No Clues in Missing NYC Woman's Case

NEW YORK — Police have tracked cell phone signals and examined abandoned cars, yet there's no trace of a woman who vanished last month after going to a Florida night club.
Miami-Dade County police have said they don't know whether foul play was involved in Stepha Henry's disappearance, but family members think something happened to the 22-year-old honors graduate of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Henry was visiting relatives in the area with her 16-year-old sister and made plans for a friend's brother-in-law to pick her up on May 29, her aunt Daffodil Samuel said Sunday at the family's home in Brooklyn.
Relatives saw Henry get into a black sedan with a man. There is video of Henry at a Sunrise nightclub and police have said they have questioned a man who told them he left her at the nightspot.
No one has seen or heard from her since. Her cell phone goes straight to voicemail.
"She was a fighter," Samuel said of her petite niece. "I know they didn't take Stepha easily."
Samuel, who is the sister of Henry's mother, said her niece is fascinated by criminal cases and aspires to be a lawyer.
"She always wanted to be the lady Johnnie Cochran," Samuel said, referring to the late attorney who became nationally known after winning an acquittal of murder charges for O.J. Simpson.
Samuel said her niece often resisted her mother's tendency to inquire about her whereabouts and who she was with and once asked a relative to ask her mother to ease up.
"We just pray that whoever has her will release her so that she can come home and continue her life," Samuel said just before bursting into tears. "We're trusting in God and believing that He will do what He says He will do."
Henry's mother and father have been in Florida since the week their daughter went missing. Her mother has posted fliers seeking information and plans to stay there to keep searching; her father returned to New York on Sunday night.
"She is not going to leave Miami until we know what happened to our daughter," Steve Henry said of his wife, Sylvia.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2007/06/18/789007-no-clues-in-missing-nyc-womans-case

Toyota: Gas-saving valve in engines by 2010

Toyota says it's revamping its gas engine lineup to boost fuel economy
and lower emissions.

Toyota says it's revamping its gas engine lineup to boost fuel economy and lower emissions.
The company has designed a new valve system for gas engines that will reduce fuel usage per mile, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and enhance performance, the company announced this week in Japan.
The valve system, called Valvematic, controls both the valve timing and valve lift in an engine, according to Toyota.
That means that a gas engine with Valvematic will adapt intake to give each cylinder as much air as necessary for ideal performance or combustion. The system varies airflow for things like engine speeds, driving habits and differing terrain, and should translate into better overall performance and fuel economy, Toyota claims.
Toyota says the system could improve fuel efficiency by 5 percent to 10 percent. The company plans to implement the new technology in all its gas car engines within the next three years.
"As a part of its efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through high fuel efficiency and to achieve cleaner exhaust emissions, (Toyota) plans to completely revamp its gasoline engine and transmission lineup by 2010," the company said in a statement.
The company cites corporate social responsibility as its incentive for developing technology that supports "energy diversification" and the environment.
A more fuel-efficient car with enhanced performance could translate to better sales for the company's line of gas engine cars, especially as fuel prices rise.
The Valvematic system doesn't apply to Toyota's diesel engine lineup. Since Toyota garnered a stake in Isuzu, a company known for its expertise in diesel engines, many have been waiting to see if diesel engines will play a more prominent role in Toyota's consumer product lines.

http://news.com.com/Toyota+Gas-saving+valve+in+engines+by+2010/2100-11389_3-6191339.html

Report: FTC to probe Microsoft, Yahoo ad deals too

Posted by Ina Fried
The Federal Trade Commission reportedly wants to take a look at a few online advertising acquisitions, not just Google's planned deal to acquire DoubleClick.
The regulatory agency also plans to look into Microsoft's $6 billion deal to buy Aquantive and Yahoo's plans to buy the rest of Right Media, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on its Web site.
Microsoft confirmed to CNET News.com that it has been notified by the trade commission that the agency plans to review the Aquantive deal.
"We are cooperating fully and look forward to addressing any questions the FTC may have as part of their review," Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans.
In an interview last month, Microsoft division president Kevin Johnson tried to draw distinctions between the Aquantive deal and Google's DoubleClick buy, outlining why he believed that deal merited antitrust scrutiny while Microsoft's purchase did not.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9729765-7.html

Another flaw within Safari 3.0 for Windows beta

Security researcher Robert Swiecki disclosed yesterday another vulnerability within the new Safari 3.0 for Windows beta, bringing the total of public vulnerabilities to nine. The latest flaw allows an attacker to steal a cookie. The flaw exists in the Javascript's window.setTimeout()implementation where the content timer-triggered function is processed after window.location property is changed.
In response to other Safari 3.0 vulnerabilities, Apple today released an updated version that addresses three of the nine public vulnerabilities.

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9729768-7.html

Yahoo CEO Semel steps down, Yang takes over

Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel is stepping down, and co-founder Jerry Yang will become the new chief executive, the company announced Monday. Semel will assume the position of nonexecutive chairman and serve as an adviser to the management team and board of directors. Sue Decker, former chief financial officer and head of the advertiser group, has been named president.

"This is the time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realize its full potential--it is the right thing to do, and the right time is now," Semel said in a statement.
The company has been struggling to regain the leadership position it lost to Google in the search market. Yahoo also was late to counter Google's search advertising juggernaut, which has propelled Google's profits and stock price to record highs while Yahoo's have dropped.
A letter sent to Semel from Ed Kozel, on behalf of Yahoo's board of directors, is here. A letter written by Semel and sent to the board of directors is here.
Stay with CNET News.com for more on this developing story.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9730999-7.html

Despite promises, few in House make earmark requests public

From Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston CNN
Adjust font size:(CNN) -- Despite the new Democratic congressional leadership's promise of "openness and transparency" in the budget process, a CNN survey of the House found it nearly impossible to get information on lawmakers' pet projects.
Staffers for only 31 of the 435 members of the House contacted by CNN between Wednesday and Friday of last week supplied a list of their earmark requests for Fiscal Year 2008, which begins on October 1, or pointed callers to Web sites where those earmark requests were posted.
Of the remainder, 68 declined to provide CNN with a list, and 329 either didn't respond to requests or said they would get back to us, and didn't. (Find out how your representative responded)
"As long as we are not required to release them, we're not going to," said Dan Turner, an aide to Rep. Jim McCrery, R-Louisiana.
Seven members of the House said they had no earmark requests.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Illinois) released a list of his earmark requests on Monday.
In 2006, Congress approved a record $29 billion in earmarks --those spending requests derided as "pork" that fund everything from road construction and research grants to ski lifts and minor league baseball diamonds. Legislators view these projects as important proof that they are serving their constituents back home.
The 2006 total was 6.2 percent more than 2005's $27.3 billion.
When Democrats regained control of Congress last fall, they promised to create the most honest, open Congress in history.
"We will bring transparency and openness to the budget process and to the use of earmarks," Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi said in December 2006, "and we will give the American people the leadership they deserve."
Democrats said that Republicans had corrupted the earmark process while they controlled Congress.
Earlier this year, the House implemented rules changes that require greater disclosure of earmark requests, and the Senate passed a bill that would require lawmakers to post a list of their earmark requests on the Internet. The bill, however, has not passed the House.
Last week, the issue came to a head as the House got bogged down deliberating the budget for the Department of Homeland Security Department.
Republicans accused the Democratic leadership of attempting to bypass debate on questionable earmarks when House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, said he would not attach them to legislation until those bills had passed the Senate and House and had been sent to conference committees to work out differences.
Obey said there wasn't time to scrutinize the 32,000 earmark requests and keep the legislation moving. He blamed having to "clean up after" the Republican-controlled Congress for why the requests wouldn't be examined in time. (Watch Obey tell the GOP that Dems had to clean up "your mess" before addressing earmarks )
But House Republicans pointed out that position was counter to Democratic campaign promises and Obey was forced to back down and allow Republicans weeks to examine the earmark requests.
Critics said that doesn't play well with reform-minded taxpayers.
"Their behavior isn't better than the last Congress and in some ways worse because they know they have those requests," said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "We know they have more than 30,000 letters asking for specific earmarks and they're not letting us see them."
Tom Schatz, of Citizens Against Government Waste, said the compromise is a step in the right direction but short of promised reforms -- all requests won't be made public, only the ones for which spending requests are approved.
Originally there was going to be no disclosure, now we have some disclosure," Schatz said. "And yet again the judgment will be made by the Appropriations Committee staff."
But others like Public Citizen say the compromise is far from what was promised.
"It violates the whole spirit of the reform, said Craig Holman, legislative representative for the nonpartisan group's Congress Watch.
"We really did expect that earmark requests would be an open book so that all of America could sit there and take a look at who's requesting what earmarks," Holman said.
CNN staffers Amanda Sealy and Todd Schwarzschild and interns Rachel Zelkowitz, William Hudson, Rachel Reynolds, Chamise Jones, Haley Van Dyck and Brittany Edney contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/06/18/earmarks/index.html

Fast Food Simmers Away, Slow Food Spices Up

By Jane HanStaff Reporter
Order value meal number four, grab it in two minutes and chow down in less than 10 _ the once valued art of eating has deteriorated over time to convenient, quick, easy _ but a rising crowd of ``slow food'' enthusiasts are cooking up a movement that goes just the opposite.
``Slow food is everything that fast food is not,'' said Kim Jong-duk, an agricultural sociology professor at Kyungnam University, who founded Slow Food Korea, a local group promoting healthy eating habits. ``For today's busy people who don't have time to sit and enjoy a full meal, fast food may be an ideal option that keeps them from starving, but it's crucial to know that the easy meal is also chipping away at their health.''
And nutrition conscious individuals worldwide have recognized this and kicked off a ``slow food movement,'' which sprouted from Europe in the late 1980s.
The campaign has been widely noticed abroad, as more restaurants began using everyday fresh ingredients (some even grown in their own backyards), along with consumers pushing away processed food, but it's only been recently that local eaters have turned toward the new trend.
``The slow food initiative goes well with the still booming well-being lifestyle in Korea,'' said food marketing consultant Kim Hyo-jin. ``Just as businesses reaped super high profits off of well-being products, likewise they probably will with the new fad.''
Hamburger eatery Freshness Burger nods to this, adding that diners now want more than buns and patties.
``Diners want to enjoy food not simply tasty to their tongue but also their health, which is why we focus on every ingredient that goes into our variety of burgers,'' said Lim Ji-young, a marketing official at Freshness Burger.
Opening its first location in Seoul four years ago, the franchise that makes healthy pumpkin buns and quality filling emphasizes that the brand is ``slow,'' differentiating it from conventional fast food shops like McDonald's and Wendy's.
``We studied why people neglect fast food as they grow older and concentrated on developing those weak points,'' said Lim, pointing out that their main consumer target is those in their 20s and 30s who want fast, but good.
Other grab-n-go eateries, including Subway and Schlotsky's Deli, are also in the game to do the same.
Bon Juk, a popular well-being franchise famous for its quick-to-serve porridge, is representative of Korean slow food brands.
As porridge typically takes hours to cook, diners have enjoyed the restaurant for its convenience, taste and nutrition.
``Our main consumers in their 20s and 30s have high expectations and they want food they can trust,'' said Na Sae-chul, a PR team manager at Bon Juk. ``It's not the price that matters, but the quality that moves them.''
Although diners have a wide array of slow food restaurants they can pick and choose from, professor Kim notes that many everyday dishes we eat at home make excellent slow food.
``Fermented food like `kimchi' and `doenjang' (bean paste) take a long time to give its full taste but it's fully charged with nutrition,'' he said, adding that with slow food preparation should come a slower lifestyle as well.
``Slow life is different from being lazy _ it means that a person moves based on human pace, instead of machine speed,'' said Kim.
Globally spread slow food enthusiasts root for the same, stressing that after decades of microwaved and processed food, it's important to look back to our old grandparents' days where, sometimes, all-day cooking was a harmonious family occasion.
jhan@koreatimes.co.kr

Two Thirds of Koreans Have Dental Problems

By Park Chung-a Staff Reporter
About two thirds of Koreans have dental problems and 53 percent of those aged over 65 find it hard to chew.
The fact was made public in a survey of 16,000 Koreans aged between 2 and 95 by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
Only 27 percent of eight-year-olds said they brush their teeth after lunch and 6 percent of adults said they receive dental examination on a regular basis.
However, the survey reported improvements in the dental health conditions in some areas. The number of tooth decay or dental caries of 12-year-olds has decreased from 3.3 in 2003 to 2.2 in 2006. It is the first time that the number has fallen since the survey was first conducted in 1972.
But the number is still greater than the OECD average of 1.6.
Also, the number of people who experienced tooth decay decreased by 24 percentage points to 61 percent compared to three years ago.
The percentage of people who experienced the worsening of dental health has fallen from 48 percent in 2003 to 17 percent in 2006 in cities but the corresponding number in small counties rose from 48 percent to 52 percent during the same period.
Choi Soo-young, a dentist at Soosung Dental Clinic in Seoul, pointed to incorrect ways of brushing one’s teeth and lack of health insurance coverage for the majority of dental treatments as most significant hindrances to improvement of dental health.
``Make sure to brush the outside, the tongue side and the chewing surfaces of your teeth. For the front teeth, brush the inside surfaces of the upper and lower jaws by tilting the brush vertically and making several up and down strokes with the front part of the brush over the teeth and gum tissues,’’ she said. ``People should brush their tongue as well, which can help remove bacteria that causes bad breath. It's also important to brush twice a day and to use a toothpaste containing fluoride to help prevent tooth decay.’’
The government said that it will make efforts to expand free dental check-ups and dental education but it said it will take a long time to expand health insurance coverage for dental treatments as it requires restructuring of the health insurance system.
michelle@koreatimes.co.kr

Roh Violates Election Law Again: NEC

By Kim Yon-seStaff Reporter
The election watchdog Monday ruled that President Roh Moo-hyun again violated the Election Law requiring public officials to stay ``neutral'' ahead of elections. It will send Roh an official document asking him to respect the law.
But the National Election Commission (NEC) withheld a decision as to whether the President violated the article governing pre-electioneering.
The ruling came after a six-hour meeting of the nine NEC members.
The first ruling was issued after the Grand National Party (GNP) filed a complaint on June 5 against Roh who has argued that he has the right to engage in political activities and has proposed amending the election law.
In its second complaint, the opposition party said Roh's remarks in an interview with the Hankyoreh newspaper on June 13 were a breach of the law.
Roh told the daily that the GNP is a party with roots in regionalism and the vestiges of military dictatorships, calling on the people to support a candidate from the pro-government Uri Party.
The GNP also said that Roh breached the law during his speeches at Wonkwang University on June 8 and at a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the pro-democracy movement on June 10.
Roh described GNP candidate Lee Myung-bak's campaign pledges as ``empty,'' while calling Park Geun-hye, another GNP hopeful, the ``daughter of a dictator.'' Park is the eldest daughter of the late President Park Chung-hee.
Roh also said the GNP is obstructing him from conducting state affairs in a normal fashion.
On June 7, the NEC ruled that Roh violated the law by criticizing opposition presidential candidates _ former Seoul Mayor Lee and former GNP Chairwoman Park.
Just days after the first ruling, Roh again attacked the two GNP contenders.
The GNP filed a second complaint with the NEC over the issue last week.
In its first ruling, the commission neither issued a warning nor indicated it would take legal action against Roh.
During a four-hour speech before 1,000 supporters in Seoul on June 2, Roh said it would be ``horrific'' if the GNP won the Dec. 19 presidential election.
``I cannot find any creativity in their pledges. In a nutshell, their vision has no content. The GNP candidates have only engaged in a pros and cons debate over the grandiose canal and ferry projects,'' he said. ``The total budget of these projects is below a fifth of the budget used for balanced development planning under the incumbent government.''
Presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-seon had previously said that it was difficult to set the boundary between violating and observing the election law.
kys@koreatimes.co.kr

2 die as heavy rains bring flooding to Texas cities

GAINESVILLE, Texas (AP) -- Torrential overnight rainfall flooded a handful of North Texas towns Monday, killing at least two people and stranding people and their pets on the roofs of their homes.
Two young girls were reported missing in Gainesville as creeks swollen by as much as 8 inches of rain inundated parts of that town and Sherman near the Oklahoma state line.
A 4-year-old girl, Alexandria Collins, died after she was swept away by rushing water in Haltom City, a Fort Worth suburb. Her body was found more than two hours later.
"We were in the boat when the boat capsized," her mother, Natasha Collins, tearfully told KXAS-TV of Dallas. "The current swept her from my arms."
But firefighters said the girl was already missing by the time they pulled her mother onto a boat.
A woman died in Sherman, about 60 miles northwest of Dallas near the Oklahoma state line, after her car stalled in rising water and was swept away, Sherman police Sgt. Bruce Dawsey said. (Watch floodwaters flow through city )
About 125 residents of a Sherman nursing home were evacuated, and an unknown number of people were rescued from an office building where the roof started caving in, Dawsey said.
In Gainesville, aerial video showed families awaiting rescue on their roofs, some having hacked their way to the outside from their attics. Some were joined by their dogs. (Watch rescuers pull residents from rooftops )
Divers search for missing girls
Divers searched a creek in Gainesville for two girls, ages 2 and 4, who were believed to have been swept away by high water in a mobile home park, said Cpl. Mike Linnell of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Three mobile homes were washed out of the park, including one that became lodged against a bridge, he said.
About 100 mobile homes in Haltom City were inundated and many were washed off their foundations, emergency officials said.
"When I looked out the window, water was up to the bottom of the window and the current was so fast houses were washing away, said Haltom City resident Rachel Hawkes. "You could hear people screaming but we couldn't get out to help."
About 37,000 people live in Sherman and about 16,500 in Gainesville.
Amtrak's daily round-trip service between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth was canceled because of flooding, and passengers were placed on buses, said Joe Kyle of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which owns the rail line, will decide when service can resume, Kyle said.
Authorities closed Interstate 35 from Gainesville to the Oklahoma state line for several hours because of flooding, the Department of Public Safety said.
The National Weather Service said rain fell at a rate of an inch every 15 minutes in some places early Monday.
"We get heavy rains in North Texas, but the rate, the amount, the duration and the coverage of this are just amazing," said Gary Woodall, the warning-coordination meteorologist for the weather service office in Fort Worth.
Only isolated thunderstorms were forecast in the area Monday and Tuesday.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WEATHER/06/18/texas.storms.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Over 100 Reportedly Die in Afghanistan

More than 100 people, including militants, civilians and police, have been killed in three days of fierce clashes between NATO and the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Monday.
To the east, U.S.-led coalition jets bombed a suspected al-Qaida compound, killing seven boys and several fighters.
Afghanistan has seen a spike in violence the last several days, leading to a mounting number of civilian casualties that are sapping support for foreign troops and the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Even though a majority of civilians deaths is caused by attacks initiated by the Taliban, Afghan anger over civilian casualties is often directed toward U.S. and NATO-led troops. Such killings have prompted Afghan authorities to plead repeatedly for international forces to work more closely with Afghans.
But in Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban have launched what appears to be their biggest offensive of the year, forcing NATO troops to respond.
Dutch military officials said hundreds of Taliban fighters attacked police posts near the strategic town of Chora on Saturday, sparking a battle that officials said was continuing. The attack appeared to be a change in strategy by the insurgents, who had been relying on an increasing number of suicide and roadside bombings this year.
Maj. Gen. Jouke Eikelboom, director of operations with the Dutch military, said Karzai and the Uruzgan governor sought military support after the attack on the police posts.
A summary of fighter jet activity from Sunday sent out by the U.S. Central Command hinted at the ferocity of the battles, detailing at least eight aircraft dropping bombs or firing on the area.
Precise casualty figures were not available because of the continued fighting, though two Afghan officials said more than 100 people have been killed, including at least 16 police. A Dutch soldier also died.
Afghan officials said Taliban fighters sought shelter in civilian homes and that NATO bombers targeted them. Khan called such deaths "friendly fire."
In eastern Paktika province, meanwhile, U.S.-led coalition warplanes targeted a compound Sunday that also contained a mosque and a madrassa, or Islamic school, resulting in the deaths of seven boys ages 10 to 16, said Gov. Akram Akhpelwak.
The governor said there normally is excellent coordination between the government and international forces but said he was not told of the missile strike in advance.
Authorities are working with foreign forces "to have better coordination and to not have these misunderstandings, but today we had a misunderstanding and the people will be unhappy," Akhpelwak told the Associated Press by telephone. "We will go to the area and discuss the issue with the people and apologize."
A coalition spokesman, Maj. Chris Belcher, said coalition troops had "surveillance on the compound all day and saw no indications there were children inside." Belcher, an American, accused the militants of not letting the children leave.
"If we knew that there were children inside the building, there was no way that that airstrike would have occurred," said Sgt. 1st Class Dean Welch, another coalition spokesman.
Reports of civilian deaths in Uruzgan were coming from various quarters.
One wounded man at the main Uruzgan hospital told the AP that 18 members of his family had been killed.
Mullah Ahmidullah Khan, the head of Uruzgan's provincial council, estimated the clashes in Chora killed 60 civilians, 70 suspected Taliban militants and 16 Afghan police.
"I have talked to President Karzai and asked him to send helicopters to ferry the wounded to Kabul," he said.
An official close to the governor who asked not to be identified when talking about preliminary estimates, said 70 to 75 civilians were killed or wounded, while more than 100 Taliban and more than 35 police were killed.
But Maj. John Thomas, a NATO spokesman, said he doubted that Afghan officials could tell the difference between civilians and militants, suggesting some of the wounded who claimed to be civilians were insurgents.
Dr. Hajed Noor, a doctor at Uruzgan's main hospital in the provincial capital, Tirin Kot, said the hospital had received 34 wounded, including nine women and seven children. He said his patients reported that many other wounded were in the Chora district and couldn't make it to the hospital because of the fighting.
Speaking by phone from a hospital bed, Janu Akha, 62, said bombs hit his village of Qala-i-Ragh on Saturday.
"Eight bombs fell in my village," Akha said. "On Sunday my relatives buried 18 members of my family, including women and children."
Khan, the Uruzgan provincial council chief, said he talked to a man named Gul Mohammad at the Tirin Kot hospital who said 15 relatives, including women and children, had been killed. "I also saw Manan Jan in the hospital. He had 12 family members killed," Khan said.
Another doctor at the hospital, Mohammad Fahim, said: "Most of the people who were killed are still there (in Chora). They are not bringing the bodies here, so that is why we do not know how many have been killed."
In the capital, Kabul, police said they detained a suspect in connection with a bus bombing Sunday that killed at least 35 people, most of them police trainers. The suspect, whose name and nationality were not disclosed, had pictures of slain Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah in his phone, as well as text messages from a foreign country, police said.
___
Associated Press reporters Rahim Faiez, Amir Shah and Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2007/06/18/788784-over-100-reportedly-die-in-afghanistan

Paedophile ring smashed by police

Police have smashed a global child abuse network which was co-ordinated through a UK-based internet site.

Global agencies, led by UK investigators, examined more than 700 suspects, including 200 in the UK.
The ring was run by Timothy Cox, 28, of Buxhall, Suffolk, who admitted nine offences and has been handed a sentence which could mean he dies in jail.
A judge at Ipswich Crown Court told Cox: "You are obsessed with images of children being sexually abused."
Chatroom infiltration
Cox ran a website called "Kids the Light of Our Lives" which let users exchange abuse images, the court heard.
Judge Peter Thompson told Cox: "These are shocking images which involve very young children - in the worst cases being subjected to sadistic, painful abuse which you, for some distorted reason, appear to take enjoyment from."
More than 75,000 indecent and explicit images were found on Cox's computer and there was evidence that he had supplied more than 11,000 images to other site users.
Cox pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing indecent images of children at an earlier hearing and was handed an indeterminate sentence.
Cox posed "significant risks", the judge said, and had to be imprisoned for "for public protection".
Under the terms of his sentence, he must satisfy the authorities that he is fit for release and does not pose any threat to the community before he can ever be set free.
Ian Robertson, of the UK-based Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre (CEOP), told BBC News 24 that the ages of the children whose images were exchanged on the site ranged from babies to teenagers.
After he was arrested in September 2006, undercover officers spent 10 days infiltrating the chatroom, assuming his identity to collect evidence about other users.
When Cox was arrested, undercover officers placed a message online saying he had gone for his tea and would be back in half an hour to avoid raising suspicions.
As many as 70 online paedophiles were waiting to download images of abuse.
Investigators from the Australian Federal Police, the US Department of Homeland Security and Toronto Police took part in the online surveillance operation.
In total, 31 children were saved as a result of the investigation, CEOP said.
Cox lived with his parents, sister and 26-year-old girlfriend in a large farmhouse and worked at the family's micro-brewery. The website was operated from his bedroom.
CEOP said Cox hosted the website using the pseudonym "Son of God" - a reference to "G.O.D", the online identity of the owner of another paedophile site shut down by police last year.
The court heard Cox spotted a "gap in the market" after the other site was closed.
Simon Spence, prosecuting, told the court: "For what must have been hours at a time he was online either viewing these images of children, arranging the chat room or communicating with other paedophiles."
'Horrific activities'
Jim Gamble of CEOP said his capture "sends a powerful warning to those using the internet to facilitate the sexual exploitation of children".
He added: "From the apparent 'safety' of his home, Cox spent hours each day planning, promoting and encouraging the abuse and exploitation of children.
"In doing so he provided a service to hundreds of like-minded individuals, enabling those with a sexual interest in children to share indecent images and discuss further plans for abuse.
"Anybody who thinks they can carry out such horrific activities undetected is in for a rude awakening."
Cox had been identified after intelligence connecting the site to the UK was passed to CEOP by Canadian investigators.
Detective Constable Stefan Jochan said: "He doesn't fit any kind of traditional image of paedophile. He had a veneer of respectability."
The investigation uncovered another member of the same ring, Gordon Mackintosh from Hertfordshire, who attempted to keep the website going after Cox was arrested.
Mackintosh, 33, used the names "silentblackheart" and "lust4skoolgurls". More than 5,000 images were found on his computer as well as 392 indecent movie files.
He pleaded guilty to 27 charges of making, possessing and distributing the material and is due to be sentenced on June 29.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6763817.stm

Yahoo boss steps down from post

The chief executive of internet search firm Yahoo, Terry Semel, has quit his position and has been replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang.

