via meet the youtube stars making 100000 plus per year: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance.

via Focus On The Family Concerned Hollywood Is Making Gay Relationships Look Healthy, Fabulous / Queerty.

“Clearly there’s a huge opening now,” Stephen Spaulding of Common Cause told TPMmuckraker.

The ruling affirms that corporations, like individuals, have a free-speech right to spend unlimited amounts from their general treasuries on ad campaigns that support or oppose political candidates. It’s true that foreign nationals are currently prohibited by law from making independent expenditures in U.S. elections. But that prohibition has little teeth. According to experts, it doesn’t apply to foreign-owned corporations that incorporate in the U.S., or have U.S. subsidiaries — meaning most foreign multinationals likely aren’t covered. So there’s “essentially no difference” between domestic and foreign corporations in terms of their ability to pump money into U.S. elections, says Lisa Gilbert of U.S. PIRG — a view backed by several other advocates of increased regulation.

via Reformers: Court Decision Creates ‘Huge Opening’ For Foreign Companies To Sway Elections | TPMMuckraker.

The UK economy has come out of recession, after figures showed it had grown by a weaker-than-expected 0.1% in the last three months of 2009.

The economy had previously contracted for six consecutive quarters – the longest period since quarterly figures were first recorded in 1955.

There have been recent recovery signs – last week UK unemployment fell for the first time in 18 months.

The UK’s had been the last major economy still in recession.

Europe’s two biggest economies – Germany and France – came out of recession last summer. Japan and the US also emerged from recession last year.

via BBC News – UK economy emerges from recession.

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

via UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers – Times Online.

A stage production based on the Spice Girls and their music is being created by Mamma Mia! producer Judy Craymer, Simon Fuller has announced.

The working title of Viva Forever takes its name from the girl group’s 1998 number one single.

Music mogul Fuller – who managed the Spice Girls at their peak – and Craymer will work together to produce the show for London’s West End.

Fuller said the Spice Girls are “very excited” about the project.

via BBC News – Simon Fuller and Judy Craymer plan Spice Girls musical.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re seated on a flight next to a morbidly obese person, and their rolls of flesh spill onto your lap and interfere with your coffee drinking?

Or perhaps you’re a morbidly obsese person and you feel wildly embarrassed when your own bodily overkill does that to someone else for nine hours of airborne torture?

Well, on Air France-KLM, that won’t be happening anymore starting February 1!

And that’s because they’re going to make any fattie who can’t safely fill a single seat and ONLY a single seat pay 75% for the adjacent seat as well (unless the flight isn’t fully booked, in which case you’ll get a refund and can nab a year’s worth of AcuTrim and some crackers with it.)

Is this a reasonable solution that’s designed for everyone’s benefit or a crass bit of exploitation that seems begging for lawsuits?

via Fat People Will Have To Pay Double To Fly! – New York News – La Daily Musto.

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.

The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels.

“The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels,” said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis.

Last year 107m tonnes of grain, mostly corn, was grown by US farmers to be blended with petrol. This was nearly twice as much as in 2007, when Bush challenged farmers to increase production by 500% by 2017 to save cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions.

More than 80 new ethanol plants have been built since then, with more expected by 2015, by which time the US will need to produce a further 5bn gallons of ethanol if it is to meet its renewable fuel standard.

via One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars – not people, new figures show | Environment | The Guardian.

British Airways has warned cabin crew that they will be stripped of travel benefits if they take part in a strike over staffing cuts.

BA said that any employee who joined the walkout would no longer receive discounted or free fares. Many French and Spanish cabin crew rely on the BA travel scheme to commute to the airline’s Gatwick and Heathrow bases and would be left out of pocket by the move, according to trade union sources. The Unite trade union, which is locked in an increasingly bitter dispute with BA, described the move as “shocking” and “another act of provocation”.

A BA spokeswoman confirmed that the airline has written to its 13,400 cabin crew ahead of a strike ballot that opens on Monday to warn that taking industrial action would see participating staff lose travel and pay benefits.

via Striking BA cabin crew will lose travel perks | Business | guardian.co.uk.

British Airways has told employees with no flying experience they can become cabin crew within 21 days as it plans to build a strike-breaking workforce.

BA flights could be crewed by baggage handlers and check-in agents following three weeks' training ahead of industrial action that could take place as soon as 1 March. In a message to around 25,000 non-cabin crew staff, the airline said temporary recruits will operate a scaled-down service during industrial action, implying that the emphasis with be on passenger safety rather than customer service.

“You will be responsible for delivering a simplified service onboard, undertake duties similar to existing cabin crew and be responsible for the safety of our customers,” the company said.

via British Airways to begin fast-track training for strike-breaking cabin crew | Business | guardian.co.uk.