Fighting for quality news media in the digital age.
Ziff Davis sues OpenAI while The Washington Post signs.
By Charlotte Tobitt
A small number of news publishers have followed in the footsteps of The New York Times to sue OpenAI and other AI companies over the unauthorised use of their content.
However many more now have signed deals with the AI companies which commonly include the use of their content as reference points for user queries in tools like ChatGPT (with citation back to their websites currently promised) as well as giving them the use of the tech to build their own products.
As of 29 May 2025, The New York Times has now signed its first AI licensing agreement – with Amazon.
The news publishers suing AI platforms are (scroll down or click to see more information about each):
The news publishers/organisations that have signed deals with AI companies (scroll down or click for full information):
This page will be updated when new deals are struck or legal actions are launched relating to news publishers and AI companies (scroll down for the latest: Google first with AP, AFP signs with French AI company Mistral, and Axios expands local newsrooms as part of OpenAI deal).
OpenAI has reportedly offered news organisations between $1m and $5m per year to license their copyrighted content to train its models – although News Corp’s deal is reportedly worth more than $250m over five years.
Meanwhile Apple has reportedly been exploring AI deals with the likes of Conde Nast, NBC News and People and Daily Beast owner IAC to license their content archives, but nothing has yet been made public.
Plenty of other news organisations are understood to be in negotiations with OpenAI while some, including the publisher of Mail Online, have suggested they are seriously considering their options legally.
But not all publishers want deals: Reach chief executive Jim Mullen told investors on 5 March last year that the UK’s largest commercial publisher is not in any “active discussions” with AI companies and suggested other publishers should hold off on deals to allow the industry to come at the issue with a position of solidarity.
He said: “We would prefer that we don’t get into a situation where we did with the referrers ten years ago and gave them access and we became hooked on this referral traffic and we would like it to be more structured. We produce content, which is really valuable, and we would like to license or agree how they use our base intelligence to actually inform the AI and the open markets. The challenge we have as an industry is that we need to be unified.
“I used to be the chairman of the NMA and if we stay together and work with it, then that’s a really strong position that we have, particularly with the Government to help us get to there. So I’m using this as a bit of a campaign, [it] only takes one publisher to break away and start doing deals and then it sort of disintegrates.”
Press Gazette analysis in February last year found that more than four in ten of the 100 biggest English-language news websites have decided not to block AI bots from the likes of OpenAI and Google.
If you feel there is something missing that should be included, or you want to alert us to a new development, please contact charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.
25 April 2025: US-based online publisher Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI for “intentionally and relentlessly” using its copyrighted content.
The lawsuit says: “OpenAI seeks to move fast and break things on the assumption that the federal courts will not be able to effectively redress content owners’ sometimes existential concerns before it is too late.”
Ziff Davis publishes tech brands like CNET, PCMag and ZDNet, gaming and entertainment titles like IGN and Eurogamer, and health/lifestyle brands like The Skimm and Everyday Health.
OpenAI said in response that its models “empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use”.
13 February 2025: A collection of news and magazine publishers who are members of the US News/Media Alliance have filed a copyright suit against Canadian AI start-up Cohere Inc.
The publishers involved are: Advance Local Media, Conde Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Business Insider, LA Times, McClatchy Media Company, Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, Politico, The Republican Company, Toronto Star Newspapers, and Vox Media.
They say Cohere “engaged in widespread unauthorised use of publisher content in developing and running its generative AI systems” in a complaint that lists 4,000 articles allegedly used for training and to surface real-time content.
They claim Cohere copies publisher content even when it is behind a paywall or when a website has blocked its bot from scraping. They also say Cohere’s products provide users with “verbatim regurgitations and substitutional summaries” of publishers’ original news content.
When publisher content is not copied, they say, the chatbot produces “damaging hallucinations” and even fake pieces under publishers’ names.
News/Media Alliance president and chief executive Danielle Coffey said: “As news, magazine, and media publishers, we serve an important role in keeping society informed and supporting the free flow of information and ideas, but we cannot continue to do so if AI companies like Cohere are able to undercut our businesses while using our own content to compete with us.”
Conde Nast chief executive Roger Lynch, who last year called for “immediate action” on AI and copyright from US Congress and warned that many media companies could go out of business in the time it takes for lengthy litigation to go through the courts, said: “The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair and our many other iconic brands cannot live up to their exceptional standards if we allow their content to be stolen, distorted and trafficked. We will defend our rights fiercely and wherever they are infringed.”
And Anna Bateson, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, said, “As part of a considered approach to generative AI, the Guardian has explored and signed agreements with numerous partners to ensure fair compensation and attribution for the Guardian’s award-winning investigative journalism.
“Unfortunately, Cohere has demonstrated an egregious pattern of scraping and copying news articles to produce full verbatim copies of original content without compensation – or even worse, complete hallucinations. The Guardian is proud to stand with some of the world’s top publishers in an attempt to stop Cohere’s brazen theft and distortion of original journalism.”
28 January 2025: Several Indian news publishers are joining together in a copyright battle against OpenAI.
The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, NDTV and the Digital News Publishers Association, which represents about 20 news companies, have told a court in New Delhi they want to join a lawsuit against OpenAI first launched by local news agency ANI last year.
Reuters, which said it has seen the court filing, reported that the publishers argued OpenAI presented “a clear and present danger to the valuable copyrights” of DNPA members and other news titles through its “wilful scraping … and adaptation of content”. They also noted that OpenAI has entered into partnership deals with news publishers elsewhere but none in India.
Not all DNPA members want to take part, with The Times of India specifically cited.
OpenAI has previously argued in the ANI case that Indian judges have no jurisdiction to hear the case as its servers are located elsewhere, and that an order to delete training data would be in violation of its obligations in the US.
29 November 2024: A coalition of major Canadian news publishers, including CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia and the Canadian Press, have joined together to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.
The publishers said in a statement: “News media companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars into reporting Canadians’ critical stories, undertaking investigations and original reporting, and distributing media in both official languages in every province and territory across this country. The content that Canadian news media companies produce is fact-checked, sourced and reliable, producing trusted news and information by, for, and about Canadians. This requires significant investment, and the content produced by news media companies is protected by copyright.
“News media companies welcome technological innovations. However, all participants must follow the law, and any use of intellectual property must be on fair terms.
“OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swaths of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT. OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners.
“OpenAI’s public statements that it is somehow fair or in the public interest for them to use other companies’ intellectual property for their own commercial gain is wrong. Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.
“This claim seeks to address this inappropriate and illegal use of Canadian content, and enforce Canadian laws.”
OpenAI told the BBC in response that its models are “trained on publicly available data” and “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.
21 October 2024: The News Corp subsidiaries that publish the Wall Street Journal and New York Post have filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against AI upstart Perplexity, which they accuse of “massive freeriding”.
The publisher is seeking massive damages and the removal of its content from Perplexity’s web index and wants its case heard at a jury trial.
News Corp has separately signed a deal with OpenAI (see below for more information). It is the first to sue Perplexity though other publishers including The New York Times have sent the AI company cease and desist letters.
