The devolution of policing and justice powers to Northern Ireland marks the final end to decades of strife, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said.

Out of the 105 votes cast in the NI Assembly, a total of 88 supported the move, while 17 voted against it.

Mr Brown said the politics of progress had now replaced politics of division.

"It sends the most powerful message to those who would return to violence: that democracy and tolerance will prevail," he said.

"The courage and leadership of the parties who voted to complete devolution at Stormont will be noted around the world."

Policing and justice powers will now be devolved on 12 April after a 38 year gap.

Dutch religious leaders have ordered an inquiry into alleged sexual abuses of children by Roman Catholic priests.

Earlier, the Vatican defended its response to child sex abuse allegations in a number of European states, saying it reacted rapidly and decisively.

In the latest revelations, an Austrian monastery head offered to resign for abusing a boy more than 40 years ago.

Separately, Pope Benedict's brother said in an interview he slapped pupils in the face at a German choir school.

Seven people have been arrested in the Irish Republic over an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist for depicting the Prophet Muhammad, police say.

The four men and three women are all Muslim immigrants, according to media reports, though a police statement did not confirm this.

Cartoonist Lars Vilks had depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog in the Nerikes Allehanda newspaper.

Islamic militants put a $100,000 (£67,000) bounty on his head.

Mr Vilks was quoted as saying he was unfazed by the arrests, which he said he thought could be linked to two death threats he had received by telephone in January.

In a bid to divert attention away from the Ashcroft scandal, the Conservatives and their allies in the media are today attacking Labour's financial links with the trade union movement, most notably with Unite.

It's no secret that Labour has become increasingly reliant on the trade unions for money as donations from the rich, who bankrolled the party throughout the Blair years, have dried up. I first reported on this issue back in January and predicted that Labour's financial dependence on the unions would become a campaign issue.

The brothers were responsible for 64 per cent (£9.8m) of all donations to the party last year, with Unite, Britain's biggest union, responsible for 25 per cent (£3.6m). By contrast, when Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994, the unions accounted for less than a third of all donations.

It's never healthy for a political party to become reliant on only a few sources of income and I'd be surprised if any Labour figure argued otherwise.

Cypriot police say three men have been arrested over the theft of the corpse of former president Tasos Papadopoulos.

Police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos says the suspects were arrested late Tuesday. He said they will appear in court Wednesday, and police will request their detention to assist with the investigation.

Papadopoulos' body was found late Monday, three months after it was stolen from a Nicosia cemetery. The country's justice minister said it had been held for ransom. But two spokesmen for Papadopoulos' family insisted his relatives had never received a demand for money.

The former head of MI5 reveals she had no idea US intelligence agencies were using torture techniques to obtain information.

Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the MI5 between 2002 and 2007, told an audience at the House of Lords tonight she knew nothing of the controversial practices.

Speaking at a question and answer session organised by the Mile End Group she said she discovered from the media that information on UK terrorism from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was only obtained after he was repeatedly water boarded.

Our home affairs correspondent Simon Israel commented: "The Baroness says that she had no knowledge at all about what the Americans were doing - how they were treating their captives both in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

"Tonight she simply says she only discovered these things after the media started reporting it, and presumably after the security and intelligence committee were beginning their investigations into what was going on.

Hundreds of people in eastern Turkey have been sheltering in tents after a deadly earthquake left many homeless and exposed the region's poor construction standards.

Recep Akdag, the health minister, said the mud-brick homes typical of Turkey's
impoverished villages "topple down at the slightest of jolts, and those caught beneath die from lack of air".

"It has been this way for a hundred years, and we have to beat this," he said on Tuesday.

At least 51 people were killed in the 6.0 magnitude quake early on Monday in six villages near the town of Kovancilar in Elazig province.

"The number of deaths is related directly to the construction quality," Okan Tuysuz, a geologists from Istanbul University, said.

"Unfortunately, Turkey is a country poorly prepared for earthquakes in terms of building quality."

All the children in Ayrfield, Dublin, knew fun-loving Father Bill Carney - not just the altar boys and those who met him through school, but members of the Scout troop he ran and the groups of local children he took swimming.

His door was always open, there was a ready supply of Coke in the fridge and in the 1980s he had the very latest thing to lure youngsters in - a video player.

Adults disapproved of his swearing and crazy driving, but the Catholic Church was still so trusted, no-one suspected the truth about him.

