Don't stop Brazil Carnival but be careful: Lula...

Lula U.S. Reuters

Mon Jan 28, 2008 SAO PAULO (Reuters) - As Brazilians get ready for their annual Carnival celebrations, the government is urging them to practice safe sex and avoid drinking too much.

"Everybody has the right to have fun and enjoy themselves but it is important to remember that the next week we have to work and look after our families," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Monday.

The government also started handing out millions of free condoms at the weekend as part of its campaign to combat AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases during Carnival.

Five days of frenzied festivities kick off on Friday, with the biggest parties in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife.

Latin America's largest country stops work and indulges in a riot of drinking, dancing and parades accompanied by often licentious behavior.

Lula appealed in his weekly radio address for people to be careful during the partying.

"No one needs to drink or do anything more than normal to enjoy themselves," he said.

Lula is known as a gregarious character who himself enjoys a drink. His dour warning appeared to be partly prompted by a rise in deaths and accidents from drunken driving during the Christmas holidays.

The Health Ministry launched its annual safe sex campaign on Sunday under the slogan "Good in bed means wearing a condom."

"We have to let people know the importance of prevention," Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao said at an event in Rio.

States and municipalities in the world's largest Roman Catholic country will distribute 19.5 million free condoms for Carnival.

An education program will focus on alerting young women to the dangers of unprotected sex and encourage them to demand that their partners wear condoms.

Thousands of bandanas and temporary tattoos with safe sex slogans will also be handed out to revelers in the big cities.

Recife city also plans to distribute morning-after contraceptive pills -- a move that has angered the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.

The church opposes Brazil's much lauded anti-AIDS campaign on the grounds that it promotes contraception.

Bishop Antonio Augusto Dias Duarte of the National Bishops Conference of Brazil said last week that while the church was not against people having fun in Carnival, the morning-after pill and condom campaign "will only serve to diminish inhibitions and encourage orgiastic behavior."

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Caffeine ups blood sugar level in diabetics: study...

Health Reuters

Mon Jan 28, 2008 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cutting down on caffeine could help people with the most common form of diabetes better control their blood sugar levels, researchers said on Monday.

Giving caffeine to a small group of people with type 2 diabetes caused their levels of the blood sugar glucose to rise through the day, especially after meals, researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, found.

"Caffeine appears to disrupt glucose metabolism in a way that could be harmful to people with type-2 diabetes," James Lane, a Duke medical psychologist who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Caffeine is found in coffee, tea and many soft drinks.

Diabetes is a condition in which one's blood glucose levels are too high. Having too much glucose in the blood can damage the eyes, kidneys and nerves, and diabetes can also lead to heart disease, stroke and limb amputations.

Type-2 diabetes is the form closely linked to obesity.

The new findings seem to run counter to previous research regarding diabetes and caffeine. Earlier studies indicated that people who drank coffee had a reduced risk of type-2 diabetes, and those who drank the most coffee had the lowest risk.

The researchers used new technology -- a tiny glucose monitor embedded under the abdominal skin -- to monitor the glucose levels continuously in 10 people, average age 63.

On days when the participants were given four tablets containing caffeine equivalent to four cups of coffee, their average daily sugar levels rose 8 percent compared to days when the same people were given four placebo tablets, the researchers reported in the journal Diabetes Care.

"What we are really showing here is that when people with type-2 diabetes who are regular coffee drinkers drink coffee, it produces an elevation in their glucose throughout the day above what it is if they don't have caffeine," Lane said.

"This suggests that people with diabetes might want to avoid coffee and other caffeinated beverages so that this exaggeration doesn't occur. They may find that it's easier for them to keep their glucose down if they avoid caffeine."

Lane cited two possible explanations.

Caffeine may interfere with the process that transports glucose from the blood into muscle and other cells in the body to be burned as fuel, he said. Caffeine also triggers the release of the hormone adrenaline, which can elevate blood sugar levels, he said.

A number of studies have provided various results about the health effects of caffeine.

For example, U.S. researchers reported last Monday that pregnant women who drink two or more cups of coffee a day have twice the risk of a miscarriage as those who avoid caffeine. Other U.S. researchers reported the next day that caffeine may lower a woman's chances of developing ovarian cancer.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Vicki Allen)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Pet girl kicked off bus for wearing leash..

Reuters

Wed Jan 23, 2008. LONDON (Reuters) - A British bus company has apologized to a girl who is led around on a leash by her boyfriend and describes herself as a human pet after one of its drivers threw her off a bus.

Tasha Maltby, 19, told British newspapers she was the "pet" of her 25-year-old fiance Dani Graves.

Pictures showed her dressed in black Gothic-style clothing with silver buckles on a silver chain -- which the driver of a bus from the firm Arriva took exception to.

She told the Daily Mail newspaper Wednesday she was thrown off and told: "We don't let freaks and dogs like you on."

Arriva would not comment on specifics but said it apologized if the couple felt they had been discriminated against. It added, however, that the driver was worried about safety and the company told Maltby to take the leash off in the future.

"We have spoken to the driver who has talked about health and safety," a spokesman said. "Should she be attached to a chain and something happens on the bus, that could be dangerous. All we are saying is that she is very welcome to use the buses but not when she is on her lead."

Maltby -- who lives on state benefits and got engaged in November -- said her choice of lifestyle might seem unusual but was harmless.

"I am a pet," she told the Daily Mail. "I generally act animal-like and I lead a really easy life. I don't cook or clean and I don't go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It's my culture and my choice. It isn't hurting anyone."

(Editing by Michael Winfrey)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

French bank SocGen says hit by $7.1 billion fraud...

Reuters

Thu Jan 24, 2008. PARIS (Reuters) - French bank Societe Generale said fraud by a single trader had caused it a 4.9 billion euro ($7.1 billion) loss and that it would seek emergency funds as a result, shocking battered markets.

If fraud is proved, the loss will be the biggest caused by a rogue trader, ahead of the $2.6 billion hit to Sumitomo Corp caused by copper trader Yasuo Hamanaka and the $1.4 billion loss caused to Barings by Nick Leeson, both in the 1990s. It also eclipses a $6 billion loss racked up by hedge fund Amaranth trader Brian Hunter and his team ahead of its collapse in 2006.

SocGen, France's second-biggest listed bank, announced plans to raise 5.5 billion euros through a capital increase to shore up its balance sheet, also reeling from a crisis in global credit markets. It unveiled a further writedown of 2.05 billion euros related to the global credit crunch on Thursday.

The announcement sent a shiver through the world banking industry, which is suffering a credit crunch as high-risk mortgage borrowers default on their loans.

Lehman Brothers CEO and Chairman Richard Fuld called it "everyone's worst nightmare" in a comment from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"The most serious thing is that this puts into doubt the risk management systems at some banks," said Fortis analyst Carlos Garcia. "You can't suddenly announce this from one day to the next a hit of $7 billion. In the light of this what we've done is to downgrade banks that are very linked to trading income or whose capital base is weak."

SocGen said it was in the process of dismissing the Paris-based trader, who it did not name, and added that the trader's managers would leave the company. Chairman Daniel Bouton later said he did not know where the trader was.

A source at SocGen said the trader was "not one of its stars" and was relatively young. SocGen said the trader had been handling futures contracts on European stock market indices, betting on broad share market movements.

It added that its board had rejected an offer by Chairman and Chief Executive Daniel Bouton to resign.

SocGen shares were suspended.

The Bank of France announced an inquiry by the Banking Commission and said no further comment was necessary after Societe Generale took steps to strengthen its balance sheet.

French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde will make a statement during the day on the issue, her office said.

It was not immediately clear what role French police were taking in the investigation. The French prosecutor's office was not available for comment.

FURTHER WRITEDOWNS AT SOCGEN

Analysts said the episode would have a major impact on the reputation of SocGen, which was founded in 1864 and is one of France's most prestigious blue-chip companies.

UBS said in a research note that the fraud would impact the credibility of its derivatives business, which has been one of its fastest-growing units and has a world-leading reputation.

Shares in rival BNP rose. The fraud could rekindle BNP's ambitions to take control of SocGen, analysts said.

The losses also echo a similar blow on a much smaller scale last year to France's biggest retail bank, Credit Agricole, which in September announced a 250 million euro charge related to an unauthorized trading position.

SocGen said it expected a 2007 net profit of between 600 and 800 million euros -- well below its 2006 profit figure.

