Category: news

A US judge has dismissed a claim that Shia LaBeouf’s thriller Disturbia stole the plot of short story Rear Window.

Lawyers for a trust which owns the rights to Cornell Woolrich’s story, had claimed film company DreamWorks did not get permission to turn it into a film.

In both plots, a man spies on a neighbour from his window and becomes convinced they have committed murder.

But a New York District Court judge said the similarities were not enough to constitute copyright infringement.

“The main plots are similar only at a high, unprotectible level of generality,” judge Laura Taylor Swan wrote in her ruling dismissing the complaint.

“Where Disturbia is rife with sub-plots, the short story has none.

“The setting and mood of the short story are static and tense, whereas the setting and mood of Disturbia are more dynamic and peppered with humour and teen romance,” she added.

Disturbia made $117 million (£74.6m) at the box office worldwide in 2007.

Alfred Hitchcock made an Oscar-nominated 1954 version of the story which was filmed with permission.

A TV version was also made in 1998 starring Daryl Hannah and the late Christopher Reeve.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

It is an intensely emotional homecoming for Mangayarkarasi Amirthalingam.

After 21 years she has returned to the residence where her family stayed in Colombo on the fateful day her husband – one of the most prominent Tamil political leaders of the past half-century – was shot dead by the Tamil Tiger rebels.

“Sri Lanka is a beautiful country but the war destroyed everything,” she reflects ruefully.

Mrs Amirthalingam is at the place where her husband – who in contrast to the Tamil Tigers advocated a peaceful solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic divisions – was murdered in Colombo in July 1989.

Appapillai Amirthalingam was the only Tamil leader ever to become leader of the opposition in Sri Lanka and was the last Tamil politician to command a mass following.

Since his death, no other Tamil leader has appealed so strongly to the masses.

The suffering of his widow reflects the suffering of tens of thousands of Sri Lankan war bereaved over the past two decades.

The only difference perhaps is that Mrs Amirthalingam was fortunate enough to flee the ravaged country and live in UK.

She returned to Sri Lanka with her youngest son Bahirathan, to find out what the future holds for the Tamil community after decades of brutal conflict that finally came to end with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers – known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – in May last year.

They made sure to visit Mr Amirthalingam’s loyal security guard, Nissanka Thibbotumunuwa – a Sinhalese national – who killed all three Tamil Tiger assassins on the spot.

It was a highly moving reunion – all three of them were in tears.

“Every time these people came and murdered they managed to escape but Nissanka killed all of them,” says Mrs Amirthalingam.

The assassins were invited to the house by another Tamil parliamentarian, Yogeswaran, and were to discuss improving ties with the most prominent Tamil political party of the day, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), which was led by Mr Amirthalingam.

They were allowed in without any security – all three had hidden weapons.

As they sat down for tea they killed both Mr Amirthalingam and Yogeswaran.

“He was killed by the Tigers because he supported the Indo-Lanka agreement which he thought was the best solution at the time,” Bahirathan Amirthalingam – who is in Sri Lanka for the first time since his father’s funeral – tells me.

The accord with India signed in 1987 forced the Tigers and other militant groups to give up arms.

Long before the Tigers began their armed struggle, TULF leaders including Mr Amirthalingam were calling for an independent state for Tamils in the north and east called Tamil Eelam.

But they wanted it through negotiations, not guns.

His stance meant that he was seen as a “stooge” by the Tigers, who wanted to be the “sole representatives” of the Tamils.

This was although many Tamil militant leaders were inspired by Mr Amirthalingam’s politics and were initially his followers.

But while the father was promoting peaceful, democratic solutions, both the sons, Kandeepan and Bahirathan, took up arms on behalf of Tamil militant groups not associated with the Tigers.

It was not a secret for the parents.

“My father did not oppose my taking up arms but he did not support targeting civilians,” Dr Bahirathan tells me.

“He was a forceful moderate.”

But not everyone saw it that way. Mr Amirthalingam was accused by some Sinhala groups of grooming and supporting militant groups as a bargaining tool.

A presidential panel that investigated attacks on Tamils in 1977 by Sinhala mobs – widely seen as a key event which triggered the Tamil uprising – accused the TULF of stirring up inter-ethnic animosity by spearheading the campaign for Tamil Eelam.

But it seems that point of view has faded over the years.

When President Rajapaksa marked the anniversary of Mr Amirthalingam’s death in 2006, he paid tribute to his “commitment to democracy and the larger unity of the Sri Lankan people”.

