professional J. League football team Cerezo Osaka take on a team of 100 Japanese primary school children.

Part 1 (including pre-match analysis in Japanese – kick off at 5 min 50) Part 2 Part 3.

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The European Parliament has failed to offload the half-dozen body scanners it bought in 2005, shortly before MEPs decided the technology was intrusive – even for normal people.

The scanners were bought in the wake of the September 11 attacks, but only turned up in 2005, by which time things had calmed down a bit. They were quietly put into storage pending another emergency.

The emergency, when it came, was MEPs’ vocal opposition to intrusive body scanners last year – meaning the scanners had to be offloaded once someone remembered the EU had its own cache of perv scanners still lying around Strasbourg somewhere.

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However, it seems the MEPs might have to face up to the fact that the only likely buyers are probably power mad despots, paranoid oligarchs, or an unwieldy bureaucracy with more money than sense.

Which probably means the scanners will be going straight back to the basement at the European Parliament.

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The battle between Apple and Google is heating up, with execs taking potshots at each other and Silicon Valley insiders choosing sides – some by getting new business cards.

“It’s World War III. Amazing animosity is motivating two of the most powerful people in the industry,” a “well-connected” investor told The New York Times, referring to Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt. “This is emotional. This is the biggest ego battle in history. It’s incendiary.”

[..]

Microsoft, for its part, is being unusually cordial to its one-time bête noire. First, Steve Ballmer praised Apple’s App Store, and now The Seattle Times reports that Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith recently gave “a nod of support” for Apple’s patent-infringement lawsuit against Android-phone maker HTC.

And then there are the persistent rumors that Apple is in talks with Microsoft to dump Google from its privilged spot as the iPhone’s – and the iPad’s? – default search engine and instead promote Redmond’s Bing into that role.

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Orwell Rolls In His Grave [trailer, Google Video 1h43m] is a 2003 documentary exploring the Fourth Estate, corporate ownership, and the power to control public perception.

Variety review. TurnOffYourTv.com synopsis and review. Complete on YouTube [Part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11]
Bonus related watching: Toxic Sludge Is Good For You [Google Video 45m] exploring the work of public relations firms and media in affecting public perception.

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Each year some 30 million American men undergo testing for prostate-specific antigen, an enzyme made by the prostate. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1994, the P.S.A. test is the most commonly used tool for detecting prostate cancer.

The test’s popularity has led to a hugely expensive public health disaster. It’s an issue I am painfully familiar with — I discovered P.S.A. in 1970.

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And thus, our true colours reveal. Since Obama was the young newcomer, technically savvy, many of us were hoping that he might support patent and/or copyright reform. In case our story earlier on this subject didn’t already tip you off, this certainly will: Obama has sided squarely with the RIAA/MPAA lobby, and backs ACTA. No copyright and/or patent reform for you, American citizens!

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Israel is launching a potentially trailblazing experiment in organ donation: Sign a donor card, and you and your family move up in line for a transplant if one is needed.

The new law is the first of its kind in the world, and international medical authorities are eager to see if it boosts organ supply. But it has also raised resistance from within Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority.

These opponents say it discriminates against them because their religious convictions forbid the donation of their organs, and while they are unlikely to get the law reversed, they have the political clout to slow its implementation.

I don’t understand why they feel it discriminates against them – unless their religion doesn’t forbid receiving organs, but that would make their religion inconsistent, right?

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Germany’s state broadcaster is locked in a row with the Church of Scientology which wants to block an upcoming feature film that depicts the controversial organisation as totalitarian and unethical.

Bis Nichts Mehr Bleibt, or Until Nothing Remains, dramatises the account of a German family torn apart by its associations with Scientology. A young married couple joins the organisation but as the wife gets sucked ever more deeply into the group, her husband, who has donated much of his money to it, decides to leave. In the process he loses contact with his young daughter who, like his wife, is being educated by Scientology instructors.

Scientology leaders have accused Germany’s primary public TV network, ARD, of creating in top secret a piece of propaganda that sets out to undermine the group, and have demanded to see it before it is broadcast.

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The team from Southwest Broadcasting (SWR), the public broadcaster in charge of the project, went about its work with an unusual degree of secrecy. Signs, screenplays and even the director’s clapboard all bore a fake title, “The Dead Man in the Sound,” in a bid to disguise the project’s actual subject matter. Shooting for the film, which was produced for Germany’s consortium of public broadcasters ARD, was kept completely secret. The filmmakers plan to make the project public for the first time this week, when they present the completed film on Tuesday. The drama will air on March 31 under the title “Until Nothing Is Left.”

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Health authorities in the U.S. have for the first time used department store credit cards to help trace the source of a recent salmonella outbreak that left hundreds of Americans ill.

Investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were scrambling to find the source of the outbreak when they hit upon the idea of tracking grocery purchases of those who became ill.

With permission from the patients, health authorities followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat.

Never before had the CDC successfully mined the mountain of data that supermarket chains compile.

“It was really exciting. It was a break in the investigation for sure,” CDC epidemiologist Casey Barton Behravesh said.

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A doctor accused of faking research for a dozen years in published studies that suggested after-surgery benefits from painkillers including Vioxx and Celebrex pleaded guilty Monday to one count of federal health care fraud.

An attorney for Dr. Scott Reuben said the anesthesiologist will have to repay $361,932 in research grants and forfeit assets worth at least $50,000 as penalty for his conduct following a plea hearing in U.S. District Court.

He managed to do this for twelve years before he was caught. He was wrong, but so were the magazines publishing the results, the local hospital that was supposed to check the results, and Pfizer for claiming they just gave the money and were not “involved” in the research.