National / International News

Former service personnel leaving the military will be able to get help and advice on education from a new University of South Wales "forces champion".

Ed Miliband says "massive increases" in spending on the NHS simply "won't be available" if his party wins the next general election.

Laxmi's story of being kidnapped and trafficked in Nepal is not an isolated case but, as this graphical account shows, things are not always what they seem.

The House of Lords backs government plans to allow people to build bigger home extensions, after ministers make concessions.

Governors and mayors become the faces of communities coping with events such as natural disasters or mass killings. They have to offer the impression that someone is in charge, despite what may be scant preparation and while dealing with heartbreak themselves.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

The days of tax-free online shopping could be coming to an end. The Senate is debating a bill that would give states the authority to collect taxes on all Internet sales. The bill pits two web titans against each other: Amazon supports it; eBay does not.

eBay has taken the lead against the Internet sales tax legislation. Over the weekend, it sent an email out to its merchants.  Trying to rally them against the bill. Right now, the Senate bill exempts online businesses with less than $1 million a year in sales outside of their home states. eBay wants to expand the exemption to $10 million. eBay vice president Tod Cohen has spearheaded the online tax fight.

He says, “We are committed to working for small businesses and not just have the giant retailers like Amazon use their size advantage against small guys."

Small guys like Chris Chapman. He owns snowsportdeals.com, an online business that sells used skis and snowboards on eBay and Amazon. Cohen has just over $1 million in sales every year. He says if he had to charge taxes for all 50 states, he’d have to hire someone just to handle taxes. In his dozen years in business, he says the tax debate is one of his biggest challenges.

“Of all the things for 12 years, this one scares me more than anything," he explains. "Because this could be crushing.”

Chapman says, by supporting the online taxation bill, Amazon is trying to crush him. Amazon wouldn’t talk to me for this story, but I did talk with Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. She says Amazon is supporting the Senate bill because it’s going to be hit with sales taxes anyway. Online retailers have to pay the taxes if they have a physical presence in a state. And Mulpuru says, Amazon is thinking about a major warehouse expansion, as part of a same day delivery plan.

She says, “How do you get to same-day delivery? Well you get to same-day delivery when you have a whole bunch of warehouses all over the U.S.”

Mulpuru says Amazon may also be planning to build actual stores someday -- which would definitely be collecting sales tax.

When Twitter first went live, some people wondered if anyone would want to communicate in 140 characters or less. We all know how that worked out.

A half a billion users later, Twitter’s got a new challenge for us: Try to tell a joke in under six seconds.

Twitter’s teaming up with one of the biggest brands in comedy to launch an online comedy festival. As if it’s not hard enough to be funny when you’ve got a whole stand-up routine, next week Comedy Central’s comedians will spend five days telling jokes in tweets and super-short videos made with Twitter’s new Vine app.

“Thankfully I’m not the one who has to make the jokes,” says Walter Levitt, executive vice president of marketing for Comedy Central.

Twitter really has over last couple of years become terrific social platform for comedians and for comedy, and it just seemed like an absolute logical place for us to try something new and innovative,” Levitt says.

For Twitter, it’s not about making media, but giving partners a place to put theirs, and attracting the built-in fan base. The company bought Vine last fall and just launched a music discovery app.

“Twitter has rolled out a strategy of expanding beyond 140 characters,” says Richard Greenfield, a media analyst for BTIG Research. “High-quality content from brands like Comedy Central is a great way to introduce new people who’ve not tried Twitter to use it.”

From a cost perspective, the content will come cheap for both Twitter and Comedy Central.

“Compared to producing a full television show, Comedy Central doesn’t have to invest that much resources in it, in order to see, will this work,” says media analyst Zachary Reiss Davis with Forrester Research.

So will six-second comedy fly with the fans? That’s one job we’re happy to leave to the pros.
How funny can you be in six seconds? You're about to find out.

Next week, comedians will post video snippets of routines using Vine, Twitter's six-second video maker, as well as tweets using the hashtag #ComedyFest.

Of course, crafting funny videos on Vine -- just as with tweeting -- is no easy task. There's a level of creativity involved. We've gathered five Vine videos to show you just how fun six seconds can really be.

Anyone who can pretend to fly on a broom gets an A+ for creativity:       It's like a six-second story:       Anyone craving caffeine can understand this video:       Capturing the mundane. How many people walk through a plane everyday?        This one made us laugh:      
Have a favorite belly-laugh inducing tweet or video? Share it with us in the comments.

Liverpool striker Luis Suarez is charged by the Football Association for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic.

A trial hears that a woman stabbed her boyfriend to death when trauma from childhood sexual abuse made her lose control.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has denied making a statement to police about alleged child sex abuse "to save his political skin".

Brazil's largest city is more about business than art. But a new crop of creators — who work in media as different as crochet, graffiti and poetry — is trying to change that by sprucing up public spaces.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Brazil's largest city is more about business than art. But a new crop of creators — who work in media as different as crochet, graffiti and poetry — is trying to change that by sprucing up public spaces.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

One of the scientists who developed the theory of the Higgs boson says the particle should be renamed to acknowledge the contributions of others involved in the work.

The U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force -- REF for short -- is a little-known agency making big changes in how soldiers fight. It was created after an officer saw a video of soldiers trying to clear an Afghan cave with a rope and grappling hook -- why not robots, he wondered? That was 10 years ago, and since then REF has become an innovator in many fields, including energy.