SocGen shares closed down 4.15 percent at 79.08 euros on Wednesday. The stock has fallen around 20 percent since the start of 2008.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, editing by Astrid Wendlandt and Erica Billingham)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Microsoft expected to post sharp profit rise...

Reuters

Tue Jan 22, 2008. SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft is expected to report a sharp rise in quarterly profit this week, boosted by surging revenue as strong computer sales drive demand for its Windows operating system and Office software.

Investors will also look at its full-year outlook to see if the world's largest software maker can maintain momentum from a strong first quarter in the face of growing concerns over the U.S. economy. Microsoft reports fiscal second-quarter results on Thursday.

Economic concerns and stock market declines have erased the share price gains that followed its first-quarter results, but analysts said personal computer sales figures last week suggest any economic softness did not weigh on year-end demand.

"We're looking for Microsoft to continue to have positive results. Last quarter was one of the best we've seen from it in a very long time and we think the company is certainly headed in the right direction," said Andy Miedler, technology analyst at Edward Jones.

Analysts, on average, forecast Microsoft to post a 66 percent rise in quarterly net profit to $4.35 billion, or 46 cents per share, on a 27 percent increase in revenue to $15.93 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

Those growth rates are exaggerated by the results in the year-ago period, when Microsoft deferred more than $1 billion in net income due to delays in releasing Windows Vista and Office 2007, which hit stores in early 2007.

Last week, research firm IDC said global PC sales rose 15.5 percent in the October-to-December period, while rival firm Gartner put worldwide computer sales growth at 13.1 percent.

"We believe that the strength of PC shipments this quarter portends well for Microsoft's (Windows) Client division and should give at least some boost to the results," Bernstein Research analyst Charles Di Bona wrote in a note to clients.

Windows, which sits on more than 90 percent of the world's PCs, was the main catalyst behind Microsoft exceeding 20 percent in revenue and profit growth in its first quarter. It was aided by strong PC sales, but the company also sold pricier versions of Windows and made progress in reducing piracy.

Office 2007 sales are also expected to rise in the strong PC market, while growing demand from corporate customers for products like its SharePoint collaboration software should spur revenue growth at its business division.

TECHNOLOGY OUTLOOK

Investors will also watch Microsoft's results as an indication of the outlook for technology. So far, results from tech bellwethers have painted a mixed picture.

Chip maker Intel Corp spooked investors with a disappointing forecast last week, while International Business Machines Corp provided some reassurance with a 2008 outlook that blew past Wall Street's expectations.

Microsoft has long argued its products are less sensitive to swings in technology spending because they account for a small, but essential, portion of overall technology spending by corporate customers.

Goldman Sachs added Microsoft to its Americas "Conviction Buy" list last week with analyst Sarah Friar writing that Microsoft is a good defensive stock in a tough economy.

She noted Microsoft should benefit from new server software releases in February and the upcoming availability of Vista's first major update, Service Pack 1. Historically large organizations have waited for the release of SP1 to upgrade operating systems.

Wall Street will also look for signs of improvement from Microsoft's online services arm. The just-ended quarter was the first since the company absorbed digital advertising firm aQuantive after last year's $6 billion acquisition.

Microsoft has clinched several Web ad syndication deals in recent months such as a five-year deal with media conglomerate Viacom Inc. Yet it has failed to take Web search market share from Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.

Microsoft's entertainment and devices division has already said it had a strong quarter. The company said it sold 4.3 million Xbox 360 consoles in the last three months of 2007, while sales of "Halo 3," a popular shooting game exclusive to the Xbox released in late September, hit 8.1 million units.

(Editing by Braden Reddall)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

'Yahoo zet eenvijfde werknemers op straat'...

Webwereld Door Martin Gijzemijter

Maandag 21 januari 2008, 18:51 - Internetbedrijf Yahoo zou van plan zijn om wereldwijd 20 procent van haar personeel op straat te zetten. De ontslagen zouden binnen nu en twee weken moeten vallen.

De internetportaal telt op dit moment zo'n 12 duizend werknemers. Naar verluidt is er een lijst opgesteld met 1.500 tot 2.500 namen van personen die binnenkort het veld moeten ruimen, meldt The Register.

Terugkeer van Yang
Investeerders sturen al lange tijd aan op ontslagen, maar gehoopt werd dat de terugkeer van Yahoo-oprichter Jerry Yang het tij zou kunnen keren. Yang keerde in juni 2007 terug aan het roer van zijn bedrijf omdat de zowel de aandelenkoers als het marktaandeel van het ooit zo gigantische internetbedrijf snel afnam. Hoewel het niet helemaal duidelijk is of de ontslagen het resultaat zijn van het falen van Yang of juist onderdeel zijn van een nieuwe strategie, zullen mogelijk ten minste 1.500 werknemers hiervan de dupe worden.

Persbericht
Opmerkelijk is dat Yahoo een persbericht heeft uitgestuurd over de geruchten. Daarin wordt uitgelegd dat: "Yahoo van plan is om meer geld te steken in bepaalde onderdelen van de markt en zich minder te richten op onderdelen van de markt die niet onder de prioriteiten van het bedrijf vallen.

Klappen in Europa
Als Yang daadwerkelijk doorgaat met het massa-ontslag, zullen de hardste klappen waarschijnlijk in Europa vallen. De zoekgigant heeft wereldwijd veel concurrentie van Google, maar nergens legt ze het zo af tegen Google als in Europa. De Europese topman van het bedrijf, Toby Coppel, liet in november 2007 al weten slecht presterende onderdelen in het eerste kwartaal van 2008 te willen sluiten of verkopen.

Credit issuer says data lost for 650,000 customers...

Tech News on ZDNet

Jan 18, 2008. Reuters. A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.

Richard Jones, a spokesman for the General Electric unit, said a backup computer tape being stored at a facility operated by Iron Mountain, an information protection and storage company, had been lost.

Jones added that Social Security numbers of about 150,000 people were also included on the tape.

The GE Money spokesman declined to name other retailers whose customers could be affected. "It's many of the large national retailers, as well as some smaller regional ones," Jones said.

In a statement, Iron Mountain said it notified GE Money of the missing tape in October, and added that there has been no evidence suggesting that the identity of any person had been compromised.

"We believe this is an unfortunate case of a misplaced tape," Iron Mountain's statement said. "We also understand the tape was created in such a manner to make unauthorized access extremely unlikely and difficult, even for experts with specialized knowledge and technology."

Jones said affected consumers, who include some GE Money employees, were being notified by letter of the missing tape.

Individuals whose Social Security numbers were on the tape are being offered free credit monitoring services for 12 months, Jones added.

©2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. CNET , CNET.com , and the CNET logo are registered trademarks of CNET Networks, Inc. Used by permission.

Story Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Chess legend Fischer dies at 64....

BBC NEWS Europe

Friday, 18 January 2008. The US-born player was a fierce critic of his government. The controversial former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, has died in Iceland at the age of 64.

The US-born player, who became famous for beating Cold War Soviet rival Boris Spassky in 1972, died of an unspecified illness, his spokesman said.

He was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2005 as a way to avoid being deported to the US.

Mr Fischer was wanted for breaking international sanctions by playing a match in the former Yugoslavia in 1992.

He also had alienated many in his homeland by broadcasting anti-Semitic diatribes and expressing support for the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York.

The reclusive player - who had renounced his US citizenship - had lived undetected in Japan for a number of years before moving to Iceland.

'Match of the century'

Mr Fischer died in Iceland on Thursday, his spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said.

The nature of the illness was unknown but Mr Fischer had been reportedly seriously ill for some time.

Mr Fischer had many supporters in Iceland, after playing a world championship match there in 1972, beating title-holder Spassky.

He should be remembered for his wonderful 1972 victory over Spassky, rather than the sad and prolonged end-game of his personal life, Philip Hollywood, UK.

The so-called chess "match of the century" came to be seen as a proxy for the Cold War, as the Soviets had held the world title since World War II.

Mr Fischer, the individual who had triumphed over the might of the Communist system, became an American hero.

The 1972 match made chess fashionable, even sexy, some experts say.

But after his victory, the eccentric genius simply disappeared, declining all lucrative sponsorship deals.

He resurfaced briefly in 1992, to play a re-match with Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.

Mr Fischer then vanished again, though it later became clear he had been living for a number of years in Japan before moving to Iceland.

Eddie Murphy and new wife split after two weeks...

