Murdoch is ad world's new whipping boy
London: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is the poster boy for the evils of increased media consolidation in a new ad campaign launched this week. “This man wants to control the news in America,” states a new series of ads that feature a scowling Murdoch on four TV screens, launched in several US newspapers by three groups opposed to loosening restrictions on media ownership.
“Unless we act now, Rupert Murdoch is going to get his way.” An accompanying television ad features a man desperately changing channels, only to find Murdoch on every station. The News Corp chairman and CEO, whose empire also includes BSkyB and Fox Entertainment, is at the centre of deregulation initiatives currently pending in both the US and Britain.
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Hyundai official grilled in inter-Korean summit scandal
Seoul: Prosecutors questioned a top executive of Hyundai conglomerate on Friday after detaining a former aide to ex-President Kim Dae-jung in a scandal over a historic inter-Korean summit in 2000. Chung Mong-hun, head of Hyundai Asan and son of Hyundai's late founder Chung Ju-young, was grilled about allegations that some of the $ 500 million his company sent to North Korea shortly before the summit was a payoff for the meeting. The summit was a crowning achievement of former President Kim and helped him win the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize. Kim left office in February after a five-year tenure. Last Saturday, prosecutors arrested a former head of the government-run Korea Development Bank on charges of causing damage to the bank by approving loans to Hyundai beyond the company's credit limit. As the investigation expanded, prosecutors detained Lee Ki-ho, President Kim's former economic aide, on Wednesday. They planned to apply for an arrest warrant for Lee on charges of influencing the Korea Development Bank to give loans to Hyundai.
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California court reviews DVD decryption case
San Francisco: California's top prosecutor on Thursday argued that an engineer had acted as a thief and not a free speech advocate when he published on the Internet computer code used to decrypt DVDs. "The program we are talking about is a burglary tool," Attorney General Bill Lockyer told the California Supreme Court, which is considering whether it was illegal to publish the decrypting program. "It makes no sense for the law to create a safe harbor for hackers," Lockyer told the court in San Francisco. In a case recalling the intellectual property dispute involving the defunct music file swap service Napster, the state's top court is now considering whether a lower court acted correctly in barring Andrew Bunner from publishing the DVD decrypting code.
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