In my third year of writing my editorial, The Catwalk, for my local newspaper I am almost at my end as a high school correspondant. I am about to graduate. I wish I could say I will miss writing this editorial, but alas!

Transitions Online is a cracking site devoted to 28 post-Communist countries.

By Richard Sambrook, Director of the BBC's Global News Services

No doubt about it: The World Press Freedom Day is a decent and useful international campaign.

One relatively unreported development in western journalism has been the Irish government's attempt to gag whistleblowers in its police force, the Garda Siochana.At present there is a law in the Irish republic that has been condemned by both Index on Censorship and Article 19,two human rights organisations set up defend freedom of expression across the planet.  The law threatens garda officers who give information to the press and media without the consent of its Dublin Press Office with heavy fines and up to five years in prison. As a result many garda sources who have briefed j

The most recent public exercises of the German politician Gabriele Pauli are intriguing not only from a psychiatrist's point of view but also for journalists: First, Pauli invited Park Avenue magazine to her private home where she posed in Domina style with black latex gloves on and a black eye-mask painted into her face. Then, she started a legal fight about the April issue of Park Avenue when it came out on 28 March.

When John Hooper was still the Guardian's correspondent to Berlin (he is now in Rome) he was very outspoken about one deplorable aspect of the German press. It is known as "the authorisation" of verbatim quotes. John said: "The way journalists are treated in Germany is unique in the Western world. It reminds me of what I have experienced in totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe or in Asia."

A censor, according to the Oxford English dictionary, is somebody who expresses opinions on somebody else's morals and conduct or an official with power to suppress whole or parts of cultural output such as books or news on the grounds of, for example, obscenity or seditiousness. How antiquated that all sounds!