Reuters

Actor Eddie Murphy poses with actress Tracey Edmonds at the premiere of "Good Luck Chuck" at the Mann National theatre in Westwood, California, in this file photo from Sept. 19, 2007. Picture by Mario Anzuoni

Wed Jan 16, 2008. ANGELES (Reuters) - Comic actor Eddie Murphy and his new wife Tracey Edmonds have split up just two weeks after their romantic wedding in French Polynesia, People magazine reported on Wednesday.

The star of "Shrek" and "Dreamgirls" and Edmonds, a film producer, exchanged their vows on a private island off Bora Bora on Jan. 1.

Under U.S. law, the couple needed a ceremony on U.S. soil to make the marriage legal.

But Murphy, 46, and Edmonds, 40, told People in a statement they would not do that and had decided to remain friends.

"After much consideration and discussion, we have jointly decided that we will forego having a legal ceremony as it is not necessary to define our relationship further," the statement said.

"While the recent symbolic union in Bora Bora was representative of our deep love, friendship and respect that we have for one another on a spiritual level, we have decided to remain friends," it added.

Murphy, 46, was divorced from his wife of 13 years, Nicole, in 2006. They had five children together. Last year, he fathered a daughter with Melanie Brown of the Spice Girls, but did not acknowledge paternity until four months after the baby was born.

Edmonds split last year with her husband, R&B singer/songwriter Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds. They had two sons together.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Ferrari unveils ethanol-powered sports car...

Reuters

Tue Jan 15, 2008 (Reuters) - Fill up your Ferrari at the farm? The Italian luxury sports car maker unveiled a concept car on Monday that can run on ethanol which it said reflected its engineering expertise from Formula One racing and growing demand for alternative fuel vehicles in the United States.

The sleek Ferrari F430 Spider Biofuel, with green stripes on its silver bodywork, consumes an E85 -- 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline -- mix, a growing fuel blend in the U.S.

Ferrari chief executive Amedeo Felisa said during a news conference at the North American International Auto Show that the concept was part of the firm's efforts to reduce tailpipe emission levels by 40 percent by 2012.

Felisa said Ferrari had gleaned experience in using biofuel in Formula I because of regulations that competitors use gasoline with a 5.75 percent biomass content.

The FIA GT and American Le Mans Series racing organizations require 10 percent ethanol.

For the Spider Biofuel, Ferrari made some changes to the fuel injection system and to the engine's computer chip. The result was an increase in power output, with equal weight and a five percent decline in carbon dioxide emissions.

Ferrari, a unit of Fiat, shipped 6,400 cars in 2007, up 14 percent on 2006.

Sales to the Asia Pacific rose 50 percent, with 177 cars delivered to China. Sales to the Middle East rose 32 percent.

The operating result was 15 percent of turnover, according to a company statement.

(Reporting by Marcel Michelson, Editing by Peter Bohan)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

New study blames Columbus for syphilis spread...

Reuters By Julie Steenhuysen

Tue Jan 15, 2008. CHICAGO (Reuters) - New genetic evidence supports the theory that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe from the New World, U.S. researchers said Monday, reviving a centuries-old debate about the origins of the disease.

They said a genetic analysis of the syphilis family tree reveals that its closest relative was a South American cousin that causes yaws, an infection caused by a sub-species of the same bacteria.

"Some people think it is a really ancient disease that our earliest human ancestors would have had. Other people think it came from the New World," said Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"What we found is that syphilis or a progenitor came from the New World to the Old World and this happened pretty recently in human history," said Harper, whose study appears in journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases.

She said the study lends credence to the "Columbian theory," which links the first recorded European syphilis epidemic in 1495 to the return of Columbus and his crew.

"When you put together our genetic data with that epidemic in Naples in 1495, that is pretty strong support for the Columbian hypothesis," she said.

Syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum, starts out as a sore, but progresses to a rash, fever, and eventually can cause blindness, paralysis and dementia.

Most recent evidence of its origins comes from skeletal remains found in both the New World and the Old World. Chronic syphilis can leave telltale lesions on bone. "It has a worm-eaten appearance," Harper said in a telephone interview.

SYPHILIS FAMILY TREE

Harper used an approach that examines the evolutionary relationships between organisms known as phylogenetics. She looked at 26 strains of Treponema, the family of bacteria that give rise to syphilis and related diseases like bejel and yaws, typically a childhood disease that is transmitted by skin-to-skin contact.

The study included two strains of yaws from remote areas of Guyana in South America that had never been sequenced before.

"We sequenced 21 different regions trying to find DNA changes between the strains," Harper said.

They concluded that while yaws is an ancient infection, venereal syphilis came about fairly recently. Harper suspects a nonvenereal subspecies of the tropical disease quickly evolved into venereal syphilis that could survive in the cooler, European climate.

But it is not clear how this took place. "All we can say is the ancestor of syphilis came from the New World, but what exactly it was like, we don't know," she said.

In a commentary published in the same journal, Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida and colleagues disagreed with Harper's analysis, suggesting her conclusions relied too heavily on genetic changes from the Guyana samples.

Mulligan suggested that better clues would come from DNA extracted from ancient bones or preserved tissues.

Harper concedes that more work needs to be done to explain the journey of syphilis to the New World. "This is a grainy photograph," she said.

(Editing by Maggie Fox)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Eindhoven Stad - Een jurk met honderd ritssluitingen...

Eindhovens Dagblad door Gerard Janssen

<---Jeffrey Daniels na de modeshow met enkele modellen in het Muziekcentrum. foto Kees Martens

14 jan 2008, 09:07 - EINDHOVEN - Een jurk met honderd ritssluitingen, dat was wel zo'n beetje de uitsmijter van een modeshow zaterdagavond in het Eindhovense Muziekcentrum.

Couturier Jeffrey Daniels verzorgde daar zijn eerste grote show tijdens het nieuwjaarsgala van de ECU, de Stichting Eindhoven en Cultuur. Het aldaar aanwezige old boys network van de Eindhovense zakenwereld zag belangstellend 32 modellen van Daniels de trap afdalen.

Voor de Valkenswaardse modeontwerper was het een voorlopig hoogtepunt van een veelbewogen leven. De 28-jarige Afrikaan ontvluchtte zijn geboorteland Sierra Leone tien jaar geleden vanwege het oorlogsgeweld, waarna hij tevens zijn studie Internationaal Recht afbrak ('als je ziet wat er in Sierra Leone gebeurt heeft zo'n studie weinig zin, laat ik het daar op houden').

Na in Nederland de immigratieprocedures te hebben doorlopen rondde hij op het ROC aan de Eindhovense Sterrenlaan de studierichting mode af en begon in Valkenswaard zijn eigen ontwerpbedrijf.

"Mode heeft me altijd geboeid. Ik vind mensen mooi, hoe ze er ook uitzien. En dat prikkelt me om ze nóg mooier aan te kleden, om er iets aparts van te maken. Deze show in het Muziekcentrum is mijn eerste echt grote. Beetje zenuwachtig ben ik wel, eigenlijk."

Het waren – even afgezien van dat ritssluitingenwonder – tamelijk ingetogen ontwerpen. Geen uiterst kleurrijke Afrikaanse uitbundigheid. Sterker: diverse gades van de Eindhovense zakenlieden liepen er zaterdagavond uitbundiger bij dan Daniels' modellen. "Maar dat doe ik met opzet. Ik kan wel heel opvallende ontwerpen maken, maar met zo'n publiek weet ik van tevoren: dit moet ik een beetje rustig houden. Je stemt je collectie af op wat je in de zaal verwacht."

Prijzig is Daniels (nog) niet. De meeste creaties schommelen zo rond de vijfhonderd euro; gearriveerde couturiers zetten daar fluitend een nulletje achter. "Dat moet nog komen, hè. Niet meteen te hoog in de boom. Maar dit is vanavond wel een grote stap voorwaarts voor mij."

Dat vonden de aanwezige dames ook. Zij waardeerden de creaties zeer, al dient aanschaf nog even te worden overwogen. "Als ik dat zie denk ik: tja, dat wordt weer afslanken."

Panasonic and Google to launch Internet TVs...

Tech News on ZDNet

Jan 8, 2008. Google and Matsushita's Panasonic unit are jointly developing televisions that display Internet content such as photos and videos.

The TVs, to be launched this spring, will allow users to directly browse and access videos from YouTube, a video-sharing Web site owned by Google, and view Picasa Web Albums, a free online photo-sharing service from Google, Panasonic said in a statement on Monday.

