in navy suit with a recycled sustainable tie from Wilmok, said the clock was ticking on meeting the target agreed at the 2022 UN Biodiversity Summit aiming to protect at least 30 per cent of the world's land and sea by 2030. Speaking at the heads of state and government session on the forum's final day, the prince added: 'Watching human activity reduce beautiful sea forests to barren deserts at the base of our oceans is simply heartbreaking. 'For the future of our planet, for the future generations, we must listen to the words of Sir David Attenborough: 'If we save the sea, we save our world'. 'I call on all of you to think big in your actions.' World leaders were greeted by a blue carpet as they arrived at the event, with William chatting with Mr Macron and other dignitaries. Addressing an audience of 1,800, William said: 'Rising sea temperatures, plastic pollution and overfishing are putting pressure on fragile ecosystems. 'What once seemed an abundant resource is diminishing before our eyes. "We all stand to be impacted. And we are all responsible for change — both negative and positive. "But there remains time to turn this tide.' Wills jokes 'families can be a mixed bag - some of them might not want to see you much' Later, William said he went through a range of emotions when he saw Sir David's new Ocean film. He told Enric Sala, who worked on the film: 'I got angry, then sad, then I got frustrated, then I got happy.' Unlock even more award-winning articles as The Sun launches brand new membership programme - Sun Club.
