The news this morning that the information commissioner has ruled in favour of disclosure of royal correspondence could have profound repercussions for the monarchy and the British constitution.

When the Freedom of Information Act was introduced the monarchy was simply not recognised as a public body, so the remit of the act failed to get past the gates of Buckingham Palace. Correspondence between the palace and public authorities that are covered by the act was exempted under section 37. There was, however, a public interest test, meaning that if it could be demonstrated that it was in the public interest to release information then the information must be released.

The UK looks set to have its first ever televised leader election debates after a deal was struck between the three big parties and the main broadcasters.

Labour's Gordon Brown, Conservative leader David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg have agreed to go head-to-head in a series of three debates.

Each clash will last about 90 minutes, with the first shown on ITV, the second on Sky, and the third on the BBC.

But the SNP and Plaid Cymru say they should be allowed to take part too.

Live presidential debates in the US and other countries have provided many of the key moments of election campaigns and are seen as having raised voters' interest.

The "Arbeit macht frei" sign stolen from Auschwitz in southern Poland has been found in the north and five men are being questioned by police.

The five suspects, aged in their 20s and 30s, were not members of a neo-Nazi group, Krakow police said.

The metal sign from the main gate, which symbolises for many the atrocities of Nazi Germany, had been cut into three pieces, they added.

A major search was launched after the sign was stolen before dawn on Frida

he European Parliament has approved a 122.9bn euro (£110bn) EU budget for 2010 - nearly half of which is to go to agriculture and natural resources.

It is a 6% increase on the 2009 budget, which was worth 116bn euros.

Next year the EU is due to conduct a major review of the budget. The UK wants to see a cut in farm subsidies.

In 2010 an extra 2.4bn euros will go towards economic recovery projects, with the energy sector and broadband development the priorities.

Police will continue to retain the personal details of everyone they arrest, despite a human rights ruling meaning the DNA profiles they are linked to must be deleted.

The European Court of Human Rights said last year that DNA data should not be indefinitely retained from those who have not been charged or convicted.

The government plans to delete some such profiles, hoping to bring the UK into line with the law, but it's emerged they do not plan to delete the accompanying identity data on the Police National Computer.

In 2005, changes to DNA procedures meant a PNC record was created each time a sample was taken, The Observer reports. These records won't be deleted as part of the response to the human rights ruling.

Guest post by my sister who was trapped on the Eurostar train last night. These are her observations and experiences:


My journey from Paris to London this weekend:
I was supposed to get the ill fated 9.13pm train from Paris on Friday night but I missed it due to train delays from Lyon.
I stayed the night in Paris at a hotel which was provided for by a Eurostar voucher. We were told to return early Saturday morning.
At 5.30 am, I waited by the Eurostar desk at Gare du Nord for the 7.13 am train. The staff at that point knew that a train had been stuck all night and didn't know when a train would be running again. We were repeatedly told to 'go away' and come back the next day 'maybe there would be a train'. Passengers responded with 'Go where?'. Staff had no information.

Evidence that the British army subjected prisoners in Northern Ireland to waterboarding during interrogations in the 1970s is emerging after one of the alleged victims launched an appeal against his conviction for murder.

Liam Holden became the last person in the United Kingdom to be sentenced to hang after being convicted in 1973 of the murder of a soldier, largely on the basis of an unsigned confession. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he spent 17 years behind bars.

The jury did not believe Holden's insistence that he made the confession only because he had been held down by members of the Parachute Regiment, whom he says placed a towel over his face before pouring water from a bucket over his nose and mouth, giving him the impression that he was drowning.

But now the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred Holden's case to the court of appeal in Belfast after unearthing new evidence, and because of doubts about "the admissibility and reliability" of his confession. The commission says it believes "there is a real possibility" his conviction will be quashed. After a preliminary hearing earlier this month, Holden's appeal was adjourned to the new year.

However, the account that Holden gave at his trial is remarkably similar to those that have emerged since the CIA began using waterboarding techniques while interrogating al-Qaida suspects during the so-called war on terror.