"Panasonic's cooperation with YouTube and Google's Picasa Web Albums exemplifies our commitment to leading the natural evolution of the Internet and extending it to the high-definition television," Panasonic Consumer Electronics Vice President Merwan Mereby said in the statement.

Late last year, Matsushita, the world's top plasma TV maker, said it would take control of a liquid crystal display joint venture and may build a new factory, marking a major shift in its strategy for the flat-panel TV market.

Matsushita has until now invested aggressively in plasma displays in the belief that it was the most cost-effective technology for flat TVs bigger than 37 inches, while procuring LCD panels to make TVs for the smaller sets.

©2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. CNET , CNET.com , and the CNET logo are registered trademarks of CNET Networks, Inc. Used by permission.

Story Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Possible Parkinson's trigger identified...

Health Reuters

Thu Jan 3, 2008. By Michael Kahn LONDON (Reuters) - A glitch in the way cells clear damaged proteins could be the trigger for the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, researchers said in a finding that could lead to new treatments for the incurable condition.

The U.S. team focused on a process called autophagy in which cells digest and recycle damaged molecules, including proteins, that develop as cells grow older. This system essentially renews cells to keep them functioning properly.

This mechanism is also important for nerve cells in the brain where defective proteins can kill cells and cause the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson's, such as tremors, said Ana Maria Cuervo, a cell biologist who led the study.

"We have found in Parkinson's there are problems in removing abnormal proteins," said Cuervo of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

The finding could potentially lead to drugs to treat the symptoms but not cure the disease, which affects more than a million patients in the United States alone and is marked by the death of brain cells that produce dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, or message-carrying chemical, associated with movement.

Cuervo had previously shown how mutant forms of a protein called alpha-synuclein -- found in a tiny percentage of Parkinson's patients -- blocked the breakdown of substances and prevented cells from clearing damaged proteins.

In the study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation on Wednesday, the team showed how in the majority of patients dopamine modifies normal proteins to act like the mutated ones to trigger tremors and other symptoms.

"What we have found is dopamine modifies alpha-synuclein that really resembles the mutation," Cuervo said. "That is why they have the same symptoms."

Problems in this process have also been linked with other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, though the specific mechanisms that cause problems in those conditions are different, she said.

Cuervo said a drug to fix the breakdown in Parkinson's patients was years away because it would take researchers time to understand fully how the process worked.

"This is not something that is going to lead to a treatment tomorrow," she said. "The hope is within five years we can get companies to find a drug able to activate this system."

(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Robert Woodward

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved.

Dentists win Lacoste crocodile logo battle...

Reuters By Peter Griffiths

Thu Jan 3, 2008. LONDON (Reuters) - Two dentists have won a second legal battle with French fashion giant Lacoste over the right to use a toothy crocodile on the sign outside their surgery, the government trademark body said on Thursday.

Dentists Dr Simon Moore and Dr Tim Rumney said they chose a crocodile for their logo because the reptile is famous for having a mouth full of teeth.

But Lacoste argued that the dentists' sign was too similar to their own emblem, a green crocodile that adorns millions of polo shirts around the world.

After losing the first round of its trademark fight last year, Lacoste appealed to London's UK Intellectual Property Office, the official body responsible for patents, trademarks and copyright issues.

The office upheld the original decision, saying that consumers were unlikely to confuse the dental practice and the clothing company.

The dentists' logo includes the words "The Dental Practice" and does not share the Lacoste crocodile's knobbly back and red tongue.

The Lacoste logo comes from the French tennis player Rene Lacoste, who was nicknamed "The Alligator" or "The Crocodile" in the 1920s. He struck a deal with a manufacturer to make clothes with a crocodile logo.

The dentists, from Cheltenham, southwest England, said Lacoste's action was like "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut."

"We liked the crocodile design because of the natural association with teeth," Dr Moore told the Times. "They have little birds that pick bits out of their teeth."

Lacoste was ordered to pay a total of 1,450 pounds in legal costs. The appeal ruling is online at: www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-decisionmaking/t-challenge/t-challenge-decision-results/o36107.pdf

(Editing by Steve Addison)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Gadget lovers seek out 2008's hottest products...

Technology Reuters

Thu Jan 3, 2008. NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The world's premier consumer electronics show kicks off in Las Vegas next week, but economic headwinds may mute the glitz and glamour of a conference that defines what gadgets are in store for 2008.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is set to attract 140,000 attendees to a show covering 1.8 million square feet and featuring everything from 100-inch TVs to sophisticated car navigation systems to quirky "zero-gravity" massage chairs.

The oddly timed event, coming on the heels of the festival of consumption that defines the year-end Christmas holiday season, showcases thousands upon thousands of products and prototypes set for release over the next year.

Martin Reynolds, a vice president at market research firm Gartner Inc, says hit products are coming faster and having shorter shelf lives than consumers electronics of the past.

The industry's iconic gadgets -- Apple Inc's iPod and iPhone franchises, the Nintendo Wii game platform -- and Google Inc's Web services show how the electronics industry has become a Hollywood-style blockbuster hit parade.

"It is no longer first-to-market that matters. It is first to volume," Reynolds says. "Whoever can get to the price that makes the volume of popular products explode, wins," he said.

Still, while headline speakers such as Microsoft's Bill Gates, General Motors' Rick Wagoner or Comcast's Brian Roberts will hail the convergence of digital electronics across industries, economic factors could spoil the party.

Market watchers are debating how long consumer spending on gadgets can hold up in the face of a global credit crunch, weak U.S. dollar and ever higher oil prices. But consumers caught short by these forces may focus on improving existing homes with the latest wireless or video gear, some analysts argue.

And most consumers see no need to upgrade at current prices to next-generation Blu-ray or HD-DVD while gadget manufacturers and Hollywood studios will once again defend their stalemated positions at CES over what standard to adopt for digital media storage discs.

VIDEO, WEB AND LOTS OF FLASH
Nonetheless, a wave of innovation is being driven by the increasingly Web-connected nature of devices, ranging from phones to TVs to cars and cameras.

This connectedness allows products to be upgraded by software rather than forcing consumers to buy new devices to get new features. That shifts the industry's focus from technical breakthroughs to the clever new services that can be delivered cheaply and conveniently through such devices.

As an example of services that have been technologically possible for some time but are now hitting the mainstream, Karen Chupka, a Consumer Electronics Association senior vice president, points to satellite-linked mobile phones that can locate nearby restaurants.

"While that is not a new technology, there is a 'wow factor' compared to what was available in the past," Chupka said. "It's adding services that you would never think ... would be available to you," she said.

The proliferation of devices that let users store video, music or pictures in convenient flash memory has caused the price of such products to plunge, meaning that not just digital cameras but phones and computers and other gadgets now come ready to store up to eight gigabytes of media, enough for more than 2,000 songs or about five feature films.

At CES, look for pocket-sized computers capable of running full-featured Windows software programs. Two Korean companies -- Wibrain and Raon -- now offer sub-notebook sized computers for $699.

"This is the first year where really small notebooks are available at more widely affordable prices," say Douglas Krone, CEO of Dynamism.com, a U.S. reseller that serves up the latest gadgets from Japan and Korea to electronics enthusiasts.

"For the price of a high-end phone, you can now buy a pocketable laptop," he added.

Reynolds says 2008 is the year that high-definition (HD) video production should finally get in the hands of mainstream consumers.

That's because affordable camcorders that can shoot high-definition TV-quality video have fallen in price to as little as $400, which should help vastly accelerate the market for homemade HD video.

(Editing by Brian Moss)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Miss France keeps crown after photo controversy...

Reuters

Fri Dec 28, 2007. PARIS (Reuters) - Miss France 2008 has kept her crown, contest organizers said Friday, after a row over suggestive photographs that saw members of parliament, a bishop and the minister for overseas territories spring to her defense.

However she will not be able to compete in the Miss World or Miss Universe contests, where she will be replaced by Miss New Caledonia.

Valerie Begue, 22, from Reunion, won the beauty pageant, which is taken more seriously in France than in many other countries, in a televised ceremony on December 8.

But her reign threatened to be short-lived after a magazine published a risque series of photographs in which she was seen lying in a crucifixion-like pose while wearing a bikini or licking condensed milk in a suggestive manner.

The rules of the contest forbid participants from appearing in nude or provocative photographs and the head of the Miss France contest, Genevieve de Fontenay, called for Begue to renounce her title when the pictures emerged.

