Former employee of RGB Technology, which worked with the General Accounting Office of the US Congress (GAO), Darryl Lyles was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined $180,000 for stealing 89 government-owned laptops, AP reports. RGB Technology, where Lyles, 37, worked, was a GAO contractor. Lyles worked directly at GAO headquarters and was responsible for maintaining records of department-owned computers, including issuing equipment to agency employees.

The driver of a police service car hit a fifth-grader crossing the road at a pedestrian crossing in eastern Moscow, RIA Novosti reports , citing unnamed sources in law enforcement agencies. The accident occurred on the evening of May 4 near house number 10 on 1st Vladimirskaya Street. The child suffered a concussion, leg bruises and abdominal trauma. A police officer driving a car did not let a child cross the road on roller skates at a pedestrian crossing.

The reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics lost to the Orlando Magic in the first match of their quarter-final playoff series with a score of 90:95. Dwight Howard scored 16 points and grabbed 22 rebounds for the winners. The official website of the NBA reports this. Before the big break, Orlando led by 18 points, but Boston managed to close the gap in the third and fourth quarters.

In the UK, J.R.R. hit bookstores on May 5, 2009. Tolkien's "Sigurd and Gudrun", a 500-stanza poem based on the Scandinavian epic. The writer's son and his executor, Christopher Tolkien, in an interview with The Guardian dedicated to the publication, admitted that the book's form may scare off many fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The poem is based on the story of two heroes, known in Scandinavian myths as Sigurd and Gudrun, and in Germanic ones as Siegfried and Kriemhild.

The first meeting of the new Moldovan parliament took place in Chisinau. According to RIA Novosti , the deputies had to move to the Palace of the Republic because the parliament building was destroyed during the riots on April 7 that followed the announcement of the election results, which were won by the communists. Opposition supporters staged protests, which escalated into clashes with police and riots, during which the president's residence was also vandalized.

The screen diagonal of the new device for reading electronic documents from Amazon is 9.7 inches, reports Engadget. The name of this device is Amazon Kindle DX. It is designed for reading newspapers and magazines. From the technical specifications of the Kindle DX we know that it works with PDF documents. Users of this device will also have the opportunity to add annotations to texts.

A prominent Czech journalist was fired from his job on Monday for making a joke about the H1N1 flu epidemic, also known as "swine flu." reports this Agence France-Presse . The reason for the dismissal of Jiri Dlabaja, an employee of the largest television company in the Czech Republic, Nova, was a video posted by the journalist on the pages of his personal Internet blog . In the video, Dlabaja asks five co-workers what they've been working on lately.

from Lego bricks British children assembled a portrait of JK Rowling , the author of Harry Potter, . Now the image of the writer, made up of 48 thousand yellow, white and gray parts, adorns the Legoland Windsor amusement park in Berkshire, The Telegraph reports.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation removed from office the general director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "State Research and Production Enterprise 'Basalt'", which produces most of the Russian aerial bombs, grenade launchers and mortar shells. This was reported by Gazeta (GZT.RU) . The place of Vladimir Korenkov, who headed Basalt since 2000, will be taken by Alexander Rybas, who headed the Tula Instrument Design Bureau.

The Foreign Ministry has not received official information from the Belgian Foreign Ministry about the expulsion from the country of two Russian diplomats, whom NATO has deprived of its accreditation. reports this Interfax with reference to a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He noted that the note was received by fax, but the department does not consider this method of sending official.

The three-month London interbank lending rate LIBOR fell below one percent for the first time in history, Bloomberg reports, citing the British Bankers Association (BBA). The rate amounted to 0.99 percent on May 5. At the same time, the LIBOR-OIS spread (effectively the difference between LIBOR and the US Federal Reserve's base rate), which measures how willing banks are to lend to each other, fell to 0.78 percent, the lowest since September 1, 2008.

The remains of the largest trilobite known to date have been discovered in Portugal. An article describing the find was published in the journal Geology . The fossils are 465 million years old. The body length of the extinct arthropod is close to 90 centimeters. The size of the largest trilobites found so far did not exceed 72 centimeters. Trilobites were common in the Earth's oceans during the Paleozoic era. The oldest trilobite remains discovered are 540 million years old.

The Belgian Foreign Ministry announced its intention to expel from the country two employees of the Russian Permanent Mission to NATO, who were previously deprived of accreditation by the North Atlantic Alliance, RIA Novosti reports . A scandal surrounding Russian diplomats erupted on April 30: NATO stated that the diplomats, deprived of accreditation, were working for Russian intelligence.

If the average person knows one thing about Vincent Van Gogh, it is that the artist was not very himself and one fine day cut off his ear. In the 20th century, this act began to be understood as a sacrifice to art. That is why the kindest St. Petersburg Mitki offered the great Dutchman their own ears (in the form of a painting). So what is happening in the 21st century?

The Russian Navy has denied statements by the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs that the ships of the Black Sea Fleet have been put on high alert. In a corresponding statement, the information and public relations service of the Russian Navy states that the ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet are serving as usual, RIA Novosti reports .