Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked the people of India to assess whether going by its track record Bharatiya Janata Party is capable of forming a decisive and strong...
Warren Buffett may have sagely advice on investment in any number of fields, but one area he says he won't touch these days is the newspaper industry.
'The Oracle of Omaha' made these remarks at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting last weekend, according to the Wall Street Journal online.
Though his Berkshire Hathway still owns Omaha-based Sun Newspapers and the Buffalo News, the world's top money manager views the future of the newspaper industry dismally, says the journal.
"For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,'' the world's second richest man was quoted as saying. "They (newspapers) have the possibility of going to just unending losses,'' said Buffet, who has long considered himself to be a newspaper man.
As long as newspapers were essential to readers, the journal quoted him as saying, they were essential to advertisers. But now news is available in many other venues.
Referring to the Washington Post Company in which Berkshire has a significant investment, Buffet said "the company has a solid cable business, a good reason to hold on to it, but its newspaper business is in trouble,'' according to the journal.
His deputy Charles Munger termed newspapers' woes "a national tragedy.'' "...these monopoly daily newspapers have been an important sinew to our civilization, they kept government more honest than they would otherwise be,'' Munger was quoted as saying.
One of Buffett's first jobs as a child was delivering newspapers, the journal said of his old links to the media industry. "An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided. One of Berkshire's biggest investments in the 1970s was the Buffalo News, which it still owns,'' according to the journal.
With the Boston Globe, another major American newspaper on the edge of shutdown, President Barack Obama's administration has signalled that the newspaper industry will not be getting a government bailout.
"I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters when asked whether the federal government will consider stepping in to help save newspapers, as it has with so many other industries.
Gibbs signalled one difference from bailouts for the auto industry and financial firms is that it's a "bit of a tricky area" for the White House to be helping media companies that cover the President, given the potential for conflicts of interest.
It's not like the President, who is routinely spotted with a newspaper tucked under his arm when he's getting into a motorcade, is completely unsympathetic to the industry.
Gibbs said Obama feels "concern and sadness" over the plight of the print media, though the spokesman couldn't resist a poke at some of the reporters in the briefing room who had recently posed sceptical questions about the President's push to trim a small amount of federal spending.
"You guys didn't think $100 million meant a lot a few weeks ago," Gibbs said. "But looking at some of the balance sheets, $100 million seems to mean a lot."
The White House comments came amid reports that the New York Times Co, owners of Boston Globe, were planning to close the newspaper unless the unions agreed to $20 million in cuts.
The Special Public Prosecutor in the Mumbai terrorists attack case, Ujjwal Nikam confirmed that the trial court has been requested to give its consent to send evidences includi...
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