• A cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as gun-toting militants and performing what rightwing commentators called a "terrorist fist bump" was supposed to poke fun at the smear campaign being run against the presidential candidate. But the image in New Yorker magazine pictured the couple in an Oval Office decorated with a portrait of Osama bin Laden. It drew widespread criticism and forced the editor, David Remnick, on to the defensive. "It's clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumours and scare tactics about Obama's past and ideology," he said. "If you can't tell it's a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don't know what more to say."
• Italian Vogue broke one of the fashion world's taboos last year when it featured only black models in its July issue. The pictures by New-York based Steven Meisel filled about 100 pages of and were accompanied by features on black women in the arts and entertainment. The "black issue" proved so popular that Condé Nast, the publisher, rushed to print and distribute tens of thousands of extra copies.
• The Adventures of Tintin in the Congo was moved from the children's shelves in Borders bookstores and placed in the adult graphic novels section after the book was criticised for having allegedly racist content. The Commission for Racial Equality said the book, which includes a scene where Tintin is made chief of an African village because he is a "good white man", and a black woman bowing to Tintin saying: "White man very great ... white mister is big juju man" was highly offensive, a spokeswoman from the commission said.
• The original UK album cover for Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland drew widespread criticism when it was released in 1968. The cover which consisted of a group of nude women was later replaced by animage of Hendrix's face.