Like her husband, Mrs Amirthalingam is also a controversial politician.

She was accused of making inflammatory and racist remarks while campaigning for him but was exonerated by an investigating judicial panel.

A quarter of a century later, the widow has strong words against the Tigers.

“If they were fighting for the Tamils, why did they kill my husband? Why did they kill so many moderate politicians?” she asks.

Though revisiting the painful memories is highly emotional, the family say they are happy to be back in Sri Lanka.

“I love my country. Sri Lanka is a beautiful island. I am happy to be here to recollect my memories,” Mrs Amirthalingam says.

She insists that the passage of time has meant that she has no intention of seeking revenge.

“I think they lost an opportunity to solve the issue. The LTTE should have negotiated a political settlement with the government while they had power.”

Mrs Amirthalingam says the president must now find a solution for Tamils so that they can live in Sri Lanka in dignity and as equal citizens.

“We can’t go to any other country. We have our land, language and culture so this must be honoured by the president,” she says through the tears.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The terms “nerd” and “geek” are not names traditionally associated with the stylised and egocentric world of hip-hop.

But now musicians are giving them a makeover in a form of music known as nerdcore.

“Nerdcore is like every other sort of hip hop, just considerably less cool,” said MC Frontalot, one of the founding fathers of the scene.

The subject matter stands in contrast to that traditionally explored in hip-hop, he explained.

“Topics include video games, science fiction, dungeons and dragons, but the deeper themes also look at feelings of alienation, paranoia and inadequacy that must always be battled in order to leave your apartment.”

Geek chic may have become de rigour with the fashionistas but MC Frontalot believes that becoming a real nerd is based on childhood experience.

“A nerd is someone who was conditioned as they were growing up to think that he or she didn’t have the ability to fit in socially.

“Most of the time that’s because we were smart.”

However, proponents of the genre are keen to point out that not all geeks are cut from the same cloth.

“In the Venn diagram of geekdom, you become a geek by association,” said Adam WarRock, who left his job as an attorney to become a full time rapper.

One of his first singles addressed the tendency to assume that all geeks have the same interests.

“All of my friends love Dr Who but I have never seen it. I have nothing against it but people seem surprised because I’m a geek, but not that sort of geek.”

Nerdcore MC Madhatter McGinnis thinks that geekdom is simply becoming more mainstream.

“My personal take is not that nerdcore is getting big but that the whole world population are becoming nerds,” he said.

“My three year old daughter will exceed my computer skills; nerds run the defence systems for the country. I think the music is appealing to these themes.”

Some have noted that the themes of nerdcore and hip hop rap rarely overlap.

However, some argue that nerdcore like grassroots hip hop is all about keeping it real.

“The origins of hip-hop were about politics, community, survival and entertainment,” said MadHatter.

“Today hip hop is not really about that anymore. You have people on the radio talking about the yachts they own and the people they shoot and none of that is real.

“But people rapping about programming languages or role-playing games; that is all real.

“It’s people rapping about what they really are. That’s more hip-hop than anything you hear on the radio.”

However, one thing that does tally with mainstream rap music is that female performers are in the minority.

“There’s not a lot of girls – I think I am the only one in Canada,” said Nursehella, an MC from Canada.

She puts the lack of female artists down to the confidence needed to stand up and rhyme in public.

“If girls who are nerdy can rap and write rhymes, that’s great. They also need to have the confidence to sing them and record something, those puzzle pieces are a bit harder to find and fit together.”

But for budding artists, there is support amongst the musicians, who view each other as peers rather than rivals.

“It’s one of the most supportive subgenres I have come across,” said MadHatter. “We make music at our house. We set up studios because we are proficient with computers and know how to make it all work

He said a lot of the musicians have made songs together but have never met each other.

“That’s where the internet steps in,” he said.

“We may not have been picked first for dodge ball or at the high school dance but we reach out across the internet to work together without even leaving the house.”

You can hear more about nerdcore in this week’s edition of Outriders.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

US schools and libraries may be able to tap into unused fibre networks in a bid to boost connection speeds.

On Thursday the US’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on a proposal outlining the plan.

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski told BBC News that high-speed web access for schools was vital “in order to participate in a 21st Century economy”.

His remarks came at a conference looking at the role of technology in learning hosted by Common Sense Media.

The non-profit advocacy group’s founder Jim Steyer argued for digital literacy as the next social movement, warning that the US’ education system was in crisis.