Bridie Dwyer still lives in Ayrfield. Above the fireplace, with other family photographs is a picture of her youngest child, Paul, on his first Communion day.

At the age of 13 Paul went with other boys to watch videos at Father Carney's house and to have a sleepover, Mrs Dwyer told me. But at 2am Paul unexpectedly returned home

Hundreds of local records which would reveal the extent of Lord Ashcroft's donations to Conservative Party candidates during the crucial last few weeks of the 2005 general election campaign have been destroyed the Electoral Commission has confirmed.

Although the Electoral Commission publishes records of donations made to political parties, donations made specifically to individual candidates during an election campaign are recorded separately.

Those separate records are submitted with candidates' election expense return forms and stored locally after an election before subsequently being destroyed by the local council. The Electoral Commission also takes in copies of all these returns for its national analysis of election expenditure, but the Commission confirmed to me yesterday that it too has destroyed its copies of the records.

The UK's trade gap with the rest of the world widened unexpectedly in January to its largest since August 2008.

Exports saw their sharpest drop in more than three years, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The UK's trade gap in goods and services widened to £3.8bn, compared with £2.6bn in December.

The news came as a disappointment and caused the pound to weaken, dipping 0.4% to 1.10 euros and losing 0.75% against the dollar to below $1.50.

Aer Lingus has announced plans to lay off 670 staff, including nearly a quarter of its cabin crew, as part of large-scale restructuring plans.

The Irish Airline says it plans to save 97m euros (£88m, $132m) as a result of the cuts.

The airline's cabin crew face 230 compulsory redundancies after their union rejected restructuring plans.

Other staff, whose unions agreed with the cuts, will see 440 voluntary job losses.

Earlier, Aer Lingus reported losses of 66.2m euros for 2009.

Eurotunnel, the firm that manages the Channel Tunnel, made a profit of 1.4m euros ($1.9m; £1.3m) last year, despite a "poor economic environment".

The 2009 net profit was a decrease on the 34m euros it made in 2008, and also came despite the knock-on impact of the fire in the tunnel in September 2008.

This blaze resulted in services through the tunnel not returning to normal levels until February of last year.

Brussels has said it would be "extremely concerned" if the defence group EADS was prevented from fairly bidding for a major US defence deal.

Its comments came after pan-European EADS and US partner Northrop Grumman abandoned a bid for a $35bn (£23bn) mid-air refuelling aircraft contract.

Northrop Grumman and EADS said the terms of the Pentagon tender "clearly favour" US aerospace giant Boeing.

Boeing is now widely expected to win the contract for the aircraft.

A professional gambler has been found guilty of running a £34m pyramid scam that targeted people on low incomes.

Kevin Foster, 51, of Doddington, in Kent, was convicted of charges of dishonestly concealing a material fact and theft at Harrow Crown Court.

Jurors were told he persuaded thousands of people to part with an average of £4,200 at high-pressure rallies in sports and social clubs across the UK.

The judge warned Foster he faced a "substantial" jail sentence.

He was cleared of one count of theft and no verdict was reached on a further charge.

The Greek prime minister has welcomed the US response to his call for a crackdown on speculators he blames for damaging Greece's economy.

George Papandreou met President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday to discuss his country's financial woes.

"We have found a positive response from President Obama which means this issue will be on the agenda in the next G20 meeting," Papandreou told reporters outside the White House after the talks.

Greece wants to see the US impose stricter regulations on hedge funds and currency traders that Athens believes aggravated their crisis.

Want to see the real consequence of smash mouth economics? Forget about Greece and take a look at Latvia. Its 25.5 per cent plunge in GDP over just the past two years (almost 20 per cent in this past year alone) is already the worst two-year drop on record. The country recently reported a 12% decline in annual wages in Q4 2009 versus Q4 2008. The IMF projects another 4 percent drop this year, and predicts that the total loss of output from peak to bottom will reach 30 percent. The magnitude of this loss of output in Latvia is more than that of the U.S. Great Depression downturn of 1929-1933.

Policies and systems built for failure

Mainstream economics insists that one path to full employment is via lower wages. If you want to sell more labor services, lower the price of them, namely wages. This is a classic fallacy of composition argument. What might work for one firm is unlikely to work for all firms. Wage cuts in the aggregate simply destroy aggregate spending power, unless the lost demand is made up for in other ways.

