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Salford have made the first major signing for their final season at The Willows as they bid to retain their Super League licence for 2012. The Canterbury full-back Luke Patten will arrive next season on a three-year contract after the City Reds beat several other clubs for his services.

"Luke has been one of the finest full-backs in the world for many years and it is a signal of our intent for the future," said the Salford chairman, John Wilkinson, who has been driving the club's plans for a new stadium for 2012. "We are continuing to look at bringing further exceptional talent to The Willows for the final season."

That talent is unlikely to include Patten's Canterbury team-mate, the Australian Test second-rower Andrew Ryan, but signing the full-back, known as "The General", is a major coup. Among other clubs, Huddersfield had seen him as a potential successor to Brett Hodgson in their No 1 shirt.

"Luke has been one of this club's great leaders and we are sorry to see him go," said Canterbury's chief executive, Todd Greenberg.

Patten's arrival throws doubt over the future of Salford's current full-back, Karl Fitzpatrick, who has not been offered a new contract for next season.

Castleford have reiterated that they are to press ahead with their proposed new stadium at Glasshoughton, following Wakefield's announcement that they are not interested in ground-sharing with them there.

Hull KR have asked Wigan whether they can extend Josh Charnley's loan until the end of the season. The 19-year-old centre has yet to make his first-team debut at Wigan, but has shone in three games since his arrival at Rovers.

Geoff Carr, the chairman of the Australian Rugby League, has warned NRL clubs that it would be illegal for them to prevent their players taking part in the Four Nations tournament this autumn.

Reports have suggested that clubs could impose the boycott in protest at delays in setting up an independent commission to run the game in Australia, but Carr said that they are contractually obliged to release their players to play against England, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea in the competition.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Glamorous Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks graced many a newspaper page yesterday after being hailed as a perfect physical role model by Equalities minister Lynne Featherstone.

"Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous," the Lib Dem politician gushed. "We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn't be so unusual."

Sadly, having witnessed the undeniably enthusiastic coverage that greeted her remarks – namely several sizeable photographs of Hendricks in various broadsheets – Featherstone now complains that many commentators have missed the point.

"Oh, for goodness' sake!" she snaps. "Christina Hendricks is a fine-looking woman and it is great to see a curvy woman rather than a stick insect. But that was hardly the point of the article in the Sunday Times! However, the follow-on newspaper articles in other publications seem to focus only on Ms Hendricks."

I'm only too happy to help clear up any unfortunate confusion.

* Being the sensitive soul he is, no one should underestimate Conservative MP Rory Stewart's frustration at having to explain away unhelpful reports that he innocently suggested that some of his northern constituents were a "pretty primitive" bunch who held up their trousers with string.

The ex-soldier, who was elected MP for Penrith and the Border in May, found himself in hot water over the weekend and has been on a hasty charm offensive ever since.

Stewart, an Old Etonian, former diplomat and Harvard professor to boot, has been at pains to stress that he was merely attempting to debunk the ignorant London-based view that Cumbria is a "wealthy and comfortable" area that could afford government spending cuts. He does, however, humbly add for good measure that it was "extremely foolish" on his part.

Young Rory must be wondering just what he's allowed to say these days. Earlier this year his bayonet was fixed firmly in the direction of this very newspaper when one impertinent hack dared to report – despite his firmest warnings – that he'd been jokily comparing the Lib Dems to the Taliban.

* Back in those far-off days when he was cutting his showbiz teeth as the sinister Noel Edmonds' high-pitched sidekick, few would have dreamt that Keith Chegwin would be capable of becoming such a controversial figure in middle-age.

You may have seen that Cheggers has recently become embroiled in an unseemly row with the nation's comedy establishment after standing accused of nicking performers' gags and posting them on Twitter as his own.

I for one had naively presumed the old boy might be giving the troublesome one-liners a rest – but no! By yesterday he was back in cyberspace defiantly posting his fans no less than six new gags – (well, "new" is probably a bit of a stretch).

* News that George W Bush's former press secretary Dana Perino has been handed a teaching post by George Washington University is being met with predictable sniggers among her critics. Should students get restless they might have fun asking Perino about the Cuban Missile Crisis – the 38-year-old once admitted to having no idea about what all the fuss had been about all those years ago.

* While fearsome rock chick Courtney Love has never struck me as the kind of woman you could embarrass easily, it seems that band mates have succeeded in locating her weak spot.