Read the full story here.
19 July 2024: UK parenting forum and publisher Mumsnet has launched legal action via an initial letter against OpenAI over the scraping of its site and its more than six billion words – “presumably” for the training of large language model ChatGPT.
Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts told users: “Such scraping without permission is an explicit breach of our terms of use, which clearly state that no part of the site may be distributed, scraped or copied for any purpose without our express approval. So we approached Open AI and suggested they might like to licence our content.”
In particular, she said, Mumsnet’s content would be valuable because it could help to counter the misogyny “baked in” to many AI models.
But, she continued: “Their response was that they were more interested in datasets that are not easily accessible online.”
Roberts said what OpenAI differs from Google’s scraping of the web for search purposes because there is a “clear value exchange in allowing Google to access that data, namely the resulting search traffic… The LLMs are building models like ChatGPT to provide the answers to any and all prospective questions that will mean we’ll no longer need to go elsewhere for solutions. And they’re building those models with scraped content from the websites they are poised to replace.”
Roberts continued: “At Mumsnet we’re in a stronger position than most because much of our traffic comes to us direct and though it’s a piece of cake for an LLM to spit out a Mumsnet-style answer to a parenting question I doubt they’ll ever be as funny about parking wars or as honest about relationships and they’ll certainly never provide the emotional support that sees around a thousand women a year helped to leave abusive partners by other Mumsnet users.
“But if these trillion-dollar giants are simply allowed to pillage content from online publishers – and get away with it – they will destroy many of them.”
Roberts acknowledged it is “not an easy task” to go up against a big tech company like OpenAI but said “this is too important an issue to simply roll over”.
Responses from users on the forum contained a lot of “well done” and “good luck”.
28 June 2024: Non-profit news organisation The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones (after a merger this year) and Reveal, is suing OpenAI and its largest shareholder Microsoft.
It said the companies had used its content “without permission or offering compensation” and accused them of “exploitative practices” in a lawsuit filed in New York.
Chief executive Monika Bauerlein said: “OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material.
“This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.”
She added: “For-profit corporations like OpenAI and Microsoft can’t simply treat the work of nonprofit and independent publishers as free raw material for their products.
“If this practice isn’t stopped, the public’s access to truthful information will be limited to AI-generated summaries of a disappearing news landscape.”
30 April 2024: Eight daily newspapers in the US owned by Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI and Microsoft.
The newspapers involved in the lawsuit are: the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Sun-Sentinel in Florida, the Mercury News in San Jose, the Denver Post, the Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The lawsuit says the newspapers want recognition that they have a legal right over their content and compensation for the use of it in the training of AI tools so far.
Frank Pine, executive editor of Media News Group and Tribune Publishing Newspapers, the Alden subsidiaries that own the newspapers concerned, said: “We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense.
“They pay their engineers and programmers, they pay for servers and processors, they pay for electricity, and they definitely get paid from their astronomical valuations, but they don’t want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all. That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair. It needs to stop.

“The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing purloined content and delivering it to their users.

“Even worse, when they’re not delivering the actual verbatim reporting of our hard-working journalists, they misattribute bogus information to our news publications, damaging our credibility. We employ professional journalists who adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. They are real people who go out into the world to conduct first-hand interviews and engage in actual investigations to produce our journalism.
“Their work is vetted and checked by professional editors. The Mercury News has never recommended injecting disinfectants to treat COVID, and the Denver Post did not publish research that shows smoking cures asthma. These and other ChatGPT hallucinations are documented in our legal filings.”
28 February 2024: Three US progressive news and politics digital outlets filed lawsuits against OpenAI.
The Intercept, Raw Story and Alter Net objected to the use of their articles to train ChatGPT. The Intercept also sued Microsoft, which has partnered with OpenAI to create a Bing chatbot.
Raw Story publisher Roxanne Cooper said: “Raw Story’s copyright-protected journalism is the result of significant efforts of human journalists who report the news. Rather than license that work, OpenAI taught ChatGPT to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide its use of copyright-protected material.”
CEO and founder John Byrne added: “It is time that news organisations fight back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetise other people’s work.”
27 December 2023: The most high-profile case against OpenAI and Microsoft from a news publisher so far, The New York Times made a surprise announcement in the days after Christmas that it would seek damages, restitution and costs as well as the destruction of all large language models (LLMs) trained on its content.
OpenAI and NYT had been in negotiations for nine months but the news organisation felt no resolution was forthcoming and decided instead to share its concerns over the use of its intellectual property publicly. The success of the lawsuit will depend on the US court’s interpretation of “fair use” in copyright law – assuming the companies don’t find their way to a settlement first.
OpenAI previously said a “high-value partnership around real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT” was on the cards with the NYT before the news organisation surprised it by launching the lawsuit.
The NYT said the two tech companies, which have a partnership centred around ChatGPT and Bing, have “reaped substantial savings by taking and using – at no cost” its content to create their models without paying for a licence. It added that the use of its content in chatbots “threatens to divert readers, including current and potential subscribers, away from The Times, thereby reducing the subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate revenues that fund The Times’s ability to continue producing its current level of groundbreaking journalism”.
In its response, filed on Monday 26 February, OpenAI argued: “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product” to substitute for a NYT subscription. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”
OpenAI accused the NYT of paying someone to hack its products and taking “tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results” in which verbatim paragraphs from articles were spat out by ChatGPT. “They were able to do so only by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” it said.
“And even then, they had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages of, virtually all of which already appear on multiple public websites. Normal people do not use OpenAI’s products in this way.”
17 January 2023: Getty Images began legal proceedings against Stability AI in the UK in January 2023, claiming that the AI image company “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of its copyrighted images without a licence through its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
In December, the High Court in London ruled that Getty’s case could go to trial after Stability AI failed to persuade a judge that two aspects of the claim – relating to training and development as well as copyright – should be struck out.
Mrs Justice Joanna Smith said Getty’s claim has a “real prospect of success” in relation to Stable Diffusion’s “image-to-image feature” which the photo agency claimed allows users to make “essentially identical copies of copyright works”.
6 June 2025: More than 500 publications have signed partnerships with Prorata.ai, which said the deals have given its AI search engine Gist.ai one of the largest generative AI licensed content libraries.
Publishers involved include: The Atlantic, Fast Company, Fortune, Time, Boston Globe, New York Magazine, The Verge, Vox, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, Daily Mail, Sky News, Newsday, Tom’s Guide and Who What Wear owner Future, and Australia’s Man of Many.
Prorata.ai chief executive Bill Gross said: “Publishers everywhere are rallying behind ProRata because we prove that generative AI can both honour creators and deliver an outstanding user experience.
“Gist.ai answers every query using 100% licensed content so consumers get authoritative, accurate answers and publishers share in the value their important journalism creates – all made possible by our state-of-the-art attribution technologies.”
Prorata has a proprietary algorithm to analyse its AI output to “measure the value” of the sources used and allocate them proportional compensation.
