The US government is expected to relax control over how the internet is run when it signs an accord with net regulator Icann on Wednesday.

The "affirmation of commitments" will reportedly give Icann autonomy to run its own affairs for the first time.

Previous agreements gave the US close oversight of Icann - drawing criticism from other countries.

Earlier this year, the EU called on the US to relinquish its control and Icann to become "universally accountable".

"The US government is the only body to have had formal oversight of Icann's policies and activities since its inception in 1998," it said.

"The Commission believes that Icann should become universally accountable, not just to one government but to the global internet community.

"This is particularly relevant given that the next billion of internet users will mainly come from the developing world."

The current agreement between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) and the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration is due to expire on Thursday.

'Formal relationship'

Icann is a not-for-profit private sector corporation - set up by the US government - which oversees critical parts of the internet, such as the top-level domain (TLD) name system. Top level domains include .com and .uk.

The body recently voted to relax the strict rules on TLDs, meaning companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names. Icann also agreed to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts.

The regulator has not yet released details of the new agreement with the US.

However, a report - described as "accurate" by people familiar with Icann - in the Economist magazine says the new deal does not have a fixed term.

It identifies a number of groups, including representatives of foreign governments, which will conduct regular reviews of Icann's work.

The panels would specifically focus on competition among generic domain names, how domain-name registrants' data are handled, network security and transparency, and accountability and the public interest - the only panel on which the US will reportedly retain a permanent seat.

A formal announcement about the deal is expected on Wednesday.

However, it is unlikely that the new agreement will sever the links between the US government and Icann entirely.

Rod Beckstrom, president and chief of the organisation, said in a letter to Congress last week that it would seek to maintain a "long term, formal relationship with the United States Government".

The body also has a separate agreement with the US - to run the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) - that expires in 2011.

The IANA oversees the net's addressing system.

An 18-year-old construction worker braved rampaging floods in the Philippines to save more than 30 people, but ended up sacrificing his life in a last trip to rescue a baby girl and her mother who were being swept away on a styrofoam box.



Family members and people who Muelmar Magallanes saved have hailed the young man a hero, as his body lay in a coffin at a makeshift evacuation centre near their destroyed Manila riverside village.
Residents east of Manila go to all lengths to escape neck-deep flood waters.

Philippines residents go to all lengths to escape neck-deep flood waters. Photo: Reuters

"I am going to be forever grateful to Muelmar," said Menchie Penalosa, the mother of the six-month-old girl whom he carried to safety before being swept away himself. "He gave his life for my baby. I will never forget his sacrifice."

Mr Magallanes was at home on Saturday with his family when tropical storm Ketsana unleashed the heaviest rains in more than 40 years on the Philippine capital and surrounding areas.

At first the family, long used to heavy rains, paid little attention to the storm.

But Mr Magallanes and his father quickly decided to evacuate the family once they realised the river 800 metres away had burst its banks.

With the help of an older brother, Mr Magallanes tied a string around his waist and attached it one-by-one to his three younger siblings, whom he took to higher ground. Then he came back for his parents.

But Mr Magallanes, a strong swimmer, decided to go back for neighbours trapped on rooftops.

He ended up making many trips, and eventually saved more than 30 people from drowning, witnesses and survivors said.

Tired and shivering, Mr Magallanes was back on higher ground with his family when he heard Ms Penalosa screaming as she and her baby were being swept away on the polystyrene box they were using in an attempt to cross the swift currents.

He dived back in after the mother and daughter, who were already a few metres away and bobbing precariously among the debris floating on the brown water.

"I didn't know that the current was so strong. In an instant, I was under water. We were going to die," said Ms Penalosa, her eyes welling with tears and voice choking with emotion.

"Then this man came from nowhere and grabbed us. He took us to where the other neighbours were, and then he was gone," Ms Penalosa said.

Ms Penalosa and other witnesses said an exhausted Mr Magallanes was simply washed away amid the torrent of water.

Neighbours found his body on Sunday, along with 28 others who perished amid Manila's epic flooding. The official death toll stands at 100 with 32 missing.

Standing next to his coffin, Mr Magallanes' parents paid tribute to their son.

"He always had a good heart," said his father, Samuel.

"We had already been saved. But he decided to go back one last time for the girl."

His mother, Maria Luz, wept as she described her son as incredibly brave.

"He saved so many people, but ended up not being able to save himself."

Everybody Beyonce had some real good music videos! congrats taylor but beyonce had some great music videos yall.

A father trying to teach his 13-year-old son how to drive was killed in The Bronx last night when the youngster accidentally mowed him down, police said.
--
The kid got behind the wheel as his dad stood beside the open door, and threw the SUV into reverse, law-enforcement sources said.

The door pinned Cedeno against a tree.
--
Cedeno was pronounced dead at the scene.

TAMPA, Fla. - An autopsy report shows that cocaine use contributed to the heart disease that suddenly killed TV pitchman Billy Mays in June, officials announced Friday.

The Hillsborough County medical examiner's office previously determined that the bearded, boisterous TV spokesman had a heart attack in his sleep. His wife found him unresponsive in bed in their Tampa condo June 28.

Mays was a pop-culture fixture with his energetic commercials pitching gadgets and cleaning products like Orange Glo and OxiClean.

While heart disease was the primary cause of death, a report released Friday by the medical examiner listed cocaine as a "contributory cause of death."

Drug taken days before death
The medical examiner "concluded that cocaine use caused or contributed to the development of his heart disease, and thereby contributed to his death," the office said in a press release.

The office said Mays last used cocaine in the few days before his death but was not under the influence of the drug when he died. Hillsborough County spokeswoman Lori Hudson said nothing in the toxicology report indicated the frequency of Mays' cocaine use.

Cocaine can raise the arterial blood pressure, directly cause thickening of the left wall of the ventricle and accelerate the formation of atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries, the release said.

The toxicology tests also showed therapeutic amounts of painkillers hydrocodone, oxycodone and tramadol, as well as anti-anxiety drugs alprazolam and diazepam. Mays had suffered hip problems and was scheduled for hip-replacement surgery the day after he was found dead.

Mays reached wide audience
The McKees Rocks, Pa., native developed his style demonstrating knives, mops and other "As Seen on TV" gadgets on Atlantic City's boardwalk. For years he worked as a hired gun on the state fair and home show circuits, attracting crowds with his booming voice and genial manner.

He got his start on TV on the Home Shopping Network and then branched out into commercials and infomercials. He developed such a strong following that he became the subject of a reality TV series, Discovery Channel's "Pitchmen.

Firing one of the first shots in the net neutrality war, AT&T has blocked 4chan’s /b/ image board. AT&T subscribers are unable to connect to /b/ and /r9k/ (both of which are hosted on img.4chan.org). However, subscribers can get on any of the so-called «worksafe» boards that 4chan.org offers.

The problem seems to be present only for wired connections only (AT&T Mobility customers are not affected). The problem is not caused by an DNS-error, as traceroutes indicates that AT&T is dropping img.4chan.org requests in the AT&T network.

Slashdot, Digg & Reddit are now running stories that are rapidly being upvoted about the topic.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comment...to_img4chanorg/

As citizens of a free internet, what do we think about this kind of censorship?

UPDATED 1: Confirmation comes from several Reddit users that the website has indeed been blocked in a number of areas in the US and that it is not a technical issue.

UPDATED 2: A mere 5 hours after the problems were first reported on Reddit, sources on /b/ say that members of Anonymous has already started planning retaliation towards AT&T – amongst other things posting personal information about AT&T executives. One might quietly wonder if the AT&T megacorp. knows what’s it up against – with 4chan often being referred to as “The Internet Hate Machine”.

UPDATED 3: It turns out 15.5% of all US internet users use AT&T DSL, so this is quite a big problem. It will severly affect 4chan, both in regards of traffic and advertising volumes.

UPDATED 4: moot, the founder of 4chan, officially acknowledges the ban – calling for disconcerned users to «call or write customer support and corporate immediately»: http://status.4chan.org … Somehow, I get a feeling they’re gonna do a lot more than that, moot.

UPDATED 5: From rumors on /b/, it seems 4chan’s first retaliatory strike will be towards Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T. The Consumerist has more. There are also murmurs about the AT&T block being put into place because of supposed mass DDoS-attacks to and from img.4chan.org, but so far there has been no official, verifiable response from AT&T.

UPDATED 6: 4chan’s current gameplan evolving over at Encyclopedia Dramatica (Great stuff!). Also, from reports gathered on Reddit, it seems this block allegedly is because of massive DDoS-attacks against img.4chan.org. The reports doesn’t say anything about why AT&T would block 15.5% of all US internet users from using a specific website without any warning, though.

UPDATED 7: This article is now no. 1 on Digg.com – and has received more than 120.000 visitors in less than 10 hours. For now, I guess 4chan and Anon is showing AT&T its strength in pure numbers. Help spread the word, we need to raise awareness of this issue and Net neutrality.

UPDATED 8: According to CentralGadget, 4chan is now UNBLOCKED by AT&T. AT&T says they were «following the practices of their policy department», but that they have restored network-wide access to all areas of 4chan. Shitstorm averted? Also, according to CentralGadget, 4chan is currently down «due to a large DDOS attack, affecting most of 4chan’s servers.» This appears unrelated to the AT&T blockade, but may have been triggered by the high-profile attention that 4chan has received during the past 24 hours.

Finally, we’re starting to see him sweat.

President Barack Obama made his personal icy cool the trademark of his campaign, the tenor of his White House and the hallmark of an early run of successes at home and abroad. But as the glamour wears off and a long, frustrating summer wears on, he is being forced to improvise — stooping to respond to political foes and adjusting his tactics and demeanor for the trench warfare of a legislative agenda.

The root of the change is one that faces every president: Economic and international realities that resist political charm. Iran and North Korea have shown no interest in the president’s outstretched hand. The economy has delivered a double-whammy, with rising unemployment stirring voters’ concerns while sluggish growth deprives the government of tax revenues Obama would like to spend on new programs.
Health care reform, which once appeared flush with momentum from earlier congressional victories, is now on a slog through no less than five committees, which include Democrats who either aren’t sold on Obama’s expansive vision or can’t figure out how to convince voters to pay for it.

“This is when it gets harder,” the president told supporters June 30.

And so it has.

In turn, Obama has adjusted, deviating from the playbook on every front.

The cool president has turned hot on the stump, stripping to shirtsleeves to lambaste doubters in New Jersey Thursday. He departed from his prepared remarks last week to accept a Republican challenge to take personal ownership of the economy: “That’s fine. Give it to me,” he said.

Even Obama's scripted speeches are deliberately more forceful, aggressive and direct in taking on critics, aides say. Friday remarks at the White House had a trash-talk edge – count me out and you’ll be sorry.

Obama’s political operation has dispensed with its post-inauguration cocktails for Republicans – or more often, ignoring them outright — in favor of the old politics of engage, attack and cajole. Obama’s even engaging in a little Democrat-on-Democrat politics, as his ex-campaign arm is beaming TV ads into the home states of moderate fence-sitters on health care.

The tightly programmed White House also is champing at the bit, kicking off what officials say will be a relentless three-week push on health care, starting with the hastily scheduled Friday address. But its first event might have backfired a bit. Its main consequence was proving that the magnetism of Obama’s personal appearances has worn off, as it drew little media attention and a dismissive tweet from the key Senate Republican, Chuck Grassley of Iowa: “Waste of time.”

