Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/series/doc-of-the-day/)
The US Department of Justice unsealed two federal indictments charging government employees of Russia’s Ministry of Defense and Federal Security Service with hacking campaigns that infiltrated the global energy sector, including a US nuclear power plant.
The Biden White House spotlighted its support for investigative journalism as part of a new strategy for fighting corruption around the world. To strengthen the investigative capacity of journalists, it is funding the USAID’s PROSAFE project, helping to “create a regional clearinghouse for investigative journalism that provides a publishing outlet for stories too dangerous to be published with an individual byline, and providing an umbrella organization for security, mentoring, and collaboration among journalists.”
State-embedded actors are the most dominant criminal actor type in the world. The degree to which criminality permeates state institutions varies, from low-level corruption to full state capture, but across the spectrum this involvement has implications for countries’ capacity to respond to organized crime.
The US Justice Department indicted five Iranian intelligence officials last week, alleging they were part of a plot to surveil and eventually abduct an Iranian-American investigative journalist living in the US. Read the indictment.
Freedom House, which released its annual report Freedom in the World this week, has documented the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom, finding less than a fifth of the world’s population living in what it considers “free” countries.
A November 18 press release, claiming a safe vaccine that protects 95% of people against COVID-19, by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech was greeted with excited headlines. In this article, two leading health reporters shared tips on how to read such releases and balanced cautious optimism with the provision that the release relied on interim results from a trial in an accelerated setting.
In this edition of Document of the Day, we feature a new report out from UNESCO detailing that over the past decade, a journalist has been killed on average every four days. In 2018-2019, UNESCO recorded a total of 156 killings of journalists worldwide. See our roundup with links to the full report in English and links to resources in other languages.
In this edition of Document of the Day, we feature a new report out today from Freedom House, a US-based think tank, about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected digital freedoms around the world. The report includes details on governments’ actions that have curtailed citizens’ access to open information on the web, and the website features and interactive map where users can see which countries made the “free” list and which ones didn’t.
The federal indictment of Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former senior campaign advisor, provides a chilling case study in how fraudsters can exploit the fervor of political supporters in a partisan landscape.
The United States Senate report on Russia’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 US elections offers reporters insights that go far beyond the Trump presidential campaign’s links to the Kremlin.