Begue refused, saying the photographs, taken three years ago, had been published without her consent and in the face of wide public support, the organizers relented.

"We felt that, as she had been elected in front of 9 million television viewers, faced with this public that had never seen the photographs, we couldn't take the title from her," de Fontenay told a news conference in Paris.

The affair stirred a major controversy in Reunion, the French Indian Ocean department (region) that Begue comes from, and several members of parliament and local politicians spoke out in her defense.

The bishop of Saint-Denis de La Reunion said that while the photograph of Begue lying on a cross like Christ insulted Christians, it was a "youthful error" and he refused to be used as an ally by those seeking to strip her of her title.

Christian Estrosi, minister for overseas territories, also defended Begue on French radio during the week and he welcomed the decision.

"Reunion, beyond any political and social differences has defended Valerie Begue with heart and talent but has also defended the image of a courageous, determined and successful Reunion," he said in a statement.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau, Writing by James Mackenzie)

Neuroticism hard on the heart: study...

Health Reuters

Wed Dec 26, 2007. NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Neurotic people are more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, while being extroverted seems to protect people from dying from respiratory illness, UK researchers report based on a study they conducted.

Neuroticism -- a proclivity toward worry and emotional ups and downs -- is related to anxiety and depression, which could help explain the relationship with heart trouble, note Beverly A. Shipley of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and colleagues in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

Reports on the health effects of both neuroticism and extroversion, which is the tendency to be friendly and outgoing -- have been mixed, the researchers note. To clarify the relationship, Shipley and her team looked at mortality in 5,424 middle-aged adults who were followed for 21 years after they completed personality tests.

While an increasing degree of neuroticism was tied to an increased risk of death from any cause, the relationship disappeared after the researchers adjusted for other relevant factors such as body weight, alcohol use, social class and education.

Risk of death from cardiovascular disease also climbed as a person's level of neuroticism rose, and the relationship remained significant after statistical adjustment.

Extraversion reduced a person's likelihood of dying from respiratory disease, but had no other effects on mortality.

Based on the findings, the researchers conclude, the neuroticism-cardiovascular disease death link could be related to genes, but socioeconomic and behavioral factors are apt to be involved as well.

SOURCE: Psychosomatic Medicine, November-December 2007.

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserved

Brothers hand out Christmas cash at mall

Reuters

Wed Dec 26, 2007. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shoppers got a Christmas Eve surprise on Monday when a pair of brothers handed out $100 bills at a mall on Long Island, New York.

Police responded to a call from security staff at the Sunrise Mall in the town of Massapequa, concerned that the give-away might create a scene or involve counterfeit bills.

Instead, officers found a simple case of Christmas charity where calm prevailed as the businessmen, aged 45 and 41, gave out the money at the entrance to the shopping center, police said.

"These two brothers say they do this every year. They say they've been blessed and just want to give something back," Detective Sergeant Anthony Repalone said.

"They gave it to people who they thought needed it. The people were very appreciative."

Police declined to identify the brothers, respecting their wish to remain anonymous.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by John O'Callaghan)

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserved

Referee pulls out red card, then a gun....

Wed Dec 26, 2007. "KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian referee took out his gun and fired warning shots in the air after a local soccer match turned unruly following the suspension of a player, a newspaper said Tuesday. The referee, who was also a policeman, ran to...";

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian referee took out his gun and fired warning shots in the air after a local soccer match turned unruly following the suspension of a player, a newspaper said Tuesday.

The referee, who was also a policeman, ran to his patrol car to get his gun after players mobbed him for showing the red-card to one of them, the New Straits Times said.

"We are investigating as to whether the policeman was justified in taking out his firearm and discharging it, and also why he had it with him during the match," it quoted Hussin Ismail, police chief in the southern Johor state, as saying.

The policemen was taken into custody for suspected misuse of firearms.
Five players, aged between 23 and 40, were also being held for questioning and could be charged for rioting, the paper said.

(Reporting by Jalil Hamid, Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserved

Student wins lottery, leaves school...

Reuters

Thu Dec 27, 2007. BEIJING (Reuters) - A college student withdrew from school after winning the 5 million yuan ($683,000) jackpot in a lottery in China' eastern city of Nanjing, local media reported on Thursday.

The second-year student at the Jiangsu Maritime Institute, identified by the nickname Yong to protect his identity, was the sole first-prize winner in the "Double Colour Ball" issued by the China Welfare Lottery on Tuesday, the Beijing News said.

"After winning the lottery, Yong told his roommates that he would share 2,000 yuan with each of them," it added.

Yong informed school authorities of his winnings, and had returned home.

"We are not sure if he will return to school, but we hope he will eventually finish his education," the paper quoted Yong's teacher as saying.

The Communist Party abolished lotteries in China after taking power in 1949, denouncing them as a practice of decadent capitalists. But the country launched state-run lotteries in 1987 amid market-oriented reforms.

Lotteries have become increasingly popular both among the poor and the newly rich in China, where many forms of gambling are banned. Per capita income in China's urban areas is roughly $1,900 a year and about $600 a year in rural areas.

Lottery-related crimes have been on the rise as well, and underground lottery schemes have become rampant across the country in recent years, bankrupting many families.

Last month, China set up its first help centre for lottery addicts, offering counseling and legal assistance.

(Reporting by Beijing newsroom, Editing by Ken Wills and Sanjeev Miglani)

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserve

Student wins lottery, leaves school...

Reuters

Thu Dec 27, 2007. BEIJING (Reuters) - A college student withdrew from school after winning the 5 million yuan ($683,000) jackpot in a lottery in China' eastern city of Nanjing, local media reported on Thursday.

The second-year student at the Jiangsu Maritime Institute, identified by the nickname Yong to protect his identity, was the sole first-prize winner in the "Double Colour Ball" issued by the China Welfare Lottery on Tuesday, the Beijing News said.

"After winning the lottery, Yong told his roommates that he would share 2,000 yuan with each of them," it added.

Yong informed school authorities of his winnings, and had returned home.

"We are not sure if he will return to school, but we hope he will eventually finish his education," the paper quoted Yong's teacher as saying.

The Communist Party abolished lotteries in China after taking power in 1949, denouncing them as a practice of decadent capitalists. But the country launched state-run lotteries in 1987 amid market-oriented reforms.

Lotteries have become increasingly popular both among the poor and the newly rich in China, where many forms of gambling are banned. Per capita income in China's urban areas is roughly $1,900 a year and about $600 a year in rural areas.

Lottery-related crimes have been on the rise as well, and underground lottery schemes have become rampant across the country in recent years, bankrupting many families.

Last month, China set up its first help centre for lottery addicts, offering counseling and legal assistance.

(Reporting by Beijing newsroom, Editing by Ken Wills and Sanjeev Miglani)

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserve

Coffee, tea linked to lower risk of kidney cancer...

Health Reuters

Mon Dec 24, 2007. (Reuters Health) - Coffee and tea lovers may have a slightly reduced risk of developing kidney cancer, research hints.

The findings, based on an analysis of 13 previous studies, suggest that coffee and tea may be protective against kidney cancer, while milk, soda and juice seem to have no effect one way or the other.

Across the studies, people who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were 16 percent less likely to develop kidney cancer than those who averaged less than a cup per day. And those who sipped just one 8-ounce cup of tea each day had a 15 percent lower risk of the disease than non-drinkers.

The findings appear in the International Journal of Cancer.

While the study cannot show that coffee or tea directly lower kidney cancer risk, there are reasons why the beverages could be beneficial, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Jung Eun Lee of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

For example, they explain, coffee and tea may increase the body's sensitivity to the blood-sugar-regulating hormone insulin, and researchers suspect that insulin levels over time may affect kidney cancer risk.

Coffee and tea also contain antioxidant compounds that may help protect cells in the kidney from cancer-promoting damage, the researchers point out.

For their study, the investigators combined the results of 13 long-term studies that included a total of 530,469 women and 244,483 men. Each study collected information on participants' diets at the outset and then followed them for seven to 20 years.

Coffee and tea consumption were linked to a lower risk of kidney cancer even when the researchers accounted for a number of factors known to affect people's risk of the disease -- such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure.

"Our results suggest that coffee and tea consumption may be associated with a modestly lower risk of (kidney) cancer, whereas intakes of milk, juice and soda were not associated with risk," Lee's team writes.

