Associated Press

Plucking the already tense string that binds new media and old, the Associated Press announced an initiative Monday to protect online versions of its news content from what it called "misappropriation" by a variety of online news outlets. At its annual meeting in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton said the news syndicate would pursue "legal and legislative remedies" against entities that it believes are unfairly borrowing its content.

The Los Angeles Times was among five newspapers in the over-250,000 circulation category to win a Triple Crown -- earning top-10 recognition for its daily, Sunday and special sections -- in the annual Associated Press Sports Editors writing and section contests that ended Wednesday. Times reporters earned six acknowledgments, giving the newspaper an industry-high nine top-10 finishes overall.

The Associated Press announced Thursday that lower-division schools are now eligible for its 71-year-old poll. Several AP voters expressed interest in putting Appalachian State on their ballots after a shocking 34-32 upset at then-No. 5 Michigan. But the poll guidelines, which mirrored the coaches' rankings conducted by USA Today, limited eligibility to teams competing in the former NCAA Division I-A, now known as the Football Bowl Subdivision.

The U.S. military has decided to turn over an Associated Press photographer to an Iraqi court for criminal prosecution, accusing him of having links to terrorist groups operating inside Iraq. The photographer, Iraq native Bilal Hussein, was taken into custody by U.S. troops in Ramadi 19 months ago and has been detained ever since.

An Associated Press correspondent left Ethiopia Sunday under an expulsion order after the government called his reporting "hostile" to its interests. The Ethiopian government in recent weeks has cracked down on other journalists. Independent writers and editors were among 129 people arrested in November and December and charged with treason, genocide and other offenses.

The Pentagon defended its months-long detention of an Associated Press photographer in Iraq, saying it has authority to hold him indefinitely without charges because it believes he had improper ties to insurgents. But journalism organizations said that covering all sides in the Iraq war sometimes requires contacts with insurgents. They called on the Pentagon to either bring charges against photographer Bilal Hussein so he can defend himself or release him.

A widely watched court case about fair use, based on artist Shepard Fairey's claim that he had the right to use a news photo to create his Barack Obama "Hope" poster, now appears to have nearly collapsed. His attorneys -- led by Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University -- said that they would withdraw from the case and that the artist had misled them by fabricating information and destroying other material. Fairey, 39, a Los Angeles-based street artist with a long, often proud history of breaking rules, admitted that he didn't use the Associated Press photo of Obama seated next to actor George Clooney he originally said his work was based on -- which he contended would have been covered under "fair use," the legal claim that allows exceptions to using copyrighted work without having to pay for it. Instead he used a picture the AP has maintained was his source -- a solo photo of the future president that is seemingly closer to Fairey's red, white and blue image of Obama, with the caption "HOPE."

The Associated Press is trying to back out of an old media-new media fight that it didn't quite mean to pick. The 162-year-old news service will sit down with representatives of a bloggers group Thursday to devise guidelines allowing Internet commentators to use excerpts from AP stories and broadcasts. The AP provoked outrage in the blogosphere last week when it issued a blunt legal demand that the Drudge Retort, a small online news and commentary site, remove seven posts containing snippets -- all less than 80 words long -- from AP stories.

The Associated Press is digitizing and has begun to release a "treasure trove" of historical film footage from the 1960s and '70s that had been sitting in Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's former World War II headquarters in London. The archive includes color film recordings of a young Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi immediately after taking power, Richard Nixon with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro meeting Latin American and Eastern European leaders, as well as a young Saddam Hussein in Paris.

Former Associated Press freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, whose 2006 image of Barack Obama inspired Shepard Fairey's famous "Hope" election poster, sued the news company and the artist for copyright violations. In papers filed Thursday in New York federal court, Garcia said the AP fraudulently won a copyright for the photograph, while Fairey illegally used the image on his red, white and blue poster and is profiting from sales of related goods. The new claims were made in Fairey's pending lawsuit against the AP.