Cars and alien shrubs are being blamed for the mysterious disappearance of house sparrows from British towns and cities.

Scott is an all-action director

Ms Anderson delivers a Pamifesto to Obama

Organisers of a campaign to keep a Renaissance masterpiece on public view are convinced that they will succeed after receiving a £10 million donation for their fighting fund.

A law firm that earned £141 million from a government industrial disease compensation scheme denied yesterday that it had exploited sick miners and their families.

Maurice Richardson spent 40 years hunting for treasure in the fields of Nottinghamshire, unearthing little but pieces of scrap and the odd coin. Then one rainy day, using his metal detector to look for parts of a Second World War aircraft, he stumbled across the most expensive single find in recent history.

Read the Ofsted report in full

Connah’s Quay A rabbit has been given a custom-built wheelchair after her back legs were paralysed by illness. Ethel’s owner, Zoe Holbourne, an animal sanctuary volunteer from Flintshire, North Wales, ordered the £80 cart #150; made from toy wheels and plastic tubes #150; from America. “At first she kept tipping over, but she soon got to grips with it,” she said. “As soon as we put her in it, she starts hopping around and really enjoys it.”

The second-in-command of the British National Party is employed at public expense by the Greater London Authority, The Times has learnt.

About four fifths of the members on the leaked BNP list are men and the most common names are John, David and Paul. Those three names accounted for just over 1,000 of the 12,801 names on the list. Susan was the most popular female name. The postcode with the highest number of party members was NG16 – in northwest Nottingham – with 57. Among the more common professions listed by members are electrician, security consultant, former serviceman and IT specialist.

A policeman was under investigation, a radio DJ heard there were no plans to rehire him, a Cambridge academic feared the sack and an Apostolic Church minister was unrepentant after the leaking of the British National Party’s membership list.

Nick Griffin, the BNP chairman, went yesterday to a police station where four of his members were being questioned on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.

Berlin

When he first placed his less than dainty feet on the dancefloor nine weeks ago, John Sergeant was hoping for a little bit of fun in his “rather quiet life”.

Caitlin Moran: He should have stayed

The doctor accused of failing to detect that Baby P had a broken back and eight broken ribs has spoken of the “shocking and tragic circumstances” of the case.

The licence fee was designed 86 years ago for a single radio service. Twenty-four years later a television fee was added and viewers and listeners were offered a simple choice: pay for each service or do without. The equity of this subscription system was then undermined by the introduction of ITV. At that point, the TV licence fee (the separate radio licence fee was eventually phased out as unduly expensive to collect) became a flat-rate equipment tax.

Watching television online can be frustrating. The video often skips and for no obvious reason can stop working altogether. So for many, settling on the sofa to watch Doctor Who or Match of the Day on a computer screen would be difficult, as so much time would be spent getting up again to work out what the problem was.

Apple has reportedly set an industry record by moving its OpenCL parallel computing standard from its beginnings to imminent approval in half a year, paving the way for its inclusion in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

California's top court says it will hear challenges to the gay marriage ban, but it will remain in place for now.

California's top court says it will hear challenges to the gay marriage ban, but it will remain in place for now.

!--paging_filter--pAccording to sources, it might be the end of things for James Murphy's a href="http://www.lcdsoundsystem.com/" target="_blank"LCD Soundsystem/a outfit. According to an a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7733760.stm" target="_blank"interview/a guitarist Al Doyle gave BBC 6Music, the band could be on permanent hold. "I don't think James is going to do anything more under that name," Doyle stated./p pa href="http://www.xlr8r.com/news/2008/11/r-i-p-lcd-soundsystem"read more/a/p

via MacNN:

IOGEAR has released the GCS1716, a 16-port USB or PS/2 KVM switch designed for small-to-medium size businesses. The device allows peripherals, such as monitors, keyboards, or mice, to be shared across 16 computers. The switches can be chained, linking up to 256 computers if needed. Users can select the computer assignment from the display menu, hot-key combinations, or with push button LEDs on the...


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via macrumors.com:

CNet confirms some earlier rumors that Apple is in ongoing negotiations with the major music studios to offer more DRM (copy protection) free music in iTunes. Earlier rumors had suggested that Sony BMG had already agreed but CNet was unable to confi...

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In recent years, that vast majority of thumbdrive "innovations" have been...well...non-technical. However, Kanguru has actually done something useful by integrating an eSATA plug with a standard USB...

The leader of Haringey Council issued a “formal apology” last night and acknowledged that the death of Baby P had highlighted the failure “by all the agencies involved”.

pWhat's cooler than the Internet and cooler than outer space? Why, the Internet in outer space, of course. This month, NASA is building on ten years of work by testing an Internet-esque communications protocol designed for data transmission in deep space./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081119-epoxi-spacecraft-tests-modified-tcpip-in-outer-space.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/BSMYMTT1tCr54SPr7fuxnI1Ze04/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/BSMYMTT1tCr54SPr7fuxnI1Ze04/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=L191SN5f"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=L191SN5f" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=5oeANq8W"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=VYGuqRo4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/da8I6yS7G9A" height="1" width="1"/