In the post since 2001, Mr Semel has been under pressure for some time amid disappointing trading results and the growing dominance of rival Google.
The firm suffered a 16% fall in profits in the first three months of 2007.
Mr Yang helped launch the business, which now has more than 500 million users worldwide, in 1995.
Recent struggles
Mr Semel will take on the role of non-executive chairman but will no longer be involved in the day-to-day running of the business.
Yahoo has struggled in recent years, losing market share to rivals such as Google and being criticised for poor technology and a lack of innovation.
Announcing his departure, Mr Semel said no-one at the firm was "satisfied" with the company's recent financial performance.
"This is a time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realise its potential," he said.
"It is the right thing to do and the right time is now."
In a statement, Yahoo acknowledged that the past year had been a "difficult one" for the business.
But it stressed that it had made progress in key areas such as developing advertising search functions and building its presence in video and on mobile platforms.
Mr Yang created the original Yahoo search engine in 1994 alongside partner David Filo before helping to launch the business a year later.
Since then, he has held a number of roles overseeing corporate strategy, technological development and international expansion.
Microsoft link
Yahoo has repeatedly been linked with a deal with Microsoft to try and counter Google's increasing supremacy in the online search market.
The two were reported to have held informal merger talks last year and to have revived discussions over possible co-operation earlier this year.
The two firms have dismissed the reports as speculation but, on both occasions, such talk led to a sharp increase in Yahoo's share price.
Mr Semel joined Yahoo at a time when its fortunes were at a low ebb following the collapse of the dot.com boom and helped to lead a revival in its business.
But Google's formidable growth and concerns about Yahoo's ability to respond has led to growing doubts about the firm's direction.
Yahoo's shares rose nearly 3% after news of Mr Semel's departure was revealed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6765893.stm

Day in pictures

A woman from Dharavi - one of the world's largest slums in Mumbai (Bombay) - shouts slogans at a rally outside the city's housing department.

Huge oilfield discovered in Ghana

UK firm Tullow Oil has announced the discovery of 600 million barrels of light oil offshore from Ghana. Reserves in the Mahogany exploration well were far greater than the 250 million barrels than the firm had earlier forecast, it said.
Tullow - which saw its shares rise 10% on the news - jointly owns the West Cape block where the drilling took place with Anadarko Petroleum.
The firms share rights to the adjacent Tano basin, which could yield more oil.
"Based on evidence to date, ultimate reserves are likely to be materially in excess of previous estimates, with some high potential zones still to be drilled," said Tullow chief executive Aidan Heavey.
He said it was one of the biggest oil discoveries in Africa in recent times, but warned it could be up to seven years before the oil started to flow.
'Boost to economy'
Ghana's President John Kufuor told the BBC that the discovery would give a major boost to Ghana's economy.
"Oil is money, and we need money to do the schools, the roads, the hospitals. If you find oil, you manage it well, can you complain about that?
"Even without oil, we are doing so well, already. Now, with oil as a shot in the arm, we're going to fly," he said.
Tullow Oil holds a 22.9% stake in the West Cape Three Points licence and just under 50% in the Deepwater Tano licence.
The move comes as foreign firms are increasingly tapping into Africa for oil.
Tullow shares closed up more than 12% on the news in trading in London.

Hong Kong ambiguous about China dissidents

HONG KONG, China (Reuters) -- For a couple of days around this time every year, thousands of Hong Kong residents demonstrate for more democracy in the territory and in China, and for Beijing to come clean on the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.
The rest of the year, such calls take a back seat to commerce with mainland China, the world's fastest-growing economy.
But the city of 7 million people that Britain handed back to China a decade ago remains a hive of dissent. Along with its neighbor, the former Portuguese-run enclave of Macau, it is one of two places under Chinese rule allowed such freedoms.
A handful of well-known Chinese dissidents call Hong Kong home, several magazines writing on a range of politically taboo topics in China are published here, and the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned on the mainland, thrives.
Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy from the mainland but there are murky lines that cannot be crossed, and the highest-profile exiled Chinese dissidents are denied entry.
Among the few high-profile Chinese dissidents living in the city are labor activist Han Dongfang, a major player in the Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations, and human rights activist Frank Lu, also a 1989 veteran.
"If I had been living abroad for the last 14 to 15 years and I tried to enter Hong Kong now, I don't think I would be allowed in," Han said.
Han was jailed for nearly two years after the Tiananmen crackdown in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, and he contracted tuberculosis. Issued a visa to get treatment in the United States upon release, he was banished to Hong Kong in 1993 after being forcibly expelled from China upon his return.
"There's really no other comparable case," Han said.
Case by caseMany high-profile, exiled Chinese dissidents live in the United States, where they take up posts or study at universities.
It is widely known that veteran dissident Wei Jingshang has been barred entry to Hong Kong.
Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen protests who spent 6-1/2 years in prison, was told his presence in Hong Kong would hurt the territory's "interests" when he applied to make a visit.
Wang said such refusals and other kinds of censorship are likely to continue as Hong Kong residents weigh the possible economic costs of criticizing China's leaders.
"Take freedom of speech for example," said Wang. "The newspapers in Hong Kong could lose much commercial coverage. In the 10 years since the handover, pressures like this have notably increased."
But in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics next year, China's leaders appear to be easing restrictions and allowing some dissidents into Hong Kong on a one-off, case-by-case basis.
In April, Chen Ziming, an academic branded a mastermind of the 1989 protests and sentenced to 13 years in prison, was allowed to do research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Ren Wanding, another Tiananmen-era dissident jailed for 11 years, was allowed to visit for seven days for health checks.
Some analysts said the central government gave its blessing to the trips because no untoward incident has been reported in China since the 2005 death of Zhao Ziyang, who was toppled as Communist Party chief for opposing the Tiananmen crackdown.
Small but persistentThe dissident community in Hong Kong is small but vocal and some say its messages seep into parts of southern China, where Hong Kong TV signals can be picked up.
Ultimately, though, some activists see political change in China as a struggle to be won on the mainland.
"China's democracy must be fought for by its own 1.3 billion people," said Szeto Wah, former lawmaker and now chairman of The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which organizes Hong Kong's June 4 Tiananmen protests.
"I always say that wagging a dog's tail won't move the dog. China's population is 200 times larger than Hong Kong so how can we hope to influence China's overall situation?"
But Hong Kong people are not afraid to speak up when they feel Beijing's influence in the city's affairs is overbearing.
In July 2003, hundreds of thousands turned out to protest against state security laws geared to punish subversion: lawmakers subsequently shelved the legislation.
On June 4 this year, 27,000 people by a police count turned up for a candlelight vigil, spurred by the comments of a pro-Beijing lawmaker who said that what happened in 1989 "wasn't a massacre".
That huge turnout came despite the hazy status of dissidents in the territory, a status Han Dongfang is comfortable with.
"A lot of friends told me to leave Hong Kong in 1997," Han said. "But I thought, the worse-case scenario would be that I would be sent to prison, and a Hong Kong prison is much better than a prison in China, so I decided I could live with it."
U.S.-based Wang Dan, studying for a PhD at Harvard, will try again in hopes of one day teaching at a local university.
"I will keep trying," Wang said. "For this would be a test of the Chinese Communist Party's sincerity to realize its one country-two political systems promise."
Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

DAILY Snap Shot

A flock of seagulls hang fluttering over their nests in a remote island off Tongyong, 450 kilometers (290 miles) south of Seoul, on June 8. The island is one of the most famous hatching places for seagulls on the southern coast of the Korean peninsula. (www.cnn.com)

Jessica Alba, 'Fantastic Four' are No. 1

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Hollywood's superhero foursome is still fantastic at the box office.
The 20th Century Fox sequel "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" debuted as the No. 1 weekend flick with $57.4 million in sales, slightly surpassing the $56.1 million opening of "Fantastic Four" two years ago, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Among other new wide releases, a favorite teen detective had trouble finding an audience as the Warner Bros. mystery "Nancy Drew" premiered with a so-so $7.1 million to finish at No. 7.
Opening in narrower release was the Weinstein Co. thriller "DOA: Dead or Alive," an adaptation of the martial-arts video game that pulled in just $232,000. Playing in 505 theaters, "DOA" averaged a paltry $460 a cinema, compared to $14,499 in 3,959 theaters for "Fantastic Four" and $2,732 in 2,612 locations for "Nancy Drew." (See Mr. Moviephone's take on 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer')
The previous weekend's No. 1 movie, George Clooney and Brad Pitt's "Ocean's Thirteen," fell to No. 2 with $19.1 million. The Warner Bros. casino caper raised its 10-day total to $69.8 million, putting it on track to become the franchise's third $100 million hit.
Despite the big opening for "Fantastic Four," Hollywood revenues slipped for the third straight weekend. The top 12 movies took in $138.8 million, down 4 percent from the same weekend last year, when "Cars," "Nacho Libre" and "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" led with a combined $86 million.
The industry had a blockbuster May with "Spider-Man," "Shrek" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequels, but big films are not holding their audiences after huge opening weekends.
After a surge early this year, attendance has slipped to just a fraction ahead of 2006, diminishing prospects of a record summer that many analysts had predicted.
"We've seen our advantage over last year slowly being chipped away," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. "A lot of films are doing what these big summer movies do, open big and drop off fast."
The new "Fantastic Four" reunites the quartet of astronauts-turned-mutant-superheroes, played by Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans. This time, the comic-book heroes join forces with archenemy Dr. Doom (Julian McMahon) to take down the Silver Surfer, an emissary leading a planet-destroying entity to Earth.
The studio and filmmakers toned down the action so the sequel could earn a PG rating to broaden the audience to family viewers. The first "Fantastic Four" was rated PG-13.
"A lot of the superhero comic-book movies are sort of geared toward being darker and edgier. We think 'Fantastic Four' is a more family friendly group of superheroes," said Chris Aronson, senior vice president for distribution at 20th Century Fox. "We wanted to make sure to cast a wide net and go after the family audience, and it worked."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

GOP leader: Immigration bill's future still uncertain

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Senate should wrap up work on a sweeping overhaul of U.S. immigration laws before July 4, but its odds of passage remain uncertain, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday.
"It's hard to know whether the votes will be there to pass it or not," McConnell said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
McConnell predicted the Senate would wrap up work on the measure "one way or the other" before the holiday.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, yanked the bill off the floor June 7 after supporters failed to muster the votes necessary to cut off debate on a series of amendments and bring the bill to a vote. Many said the amendments being considered at the time were nibbling away at the bill's delicate political balance and core aims.
But Senate leaders agreed to bring the measure back after reaching a deal Thursday to consider about 20 amendments, split evenly between Democratic and Republican proposals.
Bush has made reforming U.S. immigration law a priority for his second term, and Thursday's breakthrough came after he backed an amendment to use $4.4 billion in fees raised by the legislation to boost border security and prevent illegal immigrants from being hired in workplaces. (Watch who wants to pass the immigration bill )
The proposal was an effort to woo critics who say the bill needs to place more emphasis on border security.
The bill would create a guest-worker program to let migrant workers from other countries work temporarily in the United States, a plan that critics have said would create a permanent underclass of poor, low-skill workers.
The bill's most controversial measure is the creation of a pathway to legal status and eventual citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country -- a plan critics denounce as "amnesty." (Watch debate over 'earned citizenship' )
The plan has its critics in both houses of Congress, and Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-California, told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that the Bush-backed amendment is "a terrible trade."
"Border security is the obligation of the American government," said Hunter, a GOP presidential candidate. "That's like saying we'll send enough bullets to our troops in the field in Iraq or Afghanistan if you do something else, if you in Congress will make the right move. That should be a given."
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called Bush's plan "a good idea." But he added, "That alone is not going to satisfy the concerns about whether we are really going to build a workable system."
"Part of the problem is the American people look at this and they remember what happened in '86, when they were told, if you'll accept a one-time amnesty, then we'll get true enforcement," he told CNN. "Well, we all know what happened. We got an amnesty, but no enforcement."
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said it would be "political malpractice" to simply focus on current law without addressing the status of the immigrants now in the United States illegally.
"This is no longer about immigration reform. This is about, can we govern ourselves?" Graham said. "Can Republicans and Democrats sit down at a table and do the hard things, or are those days behind us? I am confident that the Senate will deliver."

Group wants demands met before freeing BBC reporter

TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) -- A Palestinian militant group holding BBC reporter Alan Johnston said on Sunday there was no deal to free the Briton abducted in Gaza three months ago and said he would be released only if its demands were met.
"Freeing this detainee has not been part of any deal with any faction or organization. What appears on television screens and through the media here and there is untrue," a man identified as a spokesman for the Army of Islam in Gaza told Al-Jazeera television.
"If they do not meet our demands there will be no release for that detainee and if things become more difficult ... then we would seek God's satisfaction by slaughtering this journalist," said the spokesman, identified as Abu Khatab.
An official of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said earlier on Sunday Johnston would be released within hours, but as the clock ticked by another senior Hamas member counseled caution.
The British Foreign Office said such statements only caused distress to Johnston's family and friends.
"We continue to urge Alan's safe and swift release and welcome the efforts of all those in the Palestinian territories to that end," a spokesman said.
The BBC said it was aware of the statement and other reports coming out of Gaza on Sunday.
"We are watching developments very closely," it said. (Watch video from captors in which Johnson says he is being treated well )
Abu Khatab acknowledged that negotiations for the release of the 45-year-old man were under way, but insisted that at least part of the group's demands be met.
In a June 1 video, the group holding Johnston repeated its demand for Britain to free Muslim prisoners, particularly the Islamist cleric Abu Qatada.
"There are negotiations -- one session after another, but we are interested in the main point, which is this detainee will not be released until they meet these demands, or what could be agreed upon (the release of) other detainees other than (Abu) Qatada," said the masked militant surrounded by gunmen.
Johnston, the only Western correspondent based full-time in Gaza, was seized March 12.
None of several foreigners seized in Gaza in recent years has been harmed. None has been held as long as Johnston, with most freed within days.
Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[ANN]RP's biggest criminal trial: Summations in

Public prosecutors took 626 pages to make their final written assertion that deposed President Joseph Estrada was guilty of plunder, and that a country still to heal fully from the Marcos dictatorship could not waste a "second chance" to punish a corrupt leader.
Defense lawyers, on the other hand, took only 276 pages to insist that Estrada was innocent, and that his downfall and subsequent legal troubles were brought on by a "mobocracy" - a reference to the EDSA II or the people power uprising in January 2001.
The protagonists in the biggest criminal - and most politically charged - trial in Philippine history filed their summation of evidence and arguments in the Sandiganbayan (anti-graft court) Wednesday (June 13), two days before the anti-graft court is to hear their oral presentation.
This penultimate volley only seemed to heighten the tension leading to the June 15 confrontation of the two camps at which the 70-year-old Estrada, under house arrest at his vacation estate in Tanay, Rizal, has been allowed by the court to attend.
Each of the memoranda, while mostly a rundown of the paper trails, legal jurisprudence, and quotes from the witness stand, also tried to appeal to the justices' sense of history.
"It is a rare occasion, indeed, for the country to have a second chance at attempting a fundamental change in its administration of justice - after the failure to obtain swift and timely justice against the Marcoses and their cronies, many cases against whom are still pending with courts after more than 20 years," the prosecution's memo read.
'Overwhelming evidence'
The government lawyers told the court that the evidence against Estrada had turned out "overwhelming" after almost seven years of trial and "after political alliances were forged and broken, after ambitions were formed and thwarted, after numerous delays engineered by the defense."
They said Estrada's acquittal by the Sandiganbayan would "sound the final death knell for good governance in our country and irreversibly doom our generation and the succeeding generations to decades of abject poverty caused by the pernicious effects of continuing pervasive corruption."
The prosecution led by Special State Prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio - and formerly by past Ombudsmen Aniano Desierto and Simeon Marcelo - had presented 76 witnesses to pin Estrada down for plunder, previously a capital offense until the Arroyo administration abolished the death penalty last year.
Estrada, with eight other respondents, is accused of running a conspiracy to amass some 4.1 billion pesos (US$88.763 million) in kickbacks from illegal gambling, tobacco excise taxes, and stock market commissions, and laundering the money through a foundation and secret bank accounts during his short-lived presidency.
His co-accused include his son, now senator Jinggoy Estrada, and lawyer Ed Serapio, both of whom have been granted bail, and Yolanda Ricaforte, Jaime Dichaves, Eleuterio Tan, Alma Alfaro, and Delia Rajas, who all remain at large.
Another respondent, Charlie "Atong" Ang, Estrada's former gambling buddy, was granted a two-year probation by the Sandiganbayan last May. Ang had pleaded guilty to corruption of a public official and agreed to return 25 million pesos ($541,242) to the government in a plea bargain arrangement.

By Volt Contreras
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Beckham exit 'will not hurt Real'

David Beckham's exit will not adversely affect Real Madrid finances, according to an ex-deputy chairman of advertising giants Saatchi and Saatchi.
Much has been made of the midfielder's marketability, both to former club Manchester United and Real, but Alex Fynn says his value can be overstated.
"If Real win La Liga and Beckham goes, there won't even be a blip that will be felt," Fynn told BBC Sport.
"To have an optimum business you need a successful team and Real haven't been."
Beckham, who will now join Major League Soccer club LA Galaxy in the United States after four years in Spain, helped give Real a marketing presence in the Far East but until this season the club have underperformed on the pitch.
Real's Primera Liga success on Sunday was the first time Real have won the league title since 2003 - just before Beckham joined the Spanish club.

Fynn's view is supported by Barcelona vice-president Ferran Soriano, the club that Beckham snubbed in favour of joining Real Madrid in 2003.
"The addition of good and notorious players such as David Beckham is supposed to improve the Spanish League," said Soriano.
"But actually there are no numbers that support this - it is hard to say."
After Beckham chose Real, Barcelona bought the Brazilian Ronaldinho, who guided the Catalan club to two Primera Liga titles and the Champions League crown in 2006.
As Barcelona won those titles, Madrid were hit by internal boardroom politics.
"Barca have no regrets over Beckham," added Soriano, referring to the 32-year-old's decision to join Real.
"I think he would have done well at Barca but we bought Ronaldinho instead, who has added a lot of value - in all senses - to our club."
Business magazine Forbes ranks Real as second to Manchester United in being the most valuable team in the world.
United are priced at £740m, ahead of Real (£528m), with Arsenal (£466m) in third.
However, accountants Deloitte and Touche rate Real as the world's wealthiest club in terms of sales as its revenues rose to £202m from £186.2m.
Deloitte's figures take into account income from ticket sales, merchandising and broadcasting contracts but do not include transfer revenues and does not calculate profitability.
The key to Real's wealth has been the money the club has accrued from lucrative domestic television deals.
"Real, Barca and Italian giants like AC Milan have achieved a level of revenue from TV deals that English clubs will only realise next season," said Fynn.
"That's because those overseas clubs have been are able to negotiate those domestic rights themselves and not collectively as the Premier League clubs do."

According to the Forbes survey, the highest-earning footballer was Ronaldinho, with earnings of £15.2m.
Beckham, with £14.8m, was second, although those figures do not take into account the England midfielder's move to LA Galaxy.
While not disputing Beckham is a very good "marketing property", Fynn argues his appeal remains relatively limited.
"Because of the type of person he is, Beckham will appeal best to a certain audience - mainly young and impressionable people," stated Fynn, who has advised clubs and federations on media marketing.
"If Real were looking to improve their appeal to a more affluent and older market, whose spending power would be dictated by a more refined choice, you wouldn't necessarily turn to Beckham first.
"There is no-one in football who transcends all markets in the way golfer Tiger Woods does and Michael Jordan used to in basketball.
"Beckham is not as influential a sporting ambassador as those two American superstars.
"They transcend class and boundaries in the way Beckham does not.
"Partly because of the sport he plays - football isn't popular in the United States - partly because he isn't particularly articulate."
Fynn says Arsenal forward Thierry Henry offers an interesting contrast to Beckham.
"Henry defines himself first and foremost as a footballer and in that capacity the Frenchman is far superior to Beckham.
"If Henry used his renown as a footballer to promote products he would be able to promote them over a wider field than Beckham.
"But he still chooses to prioritise his sport. Arguably, he is as fluent in English as Beckham is - and that is Henry's second language."

Warnings of 'internet overload'

As the flood of data across the internet continues to increase, there are those that say sometime soon it is going to collapse under its own weight. But that is what they said last year.

Back in the early 90s, those of us that were online were just sending text e-mails of a few bytes each, traffic across the main US data lines was estimated at a few terabytes a month, steadily doubling every year.
But the mid 90s saw the arrival of picture-rich websites, and the invention of the MP3. Suddenly each net user wanted megabytes of pictures and music, and the monthly traffic figure exploded.
For the next few years we saw more steady growth with traffic again roughly doubling every year.
But since 2003, we have seen another change in the way we use the net. The YouTube generation want to stream video, and download gigabytes of data in one go.
"In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it's clearly very different," said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems.
"The network is growing up, is starting to get more capacity than it ever had, but it is a challenge.
"Video is real-time, it needs to not have mistakes or errors. E-mail can be a little slow. You wouldn't notice if it was 11 seconds rather than 10, but you would notice that on a video."
Spending our inheritance

Perhaps unsurprisingly, every year someone says the internet is going to collapse under the weight of the traffic. Looking at the figures, that seems a reasonable prediction.
"Back in the days of the dotcom boom in the late 90s, billions of dollars were invested around the world in laying cables," said net expert Bill Thompson.
"Then there was the crash of 2000 and since then we've been spending that inheritance, using that capacity, growing services to fill the space that was left over by all those companies that went out of business."

Router reliability
Much more high-speed optic fibre has been laid than we currently need, and scientists are confident that each strand can be pushed to carry almost limitless amounts of data in the form of light.
But long before a backbone wire itself gets overloaded, the strain may begin to show on the devices at either end - the routers.
"If we take a backbone link across the Atlantic, there're billions of bits of data arriving every second and it's all got to go to different destinations," explained Mr Thompson.

The router sits at the end of that very high speed link and decides

where each small piece of data has to go. That's not a difficult computational task, but it has to make millions of decisions a second."
The manufacturer of most of the world's routers is Cisco. When I pushed them on the subject of router overload, they were understandably confident.

The real issue that people are going to face, and are already noticing at home, is that ISPs are starting to cut back on the bandwidth that is available to people in their homes

"Routers have come a long way since they started," said Mr Smith. "The routers we're talking about now can handle 92 terabits per second.
"We have enough capacity to do that and drive a billion phone calls from those same people who are playing a video game at the same time they're having a text chat."
Congestion
Even if the routers can continue to take what the fibre delivers, there is another problem - the internet is not all fibre.
A lot of the end connections, the ones that go to our individual home computers, are made of decades-old copper.
"The real issue that people are going to face, and are already noticing at home, is that ISPs are starting to cut back on the bandwidth that is available to people in their homes," said Mr Thompson. "They call it bandwidth shaping.
"They do this because they have a limited capacity to deliver to 100 or 200 homes, and if everybody's using the internet at the same time then the whole thing starts to get congested. Before that happens they cut back on the heavy users."
Obstacles
But digital meltdown is not the only threat facing the net. There are other, more sudden, real world hazards which the net has to protect against.
Anything from terror attacks to, would you believe it shark bites, can and have taken out major links and routers.
"There's a perception that the internet is very resilient," said Paul Wood, senior analyst of security firm MessageLabs. "The way it was designed means that if any particular part of it is disrupted then the traffic will find another route.
"It only takes an earthquake, as we saw at the end of last year, to take out a significant segment of internet infrastructure. Then the traffic finds another route, but it goes over a very slow route, which then becomes saturated and can't handle the bandwidth. Then you lose the traffic and that part of the world goes dark for a while."
For decades the internet has kept pace with our demands on it. And demand continues to grow.
And the service providers will continue to insist that the net will survive, and the doomsayers will continue to insist that it is just about to collapse.

Moscow world's most costly city

Russia's capital Moscow has been named as the world's most expensive city for expatriate staff to live for the second year in a row.

