News Snippets
• More than 50 development experts have formed a national alliance which will try to take knowledge-based services of information and communication technologies (icts) to every village in India by 2007. The National Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies for Basic Human Needs will promote technology innovation in rural ict applications and connectivity.
• Sydney's ethnic community groups have protested the Australian media regulating body's decision to cancel the license of a tv channel, which has been giving a voice to the communities for 11 years now. The Australian Broadcasting Authority cancelled Channel 31's license and gave it to a new group, backed largely by Anglo-Saxon community groups.
• Oxfam, the uk charity group, has launched a digital distribution service for online music. The Oxfam service will offer tracks at between 75-99 pence per track, out of which 10 pence will go to fight poverty. The service will initially offer 300,000 songs.
• A media resource centre with 2,000 publications on hiv/aids has been opened in Nairobi to help Kenyan journalists in reporting on the disease. The centre has Internet, radio editing programs and an electronic database.
• Three radio talk show hosts resigned in Hong Kong in May 2004, complaining of intimidation and threats of violence by pro-Beijing forces. But a local official of China's National People's Congress demanded the trio give more details of the pressure they claim forced them to quit.