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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Prosecutors want to admit calls in Zimmerman trial

SANFORD, Fla. (AP) ? As a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman called police close to 50 times over an eight-year-period to report such things as slow vehicles, loitering strangers in the neighborhood and open garages.

Prosecutors want to introduce recordings of some of those calls during Zimmerman's second-degree murder trial for the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, saying they are indicative of his overzealousness in pursuing people he considered to be suspicious ? and of his state of mind on the night the unarmed teen was killed.

Defense attorneys object to the introduction of the calls, saying they should not be admissible under the rules of evidence.

Judge Debra Nelson said she would address the matter Tuesday, on the second day of the trial that has stirred nationwide debate over racial profiling, vigilantism and Florida's expansive laws on the use of deadly force.

Jurors are being sequestered for the duration of the trial, which could last several weeks.

In his opening statements Monday, State Attorney John Guy repeated obscenities Zimmerman uttered while talking to a police dispatcher moments before the deadly confrontation with Martin. He quoted Zimmerman as saying that Martin was one of the "F------ punks" who "always get away."

The defense opened with a knock-knock joke about the difficulty of picking a jury for such a widely publicized case.

"Knock. Knock," said defense attorney Don West.

"Who is there?"

"George Zimmerman."

"George Zimmerman who?"

"All right, good. You're on the jury."

Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder for gunning down Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, as the black teenager, wearing a hoodie on a dark, rainy night, walked from a convenience store through the gated townhouse community where he was staying.

Randy McClean, a criminal defense attorney in Florida with no connection to the case, called the prosecution's opening statement "brilliant" in that it described Zimmerman's state of mind. But he described the knock-knock joke as less than stellar.

"If you're defending your client for second-degree murder, you probably shouldn't start your opening with a joke," McClean said.

The case took on racial dimensions after Martin's family claimed that Zimmerman had racially profiled the teen and that police were dragging their feet in bringing charges. Zimmerman, who identifies himself as Hispanic, has denied the confrontation had anything to do with race.

But in his opening statements, Guy reiterated the Martin family's claim, saying Zimmerman viewed the teen "as someone about to a commit a crime in his neighborhood."

"And he acted on it. That's why we're here," the prosecutor said.

Zimmerman didn't have to shoot Martin, Guy said. "He shot him for the worst of all reasons: because he wanted to," he said.

The prosecutor portrayed the then-neighborhood watch captain as a vigilante, saying, "Zimmerman thought it was his right to rid his neighborhood of anyone who did not belong."

West told jurors a different story: Martin sucker-punched Zimmerman and then pounded his head against the concrete sidewalk, and that's when Zimmerman opened fire.

Showing the jury photos of a bloodied and bruised Zimmerman, the defense attorney said, "He had just taken tremendous blows to his face, tremendous blows to his head."

West said the idea that Martin was unarmed is untrue: "Trayvon Martin armed himself with a concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman's head."

The prosecutor, however, disputed elements of Zimmerman's story, including his claim that Martin put his hands over Zimmerman's mouth and reached for the man's gun. Guy said none of Zimmerman's DNA was found on Martin's body, and none of the teenager's DNA was on the weapon or the holster.

But West said that doesn't prove anything, arguing that crime-scene technicians didn't properly protect Martin's hands from contamination.

Two police dispatch phone calls that could prove to be important evidence for both sides were played for the jury by the defense. Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, left the courtroom before the second recording, which has the sound of the gunshot that killed Martin.

The first was a call Zimmerman made to a nonemergency police dispatcher, who told him he didn't need to be following Martin.

The second 911 call, from a witness, captures screams in the distant background from the struggle between Zimmerman and Martin. Martin's parents said the screams are from their son, while Zimmerman's father contends they are his son's.

Nelson ruled last weekend that audio experts for the prosecution won't be able to testify that the screams belong to Martin, saying the methods used were unreliable.

___

Follow Kyle Hightower on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KHightower

Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/prosecutors-want-admit-calls-zimmerman-trial-083739961.html

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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A Terabyte of Portable Storage for $60 Is Your Deal of the Day

Here's a 1TB, USB 3.0 capable portable hard drive for $60 shipped from Amazon. That's a good price! And it's another reminder to back your data up.