Pauline Frommer, co-president of travel publisher Frommer Media, said: “AI driven search does not have to be based on theft; publishers can, and should, be compensated for the use of their copyrighted material… No machine can sleep in a hotel bed to review a property, eat at a restaurant, or explore a new museum, amusement park, or monument.
“These tasks, and the writing that comes from them, will remain the work of human journalists, and compensation for that work is necessary for it to continue. Prorata provides a path forward for travel journalism, and, frankly, all journalism.”
29 May 2025: Amazon has signed a deal to license New York Times, NYT Cooking and The Athletic editorial content for AI-related use.
This includes real-time display of summaries and short excerpts of content within Amazon products and services like voice assistant Alexa, as well as training Amazon’s own AI models.
The New York Times said the deal, its first AI licensing agreement, would make its content more accessible to Amazon customers with direct links to its products.
New York Times chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien said in a note to staff: “The deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for.
“It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”
22 April 2025: The Washington Post is the latest to sign a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI, giving the tech company permission to display summaries, quotes and links to its journalism in response to ChatGPT search queries with “clear attribution”.
Peter Elkins-Williams, head of global partnerships at The Washington Post, said: “We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are.
“Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it.”
The title said it is still building its own AI tools for which it is “LLM-agnostic”.
8 April 2025: Shutterstock is allowing AI video platform Synthesia to research ways of training on its content library.
Synthesia said it is “pre-training” for its upcoming EXPRESS-2 model which will create AI avatars.
Its R&D team has access to Shutterstock’s video library through a research licence, which may later be extended into a commercial licence.
Synthesia said: “Building a large AI model involves a lot of research-focused experimentation before it can be put into production. Since last year, we’ve been testing various approaches and architectures for pre-training EXPRESS-2, our second foray into building a large video and audio model for our platform.
“During the pre-training phase, models require access to a wide variety of data so that they learn general aspects about the world. In our case, we need to show EXPRESS-2 enough human performances so it can reproduce natural and realistic behaviors, movements and expressions, such as delivering a script in the appropriate tone and with the correct facial expressions and body language movements.”
26 March 2025: US news publisher trade association News/Media Alliance has announced an agreement through which its members can opt into a content licence with revenue-sharing AI tech solution Prorata.
Some News/Media Alliance members have already signed up as content partners with Prorata, including McClatchy, The Atlantic and the MIT Technology Review, and the trade body said it expected more to take advantage and follow suit.
Prorata identifies when publisher content is used in generative AI answers in its Gist.AI product and will pay those publishers 50% of revenues driven by those responses.
The News/Media Alliance said: “By offering technology companies the opportunity to reach multiple publishers at once, the Alliance hopes to make it easier for AI companies to reduce transaction costs and responsibly source their content.”
14 February 2025: The Guardian has signed a deal with OpenAI giving it compensation for the use of its journalism on ChatGPT in short summaries and article extracts, with proper credit.
The Guardian will also be able to use OpenAI technology in-house to develop new products and features.
Guardian chief financial and operating officer Keith Underwood said: “This new partnership with OpenAI reflects the intellectual property rights and value associated with our award-winning journalism, expanding our reach and impact to new audiences and innovative platform services.”
Read the full Press Gazette story here.
12 February 2025: Nordic news publisher Schibsted Media has signed a deal with OpenAI allowing the tech giant to integrate real-time news articles from some of its newsbrands into products like ChatGPT.
The articles, from newsbrands including VG and Aftenposten in Norway and Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden, will be used to provide up-to-date news summaries and be clearly attributed in the responses.
Schibsted Media chief executive Siv Juvik Tveitnes said: “This partnership is part of Schibsted Media’s broader efforts to integrate AI in ways that support and strengthen journalism.
“By combining our editorial expertise with OpenAI’s technology and insights, we continue adapting to ensure that journalism evolves alongside technological advancements.”
She added: “As AI-powered platforms increasingly influence how people search for and interact with information, this partnership allows us to explore new commercial opportunities in the evolving digital ecosystem.
“By engaging early, we position ourselves to better understand and help shape how high-quality journalism can be distributed, monetised, and sustained in AI-driven environments.”
She said the OpenAI agreement will lead to additional resources earmarked for innovation and AI development, as well as the ability to “gather insights on productivity gains and audience engagement based upon real-time data”, so Schibsted newsrooms can optimise their use of AI.
Schibsted has already used AI to boost audience engagement by developing AI-generated audio articles, article summaries and a chatbot for Aftonbladet which answered more than 600,000 reader questions about the US presidential election.
16 January 2025: French AI company Mistral has done a multi-year global deal with AFP, giving its AI assistant Le Chat access to the news agency’s full output of text stories in six languages.
The companies said the partnership “aims to strengthen the accuracy and relevance of Le Chat’s answers” by making them “more detailed, accurate, and properly sourced”.
AFP’s chairman and chief executive Fabrice Fries said the partnership means AFP “is further diversifying its revenue sources, reaching a clientele beyond the media sector and exploring new uses for its content in the daily operations of businesses.
“AFP is delighted with this first collaboration with an AI player that proudly embraces its European identity, recognising, especially in these challenging times, the value of verified, contextualised, and prioritised information.”
AFP-sourced information will be available to all Le Chat users within a few weeks.
Mistral chief executive and co-founder Arthur Mensch said: “Partnering with a globally trusted news agency like AFP allows Le Chat to offer reliable, factual, and up-to-date responses, verified by professional journalists. We believe improving the accuracy of these responses is a key step in the deployment of our technology, particularly for businesses.
“Through this partnership, we are providing our clients with a unique multicultural and multilingual alternative.”
16 January 2025: Google has done its first deal with a news publisher relating to showing up-to-date information in its Gemini chatbot.
The deal means the Associated Press will “deliver a feed of real-time information to help further enhance the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app”.
AP senior vice president and chief revenue officer Kristin Heitmann said it was a continuation of the agency’s “longstanding relationship” with Google.
“We are pleased Google recognises the value of AP’s journalism as well as our commitment to nonpartisan reporting, in the development of its generative AI products.”
15 January 2025: Axios will open four more local newsrooms using funding from OpenAI.
The new three-year deal will allow Axios to use OpenAI technology to build its own products, including helping to speed its local expansion further, with all Axios staff given use of the enterprise version of OpenAI.
It also means Axios journalism will appear in ChatGPT results with attribution and links.
Axios chief executive Jim VandeHei wrote: “Axios and OpenAI entered into the three-year agreement after deep, months-long discussions about how artificial intelligence can assist with bringing local news to more locations… We see AI as a vital part of our long-term plans — not to report stories, but to help build a system for creation, distribution and monetisation of our journalism.”
The new Axios Local newsrooms will open in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, Kansas City in Missouri, Boulder in Colorado and Huntsville, Alabama.
VandeHei said this will take Axios to 34 cities and the goal is to expand to 100 or more.
Axios will also double its Axios Local sales staff “immediately”.
OpenAI head of media partnerships Varun Shetty said: “Our partnership with Axios will help establish new operations in four cities. We’re excited to see how Axios uses our technology to support quality reporting and tackle opportunities that they, and other local news organisations, face.”
