The newly elected President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, appointed Mervyn Silva as the deputy minister for media and information on Friday. Silva is a politician with a notorious reputation for physically and verbally attacking journalists and other members of the press, including one incident in December 2008 where he and a large group of men stormed a television station and assaulted its news director. The appointment angered Reporters sans frontières, it asked “In what country do you appoint an arsonist to put out fires?”
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