They say more studies are needed to understand why coffee and tea might be protective against the disease.

SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer, November 15, 2007.

Revealed: The seven great medical myths...

Reuters

Mon Dec 24, 2007.LONDON (Reuters) - Reading in dim light won't damage your eyes, you don't need eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy and shaving your legs won't make the hair grow back faster.

These well-worn theories are among seven "medical myths" exposed in a paper published Friday in the British Medical Journal, which traditionally carries light-hearted features in its Christmas edition. Two U.S. researchers took seven common beliefs and searched the archives for evidence to support them.

Despite frequent mentions in the popular press of the need to drink eight glasses of water, they found no scientific basis for the claim.

The complete lack of evidence has been recorded in a study published the American Journal of Psychology, they said.

The other six "myths" are:

* Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight

The majority of eye experts believe it is unlikely to do any permanent damage, but it may make you squint, blink more and have trouble focusing, the researchers said.

* Shaving makes hair grow back faster or coarser.

It has no effect on the thickness or rate of hair regrowth, studies say. But stubble lacks the finer taper of unshaven hair, giving the impression of coarseness.

* Eating turkey makes you drowsy

It does contain an amino acid called tryptophan that is involved in sleep and mood control. But turkey has no more of the acid than chicken or minced beef. Eating lots of food and drink at Christmas are probably the real cause of sleepiness.

* We use only 10 percent of our brains

This myth arose as early as 1907 but imaging shows no area of the brain is silent or completely inactive.

* Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death

This idea may stem from ghoulish novels. The researchers said the skin dries out and retracts after death, giving the appearance of longer hair or nails.

* Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals

Despite widespread concerns, studies have found minimal interference with medical equipment.

The research was conducted by Aaron Carroll, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Regenstrief Institute, Indianapolis, and Rachel Vreeman, fellow in children's health services research at Indiana University School of Medicine.

(Editing by Steve Addison and Paul Casciato)

Microsoft's piracy fight gains momentum in China...

Technology Reuters

Fri Dec 21, 2007. SHANGHAI/SEATTLE (Reuters) - In his first official visit to the United States in 2006, China President Hu Jintao arrived for dinner at Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman Bill Gates' house with a gift for the host.

Shortly before Hu's Seattle visit, the Chinese government had issued a decree requiring all personal computers manufactured in China to come with a licensed operating system before leaving the factory gates.

Now, nearly two years later, that gift keeps giving. The software company co-founded by Gates is seeing the benefits of more stringent intellectual property policies in China, with a decline in piracy rates and improved results at its mainstay Windows division.

China is by no means the worst offender.

More than a dozen other countries -- including Indonesia and Ukraine -- have higher software piracy rates, according to a study from the Business Software Alliance and IDC. None of those countries, however, offers the promise of China, the world's second-largest PC market, growing at more than 10 percent a year.

China's piracy rates, the level of pirated software in a particular country, dropped to 82 percent in 2006 from 90 percent in 2004, the study said.

"In China, where piracy is the way things are done with respect to software, any marginal money Microsoft gets back is super important," said Kim Caughey, portfolio manager and senior analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group.

Reducing software piracy and selling more expensive versions of Windows are ways for Microsoft to generate sales growth that exceeds the overall PC market, a task made difficult since its global market share already tops 90 percent.

Microsoft said improvements in fighting piracy accounted for about $164 million of the $822 million revenue gain at the Windows client unit in the quarter ended September.

Windows is Microsoft's most lucrative product with an operating margin exceeding 80 percent.

"Every pirated copy that Microsoft converts into a paying customer all flows to the bottom line," said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran. "It could have a dramatic effect on its profit margin."

PIRATES AT WORK

Despite the progress being made, pirated software is still readily available on the streets of Shanghai.

Fuzhou Road in the former British concession near the Bund, an area famous for bookstores and art boutiques, is also locally renowned as a place to buy pirate PCs and software.

The small alleyways running off Fuzhou Road host dozens of pirate PC shops, which usually have no signs. Locals ask passersby if they want to buy "cheap" PCs or software before leading potential customers to the store.

Once a computer is assembled, the customer is given a list of pirated software options, ranging from Microsoft Office to Adobe Systems' (ADBE.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Photoshop. If a software program is not there, it can be ordered.

The government decree requiring PC makers to pre-install an operating system sought to address the problem of Chinese consumers buying computers without software and then opting to buy less expensive counterfeit software.

Beijing went one step further, calling on any Chinese companies wanting to do business with the government to run properly licensed software.

"The whole situation is heading in the right direction," said Hao Jing, spokeswoman at Founder Technology Group (600601.SS: Quote, Profile, Research), China's second-largest PC maker. "Pre-installing genuine copyrighted operating systems has become an industry standard."

Earlier this year, the Chinese police and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation seized $500 million worth of pirated software, including counterfeit Microsoft and Symantec (SYMC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) products, from a Chinese piracy syndicate.

"We've seen in the last two years significant emphasis on legitimate intellectual property use in China," said Cori Hartje, director of Microsoft's genuine software initiative.

Microsoft said it needs to do more in educating consumers to the benefits of getting genuine software like access to software updates and better security. Improved technology also serves to deter piracy.

Windows Vista, the latest version of its operating system, has been more effective in preventing piracy. Microsoft has said piracy rates for Vista are half the level of its predecessor Windows XP.

In Vista's first major update due out next year, Microsoft said it plans to close two primary methods used by software pirates to illegally copy Windows Vista.

Passport office in need of spellcheck...

Reuters

Thu Dec 20, 2007. (Reuters) - Israel's national passport office could have done with a good spellchecker.

First it stamped "Ministry of the Intrerior" in English in new batches of passports. Then it advised Israelis of the misspelling in a jumbled newspaper advertisement Thursday that only compounded the mistake.

"Due to a technical error in some of the Ministry's stampsthe document you received may have been stampedwith an flawed stamp," the Interior Ministry said in a notice in the English-language Jerusalem Post.

The newspaper said its advertising department was responsible for mistakes in the ministry's ad, which urged people with the faulty passports to apply for new documents.

(Writing by Jeffrey Heller, Editing by Peter Millership)

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserved

Disco babes bring Saturday night fever to Sundays...

Reuters

Itsy-bitsy pink bikini gets serviceman jail...

Reuters

Tue Dec 18, 2007 SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singapore national serviceman who sashayed into a lift early one morning wearing only a pink bikini has been handed a day's jail and a S$11,000 ($7,529) fine by a court in the city-state, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

Tan Wen Zhong, 21, admitted to five charges, including "outraging the modesty" of the woman who shared the lift with him and "fraudulent possession of women's underwear," Singapore's Straits Times reported.

The paper said a subsequent police search of his apartment turned up 46 pieces of women's underwear and bikinis as well as four obscene films.

Tan, who was completing Singapore's mandatory national service when he committed the offence in April, was also accused of grabbing a 23-year-old woman's buttocks a year ago and of shoplifting a pair of sunglasses two years ago.

In mitigation, Tan's lawyer said his client had been badly affected by his parents' divorce during his
formative years.

(Reporting by Sebastian Tong; Editing by Jerry Norton)

Author of nasty letters from Santa sought...

Reuters

Fri Dec 14, 2007. OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's post office and police are trying to track down a "rogue elf" who wrote obscene letters to children on behalf of Santa Claus, a newspaper reported on Friday.

The Ottawa Citizen said at least 10 nasty letters had been delivered to little girls and boys in Ottawa who wrote to Santa this year care of the North Pole, which has a special H0H 0H0 Canadian postal code. Return letters from Santa are in fact written by an 11,000-strong army of Canada Post employees and volunteers.

"We firmly believe there is just one rogue elf out there," a Canada Post spokeswoman told the paper.

Canada Post's popular "Write to Santa" program -- which last year delivered more than a million letters to children in Canada and around the world -- has been shut down in Ottawa until the offender is caught.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Peter Galloway

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserve

Export and Backup All Emails from Outlook to Your Gmail Account...

Digital Inspiration Technology Guide Written by Amit

Friday, December 14, 2007. Export and Backup All Emails from Outlook to Your Gmail Account. Sachin writes - “I have few thousand email messages inside Microsoft Outlook (a pst file) organized in various folders. I know it is possible to download emails from Gmail to Outlook using POP3 or IMAP but is the reverse path possible.”

Sachin is looking for a trick to archive all Outlook email messages (and folders) to his online Gmail account for two reasons - one is secure backup and two, he will be able to access his old emails from any computer.

