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Why the Prosecution of Julian Assange is Troubling for Press Freedom

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Alex Ellerbeck* is North America Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists & Avi Asher-Schapiro* is North America Research Associate
NEW YORK, Apr 16 2019 (IPS) - After a seven-year standoff at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, British police last week arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange–a development press freedom advocates had long feared.
For years, journalists and press freedom advocates worried the U.S. would prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act for the publication of classified information, a scenario that potentially would have set a devastating legal precedent for U.S. news organizations that regularly publish such material.
During the Obama administration, officials ultimately said they would not prosecute because of the possible consequences for press freedom.
It was unclear whether the Trump administration would have the same compunction: while Trump praised WikiLeaks, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo labeled it a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
Trump has shown little concern for freedom of the press, once allegedly urging then-FBI Director James Comey to jail journalists. (In response to news of Assange’s arrest, Trump said he would leave it to the Justice Department).
In this context, the charge on which Assange was arrested seemed modest: A single count of conspiracy (with former Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning) to “commit computer intrusion” under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, with a maximum penalty of five years.
Unlike the publication of classified information, hacking computers is not a tool for reporters. Some journalists were quick to point out this out.
“[The] charge here is attempting to help crack a password to steal classified material. Didn’t work but would news orgs do that? (Not in my experience.),” said Greg Miller, a national security reporter at The Washington Post, said on Twitter.
But press freedom advocates, and some journalists, have not expressed relief based on the indictment. A host of organizations, including CPJ, spoke out against the prosecution. Here’s why:
(1) The indictment is flimsy and could simply be a pretext to punish Assange for publishing classified information.
The diplomatic time and resources expended between three countries to detain Assange strikes some observers as disproportionate to the single computer misuse charge.
The indictment is vague about the exact nature of the aid Assange allegedly provided Manning in the course of their interaction, but it does not appear that Assange successfully hacked any password.
Even if his attempts were successful, they would have helped Manning cover her tracks, but not let her break into a system to which she didn’t already have access.
Prosecutors have wide range of latitude; it’s worth remembering that the Obama administration likely had all the same information, but declined to pursue an indictment.
Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesperson in the Obama administration, told The New York Times that he thought the charge was justified but “This is not the world’s strongest case.”
So, is it just a pretext on the part of the U.S. government to punish Assange for the publication of classified information — a practice that should be constitutionally protected? The issue comes in a time of heightened concern for investigative journalists and national security reporters.
Since the September 11 attacks, the government has increasingly classified large amounts of material and punished those who share it with the press. CPJ has written extensively about the chilling effect of this crackdown on reporting in the public interest.
“Given the nature of the charge — a discussion 9 years ago about an unsuccessful attempt to figure out a password — I think it’s fair to debate whether this is a fig leaf for the government punishing someone for publishing stuff it doesn’t want published,” tweeted Scott Shane, a national security reporter for The New York Times.
“If it wasn’t Julian Assange, it would be very unlikely you’d see this prosecution,” Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CPJ. “This is what over-broad discretion in prosecution does, it gives them a pretext for going after people they don’t like.”
(2) The charge could be a placeholder, with more to come.
Another reason why the charge may seem so modest: It could be the first of several. Last week, CNN cited U.S. officials promising additional charges against Assange. The press freedom implications of any future charges could be significant–especially if they involve the Espionage Act.
“It may be part of a larger case,” Ben Wizner the director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told CPJ. The current indictment already cites the Espionage Act and describes the cracking of a password as part of a conspiracy to violate it.
The DOJ’s legal strategy could be to pile on more charges after Assange is extradited. The extradition treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. says an individual can only be charged for the “offense for which extradition was granted” or similar offenses, but it also stipulates how governments can waive this rule.
Assange has an extradition hearing on May 2, which gives the U.S. government time to develop new charges.
(3) The language of the case seems to criminalize normal journalistic activities.
While the charge against Assange relates to the alleged conspiracy to hack a password, the language of the indictment sweeps in a broad range of legally protected and common journalistic activity.
Count 20 of the indictment states, “It was part of the conspiracy that Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records from departments and agencies of the United States.”
The indictment goes on to characterize a number of journalistic practices as part of a criminal conspiracy, including use of a secure message service, use of a cloud-based drop box, and efforts to cover Manning’s tracks.
The cultivation of sources and the use of encryption and other means to protect those sources are essential to investigative journalism. While the government may include these details to show intent or to describe the means and context for the alleged criminal action, they seem to go beyond what is necessary.
Barton Gellman, who led The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Snowden documents, told CPJ, “If asking questions and protecting a source are cast as circumstantial evidence of guilt, we’ll be crossing a dangerous line.”