London climbed three places to second in Mercer Human Resource Consulting's 2007 Cost of Living study.
Asian cities Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong completed the top five. Paraguay's capital Asuncion was the cheapest.
The report measures the cost of 200 items such as housing, clothing and food in 143 cities on six continents.
The most expensive place to rent a luxury two-bedroom unfurnished apartment was Tokyo, at £2,110 per month, and the cheapest Johannesburg, at just £490.
And while a coffee in Moscow will set you back £3.14, in Buenos Aires it will cost less than £1.
The high cost of accommodation and a favourable exchange rate against the US dollar were the key factors behind Moscow's continued dominance of the annual cost-of-living survey, Mercer said.
See a comparison of key cities in the survey It was a similar story in London, where property rental prices and the weakening US dollar saw the English capital rise from fifth place in 2006.
Mercer senior consultant Rebecca Powers said there had been significant changes since the 2006 rankings of the annual survey.
"These are primarily due to exchange rate fluctuations - in particular, the weakening of the US dollar and strengthening of the Euro," she said.
Across Europe, a stronger Euro pushed up the premium paid to live in many countries, notably Germany and Spain. Six European cities were in the top 10.
Israel's capital Tel Aviv was found to be the priciest city in the Middle East, with a ranking of 17th (up from 24th in 2006).
Cities in the United Arab Emirates such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi slumped largely because their currency is pegged to the ailing US dollar, Mercer said.
Dollar's decline
Asia had four of the top-10 most expensive cities in the rankings, with the Japanese city of Osaka taking eighth place. Australia's largest city, Sydney, was the most expensive in Oceania, taking 21st place.
In Africa, the most expensive place to live was Cameroon's largest city, Douala, which ranked 24th.
Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, was excluded from the survey this year. It is caught in a spiralling economic crisis, with the world's highest inflation rate of 3,714%.
In North America, you will still have to fork out for a bite of the Big Apple - New York was again the most expensive city, but it dropped five places to 15th. Other US cities also experienced sharp falls.
"The change reflects a reversal of the situation experienced this time last year, when the majority of US cities climbed the ranking due to the strength of the dollar," Ms Powers said.
In South America, Sao Paulo (62nd) and Rio de Janeiro (64th) were the most expensive places to live, but both slumped by more than 20 places each.
Asuncion in Paraguay was the cheapest of the 143 cities ranked for the fifth year in a row.
It was joined by Pakistan's largest city, Karachi (142nd), and Ecuador's capital, Quito (141st), at the bottom of the table.

Manhunt after Melbourne shootings

One person has died and two been injured after a gunman opened fire on a busy street in the centre of Melbourne in Australia, police have said.

The two who were hurt reportedly both suffered chest wounds and were taken to hospital in a critical condition.
The gunman escaped on foot and is now being sought by police.
The incident on the corner of Flinders and William Streets happened during the morning rush hour, sending hundreds of commuters fleeing for cover.
Police believe that one of the injured victims, a woman, knew the assailant.
"There is no suggestion this is a random act - it appears there was a relation with the gunman and the victims, so we are asking people not to panic," Victoria Police Inspector Glen Weir said.
"There are numerous police attending the search within the vicinity of the incident and there's a large cordon and containment operation under way as we speak," Inspector Weir added.
Businesses closed
"A girl came out of a building over the road, she was screaming and a guy had her by the hair," witness Ross Murchie told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
"She tried to grab hold of a taxi that was going by and the couple of bystanders went over to ask what was happening," Mr Murchie said.
"He let go of her hair, pulled out a gun and shot them all."
The other person who was injured and the one who died were both reported as male.
The incident forced the closure of a number of streets in the commercial heart of what is Australia's second-largest city, with shops and offices shut as armed police and helicopters hunt for the gunman.
"No-one is allowed out of the building - we have to close down everything, customers are inside, we have to remain inside," shop owner Hened Mouawad told AFP.

Sarkozy party wins in French poll

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right party won a comfortable majority in parliamentary elections. But his UMP party fell far short of the landslide win predicted for it in the second-round vote, with the Socialist opposition faring better than expected.
The UMP won 314 seats in the 577-member assembly, while the Socialists won 185. Voter turnout was low, at about 60%.
The results will be seen as a minor setback for Mr Sarkozy's party, says the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris.
However, a major blow for the UMP was the defeat of former Prime Minister Alain Juppe, who was made energy and environment minister in the new government after Mr Sarkozy's election.
Mr Juppe said he would offer his resignation. Mr Sarkozy has insisted that any minister would have to leave the government if they failed to be elected.
But the victory gives Mr Sarkozy enough room to start pushing his reforms through parliament, our correspondent says.
Mr Sarkozy has promised to give universities more autonomy, impose tougher sentences on repeat offenders, tighten immigration, make labour laws more flexible and reduce taxation.
'Coherent choice'
The UMP and its allies' 314-seat majority is smaller than the 359 seats they held in the previous parliament, when Jacques Chirac was president.
HIGH-PROFILE LOSERS Former Prime Minister Alain Juppe, appointed to be energy and environment minister in new governmentMarine Le Pen, daughter of far-right National Front leader Jean Marie le PenJean-Louis Brugiere, France's best known anti-terrorist judge, standing for UMP
The Socialists and their allies won 185 seats, up from 149 in the previous assembly.
The centrist Democratic Movement, founded by presidential candidate Francois Bayrou, won three seats. The far-right National Front party did not win any seats.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the result gave Mr Sarkozy a strong mandate to introduce his reforms.
"Your participation has resulted in a clear and coherent choice, which will allow the president of the Republic to implement his project," he said.
Royal separation
The leader of the Socialists, Francois Hollande, said the result was "good for the country".
"The blue wave that had been predicted... has not taken place. In the new assembly, there will be diversity and pluralism," he said.
He also described the result as an indictment of "unfair measures" set to be introduced by the UMP such as raising sales taxes from 19.5% to 24.5% to finance healthcare costs.
The Socialists' results are a relief to the party, which has been riven by infighting since its candidate, Segolene Royal, lost the presidential elections in May.
But according to our correspondent, discussion on Monday is likely to focus on a surprise announcement by Ms Royal that she is splitting from her partner, the Socialists' leader, Francois Hollande.
The defeated presidential candidate said in a book to be published this week that her partner was having an affair.
"I have asked Francois Hollande to leave our home, to pursue his love interest which is now laid out in books and newspapers and I wish him happiness," she said in an interview ahead of the book's release on Wednesday.
The couple have been together for more than 25 years and have four children.
Ms Royal has said she will challenge Mr Hollande for the party's leadership.

Elton John gives Kiev HIV concert

Elton John has given a free concert in the main square of Ukraine's capital, Kiev, to promote HIV-Aids awareness. President Viktor Yushchenko and other leading politicians were among the 200,000 people attending the show.
Ukraine has one of the highest HIV infection rates in Europe with a new case every 10 minutes, according to Ukraine's Anti-Aids Foundation.
The organisers said they hope the UK star's performance will help reduce ignorance surrounding the disease.
The free, open-air concert, which was broadcast live on Ukrainian TV, was the biggest ever seen in Ukraine.
The event's slogan was "Stop Aids before it stops us" and Elton John told the crowd that he would do all he could to help Ukraine in its battle against the disease.
His Aids foundation already funds 23 HIV-Aids projects in Ukraine and he said that the concert would allow them to do even more.
Before the show free condoms were handed out along with leaflets on HIV testing and counselling centres.
Boycott call
A religious group had urged Ukrainians to boycott the event, describing it as blasphemous and accusing Elton John of trying to promote a gay lifestyle.
Despite the Western outlook of Ukraine's leader, it is a conservative and predominantly Orthodox Christian country, the BBC's Helen Fawkes in Kiev says.
Even in the capital, very few men are openly gay, while lesbians are virtually invisible, our correspondent says.
An estimated 400,000 people are HIV-positive in Ukraine and it is believed that gay men make up only a small percentage of that figure.
Experts say that the disease, which was initially spread by drug-users, is now becoming widespread and that within the next decade one in 50 people in Ukraine could be HIV-positive.

Amazon river 'longer than Nile'

Researchers in Brazil are claiming to have established as a scientific fact that the Amazon is the longest river in the world.
The Amazon is recognised as the world's largest river by volume, but has generally been regarded as second in length to the River Nile in Egypt.
The claim follows an expedition to Peru that is said to have established a new starting point further south.
It puts the Amazon at 6,800km (4,250 miles) compared to the Nile's 6,695km.
Mountain source
The precise length of a river is not easy to calculate and depends on correctly identifying the source and the mouth.
The new claim in Brazil follows an expedition by scientists which is said to have discovered a new source for the Amazon in the south of Peru and not the north of the country as had been thought for many years.
While the exact location has yet to be confirmed from two choices, scientists say either would make the river the longest in the world.
Guido Gelli, director of science at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, told the Brazilian network TV Globo that today it could already be considered as a fact that the Amazon was the longest river in the world.
The Amazon is now said to begin in an ice-covered mountain in southern Peru called Mismi.
Researchers travelled for 14 days, sometimes in freezing temperatures, to establish the location at an altitude of 5,000m.
The research was co-ordinated by the National Geographical Institute of Peru, with the help of their colleagues in Brazil.
There has been a healthy academic debate over the world's longest river for some years and the claim from Brazil may not go unchallenged.

Massive labor strikes coming this summer

Korea's seasonal wave of labor strikes, or the so-called summer strife, is expected to hit the nation beginning this week, stirring concerns of severe labor unrest in key industries.
Setting the stage for the June offensive, tens of thousands of golf caddies, insurance salespeople and cement-mixer drivers will go on massive walkouts beginning today, demanding the government secure three labor rights for workers in the special employment bracket.
Strikers will rotate sit-ins outside the National Assembly, calling for the legalization of a set of bills which will permit them to get national industrial accident insurance and scrap oppressive labor regulations, within the June parliamentary session.
Workers affiliated with the Korean Metal Workers Union are also gearing up for collective action, pressing management at Korea's four automakers to participate in the industrial-level negotiations, which have been stalled since last week.
The group, representing about 143,000 workers, said there has been a rupture in negotiations as management at four automakers, including Hyundai Motor Co. and its affiliate Kia Motors Corp., refused to attend the four previous meetings.
The managements of Hyundai, Kia, Ssangyong and GM Daewoo have refused to come to the negotiation table, citing the danger of duplicated negotiation results.
The metal workers' union has been demanding the legalization of industrial-level negotiations since last year, in order to increase its bargaining power. But businesses have opposed the push saying that such a mechanism would give greater leverage to the labor side during collective bargaining.
The union plans to go on partial strikes next Monday through Friday and hold an all-member vote for a second walkout in July.
Labor unions at Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors are planning to decide whether or not to participate in the strikes by Thursday.
The two labor groups are facing fierce criticism as its leaders have been pushing to participate in the strikes, abiding by orders from its parent organization, the metal workers' union, without allowing union members to vote on the move.
Civic groups in Ulsan are planning to hold a press conference today at Ulsan City Hall to prevent the Hyundai Motor union from taking part in the walkout.
An umbrella organization of over 140 civic groups in Ulsan is planning to hold massive protest rallies should the union decide to participate in the "political strike," said Lee Doo-cheol, head of the organization.
"We cannot sit back and watch the union hold political strikes when it is threatening the national economy," said Lee.
"Amid declining public support, the union appears to be weighing the pros and cons carefully," said an unnamed official at Hyundai Motor. "The political strikes will become a burden for both labor and the management."
Serious production losses are expected in the major plants of Hyundai and Kia should the two unions decide to join in the strikes.
The Hyundai Motor labor union had pledged not to go on political strikes for matters outside wage and working condition negotiations after launching a 34-day strike last year.
The prolonged strike last year - over bonuses and various political concerns - caused a 115,000-vehicle drop in production, and a 1.6 trillion won ($1.7 billion) loss in sales for the automaker, according to Hyundai Motor statistics.
A group of hospital workers is also planning to vote this week for a massive walkout next Tuesday to fend off the government-led revision of the medial law. The bill has been facing mounting opposition after the former chairman of the Korean Medical Association - the largest doctors' group in Korea - was accused of illegally lobbying several lawmakers to influence the legislation.
The Korean Health and Medical Workers Union, representing about 40,000 workers at more than 100 hospitals nationwide, is demanding the government nullify the bill and open discussion with all medical representatives.
Amid waves of labor unrest in major workplaces, the radical Korean Confederation of Trade Unions plans to go on strike July 25-29 to protest the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement.
Members of the labor group plan to go on simultaneous strikes in several regions nationwide for four days, meeting up in Seoul for a joint demonstration on June 29.
Workers will go on two-hour strikes in turns June 25-27, and they will lengthen the strike to four hours on June 28 and six hours in 29, the KCTU said.
The KCTU, one of the nation's umbrella unions, currently has about 360,000 members.
By Shin Hae-in
(hayney@heraldm.com)

IAEA Inspectors Likely to Visit Pyongyang on June 20

Inspectors of the international nuclear watchdog are likely to visit Pyongyang on Wednesday on the invitation of North Korea as the banking problem, a main stumbling block to a six-party talks on the North’s nuclear program, have been solved.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will Monday discuss matters concerning the dispatch of the working-level inspectors to the North, Yonhap News Agency quoted a U.S. diplomat as saying, adding that they would enter the North as early as June 20 as they are able to prepare for the entry in two days.
Christopher Hill, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Asia and Pacific affairs and U.S. top negotiator to the six-party talks, said at a bar in Ulan Bator Sunday evening that he received an e-mail from IAEA that it would send the working-level delegation to the North soon, Yonhap reported.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming confirmed it had received the invitation and said the organization would decide next steps on Monday, Kyodo news agency reported.
Consequently, IAEA inspectors are expected to discuss how to verify and monitor the suspension of the operation of nuclear facilities from Wednesday.
As a result, in a few weeks, the nuclear reactors in Yeongbyeon are expected to be scrapped completely, local North Korea watchers said..

FTA Negotiators Face Scrutiny

By Kim Yon-seStaff Reporter
South Korean negotiators for a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States will face intensive parliamentary inquiries from Monday.
The National Assembly, which has been reviewing the full agreement since May 25 when the FTA text was made public, will put its scrutiny focus on Korea’s few gains and many yields in the bilateral talks sealed in early April.
Figures such as Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, Trade Minister Kim Hyun-chong, chief negotiator Kim Jong-hoon and deputy chief negotiator Lee Hye-min are required to answer lawmakers’ questions.
In a statement, 65 lawmakers from the pro-government and opposition parties announced 75 major items which should be probed by the National Assembly.
They said the items include ``infringement on legislative power,’’ ``alleged manipulation of economic effects by state-owned research institutes,’’ ``the government’s intentional delay of notifying negotiation results to the Assembly’’ and ``the government’s concealing of information.’’
They said the negotiations were concluded on the basis of ``apparent inequality’’ in each sector.
``As expected, Korea accepted almost all the demands of the U.S. lopsidedly,’’ they said. ``We cannot expect positive effects from our main demands in the automobiles and textiles sectors.’’
Pointing out the ``poisonous’’ clauses, demanded by U.S. negotiators, in the non-tariffs barrier sector, the lawmakers insisted the situation is very serious.
``The government even victimized the sector for public health and medical services by accepting U.S. demands to import mad cow disease-related American beef, and to open the Live Modified Organism (LMO) market,’’ they said.
Saying that the FTA talks proved to be spoiled and humiliating, they expressed deep anxiety about the coming renegotiations (or additional discussions) requested by the U.S.
``The Korea-U.S. FTA talks should be nullified as we have already emphasized a number of times,’’ they said.
President Roh Moo-hyun should keep his promise to hold televised debates with Korea-U.S. FTA opponents before signing the provisional agreement, they added.
Among the 65 lawmakers are those from the Uri Party, the Grand National Party, the Democratic Labor Party, the Democratic Party and those who deserted the Uri Party.
kys@koreatimes.co.kr

New St. Louis school board asks for community's help

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AP) -- A newly appointed state board started running the St. Louis school district Friday and asked for the community's help in trying to improve its schools' performance.
The state had voted in March to strip the district's accreditation because of unmet academic and financial standards, and a judge ruled Thursday the takeover was constitutional.
All three members of the appointed board pledged to seek input from students, teachers, residents and members of the elected school board that still remains, though it now has no power.
"We're in uncharted waters on a lot of things," said Rick Sullivan, a homebuilder appointed by Gov. Matt Blunt to lead the transitional board.
Sullivan praised the work of school superintendent Diana Bourisaw and said the board has no intention of removing her. She has said she intends to stay because students need stability.
Member Richard Gaines, an insurance broker who also served on the board from 1983 to 1989, acknowledged the awkwardness of a board not elected by the city's residents now running the district.
"It brings a great deal of discomfort to me and other people in this city," Gaines said.
That discomfort was barely evident at the meeting. Muted catcalls or laughter occurred a few times during the brief meeting, and two protesters stood outside.
In challenging the takeover, St. Louis school attorneys questioned the fairness of the accreditation process.
State officials were pleased the court affirmed the standards used to evaluate the district.
"In this case, the data clearly show that St. Louis has been losing ground in academic performance," said Jim Morris, a spokesman for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. "We feel the state action is not only justified, but also necessary to get this school district back on track."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Models Find A Runway On MySpace

Ford Models international model search has covered 50 countries annually since the the1980s. Previously the competition was only open to applicants where Ford Models had a presence. Now models in any city will be able to enter the competition through the companies MySpace profile.
Visitors to the site will have access to videos, editorials, blogs and other content from Ford models, artists, photographers, agents and stylists. The profile and competition will launch in July.
"By tapping into the MySpace community, Ford Models will be able to engage with millions of new faces and potential models quickly and without any geographic constrictions," said Shawn Gold, SVP of Marketing for MySpace.
"At the same time, MySpace users all over the world will get unprecedented access to the world's most prestigious modeling agency."
Contestants will be able to promote themselves through their MySpace profile by updating their photos, videos, music and information. Applicants will have a chance to win one of three contracts from Ford Models with the top prize being a $250,000 contract.
"Joining Ford's talent, knowledge and industry experience with the MySpace community creates a truly international destination for fashion and beauty without limitation," said John Caplan, President and COO of Ford Models Inc.
MySpace Ford Models

EBay Explores Human Nature, Likes What It Sees

Omidyar, speaking alongside John Donohoe, president of eBay Marketplaces, and Bob Kagle of Benchmark Capital, at the opening "Coffee Talk" segment of the eBay Developers Conference in Boston, pulled out all of the Pollyanna stops.
I know what you're thinking, but save the references to Kool-Aid, flowers, handholding and Kumbaya for the comments section. Omidyar's message of hope and eBay was a nice change of pace from a world enamored with the descent of celebrity heiresses and bombshell drama.
Omidyar said the driving mantra behind eBay, back when it was still a startup in 1995, was "people are basically good," and the continuation of that idea with an emphasis on trust is what will keep eBay afloat in the future.
Like any good collective myth creator (we apply "collective myth" in the positive sense rather than the pejorative, if you pessimists think otherwise – hegemony has its own noble function), Omidyar focused on success stories.
Our sources at the conference readily relay Pierre's tale of a woman pulling herself out of public assistance because of the opportunity a service like eBay's offers, where the barriers to doing business are effectively laid flat.
His conclusion, then, is split into two lessons eBay has presented mankind:
Lesson 1: Business is a force for good (Again, hold your comments, he said "business" and not "corporatism," as might be your first objection).
Lesson 2: Given the right environment, people can discover power within themselves to make good things happen.
Mmmm. Excuse me a moment as I rub that into my skin and like it, hope beyond reason, and reconsider my thoughts on altruism and human nature, and ponder whether or not turning 30 has really jaded me forever. Maybe I just need more coffee.
Kagle interjects to back up Pierre, reiterating the idea that people can simultaneously "do good and be successful," an idea that inspired eBay from its roots, and that the people on eBay genuinely want to help others.
Barring a few bad apples, we can imagine, like fathers sharing their parenting skills via Nintendo boxes of rocks, and opportunists selling locks of Britney's hair. To eBay's credit, the team weeds these out with good-faith vigor – though people are basically good, at least born as a good, clean slate, they are often polluted over time, like good ideas, and good websites. Cleaning and showering are ongoing human crises.
Nonetheless, Pierre believes in this innate goodness – a nice rebuttal to Original Sin – and believes eBay is "just beginning to impact the world, if you believe in people and trust each other."
That's a tall order for the Aristocracy, Pierre, but so was the idea that housewives, paupers, the physically afflicted – well, anybody – could run a proper online business with eBay. And that's working out so far…
Bob interjects again, says, eBay "brings the world together, and over time…will impact communities, cities, and even countries. And that will change the world."
Pierre was selling the idea better, but that's okay. "Third parties," says Pierre, "consumers, developers, are the ones that will lead."
Scoff all you want, he could be right – has been so far – and at the least, it's a nice battle cry.

eBay Developers Conference Pierre Omidyar Bob Kagle Human nature

Google Offers Olive Branch To eBay

The move by Google came after eBay said that it was pulling all of their advertising off of Google AdWords. In the Google Checkout Blog Tom Oliveri explains, "eBay Live attendees have plenty of activities to keep them busy this week in Boston, and we did not want to detract from that activity.
"After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference."
"Google is constantly reaching out to new users and sellers, and we are available to privately discuss any matters of concern with individuals as they relate to Google products."
What caused this latest kerfuffle was due to Google Checkout not being available to eBay merchants. eBay has maintained that when Google Checkout was launched it was unproven. Reading between the lines eBay does not want to directly compete with Google Checkout because they have their own payment service PayPal.
Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman said, "We are pleased that they apparently have seen that the party was inappropriate. It is not the way one partner should act with another."
eBay would not say when they would bring ads back to Google. "We have no firm date for how long the experiment will go," Mr. Durzy said.
Google eBay

Ask.com Ad Campaign Associated With Google

Ask.com has gotten a lot of flack over its “algorithm” ad campaign, and it seemed possible that the publicity might hurt, rather than help, the company. Now one survey has revealed that many people didn’t even associate the ads with Ask.com - instead, they believed those strange and controversial messages were coming from Google.


This discovery comes courtesy of Barry Schwartz (posting under the name “rustybrick”), who found that 78 percent of his Digg respondents thought Google was behind the ads. Now, for all you statisticians out there, I should note that only 27 people answered Schwartz’s question, and Schwartz himself admits, “This also only reflects the Digg market and does not reflect normal people who work in schools, in doctor offices, legal offices and so on.”
Still, for Ask.com to run a campaign that so many people think is the work of another company . . . well, if it weren’t for the poor response to the ads, I’d call it disastrous. Yet random references to Jesus and the Unabomber didn’t go over well, so, as things stand, perhaps having people think Google’s behind it will help Ask.com, after all.
Let’s just pretend, though, that Ask might want to claim ownership of its commercials - this doesn’t seem like a huge leap. Schwartz points to John Mueller, a veteran member of the Cre8asite Forum, who thinks it may still require a huge effort. “Google is constantly doing something with [its] ‘algorithm’. It even ranks #4 for ‘algorithm’ (on Google),” Mueller writes.
“Getting a ‘new’ company associated with a term like that is going to be a long, hard journey,” he concludes.
Well, at least, according to Schwartz’s numbers, 24 percent of people have already made the connection.
Tags: Ask.com, Algorithm, Google

Google Wants Your Medical Somatoformatic Info

It may have never occurred to you what the doctor's doing the whole time you're half-naked in a paper gown sitting on a paper sheet and reading the laminated diagram of the inner ear hanging on the wall, but there's a good chance he's looking up what you think he should know off the top of his head.
Things like: symptoms, latest treatment, drug interactions, discounts on car rentals, and how to deal with a teenage daughter.
Well, the first three mostly, among other complicated medical issues your tongue-depressor-counting self doesn't want to think about.
Google product manager and MD Roni Zeiger says keeping track of all the overlapping information can be a daunting task. This is why there are computer systems for medical informatics to help them out.
Zeiger says Google is looking to bring this information online. (So, when you're sitting there doing nothing, you can whip out your Blackberry and try to predict what the doc's going to say.)
Zeiger writes:
I believe patients should also have access to these kinds of systems so that they can help make sure they are getting the best care. If you search online to learn more about diabetes, it should be easy to find out what the generally recommended treatments and tests are….
We have been talking to many medical experts to understand what the best guidelines are, and how we can determine which ones apply in different circumstances. If such guidelines were more available to patients, they might be able to, by inputting information such as age, gender or medications, learn about recommended screening tests and other preventive measures, or about harmful drug interactions.
Cheers to that, and score one for fueling your hypochondriasis. Somatoform just ain't what it used to be – it used to require commitment, dusty books and hours of reading. But Google's looking to streamline it, make it so you can multitask your OCD.

Google Health Medical Information

MySpace, Sony, Honda Create Classic "Minisodes"

Some people think our attention spans are getting shorter, while others argue that we’re simply getting better at multitasking. Well, you can decide for yourself, but MySpace, Sony, and Honda are preparing to air edited four-to-six minute versions of thirty-to-sixty minute television shows.
MySpace TV
The so-called “minisodes” will be shown on MySpace, and this may say more about the social networking site’s primary user base than society in general. But, to be fair, online video lends itself to showing shorter clips. And some young people have never even heard of “Fantasy Island,” “Who’s the Boss,” and “The Facts of Life” - you can’t blame them for not wanting to sit through full episodes.
In fact, the classic Sony shows that have been selected for this Minisode Network are an odd fit for MySpace. Honda’s sponsorship, on the other hand, is intended to promote the Fit, a compact car. While I’m not a fan of the Fit’s styling, it’s gotten positive reviews (first place out of seven models, according to Car and Driver), and the Fit’s small price tag is well suited to MySpace’s main demographic.
That’s where the commercials come in. “To mirror the pared-down programming, Honda and its longtime agency, RPA, have agreed to run only eight seconds of commercials with each episode, appearing before the shortened show starts,” reports Stuart Elliott for The New York Times.
Elliott also writes that Honda’s sponsorship is “estimated in six figures,” and “is indicative of the intensifying interest in online video among marketers.”
As for the future of the Minisode Network, Amy Carney, president for advertiser sales at Sony Pictures Television in New York, told Elliott, “After the exclusivity with My Space ends . . . . Sony Pictures Television is looking at sites like aol.com, yahoo .com and youtube.com.” It appears that these short clips may have a long shelf life.

