Five central banks have announced a co-ordinated move to try to help the financial system, as the boss of the International Monetary Fund warns of a "dangerous" new economic phase.

The move by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Swiss National Bank follows fears about the exposure of banks - primarily those in Europe - to eurozone sovereign debt.

They’ve been accused of rampant thievery, spending billions of dollars like drunken sailors, groping children and little old ladies, and making everyone take off their shoes.

“The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats,” said Rep. John Mica (R. -Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”

In 2004, several screeners were arrested and charged with stealing jewelry, computers and cameras, cash, credit cards and other valuables.

“We are one of the only countries still using this model of security," Mica said, "other than Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and I think, Libya."

The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software.

"Warner continued to make these misrepresentations even after Hotfile explicitly brought this rampant abuse to Warner’s attention, ruling out any possibility that its wrongful actions were accidental or unknowing,” Hotfile writes in its complaint.

Hotfile has repeatedly notified Warner about this issues, but instead of improving the takedown system the number of fraudulent takedowns only increased.

“By increasing the number of links it was taking down with Hotfile’s SRA, and indeed falsely inflating these numbers, Warner was increasing the number of times it could present ecommerce links to Hotfile’s users for its own enrichment,” Hotfile argues in the complaint.

On Monday, the EU Council voted to extend the copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years.

Announcing the ruling, the council of the European Union said: "Performers generally start their careers young and the current term of protection of 50 years often does not protect their performances for their entire lifetime.

"Therefore, some performers face an income gap at the end of their lifetimes."

It has shut down fanzines, stopped a documentary about the real town where Twilight is supposed to take place, sued a fashion designer for accurately noting that one of its jackets was worn by "Bella" in Twilight, been involved in a legal battle with Bath & Bodyworks for selling a body lotion called "Twilight Woods," which had nothing to do with the movies, and pressed criminal charges against a fan who tweeted some photos from the movie set of the latest Twilight flick.

Its latest move is to sue the guy who owns Twilight.com -- which he registered in 1994, eleven years before Stephenie Meyer published the first Twilight book and thirteen years before Summit Entertainment bought the movie rights to the book.

The catastrophe hardliners had secretly longed for was on everyone's screens, providing the justification for rafts of intrusive new surveillance measures.

Much aided and abetted by the internet giants' readily expressed contempt for privacy in the rush to monetise their customers and their customers' data, the long-term legacy of 9/11 is that new generations are being schooled to no longer see or understand why control of personal information may really matter, and why in history it does and did matter.

The intercepted correspondence included employee usernames and passwords, sensitive security information about the configuration of corporate network architecture that would be useful to hackers, affidavits and other documents related to litigation in which the companies were embroiled, and trade secrets, such as contracts for business transactions.

The researchers also discovered that a number of doppelganger domains had already been registered for some of the largest companies in the U.S. by entities that appeared to be based in China, suggesting that snoops may already be using such accounts to intercept valuable corporate communications.

Someone whose registration data suggests he’s in China registered kscisco.com, a doppelganger for ks.cisco.com. Another user who appeared to be in China registered nayahoo.com – a variant of the legitimate na.yahoo.com (a subdomain for Yahoo in Namibia).

Over a thousand Americans were polled by NORC at the University of Chicago into their attitudes a decade on from the attacks, and the results make depressing reading. Almost half of respondents thought the government should be able to review someone’s search history without court permission, and 55 per cent thought financial records were fair game for unwarranted scrutiny.

On the much-debated topic of torture over half of those surveyed thought that torture of suspected terrorists was OK, and a similar number favoured “harsh interrogation techniques.”

NASA's plans in the post-shuttle era are somewhat unclear, although it aims to keep flying astronauts to the space station until at least 2020, initially on Russian Soyuz rockets and later on private space taxis. In the more distant future, it may also send people to an asteroid and then on to Mars, although these goals may shift depending on how much funding the agency receives from Congress.

It's no secret that Nicolas Sarkozy is a strong supporter of more draconian copyright laws, and has also been talking about the need to clamp down on free expression online. Even so, it's still a bit shocking to see him outright declare that copyright is more important than human rights online.

It appears the French government is saying that it refuses to sign a declaration concerning human rights online unless those who sign on agree to admit that freedom of expression and communication is less important than copyright.