The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) is backing a formal complaint to UEFA against the Romanian Football Federation (FRF) and its president Mircea Sandu, after the football federation allegedly encouraged footballers to throw stones at journalists and verbally abuse them.

Football is unsafe in the FIFA senior vice-president’s country. Violence seems unstoppable in Argentina’s most popular sport and the latest fight took a victim outside a stadium, when a local supporter killed a visiting fan, smashing a stone into his head. So, the solution for Argentina’s football madness is… get rid of visiting supporters.

The behaviour of violent fans at a match in Nancy last November, has cost the Dutch club Feyenoord its place in the 2006/07 UEFA Cup after UEFA's Appeals Body decided to exclude the Rotterdam team from all UEFA competitons this season. The club feels let down by the police that was warned that banned supporters were on their way to France.

At a recent meeting no less than 600 people cheered for FIFA vice president Julio Grondona and encouraged him to run for the eighth consecutive reelection as president of the Argentinian Football Association (AFA). The rally went on despite the terrible mess that was the last AFA tournament - clearly the most controversial in the football history of Argentina.

Two Argentinian sports journalists have been beaten up by football fans that were angry with one of the journalists after he had accused fans of threatening players in order to harm a rival team. The journalists were only rescued when police opened the doors into the changing rooms at the stadium to allow them an escape.

In Iraq kidnappers have released a blind Iraqi athlete and a paralympic coach just two days after capturing them. The two men’s experience is an exception to the rule as athletes in Iraq continue to be prime targets of abduction and assassination for political and economic reasons.

In Swaziland one reporter has been assaulted for taking pictures of violence between football fans and another was beaten up by a football player who was unhappy with the stories the journalist had written about him.

Two years before more than 20,000 international journalists are expected to go to China to cover the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a survey by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China shows that Chinese authorities frequently detain foreign reporters, and occasionally use violence against them and their sources.