Political leaders have headed off on the campaign trail after Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the UK general election would be held on 6 May.

He said he would seek a "clear" mandate to continue the "road to recovery", as Labour bids for a fourth term.

David Cameron, whose Conservative Party has been ahead in the polls, said they offered "hope" and a "fresh start".

Nick Clegg, leader of the UK's third biggest party the Liberal Democrats, said only they offered "real change".

Shortly after announcing the date at Downing Street, Mr Brown boarded a train and headed to Kent to meet voters at a supermarket in Rochester.

French police have launched a criminal inquiry to trace the bloggers behind rumours President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife were both having affairs.

The inquiry follows a legal complaint filed by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

It was on a blog housed by the paper's website that the speculation about the Sarkozy-Bruni marriage first appeared in March.

The rumours, relayed around the world, then appeared on newspaper front-pages.

However it now appears that they were based on no more than idle fantasy.

Mafia leaders angry at church officials for excluding them from the annual Easter procession in the Italian town of Sant'Onofrio got their revenge by opening fire on a prior's house in a drive-by shooting.

The Affruntata procession was subsequently cancelled "for spiritual and public order reasons", said parish priest Father Franco Fragala.

Police believe the attack on church prior Michele Virdo's home in the early hours of Sunday was a reprisal for a decree that in effect excluded the local mafia from their traditional prominent roles in the parade.

The Affruntata ("Encounter") is a symbolic re-enactment of St John's search for Mary to tell her of the resurrection of Jesus. The various protagonists of the story are represented by statues, borne shoulder-high through the streets of Sant'Onofrio, a town of 3,000 people in Calabria, southern Italy.

A message from Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, to survivors of the Abruzzo earthquake was greeted with whistles of protest as the first anniversary of the tragedy was marked by a candelit nighttime procession through the deserted streets of L'Aquila, many still strewn with rubble.

Mr Berlusconi, who visited the stricken area repeatedly after the earthquake to oversee rescue efforts and meet survivors, did not attend the vigil. However he sent a message of greetings to a packed town meeting held at a church on the Cathedral square as residents assembled for the procession.

Franco Gabrielli, the chief of police, dismissed the protesters as "four or five scoundrels". However Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, said there was "more whistling than applause".

In his message Mr Berlusconi stressed the government's achievement in swiftly rehousing many displaced residents. He said he felt close to the survivors and shared their suffering over the "sorrow and death". "We managed the crisis with absolute efficiency and began reconstruction in the best way" he said. "It will take years to completely restore and reconstruct what has been damaged and lost, but the people of L'Aquila should remain confident that the necessary resources for reconstruction have been set aside."

The Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty recently agreed to by the US and Russia will reduce each country's nuclear stockpile by nearly a third. Russia acknowledges the progress made, but also reserves its right to back out. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia maintains its right to withdraw from a new arms proliferation treaty with the United States if it feels threatened by US missile defense plans. But he told reporters that the nuclear disarmament agreement represented a "new level of trust" between the two countries.

"Russia will have the right to abandon the START treaty if a quantitative and qualitative buildup of the US strategic anti-missile potential begins to significantly affect the efficiency of Russia's strategic nuclear forces," Lavrov said during a press conference held on Tuesday morning.

A senior Greek official has indicated that Athens is ready to accept the name 'Northern Macedonia' for its northern neighbour, in a development that could bring an end to the 19-year-old title dispute that has hampered Skopje's EU membership ambitions.

"The name 'Northern Macedonia' fits with the settlement as envisaged" by Athens, Greek deputy foreign minister Dimitris Droutsas told national media on Monday (5 April).

Should Macedonian leader Nikola Gruevski reject this proposal "he will have to explain to the Macedonian people why he is depriving them of their European prospects," Mr Droutsas added.

Currently referred to as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) in official terminology, Athens is strongly opposed to a shortening of the country's name to simply "Macedonia," a title already used by a northern province in Greece.

France's National Assembly has passed a bill to legalise online gambling and open up the French market to international operators. French laws regulating online gambling are among the strictest in Europe.

