Michael @ Burachura

Louisa Mellor News May 15, 2012

Executive produced by JJ Abrams, new sci-fi series Revolution asks what would happen if the power went off and never came back on?

Martinsh Egle Eric Butterbean Esch Efrain Escudero Rashad Evans Urijah Faber

After losing about 4m viewers and the spinning chairs stage, can the talent show tweak things to win viewers back?

Remember when people liked The Voice? It wasn’t that long ago. Back then we were all dazzled by how committed it was to fairness, vocal ability and fighting back against The X Factor’s shallow artifice. With good reason, too: truly, you’d have been hard pushed to find a more gimmick-free TV show in which Tom Jones bellowed half-remembered anecdotes about Frank Sinatra in a spinny chair while someone shouted a power ballad at him.

But then things started to go horribly wrong. Sunday’s results show could only muster 6.4 million viewers ? down about 4 million from its audition-stage peak. While The Voice was ploughing on with its insistence that earnest credibility will always out, everyone else was too busy hooting at a dancing dog on Britain’s Got Talent. Clearly, The Voice isn’t getting something right.

The main complaint seems to be that without the show’s main gimmick ? the blind auditions ? we’re basically left with a sort of dreary, borderline inept am-dram recital of The X Factor live shows. There is some merit to that argument ? but all is not lost. A little bit of tweaking here and there and The Voice could be great again.

The problems are easy to spot. Most importantly, as things stand it’s impossible to feel anything for any of the acts. We know they can sing, but we barely know them as people. Yes, Tyler knew Amy Winehouse. Yes, Leanne used to work in a holiday camp. Yes, Vince Kidd looks like he haunts the dreams of crying children. But that’s about it. If this was The X Factor, at least we’d know who to root for by now.

The exception to this rule, obviously, is Jaz Ellington, who was fawned over for what seemed like an eternity in the auditions and then revealed the sex of his unborn baby during Saturday’s show. He’s been given such prominence that he’s all but guaranteed to win the series, which seems a little unfair. If all the acts got Jaz’s treatment, we’d have a much better show.

Then there’s the weird presenter imbalance. Why is Reggie Yates barely on screen? He’s a great presenter with an easy charm and a quick wit, but he’s stuck in a miserable box of a room and consigned to glumly read out tweets. Might it be a good idea to let him loose on the main stage every now and again?

And let’s talk about the start of each episode. On The X Factor, there’s a near-hysterical montage of screaming and explosions, and then a dance routine, and then the judges are introduced in such a pyrotechnic blaze that you could be forgiven for thinking they were returning war heroes or actual demigods. Not so on The Voice. Now that the coaches’ group performance has been ditched ? perhaps out of fear that it’d induce dangerous levels of travel sickness in everyone watching ? all we’re left with is an awkward explanation of the rules, followed by three minutes of mind-numbing smalltalk. If the show can’t dazzle us from the start, why should we keep watching?

Finally, after initially making such a fuss of the spinny chairs, it seems like a waste to just ditch them. So let’s bring them back. Maybe they could spin around after every song, or whenever the coaches get excited, or every time Will.i.am calls something “dope”. Or maybe they could just whirl around all the time until Tom Jones gets confused and vomits in his lap. Promise me that and I’ll forgive The Voice anything.

What about you? Have you been turned off The Voice? What could lure you back? Leave your thoughts below. And don’t forget to come back and join us ? even if it is just to whinge ? for our Saturday liveblog.

He Peng David Heath Delson Heleno Dan Henderson Josh Hendricks

How many conductors can you fit into a single TV show?

We’re into the finale of Maestro at the Opera (BBC2) already. Josie Lawrence and Trevor Nelson have been dispensed with, leaving Craig Revel Horwood and Marcus Du Sautoy to battle it out to get to the podium of the Royal Opera House.

So it’s off to mentors Paul McGrath (the conductor, not the former footballer) and Michael Rosewell (another conductor) for some final coaching. Plus a few wise words and a demo from conductor Sir Mark Elder. Oh, hello: suddenly Craig and Marcus are off to Tuscany to spend a few days at a famous academy named after another conductor, Georg Solti. After some extra coaching from two more conductors, Jonathan Papp and Anthony Legge, it’s back to Covent Garden and McGrath and Rosewell for some last-minute conducting revision, while Sir Mark looks on beknightedly (I know that’s not really a word, but you know what I mean).

And then we’re in the final contest: Craig v Marcus. And Craig’s the winner. Eh? We’re still only 25 minutes into an hour-long show. Ah, I see, the rest is about Craig’s prize, conducting an act of La Bohème in front of an audience. That means further practice and coaching ? from McGrath (or is it Rosewell?) with advice from Sir Mark and artistic director John Copley, plus a few words of encouragement from Sir Someone-or-other (Semyon Bychkov in fact).

God, it’s a mess isn’t it? As television. Far too baggy and unstructured. There’s no sense of excitement about the competition. And there are way too many bloody conductors. It’s like they thought: “Who shall we get on our show about conducting? So hard to choose. Oh to hell with it, let’s just have them all on, shall we?” Well done Craig, though. I think he does act two of La Bohème rather well. (Ha, like I know!)

Best line in Episodes (BBC2)? Stephen Mangan suggests that perhaps the gift of an Infiniti (Nissan’s luxury brand) from Matt LeBlanc isn’t enough to forgive him for sleeping with his wife. “What d’you want, a Bentley?” says LeBlanc. “It’s not like I fucking killed your wife.”

Murilo Bustamante  Grant Campbell  Gesias JZ Calvancante  Luiz Cane  Dos Caras Jr  

Paul Martinovic News Apr 24, 2012

Paul celebrates fifteen years of South Park (yes, you are that old), and looks at why it's worked so well, and for so long…

Wilson Gouveia Jason Grace Crosley Gracie Gregor Gracie Ralek Gracie

After I graduated from high school and moved to Chicago, I decided it was time for me to look into alternative treatments and solutions for the back pain that I was experiencing on a daily basis. I began to look online and I also asked around to some local friends and co-workers about Chicago chiropractors. [...]

Manvel Gamburyan Sean Gannon Edgar Garcia Leonard Garcia Andrew Gardner

Fif tells MTV News he’s ‘in good spirits’ despite nearly having to go into surgery to remove blockage in his small intestine.
By Rob Markman, with reporting by Ade Mangum

50 Cent
Photo: MTV News

Nine gun shots wasn’t enough to take out 50 Cent, but a bad hamburger could have been the undoing of rap’s #1 bad guy. The G-Unit general was hospitalized this week with stomach pains, but a phone call from his homey Eminem surely lightened the mood.

“I’m in a dead serious moment like, ‘Damn, I don’t believe this is happenin’ right now,’ ” Fif said recalling the moments before Slim Shady phoned him. “He goes, ‘Yo Fif, you were shot nine times man if you die over a burger, this sh– ain’t gonna go right. People ain’t gonna be feelin’ this.’ ”

On Wednesday, Fif tweeted a picture of himself in a hospital bed and sent a public message to his boxing friend Floyd Mayweather that read: “I don’t want to go into surgery.”

Lucky for him, he didn’t have to. When MTV News checked up on 50 at his NYC G-Unit office on Thursday, just hours after he was released from the hospital, he said he was able to avoid going into surgery to remove blockage in his small intestine.

“I’m feelin’ better; I’m in good spirits,” Fif added.

DJ Drama, who is in New York to promote his upcoming mixtape with 50, The Lost Tape, told MTV News he was worried about his boy. To lift the gangsta rapper’s spirits Drama sent three stuffed animals to 50: a giraffe, an elephant and a lion.

They say it’s the thought that counts, but Drama’s get-well gifts didn’t go over so well. “That wasn’t cool. That’s all you get,” 50 told Drama jokingly while our cameras rolled. “You get 15 tracks, you damn near have to die to do a Gangsta Grillz and this is the thanks I get?”

Stay tuned to MTV News’ Mixtape Daily for more on 50 Cent and DJ Drama’s The Lost Tape, which will be released on May 22.

Related Artists

• 50 Cent
• Eminem

Stephan Bonnar Lorenzo Borgomeo  Kyle Bradley  Jai Bradney  Ebenezer Fontes Braga

KStew wants to ‘get together really weird, freaky actor people’ for the Nick Cassavetes-directed film, her first producer credit.
By Jocelyn Vena, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Kristen Stewart
Photo: MTV News

Kristen Stewart might be the light in the darkness of “Snow White and the Huntsman,” but in her next film, “Cali,” Stewart is fully embracing the unsavory. The Nick Cassavetes-directed flick is expected to shoot this summer and, from the looks of it, it exists in a world that couldn’t be farther from the fairytale world of “Snow White.”

“Hopefully after all of this we can go and we can do it in the summer, like lock ourselves away for a few weeks in the Valley [in L.A.] in a little production office and get together really weird, freaky actor people,” she told MTV News. “It’s filled with like the coolest characters.”

The film centers on Mya (Stewart) and Chris, a couple from San Fernando Valley who sell a fake snuff film and disappear with the money. But Mya, who’s thought to be dead, must head back to Cali years later to save the younger sister she left behind. When she and Chris return, they’re faced with an array of characters, including “angry former business partners, homicidal porn stars, stoner vet techs [and] an unstoppable killing machine in a cowboy hat.” Michael Diliberti (“30 Minutes or Less”) wrote the script.

“I’m from the Valley. It’s been a while since we captured that world and it’s super extreme, everything about it. I think it’s like, it’s extremely violent, it’s extremely funny, extremely emotional,” she explained about the film, which will be Stewart’s first producer credit. “But all very kind of, not hard to watch, but real.”

Until she gets real in “Cali,” KStew will close the “Twilight” chapter of her career when “Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ opens this November. She’s expected to hit up the Cannes Film Festival to premiere “On the Road,” in which she’ll showing another real side of herself when she appears nude.

“I wasn’t scared, honestly,” Stewart told MTV News of the sex scenes, including a ménage à trois with co-stars Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley.

“It’s kind of insane to watch now. I’m like, ‘Who is that?’ But I think — as every actress says when they do this is — it just felt so right,” she said. “It was so within a different world and so within a different environment that I don’t even really feel — I mean, I am personally connected to it, of course — but it is something outside of myself.”

Which Kristen Stewart movie are you looking forward to most? Leave your comment below!

Check out everything we’ve got on “On the Road” and “Breaking Dawn – Part 2.”

For young Hollywood news, fashion and “Twilight” updates around the clock, visit HollywoodCrush.MTV.com.

Related Videos

• MTV Rough Cut: ‘Snow White And The Huntsman’

Related Photos

• Snow White And The Huntsman

Luiz Buscapé Firmino Spencer Fisher Jon Fitch Kenny Florian Jesse Forbes

Nudity on screen can often seem unnecessary or gratuitous ? but Sky Atlantic’s new drama suggests this isn’t always the case

A drama producer who has worked in both television and radio once told me that the great benefit of working on the wireless was that there was never any hassle from actors or audiences over nude scenes. Apart from strong language, nakedness is the most frequent complaint in TV feedback forums and, in both cases, the objection is that these elements are unnecessary or gratuitous. The difference is that whereas opinions on language are largely generational ? the more recent the viewer’s birth-date, the less likely they are to be offended by swearing ? objections to nudity are more widely shared because of changing attitudes to women on screen, often influenced by feminism.

In this context, one of the striking aspects of new Sky Atlantic drama Hit & Miss, Paul Abbott and Sean Conway’s compelling drama about a transgender assassin played by Chloe Sevigny, is that it contains a moment that attempts to make the case for a full-frontal nude scene that is dramatically crucial and completely non-gratuitous.

Sevigny’s character Mia, who is undergoing hormone treatment prior to the final transformative operation, stands naked in front of a mirror. The unusual complexity of this image is that the viewer is seeing male and female nakedness simultaneously, being shown genuine breasts and a prosthetic penis.

It might possibly be objected that this scene is prurient ? offering up a transgender patient as a sort of freak-show ? but Mia is explicitly a character tracking the transformations of her body and it is relevant to the narrative for the audience to know what she has under her clothes at this stage: the information pays off in later scenes when her long-lost son surprises her in the bath and a local lothario tries to grope her between the legs. Abbott and Conway are surely right ? and Sevigny seems to have agreed ? that the reveal was necessary.

Most dramas, though, can’t claim such an easy absolution. In British cop shows of the 1970s and ’80s, it sometimes seemed almost obligatory for the central detective to be interrupted during love-making by a call-out to a crime-scene. As he heaved discreetly out of bed ? often conveniently wearing boxers or even trousers ? his big-busted girfriend would walk, in the foreground of the shot, naked past him to the bathroom. Memory suggests that The Sweeney was a particular offender.