5 December 2024: Future plc has signed a deal with OpenAI, which does involve payment but is “not financially material” to the publishing company.
Future said the strategic partnership would “bring our content to Open AI’s users, creating new ways for users to engage with our content”.
5 December 2024: More than a dozen more publishers in the UK, US, Spain, Japan and Latin America have signed up to Perplexity’s revenue-sharing programme.
The publishers include Adweek, The Independent, US local publishing owner Lee Enterprises, Los Angeles Times and World History Encyclopedia.
Also involved are Newspicks and Minkabu Infonoid, the first two Japanese news publishers to sign agreements with an AI company, Spanish-language publisher Prisa Media, Mexico News Daily, RTL Germany brands Stern and NTV, as well as independent brands Blavity, DPReview, Gear Patrol and Medialab.
Perplexity said the publishers will share in revenue generated from advertising when their content is referenced in AI-generated results.
They will also have access to its APIs and developer support to build features using its proprietary search technology, access to data and analytics to track trends and content performance, and receive free Perplexity Enterprise Pro for their staff for a year.
Perplexity also said it has appointed a head of publisher partnerships, Jessica Chan who previously built Linkedin’s content partner programmes, due to the level of interest it has received from news organisations.
21 November 2024: Mail, Metro and i publisher DMG Media has invested in Prorata.ai in a deal that gives the AI start-up access to its content, including its archives.
The Guardian, Sky News and Prospect magazine have also done content deals with Prorata.
Read the full Press Gazette story here.
25 October 2024: Reuters, which has previously said it had struck a number of deals with unspecified AI companies and then signed up as a publisher partner for Microsoft’s new AI companion Copilot, has become the first news publisher to sign an AI deal with Meta.
The deal allows Meta’s AI chatbot to use real-time Reuters content to answer questions from users about news and current events, it announced on 25 October, although it will begin only in the US.
The chatbot, which appears with the search and messaging features on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger, will provide summaries and link out to Reuters which will be compensated when its work is used in this way.
Reuters already had a fact-checking partnership with the Facebook owner.
A Reuters spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Reuters has partnered with tech providers to license our trusted, fact-based news content to power their AI platforms. The terms of these deals remain confidential.”
A Meta spokesperson told Axios: “We’re always iterating and working to improve our products, and through Meta’s partnership with Reuters, Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content.
“While most people use Meta AI for creative tasks, deep dives on new topics or how-to assistance, this partnership will help ensure a more useful experience for those seeking information on current events.”
22 October 2024: OpenAI and Microsoft are distributing $10m to The Lenfest Institute for Journalism to provide five US newsrooms with a grant to each hire a fellow to work on AI projects for two years.
The newsrooms benefiting from the initial round of funding are: Chicago Public Media, Newsday in Long Island, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. Three further news organisations will receive funding in a second round.
The projects from the fellows should “focus largely on improving business sustainability and implementing AI technologies within their organisations”, Lenfest said.
OpenAI and Microsoft will also allow the publications to use their tools to experiment and develop tools to help with their local news output.
Tom Rubin, chief of intellectual property and content at OpenAI, said: “While nothing will replace the central role of reporters, we believe that AI technology can help in the research, investigation, distribution, and monetisation of important journalism.
“We’re deeply invested in supporting smaller, independent publishers through initiatives like The Lenfest Institute AI Collaborative and Fellowship, ensuring they have access to the same cutting-edge tools and opportunities as larger organizations.”
8 October 2024: Newspaper and magazine giant Hearst has agreed a “content partnership” with OpenAI in the US.
Hearst said OpenAI products including ChatGPT will incorporate content from its US brands including Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Runner’s World and Women’s Health – more than 20 magazine titles and 40 newspapers in total. It does not include Hearst’s content in other countries like the UK.
Hearst said its content will “feature appropriate citations and direct links, providing transparency and easy access to the original Hearst sources” from ChatGPT.
Hearst Newspapers president Jeff Johnson said: “As generative AI matures, it’s critical that journalism created by professional journalists be at the heart of all AI products.
“This agreement allows the trustworthy and curated content created by Hearst Newspapers’ award-winning journalists to be part of OpenAI’s products like ChatGPT — creating more timely and relevant results.”
Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella added: “Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content. This collaboration ensures that our high-quality writing and expertise, cultural and historical context and attribution and credibility are promoted as OpenAI’s products evolve.”
And OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the use of Hearst content “elevates our ability to provide engaging, reliable information to our users”.
1 October 2024: The FT, Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Mags and USA Today Network have been named as publisher partners for Microsoft’s new AI “companion”, Copilot.
Those announced were existing partners of Microsoft’s MSN news licensing service but Press Gazette understands these are new deals.
Microsoft said Copilot Daily can give a summary of the news and weather using an AI Copilot Voice.
“It’s an antidote for that familiar feeling of information overload. Clean, simple and easy to digest. Copilot Daily will only pull from authorised content sources. We are working with partners such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network and Financial Times, and plan to add more sources over time. We’ll also add additional personalisation and controls in Copilot Daily over time.”
20 August 2024: Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair and GQ publisher Conde Nast has become the latest publisher to sign a “multi-year partnership” relating to the display of its content in OpenAI products.
Conde Nast chief executive Roger Lynch has been outspoken about the risks generative AI poses to news businesses, telling US Congress “many” media companies could go out of business by the time any litigation passes through the courts and that “immediate action” should be taken through a clarification that content creators should be compensated for the use of their work in training.
In a memo to staff he has now said the OpenAI deal helps to make up for revenue being lost through declining search traffic.
He wrote: “It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are and embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property. This is exactly what we have found with OpenAI.
“Over the last decade, news and digital media have faced steep challenges as many technology companies eroded publishers’ ability to monetize content, most recently with traditional search. Our partnership with OpenAI begins to make up for some of that revenue, allowing us to continue to protect and invest in our journalism and creative endeavours.”
The deal will allow OpenAI to display content from Conde Nast brands in its products, including ChatGPT and its SearchGPT AI-driven search engine prototype.
OpenAI explained what this means in a blog post: “With the introduction of our SearchGPT prototype, we’re testing new search features that make finding information and reliable content sources faster and more intuitive. We’re combining our conversational models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources. SearchGPT offers direct links to news stories, enabling users to easily explore more in-depth content directly from the source.
“We plan to integrate the best of these features directly into ChatGPT in the future.
“We’re collaborating with our news partners to collect feedback and insights on the design and performance of SearchGPT, ensuring that these integrations enhance user experiences and inform future updates to ChatGPT.”
Lynch praised OpenAI for being “transparent and willing to productively work with publishers like us so that the public can receive reliable information and news through their platforms”.
He continued: “This partnership recognises that the exceptional content produced by Condé Nast and our many titles cannot be replaced, and is a step toward making sure our technology-enabled future is one that is created responsibly.
“It is just the beginning and we will continue what we started in Washington earlier this year – the fight for fair deals and partnerships across the industry until all entities developing and deploying artificial intelligence take seriously, as OpenAI has, the rights of publishers.”
