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What does it take to get yourself barred, not just from your local after-work watering hole, but from every bar in your entire country? There’s a 20-year-old woman in England who can answer that question, having just become the first person to ever be legally banned from buying or drinking booze anywhere in the UK.

The woman has been issued a two-year ban that prevents her from even stepping foot inside of any pub or bar in her home country. She is also not allowed to purchase alcohol, carry it in an open container or drink in public.

The ban comes after the woman had already been convicted in various intoxicated incidents. She had been issued, and subsequently ignored, bans at pubs, bars and clubs in her local municipality, so the ban has been expanded nationally.

She must also attend “alcohol-misuse” classes, which if completed without incident could halve the term of the ban to a single year.

If she violates the order, the woman could face a fine of approximately $3850.

Woman becomes first person banned from EVERY pub and club in the country [Daily Mail]

The ash of Eyjafjallajökull could have a severe impact on UK food imports, with foreign fruit and vegetables like pineapple and baby sweet corn already seeing shortages, according to The Guardian.

Other produce under threat includes lettuce, grapes, and asparagus.

Flights in and out of the UK continue to be halted. British Airways maintains that flights will not start moving again tomorrow, as all Saturday flights in and out of London have been canceled.

Ryanair has canceled flights until Monday.

Follow our continuing coverage of the volcano ash crisis here >

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“Dr. Who,” the UK’s longest running sci-fi series, starts a new chapter this week.  The show has a new star in the title role, actor Matt Smith, and fans can soon watch it on this side of the pond on BBC America.

‪Smith and co-star Karen Gillan joined me on FoxNews.com’s Strategy Room this week.  Our viewers from Arizona to Illinois to Florida flooded my inbox with excited emails and questions for the stars.  One compared Smith to James Dean, while another said his son is the series’ biggest fan. 

For those who aren’t familiar with “Dr. Who,” Smith explained his character.

“Dr. Who is a 907-year-old who travels through space and time,” Smith said.  “What’s sort of brilliant about it is, from one week to the next, he can be in the past or the future.  And he does all this with a companion.”

His companion is the lovely Amy Pond, played by Scottish actress Gillan. When the pair first meet, Amy is just seven years old.  Gillan says this plotline led to a role for her young cousin.

‪“They needed an actress to play a younger version of me,” said Gillan.  “And because I have a weird sort of Highland accent and ginger hair, it’s not sort of easy to find.  So they asked me if I knew anyone, any relatives, and I put her forward and she nailed it.”

Once Amy grows up, she and Dr. Who meet again and soon find themselves saving the world.  The adventure begins at 9/8 Central Saturday on BBC America – good news for our Strategy Room viewers who love sci-fi.

‪Stay tuned to the Strategy Room for special guests, hot topics and lively discussion that includes YOU!  Catch the Strategy Room Entertainment Hour weekdays at 12et online at http://live.foxnews.com/strategy-room and send your emails during the LIVE show to [email protected] to join the conversation.

WMPoweruser.com has made it through to the final round of the Wirefly blog awards in the Best Windows Mobile Blog category!

Voting has now opened and closes on the 30th April 2010, and winners will be announced on May 1, 2010 and receive $250 in prizes and promotion across Wirefly.com and other Wirefly web properties.

Help us win the category by voting for us at Wirefly here!

While frowned upon by many in my home state of Connecticut, off-roading is nevertheless a prevalent past time in a state filled with farms, forest, and Fortune 500 CEO’s. In fact, for such a politically liberal state, there are a surprising number of Hummers (though far more Priuses). While mostly reserved for commuting, every now and then I’ve seen a Hummer tearing it up off-road.

Still, there is a part of me that winces everytime I see the mud flying and the engines revving. It is bad for the environment, and off-roading definately breeds a disregard for nature. It is still fun, but if there was a better way to do it, I would be all over it. Raser Tech’s plug-in hybrid Hummer might just be that better way.

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Draw It! for iPad ($1.99) – by iPhonig

iTunes Preview Link

Pros: Drawing and painting app with multiple stock backgrounds and support for user photos as backgrounds.

