News

CHICAGO: Newspapers are doing themselves and their readers a disservice by so strictly obeying the industry’s latest mantra, former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Richard C. Longworth argues. “Local news dominates, and it’s not just local, but ‘local, local, local’ they’ve gotta repeat it three times -- and it’s coming at the expense of the newshole for international news,” he says. The...

New York, August 14, 2006—A Brazilian television reporter abducted by a São Paulo criminal gang was released unharmed today after his station broadcast a message by the kidnappers denouncing prison conditions. Reporter Guilherme de Azevedo Portanova and technician Alexandre Coelho Calado of the São Paulo-based TV Globo network were seized on Saturday by members of the gang First Capital Command...

The September issues of fashion magazines hit newsstands this week, thick with ads and advice on what to wear — and buy. Fashion advertising is vigorous in magazines this year. Leading the pack is Vogue with Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette on the cover. Vogue, the perennial heavyweight champion, boasts a hefty 625 advertisement pages, which is not the magazine's best, but good enough to keep it...

JAKARTA, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- The fluctuating relations between the Muslim and Western worlds are now seemingly more difficult, especially since the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City on September 11, 2001, popularly known as 9/11. Right after the tragedy which resulted in thousands dead and thousands more injured, condemnation emerged from around the world. Soon after that, Western...

Photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin of Magnum Photos was one of several people injured in an Aug. 6 missile attack in southern Lebanon. Pellegrin and reporter Scott Anderson were traveling together in Tyre on assignment for The New York Times Magazine. They were treated for their injuries and now are back at work in Lebanon. "They're in Beirut. They're fine," says Kathy Ryan, director of photography...

BAKU. Aug 14 (Interfax) - Shakhin Agabeili, the editor of Azerbaijan's Milli Yol [National Road] newspaper who was sentenced to a one-year prison term, has begun a hunger strike, said Fikret Faramazogly, the head of a journalists' rights committee. "Shakhin Agabeili began his hunger action to protest his illegal sentence and the strike will continue until the court's ruling is reversed,"...

LONDON (Reuters) - A Fox News reporter, responding to accusations he misrepresented himself as a Vatican offical to an east London mosque used by suspects in a foiled plot to blow up planes, said on Monday he had identified himself clearly. Mohammed Shoyaib, imam of the Masjid-e-Umer mosque in Walthamstow, told Britain's Guardian newspaper that Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News religion reporter...

CERTAIN she would be murdered by the men who kidnapped her on a Baghdad street and fatally shot her translator, American journalist Jill Carroll begged her captors at one point to use a gun to end her life rather than a knife. "Promise me you will use this gun to kill me by your own hand. I don't want that knife, I don't want the knife, use the gun," Carroll remembered crying hysterically to the...

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Brazil's most notorious organized crime group kidnapped a television reporter and forced his station to broadcast a video Sunday in which the gang called for improvements in Brazil's prison system. The prison-based First Capital Command, or PCC, whose leaders have been accused of ordering violence in Sao Paulo state, said it would release the reporter only after the video was...

TEHRAN, Iran - Sayeed Habibi considers himself a marked man. The reason: his Internet blog that challenges some of the policies of Iran's theocracy. He predicts that someday - perhaps soon - he'll be taken to prison and his site will be shut down. "And another voice will be silenced," said Habibi, a 34-year-old postgraduate and an unofficial elder statesman for student-led activist movements. "I...