Just over a year after taking office in January 2018, President George Weah signed a press freedom law decriminalizing defamation of the president, sedition and malevolence. Despite this significant advance in the protection of Liberian journalists, there have been many verbal and physical attacks on media personnel, with the result that the Press Union of Liberia wrote an open letter to the UN secretary-general voicing alarm about the rapid rise in official intolerance for independent journalism and dissent. The targets included the investigative newspaper Frontpage Africa, of which the entire staff was briefly arrested in April 2018 and the publisher was threatened by a government minister with imprisonment after a report questioning government spending. The problems continued in 2019 with a series of attacks by unidentified persons on radio stations critical of the government and cases of police violence against journalists.