In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" -- the right to copy without permission -- means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").
It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP "reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."
GAZA (Reuters) - A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will begin on Thursday, a Palestinian official familiar with Egyptian-brokered truce efforts said on Tuesday.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said he was unaware of any deal. There was no immediate comment from Hamas.
"The two sides agreed and the implementation of the truce will begin at 6 a.m. on Thursday," said the Palestinian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to announce a deal.
He said the ceasefire was agreed despite Israel's killing of at least six Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
Since 2004, a team of professors and students from the University of California, Berkeley has searched for ways to let a single human supervise a team of robot planes. Now, this Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles has a new device for ordering around its drones: an iPhone.
In a video taken from this month's Teaching & Technology conference, the Berkeley crew uses an iPhone to pick tasks for its drone squadron, input a set of coordinates for a local reconnaissance mission, and send the planes new orders while the aircraft are in the sky.
But don't tell Steve Jobs how the Berkeley folks are using his gadget. According to the terms of the Apple Software Developer Kit agreement, "applications may not be designed or marketed for real-time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes."
Gay couples in Norway will be granted the same rights as heterosexuals to marry, adopt and undergo artificial insemination under a new equality law passed Tuesday.
Norway's upper house of parliament voted 23-17 in favor of the gender-neutral marriage law on the same day that gay couples were marrying in California.
The law replaces 1993 legislation that gave gays the right to enter civil unions similar to marriage but did not allow church weddings or adoption. It takes effect Jan. 1.
"We are so overjoyed. We have worked for this for so long," said Jon Reidar Oeyan, leader of the Norwegian National Association of Lesbian and Gay Liberation.
"Now we are going to celebrate," he said. "I didn't dare until I heard the chairman of the upper house bang the hammer."
A parliamentary majority had announced agreement on the legislation last month, and the lower house voted 84-41 in favor last week.
Buoyed by a public mood favoring Democrats, Sen. Barack Obama begins the general-election campaign holding a narrow advantage over Sen. John McCain, with independent voters emerging as a constituency critical to the Republican's hopes of winning the presidency in November.
In the first Washington Post-ABC News poll since the Democratic nomination contest ended, Obama and McCain are even among political independents, a shift toward the presumptive Republican nominee over the past month. On the issues, independents see McCain as more credible on fighting terrorism and are split evenly on who is the stronger leader and better on the Iraq war. But on other key attributes and issues -- including the economy -- Obama has advantages among independents.
The presumptive Democratic nominee emerged from his primary-season battle against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton with improved personal ratings overall, but with no appreciable gain in the head-to-head competition with McCain. Majorities view both men favorably, but about twice as many said they have a "strongly favorable" impression of Obama as said so of McCain.
BEIJING -- A Chinese high school teacher has been fired and denounced by local media and Internet users for fleeing a classroom before his students during last month's devastating earthquake.
Fan Meizhong, a Chinese-language teacher at a private high school in quake-ravaged Dujiangyan in southwest Sichuan province, has been branded “running Fan” on Internet chat-rooms and come under fire for defending his actions online in a lengthy post.
The 8.0 magnitude earthquake on May 12 killed more than 70,000 people, including thousands of children at their desks in what many parents believe were shoddily made school buildings.
"At such a life-or-death moment, I would only consider sacrificing my life for my daughter. I would not do it for anyone else, even my mother," Mr. Fan wrote on popular online portal Tianya.cn.
"In a flash I felt it -- a big earthquake! Then I charged to the building's stairs," Mr. Fan said, adding that he was the first person to emerge from the school on to the soccer pitch.
MOSCOW -- Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, Russian media said on Tuesday.
"A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.
Ahead of major public holidays the Russian Air Force often dispatches up to 12 cargo planes carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.
A spokesman for the Russian Air Force refused to comment.
June 12 was Russia Day, a patriotic holiday celebrating the country's independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Weather specialists said the cement's failure to turn to powder was the first hiccup in 20 years.
The homeowner was not injured, but refused an offer of 50,000 roubles ($2,100) from the air force, saying she would sue for damages and compensation for moral suffering, Interfax said.
Airplane, heal thyself.
