The Alligator's Mike Webb talks to Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, the Shadow Security Minister and David Cameron's National Security Adviser, about Afghanistan, tackling violent extremism at home and abroad - and why investment banking is great preparation for politics. ...

On his first trip to Africa, Pope Benedict XVI was asked a question about the Catholic Church’s position on the way to fight AIDS. This is how he answered: Delivered to a continent where 22 million people live with HIV, and which accounted for 75% of all AIDS deaths in 2007, his words provoked strong reactions. Journalists, politicians and AIDS activists from around the world lined up to criticise the Pope’s views: “The Pope deserves no credence” said the New York Times in an editorial; “Impeach the Pope” urged a guest writer in the Washington Post . The British medical journal the Lancet accused him of having “publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine”, Former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe suggested that he was “living in a situation of total autism”, while Rebecca Hodes of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa described his remarks as “alienating”, “ignorant” and “pernicious”.The row goes beyond previous ...

1. People will discover the 'Remove from Friends' button on Facebook Some Oxford students who aren't Union hacks will see the number of their Facebook friends climb into the 1000s. They will decide it's time to say goodbye to all the people they've never met, those friends of friends they met once at a party, and anybody with more than seventeen applications on their profile. 2. Smartphone apps will explode... ...making some people very rich. Since Apple's App store opened in July iPhone owners have made more than 300 million downloads, and they're showing no sign of slowing down. "Some kid in his bedroom can literally make a million bucks just by writing a little app," says Brian Greenstone, whose small software company made $5m this year from iPhone games. Who will be the first Oxford success story? 3. Goodbye, hard drives Solid state storage will get so good that we'll dispense with hard drives altogether: computers will become more rugged, and their shelf l ...