Greater sensitivity to the exploitation of women has reduced the popularity of such shots, although one contributor to the Guardian’s letters page reported that he had stopped watching Homeland after episode four because of the frequent female nudity. The correspondent found these shots of women’s bodies “misogynistic” and accused reviewers who admired the series (including me and Sam Wollaston of the Guardian) of either ignoring or privately revelling in this woman-hating parade of flesh.

My view was that the other qualities of the series (acting, shooting, writing, plotting) were enough to overlook the inequalities of its costume policy. And the far greater quantity of female than male full-frontal scenes in screen drama results from something more complicated than just male chauvinism in the production process.

The standard compositions of TV sex scenes ? the woman, with her breasts showing, on top of the man; or the man on top of the woman, whose breasts are showing ? follow from the widely acknowledged theory that sexual arousal in men has a more dramatic visual indication than for women, and the regulatory and legal convention that erect penises are seen only in pornography or, more recently, 18 certificate movies. So, on television, if an actor is shown walking fully-naked towards a bed before a passionate love scene, application of the editorial guidelines raises distracting issues about his enthusiasm for the relationship.

But, while this excuse is true, it does also encourage lazy direction. The fact that an actor can’t be shown fully naked during sex but that an actress can doesn’t mean that the latter has to be. It is possible to film bedroom scenes while protecting the modesty of both participants ? and certainly Homeland would not have suffered from a lower nipple count. Hit & Miss, however, fascinatingly fleshes out the debate over how naked bodies should be shown.

? Hit & Miss begins on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday 22 May at 10pm

Ryan Bader  Siyar Bahadurzada Bao Ligao  Josh Barnett  David Baron 

Early trading delays subsided to sell 82m shares of Facebook stock in 30 seconds before subsiding close to the offer price

Facebook became a public company on Friday after one of the most frenzied share sales in history led to the social network giant being valued at over $100bn.

The share sale makes Facebook worth more than the combined worth of Goldman Sachs and Nike. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 28-year-old founder and Facebook’s largest shareholder, is now sitting on a fortune of over $21.6bn.

Facebook shares were priced at $38 overnight but early trading on the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock market was delayed for two hours until 11.30am as the exchange systems seemed unable to cope with the scale of the initial public offering (IPO) and failed to send electronic reports back to traders and firms to confirm that shares had been bought or sold.

More than 82m shares were traded in the first 30 seconds, as investors chased after the stock in a float that brought back memories of Netscape’s 1995 float that began the first technology boom ? and with the social network being valued at 27 times its turnover, comparisons even with the days of Dutch Tulip Mania or the South Sea Bubble.

The stock soared 11% initially before dropping to close to the $38 offer price. Privately dealers speculated that Facebook’s army of bankers had stepped in to stop the shares falling below $38, a move that would have landed the social network with a public relations disaster on its first day as a public company.

Wearing his trademark hooded top ? coloured navy blue ? Zuckerberg remotely rang the opening bell for the New York-based stock exchange from outside his California headquarters as staff cheered him on. Forbes calculated that as he did so, he was the world’s 23rd richest man ? two places above Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

However, the riches generated by Facebook went wider. At $38 a share Facebook created 88 people with fortunes of over $30m, according to Wealth-X, an analyst that monitors high net worth individuals. If the price reaches $43, there will be 265 Facebook millionaires worth more than $30m.

The sale reaped enormous rewards for Facebook’s co-founders and early backers. Co-founder Dustin Moscovitz is now worth over $5bn. Elevation Partners, an investment firm that counts U2 singer Bono among its partners, holds shares worth over $1.6bn.

Facebook’s IPO is the most hotly anticipated share sale since Google’s in 2004. Google’s stock started trading at $85 and ended the day at $100.34. Google’s shares now sell for over $620.

As with the Google IPO, there has been a lot of scepticism about Facebook’s ability to turn its phenomenal number of users into a business able to support a $100bn-plus valuation. Facebook’s revenues were $3.7bn last year. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, had revenues of close to $29bn and is valued at half Facebook’s current value.

The social network now has over 900 million people on its service and will soon top a billion. For its fans, Facebook is the defining company of the 21st century. “His impact on the world will be as least as big as Bill Gates and probably already has been,” said David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect.

Kirkpatrick has spent many hours with Zuckerberg writing the only authorised history of the company. He said Zuckerberg had a “laser focus” on business and planned to spend Friday working rather than watching the share price.

“He really doesn’t believe in paying attention to that stuff. He’s much more focussed on product development, on penetration of the service around the world,” said Kirkpatrick.

“In some ways he is a typical American suburban guy. Of course the money means something to him. But he’s not doing it just for the money and he assumes that rather than focus on the money, he should focus on making sure Facebook does well. He is highly analytical in everything he does, extremely disciplined. He is not going to be watching that stock price every day, I can tell you that.”

The sale comes amid what some are calling a new bubble in tech companies. Facebook’s IPO follows a mixed set of share sales from other social media firms including Groupon, the online coupon company, and Zynga, the games firm behind Words With Friends and Draw Something.

Facebook itself has driven up the bubble, according to some, by spending $1bn on Instagram, a profitless photo-sharing application.

Earlier this week Pinterest, a social site that lets people “pin” pictures and content to create collections of interest, raised $100m at a price that valued the company at $1bn.

“There is a frenzy going on. I think this is a bubble,” said Alan Patrick, co-founder of technology consultancy Broadsight. “Short term I can see that Facebook can be valued at $100bn on sentiment. People believe that it is going to make a lot of money. But sentiment doesn’t last.”

He said Facebook had yet to prove that it could make money on mobile devices, the fastest growing way in which people access Facebook.

However, the share sale comes in a week when General Motors announced it was dropping its own Facebook ads and said they were not working. GM is one of the world’s largest advertisers and spent $1.83bn on US ads last year, according to Kantar Media, an ad-tracking firm.

“Facebook’s shares were always going to pop at the open, that’s no suprise at all,” said Sam Hamadeh, co-founder of PrivCo, a financial analyst. “After the first couple of weeks, I think it’ll drop back down to the mid twenties.”

Hamadeh said he believed Facebook was worth $24-$25 a share. “And that’s being generous,” he said.

Whatever the future for Facebook, its founders and early investors were certainly celebrating. Co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who is now worth over $2.7bn, congratulated Zuckerberg on his Facebook page: “Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg (sic) on keeping tremendous stead-fast (sic) focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.”

Dan Cramer Alberto Crane Marcio Pe de Pano Cruz Luke Cummo  Jeff Big Frog Curran

Hampshire 427 & 21-1; Yorkshire 399-9 dec

Anthony McGrath began the County Championship season as Yorkshire’s odd-man-out but has rapidly turned into their odd-job man.

It was expected that the 36-year-old would provide a steadying influence in the second XI in the initial weeks of the campaign, following the recruitment of the Australian Phil Jaques and the decision to appoint Joe Sayers as vice-captain. However, the late arrival of Jaques opened the door in the opening fixture against Kent and, although he failed at No3, his jack-of-all-trade qualities have contributed to an ever-presence.

The medium-pace bowling that got him the nod at No7 was deemed to be of sufficient quality to earn him the new ball for the second innings of the win over Leicestershire at Scarborough, a match in which he also struck 90. But it was in his more familiar guise as a frontline batsman, one place higher at No6, that he excelled in this contest against Hampshire, between last season’s two relegated sides.

McGrath was good enough as a teenager to be selected for an England A tour; in his pomp he won four Test caps; even in the twilight of his career the deftness of touch that has perennially belied his physicality remains. So does a sense of timing: his unbeaten 106 came on the 17th anniversary of his first-class debut.

“Going into the season, we had plenty of batting options, so whoever played was always going to have to get some runs,” McGrath said. “I’ve been trying to convince everyone I am still young and these days in sport it doesn’t matter how old you are as long as you are performing. I just want to play in the first team so I’m happy to play in any position.”

The match situation prevented any thoughts of personal milestones entering McGrath’s head. When David Balcombe, Division Two’s leading wicket-taker, pinned back the top of Adil Rashid’s off-stump, Yorkshire were wobbling on 237 for seven, still 41 runs shy of avoiding the follow-on. McGrath had only 16 to his name when, with the second new ball imminent, Ryan Sidebottom joined him.

Ultimately it was McGrath’s 189-ball effort, his first hundred since one against the same opposition in Southampton last August, that guided the hosts out of danger and into a position from which they can push for another unlikely victory. But his sidekicks Sidebottom, Steve Patterson and Iain Wardlaw ? whose three consecutive fours were the preamble to a declaration in the evening gloom ? emphasised that Yorkshire’s daring is matched by their resolve.

Last weekend a double-century stand between Jaques and Gary Ballance engineered a marathon chase of 400 following collusion with Gloucestershire, a result that sent them joint-top of Division Two. However, for the opening 80 minutes of the third day here they were tasked with a contrasting challenge posed by the luckless Chris Wood, Kabir Ali and James Tomlinson and shared a further 149 before surprisingly departing in quick succession to tame dismissals.

Rashad Evans Urijah Faber Wagnney Fabiano Kevin Kimbo Slice Ferguson Paulo Filho

Caroline Preece Review May 1, 2012

A last-minute twist rescues the latest episode of Awake from being consigned to the 'yawn' pile. Read Caroline's review here…

Jason Hollywood Chambers Ryo Piranha Chonan  Dan The Sandman Christison  Logan The Pink Pounder Clark  Steve The Snake Claveau 

Thompson, who quit amid allegations that he had lied on his CV, reportedly said his illness contributed to his decision to resign

Yahoo’s ex-chief executive Scott Thompson, who quit on Sunday as Yahoo sought to defuse a row over allegations Thompson lied on his CV, has reportedly been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

After a board meeting on Sunday morning, the company announced that Thompson, who has led the embattled web giant for less than six months, would be replaced by Ross Levinsohn with immediate effect.

Thompson’s decision to step down from Yahoo was in part influenced by his cancer diagnosis, reports the Wall Street Journal. But his resignation had seemed inevitable amid demands by Daniel Loeb, an activist shareholder whose firm, Third Point, owns a 5.8% stake in the company.

Yahoo did not immediately return calls from the Guardian.

Thompson’s diagnosis had reportedly been made even as the board was investigating why the his academic record had erroneously included a computer science degree ? a falsehood that appears on Yahoo’s regulatory filing.

Over the weekend, Yahoo said it would appoint several new board members including Third Point’s Loeb, the person who had had spotted Thompson’s misstated academic record in a Yahoo regulatory filing in April.

Yahoo also announced that Roy Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman, would leave and be replaced by Fred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive.

“The board is pleased to announce these changes and the settlement with Third Point, and is confident that they will serve the best interests of our shareholders,” Amoroso said in a statement on Sunday night.

Despite a massive online presence, Yahoo has been struggling to keep up with Google and Facebook. Yahoo’s share of overall US online ad revenues, which reached 15.7% in 2009, declined to just 9.5% last year, according to eMarketer.

Yahoo shares rose 1.7% after Sunday’s announcement.

“Investors are likely to take comfort in fresh leadership, particularly at the board level, as eight of the 11 board seats were named in the past year,” wrote Evercore Partners analyst Ken Sena in a note.

Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter said that the management changes were necessary, even though he worried that Yahoo would essentially start from scratch again with its strategy.

“As a practical matter, what this means for the company is that the past four months have been little more than a false start, and it must once again start at the beginning in terms of establishing a strategic direction,” Schachter said in a research not.

Analysts welcomed Levinsohn’s appointment because of his history in media and advertising sales. Schachter said he may be “auditioning to take on this role on a permanent basis.”

“We view Mr Levinsohn as well-equipped to lead the organization and to build off of the company’s core strengths ? advertising products and digital media,” said Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang.

However, even with Levinsohn at the helm, Schachter said that Yahoo’s future is uncertain: “The bottom line is that the situation at Yahoo is a mess.”

Karen Grigoryan Kendall Grove Clay Guida Jason Guida Melvin Guillard

Users of the social network have filed a $15bn class action complaint over data collection

Facebook’s first day of trading following its $100bn flotation has been gate-crashed by a $15bn class action against the social network.

Users of the service have filed an “amended consolidated class action complaint” in federal court in San Jose, California, relating to allegations that Facebook has been “improperly tracking the internet use of its members even after they logged out of their accounts”.

The class action is being brought by law firms Stewarts Law US and Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny.

David Straite, a partner at Stewarts Law, said: “This is not just a damages action, but a ground-breaking digital privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications.”

