Blagojevich suggested Oprah Winfrey for Senate, FBI tape shows   Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor, weighed up the possibility of naming talk show host Oprah Winfrey to the US Senate seat left vacant by Barack  Read Article   

  The Loneliness of Governor SchwarzeneggerBy JENNIFER STEINHAUER Arnold Schwarzenegger has tried to be nonpartisan. In politics, that will not win you many friends. Read Article   

  Barack Obama using 'dangerous' Sarah Palin to raise cash By Toby Harnden World Last updated: November 20th, 20098 Comments Comment on this article The man himself “probably” won’t be reading Sarah Palin’s book but that isn’t stopping Barack Obama’s Organizing for America sending out pleas for cash using her name. This email from Mitch Stewart, director of Organizing for America, sets a target of raising half a million bucks (about 30 cents for every copy of “Going Rogue” that’s been printed so far) to oppose “Sarah Palin and her allies”:From: Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com [mailto: \n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ]
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 9:56 AM
To: Toby Harnden
Subject: Sarah PalinToby –Right now, Sarah Palin is on a highly publicized, nationwide book tour, attacking President Obama and his plan for health reform at every turn.It’s dangerous. Remember, this is the person who coined the term “Death Panels” — and opened the flood gates for months of false attacks by special interests and partisan extremists.Whatever lie comes next will be widely covered by the media, then constantly echoed by right-wing attack groups and others who are trying to defeat reform.As we approach the final sprint on health reform, we can’t afford more deception and delay. We need to be ready for anything — and have the resources to respond with ads, events, and calls to Congress when the attacks come.So we’re setting a big goal: $500,000 in the next week to help push back against Sarah Palin and her allies. Please chip in $5 to help reach our goal.Earlier this month, Palin publicly said that she hopes health reform will be “dead on arrival.” And since then, she’s been working fiercely toward that goal.On Tuesday, Palin went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show where she outrageously — and falsely — suggested that Americans could “face jail time as punishment” if they don’t buy insurance.Palin has many more interviews scheduled on Hannity and other conservative shows in the next few weeks, with more platforms to go after the President. As soon as she does, the rest of our opponents will likely parrot those attacks.We need to be prepared. And we’re counting on you help. Can you chip in $5?https://donate.barackobama.com/SarahPalinThanks,MitchMitch Stewart,  Director Organizing for America  

  Ross Mantle for The New York TimesAlessandro Acquisti mined Web data to successfully predict Social Security numbers.In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male. Read Article   

 Grumpiness is a sign of advanced civilisationBy Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 3:25PM GMT 29 Jan 2010Researchers now believe that being aggressive, intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of a more advanced nature. A more childlike attitude to behaviour such as tolerance and sharing, could, in contrast, be an indication of not being as developed, the new study suggests. The news will be welcomed by those who are known to operate on a short fuse, such as talented but foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay and businessman Sir Alan Sugar. It could also provide scientific weight to the writer George Bernhard Shaw's famous saying that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man". Researchers looked at two different kinds of monkey – the familiar chimpanzee and the less evolved but much more easy going bonobo, two of the closest living relatives to human beings. Chimpanzees are accepted as more evolved than bonobos in terms of physical appearance, behaviour and social structure. But chimps are also much more aggressive, particularly as they get older, when they become less tolerant of each other, share less and show more signs of violence to others. Adult bonobos, on the other hand, are more Peter Pan-like. They retain the same levels of playfulness and behaviour they showed as juveniles, said the research by Harvard University for the online journal Current Biology. The two types of ape are very close to each other, genetically, but the clear differences are believed to be down to simple evolution, said lead researcher Victoria Wobber. Her team put both chimps and bonobos through a variety of skill tests with rewards for those who completed various tasks the quickest. They included a sharing exercise and a begging exercise in which they had to work out which of their keeper's was most generous. In all cases the chimps learnt the tasks fastest and to their better advantage. She believes that the ability to "restrain" their sociability was one of the reasons they were more intelligent and more civilised. She said: "Bonobos took longer to develop the same skill level shown even among the youngest of the chimpanzees that were tested. "It seemed as if adult chimpanzees were able to exhibit more social restraint than adult bonobos." She believes that humans being even more advanced are likely to exhibit even more adult like behaviour. "If we can understand the evolutionary processes by which developmental changes occurred in bonobos, perhaps inferences can be made about our own species' evolution," he said.