Gordon Brown is preparing to call the general election this coming Tuesday, 6 April, making way for a month-long campaign culimating in polling day on May 6, Newstatesman.com has learned from several sources.

Confirmation that the announcement will come two days after Easter contradicts speculation that rail strikes planned for that day -- which Government insiders now expect to be delayed -- would cause a delay in the announcement, possibly until as late as the week after next.

Cabinet ministers who will feature prominently in the campaign from the outset include David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and Ed Miliband, the Climate Change and Energy Secretary who is devising the party's manifesto.

Boris Johnson's disgraced former fire chief Bertha Joseph will no longer be a candidate for the Conservative Party one of her colleagues said today.
Senior Brent Tory John Detre told me that Bertha had been a "hard working councillor" who was "hounded out by the Labour Party."
However, when asked whether she would stand for them again, he replied:

"No she will not stand as a Conservative."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been forced to admit he misused immigration figures after being criticised by the statistics watchdog.

In a podcast on Friday, Mr Brown said net migration into the UK fell from 237,000 in 2007 to 163,000 in 2008 and provisionally 147,000 in 2009.

But the head of UK Statistics Authority agreed with a Tory complaint that he had made inaccurate comparisons.

Downing Street said it accepted the statistics had been "unclear".

But it insisted that Mr Brown had since corrected them.

A Belgian parliamentary committee has voted to ban face-covering Islamic veils from being worn in public.

The home affairs committee voted unanimously to endorse the move, which must be approved by parliament for it to become law.

Such a vote could be held within weeks, correspondents say, meaning that Belgium could become the first European country to implement a ban.

France is also considering restricting face-covering veils.

There are several types of headscarves and veils for Muslim women - those that cover the face being the niqab and the burka.

Roman Catholic bishops in Switzerland have admitted that they underestimated the extent of sexual abuse committed by priests, and have offered an apology.

The Swiss Bishops' Conference said it was "ashamed" and suggested victims should consider pressing criminal charges against the perpetrators.

The bishops did not, however, support the publication of a list of priests who have been found guilty of abuse.

An estimated 60 cases of abuse are now under investigation by the authorities.

It seems that gloomy days could be coming for Poland's Kaczynski brothers and their Law and Justice party (PiS), the UK Conservatives' ally from their European Conservatives and Reformists group. The looming marginalisation of the Kaczynskis on the Polish political scene could have grave consequences for the Tories' alliance of Eurosceptics as well.

In 2007, after two years of governing shoulder to shoulder with far-right and populist parties,PiS was ousted from power by the centre-right Civic Platform (PO), ending Jaroslaw Kaczynski's premiership. All the same, his brother Lech has remained Poland's president, emerging as a rock-solid opposition to the new government. Now it appears that the president's days in office could be over quite soon.

Last Saturday, the ruling centre-right chose its presidential candidate, parliament speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, who will run against Kaczynski this autumn. The latest polls indicate that in the first round voters would favour Komorowski over Kaczynski by 38-21%. Third-party candidates garner no more than 5% of the vote, therefore their endorsement of any of the candidates is of little importance. In the runoff, the result would be even more devastating for the current president, as over 60% of Poles would vote for Komorowski, while only 27% would back Kaczynski. The parallel 24% support for the president's Law and Justice party is enough in order to remain a muscular opposition, but it is no match to the Civic Platform's 50%.

(March 30) -- To many, the charismatic Pope John Paul II represented much that is lacking in the dour, scholarly Pope Benedict XVI, who was once nicknamed "the Rottweiler" and is under worldwide siege for the child sex abuse scandals sweeping the Roman Catholic Church.

But even as more questions swirl around Benedict and his alleged role in the cover-ups of pedophile priests, John Paul's stellar reputation is suddenly taking a subtle beating.

A miracle ascribed to John Paul that is a prerequisite for his canonization has been questioned, and one of church's highest-ranking officials has said that John Paul ignored Benedict's pleas to mount a full investigation into sex abuse accusations against the archbishop of Vienna.