Among the hell-raiser singer's more unlikely romantic conquests in recent years was one Steve Coogan, the man behind that national treasure of fictional broadcasting Alan Partridge. Despite the said liaison occurring some five years ago, Kurt Cobain's widow complains that she still isn't being allowed to forget it.

"I'm in a band with three Brits and it never, ever ends," sighs the star, who reveals that she still has to endure Partridge catchphrases on a regular basis while on the road. "It's 'Back of the net!' or 'Cashback!' or whatever," she says. "It's torture. I walked into the studio recently and they'd put up this giant poster of Alan Partridge on the wall. I was like 'You take that down, right now!'"

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Paddy's Pub isn't the best place to turn for child care: The guys of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia once purposefully started serving underage kids to get more business, and  adopted a Dumpster baby to exploit as a TV star. But now that star Kaitlin Olson is pregnant in real life, get ready to see Sweet Dee with child this season.

"Ultimately we realized we were never going to be able to hide it, realistically," co-creator, executive producer, star and baby daddy Rob McElhenney tells TVGuide.com. "So we knew we had to embrace it and put it into the show."

Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson expecting first child

Although the writers could have felt limited by the development, co-creator, executive producer and star Glenn Howerton says the pregnancy provided new opportunities for Season 6, premiering Thursday, Sept. 16 at 10/9c on FX.

"Why not put our own spin on that, the way we put our own spin on a lot of other things," he says. "It has been done so many times, it became very challenging for us to try and figure out something that hadn't been done a million times."

Olson, who's been married to McElhenney since 2008, says she was happy not to have to wear giant shirts and carry around boxes — TV's standard tricks for hiding an actress' pregnancy.

"Being able to write it into the show and document it has been really awesome," Olson said. "It just happened to work out perfectly where I was shooting during my second trimester and I felt really good."

Watch full episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The cast and crew say the pregnancy will not be addressed in every episode, but promise a whodunit episode, in which the guys try to figure out who the father is, as well as a Dee-gives-birth episode this season. Just don't tell us that Mac, Dennis, Charlie and Frank will actually become — gasp — softies at the sight of Sweet Dee's growing belly.

"I wouldn't say that any of them are that compassionate," Olson says. "They do come around ... you get to see how they all kind of respond to it."

The series will explore domesticity in various ways this season, as Dennis will get hitched to his high school sweetheart. Both Dennis' surprise nuptials and Sweet Dee's pregnancy are recurring storylines throughout the season, which will also welcome guest stars such as Dave Foley, Jason Sudeikis, and Tom Sizemore.

"It was an interesting challenge for us to do something a little different, which is to have a storyline that continues through more than one episode," Howerton says.

The cast was tight-lipped on how Season 7 (the series' last on its current contract with FX) will address Sweet Dee's new addition.

"The resolution of the pregnancy, where we landed, is something no show has ever done, McElhenney says.

driver from www.tvguide.com

Many economists will tell you that the simplest way to address climate change is just to put a levy on carbon emissions at the source (i.e., coal at the mine, gas at the wellhead, etc.) and use the money to cut taxes elsewhere. The price signal will nudge people away from dirtier energy and toward conservation and cleaner types of power. And now there's even a real-life model to examine. Back in 2008, the Canadian province of British Columbia passed a carbon tax that rises by $5/ton per year. And, according to three economists in the Ottawa Citizen, the early results look good:
In fact, B.C.'s economic growth in 2009—the first full year the tax was in effect—was higher than Canada's as a whole. Unemployment, although high because of wider economic events, is below the national average and does not appear to have jumped when the tax shift came in.

Perhaps even more significantly, for the average taxpayer, the carbon tax shift has been an economic boon. During 2008 and 2009, the tax raised $846 million. However, the province tied the carbon tax to reductions in personal and corporate income taxes, as well as tax credits to offset impacts on low-income individuals. The total value of these offsetting cuts was nearly $1.1 billion over those two years, meaning a net tax reduction for B.C. taxpayers of about $230 million.

While the economic effects of the tax have been negligible, the environmental impacts are expected to be positive. The province's economic modeling projects that the policy will lower greenhouse gas emissions by about 5 per cent. It is too early to say exactly how much reduction has happened so far—in part because Canada has not yet released carbon emissions data for 2009, and because the current level of the tax is still quite low (about four cents per litre of gas). But common sense tells us that people use less oil, gas and coal as their costs rise.

