Senior Sun journalists arrested in police payments probe | Media | guardian.co.uk

The Sun has been plunged into its worst ever crisis following the arrest of five of its most senior journalists over corruption allegations, moving Rupert Murdoch to pledge his support for the paper amid rumours that it faces closure.

Murdoch's "total commitment" to continue to own and publish the Sun was sent to News International staff by chief executive Tom Mockridge after the journalists, who include the deputy editor, were arrested in connection with an investigation into inappropriate payments to police and public officials.

Mockridge confirmed that the five Sun journalists involved are deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and deputy news editor John Sturgis.

BBC News - Why Borgen's all the buzz at Westminster

During the Blair years it was the West Wing that obsessed the Westminster village.

The fast-talking, fast-walking, frenetic White House drama somehow seemed to reflect and tap in to the more optimistic mood of those times.

Oh, and the good guys always seemed to win.

Now rather more bizarrely, it is Borgen that's all the buzz.

A moody, Danish political drama, complete with subtitles, prolonged pauses and superficially consensual continental politics would not seem the sort of programme to become the hot topic in the coffee bars and corridors of the Commons.

Even more improbably the central character in Borgen is such an unlikely figure when viewed from the staid, male dominated world of Westminster.

Birgitte Nyborg is an attractive, well-intentioned, left-leaning, green-tinged female prime minister who's worried about her weight and leads a party called "The Moderates".

So far, so terribly naff.

BBC News - Acta: Germany delays signing anti-piracy agreement

Germany has halted signing a controversial anti-piracy accord, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta), after the justice ministry voiced concerns.

A foreign ministry spokesperson told AFP that the delay was to "give us time to carry out further discussions".

Latvia put off ratification on Friday. Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have already delayed the process.

International protests against the agreement are expected on Saturday.

Anti-Drug Vaccines Hold Promise - But Little Profit - IPS ipsnews.net

MEXICO CITY, Feb 10, 2012 (IPS) - Vaccines against drug addiction appear to be a better strategy than the repressive worldwide "war on drugs", but first they must overcome resistance from pharmaceutical laboratories and secure financial backing, scientists say.

Experimental trials against cocaine and heroin addiction are under way in Mexico and the United States, but two or three more years of work are needed to prove that the treatment is viable. Ethical aspects must also be resolved, such as compulsory medication for addicts and permission for use in children.

"Different delivery methods need to be designed. The pleasurable effect of drugs needs to be eliminated, which is feasible. But it will have to start being done in under-age children, and that raises a number of legal and ethical issues," Dr. Rogelio Rodríguez told IPS.

At his private clinic, Rodríguez offers serum treatments for cocaine and alcohol dependency, combined with psychotherapy. For seven days, at a cost of 64 dollars a day, patients receive doses that lead to rejection of the addictive substance and its abandonment.

The Mexican health ministry patented a vaccine against heroin that has been successfully used in mice, and is about to enter the phase of clinical trials in humans, for which the government is seeking international funding.

A silver bullet to beat cancer?

The internet is awash with stories of how silver can be used to treat cancer. Now, lab tests have shown that it is as effective as the leading chemotherapy drug - and may have fewer side-effects.

Results from the study at the University of Leeds, published in Dalton Transactions, show that particular silver compounds are as toxic to cancer cells as the platinum-based drug Cisplatin, which is widely used to treat a range of cancers.

But the crucial difference is that silver is thought to be much less toxic to healthy human cells, and in some cases, can be beneficial. Silver is currently used for its antiseptic and antibiotic properties, in bandages, wound dressings and water purification filters in the third world.

Nausea and vomiting, kidney damage and an increased risk of infection are common side effects of Cisplatin which is used to treat cancer of the lungs, breast, bladder, testicles, head and neck, ovaries and lymph nodes.

Brain capacity limits exponential online data growth

Scientists have found that the capacity of the human brain to process and record information - and not economic constraints - may constitute the dominant limiting factor for the overall growth of globally stored information. These findings have just been published in an article in EPJ B by Claudius Gros and colleagues from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany.

The authors first looked at the distribution of 633 public internet files by plotting the number of videos, audio and image files against the size of the files. They gathered files which were produced by humans or intended for human use with the spider file search engine Findfiles.net.

They chose to focus on files which are hosted on domains pointing from the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and the open web directory dmoz. Assuming that economic costs for data production are proportional to the amount of data produced, these costs should be driving the generation of information exponentially.

However, the authors found that, in fact, economic costs were not the limiting factors for data production. The absence of exponential tails for the graph representing the number of files indicates this conclusion.

They found that underlying neurophysiological processes influence the brain's ability to handle information. For example, when a person produces an image and attributes a subjective value to it, for example, a given resolution, he or she is influenced by his or her perception of the quality of that image.

I'm aghast at the Spanish labour law reform announced by the PP government yesterday and unveiled today.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

Web of Trust is the first "crowd-sourced safe-web-browsing tool that grades websites on their safety and lack of harmful spyware and virus. With almost 30,000,000 users, this platform is creating a web within the web of safe sites."

It's Finnish.

You can't be me, I'm taken