Tags: MySpace, Sony, Honda, Online Video
About the AuthorDoug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

East meets West in Switzerland galleries

BASEL, Switzerland -- In time for the Art Basel, Galerie Beyeler and Gallery Hyundai are jointly hosting an exhibition to showcase the works of 10 artists from Korea next to those of 10 European artists.
Titled "Poetry in Motion," the group show is exhibiting the works of Kim Whan-ki (1913-1974), pioneer of abstract painting in Korea, Lee U-fan, who is internationally recognized for his minimalist paintings that superbly infuse eastern philosophy (Lee is also having a well-received solo exhibition in Venice), Kim Tschang-yeul, known for hyper-realistic "Water Drops" paintings and "Recurrence" series, and of course, Paik Nam-june (1932-2006), the most prominent Korean figure in contemporary art.
"Korean aesthetics, I think, is very sensitive and not very far from European thinking," said Claudia Neugebauer, director of the Swiss gallery, at the opening of the show Monday. "The East have considered artworks in line with poetry, as did the West," she said. "Art moves and expresses."
The 56-year-old Galerie Beyeler is one of the venerable European galleries and has teamed up with Gallery Hyundai, with which it has collaborated over the last decade, to introduce Korean contemporary art to the coterie of the European art enthusiasts.
Although this exhibit is a rather "small selection" showing 48 pieces by Korean artists and it is too early to tell "what the people's reaction will be," she is quite positive it will serve as a stepping stone to introduce Korean contemporary art to Europe -- and the red stickers on Lee U-fan's "From Point" (1980) and "From Line" (1982) on the first day of the show certainly seem to back her confidence.
A unique sequined Buddha statue by Noh Sang-kyoon strikes in contrast with the abstract mobile of Alexander Calder on the second floor. The list of Western artists includes Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz and Rebecca Horn.
The exhibition runs through Sept. 15 at Galerie Beyeler in Basel and will arrive in Seoul from Oct. 2-14.
By Hwang You-mee
Korea herald correspondent
(glamazon@heraldm.com)

"Forest Fire" restaged as drama, musical

The story starts when an injured communist, Gyu-bok, escapes from the mountains and seeks refuge in a widow village. The young widow Jum-rye, who lost her husband during the war, hides Gyu-bok and the two begin to have sex, but the relationship develops emotionally. Soon after Sa-wol, another sexually frustrated widow, finds out the two having physical relationship and demands Jum-rye to "share" her man in exchange for keeping him alive. Several months later Sa-wol gets pregnant and a rumor circulates around the village about the presence of "an unknown man," Gyu-bok. The situation gets worse when South Korean troops set fire to the mountain to kill the man. Widows struggle to save the man's life, but Gyu-bok commits suicide, leaving his body burning in fire. What makes the play more significant this year is that a musical version of the drama will be staged next month.
Seensee Musical Company, one of the major musical productions here, is to stage a musical adaptation of "Forest Fire," at the Opera House of the Seoul Arts Center, southern Seoul on July 8. The musical runs through August 30.
For years, the drama has been adapted for movies, TV drama and opera, but it is the first time for the piece to be produced as a musical piece. Renamed as "Dancing Shadows," the musical brings all the characters from the original piece, but some parts of the plot are changed. In the musical, Sa-wol (whose name changed to Cinda), pregnant with the child of the communist guerrilla Kyu-bok (Solomon), decides to save the child, who brings hope and peace to the village. Offering an unusual chance for theatergoers to appreciate one of the most admired realist plays, the National Drama Company of Korea will restage "The Forest Fire" June 22 at the National Theater of Korea, central Seoul, where it will run for a week. Written by the country's celebrated playwright, Cha Bum-seok, the play explores human desire as coming before ideology, social norms and tradition through a story of an injured communist guerilla who has sexual relationships with two widows in a village located in the Sobaek Mountains.
Originally staged in 1962, "Forest Fire" is widely regarded as the most significant work of Cha's artistic career, earning a reputation as the masterpiece of Korean realist drama. The drama, taking motives from people's devastated lives during the Korean War (1950-53), surprised the country's drama circle at its premier with the sarcastic descriptions of the tragic realities of war and meaninglessness of ideological dominance. The play is now being introduced to the country's school textbooks.
The musical is a joint production with foreign organizations and renowned writer Ariel Dorfmann writing the script for the musical. The music was composed by Eric Woolfson, leader of 1970s rock band Alan Parsons Project.
The cast of "Dancing Shadows" includes a number of experienced musical actors. Kim Bo-kyung, who played the protagonist of the Korean language musical "Miss Saigon," takes the role of Nashtala (Jum-rye from the original piece), and Bae Hae-sun, known as one of Korea's musical divas, takes the main character Cinda. Musical actor Shin Sang-rok who recently made a successful debut on TV screen with the drama "Thank You" (2007, MBC) plays the male protagonist Solomon.
Veteran actress Kim Sung-nyo plays the role of the mother of Sa-wol. The production company, Seensee Musical Company's publicist Choi Seung-hee said that the show is likely to be staged in Japan next year after its debut in Seoul.
Tickets for "Forest Fire" are 20,000 won to 30,000 won. For more information, visit www.ntok.go.kr or call (02) 2280-4115.
Tickets for musical "Dancing Shadows" are 30,000 won to 120,000 won. For details, visit www.dancingshadows.co.kr
By Cho Chung-un
(christory@heraldm.com)

New Smokeless Tobacco Threat Coming Soon to U.S.

Stop smoking by using smokeless tobacco?
Except for a very vocal minority of tobacco experts, most tobacco researchers would not recommend this.
Nonetheless, with the blessing of this vocal minority, this is exactly what tobacco giant Philip Morris intends to do in August.
This summer Philip Morris will introduce a tobacco product called snus (pronounced, snoose) in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to test market its appeal to adult smokers. And some tobacco experts are applauding this effort.
Snus is a form of tobacco developed in Sweden that seems to be less risky than American smokeless tobacco products such as moist snuff (like Skoal), chewing tobacco (like Red Man) or dried, powdered snuff (Dental, Tube Rose, Peach and other brands).
Using snus for smoking cessation falls under the banner of "harm reduction," and has some support in the field of tobacco control. Such an approach seems appealing: By reducing a smoker's dependence on cigarettes, switching to smokeless tobacco (particularly snus) potentially reduces the risk for a whole host of smoking-related illnesses.
Harm reduction has been used successfully in other addictions: methadone administration for heroin addicts, for example, or clean needle exchanges for injecting drug users.
But residual tobacco-related health risks remain when a smoker quits by using smokeless tobacco, and these risks are not trivial when compared to quitting totally.
Less Risk Is Still RiskAlthough smokeless tobacco is much less risky than cigarettes, nonetheless mouth cancer and poor oral health definitely occur. There are also studies among large populations that show cardiovascular disease and even death by using this product.
Overall, in terms of cancer, the risk of developing mouth cancer drops from an eight-fold increased risk to a 1.2-fold increase risk when switching from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco. This is an impressive drop, but still leaves a 20 percent increase in mouth cancer risk compared to the use of no tobacco at all.

Digital 911 Takes Crime Fighting Cellular

The phrase "In case of an mergency, call 911" could someday soon become as antiquated as the rotary phone.
Several major U.S. cities, including New York and Los Angeles, are exploring a new technology that would allow citizens to send cell phone pictures and video through the cities' 911 system.
The software, developed by the Connecticut-based company PowerPhone, is not in use yet, but many cities see it in their futures.
"The sooner the better," Lt. Bill Schwartz of the Miami Police Department told ABC News. "We're living in an age where information is instantaneous. Why shouldn't law enforcement take advantage of that?"
In January, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans to install a system that could receive cell phone photos and video. The Los Angeles Police Department announced a similar plan Tuesday, also saying it was researching technology that would allow people to send text messages to 911.
"We want to be able to accept data and correlate that data with a particular emergency event," LAPD analyst Karen Bottancino told ABC News.
By December, the LAPD hopes to be able to accept solicited cell phone photos, Bottancino said. Under this system, a 911 caller would receive a text message from the operator and would reply to that message with the photo attached.
Greg Sheehan, a spokesman for PowerPhone, told ABC News that with the software, called Incident Link Multimedia, 911 call centers could also receive unsolicited pictures through e-mail addresses that would be advertised by city police departments.
"It makes it very easy for them to get that photo to the 911 center," Sheehan said. "In an emergency where seconds count that's very important."
Sending Perp PhotosFormer New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told ABC News that pictures would be very helpful to officers responding to a scene with a fleeing perpetrator because they are a dramatic improvement over witness descriptions.
"Pictures don't lie," Kerik said. "If you have a picture, and you can transpose that picture into a car, and officers can get a real-time, real-life photo, then officers are going to know what they're looking for, and that's the best."

EBay-Google Spat Hints at Larger Tension

A spat that erupted this week between eBay Inc. and Google Inc. after Google tried to siphon attention from the online auctioneer's grand user celebration might presage more tension in one of the Internet's most interesting new rivalries.
EBay and Google have been close partners. Google feeds the text ads that appear on eBay's international sites (Yahoo Inc. handles that for eBay's U.S. site). And the companies have been working on integrating aspects of the Google Talk voice-messaging software and the eBay-owned Skype Internet calling service.
EBay also is one of Google's largest advertisers, spending tens of millions of dollars a year on "keyword" ads that generate links to eBay listings when Google users type certain search terms.
At least until this week, when eBay pulled all its keyword ads from Google's U.S. site.
EBay seemed to be acting in protest of a party planned by the Google Checkout online payment service during this week's "eBay Live" event for about 9,000 of auction company's buyers and sellers. Google called its Boston affair "Let Freedom Ring" a reference to the fact that eBay, which owns rival PayPal, does not allow Google Checkout as a payment method.
Although Google canceled the party after eBay pulled its ads, eBay has not yet relented. Officially, eBay described its move as a test to see whether it could get more bang for its buck if it increased its spending on other search engines, including Yahoo, IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.
"We were not pleased by this notion of the Google Checkout party and the marketing around it, I will tell you that," eBay CEO Meg Whitman said in an interview. "But you don't (deploy) these kind of tests with no planning. You can't. Because you have to know how you're going to redeploy these dollars."
Even if eBay is likely to return to advertising on the Internet's most popular search engine, the tiff indicates just how much is at stake in the fast-growing market for Internet payment processing.

Mel C Not Opposed to Spice Girls Reunion

Mel C, who had opposed a reunion of the Spice Girls, has changed her mind.
"For the first time ever, there is some truth in the rumors. We've been discussing it and it could possibly happen," the 33-year-old singer, known as Sporty Spice, told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
"I've always said, `I don't want to do it, the past is the past. It was amazing, it was magical. We could never recreate it,'" she said. "But this year people have been talking about it and some of the girls have expressed an interest in doing it."
Mel C, who was born Melanie Chisholm, added: "There is just so much great feeling out there and I just thought, `You know what, I don't want to be the person that stops it happening or stops it being a five-piece.'"
However, she added: "If the Spice Girls were to get back together it would be for a very short space of time. It would be a final goodbye and a `thank you' to all the fans all over the world."
Mel C now bills herself as MelanieC.
The Spice Girls also included Scary Spice (Melanie Brown), Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham), Baby Spice (Emma Bunton) and Ginger Spice (Geri Halliwell).
Their 2000 album, "Forever," had weak sales, and the Spice Girls began concentrating on their solo careers.
On the Net:
MelanieC:
http://www.melaniec.net/
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Chow's 'Pirates' Scenes Cut in China

Censors have cut scenes of Chow Yun-Fat as a bald, scarred pirate in the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, saying they insult China's people, the main state news agency said Friday.
Xinhua said Chow's time on the screen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" had "been slashed in half by censors in China for vilifying and defacing the Chinese."
The version of the Hollywood blockbuster released in China earlier this week shows only about 10 minutes of Chow's scenes compared with 20 minutes in the version seen in the rest of the world, it said.
Xinhua quoted Zhang Pimin, deputy head of the film bureau under the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, as saying the decision to cut the scenes was made according to China's "relevant regulations on film censorship" and "China's actual conditions."
He refused to give specific reasons for the cuts, but Xinhua quoted a Chinese magazine, Popular Cinema, as saying the scenes were cut because of the negative images they showed.
"The captain starring Chow is bald, his face heavily scarred, he also wears a long beard and has long nails, images still in line with Hollywood's old tradition of demonizing the Chinese," the magazine said.
Chow makes his first appearance in the third of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, playing Captain Sao Feng, the pirate lord of the South China Sea.
The film took in a record $1.3 million on its opening day in China on Tuesday, the film's distributor, The Walt Disney Co., said.
Disney has said that some of the film's scenes were cut for cultural sensitivities.
"They weren't quite ecstatic with how the Chinese pirate was portrayed," Anthony Marcoly, distribution chief at Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Distribution International, said earlier this week.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Jolie Lawyer Takes Fall for Media Snafu

Try to control the media? Not me, says Angelina Jolie. The star of the new film "A Mighty Heart," about the widow of slain reporter Daniel Pearl and freedom of the press, says her representatives were trying to protect her when they sought to make media outlets sign an agreement not to ask Jolie personal questions.
"I didn't put it out there," Jolie said Thursday on "The Daily Show." "It was from my representatives trying to be protective of me, but it was excessive and I wouldn't have put it out there. But it's all right and nobody was forced to do it."
Jolie spoke candidly about her family at the film's Manhattan premiere on Wednesday. But media outlets seeking one-on-one interviews, including The Associated Press, were asked to sign a legal document banning certain questions and mandating that any story from the interview must be about the movie.
Requests to sign such documents are rare, but on the rise with the increase of tabloid celebrity coverage. The AP declined to sign Jolie's agreement, and brought up the subject during an interview with Jolie on Friday afternoon.
"I didn't know about the document, and my lawyers apologized to me and publicly to say that it was heavy-handed," she said. "But they did it with good intention," because of the serious subject matter and tone of the movie, she added.
Jolie gamely answered another question about her family, telling the AP that she and boyfriend Brad Pitt have an equal hand in disciplining their children.
Jolie's lawyer, Robert Offer, told The New York Times that he blamed himself a "boneheaded, overzealous lawyer" for the contract and that Jolie was unaware of the action. The document "was drafted overly broadly," he said. "It was well intended, but I understand how it was received."
Jolie's manager, Geyer Kosinski, and a spokeswoman for the Paramount movie studio did not immediately respond to e-mail messages from the AP seeking comment.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Hamas Offers Amnesty to Fatah Leaders

On its first day of full rule in Gaza, the Islamic militant Hamas on Friday granted amnesty to Fatah leaders, signaling that it seeks conciliation with the defeated forces of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Many had feared more bloodshed, particularly after victorious Hamas gunmen executed several Fatah fighters in the streets gangland-style on Thursday, in the final phase of the decisive five-day battle over Gaza.
Gazans awoke to the new reality of Hamas control Friday, fraught with uncertainty and fear that they'll become even poorer and more isolated. Gaza's crossings with Egypt and Israel lifelines for the fenced-in territory have been closed this week, and it was not clear if they would reopen. Extended closure could quickly lead to a humanitarian crisis.
A Hamas spokesman said Palestinian police, now under Hamas command, would take up positions at the crossings, but it's unlikely Israel would acquiesce to such a deployment, after Hamas militants frequently attacked the passages in the past.
The Palestinian territories are in effect split in two. Gaza is now controlled by Hamas, which has close ties to Syria and Iran. The more populous West Bank, with about 2 million residents to Gaza's 1.4 million, is dominated by the more moderate Fatah, which has ties to Israel and the West.
Gaza's streets, deserted in the past week, were crowded with cars, pedestrians and triumphant Hamas fighters, some driving in jeeps and firing in the air. Crowds converged on former Fatah strongholds and looted them.
A resident of a Hamas-dominated neighborhood, identifying himself only as Yousef for fear of reprisal by his neighbors, said Gazans would always back the winner, regardless of ideology.
"Today everybody is with Hamas because Hamas won the battle. If Fatah had won the battle they'd be with Fatah. We are a hungry people, we are with whoever gives us a bag of flour and a food coupon," said Yousef, 30. "Me, I'm with God and a bag of flour."
The house of former Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan of Fatah was overrun, and looters stripped it of everything from windows and doors to flowerpots. "This was the house of the murderer Dahlan that was cleansed by the holy warriors," read graffiti sprayed on the wall. Donkey carts outside the house waited to take on more loot.

Space Station Computers Have Partial Power

After days of computer malfunctions, the crew inside the International Space Station has gotten partial power in two of three computer connections that were down.
The crew bypassed a faulty power switch for the two computers, and when the Russians commanded the computers to start, they came on. Although the development is promising, the astronauts still will need to find a permanent fix.
Earlier today, while NASA said it was working to repair the computers, Russian sources told ABC News that they believe the entire computer system will need to be replaced.
Russians have moved up the launch of a Progress cargo ship, scheduled for Aug. 8. The plan now is to launch it on July 23, carrying the new units.
Watch the full story tonight on 'Nightline' at 11:35 p.m. EDT
The computers are used principally to control thrusters in the Space Staton's Russian-made Service Module, which are used to keep the station properly oriented in orbit.
Large gyroscopes in American segments of the station do most of the job of keeping the station stable, but at times they need help from the Russian thrusters. The thrusters are used, for instance, to keep the station from tumbling after a Space Shuttle undocks from it.
Russian engineers suggested earlier in the week that the computer problem began shortly after the station began receiving power from new solar panels installed by the visiting shuttle Atlantis.
NASA engineers say they looked into that, and came up dry.
They measured the power coming from the new solar panels; it appeared normal.
They shut that power down. It did not help the Russian computers.
"It appears that at least the power source is not the cause of the anomaly," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station manager, at a press conference in Houston. "We'll continue to look."
"There is nobody in this agency or in the Russian agency that thinks this vehicle is at risk of being lost -- not remotely," Suffredini told reporters.
"We work problems like this all the time," Suffredini said. "When you have two countries with a lot of experience working together, it's amazing what you can do."
Crew Not at Risk
The Russian source told ABC News that the Americans and Russians are working "very well" together.
"The Americans are really helping. Whenever a problem arises, the Americans give them answers," he said.
After the initial computer failure, according to the Russian source, the American gyroscopes saved the station from worse trouble. Without thrusters or gyroscopes to stabilize it, the station could begin slowly to tumble.
Suffredini repeated NASA's message that the crew is not in any danger.
"Space flight is a challenging business. We can go home, and do nothing, or we can choose to explore," he said. "We choose to explore, and these are the things that you occasionally deal with in this business."
'Fatal Flaw'Russian space agency officials had told ABC News early Friday that the damaged computers aboard the International Space Station could have a "fatal flaw."
The officials said they would have the Station's crew -- two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut -- stay onboard in the meantime to keep things running.

Perez Outduels Rocket to Slow Yankees

Just the sight of the New York Yankees energized the Mets. Oliver Perez outdueled Roger Clemens, Jose Reyes was 3-for-3 with three steals, two RBIs and a home run, and Carlos Gomez leapt to prevent a three-run homer.
The Mets won the opener of the season's second Subway Series 2-0 Friday, stopping their five-game losing streak and their rival's nine-game winning streak.
Perez (7-5), a flamboyant lefty known for high-jumping foul lines, allowed five hits in 7 1-3 innings to beat the Yankees for the second time this season. He struck out six and walked three, combining three relievers on a five-hitter.
"He pitched a big game for us in a huge situation," said Mets closer Billy Wagner, who pitched a perfect ninth for his 15th save in 16 chances.
The NL East-leading Mets staggered to the Bronx with nine losses in their previous 10 games, including five straight, while the Yankees were on their longest winning streak in two years. But before a pumped up crowd of 55,159, the Mets (37-28) beat the Yankees (33-32) for the third time in four meetings this year.
"They can motor. Those two guys are fast," Clemens said, marveling at Reyes and Gomez.
Reyes tied his career best for steals and leads the major leagues with 35. Torre turned to bench coach Don Mattingly in the dugout and compared the pair with Maury Wills and Lou Brock.
"Any time those guys get on base, they're going to cause havoc," he said.
The Mets avoided what would have been their losing streak since 2005. The Yankees were on their longest winning streak in two years. When the Mets took two of three at Shea Stadium from May 18-20, the Yankees were swooning on their way to a 21-29 start.
"It's just about the opposite a 180 for both teams," Yankees manager Joe Torre said.
Making his second start, Clemens (1-1) reached 92 mph with his fastball but was around 89 mph most of the time, a little more velocity than the seven-time Cy Young Award winner showed in Saturday's 9-3 victory over Pittsburgh. The 44-year-old allowed two runs, seven hits and one walk in 6 1-3 inning. With eight strikeouts, he retook second place on the career list with 4,619, five more than Arizona's Randy Johnson.

Consumer Prices Shoot Higher in May

Consumer prices shot up at the fastest pace in 20 months in May, fueled by a surge in gas prices, although inflation pressures were moderate in most other areas.
The Labor Department reported that its closely watched Consumer Price Index registered a 0.7 percent increase last month, the biggest advance since Hurricane Katrina shut down Gulf Coast oil production in the fall of 2005.
Outside of the volatile energy and food categories, inflation rose by a much more modest 0.1 percent. That was slightly lower than the 0.2 percent which had been expected and provided reassurance that this year's surge in energy costs has not spread to other parts of the economy.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve reported that industrial production was flat in May after a 0.4 percent surge in April. The slowdown in May had been expected. While factory output and mining, which includes oil drilling, both posted increases, those gains were offset by a 1.3 percent plunge in output by the nation's utilities. This reflected a return to milder weather after a colder-than-normal April.
Financial markets have been roiled in recent weeks by global inflation concerns. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury security hit a five-year high earlier this week causing a steep dive in stock prices. Investors were worried that rising interest rates could prolong the troubles in the slumping housing market.
However, stocks have rebounded in the past two days as bond yields have edged down a bit. While investors have abandoned hopes that the Federal Reserve might cut interest rates this year, they are becoming more confident that moderate inflationary pressures will keep the central bank from raising the short-term rates that it controls.
In other economic news, the Commerce Department reported that the deficit in the current account, the broadest measure of foreign trade, increased to $192.6 billion in the January-to-March period, compared to $187.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The increase reflected a higher foreign oil bill. It was slightly below what analysts had been expecting.

Missing 2 Days, 5-Year-Old Found Alive

Hannah Klamecki, 5, of Villa Park, Ill., sits with a teddy bear while being interviewed by reporters after being reunited with her family Friday, June 15, 2007, in Momence, Ill. Hannah, who disappeared with her grandfather while boating two days ago, walked up to searchers Friday--naked, scratched and with berries in her hands--hours after the man's body was pulled from the Kankakee River. Knowing that David Klamecki was dead made it all the more stunning when searchers saw Hannah, a little dirty but unhurt, walking out of the woods toward them, Kankakee County sheriff's officials said. (AP Photo/Jerry Lai)

United States urges N. Korea's denuclearization steps as soon as banking dispute ends

The United States on Thursday urged North Korea to implement its side of pledged actions on denuclearization as soon as a banking dispute is resolved, Yonhap News Agency reported. "We are ready. That has been our position for some time," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
"I hope the North Koreans would follow through the actions on what they have on multiple times... told us," which is that they intend to carry out their obligations under the Feb. 13 agreement, he said.
Macanese authorities confirmed more than $20 million of North Korean-related funds have been transferred out of Banco Delta Asia eliminating a major impediment to resuming six-way talks on Korea's denuclearization.
The BDA had frozen some $25 million in North Korea-held accounts after the U.S. Treasury accused it of laundering money for the Pyongyang regime. In a multi-party negotiated settlement, the bank wired out part of the funds which in the end is expected to arrive at a Russian commercial bank.

'Crystallizing' Rises as Fashionable 'It' Trend

By Cathy Rose A. Garcia Staff Reporter
Sparkling crystals, whether clear or colored, are the hottest things in fashion these days. Everything from T-shirts and lingerie to sunglasses and cell phones are being sprinkled with hundreds of twinkling crystals.
Supermodels like Giselle Bundchen and Heidi Klum modeled sexy lingerie embellished with crystals and beads during a recent Victoria's Secret fashion show. Designer brands Escada and Dolce & Gabbana used crystals for their glamorous evening gowns. Guess Jeans also introduced rhinestone-studded jeans
The trend is not just limited to designer brands. On the streets of Seoul, young women are wearing crystal jewelry, glittery shoes and handbags. Even LG Dios designed refrigerators with Swarovski crystals for the luxury market.
Crystals seem to have the power of transforming something ordinary like a pair of jeans into something glamorous and luxurious .

