Microsoft, Google and other US firms are pushing Brussels for a single set of rules on cloud computing and data-storage services, reports the Wall Stree Journal. The EU commission to produce a preliminary text in the autumn on 31 new pieces of legislation, some of which may touch on cloud computing.

AFP - Top Spanish bullfighting entrepreneurs vowed on Thursday take Catalonia's parliament to court in a bid to reverse its decision to ban the bloodsport and stop other regions from following their lead.

"We are going to launch a huge battle" against this "outrageous" measure, promoter Luiz Alvarez, a founder of the bullfighting lobby group Mesa del Toro, told AFP.

Catalonia's regional parliament on Wednesday voted to ban bullfighting from January 1, 2012.

AFP - An Arab man jailed for 18 months for duping a Jewish woman into consensual sex by lying about his ethnicity has appealed his sentence to Israel's supreme court, media reported on Thursday.

The man's lawyer, Elkana Laist, told the Ynet news website that he had appealed because the severity of the sentence did not reflect the reality of the case.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to jail last week after a court found that the married Arab had had sex with the woman by posing as a Jewish bachelor interested in a long-term relationship.

AP - German state authorities on Wednesday accused the organizer of last weekend's Love Parade techno festival of major security breaches which may have led to the crush that killed 21 people and injured more than 500.

The organizer's security officials failed to properly control the entrance area where the victims were crushed, according to North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger and the state's chief police controller Dieter Wehe.

"Security did not fulfill its duty," Wehe said while presenting the key findings of a preliminary police investigation at a news conference.

Access to clean drinking water is now an official basic human right - just like the right to food and the right to live without torture and racial discrimination. The resolution was approved late yesterday by the United Nations General Assembly without opposition.

 

Although the decision does not make the right to water legally enforceable, it is symbolically important and places more political obligation on national governments. The resolution highlights how urgent the issue of water shortage is for a growing portion of the world's population.

The war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague is expected to take a glamorous turn with British supermodel Naomi Campbell scheduled to testify next week. She's claimed that Taylor gave her a large, rough diamond at a dinner party in South Africa in 1997. That diamond is allegedly linked to the civil war in Sierra Leone. Taylor stands accused of arming rebels in return for illegally mined diamonds.

The French government on Tuesday announced the official launch of Hadopi, the government agency designed to promote creative works on the Internet and to counter online piracy. One of the law's most controversial provisions created a "three strikes" system where, in addition to possible fines and even jail time, a person caught illegally downloading copyrighted material three times would be blacklisted from receiving Internet service for up to a year.

 

The law, which has been in the works since 2008, has gone through various iterations, including surviving a Constitutional Council of France ruling. The court decision required judicial review before terminating someone's Internet connection. Deutsche Welle spoke with Joe McNamee of EDRi, a European digital rights organization based in Brussels about the Hadopi going into effect.

(Reuters) - Prosecutors in Germany have charged a suspected Nazi camp guard with helping to kill 430,000 Jews in the Holocaust and personally shooting 10 others.

State prosecutors in the western city of Dortmund said on Thursday charges had been filed against Samuel Kunz, 88, for assisting in the murder of Jews at Nazi death camp Belzec near the Polish city of Lublin between January 1942 and July 1943.

Kunz is also accused of shooting 10 Jews in two separate incidents, prosecutors' spokesman Christoph Goeke said.

Because Kunz was under 21 at the start of the period under investigation, the trial will probably be held in the youth chamber of a court in nearby Bonn, prosecutors said. No date has been set for the trial.

(Reuters Life!) - Calling people fat rather than obese would be more likely to motivate them to lose weight, according to Britain's public health minister.

Doctors and health workers are too worried about using the term "fat," Anne Milton said, but doing so could help encourage people to take personal responsibility for their lifestyles.

"If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried (than) if I think I am fat," Milton, a former nurse, told the BBC. "At the end of the day, you cannot do it for them. People have to have the information."

People see desirable objects as physically closer than less desirable ones, according to a study in the January issue of Psychological Science. When psychologists Emily Balcetis of New
York University and David Dunning of Cornell University asked people to estimate how far away a bottle of water was, those who were thirsty guessed it was closer than nonthirsty people did. This difference in perception showed up in a physical challenge, too. People tossing a beanbag at a $25 gift card were, on average, nine inches shy, whereas people aiming for a gift card worth nothing overshot by an inch.

In a first for modern Russia, a leading Russian theatre on Wednesday appointed a celebrated Spanish choreographer as its ballet director.

The Mikhailovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg said Spanish dance legend Nacho Duato would lead its ballet troupe from January 2011, the first time a foreigner has been appointed to such a post since the Tsarist era.

The last foreigner to lead a Russian ballet theatre was the French choreographer Marius Petipa who was invited by the Romanov imperial family to work in Saint Petersburg in the 19th century.

Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer whose reporting compelled the White House to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, does not mince words when it comes to allegations that he broke pre-arranged ground rules or agreements to go off the record.

"They were lying," Hastings said, referring to the unnamed sources who leveled the accusations last month as fallout from his story mounted. "What they said to The Washington Post and, I think, to the Army Times is fiction. And they know that."

He was speaking Thursday at a small luncheon hosted by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

Not only did he adhere to the ground rules, Hastings said; he even went beyond them, running some quotes from McChrystal's staff without attribution that he had every right to attach to names. He did that not to protect the speakers, he said, but merely as "an editorial decision."

"Whatever ground rules were put down, we followed them," he said. "Whenever someone said something was off the record, I followed that. There is absolutely no gray area here. How it works is the reporter goes and hangs out with a subject and writes down what the subject says and does."

One bit of evidence that Hastings played fair: He's already been approved by the military for another assignment. "There's actually an embed that's waiting for me in Afghanistan," he said