Nationalised lender Anglo Irish Bank has announced what is reported to be the largest corporate loss in the history of the Republic of Ireland.

The struggling bank made a loss of 12.7bn euros ($17.2bn; £11.4bn) in the 15 months to December.

The announcement comes a day after the Irish government said it would inject a further 8.3bn euros into the bank.

Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said pumping in more money was "the least worst option"

Motor insurer Quinn Direct, which specialised in low-cost policies for younger drivers and has 390,000 policyholders, has gone in to administration.

The insurer is part of an Irish company put into provisional administration in Dublin today amid concerns over its liabilities.

But drivers with Quinn policies in the UK will remain covered, according to City watchdog the Financial Services Authority.

The FSA said: "The Irish regulator has confirmed that existing policyholders in the UK will continue to be covered. Customers of the firm can continue to make claims and should continue to pay direct debits and premiums in the normal way."

Court rulings in Argentina have cleared the way for controversial government plans to use central bank reserves for servicing the country's debt.

The rulings overturn opposition efforts to stop President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner from using $6.6bn (£4bn).

Argentina has $15bn of international debt that matures this year, and a hole in its budget of between $2bn and $7bn.

In January, central bank chief Martin Redrado resigned after a bitter public row with the president on the issue.

Malaysia's prime minister has unveiled a new economic plan which may spell an end to some of the special privileges enjoyed by ethnic Malays, in a push to transform the country into a developed nation by the year 2020.

Najib Abdul Razak on Tuesday said the plan, called the New Economic Model (NEM), will eliminate rent-seeking and patronage viewed as stemming from race-based policies favouring ethnic Malays in place for nearly four decades.

The past policy has provided ethnic Malays with privileges in areas such as jobs, housing, education, businesses and government contracts.

He promised to review the controversial race-based policy, and said the new model will provide fair treatment for those who form the bottom 40 per cent of the income strata.

(have to go there, can't 'img' it.)

Icelandic gov't bond yield dropped from ~8.5% to 7.20% over the course of the crisis ... crisis ... CRISIS !!!1eleventyone1!! Meaning somebodies were buying Iceland gov't debt during the foo-foo and making a frickin' pile of money doing it.

"Rational Market" my ASS.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

William Jennings Bryan would have been pleased. The government is now officially in the banking business. On March 30, 2010, President Obama signed the reconciliation "fix" to the health care reform bill passed by Congress last week. Slipped into it was student loan legislation the President calls "one of the most significant investments in higher education since the G.I. Bill." Under the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), the federal government will lend directly to students, ending billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to firms providing student loans. The bill will save an estimated $68 billion over 11 years.

Money for the program will come from the U.S. Treasury, which will lend it to the Education Department at 2.8% interest. The money will then be lent to students at 6.8% interest. Eliminating the middlemen will allow the Education Department to keep its 4% spread as profit, money that will be used to help impoverished students. If the Education Department were to set up its own bank, on the model of the Green Bank being proposed in the Energy Bill, it could generate even more money for higher education.

Simon Johnson uses the headline transaction to show how TBTFs, typified by Goldman, are using their TBTF status to take increasingly risky moves where gains will be privatized gains and losses socialized. His conclusion is below. I included the link to his web page for his new book to atone for the longer than usual quote.

In our assessment (13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown, out today), based on the details of financial deregulation over the past 30 years, the prevailing belief system of top bankers, and the big banks' incentives to take risk, we are all heading for trouble.  The "financial reform" legislation currently before Congress and still prevailing pro-banker attitudes at the top of the Obama administration are really not helpful.  The country's course was set by a fateful meeting at the White House last March; a resurrected, unreformed, and still crazy system - symbolized by 13 bankers - is in the driving seat now.

At best, this will be another very nasty boom-bust-bailout cycle.  At worst, we are heading towards a situation in which our banks are so massive that when they fail, there is no way the government (or anyone else) can offset the damage that causes.

