Canada - B.C. will drop the HST and return to an "improved" PST next year with all previous exemptions, Finance Minister Kevin Falcon announced on Monday in Victoria.

The legislation introduced by Falcon Monday includes some significant changes to the old tax, but only a few basic exemptions - such as those food and fuel - were contained in the bill.

Falcon promised those would be included in regulations to be introduced in the fall.

"As promised, on April 1, 2013 consumers will only pay PST on those goods and services that were subject to PST before the implementation of the HST. All permanent PST exemptions will be re-implemented," said Falcon.

"There will be no PST on purchases like food, restaurant meals, bicycles, gym memberships, movie tickets or for personal services like haircuts, just as it was previously."

For business, there are a number of changes that are being introduced in the legislation, including an online system that will allow businesses to track their PST information and remit payments.

A founder of Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay will take his case to Europe's top court after the Supreme Court in Sweden refused to hear his appeal, his lawyer said Monday.

"We now see no other solution but to take this case on to the European Court of Justice," Jonas Nilsson, who represents Fredrik Neij, wrote in an opinion piece in Sweden's paper of reference Dagens Nyheter.

Neij was originally sentenced to a year in prison by a lower court, but an appeals court in late 2010 shortened his sentence to 10 months.

The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and key financier Carl Lundstroem were sentenced to eight and four months respectively, and the trio was ordered to pay a total of 46 million kronor (5.1 million euros, $6.6 million) in damages for copyright infringement to the music and movie industry.

The number of people under 30 who committed suicide last year over job-hunting futility hit 150 as the employment rate for college graduates sank to a record-low 91 percent, and the jobless rate for youths was nearly double the national average, the National Police Agency said Sunday.

The suicides were around 2.5 times worse than in 2007, when the NPA began tracking such data, but down slightly from 159 in 2010, it said.

Vulnerable children as young as 10 in Northern Ireland are being sexually exploited in the same way as the girls in the notorious Rochdale grooming case, a leading charity has said.

Last week nine men who ran a child sexual exploitation ring in the Lancashire town were jailed for plying youngsters as young as 13 with drink and drugs, so they could "pass them around" for sex.

Judge Gerald Clifton said the men treated the girls "as though they were worthless and beyond respect".

Jacqui Montgomery-Devlin, manager of Barnardo's Safe Choices, told the Belfast Telegraph sexual exploitation is happening in "every town and city across Northern Ireland".

She explained most of the girls she deals with are aged between 12 and 16 - with the youngest so far being just 10 years old.

On Tuesday, Generoso Armenante, a 49-year-old former security guard at a convenience store in the southern town of Salerno, left home after having lunch with his wife - and quietly found a secluded spot where he hanged himself.

Armenante had been fired more than a year ago, and had been struggling to find another job ever since. Next to his body he left a letter: "I decided to end it because I am a failure. I can't live without work."

Unfortunately, he is not alone. Tens of other Italians have also chosen to take their own lives in response to the strain of the economic crisis and the consequent austerity measures.

Borges writes, "dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." As a preeminent mind, Borges rightly considers the mind to be a man's greatest asset, for without mind, a man is nothing. The more oppressive a political system, then, the greater its assault on its subjects' minds, for it's not enough for any dictator, king or totalitarian system to oppress and exploit, but it must, and I mean must, make its people idiotic as well. Every wrongful bullet is preceded and accompanied, then followed up by a series of idiotic lies, but we're so used to such a moronic diet by now, our trepanned intelligentsia don't even squirm in their tenured chairs.

Sane men and women don't consent to kill, rob and rape, much less be killed, robbed and raped, least of all to enrich their masters, and that's why their minds must be molested as early and as much as possible. Hence our nonstop media brainwashing us from the cradle, literally, to the grave. Fixated by flickering boxes, even infants are now mind-conditioned to become scatterbrained idiots before they stagger into kindergarten, to begin a lifelong process of becoming docile and slogan-shouting Democrats and Republicans.

Yes, savages killed, but, like apes and monkeys, our ancestors, they mostly tried to intimidate and trash talk their way out of conflicts. There wasn't a lot of murdering after the haka, frankly. They didn't wipe out entire cities by defecating exploding metal from the sky, nor sit in a brightly lit and spic-and-span office stroking a joy stick to ejaculate missiles half a planet away. Drone hell fire for y'all, with sides of bank-sponsored debt slavery and austerity, plus an unlimited refill of American pop bullshit. Would you like a public suicide with that? No, sir, these savages need to take webcast courses from us sophisticates when it comes to genocide, or ecocide, or any other kind of cides you can think of. When it comes to pure, unadulterated savagery, these quaint brutes ain't got shit on us plugged-in netizens chillaxin' in that shiny upside down condo on da capital-punishment-for the-entire-world, y'all, hill.

In past four months, Gurgaon which has recorded over 100 such incidents. At least one suicide, on an average, is taking place every 36 hours in the city as victims hang themselves, consume poison or jump from a height, according to police figures which show that 104 people have ended their lives in the first four months of 2012.

Besides the alarming trend of suicides, there has been a huge jump in the number of suicide attempts as well. Nearly 88 of the suicide victims since January were aged between 20 and 40 and a bulk of them were in their 20s. A total of 13 victims were aged 15-19 years, police data showed.

There's a great scoop in The Australian today about more lying climate scientists making stuff up.

Claims that some of Australia's leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner.

Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to "more secure buildings" following explicit threats.

Needless to say the University did everything it could to prevent the investigation, arguing that the release of the climate scientists' emails (why am I getting an eerie sense of deja vu here?) "would or could reasonably be expected to...endanger the life or physical safety of any person". But doughty Sydney blogger Simon Turnill appealed against this stonewalling drivel and won. And here's what was revealed when the 11 relevant emails were eventually released.

Ten of the documents "did not contain threats to kill or threats of harm."

Of the 11th, the Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said: "I consider the danger to life or physical safety in this case to be only a possibility, not a real chance."

In the wake of a New York court ruling that says it's not illegal to "merely" view online child pornography, child advocates are urging Internet-savvy federal prosecutors to take over these kinds of cases as two state lawmakers rush to fix the law.

It is "a singular outrage that the highest court in New York has decriminalized the act of viewing child pornography by computer," Patrick Trueman, president and chief executive of Morality in Media, said after the May 8 ruling by the New York Court of Appeals.

The high court unanimously agreed to reverse two of the dozens of child-pornography counts against a former college professor, saying there was no evidence the professor did more than look at some images on his computer.