Behind this trend is Swarovski, the world's leading maker of precision-cut crystals for fashion,

jewelry, lighting and interiors. Crystallized Swarovski Elements, the company's brand for crystals as product materials, has positioned itself as an almost essential part of international design.
Sylvia Oh, Swarovski Components country manager for Korea, said there now are around 100 companies who are working with Swarovski in Korea. Brands like LG Dios, Bean Pole, Daks, Le Coq Sportif, Whisen, Sue Comma Bonnie and Fila Golf are currently use Swarovski crystals in their products. Designer Hwang Jae-bock also uses Swarovski crystals for her sought-after wedding gowns.
Swarovski produces loose crystals used by companies around the world for their products. These items all carry the tag ``Made with Crystallized Swarovski Elements.''
Last year, Swarovski brought the Crystal Temptation exhibition to the nation, featuring designer shoes by Christian Lacroix, Stuart Weitzman, Hugo Boss, Bally, Balenciaga and Pedro Garcia. All the shoes featured Swarovski crystals.
In interior design, Swarovski crystals provide extra shine to such props as lighting, chandeliers and crystal panels. The Rockefeller Center observation deck in New York City features a stunning crystal waterfall chandelier, and a crystal geode wall. The Hotel Ritz-Carlton in Germany used crystals in its lighting decorations. The 79th Academy Awards last February also featured a crystal curtain, as a backdrop for the glamorous event.
With the growing popularity of arts and crafts, the company will also soon introduce do-it-yourself jewelry with ``Create Your Style with Swarovski'' in Korea.
For women who want to have unique accessories, this is a good chance to learn how to design and make their own necklaces, earrings, rings and bracelets using Swarovski crystals. There will be workshops and training sessions in the future to teach how to make jewelry and how to decorate bags, clothes, flip-flops, jeans and home accessories.
Swarovski is an Austrian-based company founded by Daniel Swarovski in 1892. Throughout the years, the company has worked with fashion design icons such as Coco Chanel and Christian Dior.
cathy@koreatimes.co.kr

Bean Paste Effective in Controlling Diabetes

By Park Chung-a Staff Reporter
A fermented soybean paste, called ``cheonggukjang,’’ could prove effective in preventing adult diabetes, according to local researchers.
A research team led by Kwon Dae-young of the Korea Food Research Institute and Park Sun-min, a food and nutrition professor at Hoseo University, has recently announced its finding that the traditional Korean fermented soy bean paste could be

effective in preventing type-2 diabetes by stimulating the section of insulin, the blood sugar controller.
Type-2 diabetes, which mainly affects adults, occurs when the body does not respond correctly to insulin. Type-1 diabetes is caused by the body’s failure to secret insulin. Obese people are vulnerable to type-2 diabetes, since fat-related materials block insulin from functioning. Type-2 diabetes patients do not secret a sufficient amount of insulin.
According to the study, the amount of anti-oxidation material polyphenol and good protein peptides increases in cheonggukjang as fermentation progresses. ^When these materials were injected into a mouse with type-2 diabetes, insulin secretion was boosted and the number of cells needed to secret insulin grew in the pancreas.
``This research proves that cheonggukjang helps one to prevent from type-2 diseases,’’ said Kwon. ``It has provided the scientific evidence to show the greatness of our traditional fermented food and will support its globalization,’’ he said.
Cheonggukjang is a fermented soybean paste used in Korean cuisine. It contains whole as well as ground soybeans and is similar to Japanese natto and Korean doenjang.
It is made by fermenting boiled soybeans in a warm place, pounding a part of them and adding salt and powdered red pepper.
Cheonggukjang has traditionally been considered to be a healthy food, as it is rich in vitamins and other nutrients, though its very strong odor is not universally enjoyed.
michelle@koreatimes.co.kr

Fruits, Vegetables Good for Skin

By Park Chung-a Staff Reporter
Summer is a tough season for skin. Skin is vulnerable to strong sunlight, ultraviolet rays and sweat. In order to counterattack ultraviolet rays your skin excessively secretes melanin pigments and when pores get blocked by sweat and fail to excrete waste liquids, skin trouble like freckles and acne can arise.
With the start of the summer which requires more attention to skin care, Kim Jin-hyung , an oriental medical doctor at Myungokhun Oriental Beauty & Mental Clinic in southern Seoul has recommended the following fruits and vegetables that are effective for skin care this season.
Grapes
Grapes have various vitamins other than glucose and fructose. These enhance the action of skin cells, are good for reviving skin and have detoxification effects.
Watermelon
Watermelons provide water to skin that is exhausted by strong heat and are also good for easing fatigue their large great amounts of glucose and fructose.
Tomatoes
Tomatoes have lots of pectin, a vegetable fiber. They help blood circulation, which is vital for a good complexion. Apply the pulp of a tomato liberally to the face and leave for an hour. Then wash off with warm water. Repeating this daily produces a good complexion and quickly removes ugly-looking pimples.
Cucumber
Cucumber is a surprising beauty secret for the skin, with its hydrating, nourishing and astringent properties. Cucumbers have the same pH as the skin so they help restore the skin’s protective and natural acid mantle. Grate or blend a cucumber. Apply this over the face, eyes and neck for 15 to 20 minutes. It is a great tonic for the facial skin and regular use prevents pimples, blackheads, wrinkles, and dryness of the face. By applying cucumber slices onto your skin, you can have soothed, smoothed and cooled skin.
Corn
Corn is effective for preventing dryness and aging of your skin since it has lots of lecithin and vitamin E.
michelle@koreatimes.co.kr

Korean pop star on Billboard cover: South Korean music producer and singer Park Jin-young on the cover of the June 16th edition of Billboard, a weekly U.S. magazine dedicated to the music industry.

Mexico, Canada Grow Faster After NAFTA

Trade Minister Kim Hyun-chong, left, and Kim Jong-hoon, chief negotiator for a free trade agreement with the United States, look at documents at a National Assembly audit on the agriculture talks at the Assembly on May 2. / Korea Times File By Kim Yon-seStaff Reporter
Apart from the negotiation results, the government has been accused of ``selectively'' spotlighting the benefits of bilateral and multilateral trade pacts several countries have established with the U.S.
The selective data is being used to push for the establishment of a free trade deal with the U.S. in the face of considerable public opposition.
Experts say the case in point is the comparison of economic data between Korea and two members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) _ Mexico and Canada. NAFTA was established in 1994.
A state-run committee, led by Prime Minister Han, for the promotion of a bilateral trade pact with the U.S., claims that Canada and Mexico saw their per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grow 68.7 percent and 46.6 percent, respectively, between 1993 and 2005.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), however, reported that Canada and Mexico saw their per capita GDP growth stay at 30.1 and 11.4 percent for the past decade since 1992.
In comparison, the OECD says that Korea's per capita GDP growth came to 61 percent _ $7,590 in 1992 and $12,222 in 2003 _ based on ``a real income basis and fluctuation of the won-dollar exchange rate.'' Now it is approaching $20,000.
However, in its comparison for three countries, Han's committee dropped Korea's per capita GDP growth rate over the past decade, in an alleged bid to make it appear that Mexico and Canada are growing faster in average individual income.
Critics say the committee used the figures without taking into account changes in the foreign exchange rate and in individual purchasing power.
The committee also claimed that thanks to NAFTA, Mexico and Canada recorded higher growth rates in employment than Korea but that appeared to be the result of key indicators not being considered.
Regarding the employment numbers, the committee is accused of only citing the growth of total population but neglecting the growth of the ``economically active population'' aged 15 years or over.
Between 1993 and 2004, the increase in the number of employed was 2.94 million amid the increase of 3.28 million in the total population in Canada, while Korea posted 3.23 million amid 3.89 million.
But Han's committee did not used the statistics in which the growth of the economically active population reached 3.23 million (of the total 3.28 million) in Canada while that of Korea stood at 3.09 million (of the total 3.89 million). This could mean the committee is abusing the data.
Some of the data that experts say was dropped referred to the negative effects of NAFTA including an internal memo by the state-run Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP) that shows the market share of Canadian products in the U.S. fell to 17.03 percent in 2004, from 18.83 percent in 1993.
The KORUS FTA is valid for 10 years, which can then be extended for another 10 years with amendments in some clauses.
There is a possibility that each country's trade ministers will sign the provisional FTA at the end of June, as the Bush's trade promotion authority (TPA) _ which enables the Bush administration to negotiate trade deals with minimal congressional interference _ expires on July 1.
However, the signing could be delayed as there is a possibility that the TPA might be extended according to decision of the Congress.
kys@koreatimes.co.kr

NK Urged to Act on Nuclear Program

South Korea and the United States have urged North Korea to implement its side of pledged actions on denuclearization as a banking dispute is nearly resolved.
"We are ready. That has been our position for some time," Yonhap News Agency quoted State Department spokesman Sean McCormack saying Thursday.
"I hope the North Koreans would follow through the actions on what they have on multiple times... told us," which is that they intend to carry out their obligations under the Feb. 13 agreement, he said.
"We look forward to that."
Macanese authorities confirmed more than $20 million of North Korean-related funds have been transferred out of Banco Delta Asia (BDA), removing a major obstacle to resuming six-nation talks on Korea's denuclearization.
Chun Yung-woo, South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator, who returned to Seoul from his trip to Washington, also confirmed the transfer, calling on North Korea to immediately start implementing its denuclearization commitments.
``The transfer is in progress,'' the Associated Press quoted Chun as saying upon his arrival at Seoul's Incheon International Airport early Friday.
``Let's wait and see how long it takes for North Korea to confirm it.'' Chun was quoted as saying. In Washington, he met his U.S. counterpart over the nuclear standoff, but he did not provide further details of the transfer.
Resolving the banking dispute constitutes ``removing the first obstacle to implementing'' the February disarmament deal, Chun said.
Chun said it was too early to discuss the resumption of the nuclear negotiations, but said they would resume shortly after Pyongyang implements its February pledge to disarm.
The prolonged dispute over the BDA funds had delayed a deal struck in February between South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan. The first-phase steps involve Pyongyang's shutdown of its key nuclear facilities in return for heavy fuel oil provided by other parties.
Christopher Hill, top U.S. delegate to the six-party talks, was to arrive in Mongolia for a regional conference over the weekend. He is scheduled to stop in Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo after the conference.

Antioch College to close in hopes of reopening

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio (AP) -- Antioch College, known for its offbeat approach to education, will close in 2008 because of a money shortage and will try to find enough funds to reopen four years later, the school said Tuesday.
Enrollment at the private liberal arts college has dwindled from more than 2,000 students in the 1960s to 400 this year, and a small endowment and heavy dependence on tuition revenue combined to hurt operations, the school said.
Efforts to balance the budget over the years through faculty and staff reductions and programming changes have eroded confidence in the academic program, said officials at the college, founded in 1852.
"At this point in time, Antioch does not have the financial wherewithal to continue as it is," spokeswoman Linda Sirk said. "It will be a much healthier thing to do if we close it now, stop the financial difficulties that we have, go through this process, and then open as a strong institution. You're going to see us again."
Students will be offered a chance to complete their degrees at Antioch University McGregor, an adult education school in Yellow Springs.
The school hopes that alumni will provide financial help, that it will attract investors and that it can develop more partnerships with the Yellow Springs community, said Mary Lou LaPierre, vice chancellor for university advancement.
Antioch doesn't grade classes, encourages students to develop their own study plans, and combines academic learning with experience through a co-op program in which students leave campus to work in various fields.
The school in southwest Ohio counts the late Coretta Scott King, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould among its graduates.
In 2000, death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, gave a taped commencement address. Hundreds protested nearby, including Faulkner's widow.
The college drew national attention in 1993 with its "Sexual Offense Prevention Policy" that required students to ask permission from one another if they wanted to have sexual contact, including holding hands.
The top reason students who are accepted decide not to attend is the poor facility conditions, said Antioch president Steven Lawry, who concluded the school's $30 million endowment was insufficient.
"That kind of investment in endowment-building just had not been done. The modern liberal arts college has to do that to survive," Lawry said.
The school will create commissions on facilities improvement and curriculum design, he said. Officials hope to recruit a class of at least 300 students for 2012.
"There's not another school like Antioch," said Rory Adams-Cheatham of Washington, D.C., a 21-year-old who graduated in April with a literature degree and is working for the school as an events manager. "This was where I had to be. It's really devastating."
The school has been a fertile ground for social activism, with protests from the Vietnam War era up to the Iraq war. In 1994, students took over a building for 32 days to protest plans to turn it into an admissions office instead of a student-activity center.
The school will have one more academic year, then suspend operations July 1, 2008. The school said it will work with students who want to complete their degrees at Antioch University McGregor; at other Antioch schools with degree programs in Seattle, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, California; or at other colleges.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Beckham expected to face Mallorca

MADRID, Spain (Reuters) -- David Beckham trained with Real Madrid again Friday and is expected to start in the title-deciding match against Mallorca -- his final game before joining the Los Angeles Galaxy.
The 32-year-old England midfielder appears to have recovered sufficiently from a sprained ankle to make coach Fabio Capello's starting line-up for Sunday's league finale at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium.
Madrid are level with Barcelona at the top of the league with 73 points. Sevilla have 71 going into Sunday's final round of games.
Madrid will secure a record 30th league title -- but first in four seasons -- with a win, even if Barcelona beat bottom team Gimnastic Tarragona, because Real have the head-to-head advantage.
Madrid are undefeated in the 11 games since Fabio Capello reinstated Beckham to the line-up in February.
Capello benched Beckham after he signed a five-year deal with Major League Soccer's LA Galaxy in January.
After his spell on the sidelines, Beckham's outstanding performances also earned him a recall to the England team. He had been dropped after last year's World Cup.
Real hoped to have Robinho and Mahamadou Diarra back in the line-up but both also had international commitments.
Robinho trained with the team on Friday but had still not been given the go-ahead by Brazil to play, despite reportedly being cleared by FIFA.
Brazil wanted him for training ahead of the Copa America, which begins on June 26.
"I would like to be here for this moment, which is so important to the club," Robinho said in Spanish daily As.
"I have a lot of respect for the national team ... but I have faith I will be on the field to play against Mallorca. It would be sad if I couldn't play."
Mali team-mates Diarra and Sevilla striker Frederic Kanoute were cleared by FIFA to play, but only Kanoute had returned from Mali by Friday.
Negative reaction
Marca reported that Diarra, the Mali captain, missed the overnight flight back to Madrid fearing a negative public reaction to missing the African Cup of Nations qualifier against Sierra Leone on Saturday. It said he was expected to reach Spain on Saturday.
Mallorca will be without joint top scorer Serbian Bosko Jankovic. Argentine playmaker Ariel Ibagaza is suspended.
Kanoute's Sevilla team-mate, goalkeeper Andres Palop, is doubtful for the match against Villarreal after spending two nights in hospital battling a fever.
Defenders Ivica Dragutinovic and Javi Navarro are suspended. Russian striker Alexander Kerzhakov, midfielder Jesus Navas and goalkeeper Andres Palop are all injury doubts.
Brazilian midfielders Renato and Adriano Correia are ruled out with injury.
Sevilla's visitors, sixth-placed Villarreal, are chasing a UEFA Cup place but are deprived of top scorer Diego Forlan, who is on international duty with Uruguay.
Midfielder Matias Fernandez is with Chile and defender Juan Manuel Pena with Bolivia. The UEFA Cup champions are preparing to play without defender Daniel Alves, who remains in Brazil training for the Copa America.
If Barcelona miss out on silverware for the first time in three years, the two-time defending champions can only rue missed opportunities.
"It's unlikely Madrid will lose the championship," Barcelona midfielder Deco told As. "We can't go back (in time) now, and we've probably lost the opportunity. We haven't won when we should have."
Barcelona's Icelandic striker Eidur Gudjohnsen will miss the trip to face relegated Gimnastic Tarragona with a knee injury, but have Brazilian forward Ronaldinho back from suspension.
Seventh-placed Atletico Madrid, who visit Osasuna, are also in the hunt for a UEFA Cup place but will be without suspended French midfielder Peter Luccin and defender Pablo Ibanez. Center-back Luis Perea is on international duty with Colombia.
Sacking
Following the sacking of coach Luis Fernandez after the 5-0 home defeat to Osasuna, youth team coach Paco Chaparro has to guide Real Betis away from relegation at Racing Santander.
The side are 16th, level on points with 17th-placed Athletic Bilbao, one ahead of Celta Vigo and three ahead of Real Sociedad.
Celta's bid to avoid relegation is hindered by the suspension of Brazilian top scorer Fernando Baiano when they host King's Cup finalists Getafe.
International call-ups have deprived them of Uruguayan midfielders Pablo Garcia and Fabian Canobbio.
Second-bottom Sociedad's battle against relegation is not helped by the absence of goalkeeper Claudio Bravo who is away with Chile. They visit Valencia.

Honey, the baby's spacewalking

PALATINE, Illinois (AP) -- An elementary school science teacher in this Chicago suburb doesn't have to turn on the news for an update on NASA's space mission. She just turns on her video baby monitor.
Since Sunday, one of the two channels on Natalie Meilinger's baby monitor has been picking up black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis. The other still lets her keep an eye on her baby.
"Whoever has a baby monitor knows what you'll usually see," Meilinger said. "No one would ever expect this."
Live video of the mission is available on NASA's Web site, so it's possible the monitor is picking up a signal from somewhere.
"It's not coming straight from the shuttle," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "People here think this is very interesting and you don't hear of it often -- if at all."
Meilinger silenced disbelieving co-workers by bringing in a video of the monitor to show her class on Tuesday, her students' last day of school. At home, 3-month-old Jack and 2-year-old Rachel don't quite understand what their parents are watching.
"I've been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what's next," Meilinger said.
Summer Infant, the monitor's manufacturer, is investigating what could be causing the transmission, communications director Cindy Barlow said. She said she's never heard of anything similar happening.
"Not even close," she said. "Gotta love technology."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Car sought for clues to woman's Florida disappearance

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Police in South Florida are searching hundreds of canals and a huge area of wetlands for a car that could provide vital clues in the case of a young woman who vanished three weeks ago.
Stepha Henry, 22, disappeared after going to a party at a nightclub in Sunrise, Florida.
Police said they have no suspects. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Henry's parents -- Steve and Sylvia -- have moved to Florida temporarily from New York to try to draw more public attention to her disappearance. (Watch the family of the missing woman pledge to do everything they can to find her )
Henry and her teenage sister were visiting an aunt in South Florida over Memorial Day weekend. On the evening Henry disappeared they had been to a barbecue with friends.
Her aunt said the young woman left her apartment about 1 a.m. on May 29 to go to a club called Peppers Cafe. The aunt said she saw her get into a car driven by a family acquaintance.
There is video of Henry at the club, where a promotional video was being taped that night.
The man who took her to the club said that he left alone and that Henry was still there with people he did not know. Someone -- maybe Henry -- checked her cell phone around 4 a.m., police say.
That is where the mystery of the car comes in.
Searching for dark Acura
Police say the family acquaintance, whose name has not been released, told them he had borrowed the vehicle -- a dark late-model Acura Integra -- but it cannot be found. Police have no details about the tag or year it was made.
One of the pilots involved in the aerial search for the car said it's a frustrating task.
Miami-Dade Police Lt. Cliff Nelson told CNN that "there are pockets of wild areas and those areas. If someone were to get into the middle of them, no one might find anything in there for months."
Miami-Dade Police Commander Linda O'Brien indicated there are few leads.
"It is totally uncharacteristic from what we've learned about Stepha Henry for her to go missing like this," she said.
Henry's parents said their daughter probably is being held against her will, because she'd never disappear on her own. They've continued to call her cell phone hoping for a response.
All they hear is: "Sorry, that mailbox is full. Please call again later."
Her father, Steve Henry, said, "Right now I don't even want to think the worst. All I want to know and all I'm praying for is that my daughter is still alive."
Stepha Henry's family said vital time was lost after her disappearance.
Her aunt, Carletha Clarke, told the Trinidad Guardian newspaper that police did not contact her until June 6, more than a week after the disappearance.
"I'm very disappointed, because being so long, anything could have happened."
Henry is an honors graduate in criminal justice and was planning to go to law school next year.
Her parents said she has always been fascinated by crime.
"Every night she looks at Court TV and she always likes to look at forensic cases," said her father.
If someone is holding her, he has this appeal: "Please let my daughter go, because we need her at home."

Russian cosmonauts use cable to power space station

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Two Russian cosmonauts began to get crucial computers up and running Friday, four days after they crashed at the international space station and curbed the outpost's ability to orient itself and produce oxygen.
The progress came after days of frustrating effort and, for the time being, removed a set of troubling options lying ahead for NASA and the Russian space agency if the computers continued to fail.
"They're up and operational and this is good news for all," said Lynette Madison, a NASA spokeswoman in Houston.
Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov pulled off the feat by bypassing a power switch with a cable to get two out of three computer connections running.
They planned to watch the computers for the next several hours to make sure they were functioning properly. (Watch what's being done to fix the computers )
Had the machines continued to malfunction, the three-member space station crew could still have remained on board, but other steps would have been taken to maintain the power and oxygen supplies. Russia had already begun to move up plans for a cargo ship to deliver supplies, including new computers, next month.
And ominous questions were raised about the possibility of eventually needing to bail out of the space station -- something a top NASA official rejected earlier in the say.
Maintaining the correct position in orbit is key for the space station. It must point its solar arrays at the sun for power and be able to shift orientation to avoid occasional large debris that comes flying through space.
The computer crash came as astronauts from space shuttle Atlantis were resuming work on the long-running construction of the station.
Atlantis' seven astronauts arrived last weekend, NASA's first visit to the space station this year.
Critics: Space station is 'boondoggle'
During the computer failure, the shuttles thrusters helped control the station's position. And some of Atlantis' lights, computers and cameras were turned off to save energy in case the shuttle had to spend an extra day docked to the station to allow more time to figure out the problem. (Watch NASA repair techniques )
NASA officials said the crew was never in danger of running out of oxygen, power or essentials.
However, the failed computers were the latest technical glitch for the half-built, $100 billion outpost. In past years, a Russian oxygen machine and gyroscopes, which also control orientation, have failed.
Critics have called the space station a boondoggle, an ill-conceived, post-Cold War venture between the Super Powers which at the moment is producing little science as it undergoes construction.
The days-long computer problems fueled skepticism toward the Bush administration's "Vision for Space Exploration," which calls for finishing the space station in three years, grounding the space shuttles in 2010 and building next-generation vehicles to go to the moon and Mars.
"This growing chorus of opposition to the current vision ... is finding expression in the difficulties of the station," said Howard McCurdy, a space public policy expert at American University. "We're learning a great deal from the space station, and one of things we may be learning is we shouldn't have built this particular one."
Meanwhile, two Atlantis astronauts Friday had another mission to accomplish: repairing a torn thermal blanket that helps protect the shuttle from heat on its return flight to Earth.
Danny Olivas used a medical stapler to successfully secure in place the 4-by-6-inch corner, while James Reilly installed an external valve.
"Looking great!" Olivas said as he made rows of staples along the blanket's edge.
Plans for the 11-day mission were disrupted by discovery of the rip in the thermal material, a problem that extended the mission by two days so that Friday's repair spacewalk could be worked into the schedule.
For now, Atlantis is set to land at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Deaf dolphin's 5-day-old calf dies

KEY LARGO, Florida (AP) -- The newborn calf of a deaf bottlenose dolphin that was found stranded last fall off a Florida beach died Friday at a marine mammal rehabilitation center.
Veterinarians and volunteers had noticed Thursday that the 5-day-old calf's breathing was labored and it was struggling to swim. They stayed through the night nursing it and administering drugs, said Robert Lingenfelser, president of the Marine Mammal Conservancy.
"Everything that could have been done was done," Lingenfelser said. "There is a profound sense of sadness here." (Watch the baby dolphin swim next to its mother )
He said the body of the male calf was being sent to a National Marine Fisheries laboratory for a necropsy.
Its mother, nicknamed Castaway, was found stranded off Vero Beach in November. She was initially deemed healthy enough for release, but instead of swimming offshore, she returned to the beach three times. The dolphin was eventually transported to the center in the Keys, where she was determined to be deaf.
Lingenfelser said that Castaway appeared to be in good condition Friday, but that veterinarians had drawn blood for testing.
Researchers had hoped to use technology to teach the baby to vocalize normally despite Castaway's disability.
Castaway had been vocalizing to the calf, but officials at the Marine Mammal Conservancy said that wouldn't be enough for it to learn proper dolphin-speak.
"Castaway's vocalizations are not normal," Lingenfelser said. "She speaks in a monotone, similar to the way that people who cannot hear speak."
So researchers electronically linked Castaway's habitat with a lagoon at Dolphins Plus, a research and interactive educational facility a few miles away. Underwater speakers and microphones were installed at both locations so the calf could communicate with hearing dolphins.
However, because of the calf's death, the experiment never was put to the test.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

N. Korea Suspends Summit Anniversary Event

All the Friday events were cancelled at a joint celebration marking the seventh anniversary of the historic inter-Korean summit as the North side prevented a lawmaker of the main opposition Grand National Party from entering the VIP seat line, the joint press corps reported.
North Korean officials blocked two-term GNP lawmaker Park Kye-dong's entry into the VIP seats of the People's Palace of Culture where a "gathering of unity" with representatives from the two Koreas was planned.
South Korea's chief delegate Paik Nak-chun made it clear that he could not accept the exclusion of Park from the VIP line, originally planned.
"We are of the position that no South Korean delegate will take part in an event that blocks the GNP lawmaker to the VIP seat," said a spokesman. He added that because no compromise was reached all afternoon, events were cancelled.
The four-day event is held annually to commemorate the June 2000 summit between the leaders of the two Koreas

www.koreatimes.co.kr

Google Mistakenly Names Korean Mountains, Cities

Google, the world's biggest search engine, continues to feature a flurry of erroneous names for Korean geographical sites in its popular map-viewing program, Google Earth.
The National Geographic Information Institute said Wednesday that Google Earth has refused to revamp the mistakes despite repeated requests.
For one, Mt. Baekdu on the North Korea-Chinese border is shown as ``Baitoushan,'' the Chinese pronunciation of the word. Plus, Mt. Halla on Jeju Island is referred to as ``Kamasan,'' the Japanese name for the mountain.
``We found the mistakes last year and asked Google to revise them. We even sent an English-language map to the firm,'' said Sin Sang-ho, an official at the state-run institute.
``However, the company did not change them. In fact, it has yet to give any response. It is a shame that the popular site refuses to get things right,'' he said.
The geographical sites are not the only misnomers at Google Earth where approximately 200 million people from across the world visit everyday.
Korean cities such as Suwon, Pyeongtaek and Wonju are falsely shown as Suweon, Pyeongtaeg and Weonju.
``We will call for Google to rectify the mistakes. But I am not sure whether Google will accept our requests in consideration of its past attitude,'' Sin said.
Furthermore, Google Earth lists Dokdo, Korea's eastern-most islets, which Japan claims as its territory, as Liancourt Rocks to the ire of Koreans.
Japan once tried to spread the name of Liancourt Rocks to make the world recognize Dokdo as a disputed area. Le Liancourt, a French whaler, thought he first discovered the islets in 1849 and named them after himself.
Japan's rationale was that the islets belonged to no country before then so that it can gain a better footing in the protracted disputes on Dokdo.
Dokdo is presently under the strict control of South Korea with the nation's armed forces being stationed there.
voc200@koreatimes.co.kr

LCD TV Gets Larger, Finer, Pricier

Samsung Electronics Tuesday unveiled its 70-inch LCD TV, the largest of its kind available for sale to the public .
The company also demonstrated three new TV technologies that can improve the flat-screen TVs' picture quality to near-perfection when properly implemented.
Thursday's demonstration showed that the Samsung monster looks clearer than plasma and projection TVs of similar size. The 70-inch TV, however, carries a cumbersome price tag of 59 million won ($63,500) and Samsung has put only 100 units on sale at major department stores in Seoul before shipping the product overseas.
``We have to see how fast the first batch will be sold on the domestic market. Then we will decide whether to expand the supply or to make it a luxury good with a limited supply,'' said Kevin Lee, Samsung's vice president of TV Offering Planning Group.
The new TV has some 20,000 small light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as its light source on the back of the LCD color filters, instead of the usual bulky fluorescent light bulb used by conventional LCD sets. LEDs are easier to control than fluorescent lights but are much more expensive, Lee said.
``We hope that the LED price becomes more affordable in two or three years so that we can lower the price of our TVs,'' he said.
The previously largest LCD TV available on the market was a 65-inch model made by Japan's Sharp, which is being sold at around $30,000 in the United States. For plasma TVs, Panasonic is selling 103-inch sets on special orders at an estimated price of $70,000.