The plaintiffs are citing the federal Wiretap Act, which provides statutory damages of up to $10,000 per user and they say potentially implies damages of more than $15bn if compensation is rolled out across Facebook’s user base.

The action consolidates 21 related cases filed in more than a dozen states in 2011 and early 2012.

If successful, the claimants could stifle Facebook’s ability to collect data about its users and hinder its ability to grow advertising revenues.

The social network generated 85% of its $3.7bn revenues last year from advertising, according to its regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A German data protection official also warned Facebook investors on Friday that the social network’s $38 starting share price is based on practices that breach European privacy rules.

Thilo Weichert, the data protection commissioner for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, was quoted in the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning shareholders to be aware that if European privacy authorities have their way, “Facebook’s business model will implode.”

Facebook declined to comment as the company prepared to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday.

Wes Soldier Combs  Ray Cooper  Kit Cope  Wesley Cabbage Correira  Patrick The Predator Côté 

Louisa Mellor Feature May 18, 2012

Almost a decade after the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we find out what the Scooby Gang and co. have been up to since the hellmouth opened?

Keith Hackney Matt Hamill Volk Han Joachim Hansen Antoni Hardonk

Matteo Garrone’s watchable satire on reality TV is played with gusto and heart ? though is fundamentally a little predictable

For his latest film, showing in competition in Cannes, Matteo Garrone has brought back a couple of actors from his gutwrenching true-life mafia drama Gomorrah ? but the tone and feel is very different. This is a boisterous, watchable satire on reality television and real values: in Naples, cheeky fish stall owner and small-time scam artist Luciano (Aniello Arena) becomes obsessed with getting on Big Brother, or Grande Fratello, and translating what he fondly imagines to be his local-hero status into big time wealth and celebrity. It’s a likable film played with gusto and heart ? though fundamentally a little sentimental and predictable.

As the TV company holds its local auditions in a Naples shopping mall and national tryouts in Rome’s Cinecittà, Garrone endows the media circus with a Fellini-esque quality: there’s actually a tremendous aerial shot to begin the film ? in imitation of the master ? from which we descend to a superbly choreographed wedding scene where Luciano is getting clownishly made up as a drag queen to amuse fellow guests, who are not, in truth, especially amused. But poor Luciano is stunned at the prestige and affluence of Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a former Big Brother contestant who arrives to make a paid-for personal appearance at the wedding reception and leaves by helicopter. Luciano quite correctly notes that this conceited jerk has no more essential talent than he does. His escalating obsession with Enzo and his own future life inside the magical precincts of the Big Brother house has more than a little of Scorsese’s King of Comedy.

Luciano’s family is at first electrified and then dismayed by how well he seems to have done in the first two rounds of auditions. But while waiting for the company’s decision, Luciano becomes fixated on the idea that the TV company is sending spies down from Rome to check that he is all that he says he is. Garrone ? amusingly, if not especially subtly ? shows us how Luciano comes to believe himself to be under Orwellian surveillance every minute of the day.

As in numberless big-screen accounts of the small-screen, the keyword is irony. The delusions of people who long to be on TV are ironic and pretty sad ? of course. Playing up for a TV audience is a chimera, a dangerous unreality, compared with having an actual relationship with your family and community. In Gomorrah, the idea of “community” was a challengingly dark and complex one, riven with parasitism and violence. Here, community values are much sunnier and simpler, and the scam Luciano’s running on the side is naturally pretty much a victimless crime.

Of course, this is a very different film, but it is one which is concerned to tell us what we knew already. Well, there is a very winning central performance from newcomer Aniello Arena as Luciano, who has a sharp, calculating and very mobile, open face, which registers every jolt of fear, of hope, of triumph and dismay: the face of a would-be comedian who can do everything but make people laugh.

Rating: 3/5

Sean Gannon Edgar Garcia Leonard Garcia Andrew Gardner Tiki Ghosn

‘Everything I wanted it to feel like, everything I wanted to say, it’s there,’ KStew says of watching the final cut of the film.
By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Kristen Stewart
Photo: MTV News

Those familiar with the Hollywood moviemaking process likely know that what is first scripted on the page, and then performed by the actors, and then released unto the masses doesn’t always turn out to be an accurate representation of what was initially written. Scripts change, performances alter. In short, after an actor wraps their work on any particular production, they can’t be totally sure about what will end up on screen until they see a finished cut of the film.

That does not seem to be the case with the highly anticipated “Snow White and the Huntsman”, in that star Kristen Stewart recently revealed that director Rupert Sanders’ brilliant plans became a brilliant film.

“I was so excited,” Stewart said of her reaction upon seeing the finished product. What’s unique, she said, is that the movie is just as “cool” as its concept art — the sketches, storyboards or short videos that directors and producers often assemble in order to sell studios and actors on the concept behind a movie.

“That’s the way Rupert Sanders got the job as director of this movie, by putting together a five-minute version of the movie and presenting the darkness and lightness of the world. I thought that it was insane because it felt like two different people did it, it was so, so beautiful when it was light and so exuberantly happy, and then when it was dark it was wretched and disgusting. I think when I first saw the movie I saw that. It was like, ‘Wow.’ Everything I wanted it to feel like, everything I wanted to say, it’s there.”

Check out everything we’ve got on “Snow White and the Huntsman.”

For young Hollywood news, fashion and “Twilight” updates around the clock, visit HollywoodCrush.MTV.com.

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(Hot Fruit)

No matter how far Gaz Coombes has travelled from the days when no festival bill was complete without Supergrass chirping out Alright, he can’t escape his gift for writing songs with hooks you can hang a coat on. His debut solo album is packed with them, starting with Bombs, which links one of his wooziest, prettiest melodies to a lyric that gets inside the “mind” of a bomb as it falls to earth: “What a lonely view as I tear away, breaking sound, speeding down.” You get the feeling, from the electronic curlicues, guitar-distortion and guttural dance beats that crop up throughout the album, that Coombes would have loved to ditch the choruses and devote the entire record to off-piste experimenting (the six-minute Universal Cinema, which begins acoustically and gradually cranks up the distortion, shows a musical mindset no longer informed by chart positions). But even as he thrashes and fulminates (“Everybody is a whore in a world that’s sold out” is his sour take on things in Whore), he can’t keep the gorgeous melodies at bay.

Rating: 3/5

Kyle Bradley  Jai Bradney  Ebenezer Fontes Braga Chris Brennan Marcelo Brito 

Ron Hogan Review May 14, 2012

Game of Thrones continues a strong run of episodes with this honor-themed installment. Read Ron's review here…

Murilo Bustamante  Grant Campbell  Gesias JZ Calvancante  Luiz Cane  Dos Caras Jr  

Nascente

This is an intriguing three-album set with a misleading title. “Beginner’s Guide” suggests a history lesson on the great Spanish style that has enjoyed such a dramatic revival over the past 40 years. But the greatest musicians of the flamenco revival are not included ? although there is one track from Gypsy guitarist Tomatito, who played with legendary singer Camarón de la Isla, and there’s flute from Jorge Pardo, who worked with Paco de Lucia. Instead, the set’s compiler Jan Fairley concentrates on showing just how varied the style has become. Rapid-fire guitar flurries, hand-claps and passionate vocals are of course included, but many of the best tracks are fusion pieces, ranging from the collaboration of guitarist Pepe Habichuela with Indian Bollywood strings through to the flamenco-African fusion of Ketama (featuring kora star Toumani Diabaté), and the Cuban influenced flamenco playing of Son de la Frontera. Then there’s the Egyptian accordion flamenco of Ali Khattab, and the piano work of Diego Amador. There’s great music here, and more extensive sleevenotes would have been welcome.

Rating: 4/5

Matt Andersen  Alex Andrade  Jermaine Andrè  Yoji Anjo  Ao Hailin 

(V2)

There is a surprising muscularity to Smoke Fairies’ music: unexpected not only because their name conjures up less corporeal images, but because there is a ladylike, almost prissy elegance to Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire’s voices that could sit so easily with soft acoustic guitars. Brought up in Sussex, they’ve spent much of the past decade living in and travelling across the US, and you can hear it in the rebarbative blues that pulses through their best songs. Blood Speaks, their second album, kicks off with an insistent bass throb and angular drumming; Daylight melds trenchant piano to crackling electric guitar; while the wary violin notes slicing beneath Feel It Coming Near suggest a brewing storm which quickly breaks in crashing, thunderous chords. Elsewhere, though, the duo allow their earnestness too much sway, making for deadening solemnity. “Blood is speaking and mind is sleeping,” they chant in the title track ? and the album could do with more of that abandon.

Rating: 3/5

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Naim Edge

This successor to caustic Leeds improv group trio VD’s 2009 album Fill It Up with Ghosts retains their frantic hit-and-run staccato structures, farmyard squealings, howling distortion, and pithily short track-lengths. But, deploying a lot more hardware, they’ve made the textures thicker, the extremes scarier, and the soundscape more diverse. The opening Brick features battering arrhythmic drumming and chicken-clucking sax, but ends on a cinematically soaring theme. Crying-baby sounds and twangy synths invade the skittery improv of Ups, while Morse joins morse-code signals to background chatter in French. DBST ? with its tramping, heavy-metal vibe and surging melody ? and the hypnotically racing, roaringly headbanging Pet Shop Boys show exactly why this fearlessly independent band reaches audiences that purer jazz distillations rarely do.

Rating: 4/5

Mac Danzig  Karen Darabedyan Viacheslav Datsik Marcus Davis  Tony DeSouza 

There were apparently discreet inquiries to see whether the Manchester United midfielder might play for England again. We have been here before

Like most European countries, Britain still has a smattering of offering caves, pagan ancient grottos where leaving gifts is believed to bring good luck, or simply stave off plague, pestilence and misfortune. You may think such practices would have ended long ago ? replaced by more scientific approaches to ensuring our physical and psychological wellbeing such as immunisation, or bingo ? but, according to a friend of mine who’s an archaeologist and specialises in this kind of thing, even today, in times of extreme trauma, people tend to turn back to the old pre-Christian rituals. As a consequence, experts are still able to determine from the volume of offerings in the caves the periods when a community has been in crisis.

It is my belief that in future centuries historians will be able to do a similar thing with English football, identifying times of turmoil for the national team using the frequency with which the media starts talking up the possibility of Paul Scholes coming out of international retirement. The Manchester United midfielder ? who, according to leaked Whitehall documents, may be forced to play on until he is 68 as part of a package of Government austerity measures that may also include a swingeing new tax on hair gel and teeth-whitener which many believe is designed specifically to deter Cristiano Ronaldo ? the Donny and Marie of elaborate wing-play ? from ever returning to work in Britain.

Like the offering caves, the Scholes?gauge of the national mood appeared to most of us to have outlived its usefulness following Don Fabio’s doomed attempt to seduce the Mancunian away from the comforts of the family hearth with the promise of being locked in a luxury South African compound with Wayne Rooney for six weeks. After all, it is only last summer that we waved farewell to the ginger scowler for what we were assured was forever.

And then suddenly he was back again at United and apparently as good as ever (I say apparently because to me Scholes is one of those figures whose genius I just have to take on trust ? a footballing Ricky Gervais. I can’t see it myself, but everyone tells me he is fantastic and I’m sure they can’t all be wrong. Can they?). This unexpected yet typical surge from deep was enough to stir folk memories in the new England gaffer, Roy Hodgson. Currently besieged by the Four Horsemen of the Football Apocalypse (Injuries, Exhaustion, Tabloid Ridicule and the Left-side of Midfield situation), the wise old coach performed the sporting equivalent of laying a gold bracelet in a sacred hollow. Just as the national boss’s forebears might have sought to ward off evil spirits by talking up the possible return from injury of Bryan Robson, so he felt moved ? rumour had it ? to make “discreet inquiries about whether Paul might be available for selection again”.

We have been here before, of course, with the gallant Robbo ? a hero whose achilles heel was his entire body ? and more latterly with Paul Gascoigne. Even at the tail-end of the Geordie midfielder’s career when he was huffing and puffing around the pitch at Middlesbrough and Everton looking for all the world like a middle-aged uncle entertaining a birthday party of pre?schoolers with his Thomas the Tank Engine impression, it was still common to hear the incumbent England manager muttering the sacred imprecation: “The door is still open to Gazza.” Gazza, though, was never a man to come in through an open door, if he could risk severe injury by entering head first through a plate-glass window, and so it never happened.

