The uneasy truce between Charlie Sheen and Two and a Half Men appears to be over. For the past few months, Sheen has been gracious and supportive of the show's new direction with replacement star Ashton Kutcher. But now that he's got a new sitcom in production, Sheen is once again saying that the top-rated CBS comedy is no good without him.
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BRUSSELS (AP) ? The European Commission proposed sweeping reforms Wednesday to protect the confidentiality of personal data online including a "right to be forgotten," which would let people have information about themselves deleted if there was no legitimate reason to retain it.
The Commission said the proposal would safeguard people's privacy and save companies money, but some business interests have already said they will lobby for changes.
If the directive is ultimately adopted, it would update one from 1995, when fewer than 1 percent of Europeans used the internet. To take effect, it needs the approval of the European Council ? the 27 European Union heads of government ? as well as the European Parliament.
The "right to be forgotten" could greatly enhance the rights of people who use social media sites, which sometimes take down photos and posts at a user's request but retain the information instead of deleting it.
The commission, which is the EU's executive branch, cited the case of Max Schrems, 24-year-old Austrian law student who asked Facebook to send him a record of his personal data from three years of using the site. What he received was 1,222 pages of information ? including chats he had deleted more than a year earlier, "pokes" dating back to 2008, invitations to which he had never responded, and hundreds of other details.
For businesses, the primary attraction of the proposal is that they would have just one set of rules to follow rather than 27 different sets, one for each country in the European Union. And they would report to only one data protection authority.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, who outlined the proposal Wednesday, said that would save businesses about euro2.3 billion ($2.98 billion) a year.
Personal information covered by the proposal would include names, photographs, email addresses, bank details, social networking posts, medical information, and various other data.
"The protection of personal data is a fundamental right for all Europeans, but citizens do not always feel in control of their personal data," Reding said.
Reding said many Europeans fear their personal data could be misused, and she argued that, if public trust improved, internet businesses would grow significantly.
But representatives of internet business interests complained that, while the proposal would eliminate the red tape involved in dealing with 27 different data protection authorities, it added new requirements that would be expensive and burdensome, which could inhibit growth in the digital sector.
"The Commission's proposal today errs too far in the direction of imposing prescriptive mandates for how enterprises must collect, store and manage information," said Thomas Boue, Director of European Affairs for the Business Software Alliance. Members of the alliance include Microsoft, McAfee, Adobe, Intel and other internet giants.
"The risk in the proposal's current design is that it will bog down companies with onerous compliance requirements, which could inhibit digital innovation at the expense of job creation and growth."
Wim Nauwelaerts, a Brussels-based legal expert, said the "right to be forgotten" was unclear and would be difficult to implement. Would companies have to delete information only from their own servers and databases or would they also have to try to find other places on the internet to which the information had spread, he asked.
Companies dealing with personal data would face various other mandates, including:
? An obligation to notify national authorities and the individuals involved of serious data breaches as soon as possible, within 24 hours if feasible.
? A requirement to get explicit rather than assumed consent for personal data to be processed.
? An obligation to allow people easier access to their personal data and the ability to transfer their personal data more easily from one service provider to another.
Businesses with fewer than 250 employees would be exempted from some of the requirements, such as the need to appoint a data protection officer.
Breaches of the rules could be punished by fines of up to euro1 million ($1.3 million) or up to 2 percent of the annual revenues of the company.
Gary Clark, an expert with the internet security company SafeNet, said the proposed regulation is needed. "The proposed regulation will give consumers more control over their privacy and will force organizations to reconsider how private data is being handled and stored," he said.
The directive would take effect two years after its adoption.
___________
Raphael Satter in London contributed to this report. Don Melvin can be reached at http://twitter.com/Don_Melvin
Online:
Full text of the proposal: http://bit.ly/p0drKF
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NEW DELHI (AP) ? The ramshackle neighborhoods of northeast Delhi are home to 2.2 million people packed along narrow alleys. Buildings are made from a single layer of brick. Extra floors are added to dilapidated buildings not meant to handle their weight. Tangles of electrical cables hang precariously everywhere.
If a major earthquake struck India's seismically vulnerable capital, these neighborhoods ? India's most crowded ? would collapse in an apocalyptic nightmare. Waters from the nearby Yamuna River would turn the water-soaked subsoil to jelly, which would intensify the shaking.
The Indian government knows this and has done almost nothing about it.
An Associated Press examination of government documents spanning five decades reveals a pattern of warnings and recommendations that have been widely disregarded. Successive governments made plans and promises to prepare for a major earthquake in the city of 16.7 million, only to abandon them each time.