A new technology inspired by the self-healing powers of plants and animals may allow damaged planes to fix themselves on the fly and point out even minuscule holes to mechanics upon landing. If the technique pans out, then aircraft, wind turbines and perhaps even spaceships of the future may boast embedded circulatory systems with an epoxy resin that can bleed into holes or cracks and then fluoresce under ultraviolet light to mark the damage like a bruise during follow-up inspections.
The system could be a particular boon for lightweight, plastic-based composites known as fiber-reinforced polymers. Such polymers have recently grown in popularity with aircraft, spacecraft, automotive and wind-turbine manufacturers, who use the materials like protective layers of skin.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- European astronomers have found a trio of "super-Earths" closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it.
The discovery demonstrates that planets keep popping up in unexpected places around the universe.
The announcement is the first time three planets close to Earth's size were found orbiting a single star, said Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz.
He was part of the Swiss-French team using the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in the desert in Chile.
The mass of the smallest of the super-Earths is about four times the size of Earth.
The brains of gay men and women look like those found in heterosexual people of the opposite sex, research suggests.
The Swedish study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, compared the size of the brain's halves in 90 adults.
Gay men and heterosexual women had halves of a similar size, while the right side was bigger in lesbian women and heterosexual men.
A UK scientist said this was evidence sexual preference was set in the womb.
The government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.
In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.
James Elliott, a decorated Army sharpshooter who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving 15 months in Iraq, was confused and psychotic when he was Tasered by police in February as he reached for a concealed handgun when officers responded to a 911 call at his Maryland home.
Mr. Elliott, a chain smoker, began taking Chantix last fall as part of a VA experiment that specifically targeted veterans with PTSD, opting to collect $30 a month for enrolling in the clinical trial because he needed cash as he returned to school. He soon began suffering hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, unaware that the new drug he was taking could have caused them.
Just two weeks after Mr. Elliott began taking Chantix in November, the VA learned from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the drug was linked to a large number of hallucinations, suicide attempts and psychotic behavior. But the VA did not alert Mr. Elliott before his own episode in February.
In failing to do so, Mr. Elliott said, the VA treated him like a "disposable hero."
"You're a lab rat for $30 a month," Mr. Elliott said.
A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.
The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.
The reported evidence -- some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today -- also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.
"Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a 'few bad apples' acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true," Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement for delivery at a committee hearing this morning. "Senior officials in the United States government sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
SAN FRANCISCO -- With a series of simple "I dos," gay couples across California inaugurated the state's court-approved and potentially short-lived legalization of same-sex marriage on Monday, the first of what is expected to be a crush of such unions in coming weeks.
The weddings began in a handful of locations around the state at exactly 5:01 p.m., the earliest time allowed by last month’s decision by the California Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage. Many more ceremonies will be held on Tuesday when all 58 counties will be issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
In San Francisco, Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 84, longtime gay rights activists, were the first and only couple to be wed here, saying their vows in the office of Mayor Gavin Newsom, before emerging to a throng of reporters and screaming well-wishers.
Ms. Martin and Ms. Lyon, who have been together for more than 50 years, seemed touched, if a little amazed by all the attention.
"When we first got together we weren’t thinking about getting married," Ms. Lyon said before cutting a wedding cake. "I think it’s a wonderful day."
Outside City Hall, several hundred supporters and protesters chanted, cheered and jeered in equal measure, giving an unruly carnival feel to the scene, complete with a marching band playing wedding songs and signs reading "Homo Sex is Sin."
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- A fifth human foot in a year has washed ashore off the coast of British Columbia, and this time it's a left one.
Police said two people out for a walk spotted the left foot floating in water off Westham Island on Monday morning.
Delta Police Const. Sharlene Brooks said officials are working with the B.C. Coroner's office to see if this foot is linked to any other partial remains recovered in the province.
Westham Island is at the mouth of the Fraser River, about 15 miles south of Vancouver.
"A passerby noticed a shoe floating in the water, pulled it in and notified police," Brooks said. "We're treating it as a criminal investigation."
While the similarities to the other found feet is strong, she said there's no indication this foot is related to the other cases.
"We're certainly not discounting the possibility that this may be linked to the other recovered feet, but it's just too premature and very speculative for us to even entertain that right now," she said.
LOS ANGELES -- A paparazzo who pressed charges against Britney Spears after her car allegedly ran over his foot was himself to blame for any injury it may have caused, prosecutors said in refusing to pursue the case.