Snowden, stuck in Moscow airport, becoming headache for Russia

Most Russian analysts say the former NSA contractor's saga has ceased to be amusing for the Kremlin, which has multiple reasons to keep Snowden at arm's length.

By Fred Weir,?Correspondent / June 26, 2013

Transit passengers and press sit at a cafe in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport Wednesday. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has remained in Sheremetyevo?s transit zone, but experts say that Mr. Snowden's ongoing presence is a growing concern for the Kremlin.

Sergei Grits/AP

Enlarge

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden may be trapped indefinitely in the extraterritorial limbo of the transit zone in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, as a high level US-Russia diplomatic tug-of-war over his fate continues to show little hope of agreement.

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WikiLeaks, the radical transparency organization that's apparently sponsoring Mr. Snowden's travels, tweeted the suggestion Wednesday that US efforts to thwart Snowden's flight could actually be leaving him no alternative but to seek political asylum in Russia: "Cancelling Snowden's passport and bullying intermediary countries may keep Snowden permanently in Russia. Not the brightest bunch at State," it said.

The US reportedly has sent a high-level team to Moscow, under William Burns, deputy secretary of state and former ambassador to Russia, to try to convince the Russians that they have sufficient legal and practical reasons to expel the passport-less fugitive into US custody.

But President Vladimir Putin, who has plenty of domestic political incentives to hang tough, has staked out a position that appears to preclude that.

"We can only extradite any foreign citizens to such countries with which we have signed the appropriate international agreements on criminal extradition," Mr. Putin told a press conference in Finland Tuesday.

"Snowden is a free person. The sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it is for him and Russia," he added.

'The longer he stays, the bigger the headache'

Snowden arrived in Moscow Sunday on an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong that he apparently boarded without a valid passport or Russian visa, though he did apparently have an onward ticket to Cuba which he never used. Putin and other Russian officials have insisted that the Kremlin knew nothing at all about Snowden's trip to Sheremetyevo until they learned it from the media ? a claim that has attracted skepticism from US authorities and others.

But, in practical terms, Snowden's options appear painfully limited.

To begin with, there are very few commercial flights he could board in Sheremetyevo that would take him directly to a country where US influence doesn't hold sway. His only gateway to Latin America, the regular Aeroflot flight to Havana ? which Snowden skipped on Monday ? passes over US airspace near the coast of New York state, and could legally be forced down by air controllers if US authorities ordered it.

Snowden's destination of preference, Ecuador, said Wednesday that it could take months to decide about his application for asylum. That raises the prospect that he could be stranded for the foreseeable future, in Sheremetyevo's no-man's land.

In any case, Snowden has no passport or other valid travel papers, which he would need to purchase a ticket or enter Russia legitimately. Russia does have a rule requiring foreign transit passengers to either board an outgoing plane or pass through border control within 24 hours; but experts say it is frequently waived and is often taken up on a case-by-case basis.

"This appears to be a real problem for Russian leaders and, just as Putin suggested, the longer Snowden stays in Sheremetyevo the bigger will be the headache he causes," says Alexander Konovalov, president of the independent Institute for Strategic Assessments in Moscow.

"I don't know how he ended up here, and I wouldn't put it past Russian secret services to have played a role in this. He's stuck here now, with no documents or means to buy an onward ticket. If some country, perhaps Iceland, Venezuela or Ecuador issues him valid travel papers, then he can theoretically leave. But even that wouldn't be so easy, because there are not many routes he can safely take," he adds.

Many analysts have speculated on the possible hidden rent Russia may charge Snowden for his extradition-free stay in Sheremetyevo. Mr. Konovalov suggests that Russia's FSB security service, given the former KGB's track record, probably wouldn't have passed up the opportunity to interview Snowden upon his arrival.

But Putin insisted Tuesday that Russian security agencies "have never worked with and are not working with" Snowden. And WikiLeaks tweeted Wednesday ? ? that "Mr. Snowden is not being 'debriefed' by the FSB. He is well and WikiLeaks' [Sarah] Harrison is escorting him at all times."