Nor is football the only sport affected. Back in the 1970s the England cricket selectors reacted to every fresh crisis brought on by the pace bowling of Australia and West Indies by doing the equivalent of slaughtering a chicken and burning its entrails in the belly of a statue of Baal ? they brought back a very old batsman. Colin Cowdrey, John Edrich, Basil D’Oliveira and Brian Close were all bruisingly offered up in an attempt to appease whatever angry Gods had granted the opponents Lillee, Thomson, Holding and Roberts, while giving England Mike Hendrick. Nowadays the England and Wales Cricket Board is made of more logical minds and even when things were going slightly wrong last year they resisted all appeals from the Shaman of the Popular Prints to bring back Mark Ramprakash.

Nor is English sport alone in displaying an occasional irrational adherence to Eldritch lore. In Germany’s darkest sporting hours ? at the European Championship 12 years ago ? they showed much the same mad faith in Lothar Matthäus as medieval peasants did in corn dollies. Watching the 39?year?old sweeper at Euro 2000 it was impossible not to think of the old joke about Franco: “The general is dead.”

“Yes, but who’s going to tell him?”

Playing ability is not the issue here, however. Lothar was a talisman for the Germans and if Jens Jeremies’s legs and lungs had to be offered up to him then so be it.

Speaking of the offering caves, my archaeologist friend commented: “I’m not sure if people actually believe in it. But I think it does give them the sense they are doing something about whatever fears are afflicting them.” We can only hope wily campaigner Roy Hodgson was practising some similar form of comforting psychological self?dosing.

Kotetsu Boku  Tony Bonello Stephan Bonnar Lorenzo Borgomeo  Kyle Bradley 

Review May 7, 2012

Fringe's penultimate episode brings back a character few expected to see again. Read Billy's review here…

Luke Cummo  Jeff Big Frog Curran Dai Shuanghai  Mac Danzig  Karen Darabedyan

Felicity Kendal explores not just Shakespeare in India, but her own family story

No sooner has presenter Francesco da Mosta finished touring Italy with his version of Shakespeare (for those of you who missed Da Mosta’s BBC2 series, the bard was a secret visitor to Francesco’s native land and its swoopingly romantic people taught him everything he knew about “the arrrrt of loffff”. In return, he laid some of his scenes in Verona and gave a four-century boost to tourism), than up pops the almost-as-fruitily-voiced Felicity Kendal ? she always sounds to me like oranges being agonisingly squeezed ? to take us travelling round India to examine his influence there.

Felicity Kendal’s Indian Shakespeare Quest (BBC2) traced the arrival of the plays in India ? via East India shipping expats and their amdram societies in the 1780s, their spread through the English-style education imposed by colonial rule, and their absorption into the native culture when, post-partition, the people were free to play with and parse this enforced but ultimately precious gift as they saw fit.

Kendal was born in England but grew up in India where her parents had founded the theatre company Shakespeareana, dedicated to bringing his plays to the masses. Her own and her parents’ stories were woven neatly into the larger narrative. For once, the celebrity presenter ? without which under modern commissioning rules a programme cannot be greenlit ? seemed sensible, even occasionally helpful and illuminating, rather than madly grafted on 20 minutes before delivery deadline.

The best thing on television last year returned last night ? 24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4). It is a miracle of form and content. The latter comes from King’s College Hospital in London. Each episode looks at a selection of patients dealt with by the accident and emergency department staff in a single 24-hour period. The form is exquisite. As with the first series, small accidents mingle with great traumas, talking heads fill in the back story as flesh is stitched, scans are ordered, wounds are cleaned, tempers calmed, tears dried, and lives are lost and saved.

Octogenarian Bill comes in with dicky knees, accompanied by his friend John. Their friendship, it emerges as they joke about football and bicker gently over who is to pay the cab fare home, has kept John going since his wife died last year. Kevin, who has fallen eight feet from some scaffolding and Sarah, a cyclist who swerved to avoid a pedestrian, come in with terrible injuries and are not expected to survive. They do and, in all important respects it seems, intact.

The amount of editing and the skill involved to give it such perfect shape and pace ? it confers a sense of the urgency infusing everything, but never leaves you breathless, or the participants without enough time or space to maintain their dignity ? gives me the feeling of exhausted wonderment I used to get as a child when I thought of all the drawing making my favourite cartoons must have required. And the same gratitude that someone, somewhere had gone to all that trouble to make something really, really good.

But naturally karmic balance to the television schedules must be restored and Channel 4 stepped unhesitatingly into the breach with the festival of stupidity that was Secret Eaters. It was the first episode of a new series that tries to unravel to a different set of fat people each week the hitherto unknowable mystery of why they are fat.

The fat people allow their houses to be filled with cameras for a week and are covertly shadowed by private investigators whenever they go elsewhere so that clues may be gathered. In last night’s opening effort, a brother and sister pairing ? Gill and Stuart, both in their late 30s, were baffled by their weight gain over the last few years when she eats nothing but salad and fairy dust and he lives on asparagus tips and mountain dew. What, I think you will agree, a puzzlement.

At the end, the week’s footage is played back to them. They gasp in amazement as it is revealed to be mostly of chips and mayonnaise disappearing down eager gullets, sausages being pushed into mouths like logs into a sawmill, of mountain dew cunningly turning into pints of lager and of the fairies replacing their dust with sambuca shots and cheese. The mystery is solved, though you could be forgiven for feeling that the whole thing raises slightly more questions than it answers. Like, is there any limit to the depths that human denial can plumb? Or to the lengths that television commissioners will go to find fodder for their exercises in schadenfreude? Or to the appetite we the audience have for it? It’s all very unappetising indeed.

Ricardo Arona  Noboru Asahi Marcus Aurelio  Mikhail Avetisyan Luiz Azeredo 

This is the age of thinking thermostats and, not to be outdone by a well-known circular model, hardware startup Ecobee has released the Smart Si. It is a smart thermostat with small color screen and a web interface so temperature wonks can update their heating models on the fly. The Smart Si is not quite as sleek as the Nest but offers more accessible settings – think of this as the Linux to Nest’s OS X. The web interface allows you to see your home’s current status, set a vacation profile, and view reports on your system’s performance including HVAC and heater usage.

Siyar Bahadurzada Bao Ligao  Josh Barnett  David Baron  Phil Baroni

Everyme, the Y Combinator-backed mobile startup that helps users create groups for private sharing, is launching a whole bunch of new stuff today. For starters, it’s releasing apps for both Android and the Web. Co-founder Vibhu Norby says both products have the same features as the iPhone app. On the Android side, Norby says “worked really hard” to create an app that was designed for the platform, rather than just porting over the iPhone app.

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Children’s TV show Blue Peter will no longer be broadcast on BBC1, the BBC announced on Wednesday. Twitter went into a nostalgia-soaked meltdown

[Please note: this column is put together using Storify, which does not work on our mobile site and apps. If nothing loads below this paragraph, click here to go to Storify itself, or use the desktop version of the site.]

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Mobile phone maker steps up quest for royalties from rivals that it says infringe its patents

? A list of the patents that Nokia is asserting

In a desperate search for cash to tide it over until sales ramp up of new products, Nokia is stepping up its quest for royalties from rivals that it says infringe its patents in their technology.

Last week it filed cases relating to 45 patents in the US and Germany against HTC, Viewsonic and BlackBerry maker RIM.

Nokia already earns ?500m (£401m) annually from patent royalties in key areas of mobile telephony from a number of companies ? including Apple, which last year was forced to admit defeat after a series of legal skirmishes and signed a contract worth millions every quarter for the use of Nokia patents in its iPhone and iPad.

Some analysts reckon a more determined application of Nokia’s patent rights could boost its income by hundreds more millions of euros a year ? a badly needed source of income at a time when its core mobile phone business is losing money while it shifts its top-end smartphone portfolio from its Symbian operating system to Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Alternatively, a sale of parts of that patent portfolio could generate billions of euros.

Either way, at a time when its future is being threatened by falling sales and a loss of market share, Nokia’s patents have emerged as the company’s most valuable and stable assets. Their full exploitation could be crucial for its longer-term survival.

“They should be doing this. The only questions is: why did they wait so long?” said Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of patent consultancy General Patent.

Nokia has already served a warning to newcomers in the mobile industry with whom it doesn’t yet have licensing agreements, saying it aimed to boost its royalty revenue.

HTC and Viewsonic both use Google’s Android software; Nokia claims they infringe its mobile technology and software patents.

For HTC, the latest lawsuits mean its business is coming under increased legal pressure. It already pays a levy to Microsoft on its Android devices, after the software company sued it over software patents it owns in the US.

Apple is also suing it over similar claims in the US, seeking an import ban on some products. And now Nokia has weighed in.

HTC saw its profits drop precipitously in the more recent quarter as sales in the US fell off.

Others using Android are likely to be among the next targeted by Nokia. Analysts say it’s likely soon to go after top Chinese and Indian vendors, as well as Amazon, whose Kindle Fire uses a version of Android.

“I would expect its next targets to include ZTE, Huawei and Micromax,” said analyst Tero Kuittinen at Finnish mobile firm Alekstra.

Nokia declined to comment on other possible targets, but spokesman Mark Durrant said in an email: “It’s clear from last week’s press release about actions against HTC, RIM and Viewsonic that we are taking new steps, moving beyond essential patents to other patents for which we have no obligation to license at all.”

Durrant explained to the Guardian that of the 45 patents, four are deemed “standards essential”, for which it is obliged to license them under Frand (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.

All four are being deployed against Viewsonic in German court. “Viewsonic has so far refused to discuss licensing with us, which left is with no choice but to file suit,” Durrant said.

The other 41 are “implementation patents” ? proprietary innovations which have not been deemed essential to any standard, and which Nokia is not obliged to license.

“This is why we have flagged this as a next step for us,” Durrant said. “Our activity to date has been primarily focused on licensing our essential patents and we have around 40 licensees for them (and of course, we also have licensees to standards essential patents from many other companies).

“These actions are primarily around implementation patents, which represent the majority of the patents in our portfolio (we have around 10,000 patent families, of which only around 1,200 have been declared as essential to one or more patents).”

ZTE, Huawei, Micromax and Amazon were not immediately available for comment.

The reasons for the more aggressive stance are not hard to find. Sales of Nokia’s new Lumia phones have not compensated for diving sales of legacy products as the group loses out to smartphone offerings from the likes of Apple Inc, and analysts have said its cash reserves of ?4.9 bn are likely to dwindle.

Both Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings have recently cut their credit ratings on Nokia to “junk” status.

Turning the tables

Nokia’s position as a patent powerhouse, ranking along with Qualcomm and Ericsson as a holder of the largest patent portfolios in the industry, goes back more than 20 years.

In 1989, Motorola forced it to pay more than $10m to settle a patent infringement claim, one reason Nokia has ensured that the ?45bn invested since then in mobile research and development has been as well protected by patents as possible.

Before that, the then conglomerate making everything from rubber boots to televisions had famously protected more innovations at its toilet paper business than at its cellphone unit.

So how much are Nokia’s patents worth? One pointer is that after a legal battle against Apple in 2009-2011, Nokia gets royalties from each iPhone sold.

Nokia also has the successful example of its partner Microsoft, which has signed up 10 vendors ? including HTC and Samsung ? to pay licensing fees for their Android devices. HTC is paying Microsoft an estimated $5 royalty for each Android phone it sells.

A similar fee for its stronger wireless patent portfolio could give Nokia $800m this year alone if it signed up just half of Android makers, although in reality such an amount is unlikely since Nokia already has cross-licensing deals with some of them.

Motorola’s price: $750,000 per patent

Google’s planned $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which is now only awaiting final approval from the Chinese authorities, underlined the value of intellectual property in the fast-changing telecoms world, where established players are seeking to keep out newer rivals.

The search giant is seen by many analysts as paying a high premium to patch over its lack of intellectual property in the wireless arena.

But the deal doesn’t mean Nokia can’t go after Google suppliers, as patents the Finnish company licensed to Motorola itself are not transferable to others even in an acquisition. Also, such agreements typically only last between five and 10 years, although details of the 2010 deal aren’t public.

Another example of the value of patents came last July when a group of six firms including Apple, Research In Motion and Ericsson paid $4.5bn for 6,000 patents of bankrupt Nortel Networks, in the largest public sale of its kind. The price was about three times what the sale had been expected to raise.

The auction, in which the group fended off Google, pushed the value of a single patent or patent family to $750,000 ? a price tag which would value Nokia’s 10,000 patents at $7.5bn or roughly $2 a share.

(Google moved to acquire Motorola Mobility immediately after losing that, and was forced to bid significantly above its opening price to close the deal.)

Yet even that could undervalue Nokia’s assets. Google is paying even more for a patent in its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, whose strong intellectual property portfolio offers an entry ticket to the wireless industry.

