News

Death is always in the news. From local car crashes to catastrophes in faraway places, deadly events are grist for the media mill. The coverage is ongoing -- and almost always superficial. It may be unfair to blame journalists for failing to meet standards that commonly elude artists. For centuries, on the subject of death, countless poets have strived to put the ineffable into words. It’s only...

FOUNTAIN CITY, Wisconsin (AP) -- A man from Wisconsin says his attempts to sign up for an e-mail account with Yahoo failed when he used his name, which includes the letters a-l-l-a-h -- as in Allah, the Arabic word for God. Ed Callahan said he started trying to establish the e-mail account after his mother, with the same last name, could not get one. As he tried using various words, he determined...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it was posting on the Web confidential documents used in its defense as it fought the threat of European Commission antitrust fines reaching up to 2 million euros ($2.4 million) a day. The U.S. software giant planned to post the documents at 1800 GMT on Thursday at www.microsoft.com/presspass/legalnews.mspx, including an...

Microsoft is accusing the European Commission (EC) of denying it a fair defense in its long-running anti-trust case, so officials could nip off early for their Christmas holls. That's just one of the claims Microsoft is laying at the door of the EC - a fact learned today after Redmond took the unprecidented step of publishing confidential documents and correspondence used in the case. Microsoft...

LONDON - The Wall Street Journal Europe is to launch a style magazine aimed at high-income executives with former Esquire editor Peter Howarth at the helm, as the financial paper tries to draw in luxury goods advertisers. With a working title of Style Journal, the magazine is to be published by Howarth's contract publishing business, Show Media, and will be launched in April. Howarth said: "Style...

Controversy over the publication of drawings of the Prophet Mohammed continued to grow as an international press freedom crisis on Thursday as Indian authorities imprisoned a magazine editor and Belarusian prosecutors opened a criminal probe into a weekly newspaper. In each case, the publications said they printed one or more cartoons to provide context for the worldwide furore that has now...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Muslim hackers angered by the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed have defaced nearly 3,000 Danish Web sites over the past month in the biggest politically motivated cyber attack long-time observers have ever seen. Experts say that the world-wide protests over a Danish newspaper's decision to publish the caricatures, an act offensive to Muslims who regard...

SANAA, Feb 22 (Reuters) - A Yemeni editor on trial for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed said he had done so to show Muslims how insulting they were, not to deride Islam. Now Mohammad al-Asaadi, editor-in-chief of the English daily Yemen Observer, says Islamists could kill him for his action. "The problem now is not the trial," he told Reuters on Wednesday from a cage in a Sanaa...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- One of the toughest battles facing America and Europe in the war on terrorism is the campaign to convince Muslims around that world that the West is not really engaged in a war on Islam. The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad carried in newspapers in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe have made the battle a lot harder to win. While newspapers that have published the...

AMMAN: In a direct challenge to the international uproar over cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, the Jordanian journalist Jihad Momani wrote: "What brings more prejudice against Islam: these caricatures, or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?" An editor in Yemen, Muhammad al...