Cons: Very buggy, sometimes unresponsive UI; Frustrating to use; Instructions screen is hard to read and plagued by typos.

Buying Advice: Skip it for now. Better drawing and journaling apps are available, and they cost less.

Finger painting goes digital on iPad. While apps like Brushes and Layers vie for the high-end drawing/painting market on the App Store, a number of lower-cost, shorter-learning curve apps are making iPad doodling quick and easy. I took a look at two of them, Doodle Buddy and Draw It! and came away with a pretty clear favorite.

Draw It! was kind of frustrating to use, and the fact that its price has already been dropped by 50% reflects the rather amateur style of the app. The program’s instruction screen is laid out in an oversized, hard-to-read font and riddled with typos (“taping” instead of “tapping,” etc.), which is never a good sign, either. A basic drawing program augmented by the addition of backgrounds – blank, graph & note paper, user photos -text notes, Draw It! straddles the line between drawing and journaling apps. Unfortunately it’s not nearly good enough at either task to bear recommendation. 

The app suffered from lag that sometimes caused a short but noticeable pause between screen taps and responses from the program. Invoking the text note function made things worse: It’s unclear how to call up the QWERTY board for typing, text notes moved around the screen without warning and/or momentarily appeared in duplicate, and editing existing notes was possible though I couldn’t figure out how to do it with any certainty. In-app help outlines a tap-double tap-triple tap system for edits and erasing, but it didn’t do enough to make the program very usable. 

The idea behind Draw It! is fine, but the execution is poor. Skip this one in favor of other drawing/painting or journaling programs.

See Also: Doodle Buddy (Free)

Britain’s Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg (Comment Central)

Britain’s first ever televised prime ministerial debate, which took place on April 15 in Manchester, can be seen on C-Span here (though when I watched it the sound and pictures were distractingly out of sync), or heard on BBC Radio 4 here.

There was another first, perhaps more consequentially important than the debate itself: for the first time, the broadcast media gave a Liberal Democrat leader equal time and prominence with his Labour and Conservative counterparts. Since the debates (two more will follow, on April 22 and 29) were announced in March, it’s been said that the outsider, Nick Clegg, would “win,” provided he could hold his ground against David Cameron and Gordon Brown. He not only held his ground, he exacted every possible advantage from the claim that his opponents represented the “old politics” while he stood for the new.

Well-briefed and fluent, talking directly to the cameras and the nation, he won the debate by a mile, according to three respected polls, which gave him, on average, 52 percent against Cameron’s 25 percent and Brown’s 18 percent. (Along with most of the commentators that I read, I thought Brown did much better than that; defending his incumbency, and 13 years of Labour rule, with impressive logic and vigor—but he undeniably has what Neil Kinnock described earlier this week as a “radio face,” whose natural expression in repose is jowly and forbidding.) If Clegg’s success in the debate translates into a several-point rise for the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls, where they are presently stuck at around 20 percent, and in the real poll on May 6, a hung parliament will very probably result.

For decades, the Liberal party, then the SDP-Liberal Alliance, now the Lib Dems, have made proportional representation, based on the single transferable vote (STV) in multi-member constituencies, a major part of their platform. Under that system, once a candidate has enough votes to be declared the winner, the remaining votes would be apportioned to other candidates. Until now, such radical electoral reform has seemed a vain ambition. Election after election, the Liberal Democrats pick up a sizeable chunk of the national vote (22 percent in 2005) but win a disproportionately small number of seats (less that 10 percent in 2005, which was a good year for them).

When given a level media playing field, as they were on Thursday (and in the “Ask the Chancellors” debate on March 29, which Vince Cable, the Lib Dem shadow chancellor, won handsomely against George Osborne and Alistair Darling), the party has performed exceptionally well, thereby reinforcing their claim to be treated fairly at the ballot box. If, on May 6, they manage to retain the 63 seats they held in the last parliament and capture some Labour and Conservative marginals, they may well be in a position to wring from Gordon Brown a commitment to immediate electoral reform in exchange for their support of a minority Labour government—though such a deal with Cameron seems a lot less likely.