Analysts at Bernstein Research said this is the maximum value Nokia could fetch for its patents, if it splits managing portfolio to a separate company and boosts royalty-revenues three-fold.

A more likely if conservative valuation would be ?0.5 per share, still a big chunk of Nokia’s share price of ?2.47 late on Friday.

So far Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop has said there were no plans for a sale, a stance that industry experts said made sense given its success in earlier patent litigation.

Poltorak said: “You only get about 10% through a sale, compared with enforcing the patent. Nokia can make much more money enforcing the patents.”

Gesias JZ Calvancante  Luiz Cane  Dos Caras Jr   Phil Cardella Roan Jucao Carneiro

Caroline Preece Review May 7, 2012

Gearing up for the season finale, The Vampire Diaries returns to form in this week's episode. Read Caroline's review here…

Yves Edwards  Justin Eilers  Jon Olav Einemo Per Eklund Jason Ellis

Just about a month ago, Microsoft announced that it would end free access to its Bing Search API and start charging a minimum of $40 per month for the service. Today, the company is officially launching the Bing Search API on its Windows Azure Marketplace, but unlike its previous announcement, the company has decided to continue to offer a free tier as well. Developers will still be able to make up to 5,000 queries per month for free. This, says the Bing team, will still allow most existing developers to use the service for free.

Jonathan Goulet Wilson Gouveia Jason Grace Crosley Gracie Gregor Gracie

Fans get a sneak peek at ‘Anchorman: The Legend Continues’ (or, at least, the guys’ feet) in first official poster.
By Fallon Prinzivalli

“Anchorman: The Legend Continues” poster
Photo: Paramount

The road to the highly anticipated “Anchorman 2″ has been a long one. Since “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” arrived in 2004, there were reports from cast and crew confirming a sequel and announcing a script was in the process of being written.

But the words were then taken back, leaving fans dizzy and disappointed believing they wouldn’t see the anchormen reunite. Finally, when all hope was lost, Ferrell made a surprise appearance on “Conan” as the legendary Ron Burgundy to announce that the sequel was greenlit.

With the “Anchorman 2″ teaser trailer playing before Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Dictator,” the Lebanese Cinema Movie Guide released the first official poster. It shows the Channel 4 news team’s feet standing on set in the studio, the bottom of their suits — including Ron’s signature burgundy number, presumably not bought at the toilet store — keeping it classy as always. The official title of the film appears at the bottom in big, bold print (“Anchorman: The Legend Continues”) with a release date of 2013.

While the film is still in the very early stages of development, the first movie’s director and co-writer Adam McKay will reunite with Ferrell to pen the script and the principal cast is set to return, including Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. When MTV News spoke with McKay back in 2010, he told us he expected much of the cast to come along for the sequel.

“We had an idea, and we contacted Steve and Paul and [David] Koechner and Christina [Applegate] and checked in with everyone, and they were all game for it,” McKay said. “It’s a tricky movie, because everyone went and did really well after it, so everyone’s prices went up and everyone’s time got a little more valuable. But at the same time, graciously, Steve and Paul and everyone agreed to cut their price to come and do it, which you don’t see very often in Hollywood — and cut their price substantially.”

Thanks to the cast’s commitment, Ron and the rest of the anchormen are set to hit theaters in 2013. Until then, stay classy, moviegoers.

Check out everything we’ve got on “Anchorman: The Legend Continues.”

For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.

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Simon Brew News Apr 27, 2012

The future of Fringe is assured once more, as a final, 13-episode run is ordered?

Joe Hybrid Duarte Aldrin de Jesus  Todd Duffee  Marvin Eastman  Stav Crazy Bear Economou 

You should try natural balance premium pet food if you want to find a meal for your dog that is nutritious and delicious. I went to the grocery store and saw a bunch of choices, but none of them had the ingredients that natural balance had. I was amazed at how quickly my dog cleared [...]

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A lack of footballing knowhow has worsened the difficulties of long-distance ownership for the Americans

The Liverpool icon Kenny Dalglish’s second stint as manager is summarily over and, with his departure, so too is the honeymoon period for the club’s American owners, John W Henry’s Fenway Sports Group. Liverpool seemed to promise such fun for them, and riches, when they were back-slapped in 19 months ago, paying off, as the price of buying the club, the £200m debt that the previous pair, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, borrowed to buy the club in the first place.

Yet now, and after a disappointing season in which expensively bought players failed to justify their outlandish fees, Liverpool supporters will demand a coherent plan from FSG, for a new manager, coaching structure, and some action on the stadium.

When they arrived, Roy Hodgson was struggling painfully, but it was FSG’s decision to hire Dalglish on a permanent contract, and now they have sacked him. They appointed Damien Comolli as director of football on the recommendation of a baseball general manager, Billy Beane. Then they sacked Comolli too.

Liverpool overspent on players under FSG, the £35m for Andy Carroll the most staggering example, but Henry publicly endorsed that. The owners also supported Dalglish’s protest at the FA’s ruling that Luis Suárez had racially abused Patrice Evra, and Liverpool put out two dreadful, complaining official statements, so Dalglish’s sacking has little to do with that. Last week the head of communications, Ian Cotton, who worked for 16 years at a club previously known for a dignified Liverpool way and then had to wrestle with the Suárez stance, departed too.

FSG have not only a manager’s job to fill, but to design a whole structure, if they are to persist with a director of football, an appointment that is key, too. When they took over, the reports of their Boston Red Sox baseball team stewardship were glowing and had seductive parallels ? there they restored a grand, fallen club to championship triumphs and its old ground, Fenway Park, sumptuously. But the discomforting truth, only dimly recognised here, is that Henry, Tom Werner and their fellow FSG investors bought Liverpool just as they were running into serious problems at the Red Sox for the first time. Last season the team failed to make the play-offs, a failure considered more catastrophic there than Liverpool fans feel about missing Champions League qualification. The Red Sox general manager, Theo Epstein, left and the coach, Terry Francona, was sacked.

Yet the replacement Red Sox coach, Bobby Valentine, is not faring any better; the Red Sox are bottom of their division, the fans unhappy, the press critical, which is all uncomfortable for the owners.

At Liverpool, you can overlay on FSG’s Boston headaches four additional major difficulties. First, while they are lifelong baseball aficionados, they knew almost nothing about football before they bought one of its greatest institutions. Second, a much underrated difficulty in this Premier League experiment, the first ever in world football, is overseas ownership of clubs: FSG are busy people, a long way away, inconvenienced in daily business by time differences.

Third, Liverpool also have a stadium to sort out. The stated need that rich men must stand behind the cost of building a new stadium on Stanley Park was the sole reason Liverpool were sold in the first place, the former chairman David Moores making £90m for his shares. Yet FSG, having done a gorgeous job with Fenway Park, arrived saying they would look at redeveloping Anfield. So far they have spent 19 months scratching their heads over the same planning problems Moores’s former chief executive, Rick Parry, found insurmountable.

Fourth is money. FSG were attracted by Premier League football’s lucrative worldwide following, basing their calculations on Champions League qualification. The fans retain patience for FSG because they paid off the Hicks and Gillett debt and above that have lent Liverpool £30m interest free, freeing up money they then overspent. It appears, though, they do not intend to put more in, because Liverpool’s accounts state they organised a £120m facility to borrow money from banks.

With expensive signings of historic proportions, Dalglish now fired, much blood spilt on the carpets and no news yet on the stadium, the American owners’ next moves have to be very much more sure-footed.

Melvin Guillard Cody Guinn Jorge Gurgel Andre Gusmao Alexander Gustafsson

For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles. The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option.

Kenny Florian Jesse Forbes Xavier Foupa Pokam Hermes Franca Rich Franklin

It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is what one of the most important app discovery mechanisms for iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to make it into the top 25? Mobile analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answer just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free apps and 3530 for paid apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2280 downloads for paid apps.

Jermaine Andrè  Yoji Anjo  Ao Hailin  Shinya Aoki  Andrei Arlovski 

On July 2nd, 3rd and 4th Barry Manilow fans will fill the Hollywood Bowl hoping to get a view of this great performer. There is much to look forward to this July at the Hollywood Bowl. The time to purchase Hollywood Bowl tickets is now, and to get the best seating at the Hollywood Bowl, [...]

Bao Ligao  Josh Barnett  David Baron  Phil Baroni Don Barr

On July 2nd, 3rd and 4th Barry Manilow fans will fill the Hollywood Bowl hoping to get a view of this great performer. There is much to look forward to this July at the Hollywood Bowl. The time to purchase Hollywood Bowl tickets is now, and to get the best seating at the Hollywood Bowl, [...]

Marcio Pe de Pano Cruz Luke Cummo  Jeff Big Frog Curran Dai Shuanghai  Mac Danzig 

(Sub Pop)

Sometimes the here and now can be just too much. In our straitened times you can really understand the 21st recurrence of dream-pop ? the American term for melodic, effects-laden guitar music that refuses to make eye contact. We used to call it shoe-gaze in the early 90s, and it was noisier. Now ? depending on what it’s made on ? it’s referred to as chillwave or hypnagogic pop.

Whatever they’re calling it, those who like their existences tempered with a little unanchored dapple have already flocked to Beach House, a Baltimore duo whose fecund headspace lies far from the brutalist morality play of The Wire. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally’s last album, Teen Dream (2010), saw them corner the market in Pitchfork-approved, late twentysomething romantic melancholia. Theirs is a hazy consolation-music filtered through multiple gew-gaws to make it seem even more shimmery and grandiose.

The frequent comparisons to bands like Mazzy Star and the Cocteau Twins are logical, considering their records come out on Bella Union, the label run by two of the Twins. But Beach House sound less like either of those bands than a boy-girl synth version of an arpeggiating American outfit like Mercury Rev ? Mercury Rève, perhaps, given that Legrand was born French.

Beach House’s fourth album finds them thrumming along gauzily more or less where they left off ? somewhere internal, with big skies. Myth instantly announces itself with a hummable sequence of shimmers blown along by a bit of hydraulic percussion. The very first word of the track (and the whole record) is “Drifting?”, a state at which Legrand and Scally excel.

There is, though, a lot of intricate paddling to their swan-glide. Perhaps the best bits of Bloom aren’t the hooky melodies, or Legrand’s recasting of Nico as a sweeter pill, but the structures that underpin the feeling of coasting on a thermal. On their best songs a great deal goes on to achieve the impression of horizontality.

Wild comes in on a slow reveal of buzzing drones and crisp machine beats. Then, with a shimmer, we’re in the 60s, thanks to the tambourine boom-tish, with Scally’s guitar feeding off Legrand’s keyboards. The song quite nonchalantly turns at least half a dozen more corners before its end, like a beaded necklace strung with pre-choruses. The Casiotone opening of Lazuli gives way to the feeling that Legrand and Scally are a slacker version of Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti.

You probably only need the first four songs, though. Mid-album, Beach House seem to sink into a lull themselves. The Hours and Troublemaker don’t take the listener anywhere they haven’t been before. By New Year you begin to wonder how the hell they tell their own tunes apart. You can have too much gauze and balm; if only Legrand and Scally could find a slightly different gear than this omni-coast.

The beguiling Wishes brings the album briefly back into focus, if we want to call it that. Focus is a harsh idea to foist on an album, and an outfit, this wafty. But Beach House are at their best when their swirl is anchored; you can best appreciate being unmoored if you still have sight of the coast.

Rating: 3/5

Terrance Aflague Yoshihiro Akiyama  Gilbert Aldana  José Aldo  John Alessio 

The broadcaster’s plan to go for balance and safety in its Games line-up may prove more risky than it expects

At least one of Britain’s highest-profile sports stars will, we can be sure, be disappointed byTuesday’s announcement of the BBC presenting teams for the Olympics.

A day after Gary Lineker was tweet-tweaked by QPR midfielder Joey Barton as an “odious little toad” ? because of his comments on Barton’s weekend sending-off for violent conduct ? he was confirmed as lead presenter, fronting three and a half hours of peak-time coverage on BBC1 daily throughout London 2012.

There is an irony in the proximity of these two flourishes of publicity for the Match of the Day anchor because the case against Lineker, which is often forcibly made on message-boards and in the corridors of broadcasting, is that he is determinedly uncontroversial and bland.

And it is this visible discomfort with journalism or criticism of performers that makes the former Spurs and England striker a risky pick by BBC bosses because London will be very lucky if the Games does not spawn some stories involving drugs, corruption or threats to the security of the event: developments with which, past form suggests, Lineker would struggle. As an ex-footballer, he is also a specialist in a sport which is only a peripheral Olympic discipline and previous attempts to reposition him as a generalist ? hosting golf tournaments for the BBC ? brought criticism from experts in that game.

