Controversies & Scandals

Disputes over the use of an Associated Press photograph of Barack Obama were reported to have reached a final resolution this week, as a settlement was announced between the agency and clothing firm Obey Clothing. AP and Obey Clothing, an apparel company and exclusive licensee of Shepard Fairey, agreed to settle their high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit over Obey Clothing’s sale and...

The Washington Post suspended one of its most seasoned reporters Wednesday after editors determined that “substantial” parts of two recent news articles were taken without attribution from another newspaper. Sari Horwitz, a longtime Post investigative reporter, was suspended for three months for plagiarizing sections of stories that first appeared in the Arizona Republic. The stories concerned the...

The ongoing newspaper phone-hacking scandal intensified Monday after the BBC's Panorama programme accused a former senior journalist of hiring a private eye to illegally obtain army secrets, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. The BBC current affairs show claimed that Alex Marunchak, former senior executive editor of the News of the World tabloid, employed a private detective to intercept...

The Peruvian journalist deported by the United States to Russia in a spy swap last year says she never spied for Moscow — and that her husband hid his espionage from her until the couple's arrest, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. Vicky Pelaez says she also intends to return to her native country. "I might never forgive him," Pelaez said of her Russian husband, Mikhail Vasenkov, according to...

A reporter for a newspaper the government tried to ban says he has been arrested, and that police won't say why, according to an Associated Press (AP) report. Kandani Ngwira sent a mobile phone text message to the Associated Press Monday saying he had been arrested in Blantyre, Malawi's commercial center, and was being taken to the capital, Lilongwe. He says he wasn't told why he was being...

The ombudsman for the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo said the paper’s case against the Falha de S. Paulo (São Paulo Failure) parody blog was more harmful than the blog itself, according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. The details: [ Link] “Falha” was taken offline in October, after a court order obtained by Folha. The newspaper argued that the suit was not to meant to...

A group of Ugandans identified as homosexual in a newspaper article headlined "Hang Them" have won damages and a court injunction ordering the paper not to repeat the exercise, human rights groups said Monday, according to The Guardian. A high court judge ruled that the story in the Rolling Stone newspaper, which printed addresses and photographs of some of the 100 people it named as "Uganda's top...

Police in Kenya said Monday they had arrested a radio journalist on suspicion of links to a bombing in neighbouring Uganda which killed 76 people in July. Habib Suleiman, a presenter on Radio Salaam based in the coastal city of Mombasa, was arrested on Saturday and taken to Nairobi for questioning, regional police chief Leo Nyongesa said. "We have handed him over to the anti-terrorism police unit...

A hardline Iranian newspaper has called the French first lady a "prostitute" and recommended she be put to death for supporting a woman sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for adultery. Under the headline "French prostitutes enter the human rights uproar," the Kayhan daily newspaper referred Saturday to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as a "prostitute" after she released an open letter in support of Sakineh...

A Twitter experiment that went awry has landed a sportswriter for the Washington Post with a one-month suspension. Mike Wise, a respected Post columnist, was suspended by the newspaper on Tuesday, a day after he posted a fake report on his Twitter account. "Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told," Wise wrote on his Twitter feed, @MikeWiseguy, on Monday in a reference to the length of the...