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Make your Own Social Networking

2009-08-08T19:57:00.000+07:00

Well, there is Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. How about (for lack of a better term) MyFaceSpaceBooker ? Well with Dolphin software from Boonex.com, you could make that a reality, or at least your own creative name for a social networking site.

Maybe you want to make a social network for your neighborhood... Think bigger. How about your town or city ONLY. Well the greatest part of this software (asside from price which will be explained later) is that it is up to you.

The Dolphin Software page even gives you concrete examples on what to do, what you can do, etc. You can make your social network as feature rich as you want, or make it bare bones. It does not matter.

The software has a few price points on its website:

License Options:

Free - BoonEx logo and links must be displayed on your site.

$39 - 90 days link-free license for 1 domain.

$99 - 400 days (1year + 1 month) link-free license for 1 domain.

$299 - lifetime link-free license for 1 domain.

$998 - Prime: lifetime link-free license, plus re-brandable Mobile Apps, plus proffesional installations and more.

Imagine using the free (logo supported) site for a little bit, then as your site grows and multiplies, upgrading to Prime. The sky is the limit on what you can do. With the right tools, skills and membership base, could you take over one of the top sites ? You won't know until you try.

Microsoft and Yahoo seal search engine deal to rival Google

2009-07-30T18:15:00.001+07:00

Yahoo! and Microsoft have formed an alliance in an attempt to lure internet users away from Google.

The ten-year deal, which was confirmed on Wednesday, will allow Microsoft to use its search engine Bing on it partner's website.

This will give the company founded by Bill Gates access to the second biggest search audience on the internet, allowing it better to compete with Google.

Merger: Yahoo and Microsoft have sealed an internet search deal

In return, Yahoo!, which will retain its distinct identity but feature the phrase 'Powered by Bing' on its page, will run the advertising sales team for both online services.

It has been struggling to make profits and has fought off several takeover bids from Microsoft, including a £29billion offer.

Under the deal, which must be approved by competition authorities, Yahoo! will keep 88 per cent of revenue from search advert sales on its own site for the first five years. It

will also have the right to sell adverts on some of Microsoft's sites.

Deal: Carol Bartz (left), chief executive of Yahoo, and Steve Ballmer, her counterpart at Microsoft, are hoping the search merger will rival Google

Microsoft wants more search requests because they have become critical for selling adverts.

Despite investing billions, the company remains a distant third in market share. Google boasts about 70 per cent of all searches.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said the deal would give Bing the necessary clout to compete. He said: 'Through this agreement with Yahoo! we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company.'

The deal could also see Yahoo use Microsoft's Bing search engine

In recent weeks, commentators have pointed to a war brewing between Microsoft and Google after the latter announced it was developing a new operating system for laptop computers.

The move was seen as a strong challenge to Microsoft's dominance in that sector.

A Google spokesman said: 'There has traditionally been a lot of competition online, and our experience is that competition brings about great things for users.'

people dying after major heart surgery under the NHS

2009-07-30T18:11:00.000+07:00

Fewer people are dying after major heart surgery despite surgeons taking on more high-risk patients, an audit will confirm today.

But Britain’s top surgeon has criticised a £290 million funding gap between the money spent on encouraging innovation in the NHS and the funds for measuring the success of existing procedures.

Mortality rates for cardiac surgery have been measured since 2001 but remain the only type of procedure where the chances of survival are measured.

The chance of a person dying has fallen from 2.6 per cent in 2001 to 1.5 per cent last year, a report from the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery found. The audit, covering more than 400,000 procedures across all hospitals in Britain, also found a marked fall in death rates among patients over the age of 75, from 5 per cent in 2004 to 3.4 per cent in 2008.

John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said that recording the data had produced real improvements for patients, despite more elderly people or those with complications being operated on.

While the NHS started publishing crude mortality rates for other selected operations last year, Mr Black criticised the lack of funding to develop this reporting.

