Newspapers to disappear by 2040: UN agency chief

Newspapers will disappear and be replaced by digital versions by 2040, the UN intellectual property agency’s chief said in an interview published on Monday.

Francis Gurry, who heads the World Intellectual Property Organisation told the daily La Tribune de Geneve that “in a few years, there will no longer be printed newspapers as we know it today.”

“It’s an evolution. There’s no good or bad about it. There are studies showing that they will disappear by 2040. In the United States, it will end in 2017,” he said.

Gurry noted that in the United States there are already more digital copies sold than paper copies of newspapers. In cities, there are also fewer bookshops.

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Study seeks to prove theory humans still evolving

OTTAWA — Rare evidence of the long-held belief that humans are still evolving has been unearthed in the parish records of a French-Canadian island on the Saint Lawrence seaway, researchers say.

Ile aux Coudres is located 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Quebec City. Between 1720 and 1773, 30 families settled there and the population reached 1,585 people by the 1950s.

Poring over church registers containing detailed records of dates of births, marriages and deaths, researchers found the age of women when they had their first child fell from about 26 to 22 years over 140 years from 1799 to just before 1940.

After discounting environmental and social factors, they concluded this substantial change from one generation to the next “largely occurred at the genetic level.”

“It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection,” says the study led by Emmanuel Milot at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

“Our study supports the idea that humans are still evolving,” it concludes. “It also demonstrates that micro-evolution is detectable over just a few generations in humans.”

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Hacking Crisis Edges Closer to British PM Cameron

David Cameron will be forced to explain damaging new revelations today that have dragged him deeper into the phone-hacking scandal.

It emerged last night that Neil Wallis, the former News of the World deputy editor who was arrested last week, worked for the Conservative Party before last year's election. He gave "informal" advice to Andy Coulson, his former boss at the NOTW, who resigned from the paper over the hacking affair but was later appointed Mr Cameron's director of communications.

In a second blow to the Prime Minister, it was revealed that his chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, had appealed to Scotland Yard not to mention hacking during a Downing Street briefing last September, four months before Mr Coulson quit his No 10 post. Labour said the disclosure showed Mr Cameron could not do his job properly because of the cloud cast by the hacking controversy.

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Tavis Smiley on Morning Joe: Bush lied us into Iraq

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Separating fact from fiction on U.S. economic myths

With the recent Iowa straw poll and President Obama’s bus tour, Americans are hearing a cacophony of arguments about the wobbly economy. The federal stimulus package passed in 2009 was either a deficit-busting failure full of wasteful projects or an unparalleled rescue that would have been more successful if it had only been bigger. Taxes are either stifling or the lowest they’ve ever been. America needs to invest in infrastructure, or “infrastructure” is merely a euphemism for more government spending. So, here’s our guide to the most prevalent economic myths.

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Anti-Wall Street protests go global