IWMF board member Raghida Dergham received the Media Pioneer award March 9 at the Nissa’ Arab World Festival in Lebanon. Dergham, a journalist at Al Hayat, was presented with her award by minister of state Mona Afeish.

Christiane Amanpour, an IWMF board member, will be the new anchor of ABC News’ This Week starting in August. Amanpour, a 1994 winner of an IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, has been a reporter and anchor for CNN for more than two decades. Read more about Amanpour’s new position.

Sandhya Srinivasan, an India journalist who participated in the IWMF’s South Asia Initiative on Women and HIV/AIDS Policymaking, wrote an article about the difficulties women and children in particular face when living with HIV/AIDS. Read Srinivasan ‘s article.

The Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism is offering twenty fellowships for an all-expenses-paid seminar on "Covering the Green Economy," to be held June 28-30 in Arizona. Application deadline is April 26. Read more or apply.

Margaret Moth, a 1992 winner of an IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, died March 21 of cancer. Moth, a New Zealand native who worked as a camerawoman for CNN, survived being hit by a sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo in 1992. Read more in The Washington Post.

Bahman Ahmadi Amoyee, the husband of 2009 Courage in Journalism Award winner Jila Baniyaghoob, was released from prison. Amoyee had been held since the post-elections protests last June in Iran. Read more in The New York Times.

Liz Carpenter, a newspaper reporter, an aide to Lyndon B. Johnson when he was vice president and press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson during her years in the White House, died March 20. She was 89. Carpenter was a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and joint chairwoman of ERAmerica, an organization that unsuccessfully fought for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Read the New York Times article.

A play will commemorate the life of 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award winner Molly Ivins, who died of cancer in 2007. “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” will open March 24 in Philadelphia. Read the New York Times article.

The IWMF has joined other press freedom organizations in an international campaign to free journalists in Iran, where 52 are being held in prison. Among them is the husband of Courage Award winner Jila Baniyaghoob. Sign a petition at Our Society Will Be a Free Society.

Police broke into Courage winner Iryna Khalip’s flat on March 16. After searching for three hours, they confiscated CDs and DVDs and a borrowed laptop. Khalip’s laptop had already been seized. Sign a petition on behalf of Kahlip.

Writing in the UN Chronicle, IWMF Executive Director Liza Gross says women are still invisible in the media. Read the article.

Returning to Belarus from a trip to Lithuania, Courage winner Iryna Khalip was questioned by border police, who seized her laptop. Read more.

IWMF Board member Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour magazine, is being honored April 7 by Women in Need, a New York City organization that helps homeless families. Read more about it.

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In a February 26 letter to the head of the Iranian judiciary's human rights headquarters, 2009 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winner Jila Baniyaghoob urges Mohammed-Javad Larijani to investigate Iranian journalists' imprisonment.

"You say they have not be imprisoned because of protesting," Baniyaghoob writes, "but because of their violence and inflicting damage on people’s property."

Baniyaghoob says Larijani's claim that "no reporter or journalist has been imprisoned because of journalism" is false and challenges him to search her and her journalist husband's files to find otherwise.

Read Baniyaghoob's full account on her Web site.