“This comprehensive study shows that measuring results of surgery can help speed up improvements in quality of care.

“Surgeons in other disciplines would like to replicate what the cardiac surgeons have achieved but there remains a funding gap for these kinds of clinical audits,” he told The Times.

“At present around £8 million is available for this in the NHS, set against a £300 million NHS research budget into new treatments. Even a modest rebalance toward audit could speed up the uptake of new treatments and offer better value than focusing on innovation alone.”

Last year one in four of all patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery were older than 75. This is a rise of 10 per cent on the number in 1999. The proportion of patients with diabetes or high blood pressure also increased, as three quarters of patients having an isolated heart bypass were overweight and about a third were obese.

Doctors in other branches of surgery have previously been reluctant to publish mortality or other success rates for their procedures due to fears that “case-mix” could distort the figures.

A senior surgeon may have a lower score than a less-experienced colleague because he takes on a greater number of more difficult procedures, or has done more procedures overall, for example.

But Mr Black said that the figures for cardiac surgery proved that surgeons were not refusing to do more complicated work.

“All branches of surgery are following the trail on reporting outcomes that cardiac surgeons have blazed and this should spur those efforts on,” he added. “All of medicine should take note of the findings that full audit has not resulted in risk-averse behaviour.”

Mike Knapton, of the British Heart Foundation, welcomed the report but added that it highlighted variations in access to some types of operations in England. “Local healthcare providers need to investigate urgently why this is,” he added.

“If we are to tackle these inequalities and meet the needs of an increasingly elderly and obese population, we need a robust strategy to meet the future demand for cardiac surgery. The BHF is calling for a planned approach to cardiovascular provision in the coming decade.”

Secret Meeting Between U.S. and China Broke New Ground on Climate Change

2009-05-21T03:15:00.000+07:00

They gathered in July at the incongruously named Commune by the Great Wall, a high-concept luxury hotel nestled in China's Badaling mountains.

For two days, the secluded group of top U.S. and Chinese officials -- including one member of the Bush administration and a handful of now high-level Obama advisers -- worked out climate change policy. Participants yesterday said the off-the-record sessions broke new ground and may have laid the foundation for new cooperation between the world's two largest emitters on the thorny matter of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

"It convinced people in both countries that there was a new spirit of willingness to work this out," said William Chandler, director of the climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Chandler and officials with the Chinese nonprofit Global Environmental Institute spearheaded the talks, which first were reported yesterday in the London Guardian and were billed as "secret backchannel negotiations."

While hardly akin to the secret trip to China that Henry Kissinger made when he was President Nixon's national security adviser, the climate meeting -- which included White House science adviser John Holdren and former Undersecretary of State Frank Loy -- was not heavily advertised, and the group did not issue any statements when it returned. Together, the group members consented to the "Chatham House Rule," under which they agreed they could repeat generally what was discussed, but not identify who said what.

"What it didn't have was a published outcome. That was not the point," Loy said.

Away from the bustle and traffic of Beijing, with a private trail leading to the Great Wall, Chandler and two others who participated in the meetings said they held long, in-depth conversations with Xie Zhenhua, China's chief delegate to the U.N. climate negotiations, and officials from China's foreign affairs ministry.

Departing from the traditional negotiating lines

In addition to Holdren, Loy and Chandler, the U.S. delegation included Taiya Smith, a top aide to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Terry Tamminen, an environmental adviser to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R); and Jim Green, an adviser to now-Vice President Joeseph Biden, who at the time led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mark Helmke, a top aide to Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, the panel's ranking Republican, said he was invited but could not attend the meetings.

Chandler said the July talks started out on a rocky footing, particularly when Loy opened with what Chandler described as the traditional U.S. negotiating line that climate activists liken to a "suicide pact."

The United States and China, which together account for about 47 percent of global emissions, have long been at loggerheads over how to reduce emissions. For years, the debate essentially boiled down to each country pushing the other to act first.

