National / International News

The landlord of a flat where five people died in an alleged arson attack was one of the first on the scene in his role as a fireman, a jury hears.

The Bank of England's rate-setting committee remains divided over whether or not to increase quantitative easing, minutes of its latest meeting show.

MEPs attack the European Commission's handling of the Cyprus crisis, saying it must wrest back control from the "troika" team.

The former British prime minister was remembered Wednesday at a funeral in London. Queen Elizabeth II was among those in attendance. Thatcher died last week. She was 87.

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Properties and goods worth more than $25m (£16m) belonging to notorious Colombian drug lord Madman Barrera are seized in a police operation.

Unemployment in Scotland falls below 200,000 for the first time in more than three years, according to the latest figures.

Apple doesn’t report earnings until next week, but analysts aren’t expecting much of an announcement. The company is under pressure from competitors like Samsung, which starts shipping its new Galaxy S4 smartphone later this month. Apple hasn’t introduced a groundbreaking gadget in a long time.

Even Apple's music business is taking a hit -- from Amazon. The online retail giant snapped up 22 percent of the music download market in the last quarter of last year, according to the NPD Group’s annual music study.

“Amazon has for years had a great CD business,” says NPD Senior Vice President Russ Crupnick. As those same customers have adopted digital downloads, he says, “often times their loyalty to Amazon has stuck.” Loyalty to Apple is slipping. iTunes’ share fell to 63 percent, from 68 percent the year before.

Meanwhile, both Apple and Amazon have to worry about guys like Fletcher Price.

“I would say 99 percent of my music comes from Pandora One,” says the 24-year-old business analyst from Indianapolis, Ind.

Price pays $36 a year to stream music -- without actually owning any of it -- on Pandora. Or he borrows his fiancée’s Spotify account. That streaming service announced plans this week to expand into Asia and Latin America.

Still, Price says, sometimes you just have to own a song. His latest download:  “Gangnam Style” on iTunes. "Just because it was a fantastic song," he says.

NPD’s Crupnick says music streaming won’t dominate the music business any time soon.

“Consumers still want a variety of ways to engage with music,” he says.

Including some pretty low-tech ones. Crupnick says sales of physical, hold-in-your-hand CDs to teenagers were up about 20 percent last year.

  How do you buy or listen to music?

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the rate for Pandora One. The music service costs $36 per year. The text has been corrected.

A 32-year-old man has appeared in court charged with the murder of Stanley McAuley in east Belfast at the weekend.

Taiwanese electronics assembly giant Hon Hai - owner of Foxconn - agrees to pay Microsoft a patent fee for devices made running Google's operating systems.

South Africa's annual inflation rate was 5.9% in March, official figures show, unchanged on the previous month's figure.

The investigation continues. The FBI and other agencies are appealing to the public for help. It's possible the key clue may be in a photo or video taken by a spectator.

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A crackdown on binge drinking and alcohol-related violence starts in Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot.

Two rockets fired from the Egyptian Sinai have landed in the southern Israeli city of Eilat without causing damage or injury, police say.

David and Victoria Beckham have changed their speech to "sound less working class", researchers at the University of Manchester conclude.

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The Home Office asks for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court against a ruling preventing the deportation of radical cleric Abu Qatada.

David Cameron speaks of his personal debt to Lady Thatcher, on the day of her funeral ceremony, saying she inspired him to become a Conservative in the 1980s.

Usain Bolt will compete in the London 2012 Anniversary Games in July along with 28 other Olympic medallists.

Unemployment in Wales falls to 120,000, latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show.

Rumors are swirling that Twitter is in talks with Viacom and NBC in the hopes of putting short video clips into tweets. For Twitter, such partnerships would be about selling advertising and getting people to spend more time in their Twitter feed.

Whether or not Tweet TV becomes a reality, the TV industry is changing fast -- and one of its pillars, bundling, may be about to fall.

"You've got to think of mainstream media as an old line army that's been marching along very, very well. They've been offering consumer exactly what they want to offer," says New York Times columnist David Carr, who adds that traditional media companies are being attacked from many fronts.

"It isn't any one thing, it's insurgents coming over the hill," he says.

Insurgents like Hopper, the controversial digital video recorder that fast forwards through ads so you don't have to. Of course, bundling helped pay for a lot of good content, and the ability of consumers to pick and choose what they want to watch more efficiently means a dip in profits. Then there are the new content creators, like Netflix, which has had success with its own version of the political thriller show "House of Cards".

"The weird thing about 'House of Cards' is because of big data, because of what they know about their consumers -- they know that you like David Fincher and I like Kevin Spacey -- they knew it would be a hit before it ever happened," Carr says.

Predicting the future and making TV cheaper -- add that to the promises of big data and the tech world.