7 August 2024: Financial Times, Axel Springer, The Atlantic and Fortune (as well as Universal Music Group) have agreed to license their content to generative AI start-up Prorata.ai.
Prorata says it has a proprietary algorithm that can work out how much of various publishers’ content is used in an answer and share revenue accordingly. When it launches its own chatbot this autumn, it says, it will share 50% of the revenue from subscriptions with content creators.
Read our full story about Prorata’s plan here.
30 July 2024: Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com owner Automattic have become the first publishers to sign up to a revenue-sharing deal launched by AI search chatbot Perplexity.
When Perplexity introduces advertising via sponsored related questions within the next few months, signed-up publishers will be able to share the revenue generated by interactions where their content is referenced.
The programme also gives them access to analytics platform Scalepost.ai to see which of their articles show up frequently in Perplexity answers that get monetised, access to Perplexity tech to create their own custom answer engines for their websites, and one year of Perplexity Enterprise Pro for all employees for a year.
Read our full story about the revenue-sharing programme, and Perplexity’s view on its relationship with publishers, here.
27 June 2024: Time has signed a “multi-year content deal and strategic partnership” with OpenAI.
The deal will give the ChatGPT creator access to Time’s 101-year-old archive and its current reporting to give up-to-date answers to users (with a citation and a link back to the website).
Time will also have access to OpenAI tech to build its own products and provide feedback to the tech company on the delivery of journalism through its tools.
Time chief operating officer Mark Howard said: “Throughout our 101-year history, Time has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology. This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally.”
OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the deal supports “reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources.”
29 May 2024: Vox Media has signed a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAI that means content – including archive journalism – from its brands including Vox, The Verge, Eater, New York Magazine, The Cut, Vulture and SB Nation will be surfaced on ChatGPT and also that it can use OpenAI’s tech to develop audience-facing and internal products.
The publisher said it will use OpenAI tech to create stronger creative optimisation and audience segment targeting on its first-party data platform Forte, which is used across all Vox Media sites and on its ad marketplace Concert.
It will also use OpenAI tools to match people with the right products on its search-based affiliate commerce tool The Strategist Gift Scout.
Vox Media co-founder, chair and chief executive Jim Bankoff said: “This agreement aligns with our goals of leveraging generative AI to innovate for our audiences and customers, protect and grow the value of our work and intellectual property, and boost productivity and discoverability to elevate the talent and creativity of our exceptional journalists and creators.”
29 May 2024: The Atlantic has signed a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAI meaning its articles will be discoverable within ChatGPT and the AI giant’s other products, with these results providing attribution and links to its website.
The partnership also means The Atlantic “will help to shape how news is surfaced and presented in future real-time discovery products”.
The companies are also collaborating on product and tech, with The Atlantic’s product team given “privileged access” to OpenAI tech to give feedback and help shape the future of news in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.
The Atlantic said it is currently developing an experimental microsite called Atlantic Labs “to figure out how AI can help in the development of new products and features to better serve its journalism and readers”. It will pilot OpenAI’s and other emerging tech in this work.
Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said: “We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.”
He added that the partnership will mean The Atlantic’s reporting is “more discoverable” to OpenAI’s millions of users and give the publisher “a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms”.
OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said: “Enabling access to The Atlantic’s reporting in our products will allow users to more deeply interact with thought-provoking news. We are dedicated to supporting high-quality journalism and the publishing ecosystem.”
[Read more: What’s next for The Atlantic after reaching profitability and 1m subscribers]
29 May 2024: The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has announced a partnership with OpenAI for a programme, Newsroom AI Catalyst, designed to “help newsrooms fast-track their AI adoption and implementation to bring efficiencies and create quality content”.
The project will work with 128 newsrooms in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and South Asia providing expert guidance with funding and technical assistance from OpenAI.
Each team will receive three months of learning modules, hands-on workshops, a mini hackathon, and a showcase. They will go back to their newsrooms with a clear plan on how to roll out AI.
Vincent Peyregne, chief executive of WAN-IFRA, said: “News enterprises across the globe have come under pressure from declining advertising and print subscription revenues. The adversity confronting news leaves communities without access to a shared basis of facts and shared values and puts democracy itself at risk.
“AI technologies can positively influence news organisations’ sustainability as long as you quickly grasp the stakes and understand how to turn it to your advantage.”
He added that OpenAI’s support will “help the newsrooms through the adoption of AI technologies to provide high-quality journalism that is the cornerstone of the news business”.
OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content Tom Rubin said the programme is “designed to turbocharge the capabilities of 128 newsrooms” and he wants to help “cultivate a healthy, sustainable ecosystem that promotes quality journalism”.
22 May 2024: News Corp has signed a deal that includes the use of content from many of its major newsbrands in the UK, US and Australia in OpenAI’s large language models.
The partnership covers content from The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, FN, and the New York Post in the US; The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun in the UK; and The Australian, news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, and the Herald Sun in Australia.
The Wall Street Journal put a value on the deal of more than $250m over five years.
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson described OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his team as “principled partners… who understand the commercial and social significance of journalists and journalism.
“This landmark accord is not an end, but the beginning of a beautiful friendship in which we are jointly committed to creating and delivering insight and integrity instantaneously.”
7 May 2024: Dotdash Meredith, which publishes more than 40 titles including People, Instyle and Investopedia, signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI that will see its content and links surfaced in ChatGPT responses.
OpenAI will incorporate real-time information from Dotdash sites into ChatGPT’s responses to queries and will use the publisher’s content to train its large language models. Dotdash meanwhile will receive assistance from OpenAI in developing both consumer-facing AI products and its AI-powered contextual advertising tool, D/Cipher.
8 May 2024: Business information giant Informa announced a non-exclusive Partnership and Data Access Agreement with Microsoft (the main backer of OpenAI) in a trading update. There has been an initial fee of $10m+ and then three more recurring annual payments.
Informa said the deal covers:
“Improved Productivity: Explore how AI can enable more effective ways of working at Informa, streamlining operations, utilising Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enable Colleagues to work more efficiently, and enhancing the capabilities of Informa’s existing AI and data platforms (IIRIS);
“Citation Engine: Collaborate to further develop automated citation referencing, using the latest technology to improve speed and accuracy;
“Specialist Expert Agent: Explore the development of specialised expert agents for customers such as authors and librarians to assist with research, understanding and new knowledge creation/sharing;
“Data Access: Provide non-exclusive access to Advanced Learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems.”
Informa said the deal “protects intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references”.
29 April 2024: Following its deal with OpenAI (see below) Axel Springer has announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft covering AI, advertising, content and cloud computing.
On AI, they will partner to develop new AI-driven chat experiences to inform users using Axel Springer’s journalism.
They added: “In addition, Axel Springer will leverage Microsoft Advertising’s Chat Ads API for generative AI monetisation.”
Their existing adtech collaboration will be expanded from Europe into the US to encompass Politico, while users of Microsoft’s aggregator Start-MSN will have access to more premium content from Axel Springer’s brands. Finally the publisher will migrate its SAP solutions to Microsoft Azure.
Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Dopfner said: “In this new era of AI, partnerships are critical to preserving and promoting independent journalism while ensuring a thriving media landscape.
“We’re optimistic about the future of journalism and the opportunities we can unlock through this expanded partnership with Microsoft.”
Microsoft chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella added: “Our expanded partnership with Axel Springer brings together their leadership in digital publishing with the full power of the Microsoft Cloud — including our ad solutions — to build innovative AI-driven experiences and create new opportunity for advertisers and users.”
29 April 2024: The Financial Times has become the first major UK newsbrand to announce a deal with OpenAI.
The partnership involves up-to-date news content and journalism from the FT archive, meaning it is likely to assist with both real-time queries on ChatGPT and its continued training.
FT Group chief executive John Ridding said: “This is an important agreement in a number of respects.
“It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI… Apart from the benefits to the FT, there are broader implications for the industry. It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material.”
13 March 2024: OpenAI has signed deals with French newsbrand Le Monde and Spanish publisher Prisa Media, which publishes El País, Cinco Días, As and El Huffpost.
The deals will mean ChatGPT users can surface recent content from both publishers through “select summaries with attribution and enhanced links to the original articles”, while their content will be allowed to contribute to training OpenAI’s models.
Le Monde chief executive Louis Dreyfus said: “At the moment we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Le Monde, this partnership with OpenAI allows us to expand our reach and uphold our commitment to providing accurate, verified, balanced news stories at scale.
“Collaborating with OpenAI ensures that our authoritative content can be accessed and appreciated by a broader, more diverse audience… Our partnership with OpenAI is a strategic move to ensure the dissemination of reliable information to AI users, safeguarding our journalistic integrity and revenue streams in the process.”
Carlos Nuñez, chairman and chief executive of Prisa Media added: “Joining forces with OpenAI opens new avenues for us to engage with our audience. Leveraging ChatGPT’s capabilities allows us to present our in-depth, quality journalism in novel ways, reaching individuals who seek credible and independent content.
“This is a definite step towards the future of news, where technology and human expertise merge to enrich the reader’s experience.”
11 March 2024: Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker told the Financial Times that the company had struck “a number” of deals with AI companies looking to use Reuters news content to train their models but he did not give any further details about who was involved in the deals or for how much.
He did say that “there appears to be a market price evolving”, adding: “These models need to be fed. And they may as well be fed by the highest-quality, independent fact-based content. We have done a number of those deals, and we’re exploring the potential there.”
However away from the Reuters news part of the business Thomson Reuters is suing Ross Intelligence for allegedly unlawfully copying content from its legal research platform Westlaw to train a rival AI-powered intelligence platform.
27 February 2024: A handful of unnamed independent publishers are taking part in a private programme with Google, according to Adweek, which will see them paid a five-figure annual sum to take part in a trial of a new AI platform.
The publishers are reportedly expected to produce a certain number of stories for a year and provide analytics and feedback in exchange.
22 February 2024: Social media platform Reddit has signed a deal allowing its content to be used by Google in the training of its AI tools. Reuters reported that the deal is worth around $60m per year.
Although not a news organisation, the Reddit deal is still a content licensing deal. There is also likely to be news media content copied within Reddit posts from users on the platform which could therefore fall within the remit of the deal.
9 February 2024: Ben Smith and Justin B Smith’s start-up Semafor has secured “substantial” Microsoft sponsorship for an AI-driven news feed, although this was not built by the tech giant but by the newsroom itself.
The deal will see Microsoft help Semafor refine the tool and makes the digital outlet one of the first newsrooms to heavily involve ChatGPT in their workflow.
Although not a content deal as such, the agreement indicates a level of co-operation rather than acrimony.
13 December 2023: Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt owner Axel Springer agreed a partnership with OpenAI that would see its content summarised within ChatGPT around the world, including otherwise paywalled content, with links and attribution. Axel Springer’s content is permitted to be used to train OpenAI products going forward.
Axel Springer can also use OpenAI technology to continue building its own AI products.
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said: “We are excited to have shaped this global partnership between Axel Springer and OpenAI – the first of its kind. We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level.”
18 July 2023: OpenAI committed $5m to the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organisation working to support and rebuild local news organisations, to support the expansion of its work. It also pledged up to $5m in OpenAI API credits to help participating organisations try out emerging AI technologies.
American Journalism Project chief executive Sarabeth Berman said: “To ensure local journalism remains an essential pillar of our democracy, we need to be smart about the potential powers and pitfalls of new technology. In these early days of generative AI, we have the opportunity to ensure that local news organisations, and their communities, are involved in shaping its implications. With this partnership, we aim to promote ways for AI to enhance—rather than imperil—journalism.”
13 July 2023: OpenAI and Associated Press signed a deal that allows the AI company to license the news agency’s content archive going back to 1985 for training purposes.
The companies said they are also looking at “potential use cases for generative AI in news products and services” but did not share specifics.
Kristin Heitmann, AP senior vice president and chief revenue officer, said: “We are pleased that OpenAI recognises that fact-based, nonpartisan news content is essential to this evolving technology, and that they respect the value of our intellectual property. AP firmly supports a framework that will ensure intellectual property is protected and content creators are fairly compensated for their work.”
One professor told AP the deal could be particularly beneficial to OpenAI because it would mean they can still use a wealth of trusted content even if they lose other lawsuits and are forced to delete training data as a result, from The New York Times for example.
11 July 2023: Shutterstock expanded its partnership with OpenAI with a six-year agreement allowing access to a wealth of training data including images, videos, music and associated metadata.
For its part, Shutterstock gets “priority access” to new OpenAI technology and can offer DALL-E’s text-to-image capabilities directly within its platform.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog

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2025 U.S. Open, Day 1 recap: Ten players under par as big names struggle  NBC Sports
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Showers with a possible thunderstorm early, then variable clouds overnight with still a chance of showers. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%..
Showers with a possible thunderstorm early, then variable clouds overnight with still a chance of showers. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
Updated: June 12, 2025 @ 9:40 pm
Abuja was made the capital of Nigeria while the country was under military rule
Many Nigerians don’t think twice about streets in Abuja being named after military rulers
After 26 years of democratic rule, many streets in Nigeria’s capital Abuja remain named after military strongmen

Abuja was made the capital of Nigeria while the country was under military rule
Many Nigerians don’t think twice about streets in Abuja being named after military rulers
After 26 years of democratic rule, many streets in Nigeria’s capital Abuja remain named after military strongmen
As President Bola Tinubu praised his country’s quarter century of democratic rule Thursday, many of the streets around the Nigerian capital carried a different, perhaps less-inspiring message.
To name a few: Sani Abacha Way takes commuters into downtown Abuja. Ibrahim Babangida Way meanwhile cuts through upscale Maitama. Murtala Muhammed Expressway passes next to the presidency and the National Assembly, where Tinubu delivered his Democracy Day speech. 
All three are named after the heads of military juntas.
As other countries in west Africa have gone on a renaming spree — mostly throwing out roads named for colonial figures — Nigeria’s strongmen have survived this final, symbolic purge.
