The Washington Post will close its Toronto bureau this summer, and with it, end direct coverage of Canadian issues by American newspaper correspondents. Permanent bureaus will be replaced by wire services, contract writers, freelancers and reporters deployed to cover specific events. Jill Carroll, a Christian Science Monitor correspondent in the Middle East, found an estimated 10 percent drop in foreign bureaus in the U.S. print media since 2000 and about a 30 percent decrease in the number of correspondents over the same time period. This trend has accelerated thanks to the costs of maintaining coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no end in sight for those conflicts. "The thing you lose when you close a bureau or cut a beat is you lose expertise and you lose your attention," explained Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute. "The value of the bureau is that when a newspaper plants a reporter somewhere, they're saying they think the place is important and what is happening in the place is newsworthy."

Later this month, proposals "that would jeopardise the current ban on direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs" in the European Union will be unveiled, reports Hannah Brown. The European Commission, which drafts legislation for the European Parliament, suffered a humiliating defeat when similar proposals to weaken the ban were resoundingly rejected in 2002. The commission is expected to propose that drug companies be allowed to provide "information," but not engage in product-specific advertising. "There is no discussion of whether industry is going to be an unbiased source about its own or other products or decisions not to treat," said Barbara Mintzes from the University of British Columbia. A coalition of public health groups opposing the anticipated changes argue that "relevant, comparative and appropriate information on health issues cannot be provided by drug companies," because they focus on promoting their product and ignore alternative, non-drug treatments.