The sum has been a new sense of uncertainty and strain, and a growing murmur among Democrats in Washington nervous about the White House’s tactics, and a rising tide of concern in the states as local Democratic parties eye midterm elections that are traditionally a challenge for a new president.
“That honeymoon period is over, “ said Chris Redfern, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “Now they’re having to push back, and push back hard.”

White House officials and allies brush off any notion that this new sense of unease is meaningful. The only true test, they say, will be results. Obama still might win major health care reform legislation this year that could be the most important new government program in decades. He has a fighting chance to pass regulations on greenhouse gases, in the form of a “cap and trade” mechanism, through the Senate. And Obama continues to press hard, if with no clear progress, for a breakthrough in the Middle East.

“It’s the third quarter, he’s down by a point, and he’s got his best player on the bench – what really is going to be important is the fall,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic observer.

“If he gets what’s perceived to be some kind of a major health care thing, gets the climate bill through, if the economy recovers, then we’ll all say he had a hell of a summer. Conversely, if the thing falls apart, we’ll say that by July the 19th we could tell the thing was going bad.”

White House Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer dismissed the suggestion that Obama should be expected to succeed effortlessly – or that he’s on a path toward failure on any of these varied fronts.

“Obama and his team have been down this road dozens of times and been declared dead many times and always succeeded,” he said. “No one gets rich betting against Barack Obama.”

The most visible aspect of the White House’s new feistiness is an increasing willingness to engage Republican legislators whose criticisms Obama earlier had been happier to overlook. Relentless criticism of the stimulus package from a House Republican leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, drew a furious barrage from the Democratic National Committee and a visit from no smaller figure than the Vice President of the United States. Rank and file Republicans who criticize the stimulus have also suddenly found themselves under a concerted DNC assault that asks if they’d prefer the federal funding left their districts out. And criticism from Sen Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) drew letters from no fewer than four Cabinet secretaries to his state’s governor, asking if she would prefer they withheld stimulus money.

That pushback has been urged, and welcomed, by state leaders like Redfern and Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer.

“The DNC has been and we were quickly able to rebut and demonstrate all the money that is being spent in their respective districts,” said Brewer of two GOP congressmen attacking the stimulus. “They’ve backed off.”

Still, many Democrats say the Republican attacks on spending are taking their toll.

"The rhetoric is so empty, but it is fairly consistent and I think it’s had an impact on those in middle," said Ohio's Redfern.

But when the White House pushback focused not on Republicans but Democrats on health-care – in the form of Organizing for America ads running in the home states of moderate senators -- some in the party called foul, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

The vote last month in the House on the American Clean Energy Security Act showed a willingness to get White House hands dirty in a different way.

Wrangling votes for the “cap and trade” legislation in the House, Obama backed off a campaign promise to auction off all “allowances” – permits to release a set amount of greenhouse gases. Instead of selling them to raise money for other environmental initiatives, the White House allowed congressional Democratic leaders to trade them for votes, assigning allowances to the refinery-heavy district of, for instance, Texas Rep. Gene Green in exchange for his support.

The battle over health care, the centerpiece of the President’s summer, has also hardened into a fairly conventional Washington fight, a new president’s sweeping agenda colliding with congressional caution. Obscure Washington figures like Congressional Budget Office chief Doug Elmendorf and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) have shown the ability to pose a real threat to the White House juggernaut. And some of the White House’s close allies have grown jittery about what they say is a strategy to spend the three weeks leading up to the Senate’s August recess – the insecure deadline for health care votes in both houses – with a series of events aimed at building public pressure on Congress.

“They’re great at campaigns, but legislative battles are different,” said a senior Democrat close to the White House. “It’s not about persuading 51 percent of the American people – it’s about seven senators.”

In another mark of Obama's constant adjustments, his latest remarks didn't mention the August deadline.

White House allies acknowledge the new strains, but say the hard work will pay off.

“A lot of the hard stuff he’s doing now will pay dividends,” said John Del Cecato, a former Obama campaign aide.

Meanwhile, admiration of Obama’s personal qualities has been tempered, even among sympathetic observers, with anxiety for where his agenda will stand at summer’s end.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart noted recently that Obama told a Pakistani interviewer that he is an accomplished chef of Pakistani cuisines and reads the great Urdu poets.

“Mr. President,” Stewart said, “while I am impressed with your Renaissance Man-level of knowledge in a plethora of subjects, may I humbly say: That’s great. Just fix the economy!”

CODY, Wyoming - Wielding his chain saw as a weapon, a former U.S. Marine says he fought off a starving mountain lion that attacked him while he was camping with his wife and two toddlers in northwestern Wyoming.

Dustin Britton, a 32-year-old mechanic and ex-Marine, said he was alone cutting firewood about 100 feet from his campsite in the Shoshone National Forest when he saw the lion staring at him from some bushes.

Britton revved his 18-inch chain saw and tried to back away. But the 100-pound lion followed.

As the animal pounced, Britton raised his saw and met it head-on — a collision he said felt like a grown man running right into him.

"It batted me three or four times with its front paws and as quick as I hit it with that saw it just turned away," he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Britton later discovered he'd inflicted a gash on the lion's shoulder. He said he was surprised the damage wasn't worse.

"You would think if you hit an animal with a chain saw it would dig right in. I might as well have hit it with a hockey stick," he said.

The wounded animal retreated, leaving Britton with a only small puncture wound on his forearm.

The attack occurred Sunday evening. Wildlife agents shot and killed the lion Monday after it attacked a dog brought in to track the animal.

Authorities say the lion was in poor physical condition and appeared to be starving. The lion was 4 to 5 years old.

Mountain lions are considered reclusive by nature and officials said the circumstances of the attack were highly unusual. Wyoming officials have documented only eight cases of mountain lions acting aggressively toward humans over the last decade.

WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.

But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.

"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out."

The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it.

The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done. But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder; Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface.

Nafzger said a huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. His report on that will come out in a few weeks.

The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl?

Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

Outside historians were aghast.

"It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared."

The remastered copies may look good, but "when dealing with historical film footage, you always want the original to study," Brinkley said.

Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much."

"It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government. ... They don't think that preservation is all that important."

Launius said federal warehouses where historical artifacts are saved are "kind of like the last scene of `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It just goes away in this place with other big boxes."

The company that restored all the Indiana Jones movies, including "Raiders," is the one bailing out NASA.

Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., noted that "Casablanca" had a pixel count 10 times higher than the moon video, meaning the Apollo 11 footage was fuzzier than that vintage movie and more of a challenge in one sense.

Of all the video the company has dealt with, "this is by far and away the lowest quality," said Lowry president Mike Inchalik.

Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video. Historian Launius wasn't as blown away.

"It's certainly a little better than the original," Launius said. "It's not a lot better."

The Apollo 11 video remains in black and white. Inchalik said he would never consider colorizing it, as has been done to black-and-white classic films. And the moon is mostly gray anyway.

The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots of a TV monitor.

Both Nafzger and Inchalik acknowledged that digitally remastering the video could further encourage conspiracy theorists who believe NASA faked the entire moon landing on a Hollywood set. But they said they enhanced the video as conservatively as possible.

Besides, Inchalik said that if there had been a conspiracy to fake a moon landing, NASA surely would have created higher-quality film.

Back in 1969, nearly 40 percent of the picture quality was lost converting from one video format used on the moon — called slow scan — to something that could be played on TVs on Earth, Nafzger said.

NASA did not lose other Apollo missions' videos because they weren't stored on the type of tape that needed to be reused, Nafzger said.

As part of the moon landing's 40th anniversary, the space agency has been trotting out archival material. NASA has a Web site with audio from private conversations in the lunar module and command capsule. The agency is also webcasting radio from Apollo 11 as if the mission were taking place today.

The video restoration project did not involve improving the sound. Inchalik said he listened to Armstrong's famous first words from the surface of the moon, trying to hear if he said "one small step for man" or "one small step for A man," but couldn't tell.

Through a letter read at a news conference Thursday, Armstrong had the last word about the video from the moon: "I was just amazed that there was any picture at all."

RIGA (Reuters) – Ready to give your soul for a loan in these difficult economic times? In Latvia, where the crisis has raged more than in the rest of the European Union, you can.

Such a deal is being offered by the Kontora loan company, whose public face is Viktor Mirosiichenko, 34.

Clients have to sign a contract, with the words "Agreement" in bold letters at the top. The client agrees to the collateral, "that is, my immortal soul."

Mirosiichenko said his company would not employ debt collectors to get its money back if people refused to repay, and promised no physical violence. Signatories only have to give their first name and do not show any documents.

"If they don't give it back, what can you do? They won't have a soul, that's all," he told Reuters in a basement office, with one desk, a computer and three chairs.

Wearing sunglasses, a black suit and a white shirt with the words "Kontora" (office) emblazoned on it, he reaches into his pocket and lays out a sheaf of notes on the table to show that the business is serious and not a joke.

Latvia has been the EU nation worst hit by economic crisis.

Unemployment is soaring and banks have sharply reduced their lending, meaning that small companies offering easy loans in small amounts have become more popular.

Mirosiichenko said his company was basically trusting people to repay the small amounts they borrowed, which has so far been up to 250 lats ($500) for between 1 and 90 days at a hefty interest rate.

He said about 200 people had taken out loans over the two months the business was in operation.

(Reporting by Patrick Lannin; Editing by Steve Addison)

MICHAEL Jackson has died after suffering what is believed to have been a cardiac arrest in Los Angeles.

The singer, 50, was pronounced dead soon after he arrived at an LA hospital.

The LA Coroner has confirmed his death.

Lieutenant Fred Corral told CNN Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26pm (7.26am) local time after reportedly suffering a cardiac arrest, but not a heart attack.

"I can tell you at this time that we were notified by West Los Angeles Police Department detectives that Mr Jackson was transported ... to the hospital, and upon admitting, he was unresponsive and was pronounced dead at approximately 2:26 this afternoon," Corral told CNN.

Corral said an autopsy would "most likely" be carried out tomorrow but would not speculate on the exact cause of death.

"Everything is still ongoing. We will be responding to the hospital to move Mr Jackson to our facility where he will be examined to determine the cause of death," Corral said.

"At that point, as I said, there's no further medical history until we get and review the medical records."

Jackson, who had been preparing for his comeback tour, was rushed to the UCLA Medical Centre shortly before 12.30pm local time.

Special Section: Michael Jackson dead at 50

Paramedics received a 911 call directing them to the Bel Air home, off Sunset Boulevard, which Jackson rented for $100,000 a month.

Fire Department Captain Steve Ruda told US media Jackson was not breathing when they arrived. Mr Ruda said they received him at about 12.21pm.

When they arrived, they performed CPR and rushed Jackson to the medical centre, about a six-minute drive away.

Brian Oxman, a Jackson family attorney, said he was told by brother Randy Jackson that Michael Jackson had collapsed at his home in west Los Angeles.

Family members were told of the situation and were either at the hospital or en route, Oxman said.

His sister La Toya was seen rushing to the medical centre in tears.

The Los Angeles Times and CBS reported that Jackson arrived in a deep coma and was pronounced dead soon afterwards.

His dad Joe Jackson was shocked and confused after learning his son had been hospitalised.

Gallery: Michael Jackson and his very Wacko life that turned tragic

Join The Daily Telegraph's tribute blog to Michael Jackson:

"His mother is on her way to the hospital now," Joe Jackson said.

Police officers cordoned off the road outside Jackson's Bel Air home yesterday as fans swamped the UCLA Medical Centre.

Michael is survived by three children _ Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince "Blanket" Michael Jackson II.

The seventh of nine children, Jackson was born in Indiana before moving to LA with his family where he became the star of the Jackson 5.