All eight of Nigeria’s military leaders have at least one street named after them in the capital — a fact that’s often met with a shrug, even as Thursday’s holiday celebrates the transition to civilian rule in 1999 after decades of coups and military rule.
“Some leaders, because of their stature, a road can be named after them,” said Ibrahim Hassan, 45, an employee at a corner store. “It’s not about whether you’ve done the best for Nigeria.”
A woman ringing up her groceries, who gave her name only as Adekemi, chimed in with an indifferent laugh: “Right now I’m focusing on how to afford this.”
Abuja — a planned city that became Nigeria’s capital in 1991 under Babangida — “is the house that the military built, so naturally they paid homage to themselves” said Ikemesit Effiong, a partner at SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy. 
While data from pollster Afrobarometer has shown consistent public support for democracy in Nigeria, “the military is still a formidable, well-regarded institution, seen by many as comparatively disciplined and well run” after 26 years of often chaotic civilian rule. 
Former military chiefs have also entered civilian politics, rehabilitating their image — including Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari, both elected president in the democratic era.
In the United States and Europe, activists in recent years clamoured to have streets renamed to address colonial or racist legacies — though those moves weren’t always without pushback. 
In west Africa, including in Senegal and Ivory Coast, governments have ditched boulevards named after French leaders and renamed them after their own countrymen.
“We have not fully grasped what democracy is about,” lamented Edwin Ajibola, 42, who as an Uber driver, makes his living plying roads named after strongmen.
Tinubu too, while praising in his speech “how far we had come as a nation”, acknowledged that “we still have so much, and a lot, for that to go.”
Earlier this week, he found himself directly facing his predecessors’ infrastructural legacy when the minister of the Federal Capital Territory renamed Abuja’s International Conference Centre after the president. 
Amid the political squabbling in the aftermath, one former lawmaker suggested the move would unfairly obscure the head of state who oversaw its building: junta head Babangida.
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President Bola Tinubu at a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives
President Bola Tinubu will address a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives today to mark the nation’s Democracy Day.
The session begins at noon and will be held in the House chamber.
On Wednesday, President Tinubu cancelled his plan to make a nationwide broadcast commemorating the anniversary of Democracy Day.
A statement by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) attributed the change to the president’s scheduled attendance of the joint session of the National Assembly.
The SGF’s Director of Information and Public Relations, Segun Imohiosen, said President Tinubu would instead deliver his Democracy Day address directly from the federal legislature.
“Due to President Bola Tinubu’s scheduled attendance at the National Assembly Joint Session, the Presidential National Broadcast on 12 June has been cancelled. President Tinubu will deliver his address from the National Assembly,” the statement said.
The president last attended a joint session of the National Assembly on 18 December when he presented the 2025 budget to the lawmakers.
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PREMIUM TIMES will bring you live updates on the proceedings of the session. You can also follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and X.
11:51 a.m. : The Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, moved a motion for the senators to proceed to the House of Representatives for a Joint Session to receive President Bola Tinubu in celebration of Nigeria’s Democracy Day.
The motion was supported by the Minority Leader Abba Moro, and following this, Senate President Godswill Akpabio directed the senators to move to the House of Representatives for the joint session.
11:58 a.m. : The senators led by the senate president are moving into the House chamber for the joint session
12: 00 p.m. : The senators are taking their seats at the House chamber, while expecting the arrival of President Tinubu.
12: 05 : The president has arrived.
12:08 p.m : The lawmakers arise for the National Anthem to commence the joint session
12:08 : p.m. President Tinubu has taken his seat. The Senate President is chairing the joint session
12:10 p.m. : The senate president directed a House member, Gadji to lead the joint session in an Islamic prayer.
Hon. Gadji is already leading the praying, he’s praying for the president and the nation

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The cabinet minister leading Prime Minister Mark Carney’s border security push said Tuesday he is recusing himself from files related to a Sri Lankan terrorist group and its Canadian front organization.
In a statement sent to Global News on Tuesday, the office of Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said he had stepped back from “any matter related to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or the World Tamil Movement.”
The minister did not explain why he had done so, except to state that it was “out of an abundance of caution.” He released the statement after Global News asked for a copy of a conflict of interest document he had prepared.
By contrast, his office issued a statement last Thursday saying he had “asked Public Safety Officials to implement a screen on any national security issues relating to the Tamil Community.”
Anandasangaree and his family are members of the Tamil community, it said, and he had asked Public Safety officials to “implement a screen … to ensure that there is no perception of any conflict.”
Global News asked the minister’s office Tuesday why he had recused himself from files on the two terror groups and why he changed his description of the topics deemed off-limits, but he has not responded.
Both groups he cited in his recusal statement have their origins in the conflict in Sri Lanka, where Anandasangaree was born before coming to Canada in 1983 and becoming an activist, realtor, lawyer and MP.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, fought a 25-year civil war against Sri Lankan government forces in an attempt to carve a separate state out of the tiny island nation off India’s southern tip.
In 2006, Canada placed the LTTE on its list of terrorist entities, citing its “terror attacks against civilian centres, and political assassinations,” such as the 1991 killing of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The World Tamil Movement, or WTM, was added to the list in 2008. The RCMP raided its offices in Toronto and Montreal, and the government seized its assets on the grounds it was a fundraising arm of the LTTE.
“WTM representatives canvas for donations amongst the Canadian Tamil population, and have been involved in acts of intimidation and extortion to secure funds,” according to the Public Safety Canada website.
The minister of public safety is responsible for the government’s official list of terrorist groups. Last year, when Dominic LeBlanc was minister, he recommended the LTTE and World Tamil Movement remain listed.
According to Public Safety Canada, while there have been no known LTTE attacks in recent years, remnants of the group have continued to operate in Sri Lanka and India’s Tamil Nadu.
“In addition, the LTTE has an international fundraising and procurement network that continues to exist,” the Canadian government said in its online profile of the group.
Former Conservative MP Stockwell Day, who was the public safety minister when both groups were first put on the list, told Global News that Anandasangaree’s recusal could concern Canada’s allies.
“While I appreciate the minister being aware that some people may question his loyalties, it is not enough to recuse himself from such a key item in his portfolio,” Day said.
“The PM needs to reassign his minister and bring in somebody completely free of appearance of conflict.”
The office of the ethics commissioner said the minister’s statement suggested he had asked his department “to implement an internal screen,” which was not done through its office.
“For any minister that has changed portfolios, the office reviews with the minister whether any new compliance measures, like conflict of interest screens, are needed. That process can take some time.”
The prime minister has handed Anandasangaree the task of bringing in legislation to toughen Canada’s borders amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war and concerns about human and drug smuggling.
Carney said last week that his public safety minister had done the right thing by deciding to keep a distance from national security decisions in which he could appear to have a conflict.
“We have a rigorous vetting process and he’s taken the right decision, in his judgment and my judgment, to make these arrangements. We will be well covered with respect to all public security decisions,” Carney said.
Government forces routed the LTTE in 2009 and killed its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in a military operation that has been widely condemned for its failure to protect civilians.
