Gary Barlow's Jubilee songs top single and album charts - BBC News
Gary Barlow has topped the UK single and album chart with his tracks inspired by the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
Sing, the title of both the single and album, was recorded with musicians from across the Commonwealth.
Its success comes a week after Barlow helped stage the Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace.
The album chart saw the return of Paul Simon's Graceland at number 10, 25 years after its release.
The hugely successful yet controversial album featured South African musicians when there was a cultural boycott of the country over apartheid.
New entries in the album chart were dominated by music veterans, with Dexys, formerly Dexy's Midnight Runners, entering the chart at number 13 with One Day I'm Going to Soar, 32 years after their first album charted.
Adele's album 21 dropped out of the top 10 for the first time since its release in January 2011, slipping to number 12 in its 72nd week in the chart.
And US veterans The Beach Boys' studio album, That's Why God Made the Radio, reached number 15 in its opening week. The album's release coincides with the US band's 50th anniversary.
Biggest sellingBarlow's Sing, which was co-written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, features 210 musicians including the African Children's Choir, Aboriginal guitarist Gurrumul, Slum Drummers from Kenya's Kibera slum and the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force Band, as well as the Military Wives choir - and Prince Harry on tambourine.
The Official Charts Company said the song, which is raising money for the Queen's Jubilee charities, was the biggest selling number one of the year so far, selling 142,000 copies in the past week.
In the UK singles chart there were three new entries in the top three, while last week's number one, Feel the Love by Rudimental, fell to number four.
US rapper Flo Rida's Whistle entered the chart at number two, while Usher's latest single Scream was at five followed by DJ Fresh's The Power, which features Dizzee Rascal, at six.
Other new singles in the chart include Nelly Furtado's Big Hoops at 14 and Justin Bieber's All Around the World at 30.
Leanne Mitchell, winner of the BBC's talent search The Voice, failed to capitalize on the final show's seven million viewers and missed out on the top 40 altogether.
Her song, a cover of Whitney Houston's Run To You, landed at number 45.
Facebook's growth rate is slowing, report finds - San Jose Mercury News
NEW YORK (AP) -- Facebook's growth appears to be slowing, particularly in the U.S., according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Unique U.S. visitors to the wildly popular social media site rose 5 percent in April to 158 million, according to data attributed to comScore. ComScore confirmed the data.
That's the slowest growth rate since comScore started tracking data in 2008.
Users spent more than six hours a month on the site in April, up 16 percent from the prior year. Still, that's a slower growth rate than the 23 percent increase in 2011, according to comScore data cited in the report.
Facebook went public May 18 in a widely anticipated market debut. But the stock price has slid since then. Facebook's stock fell again Monday, closing down 10 cents to $27.
Investors are concerned about Facebook's ability to keep increasing revenue and make money from its growing mobile audience. Meanwhile, many analysts hold positive long-term ratings on the stock.
The company has been rolling out new offerings for mobile users, including apps for taking photos, messaging and for managing business brand pages.
It is also unveiling an app center to allow users to find Facebook-related games and other applications more easily.
Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has nearly a billion users worldwide.
On Tuesday, comScore will publish a report measuring
the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook. The report, previewed on a comScore blog post last week, also looks at other things brands do to promote themselves on Facebook beyond paid advertising. Such "earned media" can include Facebook users sharing a post about the brand.Google, French groups reach deal in online-books dispute - San Jose Mercury News
PARIS -- Even as a dispute over Google's (GOOG) digital book project deepens in the United States, the Internet company said Monday that it had reached an agreement in France that could bring back to life thousands of out-of-print works.
The French Publishers' Association and the Societe des Gens de Lettres, an authors' group, dropped lawsuits in which they contended that Google's book-scanning here violated copyright. Google agreed to set up a "framework" agreement under which publishers would be able to offer digital versions of their works for Google to sell.
"Our hope is that these path-breaking partnerships will help jump-start the emerging French electronic book market," said Philippe Colombet, head of Google Books France.
While e-book sales have surged in the United States, they have been held back in France, and across much of Europe, by disputes over rights and other issues.
The deal is modeled on agreements that Google struck separately with two leading French publishers, Hachette and La Martiniere. Under all of these agreements, the publishers retain control over many conditions of the book-scanning project, including which titles are made available.
"What we are saying is that this agreement respects our copyright law in France," said Christine de Mazieres,
managing director of the French Publishers' Association. "That is very important."It is also a key difference with proposals to settle U.S. litigation over Google's book scanning. In those talks, the court last year dismissed a $125 million settlement proposal, under which any book that had been scanned would automatically be included in Google's database unless the rights holder specifically opted out.
The parties to the U.S. talks have been unable to reach a new agreement. This month, a judge granted authors class-action status in the dispute.
Google said this means France is now the only country where it has an industrywide book-scanning agreement in place to cover works that are out of print but still under copyright -- a category that covers a majority of the world's books.
"No question this is an innovation," Colombet said. "We are interested in exporting these deals elsewhere."
Publishers in other European countries have mostly been waiting to see what happened in the U.S. talks and the French litigation before developing their own strategies with regard to out-of-print works.
The agreement is not binding on French publishers, which retain the right to exclude their books from Google. The publishers' association includes 600 members.
Meanwhile, other digital book initiatives are under way in France. The Parliament recently passed a law authorizing the French National Library to scan so-called orphan works -- out-of-print books whose copyright holder cannot be found -- for an openly available digital repository. Orphan works would be automatically included unless the rights holders objected within six months.
The deal with Google ends six years of legal battles with the publishers' and authors' groups.
Pete Cosey, jazz guitarist, dies at 68 - BBC News
Pete Cosey, a jazz guitarist who was best known for his work in Miles Davis' electric band in the 1970s has died aged 68.
His daughter said he died at a Chicago hospital of complications from surgery on 30 May.
During the 1960s Cosey was a member of the studio band for Chess Records, playing for the likes of Etta James, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters.
But it was his creative sound that attracted the attention of Davis.
He liberally applied the distortion pedal to his licks, punctuated by wah-wah effects, and appeared on some of Davis' most experimental albums including Agharta, Pangaea, Get Up With It and Dark Magus.
"Pete's sound was something quite amazing," Wendy Oxenhorn, from the Jazz Foundation of America told the Chicago Tribune.
"He took blues, funk, rap and jazz and combined it into a new sound."
In recent years, Cosey had suffered from health problems, but the musician had been playing music in children's hospitals and schools.
He also featured in Martin Scorsese's 2003 blues documentary, The Blues: A Musical Journey.
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