MUMBAI: News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has sold his entire Class A non-voting shares to retain his voting stake in the company.

As per regulatory filings, Murdoch sold 418,631 shares on 20 November for more than $10 million at $23.87 to $24.01 per share.

The sale was for estate-planning purposes, reported Bloomberg quoting a source.

The Murdoch family holds 12 per cent but its dual class shareholding structure gives it 40 per cent of the voting power.

It needs to be noted that Murdoch was facing stiff opposition from News Corp shareholders, some of who had proposed sweeping changes to make the management more accountable particularly in the wake of phone hacking scandal in the company?s UK publishing unit.

The investors had also criticised the dual-class structure during the annual general meeting which gives Murdoch family undue power to take their agenda forward.

The company?s Class A shares fell less than 1 percent to $23.82 at the close in New York.

MUMBAI: UK media watchdog Ofcom has imposed a financial penalty of ?40,000 on E! Entertainment UK.

This penalty follows Ofcom?s finding, published on 23 April 2012 in Broadcast Bulletin 204 relating to the broadcast of consecutive episodes of Girls of the Playboy Mansion at various times during the day on 27 December 2011.

The content of these episodes included material which was unsuitable for pre-watershed broadcast and the episodes were broadcast during the Christmas holiday period, when it was likely that children ? some unaccompanied by an adult - would have been watching. The broadcaster was found in breach of Rule 1.3:

According to Rule 1.3, children must also be protected by appropriate scheduling from material that is unsuitable for them.

Before the broadcast on 27 December 2011 of Girls of the Playboy Mansion, which was subject to this sanction, E! had also previously been found in breach for two programmes, which were also unsuitable for broadcast before the watershed because the nature of the content and because the most offensive language was broadcast (Broadcast Bulletin 195).

Ofcom decided that the Code breach of Rule 1.3 recorded in Broadcast Bulletin 204 was serious and repeated and, therefore, a financial penalty should be imposed.

MUMBAI: In just a single lifetime, humans have changed the face of planet Earth on a scale unimaginable to our predecessors.

Generation Earth, a three-part documentary series by UK pubcaster BBC‘s BBC One channel, for the first time charts the epic scale of our re-design of the planet and how humans have transformed the planet.

‘Generation Earth‘ traces the spectacular story of how humans have changed our world in a single generation.

In this series, Dallas Campbell travels the globe, visiting the world‘s largest and most ambitious engineering projects, exploring the power of human ingenuity and the making of the modern world.

In 1980, the tallest building on the planet was the Sears Towers in Chicago and Dubai was a dusty strip of desert with a single highway. Fast forward 30 years and the world‘s tallest building stands at more than 800 metres in Dubai, cities like Las Vegas have sprawled across the desert and are home to millions, and China is the manufacturing capital of the world, with many of the fastest growing cities on earth.

Throughout the series Dallas undertakes some extraordinary feats - from cleaning the windows of the world‘s tallest building - the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, to scuba-diving in raw sewage in Mexico City, in order to unblock the turbines driving the mega-city‘s failing sewage system. He also flies a replica of the Wright Brother‘s glider from 1902, paraglides over the world‘s largest greenhouse array and travels to a cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan, to witness a new age of space travel.

Dallas said: "The way we live on the planet is changing in ways that our ancestors would have thought impossible. Telling that story has been utterly absorbing and fascinating and by far the most ambitious and demanding project I‘ve ever worked on. I‘ve had privileged access to the some of the world‘s defining engineering projects - projects that are re-shaping the planet, and the chance to experience first-hand some of the extraordinary innovations that allow us to live the way we now do."

In the first episode, Dallas looks at how we are building faster than ever before.

In episode two, he explores how we are shrinking the planet, transforming our transport networks, and moving more objects around the globe faster.

In the final episode, Dallas examines what it takes to keep seven billion of us alive, in terms of energy, food and water.

Drawing on satellite imagery, CGI and specialist filming, the series provides a new view on the world and compresses time to watch a generation of change pass in a few moments. Multiple time?lapse cameras track the progress of the biggest construction projects underway today, from bare rock to engineering marvels. Each an emblem of a global trend, together they capture the sheer scale of human ambition to remake the planet. Filmed in HD, Generation Earth invokes the stunning and sometimes terrible beauty of the man-made world.