Television stations should turn off sounds or colour when a racist incident occurs on the stadium during a football match. This was one of the more colourful suggestions made by a member of the European Parliament, Claude Moraes, at a press conference in Strasbourg this week.

In a surprising about-turn FIFA has now agreed to lift all planned restrictions on digital publication of photographs from the upcoming World Cup in Germany. Now newspapers can publish all the photos they want on their websites and they can do it while the match is still being played.

According to FIFA, print media can superimpose headlines on photographs from the football World Cup and blog directly from football matches even if pictures can not be published on the Internet until after the final whistle.

A cartoon of Iranian soccer players dressed as suicide bombers has caused friction between the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin and Iran. The cartoon was published on 10 February as a comment on preparations for the football World Cup but it has angered Iranians to such a degree that the Iranian embassy in Germany has demanded a written apology and the cartoonist has gone into hiding after receiving several death threats.

Frustrated local soccer fans may be behind a recent armed attack on the home of sports journalist Manuel Gilberto García on 22 January in the city of Jutiapa in Guatemala. Two bullets penetrated the door of his home, landing inside, but luckily neither Garcia nor his family was hurt.

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).

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