Quote: Originally Posted by www.mcvuk.com : Square makes late Eidos bid – but Warner in pole position A battle between East and West looks set to decide the future of Eidos.

MCV understands that both Warner Bros and Square Enix are ready to mount rival acquisition bids this month for the ailing British publisher. Caught on Kotaku. Sourced from here

Not sure what to think personally. Other than I hope this doesn't effect DeusEx 3 in anyway.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thais marked their revered king's birthday on Friday in a solemn mood, concerned for the health of the aging monarch and worried as well over their country's debilitating political deadlock.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.reuters.com/~f/reuters/topNews?a=qS5eTuAJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/topNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.reuters.com/~f/reuters/topNews?a=vSqC03iY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/topNews?i=vSqC03iY" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.reuters.com/~f/reuters/topNews?a=X2QYv3GL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/topNews?i=X2QYv3GL" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reuters/topNews/~4/kZYeCZyqWhU" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/41220?ns=guardianpageName=Comment+is+free%3A+America%2C+cowering+to+an+imaginary+enemy%2C+is+not+the+country+I+once+knewch=Comment+is+freec3=The+Guardianc4=US+news%2CAl-Qaida+%28News%29%2CTerrorism+-+international%2CObama+White+House+%28News%29%2CUS+foreign+policy%2CWorld+newsc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CUS+Electionsc6=Simon+Jenkinsc7=2008_12_05c8=1129131c9=articlec10=GUc11=Comment+is+freec12=blogc13=c14=Comment+is+freeh2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" //divpAmerica seems much in need of Roosevelt's maxim to stop fearing fear itself. Virtually all comment on the Mumbai massacre has mentioned 9/11 and al-Qaida, and thus invited citizens to continue feeling afraid. No matter that Mumbai appears to have been primarily about Kashmir and the status of India's Muslims. No matter that Osama bin Laden has no dog in that fight. Any stick will do to elevate al-Qaida as America's enemy number one./ppLast week, the CIA warned of a terrorist threat that "might be unleashed" during the presidential transition, a threat that George Bush described as "dangerously real". On Wednesday Barack Obama was formally told by a congressional inquiry that "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction, either nuclear or biological, will be used in a terrorist attack" in his first year of office. The inquiry demanded that an official must be appointed "to oversee efforts to prevent such an attack", as if millions of Americans in and out of uniform were not doing that already. /ppThen London added its pennyworth, with a Home Office minister, Lord West, telling of "another great plot building up again" and a "huge threat" from al-Qaida. The purpose of all this scaremongering remains a mystery./ppReactions to Mumbai have seemed to suggest Americans are still seeking fellowship in their 9/11 pain, as after the London and Madrid bombings. Gone are the days when Americans would tell Britons to shrug off IRA terrorist attacks (many instigated from America) and grow up. Any explosion anywhere now abets the extraordinary 9/11 iconography, underpinning the politics of fear that has been the leitmotif of the Bush presidency./ppDebating this presidency in New York on Tuesday night, I found myself pitted against Bush's impresario of fear, Karl Rove. Nothing in his master's glorious reign quite matched his "victory" over terror. The sense of unreality was equalled by Rove's supporters, to whom all who did not fear the "Islamofascists" were "liberal upper-east side elitists", an apparently crushing epithet. One assured me that Afghanistan would soon be won by merely "moving the surge" to Kabul. The whole evening was like the scene in Gone with the Wind where Southern gallants out-boast each other in predicting victory over the Yankees. /ppRove was undeniably a master manipulator of fear politics, like Tony Blair's Alastair Campbell, who called him a "kindred spirit". Both Bush and Blair were led to portray al-Qaida in its Tora Bora cave as they had Saddam Hussein, as a threat to their respective realms. It was what the sociologist Ulrich Beck described as an exaggerated risk "exploited as an elixir to an ailing leader". On this the two leaders built a culture of self-validating counter-terrorism, where both the absence of any threat and the presence of one can be made equally supportive. /ppThe media's fondness for describing any explosion as "al-Qaeda-linked" has turned what was a tiny, if efficient, cabal of fanatics into a global menace, ridiculously on a par with Hitler and postwar communism. Whoever said the political brain has advanced over time was mad./ppOn every visit to America I am stunned by the pervasiveness of fear. Terrified officials pounce on the slightest deviation from security rules. Americans must strip almost to their underwear to board even the shortest domestic flights. IDs are scanned in the meanest office blocks. Computers must be dismantled. National guardsmen troop out at dawn to protect New York installations "against the terrorist threat". /ppThe repressive Patriot Act - mocking a patriotism that was once built on courage and the rule of law - remains in operation. Getting through American immigration with a brown face is an indignity that many Indians and Arabs of my acquaintance now simply refuse to endure. I had trouble even with a Baghdad visa in my passport./ppBarack Obama, who is pledged to close Guantaacute;namo Bay, is being challenged to say what he will do with what the conservative Weekly Standard asserts are "250 participants in the most devastating terrorist attacks in history" from "an enemy unlike any other this nation has ever faced". Britons should not smile at this hyperbole. The same madness afflicts Jacqui Smith's Home Office./ppIn the 1960s Richard Hofstadter, the American political scientist, puzzled over the anti-intellectualism of much of American public life, echoing the remark of the Puritan, John Cotton, in 1642 that "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan". Listening to the debate on Tuesday I realised how deep is that strand, how strong the line of descent to the war on terror from previous generations who likewise puffed up the mafia and home-grown communism. /ppThe 1950s Kefauver commission on organised crime sought a foe to demonise as foreign, sinister and ubiquitous. The inquiry found that there was no national "mafia" worthy of the name, or of their attention, just disparate bunches of local hoodlums. Kefauver and the FBI, whose burgeoning empire depended on him, were furious. They had come to need the mafia and its menace to justify their budget, effort and status. /ppThe same synthetic sense of fear enveloped the McCarthy hearings on communism. A grain of truth was exaggerated to boost McCarthy's standing as a defender of the people against a real and present danger, that of reds under every bed. Communism had to be erected as an internal weapon of mass destruction, and much cruelty resulted./ppAt least organised crime and communism posed genuine threats to American liberties. Al-Qaida does not, yet it has become the ruling obsession of Bush's courtiers. They see al-Qaida fiends on every side, bearded mullahs, caches of bombs, ricin and anthrax. The precautionary principle has become fanaticised. By treating the unknown as an enemy, we ensure that the unknown becomes one. /ppMost of the outrages committed by graduates of the Pakistan terrorism camps are locally motivated, and will continue as long as such motivation survives. A network of criminal suicide squads with no coherent programme has no conceivable hope of undermining western democracy. It can just set off bombs, and will always do so if front-line policing is weak and constantly overruled by a grand "counterterrorism" bureaucracy. /ppJust when America had won a real victory in the century-old combat with communism, it allowed itself to be terrified by a band of fanatics who, in part through America's negligence, "got lucky once" and pulled off a coup on 9/11. For seven years its behaviour at home and image abroad have been dogged by the reaction to it. The challenge to Obama, here as elsewhere, is immense. /ppThe attractive feature of the America in which I once lived was its bold self-confidence. To find the survivors of the Bush presidency still cowering in a mental bunker afraid of a bunch of Arabs - and with British ministers for company - strips western democracy of a leadership that should be both heroic and sensible. It is surely an un-American activity./ppa href="mailto:simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk"simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk/a/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/alqaida"Al-Qaida/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/terrorism"Global terrorism/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/obama-white-house"Obama White House/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usforeignpolicy"US foreign policy/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/jAwPo33e1p2W35OTVycr8aQ0Iko/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/jAwPo33e1p2W35OTVycr8aQ0Iko/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