“A lot of the way the crime is described here could be applied to other journalists,” Wizner, at the ACLU, told CPJ. “If the government wanted to just target the attempted intrusion, they could have written a very different complaint.”
(4) The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is incredibly broad.
In all of the concern over the Espionage Act, journalists may not have sufficiently raised alarm over the law under which the U.S. charged Assange: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). “Thinking we should breathe a sigh of relief because it was the CFAA instead of the Espionage act is premature.” Cohn, of Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CPJ.
The CFAA carries its own set of free expression issues. While it encompasses clearly illegal behavior like hacking, it also criminalizes “unauthorized access to a computer.”
Manning was prosecuted under the CFAA in addition to the Espionage Act, but prosecuting a publisher under the under the CFAA for conspiracy in obtaining the classified information could potentially create a dangerous legal model.
While reporters do not conspire to decrypt passwords, they are often aware of, and might actively discuss with sources, activities that could fall under the broad frame of “unauthorized access.”
As the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez wrote on Twitter, “The way ‘helping to hack’ is being charged is as a conspiracy to violate 18 USC §1030 (a)(1) [of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act]. And good reporters conspire with their sources to do that constantly.”
“For almost every reporter working with a source, the source is providing information in digital form. Anyone who is working with a source who obtained that info in a way that they weren’t supposed to has a CFAA risk,” Cohn said.
She added that any journalists who don’t think there are broader press freedom implications to the Assange prosecution are “whistling past the graveyard.”
(5) Ecuador’s withdrawal of asylum raises questions.
Assange’s arrest came after Ecuador withdrew his asylum protection. In a tweet on April 11, Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno said the decision came after Assange’s “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.”
In a video statement accompanying the tweet, he cited Assange’s repeated “intervening in the internal affairs of other states” via WikiLeaks publications.
Ecuador had previously restricted Assange’s access to the internet based on allegations that he was interfering in U.S. elections and in the referendum for Catalan independence from Spain.
While Assange’s unusual presence in a diplomatic mission created tensions–both inside the embassy and in Ecuador’s broader international relations–withdrawing asylum is an extreme measure, and one that could have troubling implications if it was done in response to publishing.
*Alexandra Ellerbeck, CPJ’s North America program coordinator, previously worked at Freedom House and was a Fulbright teaching fellow at the State University of Pará in Brazil. She has lived in Chile, Bolivia, and Brazil.

*Asher-Schapiro is CPJ’s research associate for North America. He is a former staffer at VICE News, International Business Times, and Tribune Media, and an independent investigative reporter who has published in outlets including The Atlantic, The Intercept, and The New York Times.
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Media Landscape Marked by “Climate of Fear”

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The state of journalism and press freedom around the world is declining according to a new press index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 19 2019 (IPS) - Journalists around the world are increasingly seeing threats of violence, detention, and even death simply for doing their job, a new press index found.
In the 2019 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has found a worrisome decline in media freedoms as toxic anti-press rhetoric have devolved into violence, triggering a climate of fear.
“The scene this year is fear. And the state of journalism and press freedom around the world is
declining… but also in the traditional press freedom allies—countries in Europe and here in the
United States,” said RSF’s Executive Director Sabine Dolan during the launch of the index.
RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire echoed similar sentiments about the dangers of declining press freedom, stating: “If the political debate slides surreptitiously or openly towards a civil war-style atmosphere, in which journalists are treated as scapegoats, then democracy is in great danger…Halting this cycle of fear and intimidation is a matter of the utmost urgency for all people of good will who value the freedoms acquired in the course of history.”
Of 180 countries evaluated in RSF’s index, only 24 percent were classified as “good” or “fairly good” compared to 26 percent in 2018.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region continues to be the most dangerous area for journalists as they face violence due to ongoing conflicts while also being deliberately targeted, imprisoned, and killed.
For example, Emirati blogger Ahmed Mansoor was sentenced to 10 years in prison after criticising the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) government on social media.
He was accused of “publishing false information, rumours and lies” which would “damage the UAE’s social harmony and unity.”
The persecution of MENA’s journalists has even extended past its own borders as seen through the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey.
Such a chilling level of violence has provoked fear among the region’s journalists, causing many to censor themselves.
But of all the world’s regions, it is the Americas that has seen the largest dip in its press freedom score.
Nicaragua for instance fell 24 places to 114th, making it one of the steepest declines worldwide—and with good reason.
What started as protests against controversial social security reforms has turned into one of the biggest crackdowns on dissent and media in the Central American nation.