But even though Latvia's external balance is improving (largely through a collapse of imports as a result of the collapse of domestic demand), the country is unable to deploy fiscal policy effectively due to the external constraints of its monetary system, which is predicated on the existence of a currency board system. True, the current account is now turning positive, but to suggest that every single country can "internally deflate" its economy via wage destruction of this magnitude to achieve this state of affairs is another fallacy of composition argument. The whole world cannot run trade surpluses, especially not if policy is designed to destroy demand via massive wage destruction.

More importantly, the very structure of a currency board is wrong. It requires a nation to have sufficient foreign reserves to facilitate 100 per cent convertibility of the monetary base (reserves and cash outstanding). Under this system, the central bank stands by to guarantee this convertibility at a fixed exchange rate against the so-called anchor currency. The government is then fiscally constrained and all spending must be backed by taxation revenue or debt-issuance. Pegging one's currency, then, means that the central bank has to manage interest rates to ensure the parity is maintained and fiscal policy is hamstrung by the currency requirements (which is why organizations like the IMF love them so much; it ties governments' hands). Latvia pegs its currency at 0.71 lat per Euro and joined the ERM in 2005 with the intent of qualifying for the euro zone. It operates a system similar to Argentina in the 1990s which ultimately collapsed and led to its default in 2001 (Argentina pegged against the US dollar).

China's exporters fret over labour shortage | AFP via France24

... Huada is one of thousands of companies in China's coastal exporting belt now grappling with a massive labour shortage, just one year after the economic crisis put some 20 million migrant workers out of work. <...>

"Young workers are no longer prepared to accept indefinitely the appalling working conditions their parents put up with," said Geoff Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, an advocacy group. <...>

... decades of prosperity -- along with Beijing's 586-billion-dollar, infrastructure-focused stimulus package unveiled in late 2008 -- have created more jobs in China's interior, leaving workers with more choices. <...>

Some companies have even built on-site Internet cafes, table tennis rooms and basketball courts. <...>

"We should gradually enable migrant workers to get the same rights that urban residents have in terms of work payment, children's education, health care, home purchase and renting, and social security," Wen [Jiabao] said. ...

See also from yesterday's Salon:

   Chinese factory workers cash in sweat for prosperity | OregonLive.com

   China's "labour famine:" Hype and reality | China Labour Bulletin

What is not addressed in this article is the huge number of college graduates who are unable to find work in China -- and who are growing increasingly frustrated and desperate.  See for example:

Paradoxes in China's job market increasingly apparent | CLB

Two recent news reports underscored paradoxes in China's economic structure, with too few people to work in construction, manufacturing, cleaning and the restaurant sector - positions typically reserved for "migrant workers". Meanwhile, college graduates face bleak employment prospects, even as the economy hums along at well above 8 percent GDP growth. Women graduates, in particular, are facing difficult employment prospects, and according to a high ranking official of the All-China Women's Federation, there are five major reasons behind it...

The US treasury department has eased sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Sudan to help further the use of web services and support opposition groups.

US technology firms will now be allowed to export online services such as instant messaging and social networks.

Companies had not offered such services for fear of violating sanctions.

Opposition supporters in Iran used social networking sites and services to organise protests after the country's disputed presidential poll last year.

The US Treasury said exports would be allowed of services related to web browsing, blogging, e-mail, instant messaging, chat, social networking and photo- and movie-sharing.

Nigerians are burying victims of a massacre of predominantly Christian villagers near the central city of Jos, blamed on a Muslim group.

The burials in mass graves using mechanical excavators follow Sunday's attack on three villages that left more than 500 people dead.

Residents of the village of Dogo Nahawa, about 15km south of Jos, said herders from nearby hills had attacked their village, shooting into the air before using machetes to cut down those who came out of their homes.

Nigerian authorities have arrested nearly a hundred people in connection with the attacks.

Britain will tomorrow urge the Afghan government to put more effort into the pursuit of peace talks amid fears that the war could be prolonged - and more British lives lost - as a result of incompetence and lack of political will in Kabul.

A speech to be delivered in the US by the foreign secretary, David Miliband, will reflect growing anxiety in London that President Hamid Karzai's professed desire for a political solution has not been backed up by any serious planning or concrete proposals.