France's National Assembly on Tuesday passed a bill to legalise online gambling and open up the French market to international operators.

The bill, which is expected to become law in time for the World Cup in South Africa to take place from June 11 to July 11, had already been passed by the French Senate in February.

The law will also prohibit minors from online gambling and reinforce measures targeting illegal gambling Web sites.

Italian authorities have arrested, investigated or convicted 130 Catholic priests for sexually abusing children over the last decade, it has been claimed.

A report by prosecutors said that not one of the cases was referred to the police by the local bishop.

Sergio Cavaliere, a lawyer who has compiled evidence on the cases, said: "It's an alarming figure if you consider that it's only the tip of the iceberg, if you think about all the cases that haven't shown up in the media or that haven't gone to court."

For the second time in a week, robbers in Paris have dug a tunnel to access the vaults of a high-street bank.

Police said they may have used the sewerage network to enter the BNP Paribas bank from a metro station, but fled before they could steal anything.

It is the latest of several similar incidents in the city.

A week ago, thieves raided dozens of safety deposit boxes at a branch of Credit Lyonnais after digging a tunnel into the vault.

Last weekend's underground raid on a branch of the Credit Lyonnais seems to have whetted the appetite of other would-be bank robbers, says the BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris.

French oil company Total is to be investigated over allegations of corruption relating to Iraq's oil-for-food programme.

A French judge has filed preliminary charges accusing Total of bribing Iraqi officials while Saddam Hussein was in power in order to secure oil supplies.

This marks the first time the company itself will be investigated.

Total reacted with surprise to the news. It insists it abided by the rules of the UN-sponsored programme.

Filing preliminary charges against the company will give French officials more time to continue their investigation.

The euro has fallen sharply against the dollar and the pound after reports that Greece had tried to renegotiate the terms of a eurozone rescue plan.

The euro was down by more than a cent, or 1%, against the dollar, at $1.3381. Against the pound, it fell by half a penny to 87.899 pence.

The risk premium on Greek bonds also increased sharply.

Greece moved quickly to deny the reports it had tried to change the terms of the bail-out plan.

UOBSERVER / BARCELONA - Europe should invest more in its creative industries as a source of future growth the European Commission has said, while EU ministers have called for culture to be put at the "heart" of the bloc's new economic plan, the Europe 2020 strategy.

The EU executive is in late April set to adopt its "Green Paper on Cultural and Creative Industries," aimed at unlocking the economic potential of cultural and creative industries in Europe - a sector that generates 5 million jobs and represents 2.6 percent of GDP in the 27-nation bloc.

Barcelona park: The cultural sector includes areas as diverse as cinema, music, publishing, the media, fashion, interior and product design, cultural tourism, performing arts and heritage

The sector includes areas as diverse as cinema, music, publishing, the media, fashion, interior and product design, cultural tourism, performing arts and heritage.

Speaking at the European Forum on Cultural Industries in Barcelona, the director general of the European Commission's education and culture department, Odile Quintin, outlined the general lines of the upcoming commission document.

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. Readers' Comments

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The decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, specifically concerned the efforts of Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, to slow down customers' access to a service called BitTorrent, which is used to exchange large video files, most often pirated copies of movies.

After Comcast's blocking was exposed, the F.C.C. told Comcast to stop discriminating against BitTorrent traffic and in 2008 issued broader rules for the industry regarding "net neutrality," the principle that all Internet content should be treated equally by network providers. Comcast challenged the F.C.C.'s authority to issue such rules and argued that its throttling of BitTorrent was necessary to ensure that a few customers did not unfairly hog the capacity of the network, slowing down Internet access for all of its customers.

But Tuesday's court ruling has far larger implications than just the Comcast case.

The ruling would allow Comcast and other Internet service providers to restrict consumers' ability to access certain kinds of Internet content, such as video sites like Hulu.com or Google's YouTube service, or charge certain heavy users of their networks more money for access.

