Maybe they should have kept this story zipped up

I'm all for a free press but there's probably a bit too much information on gulfnews.com about the painful "zipper trauma" suffered by a six-year old boy in Dubai - complete with a big picture of the offending zip.

Doctor's libel nightmare ends as company closes

Index on Censorship reports that NMT Medical, the US company which pursued cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst in the London libel courts for almost four years, has announced that it is ceasing operations and selling off its assets.

Dr Wilmshurst has been fighting since 2007 to defend his comments about a clinical trial of a heart device manufactured by NMT Medical. Losing the case could have meant he lost his house.

It is one of the cases that has been used to highlight the need for the libel laws in the UK to be reformed.

Index says: "This news of NMT’s closure comes just weeks after Wilmshurst discovered he was facing a fourth libel suit over an interview he gave to BBC Radio 4 Today Programme piece on the chilling effects of England’s libel laws on medical science."

Wilmshurt told Index on Censorship: “It is good news that it seems that my libel case may now be over. However it has cost me all my free time for the last three and a half years. It has also cost hundreds of thousands of my own money and about £200,000 on the conditional fee agreement with my lawyers, Mark Lewis and Alastair Wilson QC. Now that NMT have gone into liquidation, we are uncertain how much of the money we will get back. There will be no compensation for the enormous amount of time my family and I have wasted in fighting the case.”

Solicitor Mark Lewis commented: “It looks like the nightmare is nearly over. After 4 years NMT looks to have gone out of business. Poor Dr Wilmshurst. The continual deployment of the libel laws to stop scientific discussion seems to be over. Peter Wilmshurst and his family enter the normal world blinking from the bright light of a case that is over.”

• Peter Wilmshurst: Changing the experience of being sued and the impact on science and medical research (from the Reframing Libel Conference at City University)
  

Times goes blankety blank over privacy gags: Telegraph on 'worldwide' ban on naming tv star

The Times today blanks out parts of its story - both in print and online - on the latest privacy injunction granted to a football star to emphasise what readers are not allowed to know.

While the Telegraph reports that an unprecedented worldwide privacy order has been imposed to stop the media reporting on a tv star's private life - even online.

It says: "A Premier League footballer won a legal gag yesterday against a topless model, preventing her from revealing details of their six-month affair.

"The married sportsman, who plays for ****, is using controversial human rights laws to prevent details of his adulterous relationship from being made public.

"The secrecy orders override the traditional principle of open justice in favour of the right to privacy or to prevent the risk of harm to family members who may be embarrassed by the revelations.

"Politicians had pledged that human rights laws would not be used by the courts to introduce a legal right to privacy behind the back of Parliament.

"**** had been accused of having a six-month affair with Imogen Thomas, a glamour model who has appeared as a housemate in Channel 4’s Big Brother."

The Telegraph reports: "A High Court judge has issued an unprecedented gagging order in an attempt to prevent details of a television star’s private life being published, even on the internet.

"Mr Justice Eady, who has been at the centre of most recent controversial libel and privacy cases, made the injunction "against the world" rather than just against national newspapers and broadcasters.

"His order seeks to prevent the publication of “intimate photographs” of a married public figure after a woman tried to sell them for a “large sum of money". The judge said the woman “owed” the claimant, identified only as OPQ, a “duty of confidence” and breaching his privacy would damage the health of the man and his family.

"His order is intended to cover discussion of the case online as well as in traditional media, despite the difficulties in enforcing it. The injunction contra mundum is intended to be never-ending and, as its Latin name suggests, applies to the entire world."

The Telegraph adds: "It is understood that it is the first time that such an order has been granted in a privacy case. They were issued on personal safety grounds in the cases of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who murdered James Bulger; the child killer Mary Bell, and Maxine Carr, the former girlfriend of the Soham killer Ian Huntley.

"The ruling takes secrecy laws to a new level, marking a further advance in the steps the courts are prepared to take to protect high-profile figures and to restrict the right to freedom of expression."

MacKenzie tells Sun readers: 'Journalists know who is protected by injunctions but you don't'

Kelin MacKenzie tells readers of the Sun today that while he and "most media folk" know the names of the public figures protected by privacy injunctions the public don't.

He says: "There is currently a dangerous two track-society.

"There are those that know and I'm one of them. And there are those that are denied knowing and that's you, dear reader."

He suggests that somebody could set up a site in America to run all the names and allegations against the people the courts are protecting and the High Court couldn't touch them.

In a blast at the judges, Mackezie says: "There is a state in America that has a phrase summing up its attitude. It says: Live free or die.

"The High Court and its silk panty-wearing judges - hiding their own sexual peculiarities - have torn up the phrase.

"I despise them."

The Sun has a full page rundown on all the privacy injunctions granted to public figures under the headline: 'Doesn't it make you gag.'

They include a famous actor, tv star, top footballers, a soccer manager, various sportsmen and a tv journalist.

The latest injunction, according to the Sun is a married entertainer who has cheated on his wife with an actress and has left the show they both appeared in.

The Sun says: "Hypocritical showbiz stars, sports idols and high-profile public figures lap up positive publicity. And they often cash in on their popularity and wholesome image with mega salaries and huge fees from companies whose products they endorse.

"But when they misbehave and things turn sour, they go for the gag in order to protect false impressions - and their massive incomes."