WikiLeaks detailed its views on Snowden's situation in a lengthy online press conference Wednesday, which featured an impassioned plea by founder Julian Assange to all world governments to aid Snowden's search for a safe haven.

A risk for Russia

Possible secret service intrigues aside, most Russian analysts say the Snowden saga has ceased to be amusing for the Kremlin. The Russian media has had a field day with Snowden's disclosures of mass NSA spying on the world, including the revelation that British and US agencies tried to listen to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's phone calls during a 2009 G20 summit in London.

But official jeers that the US engages in "double standards" by describing Russian defectors as "political refugees," while hounding those like Snowden who have leaked intelligence to the ends of the earth, have been replaced by much more cautious rhetoric such as Putin's oddly colorful metaphor whose meaning appears to be that he wishes Snowden had never turned up in Russia.

"Just like Snowden, [Mr. Assange] considers himself a rights advocate and fights for sharing information. Ask yourself: should or should not people like these be extradited to be later put to jail?" Putin said.

"In any case, I would like not to deal with such issues because it is like shearing a pig: there's lots of squealing and little fleece," he added.

Experts say the basic reason for the change of tone may be fear of diplomatic consequences.

Russia has stepped up its security cooperation with the US in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings, and experts say it's seriously counting on American cooperation to help secure the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which face a range of potential terrorist threats. In September, Russia will host the 2013 leaders' summit of the G20 in St. Petersburg ? a major prestige event for the Kremlin, and one in which Putin is expected to hold important sideline talks with US President Obama.

"If Snowden stays in Russia, it's going to have a bad impact on US-Russia relations. I know, you might have said a month ago that they could hardly get worse. But they can," says Andrei Piontkovsky, a frequent Kremlin critic and researcher at the official Institute of Systems Analysis in Moscow.

"Even for Putin, it's getting to be too much. That's why he's expressing hope that this affair will die down, and not harm relations with the US," he adds.

Mr. Konovalov suggests there could be a reason closer to home for Russian authorities to hold Snowden at arms length. It's one thing for the Kremlin's English-language satellite news network Russia Today, known as RT, to lionize information leakers such as Assange and Snowden, and quite another for domestic Russian audiences to see Putin openly embracing an idealist bent on ripping the lid off government secrets.

"This is a new situation in the world, where a lot of the younger generation support behavior that favors complete transparency even in violation of state laws," he says. "Russian authorities are definitely not interested in encouraging such actions, because we too have a younger generation who are Internet-savvy and attracted to this new global culture. All other political considerations aside, the US message that 'this guy is a criminal' should definitely resonate with Putin."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/mM4sFYfJuyg/Snowden-stuck-in-Moscow-airport-becoming-headache-for-Russia

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New palm-sized microarray technique grows 1,200 individual cultures of microbes

June 25, 2013 ? A new palm-sized microarray that holds 1,200 individual cultures of fungi or bacteria could enable faster, more efficient drug discovery, according to a study published in mBio?, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

Scientists at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston have developed a microarray platform for culturing fungal biofilms, and validated one potential application of the technology to identify new drugs effective against Candida albicans biofilms. The nano-scale platform technology could one day be used for rapid drug discovery for treatment of any number of fungal or bacterial infections, according to the authors, or even as a rapid clinical test to identify antibiotic drugs that will be effective against a particular infection.

"Even though we have used the antifungal concept for development, it is a universal tool," says co-author Jose Lopez-Ribot of the University of Texas at San Antonio. "It opens a lot of possibilities as a new platform for microbial culture. Any time you need large numbers of cultures, this has a big advantage over other methods."

"The possibility exists to use this same technology for pretty much any other organism," he says.

Microbiology and medicine have become increasingly reliant on micro- and nano-scale technologies because of the increased speed and efficiency they can offer, but until now the cultivation of microorganisms has mostly been conducted on larger scales, in flasks and in trays called micro-titer plates. The microarray technology enables the user to rapidly compare hundreds or thousands of individual cultures of bacteria or fungi, a big benefit in the search for new drugs to treat infections. And like many nano-scale techniques, the nano-culture approach described in the mBio? study is also automated, a feature that saves time, improves reproducibility, and prevents some types of user error.

