The Football Association have scrapped thousands of copies of a DVD claiming to feature the best post-war England internationals as it did not include a single black player. The DVD, entitled The Pride of the Nation, had been included in a welcome pack for newcomers to the englandfans official members club. Sven-Goran Eriksson introduced a retrospective look at the leading footballers to have worn an England shirt over the past 40 years. But while the initial list given to video producers Octagon is understood to have included black players, none of them made the final cut as the running time was...

The latest Internet hoax has Volkswagen officials threatening legal action against a pair of British ad men. Volkswagen denies it sanctioned a video circulating on the Internet that depicts a suicide bomber in one of their cars. The video shows a man dressed in camouflage and a black and white checkered kaffiyeh, like the one worn by Yassar Arafat, leaving a building and getting into a VW Polo. The polo is a much-smaller version of the VW Golf sold in the United States. The man parks the car in front of an outdoor cafe packed with people. The ad then shows the man pushing what appears to be a detonator....

Five Palestinians were killed Wedneday in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli occupation soldiers on Wednesday shot and killed a three-year-old girl inside her home in central Gaza Strip, eyewitnesses and medical sources said. Rahma Ibrahim Abu Shamas reportedly was inside her home in Deir al Balah in central Gaza Strip when a bullet struck her in the head, killing her instantly. Palestinian woman Palestinian sources said Israeli soldiers manning an army watchtower at the nearby settlement of Kfar Dorom opened machinegun fire randomly on Palestinian homes around sunrise Wednesday. PA security...

Ted Turner called Fox a propaganda tool of the Bush administration and indirectly compared Fox News Channel’s popularity to Adolf Hitler’s popular election to run Germany before World War II. Turner made those fiery comments in his first address at the National Association for Television Programming Executives’ conference since he was ousted from Time Warner Inc. five years ago. The 66-year-old billionaire, who leveraged a television station in Atlanta into a media empire, made the comment before a standing-room-only crowd at NATPE’s opening session Tuesday. His no-nonsense,...

Despite Bush’s endless hypocritical assertions about how we have brought freedom to Iraq, the truth is that almost all of the people in that country who have managed to survive the military attacks, have lost loved ones and had their lives ruined. Iraqis have been telling us to leave ever since we arrived. They want to run their own country and they want an end to the torture and killing. They’re willing to take the risk of believing their lives will be better without the involvement of the US. An anonymous Iraqi woman edits the blog “Baghdad Burning,” subtitled “Girl...

“HP has received a patent on technology that would allow anyone who didn’t want their picture taken to remotely instruct cameras to blur their face. While this is being promoted as a privacy measure, does anyone else see the serious rights issues here? What’s to prevent this being used by police to block their images when they’re beating or otherwise mistreating people? If this tech can be used to blur faces, it can be quite easily adapted to turn cameras off altogether, with deeply troubling implications. And even without these ‘what if’ scenarios, isn’t...

Apple has quietly lowered the price of some of its build-to-order components on the Mac mini as well as offering a faster version of its optical SuperDrive. The Apple Store is now offering the combination SuperDrive reads DVDs at 8x, writes to DVD-R at 4x, writes DVD+/-R at 4x, writes DVD+RW at 2-4x, reads CDs at 24x, writes to CD-R at 16x, and writes to CD-RW at 8x. Bluetooth/AirPort Extreme upgrade for $100 ($30 drop), while offering the Bluetooth upgrade separately for $50. Apple is also offering 1GB RAM upgrades for $325 ($150 drop) and offering a faster 8x SuperDrive (with both DVD+/-RW functionality)...

[UPDATE] The Japanese publisher confirms it has sold off Visual Concepts and its Kush subsidiary for a bargain price of $24 million. When Sega entered into an agreement with Take-Two Interactive to copublish its line of ESPN sports games last year, many industry watchers suspected the publisher was planning to sell off its internal sports studio, Visual Concepts. Those suspicions were confirmed just before Christmas when it was revealed that part of the codistribution deal allowed Take-Two to buy Visual Concepts, should it choose to do so… Gamespot [ article cont ] Well they didn’t...