Global Economics-18

Romam Fil is moving rapidly through a dense patch of forest. Every few metres he pauses and points to edible plants and roots that the Jarai people of north eastern Cambodia have relied on for generations.

Then suddenly the trees come to an end. In front of us is a vast clearing, the red earth churned up and dotted with tree stumps.

Beyond that, stretching as far as we can see is a rubber plantation, the young trees are still thin and spindly and sway gently in the breeze.

This is the scene of a battle the Jarai people of Kong Yu village have been fighting, and losing for the past five years.

It started when local officials called a meeting and said they needed some of the forest.

"They told us they wanted to give part of our land to disabled soldiers," said Mr Fil.

"They said if you don't give us the land, we'll take it. So we agreed to give them a small area, just 50 hectares."

The villagers say they were then invited to a party and when many of them were drunk they were asked to put their thumbprints on documents.

"Most of us don't know how to read or write, and the chiefs did not explain what the thumbprints were for," said Mr Fil.

The villagers later found they had signed away more than 400 hectares - and the land was not for disabled soldiers, but a private company who began making way for the rubber plantation.

"They cleared areas where our people had their farms, and they destroyed our burial ground," said Mr Fil.

Lawyers for the owner of the plantation company, a powerful businesswoman called Keat Kolney, insist she bought the land legally.

But groups advocating for local land rights in Cambodia say part of the reason she was able to acquire the land is because she is married to a senior official in the ministry of land management.

It is not the only case where those closely connected to senior government figures are alleged to have taken land from poor Cambodians.

Five years ago, in north-western Pursat province a large grazing area was turned into an economic land concession - land the government grants to private firms for investment in large-scale agriculture.

"They just came one day with their bulldozers and started clearing the land straight away," said Chamran, a farmer in the area.

"So we organised a demonstration but then a grenade was thrown among us - we don't know who by. Nine people were injured. The military police pointed a gun in my stomach and said if you hold another demonstration we will kill you."

Under the law, land concessions granted by the government should not exceed 10,000 hectares but the Pheapimex concession, although much of it is so far inactive, covers 300,000 hectares.

Global Witness, an environmental pressure group, estimates Pheapimex now controls 7% of Cambodia's land area.

The organisation says the company's owners, a prominent senator and his wife, have strong links to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Pheapimex did not reply to requests for a response to these allegations, but the Cambodian government maintains that the process by which private companies acquire land is both transparent and legal.

"The requirement is not to be close to the prime minister," said Phay Siphan, spokesman for Cambodia's Council of Ministers.

"The requirement is that you have enough capital, you have the technology to develop the land."

Cambodia's recent stability, following decades of violence, has attracted a rapid boom in tourism and a race among foreign and local entrepreneurs for prime real estate on which to build new resorts.

And rights groups estimate that 30,000 people have been forcibly evicted from their homes in the capital Phnom Penh over the past five years to make way for new developments.

The roots of the problem date back to the 1970s when the brutal Khmer Rouge regime abolished private property and destroyed many title documents.

A land law passed in 2001 recognises the rights of people who have lived on land without dispute for five years or more, but in many cases it is not being implemented.

The UN estimates hundreds of thousands of Cambodians are now affected by land disputes.

Beginning in the 1990s, large swathes of the country's rich forests were bought up by logging companies.

Now sizeable mining and gas concessions are also being granted to private enterprises.

Eleanor Nichol of Global Witness believes individual members of the Cambodian government, right up to the highest levels, are benefiting.

"Essentially what we're dealing with here is a kleptocratic state which is using the country and its assets as their own personal slush fund," she said.

"They could accuse [the government of] anything they like. Cambodia operates under a modernised state of law. Everyone is together under one law,” said Phay Siphan.

Back in Kong Yu village, the Jarai people are waiting to hear the result of suit filed in a local court to try to get their land back.

‘Arroyo overspent by P1.6B in foreign travels since 2003’

Venezuelan police have fired tear gas to disperse rival groups of protesters who clashed in Caracas over plans to reform the nation's educational system.

The scuffles broke outside parliament as lawmakers debated a bill that would broaden state control over schools.

President Hugo Chavez backs the bill that requires curricula to be based on the ideals espoused by the 19th-Century independence hero Simon Bolivar.

"They don't use the word 'socialism', but that's what they want to introduce in our schools," Ray Gonzalez, who opposes the bill, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

Supporters of the legislation reject such allegations, saying the document stipulates that teaching should be "open to all forms of thinking".

Meanwhile, a local Caracas newspaper that a group of its reporters had been attacked by pro-government supporters.

The newspaper said the attack happened as the journalists were handing out leaflets against the proposed bill.

The document orders the country's public and private schools to base their teaching on "the Bolivarian Doctrine" - a reference to Simon Bolivar's ideals, such as Latin American unity and national self-determination. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8200828.stm>

Early modern humans in South Africa were using "heat treatment" to improve their stone tools about 72,000 years ago, according to new research.

This technique may bridge a gap between the use of fire to cook food 800,000 years ago and the production of ceramics 10,000 years ago.

Evidence for this innovation was found at Pinnacle Point, a Middle Stone Age site on the South African coast.

"We found that as early as 165,000 years ago, but definitely 72,000 years ago, people are doing more than just using fires for cooking, heat, light or protection," lead researcher Kyle Brown, from Arizona State University, US, told BBC News.

"One of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we can take the things in our landscape and adapt them. We can engineer them to fit our needs."

Evidence suggests that about 800,000 years ago, people were able to control fire to cook their food.

By about 10,000 years ago, humans were using fire to make ceramics and to extract iron and copper from their ores.

Until now, there was nothing to link these two different uses of fire, the researchers explained.

"These early modern humans seem to have been able to make a big mental jump," Kyle Brown commented.

The heat treatment makes the stones more brittle, making it easier to chop off clean flakes. This produces a fine cutting edge - like a modern day razor blade - good for cutting animal skins or making clothing.

However, the breakable edge is not very strong, making it unsuitable for use as a chopping tool in wood working, digging or stone shaping.

The stone tools found at the Pinnacle Point site were made of silcrete, a hard and resistant material that looks like another mineral called quartzite - but is not as coarse.

When the archaeologists searched a 50km radius around the site, they could not find the right type of stone required to recreate the ancient tools.

The stones had a different colour and texture; they were a deeper red, with a high gloss and were more brittle.

Mr Brown explained: "What we had spent six years looking for had always been right under our noses.

"Taking that step of putting the stone in the fire and pulling it out… I could imagine what the first people must have thought when they did that and realised that what they just did was going to change their lives."

Mr Brown, who is an experimental archaeologist, tried to recreate the "heat treatment technology" for himself.

"The fire requires a significant amount of fuel, which you need to gather in advance, together with the stones," he explained.

"Then you bury the stone in sand two centimetres below the fire, and, gradually, over 12 hours, build up the fire. You keep it at about 300 degrees for roughly five hours. Then you gradually let it cool down on its own so the stone does not crack.

"This can take 10 or even 20 hours. So you need to schedule your time, knowing that you need to be around the fire for 40 hours."

"As you can imagine, there are several ways in which materials can be unintentionally burnt on an archaeological site."

At around the same time as the tools were being fired in South Africa, humans had begun harvesting shellfish, making pigments and grinding ochre.

"These are highly sophisticated people who spread from Africa to eventually colonise the rest of the world," Mr Brown explained.

Heat treatment technology appears to have been known about 165,000 years ago, but it was not used routinely until about 70,000 years ago. It is unclear why the technology suddenly took off.

"Perhaps," the archaeologist speculated, "heat treatment could have become popular because good silcrete stones were scarce. Or it could have been a way to produce high quality material to be traded for other goods". <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8195664.stm>

Algeria is changing its weekend, a transition that has caused considerable confusion and given public sector workers a three-day break.

The country has had a Thursday-Friday weekend since 1976, but is now aligning itself with other states in the region that have a Friday-Saturday weekend.

But there are also concerns that with Thursday no longer a day off, working hours and some trade will be lost.

There is considerable confusion about how the country will adjust to the new weekend, the BBC's Mohammed Arezki Himeur reports from Algiers.

Banks, shops, and services such as medical or dental practices have always remained open and widely used on Thursdays, and were already in the habit of closing on Friday and Saturday.

Now they are worried that - even if they open on Saturday - they will lose up to a day of business as people will observe the Muslim holy day on a Friday and then stay at home until the new week starts, our correspondent reports.

He says that to compensate, some are considering opening on Friday morning, before the day's prayers.

There are also worries that the change will lead to a rise in absenteeism, as employees take time off to pay bills or complete other chores during the working week, our correspondent adds.

Public sector workers took advantage of the transition to the new weekend this week by taking three days off.

Algeria established the Thursday-Friday weekend in 1976 in what was seen as an assertion of Algeria's post-colonial identity as it tried to distinguish itself from the West.

Business people who deal with international markets or companies have long complained that the country has lost hundreds of millions of dollars each year because of the practice.

Often restricted to just three normal working days a week, they had campaigned for the Friday-Saturday weekend that is observed in many other Arab countries. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8198365.stm>

Hurricanes in the Atlantic are more frequent than at any time in the last 1,000 years, according to research just published in the journal Nature.

Scientists examined sediments left by hurricanes that crossed the coast in North America and the Caribbean.

The record suggests modern hurricane activity is unusual - though it might have been even higher 1,000 years ago.

The possible influence of climate change on hurricanes has been a controversial topic for several years.

Study leader Michael Mann from Penn State University believes that while not providing a definitive answer, this work does add a useful piece to the puzzle.

"It's been hotly debated, and various teams using different computer models have come up with different answers," he told BBC News.

"I would argue that this study presents some useful palaeoclimatic data points."

Hurricanes strike land with winds blowing at up to 300km per hour - strong enough to pick up sand and earth from the shore and carry it inland.

In places where there is a lagoon behind the shoreline, this leads to "overwash" - material from the shore being deposited in the lagoon, where it forms a layer in the sediment.

Researchers have studied eight such lagoons on shores where Atlantic hurricanes regularly make landfall - seven around the US mainland and one in Puerto Rico.

Over time, Dr Mann's team believes, the number of hurricanes making landfall on these sites will be approximately proportional to the total number of hurricanes formed - so these zones provide a long-term record of how hurricane frequency has changed over the centuries.

The last decade has seen an average of 17 hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic - earlier in the century, half that number were recorded.

But current levels were matched and perhaps exceeded during the Mediaeval Climate Anomaly (also known as the Mediaeval Warm Period) about 1,000 years ago.

"I think if there's one standout result (from this study), it's that the high storm counts we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years could have been matched or even exceeded in past periods," commented Julian Heming, a tropical storm specialist from the UK Met Office who was not involved in the new research.

"So it's worth feeding into the debate about whether what we're seeing now is exceptional or something related to multi-decadal or even multi-centennial variability; and it does tell us that the levels we're seeing at the moment are within the bounds of uncertainty."

Dr Mann's team also used a pre-existing computer model of hurricane generation to estimate activity over the same 1,500-year period.

The model includes three factors known to be important in determining hurricane formation: sea surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, the El Nino/La Nina cycle in the eastern Pacific, and another natural climatic cycle, the North Atlantic Oscillation.

This analysis suggests, Dr Mann argues, that the hurricane peak 1,000 years ago and the current high activity are not produced by identical sets of circumstances.

Then, he says, an extended period of La Nina conditions in the Pacific - which aid hurricane formation - co-incided with relatively warm conditions in the Atlantic.

Now, the high number is simply driven by warming waters in the Atlantic - which is projected to increase in the coming decades.

"Even though the levels of activity are similar (between 1,000 years ago and now), the factors behind that are different," said Dr Mann.

"The implication is that if everything else is equal - and we don't know that about El Nino - then warming of the tropical Atlantic should lead to increasing levels of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity."<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8197191.stm>

A stark warning about the finances of the games industry has been aired at the Edinburgh Interactive conference.

The sector had suffered "significant disruption" to its business model, Edward Williams, from BMO Capital Markets told the industry gathering.

"For Western publishers, profitability hasn't grown at all in the past few years and that's before we take 2009 into account," he said.

What makes the difference between Western firms and Chinese developers was the way they went about getting products to players.

Western publishers, said Mr Williams, still relied on the traditional develop methods of putting a game on a DVD and then selling that through retail channels.

Chinese developers focussed primarily on the PC market and used direct download, rather than retail stores, to get games to consumers.

Those Chinese developers were also helped by the low number of console users in South East Asia (other than Japan) which meant developers there did not have to pay royalties to console makers. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8201332.stm>

The economy of Hong Kong has emerged from recession, posting growth of 3.3% in the three months from April to June.

The seasonally adjusted figures were better than had been expected and the government has raised its forecast for growth in the whole year.

It followed the emergence from recession of Singapore, which grew an annualised 20.7% in the second quarter.

Hong Kong's growth was negative for four consecutive quarters, starting in the second quarter of 2008.

The growth of 3.3% compares with a revised contraction of 4.3% for the first three months of 2009.

The government was previously expecting the economy to contract by between 5.5% and 6.5% in the whole of 2009, and is now predicting a contraction of between 3.5% and 4.5%.

"The GDP data was much better than we expected, partly because the exports were better and partly because of a pick-up in private consumption," said Paul Tang, chief economist at Bank of East Asia. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8201056.stm>

A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently.

East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.

In the research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.

The work published in Current Biology journal challenges the idea facial expressions are universally understood.

In the study, East Asians were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust" as "anger".

The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.

East Asians participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth.

Co-author, Dr Rachael Jack, from the University of Glasgow, said: "Interestingly, although the eye region is ambiguous, subjects tended to bias their judgements towards less socially-threatening emotions - surprise rather than fear, for example.

"This perhaps highlights cultural differences when it comes to the social acceptability of emotions."

The team showed 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians a set of standardised images depicting the seven main facial expressions: happy, sad, neutral, angry, disgusted, fearful and surprised.

They used eye movement trackers to monitor where the participants were looking when interpreting the expressions.

A computer programme given the same information from the eyes as the East Asian observers was similarly unable to distinguish between the emotions of disgust and anger, and fear and surprise.

The paper states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal facial expressions of fear and disgust.

It concluded that information from the eyes is often ambiguous and confusing in these expressions, with consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalisation.

The researchers also point out that this difference in perception is reflected in the differences between Eastern and Western emoticons - the typographical characters used to convey emotions in e-mails.

East West differences in Emoticons
Emotion	West	East
'Happy'	:-)	(^_^)
'Sad'	:-(	(;_;) or (T_T)
'Surprise'	:-o	(o.o)

India's unsustainable lesson

It comes from an unexpected source: but Nasa's just-released finding that water tables in the northwest of India are falling by about 4cm (1.6in) per year is a striking microcosm of the unsustainable strain that modern societies are putting on the Earth's natural resources.

This is a region that is home to more than 100 million people.

And they're not using the water for long, languid baths or spraying it on manicured lawns; more than 90% is used simply to grow the staple crops that feed Delhi and the regions around.

More mouths to feed means a demand for higher yields, which implies irrigation - mining the water at a rate faster than nature replaces it - a process that is, by definition, unsustainable.

The Indian government's latest assessment of the environment nationwide [pdf link] - also released this week - shows that water is just one of the resources being depleted as the population expands (tripling in 50 years, according to government statistics) and the economy gathers pace.

Nearly half of the land surface is degraded in some way, air pollution in increasing, some unique species and ecosystems are threatened by development, waste from uncontrolled urbanisation is emerging as a health issue - so the litany goes on.

And climate change now threatens to exacerbate many of the existing problems - progressively eroding the Himalayan glaciers that provide water for so much of the country (for more than a billion people across South and East Asia), reducing crop yields, salinating aquifers around the coast, increasing the need for energy.

Water, energy and food security are a triple whammy of major issues for the years ahead, the government concludes.

Can technology help? In principle the storage function of disappearing glaciers could be replaced by reservoirs; agriculture's need for water could be curtailed through such approaches as laser precision ground levelling and direct dry seeding; switching to cleaner fuels (which has already happened to some extent) could purge city air of its pollutants.

But coming up in the rear - as the government report acknowledges - is the juggernaut of a growing human population.

It now stands at just over one billion and is forecast to increase to 1.6 billion by 2050, which the report describes as "hinting towards an alarming situation".

India's looming multi-faceted environmental crisis is not unique. Globally, relentlessly, too many people are chasing too few resources; and now comes research showing that after decades of decline, fertility rates in many developed countries are rising.

For the first time in 40 years, for example, French couples are having on average two children each; what this all means for the much-cherished "demographic transition" can only be guessed at.

Next week, another major report will show that India's water problems are increasingly replicated in other parts of the world - a growing global thirst, and a dwindling supply.

Nearly 40 years ago, governments, through the UN's first environment summit, acknowledged that the world was on a path of unsustainable development and vowed to do something about it.

What marks would you give them - and, indeed, the whole human species - for success? <http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/>

The Australian government has proposed a budget to implement a long-standing plan to cull the country's camels by shooting them.

Animal welfare supporters reject the plan, but people sharing the outback with the camels call them a menace.

Unlike the kangaroo or koala, the camel is not an animal automatically associated with Australia.

They were first brought there in the mid-19th Century to help explorers traverse the desert.

That is roughly one camel for every 20 people, and the population is set to double over the next decade unless some form of action is taken.

In remote communities they are seen as a troublesome menace, trampling vegetation and occasionally ripping up water pipes, as they search for food and water.

So the Australian government has set aside $16m (£9.7m) to contain the problem and one proposal is to shoot the camels from helicopters or on foot.

Experts in Vietnam have warned that the Vietnamese could be eating a number of wild species into extinction.

The chairman of the Vietnam Zoology Association said animals at risk included the rhinoceros, the white-handed gibbon, the civet and the tapir.

He said that demand for wild animal meat had spread from mountain communities to rich urban areas.

Some 200 species are traded in Vietnam - 80 of them rare, according to the Thanhmien News.

The most common ones include snakes, monitor lizards, pangolins, turtles, wild cats, tigers, leopards, bears, elephants, wild boars, deer, monkeys, chamois and porcupines, the newspaper said.

It quoted Prof Dang Huy Huynh, the Vietnam Zoology Association chairman, as saying that wildlife meat was now served in many Vietnamese restaurants and resorts.

An estimated 3,400 tonnes of wild meat - or a million individual animals - are consumed each year, 18% of them illegally, an official from Vietnam's national assembly said.

More than 66% of poached wildlife is used for food, 32% is exported, and a small number of animals are used for pets and medicinal purposes, another official was quoted as saying.

The experts were speaking at a conference for discussing ways to protect Vietnam's wildlife and natural resources.

It was the first time an advising body to the ruling communist party has been involved in efforts to raise awareness about the illegal wildlife trade, according to Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network that took part. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8199997.stm>

India and the 10-country South East Asian bloc Asean have signed a free trade agreement after more than six years of talks.

Tariffs on electronics, chemicals, machinery and textiles will be reduced and eventually eliminated.

But India has been allowed to continue protecting its farm sector, and has excluded 489 products, including rubber, from the trade deal.

A smaller list of products, described as "highly sensitive", such as palm oil and coffee, will see tariffs reduced over about 10 years, but only modestly.

The deal was signed in Bangkok at a meeting of economic ministers of the Association of South East Asian Nations - made up of Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Asean is India's fourth-largest trading partner. The value of trade between the two was $47bn (£28bn) in 2008.

Secretary-general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Amit Mitra, said the agreement, which comes into effect form January next year, was "a win-win for both sides".

A court in South Korea has convicted the former chairman of the electronics giant, Samsung, of a breach of trust over fraudulent bond deals.

The case centred on charges that Lee issued bonds at below the market price, which led to problems at a Samsung owned company.

Lee stepped down as chairman of Samsung in 2007 after being indicted for tax evasion.

The breach of trust case was being heard for a second time after the Supreme Court in May ordered the Seoul High Court to reconsider an earlier verdict.

Lee's bonds issues were apparently aimed at transferring management control to his only son Lee Jae-yong.

The Seoul High Court sentenced Lee to three years in prison and fined him 110 billion won ($89.2 million) but the suspension of the sentence means he will not go to jail if he stays out of trouble for five years.

The 67-year-old Lee, wearing a black suit, listened quietly to the verdict and then left the courtroom.

One of South Korea's richest people, Lee led Samsung for 20 years following the death of his father, the conglomerate's founder.

Samsung is best-known for its electronics unit, but it is also one of the world's largest shipbuilders.

With a global workforce of 254,000, it enjoyed annual profits of more than $12.9bn (£6.45bn) in 2006 and accounts for nearly a fifth of all South Korean exports. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8200842.stm>

The ousted prime minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands has hit out at the UK government for imposing direct rule amid corruption allegations.

But premier Galmo Williams said UK Foreign Office findings of "systematic corruption" must also reflect badly on the territory's British governor.

Power was transferred to the governor on Friday, when the Caribbean colony's administration was suspended.

The UK government had been threatening action for several months after an inquiry commissioned by the Foreign Office returned a damning verdict.

It examined the actions of the Turks' Cabinet and Assembly and found "information in abundance pointing to a high probability of systematic corruption or serious dishonesty".

It also concluded there were "clear signs of political amorality and immaturity and of a general administrative incompetence".

However, Mr Williams told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We have a British governor who's responsible for good governance; who's responsible for civil servants."

This made the British government equally responsible for systemic weaknesses, he said, adding that his administration could have worked alongside the UK to address the problems.

"It's a very sad day for us in Turks and Caicos to see... that democracy has been taken away from the citizens," Mr Williams said.

He said his administration had not been given the same opportunities as British politicians, who were being allowed to put right the issues exposed by Parliament's expenses scandal. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8202823.stm>

Bolivia and Peru are not always on the best of terms but their latest row is not of a political nature - it's down to the choice of a dress.

For her appearance at the Miss Universe contest in the Bahamas this month, Miss Peru has chosen a dress inspired by an Andean dance popular in both nations.

Bolivia has accused the Miss Peru organisers of unfairly appropriating Bolivian cultural heritage.

It has prompted angry newspaper editorials and indignant blogs, and Bolivian Culture Minister Pablo Groux was quoted in Peruvian newspapers as saying that Bolivia would sue.

Peru, meanwhile, coolly maintains the dance is part of the culture of the Altiplano, or high plateau, which straddles the two countries.

In Peru La Diablada, or the Devil's Dance, is played at the carnival of Puno in the south of the country.

In Bolivia, it is the main dance at the carnival in the city of Oruro which has been given special cultural heritage status by the UN.

In both countries the dance depicts the fight between good and evil, embodied by the Archangel Saint Michael who battles the devils representing the seven deadly sins.

Healthcare around the world

Bereaved families will have to pay 3% interest on late payments of inheritance tax from next month, HM Revenue and Customs has confirmed.

Such payments are due within six months of a death. Interest on late payments, which roughly followed Bank of England base rate, fell to zero in March.

Meanwhile, the Treasury will set the interest rate it pays when too much tax has been levied at 0.5%.

Inheritance tax is levied on estates, including assets such as property, possessions, money and investments, worth a total of more than £325,000.

In a statement, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) said: "Interest is not a penalty but compensation for tax paid late.

"We are streamlining the rates charged and paid for interest to simplify and make things fairer for customers.