Nicaraguans covering demonstrations have been treated as protestors or members of the opposition and have been subject to harassment, arbitrary arrest, and death threats.
Some have been charged with terrorism including Miguel Mora and Lucia Pineda Ubau, journalists for the news agency 100% Noticias.
Further north, the United States’ media climate is now classified as “problematic” as a result of an increasingly toxic anti-media rhetoric.
Over the last year, media organisations across the country received bomb threats and suspicious packages including CNN, forcing evacuations.
In June 2018, after expressing his hatred for the Capital Gazette newspaper on social media, Jarrod Ramos walked into the newsroom and killed four journalists and a staff member.
Most recently, Coast Guard lieutenant Christopher Paul Hasson was arrested for planning a terrorist attack targeting journalists and politicians.
Such anti-media sentiment is partially fuelled by U.S. President Donald Trump who has called journalists “enemy of the people.”
“When this becomes constant, it’s almost normalised and it percolates to large segments of the
population. And this is how it has contributed to create this climate of fear for journalists,” Dolan said.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), over 11 percent of the president’s tweets have insulted or criticised journalists and news media.
In reference to a particular tweet by Trump which states that it is “disgusting” that the press can write whatever they want, former White House Correspondent Bill Plante noted that the U.S. is in a very “dangerous place” now.
“It is one thing to steer news coverage, by putting things out there or leaking certain stories or trying to avoid coverage of other things—it’s entirely another to threaten reporters and to say that news coverage shouldn’t be allowed,” he said.
This rhetoric has not only impacted journalists in the U.S., but has also spilled over abroad as world leaders from Venezuela to the Philippines use terms like “fake news” to justify human rights violations and crackdowns on press freedom.
But it is not all bad news.
Ethiopia made an unprecedented 40-place jump in the Index after new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took swift steps to improve press freedom including the release of all detained journalists.
While such progress is promising, there is a long way to go to secure press freedom globally, especially as it seemingly regresses.
“The only weapon we have is truth. The problem is that in today’s media environment along with social media, we can be overwhelmed. So we have to come out there with more effort than ever to get the truth out,” Plante said
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Bleak Outlook for Press Freedom in West Africa

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LONDON, Apr 23 2019 (IPS) - When former footballer George Weah became president of Liberia in 2018, media practitioners felt they had in him a democrat who would champion media freedoms. “But we were mistaken,” journalist Henry Costa told IPS.
Any objective assessment of the relationship between West Africa governments and media organisations will conclude that, but for a few exceptions, the outlook for press freedom in the sub-region is a bleak one.
From Cameroon and Ghana, to Nigeria, Liberia and Senegal, journalists and media organisations are being attacked for simply doing their jobs. The fact that these attacks emanate from mostly state actors, who as a rule remain unpunished, points to a culture of impunity.
Liberia is a case in point.
“The president does not like criticism,” said Costa, owner of Roots FM and host of the station’s popular Costa Show. “And because we are critical of some policies, our offices have been attacked on two occasions by armed men and our equipment damaged and some stolen.”
Some would say Costa was lucky, for the corpse of another journalist, Tyron Brown, was dumped outside his home last year by a mysterious black jeep. A man has confessed to killing the journalist in self-defence but his colleagues are not convinced. They believe the murder was a message – mind your words or you could be next.
This climate of fear was heightened when Weah accused a BBC correspondent being against his government. Then Front Page Africa, a newspaper that has been critical of successive governments, was fined 1.8 million dollars in a civil defamation lawsuit brought by a friend of the president.
Mae Azango, a senior Front Page Africa reporter, said the government’s new tactic was to “strangulate the free press” by refusing to pay tens of thousands owed for media advertisements. “One minister said since the media does not write anything good about the government, it won’t pay debt owed, which will compel some media outlets to shut down,” she said. “Some media houses have not paid staff for up to eight months.”
In Ghana, once Africa’s top-ranked media-friendly country, things have deteriorated to the level where a sitting politician openly called on supporters to attack a journalist whose documentary on corruption in Ghanaian football exposed him. Ahmed Divela was subsequently shot dead last January. In 2015 another journalist, George Abanga, was also shot dead on assignment.
In March 2018 Latif Iddrisu, a young reporter, was covering a story when he was dragged into the Accra headquarters of the police and given a merciless beating which left him with a fractured skull.
Iddrisu told IPS by phone: “Journalists are being threatened with assault and death by politicians and people in power because they feel threatened by our exposés.” He doubts whether the passage of freedom of information (FOI) legislation will improve matters.