Spain is revving up its green credentials with a plan to encourage electric cars. It wants to see a quarter of a million of them on its roads by 2014, investing 590 million euros in public funds.

Lower off-peak power rates and recharging points in homes, car parks and motorways are on the cards.

One recent convert said: "A hundred kilometres in this costs one and a half euros, compared to eight euros of petrol for a normal car, so you save a lot. You could say this kind of car pays for itself."

The socialist government has announced a 20 percent subsidy for electric car purchases, with a 6,000 euro ceiling. The prime minister unveiled the plan within the context of the economic crisis. Spain is one of the EU countries hardest hit.

A senior government economist told reporters in Beijing yesterday China could widen the daily trading band for the renminbi and allow it to resume the gradual appreciation it halted in July 2008 in response to the global credit crisis,

...

Speaking at a press briefing organised by the Foreign Ministry, Mr Ba said the current peg was a temporary emergency measure that would be abolished at some point.

...

Both sides have made conciliatory gestures following months of strained relations, with the US delaying a decision on China as a currency manipulator and Beijing moving diplomatically in tandem with Washington on Iran and nuclear security.

One VC source complained to us recently that these days there are "so few deals and so much money." The VCs trying to get Foursquare agree. From their perspective, there are very few consumer-facing startups with the ambition of Foursquare. Foursquare is the only deal to get. Meanwhile, there's a ton of VCs firms with piles of cash. The supply and demand equation [?] skews in Foursquare's favor.

The other huge factor to remember is that investing in Foursquare is not necessarily a bet that Foursquare will gain mass consumer adoption.

Investing in Foursquare, is actually just a bet that any of the five following things will happen:

• That some company -- Google? Yahoo? Facebook? -- will believe that Foursquare can gain mass consumer adoption.
  
• That some company will buy or develop a Foursquare rival and that another company will come to believe it needs Foursquare to defend its market position.
  
• That some company -- we're thinking of Yahoo here -- will decide that buying Foursquare for $100 million is a cheap way to demonstrate to its employees and investors that it is interested in making bets on startups that could gain mass consumer adoption.
  
• That Foursquare will gain mass consumer adoption
  
• And, most importantly: That someone,someday will come in and bet on any of the above happening, but at a higher price.

Don't miss: Yahoo Considers Buying Foursquare For ~$100 Million

Read more...

Normally, Foursquare is an ancient American ball game played by, you guessed it 4, elementary school aged girls. This Foursquare is a cell phone app leveraging GOOG GPS maps to locate, accumulate, and redeem "customer loyalty program" points, if any, awarded by retailers. Do watch the "Learn more" animation.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Barack Obama is set to announce a new defence strategy that would reduce the circumstances in which the US would be prepared to use nuclear weapons.

It would rule out a nuclear response to attacks on the US involving biological, chemical or conventional weapons.

Nor would the US use nuclear arms on non-nuclear states that comply with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Mr Obama said he would make exceptions for states deemed in violation of the treaty, naming Iran and North Korea.

Ahead of the report's release, Mr Obama told the New York Times he was convinced Iran was on a course that "would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities".

Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan project has been following the story about a night raid in Gardez by U.S. and Afghan forces (see the video above), and today those forces made a major admission about their responsibility for civilian deaths. In a press release issued on Easter (gee, I wonder if they hoped people would be distracted today), the U.S. and allied forces under General McChrystal's command, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), admitted they killed three innocent Afghan women, two of whom were pregnant.

At least 79 people have been killed after torrential rain caused landslides and flooding in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, officials have said.

Thirty-three people died in the city of Rio de Janeiro after 7cm (3in) of rain fell in 15 hours, while 33 were killed in the neighbouring city of Niteroi.

Flooding left another 12 people dead in Sao Goncalo, and one in Petropolis.

Rio de Janeiro's governor has declared a state of emergency while the city's mayor has told people to stay indoors.

Authorities say the transport system is close to collapse.

Twenty-five miners are now known to have died and four are missing in an accident at a West Virginia coal mine.