The problem, though, is that, since the retirement of Desmond Lynam, sports broadcasting has lacked a host for all seasons, especially because of the corporation’s curious under-use of the personable and journalistic John Inverdale, who long seemed Lynam’s natural successor but is again given only a supporting role at the Olympics. But Clare Balding, who will be a prominent presence in midday BBC1 slots this summer, is increasingly at ease in a range of sports and looks a good bet to take the main gold chair by 2020 at the latest.

Whereas the selectors of sporting teams can, to a large extent, cite qualifying times or recent performance records to justify omissions and inclusions, broadcasters choose on subjective preference and past connections. However, perhaps guided by recent controversies over on-screen talent policies, the BBC seems this time to have carefully balanced gender, race and age. Mishal Husain, a news presenter who has been given the morning slots in the schedule, looks like another to watch for in the future.

Yet, while Barton and TV critics may get exercised over the selections, it can be argued that anchors have never been less relevant than in this Olympics. Significantly, the BBC is billing 2012 as the “first digital Games”, with audiences able to watch the event they want, when they want on a device of their choice. So the old image of the family sitting down in front of the box in the corner to see what Des (or, before him, Frank Bough) has got for us to watch has been left behind as decisively as a straggler in the 100m. Viewers ? especially those as au fait with modern social networking methods as Barton ? should be able to avoid the presenters almost completely if they want to.

Royce Gracie Royler Gracie Ryan Gracie Peter Graham Forrest Griffin

(Wichita)

Californian duo Best Coast’s 2010 debut, Crazy for You, mixed sunny pop with fuzzy garage rock to impressive effect. The follow-up picks up where it left off, only with more studio polish, the title track a guilelessly irresistible paean to their home state (“We were born with sun in our teeth and in our hair”), as joyful as it is catchy. Less successful, however, are the ponderous moments when frontwoman Bethany Cosentino dabbles in introspection and the tempo drops, as on No One Like You and Up All Night. There are still moments of magic but it sounds like the work of a band in transition, and not necessarily for the better.

Rating: 3/5

Volk Han Joachim Hansen Antoni Hardonk Dan Hardy Lee Hasdell

BBC Radio 6 Music DJ apologises after criticising station’s morning presenter Lauren Laverne and Radio 1′s Fearne Cotton

BBC Radio 6 Music’s triumph at the Sony Radio Academy Awards was soured by a string of abusive tweets by one of the station’s DJs, Huey Morgan.

Morgan, who was at the ceremony on Monday night, was critical of the station’s morning presenter Lauren Laverne and also took aim at another BBC DJ, Radio 1′s Fearne Cotton.

He later apologised and deleted the offensive tweets, but not before they had been recorded elsewhere.

A BBC spokesman said on Tuesday that management would be speaking to Morgan about his behaviour. “Huey was tweeting from a personal account. He has apologised for his comments and deleted them. However, due to the nature of his comments, he will be spoken to today by Radio 2/Radio 6 Music management.”

The presenter wrote on Twitter, according to Holy Moly: “They ain’t gonna let some dude from NYC win this shit. Fern, Lauren, Chris. Yeah right, that’s cool? Suckers they come a dime a dozen …

“I am the peoples champ, don’t need no award. Y’all know how it be.”

He added: Yo, Fern cotton won a gold award, shit is fake!”

Morgan, the Fun Lovin’ Criminals frontman who also has a show on Radio 2, said Laverne had “no idea what I put into my shows. She just shows up and plays in twitter. Ain’t that BS”.

Referring to Laverne and her former band, Morgan said: “Ask me to cover for her and up her ratings. Fuck that shit. Kenickie? Please.”

He later tweeted: “I don’t care about the awards y’all, it’s the suckers hat get ‘em that got me worried. Now go live your life.”

Laverne won a silver award in the music radio personality category in which Morgan was also nominated but did not win a prize.

She later responded to Morgan on Twitter, asking him to “please stop being weird”.

“Hi Huey, I really don’t know why you’re being like this but I do programme my shows, every single morning,” she said.

“I’d always hoped this was obvious from it being quite good, but apparently clarification would help.”

She said she was “getting friction from someone I’ve always got on [with] here. Very weird, not sure why.”

Morgan later apologised for the tweets, which he deleted, and appeared to suggest he was quitting Twitter.

“I am sorry for my comments last night. If I offended anyone, I apologize. I will tweet no more. Goodbye and thank you for you reality check,” he wrote.

“I said things I shouldn’t have, man. Twitter ain’t for me no more. I can’t say it like it is, so I’m out.”

BBC 6 Music was named UK station of the year at last night’s ceremony at the Grosvenor House hotel in central London.

? To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.

? To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.

Aleksander Emelianenko Fedor Emelianenko Yasubey Enomoto Mark Epstein Tom Big Cat Erickson

? Ferdinand, RIchards and Crouch left out, Downing, Ruddy and Oxlade-Chamberlain in
? Gerrard appointed captain

2.19pm: The cameras have finally been turned off, which means it’s just about time to wrap this up. I’ll give the second-last word to myself: I think there is too much negativity towards this England squad, which is close to the best that Hodgson could have chosen and is still sixth-favourites for the tournament. And I’ll give the last word to Twitter’s Turkey international, Colin Kazim-Richards, who strikes a positive tone. Sort of. “@colin_kazim08 Well at least Great Britain will have a good Olympic team…”

2.18pm: “Now, as a Liverpool fan, I’m used to seeing Steven ‘Stevie G’ Gerrard as some kind of superhuman force with extraordinary, exotic powers,” admits Matt Dony. “But helping to foster ‘unity and team spirit’ in that bunch? Good luck…”

2.15pm: The last question concerns the amount of players travelling with niggles. “Whenever you go into a tournament in the summer, especially with an English team – since we don’t have a winter break – we’re going to have that situation.” He then says that more significant than the absences through injury is the unavailability of Rooney for the firs two games.

2.13pm: Hold up, Hodgson is back on to answer a penultimate question: why did he cancel the warm-up trip to Spain. He explains that it’s because he would be missing a lot of players, what with Chelsea being in the Champions League final, Rob Green being in the play-off final and Manchester City players being on the lash for the last few days.

2.10pm: That’s it for the televised section of Hodgson’s press conference. For more of this thoughts, see stories across the Guardian a little later. For what it’s worth, Hodgson spoke very well and asserted his thinking clearly and with conviction. There was none of the unctuous efforts to impress that Steve McClaren specialised in, nor any of the aloofness of Fabio Capello, who seemed to think folks had a cheek asking him to explain the composition of the national team. Hodgson struck a good balance.

2.07pm: On John Terry: “He’s an innocent man until proven guilty … my decision to take him was made solely on football matters. I believe he has played an important in Chelsea’s FA Cup victory and reaching the Champions League final … I know you’re going to come back to me about what he did agaisnt Barcelona but I’m taking a longer view than that.”

2.06pm: On Andy Carroll: “A different type of players to the others in the squad. Has the ability to hold the ball up, has aerial ability and can also make runs in behind. I spoke to Kenny at length about him … and he was absolutely convinced about the players ability, personality and seriousness as a professional. Whewn I heard that I had no further reservations.”

2.05pm: On Oxlade-Chamberlain: “he’s one of those who can play wide or in the middle,” and mentions that he was particularly impressed with how well he did against when Arsenal played against Milan.

2.04pm: On Ruddy: “Joe Hart is the obvious No1 and Rob Green is the obvious No2, when I was looking for a No3, I turned to John because he has had an excelelnt season.”

2.02pm: On the omission of Rio: “It was a purely footballing decision. I decided on the basis of what I’ve seen in recent months … and also the fact that he hasn’t played much since the World Cup and only once for England. It was a hard phone call to make.” He also hints that Rio may have lost out because the versatile Phil Jones had to be called up after Walker got injured.

2.02pm: Hodgson announces that Gerrard has been appointed captain. “I’ll be counting on him to help foster the unity and team spirit that will be very important.”

2.01pm: Wearing what looks like an old school tie, he says his squad is “well-balanced”. “A lot of the players have helped us qualify and deserved their chance … but I’ve also added a couple of new players.”

2.00pm: Hodgson has taken his seat and is about to hold forth …

1.51pm: “This is the worst England squad ever to be sent to a major championship,” hollers Christopher Hamilton, who is presumably too young to remember Euro 1992.

1.48pm: “Taking Terry is the biggest mistake,” argues Ben Howell. “Our only chance of success with a squad of such limited talent is to create a genuine team environment where everyone pulls together to achieve the impossible, a la Greece and Denmark in Euros gone by. Terry’s presence ruins that possibility.” I think one person who will be pleased at Terry’s inclusion is Karim Benzema.

1.45pm: As we await the press conference with Hodgson, who is due on stage in 15 minutes, here’s an email from Tony Nolan: “I couldn’t agree with you more about Carrick. With that midfield there is not one comfortable passer of the ball, not one. Gerrard can hit some
great balls but he is not what I would call a comfortable passer in
midfield. Lampard gets forward well but doesn’t like to have the ball
through him all the time. Parker and Barry are wreckers and Walcott
and Oxlade-Chamberlain are flyers. Friends of mine ridiculed me when I
asked if Danny Murphy was available but if it’s not him, Carrick or
Scholes who’s gonna control the tempo, given that Wilshere is injured?”

1.43pm: Time for some Downing-love, albeit relucant, from Ian Childs: “I know that the Downing pick has caused a bit of consternation but what were his left-sided options?” blabs Ian via email. “We all know Roy likes shape, and for Carroll to work as a front man he’ll need left-sided players who are left footed. OK, Young could do it even though he prefers his right, but beyond that who else but Downing is there? You have to pick the best players for the position and the role rather than imposing a limit of how good player should be to be in the squad. If he’s the second best English left-footed left winger then a) he has to go and b) it’s a pretty depressing picture of the quality of English players.”

1.38pm: “What’s the news on Scott Parker?” asks Tom Rawlings. “Yesterday reports were that he would miss the tournament through injury, today he’s in the squad.” Harry Redknapp, who entirely wrong in his diagnosis of Walker, as discussed, says that it will depend on how his achilles problem responds to the injections he got yesterday and a week or so of rest. Only then will it be known whether he requires an operation. So Jordan Henderson shouldn’t go on holiday just yet. If only Joe Allen were English.

1.36pm: I do wonder whether Gary Neville had any input into the decision regarding Rio?

1.33pm: On Rio Ferdinand: I think Hodgson was right to leave him out. Granted he has not missed a match through injury since January but it seemed to me that he was playing within himself for the last few months, or rather that he is playing in more limited fashion that before. It seemed like he could not get around as much as he did in his prime and did not cover the full-backs as much.

1.31pm: “Big questions need to be asked as to why Richards was not in the squad, easily one of the best right backs in the league, much more dependable than Johnson,” fumes Ben Targett. His dependency is not as evident as you makea out, Ben. Fabio Capello overlooked him because of suspicions about his positional play, which possibly also motivated Roberto Mancini to prefer Pablo Zabaleta when the going got tough at the end of this season. As a stickler for shape, Hodgson may have similar concerns.

1.27pm: A lot of emailers are insisting that Hodgson has not shown enough faith in youth. I don’t understand that: he has been deprived of three of the country’s most promising young players – Wilshere, Walker and Smalling – and has taken Oxlade-Chamberlain, Welbeck and Jones (and Hart). Sturridge is the main omission but that is justified, in my book. Besides, did you watch England’s U-21 last summer?

1.26pm: Want to know what former England striker Rodney Marsh thinks about all this? “If we get to the semi finals RH should be knighted,” he has jsut tweeted. “It’s simple, shit squad!”

1.23pm: On the subject of Ruddy, does anyone else think his reactions and footwork were far too slow when he was beaten by that famous lob by Luis Suarez a few weeks ago? I also fear that he does not hold on to the ball enough: tends to parry rather than catch.

1.21pm: The most surprising exclusion from this England, in my view, is Michael Carrick. He’s the closest thing England have to the youngish Danny Murphy, who did so well for Hodgson at Fulham, and he has been good for United. With his range of passing he would do well along side Parker at the base of midfield.

1.19pm: John Ruddy is talking to Sky Sports News. “I had a phone call from Ray Clemence on Monday to inform me I was selected, it hasn’t sunk in yet but I’m over the moon.” He’s got his cliches down, that’s for sure.

1.18pm: Here’s a Guardian story on the squad.

