The festival organisation is delighted to hear the news that Laura Ling and Euna Lee have been released. We wish them a speedy recovery from their ordeal.

American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were arrested in March 2009 while filming near the North Korea-China border. The two journalists, together with a cameraman and a guide, were headed to the town of Yanji where they planned to interview women forced into prostitution, according to sources.

Laura Ling was due to appear at the International Journalism Festival on Saturday 04 April 2009 as part of the presentation of the Current US Vanguard journalism unit. The other four members of the Vanguard team were able to make it to Perugia.

Laura Ling currently serves as Vice President of Current TV’s Vanguard Journalism unit, the network’s journalism division dedicated to covering global issues that are relevant to young adult audiences. Ling also serves as an on-air correspondent for Current TV. She has covered subjects including the avian flu crisis in Asia, slave labor in the Brazilian Amazon, China’s booming sex industry and marijuana cultivation in California’s national forests. Prior to joining Current in 2005, Ling worked as a series producer for Channel One News where she produced reports from over two-dozen countries. She has posed as a tourist in North Korea, covered underground youth culture in Iran and interviewed the leaders of the United Wa State Army in Myanmar—one of the largest armed drug trafficking organizations in the world. Ling co-created Breaking it Down, a documentary series on MTV that aired between 1999 and 2001. Her work has also appeared on ABC's Nightline, NBC, PBS and the WB.