World News for Students of English

17-02-2022 07:00

Someone shot a journalist in the southern state of Oaxaca on Thursday, the fifth killed in Mexico this year, and the third in two weeks.

Officials confirmed that the victim was Heber López, the director of the online news site Noticias Web. Police held the two suspects in custody, and they recovered a gun from them. The two men walked into López’s recording studio, and they shot him. Reportedly, his 12-year-old son was there but uninjured.

López covered crime and police news, and he regularly wrote about politics and corruption in the local government. López worked in the port city of Salina Cruz, and he received death threats in 2019. According to another journalist and López’s friends, he never told them about the threats. However, they believed the killing was a response to his work.

According to a human rights organization called Article 19, people killed at least 145 journalists in Mexico from 2000 to 2021, which made the country one of the deadliest for journalists.

Difficult words: custody (in prison), corruption (illegal or dishonest behavior by people who are in power), death threat (a threat to kill someone, often anonymous).

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