1.14pm: So the starting XI agaisnt France will probably included three-quarters of the Chelsea defence, plus the Chelsea cast-off Glen Johnson. Ahead of that, how about this for the line-up agaisnt France: Walcott, Parker, Milner, Young, Gerrard, Carroll?

England: Hart, Green, Ruddy – Baines, Cahill, Cole, Johnson, Jones, Lescott, Terry – Barry, Downing, Gerrard, Lampard, Milner, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Parker, Walcott, Young – Carroll, Defoe, Rooney, Welbeck.

Standby: Butland, Jagielka, Henderson, Johnson, Sturridge

1.08pm: Two uncapped players have been included: Ruddy and Oxlade-Chamberlain.

1.07pm: It’s official: Rio Ferdinand has been left out. The reason has not yet been disclosed.

1.05pm: WE were told the announcement would be at 1 o’clock. Roy’s late. The Sun will have his head for this. “Any word on Matthew Upson’s chances today?” wibbles Ethan Dean-Richards. “This squad, by the sounds of it, needs some more slow players – Carroll, Barry, Lampard and Terry doesn’t seem to lack enough pace.” To such points, Julian Fleming retorts: “those looking for ‘pace”‘, remember Scolari’s words from 2002: ‘Nobody moves faster than the ball.’”

12.59pm: “Wouldn’t Gabby Agbonlahor be a useful weapon against a tiring opposition in extra time?” spews David Penney, who has evidently not been watching Aston Villas this season. “Always though England managers should use what England has an abundance of – pace. Not ponderous, slow 30-yard shooting machines.”

12.55pm: “If the choice was between Welbeck and Sturridge as a second striker, who do you think should get the call up, Paul?” asks Matthew Sharpe. I’d go for Welbeck even though Sturridge’s ability to go around players would give England an ability to unhinge defences. The trouble is Sturridge too frequenlty makes the wrong decision when he gets into a good position. So if it was a choice between the two, I’d go for Welbeck, who’s been in tune with Rooney for much of the season. However, I think that the second striker with whom Hodgson will start will be Gerrard.

12.52pm: “Anyone expecting an announcement about Dalglish to be made around the same time?” parps Graeme Neill. “If ever there was a day to bury news, it’s today (although I’d argue Liverpool would be burying good news, rather than bad).” Dalglish sacked on the day that his predecessor announces he’s takign some of Dalglish’s most contentious signings to the Euros?

12.45pm: Turn your sound up and enjoy some choice lobbying for the inclusion of Grant Holt. Thanks to Tom Allen for pointing that out.

12.39pm: “Why does the most newly appointed manager want to be the earliest to declare his squad for the Euros?” wonders Saurnav Samaddar. “Shouldn’t Hodgson at least wait till the Champions League final to make sure that his Chelsea picks come out of it unscathed or possibly pick an oversized squad which he can prune after the friendlies like most other nations?” It wouldn’t be the first time a big decision has been delayed to suit John Terry …

12.36pm: Assorted respected tweeters are saying that Carroll, Downing and Defoe are among the players summoned by Hodgson. Downing seems the diciest call, what with him having endured a ropey season in which he had 72 shots without scoring a Premier League goals. He also didn’t have an assist to his name. But those stats can be misleading: Liverpool put in more crosses than any other team in the Premier League and Downing delivered a lot of good ones that went unused because of Kenny Dalglish’s occasionally quirky tactics, whereby there was often no one on hand to meet the crosses.

Preamble:
Welcome to the announcement of England’s Euro 2012 squad, as brought to you by the fresh-faced new kind on the block, Roy Hodgson. Word is that Rio Ferdinand, Micah Richards and Peter Crouch have been left out and the Norwich goalkeeper John Ruddy has been called up but the manager has yet to confirm any of that publicly. So the suspense lingers.

And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Suspense and drama. I can’t think of a good sporting reason for Uefa limiting squad sizes to 23 players. Why shouldn’t a country be allowed to bring 100 players if they fancy it? Or 300? Or just 11? The more players you bring, the bigger your logistical and man-management worries, of course, but let each country decide on t heir own strategy. A universal quota of 23 seems arbitrary and pointless, except that it creates exciting cut-offs like the one Hodgson is going to talk us through today.

Speaking of talking, maybe Harry Redknapp should do less of it. There he was on Sunday insisting that the injury that forced Kyle Walker to limp off early in the second half against Fulham was but a trifle. “He’s OK, he’ll be better by tomorrow, he’s certainly not a doubt for the Euros,” is what Redknapp said ? and now reports tell us that Walker has a broken toe and will not go to the Euros. And nor will Richards, we also hear, which, if true, means that (1) the best three right-backs in the Premier League will not be going to the Euros (since France’s Bacary Sagna is also out) and (2) Glen Johnson is likely to go, which, given that he and Hodgson seldom saw eye-to-eye when they were together at Anfield, suggests England’s new manager is not a man to hold grudges. If Richards has indeed been omitted, that is a surprise but that, at least, is a position where England have ample resources. The other places will be more interesting.

Whichever strikers Hodgson takes will represent a gamble. Even bringing Wayne Rooney is slightly risky given that he’ll miss the first two games. But it would be a bigger risk to leave him at home. After him, who? Daniel Welbeck seems a good bet. And has Andy Carroll’s promising end to the season for Liverpool convinced Hodgson he’s the targetman he wants to use? Should he gamble on the fitness of Darren Bent, the self-indulgence of Daniel Sturridge, the inconsistency of Jermain Defoe, the form of Bobby Zamora, the callowness of Rickie Lambert? How about the rawness of Grant Holt, who was the second-highest English scorer in the Premier League this season and the joint-highest fouler? Is it true that Hodgson has always been an admirer of Carlton Cole and just how far is he willing to push his luck?

And what of the midfield? Will the wild card be old or new, i.e. Paul Scholes or Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain? Or both? Or neither. Some say the Ox should be carted along instead of Theo Walcott. I think that’s crazy talk – both should go. Stewart Downing, on the other hand, should not. Will Scott Parker be fit? Have Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard got another tournament in them?

And at the back, will John Terry be left out, signalling a shift to a new central defence, featuring, say, Gary Cahill and Joleon Lescott or Phil Jagielka? Or Anton Ferdinand?

To all of these questions and more we will soon have answers. In the meantime, let’s try to tell Roy how to do his job.

Luiz Azeredo  Luciano Azevedo  Ba Te er  Ryan Bader  Siyar Bahadurzada

BBC Radio 6 Music DJ apologises after criticising station’s morning presenter Lauren Laverne and Radio 1′s Fearne Cotton

BBC Radio 6 Music’s triumph at the Sony Radio Academy Awards was soured by a string of abusive tweets by one of the station’s DJs, Huey Morgan.

Morgan, who was at the ceremony on Monday night, was critical of the station’s morning presenter Lauren Laverne and also took aim at another BBC DJ, Radio 1′s Fearne Cotton.

He later apologised and deleted the offensive tweets, but not before they had been recorded elsewhere.

A BBC spokesman said on Tuesday that management would be speaking to Morgan about his behaviour. “Huey was tweeting from a personal account. He has apologised for his comments and deleted them. However, due to the nature of his comments, he will be spoken to today by Radio 2/Radio 6 Music management.”

The presenter wrote on Twitter, according to Holy Moly: “They ain’t gonna let some dude from NYC win this shit. Fern, Lauren, Chris. Yeah right, that’s cool? Suckers they come a dime a dozen …

“I am the peoples champ, don’t need no award. Y’all know how it be.”

He added: Yo, Fern cotton won a gold award, shit is fake!”

Morgan, the Fun Lovin’ Criminals frontman who also has a show on Radio 2, said Laverne had “no idea what I put into my shows. She just shows up and plays in twitter. Ain’t that BS”.

Referring to Laverne and her former band, Morgan said: “Ask me to cover for her and up her ratings. Fuck that shit. Kenickie? Please.”

He later tweeted: “I don’t care about the awards y’all, it’s the suckers hat get ‘em that got me worried. Now go live your life.”

Laverne won a silver award in the music radio personality category in which Morgan was also nominated but did not win a prize.

She later responded to Morgan on Twitter, asking him to “please stop being weird”.

“Hi Huey, I really don’t know why you’re being like this but I do programme my shows, every single morning,” she said.

“I’d always hoped this was obvious from it being quite good, but apparently clarification would help.”

She said she was “getting friction from someone I’ve always got on [with] here. Very weird, not sure why.”

Morgan later apologised for the tweets, which he deleted, and appeared to suggest he was quitting Twitter.

“I am sorry for my comments last night. If I offended anyone, I apologize. I will tweet no more. Goodbye and thank you for you reality check,” he wrote.

“I said things I shouldn’t have, man. Twitter ain’t for me no more. I can’t say it like it is, so I’m out.”

BBC 6 Music was named UK station of the year at last night’s ceremony at the Grosvenor House hotel in central London.

? To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.

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Jonathan Goulet Wilson Gouveia Jason Grace Crosley Gracie Gregor Gracie

Facebook has nearly a billion users today, so what could topple the blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt Facebook, or at least see it lose its iron grip on social networking. Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world.

Chris Dolman Edson Drago  Tomasz Drwal Joe Hybrid Duarte Aldrin de Jesus 

More expert plotting and multi-character threads woven together in this week’s Game of Thrones. Read Ron’s review here…

This review contains spoilers.

2.5 The Ghost of Harrenhal

Just when you think the first clash of kings promised in the book of the same name is coming, something just has to get in the way. While the Starks and Lannisters war for the North and Greyjoy of the Iron Islands prepares his assault on Winterfell, Baratheon and Baratheon ends up being something of a dud. It’s hard for brother to fight brother when one brother ends up dead, a giant Tilda Swinton-alike bodyguard ends up on the run, and the Baratheon bannermen switching teams. Might the balance of power have shifted in Westeros, or does Littlefinger have his little fingers on a new pawn in the Game of Thrones?

I love the way Game of Thrones is handling its large cast. They can’t get everyone in every episode, but what they have been doing is finding a way to pair off characters who seem to complement one another. For example, the new pairing of Brienne and Catelyn Stark. Brienne is the brawn, Catelyn is the brains; like Tyrion and Bronn, they work well together. Another pairing that works well is Arya and Tywin. (Or Arya or anyone, really; Maisie Williams is great, and her character plays nicely with Gendry, Tywin, Jaquen, Syrio, or her late father Ned.) This allows characters to flesh out and establish relationships with one another and move the plot along briskly. 

It’s also a showcase for the dialogue. Tyrion and Bronn’s walk through the city alone was brilliant, and while Arya’s reaction shots to Tywin’s discussion of the war for the north were great moments, the real showcase was her brief exchange with the deliciously weird and murderously skillful Jaquen (Tom Wlaschiha). We found out more about the mysterious killer this week in one scene with Arya than we had in weeks of the walk to the Wall.

Since it seems like the show has introduced all its locations for this season, it must be said that the shooting locations were incredible this week. From the looks of the North beyond the wall, Game of Thrones must be shooting in Iceland, because it just looks cold and foreboding and terrifying where the Night’s Watch are marching in their war on Mance Rayder and his wild savages. Ditto Qarth, which was one of the most impressive stages the show has had. It’s so vibrant and full of life, and it only needs a few interior shots to live up to the promise it revealed when Xaro Xhoan Daxos (Nonso Anozie) cuts his hand to give her entrance. Dany is a queen in need of a king, and Xaro Xhoan Daxos is a savage from the Iron Islands in need of pedigree. 

As the show has established, everyone wants something from someone else. Dany needs troops and ships to recapture the Iron Throne, Xaro wants political power to go with his wealth, Robb wants freedom for the Northmen, Greyjoy wants his position back, the Lannisters want to hold onto the Seven Kingdoms, and Stannis wants his brother’s old seat on the Iron Throne. Will the participants, like Stannis, make compromises to get what they want and betray their principles, or will they, like Brienne, try to do things honorably while still getting their desires met?

Speaking of Stannis and his flexible morals, Game of Thrones is handling the supernatural in some interesting ways. There’s power in the magic of Melisandre and her shadowy vaginal assassin, but there’s more power in steel and good men at your side and in the wildfire of the Targaryens. Even Dany’s dragons, small and mostly helpless now, are nothing without handlers and riders and a team to control them. Magic is fun—as we saw with Dany meeting the warlocks of Qarth—but it is of limited use in this universe. At least, so far. Power takes many forms in Westeros and, for the moment, it seems to be the least powerful form of power behind arms and knowledge. Then again, the dragons were dead for hundreds of years before making a comeback; maybe by the time the show is into season four, magicians will be fighting warlocks and magic knights will be riding dragons into battle.

