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A vintage Dad’s Army episode, thought to have been lost by the BBC, is to be shown with improved sound and colour – partly thanks to a BBC presenter.

The BBC erased some archived material in the 1970s to save space and money.

BBC Radio WM presenter Ed Doolan made an audio recording of the programme in 1969 and the sound has been digitally re-mastered for transmission quality.

A colour version of Room at the Bottom will be broadcast with the improved audio on BBC2 at 2025 GMT on Saturday.

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The irony is that, as you know, UK law only allows ‘home taping’ for temporary ‘time shifting’. Certainly not for creating a library of recordings lasting 30 years. With their DRM-encumbered iPlayer and other efforts to prevent ‘copying’, it’s even less likely that there will be any duplicate discoveries 30 years from now.

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Belief in God symbolically evaporated when more than a hundred atheists were “de-baptized” with a blow dryer yesterday.

Organizers of the event in Westerville, described as a “coming out party” for atheists, agnostics and humanists, served root beer and crackers with peanut butter and honey to top off the late afternoon ceremony.

“Do you agree that the magical potency of today’s ceremony is exactly equal to the magical efficacy of ceremonial baptism with dihydrogen oxide, and do you agree that the power of all magical ceremonies is nonexistent?” Frank Zindler, president of American Atheists, said to launch the de-baptism.

After a resounding “amen” from the audience, the first person in line yelled, “Dry me brother! I’m free!” The crowd laughed as each person squeezed his or her eyes shut and walked underneath the blow dryer.

“It sounds perhaps frivolous, but it’s a very serious thing,” Zindler said before the ceremony. “The event is more of an invitation to a revolution more than a party in a sense. Until we come out of the closet and let people know our numbers, politicians think they can ignore us.”

Gillian Peiffer, 25, became more vocal about being an atheist after she said she was fired in the fall from a Columbus truck dealership because of her atheism.

“It’s the last form of discrimination that’s still acceptable,” Peiffer said.

[..]

“The de-baptism doesn’t have any magical or supernatural aspect,” event organizer Ashley Paramore said. “It’s just symbolic and a way to out themselves.”

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Opiate painkilling drugs are in critically short supply across the developing world. So why doesn’t the USA just buy the Afghan poppy harvest, process it into painkilling meds, and distribute them to poor countries?

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After a two-year investigation, the Senate names names — Bush, Tenet, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Addington, Rice.

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For years, investors, rivals and regulators all wondered how Bernard L. Madoff worked his magic.

But on Friday, less than 24 hours after this prominent Wall Street figure was arrested on charges connected with what authorities portrayed as the biggest Ponzi scheme in financial history, hard questions began to be raised about whether Mr. Madoff acted alone and why his suspected con game was not uncovered sooner.

As investors from Palm Beach to New York to London counted their losses on Friday in what Mr. Madoff himself described as a $50 billion fraud, federal authorities took control of what remained of his firm and began to pore over its books.

But some investors said they had questioned Mr. Madoff’s supposed investment prowess years ago, pointing to his unnaturally steady returns, his vague investment strategy and the obscure accounting firm that audited his books.

I have some more hard questions. How much longer would he have been able to continue this had the credit crisis not occurred? And how many other firms use the same tricks?