After the war ended, Anandasangaree helped hundreds of Sri Lankan migrants who had paid human smugglers to ferry them to Canada’s West Coast on board the ships MV Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea.
He and his wife have also been critical of Canada’s national security agencies, particularly when it comes to their handling of issues related to Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka.
Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca
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When allegations of sexual assault against members of Canada’s 2018 world junior hockey team were first investigated, player Michael McLeod volunteered to make a statement to London police.
It’s what he didn’t say to now-retired Det. Stephen Newton on Nov. 17, 2018, that the Crown says should concern Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia at the high-profile trial of five men who were teammates on the world championship team.
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His omission, Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham said, contradicts the heart of the defence argument that all the sex at the Delta Armouries hotel room on June 19, 2018, was the complainant’s idea.
“Mr. McLeod does not say that this was (the woman’s) idea. He does not say that she asked him to invite his teammates into the room for group sexual activity,” Cunningham said Wednesday as she began her closing argument, pointing to McLeod as the one who “set (the woman) up.”
“If this was something that had happened, I submit you can be confident he would have said that during this interview. There is no logical or plausible reason why he wouldn’t, if it was a true fact.”
Cunningham argued that the 27-year-old woman, whose identity is protected by a court order, “did not voluntarily agree to the charged sexual acts that took place in the room that night.
“The woman did not make an affirmative, voluntary choice to engage in sexual activity,” Cunningham said.
McLeod, 27, Alex Formenton, 25, Carter Hart, 26, Dillon Dube, 26, and Cal Foote, 26 – all members of the 2018 championship team who went on to professional careers – have pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. McLeod has also pleaded not guilty to a second sexual assault count for being a party to an offence.
The allegations stem from a boozy night in London while the team was in town for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament on June 18 and 19, 2018. The judge has heard that some of the team ended up at Jack’s bar on Richmond Row to drink and dance, and that’s where McLeod met the woman, who was 20 years old, and took her back to the Delta Armouries hotel for consensual sex.
It’s what happened in the hotel room that forms the basis of the charges. The woman claims that several members of the team – as many as 10 – came to Room 209 at McLeod’s invitation without her knowledge, and that she was sexually abused while naked on a bedsheet.
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She testified over several days and insisted she was extremely drunk when she went back to the hotel, and had disassociated her mind from her body to cope with what she described as a harrowing early morning with the men.
The defence and even two players who were called as Crown witnesses say the woman was the sexual aggressor, who masturbated in front of them, then begged and taunted them to have sex with her. The players with girlfriends refused, but there were some who took her up on her offer, all of which they say was consensual sex.
The trial began in late April. Julianna Greenspan, Hart’s defence lawyer, made the final of the five defence arguments Wednesday morning.
Cunningham is expected to continue her argument Thursday, but began Wednesday afternoon urging Carroccia to accept that the evidence shows McLeod “brought his teammates into the room for sexual activity with (the woman) without any belief that she was interested in that, and knowing, in fact, that she had not asked for that.”
Understanding that core fact, she said, will help the judge assess what happened that night and the evidence of the woman, which the defence has strenuously argued is not credible or reliable.
Cunningham pointed to a text exchange McLeod had with the woman on June 20, 2018, after he was told that police and Hockey Canada had been alerted to the activities in his hotel room. The court has heard that McLeod tracked the woman down through Instagram and arranged to text her.
McLeod asked her if she had gone to police. The woman replied that her mother had. McLeod wrote back, “You were having fun.”
The woman responded: “I was OK going home with you. It was everyone else afterwards that I wasn’t expecting. I just felt like I was being made fun of and taken advantage of.”
McLeod wrote back, “I understand that you are embarrassed about what happened,“ and then urged the woman to straighten things out with her mother and police because the mother “is misrepresenting” what happened.
Cunningham said McLeod didn’t express surprise or shock – or say, “What are you talking about? You asked me to invite them in.”
Carroccia interjected that McLeod did say it was “a serious matter” that was being misrepresented. Cunningham said she didn’t see that as a response but “an adoption by silence” of the woman’s claim that she “wasn’t expecting” the other men and was “really drunk.”
While the defence argued that the woman was the instigator, Cunningham said that there was no evidence – only suggestions during cross-examination. She pointed to the group text McLeod sent out to the team inviting them to “a 3-way, quick,” and how he pulled both Crown witnesses Boris Katchouk and Taylor Raddysh into the room and asked if they wanted oral sex.
Both Katchouk and Raddysh testified to seeing the woman in bed with the covers up to her neck. The only comment made by the woman, the court heard, was to Katchouk, who was briefly alone in the room with her and holding a piece of pizza. He testified she asked if she could have a bite.
Katchouk agreed that she was being “flirty” but Cunningham asked: “How do you ask for a bite of pizza flirtatiously?”
After the two men left, Cunningham said the woman went into the bathroom and was “shocked” to see more men in the room when she came out naked. “This is the moment . . . where she first begins to perceive that she is in a dangerous situation – a situation without a viable or safe means of escape,” and when the woman essentially went on “autopilot”, disassociating her mind from her body, Cunningham said.
She noted that the woman was steadfast during cross-examination in saying she didn’t think she would have stated or demanded that the players in the room have sex with her. And the evidence from Katchouk and Raddysh was that she did not offer them sex. So, logically, Cunningham argued, it doesn’t make sense she would offer sex to others after they left.
She said McLeod recruited the men to come to the room and some showed up looking for sex “even before they laid eyes on her, even without knowing her name.”
Earlier in the day, Greenspan called the 2022 revival of the Hockey Canada and London police investigations of the 2018 allegations “Tunnel Vision 101” because they both relied on a new narrative that anchored the woman’s $3.55-million civil action against Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League and eight unnamed players from the team.
Hockey Canada quickly settled the lawsuit without the players’ knowledge and then “went on a bit of a rampage,” Greenspan said, to corroborate the woman’s allegations.
The same urgency came over London police in 2022 when it reopened its investigation that had been closed in 2019 because there weren’t grounds to lay charges.
“The police, just like the complainant and just like Hockey Canada, were focused on (the woman’s) truth, not the truth,” said Greenspan.
Hockey Canada’s investigation, she said, was “premised on coercion” with warnings to former players that if they didn’t cooperate, “they could be named and shamed.”
London police, she added, chose not to do further interviews with the complainant to limit the number of times she had to “relive the traumatic experience.”
The trial, Greenspan said, has been conducted while “the public and the press have been actively engaged at quite a high and, quite frankly, suffocating level,” pointing specifically to courthouse demonstrations she described as “active efforts to bully and intimidate.
“The most upsetting part of all of this is a glaring reality – that the concepts of the presumption of innocence and holding the state to this burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt have been, outside these walls of justice, forgotten,” she said.
Foote, Greenspan added, was fully clothed and did not touch the woman when he did the splits – his party trick – over her torso at his teammates’ request, and there was no evidence he saw McLeod’s text or went to the room looking for sex.
The evidence was that everyone, including the woman, was smiling and laughing, Greenspan said.
jsims@postmedia.com
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