The worst mine disaster in the US since 1984 was caused by an underground explosion at Upper Big Branch, about 30 miles (50km) south of Charleston.

It happened at about 1500 (1900 GMT) in a chamber 330m (1,000ft) below ground, mine owner Massey Energy Company said.

The rescue operation has been suspended because rising methane gas levels have heightened the risk of another blast.

The operation will resume as soon as conditions allow, Massey Energy said.

Anti-government protesters in Thailand have defied a government ban to march through more areas of Bangkok, shutting down parts of the city.

The government had ordered the red-shirts, as the protesters are known, not to demonstrate along 11 key routes.

But the reds, who are calling on the government to step down, fanned out into Bangkok's business district.

The move followed scuffles earlier in the day between riot police and protesters.

No-one was hurt but it marked the first clash since the protests began almost a month ago.

The former Russian oligarch and opposition critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky today called for the latest case against him to be thrown out, describing Kremlin allegations that he stole billions of tonnes of oil as "deliberately malicious".

Taking the stand for the first time since his second trial began just over a year ago, Khodorkovsky brandished a jar of crude oil and said state prosecutors had failed to grasp how the oil industry worked. He is accused of stealing $25bn worth of oil and laundering most of the proceeds.

Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 after defying the then president, Vladimir Putin, by funding opposition political parties. He has been in jail ever since. In 2005 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for tax evasion and he was then charged with further offences as he neared parole in what critics say is an attempt to keep him behind bars.

Pope Benedict XVI and the people around him "are just not really aware of what is actually going on in many of the places in the world and how strongly felt these issues are," said the Rev. Thomas Faucher, pastor at St. Mary's Catholic Church.

In a Reader's View on today's Opinion page, Faucher writes that the pope "may be a saintly man, but he is much too old to lead the church through this mess."

Pope Benedict is 82. He became pope in 2005 at the age of 78. Popes are typically in their 60s when they are selected.

Michael Driscoll, Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise bishop, declined to comment. A church spokesman said Faucher was expressing his opinion, which he has a right to do.

JERUSALEM -- Leaders of some of Israel's most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their critics say endanger the country.

The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country's leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the limits of free speech and dissent in Israel's much vaunted democracy.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake has struck the northern part of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, triggering a tsunami watch for the immediate area.

The quake struck at 5:15 a.m. local time, the USGS said. Its epicentre was about 205 kilometres northwest of Sibolga, on Sumatra, and 1,425 km northwest of Jakarta.

The agency said the quake's depth measured 46 kilometres.

A 23-year-old journalist is under arrest for exposing a secret Israeli assassination plot, and another has fled to London, afraid for his life. Judith Miller talks to insiders who have been gagged by the government about the scandal rocking Tel Aviv, and Israel's slide toward Iranian-style censorship.

Besides their apparent inability to spot a scientific consensus in plain view, the thing that puzzles me the most about climate change deniers is why, exactly, they think those trying to stop climate change are so invested in doing so.

Look into the northern sky tonight and you could be in for a surprise - an aurora.

Yesterday a huge storm on the surface of the sun led to a massive explosion that produced its biggest recorded solar flare.

Experts predict that the interaction between the highly charged ions and the earth's magnetic field could produce a pink and green display of lights visible through the South-East, weather permitting.

The Meteorological Office is predicting a clear, cold night.

Auroras are rarely visible in the South of England and are usually small when they do appear. But astronomers predict tonight's show could be the most impressive ever.

The price of oil reached a fresh 18-month high on Tuesday on growing hopes of a US-led global economic recovery.

One-month futures for US light crude hit $86.97 a barrel in New York trading, before falling back slightly.

The UK benchmark, Brent crude, peaked at $86.63 a barrel on Tuesday - also an 18-month high.

Investors have also signalled their confidence in the US economy with the strengthening of the dollar against both the pound and the euro.

The US dollar was up by more than a cent against the euro, with a dollar worth 74.8 euro cents.

Millions of marine turtles have been killed over the past two decades through entrapment in fishing gear, according to a global survey.