This time our government debt (held by the private sector) will roughly double - increasing by 40 percentage points of GDP - as a direct result of what the banks did.  We've lost more than 8 million jobs since December 2008 - for what good reason?  Next time could easily be worse.

You can disagree with our analysis - provide your own facts and figures, and we'll have that debate here or elsewhere; the more public, the better from our perspective.  And you should certainly want to improve on our policy prescriptions.  We put forward some simple ideas that can be implemented and would help - our versions can also be communicated and argued widely: if banks are too big to fail, making them smaller is surely necessary (although likely not sufficient).

But don't ignore the question.  Don't assume that this time Goldman and its ilk will avoid getting carried away - they are just doing their jobs, after all, and their job description says "make money"; system stability is someone else's job.  

And also don't presume that, just because the big banks and their friends seem to hold all the cards, they will necessarily prevail in the future.

In all previous confrontations between elected authority and concentrated financial power in the United States, the democratic element has prevailed (see chapter 1 in 13 Bankers; also Monday's WSJ, behind the paywall).  This can happen again - but only if you stay engaged, argue this out with everyone you know (including your elected representatives), and help change the mainstream consensus on banking definitively and irrevocably.

Tough talk on China ignores economic reality | Opinion - Jim O'Neill  - FT.com

With respect to domestic demand in China, there is rather clear evidence that, if anything, it is currently too strong, and certainly not at a level to justify accusations that China is not doing its "bit" for the world economy. <...> Chinese consumption is probably growing at about 15 per cent, similar to a 2-3 per cent rate for the US consumer.

<....>

Germany's trade with China is showing such strong growth that by spring next year, on current trends, it might exceed that with France. China last year reported a current account surplus of 5.8 per cent of GDP, significantly lower than apparently assumed as the current level by many people in Washington. In 2010, it could be closer to 3 per cent - incidentally below the 4 per cent level deemed as "equilibrium" by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

<...>

At the moment, rather oddly, our model suggests that the renminbi is very close to the price that it should be. This has not always been the case. The model used to suggest the currency was undervalued by about 20 per cent, but it has moved by that degree in the past five years. ...

This week there was an alarming report that AT&T was going to have to reduce its long-term profit estimates by about $1 billion because of the new law -- or, as the House minority leader, John Boehner, put it, the newly enacted "job-killing tax increases." The AT&T charge was for accounting purposes, which is not as much real money as currency-based theology. But still, it did sound bad.

""In a somewhat bizarre move, the Chancellor launched yesterday the so-called "Lysistrata Initiative", named after Aristophanes' eponymous play, which calls on the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their partners until they file their tax returns.

The call comes on the heels of a European Council report showing Germany, along with Finland, trailing far behind France, Italy, Greece and Spain (or the FIGS) in the eurozone rankings for sexual activity.

"German taxpayers cannot be asked to finance the unrestrained lives of the Greeks" said an exasperated Ms Merkel.

A senior German diplomat agreed: "All we're asking the Greeks is to take their strikes to a more constructive level."

Greek women have yet to come forth with an official position on the matter. But sources inside the "Hellenic Association of Female Pensioners Under 40", a representative group, suggest they are not entirely closed to the idea.

Reportedly, a hardline faction within the Association is pushing for a pledge to renounce all sexual pleasures, including The Lioness on The Cheese Grater (a popular sexual position with ancient roots), in the name of fiscal discipline.

[Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou] moved to condemn speculators for planting rumors about a "Greek brain drain", saying that there is "absolutely no evidence" of Greeks moving to Germany to exploit the underutilized sexual landscape.""

"Schiller sprach zu Goethe, Steck in dem Arsch die Flöte! Goethe sagte zu Schiller, Mein Arsch ist kein Triller!"

The International Criminal Court has authorised a formal investigation into the violence after Kenya's 2007 poll.

Some 1,300 people died and tens of thousands were displaced as political differences snowballed into weeks of ethnic score-settling after the poll.

The ICC judges said that crimes against humanity may have been committed.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo requested the investigation last November, saying political leaders organised and financed some violence.

