French football 'approved quotas on number of black players’ French football chiefs have been accused of secretly approving unofficial quotas on the number of “athletic” black and Arab players in favour of “intelligent” white players in youth academies groomed for the national squad.    

Van Gogh’s Evolution, From Neophyte to MasterBy TED LOOS While van Gogh’s reputation virtually guarantees that people will flock to a show where his art is the centerpiece, some curators say that adds to the challenge. There are some artists on whom the sun never sets.

 U.S. Alarmed at China BuildupThe Pentagon said China was expanding its advantage over Taiwan and investing heavily in ballistic and cruise missile capabilities that could one day pose a challenge to U.S. dominance in the western Pacific. Read Article   

 Yahoo! and the future of searchYahoo!'s search deal with Microsoft could usher in a new purple patch for the former web giant By Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent
Published: 1:00PM GMT 27 Feb 2010YoelleMaarek says the search deal with Microsoft will allow Yahoo! to focus on front-end search innovations Photo: Yahoo!  Yahoo! and Microsoft’s multi-million pound search deal was given the green light last week by both the US and European regulators. The arrangement, which will see Microsoft’s search technology power Yahoo!’s search engine for the next decade, will probably go totally unnoticed by users of both services, as it is no more than back-end tweaking. But what does the union really mean for the future of Yahoo!’s search offering, ambitions and the overall search market? To some, Yahoo!'s decision to "outsource" its search operation (in exchange for managing the search advertising business of both companies) is a sign that it has ducked out of the search war that's raging between Google and its competitors, including Microsoft's own Bing platform. Indeed, even Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, said it was a "shame" that Yahoo! was apparently exiting the market, as it had some interesting ideas. “I think Yahoo! had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search,” he told delegates at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year. However, according to Yoelle Maarek, senior director of Yahoo! Research, nothing could be further from the truth. The deal, she explains, should be seen as liberating Yahoo! to focus on front-end search innovations, rather than spending time and money on ensuring the back-end technology is working well. If anything, says Maarek, the Microsoft deal has freed the company up to start fighting the search war in the most…

Did the Terror List Fail? by Daniel Klaidman Tamerlan Tsarnaev was on the list, but so are 700,000 other names. But the Boston Marathon case illustrates the limitations of terror watch lists in a democracy where keeping tabs on potential terrorists must be balanced against the civil liberties of citizens. Moreover, in some ways the establishment of the massive, unwieldy list has created other problems that work at cross purposes with its original objective.