Meanwhile, by 52 to 44 per cent, the public agrees with the statement that "a Conservative Government would mainly represent the interests of the well-off rather than ordinary people".

BAA has won its appeal against an order to sell three of the seven UK airports it runs on the grounds that the ruling panel was affected by "apparent bias".

But the appeal tribunal rejected BAA's argument that it was being forced to sell the airports too quickly.

The Competition Commission had ruled in March that BAA must sell Gatwick, Stansted and either Edinburgh or Glasgow airports within two years.

BAA has already sold Gatwick but the judgement will not affect that sale.

According to a report by Business Week's Spencer E. Ante, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million - enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports - which Twitter did not comment on - the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue.

The idea that Twitter made a profit from these deals is based on the assumption that the company's annual operating costs are roughly $25 million. Twitter, of course, doesn't release any information about its operating costs or the revenue it made from these deals, so we have to take this estimate with a grain of salt.

Dutch specialist automaker Spyker Cars has submitted a revised last-minute offer to buy the Saab car firm from General Motors, offering hope that thousands of jobs could be saved.

The offer on Sunday follows an announcement from GM that it would begin winding down the Swedish firm after failing to find a buyer.

GM has said it is evaluating the new Spyker bid, having rejected an earlier offer from the firm.

Victor R. Muller, CEO of the Dutch sports carmaker, said he was "very confident" that the renewed offer would remove previous obstacles in the negotiations enabling a deal to go through by the end of December. 

I have recently republished my lecture notes on the history of theories of Trade Development and Foreign Debt. (Available from Amazon) In this book, I provide the basis for refuting Samuelson's factor-price equalization theorem, IMF-World Bank austerity programs, and the purchasing-parity theory of exchange rates.

These ideas were lapses back from earlier analysis, whose pedigree I trace. In view of their regressive character, I think that the question that needs to be asked is how the discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical flowering? How did it become marginalized and trivialized, taking for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the substance and focal point of its analysis? As John Williams quipped already in 1929 about the practical usefulness of international trade theory, "I have often felt like the man who stammered and finally learned to say 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' but found it hard to work into conversation."  But now that such prattling has become the essence of conversation among economists, the important question is how universities, students and the rest of the world have come to accept it and even award prizes in it!

To answer this question, my  book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth, after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic, narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo. It has ended up as an intellectual ploy to distract attention away from the financial and property dynamics that are polarizing our world between debtors and creditors, property owners and renters, while steering politics from democracy to oligarchy.

Bad economic content starts with bad methodology. Ever since John Stuart Mill in the 1840s, economics has been described as a deductive discipline of axiomatic assumptions. Nobel Prizewinners from Paul Samuelson to Bill Vickery have described the criterion for economic excellence to be the consistency of its assumptions, not their realism.[2] Typical of this approach is Nobel Prizewinner Paul Samuelson's conclusion in his famous 1939 article on "The Gains from International Trade":

"In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions."

This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live. These conclusions are diametrically opposed to the empirically successful protectionism by which Britain, the United States and Germany rose to industrial supremacy.

Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:

"Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor theconclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made."

Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?

Iranian reformists have clashed with police after the funeral of a dissident cleric, opposition websites say.

Earlier, tens of thousands took part in a procession for Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri in the holy city of Qom.

Clashes reportedly broke out, but the scale of the confrontation is not clear, says a BBC correspondent.

Montazeri - who died aged 87 of natural causes in Qom on Saturday night - had decried President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election in June as a fraud.

The reformist Jaras website said mourners chanted slogans in support of the cleric and also of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Guinea's military leader should be charged with crimes against humanity over the killing of opposition protesters, a leaked UN report says.

The UN panel says Capt Moussa Dadis Camara bears "direct criminal responsibility" for the killings.

The report said it could identify 156 people who were killed at the protest - contradicting claims from the ruling junta than fewer than 60 people died.

Earlier this month Capt Camara was shot and wounded by one of his own soldiers.

US President Barack Obama has hailed the Senate's healthcare vote as a "big victory for the American people".