To test the technique, the authors embedded cells of the opportunistic pathogen C. albicans in each of the 1,200 tiny dots of alginate on the surface of the microarray. Under the microscope, these nano-biofilms of C. albicans, each of which was only 30 nanoliters, exhibited the same growth habits and other outward characteristics as conventional, macroscopic biofilms, and achieved maximum metabolic activity within 12 hours. The tiny cultures were then treated with a wide range of candidate drugs from the National Cancer Institute library, or with different FDA-approved, off-patent antifungal drugs in combination with FK506, an immunosuppressant, for identifying individual or synergistic combinations of compounds effective against biofilm infections. Co-author Anand Ramasubramanian of the University of Texas at San Antonio says that the tests prove the utility of the technology in screening combinations of drugs.

"The antifungal screening results were similar to results in larger macroscale techniques. That gives us confidence that it could be used as a tool to replace existing techniques," says Ramasubramanian.

Going forward, Ramasubramanian says he and his colleagues are testing the microarrays with polymicrobial cultures -- mixtures of fungi and bacteria -- to see whether the technology can be used to explore treatments for mixed infections. They are also exploring clinical applications for the technique, testing patient samples against an array of drugs or combinations of drugs to develop tailored therapies.

Lopez-Ribot says their microarray technique is just the latest development in a decades-long trend toward the tiny in science. "Things are moving toward smaller scale, more powerful techniques. You don't need millions of cells for these assays like we used to -- maybe a few cells will do."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/giFEwbHPi0M/130625074149.htm

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Supreme Court halts use of key part of voting law

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A deeply divided Supreme Court threw out the most powerful part of the landmark Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, a decision deplored by the White House but cheered by mostly Southern states now free from nearly 50 years of intense federal oversight of their elections.

Split along ideological and partisan lines, the justices voted 5-4 to strip the government of its most potent tool to stop voting bias ? the requirement in the Voting Rights Act that all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, get Washington's approval before changing the way they hold elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a majority of conservative, Republican-appointed justices, said the law's provision that determines which states are covered is unconstitutional because it relies on 40-year-old data and does not account for racial progress and other changes in U.S. society.

The decision effectively puts an end to the advance approval requirement that has been used to open up polling places to minority voters in the nearly half century since it was first enacted in 1965, unless Congress can come up with a new formula that Roberts said meets "current conditions" in the United States. That seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

President Barack Obama, the nation's first black chief executive, issued a statement saying he was "deeply disappointed" with the ruling and calling on Congress to update the law.

But in the South, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said that, while the requirement was necessary in the 1960s, that was no longer the case. He said, "We have long lived up to what happened then, and we have made sure it's not going to happen again."

The advance approval, or preclearance, requirement shifted the legal burden and required governments that were covered to demonstrate that their proposed election changes would not discriminate.

Going forward, the outcome alters the calculus of passing election-related legislation in the affected states and local jurisdictions. The threat of an objection from Washington has hung over such proposals for nearly a half century. Unless Congress acts, that deterrent now is gone.

That prospect has upset civil rights groups which especially worry that changes on the local level might not get the same scrutiny as the actions of state legislatures.

Tuesday's decision means that a host of state and local laws that have not received Justice Department approval or have not yet been submitted can take effect. Prominent among those are voter identification laws in Alabama and Mississippi.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, said his state's voter ID law, which a panel of federal judges blocked as discriminatory, also would be allowed to take effect.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting from the ruling along with the court's three other liberal, Democratic appointees, said there was no mistaking the court's action.

"Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition" of the law, she said.

Reaction to the ruling from elected officials generally divided along partisan lines.

Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said in a news release, "The practice of preclearance unfairly applied to certain states should be eliminated in recognition of the progress Mississippi has made over the past 48 years."

But Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only black lawmaker in Mississippi's congressional delegation, said the ruling "guts the most critical portion of the most important civil rights legislation of our time."