The EU has pledged $1.7bn (£1.1bn) in aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti and the US has offered $1.15bn at a UN fund-raising conference in New York.

The delegates are backing a $4bn plan by the Haitian government to rebuild infrastructure over the next 18 months.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon opened the meeting by calling for a "wholesale national renewal" of the Caribbean nation.

The 12 January earthquake killed 200,000 people and left one million more homeless.

The Haitian government and international officials have spent weeks putting together a plan for the country.

Six of the winning candidates in Iraq's elections should be disqualified because of alleged ties to the former Baath government, a vetting panel says.

If upheld, the move could alter the election result, to which State of Law coalition leader, Nouri Maliki, is already mounting a legal challenge.

Former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqiyya list won the election by two seats - too few to form a government.

A list spokesman said the suggested disqualifications would be illegal.

Unnamed officials from the Justice and Accountability Committee told the Associated Press (AP) news agency four of the six candidates belonged to Mr Allawi's Iraqiyya list, but none of the six was named.

Western governments risk creating a new generation of Islamist extremists if they continue to support repressive regimes in the Middle East, the former UN nuclear weapons chief Mohamed ElBaradei has told the Guardian.

In his first English-language interview since returning to Cairo in February, the highly respected Nobel peace prize-winner said the strategy of supporting authoritarian rulers in an effort to combat the threat of Islamic extremism had been a failure, with potentially disastrous consequences.

ElBaradei, who has emerged as a potential challenger to the three-decade rule of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, said: "There is a need for re-evaluation ... The idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is [Osama] Bin Laden and co is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophecy come true.

Sudan's opposition parties are set to decide this week on whether to boycott the country's April presidential and parliamentary elections.

More than a dozen opposition parties met on Wednesday to discuss a possible boycott after their calls for postponing the April 11 poll were dismissed.

Going ahead with Sudan's elections as planned would be a "disaster", the groups warned, saying it would be impossible to hold a fair and free poll by the scheduled date.

They also said many candidates have not been given the fair opportunities to carry out significant electoral campaigns in the volatile country. 

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of production.  Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years -- the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the U.S. invasion, occupation, and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military success -- a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's number one narco-state.

... To be "as rich as a Creole" was a familiar boast in Paris, and a substantial portion of the French economy depended on this one distant settlement. This was the jewel of the French empire, furnishing the coffee drunk in Paris, the sugar needed to sweeten it, and the cotton and indigo worn by men and women of fashion. Saint Domingue's commerce added up to more than a third of France's foreign trade. One person in eight in France earned a living that stemmed from it. By 1776, this tiny colony produced more income than the entire Spanish empire in the Americas.

But Haiti's superheated economy required constant, grinding labor in the plantations -- and that meant massive importation of human beings from Africa. ...

<...>

The money that kept the United States afloat during the long war for independence came from those enormous loans, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams during their long stay in Paris. Does it not seem plausible that France had money to lend to one part of America because of the huge profits that another part of America -- Saint Domingue -- made possible?

<...>

We are naturally drawn to the most elevated part of the story of our national birth, and there is plenty of inspiration in the orations of Sam Adams, the immortal words of the Declaration, and the valor of American soldiers at Lexington and Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. But we do a disservice to the people of Haiti, and ultimately to ourselves, if we do not remember that a large contribution toward American freedom was made by the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans who, in their way, toiled and died for the cause. ...

... if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to push his luck on settlements or the peace process, he would do well to remember an unnerving precedent: Israel's loss, in 1967, of what had been a robust alliance with France.

The French-Israeli relationship began in the mid-1950s, when Israel became a major customer for the French arms industry. But the bond was not merely commercial: at the time France was trying to quash a rebellion in Algeria, and it shared with Israel a strategic interest in combating radical Arab nationalism. <...> French technical assistance helped Israel get nuclear weapons, and France supplied the advanced military aircraft that became the backbone of the Israeli Air Force.

