1 . Christmas is the most important Christian holiday. For all the cards sent and trees decorated — to say nothing of all the Nativity scenes displayed — Christmas is not the most important date on the Christian calendar. Easter, the day on which Christians believe Christ rose from the dead, has more religious significance than does Dec. 25. Christ’s resurrection means not just that one man conquered death, nor was it simply proof of Jesus’s divinity to his followers; it holds out the promise of eternal life for all who believe in him. If Christmas is the season opener, Easter is the Super Bowl. Read full article > >

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Five myths about Christmas

1 . Christmas is the most important Christian holiday. For all the cards sent and trees decorated — to say nothing of all the Nativity scenes displayed — Christmas is not the most important date on the Christian calendar. Easter, the day on which Christians believe Christ rose from the dead, has more religious significance than does Dec. 25. Christ’s resurrection means not just that one man conquered death, nor was it simply proof of Jesus’s divinity to his followers; it holds out the promise of eternal life for all who believe in him. If Christmas is the season opener, Easter is the Super Bowl. Read full article > >

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Five myths about Christmas

Toby Flood will start at centre alongside Jonny Wilkinson for England in their World Cup quarter-final against France, while Nick Easter, Tom Palmer and Mark Cueto also return to the side.

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Flood starts alongside Wilkinson

Old Bailey bomber Marian Price is charged with encouraging support for an illegal organisation following a parade in Londonderry on Easter Monday.

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Price is charged over Derry march

A&E specialists are warning casualty departments risk being swamped unless there is proper planning for the long Easter and royal wedding weekends.

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Royal wedding weekend A&E warning

Families flying off to European destinations over Easter have been urged to vaccinate their children against measles.

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Travellers put on measles alert

This is what happens when the taxman and the Easter Bunny meet.

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Abstract Sunday: The 2011 Easter-Egg Audit

Universal’s family comedy Hop-the story of the Easter Bunny’s rebellious, Russell Brand-voiced son-leapt to first place at the weekend box office, taking in an estimated $38.1 million so far and putting itself on track to be the biggest weekend opener…

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Hop Bounds to $38 Million

A play directed by Michael Sheen to be performed on the streets, beaches and hills of Port Talbot at Easter is also to become a film.

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Sheen passion play to become film

Two police officers are suspended during a probe into officer conduct prior to the murder of an Easter Ross woman.

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Officers suspended over conduct

In a post about Easter eggs hidden in various Apple icons yesterday, I asked readers if they could figure out a puzzle that has stumped us all for years: What’s the significance of the default number on the Calculator icon? I’m sure you’ve seen it before and dismissed it: Oh, just a placeholder, you might have thought. Doubtful. Apple’s developers and designers have carefully created all of their application icons, working small references to everything from Latin-esque jargon that is used industrywide to the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, into the small graphics. (Read the original post: ” The Secrets Hidden Inside Apple’s Most Famous Icons .”) One member of the Reddit community, CaptainPain , pointed to a comment thread from a similar post about Apple Easter eggs on the UsingMac website  that provided a possible explanation. “The .75 refers to the year 1975, the year Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple,” according to the comment. ”The 12374218 is the number of seconds into the year 1975 (143 days = May 23rd) for when the actual ‘production’ has begun [sic].” Sounds plausible. Was the mystery finally solved? I fired off an email to Steve Wozniak, the engineer who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, asking for confirmation. His response: “yeah, that must be it, ha ha.”

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The Secret Behind Apple’s Calculator Icon Revealed

Let It Burn “A fabulous Easter gift,” commented Monsanto Director of Development Initiatives Elizabeth Vancil. Nearly 60,000 seed sacks of hybrid corn seeds and other vegetable seeds were donated to post-earthquake Haiti by Monsanto. In observance of World Environment Day, June 4, 2010, roughly 10,000 rural Haitian farmers gathered in Papaye to march seven kilometers to Hinche in celebration of this gift. Upon arrival, these rewarded farmers took their collective Easter baskets of read more

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Manifest Haiti: Monsanto’s Destiny

Our interview with Macallan’s latest Master of Photography Back in September when we visited Macallan at their home in the Scottish Highlands we were given a sneak preview of both the liquid and the imagery from the latest in their Masters of Photography series. While the 20-year-old whisky instantly became our new favorite for the way its buttery smooth texture offsets its rich and complex flavor, the imagery Albert Watson created to celebrate it offers a beautiful and educational perspective on what makes Scotch whisky so special. Where Rankin (the last Scottish photographer to create a series for The Macallan) used the Easter Elchies estate as a background for nude portraiture, Watson chose to tell the story of the complex journey Oak wood makes from the forest to the Estate, picking up the varied characteristics through Spain and Scotland that eventually define the whisky. In anticipation of Thursday’s NYC stop of the one-night-only series of gallery exhibitions of Watson’s series, I sat down with the famed photographer to hear more about the project from his perspective. You’re very highly regarded as a fashion photographer, I’m wondering if you consider yourself one. I certainly have been a fashion photographer and I still do fashion. But I’ve also done a vast amount of portraiture and movie posters. I’ve done over the years a lot of landscape work and also a huge amount of still life work. So I’ve done more fashion than anything else, but in the end I’m really a photographer who will take fashion photographs. I’m really a photographer in the broad sense of the word. There’s a very simple way to look at all of the work that I do because I was trained as a graphic designer for four years at university and then did three years of post-graduate at film school. And that is written all over the work. It’s either one of three things: graphic design, filmmaking or a mixture of the two. Which photograph was chosen for the label of this edition? It is the one of the barrel in the shaft of light, which was the first one we did. Due to the logistics, we shot the cooperage first and I went in to the saw mill and there was a big room. The place was very dusty and smokey and humid so this was the perfect condition for a shaft of light to come through. I walked into the room and there was this shaft of light. I turned to Ken Grier, the Creative Director, and said there’s a shot there, so we put a barrel in it. It was an important moment because it laid a standard for the rest of the shoot—a lot of times when working on a photographic project you want to get the best shots first because if you start low and improve you end up wanting to reshoot the early shots. Where did the idea for the storyline come from? That came from me. What came from them was that they wanted to do Spain and Scotland. But to tie it all together we had to put a human face on it and to do it as a journey that a young couple takes from a sustainable forest in the North of Spain to the barrels being made in the South of Spain and filled with Sherry there. Then they go from there to Scotland to the distillery where the whisky is put in them. I thought people should discover a forest, a saw mill, the cooperage, the barrels, and through that discover Scotland and ultimately the distillery. Doing that through this couple put a face on it. The series of photographs you created for The Macallan combine the various facets of photography you described to create a very specific narrative. Was this project different from others you’ve done for that reason? Once inside the project there wasn’t anything I might do over a six month period for a variety of people—I might be employed to do both landscape work and fashion work. So the Macallan thing was just concentrating it in to a very short period of time. The actual shooting time for the project was eight days, which is not a lot of time when you’re doing South of Spain, North of Spain, Central Scotland and West Coast of Scotland. What do you think of the whisky? I don’t drink at all. It’s unusual for someone from Scotland not to drink. The limited-edition of 1,000 bottles of The Macallan Sherry Oak 20 years old has the specially-commissioned label by Watson and each bottle includes a set of 10 portfolio prints, $1000 from select retailers .

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Albert Watson for The Macallan

Two days before Christmas, the alleged smuggler apparently thought Easter eggs would be the perfect ploy to conceal 14 pounds of cocaine.

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Easter eggs used to smuggle cocaine

At least 25 people are injured as police try to evict a group of indigenous Rapa Nui people from buildings on Easter Island.

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Injuries in Easter Island clashes