Watch the unfolding scene live at the hospital where Michael Jackson died

The artist behind the biggest-selling album of all time, Thriller, Jackson was attempting a comeback after years of headlines about his child molestation charges (he was acquitted) to his plastic surgery and his habit of wearing face masks.

He had been scheduled to perform 50 sell-out concerts at London's 02 arena from next week to March 2010.

Jackson started in the music business at the age of 11 as a member of the Jackson 5 with his brothers.

The group had a number of hits on Motown in the 1970s.

Five of his solo albums are some of the top-selling albums of all time: "Off the Wall," 1982's "Thriller," "Bad," "Dangerous" and "HISstory."

He was twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and had 13 Grammy awards and 13 number one singles.

He has sold over 750 million albums worldwide.

His total earnings have been estimated at $500 million dollars. His music videos on MTV, such as "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" were some of the most influential early music videos, and his sound influenced numerous hip hop and R&B artists.

He was tried and acquitted of sexual abuse allegations in 2005.

He married nurse Deborah Jeanne Rowe in Sydney, with whom he fathered a son, Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr, also known as Prince, and a daughter, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson.

After they divorced in 1999, he retained full custody of the children.

In the early 1990s, he was briefly married to Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley.

He lived at Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara from 1988 to 2005.

It was sold to Colony Capital, although he still owns a stake in the property.

To celebrate his 50th birthday, Sony BMG released a compilation album, "King of Pop," in various countries, but it was not released in the US.

The Los Angeles Times reported Jackson's condition had died after going into a deep coma.

In recent months, Jackson had been trying to revive his flagging career which crashed after he faced child-sex charges - allegations he eventually beat in court.

As the first step in this comeback, the singer had been due to play 50 sell-out shows at London's O2 Arena starting in July.

But the King of Pop had already postponed the first few nights' shows amid claims he was suffering health problems.

The Daily Mail in London reported organisers AEG Live said this was in order to make sure everything for the "massive and technically complex show" was running smoothly.

But critics say ongoing concerns about Jackson's health were the real reason behind the gigs having to be postponed.

Earlier this year, Jackson was seen emerging from a doctors three times in one week amid rumours that he was battling skin cancer.

The claims were denied by his representatives.

Jackson has not been on tour for more than a decade, but the concerts at the O2 were seen as his final comeback before finally retiring from music.

In later years, Jackson - whose personal life and sexual preferences remained somewhat mysterious - was plagued by child-sex allegations.

He was accused of molesting an American boy Jordan Chandler after befriending his father early in the 1990s and reportedly settled for $US30million for the allegations to go away and avoid possible charges.

But in 2003, Jackson faced new child-sex allegations that he abused a teenage boy he had also befriended during sleepovers. The singer ended up facing seven sex charges in court but was acquitted.

The paedophile image, however, did enormous damage to his career and Jackson became a virtual recluse, with his behaviour increasingly weird and reports that his financial position was becoming dire due to bad investments, skyrocketing legal bills and a public turned against him.

Following up from last Friday's entry about Iran's Presidential Election, Tehran and other cities have seen the largest street protests and rioting since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Supporters of reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, upset at their announced loss and suspicions of voter fraud, took to the streets both peacefully and, in some cases, violently to vent their frustrations. Iranian security forces and hardline volunteer militia members responded with force and arrests, attempting to stamp out the protests - meanwhile, thousands of Iranians who were happy with the election outcome staged their own victory demonstrations. Mousavi himself has been encouraging peaceful demonstrations, and called for calm at a large demonstration today (held in defiance of an official ban), as Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has just called for an official inquiry into accusations of election irregularities.

The online store that offers third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than 35,000 applications available in 77 countries.

A 13-year-old downloaded the billionth application from the Apple App Store, becoming the grand-prize winner in the company's app countdown contest, the Apple said Friday.

Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Conn., will receive a $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule backup system for the Mac, and a MacBook Pro. The billionth app was Bump Technologies' "Bump," which enables iPhones to share contact information from users' address books by bringing the devices close together.

The App Store, launched nine months ago, reached the billion-app milestone Thursday, according to Apple. The online store that offers third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than 35,000 applications available in 77 countries.

Mobile applications have been available for download for years from the Web, but the popularity of the App Store has changed the market. All of Apple's major rivals are expected to eventually have their own over-the-air way to distribute mobile programs.

However, competitors have their own twists. Google says its Android Market will be more open, Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM)'s App World is more enterprise-friendly, Nokia (NYSE: NOK)'s Ovi Store will integrate social networking and location, and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows Marketplace for Mobile will allow users to be billed through their carriers.

Apple is hoping the App Store will become even more popular with the release this summer of version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system. The update provides more than 1,000 new application programming interfaces that enable developers to build software with in-app purchases, peer-to-peer connections, push notifications, and more.

Chicago (IL) - Researchers at the Cyber Secure Institute estimate that the nefarious Conficker worm has racked up a staggering $9.1 billion bill.

The Institute also warned against "downplaying" the worm's significance.

"Because there was no major Conficker-created problems on April 1st when hijacked computers went online and began communicating with controller domains, numerous commentators are now downplaying the significance of the Conficker problem. This conclusion is wildly off base and patently flawed," explained Rob Housman, executive director of the Cyber Secure Institute. "In short, just because the other guy in a fight doesn't pull the trigger when he's got the gun to your head, doesn't mean you won the fight. It is important to look at the totality of the Conficker problem. Whether or not Conficker ultimately turns out to be a sales tool for bogus Ukrainian security software or something much more destructive, the simple fact is that the Conficker worm has infected vast numbers of computers around the world."

According to Housman, any analysis of the Conficker worm's impact should factor in "wasted time, resources, and energies of the cyber-community, governments, companies and individuals."

In addition, Housman noted that while Conficker has yet to play out a doomsday scenario, there was a "strong possibility" that future worms would be much less benign. As such, the executive director recommended deploying secure technologies, including the Integrity Global Security operating platform and the Tenix Interactive Link Device. Both have reportedly been certified by the National Information Assurance Partnership and NSA against sophisticated cyber threats.

As TG Daily previously reported , Conficker, like many other worms, is a blended threat relying on many different attack methods - ranging from password-guessing and brute force techniques to infection via flash drives in effort to replicate and then spread over a network.

The most recent versions of the code were responsible for the infection of many networks through peer-to-peer communication. The worm had protective measures which enabled it to duck detection and removal through the disabling of Windows Automatic Updates and Windows Security Center. The virus also blocked access to the web sites of numerous security vendors -- rendering many anti-virus programs which had an effective removal protocol ineffective.

Conficker is expected to stop functioning on May 3, 2009.

ShamWow Guy In Slap, Chop Bust

TV pitchman battered hooker in South Beach hotel room brawl

MARCH 27--Meet Vince Shlomi. He's probably better known to you as the ShamWow Guy, the ubiquitous television pitchman who has been phenomenally successful peddling absorbent towels and food choppers. Shlomi, 44, was arrested last month on a felony battery charge following a violent confrontation with a prostitute in his South Beach hotel room. According to an arrest affidavit, Shlomi met Sasha Harris, 26, at a Miami Beach nightclub on February 7 and subsequently retired with her to his $750 room at the lavish Setai hotel. Shlomi told cops he paid Harris about $1000 in cash after she "propositioned him for straight sex." Shlomi said that when he kissed Harris, she suddenly "bit his tongue and would not let go." Shlomi then punched Harris several times until she released his tongue. The affidavit, a copy of which you'll find here, notes that during the 4 AM fight Harris sustained facial fractures and lacerations all over her face (she is pictured here in mug shots snapped following busts in 2008 and 2005). After freeing his tongue, a bleeding Shlomi ran to the Setai lobby, where security summoned cops. Harris refused to cooperate with officers, who recovered $930 from her purse. "Both parties had a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from their persons," police reported. In a brief telephone interview, Harris declined to answer TSG questions about her run-in with Shlomi, though she did say she is considering a lawsuit against the pitchman. Asked if she worked as a hooker, Harris declined comment. As seen in the below mug shot, Shlomi was also injured during the fracas and, court records show, was treated at Mount Sinai Medical Center. While Shlomi and Harris were both arrested for felony aggravated battery, prosecutors this month declined to file formal charges against the combatants. Police records list Shlomi's occupation as "Marketing," but make no mention of his affiliation with the ShamWow or the Slap Chop, both of which sell for $19.95 (plus shipping and handling). (6 pages)

Today we’re excited to release the final build of Internet Explorer 8 in 25 languages. IE8 makes what real people do on the web every day faster, easier, and safer. Anyone running Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server can get 32- and 64-bit versions now from http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. (Windows 7 users will receive an updated IE8 as part of the next Windows 7 milestone.)

We’ve blogged a lot here about what’s in IE8. Stepping back from individual features, Internet Explorer is focused on how real people use the Web. We designed the product experience based on real-world data from tens of millions of user sessions. We worked closely with developers and standards groups to deliver a far better platform for the people who build the web. We cooperated closely with the security community to address the real threats that users face on the web, and keep users in control of their browsing and information. The resulting product takes a “batteries included,” just works out of the box approach to delivering the next browser for how hundreds of millions of people really use the web. We think it will surprise people who haven’t looked closely at IE in a while. Perhaps it’s time to re-think conventional wisdom about IE.

Recently, a meteor landed (or atleast we think) in Denmark, where i live.
Sadly, i didn't see it, but as i saw it in the news, it lighted the whole sky.
I think this is major....
Discuss.

Daniel Petric, the Ohio teen who shot and killed his mother over a dispute involving Halo 3, was convicted today of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, and other charges related to the heinous crime.

As reported previously, Petric had purchased a copy of Halo 3 following his parents' Mark and Susan had forbid him to do so. After having the game confiscated, Daniel broke into his father's lock box, which held the game and a 9mm handgun, entered the living room of his house, asked his parents to close their eyes, and shot both of them in the head, killing his mother and wounding his father.

Petric's lawyers argued that video game addiction had driven the teen to the crime, but Common Pleas Judge James Burge found otherwise. Petric now faces up a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole.

Once again my condolences go out to the Petric family for this horrible tragedy, though I sincerely hope Daniel doesn't see the outside of a prison for quite a long line.

Widescreen And HD?

Two weeks ago, YouTube switched its default screen settings to widescreen with the 16:9 aspect ratio replacing the 4:3 ratio that had been the norm since the site launched. And now the reason for that move may have become more clear.

YouTube has been trying to move away from being full of user-generated content in order to tempt more professional broadcasters to allow their content to be aired on the site. Now, those broadcasters have the option of broadcasting in HD.

Higher Quality To High Definition

For a while now, YouTube has offered a ‘Higher Quality’ option under most videos, which once clicked, loads the video in a higher quality format with slower streaming an obvious result.

Now, that option has been replaced with a ‘Watch in HD’ option. The improvement over normal quality is very noticeable, as can be seen by the two screenshots below from the new Ghostbusters trailer.





Costs Or Profit

Initially, this move will actually cost YouTube more, due to the higher bandwidth costs associated with the switch to HD. And high definition on its own doesn’t add any new profit opportunities.

But, HD is likely to make YouTube a much more attractive place for professional content creators to broadcast their videos on, and professional content is what Google wants to see more of on YouTube in the future.
Future-Proofed

Switching to the HD version of a video does cause some problems however - streaming is slower, and the video jumps on all but the highest speed Broadband connections. So, good for the future, but a little taxing on most people’s current connection speeds.