<...>

This double game, however, ended when the Six-Day War in 1967 forced France to pick a side. In a shock to its Israeli allies, it chose the Arab states: despite aggressive moves by Egypt, France imposed a temporary arms embargo on the region -- which mostly hurt Israel -- and warned senior Israeli officials to avoid hostilities.

When Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on June 5, France condemned it -- even as Israel's nearly immediate aerial victory was won largely with French-made aircraft.

<...>

Like de Gaulle after Algeria, President Obama understands the strategic importance of improving relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds after years of bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

Red States, Blue States and the Distribution of Federal Spending | Jeff Frankels Weblog

A virtue of the Tea Party movement is that many of its members are engaging in national politics for the first time.  It occurred to me that they might be able to use some help figuring out the lay of the land, and so I thought I would pursue a little research on their behalf.   The question is geographical redistribution:  which states receive subsidies from the federal government, and which other states are taxed to provide those subsidies.    One might be able to sympathize with the feeling of those living in the heartland of the country that they should not have to subsidize the northeastern states through, for example, federal housing programs.

It will come as a surprise to some, but not to others, that there is a fairly strong statistical relationship, but that the direction is the opposite from what you would think if you were listening to rhetoric from Republican conservatives:   The red states (those that vote Republican) generally receive more subsidies from the federal government than they pay in taxes; in other words they are further to the right in the graph.  It is the other way around with the blue states (those that vote Democratic). 

MPs investigating the climate change row at the UK's University of East Anglia (UEA) have demanded greater transparency from climate scientists.

The Commons Science and Technology Committee criticised UEA authorities for failing to respond to requests for data from climate change sceptics.

But it found no evidence Professor Phil Jones, whose e-mails were hacked and published online, had manipulated data.

It said his reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact.

The e-mails were hacked from the university's computer network and were published on the internet just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.

China will tomorrow start ramping up preparations for typhoons, dust storms and other extreme weather disasters as part of a 10-year plan to predict and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

Improved warning systems, new emergency drills and bolstered infrastructure will form the backbone of the new regulations, which are the country's most advanced measures yet to deal with natural disaster.

China has a long history of devastating floods and droughts, but officials said the problems were intensifying.

In a reversal of a long-standing ban, Barack Obama is to allow oil drilling off Virginia's coast - while rejecting some new drilling sites that had been planned in Alaska.

Obama's plan offers few concessions to environmentalists, who have been strident in their opposition to more oil platforms off US shores. Hinted at for months, the plan modifies a ban that for more than 20 years has limited drilling along coastal areas other than the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama will announce the new drilling policy today at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. White House officials claimed the changes would reduce US reliance on foreign oil and create jobs but the president's decisions could help secure support for a climate change bill languishing in Congress.

R.I. PUC rejects wind power contract

WARWICK -- A proposal to build an eight-turbine wind farm in waters off Block Island is in jeopardy after the state Public Utilities Commission rejected a long-term contract for Rhode Island's largest electric utility to buy power from what was envisioned as the first project of its kind in the United States.

The three-member commission voted unanimously against the power-purchase agreement between developer Deepwater Wind and National Grid during a public meeting Tuesday morning in its Warwick offices. In separate statements during the hour-long hearing that capped nearly four months of deliberations, the commissioners all spoke out against the proposed contract, saying that the price of power agreed to by the two sides was too high and that the overall deal -- according to the standard set by statute -- was not "commercially reasonable."

The decision was a setback not just for the wind farm, but also for the state's plans to create a green energy economy in Rhode Island, centered at Quonset Point, where Deepwater has plans to create an assembly facility. Governor Carcieri, a vocal supporter of the company's proposal, said he was "stunned" by the vote and called it "an extraordinarily short-sighted and narrow-minded decision."

Allowing whaling nations to kill a limited number of the animals is the only way ensure control, New Zealand's representative on the issue has said.

Former PM Geoffrey Palmer said attempts to reach a global deal on whaling would fail unless nations could compromise.