Unless more pressure is put on the Afghan government, some British officials predict that Karzai's proposed loya jirga, or grand peace council, due at the end of next month, will be little more than a PR stunt. "My argument today is that now is the time for the Afghans to pursue a political settlement with as much vigour and energy as we are pursuing the military and civilian effort," Miliband will say at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a text of the address seen by the Guardian.

Israel's interior ministry tonight announced approval for 1,600 new homes in an East Jerusalem settlement, casting a cloud over a visit by US vice-president, Joe Biden, just hours after he pledged his strong support for the Israeli government.

The new approvals, for homes in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox settlement near Shuafat, came just a day after the Israeli defence ministry announced 112 new apartments would be built in Beitar Illit, a settlement on the occupied West Bank.

The new building comes at a delicate moment in the long-stalled peace process when Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed to start indirect negotiations. The latest approvals were announced by the interior ministry, which said they had been passed by the Jerusalem district planning committee. A spokeswoman said there were 60 days to appeal against the decision.

A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home.

"People should be thankful, you made them so proud," said Hamid Mir, the host of a popular national talk show, during an interview in his studio on Tuesday with four of the six politicians, who railed against the security precautions at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Meetings with the Obama administration's top policy makers on Pakistan, including the president's special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, and visits to the Pentagon and the National Security Council, did not allay the anger the politicians said they felt at being asked to submit to a secondary screening on Sunday before boarding a flight to New Orleans. They declined to be screened and did not board the flight.

A court case brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, a US protester killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003, has begun in Israel.

The civil action against the Israeli defence ministry will decide whether damages should be paid for her death in Gaza at the age of 23.

Corrie and other activists had been trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes.

Her family has maintained that a full investigation was never carried out.

Corrie's writings - published posthumously - and a play about her life made her a symbol of the international campaign on behalf of Palestinians.

Top Pakistan stars Mohammad Yousuf and Younus Khan have been told they cannot represent their country again.

The Pakistan Cricket Board's inquiry into the tour of Australia found the pair had been involved in "infighting which... brought down the whole team".

Rana Naved-ul-Hasan and Shoaib Malik each face one-year bans and big fines.

Shahid Afridi, Kamran Akmal and Umar Akmal also face heavy fines while their conduct will be strictly monitored during a six-month probationary period.

The PCB has implemented the recommendations of an inquiry committee formed to evaluate Pakistan's dismal performance against Australia during the winter, when they lost all nine internationals.

Pakistan must now try to defend their ICC World Twenty20 crown in the Caribbean next month with severely depleted resources, before facing what could be a chastening tour of England.

Reports from Fiji say the wherabouts are unknown of a nationalist politician, Peceli Rinakama, who was last seen on Friday.

Mr Rinakama, who was once a member of parliament, was reportedly seized by soldiers and sources say it is not known where he has been taken.

Attempts to get information from the interim government have been unsuccessful.

Fiji's military regime has jailed 8 of its opponents on dubious charges of conspiring to kill the dictator, after an unfair trial.  Rinakama was originally accused of the same charge, but the charges were dismissed at an early stage.  The military thugs may be out for revenge against someone they see as having escaped "justice".

Rich countries including several EU nations are "importing" about a third of their CO2 emissions, says a study.

US-based researchers used a global trade database to track goods and services, and assigned emissions to the countries where they were used.

Nearly a quarter of China's emissions come from goods exported to the West.

Writing in the journal PNAS, the researchers say this is an ethical reason why rich countries should lead global attempts to cut emissions.

"We expected to find this net flow from developing countries to the developed world," said lead researcher Steve Davis.

"But what stood out was how much of the global flow is accounted for by bilateral trade between China and the US."

A tiny Japanese insect that could help the fight against an aggressive superweed has been given the go-ahead for a trial release in England.

Since Japanese knotweed was introduced to the UK it has rapidly spread, and the plant currently costs over £150m a year to control and clear.

But scientists say a natural predator in the weed's native home of Japan could also help to control it here.

The insect will initially be released in a handful of sites this spring.

This is the first time that biocontrol - the use of a "natural predator" to control a pest - has been used in the EU to fight a weed.