Will dragons and their magic fire be able to ward off the cold of the north? After all, winter is coming.

Read our review of last week’s episode, Garden of Bones, here.

US Correspondent Ron Hogan would love it if Game of Thrones could expand into two hour maxi-episodes next season. Find more by Ron daily at Shaktronics and PopFi.

Joe Doerksen  Chris Dolman Edson Drago  Tomasz Drwal Joe Hybrid Duarte

‘We’ve been working on a song for a while now,’ he tells MTV News of Keys, while also gushing about mentor Blake Shelton.
By Christina Garibaldi

Jermaine Paul
Photo: MTV News

It’s been a week since Jermaine Paul won the second season of “The Voice,” beating out Juliet Simms to take the title for Team Blake, but the former Alicia Keys backup singer still can’t believe all that has happened to him in such a short amount of time.

Paul stopped by MTV News on Monday and reflected on the moment they announced his name as the winner and how his coach, and friend, Blake Shelton was able to bring him back to reality.

“I was going through a whole emotional, mental shock, and I even physically thought my legs weren’t under me, I had my hands on my head,” Paul said. “I had this crazy tingling sensations like going through my head — it’s a feeling I can’t even explain — and he brought me back to reality and grabbed me and was like, ‘You did it, man! It’s you!’ It was an amazing feeling.”

Many were surprised when Paul chose Shelton to be his mentor in the beginning of the season, given that he’s an R&B artist, while Blake is a country star. But much like Shelton and fellow coach Adam Levine, Paul developed his own “bromance” with his mentor.

“He’s a good guy, he’s a man’s man, he’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of guy, and that’s the kind of guy I try to be,” Paul said. “That was ultimately one of the main reasons I chose him as my coach. I just felt his sincerity, the realness. He jokes around a lot, you know? When he walks in the room, he definitely has a way of lighting up the air.”

Another huge supporter of Paul’s is his former boss, Alicia Keys. Paul revealed that the superstar singer was always advocating for him to begin his own solo career.

“She’s always been supportive. Even while I was singing, I would tell her, ‘I want to go solo,’ and she was like, ‘What are you waiting on?’ and I would tell her, ‘I’m waiting on God to fix things out,’ and she was like, ‘Maybe God is waiting on you.’ ”

Clearly, Keys’ advice has paid off for Paul, who is hoping to release a track with her on his future album. “We’ve been working on a song for a while now,” Paul said. “And, you know, what better time than now?”

Are you excited for Jermaine Paul’s debut album? Let us know in the comments!

Dennis George Kultar Gill Allan Goes Takanori The Fireball Kid Gomi Akihiro Gono

The title could go to a play-off, expect something decisive from the QPR striker; and Squeaky Bum Sunday

FACT OF THE DAY

It’s a big day for Rule B.31 from the Premier League Handbook. Rule B.31 lives for days like these. If Manchester City beat QPR 7-6, and United beat Sunderland 9-0, B.31 says there will be a play-off for the Premier League title. Keep believing, Rule B.31.

FUNNY-OLD-GAME WATCH

It looks like City’s title, but anything could happen. Consider this. On the opening day Wolves beat Blackburn 2-1. Blackburn then beat Manchester United 3-2 on New Year’s Eve. United had thrashed Arsenal 8-2 a few weeks earlier. And yet Arsenal had it in them to beat City last month. Spurious of course, but then again ? if QPR can beat Spurs (1-0) who beat Sunderland (1-0) who beat City (1-0) ? maybe there’s hope for United yet.

ONE TO WATCH

QPR’s Djibril Cissé. If he starts at City today, expect something decisive. Cissé has played seven games for QPR this season, and either scored (five times) or been sent off (twice) in each of them.

LAST CHANCES FOR …

? Terry Connor, replaced at Wolves by household name Stale Solbakken from next season, leading his side out at Wigan looking for the first win of his 13 games in charge.

? Liverpool’s £20m Stewart Downing ? looking to end a bleak league run of having failed to score with any of his 72 shots this season.

? Aston Villa, needing to win today or they will equal their all-time low of seven wins in a season, set in 12-team divisions in 1889?90 and 1890-91. The second-best Villa stat of the day: they are the only top-flight side not to have scored from a corner.

? Plus, after a season of animal cameos ? two cats (Anfield and Upton Park), a squirrel (Loftus Road) and a chicken (Ewood Park) ? today is the last chance for a creature to make it big. @AnfieldCat has 71,719 followers.

FASHION WATCH

All eyes on Old Trafford for the first awkward modelling of Manchester United’s new Gingham pattern shirt ? launched last week to widespread online derision. “Forged in Industry, Made of Manchester” says the tagline ? forgetting to add “Made in Asia”.

PLUS: QUESTION OF THE DAY

How will Sky hold themselves together? It’s not just Super Sunday ? it’s a title-race, European places, relegation showdown sandwich of a Sunday. Super Sensational Squeaky Bum Sunday? Expect more Gary Neville goalgasms.

Rob Broughton  Mike Brown  Junie Browning Paul Buentello  Josh Burkman 

The creator of the Walkman music player and PlayStation forecasts operating profit of ¥180bn for year to next March

Sony, the name once synonymous with high-quality consumer electronics, posted a record loss of ¥456.7bn (£3.6bn) for the last financial year on Thursday as it struggled with its loss-making televisions business and lack of new products.

Sony shares have slipped to a 25-year low, a sign of how the Walkman and PlayStation maker has lost its innovative edge and fallen behind rivals Apple and Samsung. Sony is now valued at around £9bn, or just 3% of Apple.

Under new chief executive Kazuo Hirai, who replaced Briton Sir Howard Stringer last month, Sony is slashing costs. Some 10,000 jobs, or 6% of the global workforce, will go as it tries to turn around its struggling TV unit, which has lost more than £7bn in nine years.

Although the company has been hit hard by the strength of the yen, Hirai has sketched out a future driven by video games, cameras and mobile devices such as the Xperia smartphone, as well as medical devices and electric-car batteries.

The company said it expected to sell more than 33m smartphones this year, up from 22.5m last year. In preparation for that mobile push, Sony last year bought out Ericsson from the two companies’ phone joint venture to integrate the business with its other consumer electronics units.

“In handsets, without big innovations, Sony will still be a second-tier smartphone market player,” said SR Kwon, an industry analyst at Dongbu Securities in Seoul. “I’m just not impressed by Sony smartphones. “Will Sony get much better as time goes by? I’m not that optimistic. Currency is not the only problem: the bigger problem is that Sony has failed to catch up with consumer trends in TVs and handsets.”

Sony expects an operating profit of ¥180bn in the year to next March, slightly ahead of market estimates, and a rebound from a loss of ¥67.3bn in the year just ended. It forecasts a full-year net profit of ¥30bn.

“The operating profit forecast isn’t far off the level seen two years ago … This suggests we’re on a recovery trend and last year was definitely the bottom,” said Kenichi Hirano, operating officer at Tachibana Securities in Tokyo. “But I think not everyone in the market is convinced of this, especially since the company lacks a solid plan to turn around its TV business.”

Sony predicted that sales of its liquid crystal display TVs would fall 11% to 17.5m in the current year, but forecast that losses from the LCD TV business would halve to ¥80bn.

But in a sign that Sony is struggling to compete with its rivals, Samsung said on Thursday that it plans to sell organic light emitting diode (OLED) TVs from the second half of this year and predicted that this would become mainstream TV technology within two to three years. Samsung and its fellow Korean rival LG have overtaken Sony as the world’s leading TV makers. Samsung made $150m from its business last year ? comparing very favourably with Sony’s huge losses.

Hirai hopes to reduce Sony’s TV costs after exiting a LCD screen joint venture with Samsung. The Japanese firm in December agreed to sell its 50% stake in the panel production firm, which had locked it into buying expensive screens as a market glut triggered a drop in the price of the main component for flat-panel televisions.

Sony also foresees an 11% decline in sales this year of its PlayStation games console, to 16m units. Sales of its new Vita handheld games console hit 1.8m in the previous year, Sony said.

Hirai has set a target for group sales of ¥8.5tn (£66bn) in two years, with an operating margin of more than 5%, but he has yet to spell out how Sony will achieve those mid-term targets. Investors are concerned about the company’s prospects as consumers flock to gadgets made by Samsung and Apple.

Phil Baroni Don Barr Pat Barry  Vitor Belfort  Robert Berry

Not everyone considers the all-Irish Heineken Cup final to have brought glory on the Rabo Direct Pro 12, but it could be a classic

When a competition spans six countries, a final involving teams from just the one tends to go down indifferently at best in the other five. It had previously not gone unnoticed that Edinburgh had reached the last four in the Heineken Cup, the distance between this place at the high table of Europe and their lowly standing of 11th in the RaboDirect Pro12 not necessarily sitting well with English clubs that have to scrap every inch of the way through their domestic league to European qualification.

Similarly, the absence of Ulster in the Pro12 play-offs only adds to the lack of respect for the Celtic league. Even in Ireland there has been concern about the situation, although from a different angle: how can it be that a country so strong at provincial level ? Munster are right up there in the European mix, too ? fails to prosper on the international stage? It has not been a great Irish season, either at the World Cup or in the Six Nations. The advance of Leinster and Ulster places a degree of pressure on Declan Kidney, the coach of an underachieving Ireland.

Leinster rise above any criticism. Yesterday they played Glasgow in the Pro 12 play-off semi, having finished top of the regular-season table by a clear 10 points, and next they defend their European title in what will be their third Heineken Cup final in four years. They play with invention, from the Irish player of the year, Rob Kearney at full-back, and the one-cap Fijian, Isa Nacewa on the wing, to the string-puller at fly-half, Jonathan Sexton. They more than survived the absence of Brian O’Driscoll for the greater part of the season, but now the centre is back for the run-in, still highly influential, the example for all to follow about keeping skills and decision-making processes intact under pressure. Leinster play with a flourish, but it is their accuracy in conditions of stress that sets them apart.

None of this would be possible without a pack to provide the ball and offer variety in attack. Cian Healy is excelling in all departments in the front row, the visible half of the propping department, with Mike Ross his unseen but equally effective partner. Brad Thorn is obviously having a ball in the second row. The ancient All Black, in his 38th year and after a life of going back and forth between league and union, is having a blast in his twilight rugby days, hitting rucks with relish and forming a partnership with Leo Cullen that swaps lighthouse tallness for work-rate and durability.

Ulster do not offer such a glittering portfolio or style. They missed out on qualification for the Pro12 play-offs by losing in quick order to Connacht, Leinster and Munster in their final three games of the regular season. This was no all-Ireland celebration of victory over the Cardiff Blues and Edinburgh in the knock-out stages of Europe, but a cruel domestic put-down by their own.

Joe Schmidt, the coach of Leinster, has just pledged himself to the completion of his job in Dublin, despite possibilities opening up for him back home in Auckland, whereas Brian McLaughlin, Ulster through and through, will be heading out of the head coach’s job there, down ? or at least sideways ? into the nursery end of the game. There was no avoiding the sense of another put-down when David Humphreys, Ulster’s director of rugby and hero at outside-half of the Heineken Cup victory 13 years ago, announced McLaughlin’s departure in the new year, with Mark Anscombe coming in from New Zealand.

The full story has yet to be told of McLaughlin’s ousting, but perhaps in the camp of the underdog it provides a little inspiration. Ulster are a blend of imported South Africans and home-grown players. The No8 Pedrie Wannenburg, second row Johan Muller, full-back Stefan Terblanche and, above all, scrum-half Ruan Pienaar excelled against Edinburgh and they bring a palpable sense of confidence to their side.

Stephen Ferris is also all-important in the back row, while Craig Gilroy gives them some zip on the wing and Darren Cave is a real presence in midfield. Chris Henry is the other home-grown player who ties things together. Without their captain and No7, out with an ankle injury, they were a bit disjointed in the semi-final victory. They will also want John Afoa back on the tighthead of the front row after a four-week suspension for tip-tackling Felix Jones of Munster. At their best ? and prompted perhaps to be just that for coach McLaughlin ? Ulster are ferocious, direct and very intense. If their nerves hold on the big day this will be a close encounter, one perhaps with an Ulster twist.

And a lot more impressive than five of the six competing countries in the Heineken Cup may be thinking. The Celtic League is a decade old and in that time it has produced four winners ? about to be five ? in the Heineken Cup, while there have been four Celtic grand slams in the Six Nations. Not so rubbish after all.

Gesias JZ Calvancante  Luiz Cane  Dos Caras Jr   Phil Cardella Roan Jucao Carneiro