BBC World News America is a current affairs news programme produced by BBC World News to be shown initially for American audiences. It's presented by Katty Kay, who was announced the main anchor in September 2011.

Until March 25, 2011, the programme was shown daily in a full hour format on BBC America and BBC World News, and for the first half hour (on tape delay) on BBC News Channel in the middle of the night in the UK. On March 28, 2011, the programme was reduced to a half-hour from the previous full hour. It is no longer shown on BBC America or BBC News Channel. It is now shown on BBC World News, and made available to PBS stations in the United States.

(all times UTC)

Weekdays:
BBC World News - 20:00 to 20:30 and 22:00 to 22:30

In some instances, this programme has been cut off on its hour broadcast to a few snippets because of a breaking news broadcast (e.g.: 2007 Karachi bombing). But in the case of the 2008 US Election primaries & caucus, the programme has been extended to 3 hours (e.g.: 2008 Iowa Caucus) and even up to 6 hours (e.g.: 2008 Super Tuesday) and only being presented by one host. BBC World News America also covered the three presidential and the only vice-presidential debates.

World news or international news or even foreign coverage is the news media-jargon for news from abroad, about a foreign country or a global subject. For journalism, it is a branch that deals with news either sent by foreign correspondents or news agencies, or — more recently — information that is gathered or researched through distance communication technologies, such as telephone, satellite TV or the internet.

Although in most of the Anglophone world this field is not usually regarded as a specific specialization for journalists, it is so in nearly all the world. Particularly in the United States, there is a blurred distinction between world news and "national" news when they include directly the national government or national institutions, such as wars in which the US are involved or summits of multilateral organizations in which the US are a member.

Actually, at the birth of modern journalism, most news were actually foreign, as registered by the courants of the 17th century in West and Central Europe, such as the Daily Courant (England), the Nieuwe Tijudinger (Antwerp), the Relation (Strasbourg), the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung (Wolfenbüttel) and the Courante Uyt Italien, Duytsland & C. (Amsterdam). Since these papers were aimed at bankers and merchants, they brought mostly news from other markets, which usually meant other nations. In any case, it is worthy to remark that nation-states were still incipient in 17th-century Europe.

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."

Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish Russian family. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school paper with James Baldwin. After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present. In 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. Lillian Bassman also promoted Avedon's career at Harper's.

In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper's Bazaar. From 1950 he also contributed photographs to Life, Look and Graphis and in 1952 became Staff Editor and photographer for Theatre Arts Magazine. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action. Towards the end of the 1950s he became dissatisfied with daylight photography and open air locations and so turned to studio photography, using strobe lighting.

Peter Lik is a self-taught Australian landscape photographer. While traveling in Alaska in 1984, Lik began to experiment with panoramic cameras. He is known for his limited editions and his work has been compared to that of legendary photographer Ansel Adams.^{[citation needed]} Lik is regarded as an adventurer as well as a photographer due to the risks he will take to get "the shot."

Lik was born to Czech parents who migrated to Australia after World War II as refugees, eventually settling in Melbourne. He took his very first photo when given a Kodak Brownie box camera on his eighth birthday. The shot was of a dewy spider web in the garden of the family home. As a child, Lik would take his camera on family vacations and take photos of country scenes and the ocean. This practice would continue when he became a youth and took road trips out of the city and into the wilds of Australia, often with his lifelong friend and fellow professional photographer Michael Plumridge.

In 1984, Lik made his first trip to America and undertook to photograph all 50 states. The project was finally completed five years later and became his book "Spirit of America."^{[citation needed]}