YouTube has had a reputation for offering sub-standard SD video up to this point, with short grainy clips of people’s animals doing funny things the normal content. But with HD video clips now playing natively at 720p, that reputation could be about to change.
Conclusions

Other video sharing sites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion have offered HD for a while, but they haven’t got quite the levels of traffic YouTube has. Which makes YouTube’s switch to high definition very important.

This is just the latest move in Google’s effort to make YouTube a place for professional content such as full length movies and television episodes which can be advertised heavily on. And at least this one stops the eye strain.

Moving to defuse news that the text messages of Skype users in China, and those who exchange messages with them, are being monitored for communication deemed subversive by Chinese authorities, Skype president Josh Silverman on Thursday defended his company's actions using the same rationale thatGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) have used in the past: We have to obey Chinese law to operate in China.

"It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years," said Silverman in a blog post. "This, in fact, is true for all forms of communication such as e-mails, fixed and mobile phone calls, and instant messaging between people within China and between China and other countries. TOM [Online], like every other communications service provider operating in China, has an obligation to be compliant if they are to be able to operate in China at all."

TOM Online is a Chinese communications service that partnered with eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), Skype's owner, to distribute Skype in China.

According to a report released on Wednesday by Citizen Lab, an Internet research group that's part of the University of Toronto in Canada, the text messages of TOM-Skype users, and those that communicate thus with them, are regularly monitored for politically sensitive keywords.

Sensitive words include references to the Chinese Communist Party, the Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, Tibet, and the ongoing tainted milk scandal in China.

When such words are found, the messages and information about them are logged. But this stored data is stored insecurely; it is, or at least it was until recently, publicly accessible.

Nart Villeneuve, CTO of Psiphon and the author of the Citizen Lab report, was able to access the Web servers where this surveillance data was stored. He suggests in his report that TOM's servers have been compromised in the past and have been used to host pirated movies and peer-to-peer torrents.

"The log files obtained during the course of the investigation reveal information such as the IP addresses, usernames (and landline phone numbers) used to place or receive TOM-Skype calls, as well as the full content of filtered messages and the time and date of each message," the report states. "The collected data affects all TOM-Skype users and also captures the personal information of any Skype users that interacted with registered TOM-Skype users. This represents a severe security and privacy breach. It also raises troubling questions regarding how these practices are related to the Government of China's censorship and surveillance policies."

Silverman, in vague terms, said Skye is engaged with TOM regarding its security and business practices. "We are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM," he said in his blog post.

And he points out that issues in the Citizen Lab report "refer only to communications in which one or more parties are using TOM software to conduct instant messaging. It does not affect communications where all parties are using standard Skype software. Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private."

It's hard to take comfort in such reassurances, however. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security report, issued in June, stated that "Foreign governments routinely target the computers and other electronic devices and media carried by U.S. corporate and government personnel traveling abroad to gather economic, military, and political information." It also said that "travelers should assume that all communications are monitored."

Apple has asked the court hearing its suit against Psystar to toss out Psystar's counterclaim that Apple is in fact a monopoly, arguing that Psystar's own arguments acknowledge that fact.

The motion to dismiss, filed on Sept. 30, argues that Apple can not be considered a monopoly, based in part upon ads that Psystar and others have run characterizing the Apple Macintosh line as just one product in a sea of PCs.

If this is true, Apple argued, then the company should not be compelled to assist its competition by allowing what are essentially Apple clones to be sold.

In August, Psystar charged Apple with restraint of trade, unfair competition and other violations of antitrust law in a 54-page complaint filed in the Northern California Division of the United States District Court. Apple originally filed suit in July after Psystar began selling its "Open Computer," which many considered to be an Apple clone.

In its counterclaim, Apple said that Psystar had undermined its own claim by citing Apple's campaign as evidence. "Purchasers have concluded Apple's Mac is better than Windows-based PCs," Apple said. "And, yes, as Psystar asserts, some Windows-based PCs are less expensive for that reason. But, that is the very essence of competition involving quality and price!"

"In direct contradiction to Psystar's claimed Mac-only market, Psystar admits that 'a seemingly infinite list of manufacturers may be found in the computer hardware system marketplace,'" Apple added.

Apple asked the court for the charges to be dismissed based upon those arguments. Any more, Apple argued, and the company would be forced to prop up a competitor.

"[T]he ultimate goal of Psystar's Counterclaims is an order from this Court compelling Apple to help competitors, like Psystar, by forcing Apple to license its proprietary software to those competitors for use on their own computer hardware," Apple argued. "Psystar's effort is contrary to law and must rejected. Neither the federal nor the state antitrust laws require competitors to stop competing with, and instead to start helping, each other."

The notice to dismiss will be filed on Nov. 6 "or as soon thereafter as the matter can be heard," Apple said.

The fourth generation Nano was launched at a US press conference by Apple chief Steve Jobs, who announced new shuffle and library features.

He also listed the Nano's environmental credentials, including arsenic-free glass and a mercury and PVC-free body that is "highly recyclable".

The Nanos are expected to sell in the UK for £109 ($191) for the 8GB version.

The 16GB version will retail at £149.

Speaking live in San Francisco, Mr Jobs unveiled Apple's new Genius function which allows users to create automatic playlists from the iPod's library with the click of a button.

He said the function worked by taking one song and creating a playlist based on the user's song library and could also suggest other tracks the user might want to buy.

Mr Jobs said the new Nano also had a "shake to shuffle" mode, which sends the gadget to shuffle mode with the flick of a wrist allowing you to go backwards and forwards on your playlist.

'Lots of fun'

The Apple chief executive officer said the company had sold more than 160 million iPods since its introduction seven years ago.

An updated iPod Touch - the closest cousin to the iPhone - was also announced at the event.

It is thinner than previous models and has integrated volume controls and a built-in speaker for "casual listening" and will also include the Genius function.

New software for the iPhone - which will be available free to all users - would "fix a lot of bugs" including dropped calls and connection problems reported by customers.

Mr Jobs said: "We're really, really excited about all these products. We think people are going to have a lot of fun."

Rocks the house?

The Apple announcement was much touted on the blogosphere for days leading up to the launch with plenty of speculation about what would be unveiled.

Gizmodo's Jesus Dias was not disappointed and said "iPod touch second generation rocks our socks off."

However Craig Grannell of Cult of Mac said "Fairly modest expectations were barely met and all we got were skinny things we already knew about anyway."

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told the BBC that this line up of new products did not deliver the way the company has in the past.

"I don't like to sound like I am putting products down. I like new pieces of hardware and I didn't think it was the biggest one of all time for Apple.

"But then we don't present like we do at our Mac World Expo. Some of our introductions are weaker than others and we didn't really expect an awful lot from today."

Wall Street's reaction was also fairly lacklustre with Apple's share price actually falling more than 7 points during the course of the event from $159.64 (£90) to $152.12 (£86).

Some analysts however were more than happy with Apple's product launch. "These are evolutionary products with some revolutionary new features," Michael Gartenburg, vice president of Jupiter Media told the BBC.

"Apple has done it again. They have reinvented the line in a way to capture mainstream consumers' hearts and minds and doing at a price point that is extremely affordable."

The LHC will generate huge amounts of data, with nearly 150 million sensors picking up information from millions of particle collisions every second at the centre of each of the four main detectors.

This will produce around half a gigabyte of data every second, or around 15 petabytes (15 million GB) every year, equivalent to filling a standard 100GB hard drive every four minutes.

To cope, a specialist LHC Computing Grid (LCG) has been built.

The number crunching starts at the detector. Each of the four main experiments has an attached "counting room" which is used to sort through the raw data and store anything of interest.

Batches of data are then sent to the Cern computing centre where they are backed-up on tape. A processor farm begins the huge task of crunching the data to create an event summary, also backed up on to tape.

From Switzerland, the data is pumped out across the net to 11 so-called "tier one" centres such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, each directly connected to Cern through dedicated cables.

Each centre reprocesses the raw data, creates another back up and then pumps it out to 150 "tier two" centres, mainly universities located around the globe.

From here, the information will be available to around 7,000 physicists who will perform the final simulations and detailed analysis.

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.

Iraqi police remove a suicide vest from an Iraqi girl in Baquba in this handout photo from the Iraqi police taken August 24, 2008. A teenage Iraqi girl wearing a vest packed with explosives turned herself in rather than go through with a suicide bombing in a violence-torn city north of Baghdad, police and the U.S. military said. REUTERS/Iraqi Police/Handout (IRAQ)

Cyber-criminals have attacked key government and consumer websites, allowing them to steal the personal details of anyone browsing the sites, The Times has learnt.

Eastern European hackers are suspected of placing the Asprox virus on more than a thousand British websites, including those run by the NHS and a local council, in the past two weeks.

Experts described the Asprox virus as an alarming departure from commonplace viruses, which tend to be spread through rogue e-mails and unregulated websites.

Unlike other viruses, Asprox sits undetected on mainstream sites, with any visitor at risk of being infected. The virus automatically installs itself on a visitor's computer, allowing a hacker to access financial information.

It is not known how many people are affected by the virus, but security experts estimate that it has spread to at least two million computers worldwide.

Detective Constable Bob Burls, of the Metropolitan Police computer crime unit, said that there had been a sudden rise in infection rates. “The virus got into the job pages of a local council’s internet page,” he said. “It’s a new thing that people who visit mainstream websites are clobbered.”

Such incidents have only come to light after people have found money removed from their bank accounts or other personal data frauds.

“We’ve dealt with two major websites in as many weeks,” he said.

Ben Taylor, an engineer from South London, had £560 fraudulently taken from his bank account this month. After reporting the theft he installed an anti-virus system, which identified “SQL malware” embedded on his computer — technology associated with Asprox. “I only use the internet a few times a week and didn’t look at anything dodgy,” he said. “It’s scary to think that a criminal was controlling my computer. I’ve got rid of it now.”

Last week, Asprox infected a website managed by the Norfolk NHS, used by thousands of people a day. Hackney Council’s website was one of 12 local council websites also compromised, meaning that anyone logging on to pay a parking ticket or council tax was at risk over a three day period.

And visitors to Nigella Lawson’s website last week were in danger of picking up something less palatable than a recipe for goose-fat potatoes. A spokesman for Ms Lawson said that the virus, which was installed on the website last Monday, was dealt with “instantly” and that nobody was infected.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technical officer of Finjan, an online security company who exposed the rapid growth of Asprox around the world, said: “This is very serious threat.

“Five years ago when your computer got infected by a virus, you noticed immediately that your PC was broken. These days, you don’t notice anything. This is exactly what the hacker wants. It gives him complete control over the infected machine.”

Once installed on a personal computer, the Asprox virus allows a hacker to steal files, e-mails and passwords. It can also be used to infect other computers and even make attacks against companies and foreign governments.

Any computer without up-to-date anti-virus software is vulnerable. But only around half of current anti-virus programmes can detect Asprox, Mr Ben-Itzhak said.

In the US, the virus has successfully penetrated mainstream sites belonging to Sony’s Playstation, the city of San Francisco and Snapple.

A spokeswoman for Apacs, the payments organisation, said: “There is a responsibility on website owners to ensure that they have sufficient security software installed so that criminals are not able to easily compromise their sites.

“This combined with users not downloading any pop-ups, or falling into any other traps such as those, does considerably reduce the chance of a criminal being able to infect their PC with malware.”

The breach comes as losses through online fraud, partly caused by hackers stealing personal data through virus, increased by 37 percent with losses on cards issued in Britain amounting to £144 million compared with £100 million in 2000.

