The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) announced today that 64 journalists were killed around the world with the most dangerous region being the middle east. Ten journalists were killed in Pakistan for the second year in the row making it the deadliest country for journalists.

The uprisings in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen cost the lives of 16 journalists, while Iraq remains dangerous with six journalists killed last year.

Mexico is the most dangerous country in the Western hemisphere with six deaths reported in the country due to the coverage of organized crime and corruption.

The deaths are down from previous years with the high being in 2006 where 110 journalists were killed. The full list of deaths from last year and those prior can be found on the WAN-IFRA Web site.

While journalists are killed in war zones, a lot of them are killed for merely investigated organized crime, drug trafficking, corruption and other crimes. Those who kill journalists are rarely brought to justice.

Journalists were killed in 27 countries in 2011. A lot of the countries are located in the Middle East, but a few of them are surprising such as Russia or Brazil.

The International Press Institute released their own numbers saying that the death count was at 103. They list Latin America as the most dangerous country for journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists released their own numbers in December pegging the death toll at 43.

Regardless of who has the right numbers, the point still stands. The Middle East and Latin America were both dangerous for journalists in 2011.

People took to Twitter to comment on the news while focusing mostly on the deaths in the Middle East.

Until now, the service was only available in the U.S. and Canada.

“Getting to this day has been incredibly rewarding for everyone at Netflix – the passion and energy that have gone into building our Latin American service is amazing,” says Netflix VP of User Experience and Design Rochelle King. “Over the last few months, our team has spent countless hours in the region learning as much as we can about how Latin Americans think about, and enjoy, movies and TV shows.”

“We’ve licensed thousands and thousands of hours of feature films, classic favorites, gripping telenovelas, documentaries and kids shows we know you’ll enjoy,” says King. ”We’ve been testing and figuring out the right internet architecture to make sure the quality and speed of the Netflix streaming experience is the best it can be.  And we’ve been training people locally to deliver the excellent customer support Netflix is known for in the U.S. and Canada.”

In the U.S. prices just went up for users who were accustomed to getting unlimited streaming movies along with DVDs in the mail. The company has split this into two separate plans, which means users that wish to keep both of these plans have to pay 60% more than they were before.

Netflix also just lost its partnership with Starz, which has been the provider of a great deal of the more popular and recent releases on Netflix.

Netflix did announce a an expansion of its deal with Miramax to bring hundreds of titles to Latin America. Netflix has been streaming movies from Miramax in the U.S. since May.

If you missed it, last week comScore came out with its United States search engine rankings for April. The rankings showed that Google still dominates the search market, holding 65.4% of the share. Yahoo came in a distant second with 15.9% and Bing rounded out the top three with 14.1%.

Google dropped .3% from March to April, while both Yahoo and Bing increased their volume by .2%.

So, while Google holding almost 2/3 of the share of search in America is dominant, it’s nothing compared to what’s going on in Latin America.

comScore reports that over 90% of searches in Latin America are happening through Google (including YouTube). Of the 18.5 billion individual search queries in March 2011, 16.7 of them were performed through Google. Facebook garnered the next highest percentage at 2.8% and Microsoft rounded out the top three just under Facebook’s volume.

The study also found that search in general surged in Latin America, up 21% year-over-year. They found that the average searcher in Latin America conducts 167 queries per month. The study reported a 14% increase in unique searchers and 6% increase in search volume per person.

Brazil accounted for the largest volume of queries with 6 billion in March and also had the strongest growth year-over-year at 34%. Mexico and Colombia followed with 3.2 billion and 2.9 billion respectively.

Google’s level of dominance in the States pales in comparison to their dominance in Latin America. And their dominance is a global thing – according to a report earlier this year there are only 5 countries in the world where Google isn’t the top search engine.

In a move that may help their cause in challenging Google’s supremacy, Bing just announced Facebook integration in search. This move allows friend’s “likes” to become a factor in search rankings. Bing says that this move towards “social search” is what people want, and is the model of the future.

Bill Faries reported earlier today, "Google Inc., the world’s biggest Internet-search company, is opening new offices in Latin America and boosting staffing levels by 50 percent to capitalize on its fastest-growing region."

Faries then added, "Revenue from Latin America surged 80 percent last year, outpacing every other market, Vice President Dennis Woodside said in an interview at the company’s Buenos Aires office.  Google, which has about 500 people in the region, has opened branches in Santiago, Lima and Bogota to take advantage of the growth, he said."

Meanwhile, Daniel Gertsacov, Google’s head of new markets for Latin America, gave an interview in which he stressed the importance of Peru in particular.

All this comes at an interesting time for the company, considering that just one week ago, Google lost its managing director of Latin America to Facebook. 

Google’s hiring spree should more than compensate for that loss, however, assuming a couple dozen people on its payroll aren’t already able to step up and fill the opening.

Monster will become Yahoo’s provider of career and job content in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Monster says the partnership will give it access to almost 55 million new Internet users in Latin America. Terms of the deal were not released.

“The alliance with Yahoo! offers great synergy for our clients in Latin America, many of whom approach their needs in the market from a regional point of view,” said Rob Brouwer, senior vice president for Latin America and Developing Markets, for Monster Worldwide.

“For millions of job-seekers, this is extremely welcome news. As more and more seekers are casting a wider net that includes cross-border opportunities, giving them the ability to tap into Monster’s global footprint provides them with a tremendous advantage.”

Recently Yahoo tapped Zillow to power all of its real estate listings and sell local ads on both sites.

 With broadband prices falling many first-time Internet users are signing up. Growth is also due to subscribers upgrading from dial-up.

"The perceived growth in broadband services and the expected growth in the future are aligned with two main factors, namely the migration from traditional dial-up connections highly promoted by Internet providers and the low costs of new plans with more complete offers," said Andrs Sciarrotta, a research analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

Frost & Sullivan pointed out that the market still has a way to go.

"To overcome the challenges faced by broadband penetration, it is crucial for operators and ISPs to forge alliances and make acquisitions so that they can present all three services, namely voice, video and data," Mr. Sciarrotta said.

"Making such complete offers will allow them to be more competitive and gain more subscribers," he said.

Brazil had the largest amount of users online with 15.8 million, which is 11 percent of the country’s population over the age of 15. Chile had 45 percent of its population online and had the highest Internet penetration.

Internet users in Argentina were the most active of all users, going online an average of 18 days in the month.

On average the Brazilian Internet user viewed 3,371 pages during the month, 40 percent more than the Latin American average of 2,338.

Said Bob Ivins, EVP of comScore International Markets, "Because of it size and rapid development, the Internet industry in Latin America is an exciting region to track and analyze. We have been reporting country-specific browsing data from the comScore panel for a number of years but this is the first time we have compared metrics across the
region."

The most visited Latin American property was Microsoft Sites, which had 47.3 million unique visitors. Google Sites trailed closely with 46. 5 million unique visitors and Yahoo Sites were a distant third with 35 million unique visitors.