2005-2014

Shepard Fairey, the artist whose “Hope” image of President Barack Obama was added to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, sued the Associated Press over the news company’s copyright challenge to the artwork. The lawsuit Monday in US District Court in Manhattan said Los Angeles street artist Shepard Fairey did not violate the copyright of the April 2006 photograph because he dramatically...

Media freedom is nowhere on the agenda in the Middle-East, North Africa and the Gulf. The region remains generally opposed to the free flow of news despite some easing of press laws and a few signs of opening up and greater tolerance. The three sub-regions have very different national constitutions and press laws and a variety of regimes (that also often clash with each other, sometimes violently)

French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which helped launch the 1950s New Wave, has been sold by Le Monde to international arts publishing house Phaidon Press. Founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and edited by Eric Rohmer, Cahiers du Cinéma was a crucible for writers-turned-New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and a vocal...

Four female journalists were in a state of shock on Monday after reportedly being attacked, forced to strip and marched through a Sierra Leonean town by a pro-female genital mutilation (FGM) group, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. Witnesses said the four were accused of reporting on an anti-FGM campaign last Friday, which marked the international day of zero tolerance to female...

Newsstand and retail sales of US magazines fell 11 per cent in the second half of 2008, with celebrity and women's titles taking a hit as supermarket and drugstore shoppers cut back on their spending. "Single-copy" sales of magazines in figures released by the US Audit Bureau of Circulations on Monday performed worse than paid subscriptions, which were up less than 1 per cent. Total paid and...

Sudan has expelled a foreign journalist for reporting on the country's Darfur crisis and arms industry. Canadian-Egyptian reporter Heba Aly, who wrote for US news agency Bloomberg, Boston-based Christian Science Monitor newspaper and the United Nations news service IRIN, left the country last week. She told colleagues that officers from Sudan's security service contacted her and ordered her to...

Press freedom in Nepal continues to face serious threats despite the hope that restoration of democratic rule would improve the situation. The Federation of Nepali Journalists (FNJ) recorded a staggering 342 press freedom violations in 2008 alone, including a significant escalation in the number of physical attacks on journalists and media houses. Four journalists—Uma Singh, JP Joshi, Birendra

Asia replaced the Middle-East as the deadliest region for journalists last year, with 26 reporters, photographers and editors losing their lives in retaliation for their work or in civil conflicts, according to the International Press Institute's annual World Press Freedom Review. Though more journalists were killed in Iraq than in any other country in 2008 for the sixth year in a row, Pakistan

Seven people were arrested on Sunday after taking part in a tribute to slain human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasia Baburova in which flowers were lain at the spot where they were gunned down in the centre of Moscow on January 29. Interior ministry Omon anti-riot police arrested them on the grounds that they were holding an “unauthorised” demonstration. Human...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned Saturday's brutal knife attack on Hassan Bulhan, director of a local radio station in the central town of Abudwaq. Bulhan was stabbed at least five times in the chest and abdomen during a clan reconciliation meeting, two local journalists told CPJ, in what was the second attack on a Somali journalist in just four days. Bulhan was in stable...