Britain already has proportional representation: the STV system is used in elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, and “List PR” for the European Parliament elections. The country is out of step with the rest of Europe and the Republic of Ireland in clinging to the first past the post system for its domestic elections, and the electorate is showing every sign of having had its fill of one-or-the-other, Conservative or Labour government. One of the most striking and persistent features of recent opinion polls has been the number of people (ranging from around 30 percent to 43 percent) who’ve said that Britain’s interests would “best be served” by a hung parliament—in other words, they want to vote for a coalition. Or, as Paddy—now Lord—Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader, said the other day, “The mood of the country, I think, is that Gordon Brown deserves to lose, but David Cameron doesn’t deserve to win.” This is the perfect climate for his party.

Britain hasn’t been ruled by a true coalition since the Churchill government of 1940-1945, though Harold Wilson in 1974, and James Callaghan, from 1977-1979, kept their minority Labour governments alive by doing deals with other parties (mainly the Liberals, as they were then) to save them from no-confidence motions in the House of Commons. Should the Lib Dems do well in May, and at last achieve the electoral reform they have so long promoted, it’ll be the end of the two-party system, and government by coalition is likely to be the norm in Britain for the foreseeable future, with no party able to secure an overall majority. My brother Colin, a lifelong Labour voter, now a Liberal Democrat supporter (Blair’s juvenile complaisance in the Bush/Cheney Iraq project was my bro’s final straw), said to me over the phone last week: “It seems to work alright in Germany, so why not here?”

The latest figures from the NPD Group reveal that Final Fantasy XIII has sold 1,322,000 units in the United States no suprises there, given the strength of Square Enix and its Final Fantasy brand. What’s interesting

New details have emerged about Dell’s upcoming line of Android tablets. Engadget has leaked some pictures of the new Dell Streak which will come in 5, 7, and 10 inch versions. The Dell Streak 5 (aka Mini 5) will be the first version to be released and should appear on AT&T in late summer. The 7 inch version should launch in late 2010 followed by the 10 incher in early 2010.

Engadget also notes that the Dell Aero will launch on AT&T this June. Hopefully Dell is using that extra time to upgrade the firmware to something newer than Android 1.5.

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• Dell Aero continues AT&T’s lockdown strategy for Android

Millions of students spend a summer, semester, or year learning the inside of a private sector industry.  Often they do it for school credit, but no pay.

The Department of Labor says most times that’s illegal, and it’s going to crack down on companies that don’t pay interns.

Labor lawyers, such as Kara Maciel at EpsteinBeckerGreen law firm, suggest businesses should review what they ask interns to do.  “If [interns] are performing administrative tasks, clerical tasks, answering phones, getting copies,”  Maciel says, “things that would otherwise displace a regular employee, then the Department of Labor may find that to be more looking like an employee than an intern.”  And therefore should be paid, she says.   

But business lobby groups note the economy is so tight, companies may have to cut the number of interns they hire, or not hire interns at all, if they all have to be paid. 

Barbara Lang, the Vice President and CEO of the DC Chamber of Commerce, says this will hit small businesses especially hard. 

“They will likely not be able to pay for it. Unless the government is going to provide some subsidy along with these requirements, they won’t be able to provide these experiences any more,” Lang says.

Supporters say the law should be enforced, and companies should not get free labor.  They also want to level the playing field between interns who can afford to work for free and those who can’t.

Ross Eisenbrey, the Vice President of the Economic Policy Institute, says, “If you can’t have an unpaid internship because you need to work, you’re poor, or your family just doesn’t have the means, you’re cut out, and that’s wrong.”

Eisenbray says the law does not apply to non-profit organizations or the federal government.

There is such a thing as a legally unpaid internship if it is truly a structured educational experience, for the benefit of the intern, rather than the company, with no promise of a job after the internship ends.