Alabama Gov. Bentley, a Republican, pointed to his state's legislature ? 27 percent black, similar to Alabama's overall population ? as a sign of the state's progress.

The court challenge came from Shelby County, Ala., a Birmingham suburb.

The prior approval requirement had applied to the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. It also covered certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some local jurisdictions in Michigan. Coverage was triggered by past discrimination not only against blacks, but also against American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaska Natives and Hispanics.

Obama, whose historic election was a subtext in the court's consideration of the case, pledged that his administration would continue to fight discrimination in voting. "While today's decision is a setback, it doesn't represent the end of our efforts to end voting discrimination," the president said. "I am calling on Congress to pass legislation to ensure every American has equal access to the polls."

Congress essentially ignored the court's threat to upend the voting rights law in a similar case four years ago. Roberts said the "failure to act leaves us today with no choice."

Congressional Democrats said they are eager to make changes, but Republicans were largely noncommittal.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he expects Republicans to block efforts to revive the law, even though a Republican-led Congress overwhelmingly approved its latest renewal in 2006 and President George W. Bush signed it into law.

"As long as Republicans have a majority in the House and Democrats don't have 60 votes in the Senate, there will be no preclearance. It is confounding that after decades of progress on voting rights, which have become part of the American fabric, the Supreme Court would tear it asunder," Schumer said.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department "will not hesitate to take swift enforcement action, using every legal tool that remains available to us, against any jurisdiction that seeks to take advantage of the Supreme Court's ruling by hindering eligible citizens' full and free exercise of the franchise."

Those federal tools include other permanent provisions of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit discrimination and apply nationwide. But they place the burden of proof on the government and can be used only one case at a time.

The Obama administration and civil rights groups said there is a continuing need for the federal law and pointed to the Justice Department's efforts to block voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas last year, as well as a redistricting plan in Texas that a federal court found discriminated against the state's large and growing Hispanic population.

The justices all agreed that discrimination in voting still exists.

But Roberts said that the covered states have largely eradicated the problems that caused them to be included in the first place.

"The coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs," the chief justice said.

Ginsburg countered that Congress had found that the prior approval provision was necessary "to prevent a return to old ways."

Instead, "the court today terminates the remedy that proved to be best suited to block that discrimination," she said in a dissent that she read aloud in the packed courtroom.

Ginsburg said the law continues to be necessary to protect against what she called subtler, "second-generation" barriers to voting. She identified one such effort as the switch to at-large voting from a district-by-district approach in a city with a sizable black minority. The at-large system allows the majority to "control the election of each city council member, effectively eliminating the potency of the minority's votes," she said.

Justice Clarence Thomas was part of the majority, but wrote separately to say anew that he would have struck down the advance approval requirement itself.

Civil rights lawyers condemned the ruling.

"The Supreme Court has effectively gutted one of the nation's most important and effective civil rights laws. Minority voters in places with a record of discrimination are now at greater risk of being disenfranchised than they have been in decades," said Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The decision comes five months after Obama started his second term in the White House, re-elected by a diverse coalition of voters.

The high court is in the midst of a broad re-examination of the ongoing necessity of laws and programs aimed at giving racial minorities access to major areas of American life from which they once were excluded. The justices issued a modest ruling Monday that preserved affirmative action in higher education and will take on cases dealing with anti-discrimination sections of a federal housing law and another affirmative action case from Michigan next term.

The Alabama county's lawsuit acknowledged that the measure's strong medicine was appropriate and necessary to counteract decades of state-sponsored discrimination in voting, despite the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee of the vote for black Americans.

But it asked whether there was any end in sight for a provision that intrudes on states' rights to conduct elections and was considered an emergency response when first enacted in 1965.

The county noted that the 25-year extension approved in 2006 would keep some places under Washington's oversight until 2031. And, the county said, it seemed not to account for changes that include the elimination of racial disparity in voter registration and turnout or the existence of allegations of race-based discrimination in voting in areas of the country that are not subject to the provision.

___

Associated Press writers Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Miss., and Bob Johnson in Montgomery, Ala. contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-halts-key-part-voting-law-200525381.html

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

German election puts Europe's ambitions on ice

By Luke Baker

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - For the best part of a year, the minds of European policymakers have focused on one overriding issue - banking union.