Described as the first global synthesis of existing data, the study found especially high rates of "bycatch" in the Mediterranean and eastern Pacific.

Six of the seven sea turtle types are on the Red List of Threatened Species.

Writing in the journal Conservation Letters, researchers advocate much greater use of gear safe for turtles.

The first public trial of a system that "refills" electric cars in minutes will be launched this month. The Californian company Better Place will test its automated battery-swap stations in Tokyo.

It is the latest element in the company's ambitious plans to build the world's first infrastructure networks for electric cars by the start of next year.

Globally, road vehicles generate around a fifth of carbon dioxide emissions. The figure is the same for the UK. According to a study for the Department for Transport, widespread adoption of electric vehicles with a range of 30 miles or more could halve road transport emissions.

One of the biggest challenges, however, to the large-scale implementation of electric cars is the problem of infrastructure for recharging.

In France, a controversial planned increase in the number of wind farms has rubbed some residents the wrong way. Now a newly commissioned parliamentary report has criticized the way wind farms are financed. 

France has between 2,000 and 2,500 wind farms, far fewer than its neighbors Germany or Spain. However, the government has ambitious plans to build 8,000 more over the next decade, as part of a strategy to reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Kyoto climate change agreement.

But in many parts of the country, people are unhappy with the wind farms that already exist.

Some 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the three varieties of Monsanto corn this year, have reported extensive seedless corn problems....

[E]nvironmental activitist Marian Mayet, director of the Africa-centre for biosecurity in Johannesburg, demands an urgent government investigation and an immediate ban on all GM-foods, blaming the crop failure on Monsanto's genetically-manipulated technology.

Willem Pelser, journalist of the Afrikaans Sunday paper Rapport, writes from Nelspruit that Monsanto has immediately offered the farmers compensation in three provinces - North West, Free State and Mpumalanga. The damage-estimates are being undertaken right now by the local farmers' cooperative, Grain-SA. Monsanto claims that 'less than 25%' of three different corn varieties were 'insufficiently fertilised in the laboratory'.

80% crop failure

However Mayet says Monsanto was grossly understating the problem. According to her own information, some farms have suffered up to 80% crop failures. The centre is strongly opposed to GM-food and biologically-manipulated technology in general.

"Monsanto says they just made a mistake in the laboratory, however we say that biotechnology is a failure. You cannot make a 'mistake' with three different varieties of corn.'...

"One can't see from the outside whether a plant is unseeded. One must open up the cob leaves to establish the problem,' he said. The seedless cobs show no sign of disease or any kind of fungus. They just have very few seeds, often none at all.

Read more...

I wonder idly, if the farmers' compensation offer is cash or in-kind.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

When an aggregator like Google News publishes newspaper headlines, is the company treading on thin ice? What about aggregators that publish headlines and a one-line excerpt? What about those that simply rewrite the facts contained in the story and publish a new account in their own words?

Newspapers have long objected to these practices, arguing that they dilute the value of their own work. Case in point: last month, Laura Malone of the Associated Press appeared at a Federal Trade Commission conference on the future of news and told the assembled audience (read the transcript PDF):

Sarah Palin's "Real American Stories" Fox News Special generated its fair share of controversy, but that didn't translate into a ratings boost.

The special, which debuted Thursday night in Greta Van Susteren's "On the Record" time slot, drew 2.073 million total viewers and 472,000 A25-54 viewers. While that was more than enough to win the timeslot (beating everything else on cable news in the hour combined), it's an unspectacular number for Fox News. TVNewser notes that Palin's special was down 10% in total viewers and 28% in the demo compared to Greta's previous Thursday episode.

There's information about my Facebook data set scattered around multiple news articles, as well as posts in this blog, but here's the full story of how it all came down.