And there are lots of examples of this happening. At UBC, for example, the tax provides a $43-million incentive to reduce fossil fuel consumption; enough money to justify a major investment in ground source heat pumps, high efficiency windows, and other energy efficiency retrofits.

One potential problem, though, is that the carbon tax only applies to a single province, which means that Canadian businesses could still move elsewhere. It'll be interesting to see if this is in fact happening. If not, then it's possible you could see some states down here look closely at this experiment.

Getting a carbon tax enacted across the broader United States would be trickier, mainly because it would affect different regions differently—states that burn a lot of coal for power, like Indiana, would see higher jumps in electric bills than a hydropower state like Washington. As a response to this, carbon-tax proponents will argue that when you factor in all the different uses of carbon, from electricity to the embedded petroleum in products, the regional disparities more or less even out. (See the graph on p. 8 of this report.) But for whatever reason, politicians from coal states don't seem to buy this argument, which makes it much more difficult to pass a carbon tax than it is in a single, relatively homogenous Canadian province.

driver from www.tnr.com

Did you ever worder how it is possible for us to recognize people. Even a skilled writer probably could not

describe all the feafures that make one face different from another. Yet a very young child or even an animal, such as a pigeon-can learn to recognize faces, we all take this ability for granted.

We also tell people apart by how they behave. When we talk about someone's personality, we mean the ways in which he or she acts, speaks, thinks and feels that make individual different from others.

Like the human face human personality is very complex. But describing someone's personality in words is somewhat easier than describing his face. If you were asked to describe what a "nice face" looked like, you probably would have a difficult time doing so.

But if you were asked to describe a "nice person", you might begin to think about someone who was kind, considerate, friendly, warm, and so forth.

There are many words to describe how a person thinks, feels and acts. Fordin Allport, an American psychologists, found nearly 18, 000 English words characterizing differences in people's behavior. And many of us use this information as a basis for describing, or typing, his personality. Book¬worms , conservatives, military typespeople are described with such terms.

People have always tried to "type" each other. Actors in early Greek drama wore masks to show the audience whether they played the villains (if A) or the hero's role. In fact, the words "person" and "personality" come from the Latin persona, meaning "mask" . Today, most television and movie actors do not wear masks. But we can easily tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" because the two types differ in appearance as well as in actions.

Before considering this question, it will be useful to introduce some related concepts. Conflict, defined as opposition a-mong social entities directed against one another, is distinguished from competition , defined as opposition among social entities independently striving for something which is in inadequate supply. Competitors may not be aware of one another, while the parties to a conflict are. Conflict and competition are both categories of opposition, which has been defined as a process by which social entities function in the disservice of one another. Opposition is thus contrasted with cooperation, the process by which social entities func-tion in the service of one another. These definitions are necessary because it is important to emphasize that competition between individuals or groups is inevitable in a world of limited resources,but conflict is not. Conflict,never¬theless, is very likely to occur,and is probably an essential and desirable element of human societies.

Many authors have argued for the inevitability of war from the premise that in the struggle for existence among animal species,only the fittest sur¬vive. In general,however,this struggle in nature is competition,not conflict. Social animals,such as monkeys and cattle,fight to win or maintain leadership of the group. The struggle for existence occurs not in such fights,but in the competition for limited feeding areas and for the occupancy (t&'fif) of areas free from meat-eating animals. Those who fail in this competition starve to death or become victims to other species. This struggle for exis¬tence does not resemble human war,but rather the competition of individu¬als for jobs,markets,and materials. The essence of the struggle is the competition for the necessities of life that are insufficient to satisfy all.

Among nations there is competition in developing resources, trades, skills,and a satisfactory way of life. The successful nations grow and pros¬per (3$:^); the unsuccessful decline. While it is true that this competition may induce efforts to expand territory at the expense of others, and thus lead to conflict,it cannot be said that war-like conflict among nations is in¬evitable , although competition is.

The view over a valley of a tiny village with thatched roof cottages around a church; a drive through a narrow village street lined with thatched cottages painted pink or white; the sight over the rolling hills of a pretty collection of thatched farm buildings — these are still common sights in parts of England. Most people will agree that the thatched roof is an essential part of the attraction of the English countryside.

Thatching is in fact the oldest of all the building crafts practised on the British Isles (^ -rfe-itr.$7). Although thatch has always been used for cottage and farm buildings, it was once used for castles and churches, too.