A model stands by a 70-inch LCD TV of Samsung Electronics displayed at its headquarters building in Seoul, Thursday. The world’s largest commercially available LCD TV is priced at 59 million won. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

Evolving LCD Technologies
As well as its size, the new 70-inch TV from Samsung has reasons to impress consumers with its quality. It is the firm's first product to implement three new technologies called Local Dimming, LED Scanning and Motion Estimation. The demonstration showed that those three techniques can efficiently improve LCD TVs' picture quality and power efficiency in general.
The Local Dimming method is to divide the screen into some 200 rectangular pieces and to dim the LEDs on pieces that represent the dark part of an image, and light up the LEDs of a bright part. The technology can save energy and achieve a maximum contrast ratio of 1 to 500,000, Samsung said.
LED Scanning and Motion Estimation are both used to reduce the blurring effect of fast-moving images. The blurry images have been blamed as a major disadvantage of LCD TVs.
The three new technologies are to be applied to some of Samsung's other LCD TVs from the second half of this year. While the opulent 70-inch set is practically out of reach of ordinary consumers because of its high price and big size, a 52-inch model due in September will be a realistic and affordable choice, a Samsung manager said at the launching show.
The price for the upgraded 52-inch model is to be set at around 7 million won, about 2 million won more expensive than ones currently on sale, he said.
indizio@koreatimes.co.kr

Blog Hacker Threatens Singer

By Kim RahnStaff ReporterIt is not only malicious comments on the Internet that irritate stars. Hacking of stars' blogs is more bothering, as their private life and personal information can be leaked and sometimes used for a crime _ like a recent case involving BoA.According to the police and S.M. Entertainment Friday, a 23-year-old college student was arrested for hacking a blog of singer BoA and blackmailing her, threatening to spread her private photos. The student, identified as Seo, sneaked onto BoA's Cyworld blog in April 2006 and obtained photos that she took with a male singer. He sent e-mails to her manager to threaten that he would release the photos if they did not provide money. He took 35 million won.S.M. Entertainment said in a press release that the victim was BoA and the male singer was Ahn Danny, former member of pop group g.o.d., and the two have been close friends.``Seo threatened to spread a rumor that was not factual, and BoA's manager tried to catch him by contacting him and giving him money,'' the entertainment company said.Seo also sent e-mails to Ahn and his manager on over 10 occasions earlier this month, demanding 65 million won in exchange for not spreading the photos and the rumor. The police investigating BoA's case traced the e-mails and caught Seo, according to the police and the company.To hide his identity, Seo sent the e-mails with pop star Lee Hyo-lee's e-mail address that he obtained five years previous when hacking Lee's Web sites. SK Communications, operator of Cyworld, said the police found that Seo did not break into the Web system but logged into the blog with a password that he guessed from BoA's information open to the public, such as date of birth.However, whether through hacking or logging in with IDs, it is not the first time that stars' blogs with personal information are disclosed, and pressure is mounting that people need to respect stars' privacy.In April, a personal blog of KBS anchor Choi Dong-sok was hacked and his photos with his girlfriend and anchor Park Ji-yoon were posted on the Internet. The photos were personal and the two reported the leakage to police.``Public attention to stars is excessive and is reaching a law breaking-level,'' an Internet user with the ID ``Jiyeong'' said on Daum.rahnita@koreatimes.co.kr

1.5 Mil. ‘Thomas & Friends’ Train Toys Recalled in US

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in Washington Wednesday announced a voluntary recall of about 1.5 million Thomas and Friends wooden train toys distributed by the RC2 Corporation. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed, the commission said.The toys, all of which are manufactured in China, are were recalled because they were colored with paint s containing lead that could be toxic causing adverse health effects if ingested by children, the commission said. There have been no injuries reported, it added. The recall covers Thomas products sold from January 2005 through June 2007 for $10-$70. Consumers can contact RC2 Corp. at (866) 725-4407 for a replacement toy. Thomas and Friends is a character derived from a TV series aired in Britain in 1984. It is composed of a locomotive named Thomas and a variety of trains. The products are sold as a hit at Thomas theme parks and department stores throughout the world.Toys, books and clothing brand-named Thomas and Friends are also popular in Korea, Korean toy traders said.

East meets West in Switzerland galleries

BASEL, Switzerland -- In time for the Art Basel, Galerie Beyeler and Gallery Hyundai are jointly hosting an exhibition to showcase the works of 10 artists from Korea next to those of 10 European artists.
Titled "Poetry in Motion," the group show is exhibiting the works of Kim Whan-ki (1913-1974), pioneer of abstract painting in Korea, Lee U-fan, who is internationally recognized for his minimalist paintings that superbly infuse eastern philosophy (Lee is also having a well-received solo exhibition in Venice), Kim Tschang-yeul, known for hyper-realistic "Water Drops" paintings and "Recurrence" series, and of course, Paik Nam-june (1932-2006), the most prominent Korean figure in contemporary art.
"Korean aesthetics, I think, is very sensitive and not very far from European thinking," said Claudia Neugebauer, director of the Swiss gallery, at the opening of the show Monday. "The East have considered artworks in line with poetry, as did the West," she said. "Art moves and expresses."
The 56-year-old Galerie Beyeler is one of the venerable European galleries and has teamed up with Gallery Hyundai, with which it has collaborated over the last decade, to introduce Korean contemporary art to the coterie of the European art enthusiasts.
Although this exhibit is a rather "small selection" showing 48 pieces by Korean artists and it is too early to tell "what the people's reaction will be," she is quite positive it will serve as a stepping stone to introduce Korean contemporary art to Europe -- and the red stickers on Lee U-fan's "From Point" (1980) and "From Line" (1982) on the first day of the show certainly seem to back her confidence.
A unique sequined Buddha statue by Noh Sang-kyoon strikes in contrast with the abstract mobile of Alexander Calder on the second floor. The list of Western artists includes Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz and Rebecca Horn.
The exhibition runs through Sept. 15 at Galerie Beyeler in Basel and will arrive in Seoul from Oct. 2-14.
By Hwang You-mee
Korea herald correspondent
(glamazon@heraldm.com)

KTF launches new wireless data uploading technology

KTF, the nation's second-largest mobile operator, said yesterday it launched a high speed up-link packet access, or HSUPA, commercial network.
HSUPA, allowing fast data uploading speed, is an upgrade of the wireless technology known as high speed down-link packet access. HSDPA is fast when downloading large files but relatively slower than HSUPA when it comes to uploads. Download speeds with HSUPA are similar to HSDPA.
Theoretically, HSUPA can upload data with a maximum speed of 5.6 megabits per second, meaning users can upload a 1-megabyte photo in 1.4 seconds.
KTF, which is the first Korean mobile operator to launch such a network, demonstrated the HSUPA service using a USB-type device with an uploading speed of 1.45 megabits per second at the KT Gwanghwamun branch in Seoul.
The company said the HSUPA service using USB-type devices will begin in major cities including Seoul, Busan, Dajeon, Gwangju and Daegu, and the nation-wide service will be available in October.
The HSUPA service using mobile phones will be available in the first quarter in 2008, the company said.
"Since KTF launched HSDPA service on March 1 in an attempt to lead the 3G market, it secured 750,000 subscribers as of June 13," said Park Won-jin, vice president of KTF.
Meanwhile, SK Telecom, which holds over a 50 percent market share in 2G mobile communications, plans to begin building the HSUPA network in Busan within this month, and it will launch the service using USB-type devices in October, company spokesperson Cindy Kang said.
By Kim Yoon-mi
(yoonmi@heraldm.com)

[EDITORIAL] Sex offense ruling

The Seoul High Court ruling which overturned a lower court order of a suspended jail term for Choi Yeon-hee, a lawmaker who sexually harassed a female reporter, is a disappointing step backward for the cause of advancing victim's rights in sexual harassment cases.
In February 2006 Choi, who was then secretary-general of the Grand National Party, grabbed a female reporter's breasts during an after-dinner get together of a group of GNP officials and newspaper reporters. The reporter promptly protested and pressed charges.
Faced with an investigation by the GNP ethics committee, Choi left the party and avoided any party censure. In April, the National Assembly passed a non-binding resolution demanding Choi's resignation.
Even as his case was being heard in court, Choi continued with his legislative activities, and when the court handed out a six-month suspended jail term in November, the legislator appealed the ruling. By law, lawmakers lose their seats if they are sentenced to jail or are given a suspended jail term.
It was audacious of Choi to have appealed the ruling. It was an action that was incongruent with his words: Choi had professed contriteness and said that he would bear all responsibilities. By appealing the court's decision, Choi was, in fact, saying that what he had done did not deserve the punishment that was meted out.
Lucky for Choi and unlucky for all sexual harassment victims, the Seoul High Court agreed with Choi that what the third-term legislator had done did not warrant a jail term. Instead of a suspended jail term, Choi was ordered to pay a fine of 5 million won. That does not even amount to a slap on the wrist.
Women's groups have voiced concerns that the court ruling amounts to declaring that sexual harassment is only a minor offence. In its sentencing, the Seoul High Court said that the sentence was lessened in light of the fact that the plaintiff has accepted the defendant's apologies. But that fact does not absolve the defendant from the crime that was perpetrated nor should it absolve the court from its duty to punish offenders.
It is curious that the court should find Choi's "advanced age" as a reason for lessening the sentence. That "advanced age" of 62 did not deter him from grabbing a woman's breasts; why should age be a factor in sentencing the offender?
The fact that the offence was committed in the presence of others does not mean that there was no serious intention to commit the offence, as the court said in its ruling. This line of reasoning ignores the fact that sexual harassment can occur anywhere, anytime.
The court also found that the degree of violence committed was not grave. Does a victim need to show bruises and stitches to prove how serious the violence was? Sexual harassment involves not only physical scars but mental and emotional ones. Surely, sexual harassment victims should not be required to show their bruises and wounds in order for the court to decide on an appropriate sentence.
Korea has a stringent sexual harassment law in place. However, without a judiciary that is willing to punish the violators, the law is merely hollow words. The latest court ruling shows that our judiciary has little resolve to root out sexual harassment.

Roh takes GNP to court for libel

President Roh Moo-hyun's office yesterday filed a libel suit against Grand National Party presidential frontrunner Lee Myung-bak's two spokespersons over their allegations that Roh is masterminding a full-fledged attack on Lee.
Lee immediately threatened to file a countersuit, calling for Roh to step away from politics.
"Reps. Park Hyung-joon and Jin Soo-hee damaged (Roh's) honor and hampered management of state affairs with malicious, ungrounded allegations," Chun Ho-seon, Roh's spokesman, told reporters.
"We have no choice but to take legal action because they rejected our demand for an apology," he added.
On Wednesday, Lee accused the presidential office of conspiring with the Uri Party to smear his election campaign. "I smell a conspiracy here. It is evident that the powers that be are doing everything they can to kill me off from the race," he told reporters.
Lee's spokesman Park Hyung-joon also denounced Cheong Wa Dae for being at the center of the conspiracy, saying that it was "a deliberate political ploy ordered by the president and implemented by government organizations."
Lee's camp had taken issue with a recent report compiled by several government agencies underscoring the implausibility of Lee's campaign pledge to build a cross-country canal system. The GNP claimed the agencies were acting on Roh's orders.
The Grand National Party also said yesterday that it is considering pressing charges for the third time against the president for violating election laws.
During an interview with the Hankyoreh newspaper on Wednesday, Roh said, "I will support the candidate chosen by the Uri Party. And if he forms an alliance with someone else, I will support that person."
Following the publication of the interview yesterday, GNP lawmakers urged the National Election Commission and prosecutors to deal strictly with any possible election law violations.
"The NEC must exercise its authority to deliberate on Roh's comments and we strongly urge the public prosecutor general to act on the political mudslinging ahead of the December presidential election," said Na Kyung-won, a GNP spokeswoman.
Last week, the election watchdog ruled that the president violated laws requiring government officials to remain politically neutral by criticizing the GNP and its presidential hopefuls.
On Tuesday, the GNP filed a further complaint, accusing Roh of rejecting the NEC verdict by arguing that he has the right to respond to political accusations against him. The commission said it would review the petition thoroughly, but added that it is difficult to consider the remarks in question a violation.
Tensions have been mounting as Roh and his allies in the Uri are stepping up offensives against Lee, who is leading in all polls of public opinion.
Chang Young-dal, Uri floor leader, said yesterday the party has confidential material on Lee and Park serious enough to force them to drop out of the presidential race.
He threatened to unveil the information after the GNP picks its candidate in August.
By Ahn Hyo-lim
(iamhyol@heraldm.com)

Woman charged with theft of toilet paper from courthouse

Police blame a woman named Butts for stealing toilet paper from an Iowa courthouse, and while they are chuckling, the theft charge could land her in jail."She's facing potentially three years of incarceration for three rolls of toilet paper," Chief Lon Walker said, stifling a laugh as he talked to KCCI-TV about Suzanne Marie Butts. (The word "butt" is American slang for buttocks.)Workers at the Marshall County Courthouse had noticed toilet paper rolls were disappearing much faster than usual, Walker said.Butts, 38, was caught last week after an employee saw her taking three rolls of two-ply tissue from a storage closet, Walker said.Butts insisted it was the first time she had pilfered toilet paper, but she declined to answer further questions on her attorney's advice.The fifth-degree theft charge, a misdemeanor, normally carries a sentence of less than a year in jail. But Butts could face more time if convicted under the state's habitual offender law because she has prior theft convictions.Walker said Butts did not work at the courthouse and it was unclear why she was there.MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa

It`s not all smiles for China`s toothless elderly

It is not all smiles for China's elderly, who have lost an average of 11 teeth after turning age 65, a Health Ministry study showed.The study results, reported Thursday by the state-run Xinhua News Agency, said 7 percent of Chinese over 65 had no teeth left."About 98.4 percent of Chinese elderly between 65 and 74 suffer from tooth decay, and nearly 92 percent of them did not receive treatment," said the results of the study, China's third national one on oral health."As the Chinese population ages, dental health must not be neglected," said Qi Xiaoqiu, director of the ministry's disease control bureau.Xinhua said the survey showed that dental health was better for urban residents than people in the countryside, and that women had better teeth than men."Chinese people's dental health has not greatly improved with the country's rapid economic development," Qi was quoted as saying.

Waltzing will not lead to student love, says Chinese education official

A Chinese education official has rejected worries that planned waltz lessons for senior high school students will encourage love and distract them from studying, state media reported Wednesday.The Ministry of Education announced earlier this month that the waltz, along with six other dances, would be introduced into primary and middle schools this September.But Xinhua News Agency said that has led to some parents voicing concerns the dance lessons would encourage young love and distract their children from their studies, ruining their chances of snaring a tough-to-get spot at a university.Yang Guiren, a ministry official in charge of art and physical education, was quoted as saying by Xinhua. "Young love will not blossom through dancing, nor will it die through a lack of dancing," Yang said that frequently changing dance partners would cut the chances of love developing."Four students will be grouped together to perform the waltz and they will change partners regularly as soon as one song finishes. This way the risk of young love will be lowered," he was quoted as saying.Xinhua said the dance classes were being planned due to worries about increased obesity among students.

Squirrel attacks 3 in German town, finished off by victim

An unusually aggressive squirrel attacked three people in a German town before its last victim finished it off with a crutch, police said Wednesday.The rodent jumped through a living-room window in Passau, on the Austrian border, on Tuesday and bit its first victim. With the squirrel hanging on by its teeth, the woman ran out into the street, where she managed to shake the animal off.The squirrel then bit a builder before fleeing into a nearby garden, where it bit a 72-year-old man who eventually killed it with his crutch, police said.The dead animal was to be tested for rabies.

Top News at 6:00 a.m. GMT

Hamas tramples Fatah security strongholds, appears close to controlling Gaza StripGAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) _ Hamas neared control of the entire Gaza Strip after a day of battles in which the Islamist fighters dislodged rival Fatah forces from key positions. Fatah forces were crumbling fast. Early Thursday, Fatah abandoned positions in central Gaza and blew them up, with Hamas forces advancing through the crowded, poverty-stricken seaside territory. A Hamas military victory in Gaza could split Palestinians into a Hamas-controlled Gaza and a Fatah-run West Bank. At least 20 people were killed Wednesday, most of them militants, pushing the three-day toll over 60. Three of the bodies were brought to Gaza City's Shifa hospital after midnight. In a clash early Thursday in the southern town of Rafah, a Hamas militant was killed, hospital officials said. Also, on early Thursday, Hamas charged that Fatah-linked security forces were rounding up Hamas activists in the West Bank. Fatah has threatened to carry the fighting to that territory, where it is dominant.Strong earthquake rocks Guatemala, El SalvadorGUATEMALA CITY (AP) _ A powerful earthquake shook Guatemala and parts of El Salvador on Wednesday, causing traffic chaos in Guatemala City and some landslides outside the capital. There were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries. The 6.8-magnitude quake struck at 1:29 p.m. local time (1929 GMT) and lasted 22 seconds. It was centered 70 miles (115 kilometers) southwest of Guatemala City off the Pacific coast, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In Guatemala City, people fled buildings into the streets following the quake, throwing traffic into chaos in the sprawling capital city. "It rattled a lot of nerves," said Benedicto Giron, spokesman for the National Disaster Reduction Center. Outside the capital, landslides were reported in the southwest province of Escuintla, but they apparently caused no casualties, Giron said. The quake was felt strongly in neighboring El Salvador, where people ran into the streets in the capital of San Salvador, but the Red Cross there said it had no reports of damage or injuries. It was also felt in the Mexican city of Tapachula along the Guatemalan border.

New `Wonders` poll in final month of voting

GENEVA, Switzerland -- The Great Wall, the Colosseum and Machu Picchu are among the leading contenders to be the new seven wonders of the world as a massive poll enters its final month with votes already cast by more than 50 million people, organizers say.As the July 6 voting deadline approaches, the rankings can still change, the organizers say. Also in the top 10 are Greece's Acropolis, Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Easter Island, Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer, the Taj Mahal and Jordan's Petra.The Great Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, are assured of keeping their status in addition to the new seven after indignant Egyptian officials said it was a disgrace they had to compete for a spot.The winners will be announced on July 7 in Lisbon, Portugal.Latin Americans and Asians have been the most enthusiastic voters so far in the final round of 20 candidates for the world's top architectural marvels, but people from every country in the world have voted by Internet or phone, says the nonprofit organization conducting the balloting."It's the first ever global vote," said Tia B. Viering, spokeswoman for the "New 7 Wonders of the World" campaign.Rome's Colosseum, China's Great Wall, Peru's Machu Picchu, India's Taj Mahal and Jordan's Petra have been among the leaders since January while the Acropolis and the Statue of Christ Redeemer made their way up from the middle of the field to the top level, according to latest tallies. The United States' Statue of Liberty and Australia's Sydney Opera House have been sitting in the bottom 10 since the start.

Starbucks cools on Jones Soda

Pop to be kicked out to make room for food
By CRAIG HARRISP-I REPORTER
Jones Soda, which is moving into Qwest Field next month, is getting bumped out of Starbucks, the Seattle P-I has learned.
Starbucks Corp., which has sold Jones Soda since March 2004 at its U.S. stores and since 1999 in Western Canada, will discontinue selling the pop maker's root beer and sugar-free black cherry drinks by the end of June.
"They have been a very good partner, but we decided to move in a different direction," Brandon Borrman, a Starbucks spokesman, said Wednesday.
Borrman said Starbucks wants to use the space Jones Soda occupies in coolers to expand its cold-food offerings. He said the decision to move Jones Soda was made this spring, but he didn't have a precise date.
Starbucks will continue to sell Izze, a sparkling fruit juice that sat right next to the Jones Soda products in some stores.
PepsiCo. acquired Izze in September. The cola giant and Starbucks have had a joint venture called the North American Coffee Partnership since 1994, which sells bottled Frappuccinos. A former Pepsi executive is on the Starbucks board of directors.
Borrman declined to answer questions on the decision to keep Izze. Michelle Naughton, a Pepsi spokeswoman, said Izze has been offered at Starbucks for more than four years, and she referred all other questions to Starbucks.
The loss for Jones Soda comes as Chief Executive Peter van Stolk was boasting Monday that his company could play with big soda companies after his business knocked off Coca-Cola to win the pouring rights at Seahawks games at Qwest Field. That deal begins July 1.
Van Stolk declined to comment about the relationship between Starbucks and Pepsi, but he said he understood that Jones Soda was being moved out so the coffee company could have room for sandwiches and other food items in the coolers.
"They are looking at what they need to do," van Stolk said. "We are working with them and continue to be a big supporter of Starbucks, and we will support them in many ways."
Neither Starbucks nor Jones Soda could provide a precise number of how many Starbucks stores carried the specialty pop, except that the drinks were only in company-operated Starbucks locations.
According to Starbucks, as of April 1 the company had 6,281 company-owned stores and 3,533 licensed stores in the U.S. At that time, Starbucks also had 203 Canadian stores. Starbucks does not break down its foreign stores by geographic location.
Van Stolk predicted that the two Seattle-based companies would do business in the future.
"We have a relationship that we will work on building," van Stolk said. "We are good partners, and we will continue to be good partners with Starbucks."
Van Stolk said losing Starbucks would not severely affect Jones Soda's revenue. The company had $9.2 million in revenue and profit of $58,312 for the first quarter, ended March 31. Sales for the quarter, however, were well below Wall Street's expectations, and one analyst said the loss of Starbucks "is certainly not favorable."
"It's discouraging to see they are losing this distribution," said James Maher, a retail analyst with ThinkEquity Partners of San Francisco. "Starbucks is going to open at a 20 percent clip in the U.S. ... That has gone away. The whole thing (for Jones Soda) has been a growth story, and now we have a shrinking situation. That's the last thing anyone wants to see."
John Sicher, editor and publisher of trade publication Beverage Digest, said being nudged out of Starbucks, where the sodas are near the registers and are viewed by thousands of customers daily, is a big blow to Jones Soda.
"It probably doesn't represent much loss of volume, but selling in Starbucks has tremendous marquee and presence value. That would be what Jones is losing," Sicher said.
Jones Soda's volatile stock closed Wednesday at $15.68, down 4 percent on the Nasdaq stock market.
Shares of Jones Soda have lost more than half their value since hitting an all-time high of $32.60 on April 16, following a huge run-up after the company announced it had secured a national distribution deal to be in major retail stores.