I'm a software engineer, my last job was at Apple but for the last two years I've been working on my own startup called Mailana. The name comes from 'Mail Analysis', and my goal has been to use the data sitting around in all our inboxes to help us in our day-to-day lives. I spent the first year trying (and failing) to get a toe-hold in the enterprise market. Last year I moved to Boulder to go through the Techstars startup program, where I met Antony Brydon, the former CEO of Visible Path. He described the immense difficulties they'd faced with the enterprise market, which persuaded me to re-focus on the consumer side.

WASHINGTON -- A federal court threw the future of Internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt Tuesday with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC's authority to impose such "Net neutrality" obligations on broadband providers.

The ruling marks a serious setback for the FCC, which is trying to adopt official net neutrality regulations. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat, argues that such rules are needed to prevent phone and cable companies from using their control over Internet access to favor some online content and services over others.

The decision also has serious implications for the massive national broadband plan released by the FCC last month. The FCC needs clear authority to regulate broadband in order to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including a proposal to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities.

Comcast and the FCC had no immediate comment.

Facebook.com has blocked outgoing links to collateralmurder.org (but not as yet,.com)

A "complex cyber-espionage" network that penetrated various organisations including the Office of the Dalai Lama, has been uncovered by researchers.

The shadow network targeted government, business, and academic computers at the United Nations and the Embassy of Pakistan in the US, among others.

It was used to steal at least 1,500 emails from the Office of the Dalai Lama, the researchers said.

The attacks were thought to originate in the city of Chengdu in China.

Comment When the Dragon's Den star Duncan Bannatyne realised his wife had left her dress on the train on the way to a charity dinner last Saturday he called lost property.

Unfortunately, being a Saturday afternoon, lost property was closed and his wife was distraught.

Fortunately Duncan's 50,000 Twitter followers came to the rescue. He made a single tweet offering a reward of £1000 for the safe return of the item of clothing. Amazingly the dress was indeed quickly located and returned.

Read the comments afterwards (and dont use buzzwords and technical language if you dont understand what they mean).

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Both sides of the Digital Economy Bill debate made what could be their final pitch to MPs in newspaper adverts today, as the legislation enters the Parliamentary "wash-up" ahead of the election.

The Bill is due to receive its second reading in the Commons at 3.30pm. During the wash-up, set to take place over the next few days, the parties generally push through uncontroversial Bills quickly before returning to their constituencies for campaigning.

Opponents of the Digital Economy Bill are arguing it is highly controversial, and has not been sufficiently debated by MPs. The Open Rights Group has issued dire warnings about the death of public Wi-Fi hotspots, human rights and democracy.

A team of Russian and American scientists has discovered a new element that has long stood as a missing link among the heaviest bits of atomic matter ever produced. The element, still nameless, appears to point the way toward a brew of still more massive elements with chemical properties no one can predict.

The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator about 75 miles north of Moscow on the Volga River, according to a paper that has been accepted for publication at the journal Physical Review Letters.

Data collected by the team seem to support what theorists have long suspected but so far failed to prove: that as newly created elements become heavier and heavier they will eventually become much more stable and longer-lived than the fleeting bits of artificially produced matter seen so far.

If the trend continues toward a theorized "island of stability" at higher masses, said Dawn Shaughnessy, a chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who is a member of the team, the work could generate an array of strange new materials with as yet unimagined scientific and practical uses.

By scientific custom, if the latest discovery is confirmed elsewhere, the element will receive an official name and take its place in the periodic table of the elements, the checkerboard that begins with hydrogen, helium and lithium and hangs on the walls of science classrooms and research labs the world over.

An affluent middle class of young Muslims is driving a boom in sales of halal products, including alcohol-free sparkling wine and Islam-approved foie gras in France.

The new consumers, known as the beurgeois - a combination of bourgeois and beur, slang for a French person of North African descent - have spending power worth an estimated 5.5bn euros a year.

But they don't want the foods that their parents grew up with, instead they want high end halal luxuries and a range of halal cuisines, the Guardian reports.