Australia, which wants a total ban on whaling, has expressed alarm at Mr Palmer's comments, and said it could not back such a scheme.

And they're not the only ones.  This move is as popular in NZ as the government's plans to allow mining in national parks (meaning: not at all).  But its what happens when you elect a bunch of right-wing arseholes whose primary foreign policy goal is not to represent NZ values, but to toady to any country bigger than us.

Fuck you, Geoffrey Palmer.  You don't speak for me.

Starting today, YouTube will look dramatically different for everyone. That's because the Google-owned video website will be rolling out its redesign to all users over the next few hours -- the rollout should be complete by 7:00 p.m. today.

You may have already seen elements of this redesign: The actual interface was revealed two months ago. Since then, though, YouTube has tested, iterated and made changes to the new design. Today, however, it feels comfortable enough to roll it out to its millions of daily viewers.

QUOTE OF THE DAY.... A 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll released the other day found that 50% of respondents would be willing to support an openly-gay presidential candidate. The Family Research Council, a prominent religious right group with ties to the Republican leadership, suggested yesterday that President Obama may effectively (not literally) already be "our first gay president." (via Right Wing Watch)

[I]f it was argued during his two terms in office that Bill Clinton was "our first black President" because of his supposed liberal policies that would benefit African-Americans (though I'm not quite sure what President Clinton did, that he wasn't forced to do, that would benefit any minority except for Chinese monks with political donations to spend.) With that argument shouldn't Barack Obama already be our "first gay President" due to his liberal policies pushing the homosexual agenda?

The Family Research Council isn't saying President Obama is gay; it's saying President Obama might as well be considered gay, the same way Bill Clinton was considered black.

And the religious right wonders why it's so hard to take their movement seriously.

An Islamic court in Nigeria has permanently banned a rights group from holding an internet debate about amputation as a form of punishment.

This follows a temporary order made last week by a court in northern Nigeria preventing Facebook and Twitter being used to discuss the issue.

The ban was initially sought by a pro-Sharia group which said internet sites would be used to mock Islamic law.

The Sharia code runs alongside secular law in 12 of Nigeria's 36 states.

The Yahoo e-mail accounts of foreign journalists based in China and Taiwan have been hacked, according to a Beijing-based press association.

Rival Google has been involved in a high-profile row with the Chinese government following similar cyber-attacks against Gmail accounts.

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) has confirmed eight cases of Yahoo e-mail hacks in recent weeks.

Yahoo said it condemned such cyber-attacks.

But the FCCC accused Yahoo of failing to update users about the situation.

A teachers' leader has described Conservative plans to allow parents to set up and run their own schools in England as "barking mad".

Mary Bousted, from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, claimed the move could lead to some pupils being taught creationism instead of literacy.

She said the Tories had not addressed how it would benefit poorer children.

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove insisted the policy aimed to "tackle education inequality".

Mandybill The government has been circulating revised web-blocking powers for the Digital Economy Bill with industry and activist groups, and The Register has seen a draft. This version is believed to have won the backing of the Tories, and could end up in a Second Reading.

The revised Clause 18 we've seen is a hybrid of the earlier Clause 17 (which was defeated) and its successor, the Tory/Lib-Dem Clause 18 (which was withdrawn). Ben Bradshaw's latest draft gives the Secretary of State the power to allow Courts to grant injunctions against service providers compelling them to block "internet locations" - but only after a Parliamentary vote, and with a lot of conditions to be met.

By an overwhelming margin, technology experts and stakeholders participating in a survey fielded by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center believe that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.

A highly engaged set of respondents that included 895 technology stakeholders and critics participated in the online, opt-in survey. In this canvassing of a diverse number of experts, 72% agreed with the statement:

WASHINGTON -- The most powerful camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has returned the first pictures of locations on the Red Planet suggested by the public.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, is nicknamed, "the people's camera." Through a program called HiWish that began in January, scientists have received approximately 1,000 suggestions. The first eight images of areas the public selected are available online at:

Regional publisher Johnston Press is quietly dropping its experiment in introducing paywalls to some of its local newspaper websites.

