Apple on the verge of major Google counter-attack. I understand that Apple is very close to the launch of a direct search engine competitor to Google. There has been much dithering at the company in recent years in this area, but two things are notable: gradually since last Summer, Apple has been dumping Google and its other products as iphone apps; and in the last six months, a major search engine enhancement has been developed inside the late Steve Jobs’s brainchild.
Also: stay tuned for more Googlegraft news at the The Slog over the next 24 hours.
Who were the New Romantics inside Number Ten? Since the Mail’s odd story by Glenn Owen at the weekend, half the blogosphere is rushing round in circles trying to identify the two ’10 Downing Street non Cabinet but high-profile middle-aged’ public figures who had an affair (now over) at some point. The other half is sniffily writing it off as a distraction, but they couldn’t be more wrong.
Rather alarmingly – and sadly in many ways – Sam Cameron’s name keeps on popping up as one of the participants. Less credible (to me) is the suggested involvement of Bonker Johnson: as much is being made of the fact that, when David Cameron was told, he was “stunned to the core”, I can’t imagine anyone being stunned by learning of a Mayoral sex dalliance. There is a gag in there about May Oral Sex, but I can’t be bothered.
One would, however, be stunned if one’s good lady wife was up to no good. We shall see: for myself, I have a problem with this ‘name-tease’ thing, for two reasons: one, I don’t trust Glenn Owen and two, given the Mail’s general feelings about Cameron, I would’ve thought they’d publish and be damned.
That said, it does look as if the story has a real basis in fact. So maybe what we should be looking for is an answer to the second factor above: why would the MoS not drop Dave in it? Could it be, for example, that one or both of the star-crossed lovers are folks the Mail likes? Or that one of the horizontal joggers has stuff on former Mail hacks to impart should they have been foolish enough to go with names?
I don’t know if the Bookies are taking bets on all this. But if the odds on Andy Coulson were long enough, I might be tempted to have a flutter.
Is Angela Merkel being blackmailed into saving the Euro? Last February, European Goldman Sachs boss and (sometimes) confidante of Angela Merkel Alexander Dibelius mouthed off in the German media by telling Bild, “An insolvent Greece must not happen. There must therefore be a rescheduling or a restructuring of the Greek debt burden. There is probably no way around it”. Although Forbes Magazine once again just voted Merkel the World’s Most Powerful Woman, Goldman’s power is much greater: and the Wall Street firm faces a catastrophic exposure to currency failure in the eurozone. Now word is coming on from Frankfurt and Berlin that Dibelius and other Goldman executives are, shall we say, ‘putting more pressure’ on the German leader to save the euro come what may.
The pressure involves – guess what? – certain uncomfortable details of her murky DDR past. Gott in Himmel.
The Slog 