News

ER-RIYADH, February 12 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's RIA Novosti news agency signed a cooperation agreement with the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA) on the sidelines of the Russian leader's landmark visit to the richest Arab nation. The document, signed by RIA Novosti's editor-in-chief Svetlana Mironyuk and Saudi Minister of Culture Iyad Madani, is designed to improve understanding between the two...

WASHINGTON -- Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the identity of a CIA operative to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus during a 2003 phone call, Pincus testified today as the first defense witness in the CIA leak trial. Pincus was one of the first reporters to learn the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson...

NEWSPAPER articles accusing a NSW prison chaplain of having links with terrorists were "highly inflammatory," a Sydney court has heard. Muslim cleric Anwar Al Barq is suing Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph over a series of articles accusing him of having links to terrorists. In 2005, the NSW Department of Corrective Services banned the cleric from working as a prison chaplain after it was...

The editor of a Cambridge University college newspaper is in hiding after his attempt at religious satire backfired. The 19-year-old student and aspiring journalist, who has not been named, is under investigation by the authorities at Clare College who described the satirical issue of the student newspaper Clarefication as "abhorrent". Most inflammatory, the college said, was the reproduction in...

AYLESBURY, England • Five months after a minibus smash on the eastern front of the Sri Lankan civil war broke Reuters journalist Peter Apps’s neck and left him completely paralysed, the condition has long since lost its novelty value. “Since September, I have been unable to perform most of life’s most basic functions. I need to be fed, washed, dressed and turned frequently in bed to avoid pressure...

It was vigilant bloggers who first raised questions about the validity of two Reuters photographs of Israeli military action in Lebanon published last summer. In one, wisps of smoke rising over Beirut seemed identical, as if extra smoke had been added to enhance the image. In the other the accusation was that the number of flares being dropped by an Israeli F-16 fighter had been increased by...

Less than a year ago, Gary B. Pruitt, the head of the McClatchy Company, was hailed as the white knight of newspapers. While others saw the industry headed for the dinosaur graveyard, Mr. Pruitt rode in to buy the Knight Ridder papers, or some of them anyway. Although he was the only bidder, he pronounced the industry very much alive. BusinessWeek said Mr. Pruitt was “widely considered the best in...

Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month's layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won't be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast. But...

(MENAFN) A study by the Pan Arab Research Centre (Parc), advertising spending in the UAE surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time to reach $1.06 billion, compared to $869 million in 2005, Khaleej Times reported. The study said that communication and public utilities accounted for the largest percentage of ad spend. According to the study, the UAE topped the GCC and near region for...

A protest at the sell off of dozens of newspaper titles in the Midlands has been made in parliament. Lynda Waltho, MP for Stourbridge, West Midlands, tabled an Early Day Motion raising concerns at the sale of Trinity Mirror's Midlands Newspapers group It is made up of more than 30 titles in the West Midlands, Warks, Staffs, Derbys, Northants and Leics. The motion, which has been signed by 12 MPs...