The great military book is from early China, “The Art of War.”

There is no art of soldiering... you heavy up, go for a walk, look for trouble for a few hours. Or days. Watch a YouTube video of a patrol in Afghanistan.

“The average weight on a soldier's back is somewhere around 104 pounds.”

That’s Col. Pete Newell, U.S. Army. Soldiering doesn't change. Technology does.

“Twenty-seven of it is batteries,” Newell said.

Col. Newell is the director of the Rapid Equipping Force -- REF -- a think tank, hardware store, tech lab for combat soldiers. A perfect solution to a soldier problem -- a Humvee redesigned against IEDs, for instance -- might take years. REF tries to find pretty good answers that already exist, or are about to exist.

“What we'll describe is find the first, best, fastest solution we can,” Newell said

Here's an example, something REF helped develop to answer a soldier problem with, again, IEDs. And if you wonder what all the batteries are for, well...

“It's called the Thor III,” Newell said.

Thor. It sounds heavy.

“The piece of equipment itself weighs 25 pounds,” Newell said. “Over a three-day patrol, a platoon of 28 soldiers will have three of these systems because of the bands that they operate at.”

Thor is a jammer, a signal jammer. Everybody adapts technology, including the people trying to kill us. A favorite tactic... a hidden bomb with a cell-phone trigger. Wait for the soldiers to get close, call the number... boom. If you're going out on patrol for three days, you want a Thor III, batteries included. If Thor is working, the bomb triggers will not.

“The battery total for that 72 hours is 238 pounds,” Newell said. “So 238 pounds distributed across 28 bodies, on top of the weight for the system and the weight of all the other stuff they're carrying.”

Col. Newell is a former brigade commander, awarded a Silver Star and a unit commendation for leadership at Fallujah, the biggest fight in Iraq. He knows soldiering, but when he took over REF three years ago, he didn't think about energy.

“I would tell you that I really did not see that as a major task for the Rapid Equipping Force,” he said.

But... combat outposts, remote battlefield camps for 30 to 100 soldiers, use a lot of fuel. The convoys to supply them are magnets for bombs, snipers -- they’re the Army's single greatest vulnerability in Afghanistan: Energy. It's also true for a single soldier -- heavied up, and walking patrol.

The Thor III is a REF solution. Too heavy, too power-hungry, though it works right now with existing tech, until they design something better. Still, in January, at REF headquarters at Fort Belvoir outside Washington, the colonel was more excited by something else.

“These are solar recharging blankets and you probably seen them before,” he said. “So this is a 10-watt blanket, and it's about two feet by three feet, the size of a poster.”

It folds neatly, it weighs 12 ounces, it comes in camo. Its 10 watts of power is enough to charge two smartphones in an hour.

“Nine months ago, this was the best thing I could find on the market for being developed,” Newell said.

Then he put aside the poster-size charger and showed me what looked like a camo napkin.

“This is a 10-watt solar blanket,” Newell said. “This weighs 3.8 ounces. So, within nine months we went from what we thought was really, really, really good to a 28 percent efficient solar cell and reduced the size down to a third of what it was before.

REF just bought two kilowatts of these cells for $2 million -- $100 per watt. That is way too expensive for normal use. But it's a tenth what the cells would have cost a year ago, and in another two years, the Silicon Valley company that makes them, Alta Devices, hopes to have the cost down to $10 a watt. Meanwhile, soldiers are going to be using these... and if they come to trust the mats, maybe some of those 27 pounds of batteries can stay back at base.

For all the technological wonders, REF's social tech impressed me most.

The fuel-eating Combat Outposts I mentioned earlier, REF is proto-typing a radical redesign. They put one up at a gunnery range by Fort Bliss, Texas, and got two dozen soldiers to live in it for two weeks.

Then REF hired a leading Silicon Valley marketing firm, IDEO, to run a three-day exercise to try to understand what the soldiers had learned, what they would change. It's the kind of thing very big tech firms do -- because it works. REF thinks of the soldier as the customer.

Among changes the soldiers suggested -- an emergency intercom system. REF is working on it.

REF directors, Col. Newell and those before him, spend a lot of time with high-tech firms and venture capitalists, and at the best engineering and business schools, trying to understand how to be very, very agile.

“Stop trying to solve the problem,” Newell said. “Spend your time trying to understand what it is you're supposed to be doing. The problem will eventually solve itself.

Col. Newell leaves his post at REF this week -- he's retiring from the Army. The Department of Defense has just decided to change REF's status from interesting experiment to permanent agency. We'll see how that works.

But I was in the Army long ago, and even at Fort Bliss for a while -- and it wasn't this smart.

Migrants who abuse their visa status should be barred from entering the UK again for 20 years, a Conservative MP has said.

Boston is to hold a moment of silence for its marathon attack victims, as the surviving suspect remains in serious condition in hospital.

Amazon spent years trying to avoid charging sales tax. Now, the company supports a bill that would require it.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Four-time champion John Higgins suffers a shock 10-6 defeat by Mark Davis in the first round of the World Championship.

Will Ed Milband's soapbox show wash with voters?

Schools in Northern Ireland should be made legally accountable for promoting equality and good relations, a ministerial advisory group on shared education has said.