Internet piracy is costing the U.K. alone almost $300 million a year, according to technology analysis group Jupiter Research. Little wonder that European capitals are racing to win more powers to take on the worst pirates. So far, though, they don't seem to be getting too far. In France earlier this week the Constitutional Council, effectively France's Supreme Court, ruled that proposed laws that would have forced Internet service providers to identify and help prosecute users ...

After waiting half an hour in a line of 20 people at the dusty ATM, Eduard Markov finally walks away with his old leather wallet bulging with rubles. Like thousands of others in the northern Russian industrial town of Pikalyovo, the 44-year-old clay quarry worker had not been paid in three months. But now he at least has enough to buy the basics — meat, vodka, noodles, oil and fruit — from shops that just a few days ago ...

Stand-up paddle surfing may sound like a scene from a screwball comedy, but no one's laughing in a sports and fitness industry that has hit the recession skids as hard as any other business. SUP, as it's called for short, looks exactly as it sounds: you stand on a large surfboard and propel yourself forward with a paddle. But, unlike traditional surfing, you don't have to wait for the waves. In fact, SUP, which is wildly popular, can be ...

Most people across Muslim and Arab lands viewed President Obama's speech in Cairo, Egypt, as "excellent," a spokesman for the hard-line Palestinian movement Hamas said. But the official, Ahmed Yousef, interviewed on CNN's "American Morning" from Gaza City, said there's a question on the street: Is the American president "ready to walk the way he talks" "This is the question," said Yousef, the senior adviser for former Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya. In his address to Muslims, Obama called for ...

You want to make a comedy about guys who learn the true meaning of bromance on a horrible weekend in Vegas, but you can't spend a lot of money on talent. Which actors do you cast? The leading role of Phil, the smart, energetic audience surrogate, might have suited Jim Carrey or Vince Vaughn, so go with Bradley Cooper, who was Carrey's pal in Yes Man and Vaughn's preppie torturer in Wedding Crashers. Steve Carell would have been perfect ...

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting ...

France and England have fought each other in the 100 Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars and scads of less memorably named conflicts. And more recently, the French and English have treated the blood-and-tears clashes between their national rugby and soccer teams as fetishes for those battles of yore. The geysers of bile pouring forth from the London tabloids this week suggests a new chapter in Anglo-French enmity may be upon us. Call it the "Great ...

A British tabloid on Sunday accused Buckingham Palace of failing to protect Queen Elizabeth II after one of its reporters entered the royal garage without a security check. Mazher Mahmood, of the London-based News of the World, claimed he was allowed to enter the property after paying a man identified as a Buckingham chauffeur £1,000 ($1,591). Footage of the scheme filmed undercover showed the chauffeur giving Mahmood, whose face was blurred, a tour of the royal fleet of limos ...

Barack Obama is a married man but there's another woman with a hold on him that his wife can never match: she runs the House. She is Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, the most powerful woman in Washington and lately, a target for Republicans. Pelosi is easy to spot in any crowd of U.S. politicians; she's the small brown-haired woman in the smartly tailored suit. Conservatives like to stereotype some Democrats as rich, isolated and ...

The speaker of Britain's House of Commons plans to make a statement Tuesday afternoon amid calls for him to resign, a spokesman for the House of Commons told CNN. The subject of Speaker Michael Martin's speech wasn't clear. But he has come under increasing pressure from MPs to step down in connection with a widening scandal surrounding lawmakers' expenses. Martin has so far rebuffed the criticism; he issued a public apology Monday but refused to step down. A cross-party meeting ...