After reviewing police records and a videotape of the incident last year, Deputy District Attorney Joseph D. Shidler wrote Friday that the "only way the victim's foot could have been where the video indicates it to be was by the victim placing it in that location."
The photographer, who was not identified in the report, filed a criminal complaint against Spears in early May, nearly six months after the alleged incident. A copy of the police complaint was not immediately available Monday, but it sought a felony charge of failing to stop after an accident involving an injury.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley's office reviewed a videotape and photos of the incident, which don't show the photographer being hit. The report also describes a chaotic scene surrounding Spears, with photographers on all sides of her car and "a lot of noise and confusion."
A man who police say punched and kicked his 2-year-old son to death on a country road outside Turlock calmly told motorists who stopped at the scene that he had to "get the demons out" of the child, a witness said today.
The man, a 27-year-old Turlock resident, told people who tried to stop him that the boy was "trash," said Lisa Mota, 23.
The Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department identified the man today as Sergio Casian Aguilar. A Modesto police officer shot him to death Saturday night as Aguilar beat and stomped the boy on a two-lane road 10 miles southwest of downtown Turlock, authorities said.
What prompted Aguilar to carry out the attack is still not known. Authorities do not know whether he was drunk or on drugs, and toxicology reports on him and his son will not be available for three to four weeks, said sheriff's spokesman Deputy Royjindar Singh.
Aguilar had no criminal history, Singh said. "From what we can tell, he's never been arrested," Singh said.
Mota said Aguilar didn't stop beating the boy, or even appear concerned, when the Modesto police officer arrived in a helicopter that touched down in a cow pasture and ordered him to stop at gunpoint. When Aguilar kept beating his son, the officer killed him with one shot fired over a barbed-wire fence, authorities said.
"He wasn't acting like a crazy person, running around or screaming," Mota said. "He said, 'I've just got to get the demons out of him.' He was very calm.' "
WASHINGTON -- European astronomers have found a trio of "super-Earths" closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it, demonstrating that planets keep popping up in unexpected places.
Monday's announcement is the first time three planets close to Earth's size were found orbiting a single star, said Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz. He was part of the Swiss-French team using the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in the desert in Chile.
The mass of the smallest of these super-Earths is about four times the size of Earth. That may seem like a lot, but they are quite a bit closer in size and likely composition to Earth than our solar system's giants -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They are much too hot to support life, Queloz said.
Scientists are more interested in the broader implications of the finding: The universe is teeming with far more planets than thought.
Using a new tool to study more than 100 stars once thought to be devoid of planets, the Swiss-French team found that about one-third had planets that are only slightly bigger than Earth.
SAN DIEGO -- Tiger Woods has won the U.S. Open after making birdie on the last hole of an 18-hole playoff to force sudden death and then beating Rocco Mediate on the first hole.
Woods won his 14th major and stayed perfect -- 14-for-14 — when he has held at least a share of the lead after 54 holes. Both he and Mediate shot even-par 71 over the first 18 holes, and headed to the par-4 seventh for sudden death.
Mediate hit his tee shot into a bunker, yanked his second shot well left and couldn’t get up and down from 20 feet to save par. Woods hit two shots to the green and two-putted for his third U.S. Open victory.
A scientist with a brain scanner could figure out your sexual orientation based on the symmetry of your brain, new research from the Stockholm Brain Institute hints.
The findings support the notion that biological factors help determine sexual orientation and leave a specific neuroanatomical signature.
Using MRI scans of gay and straight men and women, the researchers found that people who liked women -- heterosexual men and homosexual women -- had larger right brain hemispheres, while people who liked men -- heterosexual women and homosexual men -- had symmetrical brains. As seen in the image, MRI and PET scans showed a similar pattern in two specific regions of the brain, the right and left amygdalas, which are thought to control fight-or-flight reactions.
"The results cannot be primarily ascribed to learned effects, and they suggest a linkage to neurobiological entities," the researchers, led by Ivanka Savic, write in a paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tomorrow.
Bad news for Emmy voters: You will not have the opportunity to vote for Lindsay Lohan this year. Oh, we know. Lindsay played the hell out of her four lines in the season finale of Ugly Betty (see above), but she's decided not to submit her name for award consideration. And it's not because her character is being written as a boring, self-absorbed harpy, either.