Solution: It is quite easy to transfer Outlook emails to your Gmail mailbox. Here’s a step by step guide:

Step 1: Enable IMAP in your Gmail account and then configure Outlook (or Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail) to sync with your Gmail address via IMAP. Read this guide.

Step 2: Import your Outlook PST file into a Personal folder that is different from your default Gmail Inbox.

To import, click File -> Import And Export -> Import from another program or file. -> Next -> Personal Folder File (.pst) -> Next.

Select the PST file that contains your email, then pick the email folders that you want to import in Outlook and click Finish.

Step 3: Select the Personal folders that you want to backup online and copy them your Gmail Folder in Outlook (see screenshot).

In the Folder List, right-click the folder you want to copy and click Copy Folder name. Click the Gmail Folder in Outlook to copy that folder in that location. You can repeat the steps as needed for other folders.

That’s it. Your Outlook email will soon become available inside your online Gmail Inbox.

Caution: The migration from Outlook to Gmail can take a long time if you have very large Outlook pst file or if your internet connection speed is slow. Therefore, consider removing all large emails before moving them to your Gmail via IMAP.

Related: Is Your Outlook+Gmail Slow ?

Prisoner gets compensation over cockroaches...

Tue Dec 11, 2007. JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli judge has ordered the country's prison authority to pay an inmate over $1,000 in compensation after he complained of having to share a cell with cockroaches.

Mordechai Yehudai filed a lawsuit complaining of poor hygiene, a lack of fresh air, broken windows and inmates who smoke in a handful of cells, a spokeswoman for the Israel Prisons Service said.

"The Prisons Service mistreated the plaintiff in a number of ways, including ... broken windows, cockroaches as well as incarceration with smokers," judge Irit Cohen wrote in her verdict, according to newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

The spokeswoman said the inmate's cell would be cleaned up. Yehudai has been held in three different prisons and has had complaints about conditions in all of them.

"Prisoners have the right to sue us whenever they see fit and we comply with the court's rulings," she said.

© Reuters2007All rights reserved

Teen caller tricks White House...

Reuters

Wed Dec 12, 2007. REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - A teen-ager says he convinced the White House he was Iceland's president and managed to schedule a call with George W. Bush but was found out before he got to talk to the U.S. president.

"My call was transferred around a few times until I got hold of Bush's secretary and managed to book a call meeting with Bush the following Monday evening," Vifill Atlason, 16, told Reuters.

The teen-ager posed as Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson when he made the call on Dec 1.

Icelandic police turned up at his door two days later -- the day of the planned call -- and took him in for questioning.

"They told me the CIA had called the National Commissioner of the Icelandic police and asked if the police could try and find out where I received that phone number from," said Atlason.

The teen-ager said he was unable to recall where he discovered the telephone number for the White House.

"I know I've had it on my phone card for at least 4 years now and that an Icelandic friend gave it to me, but I don't remember who," he said.

At a White House news conference Monday, Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said her understanding was that Atlason had called a public line "that anybody can call," according to a transcript.

Local police confirmed the National Security Unit at the national police headquarters had asked them to bring Atlason in.

Jon Bjartmarz, Chief Superintendent at Iceland's national police headquarters, said Icelandic police had not spoken to their U.S. counterparts about the matter. He declined to say how police were tipped off about Atlason's call.

"As far as we're concerned, there will not be any further investigation, and I don't know if the American government is taking any action because of this," he said.

Prostitute auctions sex for charity....

Reuters

Thu Nov 29, 2007 (Reuters) - A Chilean prostitute has auctioned 27 hours of sex to raise money for the country's largest charity during an annual fund-raising campaign.

Maria Carolina became an overnight celebrity in the conservative Roman Catholic country, making news headlines and appearing on talk shows since she made her unusual donation to the televised charity event, which runs for 27 hours starting on Friday evening.

"I've already auctioned off the 27 hours of love," Maria Carolina told Reuters on Wednesday, saying she had raised about $4,000. "One of my clients already paid. It seemed like a good deed to him."

Adult prostitution is legal in Chile. Chile's two-day Teleton fundraiser is endorsed by television stars and aims to raise funds for poor, disabled children.

Speaking about Maria Carolina's unusual donation, campaign organizer Mario Kreutzberger said he would not encourage "immoral" activities, but said he would accept her pledge.

"Everyone can do what they want, but if someone tells me that they'll do something immoral ... I'm not going to encourage it," Kreutzberger, who as "Don Francisco" hosts the long-running "Sabado Gigante" program on the U.S. Spanish-language Univision network, told local media.

But Maria Carolina, who advertises her services on the Internet, defended her money-raising scheme.

"There are people who are going to be donating money that's a lot more questionable than mine," she said. "The only thing I did was publicize it."

(Reporting by Antonio de la Jara; writing by Lisa Yulkowski; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

© Reuters2007All rights reserved

Windows XP outshines Vista in benchmarking test...

Tech News on ZDNet By Suzanne Tindal, ZDNet Australia

Nov 27, 2007 New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.

Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that although the company understood the interest in the service packs, they are "still in development" and will continue to evolve before their release. "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs," the spokesperson said.

If SP1 does not evolve sufficiently, it could be another setback for Vista, with many businesses waiting to adopt the operating system until the service pack is released.

A year after its launch, only 13 percent of businesses have adopted Vista, according to a survey of IT professionals.

Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company would have liked. "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista," corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent interview at Microsoft's partner conference in Denver.

Microsoft has not done enough to make users aware of the benefits of Vista, NPD analyst Chris Swenson said at the conference. "The problem is that there are a lot of complex new features in Vista, and you need to educate consumers about them...much like Apple educating the masses about the possibilities of the iPhone or focusing on a single feature or benefit of the Mac OS in the Mac-versus-PC commercials. Microsoft should be educating the masses about the various new features in a heavy rotation of Vista in TV, radio, and print ads. But the volume of ads (for Vista) has paled in comparison to the ads run for XP."

XP has proved to be more popular than its younger sibling, with the first six months of U.S. retail sales of box copies of Vista 59.7 percent below those of XP's in the equivalent period after its release.

Microsoft has had to allow PC manufacturers to continue to sell XP on new PCs, setting a deadline for the last sale at January 31. However, the pressure from manufacturers and consumers has been so great that Microsoft has been forced to extend the deadline another five months, until June.

According to Microsoft, sales of Vista have been picking up, with the software giant reporting 88 million units sold.

German Police Unable To Crack Skype Protocol....

Soft32.com News

Published on Software, Security, Communications, Internet November 26, 2007, 8:13 am by Adrian Flucuş, Soft32

Officials in the German police, have complained that Skype calls cannot be intercepted and listen to, which makes the police work more difficult.

Everybody knows about phone tapping. Altough most of us have heard about it from the movies, we all know that this is what the police does in order to find out what are the bad men’s intentions and eventually send them to jail based on those evidence. Well, those days might be over as the VoIP calls are becoming more frequent even among the bad guys.

According to German president of police, Joerg Ziercke, the combination of strong encryption and the methods inherent to VoIP makes wiretapping impossible for the police. “We can’t decipher it. That’s why we’re talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it’s been decrypted,” Ziercke told Reuters.

Skype doesn’t use an open-source protocol for its VoIP service so the way the voice is encrypted before transmission is not available to the public. Also, the information is send over public networks in a series of small packets which take different routes over the network thus making them impossible to track.

Ziercke also told that the Police also needs legal means to perform online scanning of remote hard-drives. This would allow the authorities to install trojan-horse spyware programs remotely on targeted computers and find any information that is relevant for the investigation. Currently, the german law prohibits the use of spyware programs in police investigation.

Microsoft takes steps to prevent another WGA meltdown...

Computerworld

By: Gregg Keizer 28/11/2007.

WGA project manager says his team will be better prepared for future outages. Three months after a major failure of Microsoft's anticounterfeit system fingered legitimate Windows XP and Vista users as pirates, a senior project manager has spelled out the steps his team has taken to prevent a repeat.

Alex Kochis, the senior project manager for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), used a company blog to outline new processes that have been put in place, including drills that test the WGA group's response to an outage like the one in late August.

"We've revamped the monitoring that is used to track what's happening within our server infrastructure so that we can identify potential problems faster, ideally before any customer gets impacted," Kochis said. "[And] since August, we have conducted more than a dozen 'fire-drills' designed to improve our ability to respond to issues affecting customers or that could impact the quality of the service."

