That's what we would often call them in crime stories, and it's a common word in a lot of newspapers. It's nice because it doesn't imply guilt... it just states who is involved.
using the word actor in this case adds no information and confuses people not familiar with this use, someone skimming quickly might think it was a play. Why not: men, youths, students, locals? Make the story more clear by adding more, accurate detail; not more confusing by trying to maintain some obscure notion of political correctness.
How is not implying guilt nice? I've seen the same concept in calling criminals 'suspects', but when you've just seen someone shoot someone else (for example), not implying guilt shouldn't be taken into consideration.
Then you say you saw A shoot B. What you don't say is that A is a murderer.
(Note: I really despise the use of the word "actors" in the article, though. It's less wordy than "alleged theives" or whatever, but it could also have been omitted entirely. "The two actors" ---> "The two" etc.)
How do you know? A could be mentally ill, and thus innocent. A could be an undercover officer, or shooting in self defence against a threat you didn't see. And so on.
You can say "in my opinion, A is a murderer" -- but the only time you should be making a statement of fact on A's guilt is after it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
To do otherwise is to dishonestly masquerade your opinion as fact and to expose yourself to a nice fat libel lawsuit along the way.
Not implying guilt should be taken into consideration. People have a legal right to a fair trial, if they don't get one you lose the ability to prosecute as the verdict can easily be thrown out in the face of infallible evidence due to a tainted jury pool.
Many times, the law isn't concerned with what you did but why you did it. I could shoot someone in the middle of the street in front of 200 people, however he might have just tried to sink me with a knife to get my wallet. It's the jury's job to decide whether I'm guilty on all the evidence, not on what a newspaper publishes.
This is why in Crown countries the government frequently has the ability to put a press-embargo on a case until after conviction.
Weird that this came up again; this happened in August and there was a really crazy media frenzy at the time which mostly died down (although I do get a few random emails time to time).
A friend just told me today that he got his iphone stolen by a class mate. He went to the police, gave them the UID of the phone, and he got it back 3 days later.
Apperantly, as he told me, the police contacted apple which gave them the exact position of the mobile phone through the build in gps device, so the police could just pick it up.
If you use Mobile Me and register your iphone with it you can track your iphone as well as make it play a noise for 2 minutes and show an alert.
As someone who recently had to replace an iPhone at full price (unwilling to sign up for another two years on AT&T's horrible service in SF). I recommend looking into using this _before_ you lose/have stolen your iPhone.