The effort of Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to craft comprehensive clean energy legislation that caps global warming pollution has brought some positive words from Big Oil and their political allies. In particular, the senators are considering a proposal by ConocoPhillips, BP America, and Exxon Mobil to exclude petroleum producers and refiners from a carbon market and instead levy a carbon fee. "Once you have oil people saying, `We can live with this, this was our idea,' then hopefully everybody else begins to look at this thing anew," Graham told reporters. "That's the hope." However, the American Petroleum Institute's Jack Gerard explained that the "support" from the oil industry for a carbon fee on petroleum will come in the form of "signs at the gas pump letting people know they're paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change":

Colorado was one of the first states to adopt a renewable energy standard at all, committing in 2004 to get 10 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2015 and increasing that to 20 percent by 2020 in 2006.  This latest measure puts the state right behind California, who has the highest standard at 33 percent by 2020.

Rights activists and residents have accused the Canadian owners of Guatemala's largest gold mine of exploiting local communities.

Most worrying, they say, is the use of highly toxic cyanide to separate gold particles from the rock.

Take four cups of breast milk, add rennet, salt and yoghurt - yes, four cups of breast milk, according to a recipe created by New York chef and restaurateur Daniel Angerer, who posted his formula for maple caramelized pumpkin encrusted cheese on his blog, and offered "whoever wants to try it is welcome to try it as long as supply lasts".

Angerer runs the Manhattan restaurant Klee, and the breast milk is supplied by his wife and restaurant co-owner Lori Mason after the couple found they had an excess supply in their freezer intended for their baby daughter Arabella. Angerer explained on his blog

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the thinktank set up last November "to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant", goes from strength to strength, it would seem.

Just a few days after its chairman, Nigel Lawson, and director, Benny Peiser, appeared before the science and technology select committee to answer questions about the inquiry into the climate science emails hacked from the University of East Anglia, a job advert for a new assistant director has appeared on the House of Commons internal jobs listings website.

CHINA is considering offering a subsidy of as much as 60,000 yuan (US$8,797) to consumers who buy a new energy vehicle, Li Yizhong, Minister of Industry And Information Technology, said yesterday.

Giving a reason for the subsidy, Li said green vehicles are expensive because of the huge investment as the technology is still being developed.

"The subsidy won't be effective if it is less than several thousand yuan," Li said. "Without government support, it would be difficult for Chinese families to buy new energy vehicles."

Industry analysts estimated that green cars would normally be sold at a 50 percent premium over a traditional gasoline-powered model.

This from USTR's 2010 Trade Policy Agenda and 2009 Annual Report:

The United States has also continued to engage Taiwan on concerns raised by the pharmaceutical and medical device industries that Taiwan's procedures for medical product pricing and reimbursement fail to adequately recognize the value of innovative medical products for patients in Taiwan. The United States encourages Taiwan to continue to engage in collaborative consultations with relevant stakeholders to consider improving such policies in order to better facilitate the development of innovative products and improve patients' access to such products.

Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest format shifts in 30 years.

By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format.

Skynet 5, the UK's single biggest space project, is to be extended.

The £3.6bn system, which provides secure satellite telecommunications to British armed forces, will be boosted by the addition of a fourth spacecraft.

The first three satellites were only launched in 2007-2008, but military planners envisage even more bandwidth will be needed in the future.

Skynet 5D will be built in Portsmouth and Stevenage for a launch in 2013, most probably on an Ariane 5 rocket.

Its construction will be funded by City money.

The work will create 100 hi-tech jobs and secure another 800.

eBay Inc has suspended Cryptome's PayPal account, confiscating donations made to the site in the past two weeks. New York architect John Young has refunded around $5,300 to donors.

Young has operated Cryptome since 1996, creating a large repository of obscure or previously unpublished files focussing on intelligence and internet policy. Much of it is available on DVD, sold through a PayPal account.

Last month, Variety panned a thriller called Iron Cross. But the review has been disappeared from Variety's web site, which probably has something to do with the $400,000 Iron Cross' producers paid to Variety for an awards campaign.

Iron Cross, which ended up being Roy Scheider's last film (he died during production), is a Holocaust revenge fantasy in which Scheider, a Holocaust survivor and NYPD cop, hunts down and kills the SS officer who killed his family. It's also, according to Variety freelancer Robert Koehler, who reviewed it for the Hollywood trade paper on January 20, "hackneyed," "preposterous," "mediocre," "choppy," and "uncertain."

This is one superb database (and digitization effort) that will be interest and use to many. We can't wait to spend some serious time with it. The content-Ansel Adams photos-are simply amazing (understatement).

According to the Ansel Adams Gallery Blog, the database contains more then 2600 digitized images including several rare ones.