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My advise (Dekusvamp):
Follow the manual:

Asprox manual removal:

Kill processes:
aspimgr.exe


Delete registry values:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesaspimgr
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftsft


Delete files:
aspimgr.exe, _check32.bat, ws386.ini


Misc:
Asprox uses TCP ports 80 and 82.

Exact file location:
ws386.ini - C:WINDOWS or C:WINNT
aspimgr.exe - C:WINDOWSSystem32 or C:WINNTSystem32
_check32.bat - C:Documents and Settings[Current User]Local SettingsTemp

Comment:
If you ever visit symantecs site, don't follow their description.
They say that "It uses your computer as a proxy", they just forgot to say that it steals all information, spreads, and it uses your computer to hack other people. Grats symantec. I would believe symantec made the virus.

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews
August 13, 2008, 11:40 AM

The leading US electronics retailer will begin selling the hit phone on September 7 in 970 stores, including all the stores where Apple has launched its "mini-store" pilot program.

Best Buy said it would sell iPhones through its Best Buy Mobile shops that it has begun to open across a little over a dozen cities nationwide. Those smaller versions of the bigger retailer focus primarily on mobile phone sales.

Such a deal makes sense considering that Apple has had a closer relationship with Best Buy than with any other US retailer in recent months. The retailer resumed its sales of Apple branded products in December 2006. Later, in May 2007, the companies reached a deal to build a "store-within-a-store" for Mac products and their accessories. So far, the concept has been successful for, and Apple has said it will continue to work with the retailer to open more of these "mini-stores" during the year.

Offering the iPhone could also help Best Buy get a leg up on its competitors during the upcoming holiday season. With the device expected to be one of the hot items, it could have the effect of coercing consumers to make other holiday purchases there.

Best Buy may have also have had some help from its partnership with Britain's Carphone Warehouse. That company is working with Best Buy in its mobile department, while Best Buy is assisting Carphone in its European ventures.

Carphone Warehouse is the selected retail partner for Apple's iPhone within the UK.

Activating the phone would be no different than what Apple currently does through its own stores and AT&T. Customers would need to sign a contract and have their phones activated in-store in order to qualify for the subsidized $199 price.

It doesn't appear that the addition of the iPhone will mean any additional staffing to handle the iPhone specifically, as Best Buy did in some stores for Macs. However, the new mobile store concept includes employees who have specifically been trained for mobile sales, and would likely receive considerable training to deal with the iPhone as well.

Best Buy believes this new focus on mobile has been a key driver in its growth of wireless sales, which had previously been handled by general employees who had only had minimal training in that department.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews
August 8, 2008, 5:59 PM

Had someone with ill intent been as smart or as lucky as security engineer Dan Kaminsky, the entire Internet could have been rendered mostly inoperative. The extent of just how big a fix he implemented, is only now being realized.

There is an entire subculture that has developed around the notion of deconstructing information technology. And like those who prefer to fish in pre-stocked ponds, the people who populate this subculture are not, for the most part, particularly clever. They may be adept with their tools, but they don't construct exploitation strategies for themselves. Rather, they wait until someone smarter can do it for them.

In fact, that's the whole principle behind the "zero-day exploit," which is a bit like hyenas celebrating the availability of low-hanging fruit. Today, it's security engineers who discover the most clever possible exploits in IT systems and software. But it's typically the way those engineers alert software companies and their customers to the existence of the problem, that in and of itself causes the greatest security risk. When the smarter birds of prey can detect from a high vantage point where the ripest fruit has fallen from the trees, the hyenas can easily track them on their way to dinner.

This was the problem with respect to the implementation of one of the largest-scale fixes in the history of the Internet last month: Since 2002, it's been generally known among network engineers that there was probably a way to pollute Domain Name Server caches, using a trick of accurately guessing the source port from which a DNS name resolution would come, and then spoofing that port with a false response that could redirect users to completely different Web sites without their knowledge.

If the spoofed site was a bank, the spoof could ask for and receive user IDs without them knowing it wasn't that bank. If the spoofed site was a customer service site, users would blithely give them their support ticket numbers and license IDs. There was no telling how far this could have gone.

Maybe, just maybe, some users would have spotted the fact that the certificate sent by the spoofing site didn't match the one that was spoofed. But how many users get those certificate warnings every day, from legitimate sites that simply haven't updated their certificate or are deploying it incorrectly? Users may be growing accustomed to simply clicking on "Allow."

A few months ago, Doxpara Research security engineer Dan Kaminsky -- who had been sounding alarms about this problem for at least six years -- decided he would help manufacturers implement a patch to the DNS deficiency, one which would not only randomize the source port but exponentially increase the size of the pool from which those port numbers are chosen. Both DNS servers and clients (i.e., any computer that uses DNS to resolve a URL with an IP address) would need to implement this patch.

But if Microsoft or Cisco or any one single company simply reacted to his warning by issuing a patch, that could trigger what we now know as the "zero-day effect:" Malicious users could disseminate not only the severity of the potential problem but the dynamics of it, simply by reverse-engineering the fix. Then they could potentially exploit all the other unpatched portions of the Internet, from manufacturers that had not yet caught up.

Wolfgang Kandek is the chief technology officer for Qualys, a vulnerability management company that works with enterprises to devise security policies and implement more secure software. Kandek is personally familiar with Kaminsky's work, and has surmised the huge problem he faced down.

"There is always the potential: You have a vulnerable piece of software, you come up with a fix for it. That's great. But this gives the attackers that didn't know that this vulnerability existed, a way to analyze it," Kandek said in an interview with BetaNews, "[to ask], 'What did they exactly fix here, and how can I, if I find the machine that does not have the fix applied, exploit that machine?...If I find that software somewhere else, and that hole's still there, I might be able to exploit it this way.' So they can then work on an automatic exploit for that."

There's a cottage industry now based around malicious users who can discover new security holes through the typical hunt-and-peck method. But floating on the outskirts, and probably much larger in number, are the less sophisticated, self-proclaimed "hackers" who wait for legitimate security engineers -- people like Kaminsky -- to discover security holes before anyone else does. Typically when they sound the alarm and a manufacturer like Microsoft or Cisco responds, the response itself sounds the starting gun for a race to find out what it is they fixed.

"So I think what Dan wanted to avoid here was this situation; he wanted to enable the majority of vendors to release this patch at the same time, to make that window where it could be analyzed much smaller. And he's actually said publicly that they have spent some time on making the way they fix it difficult to re-engineer; not only fix it, but also, how can you make it difficult for somebody to look at the fix and understand what the exploit was."

Kaminsky avoided the nightmare scenario by compelling companies including Cisco and Microsoft to collaborate on a major fix, but to do something they'd never done before: not tell the general public too much about the fix in advance. That way, they could all implement their different aspects of the fix literally on the same day.

As Kaminsky wrote on his Web site, "After an enormous and secret effort, we've got fixes for all major platforms, all out on the same day. This has not happened before. Everything is genuinely under control."

(Or at least close to the same day: Apple's round of fixes to BIND were announced just last week.)



Judging from the lack of total and complete disaster in the month since the initial round of DNS fixes were deployed, it's safe to assume that the actions Dan Kaminsky set in motion were an historic success. But for how long will this patch work before someone finds a way around the obfuscation roadblock that is source port randomization?

The current round of patches, Qualys' Wolfgang Kandek told us, "should buy us time to come up with a new architecture, and people have been working on this already, a number of efforts [including] DNSSEC [DNS Security Extensions]. But it has been slow to get adopted, most likely because there was no need, no clear example of why it would be good to adopt a much safer standard for managing the DNS system."

The very probability of a global exploit to the DNS system would have been quite low, Kandek added, if DNSSEC were already in wide use.

The source port randomization fix will buy engineers time, Kandek believes, to explore a deeper architectural issue that impacts the Internet as a whole. Fixing that deeper issue, he said, "means a huge upgrade in the entire fabric of the Internet. Everybody has to understand that it's a lot of work. On the business side, they'll ask, 'Why do we have to upgrade all this software?' The answer is, 'Wel-l-l, it's safer.' [And the response to that would be,] 'Well, there hasn't really been a [business] necessity to improve safety."'

Kandek's company works directly with business in examining the impact of potential security threats. Quite literally, he says, many businesses (not necessarily Qualys' customers) are incapable of assessing the potential value, in terms of loss, of a security hole unless and until that hole is exploited. In other words, they don't know how steep the cliff is until they jump off with a spool of measuring tape.

"Now we've got a very good example here; fortunately, a white-hat researcher for one of the good guys found out about it," said Kandek of Kaminsky, "and he did the responsible thing, and he did a great job in managing the process...We are in a race to get local administrators, ISP administrators, to understand that this is an important problem, and they should work on upgrading the infrastructure."

A big portion of the fix for the DNS architectural problem may already exist, Kandek believes. It's IPv6, but the fact that it's been in existence for years, and that its already a part of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1...and yet it's still considered a low-priority transition among enterprises today, means it's still a problem for businesses such as Qualys' customers.

I suggested to Kandek that perhaps IPv6 could be implemented as the security solution to the DNS problem, wrapped together along with other architectural fixes as a single set of patches. Kandek was amenable to the idea, but believes that for the "Big Fix" -- whenever that comes -- the IPv6 transition will need to happen first, with the DNS architecture fixes to follow later.

"Everyone [needs to see], we have the new technology that would improve these things," Kandek told BetaNews. But the problem is "the implementation...There is no government, no single entity [to direct it]. This is a global initiative. There is nobody who can [mandate] that the Internet has to run on IPv6 as of [a certain] date.

"And as we [continue to deal with commercial entities], people will continue to deal with weighing the cost benefits. It's not a policy decision," he continued. "So I think we will do this incrementally, there will have to be parallel Internets -- we cannot switch simply on one day. I'm confident, though, that we can resolve all these issues."

Dan Kaminsky made an appearance earlier this week at the Black Hat security convention in Las Vegas, and plans another appearance at the DEFCON conference there on the morning of Sunday, August 10.

The star was best known in the UK for film roles in Ocean's Eleven, Charlie's Angels and Transformers.

But in the US, he achieved critical and popular acclaim for the long-running sitcom The Bernie Mac Show, which earned him two Emmy award nominations.

He was admitted to hospital in Chicago last week and died early on Saturday morning due to complications arising from pneumonia, his publicist said.

"We ask that his family's privacy continues to be respected," said Damica Taylor.

Comedian Carl Reiner, who appeared with Mac in Ocean's Eleven and its two sequels, said he was "in utter shock" because he thought the comedian's condition had been improving.

"He was just so alive. I can't believe he's gone," he said.

Inspiration

Mac was born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough in Chicago, Illinois in October 1957.

According to his uncle, there were once as many as 10 people living in the two-bedroom apartment in which he grew up.

"We learned to entertain ourselves," he wrote in his 2003 autobiography, Maybe You Never Cry Again. "I used to have long conversations with the living room wall."

The memoir told how, as a child, he had discovered his mother doubled up with laughter at Bill Cosby appearing on Ed Sullivan's TV show.

"'That's what I want to be, Mama, a comedian'" he recalled saying.

"Make you laugh like that, maybe you never cry again."

He began performing as a stand-up at a church dinner at the age of eight, progressing to open mic nights and a regular stint at Chicago's Cotton Club by the time he was 20.

But his success was far from immediate and along the way he worked as a janitor, furniture mover, appliance hauler, and delivery man to supplement his comedy income.

It wasn't until he was featured in the Kings of Comedy stand-up tour in 1997 - which was filmed and broadcast by HBO - that he achieved national prominence.

