SO Harry Potter is dead. Hold your ire. I have no idea whether JK Rowling’s young hero has really met his match at the hands of his flat-nosed nemesis Lord Voldemort. What I know is Harry Potter the concept, the brand, the franchise, is now well and truly ended, give or take the odd multimillion-pound earning catch-up film.

Business Day – News Worth Knowing.

Police chiefs have urged websites to remove violent video footage of children fighting, following an investigation by the BBC.

Panorama found that films showing brutal fights between children are regularly uploaded to sharing websites.

BBC NEWS | UK | Web child fight videos criticised.

More than 65,000 homes affected by the severe floods in the Gloucester area are set to get running water restored.

About 140,000 households have been without supply for over a week after the Mythe water treatment works in Tewkesbury was submerged by flooding.

BBC NEWS | UK | End in sight for flooding crisis.

Two news helicopters covering a police chase on live TV collided and crashed to the ground Friday, killing all four people on board.

Both helicopters went down in a park in central Phoenix and caught fire. No one on the ground was hurt

TV news copters collide while covering chase; 4 aboard killed — chicagotribune.com.

Spain’s Alberto Contador steered clear of trouble on the cobbled streets of the Champs-Elysees to seal overall victory in the 2007 Tour de France.

The Discovery Channel rider maintained his 23-second lead over Australian Cadel Evans, with American team-mate Levi Leipheimer taking third place.

BBC SPORT | Other Sport… | Cycling | Contador wins tainted 2007 Tour.

India has got its woman president in Pratibha Patil who won one of the bitterest political campaigns to the top post in the country’s 60-year-old post independence history.

Patil, 72, was voted on Saturday as the 13th president of the country. She won by 306,810 votes against her rival Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who contested the July 19 presidential election as an independent backed by opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Pratibha Patil becomes the first woman President of India- Hindustan Times.

Rain was flung about in what seemed to be great sloshing bucketfuls, liquefying sidewalks, turning intersections into soppy messes, making basements into lagoons. Then suddenly, it stopped.

By the time “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” went on sale here—at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, or 6:01 p.m. Friday Chicago time—it was a clear, bright, brisk night. That which had been blurry with rain now looked crisp and sharp. And so it was, as well, with the most intensely anticipated book in modern publishing history: Now all was visible. Everything was made radiantly plain.

Review: ‘Potter’ still magic in finale — chicagotribune.com.

Women view Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton more favorably than men do, but she still faces skepticism among some women, especially those who are older and those who are married, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

American women supportive but skeptical of Clinton, poll says – International Herald Tribune.

It has been possible for several years now for Americans to dump their landline phone companies and pay much less with services that route calls over the Internet instead of over the regular phone network. For instance, the leader in this business, Vonage, charges just $25 a month for unlimited local and long-distance calling in the U.S. and Canada, much less than most

Personal Technology – WSJ.com.

n a media marketplace heavy on celebrity news, stories are interesting, but pictures reign supreme. Want proof? Just look at the price tags.

The Most Expensive Celebrity Photos – Forbes.com.

An underground steam pipe explosion tore through a Manhattan street near Grand Central Terminal on Wednesday, swallowing a tow truck and killing one person as hundreds of others ran for cover amid a towering geyser of steam and flying rubble. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the explosion was not terrorism, though the blast caused a brief panic about a possible attack.

Huge steam pipe blast kills one in NYC – Yahoo! News.

Britain became separated from mainland Europe after a catastrophic flood some time before 200,000 years ago, a sonar study of the English Channel confirms.

The images reveal deep scars on the Channel bed that must have been cut by a sudden, massive discharge of water.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Megaflood ‘made Island Britain’.

Martin Rike was sure he wasn’t going to die wet and cold in the darkness.

The 500-pound Pine City, Minn., man’s first inner-tube trip ended shortly after it began when the tube was slashed by a sharp rock in the St. Croix River.

TwinCities.com – Copters and boats couldn’t carry him. So rescuers did..

In the final days before the world learns whether Harry Potter lives or dies, spoilers — or those pretending to spoil — are spreading on the Internet.

Get Harry Potter @ 2daydeals

Harry Potter spoilers proliferate – Yahoo! News.

A Brazilian passenger jet crashed and burst into flames Tuesday after skidding off a runway and barreling across a busy highway, officials said. All 176 people on board were feared dead in what would be Brazil’s deadliest air disaster, and at least 15 were killed on the ground.

176 feared dead in Brazil jet crash – Yahoo! News.

Retour aux sources pour Google. Longtemps simple fournisseur d’une technologie de recherche web à des portails comme Yahoo, Google vient d’officialiser la réapparition de ce type de service dans sa gamme. Au lieu de partager les revenus publicitaires Adwords avec ses partenaires, Google propose ainsi à nouveau aux portails, sites d’informations et autres sites marchands, une version hébergée en marque blanche et sans publicité de son moteur de recherche.

Google : moteur de recherche en marque blanche.