This position is borne out in Nigeria where the passing of FOI laws has not deterred officials from denying journalists access to information they need to carry out their jobs. According to Dapo Olorunyomi, the Central Bank and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (the NNPC) are the “most opaque institutions” in the country. Olorunyomi, editor-in-chief of Premium Times Newspaper, added: “So you are allowed to write what you want, but if you get it wrong you suffer the consequences.” He and journalists working for him have been arrested on several occasions to get them to reveal their sources.
The case of Jones Abiri is instructive. The journalist was incarcerated for two years without trial. And physical attacks on reporters have increased four-fold in recent times. Figures show that attacks on journalists and the press quadrupled in 2015-2019, compared to the preceding five year period.
Media academic Dr Chinenye Nwabueze maintains that the violence heightens during elections. “In the ‘season’ of elections, a journalist operates like a car parked – at owner’s risk,” he told IPS. “You could end up in the crossfire between opposing parties or thugs.”
The same story of violence and intimidation against journalists is replicated in francophone countries like Cameroon, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Mali. The most serious of them is Cameroon, where the government continues to prosecute media critics in military or special courts. As Angela Quintal, Africa Program Coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told IPS, “Cameroon is the second-worst jailer of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, and the second in the world for jailing journalists on false news charges.”
Sierra Leone and the Gambia are the two countries that emerge relatively blemish-free in our survey of the landscape of press freedom in West Africa. Both have relatively new governments that have promised repeal criminal libel laws that their predecessors had used to clamp down on the media. From Sierra Leone, reporter Amadu Lamrana Bah of AYV Media told IPS: “The president says he is committed to repealing [criminal libel laws] and the process is on.”
His statement echoes that of Sheriff Bojang Jr, president of the Gambia Press Union, who said: “We no longer work in a fearful or repressive environment, but our major problem is the lack of information coming out of government, the total lack of transparency. But the government have promised to make changes.”
This is a reference to the absence of FOI legislation in the country, which the government has promised to “deal with in due course”. But the Gambians only have to look to similarly “blemish-free” Sierra Leone, to realise that FOI will count for nought if the authorities are not prepared to honour its provisions – as this reporter discovered while researching a story on sexual violence against Sierra Leonean women and another on diamond mining.
The Ministries of Justice, Mines, and Information in Freetown refused to provide the information we requested, even though they had initially promised they would. That recent experience came to mind when, during his interview for this piece, Liberian reporter Henry Costa said the Weah government “were pretending to be tolerant” but “would go to their old tricks” when economic hardships trigger anti-government protests and the media begin to report on them.
Since Sierra Leone and the Gambia are currently implementing International Monetary Fund policies, it is only a matter of time before those policies begin to bite the people. If the “Costa equation” is correct, then it is likewise only a matter of time before we find out whether the “blemish-free” authorities in Freetown and Banjul are as toxic to press freedom as their counterparts in Cameroon and Ghana, or indeed, their immediate predecessors.
“Journalists do essential work to keep the public informed, often in difficult circumstances in West and Central Africa,” Sadibou Marong, the Regional Media Manager for Amnesty’s West and Central Africa Office, told IPS.  “They must be protected to do their work freely, and without fear of attacks or threats. Governments in the region should promote media freedom and protect media workers and organisations.”
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Sierra Leone’s Journalists Demand Justice for “Murdered” Colleague and Call for Law Reform

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This is part of a series of features and op-eds to mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3.

Press freedom in Sierra Leone faces continued pressure, even under the government of President Julius Maada Bio. Credit: CC By 2.0/Alan & Flora Botting
LONDON, May 2 2019 (IPS) - Ibrahim Samura, erstwhile editor and publisher of New Age, an independent Freetown newspaper, was beaten up with “heavy-duty metal chains and sticks” during Sierra Leone’s presidential run-off election in March 2018—in front of the police and army. He died from his injuries three months later. But more than a year since the assault the perpetrators are yet to be brought to book.
The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) has called on the government of President Julius Maada Bio for the immediate prosecution of all those who physically assaulted a newspaper editor last year.
The attack on Samura and at least two other reporters occurred in full view of security personnel, as the journalists covered the elections no more than 50 feet from the police station in the Freetown suburb of Lumley.
“The continuing delay in bringing them to justice is breeding a culture of impunity,” Ahmed Sahid Nasralla, the national secretary general of SLAJ, told IPS. “We are calling on the police and on the government to take action. The investigation has been done. It’s up to the authorities to now prosecute. We will continue to put pressure on them to do so.”