That deafening applause you hear is not from Durham, NC post NCAA, but rather from the MPAA and the representatives of other major content providers on both sides of the Atlantic cheering on what may be looked back upon as the trifecta week that broke the internet as we know it. Three momentous things took place simultaneously this week that combined are more important than most people realize - the Ipad was released, the UK looks poised to pass Debill and a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC doesn't have the right to regulate broadband, thus possibly ending its ability to enforce network neutrality.

A Washington state man has been charged with threatening to kill Democratic Sen. Patty Murray over her support for health care reform.

Read more...

OTOH

Obama Inc. is making a buck off Joe Biden calling the health care victory a "big f----ing deal."! The "Health Reform is a BFD" T-shirt appeared this week on the fundraising website hosted by President Obama's perpetual campaign, Organizing for America.

The Tee is available to anyone who makes at least a $25 online contribution to OFA.

Read more...

stay classy!

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

After writing about how Prince Charles' charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, is now under police investigation for possible fraud, it has become clear how I have missed one of the most shocking aspects of the Smallwood Report.

The report has proved to be very controversial because it was commissioned by Prince Charles and was sent directly to government ministers in an attempt to influence them to fund the provision of pseudo-medical treatments, such as homeopathy, within the NHS. Given, the unique constitutional position of the future monarch, direct lobbying over specific policy issues is seen as being in conflict with the democratic process.

<snip>

In a comment on my last blog post, Ernst makes it clear that the money was coming from Dame Shirley Porter and that Smallwood made it clear the Prince did not want it to be known who was behind the financing.

It is not difficult to understand why Prince Charles would not want it to be know that Porter was funding his pet project.

The Smallwood report was published in 2005 at a very sensitive time for Shirley Porter. She has been described as "the most corrupt British public figure in living memory". During the 80's, Porter was leader of Westminster council where she systematically tried to gerrymander wards to make them more likely to vote Tory by selling off council houses in marginal areas to private tenants. She ousted homeless people out of marginal wards and tried to house them in safe labour wards in buildings unfit for human habitation. She sold of cemeteries for 15p each and organised thugs to jeer at families who protested.

When the body of Chicago's school board president [!] was found partially submerged in a river last fall, a bullet wound to the head, cameras helped prove it was a suicide.

O RLY?

within days, police recreated Scott's 20-minute drive through the city using high-tech equipment that singled out his car on a succession of surveillance cameras, handing the image from camera to camera.

The video didn't capture Scott's final moments, but it helped convince police his death was a suicide: He wasn't followed. He wasn't following anyone. He never picked up a passenger.

Somebody, think of the savings.

In less than a decade and with little opposition, the city has linked thousands of cameras - on street poles and skyscrapers, aboard buses and in train tunnels - in a network covering most of the city. Officials can watch video live at a sprawling emergency command center, police stations and even some squad cars. "I don't think there is another city in the U.S. that has as an extensive and integrated camera network as Chicago has," said Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary....

While critics decry the network as the biggest of Big Brother invasions of privacy, most Chicago residents accept them as a fact of life in a city that has always had a powerful local government and police force. And authorities say the system helps them respond to emergencies in a way never before possible.

Read more...

Possibly related news:
On the road show
Placements, everyone! Placements
WaPo balks...
Illinois Terrorism Task Force

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Police have arrested two women after they tried to take the body of a dead relative onto a plane at Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

Staff became suspicious when the women tried to check in the man, who was wearing sunglasses, for a flight to Berlin on Saturday.

The man is thought to have died the previous day and was in a wheelchair.

Firefighters were called out to the home of ex-prime minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie after their burnt breakfast toast set off a smoke alarm.

Mr Blair's spokesman said firefighters had already arrived before they could be told it was a false alarm.

Four engines were sent to the 17th Century building in Wotton Underwood when the alarm went off on Saturday.

A spokesman for Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service said the Blairs were given fire safety advice.

Mr Blair's spokesman said that, because the house was a grade one listed building, the alarm was "automatically connected" to the local fire station.

A lifeboat crewman helped coordinate a rescue in the Caribbean on his mobile phone from a DIY store in Aberystwyth.