By establishing stricter oversight of Europe's banking sector and a unified system for dealing with any problems, they hope to draw a line under more than three years of debt and economic turmoil by separating countries from their banks.

For months, a summit of EU leaders on June 27-28 was flagged by officials as an important 'landmark' on the road towards a fully fledged banking union. But it now looks more likely to produce a letdown than a breakthrough.

There are unlikely to be any significant decisions given upcoming German elections, continued disagreement over how banking problems should best be resolved and the fact that financial markets are no longer exerting the same pressure.

"We're in a holding pattern until after the German elections in September," said a senior diplomat involved in preparing files for the summit. "Nothing controversial can happen until then, at least in terms of economic policy."

Ever since banking union started to take shape in mid-2012, Germany has been wary of it. It is concerned that as the currency union's largest and most powerful economy, it will end up on the hook for other countries' debts if a single, EU-wide system for sorting out problems is put in place.

Combined with German frustration at having to bail out weaker eurozone members including Greece and Portugal, it is not surprising Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to keep any banking union controversies out of the debate ahead of the September 22 vote, when she will bid for a third term.

She is being helped by the inability of EU finance ministers to agree on how best to go about cleaning up bad banks. Nearly 20 hours of meetings in Luxembourg last Friday again failed to reach a deal.

As a result, the Thursday-Friday summit will focus on youth unemployment and the need to reinvigorate growth in the EU - worthy goals but ones that some leaders feel are a distraction.

"If we don't discuss a common resolution of banks in crisis at the next meeting, I have a feeling that the December 2013 deadline for this will also not be met," Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta said last week.

While other countries such as Finland, France and the Netherlands share Italy's concerns about a delay, there is little sign the slowdown is having an effect on financial markets, where minds are more occupied by central bank policy in the United States, Japan and at the European Central Bank.

"Market sentiment is really of the view that banking union will come at some point in time, it's a mid-range goal," said Carsten Brzeski, an economist with ING Bank in Brussels.

"In that respect, Merkel has prevailed. Muddling through has become an accepted and successful policy strategy. Europe is muddling through in very small steps."

PITFALLS AHEAD

The danger is that muddling through becomes complacency or procrastination.

If concrete progress on banking union - originally conceived of as a three-step process involving a single supervisor, a single resolution mechanism and a single bank deposit-guarantee scheme - is put off until after the German election, the chances are that nothing will happen until mid-2014 or later.

It takes around six weeks to form a coalition in Germany, which means the next EU leaders' summit in October will come too soon to deal with the outstanding issues, and it is unlikely much progress can be made before the December EU gathering either, officials acknowledge.

Then early 2014 will be dominated by campaigning for the European Parliament elections in May. If the anti-EU vote turns out to be strong, as expected, it will complicate the appointment of a new president of the European Commission, a process in which the parliament has an increased say.

Policymakers may have to wait until after that process is complete, and perhaps until a new Commission is in place, before they can seriously crack on with implementing banking union.

"Europe is probably capable of making steady, but incremental, progress without an overarching vision for the next few years," said Alex White, an economist with JP Morgan, playing down the prospect of any progress at the summit.

"Leaders look increasingly unlikely to do much that is both additive and transformative for the region in the near term."

While that may be acceptable, it doesn't come without risks.

If the anti-EU vote in next May's elections is particularly strong, and it therefore proves very difficult to appoint new presidents to the European institutions, the EU could find itself in a power vacuum while also not having made any progress on sorting out its banks - one of the origins of the crisis.

(Writing by Luke Baker; editing by Anna Willard)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/german-election-puts-europes-ambitions-ice-073924792.html

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Sony and Disney Trial Home Streaming While Movies Are in the Theater

Sony and Disney Trial Home Streaming While Movies Are in the Theater In the ongoing battle against piracy, Disney and Sony have made a bold step: they're both testing an on-demand service (in, um, South Korea) which allows people to rent movies and stream them in their own homes while they're still playing in theaters.