Senators voted in the early hours of Monday to end debate on a compromise bill, putting the legislation on course to face a final vote on Christmas Eve.

President Obama has set health reform as a key plank of his first term.

The legislation, which aims to cover 31 million uninsured Americans, could lead to the biggest change in US healthcare in decades, if approved.

China has lost an appeal to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against a ruling that called for it to stop restricting US film and music imports.

The WTO ruled in August that China's policy of allowing the goods to be imported only by state-run firms broke global trade rules.

The WTO wants Chinese firms to be able to import US DVDs, CDs, computer games, books and magazines and films.

The US and China have been embroiled in a number of trade disputes recently.

A US Army general in northern Iraq has defended his decision to add pregnancy to the list of reasons a soldier under his command could face court martial.

It is current army policy to send pregnant soldiers home, but Maj Gen Anthony Cucolo told the BBC he was losing people with critical skills.

That was why the added deterrent of a possible court martial was needed, he said.

The new policy applies both to female and male soldiers, even if married.

The male sexual partners of female soldiers who get pregnant would also "face the consequences", he said.

It is the first time the US Army has made pregnancy a punishable offence.

Iranian authorities are holding several family members of Osama bin Laden, according to Abdul Rahman bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader's second son.

In an interview published on Al Jazeera Arabic's website on Monday, Abdul Rahman bin Laden said that Eman, his sister, one of his stepmothers and five of his brothers have been detained in Tehran since 1997.

He alleged that his sister had managed to escape several weeks ago while on a shopping tour permitted by authorities every six months.

She has since taken refuge in the Saudi Arabian embassy.

Israeli ministers have held lenghty meetings to discuss exchanging hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for a captured Israeli soldier held in the Gaza Strip.

The seven senior ministers in Israel's security cabinet met twice at the office of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, on Monday but were reportedly deadlocked over the conditions for Gilad Shalit's release.

Shalit was captured in a cross-border raid on an army post by Palestinian fighters in June 2006.

Between the two meetings, Netanyahu met Shalit's parents, who earlier made an impassioned plea for ministers to agree to a swap.

The United States has sent home 12 detainees from its Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

Six Yemenis, four Afghans and two Somali prisoners, from the the autonomus Somaliland region, were transferred over the weekend, the US department of justice said in a statement on Sunday.

"These transfers were carried out under individual arrangements between the United States and relevant foreign authorities to ensure the transfers took place under appropriate security measures," it said.

"Consultations with foreign authorities regarding these individuals will continue."

After the latest transfer, 198 detainees remain at the facility on the southern tip of Cuba.

Myanmar's supreme court is to hear an appeal against the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's opposition leader, after she was sentenced to a further 18 months in detention.

The court did not release a date for the hearing, but Nyan Win, Suu Kyi's lawyer, said he expected to present the case within a month.

Lawyers are appealing the 64-year-old democracy leader's house arrest, which she received for sheltering a US intruder who swam to her lakeside home.

Suu Kyi was initially sentenced last August to three years in prison with hard labour, but that sentence was commuted by General Than Shwe, Myanmar's junta chief.

A man accused of taking part in a deadly siege in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008 has retracted his confession, claiming that police tortured him into admitting his role in the attacks.

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 22, told the judge in a special court on Friday that he came to Mumbai as a tourist and was arrested 20 days before the siege began.

"I was not present at VT [Victoria Terminus, the former name of Mumbai's main railway station]. I do not know what has happened," Kasab said.

"Witnesses have come and recognised me because my face looks similar to the terrorists ... that is why I was picked up. I have been framed", he said.

The Pakistani national denies being the man photographed with an assault rifle in pictures taken at Mumbai's main train station, one of several sites targeted by the gunmen.

POLOKWANE, South Africa -- Men in Westenburg Township went hunting Zimbabweans. They prowled its dirt roads by the truckload as night fell recently, brandishing clubs and throwing stones.

At dawn that day, the body of Steven Hamilton, a 24-year-old local man, had been found near a tavern. In a flash, word spread that drunken Zimbabweans had stabbed him in the chest. By the time people returned home from work, the township had erupted. Men shouted for the Zimbabweans to be killed, or for them to go back where they came from.

