From the Toronto Star blurb -- Call it the Katrina effect: it's no longer enough to just report the weather; it has to be entertainment.

From Reuters:

Press freedom groups on Saturday condemned the attempted murder of a radio journalist in northern Somalia's semi-autonomous region of Puntland.

Four unidentified gunmen shot Abdikheyr Mohammed Jama in the face as he left work at Radio Galkayo late on Thursday, critically wounding the presenter.

"We condemn this brutal attack which underscores the dangers faced by Somali journalists," Joel Simon of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement.

The National Union of Somali Journalists said the motive behind the shooting was unclear, but that staff at the community radio station had been receiving anonymous death threats.

From Reuters:

Dozens of Afghan journalists and activists on Saturday sought the release of a journalist detained by security officials for allegedly making blasphemous comments.

The 23-year-old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, reporter of Jahan-e Naw daily paper and a journalism student at Balkh University in northern Afghanistan, was detained three months ago.

Kambakhsh was accused of mocking Islam and the holy book, the Koran, and for distributing an article which said Prophet Mohammad had ignored the rights of women.

Check out this cheery little graf:

Blasphemy is punishable by death in Islam and Afghanistan is a deeply conservative Islamic country.

From AP:

Pakistan has expelled an American journalist who wrote in The New York Times Magazine about the rise of pro-Taliban militants in this key U.S. ally, a media rights group said Saturday.

A Pakistani official denied that Nicholas Schmidle had been deported, however, and said the American lacked a journalist visa. Schmidle, a visiting scholar at Pakistan's state-run Institute of Strategic Studies in the capital, Islamabad, occasionally wrote media articles.