Iran moves to execute porn stars

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's parliament on Wednesday voted in favor of a bill that could lead to the death penalty for persons convicted of working in the production of pornographic movies.With a 148-5 vote in favor and four abstentions, lawmakers present at the Wednesday session of the 290-seat parliament approved that "producers of pornographic works and main elements in their production are considered corrupter of the world and could be sentenced to punishment as corrupter of the world."The "main elements" referred to in the draft include producers, directors, cameramen and actors involved in making a pornographic video.The bill also envisages convictions ranging from one year imprisonment to a death sentence for the main distributors of the movies and also producers of Web sites in which the pornographic works appear.Besides videos, the bill covers all electronic visual material, such as DVDs and CDs. Other material, such as porn magazines and books, are already banned under Iranian law.To become law, the bill requires an approval by the Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog in Iran.It is widely believed that the drafting of the bill came about as a reaction to a scandal last year, when a private videotape, apparently belonging to Iranian actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi and allegedly showing her having intercourse with a man, became available across Iran.The videotape was leaked to the Internet and released on a black market DVD, becoming a full-blown Iranian sex tape scandal. Ebrahimi later came under an official investigation, which is still ongoing. She faces fines, whip lashing or worse for her violation of Iran's morality laws.

Cyprus to tempt tourists with saints` bones

The bones of martyred saints and somber shrines may not be at the top of every tourist's must-see holiday wish list.But the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, better known as a major European sun-and-sea spot, is determined to delve into its rich cultural heritage and exploit the budding -- and more wholesome -- market of religious tourism."We are more than just a sand and sea and sex destination," said George Michaelides, chairman of the Cultural and Special Interest Tourism Association.Industry officials say about 100,000 of the island's 2.5 million tourists already come for the cultural and religious monuments and the market has seen a boost since Dan Brown's bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" made religious quests popular."Cyprus has always been associated with religion. In earlier times there was no ship going to the Holy Land without stopping at Cyprus. We are known as the island of saints," Michaelides said.According to the World Tourism Organization, 300 to 330 million pilgrims visit the world's key religious sites every year. Cyprus is eager to take a big bite out of this growing market and boost the island's main industry.In cooperation with the powerful Church of Cyprus and tourism officials it is launching religious tours for the first time this summer."Cyprus packs a huge amount of monuments in such a small space," said Vakis Loizides, a tourist officer at the Cyprus Tourism Organization (CTO). "The island's special relationship with saints, like Lazarus and Helen, make it very attractive.""We are seeing an increase in demand," said Angelos Mylonas, manager at Mantovani Plotin Travel. "After 'The Da Vinci Code', there is an interest from people to see Greek Orthodox churches."Scattered over the Troodos mountains, Cyprus's 10 medieval timber-roofed churches, listed as UNESCO world heritage monuments for their stunning wall paintings, are at the top of many religious tourists' lists, he added.

How not to climb the Matterhorn

One sheer drop-off to the right, another eight feet to the left. A switchback ridge so steep that three steps brings you to the next turn. Rope handholds to clutch when the mountain trail shrinks to less than a foot wide.What am I, a goat? It was time to consider a panic attack.A summer day hike, my husband said. A glorious saunter up a flower-filled meadow to one of the world's most famous Alpine huts. Look, families with little children are in the gondola line with us. Don't forget your sunglasses, it's so bright.Which is how, three hours later, I was shivering in a surprise July snowstorm en route to Hoernlihuette, the Matterhorn base camp, wearing capris and sneakers with no tread.At 14,690 feet, the Matterhorn is not even the highest mountain in Switzerland -- but it surely is the most photogenic, rising up on four elegant faces to a craggy peak along the Swiss-Italian border. Walt Disney even borrowed its silhouette for Disneyland, debuting the Matterhorn Bobsleds ride in 1959.At the real mountain's base lies the car-free Swiss town of Zermatt. There is no offseason here; it's nearly always packed with tourists riding trains and gondolas up the mountains, hiking on the alpine trails, walking along picturesque streets lined with traditional chalets, and eating at restaurants decorated with the ubiquitous, huge Swiss cowbells. Utterly charming or tourism gone mad, depending on your point of view.Hoernlihuette, at 10,696 feet, has been on the flank of the mountain in some version since 1880. About 4,000 people a year stay here during its brief summer season (July 1 to September 30), with 3,000 of them seeking glory on top of the Matterhorn. But I was of the lesser beings, daytrippers who gasp for breath up to the stone refuge, throw themselves exhausted upon its sturdy wooden benches and need a beer -- or maybe two -- before they can face the trials of going back down.We set off for Hoernlihuette on a crisp sunny morning, after a brief walk around Zermatt and a stop to pick up water and munchies. Then we were off to the Schwarzsee cable car, which whisked us 3,000 feet up to a restaurant and pond above the tree line, where families with children picnicked.For hikers, it was time to get started, at 8,474 feet.After 45 minutes across a stony meadow, we reached Hirli, a lone building a few hundred feet up. My, how time flies on a mountain. You can see where you are going, yet it takes forever. To match my plodding pace, my husband photographed about 10,000 alpine flowers from every direction.Then the wind turned brisk, the blue sky ashen gray. Temperatures fell about 20 degrees. We broke out the windbreakers, which held off the freezing rain for five to six minutes tops. I longed for gloves and a hat.It took about 10 steps for the landscape to turn from alpine meadow to crumbling lunar rock face. As the sleet turned into stinging hail, the trail disappeared altogether.The snowstorm struck when we were totally exposed on the switchback ridge. By then I was hyperventilating about the sheer cliffs on either side. I decided it was better to stare at the wet stones beneath my feet.Ironic, is it not, that we seek out these sweeping mountain vistas, yet when we are there, a glance in any direction sends our hearts racing in fear?Yet the mind is a marvelous thing. Since the storm limited visibility to six feet, all of a sudden I could not see the plunging cliffs. Death might be a step or two away, but I was oblivious. That's when the fear disappeared.As we drew near to Schwarzsee, we heard a shout. A climber with a fully loaded expedition backpack was practically dancing down the mountain, leaping from rock to rock, his ice pick swinging. We flattened against the cliff to let him pass. A minute later, another. Then six, then a dozen."Maybe they are racing," I mused.We soon found out why, as we watched the gondola operator lock up his office and ride the last one down, despite our own shouts from 100 yards away. We had misread the 17:15 p.m. closing time as 7:15 p.m. In fact, 17:15 p.m. is 5:15 p.m. We arrived at 5:21 p.m., six minutes too late. Believe me, he did not care.After three more hours, my thigh muscles began to twitch uncontrollably. Nearly frozen, we arrived back in the dark, utterly exhausted, about 9 p.m.What did we learn?• Zermatt and the Matterhorn are must-see destinations. • Mountain expeditions in capris and bald sneakers are bound to end in disaster. • The Swiss are nothing if not punctual -- do not miss the last tram. • Over 500 people have died climbing the Matterhorn since 1865, and Swiss tourism authorities say deaths now average about 12 annually. As of early May, six people had died this year. Many of the dead mountaineers are buried in Zermatt's downtown cemetery. Don't join that club.

U.S. businesses set sights on Chinese tourists

NEW YORK -- Standing atop the Empire State Building and looking out on the expanse of glinting skyscrapers and miniature yellow taxicabs, Lili Ma had no doubt that New York was the place to be on her vacation from China."Everybody needs to bite the Big Apple," the 36-year-old said with a smile.Mass tourism advertising for New York -- and for the U.S. as a whole -- is still forbidden in Ma's native China. But everyone knows about this place, she said. Her friends all watch "Sex and the City," and even her mother has heard of California and New York.That name recognition, coupled with a growing interest in tourism among Chinese who have seen their incomes rise while travel restrictions have lessened, could bring a fortune to hotels, tour companies and attractions around the U.S.The number of Chinese who travel outside their homeland each year is expected to nearly triple to 100 million people by 2020, and American cities and businesses are positioning themselves to profit from what they hope will be a tourist boom. They are establishing offices in China, and lobbying the government to ease restrictions on travel to the U.S."In the next 10 years, it will probably dwarf any overseas market we may have, with the potential to dwarf all overseas markets combined," said Bruce Bommarito, vice president of international market development for the Travel Industry Association.While the number of Chinese visitors has been increasing, they certainly haven't been overrunning American tourist attractions. Just 320,000 Chinese -- 1.5 percent of all overseas visitors -- traveled to the U.S in 2006. Of the Chinese who left the mainland, fewer than 1 in 100 headed for the U.S., according to American and Chinese authorities.But many American entrepreneurs believe that number could soon explode.Noel Irwin Hentschel, CEO of tour operator AmericanTours International, said China will be her company's top business focus in the coming decades. Speaking by phone from China, where she now spends half her time, she predicted that by 2009, Chinese tourists will account for one-tenth of the roughly 1 million customers her company ferries around the U.S. each year."There's more than a billion people here," Hentschel said. "Twenty percent of them are the ones with the money, with the ability to travel, from what we understand. There's a lot of pent-up demand."

Hamas claims full control of Gaza GAZA CITY

Fighters from the Islamic party Hamas claimed full control of Palestinian Authority security agencies in Gaza late Thursday as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved his unity government and declared a state of emergency.Fighters loyal to Hamas, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, waved their green banners from atop the headquarters of the Preventive Security Service in Gaza City and took numerous prisoners from Abbas' Fatah party.Abbas adviser Tayeb Abdel Rahim said Hamas was attempting a military coup.By late Thursday, Hamas had seized control of all Palestinian Authority security installations in the territory, Palestinian security sources said. The presidential compound in Gaza City fell shortly before midnight (5 p.m. ET), Hamas sources told CNN. (Watch how Hamas crushed Fatah) In his emergency declaration, Abbas dismissed Haniya and announced the creation of an interim government staffed by his Fatah allies, which would have to be approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council after 30 days. Abbas vowed to hold new elections "as soon as the situation on the ground permits," Abdel Rahim said.But Palestinian legislator Saeb Erakat, an Abbas ally, earlier had told CNN that Gaza "is now officially out of our control as the Palestinian Authority."A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Fouzi Barhoum, said earlier that Hamas was imposing Islamic law on Gaza. But speaking from Damascus, exiled Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal denied the movement would place the territory under religious law.

Weapon dates bowhead whale to 1800s

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt -- more than a century ago.
Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.
Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.
The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.
It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.
The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.
"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."
The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.
The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.

Sunni mosques targeted after blast at Samarra shrine

Hours after a revered Shiite mosque was bombed Wednesday, Sunni houses of worship came under attack, Iraq's Interior Ministry said.
The bombing destroyed two towers at the Shiite Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra. The same holy site was attacked in February 2006, causing the top of the mosque's dome to collapse. That attack sparked Iraq's current wave of deadly Shiite-Sunni violence.
There was no immediate word on casualties in the city north of Baghdad.
Authorities said they believe Sunni insurgents hit the mosque. At the Pentagon, Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey said that "it clearly seems to me to be a signature attack of al Qaeda."
After the blast in Samarra, gunmen stormed a Sunni mosque in southwestern Baghdad's Bayaa area, a Shiite neighborhood, an Interior Ministry official said. Gunmen forced two guards to leave the Khudhair al-Janabi mosque before they burned it, the official said.

New World of Coca-Cola adds flavor to Atlanta

At the new World of Coca-Cola, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable greet visitors from a 74-year-old advertisement. A 3-D movie ride takes audiences on a journey to find the secret recipe of one of the world's most popular drinks.
The nearly $100 million museum, which opened May 24, is the latest attraction in the tourism and development boom of Georgia's capital city.
What's getting Atlanta tourism officials excited is that the new Coke museum is expected to draw about 1.2 million visitors in its first year.
The new museum is about twice the size of the beverage company's former museum, which was built in 1990 and located about a mile away, next to the Georgia Capitol building. That museum closed April 17 and drew a total of about 13 million visitors in 17 years.
It's also more expensive -- adult tickets are $15, compared to $9 at the original museum. (Tickets are now $13 and $9 respectively for seniors and children, although there's a $1 discount for online purchases).
Yet Coke officials say the cost reflects more to see and do at the new museum, including more than 1,100 Coke artifacts never exhibited before.
The museum also has the "Secret Formula 4-D Theater," a movie ride in which the audience dons 3-D glasses and gets bumped, blown with air and sprayed with mist during the show.
Some of the old favorites that will again be on display are one of the company's original prototype contour bottles (only two exist), and a soft-drink dispenser used in 1985 on the space shuttle Challenger.

More than 100 die in Bangladesh mudslides, lightening More than 100 die in Bangladesh mudslides, lightening

CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh (AP) _ The heaviest monsoon rains in years have hammered Bangladesh in recent days, triggering mudslides, flooding and lightning strikes that have left at least 108 people dead and scores more missing, officials said Tuesday.
At least 97 people perished in the hardest-hit hilly port city of Chittagong, city official Nur Sulaiman said.
In Chittagong, army rescuers pulled at least 28 bodies from the debris on Tuesday, Sulaiman said. Also on Tuesday two more bodies were recovered from a nearby pond, he said.
Most deaths in Chittagong occurred in a shantytown, where chunks of earth slid off soaked hillsides Monday and buried dozens of crudely built shacks.
More than 50 more people were reported missing. The annual monsoon rains have spread across Bangladesh in the past few days, and the rains _ the heaviest recorded in seven years _ have also inundated parts of the capital, Dhaka, and other regions of the country.

Artist unveils $98M diamond skull

Damien Hirst, former BritArt bad boy whose works infuriate and inspire in equal measure, did it again on Friday with a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of a human skull priced at a cool $98 million.
The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th-century European male, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than $8 million in the center of its forehead.
"It shows we are not going to live for ever. But it also has a feeling of victory over death," Hirst said as the sparkling skull was unveiled to the public for the first time amid tight security at central London's White Cube gallery.
Hirst, who has a preoccupation with blood and death and whose works range from diced and pickled quadrupeds to bloody depictions of birth, said he was inspired by similarly bejeweled Aztec skulls. While the skull is platinum and the diamonds flawless -- and ethically sourced, Hirst stressed -- the teeth are real.
"It was very important to put the real teeth back. Like the animals in formaldehyde you have got an actual animal in there. It is not a representation. I wanted it to be real," he said.
The skull is missing one tooth, which Hirst initially replaced with a gold one and then decided to leave out.
"We felt we didn't need it, so we took it out. It feels sort of human and quirky," he said.
Hirst, whose works regularly fetch millions of pounds, said he hoped the skull would not be snapped up by a private buyer and taken away from public view.
"It would be sad it it ends up in a vault somewhere that nobody sees. Obviously I would like it to be on display.
Other works in the new exhibition include pickled creatures, a flying dove suspended in mid-air, a flayed human statue holding its own skin and a series of pictures of an operation being carried out.
"I hope this work gives people hope -- uplifting, take your breath away," he said in response to a question on what he expected the public to get from the skull.

Kelly Clarkson: I`ve never been in love

Kelly Clarkson, who rails against a former flame in her new song "Never Again," says she's never been in love.
"I love my friends and family," the Grammy-winning singer and original "American Idol" tells Elle magazine in its July issue. "But I have never said the words 'I love you' to anyone in a romantic relationship. Ever."
Clarkson, 25, doesn't take romance lightly.
"I am very old-school, conservative in my thinking when it comes to relationships," she says. "Love is something you work at. It doesn't come easily. There are going to be bad days. You are going to have to work at loving someone when they are being an idiot."
She adds: "People think they're just going to meet the perfect guy. Don't be ridiculous."
Marriage and motherhood aren't in the cards for Clarkson -- not right now, anyway.
"My point of view is that I shouldn't be a mother at all, because I'd be horrible," she says. "I'm not willing to be that selfless."
Her comments speak to the singer's frankness, which makes Clarkson stand out from many of today's publicist-protected pop stars. In recent weeks, Clarkson has made headlines for saying the media is exaggerating reports that she and music mogul Clive Davis clashed over her upcoming CD, "My December," to be released by RCA Records, a unit of Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
It's a sensitive subject.
"I've sold more than 15 million records worldwide, and still nobody listens to what I have to say. Because I'm 25 and a woman," she says.
"I am a good singer, so I can't possibly be a good writer," she continues. "If your thing is to bring me down, cool. I'll just work harder."

New World of Coca-Cola adds flavor to Atlanta

At the new World of Coca-Cola, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable greet visitors from a 74-year-old advertisement. A 3-D movie ride takes audiences on a journey to find the secret recipe of one of the world's most popular drinks.
The nearly $100 million museum, which opened May 24, is the latest attraction in the tourism and development boom of Georgia's capital city.
What's getting Atlanta tourism officials excited is that the new Coke museum is expected to draw about 1.2 million visitors in its first year.
The new museum is about twice the size of the beverage company's former museum, which was built in 1990 and located about a mile away, next to the Georgia Capitol building. That museum closed April 17 and drew a total of about 13 million visitors in 17 years.
It's also more expensive -- adult tickets are $15, compared to $9 at the original museum. (Tickets are now $13 and $9 respectively for seniors and children, although there's a $1 discount for online purchases).
Yet Coke officials say the cost reflects more to see and do at the new museum, including more than 1,100 Coke artifacts never exhibited before.
The museum also has the "Secret Formula 4-D Theater," a movie ride in which the audience dons 3-D glasses and gets bumped, blown with air and sprayed with mist during the show.
Some of the old favorites that will again be on display are one of the company's original prototype contour bottles (only two exist), and a soft-drink dispenser used in 1985 on the space shuttle Challenger.

5,000 Australians flee flooding

5,000 Australians flee flooding Thousands of Australians were evacuated from their homes on Sunday as floodwaters headed down the country's wine-rich Hunter Valley, leaving towns cut off and farms isolated like islands.
A major storm battering Australia's east coast for the past three days has whipped up huge seas, which beached a coal ship, and dumped flooding rains over the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney.
Eight people have drowned in the floods, the worst in 30 years in the area, which have been declared a natural disaster by the New South Wales state government. Another person was killed when a tree fell on him.
"I speak for every Australian in saying ... we are heart broken by the loss of lives," said Prime Minister John Howard.
Around 5,000 residents from the town of Maitland in the Hunter Valley were evacuated on Sunday fearing the swollen Hunter River would break levees overnight, said emergency officials.
Army soldiers were constructing sand bag levees to try and hold back the flooded Hunter River, which had swollen into a wide, brown swirling torrent of water heading down the valley.
Some farmers were forced to swim their horses and cattle out of floodwaters. One farmer, chest deep in water, held a chicken above his head as he waded towards higher ground.
Damage assessments of properties in the Hunter Valley were still being compiled and it was unclear how the areas famed wineries have faired in the flooding.
New South Wales state premier Morris Lemma said the damage in Newcastle, one of Australia's major coal export ports, was worse than after a 1989 earthquake hit the city.

Top 10 Ways to Peeve Your Website Visitors

How did peeves become pets? Don't know. Don't really care. But all of us have our pet peeves when it comes to surfing the net for information.
Here are the top 10 according to many surveys:
1. Pop Ups
Pop ups come in many flavors: entry pop ups, exit pop ups, delayed, small, large, multiple, Flyin, scrolling, always on top, browser stopping, surf interrupting, must be cleared to move on, viagra, and the ever popular porn.
Except for an occasional squeeze page to get a free ebook or report, web surfers HATE pop ups.
So why do they continue to litter the Internet landscape? Simple. They work.
2. Extra Software Needed to View Site
Don't blame Canada. Blame Adobe.
Adobe made the Acrobat reader a must for viewing PDF files mainly because:
- It solved a need. Every page now printed out the same regardless of which printer or operating system was being used. It could even be made interactive for form completion.
- Adobe gave away millions of the free readers before publishers adopted the new PDF format as a standard for ebooks.
Acrobat users now demand PDF files in most instances where ebooks used to have various formats including "exe". Hackers have made downloading exe files from unknown sources an unsafe activity. As standard as Acrobat now is, the same is not true for Flash, Shockwave, Deja Vu, and a host of other add-ons with various degrees of support.
I don't need to sit through a 2 meg Flash intro when what I want is information. Apparently, many others agree. You can add Flashblock to your FireFox browser and decide for yourself when to allow the Flash to load.
3. Dead Dead Dead Links
Nothing hacks me off faster than finding a spot on anchor text link that goes nowhere.
It's like having you mouth water over a menu special only to have the kitchen say they have run out.
4. Registration Required to Visit Site
Some sites think their bytes don't stink. They think you should register and login to see anything beyond the home page.
What they are doing is asking me to get married before the first date.
What's in it for me? In this Internet day and age, a company and site has to build trust before a random visitor is going to cough up a name and email address.
Show me a little leg first.
5. Slowwww Pages
If I have to wait more than 4 or 5 seconds to begin viewing your site, I am gone - never to return. If your servers are slow, find a new ISP.
If you loaded your pages with Flash, MIDI, audio, video, or other files that load with the page, dump them. Put up links instead. Let the visitor choose if they want to read or watch the video.
6. Outdated Content
One huge advantage of the web is the ability of bloggers and other Drudge wannabes to bypass traditional media and post news online instantly.
If you have not updated your website in 14 months, what does that tell me about your company. Certainly, you are less than a cutting edge solution for my problem.
7. Bad Navigation
Web designers prefer dazzle over function. Function is boring. Who wants a simple text link when a pop up Javascript navigation bar impresses the client? I do.
So do the search engines.
Every web page needs recognizable, underlined text links on every page, preferably top and bottom.
Don't make me waste time trying to find the internal page I am really looking for.
8. No Contact Information
Poor contact information is a binary pair of bad navigation. How many sites have you been to where you cannot find a phone number, a street address, or even an email address? Plenty.
I think it's sweet that you put up an email contact form on your site, but I prefer to use my default email compose screen. Every web-based email form is different. I don't want to waste time learning to use your form when my email client works fine.
What are you hiding?
9. No Decent Site Search Tool
There is no excuse for this one. If you have a large website with dozens or hundreds of pages, give me an internal search box to find what I need.
Google and Yahoo! and many others will give you the tool - free - to put on your site. Use it.
10. Disabled "Back" Button
I don't want a website to dictate how I experience their site. I am a guest on your site. I don't need to come back to your page when I hit the back button. That's why I hit the back button in the first place. You don't have the information I am looking for.
In a similar vein, I don't like to see other right click functions like "view page source" disabled. I don't need to steal your HTML code, but if I want to, disabling right click will not stop me. I might want to see how you achieved a certain formatting effect. If I am impressed, you can bet I'll be back.

China censors 'cut' Pirates film

The image of Chow Yun-fat's character has been criticised Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End has been censored for Chinese cinema audiences, according to trade magazine Variety.

The image of Chow Yun-fat's character has been criticised

Some scenes with Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat - who plays Singapore pirate Captain Sao Feng - have been trimmed.
Variety quoted local media reports that said the cuts included Chow's recitation of a poem in Cantonese.
A Disney spokesman told Variety that audiences would see a Chinese version of the film.
He added there had been cuts, but did not elaborate.

Violence
On Chinese web forums, many people have criticised the film's image of Chow's character - who is bald, has long nails and is dressed in Qing dynasty style.
They have said it is the image of the Chinese in the eyes of Hollywood producers.
China Film Group, which distributes the film, initially said it had made no cuts, then declined to comment on a Beijing News report that it had cut scenes involving too much violence and horror, Variety said.
The report said the cuts make the film difficult to follow.
"The sudden debut of the captain confused the audience at the Beijing screening," the report said.
Variety reported that the cuts included Chow's reading of a poem by Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (701-762) called Guan Shan Yue (The Moon Shining Over the Mountain on the Border).
The previous instalment in the film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was banned by the Chinese film bureau because of scenes of cannibalism and ghosts.
Censors the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television were unavailable for comment.

Nigeria author wins Booker honour

Chinua Achebe is the most translated African authorNigerian author Chinua Achebe has won the Man Booker International Prize in honour of his literary career.
Achebe is best known for his 1958 debut novel Things Fall Apart, which sold more than 10 million copies.

The 76-year-old, who was paralysed from the waist down after a car accident in 1990, beat writers including Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie to the honour.
The £60,000 prize, awarded every two years, will be presented to Achebe at a ceremony in Oxford on 28 June.
'Remarkable man'
Achebe was called "the father of modern African literature" by writer Nadine Gordimer, one of the judges, who added that he is "integral to world literature".
"In Things Fall Apart and his other fiction set in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe inaugurated the modern African novel," said another judge, academic Elaine Showalter.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who recently won the Orange Prize for Fiction, said of Achebe: "He is a remarkable man. The writer and the man. He's what I think writers should be."
Others who have been nominated for the prize, which recognises a living writer for their body of work, included Doris Lessing, Philip Roth, Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood.
The recipient of the first honour - awarded in 2005 - was Albanian writer Ismail Kadare.

