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Tom Brady's back at the helm in Foxborough. Pete Prisco says that means the Pats cruise back to the playoffs, then adds five more teams he sees as postseason breakthroughs.

Former president stands accused at The Hague of murder, rape and torture during Sierra Leone civil warLawyers for the former president of Liberia Charles Taylor began his defence against war crimes charges today, arguing that Taylor was not responsible for the murder, rape and mutilation of civilians by rebels in Sierra Leone and should not be blamed simply out of disgust at the atrocities.The 61-year-old's defence began this morning at the UN-backed special court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, where he denies charges that include enlisting and drugging child soldiers, enforcing sexual slavery, and commanding and arming rebels from his presidential palace in Monrovia during the 11-year conflict, which ended in 2002.Taylor, the first African head of state to be tried by an international court, has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges in a hearing that has heard 91 witnesses since January 2007. His defence is being led by Courtenay Griffiths, a British lawyer. Taylor will take the stand tomo

Swedbank´s interim report January - June 2009 will be published on Friday 17 July at 07.00 CET.

Evan Chesler, head of the old line New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore L.L.P., caused jaws to drop in early January when he challenged lawyers to dispense with the hourly billing system that had sustained the industry for generations.

This paper uses a measure of the relative price of out-of-the-money (OTM) European put and call currency options to forecast daily movements in the dollar/euro exchange rate over the period of January 2002-June 2004. As these OTM options are pure bets on future movements of the exchange rate, their relative price contains information about the market's estimate of the relative probabilities of appreciation or depreciation of the euro over the life of the options. Forecasts that include the relative price of the OTM options offer significantly better out-of-sample predictions of tomorrow's exchange rate than either the simple random walk or an interest rate parity model. These results offer new insight into the puzzle of the day-to-day volatility of currency prices that should be driven by slow-moving macro fundamentals. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.