As first revealed by HTFP last November, JP imposed a £5 subscription for anyone wanting to read stories in full on some of its local sites, including the Whitby Gazette in North Yorkshire and the Southern Reporter in Selkirk.

However the paywall at the Gazette has now been dropped with full stories now freely available again to users.

In a parellel experiment, some other titles, including the Worksop Guardian in Nottinghamshire, stopped uploading full stories to their websites and told readers to buy the paper instead. This aspect of the trial still appears to be ongoing.

The company has told HTFP it will be making no public comment about the trial and has even refused to confirm that it is coming to an end.

However a source at one of the titles involved in the trial said it had been a "disaster" and that the number of people subscribing had been in single figures.

In the team's analysis, three clusters emerged: One group of students solved the problems about 10 minutes after the problem first popped up, another answered a day or two later, and a third typically answered correctly in about a minute. Because the online system presents problems one at a time, it precludes working out all of the answers ahead of time and entering them all at once.

"Our first reaction was "Wow, we must have some geniuses at MIT'," Pritchard says. The team soon realized that the answers in this quick-solving group were entered faster than the time it takes students to read the question, raising suspicions that these students had a cheat sheet of copied answers.

[...]

In the study, the heaviest copiers were male, and although most of the students in the classes were freshmen and had yet to declare a major, subsequent analyses turned up an interesting trend: "Copying homework is a leading indicator of becoming a business major," Pritchard says.

Cue that kossack sig: "A career criminal is just a sociopath who never saw the value of getting good grades and going on to business school."

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

A science writer has won the right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action, in a landmark ruling at the Court of Appeal.

Simon Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association over an article in the Guardian in 2008.

Dr Singh questioned the claims of some chiropractors over the treatment of certain childhood conditions.

The High Court had said the words were fact not opinion - meaning Dr Singh could not use the fair comment defence.

'Meaning of words'

However, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley ruled High Court judge Mr Justice Eady had "erred in his approach" last May, and allowed Dr Singh's appeal.

Harold Beach, who has died aged 96, was the engineer with overall responsibility for the design of Aston Martin's most important and charismatic postwar cars. The DB4, DB5 and DB6 helped the firm prosper throughout the 1960s and epitomised everything an Aston Martin should be.

These cars put the firm on the map as the builder of Britain's finest and most glamorous GT cars, helped in no small measure by the familiar silver DB5 which, with lethal additions, appeared as James Bond's car in the films Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965). Subsequent V8-engined Astons - also conceived by Beach - were larger and, to some, less appealing, although they accommodated changing expectations in luxury and performance. His final task, before retiring in 1978, was to engineer a power-operated soft-top for the V8 Volante model.

If you're going to launch a killer April Fools' Day joke, you might as well put the full effort behind it. And that's exactly what they've done at Google. Apologies to the folks at the Googleplex for breaking the joke a day early but... c'mon, you didn't really expect us to fall for this one again, did you?

Let's play along for a second, shall we? Tomorrow, Google will announce Google TISP (Beta) - a free in-home wireless broadband service that installs in, well, your toilet. Of course, it's vacuum-sealed to prevent water damage. And, certainly, you can have it professionally installed - but please try to make sure your toilet is unoccupied at the time of installation.

Archaeologists excavating Shakespeare's final home in Stratford have unearthed the remains of an inscribed locket, apparently given to William by his mother Mary Arden.

Naming her son as Guillaume, and herself as Ardenne, Mary inscribed the locket with the date of execution of Mary Queen of Scots, giving further credence to the theory that Shakespeare's "lost years" may have been related to political Catholicism.

Labour's election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown | Politics | The Guardian

In an audacious new election strategy, Labour is set to embrace Gordon Brown's reputation for anger and physical aggression, presenting the prime minister as a hard man, unafraid of confrontation, who is willing to take on David Cameron in "a bare-knuckle fistfight for the future of Britain", the Guardian has learned.