From the NYT:

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

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From the BBC:

The family of an Iraqi journalist - who he claimed had been killed by gunmen in Baghdad - have appeared on Iraqi television, apparently safe and well.

Dia al-Kawwaz, who lives in Jordan, said that several members of his family were killed by Shia gunmen on Sunday.

But a taped report on the US-owned al-Hurra TV showed his family, none of whom seemed distressed or injured.

Mr Kawwaz' sisters denounced his actions, saying there had never been any sort of threat against them.

One of his brothers-in-law suggested that he had made the story up for political reasons.

Here's the first post on this mess: Iraqi journalist claims his family's been massacred.

The "Totally Toronto!" station is giving hourly updates that Toronto Maple Leafs general manager John Ferguson hasn't been fired yet.

From the Guardian:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, tonight issued a stark warning that the supply of reliable news reporting is dwindling despite the internet-driven worldwide information explosion.

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From the Nov. 28 Guardian:

A Turkish prosecutor is considering whether to prosecute the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins' bestselling atheist polemic, The God Delusion, on the grounds that it incites religious hatred.

The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values".

From a Guardian story about a Conrad Black remote book signing in London on Wednesday, with sentencing looming a week from Monday:

Black admitted he would have to be "brain dead" not to be contemplating the four walls of a prison cell, although he refused to say whether he would attempt any more money-spinning LongPen signings from prison. As he sits by his Florida rose garden and awaits his fate, he joked he was seeking solace in Franz Kafka's The Trial.

"When I read it at first I thought it was a novel," he said. "Now I realise it's just journalism."

The BBC moved an alert saying Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher who named a Teddy bear 'Muhammad' in her class, has been sentenced to 15 days by a Sudan court.

After serving her sentence, she faces deportation.

Addendum

Here's the Guardian story and some commentary from Meera Selva:

Gillian Gibbons has fallen foul of the most ridiculous regime, which cannot seem to see the absurdity and injustice in even arresting, never mind charging, a teacher over the naming of a soft toy.

But this case is not, as is being portrayed, a confrontation between Islam and the west - it is about the hazards of living under a chauvinistic military regime with an all-pervasive secret service. ...

Selva said the regime of Omar al-Bashir needs the support of Islamists to survive. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been agitating for Gibbons to get the maximum sentence of six months in jail and 40 lashes:

Bashir now uses the concept of Arab supremacy rather than Islam, as a rallying call to prop up his own power base. This is the language he used in Darfur to incite militias to attack devout Muslim civilians, and is the language used to encourage suspicion and mistrust of foreigners.

The Sudanese government has conceded several points to the international community recently in agreeing to allow UN and AU troops into Darfur and southern Sudan, but the Sudanese are deeply uncomfortable with having foreign troops on their soil. In this climate, it is easy and tempting for the Sudanese politicians in Khartoum to whip up anti-foreign sentiment against a teacher to disguise their loss of sovereignty elsewhere. One can only hope they realise just how much damage is being done by their irresponsible actions soon and defuse this insane situation.

The portrait of Conrad Black painted in a defence document is distinctly at odds with the disgraced media tycoon's public persona.

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From AP via globeandmail.com:

The desire for greater control over how search engines index and display websites is driving an effort by leading news organizations and other publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access.

Currently, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other top search companies voluntarily respect a website's wishes as declared in a text file known as “robots.txt,” which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site.

The formal rules allow a site to block indexing of individual web pages, specific directories or the entire site, though some search engines have added their own commands.

The new proposal, to be unveiled Thursday by a consortium of publishers at the global headquarters of The Associated Press, seeks to have those extra commands — and more — apply across the board. Sites, for instance, could try to limit how long search engines may retain copies in their indexes, or tell the crawler not to follow any of the links that appear within a webpage.