Case

Private security personnel working for Joe Miller, Alaska's Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, detained and handcuffed a local editor on October 17 when he persisted in questioning Miller at a town hall event.

Molly Norris, a political cartoonist for Seattle Weekly, went into hiding in September because of threats made after her tongue-in-cheek call for an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day," according to Seattle Weekly. The call was included in a cartoon Norris drew to protest a decision by the cable television network Comedy Central not to broadcast an episode of "South Park" that tested the Islamic taboo against depicting images of the Prophet. 

On August 17, 2010, two men barged into the offices of the Awramba Times, the independent Amharic-language weekly in the capital, Addis Ababa, and assaulted Moges Tikuye, a security guard, the paper reported. Tikuye suffered minor injuries. Early the next morning, assailants smashed the windows and doors of the office.

On July 2, photographer Lance Rosenfeld was detained by police and released only after authorities reviewed his images and collected his personal identification information, which they then shared with BP, the company responsible for the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Rosenfeld was on assignment for the non-profit media outlet ProPublica and the PBS television program "Frontline" when he was detained near BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas.

A freelance journalist was beaten by police on June 26 as he was covering a demonstration related to the G-20 summit of world leaders in Toronto. Jesse Rosenfeld, a contributor to the opinion section of the Guardian online, later said in a press conference that Canadian police authorities attacked him after recognizing him as a “loud-mouthed kid” from previous demonstrations, and after noticing that the press credentials hanging around his neck did not include an official Canadian pass to cover the summit.

Members of the Sindh National Party (SNP) violently demonstrated outside the offices of the Jang Group of Newspapers and Geo TV in Karachi, the financial capital of Pakistan on May 23, 2010, according to local news reports.

The U.S. Park Police have taken responsibility for having prevented journalists from covering a White House demonstration on April 21. A single, uniformed Park Police officer ordered reporters and camera crews to move back after gay rights activists handcuffed themselves to the White House gate. The officer ordered journalists to move toward the far side of Lafayette Park, preventing them having a view of the demonstration. Captured on camera, the officer is seen telling journalists and others alike in the middle of the day that the park was closed.

Attorneys representing a student newspaper and a county prosecutor have agreed to temporarily seal images seized from the newspaper and transfer them to a third party until the dispute over the images is settled, reported The Breeze, the student-run publication of James Madison University in Virginia. But the Rockingham County Commonwealth Attorney’s office is still pressing for at least some of the images to be released, according to the university newspaper.

In early 2007, freelancer Oscar Sánchez Madan was detained twice and warned to stop working for the independent press after he covered a local corruption scandal and social problems in western Matanzas province, where he lived. He was arrested in April 2007 and, after a one-day trial, Cuban authorities convicted him of “social dangerousness,” a vague charge contained in Article 72 of the penal code. The reporter was handed the maximum prison sentence of four years; in June 2007, a local tribunal lowered the sentence to three years.

A bomb explosion injured three local journalists who were accompanying a convoy of security forces in the Lower Dir district of northwestern Pakistan on February 3, 2010, according to a statement by the Karachi-based Pakistan Press Foundation and international news reports.