One of his co-stars in the show, Steve Harvey, paid tribute to the comedian on Saturday, saying: "The majority of his core fan base will remember that when they paid their money to see Bernie Mac, he gave them their money's worth."

Parenting skills

Mac often attributed his dogged persistence of a comedy career to his mother who, he said, had imbued him with a strong work ethic before she died of breast cancer when he was just 16.

"Parents today don't get it," he wrote in his memoirs. "They don't want to be parents. They want to be cool. They want to be hip. They don't want to be the bad guy.

"But guess what? Being the bad guy is your job.

"My mama knew better. She wasn't there to make me like her; she was there to shape me; she was there to make me a good person."

Mac's view of parenting was reflected in his hit TV show, which was based around a man's attempts to raise his sister's three children.

The show won a Peabody award for excellence in television in 2002. At the time, judges said they had singled it out for transcending "race and class while lifting viewers with laughter, compassion - and cool".

The sitcom, which ran for more than 100 episodes from 2001 to 2006, made Mac a household name in the US.

"But he had been making a living from film and TV appearances for several years, starting with a small role in the Damon Wayans movie Mo' Money in 1992.

More recently, he topped the box office with Guess Who? - a remake of the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? - in 2005.

Earlier this year, he attracted a modicum of controversy after making some off-colour jokes at a fund-raiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicago native Barack Obama.

But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.

"Wherever I am, I have to play," he said in 2002. "I have to put on a good show."

The comedian had a history of ill health and suffered from the inflammatory lung disease sarcoidosis.

He contracted pneumonia for the first time in 2004 while filming Ocean's Twelve.

Mac later told his home newspaper The Chicago Sun-Times that the disease, which had nearly killed him, had acted as a wake-up call.

"My life was slipping away. I was missing out on so much stuff with my family, and I will never do that again," he said.

In 2007, he told US chat show host David Letterman he planned to retire from comedy.

"I'm going to still do my producing, my films, but I want to enjoy my life a little bit," he said.

Mac is survived by his wife Rhonda, daughter Je'Niece and a granddaughter.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA scientists said on Thursday they had definitive proof that water exists on Mars after further tests on ice found on the planet in June by the Phoenix Mars Lander.

"We have water," said William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument on Phoenix.

"We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted," he said, referring to the craft's instruments.

NASA on Thursday also extended the mission of the Phoenix Mars Lander by five weeks, saying its work was moving beyond the search for water to exploring whether the red planet was ever capable of sustaining life.

"We are extending the mission through September 30," Michael Meyer, chief scientist for NASA's Mars exploration program, told a televised news conference.

The extension will add about $2 million to the $420 million cost of landing Phoenix on May 25 for what was a scheduled three-month mission, Meyer said.

Phoenix is the latest NASA bid to discover whether water -- a crucial ingredient for life -- ever flowed on Mars and whether life, even in the form of mere microbes, exists or ever existed there.

Phoenix touched down in May on an ice sheet and samples of the ice were seen melting away in photographs taken by the lander's instruments in June.

Boynton said that water was positively identified after the lander's robotic arm delivered a soil sample on Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by heating.

Mission scientists said the extension would give time for more analysis of Martian samples. They plan to dig two additional trenches -- dubbed "cupboard" and "neverland" -- using the robotic arm on the Phoenix craft.

"We hope to be able to answer the question of whether this was a habitable zone on Mars. It will be for future missions to find if anyone is home on this environment," Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith told the news conference.

Mission scientists said in June that Martian soil was more alkaline than expected and had traces of magnesium, sodium, potassium and other elements. They described the findings as a "huge step forward." Meyer said the scientific proof of the existence of water meant that Phoenix could "move from looking for water to seeing whether there were habitats for life.

.......But passenger Gernet Caton said the victim, who appeared to be about 19, was sleeping with headphones on when his seat mate suddenly began stabbing him repeatedly.

"We heard this bloodcurdling scream and turned around, and the guy was standing up, stabbing this guy repeatedly, like 40 or 50 times," Caton said from a hotel in Brandon, Manitoba, where he and other horrified passengers were taken.

'Like he was at the beach'
Caton said the driver stopped the bus as the savagery progressed and passengers scrambled to get off. He said the suspect then began methodically carving up the man's body.

"When he was attacking him, he was calm ... like he was at the beach," said Caton. "There was no rage or, or anything. He was just like a robot stabbing the guy."

The bus driver, Caton and a trucker at the scene re-boarded to see what was happening.

Caton said he saw the suspect had the victim on the floor of the bus and "was cutting his head off and pretty much gutting him" with a large hunting knife.

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.

To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.

By Nate Mook, BetaNews
July 24, 2008, 3:51 PM

At Microsoft's Financial Analyst Meeting Thursday, Bill Veghte, who heads up the company's Windows and online services division, said that Windows 7 is progressing well and confirmed that Internet Explorer 8 will ship before the end of the year.

Beta 2 of IE8 is slated for release next month, with a focus on new features for consumers and IT professionals. The first beta -- released in March -- was focused largely on developers, and Microsoft said the long delay between betas was due to the heavy feedback it received.

Until Thursday, however, Microsoft had remained cagey about when IE8 would become available for the general public. Veghte demoed the updated browser to FAM attendees, noting that a final build will ship "later this year." Microsoft hasn't said whether there will be a third beta before IE8 launches.

There are now two preparatory Web sites for building anticipation around IE8, the newest being a heavily revised Internet Explorer Developer Center on MSDN. This comes in addition to the marketing Web site for users, which continues to show pictures of IE8 Beta 1.

Veghte also discussed Windows 7 on Thursday, saying that "the product is tracking very, very well." He didn't discuss any features of the new operating system, on which Microsoft has largely remained silent, but said development was looking good.

Veghte expects Windows 7 to meet Microsoft's commitment of "three years from general availability of Windows Vista." That indicates it will become available to consumers in early 2010. Microsoft began talking about Windows 7 for the first time in late May, although hasn't provided many specifics.

Scientists are hailing a new drug to treat aggressive prostate cancer as potentially the most significant advance in the field for 70 years.

Abiraterone could potentially treat up to 80% of patients with a deadly form of the disease resistant to currently available chemotherapy, they say.

The drug works by blocking the hormones which fuel the cancer.

The Institute of Cancer Research hopes a simple pill form will be available in two to three years.

An advanced clinical trial involving 1,200 patients around the world is currently under way, with more trials likely later this year.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men.

It is estimated that up to 10,000 men a year in the UK are diagnosed with the most aggressive - and almost always lethal - form of prostate cancer.

Typical life expectancy following chemotherapy is no more than 18 months.

It had been assumed that the cancer was driven by sex hormones such as testosterone produced in the testicles.

Current treatments work by stopping the testicles from producing testosterone.

New action

However, experts have now discovered that the cancer can feed on sex hormones from all sources, including supplies of the hormone produced by the tumour itself.

Abiraterone works by blocking production of the hormones throughout the body.

The latest study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is based on just 21 patients with advanced, aggressive prostate cancer treated with the drug - but data has been collected on a total of 250 worldwide.

It found significant tumour shrinkage, and a drop in tell-tale levels of a key protein produced by the cancer called prostate specific antigen in the majority of patients.

Many of the patients have reported a significant improvement in the quality of their lives.

Some were able to stop taking morphine for the relief of pain caused by the spread of the disease to their bones.

Real hope

Lead researcher Dr Johann de Bono said the findings needed to be confirmed in larger trials.

At this stage, no patient has taken the drug for longer than two-and-a-half years, and so it has not been possible to determine exactly what the effect of the drug on life expectancy will be.

But he said: "We believe we have made a major step forward in the treatment of end-stage prostate cancer patients.

"These men have very aggressive prostate cancer which is exceptionally difficult to treat and almost always proves to be fatal.

"We hope that abiraterone will eventually offer them real hope of an effective way of managing their condition and prolonging their lives."

It is hoped the drug will also aid other cancer patients, including those with breast cancer.

Professor David Webb, an expert in clinical pharmacology at the University of Edinburgh, said: "This agent clearly looks promising, but it is still at the early stages of clinical development.

"It will be crucial to look carefully at the balance between its benefits and harms, before drawing firm conclusions about the usefulness of this new drug.

"Important side effects often only emerge with the larger clinical studies that now need to be done."

John Neate, of The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: "This is an exciting development which has been eagerly anticipated."

A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.

The Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The LHC has thousands of magnets which will be maintained in this frigid condition using liquid helium.

The magnets are arranged in a ring that runs for 27km through the giant tunnel.

Once the LHC is operational, two particle beams - usually consisting of protons accelerated to high energies - will be fired down pipes running through the magnets.

These beams will then travel in opposite directions around the main ring at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points along the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing into one another with cataclysmic force. Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions, revealing fundamental new insights into the nature of the cosmos and how it came into being.

The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the LHC will re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang.

Currently, six out of the LHC's eight sectors are between 4.5 and 1.9 Kelvin, though all sectors of the machine have been down to 1.9 Kelvin at some stage over the last few months.

By comparison, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is about 2.7 Kelvin (-270C; -454F).

Roberto Saban, the LHC's head of hardware commissioning, said that in order to obtain high magnetic fields without consuming too much power, the magnets were required to be "superconducting".

This is the property, exhibited by some materials at very low temperatures, to channel electrical current with zero resistance and very little power loss.

Helium exhibits spectacular properties at 2.2 Kelvin - becoming "superfluid". This allows it to conduct heat very rapidly, making it an extremely efficient refrigerant.

No particle physics facility on this scale has ever operated at such low temperatures. But, so far, the hardware was performing as predicted, Roberto Saban explained.

"We have a very systematic process for the commissioning of this machine, based on very carefully designed procedures prepared with experience we have gathered on prototypes."

He added: "Our motto is: no short cuts? exchanging a single component which today is cold, is like bringing it back from the Moon. It takes about three to four weeks to warm it up. Then it takes one or two weeks to exchange. Then it needs three to six weeks to cool down again.

"So, you see, it is three months if we make a mistake."

Two sectors of the LHC are currently not cold enough for testing to proceed. Electronics that control the cryogenic systems in these sectors are being moved to an area where they will be better shielded against particles that shoot out of the machine during collisions.

Closing the circle

One sector of the ring is being run as if the LHC was operational and carrying a beam. This is so that crews can de-bug software and hardware and gain experience of running operating cycles.

The LHC's magnets must also undergo electrical testing. Each sector of the machine contains about 200 electrical circuits. Each circuit may consist of as many as 154 magnets or as few as one.

They are being tested for their ability to handle very high currents - up to 12,000 Amps .

"We power each circuit, making sure it goes to its design current. But above all, we are verifying that all the protection systems around it - which are there to detect an eventual quench - are operating as expected," said Roberto Saban.

A quench occurs when some part of the magnet starts to heat up, becoming resistant to electrical current. Engineers have built in a recovery system to detect these quenches before they affect the magnetic field bending particles around the ring and shut off the circulating beams.

The machine's cool-down should take another two weeks to complete, provided no serious problems are found. Electrical testing of the magnets may take another couple of weeks.

Before the LHC is "switched on" for the first time, the proton beams have to be boosted to high energies in a chain of particle accelerators called the injectors.

Once the machine is cold, operators will inject beams into the main ring, threading them through each independent sector of the LHC until they close the circle.

A timing, or synchronisation, system is used to ensure each of these sectors behaves as if they were a single machine.

When the LHC is switched on it will operate at an energy of five trillion electron-volts. It will then be shut down for the winter, so that the magnets can be "trained" to handle a beam run at seven trillion electron-volts.

