New Scientist
Religion a figment of human imagination
Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.
That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.
www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/human-evolution/dn13782
-religion-a-figment-of-human-imagination.html
Also in
• Thaindian News
Is religion a figment of human imagination?
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/is-religion-a-figment-of-human
-imagination_10042722.html

Bloomberg
Brown braces for UK local election defeat after party revolt
‘The Conservatives were so weak up there that it eroded their capacity to win seats in Parliament,' says Tony Travers, London School of Economics. ‘Labour is riding towards the same problem in the south. Once you lose your local-government base, you lose your ability to win national elections.'

The results also will help determine the timing of the next general election. While Patrick Dunleavy, a London School of Economics government professor, says that: ‘it would be optimal for Labour to have a vote in 2009,' bookmaker Ladbrokes Plc expects Brown, 57, to hold off on a vote until the May 2010 deadline to give himself and his party as much time to recover as possible.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aST3TxgRQr80&refer=uk
Also in
• Economic Times, India
British elections threaten blow for Brown
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/British_elections
_threaten_blow_for_Brown/articleshow/2989466.cms

Le Temps, France
Gordon Brown affronte une crise sans precedent
Article includes comments from Patrick Dunleavy, professor of political science and public policy at LSE.
http://www.letemps.ch/template/international.asp?page=4&article=230811

AFP
London road price scheme fuels election debate
The director of the London School of Economics' Greater London Group, Tony Travers, said the charge had been ‘a success in terms of its implementation, and it's good for London as a sort of brand identifier, but it doesn't actually reduce congestion.’ Although the number of cars on the streets has fallen, it has had little effect in cutting congestion because of an increase in pedestrianised zones, he said. ‘It's a kind of token policy which signals something, and it does that really, really well...It's a mild strike by a government over the globally dominant car, but I don't think it does a great deal more than that.’
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j98-Qe4OMnJ6cBM_XI0WRIzLMJtw

Foreign Policy
Beyond City Limits
Article by Professor Richard Burdett, director of the Urban Age programme at LSE.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/login.php?story_id=4119&URL=

Financial Express
Joseph and the amazing technicalities
Could there be a better way to regulate the industry? The regulations could be countercyclical, requiring banks to be like the biblical Joseph and raise more money in the fat years to see them through the lean ones. Defining the cycle may sound prohibitively difficult but Charles Goodhart, a professor at the London School of Economics, suggests a way around it: monitoring whether the pace of loan growth or the rate of increase of asset prices was moving sharply above trend, and requiring banks to find more capital if the alarm sounds.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Joseph-and-the-amazing-technicalities/302286/2

Daily Telegraph
BNP poised for gains in the capital
The Far-Right is on course to make its biggest-ever electoral breakthrough in Britain this week, anti-fascist campaigners have admitted. At Betfair, the online bookmaker, the BNP are odds-on to win, with the price as short as 1/2. Tony Travers, a local government expert at the London School of Economics, says a BNP victory in the assembly election would be ‘the biggest prize the extremist Right has ever won in British politics’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=
/news/2008/04/27/nelect527.xml

Sunday 27 April

AFP
China-Dalai Lama talks unlikely to bring success: analysts
Observers have blamed the failure of previous talks - the last round was in July 2007 - on the fact that China's negotiators were powerless, low-level officials. ‘The first indication of how serious China is will be if they send out someone more senior with real and substantive negotiating power,’ said Andrew Fischer, a Tibet expert at the London School of Economics. Otherwise: ‘this is unlikely to be more than just a dialogue,’ he said.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hE9__leZEmyozY3VdceV6o01ocOQ

Radio Free Europe
Afghanistan: Taliban evolves into network of groups
Antonio Giustozzi is a research fellow at the London School of Economics who has studied the evolution of the Taliban since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. Giustozzi said it would be wrong to consider today's Taliban a single ethnic group or tribe. ‘I would basically describe it as a religious network which turned into a political movement,’ Giustozzi says. ‘And then they started expanding - co-opting other religious networks, and then gradually going beyond those religious networks to start forming alliances with local communities or local power players.’
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2008/04/EAE848E5-E3AF-49B8-9D6D
-D27BA748F251.html

The Dawn, Pakistan
World Bank: a break with tradition
Article by Martin Jacques, visiting fellow in the Asia Research centre at LSE.
http://www.dawn.com/2008/04/27/op.htm (scroll down)

Times
Tony Blair friend in bribery probe
Article about Victor Dahdaleh which states: ‘His foundation has also given more than £1m to the London School of Economics, a home of Blairite “third way” politics, and he serves as a governor of the LSE alongside Cherie Blair.’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3822557.ece
Also in
• Gulf Daily News
Blair's friend is named in Alba bribery scandal
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=215836&Sn=
BNEW&IssueID=31039

Saturday 26 April

Wall Street Journal
For UK's prime minister, local votes will provide a test
Article includes comments from Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at LSE.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120916020037145807.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Late-edition headlines

The Australian
The man holding Boris's leash
London School of Economics political scientist Patrick Dunleavy says that Livingstone has been outstandingly successful, having helped to win the 2012 Olympics, overseen a long boom in the city's economy and won praise for bold reforms such as his ultimately popular introduction in 2003 of a congestion charge for driving into the city centre.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23597961-5013871,00.html

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