"This has been subject to extensive consultation over the last 18 months and has been largely welcomed by customer groups and their representatives.

"The alignment of rates that will take place in September will mean that all tax paid late is subject to interest at the same rate, so ensuring all taxpayers are treated equally.

"And in the interest of fairness we will also be introducing a repayment interest floor, to ensure that any taxpayer overpaying tax will receive interest." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8202770.stm>

Students are not benefiting from the extra money brought in by tuition fees, according to a leading academic.

Lectures are overcrowded and teaching hours limited, despite the extra income, says Manchester University vice-chancellor Alan Gilbert.

He says institutions' income is not sufficient to deal with rising student numbers and research demands.

The government insists record investment has left the university sector "stronger than ever".

It had been hoped that the tuition fees introduced three years ago would generate valuable extra income for universities.

But according to Professor Gilbert, the additional money has failed to keep pace with the job which higher education is now expected to do.

He told BBC Radio 4's Beyond Westminster programme that universities had been fighting a long battle to maintain standards.

"I just think it is important for us to face up to the fact that higher education in the UK is under immense cost pressures, and that we have had decades of being asked to do more for less."

He admitted the student experience at his own institution was unsatisfactory, although efforts were being made to improve it.

"I am not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate education in the university," he said.

"We think it is too impersonal, it is not sufficiently interactive, that the curriculum has been developed a little incrementally and has not been profoundly thought through.

In a recent hard-hitting report, the Commons universities select committee accused universities across England of failing to safeguard educational standards.

The committee heard from students who felt they were not getting value for money in return for the annual tuition fees they now pay.

A recent audit of the quality of education carried out by the University of Bristol's student union found cause for concern.

"The amount of contact hours in terms of tutorials - especially in arts, humanities and social science - are not what they should be," said student union president Owen Peachey.

Colonial, a property lender based in Montgomery, Alabama, had about $25bn of assets, said the US regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC).

The agency approved the sale of Colonial's $20bn in deposits to BB&T, a North Carolina-based bank. BB&T will also buy $22bn of Colonial's assets.

The collapse is expected to cost the FDIC about $2.8bn. The total number of bank failures is now over 70 in 2009.

US retail sales unexpectedly fell in July, following two months of rises, as job security fears appear to have once again knocked consumer spending.

Sales declined 0.1% last month, following a revised 0.8% increase in June, the official figures from the Commerce Department showed.

The figures disappointed analysts, who had been expecting on average a rise of 0.7% in overall sales last month.

Car sales saw the biggest rise in July, adding 2.4% as they benefited from the government's "cash for clunkers" scrappage scheme.

The weak retail sales figures came a week after other official data showed that the US economy lost an additional 247,000 jobs in July, although this was less than had been expected.

"The US consumer remains weak," said Jennifer Lee, an economist at BMO Capital Markets.

The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that the US recession now appeared to be over.

Its comments came after other official figures showed that US worker productivity had increased at its fastest annual pace for nearly six years in the second quarter of 2009, while US exports rose in June. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8199881.stm>

Sales of video games and consoles in the US fell to $848.9m (£512.2m) in July, down 29% from $1.19bn in the same month last year.

It was the fifth consecutive monthly decline in the figures from the research group NPD.

Nintendo's Sports Resort game for the Wii console was the month's best-seller with 508,000 copies bought.

The Wii remained the top-selling console, followed by Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3.

About 250,000 Wii consoles were sold, which was roughly half the level from the same month last year.

There is optimism that sales will be boosted in the second half of the year by sales of new titles such as The Beatles: Rock Band, and the latest games in the Halo and Madden football series.

"I think the silver lining is, we're in the trough of the decline," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan.

A Canadian woman, stranded in Kenya for three months because officials said she did not resemble her passport photo, has arrived home in Toronto.

Canadian consular officials accused her of being an imposter, voided her passport and asked Kenyan officials to prosecute her.

The results of a DNA test finally proved her identity, clearing the way for her return to Canada.

Family members and a throng of reporters were waiting for Suaad Hagi Mohamud as she arrived back in Canada.

The lawyer for the the 31-year-old Somalian-born Canadian woman said that she intended to sue the governments of Canada and Kenya for their alleged roles in her detention.

Ms Mohamud's ordeal began in May when she tried to leave Kenya after visiting her mother there.

Canadian consular staff in Nairobi maintained that she was not who she claimed to be, even when Ms Mohamud handed over several other forms of identification.

It was not until a DNA test confirmed her identity on Monday that Canadian officials prepared emergency travel documents so that she could return to Toronto.

But opposition politicians and other critics say Suaad Mohamad's case raises serious questions about the willingness of Canadian officials to protect their citizens who get into difficulties abroad. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8203857.stm>

Women who drink moderate amounts of beer may be strengthening their bones, according to Spanish researchers.

Their study of almost 1,700 women, published in the journal Nutrition, found bone density was better in regular drinkers than non-drinkers.

But the team added that plant hormones in the beer rather than the alcohol may be responsible for the effects.

Experts urged caution, warning that drinking more than two units of alcohol a day was known to harm bone health.

Osteoporosis is a common problem for post-menopausal women, increasing the risk of disabling bone fractures later in life.

Scientists have been hunting for supplements which might help women maintain the strength of bones into old age.

The study authors, from the University of Extremadura in Caceres, said they did not recommend anyone drank beer to boost bone health, but said that ingredients of beer called phytoestrogens deserved further research.

They recruited volunteers with an average age of 48, and used ultrasound to measure the density of bones in their fingers.

The results were cross checked against factors such as their weight, age and alcohol use.

Women defined as "light" or "moderate" beer drinkers, covering consumption of up to 280 grams of alcohol a week - equivalent to up to five units a day, were found to have superior bone density to non-drinkers.

The findings echo those from earlier research projects, including one conducted at St Thomas' Hospital in London, which suggested that drinking an average of eight units a week of alcohol could be beneficial.

However, experts were quick to point out that the line between a "healthy" dose of alcohol and a damaging one might be very fine.

At 35 units a week, the upper limit of the "moderate" alcohol consumption defined by the study is double the recommended maximum for women.

Dr Claire Bowring, of the UK's National Osteoporosis Society, said that while the findings mirrored previous studies, it would not be recommending any woman to increase her alcohol consumption as a result.

"While low quantities of alcohol may appear to have bone density benefits, higher intakes have been shown to decrease bone strength, with an alcohol intake of more than two units per day actually increasing the risk of breaking a bone.

As international carmakers scramble to find a suitable alternative to petrol vehicles, Bolivia hopes its lithium reserves could be harnessed to provide an energy source - and hold the key to new-found wealth and political influence. Peter Day has been to the Uyuni salt flats.

The sky is an infinite blue. The land is perfectly flat, and dazzlingly white, stretching to a line of distant volcanoes.

And here is the boss of a potentially huge project that Bolivia is pinning great hopes on, showing me his highly decorative chickens.

Twelve thousand feet (3,700m) up here in the high Andean plains of south western Bolivia, the subzero nights are bitingly cold, but the days are hot even in the middle of winter.

The unclouded sun is reflected upwards by the largest salt flats in the world, the Salar de Uyuni.

It is a spectacular desert. For decades now it has drawn young and hardy international backpackers to endure the dusty hours of jolting journeying by bus and train and 4x4 vehicles into a vast nowhere.

But now this arduous journey is being made by other people - engineers and businessmen from some of the world's largest mining and chemical companies.

They are here every week. They are drawn to the salt flats by what lies metres below the ice-like crust of salt and mud.

Down there is a great reserve of brine, and contained in the salty liquid, the largest deposits in the world of the lightest metal, lithium.

For years lithium has been used for specialist purposes such as ceramics, and pills for depression.

Over the past few years I have driven or been driven in several rechargeable electric cars.

Vehicle manufacturers old and new are rushing to build substitutes for the internal combustion engine.

Great hopes are being placed on batteries with this very light lithium at their core, much quicker to charge and discharge power (so they say) than heavy conventional batteries.

So if plug-in cars catch on, lithium may be one of the vital raw materials for the auto revolution.

And here in the Salar de Uyuni the experts think that the difficult and poverty-stricken country of Bolivia holds 50% of the world's total supplies of lithium, contained in these vast hidden lakes of brine.

That is why Marcelo Castro, the man with the chickens (and rabbits too, he wants to be self-sufficient in this desolate place) is building a pilot plant to learn how to get the lithium out of these salt flats, and then how to evaporate the brine and separate the precious metal from the salt.

To outsiders it is a very curious country, the second poorest state in South America after Guyana, a society riven by fault lines - great gaps between rich and poor, big geographical differences between the lush east and the towering Andes in the west, and sharp racial differences between successful former Europeans and a majority of indigenous peoples.

These last are the ones who voted the first indigenous president into office in 2006. Evo Morales has moved quickly to shift power in favour of the peoples he comes from.

He has nationalised the commanding heights of the economy including oil and natural gas. And he has moved to break up big land estates.

The president (with a kind of Beatles hairstyle) has also pronounced that the new windfall, raw material lithium, should not be exploited by predator overseas capitalist multinationals, but developed by the state for the benefit of Bolivia.

This brings great pride to a local campaigner I heard from in the town nearest the deposits.

Wearing her characteristic native hat, based on the British bowler imported more than 100 years ago, Domitila Machaca told me how the local people had marched hundreds of miles to the capital La Paz in the 1990s to block the foreign exploitation of the salt flats; and she grinned toothily when she praised the Morales tactics of homemade development of these riches.

Later, still slowed down by the altitude, I wheezed slightly breathlessly in La Paz as I put it to the mining minister Luis Echazu that Bolivia was taking a big risk if it really wants to be (as some have said) "the Saudi Arabia of lithium".

"Oh no," he replied, "we want to go further than that - we don't want merely to process the metal, we want to make the batteries from it as well."

But that will take money and expertise, which Bolivia will have to import, and multinational companies are wary of socialist countries with big state ambitions.

Meanwhile, back at the salt flats, the plant construction manager Marcelo Castro gave me lunch - a vast egg sandwich made from one of the eggs from his chickens - delicious.

Despite the hardships, he was very proud, he said, to be taking part in this great Bolivian project.

If the world takes to the electric car, and if lithium really is the metal that will power it, and if the Bolivians can deliver, we may soon be hearing quite a lot more about the great Uyuni salt flats.

Nearly everyone who lives in Kandahar city, the capital of Afghanistan's southern province by the same name, has acquaintances among the local Taliban militants.

"We are all people from the same area, and Taliban also have good intelligence inside the city, so they know who's who," he says.

Mr Anis has been hosting music shows for two Kandahar-based television stations for some time, and is now setting up the city's first audio-visual studios where television plays would be produced.

Taliban consider music and television viewing as un-Islamic, and have often spoken to him by telephone about his plans, without overtly threatening him.

"Their message is clear, though, that I should give up my plans, but producing television dramas has been my dream since I was living in the Pakistani city of Quetta as a refugee," he says.

Kandahar, once a major centre of arts and culture in Afghanistan, has many dreamers like Mr Anis.

In the soothing, air-conditioned atmosphere of Kandahar Coffee Shop - a trendy café with a small library and a billiards parlour - a group of old and young people sit quietly around a table, watching two of them play a game of chess.

One of the players is Naimatullah Zalmay, the head of Kandahar's chess players' association.

He has been playing chess for 35 years, he says, and is among the 14-member national chess team recently selected to play in international competitions.

But like music and TV, chess is also considered un-Islamic by the Taliban and the country's powerful conservative clerics.

"The Taliban's position on the issue is well known, but what do you do when a high official close to our democratic president opposes our request for funds on grounds that we are indulging in un-Islamic activities?"

He doesn't name names, but one of his colleagues later tells me he was referring to Fazl Hadi Shinwari, chief justice of Afghanistan until August 2006 and still considered close to President Hamid Karzai.

During the seven years of Mr Karzai's rule, Kandahar city has developed by leaps and bounds.

Multi-storey trade centres have appeared all over the place, roads and streets have been built, and most commercial streets now have wide, tiled pavements.

But patrols by the US and Canadian armoured cars frequently force civilian traffic off the road, creating dejection and fear among people.

A bomb-shaped "spy" balloon that hangs high over the city and is said to carry US surveillance cameras is a constant reminder that things outside the city are also not satisfactory.

The governor of Kandahar province, Tooryalai Wesa, admits that his government has not been able to break the Taliban stranglehold in some parts of the province.

The Taliban have comparatively greater freedom to operate in the provinces of Helmand to the west, Uruzgan to the north and Zabul to the northeast of Kandahar.

For now, the most immediate target of the Taliban is to prevent people across this region from turning out to vote in presidential elections, due on 20 August.

If they succeed, it will dent the credibility of the election and may spiral into a political crisis for the government, analysts say.

Abdullah Abdali, a television actor, has been doing government-sponsored stage shows for public awareness in some of the most dangerous corners of the south.

"Going there was no problem, but once we had appeared on the stage, we felt exposed and did not feel safe to return to Kandahar by road," he says.

"We waited there three days for a US forces convoy to roll out to Kandahar, and followed it."

Early this month, he did a six-day election awareness show in Qalat, the capital of Zabul, and again took safety precautions on the return journey.

"We told our hosts - the district election commission - that we were staying the night and would leave for Kandahar the next day. Then we went out, quietly jumped into our van and left. You never know who will inform the Taliban that we are coming." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8203830.stm>

Finnish police say a ransom demand has been made for a missing Russian-manned cargo vessel, the Arctic Sea.

The demand - which has not been confirmed as genuine - was put to the ship's Finnish owners, Finland's National Bureau of Investigation said.

A Finnish radio station said it had been told the 15 crew members' lives would be at risk if it was not paid.

Mystery surrounds the location of the Arctic Sea, last sighted in the Bay of Biscay on 30 July.

The 4,000-tonne Maltese-flagged vessel, which had been carrying timber, went off radar after passing through the English Channel.

There has been huge speculation over the reason for the ship's disappearance, ranging from pirates to a mafia dispute to a commercial quarrel.

The matter is being jointly investigated by Finnish, Maltese and Swedish police.

A Finnish police spokesman, Mikko Paatero, said that he was unable at this stage to say whether the ransom demand made to the ship's owners, Solchart Management, was genuine.

"The police cannot really speculate," he said. "We need to base our investigation on existing criminal reports, and in this case there are reports of hijacking and aggravated blackmail."

Markku Ranta-Aho, of the National Bureau of Investigation, told Finland's YLE national radio that the demand was for "a largish amount of money".

He said he would not give further details or say where the ship might be located for fear of endangering the crew.

Cape Verde officials say they think the ship is 400 nautical miles (740km) off one of the islands.

But the Russian ambassador to Cape Verde, Alexander Karpushin, said he had not been officially informed of any sighting and told Russia's RAI news agency the information was "not true".

A source linked to the Cape Verde coastguard told AFP news agency the Arctic Sea was outside its territorial waters.

The coastguard was informing maritime officials about the ship's movements, the source said, adding: "When the ship enters our jurisdiction, we will decide in consultation with our partners what actions to take."

Some reports have put the ship 400 nautical miles north of the Cape Verdean island of Sao Vicente.

French intelligence said it had found a ship matching the Arctic Sea's description in the area. The Portuguese military would not confirm one of its planes had flown over the vessel.

Carrying timber reportedly worth $1.8m (£1.1m), the Arctic Sea sailed from Finland and had been scheduled to dock in the Algerian port of Bejaia on 4 August.

The crew reported being boarded by up to 10 armed men as the ship sailed through the Baltic Sea on 24 July, but the intruders were reported to have left the vessel on an inflatable boat after 12 hours.

There are also reports of the ship being attacked a second time off the Portuguese coast. However the ship's operators said they had no knowledge of the incident and Portugal said the ship was never in its territorial waters.

The last known contact with the crew was when the Arctic Sea reported to British maritime authorities as it passed through the Dover Strait.

On Friday, European Union Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said: "From information currently available it would seem that these acts, such as they have been reported, have nothing in common with 'traditional' acts of piracy or armed robbery at sea." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8203210.stm>

During the last century Poland endured both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism with atrocities on a colossal scale. Many decades later there are still those who remain determined to see compensation paid and in Krakow Nick Higham has been following a baroness's quest for justice.

In September 1942 the Nazis arrived in the village of Ustrzyki Dolne in south-east Poland.

Eugeniusz Waniek remembered the day vividly. The Nazis rounded up all the Jews and ordered them to hand over their valuables. He saw two women who refused shot in the street.

Then his Jewish neighbour Hella came and thrust a small bundle into his hand. It contained some silver cutlery, wrapped up in a linen tablecloth.

Mr Waniek had grown up with Hella and her sister and brothers. They were the children of a prosperous local man, Moshe Fraenkel, who owned an oil refinery.

Mr Waniek went on to become an art teacher in Krakow, but in 1939, he caught pneumonia and went home to Ustrzyki to convalesce.

He was still there when the Nazi-Soviet pact divided Poland into two occupied zones. Eugeniusz and his wife found themselves trapped in their village.

After Hella was taken away, Eugeniusz wrapped her silver in newspaper and buried it in the garden. And there it stayed for the next three years.

That might have been the end of the story but last year, a neighbour read in the newspaper about an English Baroness, Ruth Deech, who was threatening to sue the Polish government to recover properties seized from her family - the Fraenkels - in a place called Ustrzyki Dolne.

Last September Baroness Deech paid a visit to Eugeniusz Waniek, now aged 101. Hella Fraenkel had been her aunt.

Mr Waniek told his story and the silver and the linen tablecloth were handed over.

Photographs taken at the time show him sitting, frail and shrunken, in an armchair in his apartment. An audio recording captures his voice, quavering with age and emotion.

Eugeniusz Waniek has since died, but earlier this month Baroness Deech went back to Krakow to collect the cutlery from the flat of a friend, the distinguished historian Norman Davis.

There were 16 items in all, mostly tiny knives and forks for eating cakes or fruit, plus a larger two-pronged fork and the detached handle of a knife.

They were, she said, the only thing she had ever touched which had also been touched by those she had lost, and so they had immense symbolic value.

But Baroness Deech's campaign to recover her family's other belongings - or secure compensation for their loss - looks less likely to have a happy outcome.

Poland still has no law covering the restitution of private property seized by the Nazis or nationalised by the communists.

Historian Norman Davies says tens of millions of people in Poland were killed, deported, displaced or resettled during those eras, and millions lost their property.

They include his own wife Maria. Her parents abandoned their home in what is now part of Ukraine in 1944, when they fled before the advancing Red Army.

They ended up in a small town outside Krakow where they took shelter in an empty house and where Maria was born. That house, she says, may well have belonged to Jews deported in the Holocaust.

Norman Davies says the sheer scale of the problem and the cost of compensation - estimated a year ago at more than $8bn (£5bn) - has terrified successive Polish governments.

Several draft restitution laws have been published. None has been enacted. What is more, many younger Poles see no reason why their taxes should pay for the errors of previous generations.

To argue that all Poles were victims does not absolve the country of responsibilities others have embraced, she says.

If Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania and many other countries can offer restitution, why not Poland? No-one, she says, is asking for full compensation.

The sofa won't fit into the living room. There's not enough room for children to play in the kitchen as you cook. And where's the recycling bin meant to go?

These are some of the complaints from residents of new-build developments surveyed by Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

The floor area and room sizes are the smallest in Europe - the average room in a newly built dwelling in France is 26.9 square metres, compared with 15.8 square metres in the UK - and, the graph below shows how British new-builds are less than half the size of those in the United States and Australia. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8201900.stm>

President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan has apologised for the slow official response to Typhoon Morakot.

"We could have done better and we could have been faster," he told reporters one week after the typhoon struck.

Hundreds of people are still trapped by mudslides and floods. More than 120 have been confirmed dead.

Families of nearly 400 people feared dead in the village of Hsiaolin returned there on Saturday to the site to grieve for their loved ones.

Relatives were seen calling out to the buried victims and burning incense, while TV pictures showed one man being restrained as he tried to bang his head against a wall.

Some families have demanded to have the bodies of victims dug up, but many believe digging them out would harm them, a local official told the BBC.

The official said the wishes of relatives would be respected and the site would be turned into a memorial park. Survivors would be housed elsewhere.

"We could have done better and we could have been faster. But we weren't better and we weren't faster," President Ma told reporters in Nantou county, one of the areas hit by the typhoon, the AFP news agency reports.

They have been struggling across shattered roads and collapsed bridges to reach stranded communities.

Critics say the authorities were too slow to realise the magnitude of the emergency, while some of those stranded have said they have received no help for days and have been short of food and water.

Many have been waiting for days at the rescue operation centre in Qishan for news of relatives missing since the typhoon struck.

Officials says rescue teams have been hampered by sustained rains in the centre and south of the island and a badly damaged road network which means many villages can only be accessed by air.

Many of the worst-affected villages are inhabited by aborigines, who farm the mountainous terrain.

Thousands more people are believed to be stranded in remote settlements elsewhere in southern and central Taiwan.

The government has requested from foreign countries prefabricated buildings to help house those left homeless by the flooding and supplies of disinfectant, to try to prevent the spread of disease.

In China, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan, companies and charities have raised more than 100m yuan ($14.6m) in donations, the official Xinhua news agency has reported. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8202821.stm>

US President Barack Obama has stepped up his drive for healthcare reform, attacking excessive premiums charged by insurance companies.

Speaking in Colorado, Mr Obama said that under his plan companies would not be allowed to charge exorbitant fees nor place arbitrary limits on coverage.

Extending coverage to the millions of Americans who lack health insurance is Mr Obama's top priority for 2009.

Some 46 million people in America currently do not have health insurance, and rising healthcare costs are a major contributing factor to America's spiralling budget deficit. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8203781.stm>

Malacañang cancels plan to purchase P1.2-B jet

Amid criticism of her travel expenses and questions about her personal wealth, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Sunday ordered the cancellation of the planned purchase of a presidential jet that would have cost the government at least P1.2 billion.

Press Secretary Cerge Remonde, who announced Mrs. Arroyo’s directive, said the President wants to end the furor over her travel expenses.

Mrs. Arroyo has been criticized since last week over her “lavish" overseas dinners and alleged overspending on foreign trips.

GMANews.TV on Thursday first ran the story on the Office of the President's (OP) advertisement for bidding for an aircraft that had to be “factory new, twin-engine (turbo-fan engines), pressurized, fitted with auxiliary power unit, and with VIP cabin configuration."

The ad invited suppliers to bid for a used executive jet because one of the two presidential aircraft – the 50-year old F-27 – is undergoing a maintenance check, the Office of the President said in a statement.

The OP later explained that the planned purchase was for the safety of President Arroyo, “who risks her life and limb by using chartered civilian aircraft in performing her duties."

The ad for the bidding came out the week when Mrs. Arroyo got criticized for a $20, 000 dinner in New York and an earlier one in Washington D.C. costing $15,000. [See: Before NY, Arroyo dined in Washington for $15K]

The uproar came in the wake of the national mourning for the late former president Corazon Aquino, who was known for her simple lifestyle and personal modesty. Malacañang, for its part, denied that the dinners were lavish.

