Gordon Brown has said that today's Digital Britain report will guarantee broadband access for all, while he added that it was important to "develop and sustain" public service content such as regional TV news.

The prime minister, writing in today's Times ahead of this afternoon's publication of the report, said that a digital UK could not become a "two-tier Britain".

However, expectations ahead of the report have been lowered, with no deal expected to be announced between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4, and no firm proposals on ITV's regional news provision.

Millions of homes are also expected to be denied superfast internet access for at least a decade because of a failure to reach agreement on who should pay for the upgrade, according to the Times.

In 2001, three years before Barack Obama came to national prominence, Alysa Stanton embarked on her own audacious journey. She spoke about breaking barriers, building bridges and providing, calling on people to focus on their similarities rather than differences.

Now that stage of her journey has reached its end, with Stanton attaining the distinction of being the first black woman in America to become a mainstream Jewish rabbi. History was made last week at her ordination in the Plum Street temple in Cincinnati, one of the oldest synagogues in the US.

Parallels leap out between her journey and Obama's. She is 45, he 47. They both straddled racial and communal lines. They both faced hurdles and brickbats along the way.

In her case, her decision to enter rabbinical school in 2001 broke multiple taboos. On top of the age-old tensions between Christian -- the religion of her birth -- and Jew, were the bubbling hostilities between African Americans and largely white American Jews.

The number of people internally displaced within their own countries has reached a historical high of more than 28 million, the UN's refugee agency said today, as conflicts in Pakistan's Swat valley and Sri Lanka compound a growing global problem.

At the end of last year the total number of people forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution around the world stood at 42 million, including 16 million refugees and asylum seekers and 26 million people uprooted within their own countries, according to UNHCR's annual Global Trends report, which was released this afternoon.

But since the end of last year there has been an exodus of more than 2 million from the Swat valley, which has become a battleground between the Taliban and the Pakistani army.

More than 300,000 refugees are being held in internment camps in Sri Lanka, victims of the conflict between government soldiers and the Tamil Tigers, and 130,000 people have been displaced by fighting in the Somalian capital, Mogadishu.

Blogging is a public activity with no right to anonymity, the high court ruled today in a decision expected to have far-reaching repercussions for thousands of bloggers who keep their identities secret.

Richard Horton had obtained a temporary injunction against the Times after a reporter discovered he was the officer behind the NightJack blog, which attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to its behind-the-scenes commentary on policing.

Horton, a detective constable with the Lancashire constabulary, prevented the Times from revealing his identity after arguing the paper would be putting him at risk of disciplinary action for disclosing confidential information about prosecutions within the force.

However, in a landmark judgment Mr Justice Eady overturned the injunction, stating that Horton, whose blog at one time had around 500,000 readers a week, had "no reasonable expectation of privacy".

The Chinese government appears to have backed down in the face of public opposition to its plans for mandatory installation of censorship software on all new computers.

The Green Dam Youth Escort program, which restricts access to pornography and politically sensitive websites, was due to be compulsorily incorporated in the hard drives of all new machines sold after 1 July, but the state-run media announced today that it would instead be an optional package.

But it is unlikely to allay suspicions about the developer, Jinhui - a military-backed software firm - and about Green Dam, which tightens government control of the internet at the level of individual computers.

The review also found a gap in the literature: While many studies have tried to understand why same-sex coupling exists and why it might make sense in terms of evolution, few have looked at what the evolutionary consequences of this behavior might be.

"Like any other behavior that doesn't lead directly to reproduction -- such as aggression or altruism -- same-sex behavior can have evolutionary consequences that are just now beginning to be considered," Bailey said. "For example, male-male copulations in locusts can be costly for the mounted male" and this cost may put evolutionary pressure on the locusts, he said. As a result, a larger number of males may secrete a particular chemical that discourages the mounting behavior, he added.

A computer professional in Norway, with the help of an online computing project, has discovered a new Mersenne prime. This sought-after number represents the 47th Mersenne prime discovered since ancient Greek mathematicians first uncovered them.

These primes are called the "jewels" of number theory, and it takes a huge computing system about two or three weeks to test a single number to see if it could lead to a Mersenne prime.

For those of you for whom basic math is a distant memory, a reminder:

Primes are numbers that are divisible by only the number 1 and themselves. So 2 is prime; so are 3, 5, 7 and so on. The year 2003 was a prime year, and 2011 will be as well.

Not Just Any Prime

Mersenne primes are a special class of prime, and they have a particular formula.

2ⁿ-1

The number n is a prime, and the result is prime. And what makes the Mersenne primes so interesting is how rare they are. And their gargantuan size.

...

Nearly half of the 1.2 million people killed in traffic accidents around the world each year are not in cars. They are on motorcycles and bicycles or walking along roadsides.

That finding, released in a report yesterday, may help explain why 90 percent of the world's traffic fatalities occur in a group of countries that together have fewer than half of the world's cars.

The country-by-country survey of traffic injuries and deaths was published by the World Health Organization. Its 287-page report focuses on an overlooked problem in public health, and it gives a sense of where 178 countries stand in their use of such safety measures as speed limits, helmet laws and blood alcohol restrictions.

Traffic accidents were the 10th-leading cause of death in the world in 2004, behind lung cancer and ahead of diabetes, and they are on track to become the fifth-leading cause by 2030.