With the release in April of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who was cleared of all charges after two years in jail, we might have hoped that the US military would have been more careful in the future. But news came yesterday of another photographer, who freelances for Reuters, being detained.

Ibrahim Jassam was arrested on Tuesday morning after his house was raided in Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad. An US military spokesman Lt. Patrick Evans told Reuters that Jassam was detained because he was 'assessed to be a threat' to Iraq and coalition forces. Read our full story here.

As Reporters Without Borders says 'possessing a camera or a film camera seems to be taken as evidence that some journalists are involved in terrorist networks'. That last quote could easily be applied to countries other than Iraq. The UK springs to mind.

The number of embedded reporters in Iraq has hit an all-time low, CNSNews.com has found.

'There were just 39 embedded reporters covering Iraq in September 2008 compared to 219 in September 2007, a decline of 82 percent,' the organisation says. 'The drop in the number of reporters appears to coincide with the success of the U.S. strategy in the country.'

Has the Iraq story fallen off the radar of news organisations? Christoph Bangert, who spent more than nine months in Iraq freelancing for The New York Times and working on his latest book Iraq: The Space Between, told BJP in a previous interview that a lot of things still happen in Iraq, but 'there are too few photographers there to capture it. There are no freelancers, because they cannot afford the security. Only the New York Times, Time or photo agencies send in photographers. Newspapers all want great pictures, but they don't want to spend the money to send somebody there to supply them.'

Some photographers continue to go back. Russian Yuri Kozyrev is back in Iraq for the US elections. 'Iraq is still at the top of news,' he told BJP. 'It's still the main story.'

But is it? The economy, and to a lesser extent, the war in Afghanistan seem to have taken over the news agenda. Does that mean that the Iraq war is over? It appears unlikely, especially since the current Iraqi government seems reticent to approve a security deal with the US. And, the upcoming Iraqi elections might even bring back sectarian sentiments that have been at the centre of the violence in the years preceding the US surge. Surely, if the security takes a turn for the worse, reporters and photographers will flock back to Iraq.

Thousands of commuters in New York City were greeted with a free copy of what appeared to be the New York Times on Wednesday morning, only to find it dated 04 July 2009 and bearing the headline ‘IRAQ WAR ENDS’.

Fronting a photograph of Apache helicopters in flight, the spoof newspaper carried articles ‘reporting’ the indictment of President Bush for high treason, the nationalisation of major oil companies and the introduction of a maximum wage.

The bona fide New York Times notes that an anonymous email statement was circulated to the news media regarding the spoof and included claims that it had taken six months in preparation and had achieved a distribution figure of 1.2 million. The latter is dubious to say the least, given that it’s greater than the real newspaper’s own figures.

The Guardian reports that a group of leftwing activists called the Yes Men were responsible for the distribution of the fake NYT, while it had been funded by a number of wealthy donors and written by journalists from a variety of New York newspapers.

The photographs used in the publication, however, appear to be genuine and featured legitimately, having apparently been sourced either from the photographic skills of the pranksters themselves or through free distribution from various organisations.

You can view a website for the elaborately conceived spoof here – complete with fake adverts for many global companies.