Last week, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) also released a three-part report on Mrs. Arroyo’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) from 1991 to 2008, which showed that she got rich faster than her predecessors Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, and Joseph Estrada. [See: Arroyo got rich faster than Aquino, Ramos, Estrada]

[See: 'Conflict of interest' seen in Arroyo stock investments and Gloria's mysterious millions and undeclared houses]

Lashing back at PCIJ for what they considered as “speculative" reports, Remonde and President Arroyo’s lawyer Romulo Macalintal said there was nothing irregular about Mrs. Arroyo’s SALNs and nothing unethical about her dabbling into the stock market. - GMANews.TV <http://www.gmanews.tv/story/169954/Malaca&ntildeang-cancels-plan-to-purchase-P12-B-jet>

Shapes of DNA have been used to enhance the production of circuits for next-generation computer chips.

Researchers reporting in Nature Nanotechnology have now shown how to get engineered "DNA origami" to self-organise on silicon.

The origami can be designed to serve as a scaffold for electronic components just six billionths of a metre apart.

Making chips with components closer together leads to smaller devices and faster computers.

The six nanometre mark is nearly eight times better than the current industry produces.

Several research groups have shown that DNA itself can be used to store or manipulate data, and the juggling of DNA in a test tube or within bacteria has been shown to solve simple computational tasks.

The current method, by contrast, leverages the ability to design DNA strands into regular shapes such as triangles.

The computer industry would like to make use of next-generation materials with favourable electronic properties such as carbon nanotubes or nanowires.

Such structures are tiny and difficult to manipulate, but the chemical groups hanging off DNA helices could be used as anchor points for them.

Those anchor points can be as little as six nanometres (nm) apart, making these DNA-bound circuit components smaller and thus faster than can currently be produced.

The current industry standard for etching electronic components from larger structures - a so-called "top down" approach - has components at a distance of 45nm.

But the new "bottom-up" technique promises distances nearly four times better than the planned industry move to 22nm.

What makes the technique particularly useful is that the regular shapes of the circuit-loaded DNA origami allows them to fit neatly into shaped pits the researchers bored into silicon or carbon using standard techniques.

This self-assembly occurs when a liquid filled with the origami is put in contact with the etched surfaces in what the authors call a case of "bottom-up keys" fitting into "top-down locks".

Because the eventual placement of the components puts them so much closer, the approach could lead to computers that are both smaller and faster.

However, the motivations are also economic - industry-wide shifts to smaller components are phenomenally expensive to the manufacturers.

"The combination of this directed self-assembly with today's fabrication technology eventually could lead to substantial savings in the most expensive and challenging part of the chip-making process," said Spike Narayan, a science and technology manager at IBM's Almaden research centre.

The Chinese government has been forced to cancel the privatisation of a steel firm following worker protests, the country's state-run media has reported.

The cancellation of the deal to sell state-owned Linzhou Steel in Henan province came after staff held an official hostage for four days.

It was the second time in under a month that worker militancy in the steel industry has halted a privatisation.

Plans to sell a stake in Tonghua to private firm Jianlong Steel were subsequently shelved.

In the latest case, the government had hoped to sell Linzhou Steel to another private business, Fengbao Iron & Steel.

The local official from Anyang, one of the main cities in Henan province, was released after the government pledged to abandon the takeover.

A growing number of workers at China's numerous state-run steel firms are opposed to privatisations as they fear large scale redundancies resulting from moves to boost efficiency.

A short-term study of Twitter has found that 40% of the messages sent via it are "pointless babble."

Carried out by US market research firm Pear Analytics, the study aimed to produce a snapshot of what people do with the service.

Almost as prevalent as the babble were "conversational" tweets that used it as a surrogate instant messaging system.

The study found that only 8.7% of messages could be said to have "value" as they passed along news of interest.

To get an idea of what Twitter was being used for, Pear Analytics dipped into the Tweet stream every 30 minutes between 11:00 and 17:00 on weekdays for a fortnight.

In total it grabbed 2,000 messages and then put each message it grabbed into one of six categories; news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those with pass-along value.

Conversational tweets were those that bounced back and forth between two users, and those dubbed "pointless babble" were of the "I'm eating a sandwich" type.

When Pear Analytics started its short-term study, it assumed that most of the tweets would be either spam or self-promotion. This belief, it said, was driven by the growing number of firms starting to use Twitter as a tool to drum up sales.

Instead, it found that 40.5% could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.

"With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else," said Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, writing about its analysis.

Public services in the US city of Chicago have been shut down for a day as the authorities face an expected budget shortfall of some $300m (£184m).

Non-essential services such as rubbish collections, libraries and health centres were closed, in the first of three planned reduced service days.

City authorities hope the move, with workers taking an enforced unpaid holiday, will save an estimated $8.3m.

The savings from Chicago's reduced service days are small compared with the overall deficit.

But in a statement last week, Chicago's Mayor Richard M Daley thanked state employees for their "sacrifice".

"Every dollar we save from these measures helps to save jobs, and in the long-term, maintain service for Chicagoans," he said.

"This plan engages most civilian employees to accept cuts and to be part of the solution to our budget crisis."

Two more reduced service days have been scheduled - one for 27 November, the day after Thanksgiving and another for Christmas Eve, 24 December.

Workers have also been asked to take a series of unpaid days off and holidays without salary.

Chicago is one of a number of US cities and states to introduce closures and furlough days to address deficits.

In California, which has a budget deficit of some $24.3bn (£14.5bn) and has declared a fiscal emergency, state offices have been ordered to close for three days each month.

Students starting university courses this autumn can expect to graduate owing £23,000, a survey suggests.

The Push Student Debt Survey of 2,024 students at varying stages of degree courses found debts averaged more than £5,000 a year and that this was rising.

Separate research by the National Union of Students suggests some degrees have higher "hidden costs" than others, such as for equipment or books.

The survey suggests the amount of debt students incur varies widely between regions and institutions.

Students in England have the highest levels of debt - an average of £5,271 for each year of study. In London some students say they will have over £30,000 of debt by the time they finish their course.

Debt levels in England have risen by 10% in the last year. They have also risen by 30% in a year in Northern Ireland, from very low levels five years ago, to an average of £4,324 a year now.

They are also rising sharply in Wales where annual student debts are an average £4,021.

But in Scotland, debt levels have fallen, with students owing £2,194 for each year of study.

Students in Scotland who are Scottish or from another EU country outside the UK have their tuition fees paid by the government, and students no longer have to pay back a graduate endowment after finishing their course.

Push interviewed 2,024 students in years one to four of their degree course, in person.

Johnny Rich, editor of Push.co.uk, said he thought the recession was partly fuelling rising student debt.

"Finding part-time work has got harder and many students are facing real financial hardship and are worrying about what lies ahead.

Scientists have warned Asian countries that they face chronic food shortages and likely social unrest if they do not improve water management.

They say countries in south and east Asia must spend billions of dollars to improve antiquated crop irrigation to cope with rapid population increases.

That estimate does not yet take into account the possible impact of global warming on water supplies, they said.

Asia's population is forecast to increase by 1.5bn people over the next 40 years.

The findings are published in a new joint report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

They suggest that Asian countries will need to import more than a quarter of their rice and other staples to feed their populations.

"Asia's food and feed demand is expected to double by 2050," said IWMI director general Colin Chartres.

"Relying on trade to meet a large part of this demand will impose a huge and politically untenable burden on the economies of many developing countries.

"The best bet for Asia lies in revitalising its vast irrigation systems, which account for 70% of the world's total irrigated land," he said.

With new agricultural land in short supply, the solution, he said, is to intensify irrigation methods, modernising old systems built in the 1970s and 1980s.

Common herbs and spices show promise as an
environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional pesticides, scientists have told a major US conference.

They have spent a decade researching the insecticidal properties of rosemary, thyme, clove and mint.

They could become a key weapon against insect pests in organic agriculture, the researchers say, as the industry attempts to satisfy demand.

Details were presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington DC.

These new pesticides are generally a mixture of tiny amounts of two to four different herbs diluted in water.

The research was led by Dr Murray Isman, from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Some spice-based commercial products now being used by farmers have already shown success in protecting organic strawberry, spinach, and tomato crops against destructive aphids and mites, Dr Isman explained.

"These products expand the limited arsenal of organic growers to combat pests," he said.

"They're still only a small piece of the insecticide market, but they're growing and gaining momentum."

Unlike conventional pesticides, these "killer spices" do not require more limited approval from regulatory bodies and are readily available.

An additional advantage is that insects are less likely to evolve resistance - the ability to shrug off once-effective toxins - Isman says. They're also safer for farm workers, who are at high risk for pesticide exposure, he notes.

Since the essential oils made from these herbs tend to evaporate quickly and degrade rapidly in sunlight, farmers need to apply them to crops more frequently than conventional pesticides.

Some last only a few hours, compared to days or even months for conventional pesticides.

As they are also generally less potent than conventional pesticides, they must be applied in higher concentrations to achieve acceptable levels of pest control, Dr Isman said.

Researchers are now seeking ways of making the novel pesticides longer-lasting and more potent, he added.

Conventional pesticides are still the most effective way to control caterpillars, grasshoppers, beetles and other large insects on commercial food crops, he added.

A senior US diplomat has warned that the Sri Lankan government's failure to share power with the minority Tamils could lead to renewed violence.

Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake told the BBC a delay in devolving powers might create new opportunities for the rebel Tamil Tigers to regroup.

Mr Blake also urged Colombo to resettle swiftly the hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians displaced by the war.

Japan has become the latest major economy to take a tentative step out of recession.

The world's second-largest economy grew 0.9% in the second quarter from the first three months of the year, figures showed on Monday.

Japan joins France and Germany in terms of leading nations that are showing positive growth after a torrid year.

It seems quite a turnaround for Japan, whose gross domestic product (GDP) was declining at its quickest pace ever - 13.1% on an annualised basis - in the final three months of last year.

Their largest economy is showing signs of recovery, which means increased Japanese demand for their products and greater trade between the nations.

Japan was helped by its biggest trading partner, China, which also showed signs of a rebound in its second quarter, as its $586bn (£355bn) stimulus package started to kick in and boost consumer demand.

China's economy grew at an annual rate of 7.9% between April and June, up from 6.1% in the first quarter.

Japan's exports rebounded 6.3% during the quarter, the first gain in more than a year.

This is also important for Europe. Japan is the European Union's sixth-largest export market and the fourth-biggest buyer of European imports, according to 2007 figures from the European Commission.

But that does not mean the nascent economic recoveries in Europe and Japan are the same.

"You have to differentiate between what's been happening in Europe and the situation in Japan," says Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank.

"In Europe, there's been a rebound in real activity," he adds, meaning that domestic demand has actually picked up in France and Germany.

"Japan is distorted by the fact that prices actually fell quite sharply in the quarter," Mr Dixon says.

Data shows that consumer prices in Japan dropped 1.76% over the last quarter. So that while the volume of goods and services rose, the actual value of those products fell.

A recovery fuelled by cost-cutting does not necessarily point to a fundamentally healthier economy.

While Japan has struggled with falling prices for well over a decade, this disparity between the boost to output has partly been explained by Japan's large stimulus package.

The Japanese government unveiled a 15.4 trillion yen ($162bn; £100bn) package in April, on top of two other stimulus boosts in the previous year, taking the total public stimulus to the economy to about $260bn.

Many say that this massive flow of money is doing its job and boosting the Japanese economy.

Does this mean that President Barack Obama's huge $787bn (£488bn) economic stimulus plan passed early this year will help the US economy show a rebound like Japan's?

"You're likely going to see a big boost in US GDP in the third quarter," Mr Dixon says, partly because of the popularity of the car scrappage scheme in the US, that provides cash towards a new vehicle in exchange for an older gas-guzzler.

He says that the problems in the UK and US were mostly concentrated in the banking sector, "which means that conventional stimulus measures won't have such a huge impact".

The UK's stimulus was of a different kind. It has spent far more as a proportion of its economy bailing out its banks than most other countries.

And the British and US governments' measures to bail out their biggest banks and boost lending are mostly new and untested.

The Japanese measures - to boost sales of fuel-efficient vehicles and consumer electronics - have largely delivered as much as should be expected, considering Japan did not have to deal with the near-collapse of its banking system.

With positive signs emerging from Europe and the US, the UK's biggest trading partners, this may bode well for the British economy too.

The next estimate of the UK's GDP in the second quarter, currently a contraction of 0.8% from the previous quarter, will be released on 28 August.

"It does suggest that the initial estimate of the UK GDP in the second quarter, which many thought was too negative, will indeed be revised up," Mr Dixon says.

And the boost in world trade may lead to a positive UK growth figure in the third quarter, he predicts.

As she slowly turns the pages of a leather-bound album, revealing black and white pictures of her wedding in L'Aquila's basilica, Angela Ciano can barely hold back the tears.

Unlike some L'Aquila residents, she did not lose her husband, child or home in the earthquake that devastated the city in April.

But the realisation that the places and structures that formed the fabric of her life are gone forever is still painful.

"What I felt was a sense of great loss," she tells me as she describes walking through L'Aquila in the hours immediately following the quake.

"I have that feeling with me still, today, of having lost not only the city with its monuments - which we can reconstruct - but the loss of my life, everyday life - meeting your friends in the cafe on the square or underneath the arches, the shops we used to have, my old offices."

Her memories of that walk through the ruined city have stained her image of the city she still loves.

"I had taken my camera with me but I just couldn't bear to take any photos," she remembers.

One of the most dramatically damaged buildings was the church where Angela was married 12 years ago, the Basilica Santa Maria di Collemaggio, which dates originally from the 13th Century.

With its pink and white facade, it was a focal point for many of the city's believers, who prayed by the tomb of the monk who founded the church and became pope.

It is now being rebuilt again - as it has been several times during its history - but the buzz of cranes and the sound of hammering metal from outside cannot prepare you for the sight that awaits within.

At one end of the nave a vast portion of the roof now lies as rubble on the floor. Arches that curved up towards the heavens have fallen, revealing the bricks behind, and the sky where workers dangle from cranes.

A stained glass window catches my eye - it seems open but in reality it has been partially sheered from its frame by the force of the quake.

Metal scaffolding has been erected along the entire length of the nave as men in hard hats work at shoring up pillars.

"When these things happen - we mustn't ask why did God want this?" says the rector, Don Nunzio, also in a hard hat, as well as his usual clerical garb.

"They are natural events. We have to have the faith to say - it has been destroyed, we will rebuild it," he says.

No Mass has been said in the basilica since the quake. Don Nunzio has been visiting his parishioners in their temporary homes - many in the tent cities that are scattered in fields around L'Aquila.

"For many, their faith will be reinforced, but for others it may fade," he admits. "They'll wonder how God could let all this destruction happen? They'll ask - couldn't he save us?"

He bristles at the suggestion that it makes no sense to rebuild a city that, located on a faultline, remains continually at risk of destruction.

"You can't cancel out history, history stays in the heart and in the mind. To abandon history, not rebuild it means losing our identity. We want to rebuild and leave the sign of what happened - even if that was painful."

The Italian government has been encouraging foreign governments - along with Italian provinces and multinationals - to "adopt" a building and fund its renovation.

The G8 summit in July was shifted from the glamorous holiday island of Sardinia to L'Aquila at the last minute and foreign delegations were given a tour of destruction.

Funds required vary from 50m euros ($71m; £43m) for the reconstruction of the basilica, to a few hundred thousand euros to patch up simple rural churches.

Already France has adopted the church of the 18th Century Santa Maria del Suffragio in the city and Spain is considering funding the Spanish fort, originally built in 1534.

So far, 1,360 structures, 765 churches and 535 buildings have been added to the list of those in and around the city that need repair and restoration.

The centre of L'Aquila is now known as the "red zone". It has been totally emptied, cleared and sealed and now even people who lived there have to get special permission to be accompanied back inside.

Many of the damaged buildings wear delicate wooden scaffolds, like corsets, around their damaged cupolas and arches.

These are deemed less invasive than metal scaffolding, and are more flexible when tremors occur - as they still frequently do.

Specialist firemen, many of whom normally work in Italy's Alpine regions have been deployed to do the delicate job of making the buildings safe, suspended from cranes instead of mountain faces.

On the main road leaving the city, where shops and supermarkets announce they are open for business, a billboard proclaims: "A city is not made of its buildings, but its people".

But the country's Vice-Minister of Culture, Francesco Giro, doesn't see it quite like that.

"The two things aren't mutually exclusive," he tells me in his sumptuous office in Rome.

"This cultural heritage is part of their lives - they are asking us not just for their home but also for their church, the square, the little street - they want to return to the city they knew, where they grew up." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8198179.stm>

A former Credit Suisse banker has been found guilty of fraud after deceiving investors into buying risky investments that led to $1bn (£610m) of losses.

A jury in New York needed less than a day's deliberation to find against Eric Butler. His co-defendant, Julian Tzolov, had already pleaded guilty.

The two sold high-risk US sub-prime investments to people who were told they were buying much safer products.

The fraud started to unravel towards the end of 2007 when the US housing market began to stall, and bad debts in the sub-prime mortgage market started to be revealed.

Butler faces a prison sentence of up to 45 years. Tzolov may get a lesser sentence because he agreed to help prosecutors, and testified against his former Credit Suisse colleague.

"The defendants' fraudulent misrepresentations saddled investors with unknown risks they did not bargain for," said Benton Campbell, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Butler and Tzolov deceived a number of corporate clients including drugmaker Roche, semi-conductor business ST Microelectronics, and Canadian fertiliser firm Potash Corporation.

US prosecutors have charged a man with stealing data relating to 130 million credit and debit cards.

They say Albert Gonzalez, 28, and two un-named Russian co-conspirators hacked into the payment systems of retailers, including the 7-Eleven chain.

Prosecutors say they aimed to sell the data on. If convicted, Mr Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in jail for wire fraud and five years for conspiracy.

He would also have to pay a fine of $250,000 (£150,000) for each of the two charges.

Mr Gonzalez used a complicated technique known as an "SQL injection attack" to penetrate networks' firewalls and steal information, the US Department of Justice said.

His corporate victims included Heartland Payment Systems - a card payment processor - convenience store 7-Eleven and Hannaford Brothers, a supermarket chain, the DoJ said.

According to the indictment, the group researched the credit and debit card systems used by their victims, attacked their networks and sent the data to computer servers they operated in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine.

The data could then be sold on, enabling others to make fraudulent purchases, it said.

Mr Gonzalez, who had once been an informant for the US Secret Service helping to track hackers, is already in custody on separate charges of hacking into the computer system of a national restaurant chain.

This latest case will raise fresh concerns about the security of credit and debit cards used in the United States, the BBC's Greg Wood reports. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8206305.stm>

An investigation by the BBC has found evidence of fraud and corruption in Afghanistan's presidential election. Thousands of voting cards have been offered for sale and thousands of dollars have been offered in bribes to buy votes.

The Afghan Independent Election Commission that oversees the poll has also been accused of not doing enough to prevent abuses.

We were passed information that voting cards were being sold in the capital. An Afghan working for the BBC went undercover, posing as a potential buyer. He was offered 1,000 cards on the spot. Each one would cost about $10 (£6).

We were given some samples as proof of what was being offered. They are all authentic with the name, photo and home details of the voter on them.

The cards have been returned to the seller and no money changed hands. Others have also offered to sell us thousands of votes and some traders have even been arrested.

The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), an independent monitoring group, has collected evidence of fraud, in particular during the registration process.

It found that in many places people were being issued with more than one voting card, that children were being given them and that stacks of cards were issued to men who falsely claimed they were for women in their household.

Government workers - supposed to be impartial - have actively and illegally campaigned for candidates.

Shahrzad Akbar, a senior analyst with FEFA, says that because they were only able to investigate a few parts of the country, the abuses could be even more widespread.

"We couldn't observe how it went in every single district or village. I am sure that there are cases of multiple card distribution that we don't know about.

"But those incidents that we do know about caused us enough concern to contact the Independent Election Commission and say, 'please prevent this!'"

The Electoral Complaints Commission has been training its investigators in how to spot fraud on polling day. Like the Independent Election Commission, the body insists that any problems are isolated and manageable.

But there is evidence that some people working for candidates have deliberately tried to influence the outcome of the presidential election by offering bribes.

A tribal elder and former military commander in Baghlan province described how the system works.

As a key local leader he is able to persuade large numbers of people to vote for one candidate or another.

He says that he and other local leaders have been approached by teams from the two leading contenders in this election and offered money.

"If one candidate gives $10,000, then the other gives $20,000 and a third one offers even more. It has become such a lucrative and competitive business. I don't know where they get their money from."

Western officials concede the election will be flawed - that there has been corruption, that there is apathy and that the fighting will stop some from voting.

Mark Sedwill, the British ambassador to Afghanistan, insists that whatever the problems, it is still better than not having an election at all.

"If this was a western European country with a population at peace, then the kind of difficulties we're going to face wouldn't be acceptable," he said.

"But we're working up from zero. And this election will be better than the last one, it's run by the Afghans themselves and I suspect - and hope - that the parliamentary election next year will be better and that the next presidential election will be better again.

"So it's not a question of reaching some standard that's unobtainable - we have to remember the situation we're in."

Western officials believe that these abuses will not change the result precisely because they are being carried out in the name of so many candidates.

But as international forces fight and die to allow this election to go ahead, serious questions are raised about the credibility of the process and the balance between sacrifice and reward. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8207315.stm>

The world has begun to recover from recession but the process will not be simple, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned.

The recession had "left deep scars, which will affect both supply and demand for many years to come" said IMF chief economist, Olivier Blanchard.

His comments came after Japan this week followed France and Germany is seeing their economies return to growth.

In this latest report, Mr Blanchard predicted that global output may also remain lower than it had been before the crisis.

Countries must rebalance their economies to make it sustainable, Mr Blanchard said.

Economies dominated by consumption - such as the US - would have to focus more on exports, while Asia turned more to imports, he said.

He also said that dysfunctional financial systems in many advanced countries would need "a long time to find their new shape".

Meanwhile, emerging market nations may not see capital inflows return to pre-crisis levels for a some time.

Professor David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee said that there were "some signs in some countries that the worst is over".

"But be mindful that in the European Union, 20... countries are in recession," he told the BBC.

He added that the rebalancing which Mr Blanchard called for was not going to happen "automatically".

There was a risk that recoveries in individual nations were being fuelled by government stimulus packages, Professor Blanchflower said, and that "when these disperse we will see a return to recession".

While many Israeli teenagers spend the summer hanging out on beaches or in shopping malls, Evyatar Slonam, 17, is sitting on an exposed hillside in the southern West Bank at the Jewish outpost of Mitzpe Avichai.

"We want there to be a mall right here," explains his friend Yehoyada, 15, indicating the hilltop surrounded by Palestinian houses and olive groves. "Tel Aviv once looked like this, too."

Mr Slonam fingers his long, brown sidelocks as he attempts to explain the ideology that drives some young Israelis known as the the Hilltop Youth to flout both Israeli and international law and build shacks they hope will eventually become established settlements in the West Bank.

The US is demanding that Israel stops building in all settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

Outposts are illegal even under Israeli law, and Israel agreed to remove them under the 2003 US-sponsored Road Map peace plan.

Israeli authorities have stepped up demolitions of smaller outposts - and the settlers are accelerating building and rebuilding structures at the sites. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8204826.stm>

Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.

They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used.

It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.

