This isn’t very reassuring. Retired Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, who sits on the president’s deficit commission, said Monday that Social Security was a “Ponzi scheme” that was never intended as a retirement program. “It was set up ’37 and ’38 to take…

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Ex-GOP Senator Slams Social Security

Over the years, public opinion has been less than kind to Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee at the centre of the abdication crisis.

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VIDEO: Simpson’s reputation ‘gets makeover’

A burka worn by BBC world affairs editor John Simpson and a bullet that grazed Kate Adie’s leg in Beirut are to go on display for the first time.

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John Simpson’s burka to go on show at war museum

D’oh, Homer Simpson is not so funny right now. Broadcasters in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany are reviewing episodes of the The Simpsons to cut nuclear jokes in the wake of Japan’s nuclear crisis. Homer’s ineptitude at the nuclear-power plant is…

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Simpsons Nuclear Jokes Cut

Actress Andrea Riseborough on her recent roles playing strong women including Margaret Thatcher and Wallis Simpson.

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VIDEO: Playing Thatcher and Wallis Simpson

Mr Paisley speaks to the BBC’s Mark Simpson as he leaves Stormont for the last time as an MLA

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VIDEO: Ian Paisley MLA: "I’ve had a good innings"

Tumblr users awoke this morning to find the blogging platform experiencing another round of unanticipated downtime. Was server maintenance to blame? Perhaps an errant Tumblebeast  loose among the mainframes? No. Tumblr is rolling out its new Explore pages, designed to group Tumblr’s huge amount of wide-ranging content into a highly visual page that match’s the blogging network’s signature sleek design. “It’s hard to organize Tumblr blogs by topic. A single one of your blogs may include your personal updates, your art, your opinions and a YouTube video of a cat speaking Japanese, all in a single day. This has been a real limitation of the current Tumblr Directory,” wrote product director Joshua Nguyen on the Tumblr Staff blog at the end of February, introducing the feature to the community. “So, for the last few weeks we’ve been experimenting with some brand new tools for exploring Tumblr. The new Explore page organizes and filters posts by tag. This means that every tagged post has a chance to show up in front of an audience of millions that might not otherwise see it. Think Tumblr Radar by topic.” The Explore pages are a natural evolution from Tumblr’s tagged pages , which began with News, Fashion and Long Reads and quickly expanded to cover myriad other topics. Tumblr’s  Egypt channel, launched shortly after the outbreak of the January 25 protests and curated by members of the community (including The Atlantic ), garnered praise as an on-the-fly channel for organizing the torrent of images, video and reports coming out of the country. A similar channel was developed to cover the unrest in Libya . Tumblr’s new Explore feature serves an alternative purpose, apart from providing easy navigation through the site’s ecosystem and a injecting a journalistic sensibility into Tumblr’s easy curation model. Business Insider’s Pascal-Emannuel Gobry  speculated during Tumblr’s initial roll-out of its channel pages in December 2010 that the company’s new channel page could form the basis of a new advertising network, although Tumblr’s channel pages remain prominent primarily to frequent users of the community. Navigating Tumblr’s vast network of blogs isn’t entirely intuitive, especially to outside users who may be introduced to the site through a single-serving Tumblr like Hungover Owls  or The Lisa Simpson Book Club  (which i happily edit, for full disclosure). “Most Tumblr blogs, like most people, aren’t so easily categorized in the way you presume — we’re interested in sports, and robots, and shoes, and the Middle East. Tumblr blogs display a wide range, one that’s not so easily put into a particular box,” wrote Mark Coatney, Tumblr’s media evangelist, on his on Tumblog in Feburary in response to a complaint from a community member. “What the new Explore/Curated tag pages are designed to do is to introduce people to the most interesting items. The Explore page sorts by popularity because we think that’s a useful lens on this; we could just as easily sort by activity on a particular tag, or alphabetical order, for instance (which is how the old directory is sorted).” As of the time of this writing (10:30 a.m. EST), Tumblr is still experiencing persistent outages, making a thorough evaluation of the new feature’s functionality difficult. Building on the success of it’s channel pages, Tumblr’s new Explore pages seem to be the next logical step for the expanding company. Turning a one-stop page into a one-stop portal could allow Tumblr to expand it’s readership to even more non-regulars.

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Tumblr Rolls Out Explore Pages

Items once owned by Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom Edward VIII renounced the throne, are set to be sold in an auction.

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Wallis Simpson’s scarlet nightwear up for sale

The BBC’s John Simpson has been to see the impact of the protests on traders near the Pyramids and the Sphinx and saw a very different side to the Egyptian unrest.

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Egypt’s tourist industry at standstill

England call up winger James Simpson-Daniel and prop Alex Corbisiero as injury cover ahead of Saturday’s game against Italy.

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Simpson-Daniel gets England call

Wallis Simpson, a Baltimore belle, fell in love with King Edward VIII in the 1930s. But the two-time divorcee was deemed unacceptable so the King chose to give up his throne instead. Katty Kay reports.

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How a king’s love rocked a nation

Ugly Betty star America Ferrera and The Simpsons creator Matt Groening are among the jurors at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

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Ugly Betty star on Sundance jury

Language lovers might want to check out this week’s Bits: Tech Talk podcast, which features a conversation with John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Paper Cuts: The Revamped O.E.D. Online

Bowles and Simpson have opened the door to awaken our slumbering economy.

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From the debt commission proposal, a bipartisan path forward

A bracelet owned by Wallis Simpson, whose affair with Edward VIII led to his abdication, has sold for a world record-breaking £4.5m at auction.

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Wallis Simpson bracelet sells for record £4.5m