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The U.S. government should advance an "ambitious" plan for universal broadband availability and should ensure that broadband networks are open to all content and applications, according to a new study on public information needs in the digital age.

calls for new ideas to share news and information, even as the traditional newspaper industry appears near death.

The study calls for the U.S. government to increase support for public media and push ahead with the government transparency and accountability efforts

Has enough time passed for a more impartial assessment of the man

Our traditional response to a person's death can be summed up by the Latin "de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est" - roughly translated "don't speak ill of the dead". But in the information age, where the news keeps on rolling and the notion of deference has long since been replaced by a fascination with fame, how does the old maxim hold up?

Leith believes politicians like Vaz make a "category error" when they posture in this way. "They appropriate cultural events. You wouldn't really expect Michael Jackson to ratify the Countryside Act 2000 so why should parliament say what a jolly good dancer he was?"

We think that our technology will create a new way of tagging

can be interrogated from far away by a standard mobile phone camera

However, the team also thinks they could be used in consumer applications, such as supermarkets, where products could be interrogated with a shopper's mobile phone

Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore

But the problem is not that the traditional way of writing articles isn't valuable anymore. The problem is that this is now in the minority. It used to be a monopoly, it used to be the only way to distribute news

Newspapers are not important. It may be that their physical, printed form no longer works.

More media outlets appear to be reporting entertainment news more than hard news. You go to your nearest Rite-Aid and find racks of tabloid magazines, usually reporting on the same thing in their cover stories.

I remember 1999 as a grand year for pop culture. Pop music was bombarded with boy bands, singing Lolitas and Latino heartthrobs. George Lucas was ready to unleash the first chapter of that dismal "Star Wars" prequel trilogy. Stanley Kubrick gave us his final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," after he passed away that year.

Pop culture has become one big guilty pleasure -- a gluttonous, confectionary hodgepodge that you know is bad for you but you just can't keep away.

Australia is disturbed by China's detention of an Australian executive; China is angry that Australia allowed a Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, to visit.

Australia sells huge amounts of natural resources to China and, despite hitches in the relationship, signed a new gas deal this week with PetroChina.

"China has significant interests in Australia. China's interests in Australia go to its long-term needs for its resource security," Mr Rudd said.

AUSTRALIA’S elite universities are set to pay a high price for the foreign student crisis, as middle-class Indian parents concerned for the safety of their children opt for universities in Britain, New Zealand and North America instead of Australia.

The agents have experienced falls of up to 50 per cent in inquiries by students wanting to study at Australia’s top tertiary institutions since the controversy began.

AUSTRALIA is likely to abandon its $1 million attempt to take Japan to the international court over whaling after New Zealand gave up its plans to use legal action to stop the annual cull.

using aircraft and ships to gather evidence against Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean.

But the New Zealand Government has since discovered "significant difficulties" with taking Japan to the international court and has abandoned the tactic.

Military rabbis are becoming more powerful. Trained in warfare as well as religion, new army regulations mean they are now part of a military elite.

One of their main duties is to boost soldiers' morale and drive, even on the front line.

The 19-year-olds I spoke to at the seminary told me religious soldiers like them can make the army behave better and become "more moral".

One of President Obama's campaign promises was to make the US government more open and transparent.

"It's a great opportunity to redefine how government works," said Mr O'Reilly

"We've got to recognise that we can't treat the American people as subjects but as co-creators of ideas. We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge... in communities across the country.

the Seoul city government has launched a project to attract more foreign tourists seeking cosmetic surgery -- capitalising on the popularity of the "Korean Wave" of pop culture in Asia in recent years.

Cosmetic surgery is commonplace in South Korea. A Kyung Hee University survey in 2007 found that 47.3 percent of adults had experienced it.

ens of thousands of protesters thronged to a historic square in one of Europe’s largest capitals on Saturday to defend press freedom amid concerns of growing government interference in how the news is reported in Italy.

Free information, not on a leash

Mr. Berlusconi dismissed the protest as “a real farce.” Speaking at a political convention in northern Italy, he said, “Freedom is far greater in Italy than any other Western country,”

new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

But it appears they are finding ways around Big Brother.

The success of these and other Japanese works in Korea is raising concerns that Japanese pop culture could once again dominate Korea.

Experts say the Korean entertainment industry's dependence on Japanese pop culture will increase because the Japanese novel and manga markets are popular around the world. According to the Korean Publishing Research Institute, as of 2006 the size of the Korean novel market was no more than W203 billion, while that of Japanese market stood at W724.3 billion. The gap for the manga markets was even greater, with the Japanese market (W4 trillion) some 40 times bigger than the Korean market (W124.2 billion).

Bae Won-keun, a researcher at the KPRI, says it is a shame that Korean entertainment companies scramble to snap up Japanese stories for quick returns rather than working to strengthen their creative power. "The entertainment industry should make more effort to cultivate young writers with fresh ideas," he adds.

Japan has the sixth-largest population in the world; the music industry generates billions and billions of dollars worldwide every year.

Japanese popular music is all commercialism and void of any artistic merit

The late 90's also saw some more western-style artists, such as Dragon Ash and Utada Hikaru explode onto the scene.

The term multiculturalism generally refers to the acceptance of various cultural divisions for the sake of diversity that applies to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the scale of an organization such as a school, business, neighborhood, city or nation.

Australia The response to multiculturalism in Australia has been extremely varied, with a recent wave of criticism against it in the past decade. An anti-immigration party, the One Nation Party, was formed by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s. The party enjoyed significant electoral success for a while, most notably in its home state of Queensland, but is now electorally marginalized. One Nation called for the abolition of multiculturalism on the grounds that it represented "a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values", arguing that there was "no reason why migrant cultures should be maintained at the expense of our shared, national culture."[83] A Federal Government proposal in 2006 to introduce a compulsory citizenship test, which would assess English skills and knowledge of Australian values, sparked renewed debate over the future of multiculturalism in Australia. Andrew Robb, then Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, told a conference in November 2006 that some Australians worried the term "multicultural" had been transformed by interest groups into a philosophy that put "allegiances to original culture ahead of national loyalty, a philosophy which fosters separate development, a federation of ethnic cultures, not one community". He added: "A community of separate cultures fosters a rights mentality, rather than a responsibilities mentality. It is divisive. It works against quick and effective integration."[84] The Australian citizenship test commenced in October 2007 for all new citizens between the ages of 18 and 60.[85] In January 2007 the Howard Government removed the word "multicultural" from the name of t

The response to multiculturalism in Australia has been extremely varied, with a recent wave of criticism against it in the past decade. An anti-immigration party, the One Nation Party , was formed by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s. The party enjoyed significant electoral success for a while, most notably in its home state of Queensland , but is now electorally marginalized. One Nation called for the abolition of multiculturalism on the grounds that it represented "a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values", arguing that there was "no reason why migrant cultures should be maintained at the expense of our shared, national culture." [83] A Federal Government proposal in 2006 to introduce a compulsory citizenship test, which would assess English skills and knowledge of Australian values, sparked renewed debate over the future of multiculturalism in Australia. Andrew Robb , then Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, told a conference in November 2006 that some Australians worried the term "multicultural" had been transformed by interest groups into a philosophy that put "allegiances to original culture ahead of national loyalty, a philosophy which fosters separate development, a federation of ethnic cultures, not one community". He added: "A community of separate cultures fosters a rights mentality, rather than a responsibilities mentality. It is divisive. It works against quick and effective integration." [84] The Australian citizenship test commenced in October 2007 for all new citizens between the ages of 18 and 60. [85] In January 2007 the Howard Government removed the word "multicultural" from the name of t he Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, changing its name to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.