These are the bold aims of a two-year-old project being carried out by a non-governmental organisation near Trinidad, the capital of the department of Beni.

The system is based on building "camellones" - raised earth platforms of anything up to 2m high, surrounded by canals.

Constructed above the height of flood waters, the camellones can protect seeds and crops from being washed away.

Pre-Columbian cultures in Beni from about 1000BC to AD1400 used a similar system.

"One of the many extraordinary aspects of our camellones project is that poor communities living in the Beni today are using a similar technology to that developed by indigenous pre-Columbian cultures in the same region to solve a similar range of problems," says Oscar Saavedra, the director of the Kenneth Lee foundation.

He experimented for six years in his own garden to develop the complex system of hydrology.

Ancient and modern communities face the same problems - regular flooding followed by drought.

"The floods were the basis for development and the flourishing of a great civilisation," says Mr Saavedra.

There were bad floods in 2006 and 2007, but last year the region saw the worst flooding in at least 50 years.

The floods affected some 120,000 people - a quarter of Beni's population - and caused more than $200m (£119m) of damage.

Scientists say they have evidence that the powerful greenhouse gas methane is escaping from the Arctic sea bed.

Researchers say this could be evidence of a predicted positive feedback effect of climate change.

As temperatures rise, the sea bed grows warmer and frozen water crystals in the sediment break down, allowing methane trapped inside them to escape.

The research team found that more than 250 plumes of methane bubbles are rising from the sea bed off Norway.

The joint British and German research team detected the bubbles using a type of sonar normally used to search for shoals of fish. Once detected, the bubbles were sampled and tested for methane at a range of depths.

Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, the team says the methane was rising from an area of sea bed off West Spitsbergen, from depths between 150 and 400m.

The gas is normally trapped as "methane hydrate" in sediment under the ocean floor.

"Methane hydrate" is an ice-like substance composed of water and methane which is stable under conditions of high pressure and low temperature.

As temperatures rise, the hydrate breaks down. So this new evidence shows that methane is stable at water depths greater than 400m off Spitsbergen.

However data collected over 30 years shows it was then stable at water depths as shallow as 360m.

Temperature records show that this area of the ocean has warmed by 1C during the same period.

The research was carried out as part of the International Polar Year Initiative, funded by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The team says this is the first time that this loss of stability associated with temperature rise has been observed during the current geological period.

Professor Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton told BBC News: "We already knew there was some methane hydrate in the ocean off Spitsbergen and that's an area where climate change is happening rather faster than just about anywhere else in the world." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8205864.stm>

Peer-to-peer (p2p) download services are still popular with music-loving kids, it seems. The second annual survey of young people's music consumption by pressure group UK Music found among 1,808 respondents aged 18 to 24 that three-fifths of them used p2p services, and four-fifths of those did so at least once a week.

This is almost the same as last year's result, and would seem to indicate that the efforts by the music industry to offer a range of licensed alternatives to Limewire and other p2p services have failed to have any real impact.

The survey was carried out by academic researchers in the Music and Entertainment Industry Management research group at the University of Hertfordshire, and the picture it presents is a complex one that will surely give the music industry many sleepless nights.

Feargal Sharkey, the former pop star who now heads the group, hinted at the possibility of failure in his introduction to the survey results, where he notes that "the shape of our entire business will continue to evolve".

"However, we will achieve nothing if we do not work with music fans, and young music fans in particular," he continued. "They are hugely demanding in their needs, but collectively we must rise to that challenge."

But even if they want to rise to the challenge, it's not clear that the survey tells them what do to next. Kids, it seems, like unlicensed services because they are free. But the report also acknowledges their usefulness in finding more obscure music and letting them listen to a band before they buy, so closing them down may actually make it harder for new artists to break through.

They are willing to abandon p2p in favour of licensed services that they have to pay for, but they wouldn't pay for a streaming service like Spotify. They apparently want to own their music, or rather they want to have the music files on their hard drives rather than rely on streaming.

They happily spend as much money on live concerts as on recorded music, and over half would not object to a levy on copying music from one device to another.

Overall the picture seems full of contradictions, perhaps reflecting a wide range of attitudes among young people themselves.

The unwillingness to use streaming services is interesting, especially since I've seen every one of my son's friends sign up to Spotify recently. While is is possible that kids really do value "ownership" of music, I suspect it has more to do with the limitations of their online lives. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8197574.stm>

They are icons of the American mail service, but they may be about to go the way of the Pony Express.

In villages, towns and cities across America, residents are waking up to find the familiar blue mailbox at the end of the road is gone.

In the past 20 years, more than half of America's mailboxes have been taken out of service, leaving just 175,000 nationwide.

"Mailboxes are like phone booths, that part of the scenery that you take for granted until one day you need one and it is no longer there," said Nancy Pope, curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

The first attempt by a team of British engineers to smash the longest-standing land speed record was dashed when the car's turbine became stuck.

The Hampshire-based team earlier began four days of attempts to break the world steam car record at Edwards air base, in California's Mojave Desert.

Understanding how Tasmanian devils interact may help limit the spread of a disease that threatens to wipe out the wild population, a study has suggested.

Researchers used radio collars to log how often the normally solitary devils came into contact with one another.

Writing in Ecology Letters, they said the data could help shape measures, such as habitat management, to curb devil facial tumour disease (DFTD).

"A common problem that a lot of people studying wildlife diseases have is gathering good data," explained lead author Rodrigo Hamede, from the University of Tasmania.

"Because this is a directly transmitted disease, we needed to know as much as possible about devil behaviour and devil ecology."

He added there were a number of assumptions about how the devils interacted with each other that were not based on robust findings, but the information gathered by the collars provided the most comprehensive dataset to date.

The team fitted the collars, known as "proximity data loggers", on 46 sexually mature devils - 23 male and 23 female - in Narawntapu National Park, northern Tasmania.

The devices, which weighed 120g, were set up to record encounters of 30cm or less between two or more animals.

The team decided to use these parameters because DFTD required direct physical contact in order for it to be transmitted.

The researchers said there were a number of reasons why it was important to understand animals' social networks in order to take practical steps to tackle diseases in wildlife.

"It is usually the case that a small number of highly connected individuals, often called 'super-spreaders', are responsible for the majority of disease transmission," they explained.

"If these individuals belong to identifiable sex or age classes, then management actions such as selective culling or targeted [treatment] may be effective in treating transmission."

"I was expecting to see much more male-to-male fighting," he told BBC News. "I suspect that this will have something to do with males guarding females."

He explained that devils' normal behaviour involved a male grabbing a female, taking her back to a den and preventing her from leaving - ensuring that he was able to mate with her.

"Our paper shows that 99% of encounters were male-to-female during the mating season. There were hardly any male-to-male or female-to-female encounters."

"Outside of the mating season, surprisingly female-to-female contacts were more prevalent," he added.

"This is probably as a result of devils having a matrimonial society in which females tend to stay in the area of birth and get the best location for food and rearing young.

"It was quite interesting to see that the role of the males was not that important within the devil's social network."

Mr Hamede said the data also showed that every animal fitted with a logging device appeared to be part of a bigger social network.

"These are solitary animals, meaning that they do not live in large social groups like lions or meerkats.

"But nevertheless, they are still social in the sense that they are coming into frequent contact, either as a result of competing for food or direct contact during the mating season."

Although the data showed that the extended network had a few individuals that had a higher than average number of contacts with other devils, the team was not able to identify a particular age-group or sex that could be targeted.

But it did highlight the importance of ensuring that currently unaffected populations remained isolated from the disease, they added.

DFTD was first described in the mid-1990s, when devils with large facial tumours were photographed in north-eastern Tasmania.

By the end of 2008, the disease - which kills infected animals within nine weeks - had been confirmed at 64 locations, covering more than 60% of the Australian island state's mainland.

Despite the bleak outlook, Mr Hamede said there was some hope for the long-term survival of the wild population of devils.

"We have a little bit of time to try to protect unaffected populations, which remain in only 25% of the state.

"I don't think we can stop the epidemic or do much apart from keep these populations disease-free."

He added that much more attention had to be given to protecting the habitat of unaffected devils.

"Disease itself is very unlikely to cause extinction in any species, but when we combine such a devastating disease as DFTD with degradation of habitats, fragmentation, etc, then the outlook for the devils' future is not a very nice one." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8206022.stm>

"By wintertime, the Taliban are going to be on their heels, sitting in Pakistan, wondering what to do next. And we'll have the people," Marine Battalion Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss told me.

"Once the people decide they won't tolerate the Taliban's presence, there's no way they can stay."

Last month he arrived with the 4,000 marines from 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Southern Helmand, Afghanistan's most violent province for Operation Khanjar.

Their mission - the first major military operation ordered by President Barack Obama - was to oust the Taliban and then stay in every area cleared to win the trust of the local population ahead of the presidential elections.

In counter-insurgency talk it is called "targeting the population, not the enemy" - if you win the support of the people, the enemy can no longer operate.

To me this sounded remarkably similar to what the British had been trying to do in Helmand for years, and yet they had just suffered their worst month since the start of the war.

"The Brits had a good understanding of what was going on down here, but they never had enough combat power to do what they would like to do and then sustain it over time," Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss said.

"My battalion taking over, we're obviously just a little bit larger, we've been able to position forces all over the central Helmand river valley and really get out amongst the people. They just didn't have the capability to do it right." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8201197.stm>

Ahead of presidential elections in Afghanistan, the American commander of the Nato-led international force there, Gen Stan McChrystal, described the military situation there as "serious".

He told BBC world affairs editor John Simpson that he was changing the whole approach to the conflict.

Gen McChrystal is the thinking man's soldier. He can see that things are not going Nato's way here in Afghanistan, and knows that there must be a new strategy.

As a top American special forces commander, he led the operation to capture Saddam Hussein in 2003 in Iraq. He has been in the job here in Afghanistan for just two months.

I flew with him by helicopter to the town of Sarobi, east of Kabul, which until recently was one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan.

It is held by the French Foreign Legion, and is considerably safer now - though there are dozens of insurgents operating in the mountains nearby.

The senior French officers who met him and were briefed by him about his new approach to the conflict were enthusiastic about it.

Afterwards, one told me he had been impressed by Gen McChrystal and felt he was very much on the right lines.

The general described his approach to me like this: "The situation is serious, and we need to turn the momentum of the enemy. We can do that.

"What what we need to do is to correct some of the ways we operated in the past. We need show the kind of resolve and the imagination in some cases to do this smarter and to do it right."

It is clear he wants the Nato troops in Afghanistan to move away from the idea that they are fighting an all-out war - the "body-count approach".

Instead, he wants them to help the Afghans get rid of the Taliban for themselves.

Gen McChrystal is a supporter of the way the British operated in Iraq. He is generous in his praise of the professionalism and courage of the British army.

When he spoke to the French officers he suggested that patrolling without body armour and dark glasses was one way of showing local people that Nato was on their side.

They responded enthusiastically, though one senior officer said that if he ordered his men to patrol without body armour and one of them was killed, he himself would lose his job. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8210352.stm>

That includes everything he has accumulated, written, photographed, presented, and owned.

Bell, a principle researcher at Microsoft Research, has now written a book about how in the future we may all be able to offload our own memory into a comprehensive e-memory.

In an interview with the BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme, Mr Bell explained the motivation behind his unique and intriguing work.

"We started out to see just how much information one had coming through their life," he said.

"I have a reasonably complicated life - so I wanted to find out just how many bits were coming and going, and how to deal with it."

All computer users tend to archive some parts of their life, whether it's an e-mail, a written document or a photograph.

With the increasing popularity of the cloud - the name given to information stored in the online space - people are beginning to archive even more their lives.

Mr Bell, however, has taken it one step further - even scanning in till receipts.

He estimates that he has archived around 150,000 images, along with a similar number of emails and web pages.

"I wouldn't have said this 20 years ago because of the difficulty and the cost to do it. The opportunity now is: it doesn't cost anything to do this."

One of Germany's largest video games publishers has said that the UK's retail chains make it difficult for publishers to break into the UK market.

Georg Larch, Koch Media's marketing director, also blamed the exchange rate and UK pricing structure for the difficulties faced by games publishers.

Mr Larch said at the Games Com meeting that a rise in digital distribution would make things easier in the future.

He told BBC News while the firm's turnover in Germany had risen by 18% this year, in Britain that figure was much lower.

"We're seeing companies like Amazon take a larger market share, and the growth of digital distribution, but it's going to be a long-term development as people still want to have something in their hands," he said.

Mr Larch said that other economic factors were at work against overseas publishers.

"We can see a lot of cheap imports from the UK to Europe [due to the current exchange rates]."

Ian Livingstone, president of UK-based publisher Eidos, told BBC News publishers still wanted to work with retail.

"These aren't just shops, they are a marketing tool, a window into our world where software houses can display their wares," he said.

The problem that publishers have with retail, he said, was due to the growth of the second-hand games market.

"The pre-owned market is a serious problem, because there is no benefit to developers or publishers," said Mr Livingstone.

While retailers have to pay a percentage to the publishers for a sale of a new game, there is no such requirement when selling a second hand game, with the shop pocketing all the profit.

Mr Livingstone estimated that the pre-owned market made up more than a quarter of a video-game retailers turnover.

"A shop makes a bigger margin on a pre-owned title, and can sell them six or seven times, so there is no incentive for them to reorder and the content creator gets no slice of the action," he said.

Industry experts say the landscape of what makes a successful video game is changing.

While software developers could turn a profit if a game made it into the top 20, with rising development costs and more platforms to develop on, a game often needs to be listed in the top 10 for publishers to justify any investment.

This has made some developers more cautious on what they develop and has also seen retailers allocate more space to the best-selling games.

In 1987 as I bought my first Haynes instruction manual, I was quite unprepared for the look of respect that I got from the mechanic who sold it to me.

At the age of 18 I was only used to looks ranging from disinterest to hostility from engineers, but buying the Haynes instruction manual for my car - an old Morris Minor 1100 - suddenly marked me out as someone with credibility.

So five cars later, five Haynes manuals later, and many years of spotting Haynes manuals in people's houses and giving them that look of respect, it was with tremendous anticipation that I found myself making a Radio 4 programme on instruction manuals and about to meet the man himself, the godfather of instruction manuals, John Haynes.

We tracked down the man in the Somerset headquarters of his publishing company, which looks like a cross between a dairy farm and rural village complete with pub, small paths between the out-buildings and orchards, and reassuringly, plenty of vintage cars in the car park (I spotted my beloved Morris Minor).

John Haynes himself was ensconced in a large shady office, emerging from behind a huge desk full of models of cars and stacked with instruction manuals; he looked like Father Christmas but with the twinkle in the eye of Willy Wonka.

He is the man whose love of cars started him on the road to produce the first instruction manuals on how to repair and care for cars in the 1950s.

Haynes manuals are the most famous instruction manuals in the world, having sold 150 million copies worldwide and will mark their 50th anniversary in 2010.

To this day, the Haynes manual for a particular make of car is the last word on the subject.

The practical, hardback books came into being when a young Mr Haynes, tinkering with his first car, realised he could improve on the instruction manuals given out by car manufacturers.

At the age of 16 while still at school, he bought an Austin Seven Saloon, dismantled it, and built a lightweight, open two-seater sports car.

"I thought to myself if I produce a booklet about how I built this Austin Seven Special, because there was nothing published in those days, I might sell a hundred copies in a couple of months."

But it only took 10 days to sell all the copies, which made him realise that there was a gap in the market for car instruction manuals that gave detailed instructions on how to repair and maintain different models of car.

John Haynes's ethos is "above all be honest, tell them how it really is, step-by-step".

The manuals have since become the archetype of a technological reference manual for home use, designed for non-experts to become more acquainted with machines: every car is completely stripped down, rebuilt and photographed in the course of making each manual.

Haynes manuals now cover many subjects including motorcycles, computers, spacecraft, and there are even manuals with titles such as Man, Woman and Cancer, which come under the Family series.

Yet, despite this wave of popularity, Haynes does not produce manuals for all the menagerie of modern gadgets that now surround us.

Neither have device manufacturers chosen to fill the void and produce a range of simple "how-to"s for taking apart everyday gadgets.

The first is that society has become less curious in how machines work - they are no longer a novelty.

We are surrounded by complicated machines and if we had to understand how each worked and how each could be repaired it would take up much of our leisure time.

Increasingly the manufacturers of machines do not design them to be repaired, and so it is often cheaper and easier to throw the mobile phone, fridge or toaster away rather than repair it.

The increased use of electronics in cars has led many to suggest the same process is now happening to cars and that they will soon be irreparable, making Haynes manuals mere relics of a bygone age.

"Underneath the electronics you have got all the same mechanical functions," he said.

"You have got valves going up and down, you have got pistons going up and down, you have got bearings wearing out, so basically all the work is still there to be done."

MySpace will acquire the popular music discovery service iLike that allows users listen to and share music across social networks.

iLike reportedly turned down an offer from rival Facebook, where it is the top music application.

The company has 55 million registered users and has been prominent on most social networks apart from MySpace.

"The iLike acquisition advances our relentless pursuit of innovation," said MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

"Music entertainment is an important piece of people's lives," he told reporters in a conference call.

In a statement, iLike president Hadi Partovi said: "I'm enthusiastic about what this combination will mean for our users, artists, advertisers, and our staff.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed but the blogosphere has reported that iLike was sold "fairly cheaply" at about $20m (Â£12.4m).

MySpace has been working to overhaul its business into one more focused on global music and entertainment.

Mr Van Natta said he wants iLike to branch out from music recommendation into other areas like video, games and film.

It is not known how this acquisition will ultimately affect iLike's relationship with Facebook, which has been home to much of iLike's activity. It has been estimated that 80% of its traffic comes from Facebook.

"Now that it will be owned by Facebook's closest rival, there's a chance that Facebook could restrict or block the app," said CNet's Caroline McCarthy.

Mr Van Natta for his part told reporters: "In the short term users should expect the iLike experience to be unaffected.

"Our expectation is that social networks are going to be thrilled that we're making iLike an even richer experience."

In a statement to the BBC Facebook said: "iLike was one of the first applications to be built on Facebook Platform and has become a success with more than 10 million users.

"We expect that users will continue to discover and share music through the iLike application on Facebook."

The deal was not unexpected and had been heavily trailed by blogs like TechCrunch.

"iLike ultimately chose MySpace based partly on price, and partly on a fit with the buyer," said Mike Arrington founder of TechCrunch.com.

"Ongoing uncertainty over Facebook's intentions to compete with them (iLike) directly as well as regular changes to the rules around Facebook Platform mean they could get cut off at any time," warned Mr Arrington. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8210708.stm>

PhilHealth assures members will continue to enjoy medical benefits

Members of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) will continue to enjoy medical benefits â€œin the years to come" despite reports of its impending bankruptcy.

Its members â€“ comprising 86 percent of the Philippine population â€“ have â€œno reason to be worried about its financial stability," the agency said in a statement, adding that the National Health Insurance Fund remains stable.

â€œWith an investment portfolio of about P91 billion as of July 31, 2009, PhilHealth remains solid, and is poised to remain so in the years to come," the agency said.

The statement was issued after a report quoted a PhilHealth vice president who said that the agency may become bankrupt by 2016 if the national government fails to pay its P19.2 billion debt to the state-led corporation.

The obligation was incurred from 2001 up to 2008.

PhilHealth vice president for actuary Nerissa Santiago disclosed the agencyâ€™s impending bankruptcy during a Senate hearing on a bill aiming to provide health insurance for Filipinos. Sen. Loren Legarda, who authored the bill, chairs the Senate health committee.

Legarda said she has already ordered the PhilHealth to submit a list of the particular government agencies which have failed to pay their respective contributions.

According to Santiago, the government debt to PhilHealth ballooned to almost P20 billion due to the different bases that the Department of Budget Management was using in the salary scale and salary caps for its 79 million members.

Despite its debt, the DBM was still able to remit P388 million and P85 million in 2006 and 2007 respectively to PhilHealth. The General Appropriations Act of 2009 has already allotted P610 million.

â€œWe continue to bill the DBM for the said amounts, and with close coordination, we remain optimistic that the DBM will fully settle its obligations soon," PhilHealth said.

PhilHealth said it was â€œexerting all efforts" to urge employers to remit their counterpart contributions for the benefit of their employees.

The agency said it is enhancing inpatient care benefits, increasing its need to step up its collection of premium contributions from different paying programs. - GMANews.TV <http://www.gmanews.tv/story/170288/PhilHealth-assures-members-will-continue-to-enjoy-medical-benefits>

CHERYL M. ARCIBAL, GMANews.TV

08/20/2009 | 04:33 PM

(Updated 4:33 PM) The Philippine economy may have contracted during the second quarter this year, possibly the first time the countryâ€™s output shrank in more than ten years, a senior government economist said on Thursday.

From April to June, the Philippinesâ€™ gross domestic product (GDP) could have hit anywhere from -0.1 to 0.9 percent, Dennis Arroyo, the National Economic and Development Authorityâ€™s (NEDA) director for national planning and policy staff.

He cited the continued weakness of all sectors and constricted consumer spending.

"The forecast is based on the latest indicators such as agricultural performance, exports and imports figures, Missi (Monthly Integrated Survey of Selected Industries), consumer goods sales, corporate profits, OF (overseas Filipinos) remittances, and other relevant data and information that have impacted on the second quarter performance of the economy," Arroyo said

If economic growth falls within NEDAâ€™s low-end expectations, it would be the first time the Philippines tip into a contraction since the 1997 Asian crisis.

Despite the forecast, Arroyo said the Philippines is in no danger of gliding into a recession.

â€œItâ€™s possible that there will be a recession but still unlikely. So there is a one in 10 chance of GDP recession," Arroyo said.

Developed economies such as Japan, France, Hong Kong and Germanyâ€™s were seen to emerge out of recession within the year, he cited.

Even if the economy shrinks in second quarter, Arroyo said it still could not be defined as a â€œrecession" because its technical definition is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Consumption â€“ which comprises up to 80 percent of the economy â€“ is expected to pick up in the third quarter, he said.

In the first three months of the year, the gross domestic product was recorded at 0.4 percent.

Farming output, which comprises about 20 percent of the domestic economy, was pegged to have grown between 0.4 and 1.4 percent.

Industry, which contributes 30 percent of the economy, was seen to have slumped at between -2.9 and -1.3 percent.

The historic declines in the manufacturing subsector dampened the sectorâ€™s performance in the April to June period.

â€œFrom 6.1-percent growth in the second quarter of 2008, the growth rate of manufacturing subsector is expected to remain negative in the second quarter of this year," Arroyo said, citing contractions in...[the] Missi and the countryâ€™s exports.

Services, which makes up half of the economy, likely pulled a slower growth of between 1.7 and 2.2 percent.

The sector remains the economyâ€™s â€œmain growth source," with â€œsustained performance of the offshoring and outsourcing sector, and the growth in health and wellness, retirement, and medical tourism," Arroyo added.

The government is set to announce the official economic figures for the second quarter on Thursday next week.

A recovery is seen in the third quarter owing to the drop in inflation and a boost in consumption.

Although Augustâ€™s inflation rate may turn out to be lower than July â€“ which at 0.2 percent is already the lowest in 22 years â€“ election campaign spending and remittances will help boost economic activity. - GMANews.TV <http://www.gmanews.tv/story/170260/RP-economy-may-have-shrunk-in-second-quarter>

By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News

Unix had computer networking built in from the start

The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines.

Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod.

Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.

Work on Unix began at Bell Labs after AT&T, (which owned the lab), MIT and GE pulled the plug on an ambitious project to create an operating system called Multics.

The idea was to make better use of the resources of mainframe computers and have them serve many people at the same time.

"With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably," said Dr Peter Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix's early years.

Time well spent

The cancellation meant that two of the researchers assigned to the project, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, had a lot of time on their hands. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims of making computers more flexible and interactive, they decided to try and finish the work - albeit on a much smaller scale.

The commitment was helped by the fact that in August 1969, Ken Thompson's wife took their new baby to see relatives on the West Coast. She was due to be gone for a month and Thompson decided to use his time constructively - by writing the core of what became Unix.

He allocated one week each to the four core components of operating system, shell, editor and assembler. It was during that time and after as the growing team got the operating system running on a DEC computer known as a PDP-7 that Unix came into being.

It got us away from the total control that businesses like IBM and DEC had over us

Peter Salus, author

Bill Thompson on "The enlightenment's operating system"

By the early 1970s, five people were working on Unix. Thompson and Ritchie had been joined by Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy and Joe Ossanna.

The name was reportedly coined by Brian Kernighan - a lover of puns who wanted Unics to stand in contrast to its forebear Multics.

The team got Unix running well on the PDP7 and soon it had a long list of commands it could carry out. The syntax of many of those commands, such as chdir and cat, are still in use 40 years on. Along with it came the C programming language.

But, said Dr Salus, it wasn't just the programming that was important about Unix - the philosophy behind it was vital too.

"Unix was created to solve a few problems," said Dr Salus, "the most important of which was to have something that was much more compact than the operating systems that were current at that time which ran on the dinosaurs of the computer age."

Net benefits

Back in the early 1970s, computers were still huge and typically overseen by men in white coats who jealously guarded access to the machines. The idea of users directly interacting with the machine was downright revolutionary.

"It got us away from the total control that businesses like IBM and DEC had over us," said Dr Salus.

Word about Unix spread and people liked what they heard.

"Once it had jumped out of the lab and out of AT&T it caught fire among the academic community," Dr Salus told the BBC. What helped this grassroots movement was AT&T's willingness to give the software away for free.

DEC's early computers were for many years restricted to laboratories

That it ran on cheap hardware and was easy to move to different machines helped too.

"The fact that its code was adaptable to other types of machinery, in large and small versions meant that it could become an operating system that did more than just run on your proprietary machine," said Dr Salus.

In May 1975 it got another boost by becoming the chosen operating system for the internet. The decision to back it is laid out in the then-nascent Internet Engineering Task Force's document RFC 681, which notes that Unix "presents several interesting capabilities" for those looking to use it on the net.

It didn't stop there. Unix was adapted for use on any and every computer from mainframes to desktops. While it is true that it did languish in the 1980s and 90s as corporations scrapped over whose version was definitive, the rise of the web has given it new life.

The wars are over and the Unix specification is looked after by the Open Group - an industry body set up to police what is done in the operating system's name.

Now Unix, in a variety of guises, is everywhere. Most of the net runs on Unix-based servers and the Unix philosophy heavily influenced the open source software movements and the creation of the Linux desktop OS. Windows runs the communication stack created for Unix. Apple's OS X is broadly based on Unix and it is possible to dig into that software and find text remarkably similar to that first written by Dennis Ritchie in 1971.

"The really nice part is the flexibility and adaptability," said Dr Salus, explaining why it is so widespread and how its ethic fits with a world at home with the web.

"Unix is the best screwdriver ever built," said Dr Salus. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8205976.stm>

SOPHIA M. DEDACE, GMANews.TV

08/20/2009 | 10:36 PM

In politics, there's no such thing as a free lunch or dinner.

Quezon Rep. Danilo Suarez’s $15,000-dinner treat at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse in Washington D.C. to celebrate the President and her husband Jose Miguel Arroyo’s 41st wedding anniversary has been linked to the business interests of the lawmaker’s family, according to a group of lawyers from Suarez’s province.

The Sentro Gabay Legal sa Quezon led by its convenor, Frumencio Pulgar, claimed that a corporation owned by the congressman's family is awaiting the go-signal for the release of a P1-billion government loan for the construction of a 10-megawatt power plant in Quezon that will cost $27.7 million.

Suarez dismissed the allegation. He said the US blowout for Mrs. Arroyo and her party was not meant to influence the President’s decision on the proposed project.

But GMA News’ Sherry Ann Torres reported on Thursday that according to Pulgar’s group, Suarez's family-owned Coco Resources Corp. (CRC), is asking state-owned Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) for the P1-billion loan. President Arroyo appoints directors to the DBP board.

Pulgar said the power plant could be used to monopolize electricity rates in the province. “Madidikta ng CRC ang presyo ng kuryente doon (CRC could dictate electricity rates there)," he told GMA News.

In his blog, Pulgar says CRC is a private stock corporation that was registered with the Securities in Exchange Commission on Jan. 14, 2008. He said Suarez’s siblings, children, and in-laws are the firm’s incorporators.

Suarez does not deny that CRC is owned by his family. But he fended off charges that wining and dining the president was intended to grease the release of the P1-billion loan.

“I’m not borrowing money. Neither (am I) influencing the President or the members of the board of DBP because the board has been there… for quite a while," Suarez told GMA News.

Jose Antonio Lopez, Suarez’s son-in-law and one of CRC’s incorporators, said there was nothing irregular about the CRC’s proposed project.

“The project (is really) above board," Lopez told GMA News.

But Pulgar said Suarez could be violating Article VI, section 14 of the 1987 Constitution because the politician, as member of the House of Representatives “is disqualified to directly or indirectly be interested financially in any contract with, or in any franchise or special privilege granted by the government…"

But according to Suarez, only the four highest elected officials and their relatives up to the third degree of consanguinity are prohibited by law from entering into projects with the government or borrowing public funds.

The lawmaker was referring to section 5 of Republic Act No. 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, which states that, “It shall be unlawful for the spouse or for any relative, by consanguinity or affinity, within the third civil degree, of the President of the Philippines, the Vice-President of the Philippines, the President of the Senate, or the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to intervene, directly or indirectly, in any business, transaction, contract or application with the Government." - GMANews.TV <http://www.gmanews.tv/story/170319/15-k-dinner-treat-for-arroyo-linked-to-suarez39s-business-interest>

By Daniel Emery
Technology reporter, BBC News, Cologne

Iran 'brings culture' to games

Video game developers from Iran have been exhibiting at a Western game convention for the very first time.

Representatives from the trade body, the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games, were on hand at a dedicated stand at gamescom in Cologne.

They were there to showcase the latest games developed in Iran, establish contacts, and to see if Western retailers would stock their games.

But they acknowledged the political situation would make it a challenge.

"We need more investors," said Amir Tarbyatjoui, head of Parsan Business Development Solutions who managed the Iranian stand.

"The [US] sanctions do affect our industry, but they cannot stop it."

'More potential'

Mr Tarbyatjoui said that Iran was becoming a leading player in video game development in the Middle East and that the event in Cologne was to show people just what they were capable of.

"We are using this event to promote what is happening in the Iranian games industry," he said.

"We believe we have more potential and we want to promote that potential."

There were a number of different types of game on offer, including a tank shooter set at the start of the Iran-Iraq war, a platform adventure set in Persia, an adventure game where you play the role of a girl called Sara; a young student caught up in events during the early stages of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and a role-playing game called Age of Pahlevans based on Iranian mythology.

Bahram Borgheai, head of Ras Games who make Age of Pahlevans, told the BBC that Iran has a rich history that was custom made for video games.

"Persia has been around for a very long time," he said.

Mr Borgheai said that while most Western developers used Greek, Norse, or Roman mythology to base their games on, Iran had its own unique mythology that has rarely been used in video games.

"What we have is something quite unique and we are using the event in Cologne to show that to the world."

Political difficulties

Video-game development in Iran attracted global media attention in 2007 with the release of Special Operation 85: Hostage Rescue. The game saw two Iranian nuclear scientists kidnapped by Israel with players in the role of Iranian special forces sent to rescue them, while battling Israeli and American forces.

However Mr Borgheai said he doubted if it was a real game in its own right.

"We never heard about it in Iran," he said. "It certainly wasn't released there and the first I heard about it was through the international media," he said.

"If it was made then I would guess they just took an existing game and stuck a few textures and the like onto it; it certainly wasn't a new game."

The group said the event in Cologne had been a success and they would be back next year, but ruled out exhibiting at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles.

"It is difficult given the relations between Iran and the USA," said Mr Tarbyatjoui,.

"Certainly all of us here today will be at E3 next year, but there will not be a dedicated Iran stand such as you see in Cologne today." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8213272.stm>

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Not everyone in the coalition wants the deal blocked, some want revisions

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.

They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

"Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.

"If this deal goes ahead, they're making a real shot at being 'the' library and the only library."

Back in 2008, the search giant reached an agreement with publishers and authors to settle two lawsuits that charged the company with copyright infringement for the unauthorised scanning of books.

In that settlement, Google agreed to pay $125m (£76m) to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and receive compensation. Authors and publishers would get 70% from the sale of these books with Google keeping the remaining 30%.

Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.

Comments on the deal have to be lodged by September 4th. In early October, a judge in the Southern district of New York will consider whether or not to approve the class-action suit.

In a separate development, the US Department of Justice is conducting an anti-trust investigation into the impact of the agreement. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8200624.stm>

The frauds have left a huge dent in the society's finances

The Chelsea Building Society has revealed it has lost £41m ($67m) as a result of mortgage frauds involving some of its buy-to-let loans.

The frauds are the main reason for the society staying in the red, with overall losses of £26m in the first half of the year.

The frauds appear to have involved professionals colluding to inflate the value of buy-to-let properties.

The society says the losses emerged after a review of all its loans.

"The society has been through a difficult period and reporting a loss in the first half of the year is disappointing," said Stuart Bernau, the Chelsea's chairman and interim chief executive.

"However, the underlying performance is strong, even though we have had to make provision for impairment and fraud losses."

Last year, the Chelsea lost £39m, the largest annual loss yet recorded by any building society.

Its chief executive agreed to resign earlier this month. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8213504.stm>

By Adam Easton
BBC News, Warsaw

Poland currently has some 2,000 troops serving in Afghanistan

The head of the Polish army has resigned after a dispute in which he accused the government of failing to properly equip troops in Afghanistan.

Lt Gen Waldemar Skrzypczak also said ministry officials' knowledge of war was limited to the movies.

He made his comments after the death of a Polish officer earlier this month in an ambush in Afghanistan.

Poland has 2,000 troops in the country as part of the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force.

The dispute involving Gen Skrzypczak became public following this month's battle between Polish troops and insurgents.

Four soldiers were wounded in the clash.

Initial inquiries found that the unit had not received prompt back-up owing to equipment shortages.

Gen Skrzypczak publicly accused the defence ministry of incompetence and failing to provide his troops with modern helicopters and other military hardware.

He resigned after the defence minister, Bogdan Klich, told a news conference that the general had admitted his criticisms were a mistake.

Gen Skrzypczak said he stood by his remarks.

He said his only mistake was to go public as the body of the dead officer was being flown home. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8213266.stm>

By Anbarasan Ethirajan
BBC News

[Mr Pathmanathan] was the person who ran a massive network to purchase arms and ammunition for the LTTE for nearly 30 years

Gotabaya Rajapaksa

The Sri Lankan defence secretary has called on foreign countries to hand over Tamil Tiger rebels and their assets, worth of millions of dollars.

The demand by Gotabaya Rajapaksa came weeks after the arrest of the new Tamil Tiger leader, Selvarasa Pathmanathan.

Mr Pathmanathan was arrested in a South East Asian nation earlier this month and brought to Colombo in a swift and secretive operation.

He is currently being interrogated by Sri Lankan security officials.

The Sri Lankan military declared victory over Tamil Tiger rebels in May this year.

Overseas assets

Mr Pathmanathan is the most senior leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to be caught alive by Sri Lankan security forces.

"He's a seasoned man, so he's coming out with information very slowly during interrogation. He was the person who ran a massive network to purchase arms and ammunition for the LTTE for nearly 30 years," Mr Rajapaksa told the BBC.

Mr Pathmanathan is alleged to have provided arms for 30 years

The LTTE had a well-organised overseas network to fund their arms purchases.

Its investments abroad are said to range from grocery shops to real estate, from petrol stations to temples, from commercial shipping to financing movies.

But most of these activities were carried out under different names as the rebels were banned in many countries.

The estimates about the LTTE's assets and investments range from $300m (£182m) to $1bn. Mr Pathmanathan is believed to have substantial knowledge about these assets.

"Once it is proved that these assets belong to the LTTE, then concerned countries should hand over the assets as well as the remaining LTTE members to Sri Lanka," Mr Rajapasa said.

He said that "if the western world is serious about fighting terrorism" it would not provide safe sanctuary "to a terrorist organisation like the LTTE".

The arrest of Mr Pathmanathan is regarded as a significant blow to the LTTE's overseas operations, especially when it was desperately looking for a figurehead to revive the organisation and boost its sagging morale following its defeat on the battleground. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8199754.stm>

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

The cells replicated to produce a new strain of Mycoplasma mycoides

In what has been described as a step towards the creation of a synthetic cell, scientists have created a new "engineered" strain of bacteria.

A team successfully transferred the genome of one type of bacteria into a yeast cell, modified it, and then transplanted into another bacterium.

This paves the way to the creation of a synthetic organism - inserting a human-made genome into a bacterial cell.

The team describe the work in the journal Science.

This advance, the researchers say, overcomes the obstacle of making a new inserted genome work inside a recipient cell.

The experiment was carried out by a team that included scientist J Craig Venter, a leading figure in the controversial field of synthetic biology.

Sanjay Vashee, a researcher at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, in the US, was one of the authors.

The resulting cell he and his team created went on to undertake multiple rounds of cell division, to produce a new strain of the modified bacteria.

Dr Vashee explained to BBC News that the work overcame a hurdle in the quest to create a fully synthetic organism.

J Craig Venter is a leading figure in this controversial field

"Bacteria have 'immune' systems that protect them from foreign DNA such as those from viruses," he explained.

He and his colleagues managed to disable this immune system, which consists of proteins called restriction enzymes that home in on specific sections of DNA and chop up the genome at these points.

Bacteria can shield their own genomes from this process by attaching chemical units called methyl groups at the points which the restriction enzymes attack.

The scientists modified the original genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, whilst it was inside the yeast cell. Then they either attached methyl groups to it, or inactivated the restriction enzyme of the recipient bacterium, before transplanting the genome into its new cell.

One of the team's ultimate aims is to transplant a fully synthetic genome into a bacterial cell - creating bacteria that can be programmed to carry out specific functions - for example, digesting biological material to produce fuel. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8210739.stm>

US car sales rose in July

The US government says that a $3bn (£1.8bn) car scrappage scheme will end next Monday when funds run out.

The Car Allowance Rebate System (Cars), dubbed the "cash for clunkers" plan, has been seen as an industry life-line.

So far, more than 450,000 cars have been sold through the programme, representing $1.9bn.

The programme was initially only allocated $1bn but a further $2bn was injected earlier this month after a boost in US car sales.

The deadline is designed to give dealers enough time to complete sales and submit applications to the government for rebates.

Some analysts expressed concern that the scheme, which has boosted car sales since it was unveiled last month, was being shelved too early.

"My fear is that ending it now could prove to be very premature... my fear is that sales in September will fall back sharply," said Howard Wheeldon at BGC Partners.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS

Car owners can gain a voucher worth $3,500 for trading in a vehicle getting 18 miles per gallon or less for a new car getting at least 22 mpg

Car owners can gain vouchers of $4,500 for those trading in a car getting 18 mpg or less in exchange for a model that gets at least 28 mpg

The Car Allowance Rebate System is based on similar schemes in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain that have boosted new car sales.

Under the terms of the scheme, owners of old cars and lorries gain up to $4,500 towards a new vehicle in exchange for their old model.

The "clunkers" programme was inspired by similar schemes in Europe. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8213316.stm>

Sri Lanka will offer specialist counter-insurgency training

Sri Lanka's army has said it will be happy to give training to members of the Pakistani military.

It says Islamabad has requested the training because of the country's success in defeating the Tamil Tigers.

In May, the government announced the end to a decades-long war with the rebel group.

The army's new commander told the BBC that Pakistan had already asked if it could send its military cadets to train in counter-insurgency operations.

"We'll give a favourable response," Lt Gen Jagath Jayasuriya said of the request.

He said the Sri Lankan military envisaged specialist courses lasting up to six weeks, directed towards small groups from interested armies.

Lt Gen Jayasuriya said there was external interest in how the military had defeated the rebel group in practical terms.

The army now wished to construct a written military doctrine in English. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8214731.stm>

Ben Bernanke said the recovery is likely to be relatively slow at first

World stock markets have risen after US central bank chief Ben Bernanke said the world's biggest economy was nearing the start of a recovery.

"The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good," Mr Bernanke told a conference in Wyoming.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones index rose more than 1%, while European markets were also sent higher.

But the Fed boss said unemployment, which is expected to top 10% in the US, would fall "only gradually".

However, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet expressed concern at what he saw as premature talk of a full recovery.

After contracting sharply over the past year, economic activity appears to be levelling out, both in the United States and abroad

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman

"I am a little bit uneasy when I see that, because we have some green shoots here and there, we are already saying, 'well, after all, we are close to back to normal'," he said, speaking later at the conference. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8214778.stm>

Libyan suggestions that the UK released convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi in exchange for trade considerations has raised the spectre of Tripoli engaging in oil diplomacy, says the BBC's Rana Jawad, in the Libyan capital.

Megrahi is the only person convicted over the Lockerbie attack

Even as the British Foreign Office denied the claims, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was hinting at the same allegation made by his son, Seif al-Islam, hours earlier.

"This step [Megrahi's release] is for the benefit of relations between Britain and Libya, and relations of personal friendship between me and them, and it will certainly be positively reflected in all fields of co-operation between the two countries," Col Gaddafi is reported to have said during his first meeting with the convicted Lockerbie bomber.

The UK government has vigorously denied that any under-the-table dealings were struck to secure Megrahi's release from jail on compassionate grounds.

However, this will do little to ease suspicions among its critics among the UK and US public that a deal was struck behind closed doors.

A first red flag for the families of Lockerbie's 270 victims was raised earlier this year with the ratification of the prisoner transfer agreement between the British and Libyan governments.

Some observers saw it as being rushed through parliament for ratification with no proper review. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8215806.stm>

Australia has tropical rainforests, deserts and temperate zones

An Australian scientist says the continent needs five or six seasons to suit its climate.

Tim Entwisle, chief of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens, says Australia should "unhook" itself from the "arbitrary" four seasons it inherited from Britain.

Mr Entwisle has proposed "sprummer" - the season between spring and summer - and "sprinter" - an early spring.

He says a new system could help people better understand their environment and monitor signs of climate change.

"Having four three-month seasons... doesn't make any sense in the place we live," he told Australia's public broadcaster ABC News.

"Something with more seasons would work better and something that unhooks us from these arbitrary European seasons," he added.

Aboriginal Australians use up to eight seasons in some parts of the country to capture local conditions.

Mr Entwisle says that for the system to work well, different regions would need a different number of seasons.

"I'd be encouraging different areas to have local regional seasons, to spend some time working that out and to use them to reflect what's going on around us," he told ABC.

He has suggested holding a national debate on the subject, and a public competition to name the new seasons. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8215570.stm>

By Greg Wood and Sandra Shmueli
BBC News, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

The idyllic setting of Jackson Hole plays host to the world's central bankers

Jackson Hole must be a contender for the most spectacular setting in the United States. The "hole", or valley, lies nearly 7,000 feet up, between the wooded ridges and jagged peaks of the Grand Teton Range, still dotted with snow even in high summer.

The sagebrush and the forests abound with wildlife - elk, moose and bear. But for two days every year a different type of animal can be spotted here - central bankers from around the world, gathering for their annual symposium at the lodge overlooking Jackson Lake.

It's a time for relaxation - hiking, kayaking - but also for serious and often technical discussion of the world's economic problems.

Government money has helped pay for a new ticket hall at the local airport

Ben Bernanke kicked off this year's symposium with some upbeat comments. "Prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good," he said.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve is not given to overstatement. So for him this is pretty heady stuff and helped to boost share prices around the world.

But it is very much in line with recent statements from the Fed and his remarks contained an important warning. The financial system is not yet fully repaired and it is still difficult for people and businesses to get credit.

The president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, also sounded a note of caution. "I am a little bit uneasy when I see that because we have some green shoots here and there, we are already saying, 'well, after all, we are close to back to normal'," he said.

'No change at all'

Airport manager Ray Bishop is not sure a recovery is around the corner

That caution is reflected in the state of the local economy here in Jackson Hole. Tourism is the biggest industry and it tells a mixed story.

Passenger traffic at the local airport is down by between 10% and 15% on this time last year. The airport has received $29m (£17.6m) of government money to pay for a new ticket hall. But manager Ray Bishop does not detect any sign of recovery.

"We don't see any change to that at all. In fact, September's numbers on the pre-bookings look a little softer. We haven't seen any statistics that makes us think that we've hit the bottom yet."

At the Mangy Moose, a local restaurant popular with holiday makers, customers are spending less than they did last year, even though the overall number of tourists has risen, perhaps because fewer Americans are going abroad, preferring instead to take a so-called "staycation".

When the last gathering was held here at Jackson Lake Lodge, no-one anticipated the scale of the financial disaster which was about to strike

"People are watching their pennies," says David Yoder, co-owner of the Mangy Moose, "I know that I'm watching mine. Our sales volumes are down but our bottom lines (profits) are up."

The Mangy Moose has cut its costs by reducing staff, so it can make a bigger profit from lower sales. This reflects what is happening across US industry. It is a jobless recovery, good for business but not necessarily for individuals.

Consensus

This presents a dilemma for the central bankers meeting here. At some stage they are going to have to put in place an "exit strategy", withdrawing the vast amounts of extra money they've pumped into the credit markets.

Many animals can be seen around the lodge where the bankers are gathering

But unless the private sector starts spending and investing more, recovery will not be sustainable. That is not happening yet. So there's a consensus at this symposium. Economic stimulus from governments and central banks will have to continue for some time to support recovery.

When the last gathering was held here at Jackson Lake Lodge, no-one anticipated the scale of the financial disaster which was about to strike.

"Is it only twelve months ago?" asked Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University Business School, who's contributing to the symposium. "It feels like twelve centuries!"

The central bankers here have all aged a lot in the last year. But, as they head out on their hiking trips among the mountains and the lakes, they are feeling a bit more confident that a global economic recovery really is on the way. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8215458.stm>

Women try and spot the real from fake designer handbag

Holidaymakers could be fined thousands of pounds - or even jailed - for buying fake designer goods when abroad, copyright lawyers are warning.

Authorities in France and Italy are not just targeting those who produce and sell fakes but also those who buy them.

In France, the maximum fine is 300,000 euro (£260,000) or three years in jail.

