Google defends listing extremist websites
Google’s indexing of extremist websites helps police track their activity and will continue, the company’s chief told an audience at the Hay festival.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was asked to act to take down terrorist-sympathising websites from his search engines during a question and answer session at the literary festival on Saturday.
This weekend MPs, including the Labour politician Paul Flynn, called on the company to prevent searches listing sites for groups such as the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab.
S [...]
‘The Sumatran rainforest will mostly disappear within 20 years’
Link to video: Sumatra, Indonesia: the rainforest’s last stand
Our small plane had been flying low over Sumatra for three hours but all we had seen was an industrial landscape of palm and acacia trees stretching 30 miles in every direction. A haze of blue smoke from newly cleared land drifted eastward over giant plantations. Long drainage canals dug through equatorial swamps dissected the land. The only sign of life was excavators loading trees onto barges to take to pulp mills.
The end is in sight for t [...]
Serbia state funeral for last king
26 May 2013
Last updated at 04:07 ET
A ceremony was held last October for three other members of Yugoslavia’s former royal family
Thousands of Serbs are expected to attend a state funeral for Yugoslavia’s last king, Peter II, and three other members of his family.
Peter acceded to the throne in 1941, aged 17, but fled 11 days later when the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia. He never returned and died in the US in 1970.
The funeral is also being held for his wife, Queen Alexandria, his mother Queen Maria, and brother P [...]
Online titans see rosy future in nostalgia
You may have noticed the hullabaloo last week over the news that Yahoo, a weighty internet giant, had paid $1.1bn to acquire Tumblr, a blogging platform allegedly popular with the yoof of today (as Tony Benn used to say). What you may not have noticed is the declaration by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s reformist CEO, about her latest trophy acquisition. “We promise not to screw it up,” she wrote on the company blog. “Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp [...]
George Saunders: ‘It was good to have a painful immersion in capitalism’
In January, a New York Times profile announced that your new short-story collection Tenth of December was the best book we’ll read all year. How did you feel about that?
Pretty good. Maybe I’m just at the stage of life where I’m like, “OK, sure, definitely.” Although it seems like the kind of quote that will follow you around for a while – or at least until the end of this year. I don’t know if the book was different or it was just that lucky first media barrage…
Did it feel different while you were wr [...]
How Silicon Valley created a world apart
Every morning and every evening the fleet glides through the city, hundreds of white buses with tinted windows navigating San Francisco‘s rush hour. From the pavement you can see your reflection in the windows, but you can’t see in. The buses have no markings or logos, no advertised destinations or stops.
It doesn’t matter. Everyone knows what they are. “Transport for a breed apart. For a community that is separate but not equal,” said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a self-professed beat poet and rabble-rouser.
The b [...]
Paris knifing treated as terrorism
26 May 2013
Last updated at 03:52 ET
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The soldier was on patrol when he was attacked, as David Chazan reports
French anti-terrorist investigators are handling the case of a soldier stabbed while on duty in Paris on Saturday evening, prosecutors have confirmed.
The soldier was wounded as he patrolled the French capital’s La Defense business district with two comrades.
Private Firs [...]
Bayern triumph proves German dominance
At Wembley
Bayern Munich’s massed ranks of red celebrated avoiding the fate of losing their third successive Champions League final with a rousing rendition of an old England classic.
The Euro 96 anthem “Football’s Coming Home” was one of the souvenirs Germany took away with them – as well as the trophy – in that memorable summer.
And it was back again on another sunny Wembley night of vindication for Bayern, match-winner Arjen Robben and that country’s great coaching state [...]
Industry, fires and poachers shrink Sumatran tigers’ last stronghold
Karman Lubis’s body was found near where he had been working on a Sumatran rubber plantation. His head was found several days later a mile away and they still haven’t found his right hand. He had been mauled by a Sumatran tiger that has been living in Batang Gadis National Park and he was one of five people killed there by tigers in the last five years.
Contact between humans and wild animals is increasing disastrously in Sumatra as deforestation, mining and palm oil concessions expand, fragmenting forest habitats and driving [...]
Italians vote in local elections
26 May 2013
Last updated at 02:57 ET
In Rome, Ignazio Marino was leading Gianni Alemanno by two points in recent polls
Italians are going to the polls in two days of local elections seen as a test for the new coalition government.
The focus is on the Rome mayoral vote, where PM Enrico Letta’s centre-left is fighting ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PfL) party.
The PfL incumbent, Gianni Alemanno, is trailing Democratic Party (PD) candidate Ignazio Marino in the polls.
Elsewhere, 565 local authoritie [...]
Oakland pounds Houston
Houston, TX – Josh Donaldson and Brandon Moss connected on back-to-back home runs in the fourth inning and the Oakland Athletics defeated the Houston Astros, 11-5, in the middle test of a three-game series.
Donaldson and Chris Young drove in two runs while, Coco Crisp, John Jaso, Seth
Smith, Adam Rosales, Eric Sogard and Yoenis Cespedes each contributed with
an RBI apiece to give the Athletics their seventh win in the last eight
games.
Oakland starter A.J. Griffin (5-3) fanned seven and gave up four runs on fiv [...]
Gay marriage: news and teaching resources round up
The same sex marriage bill has divided the Conservative party, if not the whole country, but the House of Commons has now voted to allow gay marriage in England and Wales by 266 votes to 161 (with more than half of Tory MPs voting against it). The plans will now go to the House of Lords for further consideration and if passed by both Houses, the bill will become law.
We have rounded up the best news stories, multimedia, stats, teaching resources and websites to help you discuss the issues of same sex marriage in the UK and across the worl [...]