Mortgage rates fell this week, reaching levels not seen since January, as the government steps up its efforts to aid the ailing housing market.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/money_latest/~4/ElVzl9OohHo" height="1" width="1"/

Mortgage rates fell this week, reaching levels not seen since January, as the government steps up its efforts to aid the ailing housing market.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/money_latest/~4/ElVzl9OohHo" height="1" width="1"/

p-- ba href="http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/breaking-toll-nears-1000-as-louisville.html" title="Gannett swings the big ax, slashing 1,400 jobs this week"Gannett swings the big ax, slashing 1,400 jobs this week/a:/b Jim Hopkins, the former Gannett (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=GCI" class="ticker" title="GCI"NYSE: GCI/a) chronicling the company's travails, has had a busy two days tallying the 1,400 jobs that are now gone as of this week at the company's ailing newspapers. The job cuts are part of the 3,000 staffers at local papers Gannett said would have to go. Gannet made the a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-gannett-to-slash-more-than-3000-jobs-across-local-papers" title="announcement"announcement/a at the end of October. The latest casualties are at iThe Nashville Tennessean/i (92 of 1,000 jobs cut); iPoughkeepsie Journal/i in New York (59 of 250), and South Carolina's iGreenville News/i (36 of 500). /p p -- ba href="http://www.startribune.com/business/35400639.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aU7EaDiaMDCiUZ" title="Star Tribune wants $10 million in union givebacks"Star Tribune wants $20 million in union givebacks/a/b (via a href="http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45aid=155018" title="Romenesko"Romenesko/a): The Minneapolis/St. Paul daily is asking its union to help identify $10 million cost savings by early next month. The paper's execs hope the additional savings will convince lenders to forgive some of nearly $400 million in long-term debt. The $10 million being sought is on top of $20 million the iStar Trib/i has separately asked from contract workers. Chief Executive Chris Harte says that if the union doesn't comply, the paper may have to file for bankruptcy protection. /p p -- ba href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/081201/20081201005554.html?.v=1" title="Canwest relaunches 10 newspaper sites"Canwest relaunches 10 newspaper sites/a/b: After scaling back on print delivery, Canada's largest newspaper publisher is unveiling 10 redesigned newspaper sites. Aside from making simplifying the newspaper sites' navigation, Canwest also is trying put more emphasis on hyperlocal content, including billing its classifieds as "hyperlocal" as well. /p p!-- iMark Logic Digital Publishing Summit, Thursday November 6, Westin Times Square. Insight and perspective from Outsell, Gilbane, Simon Schuster, BusinessWeek.com, more. Evening cocktail reception. Cost is complimentary. a href="http://content.adbureau.net/accipiter/adclick/CID=000010cb0000000000000000/SITE=PC_US/AAMSZ=PREMB_NEWS/relocate=http://marklogicdps.eventbrite.com/"Register now!/a/i --/p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=Cm1XnM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=Cm1XnM" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=QvjrO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=QvjrO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=PwdqO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=PwdqO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Fs8Ao"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Fs8Ao" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=VbGVO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=VbGVO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=EIEVO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=EIEVO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/474290838" height="1" width="1"/

A national poll suggests that six in 10 Americans oppose using taxpayer money to help the ailing major U.S. auto companies.

A national poll suggests that six in 10 Americans oppose using taxpayer money to help the ailing major U.S. auto companies.div class="feedflare" a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=1xpljebF"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=wcyVaw3u"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=4173HL1O"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=4173HL1O" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=mGdreeub"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=ODkiSbCG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=ODkiSbCG" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/1O9ITaXQJCI" height="1" width="1"/