The UK government has decided against criminalising consumers. Instead it has launched an information campaign aimed at people using markets and boot sales.

Seizures of counterfeit goods on the continent more than doubled in 2008, with customs authorities seizing 178 million fake items - mostly imported from China.

The European Commission is concerned about the growing involvement of organised international criminal gangs.

These are not cheeky chappies making an honest living on a Sunday morning, these are hardened criminals

Susie Winter
Alliance Against Intellectual Property Theft

It says: "Without doubt, one of the principal methods of dispersing counterfeits is the 'ant-like' traffic of tourists returning home from holiday, bringing back souvenirs."

This has prompted some member states to take a harder line.

Intellectual property lawyer Simon Tracey said anyone tempted to bring back items such as fake designer sunglasses, a football top or handbag from their holidays should beware.

He said lots of people have already been fined thousands of euros for owning a fake, and France seemed "a little bit harsher" than Italy. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8215519.stm>

Prime Minister Putin saw the extent of the damage caused by the blast

Russian PM Vladimir Putin has promised relatives of victims of an explosion at a Russian hydro-electric power plant 1m roubles ($30,000) each in compensation.

The death toll from Monday's blast at the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant in Siberia now stands at 47, with 28 people missing and assumed dead.

Mr Putin visited the site after calling for a major review of the country's strategic infrastructure.

The cause of the blast remains unclear and an investigation is continuing.

There have been claims from Chechen websites that Islamist militants were responsible for the blast at Russia's largest hydro-electric plant.

Those suggestions have been rejected by Kremlin sources as "idiotic", and investigators have reportedly found no traces of explosives at the site.

Previous reports suggested a transformer exploded during repairs, destroying three generating units and leading to the flooding of a turbine hall.

'Let's not pretend'

Earlier the plant's owner, RusHydro, pledged to pay 1m roubles to the families of the 26 workers who had been confirmed dead at that stage.

But during his visit Mr Putin said such payments should be extended to relatives of those who were still missing.

The repair job will be huge - but still worth doing, officials say

"We can see what's happened, let's not pretend," he said.

"I've just talked to the rescue workers. They have seen it all but say that nerves fail them [here]," he added.

Mr Putin compared the state of Russia's infrastructure today to that of a wartime frontline, and promised to match the company's payouts with government compensation.

Although more than 1,000 rescue workers are still scouring the damaged turbine hall and its surrounding area for survivors, most say the chances are minimal that anyone could survive for four days in the near-freezing waters of the Yenisei river.

Russian Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu said it would take at least a week to assess the damage from the blast, adding that repairing the turbine hall alone could cost 40bn roubles ($1.3bn; £762m).

But he said it would still be worth doing the repairs, because the dam - undamaged by the blast - had accounted for 80% of the construction cost. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8213622.stm>

The living wall has seen better days

A "living wall" of geraniums and euphorbia that cost a council £100,000 to install is very much dead.

When it was installed in 2005 the wall, on the side of a children's centre in Islington, north London, was a verdant sea of green.

But just four years later the award-winning feature withered and died after the watering system failed.

A spokeswoman for Lib Dem-run Islington Council said: "As with anything, it carried a certain element of risk."

But that is not good enough for Labour councillor Barry Edwards.

He said: "They seem to have been very slow to sort it out.

"I can see why they installed it - but it does seem a great pity what has happened to it and I hope they can sort it out."

Tim Newark, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, accused the council of "experimenting" with public money.

'Initially it thrived'

The council had hoped the living wall, which was watered with recycled rainwater, would provide a habitat for wildlife.

It was thought to be the first wall of its type in Britain.

A spokeswoman for Islington Council said: "Initially it thrived and even won a national award.

"Of course we're disappointed that, despite everyone's best efforts, the green wall hasn't thrived.

"This could be down to its design and we are currently looking at the best way to restore it." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8215035.stm>

Layar co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald shows the AR system in action

By Dan Simmons
Reporter, BBC Click

Imagine seeing interesting information pop up as you stroll around. It is almost like a sixth sense, and it used to be mainly the stuff of science fiction.

But Augmented Reality (AR) - in which live video images like those from mobile phone camera are tagged with relevant data - is starting to be widely available.

This is largely because of advances in smart-phone technology, explained Chetan Damani, the co-founder of an AR application firm called Acrossair.

"Mobile manufacturers have started to add digital compasses into their mobile devices and that's allowed us to offer people augmented reality applications," he said.

"As the user moves the device left to right we can actually calculate where the user is pointing to and overlay the data accordingly," he said.

Add to that the ability to "geotag" - that is, add geographic information to places, pictures, or things based on a user's location handily grabbed from a handset's GPS - and the potential for AR applications skyrockets.

Landscape choice

Late August saw the global release of a significantly expanded version of an AR application called Layar - which has been dubbed the world's first augmented reality browser.

The app Sekai Camera enables users to tag things they want others to see

The Layar system combines a digital compass and GPS co-ordinates to establish its location and where it is pointing.

Relevant information is then retrieved from a server and displayed in real time.

By scanning the landscape, the software shows houses up for sale, restaurants, bars, or Wikipedia entries that could be useful for tourists.

Also visible are Twitter "tweets" and photographs in various parts of the city that some people have geotagged.

NEXT WEEK

In a follow-up report next week, Click will look at how AR tech might be applied to friends and creating new gaming worlds

"Layar enables you to see things that you didn't know about previously - data that was hidden in books or in the basement of a company," he explained.

Much of the content, he said, is created by users themselves.

"Right now anybody can make a Layar, and all this information is provided to you as a service, and you can make it and access it for free."

Layar has only been in development since April, but it recently launched globally for phones that use the Google Android operating system.

A version for the iPhone is slated for release soon after the upgrade of Apple's operating system, which is expected to give developers greater control to manipulate and merge on-screen graphics and the camera feed.

Augmented directions

In Japan, a new iPhone application is being used to help visitors navigate their way through a museum and to find data on the exhibitions.

Acrossair points users to nearest tube

Developers Tonchidot's Sekai Camera app enables users to tag things they want others to see.

Other applications have more immediate practical value.

In London, for example, the Acrossair application allows commuters to find their nearest underground station.

Acrossair's app enables iPhone users in central London to point their handset's camera and see underground stops float over the picture.

The accelerometer within the phone means that if the user points their handset to the ground, arrows will pop up into view pointing the way to the nearest stations.

With hardware like GPS and digital compasses becoming more and more common on handsets - along with the ability to download and use apps - it's easy to imagine that AR will become the means of choice for delivering information that's specific to wherever we are, whenever we're there.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8214219.stm>

The mobile phone throwing world championship in Finland on Saturday is just one of many crazy contests on the country's summer diary. Helsingin Sanomat columnist Perttu Haekkinen asks why Finns have such a fondness for these wacky pursuits.

Finland is well-known for several reasons: mass-produced mobiles phones, lakes - 190,000 of them - and boiling hot saunas.

Also, for Santa Claus and the Eurovision monsterman, Lordi.

Finnish summer sports and pastimes owe something to all of these things. The telecoms industry, the natural environment - and the country's gimmicky eccentric side.

The list includes boot throwing, wife carrying, mosquito slapping, mobile-phone throwing, swamp football, sauna endurance contests... and many more.

I guess all Finnish summer sports were invented by drunk people

Harri Kinnunen, boot-throwing world championships organiser

And it's probably no coincidence that of all the many countries where people exult in playing air guitar, it's Finland that hosts the world championships.

But no-one should assume that Finns treat these contests as a joke - nothing could be further from the truth. The players and fans involved really do mean business.

Vodka and envy

Here's my theory about how they originated.

The countryside is soothing, but some people want more

Almost every Finnish family has its very own summer cottage, or moekki, where it hides every summer to escape annoying neighbours and noisy urban racket.

(Since Finland is a big country consisting mostly of trees and water, it's quite easy to find some soul-soothing peace.)

But after few days of relaxing country life, some Finns get bored. Activities like fishing, boozing or swimming lose their magic. Then it's time to call-up the annoying neighbours (or relatives) again, ask them to come over and get them to engage in some kind of contest. Toilet-paper throwing, for example.

The winner usually gets a bottle of cheap vodka and envious looks from their rivals. (Finnish people are quite competitive.)

But boredom is not the only motivating force behind weird summer sports.

"We can lure in 8,000 to 9,000 tourists during a weekend," says Eero Pitkaenen, announcer for the annual Wife-Carrying World Championships in Sonkajaervi.

This little village located in north-east Finland normally has a population of 4,825, so wife-carrying enthusiasts triple it every summer. And that means money. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8211639.stm>

Election officials have said ballot counting is over

Election observers in Afghanistan have said there was widespread voting fraud and intimidation during the presidential election on Thursday.

Stuffed ballot boxes, illiterate voters being told who to vote for and biased officials were cited by Afghanistan's Free and Fair Election Foundation.

But EU monitors said, despite widespread intimidation and violence, the vote was generally good and fair.

There have been rival claims of victory but no winner has been announced.

The chief EU observer said it was still early days in assessing the election.

The Free and Fair Election Foundation's provisional report also details accounts of multiple voting, underage voting and election officials being ejected from polling stations by representatives of candidates.

Threats of violence against voters came from local powerbrokers, the Taliban and rival political camps according to the Foundation, which sent about 7,000 observers around the country.

COUNTING THE VOTES

Counting began after polls closed at 1700 local time on Thursday

Votes counted by hand at each of the 6,200 polling stations

Polling stations are required to post their results immediately, to prevent fraud

Candidates' representatives are also given immediate access to results

The counting appeared to be completed by Friday lunchtime, with official returns due over the weekend

Regional media split on Afghan poll

Two UK soldiers killed in Helmand

Polling day experiences

Election officials have estimated turnout at between 40 and 50% which, if confirmed, would be well down on the 70% who voted in the first presidential election, in 2004.

Thursday's voting passed off relatively peacefully amid threats of Taliban attacks. The EU election observer mission said the election was well organised and was a victory for the Afghan people.

As official returns are collated, the leading contenders have said they will not incite street protests if they lose.

The incumbent Hamid Karzai and his main rival Abdullah Abdullah gave the assurance to the US special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke.

Both men have claimed victory.

Pre-election opinion polls suggested Hamid Karzai was leading the field of candidates but might face a run-off with Mr Abdullah.

Partial, preliminary results are expected on Tuesday and final results are due to be released in September.

If neither candidate wins an outright majority of 50%, then the vote goes to a second round in October.

One of the other 31 contenders and the deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, Mirwais Yassini, told the BBC he believes both main camps practised widespread electoral fraud.

He has lodged 31 complaints with Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC). <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8215612.stm>

By Daniel Emery
Technology reporter, BBC News, Cologne

Xbox's creative director demonstrates the motion control system that monitors a player's body movement

Microsoft has allowed the public to get their hands on its new hands-free games controller for the first time.

The US firm showed off the "Natal" technology, designed for use with its Xbox 360 console, at the European games convention gamescom in Germany.

The controller uses a microphone combined with visual and infrared cameras to control the onscreen action.

It was first unveiled at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles in June this year, but had not been on public display until now.

Kudo Tsunoda, Xbox 360's general manager and creative director of Natal, said that as consoles evolved from being a dedicated games machine into "living room entertainment", it was important to develop a new control interface.

"The current controller is a barrier to some people using our console," he said.

"To many users, the vast array of buttons and analogue sticks is plain confusing."

Mr Tsunoda said that Natal would allow casual users to use the console while at the same time delivering "extra fidelity to core users".

Two demos were on show at gamescom for people to try out, including a playable version of Burnout Paradise in which users control cars using an imaginary steering wheel, moving their feet forwards or backwards to control the speed.

Heat maps

At the heart of the Natal system is an infrared sensor that detects a person, their movements and their distance from the sensor.

The device calibrates itself to the room's temperature and then looks for warm bodies around the room.

Clothes, people, size, lighting - we're making Natal so it will work in all conditions

Kudo Tsunoda

Microsoft unveils new controller

Once detected, it scans the person's shape and tries to match it against profiles it stores in its memory. If the person is new, it asks them to create a new profile.

If it finds a match, it loads the person's profile and begins to work out their position. If a person moves towards the sensor they become "hotter"; as they step back they get "colder".

Natal plots 48 different points on a person's body, such as hands, feet and elbows, to create a wire-frame virtual manikin that mimics a person's movements.

Mr Tsunoda said that this means that even if someone - or something - were to move in front of a player, the sensor would not get confused, providing some of the player was still visible.

The system will allow players to automatically log on to the Xbox Live network, which allows players to compete with other gamers across the internet.

It would also monitor and adapt as people change shape, he added.

"If you take a young child, they grow at quite a fast rate," he said.

"However, these changes over days or weeks are slight. So if there are small day-to-day changes, Natal will recognise that and update your profile."

Mr Tsunoda said that because everything was done in infrared, it negated any problems they could have encountered with normal light.

"Clothes, people, size, lighting - we're making Natal so it will work in all conditions.

"And, yes, you can even log in and play Natal in the dark." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8214385.stm>

Col Tootal has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan

A former Army commander says there is a "real risk" that Britain could lose the conflict in Afghanistan.

Col Stuart Tootal, writing in the Sunday Mirror, said a lack of political will could damage the military campaign against the Taleban.

Col Tootal who led 3 Para in Helmand in 2006, said the battle could be lost "in the corridors of power".

He also said Britain and other Nato allies had to send additional troops to Afghanistan if they were to succeed.

Col Tootal said that if the conflict was lost "it will not be in places like Helmand, but in the corridors of power in cities like London and Washington.

"Counter-insurgency conflicts are rarely lost by the fighting troops, but in the arena of domestic public opinion when there is a lack of the political will to make the right commitment to see them through."

Col Tootal said he believed the campaign in Afghanistan to be "winnable".

But he added: "Mounting casualties and an incoherent and under-resourced strategy paint a pessimistic picture.

"It will take statesmanship to put extra troops, helicopters, equipment and proper development programmes in place, but the benefits are considerable." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8216497.stm>

There is an ongoing political row about equipment for troops

Ministry of Defence systems for buying new equipment are so inefficient they are "harming our ability" to conduct operations, a leaked report suggests.

According to the Sunday Times, the dossier concluded the MoD's acquisition programme was £35 million over budget and five years behind schedule.

It says the report's author Bernard Gray, a former government adviser, has called the problems "endemic".

The MoD said it was working on the problems detailed in the draft report.

The Sunday Times claims to have seen the full 296-page report and it highlights a number of Mr Gray's comments from the review.

It seems as though military equipment acquisition is vying in a technological race with the delivery of civilian software systems for the title of 'world's most delayed technical solution'

Bernard Gray

Plans to improve defence orders

"How can it be that it takes 20 years to buy a ship, or aircraft, or tank? Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought?"

"Even worse, at the end of the wait, why does it never quite seem to do what it was supposed to?"

He concluded the current programme is unaffordable in the long term and the MoD's procurement section should be privatised.

"The problems, and the sums of money involved, have almost lost their power to shock, so endemic is the issue," wrote Mr Gray.

"It seems as though military equipment acquisition is vying in a technological race with the delivery of civilian software systems for the title of 'world's most delayed technical solution'. Even British trains cannot compete."

The report warns the MoD has a "substantially overheated equipment programme, with too many types of equipment being ordered for too large a range of tasks at too high a specification".

Agile enemies such as the Taliban were "unlikely to wait for our sclerotic acquisition systems to catch up", he said.

We are constantly improving the procurement process which has seen us deliver £10 billion of equipment to the front line over the last three years

Ministry of Defence

The Gray dossier also found delays in the shipbuilding programme meant Britain could not have fought a Falklands-style campaign any time over the past 20 years.

"We would have risked significant casualties, the very significant costs of acquiring adequate equipment at short notice (if available) or the embarrassment of not fighting at all," he said.

The report was originally commissioned by John Hutton, who resigned as defence secretary in June, and it was due to be published in July.

An MoD spokesman said Mr Gray's work will "feed into" its recently announced defence green paper and the government will publish the report in "due course".

"We are constantly improving the procurement process which has seen us deliver £10 billion of equipment to the front line over the last three years," he added.

Parts of the report had already been leaked and the BBC's political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg said its findings were expected to be critical.

But it was understood the government had decided not to go ahead with publication because the conclusions were so stark, she added. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8216556.stm>

Havana relies on 200 urban farms known as organoponicos

By Sarah Murch
BBC Two's Future of Food

Climate change, drought, population growth - they could all threaten future food supplies. But global agriculture, with its dependence on fuel and fertilisers is also highly vulnerable to an oil shortage, as Cuba found out 20 years ago.

Around Cuba's capital Havana, it is quite remarkable how often you see a neatly tended plot of land right in the heart of the city.

Sometimes smack bang between tower block estates or next door to the crumbling colonial houses, fresh fruit and vegetables are growing in abundance.

Some of the plots are small - just a few rows of lettuces and radishes being grown in an old parking space.

Other plots are much larger - the size of several football pitches. Usually they have a stall next to them to sell the produce at relatively low prices to local people.

Twenty years ago, Cuban agriculture looked very different. Between 1960 and 1989, a national policy of intensive specialised agriculture radically transformed Cuban farming into high-input mono-culture in which tobacco, sugar, and other cash crops were grown on large state farms.

Cuba exchanged its abundant produce for cheap, imported subsidised oil from the old Eastern Bloc. In fact, oil was so cheap, Cuba pursued a highly industrialised fuel-thirsty form of agriculture - not so different from the kind of farming we see in much of the West today.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oil supply rapidly dried up, and, almost overnight, Cuba faced a major food crisis. Already affected by a US trade embargo, Cuba by necessity had to go back to basics to survive - rediscovering low-input self-reliant farming. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8213617.stm>

By Roger Hardy
BBC Middle East analyst

US combat troops have withdrawn from cities across Iraq

Amid rising levels of violence and political uncertainty, is it realistic for US President Barack Obama to go ahead with his planned withdrawal from Iraq?

The clock is ticking.

By August of next year, all American combat troops are due to be withdrawn from Iraq - and the remainder by the end of 2011.

That's the Obama plan. And that's what American voters signalled they wanted when they elected him president.

But are the Iraqis ready to run their country and take charge of their security?

"Iraq today," says Anas Altikriti, a Sunni Islamist, "is half-way between either being on the verge of collapse or on the verge of salvation."

Interviews with Iraqi political figures suggest that Iraqis want the Americans to go, but are far from certain about what will happen if they do. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8216896.stm>

Mobile TV has so far failed to deliver on its promise of ubiquity, but analysts expect worldwide user numbers to increase to 54 million in 2009.

Analysts also predict that by 2013 there will be about 300 million people watching analogue TV on the so-called third screen, their smart phone.

"Mobile TV is just not as big a deal as we all thought it would be," Frank Dickson of Reed Business told the BBC.

"The idea combines the two biggest things around: TV and phones. Everyone has a TV and everyone has a mobile phone. So of course the industry thought the prospect of bringing the two together was going to be huge.

Barack Obama will soon follow in the footsteps of US Presidents Bill Clinton and John F Kennedy by holidaying on Martha's Vineyard. But behind the scenes of the exclusive island getaway, BBC Brasil's Bruno Garcez finds an army of immigrant Brazilian workers tending lawns and waiting on tables.

"During his visit to Martha's Vineyard, Barack Obama will play golf in a course set up by Brazilians, eat meals prepared by Brazilian cooks and swim in a pool which was cleaned by workers from Brazil."

So predicts Mauricio Brandao, a 28-year-old Brazilian who has spent the past 12 years in Martha's Vineyard, a sophisticated resort and a traditional summer destination for Hollywood stars and politicians.

He works on the island as a horse trainer, but defines himself as a "fixer" who grabs any job available - with a preference for work offered by those he refers to as "the high-ranking people".

Mr Brandao knows the place where Mr Obama is likely to stay with his family well.

The Blue Heron Farm is a 28.5-acre vacation home likely to cost from $35,000 to $50,000 per week to rent, according to local newspaper the Vineyard Gazette.

The official data provided by the administrator of Oak Bluffs - one of the island's six towns - backs up Mr Brandao's prediction.

There are roughly 3,000 Brazilians in Martha's Vineyard, out of a population of 15,000.

Mr Brandao said: "The Brazilians are the engine of the island. They are the ones who make it happen."

Some in the local community claim the official figures do not fully reflect reality and that the correct number could be two times higher.

Many of the Brazilians working in landscaping, serving tables or cleaning rooms in hotels prefer to stay off the radar - up to 70% are undocumented workers. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8216840.stm>

She speaks softly, certain words reduced to a whisper. Her eyes are vacant, occasionally glazing over with tears which she manages, somehow, to hold back.

Against her dyed black hair and black clothes, her pale skin looks whiter still.

She doesn't want me to use her name; ashamed that local people might hear what happened.

"I'll never forgive him for leaving me alone," she says, leafing through the few photos she's kept.

"I had to borrow money for his funeral. Now I have nothing. I can't even afford a bus ticket for my daughter to go to school."

He had held a series of short-term jobs, but had been unemployed since last year.

On his 38th birthday, he took a pistol and went to a nearby disused house. His wife found him four days later.

"Sometimes I think of doing the same," she tells me. "But it's my daughter who stops me."

A former industrial centre, most of Prokuplje's factories now stand silent, their old machinery rusting inside.

They went bankrupt after a series of botched government-led privatisations at the start of the decade.

Agriculture is suffering, too. Sour cherries are the speciality of the area, but since last year, sales have plummeted and local growers no longer have the money to pay fruit pickers.

At least 200 children have died in an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis in northern India, health officials say.

So far, 900 affected children have been admitted to hospitals in Uttar Pradesh state. Some patients have come from neighbouring Bihar state and Nepal.

There is no specific cure for the mosquito-borne disease which has killed thousands in India since 1978.

Health experts complain that red tape has prevented development of an effective vaccination programme.

Doctors say children between the age of six months to 15 years are worst affected and most of the victims are poor people from rural areas.

"The attack of the encephalitis virus is extremely ferocious this year," says Dr Rashmi Kumar, an expert on Japanese encephalitis at Lucknow Medical College hospital.

"Children are developing a serious condition within a day or two of getting infected," she says.

Health officials in the state capital, Lucknow, say cases of acute encephalitis are being reported mostly from 14 districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The low-lying areas are prone to annual floods, and severe water-logging and a lack of sanitation provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Last year, the government said it would spend 60 million rupees ($1.24m) to upgrade facilities at Gorakhpur Medical College hospital.

But, doctors say, the hospital does not have adequate numbers of medical staff to deal with the large numbers of patients.

The desolate, dusty town of Pibor on South Sudan's border with Ethiopia has no running water, no electricity and little but mud huts for the population to live in.

I went there as part of a journey across Africa to ask the question "Why is Africa poor?" for a BBC radio documentary series.

I was asked to investigate why it is that the vast majority of African countries are clustered at or near the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index - in other words they have a pretty appalling standard of living.

The people - most of whom are from the Murle ethnic group - are crippled by tribal conflicts related to disputes over cattle, the traditional store of wealth in South Sudan.

The Murle have recently had fights with the Lol Nuer group to the north of Pibor and with ethnic Bor Dinkas to the west.

In a spate of fighting with the Lol Nuer earlier this year several hundred people, many of them women and children, were killed in deliberate attacks on villages.

