The web is awash with gossip and rumour about the imminent arrival of a Google-branded phone.

The search firm is widely expected to unveil the Nexus One phone at a press conference scheduled for 5 January at its California HQ.

It is believed Google will sell the gadget directly to customers and that it will also be available, subsidised, from mobile operators.

Google has remained tight-lipped about what will be unveiled at the event.

Dij Bentley's mother Christine, 47, died from acute myeloid leukaemia in August last year. Prior to her death, she had developed an infection and needed a blood transfusion. Friends and family members were asked to give blood to see if they were a match for her. Although Bentley did not know whether he was a match, he was prevented from donating under rules which bar men who have had with another man from giving blood.

All secondary school pupils in England should have the chance to learn a less familiar language such as Mandarin, says Children's Secretary Ed Balls.

Mandarin has become increasingly popular in schools - with one in seven now teaching the subject.

Making it more widely available is an "aspiration" rather than a pledge - and could mean schools and colleges sharing specialist language teaching staff.

Mr Balls highlighted the economic importance of learning languages.

As well as Mandarin, he pointed to the growing importance of Portuguese for trading with Brazil, Spanish in Argentina and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia.

Police in Sweden believe they have uncovered an elaborate cross-border criminal masterplan to steal left shoes in Stockholm and match them up with right shoes pilfered from designer boutiques in Copenhagen.

For months, officers were baffled when designer shoe shops in Malmö reported that only left shoes were disappearing from their shelves. But the mystery was solved when it emerged that in neighbouring Denmark only right shoes were put on display, the Times reports.

"Apparently this is a tried and tested approach," Stig Möller, a police superintendent in Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city and scene of the initial crime, told the paper.

GESTÉ, France -- The soaring steeple, airy flying buttresses and steep slate roof of the 19th-century parish church that dominates this town in western France is -- like many other village churches in France -- scheduled for demolition, a victim of its size, its condition and, ultimately, municipal budget concerns.

Although the church, dedicated to St. Peter, is arguably the sole architectural jewel in this town of 2,400 people, the town has decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one that will be far cheaper to keep up.

Erected in stages to accommodate 900 people, the formidable stone building has stood sadly empty since 2006. Completing the picture of dereliction, it is surrounded by a wire fence to protect visitors from the very real threat of crumbling stonework.

With only 18% of the vote in the last legislative elections in September 2009, the Bulgarian socialist party (BSP) is nowadays a rather sluggish opposition. Its leaders, nostalgic former communists, are joined on the left of the political spectrum by youngsters with ideas and dreams

In 1989, central and eastern European countries each underwent revolutions: democratic, velvet, violent or otherwise... In Bulgaria, the revolution was at the Palace. Either through street protests or fierce opposition, the country lived in a lethargic state of communism, slowly disintegrating away. Fine connoisseurs of the game of politics, those in power then devised a brilliant idea: transform the communist party into a socialist party seeking democratic change by simply changing its name...

`From that moment, the socialist party, the direct heir of the old nomenklatura, became a de facto conservative party,' analyses Ivo Petkov, a Bulgarian journalist who has been committed to the left for some years now. `Since the right launched itself into reforms to transform the country, the left took the opposite path, seeking to weaken them, while protecting the privileges of old age and talking them down with half-words. This posture can be understood because the men who made up the BSP were former communists. As for their constituents, either they lost a lot with the transition, such as pensioners, or they still firmly believe in a certain form of socialism.'

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute's move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

"The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "They were absolutely singular on this topic" -- capital punishment -- "because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States."

Does power make fertile ground for a person to develop double standards?  Do the powerful think themselves less bound by the moral strictures they would apply to everyone else? A recent parade of disgraced governors, brazenly greedy CEOs and wayward sports icons seems to say yes, and yes. A series of psychology experiments outlined in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science  says so as well. That's a publication of the newly named Assn. for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society).

Psychologists at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management conducted five separate role-playing experiments in which university students -- all female -- were assigned a range of positions from flunky to fat cat. The researchers then dangled temptation in front of their subjects with little seeming risk of getting caught. And in surveys, they plumbed participants' attitudes exhaustively about the acceptability of engaging in behavior as varied as padding expense accounts, disobeying traffic laws and appropriating a found bicycle.

Throughout, participants were divided into two groups -- each containing the full spectrum of weak and powerful. One group completed surveys on the moral acceptability of others engaging in a set of questionable behaviors. The other group completed surveys on the moral acceptability of their own transgressions in the same scenarios.

Across the five experiments, the researchers reported, "we found strong evidence that the powerful are more likely to engage in moral hypocrisy than those lacking power." Compared to the weak, the powerful were both more likely to cheat furtively on a dice-rolling exercise and to declare expense-account padding, scofflaw driving and failing to turn in a found bicycle reprehensible -- when others engaged in those behaviors. When asked to rate the acceptability of such behavior on their own part, the powerful were decidedly more forgiving than were the weak.

"The powerful judged their own moral transgressions more acceptable" than those committed by others. Weaklings, by contrast, appeared to hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior than that to which they held others -- a phenomenon dubbed "hypercrisy" by the researchers.