Alex Evans answered a call from friend Mark Corbett who said he was on a ship that was taking on water and his was the only number he could remember.

Mr Evans wrote down the latitude and longitude on a till receipt and contacted Milford Haven Coastguard.

They alerted their colleagues over 4,000 miles away and the ship was located, made safe and towed ashore.

The family bank of Democratic Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias loaned a pair of Chicago crime figures about $20 million during a 14-month period when Giannoulias was a senior loan officer, according to a Tribune examination that provides new details about the bank's relationship with the convicted felons....

Stavropoulos in 2005 began a two-year sentence following a felony conviction for running a multistate bookmaking ring, while Giorango would serve six months intermittent confinement on a felony for promoting a nationwide prostitution scheme as Broadway financed their land deals from downtown Chicago to Florida, California and South Carolina.

In the most complete examination yet of Broadway's loans to the pair, the Tribune found more than $27 million worth of mortgages to Giorango and his land trusts and companies since 1999. Stavropoulos took part in many of those deals. Broadway officials have cited privacy laws in declining to document the full extent of their business with the men. The new figures exceed reported totals by about $7 million....

Broadway violated no laws if it didn't know that Giorango and Stavropoulos were using Broadway funds to lend money, said Robert Serino, a former director of the Comptroller of the Currency's enforcement and compliance division. But Serino added that if the Giannoulias family "put their head in the sand and didn't want to know, they wouldn't necessarily be violating the statute, but they may not be doing their jobs."...

Show me da B-ROLLLLLLL!

The bank's ongoing problems have become a major campaign issue for Alexi Giannoulias as he runs against Republican opponent U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk. Giannoulias last month said he fears Broadway, which is struggling to raise more than $85 million to prevent a federal takeover, will fail.

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Possibly related news:
Feb 2010
Feb 2010

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing -- emotional experiences.

some investor guy (profile) wrote (in reply to...)  on Tue, 4/6/2010 - 7:42 am
ResistanceIsFeudal wrote: We can all buy and sell emotional experiences to each other
What was that movie? Some type of toupee that recorded emotional experiences and what people saw and heard? Pretty good science fiction. One guy stumbled across someone who committed murder while wearing the recording device.

Educated Americans grow up in a culture of moral materialism [?]; they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like "The Sopranos," "The Wire" and "Mad Men," [?] and they go on to create companies like Apple [?], with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning [?], which affluent consumers crave.

As the rising generation leads an economic revival, it will also participate in a communal one [!]. We are living in a global age of social entrepreneurship. [?]

In 1964, there were 15,000 foundations in the U.S. By 2001, there were 61,000. In 2007, total private giving [?] passed $300 billion. Participation in organizations like City Year, Teach for America, and College Summit surges every year. Suburbanization helps. [?] For every 10 percent reduction in population density [?], the odds that people will join a local club rise by 15 percent. The culture of service [!] is now entrenched and widespread.

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Yes, well, do peruse the comments. I never before had had the time for NYT comments. Incredibly, Brooks has a fan club of sorts, fellow optimists, with the exceptions rather proving the idiocracy implied by Brooks' vaunted station regarding current and future events.

66. Charles Gerard Larkin
Brooks says of America that "It's always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products." Whatever this means (and it's far from clear), it surely suggests moral bankruptcy.

Related psychotic breaks:
Wal-mart hippies and the New Left

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Japanese researchers said Saturday they have developed a humanoid robot that can laugh and smile as it mimics a person's facial expressions.

The robot, Geminoid TMF, can move its rubber facial skin to imitate a smile, a laugh showing teeth, and a grim look with furrowed brows, by receiving electric signals from the person it is modelled on.

The researchers demonstrated with a robot made to look exactly like an attractive woman in her 20s with long dark hair. The woman and the robot were dressed in the same clothes - a black skirt and black leather jacket.

The robot smiled and furrowed its brow in almost simultaneous mimicry of the woman, whose face was filmed with a video camera which then provided information on her expressions to the robot through electric signals.

The robot is from the same guy who had made a robotic copy of himself.