There has been a rash of similar clashes across South Sudan in the past year (although most were on a smaller scale than the fights between the Lol Nuer and the Murle).

And so the answer to why South Sudan is poor is surely a no-brainer: War makes you destitute.

"It's bigger than Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi combined," the South Sudan Regional Co-operation Minister Barnaba Benjamin, enthused.

"Tremendous land! Very fertile, enormous rainfall, tremendous agricultural resources. Minerals! We have oil and many other minerals - go name it!"

The paradox of rich resources and poor people hints at another layer of explanation about why Africa is poor.

It is not just that there is war. The question should, perhaps be: "Why is there so much war?"

And the headline question is in fact misleading; Africans as a people may be poor, but Africa as a place is fantastically rich - in minerals, land, labour and sunshine.

That is why outsiders have been coming here for hundreds of years - to invade, occupy, convert, plunder and trade.

The spectres of slavery and colonialism hover in the background of almost every serious conversation with Africans about why most of them are poor.

It almost goes without saying that, of course, slavery impoverished parts of Africa and that colonialism set up trading patterns which were aimed at benefitting the coloniser, not the colonised.

Hajia Amina Az-Zubair, the Nigerian president's senior adviser on poverty issues, told me that colonialism "was all about take, not build", and that this attitude "transferred itself into a lot of mindsets".

Even today, Mr Zubair said it was sometimes difficult to design poverty-reduction programmes that were inclusive:

"You sit round a table and ask 'What are your needs?' and you get an absolute blank. Because for years, they've been told what they're going to have. So even the ability to engage has been difficult for us.

During colonial rule South Sudan was used as little more than a reservoir of labour and raw materials.

Then independence was followed by 50 years of on-off war between the south and north - with northerners in Khartoum continuing the British tactic of divide and rule among the southern groups.

US telecoms giant AT&T has admitted that it struck a deal with Apple to prevent iPhone applications from using its network for VoIP.

VoIP allows voice calls to be routed over mobile internet but reduces a network operator's voice call revenue.

Apple and AT&T both responded to a federal inquiry into Apple's failure to approve Google Voice, a VoIP application for the iPhone.

In July, Apple rejected Google's application for the Google Voice app to be sold in its App Store, and removed several third-party applications that leveraged the same technology.

The app is already available on Blackberrys and phones that run both Google's Android and the Symbian operating system.

Apple's move prompted an inquiry from the US's Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In AT&T's response to the FCC, the firm said that "AT&T and Apple agreed that Apple would not take affirmative steps to enable an iPhone to use AT&T's wireless service (including 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi) to make VoIP calls without first obtaining AT&T's consent".

However, it added that the firms had agreed that "if a third party enables an iPhone to make VoIP calls using AT&T's wireless service, Apple would have no obligation to take action against that third party".

AT&T argued that the deal was struck because "both parties required assurances that the revenues from the AT&T voice plans available to iPhone customers would not be reduced by enabling VoIP calling functionality on the iPhone".

In its letter to the FCC, Apple said that several VoIP applications such as Skype had already been approved for use over wi-fi wireless networks, rather than over the cellular network.

However, it added that the Google Voice app was still under scrutiny because it could "alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience", but added that Google Voice could be accessed via the iPhone's web browser.

In its reply to the FCC inquiry, Google argued that "the Google Voice features accessible by the mobile website are more limited than those features found in the App Store version".

There is uncertainty surrounding the purchase of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) by Swedish-based Global Gaming Factory (GGF).

Trading in GGF shares has been suspended and there are reports that the firm's chairman - Magnus Bergman - has resigned.

The Swedish stock market is investigating whether GGF has sufficient funds to complete the sale.

In an exclusive interview with BBC News, GGF's chief, Hans Pandeya, said that the acquisition of The Pirate Bay would go ahead on 27 August as planed.

"The Aktietorget - the Swedish stock market - said they wanted more information on investors, which we said we would release after the acquisition," he said.

"None [of the investors] wants to give out their details, otherwise the media will attack them," he added.

Mr Pandeya said he had no knowledge of Mr Bergman's resignation, as reported in the Swedish media, but he added that the company knew he was going to leave soon.

"We are going to have a shareholder meeting to get a new board and we were doing that because Magnus was going to leave," he said.

"I have not had any information that he had already left and I met him on Friday and he didn't say anything."

The deal, which was announced on 1 July, would see the new Pirate Bay host legal content, paying copyright holders for their work, and also paying file sharers for making their files available.

The company is also looking at harnessing the storage capacity and processing power of the file-sharing community, creating a powerful grid of peer-to-peer linked computers to share legitimate files.

Mr Pandeya said the unusual nature of The Pirate Bay did not sit comfortably with some Swedish bankers.

"You are not supposed to buy an illegal site," he said. "This is out-of-the-box thinking.

"Because it is unconventional it is viewed with uncertainty by Swedish culture, even if I don't view it that way.

"Because of that, they want details and 100% assurances, but in business that is not always something you can get," he said.

Mr Pandeya said that despite this he was hopeful the Aktietorget would let GGF resume trading.

Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed.

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.

David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: "It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent."

"It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

"The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV."

But Det Sup Michael Michael McNally, who commissioned the report, conceded more needed to be done to make the most of the investment.

He said: "CCTV, we recognise, is a really important part of investigation and prevention of crime, so how we retrieve that from the individual CCTV pods is really quite important.

"There are some concerns, and that's why we have a number of projects on-going at the moment."

Among those projects is a pilot scheme by the Met to improve the way CCTV images are used.

Officers from 11 boroughs have formed a new unit which collects and labels footage centrally before distributing them across the force and media.

Internet service providers (ISPs) have reacted with anger to new proposals on how to tackle internet piracy.

The government is proposing a tougher stance which would include cutting off repeat offenders from the net.

UK ISP Talk Talk said the recommendations were likely to "breach fundamental rights" and would not work.

Virgin said that "persuasion not coercion" was key in the fight to crack down on the estimated six million file-sharers in the UK.

TalkTalk's director of regulation Andrew Heaney told the BBC News the ISP was as keen as anyone to clamp down on illegal file-sharers.

"This is best done by making sure there are legal alternatives and educating people, writing letters to alleged file-sharers and, if necessary, taking them to court."

"Disconnecting alleged offenders will be futile given that it is relatively easy for determined file-sharers to mask their identity or their activity to avoid detection," he added.

There are also concerns that the method of identifying offenders using the IP address of a specific machine may punish those who share a web connection.

At Delhi's main venue for large trade exhibitions, Pragati Maidan, there's a buzz in the air.

Stylish young women flashing designer bags and sunglasses mingle with bearded artists and men wearing conservative business suits.

Welcome to the India Art Summit, the country's largest contemporary arts exhibition showcasing collections from 54 galleries from around the world.

But although there are works from several internationally renowned artists, including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, the focus is unmistakeably on Indian art.

And there's a lot to see. Vast canvases of oil paintings from some of India's most renowned painters share space with a variety of art forms from younger, more contemporary artists including sculptures, video and digital art installations.

At the entrance is the showpiece - three giant sculptures by one of the country's leading contemporary artists, Subodh Gupta, depicting three monkeys made of bronze, steel and old utensils.

One of the artists exhibiting her work here is Arpana Caur. In her 50s, she's one of India's most celebrated painters and is often described as one of the "Great Indian Modernists".

She's displayed her work internationally and is currently exhibiting at the Bradford Museum in the UK, alongside David Hockney and Damien Hirst but believes that however contemporary Indian art may be, it must stay faithful to its roots.

"For instance, I was commissioned by the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art for the 50th year of the bombing in 1995. That painting, Where Are All The Flowers Gone, is about violence and the need for peace.

But I've deliberately used some Indian elements, especially in the use of colour."

Exports from Latin American and Caribbean nations are set to show their steepest fall in more than 70 years, the United Nations has predicted.

The region's exports are expected to shrink in volume by 11% in 2009, says the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac).

"Policies to reactivate trade are urgently needed," said Eclac executive secretary Alicia Barcena.

Imports are also expected to fall sharply, says Eclac. The commission predicts a decline of 14%, which would be the biggest reduction since 1982.

According to Eclac, Latin America and the Caribbean are feeling the impact of the global economic crisis on four fronts: foreign direct investment, remittances from citizens abroad, commodity prices and trade.

Worst hit have been countries that thrive on exporting commodities, oil and minerals.

Venezuela and Ecuador (which are oil exporters), Colombia (oil and coal) and Bolivia (natural gas) could see their exports slashed by as much as 32.6% this year, Eclac says.

In the first half of 2009, mineral and oil exports from the region slumped by 50.7%, while exports of manufactured and agricultural products showed lesser falls of 23.9% and 17% respectively.

Japanese exports slid in July at a faster annual rate than June, raising fears the effects of global stimulus measures are starting to decline.

Exports from Japan were down 36.5% last month compared with July 2008, according to the Ministry of Finance.

Slower car sales to the US, Middle East and Russia were blamed for the decline, which followed June's 35.7% fall.

The trade surplus still rose, because imports fell 40.8%, largely due to lower energy costs.

"Falls in exports have been moderating in recent months on companies' restocking efforts and government stimulus worldwide, but the July data indicate that the recovery momentum is losing steam," said Seiji Shiraishi, chief economist at HSBC Securities.

"It is questionable whether exports will continue to recover once the stimulus effect runs out."

Exports to the US fell 39.5% in July from the same month last year, which was worse than the 37.6% fall in June.

Exports to China were down 26.5%, while those going to the European Union fell 45.8%.

Gross domestic product grew 3.7% in the three months from April to June, fuelled by an improvement in exports in the period, but there have been concerns that those figures were boosted by stimulus spending and scrappage schemes.

There are also concerns that domestic demand remains weak, with average salaries falling and the unemployment rate at a six-year high of 5.4%. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8221877.stm>

More than one in six UK homes which house at least one person of working age does not have anyone in employment, official statistics show.

This is the highest rate since 1999, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

The number of workless households hit 3.3 million in April to June, a 240,000 rise compared with a year earlier.

The issue was most acute in the north-east of England, and the lowest rate was in the eastern region of England.

A workless household is defined by the ONS as a home which includes at least one person of working age, where nobody aged 16 or over is in employment.

As a result, the statistics do not include pensioner households, and student houses are also excluded from the figures.

The proportion of households where no adults work rose by 1.1% in April to June 2009 compared with the same period a year earlier, to 16.9% - or nearly one in six working-age households.

This was the highest rate since 1999 and marked the largest year-on-year increase since comparable statistics were first collected in 1997.

The rate was highest in the north-east of England - 23.2% - and lowest in the east of England - 12.2%.

Of the households that are workless, the rate was highest in lone-parent households, at 40.4%, followed by one-person households, at 30.1%.

But the proportion of lone parents who are in work has risen again. This was up 0.4% in the second quarter of the year compared with the same period a year ago, to 56.7%.

More married and cohabiting fathers are spending time at home, rather than at work, the figures show. The employment rate of this group showed the largest fall, down 2.1% to 88.8%.

The total number of working-age people in workless households stood at 4.8 million in April to June 2009, up 500,000 on a year earlier.

The number of children in workless households also increased, the figures show. This was up 170,000 to 1.9 million.

"The distribution of unemployment among households has the effect of concentrating the negative consequences of worklessness among families where no family member works," said John Atkinson, associate director at the Institute for Employment Studies.

"Eighteen months ago, worklessness was in decline. Government programmes encouraging lone parents and the long-term sick back into employment were a part of that success story. Today we can see that the recession is unravelling much of that progress.

"The concentration of worklessness among families has serious consequences for the children within them, and this cuts directly across government policy on child poverty." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8222145.stm>

The euro hit a two-and-a-half-month high against the pound after a survey showed confidence among German firms was growing.

The business sentiment indicator from the Ifo Institute rose to 90.5 in August from a revised 87.4 in July.

The unexpectedly strong rise was the fifth consecutive monthly increase, taking the figure to its highest since September 2008.

Growing confidence may be good news for Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of federal elections on 27 September.

"These are extremely positive numbers that go well beyond our expectations," said Stefan Schilbe, analyst at HSBC Trinkaus.

"After the positive [economic] growth rate in the second quarter, the upturn will most likely firm up. We're expecting robust growth rates in the second half of the year," he added.

Earlier in August, steelmaker ThyssenKrupp said it had seen signs of recovery among its customers, which include construction, machinery, carmakers and shipbuilders.

"Confidence remains relatively fragile," warned Colin Ellis, European economist at Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe.

"Today's headline figure is still not back to the same level it was at pre-Lehmans - and it will take time for better sentiment to show up in orders and investment." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8222102.stm>

Scientists have shown how flesh-eating parasites responsible for the disfiguring tropical disease leishmaniasis dupe the immune system.

The parasites produce a gel which the latest study shows can fool specialised immune cells into feeding rather than killing them.

It is hoped the findings could aid development of a vaccine for a disease which affects 12m people a year.

Symptoms include disfiguring and painful skin ulcers, and in severe cases the infection can also spread to the internal organs.

Patients with the infection often suffer from social exclusion because of their disfigurement.

There is currently no vaccine against the disease and, although treatments are available, they are not always effective and access is limited in many areas.

The parasites produce a gel which turns into a plug which effectively blocks up the fly's digestive system.

When an infected fly bites a human it regurgitates this gel plug, which enters the skin alongside the parasites.

The latest study - carried out on mice - shows that the plug acts to entice immune cells called macrophages to the bite site.

But the gel persuades macrophages to engulf the parasites, and feed them rather than digest them.

This happens within the first few days following infection, enabling the parasites to establish themselves and infect the skin.

Lead researcher Dr Matthew Rogers said previous studies might have failed to explain leishmaniasis infection because they injected parasites directly into tissue without including the gel plug.

He said: "Our research shows that leishmania parasites are very cunning - they make their own gel to control the human immune system so they can establish a skin infection." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8219634.stm>

"Cucuta is dead," says Fernando, a Colombian textile trader who is planning to return to his home city of Medellin because work on the border with Venezuela has dried up.

"We bring in fabrics and jeans from Medellin to sell here and we've always done well out of it. But not any more. I'm taking my family back home where things are a bit better. Business here is over."

It is a sentiment echoed by many members of the business community on the Colombian side of the border with Venezuela, who say a range of problems in recent months has hurt them.

Chief among them, they say, is the dispute between President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, over a decision by Bogota to allow the United States to use seven military bases on Colombian soil.

Recently President Uribe travelled to the region to hold talks with local business leaders and politicians to persuade them that his government had a plan in place to lessen the effects of a drop in trade with Venezuela.

It included reducing sales tax in Cucuta and improving road links to the rest of Colombia.

But not all the delegates were impressed. Liberal Party Senator Juan Fernando Cristo walked out of the meeting with Mr Uribe.

"President Uribe and the ministers and technocrats from Bogota don't understand this situation," he said as he left.

"They don't understand this border region, nor the people, and they don't understand how things work here. They come to Cucuta and talk about budgets and money and infrastructure and social investment. But they don't really have the solutions."

Many of the products that Colombia exports to Venezuela are perishable, including milk, eggs, meat, rice and coffee.

After Venezuela moved to close the border, much of that produce went bad and had to be destroyed.

Local sugar cane producer Eliodoro Viveros took us down dirt roads in the small town of El Zulia to see one such damaged crop.

"The cane was cut and we got the export licence, but at that moment there was the dispute between the two presidents. Chavez shut the border and we lost all this," he said, motioning to the piles of blackened and useless sugar cane in the field behind him.

"This has happened at least three times to members of our co-operative in the past few weeks."

Mr Vivieros says that the crops represented thousands of dollars' worth of profit for the farmers involved.

His co-operative is pinning its hopes on plans to build an ethanol plant in the region so that sugar cane producers are not so reliant on the Venezuelan market.

On the Venezuelan side of the frontier they are feeling the pinch too, but in different ways.

"Both countries are losing out," said Alexis Balsa, border affairs commissioner for Tachira state in Venezuela.

"Colombia may be losing out a little more economically, but in Venezuela we're experiencing food shortages because of all of this. President Chavez has decided to replace Colombia with Brazil or Argentina. That's going to be very damaging for this frontier region because international trade here could be reduced to zero."

But while the legal trade of food, textiles, electrical goods and cars may be held up, illegal trade - especially in fuel - is thriving.

Smugglers fill up their tanks with cheap petrol in Venezuela, then drive over the border and siphon it off in Cucuta at huge profit.

Having paid a few cents a litre, they can sell it on for several dollars. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people make their living from the practice and there is a constant flow of vehicles, many of them taxi drivers, taking contraband fuel in one direction and contraband goods in the other.

Much of the trade is run by paramilitary and criminal gangs, but many are ordinary Venezuelans and Colombians making a quick dollar on the side.

"I do this at least once a day," he said, while heading towards Cucuta with a full tank.

On arrival in Colombia, he found a stall set up by the side of the road where he regularly sells his fuel.

A 20-year-old "pimpinero" - as those who siphon off fuel are known - takes the petrol from Juan's car by sucking it out of the tank with his mouth and a hose, seemingly oblivious of any potential health risks.

The transaction is successful and Juan leaves with about $7-worth of Colombian pesos for what cost him about 50 US cents in Venezuela.

Recently, Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez announced that Venezuela would not be renewing an agreement on subsidised fuel with Colombia.

The Venezuelan government has announced new measures to clamp down on smuggling, including using GPS to track large fuel tankers and forcing drivers to give up their petrol as they cross the border.

But few in Cucuta expect that the authorities will succeed in shutting down the illegal industry.

"This has always been a popular trade and it's a good way to make money, but there are more and more people doing this since the argument between Chavez and Uribe," Juan says.

It seems people on both sides of the border are concerned about the consequences, legal and illegal, of the argument between the two Latin American leaders.

"President Chavez and President Uribe are not going to be here for ever - or at least I hope not," says Senator Cristo.

"But the people of this region are going to be here for always. We must have a very good relationship with Venezuela and a very good relationship with Ecuador in the south.

In the latest of a series of articles marking the outbreak of World War II 70 years ago, BBC Russian affairs analyst Steven Eke analyses how opinions on the Nazi-Soviet pact have changed over the years.

In recent years, the tone and content of disagreements between Russia and the West over interpretations of World War II have seemed reminiscent of the Cold War.

Official Russia may not have many supporters abroad of its increasingly Sovietised, if not revisionist, approach. But it is one that Russia's own citizens appear to strongly support.

The original German-language copy of the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on the Nazi-Soviet division of Europe was seized by Soviet troops in 1945 and removed to Moscow.

The Soviet government understood why the document could have a devastating effect on the image of the USSR as the nation that had done - and suffered - the most for the defeat of the Nazi curse.

This is why the secret protocol's existence was officially denied until 1989. Even Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the signatories, went to his grave categorically rejecting foreign reports of it.

The teaching of history developed by the Soviet authorities in the post-war decades instead chose to portray the pact as a masterstroke of Soviet diplomacy, one that prevented an alliance between Nazi Germany and Western capitalist nations against the USSR.

In 1989, lawmakers in the Soviet Union's first, quasi-democratic parliament, passed a resolution unequivocally condemning the pact. And that, essentially, was the end of efforts in official Russia to address the document's geopolitical legacy.

The statement released by the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, just ahead of the 70th anniversary of the signing of the pact, strongly suggests Russian official history has reverted to Soviet, if not at times, Stalinist, orthodoxies.

Russia's leading opinion pollster, VTsIOM, asked ordinary Russians what they thought of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ahead of the anniversary.

Some 57% of those questioned said they believed there was "nothing reprehensible" in the agreement.

Just 14% agreed with the western interpretation of the pact as dividing Europe between two totalitarian systems.

After all, in the neighbouring countries - those that had been partitioned or subjected to border shifts and mass repressions as a direct result of the pact - it is seen as a symbol of totalitarian evil.

The BBC's Russian Service, in an online forum, asked its readers what they thought of the pact and its modern-day significance.

Very few of their comments support the Western interpretation of the pact. Indeed, some question whether the secret protocol even existed.

A number adhere to standard Soviet versions of history - the Soviet Union incorporated western Ukraine and western Belarus (parts of Poland in 1939) for "the protection of the local population".

In general, the tone is anti-Western, strongly rejecting moral comparisons of Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR.

These comments come largely from young people living in large cities. Many of them are products of post-Soviet upbringing and education.

They are likely to have travelled abroad, and to have adopted western cultural and social mores.

In connection with its association with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August remains a highly emotive date.

In early July, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe passed a resolution basically equating Nazism with Stalinism.

Proposed by Lithuania and Slovenia, it suggested making 23 August a day of remembrance for the victims of the two totalitarian systems.

It remains unclear how nascent efforts to criminalise non-official interpretations of history in Russia will shape analysis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

But already, both Russian and foreign historians are reporting that it has become very difficult to gain access to state archives containing material describing Nazi-Soviet co-operation. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8221119.stm>

In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, Sola Odunfa wonders what Nigeria's banking crisis says about the country's elite.

Once again Nigeria is in the throes of a bank crisis. Rumbles of a quake have been heard and the nation is girding its loins.

Ten banks were audited by the Central Bank of Nigeria. Only half of them got the pass mark. The others were said to have fallen far short of the prudent and transparent management required by law and by public trust.

The remaining 14 banks in the country are now being audited. How many of these will scale through?

Should half of them also require government bailouts, the entire financial industry in Nigeria may crash, taking what is left of the economy with it.

Banking laws in Nigeria are tight enough to prevent the type of crisis creeping in.

By law, no loan can be given by any bank without physical collateral and every bank must disclose its non-performing loans to the Central Bank promptly.

"I feel like a slave," says 21-year-old Palestinian Musanna Khalil Mohammed Rabbaye.

"But I have no alternative," he says, as he waits among a group of sun-beaten men in dusty work boots outside the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim.

The phrase comes up again and again as the labourers try to explain why they spend their days hammering and shovelling to help build the Jewish settlements eating into the land they want for a future state of Palestine.

Jaffar Khalil Kawazba, 24, says he is supporting his 10 brothers and sisters as his father is too ill to work. Fahd Sayara, 40, is trying to fund treatment for his disabled child.

"I'm not the only one. My whole village works in the settlements," says Mr Rabbaye.

"Everything, all the settlements - even most of the Wall - was built by Palestinians," he says, referring to the barrier, detested among Palestinians, Israel is building, sometimes looping deep into the West Bank to stop, Israel says, attacks on its citizens.

The settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are illegal under international law.

The Palestinian Authority is refusing to negotiate unless Israel heeds US pressure to stop all construction in the settlements.

Israel says it wants to keep building, at the very least to provide homes for the "natural growth" of the 450,000-strong Jewish settler population in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8220680.stm>

Network Rail has proposed a new £34bn ($55bn) high-speed railway line linking Scotland and London by 2030.

The line would serve Birmingham and Manchester, getting passengers from Glasgow to London in just two hours and 16 minutes, the rail firm said.

The government said assessments of the costs and environmental issues involved needed to be carried out before it could approve any plans.

It is currently conducting its own rail network review and said it hoped to be in a position to make a decision next year.

If given the go-ahead, Network Rail said it would take up to five years to decide on the exact route and complete the planning stages.

It wants the first section of the line between London and Birmingham to be completed by 2020.