Woolmer 'died of natural causes'

Bob Woolmer was found unconscious in his hotel room
Police statement Jamaican police have confirmed that Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer died of natural causes and was not murdered, as they stated earlier.
Mr Woolmer, 58, died after being found unconscious in his Kingston hotel room on 18 March, following his team's loss to Ireland in the cricket World Cup.
An initial pathologist's report concluded that he had been strangled.
Every member of the Pakistan team was fingerprinted before returning home, sparking anger among many in Pakistan.
'No poison'
Jamaican Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas told a news conference in Kingston that three expert opinions had concluded that the original pathologist report of death by manual asphyxiation was wrong.
We got [the bone] x-rayed and the fact is that the bone wasn't broken in the first place
Mark Shields,deputy police commissioner Thomas also said that toxicology tests had now been received and that they showed there was no substance to indicate poisoning.
"The police have now closed the investigation into the death of Bob Woolmer," he said.
Mr Thomas launched a strong defence of the police investigation, saying it had been commended by both Scotland Yard and Pakistani police who had helped with the case.
The original pathologist's report had said a specific bone - the hyoid - was fractured.
But deputy police commissioner Mark Shields told the BBC a later x-ray showed the bone was not broken.
"I instructed my team... to go back and actually retrieve it from his body... We got it x-rayed and the fact is that the bone wasn't broken in the first place," he said.
Mr Woolmer's widow, Gill, welcomed the latest news, saying: "My sons and I are relieved to be officially informed that Bob died of natural causes and that no foul play is suspected in his death."

'Terrible days'
olmer's death sparked speculation he had been murdered by an angry fan or by an illegal betting syndicate. There was also speculation members of the Pakistan team may have been involved.
They should have first ruled out natural causes before this whole drama about the murder
Imran Khan Mr.Thomas said the Jamaica Constabulary Force had found no evidence "of any impropriety by players, match officials nor management".
In response to the findings, the head of anti-corruption unit of the International Cricket Council said that "bizarre" theories of match-fixing had "unnecessarily tarnished" the game.
Paul Condon said: "To those who suggest that corruption is still widespread... we have one clear message: put up or shut up."
Mr Thomas said his force had carried out its investigation thoroughly and with respect to the Pakistan cricket team.
But Pakistan's former captain Imran Khan said he was shocked there was no apology to the national side.
He said Pakistan's cricket board should sue those responsible for the "humiliation that the Pakistan team went through".
"Bob Woolmer had diabetes, he had blood pressure, an enlarged heart, he had respiratory problems. On top of it, the depression of losing and then he drank a bottle of champagne. They should have first ruled out natural causes before this whole drama about the murder," Imran Khan said.
But Inzamam-ul-Haq, captain during the World Cup, said that although the days after Mr Woolmer's death were "the most terrible of our lives", legal action now would serve no purpose.
The Pakistan Cricket Board made no mention of legal action in its statement, saying only that it felt "great satisfaction over the fact that the truth has finally come out".
The BBC's Andy Gallacher in Kingston says this is an embarrassing U-turn for the Jamaican police.
He says the news conference was an attempt to shift the blame for the errors in the case onto the report of the original pathologist, Dr Ere Sheshiah.

Luck Beer goes on display at the Sydney International Beer Festival in Sydney, Australia. The festival offers three days of hops, barley and tastings, with more than 60 international brews available for sampling.

(cnn snap shot)

Bush's watch disappears in crowd

AP) -- One moment President Bush was glad-handing Albanians on Sunday, proudly sporting a watch with a dark strap on his left wrist. Moments later, it was gone.
Did it fall off? Did one of his bodyguards remove it? Or did one of the crowd artfully slip it off his wrist and pocket it?
The United States Embassy in Albania on Tuesday emphatically denied that Bush's watch was stolen during his visit to the country, where he was acclaimed as a hero.
The Albanian media -- and international Web sites -- is buzzing with video showing Bush's wrist watch apparently disappearing while he was shaking hands with people in Fushe Kruje, 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of Tirana.
"What the local media is saying is absolutely not true," an embassy official, who declined to be named, said.
People waiting on the sidewalks on Sunday gave Bush a rapturous welcome, shaking hands with him, grabbing him by the arms and wrists, reaching out to embrace him and even ruffling his hair.
Bush was clearly delighted by the attention and plunged back into the crowd for more hand shaking and to be kissed on the cheek.
An Albanian bodyguard who accompanied Bush in the town told The Associated Press he had seen one of his U.S. colleagues close to Bush bend down and pick up the watch.
The Top Channel private TV station showed how one of his bodyguards may have talked to the president and then taken the watch from his hand.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Ancient Rome - Digital 3D Version

A collaborative, international effort announced today that they created a virtual, online 3D simulation of Ancient Rome, a culmination of 10 years work.
Bernard Frischer, director of the "Rome Reborn" project and director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, stated, "'Rome Reborn 1.0' is the continuation of five centuries of research by scholars, architects and artists since the Renaissance who have attempted to restore the ruins of the ancient city with words, maps and images. Now, through hard work by our interdisciplinary team, we have realized their seemingly impossible dream. This is just the first step in the creation of a virtual time machine, which our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of Rome and many other great cities around the world.

Heart triumphs over head as most trustworthy in small-town `Think-Off` debate in US


America's Greatest Thinker is not a famous philosopher, an award-winning mathematician or internationally known astrophysicist. He is a musician and arts administrator from Minneapolis, according to this year's Great American Think-Off, in which ordinary people debate perplexing questions.Joe Kaiser won the title and a gold medal Saturday after the Think-Off audience decided he was most convincing when debating the question: "Which should you trust more _ your head or your heart?"Kaiser argued a person should trust the heart more than the head. His friend and debate opponent, Episcopal priest Paul Allick of Burnsville, took the silver medal by arguing that one's head should be used in decision-making.Finalists were selected from a field of more than 530 people who submitted essays. All four finalists received $500 (euro375) in prize money and an all-expenses paid trip to New York Mills for the Saturday night debate.The question for the Think-Off is different every year. In 2006, the contestants debated, "Which is more valuable to society: safety or freedom?"

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Audiences anted up for the Warner Bros. caper "Ocean's Thirteen," the third of George Clooney and Brad Pitt's casino-heist romps, which debuted as the top flick with $37.1 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," the No. 1 movie the previous two weekends, sank to second-place with $21.3 million, raising its domestic total to $253.6 million.
Sony's "Surf's Up," an animated adventure about surfing penguins featuring the voices of Shia LaBeouf and Jeff Bridges, debuted in fourth-place with $18 million. That was less than half the $41.5 million opening weekend of last fall's animated-penguin hit "Happy Feet."
"Surf's Up" earned good reviews, but audiences may have viewed it as a retread of "Happy Feet," which finished with nearly $200 million domestically and won the Academy Award for best animated feature.
Lionsgate's gory horror sequel "Hostel: Part II," about rich people who pay to kill victims in grisly ways, opened at No. 6 with $8.75 million, less than half the $19.6 million debut of last year's "Hostel." (Watch highlights from the making of "Hostel Part II" )
The newcomers fell well short of the $60.1 million opening of the animated hit "Cars" over the same weekend last year. After a big summer start, Hollywood revenues dipped for the second-straight weekend, with the top-12 movies taking in $133.6 million, down 9 percent from the same weekend last year.
The three blockbusters that debuted in May -- "Pirates of the Caribbean," DreamWorks Animation's "Shrek the Third" and Sony's "Spider-Man 3" -- all have trailed off with big drops in revenue after huge first weekends.
Collectively, the three movies will combine for about $1 billion in domestic receipts. But all three will finish well below the $400-million-plus haul each of their most-successful predecessors took in.
The latest installments on all three franchises earned mixed reviews, and they arrived amid arguably the most-competitive summer ever for Hollywood, with huge sequels and other big films arriving every weekend.
With "Spider-Man 3" edging toward $900 million worldwide and "At World's End" nearing $750 million, overseas revenues have far exceeded domestic receipts for both franchises. "Shrek the Third" is rolling out overseas gradually.
"It's really become an opening-weekend business, but with all the competition, in the long haul, they just don't have the legs that their predecessors did," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "Studios really have to rely on those worldwide grosses to make up the difference in the long run."
An exception is Universal's comedy "Knocked Up," which held up strongly in its second weekend with $20 million, coming in at No. 3 and raising its domestic total to $66.2 million. Critical praise and audience word of mouth sustained the film, which stars Katherine Heigl as a career woman who becomes pregnant from a one-night stand with a slacker (Seth Rogen).
"Ocean's Thirteen" reunites director Steven Soderbergh with Clooney, Pitt, Matt Damon and other cast members as the gang of thieves targets a casino owner (Al Pacino) who double-crossed one of their own. (Watch the movie's stars immortalize their footprints in concrete )
The sequel debuted slightly behind the opening weekends of 2001's "Ocean's Eleven" ($38.1 million) and 2004's "Ocean's Twelve" ($39.2 million).
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

story highlights

• A new island in East Greenland is a clear sign of how the place is changing

• If the Greenland ice cap melted entirely, oceans would rise by 23 feet

• Its melt zone has expanded by 30 percent -- faster than models had predicted

• Warmer weather boosting tourism, a source of development for Inuit inhabitants

Bald eagles can be found in greater numbers throughout the United States. We asked CNN.com readers to send in their photos of the national symbol alive and well in the wild.William Schlegelmilch says he likes to spend the long, quiet winter days photographing some of the many eagles that hang out on the Homer Spit in his hometown of Homer, Alaska.

Ellen Hodges took photographs of bald eagles at Starved Rock State Park in Utica, Illinois, in January.

Astronauts will try to fix a thermal blanket that peeled back during Atlantis' launch, extending the space shuttle's mission from 11 to 13 days, NASA managers said Monday. Meanwhile, two astronauts floated outside the international space station to begin connecting a 35,000-pound power unit. ( cnn news)

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- A year before turning 50, Michele Thomas learned she had type 1 diabetes, a condition that used to be associated mainly with children.
"You deal with it," says Thomas, a stay-at-home mother from Atlanta, Georgia. "It was something I was going to have to live with. I was a mother of two young boys....I needed to stay healthy for them."
Eleven years later, Thomas stays focused on her health. "I take better care of myself than most people," she says, "I walk two miles a day and I eat a really good diet." (Watch why it's important for diabetics to manage their disease. )
Thomas is among the estimated 1 to 2 million Americans with type 1 diabetes. Ten times that number suffer from the more common form of the condition called type 2, which is linked to being overweight and lack of exercise.
"Type 1 means your body for whatever reason had its islet cells destroyed, typically by your own immune system," explains Dr. Bruce Bode, an endocrinologist with Atlanta Diabetes Associates. Islet cells, or the cells that produce insulin in the pancreas, are needed to convert sugar or glucose into energy. Thomas' illness used to be called juvenile diabetes. While it is still one of the leading chronic diseases of childhood, the name was changed in the 1980s when doctors concluded that type 1 diabetes can be diagnosed at any age.
An ophthalmologist was the first to suspect Thomas was suffering from diabetes. Her vision was blurred, but she also complained of increased thirst and frequent urination, common symptoms of type 1 diabetes.
Experts believe type 1 diabetes typically occurs after an infection. Thomas had been recently hospitalized with a severe kidney infection.
The support of her family helped her cope with the new diagnosis, she says. "I wasn't going to let the disease control me."
There is no cure for type 1 diabetes, but Bode says current treatments are effective in controlling the disease. "Once you get type 1 diabetes, you become dependent on insulin for the rest of your life." Some diabetics, like Thomas, use an insulin pump that controls the timing of injections. The device is attached to her abdominal skin with adhesive and the drug is pumped into her body at regular intervals through a tiny needle under the skin.
Thomas keeps track of her glucose levels by testing her blood with a finger prick four to six times a day. Doctors want patients to keep their blood sugar levels as close to normal as possible to avoid serious complications.
Experts say that not treating type 1 diabetes can have devastating effects on every organ of the body. Bode says there is "increased risk of blindness and eye damage, increased risk of kidney damage and possibly the need for dialysis or transplant. There's increased risk of nerve damage and numbness in your extremities as well as potential for loss of a limb." The excess sugar injures the walls of tiny capillaries found in the eyes, kidneys and nerves in the extremities. Too much sugar can also damage blood vessels, which can lead to heart attack and stroke.
In fact, the risk of heart attack and stroke is significantly higher for diabetics. According to the Mayo Clinic, "two of every three people with diabetes will die of a heart attack and stroke."
Thomas isn't frightened by the sobering statistics. "This is just part of my life. I'm very fortunate that this is a disease they know a lot about," she says. "It can be handled. You may not be cured, but it's possible to be healthy. The issue for me is to enjoy each day as healthfully as possible."
Judy Fortin is a correspondent with CNN Medical News.

11

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Google Inc.'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.
In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."
None of the 22 other surveyed companies -- a group that included Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL -- sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.
While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to "achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy," Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.
In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.
"We are disappointed with Privacy International's report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services," said Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel.
"It's a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them."
Privacy International contacted Google earlier this month, but didn't receive a response, said Simon Davies, the group's director.
The scathing report is just the latest strike aimed at Google's privacy practices.
An independent European panel recently opened an inquiry into whether Google's policies abide by Europe's privacy rules.
Meanwhile, three consumer groups in the United States are pressuring the nation's regulators to make Google change some of its privacy policies as part of its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc., which also tracks Web surfers' behavior.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into antitrust concerns raised by the DoubleClick deal, but has not indicated if privacy issues will be part of the inquiry.
Hoping to placate its critics, Google has pledged to begin erasing the information about users' search requests within 18 to 24 months.
The company says it stockpiles data to help its search engine better understand its users so it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements.
As Google becomes more knowledgeable about the people relying on its search engine and other free services, management hopes to develop more tools that recommend activities and other pursuits that might appeal to individual users.
Privacy International is particularly troubled by Google's ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps.
"Under the microscope, it turns out that Google is doing much more with our data than we ever imagined," Davies said.
Privacy International, which was founded in 1990, said it reached its preliminary findings after spending the past six months reviewing Internet privacy practices with the help of about 30 professors, mostly in the United States and United Kingdom. The group plans to update the report in September.
Seven of the Internet companies and Web sites included in Privacy International's analysis received the second lowest grade of "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." This group included: Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Apple Inc., Facebook.com, Hi5.com, Reunion.com, Microsoft's Windows Live Space and Yahoo.
None of the companies or sites received Privacy International's top grade, but five rated as "generally privacy-aware." They were: BBC, eBay Inc., Last.fm, LiveJournal.com, and Wikipedia.com.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

i started this blog nearly 20days ago~ , but actually i don't understand this world without any surrounding acknowledge. i need some help for develping my cite. who will be my assistant?

March 12th, 2007, 2:12By RBA in News

Yes, it's been a very long time since the last post here in the ZoomClouds blog, and I think, like the title says, it's about time I'll post an update on the project.
While there hasn't been any major development on ZoomClouds in the last several months, yes we've fixed a few bugs here and there, and what's even more important than that, last week we took the ZoomClouds database and moved it to a dedicated server. Up until now, ZoomClouds was sharing the database server with other projects - of course each of them using their own database, but all running on the same server.
However, both ZoomClouds and the other projects were starting to slow each other down to a point that I figured it was about time that ZoomClouds got its own database server. And after a brief downtime of about 1 hour, all data was safely moved to a new server.
With this move, first I want to make clear that ZoomClouds is far from abandoned. Quite the opposite. Having now a dedicated database server is above all a commitment that we plan to continue running ZoomClouds for many years to come. Also, this move should have speeded things up a bit, despite the data in ZoomClouds just keep growing and growing every time a cloud is reanaylized.
Also let me tell you what things we're planning to do in the next few months.
First, complete and absolute internationalization. Someone has argued that ZoomClouds is good at extracting English terms and nothing else. That isn't quite true because the two word analisys tools used by ZoomClouds don't discriminate words based on language, although it is tue that our content analysis tool learns more as it processes more data, and since most of the content that ZoomClouds analyzes is in English, it may show that it knows a bit better how to handle terms English.
The "complete and absolute internationalization" project refers to enabling ZoomClouds to use and understand non-Latin languages, or in other words, to make it UTF-8 compliant. Today it is not, and so for example, clouds from a CJK language (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) look like crap.
The second improvement I plan to make within the next few months is to design a better caching system, so that the clouds do not need to be re-calculad everytime they're drawn. The current caching system is not terrible but it can be improved a lot, and that's what I plan to do.
The third improvement - but only after these other two are complete - is to offer a private label and ad-free version of ZoomClouds, so that you can display your tag cloud in your blog or website, and when people click on a tag, they are presented a page without ads (at least without our ads) and branded to resseblme your own site, so your visitors don't get the feeling that they've left your site. The ads- free service will not be free, but the private-label service will.
Anyway, that's it for now. I apologize for not having kept this blog a bit more up-to-date. As these new developments are made, I'll be posting them here.
Cheers!

Written on September 23, 2005 by Darren Rowse :: 54 Comments :: Bookmark this at del.icio.us
ProBlogger Turns 1
Today ProBlogger turns 1 year old. Despite its 1465 posts it’s only a baby still.
I thought I’d do the normal celebratory thing and post a list of the 20 most popular posts from the last year (in no particular order). Feel free to nominate your favorite ProBlogger moments/posts/series in comments below if you’re in the mood for a little ProBlogger celebration also.
Blogging for Dollars - One of the posts that started me off on the ProBlogging journey. While it appears here on this blog on 23 September it was actually written a couple of years ago on one of my other blogs and transferred here (as were quite a few of my first posts).
Adsense Tips for Bloggers Series - Another older series of posts - popular in search engines but also because its up there at the top of my blog
Monkey Bar Blogging - A post about not racing into ProBlogging full time without making sure you’ve got something to keep you going first (I send people to this post every week)
2005 Business Underblogger Awards - a Meme I ran earlier this year to highlight some of the less popular but great quality business blogs going around (it’ll be an anual award that I run)
Positioning Your Adsense Ads - Very popular post - along with the whole Adsense category on this blog
How Much Do I Earn from Blogging - This is a summary post that links to some of my posts talking about my earnings levels - they’d have to be among the most popular posts on the whole blog.
How the Most Highly Visited Blogs Earn Money - An analysis of some of the most popular blogs going around and how they generate some amazing amounts of cold hard cash.
Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - Basic Solid tips on how to get your blog climbing the Search Engines
The Importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization - Amazing how simple tips can have an impact - I got a lot of positive feedback from this one.
One Blog Many Categories or Many Blogs? - This topic always generates a lot of discussion - we’ve talked about it numerous times on ProBlogger and it always causes controversy.
What’s wrong with Blogging? - What happens when you give bloggers an opportunity to tell each other what they don’t like about blogging? An interesting conversation happens.
10 Tips for Using Affiliate Programs on your Blog - As the header say - going beyond Adsense and BlogAds to affiliate programs.
Blogging in Formation - Lessons from a Goose - One of my famous (or should that be infamous) ‘tangent posts’ about being like Geese with our blogging.
Principles of Choosing a Profitable Blog Topic - Another post that caused some ripples.
Converting One off Visitors to your Blog into Regular Readers - A post I often refer people to that goes beyond attracting people to your blog to examining how to keep them there.
31 Days to building a Better Blog - A recent meme that generated some of the best posts I’ve ever seen on blogging - most of which were written on readers blogs.
Blog Case Study - Is it Time to Quit? - I was surprised by how many people jumped onto this case study of a blogger who was quitting blogging and why he failed.
Strategic Blogging - part of the 31 Days series that generated a lot of interest.
Generate a High Quantity of Content Series - an older series of posts on increasing your post numbers.
Declaring War on Blog Apathy - another 31 Days series that actually helped me out of a bit of a blogging slump that I was in at the time.
I want to finish this post by saying that ProBlogger is the blog I’m most proud of - I enjoy it so much. A massive part of my love for it is the community that has been forming here. While the above posts might have been popular - what I’m most proud of about the blog is the collective wisdom and community spirit that I sense. I am continually getting feedback from readers that comments from other readers and friendships with other readers have helped them so much in their blogger - this is what it’s all about.
Here’s to another year with more of the same!

Written on June 7, 2007 by Darren Rowse :: 59 Comments :: Bookmark this at del.icio.us

5 Uncommon Ways to Market Your Blog
The following post has been submitted by Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising and Quick Sprout.If you are trying to increase the popularity of your blog, chances are you’ve already looked into search engine optimization (seo) or leveraging social media sites. There is nothing wrong with using these methods and you should probably try using them, but if you have already exhausted all the common methods of marketing your blog then here are 5 uncommon methods that work well:
1. Comments - People get lazy when it comes to posting comments on other blog on a regular basis. You may say that you don’t have the time or that you don’t want to post comments on other blogs because the majority are your competitors. It doesn’t matter, if you post comments on other blogs on a regular basis and give valuable advice many of those readers will start looking up to you and start reading your blog. If you do this for months you can get thousands of new readers as well as increase your blogs popularity.
2. Social Networks - MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo and some of the most popular websites on the Internet, so why not leverage them? They get millions of visitors a day and there’s no reason not to create profiles on every one of these sites. When building your profiles you can talk about your blog as well as link to it which will cause more visitors to flood into your website.
3. Blogroll - Lots of bloggers avoid blogrolls because they hate linking out but by using a blogroll you will get more people to link back to you. Not only does this help with search engines, but more importantly will it drive visitors to your website. When adding sites to your blogroll, don’t just do it because you want a link back from a specific site, do it because you think it is a great blog.
4. Widgets - Who would have thought widgets can increase the popularity of your blog? If you are one of those people, take a look at MyBlogLog. When you setup a community like that, new bloggers will learn about you and start reading your blog. The other great thing about MyBlogLog is that you can friend other random bloggers which causes many of them to friend you back and look into your blog.
5. Offline - When people market their blogs they usually do so online. If you go to work or meet tons of new people on a daily basis you should share your blog with them if you feel it will benefit them. Every time I go to a conference or a meetup, I usually tell people about my blog and within a day or so I see an increase in RSS subscribers.
There are many other unconventional ways you can market your blog, these are just some of the methods I use. Anybody else have other “uncommon” ideas to market your blog?

Written on March 22, 2007 by Darren Rowse :: 57 Comments :: Bookmark this at del.icio.us

10 Ways to make your Blog more Attractive to Advertisers

Today’s guest post comes from Chad Randall, the Director of Sales for b5media and the author of AdvertiseSpace. Chad has been working in the online advertising industry for over 6 years now, and has personally sold more than $5,000,000 in online ads. I figured he’d be a good person to ask about how to make your blog attractive to advertisers.

1. Have an “Advertise with Us” Banner on your site
This is the single most important issue. It should click to an Advertising information page and have an easy way to contact you for more information and rates. Key points: Make it a graphical image or a tab. Keep it above the fold.

2. Keep the ads on your site specific to your site
Don’t have smiley ads and wallpaper ads if your site is site is about mobile phones.

3. Show them the banners
If you currently have no paid placements on your site, put up house ads or partner ads in the same spot you would run a paid spot. (A house ad refers to banners for other products or sites that you or your company own)

4. Throw up a free bonus ad.
Buy putting a free advertisement on your site, you may not only encourage similar ads or competitors to that product, but the company you added for free may decide to advertise with you. Ask for full disclosure of the performance of the campaign in return. (Total clicks, total purchases etc. ) Key points. Put the free bonus up with a direct URL without tracking tags or affiliate tags.

5. Show your site stats.
You need to show at least the basics for site statical information: Monthly unique visitors and total number of impressions are the 2 key ones. Other less important can be Google PR & Alexa rank.

6. User demographic information. Know your audience.
The bare minimum is Male/Female % and average age of your readers. Other potentially useful information includes geographic, HHI, single/married, number of kids. etc. How do you get this info? You can do site polls, survey’s, or get more detailed stats from ComScore or Quantcast.com
7. Have an ‘About Us’ section.
Clearly explain who you are and what your site is about. And also why you are an ‘authority’ on what you are writing about, and why anyone should care about what you have to say.

8. Don’t use Google AdSense on your site.
OK, this could be the most painful one for most people especially if you are generating a few hundred bucks a month from it already. But Google ad sense devalues your site and makes it look unprofessional. You have to ask yourself, “Do I want some real revenue from my site or Google’s table scraps.”

9. Keep your blog on topic.
If you are all over the map in regards to topics about which you talk about, advertisers won’t know if they are a good fit for your site.

10. Keep your blog professional.
If you are talking about your cat, (Matt Cutts), ranting about your drive to work, swearing or bashing every product you can think about, it will scare away advertisers.

Written on December 6, 2005 by Darren Rowse :: 285 Comments :: Bookmark this at del.icio.us
How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs

How do bloggers make money from blogs?
I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogs.
I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.
The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.
Income Streams for Bloggers - How they Make Money from Blogs
Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. Another two popular ones with many is BlogAds. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and CrispAds, Text Link Ads.
Adgenta, Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, DoubleClickTribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, Bidvertiser, Fastclick Value Click and OneMonkey (to name just some of the options - I’m sure I’ve forgotten some) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (so I hear).
RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.
Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.
Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.
Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.
Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.
Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.
Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!
Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fundraising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.
Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).
Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress (although I have to say they’ve lost one of my own orders and are being quite unresponsive to my requests to follow it up at present). While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.
Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.
As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.