Reporters on the Job

• Voting Day in Yemen: On most Wednesdays, reporter Ginny Hill says that the market outside her house in Old Sanaa, Yemen, is flush with shoppers. But Wednesday, election day, it was quiet.

"I visited three polling stations in the capital, and spoke to a range of voters. Everywhere I went, the atmosphere was light-hearted and people were excited. Yemen is slowly evolving as an organic democracy, the first country on the Arabian peninsula to introduce universal suffrage, and people seem proud of this fact," she says.

• New Study on Journalists' Deaths: Five hundred and eighty journalists have been killed – a rate of three per month – for their work during the past 15 years, according to an analysis by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists

Among the findings of the CPJ's study of journalists' deaths since 1992:

• 85 percent involved local beat reporters, editors, and photojournalists.

• 71 percent were targeted for murder in retaliation for their reporting.

• In 27 percent of the murders, government and military officials are suspected of plotting, ordering, or carrying out the killings.

• In 24 percent of murder cases, the suspects are opposition political groups armed and allied against a government.

• About 85 percent of journalists' killers did not face prosecution.

• Print reporters faced greater retaliation than any other kind of journalist.

• Iraq is the deadliest country for journalists followed by Algeria, Russia, Colombia, and the Philippines.

Foreign correspondents, unlike their local counterparts, died most often in combat situations. CPJ found no evidence that US forces deliberately targeted any of the 14 journalists it killed in Iraq.

David Clark Scott
World editor