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 advancement in the protection of Liberian journalists, 2018 was marked by 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 on 11 April voicing alarm about the rapid rise in official intolerance for independent journalism and dissent. The targets of these attacks included the investigative newspaper Frontpage Africa, of which the entire staff was briefly arrested and the publisher was threatened by a government minister with imprisonment after a report questioning government spending. Death threats were made against the editor of another newspaper after it reported the disappearance of a container with a large sum of money inside. The first few months of 2019 saw a series of attacks by unidentified persons on radio stations critical of the government.