People

NEW YORK: A 32-year-old former Wall Street Journal reporter has joined the U.S. Marines. "When people ask why," Matt Pottinger wrote in a column last month, "I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn't a straight line." Among other assignments, Pottinger...

Liu Binyan was rare person in China. For four decades, China's most famous journalist held on to high moral principles. Just about everyone else in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had long abandoned trying to help the workers and peasants, and instead thought almost exclusively in making a comfortable life for oneself at the expense of others. His belief in social justice never wavered or...

The last time Kerry Packer died, 15 years ago, he quickly took the opportunity to denounce the existence of an afterlife. "I've been on the other side and let me tell you son, there's f---ing nothing there," he was fond of saying. It was a statement redolent of the media baron's forthright approach to life and his laconic sense of humour. Given he had been clinically dead for eight minutes after...

LONDON: The founders of Internet search engine Google have been named the Financial Times men of the year, the newspaper announced yesterday. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both 32, were given the accolade for the effect the company they founded seven years ago, has had in the last year on Internet users and the worlds of business and technology, the FT said. It also noted Google's rising stock...

Roland Buerk, the son of the BBC journalist Michael Buerk, yesterday married the woman he believes saved him from death in the Asian tsunami a year ago. Buerk, who is also a journalist, and his girlfriend Anna Moore deliberately chose to marry on the eve of the anniversary of a disaster that almost claimed both their lives. "It seemed appropriate," he said. "We both know how fortunate we are and...

The New York real-estate boom is claiming a different kind of casualty, according to an article in Sunday's New York Times. Keying off a new report issued by the Center for an Urban Future, Jennifer Steinhauer noted that, thanks to high housing prices, many of the creative types who work in Manhattan-centered fields like advertising, publishing, and the arts are being priced out of the city. This...

One of the world's most distinguished newspaper publishers came out of retirement last week at the age of 79. He had settled in France, a country he loved and which loved him back, only last week having bestowed on him the Légion d'Honneur for services to journalism. But duty called. He flew home and headed for his old office. Next morning he went to bury, and praise, the young man to whom he had...

Jack N. Anderson, 83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who for years was America's most widely read newspaper columnist, died Dec. 17 at his Bethesda home. He had Parkinson's disease. A crusader in the mold of muckrakers from a century ago, unbounded by contemporary notions of objectivity, Mr. Anderson was highly successful during the 1950s and 1960s, when few reporters actively...

Located on the first-floor of a condominium in suburban Delhi, the serpent’s lair is conspicuous by its inconspicuousness. No nameplate or fancy decoratives adorn the front door. A secretary answers the bell and leads visitors into a spartan drawing room. "Sir will be here in a while," he says in a mechanical tone. The flat has had more than its share of visitors of late – at least his voice...

Thousands of people flooded the streets of Iran's capital Tehran to mourn the death of the victims of the military aircraft which crashed on Tuesday in the capital, killing 116 people, including 68 journalists, and injuring dozens of others. The families of the victims have blamed the crash on poor safety procedures. The aircraft was carrying journalists, photographers and cameramen to cover...