“We are falling behind and it’s obvious in a global economy that other countries are doing a better job than we are,” Mr Steyer said.

“I worry about the future when we hear that Singapore is ahead of the US in math and science and that 50% of the kids no longer have the educational opportunities like properly wired classrooms, the right kinds of software or textbook opportunities they should have.

“We have ignored these issues over the last decade at our own national peril,” Mr Steyer told BBC News.

The back-to-school forum highlighted three main goals to help move the country towards a digital future that puts the US back on the map:

ensuring every child is digitally literate by 8th grade, around 14 years oldeducating parents about technology and its valuemaking every classroom a 21st-Century classroom

‘American dream’

The plea did not fall on deaf ears.

The FCC’s Mr Genachowski announced a plan as part of the E-Rate programme to keep students connected to the internet both inside and outside the classroom.

The father of three told the audience of teachers, industry leaders and government officials “when our schools win, our country wins”.

“Education is at the core of the American dream and central to a thriving economy. Digital literacy is vital,” said Mr Genachowski.

To date, the E-Rate fund has doled out more than $22bn (£16bn) since it was launched in 1998 helping to bring internet connections to classrooms in the US, but most of those connections have been slow and expensive.

Mr Genachowski hopes Thursday’s vote will change that.

“There is no doubt in my mind that kids need to be digitally literate in order to participate in a 21st Century economy and a 21st century democracy – so we have to take seriously the challenge of getting high-speed broadband access to every school in the United States,” he told the BBC.

“There is a global competition out there for infrastructure and innovation and if the United States doesn’t take this seriously we will fall behind. We have to tackle this with a sense of urgency,” he added.

That was a view backed by Karen Cator, the director of education technology at the US Department of Education.

“Broadband everywhere for all student education is a matter of civil rights and economic development,” she said.

‘Entreprenurial opportunity’

During the forum, Common Sense Media urged the technology industry to play its part in moving the system towards digital schools.

It was no coincidence that the event was staged at the Computer History Museum celebrating the technological revolution and just a matter of miles from the headquarters of Google, Apple, HP, Facebook and Yahoo.

“We need to throw down the gauntlet to the tech industry because many of them are parents and while they care deeply about education, the record reflects that they haven’t done much about it,” said Common Sense Media’s Mr Steyer.

“Frankly I think they have looked at it as a secondary market. They realised there is a better profit to be made on the consumer side of their business.

“They just haven’t seen the business imperative yet but if they don’t act with some urgency, they are not going to have the employee base they will need in 10-20 years.”

Mandeep Dhillon is the chief executive officer of Togetherville, an online community aimed at kids under 10. He said catering to the young school age market can present challenges for a lot of companies.

“The speed of technology has been so rapid and markets tend to focus on the places where they have the greatest economic impact and kids don’t have tremendous economic impact.

“The money part of it is definitely part of the challenge. It’s hard. It is very difficult to deal with kids – five, seven, nine years olds are very, very different types of people.

“So one product that fits in that space is not something that large corporations are focused on. I think there is a huge entrepreneurial opportunity to fill in that gap.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

An AA survey suggests some drivers feel unsafe driving because of their choice of footwear

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Elbow’s Guy Garvey has said that file-sharers who can afford to buy music but decide not to are “going to hell”.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

An international meeting has begun in Moscow in an attempt to stop the Arctic becoming the next battleground over mineral wealth.

One quarter of the world’s resources of oil and gas are believed to lie beneath the Arctic Sea.

Russia, Norway, Canada, Denmark and the United States have already laid claim to territory in the region.

Delegates will discuss cooperation but are also likely to push their claims to the Arctic’s riches.

The region’s resources are rapidly becoming accessible due to the dramatic shrinking of the polar ice cap.

The race for the Arctic centres on an underwater mountain range known as the Lomonosov Ridge.

In 2001, Moscow submitted a territorial claim to the United Nations which was rejected because of lack of evidence.

Three years ago, a Russian expedition planted a titanium flag on the ocean floor beneath the North Pole in a symbolic gesture of Moscow’s ambitions.

Russia’s Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev says, however, that there are no immediate plans to develop the territory.

“Lomonosov is about working for the future,” he said.

Canada and Denmark are also planning to submit separate files to the UN.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Plant cuttings in herbariums around the world could hold vital clues to how the natural world will respond to future climate shifts, say researchers.

Until now, reliable long-term data on plants’ natural cycles, such as when they come into flower, had been scarce.