According to SLAJ, Samura’s death is directly related to the beating he received, which caused the intracerebral haemorrhage the autopsy determined caused his death. Further, medical experts say if Samura did not suffer “similar blunt force trauma about the head” from the time of that merciless beating to the time of his death, then it is “very safe” to conclude that those who beat him in March caused his demise.
The five perpetrators, so-called “high-powered hooligans”, comprise: a former deputy minister from the then ruling All Peoples Congress party (the APC), Ibrahim Washingai Mansaray;
the former Mayor of Freetown, Herbert George Williams;
the chairman of a local football club who was vying for the presidency of the national football association, Sanusi Kargbo;
Abubakarr Daramy, an APC government spokesman;
and, last but not least, Dankay Koroma, who happens to be the daughter of then President Ernest Bai Koroma.
Ten months after the journalist’s death, none of the infamous “Samura Five” have been arrested. This is despite the fact that police say the necessary warrants had been issued. Some reporters have attributed this to the fact that before his death Samura had publicly accepted an “apology” from the APC, in effect offering “pre-emptive forgiveness” to those who some see as his murderers.
But, as the publisher of Sierra Express Media, Adeyemi Paul, said: “He may have forgiven them, but a crime is a crime. The role of the police and the courts is to arrest and prosecute criminals, not to offer forgiveness.” Not unexpectedly, most journalists share this view. Amara Samura (no relation), editor of The Vision newspaper, said: “Those who beat Ibrahim Samura should be brought to justice, because that beating caused his death – apology or not.”
Fayia Amara Fayia of the Standard Times newspaper, said there were rumours Samura had accepted “compensation” from ex-President Koroma, whose daughter was one the alleged attackers. “Journalists should not enter into such arrangements with their abusers, because it will lead to impunity,” he said.
Many journalists who had hoped the election of Bio as president augured well for press freedom in Sierra Leone have been disappointed. The harassment, intimidation and beatings of journalists has continued under the rule of his Sierra Leone People’s Party (the SLPP). Barely a month after Bio assumed office, SLPP supporters assaulted Yusuf Bangura, a radio reporter for the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). His attackers said it was “payback” for his “negative reporting” of the SLPP and Bio in the run up to the elections.
Then last September, Fayia Amara Fayia was arrested at the television studio of AYV Media during a live broadcast. His arrest was ordered by the deputy information minister, who claimed the reporter had libelled the president in one of his articles. Fayia was later released without charge. That same month several journalists were attacked and their equipment damaged by alleged SLPP thugs while covering a bye election in the northern Kambia district.
In January of this year the editor of Sierra Express media, Alusine Bangura, was beaten up at his office by men who, he says, not only identified themselves as supporters of the SLPP, but were also wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the ruling party’s emblem. He suffered serious injuries to his head and torso from the beating the group dished out to him. Three of his colleagues had been lucky to escape.
“I recognised one of the men, a hefty bloke, a popular thug for the SLPP,” Bangura told IPS. “There were about 13 of them. Had it not been for the guys in the area, who came to assist me, I might have been killed.”
According to Bangura, this was the second attack on their offices. The first one happened in April 2018, just after Bio took office. “They attack us because they say we are too critical of the government,” he continued. “They also said we criticised them when they were in opposition. But that is our duty, to keep the politicians on their toes. We are always critical of government, any government.”
These attacks against journalists going about their lawful business can be seen as evidence of a culture of impunity which the continuing failure to prosecute the alleged killers of Samura has fuelled in Sierra Leone. Many believe that if a precedent is set, where people are punished for attacking journalists, it would serve as a deterrent to these almost pedestrian assaults on journalists who are simply doing their jobs. As Bangura said, “I myself could have easily been killed in January by those thugs.”
It will be recalled that Harry Yansaneh, the acting editor of For Di People newspaper, was killed in 2005 after an SLPP MP, Fatmata Hassan, sent her children and assorted thugs to beat him up. In this case, which is eerily similar to Samura’s, the killers got-off scot-free. It can even be argued that Samura might be alive today, or that Bangura might not have sustained those serious injuries, if Yansaneh’s alleged killers had been convicted back in 2005 of even the lesser charge of manslaughter or, at worst, aggravated assault.
In a cruel twist of fate, Yansaneh had become acting editor of For Di People after substantive editor Paul Kamara was jailed for two years for allegedly libelling President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, whose SLPP government invoked draconian criminal libel legislation to convict the journalist.
Perhaps one reason why the present SLPP government is reluctant to prosecute Samura’s killers is because it will mean not only that they would have to also prosecute their own supporters who routinely beat up journalists, as we have seen, but also those who killed Yansaneh in 2005, there being no statute of limitation for murder.