Mike Mpofu, 34, a former high school art teacher from Zimbabwe who sells vegetables from a shed, saw the mob coming. Charneal Carelse, a South African teenager whose family had befriended Mr. Mpofu, happened to be walking by. "I told her, `There is war coming,' " he said.

Charneal said she told him to hide in her house, and he took off running.

In May 2008, South Africa's image as a home to people of all races and nationalities took a hard knock as xenophobic violence leapt from city to city, victimizing poor Africans who had sought asylum and opportunity in the region's richest country.

Cuban President Raul Castro has lashed out at the US, accusing Barack Obama's administration of endorsing efforts to undermine the communist regime.

In his annual address, Mr Castro said the US had sent a government contractor to supply dissidents. The unnamed US citizen was detained two weeks ago.

Speaking during his annual address, he said "the enemy is as active as ever".

The comments came as US band Kool and the Gang performed in Havana, in what some saw a sign of improving ties.

kool and the gang... words fail. i guess it wasn't metallica, they play the guantanamo gig.

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

The three suspects, who were charged in federal court in New York, are believed to be from Mali and were arrested in Ghana during a Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] sting. Although U.S. authorities have alleged that Al Qaeda and the Taliban [?] profit from Afghanistan's heroin trade, the case is the first in which suspects linked to Al Qaeda have been charged under severe narco-terrorism laws, federal officials said....

Al Qaeda in the Maghreb -- a North African ally of Osama bin Laden's organization -- has muscled into the lucrative cocaine smuggling routes of the Sahara, according to Western and African officials. It existed for two decades under other names before declaring allegiance to Bin Laden in 2006....

Anti-terrorism investigators cite a harbinger: An Al Qaeda-connected cell of North Africans financed their 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 190 people, by dealing hashish and Ecstasy. Moreover, officials said, conversations among informants and suspects have suggested that the lawless region around the Gulf of Guinea is a crossroads for groups united by hatred of the United States -- Al Qaeda, Mexican gangsters, Colombian guerrillas and Lebanese militant groups....

Authorities say the three suspects charged Friday are not members of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb but allege that they are associates. The case against them is based largely on conversations in which, authorities say, the suspects described the smuggling trade and Al Qaeda's involvement to informants posing as representatives of the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.

Read more...

As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it's time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those "pesky leftists" -- those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.

According to Ahilan Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."

It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.

Read more...

Gordon Brown will accuse a small group of countries of holding the Copenhagen climate summit talks to ransom.

The 193-nation UN conference ended with delegates simply "taking note" of a US-led climate deal that recognised the need to limit temperature rises to 2C.

Mr Brown said on Monday the talks were "at best flawed and at worst chaotic" and called for a reformed UN process.

Four rare Northern White rhinos have been flown from a Czech zoo to Kenya, in a desperate attempt to save the species from extinction.

Animal experts hope the rhinos - two males and two females - will breed in their natural habitat in Africa.

Only eight Northern White rhinos are known to survive worldwide, all of them in captivity: six in the Czech Republic and two in the US.

The last four living in the wild in Africa have not been seen since 2006.

Asian giants China and Indonesia have hailed the Copenhagen UN climate summit outcome, despite its cool reception from aid agencies and campaigners.

Beijing's foreign minister said it was a new beginning, and Indonesia's leader said he was pleased with the result.

Earlier, US President Barack Obama defended the accord he helped broker with China and other main powers.

The non-binding pact, called the Copenhagen Accord, was not adopted by consensus at the summit in Denmark.

Four of our activists face the prospect of Christmas in jail this year over charges relating to a protest at the Heads of State dinner at the Copenhagen climate summit. But the leaders who did practically nothing about the greatest threat to our planet got away.

We're calling for the immediate release of our people, please help us by writing to the Danish Embassy today.

The activists joined Heads of State from over 120 countries en route to the banquet at the Danish Parliament. Arriving in a three-vehicle convoy they stepped out onto the red carpet as representatives of the millions of people around the world who wanted a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty to head-off climate catastrophe.