A UK team found that plants pressed 150 years ago offered “virtually identical” data to more recent observations.

The findings appear in the Journal of Ecology, published by the British Ecological Society.

“As far as we know, we are the first people ever to show independently that there is this relationship,” said co-author Tony Davy, a professor of ecology at the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) School of Biological Sciences.

‘Winning the jackpot’

The team compared 77 specimens of early spider orchids (Ophrys sphegodes) from herbariums at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and London’s Natural History Museum, with field observations of the species collected in Sussex between 1975 and 2006.

The study found that both the herbarium data-set, which covered a 111-year period from 1848 to 1958, and the more recent field observations showed that for every 1C (1.8F) increase in the average spring temperature, the orchids flowered six days earlier.

“Even we were surprised in the correspondence between the data sets,” Professor Davy told BBC News.

“It felt like winning the jackpot – two independent analyses giving exactly the same result.”

He added that phenology – the study of natural seasonal phenomena, such as plants’ flowering time in spring – had “come into own” comparitively recently as a result of a growing interest in climate change.

“It has become much more important because, first of all, it enables us to predict what the effects of a change in climate are going to be,” Professor Davy said.

“Once we know the likely effects on individual species, we are then in a position to try and predict what the disruptive effect on species’ interactions might be.

“For example, if a plant species responds at a different rate from that of its pollinating insect, you could – ultimately – see a disruption of a pollination system.

“We may not be able to do much about it, but it does forewarn us.”

Simple choice

Professor Davy explained why the early spider orchid was chosen as the species to be examined by the researchers.

“One of our team, Professor Mike Hutchings of Sussex University, had actually recorded peak flowering time in the field for every year for 30 years.

“Really, it was the only species for which we had independent data that we could use in the validation of the herbarium analysis.”

He added that the herbarium analysis was carried out by lead author Karen Robbirt, a PhD student at UEA, and co-author Dr David Roberts from the University of Kent.

This involved selecting specimens that had reliable collection dates. Out of a possible 192 samples, more than half were rejected for a number of reasons, including being undated or imprecisely dated.

Plant collectors generally took plants when the species were at their peak flowering, as this provided the best taxonomic reference for the herbarium. This was another consideration for the team when choosing the specimens for their analysis.

Once they had their final 77 specimens, the team then matched this data against the UK Met Office’s historical records for the appropriate years.

“What came out of that was a clear finding that flowering was six days earlier for every degree increase in the average spring temperature,” observed Professor Davy.

He went on to say that the close correlation between the two sets of data showed that herbarium collections could be used to examine the relationship between phenology and climate when field-based observations were not available.

Whether or not, this new source of data would become a useful tool for scientists “depends on whether people take up this idea”, he suggested.

“There are huge collections in different museums and herbariums around the world; it is estimated that there are 2.5bn specimens stored in these collections.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Remember how long and cold winter was? Now it’s payback time, with unusually rich pickings of autumn fruit and berries. Why?

So far 2010 has been a year of extremes – the coldest winter in 30 years, the first late spring since 1976, a heatwave in late June and the coldest August in 17 years.

The upside is that this means the nation’s trees and hedgerows are bursting with fruit, berries and nuts.

Not only is this good news for orchard owners, home gardeners and foragers alike, it means birds, insects and animals can stock up before winter’s chill descends.

“This relates back to the wonderful late spring and – incredibly by modern standards – the long period of settled weather we had until mid-July, when the wheels fell off somewhat,” says Matthew Oates, the National Trust’s conservation advisor, who has kept detailed wildlife diaries for many years.

Throughout August an area of low pressure sat over or near to the UK, making it a cloudy, cool and wet month.

“But we had nothing nasty all the way through May, June and early July – no gales, no late frosts, nothing. In this 10 to 12-week period free from foul and abusive weather, the trees had time to flower profusely, be amply pollinated and then set well with fruit.”

While early blackberries suffered in August’s rains, those ripening now are in plentiful supply.

Also abundant are apples, pears and the last of the plums – albeit perhaps a little weather damaged from the inclement turn last month – along with hazelnuts, rosehips and sloe berries.

“It’s a terrific rosehip year. Rosehips have about 1,000 times more vitamin C than oranges and lemons but we don’t tend to eat these now because of the preparation required. But they were a mainstay of World War II diets, with rosehip jellies and syrups.”

The hedgerows are also well-berried, dripping with spindle berries and the fruits of hawthorn and holly.