THE HOTEL chain Marriott recently announced that it will cease selling "adult content"i.e., pornographyin its newer hotels. Anyone who knows a bit about the hotel business might find this move a bit confusing. After all, porn is still a moneymaker for chains like Marriott, which by some estimates was earning $175 per room, per year in smut peddling alone. But there does seem to be a method to Marriott's madness. Politico's Ben Smith explains that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, recently left the Marriott board. The chain's owners are "longtime Romney supporters," Smith notes. And social conservatives, apparently, hit Mr Romney hard on the porn "issue" during the ex-governor's 2008 campaign for the GOP nomination. (One critic called Mr Romney a "major pornographer.") So in some sense, Mr Smith argues, Marriott appears to be doing Mr R...

IT IS only a paragraph long, but the leaders of the European Union fought over it for hours. The words in the conclusions (PDF) of the European summit on February 4th hide the deep cracks that have been re-opened within the EU over how to restore the euro zone after the year-long sovereign-debt crisis Building on the new economic governance framework, heads of state or government will take further steps to achieve a new quality of economic policy coordination in the euro area to improve competitiveness, thereby leading to a higher degree of convergence, without undermining the single market. Non-euro members will be invited to participate in the coordination. This is a long-winded reference to the competitiveness pact that France and Germany had wanted to unveil at the summit. The idea is for leaders of the euro zone to agree to co-ordinate and align their economic policies more deeply in sensitive areas like wages, pensions and taxation. The declared aim is to encourage "con...

CATHERINE Ashton has been given a difficult mission: go to Egypt to tell Hosni Mubaraks regime to begin political reforms immediately. Events in Cairo continue to push Baroness Ashton into the limelight. If ever there was a moment to raise her game as the EUs foreign-policy chief, as I suggested she should do in my column this week, this is it. She got a roasting in the European parliament on Wednesday for being too invisible, too late and too timid. Vous tes une rsistante de la vingt-cinquime heure, said the leader of the European greens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. (You are a resister of the 25th hour", in other words, a Johnny-come-lately in supporting the protesters). To be fair, Baroness Ashton has stopped issuing communiqus and has started speaking more frequently in person, including to TV cameras. By her own admission, though, she will not step an inch beyond the agreed line. Im not somebody who can go out and give my personal view, she told MEPs, I speak for the European...

MICE are coming to an airport near you. An Israeli start-up company, BioExplorers, has harnessed the rodents' olfactory abilities to develop an explosive-detecting system that could have applications in the aviation industry. The New Scientist explains how the machine would work: Along one side of an archway [in a device similar to a full-body scanner], a detection unit contains three concealed cartridges, each of which houses eight mice. During their 4-hour shifts in the detector, the mice mill about in a common area in each cartridge as air is passed over people paused in the archway and through the cartridge. When the mice sniff traces of any of eight key explosives in the air, they are conditioned to avoid the scent and flee to a side chamber, triggering an alarm. To avoid false positives, more than one mouse must enter the room at the same time. Mice are even better than dogs at this, apparently, thanks to a greater quantity of "olfactory receptor genes". BioExplore...

HERE'S something I hadn't known: first, that some people consider the use of anyways to mark an ill-educated boob (I'd have just thought it casual). Second, according to Gabe at Motivated Grammar , that anyways is an "adverbial genitive", and so in this form is grammatically equivalent to sometimes and always. I'd never thought about how that s got there, but now I see that that genitive s is just a grammatical sibling of the possessive 's in Mary's house. Why did always become mandatory, sometimes become two-way ("sometime" for the adjective, as in "a sometime grammar pundit", and "sometimes" for the adverb, as in "I pontificate on grammar sometimes"), and anyway become a prescriptivist shibboleth? Gabe doesn't know, and I don't either, but there are the facts. The linguistic fact is that there's nothing wrong with anyways, but the sociological suggestion is that you should use anyways only in the co...

A RELIABLE filler-item for newspapers the world over is the sponsored survey. You know the sort of thing: articles headed "Children who eat breakfast cereal do better in school", which reveal in the final paragraph that the "new research" was paid for by a cereal-maker. These stories are annoying not just because they are lazy journalism, but because so often they muddle up cause and effect. I am perfectly willing to believe that children do better at school, on average, if they begin their day with a proper breakfast sitting at a table with a spoon, bowl and glass of milk, compared to some desperate child who has to hunt for a packet of Monster Munch in the cupboard to start the day, because the rest of the family is still asleep. But what you are picking up there is not, I suspect, primarily a story of the nutritional superiority of cornflakes over crisps. By the same token, I am sure that you could conduct surveys that show better school performance for children ...

THE World Trade Organisation (WTO) has decided that Boeing received illegal subsidies from the American government to help with its development of the 787 Dreamliner. Two correspondents discuss the disputes that are keeping the WTO, Boeing and Airbus busy, and many trial lawyers happy.