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A last-minute deal has avoided a split between the United States (US) and other nations over future control of the Internet ahead of the UN summit aimed at reducing the global digital divide. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan gives a speech during the inaugural session of the World Summit on the Internet Society (WSIS) at the Kram Palexo in Tunis. The UN Secretary General has called for...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the attack by Tunisian security forces on a television crew that was reporting from Tunis on the eve of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which began today. "The summit will descend into chaos unless the security forces back off and allow journalists to work" said Aidan White, IFJ general secretary. "The Tunisian...

As the World Summit on the Information Society gets under way in its capital, Tunisia continues to jail individuals for expressing their opinions on the Internet and suppress websites critical of the government, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said in a comprehensive new report on the repression of Internet users in the Middle East and North Africa. The 144-page report, "False Freedom: Online...

(November 16, 2005) -- "If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power." --Michael Massing, "The End of News?," New York Review of Books, Dec. 1, 2005 It's not easy to be in the newspaper business these days. I probably don't need to provide the details why...

The American Press Institute (API) has announced an ambitious year-long project to conceive and test new business models to help newspapers thrive in the next decade. "Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project" will explore the trends disrupting the newspaper industry and develop practical business initiatives newspapers can adopt. API will be investing $2 million in this project, which is the...

WHEN YOUR CLIENTS ARE MILLIONS of bloggers, you don't want to get on their bad side. Just ask Six Apart, owner of blogging service TypePad. Users of the paid service started seeing outages and slowdowns about one month ago, triggering a wave of very public complaints. This week, CEO Barak Berkowitz finally attempted to appease his clients by offering them up to 45 days of free service and an...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Word came Wednesday that Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, knew the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame before it was published in a July 2003 column. The attorney for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff and the only person indicted during the CIA leak investigation, quickly asserted that Woodward...

WASHINGTON -- Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed. In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told...

NEW YORK Watergate legend Carl Bernstein warned critics to back off their attacks on his former partner Bob Woodward following this week’s disclosures that Woodward had testified in the Valerie Plame case, and had failed to inform Washington Post editors for two years about a confidential conversation he’d had with a White House official. "I think there is an awful lot of piling on," Bernstein...

On Monday, November 14, I testified under oath in a sworn deposition to Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for more than two hours about small portions of interviews I conducted with three current or former Bush administration officials that relate to the investigation of the public disclosure of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame. The interviews were mostly confidential...