Thatching is a solitary (#fe tj tfj) craft, which often runs in families. The craft of thatching as it is practised today has changed very little since the Middle Ages. Over 800 full-time thatchers are employed in England and Wales today, mai itaining and renewing the old roofs as well as thatching newer houses. Many property owners choose thatch not only for its beauty but because they know it will keep them cool in summer and warm in winter.

In fact, if we look at developing countries, over half the world lives under thatch, but they all do it in different ways. People in developing countries are often reluctant to go back to traditional materials and would prefer modern buildings. However, they may lack the money to allow them to import the necessary materials. Their temporary mud huts with thatched roofs

of wild grasses often only last six months. Thatch which has been done the British way lasts from twenty to sixty years, and is an effective defence against the heat.

Many of his novels and short stories are about people with troubles and problems. "Travels with Charley" is different; it's a book about traveling around the United States. John Steinbeck and Charley traveled together from New York to Maine and then to the Midwest. From the Midwest, they went west to California. On their way back east, they visited Texas. Finally, John and Charley traveled through the South, and back up north to New York.

John Steinbeck's journey took three months to complete. When he got home, he wrote about what he saw and heard when he crossed the country. He decided that Americans were wonderful people, and that the United States was full of peaceful towns, great cities, huge mountains, and beautiful parks. Charley seemed to enjoy the trip, although he didn't say or write anything. You might wonder why Charley had no ideas about America. The reason is: he was John Steindeck's dog, a big black dog.

Asteroids are bigger versions of the meteoroids(^i^.)ihat race across the night sky. Most orbit the sun far from Earth and don't threaten us. But there are also thousands whose orbits put them on a collision course with Earth.

Buy $ 50 million worth of new telescopes right now. Then spend $ 10 million a year for the next 25 years to locate most of the space rocks. By the time we spot a fatal one, the scientists say, we'll have a way to change its course.

Some scientists favor pushing asteroids off course with nuclear weapons. But the cost wouldn't be cheap.

Is it worth it? Two things experts consider when judging any risk are: 1) How likely the event is;

and 2) How bad the consequences if the event occurs. Experts think an asteroid big enough to destroy lots of life might strike Earth once every 500,000 years. Sounds pretty rare — but if one did fall, it would be the end of trie world. " If we don't take care of these big asteroids, they'll take care of us, "says one scientist. " It's that simple."

The cure, though, might be worse than the disease. Do we really want fleets of nuclear weapons sitting around on Earth? "The world has less to fear from doomsday^^i^f) rocks than from a great nuclear fleet set against them, " said a New York Times article.

But these days, parts of the southern France are laying claim to the ancient rite. From the C6te Basque to the arenas of Aries and Beziers, he traditions of the corrida have spread to towns where bullfighting has long been banned, and been embraced «th such enthusiasm you'd think the sport had been born there. The rising passion for blood and sand has seen denounced by animal-rights activists. Last month someone set off a bomb near the bullring in Carcassonne, 100 miles southeast of Toulouse. Yet France's impassioned aficionados fiercely defend their right these moral rituals. Bullfighting, they insist, is part of their indigenous heritage, an expression of a shared regional culture that should be protected.

The rest of the Continent should take note. The paradox of an ever-more-united Europe is that as borders jetween member states become less important, so do the nations themselves—and regional identities assert hemselves. It's easy to forget that most European nation-states were created as we know them only during the

19th century, after a long succession of bloody conflicts. "If the chances of war had been a little different, all the regions sharing the corrida might have been together," argues Jean Michel Mariou, a stalwart fan of bullfighting. On both side of the Pyrenees there are Basques, there are Catalans, there are common cultures, he says. "The corrida is only one expression of it."

Bullfighting isn't the only cultural tradition that has begun to transcend borders, of course. To name but one other: the Celtic revival, built largely around musical affinities that encompass the coast of Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall, Brittany and Normandy. But while bagpipes may stir the blood, they don't spill it. And the violence of bullfighting appalls many people who don't feel they share in the culture of the corrida.

"The concept of lasting local tradition doesn't mean anything anymore," says Josyane Wuerelle, coordinator of the Federation de Liasions Ami- Corrida in Agde, just south of Montpellier. Bullfighting is about attracting tourists, not honoring local history, she argues. .Robert Marge doesn't see it that way, of course. He recently declined an invitation to organize a bullfighting in Paris's enormous Stade de France. "We didn't want to sell our souls by bringing the corrida to a region where it doesn't exist," he explains. But he has also got the sense to know that some traditions, like nitroglycerin, don't travel well.