Two photojournalists killed covering war in Libya

British photojournalist Tim Hetherington (pictured), an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and photographer, is reported to have been killed in the city of Misrata while covering fighting between Gaddafi's forces and Libyan rebels in a rocket-propelled grenade attack.

Chris Hondros, a US Pulitzer Prize-nominated photojournalist, was also killed in the attack in Misrata, and British photographer Guy Martin injured.

Born in Liverpool in 1970, Hetherington, 40, was nominated for an Oscar this year for Restrepo, a documentary film he made with the journalist Sebastian Junger about soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan. He also won World Press Photo in 2008 with a still image from the same location in Afghanistan, shot while on assignment for Vanity Fair.

Hondros was based in New York for Getty Images and had covered conflict zones since the late 1990s including Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Martin, who was working with Panos Pictures agency, was hit by shrapnel and is being treated at a hospital in Misrata. New York-based photographer Michael Christopher Brown was also treated for shrapnel injuries.

Joel Simon, executive director of the Committeee to Protect Journalists, said: " Our hearts go out to family, friends, and colleagues of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, whose work in some of the world's most dangerous places has had a profound impact on how we understand and perceive war. Their deaths are another illustration of war's cruelty and a reminder of how devastatingly difficult coverage of the Libyan conflict has become."

According to the CPJ, two other journalists have been killed this year in the Libyan conflict. An unknown gunman killed Mohammed al-Nabbous, founder of the online Libya Al-Hurra TV, as the journalist was streaming live audio from a battle in Benghazi on March 19. Cameraman Ali Hassan al-Jaber was shot when his Al-Jazeera crew was ambushed near Benghazi on March 13.

CPJ has documented more than 80 attacks on the press since political unrest erupted in Libya in February. They include the fatalities, numerous injuries, 49 detentions, 11 assaults, two attacks on news facilities, the jamming of two international television transmissions, at least four instances of obstruction, the expulsion of two international journalists, and the interruption of Internet service. At least six local journalists are missing amid speculation they are in the custody of security forces. One international journalist and two media support workers are also unaccounted for.

• Hetherington family statement

• Tribute to Tim Hetherington on the Documentary Blog

• A photo by Chris Hondros ran on the front page of the Washington Post yesterday.

A good day to bury news: Strikers stage mock funeral of titles in editorial quality dispute

A mock funeral for the newspapers at the centre of a dispute about editorial quality took place in the centre of Enfield today.

Nine NUJ members on strike at North London & Herts Newspapers organised the funeral to highlight staff shortages which they claim are harming the quality of their newspapers and could lead to them going out of business.

Led by NUJ FoC Jonathan Lovett, dressed as a priest, the journalists and their supporters carried a coffin with the names of some of their newspaper titles, which include the Enfield Advertiser, Enfield Gazette, Haringey Advertiser and Barnet Press, written on the side.

Lovett urged members of the public to write to the newspapers' owner, Sir Ray Tindle, to back their call for more staff. He said the journalists would end their action if they were given one more reporter and guarantees that staff would be replaced.

Lovett added: "This feels like the last stand for quality journalism in the borough. We've got just three reporters putting out nine newspapers. The strike was a last option."

NUJ head of publishing Barry Fitzpatrick told "mourners" the strike was "proof that journalists care". He said: "This is the frontline in a battle going on throughout the regional press."

Tindle Newspapers say the North London newspapers are losing money and being subsidised by the rest of the group. The strikers were warned in letters on the eve of the action that their newspapers may face reorganisation and there could be redundancies.

Pic: NUJ FoC Jonathan Lovett, dressed as a priest, leads the mock funeral through Enfield. (Jon Slattery)

Is this the most draconian media injunction yet?

Political blogger Anna Raccoon is describing an injunction issued by the Court of Protection, which acts to protect vulnerable people, as "the most draconian injunction so far issued by any court" because it stops the news media contacting 65 people.

She says the injunction concerns a case in which the mother of a a 53 year old woman, known as 'M', who is in a ‘minimal’ conscious state, has applied to the court for permission to allow her daughter to die.

Anna Raccoon states that rather than contenting themselves with the usual demand that no party may be named or identified, the court has issued an injunction which prevents any news organisation from contacting 65 different witnesses connected with the case or from communicating with M or with any of the 65 people listed, "whether orally in person, or by telephoning, text message, email or other means."

She adds: "It is the most draconian injunction so far issued by any court.

"It now means that the understandable secrecy which is attached to court proceedings regarding vulnerable people who are in no position to give informed consent to publicity – has been extended to 65 members of the public, and journalists risk imprisonment if they breach the injunction.

"It is a quite breathtaking extension of their remit."

• The Telegraph has a full report on the injunction. It says, under its terms, reporters also risk being fined or jailed if they come within 164ft (50 metres) of any one of four properties listed in the injunction. It adds: "Legal experts said they had never seen the press restricted in such a way, in powers usually used to protect vulnerable women from ex-partners or keep animal rights protesters away from scientists."

• The Sun says today that a married actor has obtained an injunction to stop the paper naming him in a story about his alleged fling with a co-star. According to the Sun, the actor told the court that naming him would harm his teenage children. It is the latest in a string of privacy injunctions granted to actors, celebrities and sports stars to stop the tabloid press writing about their private life.