But the president would do well to recall his words to members of the SLAJ when he addressed them last December. Bio had said: “I would like us to remember the heroism of someone who is not here with us tonight – Ibrahim Samura… Never again should we have a government or politicians who abdicate their duty to protect journalists and become the perpetrators of violence against journalists.”
A month after the president said this, thugs severely beat up the editor of Sierra Express Media. They then ran away—and live to assault another journalist another day.
As SLAJ calls on the government of President Bio for action against the so-called “Samura Five”, its members are also looking to the government to fulfil their manifesto promise to repeal criminal libel laws, which previous governments have used to muzzle the press and to punish outspoken journalists like Kamara.
Speaking to IPS from South Africa, Angela Quintal, Africa Programme Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said: “President Bio must move swiftly to ensure that the law on criminal and seditious libel is finally repealed, something that he committed to when he came into power last year.”
Quintal added: “A message must also be sent that attacks on journalists will not be condoned by authorities and the only way to ensure this is to ensure that those responsible [for Samura’s death] are held accountable through prosecution. President Bio has publicly committed to upholding press freedom and this is one way to show that his sentiments are not mere rhetoric.”
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VIDEO: World Press Freedom Day 2019 – Media for Democracy: Journalism and Elections in Times of Disinformation

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ROME, Apr 29 2019 (IPS) - Journalists and media outlets worldwide have recently been subject to a subtle wave of vilification. Populist rhetoric and public indifference have begun to threaten the very foundation of our freedom.
Journalists provide the checks and balances fundamental to all democracies, by highlighting government failures or reporting on societal injustice.
But the tone of leadership today has shifted: denunciation of the media as “biased,” and the factual information they report as “fake news,” is forcing citizens into confusion and misinformation.


This tactic has given authorities the opening to dictate their own narrative and divert attention from corruption and other abuses.
As recently as six months ago, the National Broadcasting Council in Poland fined a leading television station half a million dollars “for promoting illegal activities.” This was after the network’s coverage of anti-government protests.
In Hungary, the ruling Fidesz party has taken matters further: they have consolidated control over private media outlets in the hands of government allies. This has effectively quashed critical reporting and media independence.
In the United States, we have seen a disturbing pattern of authorities disparaging journalists when factually challenged about their narratives. Here, their disdain for ordinary media scrutiny is self- evident – and the repercussions are only just beginning to emerge.
Accordingly, this year’s World Press Freedom Day events in Addis Ababa are of critical importance to the global community of journalists.
The theme of this year’s celebration is apt: Media for Democracy: Journalism and Elections in Times of Disinformation.”
It is focused on illuminating current challenges faced by media in elections, along with media’s potential in supporting peace and reconciliation processes. Furthermore, the UNESCO driven events will also examine the safety of journalists and how to combat disinformation.
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Scientists Discover Evolutionary Link to Modern-Day Sea Echinoderms

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Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio—Scientists at The Ohio State University have discovered a new species that lived more than 500 million years ago—a form of ancient echinoderm that was ancestral to modern-day groups such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins, sea stars, brittle stars and crinoids. The fossil shows a crucial evolutionary step by echinoderms that parallels the most important ecological change to have taken place in marine sediments.
The discovery, nearly 30 years in the making, was published recently in the Bulletin of Geosciences and provides a clue as to how creatures were able to make the evolutionary leap from living stuck to marine sediment grains—which were held together by gooey algae-like colonies, the original way that echinoderms lived—to living attached to hard, shelly surfaces, which is the way their modern-day descendants live now on the bottom of the ocean. 
“It throws light on a critical time, not just in the evolution of organisms, but also in the evolution of marine ecosystems,” said Loren Babcock, co-author of the study and professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. “This represents a creature that clearly was making the leap from the old style of marine ecosystems in which sediments were stabilized by cyanobacterial mats, to what ultimately became the present system, with more fluidized sediment surfaces.” 
The creature, a species of edrioasteroid echinoderm that Babcock and his researchers named Totiglobus spencensis, lived in the Cambrian Period—about 507 million years ago. (The Earth, for the record, is about 4.5 billion years old.) A family of fossil hunters discovered the fossil in shale of Spence Gulch, in the eastern part of Idaho, in 1992, and donated it to Richard Robison, a researcher at the University of Kansas and Babcock’s doctoral adviser. That part of the country is rich with fossils from the Cambrian period, Babcock said.
For years, the fossil puzzled both Babcock and Robison. But the mystery was solved a few years ago, when Robison’s fossil collection passed to Babcock after Robison’s retirement.