Wrapup: What Sony Announced at E3

All three press conferences have come and gone, and Sony ended with a few bangs. We saw some new game announcements, updates on existing ones, and hints of what's to come for the PlayStation Network and Home.

Jack Tretton started the show off with a new trailer for Resistance 2, showing a large Chimera monster destroying a building as the player ran through it. The conference went on to cleverly present Sony's sales numbers using a custom-made LittleBigPlanet stage to demonstrate them rather than a stuffy old PowerPoint presentation. Cute move. As part of the LittleBigPowerPoint, Sony unveiled the new greatest hits line-up for PlayStation 3, starting with 10 of the most popular titles for the price of $29.99. Finally, LittleBigPlanet was confirmed for October of this year.

Moving on to the PlayStation 2, the company talked up the 130 new titles coming this year, along with a new bundle that will include Lego Batman and the animated movie Justice League: The New Frontier. Not to be outdone, the PlayStation Portable is getting a new bundle pack with Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, a voucher for the downloadable game Echochrome, a 1GB memory stick, and a UMD of National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. Finally, the PlayStation 3 is getting double the storage space with an 80GB unit for $399, the previous price for the 40GB model.

On the PlayStation Network side, we got the first (official) confirmation of Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty, a PSN downloadable title that builds on the story of Ratchet & Clank Future. It promises more puzzle and adventure elements built upon the same basic Ratchet feel, in a bite-sized game for $14.99. Tretton also promised that Home is still on the way, along with teasing that trophies will be rewarding in "unique ways."

For video entertainment, the company outlined GTTV from Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, and said it will go live August 1. And of course, the company outlined its talked-about video download service, which goes live tonight and will grant access to a wide variety of TV shows and movies. One pleasant surprise is that content downloaded from the PlayStation Store on your PC or PS3 can also be transferred to your PlayStation Portable for on-the-go viewing.

Tretton then brought it back around to the games, talking up a new Resistance PSP game along with a few other portable installments of console counterparts, while comic book artist Jim Lee showed off DC Universe Online with a new trailer. Tretton went on to whet Kratos fans' appetites with a God of War 3 teaser, and then finally wrapped up the presentation with the announcement of the new MAG: Massive Action Game. Silly acronym aside, the game's title is dead serious, promising 256-player battles composed of 8-person squads. Squad commanders will be promoted based on "leadership abilities," bringing a certain strategic element into play. Those squads will get into both skirmishes with other squads and more massive warfare during matches.

So, is it the "year of the PS3," as Jack Tretton (and our own EGM) have claimed? Did the press conference impress? Let us know.

E3 2008 -- the game industry's biggest convention (arguably) -- is happening all this week! Check out E3.1UP.COM for news, previews, podcasts, videos, blogs, and more direct from the Los Angeles Convention Center.

E3 2008: Nintendo Press Conference Roundup
Nintendo's E3 press conference is over, and if you were following it on our live stream (and you were, right?), consider this wrap-up a refresher. While Microsoft focused plenty of time on new interfaces and functionality options on Monday, Nintendo was unsurprisingly all about the games: Animal Crossing: City Folk, Wii Music, and Wii Sports Resort are their big announcements for the Wii, and the DS gets another dose of Guitar Hero: On Tour along with -- maybe the biggest surprise of the conference -- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

But this isn't exactly a staggering litany of new game announcements -- in fact, Nintendo deliberately kept the list of game demos short while assuring that it would be "impossible" to fit in showings for all of the games currently in the works for Wii and DS. Still, even with the short list of games on the schedule, they are mostly games we've already heard of or seen before -- including the two most exciting Wii games shown, Animal Crossing and Wii Music.

Animal Crossing was shown first, with a video of gameplay footage accompanied by series producer Katsuya Eguchi outlining some of the new features. The biggest addition also accounts for the new subtitle -- unlike previous versions of Animal Crossing, City Folk lets you venture out from your tranquil village and visit a (relatively) bustling city, where you'll find an auction house, clothing store, academy, and a beauty salon (which lets you transform your character into a Mii). The game also features online play, which seems to be similar to the online play in the DS version and pretty short of the "Animal Crossing MMO" rumor that has circulated for a while. Nintendo also showed off a new "WiiSpeak" peripheral, which is a community microphone that lets anyone in the same room speak into it.

Wii Music closed the show, with Shigeru Miaymoto himself appearing on stage and playing the saxophone with a Wii Remote. Wii Music, of course, was first revealed at E3 2006 as a mere tech demo, but today's showing is a fully formed game, with over 50 instruments including drums, sax, piano, violin, guitar, marimba, and various percussion instruments. You use the Wiimote, Nunchuk and Balance Board to play them, and apparently, success is based more on simply mimicking the motions of playing instruments rather than any musical talent. We should have more impressions of Wii Music soon, so stay tuned.

Also demoed was Wii Sports Resort, a sequel to the Wii pack-in and the first game to use the Motion Plus add-on (which comes with the game). Wii Sports Resort's activities are beach-themed, with onstage demonstrations including playing Frisbee with a dog, riding a Jet Ski, and, um, sword fighting. Maybe that's not a typical beach activity, but with the help of the Motion Plus add-on, it's the direct, 1-to-1 motion-controlled sword-fighting game everyone's been waiting for since the Wii was first announced. The game is due for release next spring.

The DS got an equal amount of time devoted to it, and easily the biggest announcement is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, set for release this holiday season. It may not be as fancy as GTA4, but it'll be great to see the überviolent GTA series sharing shelf space with Nintendogs. Details are scarce, but as the name implies, Chinatown Wars focuses on the Asian Triad crime syndicates of Liberty City. Rockstar Leeds is developing the game in conjunction with Rockstar North, and it will of course make use of the touch screen for vehicle and character controls.

Almost as surprising is the announcement of Guitar Hero: On Tour -- Decades, but mostly because the follow-up to the first On Tour is coming so soon. As usual, not many details were revealed, but Decades will supposedly be released in different versions, and you will be able to swap songs between them. Why that's a necessary addition to the series is hard to say right now, but hopefully we'll get a better understanding of how song-swapping works soon.

Other Wii games shown include Shaun White Snowboarding, with Shaun White himself playing the Balance Board-enabled game. Leaning left and right on the board guided his virtual boarder, and pressing his weight down on the it lifted him into the air off of ramps and halfpipes. White was also holding a Wii Remote while he played, and perhaps it's used to pull of tricks, but it was hard to make out exactly how the motions translated to the gameplay.

A short trailer also showed new footage of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Rayman Raving Rabbids: TV Party, and Call of Duty: World at War. Really, the only notable feature shown is a co-op mode for Call of Duty -- one player controls the action on screen, but two additional players can add support by shooting enemies with their own Wii Remotes (which seems almost lightgun-like in execution). On the DS, Spore: Creatures and Pokémon Rangers: Shadows of Almia were also shown along with a couple of applications: one that gives you valuable airport info like flight times, nearby restaurants, and weather reports, and the DS cookbook, making its way from Japan to the U.S.

All in all, it may have lacked the technological and multimedia pizzazz of Microsoft's E3 showing, and, yeah, it kind of also lacked any big-time game announcements -- everyone saw the titles announced coming from a mile away. But you can't deny that Nintendo certainly showed up at E3, can you? So, any thoughts? Wish they had more games to show off, or are you satisfied with the announcements made today? Leave a comment and share your thoughts, partner.

E3 2008 -- the game industry's biggest convention (arguably) -- is happening all this week! Check out E3.1UP.COM for news, previews, podcasts, videos, blogs, and more direct from the Los Angeles Convention Center.

NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) - IBM will invest $1.5 billion in nanotechnology chip projects, which include a research center in upstate New York at a site yet to be chosen, Gov. David Paterson said on Tuesday.

The state will contribute $140 million in economic development grants, Paterson added in a statement.

New York for years has struggled to find a way to awaken the upstate economy and the Democratic governor said the investments will create 1,000 high-tech jobs.

In addition to the new research center, IBM will expand its operations at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany and upgrade its East Fishkill facility in Dutchess County. (Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Tom Hals)

Sony unveiled new hardware packages for each of their systems during their E3 Press conference on Tuesday, including a new 80GB PlayStation 3 bundle for $399. A new PS2 bundle with Lego Batman packed-in along with the new Justice League: The New Frontier animated movie on DVD will also be available. And lastly, Sony will also sell a new PSP entertainment pack that comes with a silver PSP, Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, a 1GB memory stick, a voucher to purchase Echochrome, and a UMD of National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.

The new 80GB PS3 basically gives you double the storage space of the 40GB for the same price; it's set to ship later this year. The PS2 package is $149 and ships this fall; the PSP package is $199. Both the PS2 and PSP packages, as you may have surmised by the pack-ins, are being targeted toward families. And with the $149 price tag for the PS2 bundle, assuming that $49 is the added value for the game and movie, does this basically mean the PS2 on its own will finally hit the $99 price point? No word from Sony, but that seems likely to happen at some point this year.

Apple Computer again cracked the top three in U.S. PC sales for the second quarter, according to surveys released Wednesday by both Gartner and IDC.

Worldwide, Apple didn't make the top five PC vendors, according to both firms. But within the U.S., IDC estimated that Apple finished in a virtual dead heat with Acer for third place, just 2,000 units behind the Asian PC maker. Gartner, meanwhile, said that Apple took the third-place spot outright, topping Acer by 65,000 PCs sold.

Both IDC and Gartner retroactively ranked Apple fourth in sales for the second quarter of 2007, if measured against a merged Acer-Gateway business. If treated as separate companies, Apple would have maintained its third-place ranking.

Both sets of data are preliminary, the firms said. The PC sales estimates include desktops, laptops, and X86 servers, but not handheld PCs. Ultraportables and so-called mini-notes were also included, although Gartner estimated that they represented just 3 percent of the market.

Domestically, Dell maintained its top spot, capturing 31.9 percent of the market according to Gartner, with 5.25 million PCs sold; IDC said that Dell's market share was 32.0 percent, with 5.44 million PCs sold. Both firms estimated that Dell grew between 11 and 12 percent from the same quarter a year ago.

HP finished second in U.S. sales, with a 25.3 percent share according to Gartner, and a 25.1 percent share according to IDC; the firm sold 4.17 million and 4.26 million PCs, according to the respective firms. HP's year-over-year growth was sluggish, about 5.6 to 5.9 percent.

Treated as a merged company that included Gateway's results, Acer's sales slipped about 20.8 percent from year to year, finishing at 1.33 million shipments or about an 8.1 percent market share, according to Gartner.

Apple, however, showed tremendous growth: 38.1 percent year over year, Gartner said, or 31.7 percent by IDC's estimates. Apple sold 1.40 million units, according to Gartner, and 1.32 million according to IDC. In total, that gave Apple an 8.5 percent or a 7.8 percent market share, according to the respective firms.

According to Gartner, total U.S. PC shipments increased 4 percent to 16.4 million units. But the firm also said that U.S. consumers are increasingly turning to low-end machines as a way to save money.

"Home mobile PCs continue to have momentum in the U.S. market. However, ASP declines were greater here than in other segments. The retail space was a harsh pricing environment during the quarter," according to Mika Kitagawa, the Gartner analyst in charge of the report.

Worldwide, PC shipments rose 15.3 percent according to IDC, to 70.6 million units. On a global scale, the top five vendors showed excellent growth; fourth-ranked Lenovo grew the least of the group, at 14.6 percent. HP grew 16.8 percent to lead the market with 13.3 million units shipped, and a 18.9 percent market share. Dell was second, growing 21.4 percent to 11.6 million units and a 16.4 percent share. Third-ranked Acer grew 63.5 percent when Gateway's numbers were factored in, finishing with 6.97 million units and a 9.9 percent share. Lenovo sold 5.6 million units and finished with a 7.9 percent market share, while Toshiba grew 28.5 percent to 3.1 million units and a 4.4 percent share.

