From guardian.co.uk…

Gordon Brown tonight sounded the death knell for Peter Mandelson’s European career as he ruled out the prospect of a second term for the EU trade commissioner.

In a devastating blow to the ambitions of his former New Labour rival, the prime minister said that Mandelson had signalled that he had no intention of standing for a second term when his current one comes to an end in October next year.

“Peter Mandelson has said he doesn’t want to become the next commissioner,” Brown said, “that he wants to do only one term. But Peter Mandelson has done a great job as commissioner. He is leading the European negotiations to get a trade agreement and I will be talking to him very soon about how we can move that forward.

“I think it’s important to say that Peter Mandelson has done a great job as commissioner and, of course, it’s his wish to do something else.”

Brown’s intervention came just hours after Mandelson said he was happy with the discussion he had had with the prime minister on the subject of a second term and that the two knew “each other’s mind”.

Something fishy here, somewhere.

Characteristically lucid review in the LRB by John Lanchester of Nick Davies’s book, Flat Earth News.

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve…

Gosh! ‘Kirsten’, the lady Eliot Spitzer was allegedly communing with in a fancy New York hotel, is — according to the New York Times — named Ashley Alexandra Dupré. What’s really surprising though is that her MySpace page is still up and active (or at any rate was at 11:10 on March 13).

I am all about my music, and my music is all about me… It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel. I live in New York and am on top of the world. Been here since 2004 and I love this city, I love my life here. But, my path has not been easy. When I was 17, I left home. It was my decision and I’ve never looked back. Left my hometown. Left a broken family. Left abuse. Left an older brother who had already split. Left and learned what it was like to have everything, and lose it, again and again. Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone. I have been alone. I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own. I am here, in NY because of my music. It started when I moved in with a musician during my odyssey to New York. One day, I was in the shower singing “respect.” He and his lead guitarist burst in, had me repeat it and it started. We wrote, rehearsed and toured. After recording a bit with them, I decided to move to Manhattan to pursue my music career. I spent the first two years getting to know the music scene, networking in clubs and connecting with the industry. Now, it’s all about my music. It’s all about expressing me. I can sit here now, and knowingly tell you that life’s hard sometimes. But, I made it. I’m still here and I love who I am. If I never went through the hard times, I would not be able to appreciate the good ones. Cliché, yes, but I know it’s true. I have experienced just how hard it can be. I can honestly tell you to never dwell on the past, but build from it and keep moving forward. Don’t let anyone hold you back or tell you that you can’t…because you can. I didn’t and here I am, just listen to it…. What we Want is my latest track. It’s really about trust, something my past has made very difficult for me to feel. This one was inspired by a guy, who taught me not to confuse my dreams with the sounds of the city…I hope you like it.

Good for her. She has 1,805 friends (excluding Eliot) and lists her ‘influences’ as:

My Brother, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, Carly Simon, Diana Krall, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Aerosmith, Lauryn Hill, Keisha Cole, U2, Jack Johnson, Vivian Green

There’s also a recording of one of her songs on her page. She’s no Ella Fitzgerald. But the opening lines are intriguing, given what we now know:

I know what you want
You know what I want
I know what you need
Can you handle me?

Hmmm…

Interesting story in today’s New York Times…

To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

The researchers said they had also been able to glean personal patient data by eavesdropping on signals from the tiny wireless radio that Medtronic, the device’s maker, had embedded in the implant as a way to let doctors monitor and adjust it without surgery…

I wonder if this will — as Good Morning Silicon Valley suggests — persuade the US Secret Service to wrap Dick Cheney in kitchen foil?