News

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a survey released on Friday. Park Associates, a Dallas-based technology market research firm, said 29 percent of U.S. households, or 31 million homes, do not have Internet access and do...

(CJES/IFEX) - Gleb Ivanov, editor of the Astrakhan opposition weekly "Fakt i Kompromat", was charged with three crimes by the Astrakhan prosecutor's office and the interior affairs department for the Astrakhan region on 17 March 2007. Ivanov's colleagues believe this repressive action was taken against the journalist over a statement by a subordinate of Tatyana Belova, the head of the Federal...

(RSF/IFEX) - Following the police chief's recent admission that the security forces have been involved in abductions, Reporters Without Borders has confirmed that the military participated in the arrest of journalist Subramaniam Ramachandran on 15 February 2007, north of Jaffna. Colleagues think he is now being held secretly at a military camp. "We appeal to the authorities to take action to...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has voiced concern about the preliminary findings of the autopsy and police investigation into the death of Jamal Uddin, a reporter for the news agency Abas and local newspaper "Dainik Giri Darpan", in the southeastern district of Rangamati. The authorities are saying it was suicide, but Uddin's colleagues insist that the circumstances suggest it was murder....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times abruptly quit on Thursday after the paper killed a special edition of its opinion section that had been edited by a Hollywood producer with ties to his girlfriend. Andres Martinez, in an angry note posted on his Times blog, said the paper's decision to scrap the section edited by movie producer Brian Grazer and planned for...

Now, here’s the bad news — the Indian print media too has begun seeing a decline in readership as has been happening in many Western countries. Most of the top-rung newspapers and magazines have lost out on readers, according to the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2007 Round 1. 'Dainik Jagran' continues to be number one among all publications in the country despite a 6 per cent drop in readership...

The Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry is expected to grow at an 18 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach an overall value of Rs 1 trillion by 2011 from its present size of Rs 437 billion, according to a report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) for the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). Growing demand coupled with technological...

Russia’s only female billionaire has won a defamation suit against the editor of Forbes Russia which had published a cover story on how she had acquired her fortune. Baturina's fortune almost tripled to $3.1 billion last year from $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to the US edition of Forbes' annual world wealth survey published this month. That ranked Baturina No 30 on the list of 52 Russian...

The United States, Britain, and the Netherlands have all assailed the deal made with the Taliban by Italy and Afghanistan to secure the release of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, according to news agencies. Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo speaks during a news conference at the "La Repubblica" editorial headquarters in Rome March 21, 2007. The United States and Britain criticised...

A Tamil journalist held without charge in Sri Lanka for four months was released Thursday. Munusami Parameshwaree, an ethnic Tamil journalist working for Sinhala newspaper Mawbima was arrested by the Terrorist Investigation Division of Sri Lanka police on November 21 last year on allegations of having links with Tamil terrorists. Tamil journalist Mounasamy Parameswaree, centre, is greeted by a...