Germany-based DigiProtect has a long history of using a machine-gun approach to “fight piracy”, in which it sends out tens of thousands of letters to people it says have illegally downloaded its clients’ content, and demanding a “pre-settlement” payment to stop them from being sued. The big problem is that the company’s net catches lots of innocent people, and it’s been condemned by all sorts of people, even including the British equivalent of the RIAA. The BBC has been asking some questions of DigiProtect, and as you might expect, the firm sees absolutely nothing wrong with what it’s doing, calling its method “the only proven effective proceeding” for dealing with piracy. How, exactly, is the method effective? Because as far as we can tell — and as far as the recording industry is concerned — the amount of illegal downloading going on really isn’t slowing down much. What it’s effective at is generating revenues for DigiProtect, which tells the BBC that after deducting costs, it pays rightsholders at least 50% of the remainder of the “pre-settlements”, leaving it a nice commission. These answers from Digiprotect are completely unsurprising, and it’s not clear if the BBC expected the company to have some sort of epiphany and shut down or what. After all, another company using a similar model in the UK called it quits last week, saying it was “surprised and disappointed by the amount of adverse publicity that our firm has attracted in relation to this work.” I mean, who in their right mind would think that sending out these bully-like letters, particularly to lots of innocent people, would upset anybody?

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Dell looks to be jumping into the Android tablet game headfirst with their Streak tablets that have just been revealed. They look similar to the Dell Mini 5, but bigger and more in line with what Apple is offering with the iPad, and this is a good thing. As you can see, you get the black bezel, the large display, and the photo app even looks similar to what you’d find on the iPad. Engadget says that the Streak 5 should hit stores this summer, while the Streak 7 should be available later this year (likely the fall, if you ask us.) The Dell Streak 10 won’t likely appear until 2011 though. Sure, that sucks for those that want the largest Android tablet that Dell has to offer, but having a 7-inch model out there gives a nice alternative for those that want something smaller than a 9.7-inch iPad. These Android tablets can’t come fast enough.

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The Goldman Sachs (GS) SEC charges are rocking markets today. Goldman closed at $160.70, down $23.57 or 12.79%.

DJIA: Down 124 points to 11,019.

NASDAQ: Down 34 points to 2481.

S&P 500: Down 19 points to 1192.

Commodities:

• Oil: Down 2.7% or $2.37 to $83.14 a barrel.
• Gold (GLD): Down 1.9% or $22.80 to $1137.50 an ounce.
• Silver (SLV): Down 3.9% or $0.72 to $17.71 an ounce.

Now here’s what you need to know as you leave work today:

• Goldman Sachs (GS) and their Vice President Fabrice Tourre have been charged with misleading clients by the SEC. Follow our ongoing coverage here. 

• The fallout from Goldman is beginning to effect the financial reform debate in Washington. President Barack Obama has now refused to sign any bill that does not include provisions to control the derivatives market.

• Warren Buffet has been revealed as a big loser in the Goldman Sachs fallout, according to Bloomberg. Movements in the stock today have reduced the value of his options by $950 million.

• Bank of America (BAC) announced impressive earnings today, beating first quarter estimates. This was partly based on the company reducing its loan loss provisions and also a product of the improving economy.

• The Icelandic volcano eruption continues its European travel scourge halting flights in the British Isles and Northern Europe. Ryanair has canceled flights until midday Monday.

Join the conversation about this story »

Posted by John Byrne and Hal Dardick at 2:28 p.m.



 A year after Cook County Board President Todd Stroger’s cousin was forced out as his top financial official amid a hiring scandal, she’s landed a job with the Cook County assessor’s office — at half the salary.

Donna Dunnings will be paid $79,000 a year to run the Cook County Stimulus and Revitalization Project, which provides funds to help developers return to the tax rolls properties they buy with large delinquent property tax bills, said Eric Herman, spokesman for Assessor James Houlihan. She starts in 10 days, he added.

As the county’s chief financial officer, Dunnings was paid nearly $176,000. Stroger forced Dunnings’ retirement in April 2009, after she was caught up in the controversy of former steakhouse busboy Tony Cole, who Stroger hired for an executive post even though he didn’t have a college degree. She bailed Cole out of jail while he was employed for the county.



