Fears that gene doping has become a reality are emerging in Germany in connection with a court case against former athletics coach, Thomas Springstein. In court, the prosecutor submitted as evidence an e-mail that Springstein sent to a doctor for a Dutch speedskating team asking for instructions on how to buy Repoxygen - a substance which activates a gene that stimulates the body's own EPO production.

Australian scientist Robin Parisotto developed a groundbreaking EPO test in the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Now he has begun work on a test that can discover if athletes have used genetic doping to augment their body’s production of EPO. In this excerpt from his recent book, Blood Sports, Parisotto describes what the world of sport may look like if genetic doping is allowed to go ahead.

In an about-turn, FIFA has now decided to grant accreditation to cover the World Cup to reporter Lasana Liburd of the Trinidad Express. Earlier in January, Liburd was denied accreditation by the local Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (T&TFF) after writing a series of articles which incurred the wrath of FIFA vice-president Jack Warner.

The Media and Sport Section has extended the deadline for submissions for its programme at the conference of the Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

FIFA vice-president Jack Warner is currently at the centre of a World Cup ticket scandal in the small state of Trinidad and Tobago.

Six months before the FIFA world cup, a group of German sports journalists has kicked off a new independent network called sportsnetzwerk.

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) is determined to fight attempts by global sports organisations to impose restrictions on media coverage of mega-events because they want to protect their commercial rights programmes. The first target of the campaign is FIFA.

An ordinary news story speculating about the potential purchase of a new player for a local football club, Mjällby AIF, led to death threats against a Swedish radio reporter. The first threat came an hour after the broadcast in December 2005 where an anonymous man informed the reporter that his life would be over if the story meant that the deal fell through.