Look, Lindsay knows she's talented. She knows that in those four lines, she probably made such an impression that voters will be scanning their ballots and asking, "BUT WHAT OF LINDSAY LOHAN?" She knows it seems like she's owed an Emmy after not even being nominated for her 2004 appearance on That 70's Show. Even though two of her four lines were "Betty!" and "That's okay," she knows there are no small parts, only very small odds of winning an Emmy, which is what everyone else would have had if she hadn't withdrawn from the race. This whole thing makes us hope Britney Spears wins for her work on How I Met Your Mother (hilariously, Britney did submit her name for consideration) just so we can start a big fight about how it's just like the 1980 summer Olympics and Britney wouldn't have won if Lindsay hadn't stayed home.
LONDON -- A British official says European Union nations have agreed in principle to freeze the assets of Iran's largest bank.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spokesman, Michael Ellam, said Monday an agreement is in place over the assets of Bank Melli.
Ellam has said following talks in London between Brown and President Bush that all EU member states had agreed they should freeze the bank's assets.
Foreign ministers were meeting in Luxembourg on Monday and Iran was high on the agenda. European Union officials could not immediately confirm the plans.
ROME -- An Italian man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend from a pub, taking her home and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash the dishes, police said Monday.
The 43-year-old man dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her, they said.
Police arrived at his house after being tipped off by a friend of the woman who watched the scene at the pub.
The man, who was apparently furious at his ex-girlfriend for leaving him, was arrested on charges of kidnapping, police said.
NEW YORK -- Federal authorities have ruled out suicide in the disappearance of a missing hedge-fund swindler whose car was found on a New York bridge with the words "Suicide is Painless" written in the dust on the hood.
U.S. Marshal Joseph Guccione said Monday that investigators now consider the case of Samuel Israel III to be solely a fugitive investigation.
Israel's car was found a week ago on a Hudson River bridge.
Federal marshals issued a wanted poster Thursday for the man convicted of cheating investors out of $450 million in his Bayou hedge funds. They said he should be considered armed and dangerous.
Israel disappeared the day he was supposed to begin a 20-year prison sentence.
Amy Winehouse fainted in her London home Monday and was taken to the hospital, her spokesman confirms to PEOPLE.
Though she "quickly recovered" from not feeling well, the soul diva, 24, did require her manager's assistant "to stop her falling" in her home, her rep said, according to the BBC. The singer's father, Mitch Winehouse, accompanied her to the hospital "as a precaution," according to the rep.
He told PEOPLE: "She's fine. It was a brief thing and they took her in as a precaution. Her Dad drove her to a private hospital, but they're unsure what caused it so aren't taking any chances."
Doctors at the London Clinic in Marylebone have not diagnosed her condition or determined what might have caused her to faint, the BBC reports.
A father who feared he would lose everything in a bitter divorce battle drove his children to a remote beauty spot and gassed them in his car.
Brian Philcox, 53, told his estranged wife he would leave her a 'present' before attaching a hosepipe to the exhaust of his car and feeding it through the window before leaving the engine running.
The bodies of Karate expert Mr Philcox and his daughter, Amy, seven and son, Owen, three, were found huddled in the rear seat of the Land Rover Freelander on Sunday afternoon.
Yesterday it emerged the former security guard had lost his job and was embroiled in a bitter divorce from his wife, Evelyn, 37.
In the days running up to the Father's Day tragedy the karate expert, who was qualified to six dan ranking, had contacted pressure group Fathers 4 Justice to plead for help.
He had also told neighbours the divorce had left him at the end of his tether and would leave him penniless.
Mr Philcox told one friend: 'I've lost my wife, I've lost my kids and I've lost my job. Now I'm going to lose my house. But I'd rather burn the house down than see that bitch get it.'
Indie hero Azazel Jacobs talks about casting his own parents -- and their eccentric, amazing New York apartment -- in his entrancing breakthrough film "Momma's Man."
Bikini Coffee -- now expanding -- offers more than one kind of stimulant.
Hillary Clinton's brother Tony Rodham meets with McCain adviser Carly Fiorina in Pennsylvania. So much for party unity?
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