Cole eventually was fired for allegedly lying about his criminal history when he filled out a county application. The scandal contributed to Stroger’s loss in the February primary.



Dunnings was a strong employee at the assessor’s office between 1987 and 1999, performing various assessing and evaluation duties, Herman said. Houlihan is not concerned about the troubles Dunnings had in Stroger’s office, he said.

 

"We’re really not, because she has had a successful history in this office," Herman said. "She has a good feel for real estate and development. She’s a very intelligent woman."

"This is clearly a good fit for her," Herman added.

Houlihan is retiring and did not seek re-election.

Doodle Buddy for iPad (Free) – by Pinger, Inc.

iTunes Preview Link

Pros: Easy to use, colorful, fun painting app; Stamps and backgrounds add to the fun; Free

Cons: Bug sometimes saves drawings in wrong orientation; Can’t turn sound effects off

Buying Advice: Get it. It’s free, it’s fun, and did I mention it’s free?

Fingerpainting goes digital on iPad. While apps like Brushes and Layers vie for the high-end drawing/painting market on the App Store, a number of lower-cost, shorter-learning curve apps are making iPad doodling quick and easy. I took a look at two of them, Doodle Buddy and Draw It! and came away with a pretty clear favorite.

Doodle Buddy reminds me of KidPix, a Mac/PC program I used to use with elementary school students when I taught computers in schools. Doodle Buddy lets you draw and paint on blank backgrounds, over pre-installed wallpapers, or over photos from your iPad’s library. You can also stamp your canvas with images from a library available in small and large sizes. In general, Doodle Buddy is great. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it supports multitouch painting, which is a neat trick. A sounds-off option is a must in the next release, as the sound effects that play whenever you’re drawing, painting, or stamping can get old pretty quickly. The brushes popover menu also should be tweaked so it doesn’t disappear after every tap – changing multiple parameters (brush type, color, diameter) requires re-activating the menu after every tweak. There also seems to be a bug involving saving landscape-mode drawings to the proper orientation.

Despite those flaws, Doodle Buddy is a terrifically fun app and one of the best basic drawing/painting iPad apps I’ve yet to try at any price. The fact that it’s free makes it all the better.

From the Breaking Business News Center:

Taste of Chicago, the city’s annual chowfest in Grant Park, is returning
to its original mission of promoting only the city’s restaurants.





A handful of suburban-based vendors without restaurants in the city are
being asked to exit this year, Megan McDonald, executive director of
Chicago’s Office of Special Events, confirmed Friday.

Mayor Richard Daley defended the move.



"It’s called Taste of Chicago," Daley said during a press conference. "Not Morton Grove, simple as that.



"A
lot of vendors in Chicago are suffering, so like anything else, you
have to take priorities," he said. "So we’ve taken priorities and say
‘Here, those are businesses in Chicago, they pay real estate taxes,
sales tax and everything else, and it’s (funded) by city money, so
that’s how it is.’ "

The mayor said he doesn’t fear a suburban backlash. "No, I don’t think so," he said. "Food is food.

For more, please click here.

25 year old Briton Lewis Hamilton is finding himself making news for all the wrong reasons this year. His ‘weaving’ defensive driving act at the Malaysian Grand Prix has been heavily criticized by a number of F1 experts and news is that the weaving act will be discussed by at the pre-event drivers’ Briefing in Shanghai.

Hamilton was severely criticized by Brazilian veteran Rubens Barrichello of Williams and Pole Robert Kubica of Renault for his car handling when he defended against Kubica’s team-mate Russian Vitaly Petrov. Barrichello also mentioned that the drivers also have a kind of verbal agreement that you should move only once during the protection of your line.

Hamilton’s defensive tactics were worthy of punishment as it was against the sprit of the competition. Mark Webber is however of the opinion that this issue should be “tidied up” when the drivers congregate for their pre-race briefing in Shanghai.