More than 1,000 people marched in the centre of the EU quarter to protest about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

The text included a clear attempt to exempt US companies from any requirement to store personal data on EU soil.

"This leak shows TiSA is intended to enforce the interests of large corporations at the expense of consumer and data protection. Data protection standards should not be lowered through the back door of trade agreements. Companies that want to offer their services in Europe, also have to accept our standards."

While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

“Most people have an iconic idea of aliens as these biological creatures, but that doesn’t make any sense from a timescale argument,” Shostak told me. “I’ve bet dozens of astronomers coffee that if we pick up an alien signal, it’ll be artificial life.”

Speaking off the record, senior intelligence officials have told The New York Times, CNN, and other news agencies that North Korea was "centrally involved" in the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).

The unnamed sources said that the White House was still deciding how to respond. With the damage done to SPE's reputation and the threats to the safety of Americans, some within the administration are reported to be in favor of direct confrontation.

Scientists have found that the animals are hastening the release of greenhouse gases from the permafrost - a vast, frozen store of carbon.

Dr Natali said: "If ground squirrels are adding nitrogen to an area - and that area doesn't have plants because they dug them up - this may result in increased loss of carbon from the system."

Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources—including nuclear power—must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change.

Although renewable energy sources like wind and solar will likely make increasing contributions to future energy production, these technology options face real-world problems of scalability, cost, material and land use, meaning that it is too risky to rely on them as the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear power—being by far the most compact and energy-dense of sources—could also make a major, and perhaps leading, contribution.

"We are preparing for you a Christmas gift," the GoP said in a post to Pastebin and Friendpaste. "The gift will be larger quantities of data. And it will be more interesting.The gift will surely give you much more pleasure and put Sony Pictures into the worst state. Please send an email titled by 'Merry Christmas' at the addresses below to tell us what you want in our Christmas gift."

"The farther time goes by, the worse state SPE will be put into and we will have Sony go bankrupt in the end. Message to SPE Staffers: We have a plan to release emails and privacy of the Sony Pictures employees.If you don't want your privacy to be released, tell us your name and business title to take off your data."

Nearly eight million old-fashioned vinyl records have been sold this year, up 49% from the same period last year, industry data show.

Record labels are waiting months for orders that used to get filled in weeks. That is because pressing machines spit out only around 125 records an hour. To boost production, record factories are running their machines so hard—sometimes around the clock—they have to shell out increasing sums for maintenance and repairs.

In an interview with Newsmax, he explained that you have to be quite deluded to think that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

"They will not have this fundamental idea that you can question things," he said of these kids. They will not be able to "think critically, use skeptical thought to learn about nature."

America is perhaps the only place in the world where a sportswriter can get into a creationism-evolution debate with a retired sportsman and find that his employer, ESPN, suspends him from Twitter.

In dozens of recently leaked emails from the Sony hack, lawyers from the MPAA and six major studios talk about "Goliath" as their most powerful and politically relevant adversary in the fight against online piracy.

At the beginning of this year, the MPAA and six studios — Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney — joined together to begin a new campaign against piracy on the web.

In another instance, the group seemed to look to articles on political corruption not as a cautionary tale but as an instruction manual.

The series details many tactics involved in Project Goliath, including hiring former attorneys general as counsel and targeting officials at the state level where lobbying dollars may stretch farther.

A 36-year-old Baltimore woman claims she was tased by police and arrested while filming the arrest of a man with her mobile phone, according to a lawsuit to be served on the Baltimore City Police Department as early as Thursday.

While in custody, she gave her phone to an officer to show the video that she didn't try to run over anybody. The video was allegedly erased from the phone in what her attorney, Joshua Insley, described in a telephone interview as a "coverup."

The suit, filed last week, said the police "attacked" the woman, "dragged" her from her vehicle, and "threw her onto the street, handcuffed her, tasered her, called her a 'dumb bitch,' and kept her restrained."