No New Coal Plants Started in 2009

Washington, DC: No new coal plants broke ground in 2009, a result of a combination of widespread public opposition, rising costs, increasing financial risks and concerns over future carbon regulations. In 2009 twenty-six coal-fired power plants--which would have emitted 146 million tons of carbon dioxide annually-- were defeated or abandoned, the largest number of new coal plants defeated since the coal rush began in 2001.  This progress opens the way for a transition to a clean energy economy, including a 22.5% increase in electricity generated from wind between 2008 and 2009.

In his 65 years, Wichitan Richard Hitchcock had never seen anything like it. He was driving by the Castle Inn Riverside along the banks of the Little Arkansas River in mid-December when he looked up and saw it -- a bald eagle soaring over the treetops in the neighborhood. "It was a real pleasure to get an opportunity to see it," Hitchcock said. "... It's a privilege. "

For the first time in memory, a pair of bald eagles have built a nest within Wichita's city limits. Wildlife officials confirmed the existence of the nest and birds last week from a distance. The nest is on the island at Twin Lakes. The eagles are easily seen from Twin Lakes' west parking lot just off Amidon.

In 1967, when the bald eagle was given protected status, the lower 48 states had fewer than 500 nesting pairs. Eagles were listed as an endangered species in 1973 but removed from the list two years ago. In recent years, bald eagles have been spotted along the Arkansas River in the winter. Last year, a pair of eagles built a nest along the river south of Wichita in Sedgwick County. No eaglets hatched.

It's too soon yet to know whether the eagles have mated or laid eggs, said Dan Mulhern, fish and wildlife biologist for the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service. Typically, 75 percent of bald eagle eggs in Kansas are laid in February, Mulhern said. Eggs have been produced as early as late December or January.

Orca Books sent me a review copy of Media Meltdown, a graphic novel about media literacy for kids, written by Liam O'Donnell and illustrated by Mike Deas.

The premise of Media Meltdown is to teach kids how to question the media they get, and to make their own. It follows the adventures of a group of kids who have discovered that the local monster-home developer is up to no good, and is getting away with it because he's a heavy advertiser with the town's only media company, which owns the newspaper, stadium, and TV station. Working together, they break the story on their own, using the Web, and along the way they learn to analyze the media they receive, to use that analysis in making their own media, and to work with others to get their message across (there's also a surprise appearance of this blog, which had me laughing aloud).

The Hubble Space Telescope brings out striking details of the famed planetary nebula NGC 2818, as seen in an image captured in November 2008 and released on Jan. 15. The structure of the nebula, which lies in the southern constellation Pyxis, represents the outer layers of a star that have been expelled into interstellar space.

Graffiti artist Banksy has marked the end of the Copenhagen climate conference with a series of murals, including one on global warming.

The four works appeared along the Regent's Canal in Camden, north London.

One includes the phrase: "I don't believe in global warming," with letters disappearing below the water.

Banksy has gained an international following for his graffiti and exhibitions, the latest of which drew 300,000 visitors in Bristol.

BT's superfast broadband network will be completed in time for the 2012 Olympic Games, the firm has announced.

The £1.5bn fibre-optic network will offer speeds of up to 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) for some customers, supporting high-definition video.

However, it will only reach around 40% of homes, mainly in towns and cities.

The firm had originally said the programme would be completed by March 2013 but said the rollout was now "ahead of schedule" .

The Vatican has awarded itself a "unique copyright" on the Pope's name, image, coat of arms, and any other symbol or logo related to the Holy Father.

"The use of anything referring directly to the person or office of the Supreme Pontiff...and/or the use of the title 'Pontifical,' must receive previous and express authorization from the Holy See," reads a statement released by the Vatican on Saturday morning, the Catholic News Agency reports.

Exclusive Wikileaks is in the process of making a cache of documents and files from eleven different neo-Nazi organisations readable, and readily available, online.

The membership records and private messages are currently being formatted to make them easy for non-techies to read and will be released on the Wikileaks site shortly.