The News of the World was tonight accused of buying silence in the phone-hacking scandal after it agreed to pay more than £1m to persuade the celebrity PR agent Max Clifford to drop his legal action over the interception of his voicemail messages.

The settlement means that there will now be no disclosure of court-ordered evidence which threatened to expose the involvement of the newspaper's journalists in a range of illegal information-gathering by private investigators.

The case had potentially important implications for Andy Coulson, media adviser to the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who edited the News of the World at the time of the illegal activity and who has said that he does not remember any of his journalists breaking the law.

BEIJING (AP) -- So this is how you get through China's biggest political event of the year: "Sit still, stare toward the front, pretend like you're looking but you're really not, pretend like you're listening but you're really not ... make your brain blank."

As delegates to the National People's Congress dip into the world of Twitter-like microblogging, the Chinese public is getting a rare glimpse inside the workings, and nonworkings, of power.

For the first time, some of the almost 3,000 delegates are posting brief online messages from behind the scenes as they shuttle between vast, largely immobile meetings and their hotels, sealed off from the public with police tape.

Background  Despite surging interest in taxation as a policy to address poor food choice, US research directly examining the association of food prices with individual intake is scarce.

Methods  This 20-year longitudinal study included 12 123 respondent days from 5115 participants in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. Associations between food price, dietary intake, overall energy intake, weight, and homeostatic model assessment insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) scores were assessed using conditional log-log and linear regression models.

Results  The real price (inflated to 2006 US dollars) of soda and pizza decreased over time; the price of whole milk increased. A 10% increase in the price of soda or pizza was associated with a -7.12% (95% confidence interval [CI], -63.50 to -10.71) or -11.5% (95% CI, -17.50 to -5.50) change in energy from these foods, respectively. A $1.00 increase in soda price was also associated with lower daily energy intake (-124 [95% CI, -198 to -50] kcal), lower weight (-1.05 [95% CI, -1.80 to -0.31] kg), and lower HOMA-IR score (0.42 [95% CI, -0.60 to -0.23]); similar trends were observed for pizza. A $1.00 increase in the price of both soda and pizza was associated with greater changes in total energy intake (-181.49 [95% CI, -247.79 to -115.18] kcal), body weight (-1.65 [95% CI, -2.34 to 0.96] kg), and HOMA-IR (-0.45 [95% CI, -0.59 to -0.31]).

Conclusion  Policies aimed at altering the price of soda or away-from-home pizza may be effective mechanisms to steer US adults toward a more healthful diet and help reduce long-term weight gain or insulin levels over time.

The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple--a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple's approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

A pensioner has admitted making a hoax bomb in a revenge plot against a dentist he believed had overcharged him.

Peter McShane, 84, of Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire, admitted making the bogus bomb and seven other charges at Haverfordwest Magistrates Court.

The package, left outside the Bush Street dental surgery in Pembroke Dock, sparked a major police operation.

McShane is due to be sentenced in April.

The court heard that McShane wrapped up a large oblong box in a bin bag and carried it down to the dental surgery, where he placed it on the steps.

Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz has done a deal with Colony Capital to clear her huge debts.

The US private equity firm will become Ms Leibovitz's sole creditor, in a deal that helps her retain the rights to her pictures.

Ms Leibovitz, whose images include a Vanity Fair cover of a nude and pregnant Demi Moore, had fallen behind on repayment of a $24m (£16m) loan.

She owed the money to Art Capital, which sued the photographer last year.

Ms Leibovitz said

The Conservative chairman, Eric Pickles, last night appeared to disown the leadership of the Young Britons' Foundation, a rightwing training organisation for young Conservatives whose officials have described the NHS as "the biggest waste of money in the UK" and suggested the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.

Pickles spoke last week at a YBF rally at the House of Commons and the group is working with Conservative Future, the party's official youth wing, on pre-election training of young Tory activists. But yesterday that relationship came under serious strain.

"We don't agree with these views," a spokesman for Pickles said in a brief statement. "The YBF organisation is independent of the Conservative party."

When I first wrote to Ronald Searle with the idea of an exhibition focusing on his reportage work, he was polite but sceptical, pointing out the difficulty of locating artwork that had been scattered across continents. The idea for a show at the Cartoon Museum, where I have been on the board of trustees for some years, fell into abeyance until the approach of his 90th birthday; this time we proposed a more general exhibition and I was delighted when he responded positivel