Two billboards advertising a papal visit to Malta have been defaced with Pedobear. "It is not clear why the artist in question juxtaposed the bears with the Pope," reports the Times of Malta. Let us clear it up.

Curse the ignominy of being arrested while tagging the door of a police training class!

Graf writer and Foster's crush UTAH gives her first post-jail interview. Spoiler: Jail is boring.

And of course, Banksy has promised the local cops he won't do any graffiti. So. [Animal NY has the whole story. Pic: trentcall]

Dickchicken would like to be the next Neckface or Poster Boy or other ubiquitous street art dude, but he has two problems: 1. His name, and 2. His logo. Anyhow, click through for a video of his dickness at work.

Serge Gainsbourg was a musical pioneer, a harrasser of Whitney Houston, and a French legend. His home in Paris also has a TON of graffiti on it. Here's an amazing timelapse of that graffiti over the past five years.

An 18-year-old in Texas was sentenced to eight years in prison with no possibility of parole for three graffiti charges and weed possession. Eight years. In prison. Here's the sentencing judge, Marisela Saldaña. Looks awful Satan-like, no? [AnimalNY]

The new head of the National Endowment for the Arts says that he'd like to explore government funding for hip hop culture, including rap and graffiti. Whoa, whoa. Does he know about the hoes?

The High Line was once a grimy set of abandoned train tracks. Now it's a fancy park for fancy people. So the fancy people want to scrub all the graffiti off the surrounding buildings, lest it hurt their fancy eyes.

One of the biggest (if not the biggest) graf pieces in America—a 57-foot high, one-third mile long "MTA" on a concrete ditch in LA—is being painted over. Finally, a clean concrete ditch. [via Animal NY. Pic: Flickr]

YouTube-loving graffiti artist Cyrus Yazdani will spend over 4 years in jail for spraying paint.

Gawker friend R. Nicholas Kuszyk, the Williamsburg-based robot artist who occasionally fools the world into thinking he is Banksy, has a new book about, yes, Robots, so why don't you pick it up? Art sample photo below!

Shepard Fairey, career vandal, applied "anti-graffiti coating to the walls" of his LA gallery. Wack.

Dash Snow, who died last night at the age of 27, took Polaroids, wrote graffiti, made collages and installations, and jacked off on newspapers (and was aware of how that was perceived). A dozen of his artworks, below.

Iz The Wiz, a graffiti legend since the 1970s, died of heart failure in Florida last night. He started in NYC and went all-world. Blogue has details and a retrospective of his art.

In 2007, NYC had "The Splasher," an anonymous pseudo-intellectual prick who went around defacing street art. Now England has its own pricks who've decided to deface Banksy murals. Unless it's an elaborate hoax.

Yesterday the formerly-secret face of awesome (suck it, haters) street artist Neckface was revealed to the world. Now we have, possibly, two more photos, which is kinda interesting, I'd say:

Spotted at the Capital One branch on the corner of 8th Street and University Place. [Vanishing NY]

Semi-anonymous street art legend Banksy reportedly collaborated with a sign-painting company on this mural, which went up last weekend in Soho, NYC. He likes us—he really likes us! At least the rats among us. [via Gothamist]

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday: