News

British broadcasters are making a series of fictionalised accounts of the Iraq war that will include a controversial Channel 4 dramatisation of soldiers abusing prisoners. Screenwriter Tony Marchant's new drama, The Mark of Cain, which began filming this month in Tunisia, draws on stories such as that of Fusilier Gary Bartlam, who was arrested in 2003 after trying to develop a roll of film that...

Knight Ridder, the 32-year-old national newspaper company that publishes the Times and the San Jose Mercury News, will fade into history by the end of this week. Corporate chiefs plan to lock up a sale of all 32 Knight Ridder newspapers to McClatchy Co. for $4.5 billion on Tuesday. McClatchy will then unload 12 of them, including the Times and the Mercury News, to help finance the deal. Although...

The group representing several newspapers in Canada has strong concerns about any further moves toward the regulation of media ownership. The Canadian Newspaper Association was reacting to a Senate report released Wednesday that recommends increased scrutiny on some media deals. The Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications, under Senator Joan Fraser, spent three years studying the...

That high-pitched squealing you hear in the background is the sound of the American newspaper shrinking. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and scores of smaller papers have downsized their staffs in recent months. About 70 newsroom staffers and 100 non-newsroom employees are exiting the Post...

Many demonstrators at Friday's rally were protesting alleged interference in Somali affairs by Ethiopia, the country's longtime enemy. The Islamic militia that has seized control of Somalia's capital said Saturday the killing of a Swedish journalist was planned by a foreign enemy that wants to shatter weeks of relative peace in this Horn of Africa nation. Martin Adler, 47, was killed instantly...

PESHAWAR: Journalist Hayatullah Khan took a photo of something the government said was never there. Within days he disappeared without a trace, dragged off by masked men. Last week, six months after his abduction, his body was found dumped in North Waziristan, handcuffed and shot in the back. The tragic news has startled the nation, sparking protests, and the government ordered a judicial probe...

The Islamist militia now controlling the Somali capital says it will protect foreign media following the murder of Swedish journalist Martin Adler. Mr Adler, 47, was shot dead as he filmed a rally in Mogadishu on Friday. The chairman of Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, sent condolences to Mr Adler's family and promised to track down the killer. The rally was in support of...

When Michael Kinsley started Slate in 1996 he had a vision of people printing it out to read. Little did he know that 10 years later the idea of printing out something online would be as old-fashioned as, well, paying to read news. Kinsley reckoned that he had a new business model. If you didn't have to pay production, paper or distribution costs, then the magazine would quickly become profitable...

CHISINAU, June 24 (RIA Novosti, Vladimir Novosadyuk) - Moldovan national Igor Velchev, suspected of killing Russian journalist Ilya Zimin February 26, will be tried in his country, Moldova's first deputy prosecutor general said Saturday. Valery Gurbulya said it was "international practice when a person charged with such crimes is tried by the country whose national he is, [and] extradition in such...

France's tangled approach to privacy and public figures was thrown into further confusion yesterday by the removal of a magazine editor who published photographs that offended a presidential front runner. Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, was furious when Paris Match, which has a weekly circulation of about a million, last summer published images of his wife, Cécilia, in the company of a man...