News Corporation's James Murdoch has said that a "dominant" BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK.

Organisations like the BBC, funded by the licence fee, as well as Channel 4 and Ofcom, made it harder for other broadcasters to survive, he argued.

Mr Murdoch said free news on the web provided by the BBC made it "incredibly difficult" for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news.

News Corporation has said it will start charging online customers for news content across all its websites.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to figure out who is sending laptop computers to state governors across the U.S., including West Virginia Governor Joe Mahchin and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal.

State officials in Vermont told him they've received similar unsolicited orders, Schafer said. Representatives from that state could not be reached for comment Thursday.

According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.

Human rights groups have often criticised China for its lack of transparency over organ donation, but critics have focused particular concern on the use of body parts from executed prisoners.

Amnesty International said at least 1,718 people were given the death penalty in 2008.

Mininova, an alternative to BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay, has lost a key legal battle. A court in Sweden ruled the site will face fines if it does not take action to remove links pointing to copyrighted material from its servers.

The court accused Mininova of both promoting the violation of copyrights and profiting from said activity due to advertising on the site.

A judge has banned a 71-year-old paedophile from being in possession of Viagra.

Martin, from Peterborough, Cambs, admitted sexual assault on a child after inappropriately touching an 11-year-old victim on December 27 last year.

He was also told he must tell police whenever he has any such drugs in his possession.

This spring, Mr. Aleynikov quit Goldman to join Teza Technologies, a new trading firm, tripling his salary to about $1.2 million, according to the complaint.

He said that he had inadvertently downloaded a portion of Goldman's proprietary code while trying to take files of open source software -- programs that are not proprietary and can be used freely by anyone. He said he had not used the Goldman code at his new job or distributed it to anyone else, and the criminal complaint offers no evidence that he has.

Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which, from noon to midnight, for certain services and providers, caps users' bandwidth at 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth.

All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3 speed, and within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well.

A formal mathematical analogy between the way metamaterials and spacetime effect light could allow scientists to recreate Big Bang-type events in the lab.

His piece de resistance, however, is a mathematical demonstration of an event in which a phase transition inside a (2+2) metamaterial leads to the sudden creation of a 2+1 spacetime (two dimensions of space and one of time) together with a large population of particles.

In principle that's an experiment that could be done in the lab in which you could watch the Big Bang in action.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year.

Considering Twitter's status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55 million in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that's good news.

The Pirate Party, which first rose to prominence in Sweden during June's European elections, has now been officially launched in Finland, the group's leader said on Wednesday.

Copyright holder organisations in Finland were outraged at the news of the group's formation.

"We are absolutely against the idea that any political party can give their support to the idea of free use of protected content," said Arto Alaspaeae, the director of IFPI Finland (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).