Today’s MediaWireWorld roundup of journalism news from outside the U.S. Send tips to Kristen Hare: khare@poynter.org
Mexico
A dispenser connected to the Internet prints headlines from Mexican newspaper Más por Más on paper towels in restrooms. Special ink keeps the words from smudging washers’ wet hands, according to Creativity, (which has a video on its site.)
News Publication Increases Online Visits by Printing Headlines on Paper Towels http://t.co/0Ycfo3Ww3y pic.twitter.com/ue2vmrYV9K
— Creativity Editors (@creativitymag) May 21, 2014
Unique visitors to Más por Más’ site increased 37 percent after the dispensers were installed in Mexico City bathrooms, the video says. A program in early 2013 printed AP news on receipts at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. The program was recently expanded to other D.C.-area joints.
Thailand
CNN, BBC and other news stations have been taken off the air, Hanyarat Doksone and Jocelyn Gecker reported for the Associated Press Thursday. On Tuesday, Reporters Without Borders reported that 10 TV stations were ordered to cease broadcasting by the Thai government after martial law was declared. The Thai military has seized power, the AP reported, in the 12th coup since 1932.
An army spokesman later announced that it had dissolved the caretaker government and suspended the constitution but that the Senate would remain in place. It also ordered the suspension of all television broadcasting and replaced programming with patriotic music to fill air time between announcements.
Russia
Five men were found guilty of the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Alan Greenblatt reported Wednesday for NPR. Greenblatt wrote that Politkovskaya criticized the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin.
She’d been warned by a Putin deputy that “there were incorrigible enemies who simply needed to be ‘cleansed’ from the political arena,” she wrote in an essay published posthumously.
“So they are trying to cleanse it of me and others like me,” she wrote.
Malaysia
From Star, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, (courtesy Newseum,) it’s a panda! In a cage. But headed to a zoo.
