Because I need to charge my laptop before I go out to the café to work.

A United Nations Report concludes that Britain has been complicit in torture. (Audio) (article by Richard Norton-Taylor)

Are you listening, Jack Straw? David Miliband?

There’s a new kid on the e-block – Wolfram Alpha. Modestly named by creator Stephen Wolfram, it’s a new search engine which will actually understand your queries, rather than just keyword searching. It’s important to recognise that this is nothing to do with the law firm Wolfram & Hart. At least, one would have to hope.

The Airline Industry is realising how much trouble it’s in right now, and is trying to green up its act. Well, yeah, but honestly, I have to doubt the basic tenet that we can have cheap air travel and beat global warming. Sorry, fellas. (And as an aside, who uses cheap flights the most? People who can afford expensive ones.)

It’s time to act on armed robots. (I love New Scientist.)

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer: I’ll try to stay serene and calm when my toaster gets the bomb.

The economy still sucks, and is likely to suck more. (From an Indian perspective.)

I feel I should mention this, although it’s not exactly news. But go browse the Times of India for a sense of the wider world.

The debate on taxing sexually oriented businesses continues in Austin.

House Bill 1751 – aka the “Titty Tax” – was supposed to be a social-service panacea: paying for sexual-assault survivor programs and indigent health care by charging $5 every time someone goes anywhere where there’s a combination of booze and nakedness.

And the world has a new superhero: a dude who put a kangaroo in a headlock, and threw the damn home-invading, infant scaring marsupial out of his house. (But, being Batman rather than James Bond, despite his underpant choices, did not shoot it.)

And my wife‘s doing a news show tomorrow on LBC with Nick Ferrari. There will almost certainly be a measure of disagreement on some issues.