For four years the Federal Communications Commission tossed the idea around like a beach ball: a coast-to-coast free wireless service across the low end of the 2GHz "AWS-3" band. The service would pay for itself via advertisements and by selling commercial access to various portions of the license area. The company that proposed the plan, M2Z Networks, would commit to building out the project in a decade, and pay five percent of its annual revenue to the United States Treasury.

But on Wednesday M2Z informed the press that the FCC has told the company and its backers that the Commission is dropping the concept, and that is so:

"We gave careful and thorough consideration to the proposal, but ultimately determined that this was not the best policy outcome," Ruth Milkman, chief of the FCC's Wireless Bureau told us. "We remain vigilant in our efforts to facilitate the universal deployment and adoption of broadband, especially through the much-needed reform to the Universal Service Fund."

Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records and interviews with agency officials shows that the BLM operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.

At a time when the nation drills ever deeper for oil off its shores even as it tries to diversify its energy supply, the federal government has, so far, failed to use the land it already has — some of the world's best for solar — to produce renewable electricity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Nevada, where a Goldman Sachs & Co. subsidiary with no solar background has claims with the BLM on nearly half the land for which applications have been filed, but no firm plan for any of the sites.

We've witnessed momentous analytical and policy errors over the years - and these blunders are allowed to repeat themselves without thorough analysis and review. All this talk about fighting deflation and helping Main Street misses the point - and only feeds the bubble. I'm fed up with ideology trumping sound analysis."

The oil painting was returned over the weekend after the Leopold Museum agreed to pay $19 million (15 million euros) as part of the settlement to the estate of art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray, the original owner.

U.S. authorities had refused to return the painting to the Leopold Museum after it was exhibited in 1998 at the New York Museum of Modern Art because of a claim by her descendants.

Bondi Jaray was forced to sell the painting, "Portrait of Wally," at an unrealistically low price in the prelude to World War II as part of a widespread Nazi campaign that stripped Jews in Austria, Germany and later other European countries of their possessions.

"Portrait of Wally" — which pictures Valerie "Wally" Neuzil, a woman Schiele knew and used as a model — was among more than 100 works the Leopold Foundation had leant to MoMA.

U.S. customs refused to let the work leave the country after Henry Bondi of Princeton, New Jersey, filed a claim that said his late aunt was forced to give up the painting before fleeing Vienna in 1939 to escape to London when Germany annexed Austria.

She died in 1969. Henry Bondi also has since died.

The controversy over the portrait, which the Leopold Museum acquired after the war, contributed to Austria passing a 1998 law that stipulates the restitution of property taken from the country's Jews by the Nazis.

But the restitution law applies to state institutions, not to private museums such as the Leopold Foundation — something that Vienna's Jewish community asserts was exploited by Leopold.

The museum was created by the late Rudolf Leopold. He is credited with assembling Austria's largest and most important private art collection, which includes more than 5,000 works by renowned artists such as Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka.

According to the Jewish community's website, paintings by Schiele, Klimt and Egger-Lienz that were looted by the Nazis were bought by the Austrian state with public funds and given to the Leopold Foundation

The judge, [b]Lynn Leibovitz,[/b] said she was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the men had sought to prevent the police from discovering who was responsible for killing Robert Wone, a lawyer. But Leibovitz offered a damning assessment of the behaviour of the men – Joseph Price, [b]Victor Zaborsky[/b] and Dylan Ward – who lived in a "committed relationship".

The judge said they had lied in claiming that Wone, who was a longstanding friend of Price's and had gone to stay at the Washington house after working late rather than making a long journey home to his wife in Virginia, was killed by an unknown intruder. She described their behaviour in dealing with the police after the killing as suspicious. His body was found laid out neatly on a bed with his arms at his side. There was almost no blood to be seen and no evidence of a struggle. A pathologist suggested Wone had been injected with a paralysing drug.

The police were unable to discover who killed Wone but concluded that the three accused men were covering up for the murderer.

The judge said that the defendants were probably lying about the intruder and had not behaved as might be expected of people who had just endured the shock of a brutal killing by a stranger entering their home.

"Some of the most persuasive evidence in the record supporting the government's position is the demeanour and conduct of the defendants. From the beginning, each one of them … displayed a demeanour wholly at odds with what anyone would expect from an innocent person whose friend had just been murdered tragically and violently in his home," she said.

"It is very probable that the government's theory is correct, that even if the defendants did not participate in the murder some or all of them knew enough about the circumstances of it to provide helpful information to law enforcement and have chosen to withhold that information for reasons of their own."

But the judge said that prosecutors had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Wone family has filed a $20m wrongful death lawsuit against the three men which requires a lower standard of proof.all

Warning, fans, the numbers on the game-clock are flashing wildly. America's ratio is now 92%, thanks to Obama's $1.7 trillion budget, future deficits, exploding debt. Soon, Ka-Booom! Another great nation bites the dust. Depression follows. Goodbye retirement"

....adding in debt payments
on moneys borrowed to fight that war, long-term care for veterans wounded in it, the war's impact on energy prices, and other macroeconomic impacts, the current tax bill for the Iraq war must be at least tripled and probably quadrupled or more to arrive at its real long-term cost......"