Once Babcock had the fossil in his lab, he and a visiting doctoral student, Rongqin Wen, removed layers of rock, exposing a small, rust-colored circle with numerous tiny plates and distinct arm-like structures, called ambulcra. Further study showed them that the animal attached itself to a small, conical shell of a mysterious, now-extinct animal called a hyolith using a basal disk—a short, funnel-like structure composed of numerous small calcite plates.
The discovery was a type of scientific poetry—years earlier, Babcock and Robison discovered the type of shell that this animal appeared to be attached to, and named it Haplophrentis reesei.
The edrioasteroid that Babcock and Wen discovered apparently lived attached to the upper side of the elongate-triangular hyolith shell, even as the hyolith was alive. They think a sudden storm buried the animals in a thick layer of mud, preserving them in their original ecological condition.
Echinoderms and hyoliths first appeared during the Cambrian Period, a time in Earth’s history when life exploded and the world became more biodiverse than it had ever been before. The earliest echinoderms, including the earliest edrioasteroids, lived by sticking to cyanobacterial mats—thick, algae-like substances that covered the Earth’s waters. And until the time of Totiglobus spencensis, echinoderms had not yet figured out how to attach to a hard surface. 
“In all of Earth’s history, the Cambrian is probably the most important in the evolution of both animals and marine ecosystems, because this was a time when a more modern style of ecosystem was first starting to take hold,” Babcock said. “This genus of the species we discovered shows the evolutionary transition from being a ‘mat-sticker’ to the more advanced condition of attaching to a shelly substrate, which became a successful model for later species, including some that live today.”
In the early part of the Cambrian Period—which started about 538 million years ago—echinoderms likely lived on that algae-like substance in shallow seas that covered many areas of the planet. The algae, Babcock said, probably was not unlike the cyanobacterial mats that appear in certain lakes, including Lake Erie, each summer. But at some point, those algae-like substances became appealing food for other creatures, including prehistoric snails. During the Cambrian, as the population of snails and other herbivores exploded, the algae-like cyanobacterial mats began to disappear from shallow seas, and sediments became too physically unstable to support the animals—including echinoderms—that had come to rely on them.
Once their algae-like homes became food for other animals, Babcock said, echinoderms either had to find new places to live or perish.
Paleontologists knew that the creatures had somehow managed to survive, but until the Ohio State researchers’ discovery, they hadn’t seen much evidence that an echinoderm that lived this long ago had made the move from living stuck to cyanobacterial-covered sediment to living attached to hard surfaces. 
“This evolutionary choice—to move from mat-sticker to hard shelly substrate—ultimately is responsible for giving rise to attached animals such as crinoids,” Babcock said. “This new species represents the link between the old lifestyle and the new lifestyle that became successful for this echinoderm lineage.
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Hubble Astronomers Assemble Wide View of the Evolving Universe

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Newswise —
FOR RELEASE: 10:00 a.m. (EDT) May 2, 2019
RELEASE: STScI-PR19-17
HUBBLE ASTRONOMERS ASSEMBLE WIDE VIEW OF THE EVOLVING UNIVERSE
Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive "history book" of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years' worth of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The deep-sky mosaic, created from nearly 7,500 individual exposures, provides a wide portrait of the distant universe, containing 265,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the big bang. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The universe's evolutionary history is also chronicled in this one sweeping view. The portrait shows how galaxies change over time, building themselves up to become the giant galaxies seen in the nearby universe.
This ambitious endeavor, called the Hubble Legacy Field, also combines observations taken by several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, capturing the key features of galaxy assembly over time.
"Now that we have gone wider than in previous surveys, we are harvesting many more distant galaxies in the largest such dataset ever produced by Hubble," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, leader of the team that assembled the image. "This one image contains the full history of the growth of galaxies in the universe, from their time as 'infants' to when they grew into fully-fledged 'adults.'
No image will surpass this one until future space telescopes are launched. "We've put together this mosaic as a tool to be used by us and by other astronomers," Illingworth added. "The expectation is that this survey will lead to an even more coherent, in-depth, and greater understanding of the universe's evolution in the coming years."
The image yields a huge catalog of distant galaxies. "Such exquisite high-resolution measurements of the numerous galaxies in this catalog enable a wide swath of extragalactic study," said catalog lead researcher Katherine Whitaker of the University of Connecticut, in Storrs. "Often, these kinds of surveys have yielded unanticipated discoveries which have had the greatest impact on our understanding of galaxy evolution."
Galaxies are the "markers of space," as astronomer Edwin Hubble once described them a century ago. Galaxies allow astronomers to trace the expansion of the universe, offer clues to the underlying physics of the cosmos, show when the chemical elements originated, and enable the conditions that eventually led to the appearance of our solar system and life.