Editor's Note: The IDC and Gartner results were for the second quarter, not the third, as the story originally stated.

What the hell is going on in San Francisco? It’s like a freaking detective novel out there all of a sudden.

One of the city’s top IT guys has been accused of locking other administrators out of the city’s new fiber wide area network (WAN).

Now he won’t give up the new password. He’s been arrested and in court. He is being held on a whopping $5 million bail and his lawyer says the accused – one Terry Childs – “loves kittens.”

Meanwhile, outside the halls of justice city officials run damage control. No, they say, no data has been compromised. But yes, they are not able to access the network. The mayor’s office and an IT official chime in that everyone is safe, nothing to see here. Mayor Gavin Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle that Childs “got a bit maniacal.”

And all of a sudden Deep Throat appears, an anonymous city official telling the Chronicle that Childs is one hell of a bad seed. His bosses have wanted him out for ages now, the source breathes from an underground parking garage. His performance (a cigarette is dropped to the ground and screwed into the asphalt by a dress shoe-clad foot) was undoubtedly poor.

But is this the mother of all cover-ups? Childs’ lawyer, tireless public defender Mark Jacobs, thinks it might be.

“There’s someone out there that’s really scared of something, and I don’t know what it is,” Jacobs told a local TV station.

Childs was arrested Sunday. He was in court Monday but sans lawyer, pushing his arraignment to Tuesday. In comes Jacobs, fresh enough to the case to convince Superior Court Judge Paul Alvarado to postpone the whole thing until Thursday. That will give Jacobs time to chat with Childs and posit some arguments for why Childs should be set free while awaiting trial.

But it wasn’t enough to stop the $5 million bail. Prosecutors are arguing that Childs poses a major threat to public safety. Why?

Because he, and apparently only he, can access the city’s brand-spanking-new WAN network. It is the holding ground of emails, law enforcement records and payroll documents, as well as God knows what else, according to the Chronicle.

Childs, prosecutors say, has been having his way with the network for a few weeks now. His superiors caught on but not in time to find they had been shut out. Now the city has hired Cisco Systems to break back in.

The running story, as reported this morning by the Chronicle is that Childs was key in setting up the new WAN network. But, bizarrely, he began taking photographs of the IT department’s female head of security while she worked on a password audit for the system, authorities told the paper. Terrified, the woman locked herself in her office.

So Childs was arrested. Prosecutors say Childs wouldn’t give police the password, then gave them fake passwords. It doesn’t take much to imagine a slick, angry San Francisco detective (Nash Bridges?) banging his hands on an interrogation table and screaming “Give us the password!”

But no, Childs holds firm. Why?

According to DA Kamala Harris, possibly for no good reason at all.

“Motive is not necessarily an element of a crime,” Harris told reporters. Which is technically true, but it’s a little like saying music doesn’t require instruments. In all reasonable cases, we expect to hear some noise. And who the hell listens to a capella anyway?

But give Harris some leeway. She probably hasn’t gotten a complete grip on this mess yet. And who’s to say everything the city tells her is true? Apparently her and the mayor aren’t on the best of terms right now.

Here’s what we know about Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, Calif.:

Childs’ official job title was network administrator in the City and County of San Francisco’s Department of Technology. His base pay, the Chronicle reports, is $126,735. Another $22,534 was tacked on last year because Childs is on call for emergency situations.

He was also arrested in Kansas in 1982 for aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary, according to the report. He received probation or parole until 1987 and disclosed the arrest to his bosses when hired in San Francisco five years ago.

He is now charged with four felony counts of network computer tampering and faces up to seven years in jail if convicted.

Childs is accused of locking a major American city out of its own network, which could make him a criminal. But it makes his bosses look like they should be the ones finding new jobs.

Oh, and he loves kittens.

 A disturbing new study is coming out about kids and their exercise habits. The bottom line: As kids grow from pre-pubescence into teens, their rate of exercise declines sharply.

The findings are revealed in the Journal of the American Medical Association that comes out Wednesday. Dr. Philip Nader, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California-San Diego, conducted the comprehensive study, which followed more than 1,000 children for six years. 

"What shocked me was the sharp decline in activity," Nader said. The study monitored the habits of the same children from different parts of the country, with different family incomes and different races. 

At 9 years old, the kids got about three hours of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day from activities like bike riding, tag or basketball. 

However, by the time the kids turned 15, their activity had dropped down to about 49 minutes a day. On the weekends, it was even worse -- kids got about 35 minutes a day.



esearchers estimated that kids' physical activity declined about 40 minutes per day, each year until age 15, when activity fell far below the recommended level. 

The Department of Health and Human Service's Dietary Guidelines for Americans suggest that children and adolescents get a minimum of 60 minutes of physical activity, seven days a week. 


The study reiterates the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation issued on July 7, that some children, as young as 8, be put on cholesterol medicine and receive lipid screening to help fight heart disease. 

What makes this study so compelling is how the kids' activities were tracked.  

For a full week when the kids were 9, 11, 13, and 15 years old, they wore a computerized device on their belt, called an accelerometer, which measured their movement. The tool gave researchers an accurate view of how kids move and exercise. 

The study also found that activity declined for all children across the board, regardless of where they lived, what their family income was or their race. This overarching trend of increasing inactivity points to the raised risk of obesity and heart disease facing America's children.

LONDON, England (AP) -- A man named by police as a suspect in the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann won £600,000 ($1.2 million) in libel damages Thursday from nearly a dozen British newspapers, his lawyer said.

Robert Murat's lawyer, Louis Charalambous, said the papers had agreed to pay Murat and to issue an apology. The settlement was formalized with a joint statement at the High Court in London on Thursday.

Murat sued The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail and other daily and Sunday newspapers over stories -- often lurid and based on anonymous sources -- claiming he was involved in Madeleine's disappearance.

The eleven newspapers had no immediate comment on the libel award.

Murat, 34, is a British man who lives near the southern Portuguese resort where 3-year-old Madeleine disappeared in May 2007.
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Last year Portuguese police named Murat, along with Madeleine's parents Kate and Gerry McCann, as "arguidos," or formal suspects.

Despite a global campaign by the girl's parents, no trace of her has been found, and no one has been charged in the case.

Outside court on Thursday, Murat blasted the newspapers.

"(They) brought about the total and utter destruction of mine and my family's life and caused immense distress," he said.



In March, the McCanns won front-page apologies and a large libel payout from several newspapers that had made claims about their role in their daughter's disappearance. The McCanns, like Murat, strenuously deny involvement in the disappearance.
Portugal's attorney general said Wednesday he would announce next week whether he plans to bring charges in the case.

 

Two telemarketing companies that sell Dish Network Corp.'s satellite TV services have agreed to pay fines of $95,000 for ignoring the federal do-not-call list and hanging up on customers, federal regulators said Tuesday.

Planet Earth Satellite Inc., of Phoenix, Ariz., and its president have been charged with calling consumers whose phone numbers are on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Star Satellite LLC, based in Provo, Utah, was accused of making telemarketing calls that failed to connect consumers to a live telemarketer within two seconds after consumers answer the call.

The FTC said the company, its president and other defendants were "unjustly enriched" by these "unlawful practices."

The FTC said the two-second rule was implemented after concerns by consumers, especially women and the elderly, that they were being stalked when they picked up the phone and no one answered.

The problem with most computers (unless you have a notebook computer with a wireless Internet connection) is that they are usually hooked up somewhere besides the bathroom. And even those that can be carried along to the room with the porcelain throne, they aren’t easy to handle once you are sitting on the toilet. So what is a computer addicted person supposed to do when they are surfing the web and the call of nature sounds? Lucky for all of us computer junkies, the designers at ThinkGeek.com have come up with a solution to this problem – the Internet Urinal!

Made of hardy plastic and including a “female adapter,” this portable urine container makes it easy to never leave your desk chair again! Just think of how much more time you will have to play that RPG or download songs for iTunes.

 
It has been an interesting time for those addicted to the thrill of shoplifting lately. In Bermerton, WA, a teenage boy took candy bars from a local store. He may have gotten away with it too, if his breath hadn’t alerted the cops to his guilt. When the police officer investigating the case questioned him about it, he caught the distinct scent of chocolate from the young man’s mouth. After witnesses also identified the boy, he finally confessed to taking the candy because “he was hungry and he did it for the thrill.”


Shoplifting seems to be going around these days, and not just with kids and teenagers, but also with adults in positions of authority. Suzanne Page of Channel WLAJ 4 in Michigan was caught stealing food from a local market (among other things) a couple of years ago and this led to her resigning as a news anchor in 2008. Eventually her bad reputation just outweighed her good reputation and she had to bow out from the public eye.

Apparently Ms. Page and the teenage chocolate thief didn’t think about the kinds of punishment they could have ended up with for their shoplifting. Last year a judge in Alabama ordered two people who had stolen items from Wal-Mart to stand outside the store wearing signs that read “I am a thief. I stole from Wal-Mart.” Its hard to say what would be more embarrassing, wearing signs telling the public that you are a thief, or getting caught taking a $7 item from Wal-Mart.

DALLAS — What do "black hole," "angel food cake," and "devil's food cake" have in common?

They're all racist terms, says a Dallas County, Texas, official.

A county commissioners' meeting this week over traffic tickets turned into a tense discussion over race when one commissioner said the county's collections office was like a certain astronomical phenomenon.

"It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole," Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said during the Monday meeting.

One black official demanded an apology, and Commissioner John Wiley Price, who also is black, said that type of language is unacceptable.

At the meeting, Mayfield said he intended his comments to be taken in the context of the scientific meaning, and became upset that he was being misunderstood.

In astronomy, the term black hole refers to a star that has collapsed upon itself, creating something so dense and small that it does not have any physical properties besides a gravitational force so great that even light cannot escape its pull.

Later, Price told MyFOXdfw.com that he believed it and other terms were racist.

"So if it's 'angel food cake,' it's white. If it's 'devil's food cake,' it's black. If you're the 'black sheep of the family,' then you gotta be bad, you know. 'White sheep,' you're okay. You know?" Price said.

Price said people should watch their words when it comes to stereotypes.

"I think people should always be careful. You know, I'm okay if I'm 'bartering' with you. ... But if I try to 'Jew you down,' Oooooh. Is that racist? I thought it meant the same thing? No, maybe it doesn't."

The world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking might have a solution to the problem over perception of the astronomical term. He refers to the phenomenon as "a singularity."

It's a tough time to be a bunny in Germany. In the last year, about 40 pet rabbits have been brutally killed in the Ruhr Valley. Many of them were decapitated.

(OK, that's as graphic as we're going to get.)


Police call it the worst case of animal cruelty they've seen. According to reports, there are no suspects and authorities don't know the motive of this "Rabbit Ripper of the Ruhr."

Although searches about the rabbit killings aren't skyrocketing on this side of the pond yet, it's almost inevitable they will. It's horrible, senseless and bizarre. There's hardly a more defenseless creature than a bunny nibbling on a carrot in a cage.

Search may play a role in these crimes. Because many of these rabbits were out of public view, police wonder if the killer, or killers, could be searching through online satellite images to locate hutches tucked away in backyards.

Like we said: horrible, senseless and bizarre.

And now, people have put up money to help bring this ripper to justice: a reward of 2,500 euros.