Category: News

Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s chief lawyer, says that fighting for free speech is more than a good idea. He thinks it is a competitive advantage for his company.

How one family who had been overseas for 20 years returned to a family home in Michigan with three teenage children and dog.

Mika Yamamoto has been killed reporting on fighting in Aleppo, Syria, Japan’s foreign ministry confirms.

The new New York Times CEO has a TV background. Mark Thompson, the outgoing director general of the BBC, was named CEO of The Times on August 14, succeeding Janet Robinson who left the company with a golden parachute last December.

Viola Drath, an OPC member, was found dead in her Georgetown home on August 11, 2011. Her husband, Albrecht Gero Muth, was charged with the murder. The Washington Post reported that the death “was the end of a difficult and sometimes violent marriage.” Their marriage is chronicled in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.

A day after President Bashar al-Assad said Syria was living in a “state of war,” rebels operating with increasing audacity around the capital were reported by the country’s official media on Wednesday to have stormed into a pro-government television station, killed several employees and planted explosives that destroyed studios.

Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter who died in Syria this year, had heated arguments with his editors just prior to his final trip into the country, a cousin of Shadid’s says, and told his wife that were he to die The New York Times would be to blame.

Syria has until recently been a country led by the cultivated, English-speaking President Bashar al-Assad who, along with his British-born wife, Asma, was helping usher in a new era of openness and prosperity. That second impression is no accident with the help of high-priced public relations advisers who had worked in the Clinton, Bush and Thatcher administrations, the president and his family have sought over the past five years to portray themselves in the Western media as accessible, progressive and even glamorous.