The organisation got massive publicity last year when it published a BNP membership list handed over by a disgruntled ex-member.

The raw data is already available but needs formatting so: "your grandmother can read them and google can find them... Journalists won't write about it otherwise."

The Australian company that runs the .com.au domain registry has been accused of abandoning its own procedures to censor a website satirising communications minister Stephen Conroy's ISP filtering regime.

On Friday afternoon, Sapia Pty Ltd, the company behind stephenconroy.com.au, was told by auDA that they had three hours to explain its use of the domain or it would be withdrawn.

"After several attempts at convincing them to give us reasonable time to reply we made a last-ditch attempt at 4.10pm stating that we provide a consultancy product with 'Stephen Conroy' in it's name," the firm said on its new site stephen-conroy.com.

Getting into the spirit of giving during the holiday season may seem like a struggle, but it turns out generous people aren't fighting the urge to screw others over, as some have suggested. Instead, generosity - or the desire for fairness - seems automatic and arises from activation in a brain area that controls intuition and emotion.

Neuropsychologists define "prosocial" people as those who prefer to share and share alike, and "individualists" as those who are primarily concerned with maximising their own gain.

....

Haruno, along with Christopher Frith of University College London used functional MRI to scan the brains of 25 prosocial people and 14 individualists (presorted using a standard behavioral test) while they rated their preference for a series of money distributions between themselves and a hypothetical other person. As expected, the prosocial group preferred even splits while the individualists favoured distributions where they got the most money.
Active amygdala

A less predictable finding was that the only brain region that differed in activity between the two groups was the amygdala. When presented with unfair money distributions the activity in the amygdala increased significantly in prosocial people but not in the individualists. "And the more they disliked the split, the more activity you saw in this region," says Frith.

"The amygdala tends to respond automatically, without thought, or even without awareness," says Frith. Combined with the fact that there was no difference in activity in the prefrontal cortex - responsible for suppressing urges - this suggested that the suppression theory might not be borne out.

Dan O'Bannon, the man who gave the world Alien and Total Recall, has died aged 63, the New York Times reports.

O'Bannon passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, last Thursday, as a result of the gastrointestinal disorder Crohn's disease, which he'd suffered for 30 years.

O'Bannon's sci-fi screenwriting career began when he and fellow University of Southern California film school student John Carpenter hooked up to write the low-budget Dark Star, which made its way to the big screen in 1974.

As many of you will know, John Brunner, one of the finest SF writers the UK has produced, died during the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow. I was only just getting back into fandom at the time, and didn't know anyone much, so I wasn't really aware of Brunner's family. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to get an email last week from his widow. Mrs. Brunner, it turns out, is still living in the same house she shared with John, which is in a part of Darkest Somerset that is even more remote, if rather prettier, than where I live. For a Chinese lady who has lost her English husband, this must be rather hard.

A 14-year-old Dutch sailor with a thwarted dream to circumnavigate the globe was due to fly back home tomorrow to a blizzard of questions after being found on Sunday in the Dutch island territory of St Martin, off Venezuela's coast.

Laura Dekker's eight-metre yacht Guppy remained moored in the Netherlands and it was unclear whether the teenager, who was in good health, had hoped to make a round-the-world voyage in another vessel or had another reason to run away.

On 21 September 2004, Michelle Weinberger woke up on the 79ft powerboat that she and her husband, Mark, owned as it rocked gently in the waters of a marina on the Greek island of Mykonos.

"I put my hand on his side of the bed, and I remember feeling it empty," she later told the US television channel NBC. Weinberger leapt from bed in alarm to find that her husband had vanished, taking with him his passport and money he had stashed secretly on board.

It was the beginning of a five-year flight from justice that ended this week even more strangely than it began, almost 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. Two officers of the paramilitary Carabinieri, led by a mountain guide, trudged up to the southern slopes of Mont Blanc to find one of America's most wanted fugitives living in a tent. He was surviving in temperatures as low as -18C on dried and tinned food and snow he melted on a portable stove.