This wider view contains about 30 times as many galaxies as in the previous deep fields. The new portrait, a mosaic of multiple snapshots, covers almost the width of the full Moon. The XDF, which penetrated deeper into space than this wider view, lies in this region, but it covers less than one-tenth of the full Moon's diameter. The Legacy Field also uncovers a zoo of unusual objects. Many of them are the remnants of galactic "train wrecks," a time in the early universe when small, young galaxies collided and merged with other galaxies.
Assembling all of the observations was an immense task. The image comprises the collective work of 31 Hubble programs by different teams of astronomers. Hubble has spent more time on this tiny area than on any other region of the sky, totaling more than 250 days, representing nearly three-quarters of a year.
"Our goal was to assemble all 16 years of exposures into a legacy image," explained Dan Magee, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the team's data processing lead. "Previously, most of these exposures had not been put together in a consistent way that can be used by any researcher. Astronomers can select the data in the Legacy Field they want and work with it immediately, as opposed to having to perform a huge amount of data reduction before conducting scientific analysis."
The image, along with the individual exposures that make up the new view, is available to the worldwide astronomical community through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). MAST, an online database of astronomical data from Hubble and other NASA missions, is located at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Hubble Space Telescope has come a long way in taking ever deeper "core samples" of the distant universe. After Hubble's launch in 1990, astronomers debated if it was worth spending a chunk of the telescope's time to go on a "fishing expedition" to take a very long exposure of a small, seemingly blank piece of sky. The resulting Hubble Deep Field image in 1995 captured several thousand unseen galaxies in one pointing. The bold effort was a landmark demonstration and a defining proof-of-concept that set the stage for future deep field images. In 2002, Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys went even deeper to uncover 10,000 galaxies in a single snapshot. Astronomers used exposures taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), installed in 2009, to assemble the eXtreme Deep Field snapshot in 2012. Unlike previous Hubble cameras, the telescope's WFC3 covers a broader wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared.
This new image mosaic is the first in a series of Hubble Legacy Field images. The team is working on a second set of images, totaling more than 5,200 Hubble exposures, in another area of the sky. In the future, astronomers hope to broaden the multiwavelength range in the legacy images to include longer-wavelength infrared data and high-energy X-ray observations from two other NASA Great Observatories, the Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The vast number of galaxies in the Legacy Field image are also prime targets for future telescopes. "This will really set the stage for NASA's planned Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST)," Illingworth said. "The Legacy Field is a pathfinder for WFIRST, which will capture an image that is 100 times larger than a typical Hubble photo. In just three weeks' worth of observations by WFIRST, astronomers will be able to assemble a field that is much deeper and more than twice as large as the Hubble Legacy Field."
In addition, NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will allow astronomers to push much deeper into the legacy field to reveal how the infant galaxies actually grew. Webb's infrared coverage will go beyond the limits of Hubble and Spitzer to help astronomers identify the first galaxies in the universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
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Blood Pressure Drug Shows No Benefit in Parkinson’s Disease

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Newswise — PHILADELPHIA – A study of a blood pressure drug does not show any benefit for people with Parkinson’s disease, according to findings released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 71st Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, May 4 to 10, 2019.
The drug isradipine had shown promise in small, early studies and hopes were high that this could be the first drug to slow the progression of the disease.
“Unfortunately, the people who were taking isradipine did not have any difference in their Parkinson’s symptoms over the three years of the study compared to the people who took a placebo,” said study author Tanya Simuni, MD,  of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.
The phase 3 study involved 336 people with early Parkinson’s disease at 54 sites in the US and Canada as part of the Parkinson Study Group. Half of the participants received 10 milligrams daily of isradipine for three years, while the other half received a placebo.
The drug had shown promise in animal studies, and a phase 2 study in humans did not show any safety concerns. Researchers became interested in the drug when the observation was made that use of the drug for high blood pressure was associated with a lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.
“Of course, this is disappointing news for everyone with Parkinson’s disease and their families, as well as the research community,” Simuni said. “However, negative results are important because they provide a clear answer, especially for the drug that is commercially available. We will all continue to work to find a treatment that can slow down or even cure this disease.”
The study was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Some biosample collection and the preceding phase 2 study were funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.                           
Learn more about Parkinson’s disease at BrainandLife.org, home of the American Academy of Neurology’s free patient and caregiver magazine focused on the intersection of neurologic disease and brain health. Follow Brain & Life® on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The American Academy of Neurology is the world’s largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, with more than 36,000 members. The AAN is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, concussion, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy
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