Those drills, Kochis said, have ranged from pre-announced simulations to surprise alerts that test a specific scenario. "The team is now better prepared overall to take the right action and take it quickly," he promised.

In late August, servers operating the WGA validation system went dark for about 19 hours. Customers who tried to validate their copy of Windows -- a Microsoft requirement for both XP and Vista -- during the blackout were pegged as pirates; Vista owners found parts of the operating system had been disabled, including its Aero graphical interface.

Several days after the weekend meltdown, Microsoft blamed preproduction code for the snafu and said that a rollback to earlier versions of the server software didn't fix the problem immediately, as expected.

Microsoft, however, downplayed the incident, claiming that fewer than 12,000 PCs had been affected. The company's support forums, however, hinted that the problem was much more widespread: one message thread had collected over 450 messages within two days and had been viewed by 45,000 people.

One analyst gave Kochis' status report a mixed grade.

"I was looking for two things from Microsoft, and the first was that they would acknowledge that there was a failure," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. "If they couldn't do that, it would show a real lack of insight into the severity of the problem. But they called it an 'outage' [here], which I don't think they had actually admitted before."

Cherry was more than on the mark. While Kochis called the incident a "temporary service outage" in his newest post, three months ago, he denied that the word applied. "It's important to clarify that this event was not an outage," he said on August 29, five days after the servers went down.

"Second," said Cherry, "I wondered if Microsoft would acknowledge that failures are going to happen, that something's going to go wrong no matter how many drills they have. And when that happens, what would they do? But I don't see anything like that here."

Kochis said the WGA team has also changed the way it updates the validation service's servers, beefed up free WGA phone support to round-the-clock coverage and improved the speed of delivery of "get-legal" kits to users who discover they're running counterfeit software, but he made no mention of any modifications to the antipiracy program itself, how it's implemented or how users are handled when it determines they're using fake copies of Windows.

"They should make it so that any impact [of an outage] is on Microsoft and not on the customer," Cherry said.

Back in August, Kochis claimed that Microsoft's policy was to do just that -- err on the side of the customer -- but he contended that the outage had been an anomaly. "Our system is designed to default to genuine if the service is disrupted or unavailable," Kochis said then. "If our servers are down, your system will pass validation every time. [But] this event was not the same as an outage, because in this case the trusted source of validations itself responded incorrectly."

That's not good enough, according to Cherry. "If users can't validate, for whatever reason, Microsoft should leave them in their current state, but not invalidate them, or validate them, at least until the next check," he said.

"You have to take the utmost care before you deny something to someone that they have purchased in good faith," he concluded.

Plasma vs. LCD or is it Myths vs Lies...

CNET Home audio & video Forums

by gabereyes - 14/11/07 12:51

So I got bored and did a google search on Plasma vs LCD.

Wow I never heard so much crap in my life and its still all about bashing plasma, One said that plasma bulbs dim over time, what bulb are they talking about I didnt know plasma TV's used a bulb, a second one stated that most people can hang there own LCD TV's but should get a professional to hang there plasma because they are harder to install, they use the same type of mount and mount the same way, Ive mounted both and its the same drill both ways.

Then everyone talks about room lighting, and how a plasma is only good in low lighting, what is low lighting? is it only one window and one light 60watts only, the fact is every person has had a CRT TV in the room at one time and plasma and LCD are brighter then a CRT TV and no TV type look good in direct light, everyone says that they have a bright room but I have never went to a house that was brighter then a retail store, so what is all this low lighting only all about.

Next is the glare issue dont buy a plasma because of the glare, but its ok to buy an LCD with a glassy type screen, most living rooms have one or two walls with windows so you should have a 25%-50% chance of having glare from a window, so why is 80%-90% of people concerned about it? I have no idea.
but what about my lamp? well lets think about it you are watching TV not you lamp so maybe you should move it.

and the list goes on and on.
plasma's uses to much power.
they run hot.
they are not as sharp.
they burn in.
they dont last very long.
they are too heavy.
you cant lay them down.
they leak gas.
you have to refill the gases.
you have to replace the bulbs.
my friend said dont buy them.

So I dicided to make a list for LCD TV's
dont buy an LCD because
they leak liquid
you have to replace the crystals
they are to lite and can fall over
they cant do a deep black level
they dont have good colors
they loss image quality at an angle
you have to replace all the bulbs at one time.
they have motion blur
the lie about there contrast or dynamic contrast
the lie about there refresh rate and viewing angle's
they are only good for still images not motion
they are harder to install
they dont work in cold climates

and the name is too long, Liquid crystal display, and the new light-emitting diode Liquid crystal display, wow that a hard to say fast five times.

I think this should be a simple thing
do you want a TV with a good black level and colors look at a TV with a glossy screen (LCD or Plasma), if you dont want glare look at a TV with out a glossy screen but it will most likely not get good blacks and/or colors.

Or size could make the choice easier, if you need a 37 inch or smaller, and if you need a 58inch or bigger.

Everything else they say about LCD and Plasma is just really not that important and/or BS.

Sorry I needed to vent on this subject.

Thanks for reading
Gabe

Message was edited by: admin to correct spelling in subject line

Bank manager gives woman loans for sex...

Reuters

Fri Nov 9, 2007 8:24am BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bank manager gave loans to a woman for sex and then embezzled thousands of euros to buy the silence of her relatives, authorities said on Thursday.

When the man realized he could not offer the jobless woman a loan because of her poor credit history, he offered to lend her the money personally in return for sexual favors, said a spokesman for a court in the southern town of Tuebingen.

The 31-year-old then stole the money from the bank. The pair continued their arrangement for the next three years.

In total, the man diverted some 520,000 euros ($760,000) from clients' accounts, of which he gave about 70,000 euros to the woman, and kept 40,000 euros for himself.

The biggest chunk of the cash went to her relatives who were blackmailing the bank manager, a married man with children. The manager had himself told her cousin about the sex deal.

"As incredible as it sounds, that's what he told us," the Tuebingen court spokesman said. "The cousin was suspicious and she called him to ask how the woman had got a loan."

The court said bank officials uncovered the ruse after probing irregularities linked to the man's handling of other loans. The court gave the man, who confessed, a jail sentence of three years and nine months.

© Reuters2007All rights reserved

Online paedophile ring busted by Aust cops...

ZDNet Australia

06 November 2007. An investigation instigated by Australian authorities and followed up by 18 European police forces has led to more than 90 arrests in eight countries, authorities reported today.

Operation Koala led to 40 arrests in Britain, 21 in France, 11 in Spain, eight in Sweden, five in Belgium, four in Italy, two in Iceland and one in Denmark, the officials from the Eurojust prosecutor's organisation said.

The arrests included not only the network's operators but also its clients who viewed sexually graphic images of children on the Internet.

"The inquiry is ongoing; it will result in further arrests," Eurojust president Michael Kennedy said.

Jim Gamble, from the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre, said 46 people had been arrested in the past five months in the UK as part of the operation, and further arrests were expected.

Eurojust and the European police organisation, Europol, coordinated the efforts to crack the group.

The main suspect was nabbed in Italy with 70,000 euros (AU$110,000) on him and large quantities of paedophilic materials.

Italian police arrested him while he was trying to leave for Ukraine, where he has two homes -- and where the vast majority of the victims are from.

Often young girls aged nine to 16, the victims were lured into a Ukrainian studio where photo shoots would become increasingly explicit and end with the victims being sexually abused, the investigation found.

Europol said 21 of the 23 victims were from Ukraine.

The other two were Belgian girls whose father forced them to take sexually explicit pictures. He was arrested last year.

The network's 2,500 clients could access 1.5 million paedophilic images by Internet, the inquiry showed. Some figured among those arrested, Eurojust official Michele Coninsx said.

"Customers come from all layers of society -- lawyers, school teachers, students, people with no jobs," Coninsx said.

The inquiry began a year ago, after Australian authorities alerted their Belgian counterparts of filmed images showing the rape of two Belgian girls.

Officials later tracked down the Italian producer and found he offered 30-minute to hour-long pornographic movies, among other services, to Internet clients worldwide.

"To fill the gap between the 2,500 clients and 92 arrests is a matter of time," Eurojust's Kennedy said.

The findings were announced as paedophilia topped the agenda of a separate, four-day Interpol meeting that began today in Morocco.

© 2007 Australian Associated Press Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors