2005-2014

BERLIN - Gerhard Schroeder, German chancellor for the past seven years until this week, is to join Switzerland's leading newspaper group, Ringier, as a political consultant and lobbyist, working at its offices in Zurich one or two days a week. The ex-chancellor, 61, who resigned his seat in the German Bundestag after handing over to successor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, would take up the post on...

What the heck's going on here? Bob Woodward -- the Bob Woodward -- is now making news instead of breaking it. The Washington Post's bigfoot reporter has made a cameo appearance as The Deposed in the ever-expanding Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame-Bob Novak-Scooter Libby-Judith Miller Follies written, directed and prosecuted by Pat Fitzgerald. Ziegfield never had such a cast, and now it includes an icon of...

London, 24 Nov. (AKI) - The widow of Tariq Ayyoub, the journalist from satellite TV network Al Jazeera, who was killed when the station’s Baghdad offices were bombed in 2003, says she is considering sueing the US government over his death. The revelation follows reports in British newspaper The Daily Mirror, that US president George W. Bush planned to bomb Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar but...

MONTEVIDEO, Nov 22 (IPS) - How can problems like poverty, education, health, the environment and gender equality make it to the front pages of newspapers or onto radio and TV newscasts? When put to journalists, the question tends to elicit a long litany of complaints of the difficulties they face in reporting on issues that the media do not consider "newsworthy". The role of the media in providing...

United States media organisations are now skewering President George Bush over his case for ousting Saddam Hussein, but few questioned the pro-war juggernaut in the run-up to battle. Now, with the White House's once-feared public-relations machine misfiring, Bush's approval ratings plumbing their lowest depths and US troops still dying in foreign fields, many commentators and journalists are...

As Florida money manager Bruce S. Sherman presses his campaign for a sale of Knight Ridder Inc., he and other principals of his firm could collect a $300 million bonanza this summer -- depending on how things shake out. Mr. Sherman, chief executive of Legg Mason Inc.'s Private Capital Management LP, shook up the newspaper industry three weeks ago with a letter to Knight Ridder's board, urging it...

Bob Woodward's journalism career has come a long way - from obscure police reporter to star of the Washington Post and one of the country's most recognizable journalists. Now the Watergate reporter whose stories brought down President Richard M. Nixon is tangled in a web of Washington journalists involved with the Bush administration's leak of Valerie Plame's secret identity as a CIA operative...

What the heck's going on? Bob Woodward - the Bob Woodward - is now making news instead of breaking it. The Washington Post's bigfoot reporter has made a cameo appearance as The Deposed in the ever-expanding Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame-Bob Novak-Scooter Libby-Judith Miller Follies written, directed and prosecuted by Pat Fitzgerald. Ziegfield never had such a cast, and now it includes an icon of...

NEW YORK Former Washington Post Ombudsman Geneva Overholser criticized her former newspaper, saying it should either sever its ties with Bob Woodward or require the legendary Watergate scribe to work solely for the paper, not pen his best-selling books on the side. "It isn't an arrangement that can really work at the Post," said Overholser, who served as ombudsman from 1995 to 1998 and later as a...

The question is: Do Americans really want to live in a world without newspapers? If you're reading this, chances are good you don't. Yet almost daily we read reports of more buyouts and budget cuts at America's papers owing to fewer readers. Newsrooms, now cubicled and corporatized, have become the morgues they so closely resemble, filled with ghosts of the departed and those who await the next ax...