The line would become the country's second high-speed rail link after the line that runs from London St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel, run by the Eurostar service and connecting to high-speed lines in continental Europe. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8221540.stm>

New survey work suggests that fewer than 1,200 Mexican axolotls remain in its last stronghold, the Xochimilco area of central Mexico.

The axolotl is a type of salamander that uniquely spends its whole life in its larval form.

Its odd lifestyle, features and ability to regenerate body parts make it a popular animal kept in labs, schools and as pets.

Recent surveys suggest that between 700 and 1,200 axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum) survive in six reduced and scattered areas within the Xochimilco area of the Mexican Central Valley.

Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper is publishing extracts from a new edition of a book giving the views of PM Silvio Berlusconi's estranged wife.

The book - called The Veronica Trend, after Veronica Lario, Mr Berlusconi's second wife - is written by a close friend who works for the paper.

Ms Lario is seeking a divorce, accusing her husband of lying about his relationship with a teenager.

Many media outlets - print, television and online - are controlled by Mr Berlusconi himself.

In an article written by journalist Maria Latella, she is quoted as saying that finding out he attended the 18th birthday party in Naples of an aspiring model was the final straw.

"It was the latest lie. Better then to try to seek a last way to respect myself, better to divorce," 53-year-old Ms Lario is quoted as saying. "He forced me into this situation."

But she also says that she might consider standing by her man if he undergoes counselling at a sex clinic.

The author of the book - who says she has known Veronica Lario for 18 years - describes Mr Berlusconi's wife as a rational and very prudent person with a strong sense of family.

She told the BBC that the couple had several years ago reached an understanding that they would lead separate lives but with mutual respect for each other.

However, the recent sordid allegations about Mr Berlusconi's private life, Ms Latella said, angered his wife and violated this arrangement.

The BBC's David Willey, in Rome says Mr Berlusconi is said to be planning to attend a special Mass of repentance celebrated by a senior Vatican Cardinal in the earthquake-stricken town of L'Aquila on Friday, where participants go each year to seek forgiveness for their sins. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8221628.stm>

Software giant Microsoft has apologised for editing a photo to change a black man's head to that of a white man.

The picture, showing employees sitting around a desk, appeared unaltered on the firm's US website.

But on the website of its Polish business unit the black man's head was replaced with a white face, although the colour of his hands was unchanged.

Microsoft said it had pulled the image and would be investigating who made the changes. It apologised for the gaffe.

The altered image, which also featured an Asian man and a white woman, was quickly circulated online.

Bloggers have had a field day with the story, with some suggesting Microsoft was attempting to please all markets by having a man with both a white face and a black hand.

"The white head and black hand actually symbolise interracial harmony. It is supposed to show that a person can be white and black, old and young at the same time," said one blogger on the Photoshop Disasters blog.

Arroyo government sponsors thank you's to itself

20 drug stores near DOH office defy 50% price cut

Two weeks into the implementation of the Cheaper Medicines Act, a health official admitted that 20 drug stores and hospitals near the Department of Health’s (DOH) main office in Manila have yet to enforce the 50-percent price cut on essential medicines.

In a television interview, DOH Undersecretary Alex Padilla explained that this is a ploy by hospitals and nearby pharmacies to evade the Aug. 15 imposition of the law.

“It could be one way of circumventing the law. Sasabihin wala ‘yung gamot sa ospital bibili dun sa tabing botika at bibilin nila sa presyo na mahal (They [hospitals] would claim that they don’t have the particular medicine that a buyer wants and instead advice the buyer to purchase the drug in the nearby pharmacies where prices are higher)," Padilla said.

Earlier, the DOH slapped four drug stores with a cease and desist order after they were found allegedly violating the Maximum Drug Retail Price (MDRP).

The drug stores are Stardust Drug and Medical Supplies Corporation, Cheer-Up Drug Store, Sunburst Drug Corporation all in Rizal Avenue in front of the Department of Health and the South Star Drug located in Matalino Street, Diliman, Quezon City.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III gave the drug stores 72 hours to defend themselves.

Republic Act 9502 or the Cheaper Medicines Law took effect on Aug. 15. DOH officials led by Duque called on the hospitals and pharmacies to immediately enforce the new prices. [See: 80 to 90% of RP drug stores complied with price cuts - DOH]

Small pharmacies were given until September 15 to comply with the law.

But Padilla clarified that only pharmacies located far from the hospitals are covered by the Sept. 15 deadline. The rest were ordered to follow the Aug. 15 imposition.

On Sunday, Duque admitted that there is still much fine-tuning before the 50-percent price cut on essential medicines is enforced nationwide. But he assured the public that the government is already intensifying its campaign to make the law fully operational. [See: 50% price cut on drugs needs fine-tuning - DOH] Aie Balagtas See, GMANews.TV <http://www.gmanews.tv/story/170852/20-drug-stores-near-doh-office-defy-50-price-cut>

It is a window on the birth of England and a reminder of the often overlooked first King of all of Britain, Athelstan.

It was buried as Viking nobility fled from Yorkshire at a key moment in British history and more than a thousand years later it was discovered by two men with metal detectors in a field near Harrogate in North Yorkshire.

It is the greatest Viking hoard of treasure to be discovered in Britain for more than 150 years.

And now it's been cleaned and prepared for display in York and London - it has revealed its stories.

There are coins from Afghanistan and northern Russia. Britain in the tenth century was part of a globalised trading system.

There is one coin featuring Athelstan, the King of England. Experts believe this means it was from 927-8.

This was the time when Viking Northumbria was conquered and the birth of what was to be the Kingdom of England.

Athelstan is also described at King of Britain. He was, it appears, claiming overlordship over Scotland and Wales as well as England. A matter that other Kings may well have disagreed with.

A coin featuring St Peter but also the hammer of Thor. It's evidence that worshippers of Thor were being encouraged to Christianise their allegiance by switching the Scandanavian god for Peter.

Simon Ostrovsky has travelled to remote far eastern Russia and obtained rare footage of North Koreans who are working there as labourers under an agreement between their secretive Stalinist state and a company run by British businessmen.

To the West, North Korea is a pariah state, best known for its secrecy, famines, belligerent politics and its leader's brutality.

At home, North Koreans live under total government control and the watchful eye of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il.

But in the Amur region of Russia, almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from the border, North Korea has created a home away from home at a series of remote logging camps in which nearly 1,500 workers are employed.

I travelled to one of the camps deep in the forest. A giant monument bearing the words "Our greatest leader Kim Il-sung lives with us forever" stood in the middle.

One of the buildings had a sign which read "Laboratory of Kim Il-sung's Theory" a commonly used slogan found on North Korean administration blocks. The camp even had its own theatre.

Further into the forest we found a group of North Koreans hard at work. They lived in a mobile wagon, decorated with portraits of the North Korean leaders.

Although reluctant to speak, one told me that he earned the equivalent of $200 per month. Another said that he earned $1 for each truck he loaded and that he could load up to nine per day, but he had not been paid since May.

To try to find out who employed the North Koreans I travelled to Tynda, where the headquarters of the region's logging operations are based.

I met Sergey Sarnavsky, the director of a small local timber firm which has a contract with Association No 2, a state-owned North Korean organisation.

"The Koreans work year round with two days off per year," he told me. "All the other days are working days no matter what the weather conditions, they always work.

"The Koreans work for the government and their communist party, they've got production targets," he said. "If the quota is filled then everything is ok. If it is not fulfilled, well then they've got their Communist Party of North Korea, and everybody gets punished from the managers down to the worker who didn't fulfil the quota."

Many North Korean labourers have tried to escape the camps. Over the last two decades thousands have abandoned their work and now live in constant fear of arrest and deportation to North Korea.

Branded enemies of the people by their homeland they are wanted by Russian police and their own country's security services.

One worker, who ran away in the 1990s and had been given refuge by a Russian family, told me about life working in the camps, where winter temperatures regularly drop to 30C below zero:

"I was working endless hours. Twelve hours is normal in North Korea, but working 12 hours at the camps is very hard. In winter it's very cold... It's hard to work on an empty stomach. But the living conditions were the worst part.

"The logs cause injuries. The drivers drop logs and people get killed. Because people are so cold, they can't avoid falling trees and are killed."

Russian human rights organisations are working with North Korean defectors. They say that often, after months of work, the labourers are underpaid and sometimes not paid at all.

Svetlana Gannushkina's organisation is assisting some two dozen former loggers who escaped before 2001 and are now living in hiding. I asked her what would happen if they were handed over to the North Korean authorities.

"They can expect terrible suffering, they can expect a cruel death," she said. "We know of cases when people in the moment of their detention have simply, killed themselves. These people and their families become pariahs in their own country. They are treated as traitors."

The North Korean state, which provides the labour through Association No 2, take 35% of the proceeds from their logging operations in Russia - approximately $7m per year.

The remainder goes to a firm called Tynda Les, who are owned by the Russian Timber Group - the largest logging firm in the region with around 1,400 North Koreans working on its sites.

The Russian Timber Group was founded in 2004 by British businessman, Peter Hambro and a Russian business partner. Together they bought up a number of forestry rights across Russia covering an area roughly the size of Belgium.

I asked Russian Timber Group's CEO, Peter Hambro's son Leo, if they had any control over the loggers' welfare.

He told me that the Russian Timber Group makes sure that the company which provides the workers complies with the Russian labour code and that they get regularly inspected. He also said that Russian Timber Group had no involvement in how much the workers are paid.

"There is always going to be criticism... of any involvement with North Korea, especially as its been flagged by people like President Obama as an axis of evil," he told me.

"It is not in our interest - in our public relations interest - to continue our involvement with the North Korean workers. But at the moment our product sells... and we are happy to continue our involvement because they are workers who are prepared to work while there is timber to be sold at good values." <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8221164.stm>

Six months on, the BBC's Mark Dummett pieces together what happened during a border guard mutiny in Bangladesh and examines claims that suspects have been tortured and killed.

It was nine in the morning and, like teenagers everywhere, Nadeet was on his way to bed.

His sister was already at school, his father had said goodbye and gone to work, and his mother had just left for the gym.

Nadeet was tired after a night spent chatting to friends and tinkering with the old car he had recently bought with his father, the first the family had ever owned.

Nadeet lived in Pilkhana, the British-era military camp in the heart of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.

Its rose gardens, deer enclosure and sports fields are a world away from the mayhem of the overcrowded streets outside.

On that morning in February, soldiers of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) border security force were about to turn it into a killing zone.

By the time their revolt collapsed the following day, 74 people had lost their lives, and Bangladesh had been dragged to the brink of a nationwide armed conflict, as the mutiny spread to camps elsewhere.

The first Nadeet heard that something was wrong was when he was woken up by the family's housekeeper.

"Then all of a sudden there were more than 25 people firing at my house," Nadeet remembered.

"I could see the ceiling was falling off. I didn't know what to do, so I called up my friend, and I told him, listen bro' this could be the last time I'm talking to you, they're killing everyone in the BDR. So you must let the army know, and please be fast.

"Then I saw them break into my house. They were so ferocious. They were like, where are they, where are the kids, where are the wives?" Nadeet told the BBC World Service's Assignment programme.

He was one of the many eyewitnesses who helped us piece together what happened during the course of the mutiny.

He described his escape and how he hid under a bed until it was finally safe to come out.

Only then did Nadeet discover what had happened to his father, Colonel Mojibul Haque, a senior officer.

He was shot and then thrown out of a second-floor window by his men, after he tried to restore order.

Fifty-six other officers were also gunned down or stabbed to death, as were the wife and two civilian house guests of the BDR's commander, Major-General Shakil Ahmed, as hundreds of soldiers went on the rampage.

The mutilated bodies were then dumped in mass graves, sewers and the camp's incinerator.

"Every day I ask myself why did such a brutal thing take place," Nadeet's mother Nehreen, who survived by hiding in the gym, said.

"My husband and the officers used to work so hard for these soldiers' benefit. My husband was a true soldier. He was such a loving and joyful character."

The question of what led to such brutality is one that has perplexed Bangladeshis ever since.

When the mutineers themselves telephoned the BBC's Bengali Service, they blamed their revolt on bad pay and years of mistreatment by corrupt officers.

They eventually gave up after the government threatened to send tanks into Pilkhana, while also promising to look into their complaints.

But Bangladesh has a history of murky political conspiracies, so many people assumed that this too must have been part of a wider plot.

Faruq Khan, the minister in-charge of co-ordinating the investigation into the mutiny, told me he thought that a hard-core group of about 20 soldiers had exploited the grievances of the other men to destabilise the government, which had been elected only two months earlier.

It is a particularly understandable view given the family history of the new Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Thirty five years ago the army murdered her father, the country's first prime minister, along with most of his family, and Hasina has survived three assassination attempts since.

"I think this was planned," Faruk Khan said. "If you look at how large the matter was, that is proof that there was a planning."

The government straight away promised to uncover what was behind the revolt and administer justice as speedily as possible.

Six months later, the police are still working on their largest ever criminal case. There are about 5,000 suspects, and the FBI and Scotland Yard have lent a hand.

But their investigation has been overshadowed by claims that the unit conducting interrogations is torturing suspects, and may even have killed some of them.

The BDR itself admits that 40 of its men have died since February, but says seven committed suicide while the rest had heart attacks or died of other illnesses.

Nur Khan Liton, of the Dhaka-based rights organisation Ain O Salish Kendra, said he had seen torture marks on the corpse of one BDR soldier, Mubarak, who according to official records, took his own life.

"I don't believe it, because I saw one dead body. I saw that a toenail of that BDR member had been pulled out," he said.

His claims echo those of the wife of another BDR soldier, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity, because she had received phone calls threatening her with arrest if she spoke out publicly.

"I saw my husband seated on the floor. He could barely move because his whole body was bruised, and so were his eyes. At first I didn't recognise he was my husband.

"Then he shuffled nearer to me. He was crying. I was crying. I said 'where've you been'? He said, 'Don't ask me that. I'm alive. You've prayed for me. That's why I'm alive. But don't ask me where I've been'."

The police and the army deny the claims that prisoners are being abused, and the state prosecutor insisted that confessions had not been extracted by force.

"Torturing is not done in Bangladeshi prisons," Faruk Khan said. "The interrogators in this incident have been clearly instructed by the government that they must not go beyond the law."

Lawyers of some of the men say that they have been prevented from meeting their clients, in breach of the Bangladesh constitution.

The Supreme Court is currently debating whether or not the border guards should be tried under military law.

The fear is that the army's desire to punish the mutineers will outweigh all other considerations.

Twelve members of an indigenous tribe have been massacred by armed men in a Colombian area notorious for its cocaine trade, state authorities say.

Five children were among those killed in the dawn attack by hooded men in uniforms at an Indian reservation in the south-west province of Narino.

Marxist rebels and armed right-wing groups are active in the area, home to large numbers of coca plantations.

The armed men shot the members of a family in two houses in the Gran Rosario reserve, about 80km (50 miles) inland from the port of Tumaco in Narino state.

Narino Governor Antonio Navarro told BBC Mundo the victims were seven adults and five children.

The identities of the killers, who were said to be wearing uniforms without insignias, are unknown.

The state and central governments have offered rewards for information leading to their arrests.

"We know they were hitmen, but we don't know who hired them, whether paramilitaries, the Farc, or some other group linked to the security forces," Luis Evelis Andrade, the head of Colombia's National Indigenous Organisation told the BBC.

Earlier this year 17 Awa people were killed in an attack blamed on Farc rebels, with 10 others being murdered a week later.

However, Mr Navarro said that unlike in February, the reports they were were evaluating did not point to the guerrillas as being behind the latest killing.

Narino state prosecutor Alvaro Lara said the gunmen asked for a woman called The Matron about a purported debt, and then started shooting "at anything that moved."

"It pains us to the core," he said after holding a meeting to discuss the killings.

Mr Uribe said the Office of the UN Human Rights Commissioner had been asked, and had accepted, an invitation to follow the investigations into the massacre.

Indigenous people in Narino, as in many parts of Colombia, find themselves on the front line of the 45-year civil conflict, as their land often sits on important transport routes where coca and poppy crops are grown as part of the cocaine and heroin trade. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8223737.stm>

A patient lobby group is demanding an urgent review of basic hospital care after highlighting accounts of "appalling" NHS standards.

The Patients Association highlighted 16 cases in England where people, often the elderly, were left lying in faeces and urine and were not helped to eat.

The group's president Claire Rayner, an ex-nurse, called for "bad, cruel nurses" to be struck off.

The latest national survey of patients by the health regulator showed that nine in 10 rated their care as excellent or good - with just 2% saying it had been poor.

But it pointed out the 2% figure had not changed over the last six years and still represented thousands of patients.

It called on the NHS regulator to intervene, saying the current system which relies on self-assessment, was not adequate.

The group said the accounts used in the report were reviewed critically before publication as it was aware complaints do "not necessarily reflect the reality".

It stressed that nearly all the cases were concerned not about treatment, but basic nursing and domiciliary care.

Earlier this year, a report from the Healthcare Commission - now replaced as regulator by the Care Quality Commission - detailed grave lapses in standards of care at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust.

The Patients Association said its report showed that appalling standards were more widespread than just at that trust.

Relatives described how they found their loved ones dehydrated or lying in faeces, blood and urine, and told of problems in getting help from nurses.

They also told how patients were left with sandwiches or drinks in packaging which they could not open.

Ron Kirk said his father, Leslie, was admitted to hospital in October 2007 having suffered a stroke, but his treatment at the hands of some nurses amounted to cruelty.

His father had been fitted with the wrong catheter, leaving him in pain, but nurses took away his bedside alarm because they thought he was "pressing it too often", Mr Kirk said. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8223710.stm>

Engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.

The trees are among three geo-engineering ideas highlighted as practical in a new report.

The authors from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers say that without geo-engineering it will be impossible to avoid dangerous climate change.

Launching the report, lead author Dr Tim Fox said geo-engineering should not be viewed as a "silver bullet" that could combat climate change in isolation.

He told BBC News it should be used in conjunction with efforts to reduce carbon emissions and to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Many climate scientists calculate that the world has only a few decades to reduce emissions before there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that a dangerous rise in global temperature is inevitable.

The authors of this report say that geo-engineering of the type they propose should be used on a short-term basis to buy the world time, but in the long term it is vital to reduce emissions.

They define two types of geo-engineering. Nem Vaughan of University of East Anglia said: "The first category attempts to cool the planet by reflecting some of the sunlight away. The problem with this is that it just masks the problem."

News from the North Caucasus is starting to look more and more like reports from the frontline. But behind the headlines, what is daily life like for the region's people?

The BBC Russian Service has joined forces with online news portal The Caucasus Knot to answer that question. The project - entitled North Caucasus through the eyes of bloggers - brings together a variety of thoughts and opinions from the region. Here are a selection: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8224120.stm>

The six-year war between forces loyal to Sudan's government and rebels in Darfur has effectively ended, the UN's military commander in the region says.

General Martin Agwai, who is leaving his post this week, said the vicious fighting of earlier years had subsided as rebel groups split into factions.

The UN says 300,000 people have died in Darfur, but the Sudanese government puts the figure at 10,000.

Gen Agwai, who led a joint UN and African Union peacekeeping force known as Unamid, said the region now suffered more from "security issues" than full-blown conflict.

"Banditry, localised issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that," he said.

Gen Agwai said only one rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem), posed a real threat but even it no longer had the ability to conquer and hold territory.

Sudan analyst Gill Lusk said his comments were "unhelpful" because they could lead people to believe that Darfur's problems had been solved.

"There has been a large decline in fighting in Darfur, and that is undoubtedly a good thing for the people," she told the BBC.

"But it is the government that turns the tap on and off - they can restart the violence whenever they want."

"If that is true, why do some parts of Darfur remain out of bounds, even for Unamid?" she asked.

BBC Sudan correspondent James Copnall says that view is shared by many within Sudan.

Although the intensity of the violence has reduced, there is still little prospect of a peace deal.

Last week, US envoy to Sudan Scott Gration said the existence of 26 different rebel factions was a major obstacle to reaching a peace agreement with the government.

He brokered talks which led to four groups agreeing to work together, calling the deal a "very strong foundation for rebel unification".

The war broke out in the arid and impoverished region early in 2003 when rebel groups including Jem attacked government targets, accusing Khartoum of oppressing black Africans in favour of Arabs.

Pro-government militiamen hit back with brutal force, which the US and some rights groups have labelled genocide.

Khartoum denies supporting the militias, but the international court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant earlier this year for President Omar al-Bashir accusing him of war crimes. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8224424.stm>

Global Economics-18

Cambodia: A land up for sale?

‘Arroyo overspent by P1.6B in foreign travels since 2003’

Venezuelan clash over education

Early toolmakers were 'engineers'

Algeria switches weekend, again

'Many hurricanes' in modern times

Alarm sounded over game futures

Hong Kong emerges from recession

Facial expressions 'not global'

India's unsustainable lesson

Australia camel cull sparks woe

Vietnam species 'risk extinction'

India and Asean sign trade deal

Samsung ex-boss breached trust

Ex-Turks and Caicos PM accuses UK

Costume provokes devil of a row

Healthcare around the world

Bereaved families hit by tax hike

'No benefit' from tuition fees

Biggest US bank failure this year

US retail sales in surprise fall

Video game sales fall in the US

Passport row Canadian back home

Moderate drinking 'boosts bones'

Prosperity promise of Bolivia's salt flats

Kandahar dreamers test Taliban edicts

'Ransom demand' for missing ship

Long quest for Polish restitution

Room to swing a cat? Hardly

Taiwan leader in typhoon apology

Obama attacks insurance premiums

Malacañang cancels plan to purchase P1.2-B jet

DNA 'organises itself' on silicon

Steel protest ends privatisation

Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'

Chicago shuts down to save money

New students 'face £23,000 debt'

Water crisis to hit Asian food

Herbs 'can be natural pesticides'

US warns of Sri Lankan violence

Does Japan offer hope around the world?

Rebuilding the fabric of life in L'Aquila

US banker found guilty of fraud

US man 'stole 130m card numbers'

Afghan election fraud is unearthed

Turnaround 'will not be simple'

Hilltop Youth push to settle West Bank

Bolivians look to ancient farming

Methane seeps from Arctic sea bed

Downloading is not enough

Decline of the blue box

UK team's steam car bid on hold

'Social networks' may help devils

Targeting Afghans, not 'the enemy'

Nato's new approach in Afghanistan

A life recorded in bits and bytes

UK games market being 'strangled'

'The godfather of instruction manuals'

MySpace to acquire music service

PhilHealth assures members will continue to enjoy medical benefits

RP economy may have shrunk in second quarter

40 years of Unix

$15-K dinner treat for Arroyo linked to Suarez's business interest

Iran tries to crack games market

Rivals band to fight Google books

£41m fraud hits building society

Polish army chief quits amid row

Mexico probe over kidnap deaths

Sri Lanka calls for rebel assets

A step closer to 'synthetic life'

Oracle gets go-ahead to buy Sun

Brakes put on US scrappage scheme

Glowing 'bomber worms' discovered

Sri Lanka to train Pakistani army

Markets rise on US recovery hopes

Oil diplomacy in Megrahi release?

Australians 'need more seasons'

Central bankers spot signs of recovery

Tourists warned over fake goods