When a reporter from Rupert Murdoch's British Sunday paper the News of the World was jailed, along with a private detective, in 2007 for hacking into the cellphone voicemails of aides to the royal family, the paper insisted it was a one-off — a "rogue reporter" operating without the knowledge or approval of his bosses. That assertion prompted two reactions from those in the U.K. newspaper industry: snorts of disbelief — after all, the British tabloids have ...

When Allied troops stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944, American correspondents and photographers were on hand to tell the story. But two weeks ago, when U.S. Marines and Rangers led the charge into Panama as part of Operation Just Cause, not a single journalist accompanied them. The Pentagon- sanctioned pool of reporters did not arrive on the scene until four hours after the fighting began, and they were unable to file their first dispatches until six hours after that. Worse, ...

Last week Portugal produced no big spot news ; it hadn't for 20 years ; it might not for 20 years more if the God he strove so hard to serve spared Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. For Salazar distrusted news. He suppressed and distorted it for the good of the Portuguese who, he believed, were unfit for facts. After 20 years of Salazar, the dean of Europe's dictators, Portugal was a melancholy land of impoverished, confused and frightened people. ...

When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office. That tacit policy has now ...

Japan's unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent in September, the government reported on Friday, according to Kyodo news Service.

One child is dead and two others are missing in Malaysia, after a suspension bridge they were crossing collapsed, the Bernama national news agency said Tuesday.

A meteorite-like object has created a crater after landing near a farm in northern Latvia, the nation's official news agency reported.

Residents of the New Jersey town where a priest was found dead in the kitchen of his church's rectory Friday morning should exercise caution, Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi said. Due to the nature of the wounds, the death of the Rev. Ed Hinds, 61, of St. Patrick's Church "in all likelihood was in fact a homicide," Bianchi told reporters at a news conference Friday afternoon. He said investigators believe Hinds was killed sometime between 11 p.m. Thursday and 8 ...

Three U.N. ambassadors on the front lines of the fight against radical Islamist terrorism presented a united front Thursday against extremism in an unprecedented joint public appearance on a major television news program.

If consumers like the new Windows 7 operating system, they'll have the much-maligned Windows Vista to thank. In part, that's because Windows 7 actually builds on the under-the-hood changes that came with Vista. But, it also turns out that the vast headaches created by Vista were just what the PC industry needed to improve their cooperation. With consumers lukewarm to Vista and many businesses shunning it entirely, both Microsoft and the computer makers realized that the standard way of business ...