The Delhi government's own estimates say nine out of every 10 buildings in the city are at risk of moderate or significant quake damage, yet the basic disaster response plan it had promised to complete nearly three years ago remains unfinished, there are nearly no earthquake awareness drills in schools and offices and tens of thousands of housing units are built every year without any earthquake safety checks.
Fearing many buildings could lie in ruins after a quake, the Delhi government began work in 2005 with U.S. government assistance to reinforce just five buildings ? including a school and a hospital ? it would need to begin a rudimentary relief operation to deal with the dead, wounded and homeless. Six years later, only one of those buildings is earthquake-ready.
"At the end of the day, people at the helm of affairs are not doing anything," said Anup Karanth, an earthquake engineering expert.
In its attitudes to disaster preparedness India is like many other poor nations ? aware of the danger but bogged down by both sheer inertia and more immediate demands on its resources.
But Delhi faces immense earthquake risks. Last September, two minor jolts sent thousands of scared residents into the streets, and experts say a big one looms on the horizon.
As far back as 1960, after a moderate quake cut power and plunged Delhi ? then a city of 2.7 million ? into darkness, the Geological Survey of India advised that all large buildings in the capital needed to have a plan for earthquake safety.
A series of reports by other agencies have expanded on that conclusion in recent years, but both the city and national governments have ignored almost all of the recommendations.
Some reports were ignored because of sheer apathy, others because of shifting priorities. In a city and country growing at lightning speed with huge problems of poverty and hunger that need more immediate solutions, earthquake preparedness has simply never been at the top of the list. Some plans begun with good intentions simply fell by the wayside.
That's what happened to the 2005 plan to prepare five important buildings in the capital for an earthquake.
Government engineers were sent to California to train. But the following year ? with only the school made earthquake ready ? all the engineers were taken off the project. They were reassigned to build stadiums for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an athletic competition held in Delhi, said M. Shashidhar Reddy, the vice chairman of India's National Disaster Management Agency.
The scale of the problem "really hasn't sunk into the minds of the people," Reddy said.
Just last year, a Delhi government agency ordered all new home buyers to get a building safety certificate that would mark their homes as structurally sound before registering property. But it later withdrew the order, saying there weren't enough engineers trained to conduct such inspections.
"That's like saying let's not have any traffic rules because we don't have enough policemen," said Hari Kumar, who heads Geohazards India, an organization that promotes earthquake awareness.
India, a still developing country plagued by corruption, isn't alone in being unprepared. More than 80 percent of deaths from building collapses in earthquakes in the last three decades occurred in corrupt and poor countries, according to a 2011 study published in the science journal Nature.
The study by Roger Bilham, a geologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Nicholas Ambraseys, a civil and environmental engineer at Imperial College London, compared the loss of life in two magnitude 7.0 earthquakes in 2010. In Haiti, 300,000 died; in New Zealand none did, though a subsequent 6.1 quake there in early 2011 killed 182.
New Zealand, a developed nation, tied for first as the least corrupt in Transparency International's most recent Corruption Perceptions Index. Much poorer Haiti came in 175th out of 178 countries.
In Turkey, which ranked 61st, a 2010 report revealed that the earthquake-prone nation had failed to enforce stricter building codes put in place after a 1999 earthquake killed 18,000 people. Last year, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 5.7 flattened some 2,000 buildings, killed 644 people and left thousands homeless.
In contrast, Japan, which was 14th on the corruption scale, requires that all structures meet a 1981 building code and offers subsidies to retrofit buildings to meet more stringent guidelines set in 1995. About 75 percent of homes and public buildings meet the newer standards.
In India, which ranked 95th, contractors routinely flout regulations, use substandard material and add illegal floors to buildings, while bribing government inspectors to look the other way, said Reddy, the disaster management official. A 2001 quake in the western state of Gujarat killed more than 13,000.
Delhi, which sits near a highly seismically active area, is ranked four out of five on a seismic threat scale used in India.
Geologists believe the Central Himalayan Gap, a 310-mile (500 kilometer) stretch between Nepal and India, is ripe for a major quake. A 6.8 quake along the fault in March 1999 damaged many buildings in Delhi, just 125 to 300 miles (200 to 500 kilometers) from the gap.
Studies show such a large buildup of energy that a shifting of the tectonic plates could cause an 8.7-magnitude earthquake, Bilham said.
Experts also fear the potential damage from a smaller quake closer to the capital. The city lies between two fault lines, and a 4.2 quake in September woke up residents, with many fleeing their buildings. The same month, a magnitude 6.8 quake in India's remote northeast was also felt in the capital.
Either type of quake would cause moderate damage to an estimated 85.5 percent of Delhi's buildings and severe damage to another 6.5 percent, Delhi's disaster management authority said in a 2010 vulnerability assessment. It could also open cracks in the ground several centimeters wide and spread "fear and panic," the report said.
It was India's Department of Meteorology that found northeast Delhi particularly vulnerable in a never-released 2005 study obtained by the AP. That "microzone" study divided the city into nine segments to evaluate the possible impact of an earthquake in each.
While the microzone study is a positive step, the report is only rudimentary and most builders haven't even heard of it, said earthquake engineering expert Karanth, who as a student lived through the Gujarat quake.
India has developed national standards for constructing earthquake-resistant buildings, but they are not mandatory and widely ignored, said Kumar of Geohazards.
Meanwhile, many residents don't realize the danger, or wrongly believe they are safe from it.
When Karanth decided to buy an apartment in 2010, he picked a builder who promised to deliver an earthquake-resistant building. He visited the site often, took photographs of the construction and talked to the engineers in charge.
Last year, he realized the project had none of the promised earthquake safety features. "This is not one or two apartments that I'm talking about. These are thousands of apartment units being constructed," he said.
He complained and demanded an explanation.
Instead, the construction company offered to give him back his deposit.
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HAVANA ? A prominent Cuban government opponent says an imprisoned dissident who went on a hunger strike to protest his four-year sentence has died.
Dissident Elizardo Sanchez heads the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation and says 31-year-old Wilman Villar died Thursday night of pneumonia in the eastern city of Santiago.
Sanchez has been in contact with Villar's family and says the prisoner had been hospitalized for a couple of weeks after pursuing his hunger strike for 50 days.
Villar was arrested Nov. 12, convicted of disrespecting authority and resisting arrest, and sentenced to four years. He protested his sentence by stopping eating.
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SPRINGFIELD, Mass.?? The last of three Massachusetts men charged in the burning of a predominantly black church to protest President Barack Obama's election was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in federal prison on Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors said Thomas Gleason was also ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution. The 24-year-old pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy against civil rights and other charges for what prosecutors called a racially motivated arson.
"This is something that never should have happened anywhere, and certainly not in Springfield, Massachusetts," said Judge Michael A. Ponsor moments after imposing the sentence in U.S. District Court, according to MassLive.com.
Prosecutors said Gleason and two friends burned down the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield on Nov. 5, 2008, hours after Obama was elected as the nation's first black president.
The church was under construction at the time and no one was inside. However, some firefighters were injured battling the blaze.
Michael Jacques was sentenced to nearly 14 years in prison. Benjamin Haskell received a nine-year sentence. All three men are white.
'One night of stupidity'
Ponsor said Gleason received a shorter sentence than his co-conspirators because he had confessed to the crime, cooperated with prosecutors and showed a real potential for rehabilitation, MassLive.com reported.
"He is a highly salvageable young man who has grown up during this experience. It's unfortunate that that's what it took," it quoted him as saying.
In court, Gleason apologized for what he called an "incredibly stupid" act and for the "pain and frustration" it caused the church's community and to his own family.
"Don't let one night of stupidity define who I am," Gleason said.
Reuters reported that the $1.7 million in restitution includes about $124,000 to the church. The remainder of the money goes to insurance companies involved in the case.
The rebuilt church reopened in September.
The Associated Press, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46052395/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
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updated 5:26 p.m. ET Jan. 18, 2012
VANCOUVER, British Columbia - A man was shot and killed in a restaurant of the hotel hosting the U.S. women's soccer team during the Olympic qualifying tournament.
Coach Pia Sundhage said none of her players witnessed the shooting and they were unaware of the incident until it was over. The U.S. is one of three soccer teams at the hotel.
"We were at a meeting. We were meeting and talking soccer," Sundhage said after Wednesday's practice session. "We're safe and secure."
Police were called to the Sheraton Wall Centre at about 8:45 p.m. Tuesday and found the body of a man dead from apparent gunshot wounds in a restaurant.
Teams from Cuba and the Dominican Republic also were staying at the hotel.
U.S. goalie Hope Solo tweeted: "Saved by our instant yoga session. Was about to walk to starbucks when all hell broke loose in the lobby of our hotel! Life is precious..."
Police had not identified the victim and had no information on a suspect. A cracked window and bullet hole could be seen from outside the hotel. It marked the city's first homicide of the year.
Richard Scott, with Soccer Canada, said CONCACAF officials went to the hotel after the shooting to confirm no one was injured.
"I would imagine that probably 99 percent of the athletes would have been in their rooms at that time," he said.
The eight-team CONCACAF tournament begins Thursday with Canada against Haiti. The U.S. team plays the Dominican Republic on Friday.
The tournament runs through Jan. 29.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/46040521/ns/sports-olympic_sports/
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