"Frank was pushing Xie on 'What can you guys really commit to?'" Chandler recalled. He said Loy, who at the time was advising then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, told Xie, "If we're elected, we're going to take action. But first we need to know what you can do."

Xie, in turn, rattled off China's long-held negotiating position: that the United States has a historic responsibility to reduce emissions, and that China as a developing country should not be expected to halt its economic growth.

"It was just like punching a tape recorder," Chandler said of Xie's well-worn comments. But just a few minutes into the spiel, he said, the Chinese negotiator stopped and said the group needed to go beyond the rhetoric.

"Everybody's shoulders kind of eased back, and we started talking about what we can do to make a difference," Chandler said.

A better awareness of China's low-carbon ambitions

Loy said the group was able to delve into the positions of both countries and gain better understandings about the political realities both countries face. Yet as to reaching a global deal in Copenhagen, Loy said, little progress was made.

Legend rocks NYC rooftop for Show Me charity

2009-05-21T03:14:00.001+07:00

NEW YORK - John Legend hopes his Show Me charity will show others that everyone can make a difference to help end world poverty.

The 30-year-old singer held a posh benefit dinner for his two-year-old nonprofit organizaton on Tuesday night, and celebrated the event with an intimate performance for his invited guests.

But more than his music, Legend wanted people to take away from the event the message that individuals have to step up to change the circumstances of the poor.

"Our organization by itself can't do it, but we believe we can be part of the solution and we don't want to wait around for everybody else to do it," he said in an interview at the dinner, which was attended by Wyclef Jean, NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Jealous, former New York Giants player Tiki Barber, top economist Jeffrey Sachs, and others.

"We're funding a village in Tanzania and we're seeing positive results on the ground that show that our work is making a positive impact over there, and if we were just to replicate that throughout the world, we can see a lot of progress made," Legend said.

In some African villages, the nonprofit has developed clean water sources and higher-yielding agricultural techniques, distributed bed-nets to prevent malaria, improved access to health care and education and even improve Internet access.

Legend said he was inspired by Sachs' book, "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time," to create the Show Me organization.

Sachs, who's worked with artists like Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie, says Legend is the kind of celebrity who can encourage others to get involved.

"This guy is just so talented and people love him, they love his music and when they listen to him he's so smart and so compelling and he's helping them understand what these issues are about," Sachs said.

The event raised about $300,000 through a private auction.

Angels & Demons’ antimatter theory debunked

2009-05-21T02:59:00.000+07:00

CHICAGO: ‘Angels and Demons’, the recently released film version of the Dan Brown thriller, focuses on a plot to destroy the Vatican using a

small amount antimatter pilfered from the European particle physics laboratory CERN, the world’s largest particle accelerator.Some of the world’s top particle physicists attempted to sort through facts and fiction about antimatter on Tuesday, and comment on their real quest behind CERN — to unlock secrets about the origins of the universe. “Antimatter atoms exist, but it is very difficult to make them,” Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said on Tuesday.

Antimatter particles are subatomic particles that are mirror images of matter, added Boris Kayser of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and chairman of the American Physical Society’s Division on Particle Physics. When the two come together, they annihilate one another, and their mass is released in the form of energy.

In Dan Brown’s book, on which the film is based, a quarter gram of antimatter was thought to be the equivalent of 5,000 tonnes of dynamite, enough to wipe out everything within a half mile or so. “That number was correct,” Kayser said. But it is not likely to be used in any bomb, they said. “It would take us billions of years to produce the amount which is used in the film,” Heuer said.

And while tempting, the notion of using antimatter as an alternative energy source is also impractical, Kayser said. It would take too much energy to make and store. Antimatter has not always been so rare. During the big bang, there were equal parts of matter and antimatter in the universe, Kayser said, and understanding what happened to antimatter is a main focus of research at Fermilab.

China's big car market aims to be green; REI chief gets a White House call

2009-05-17T16:29:00.001+07:00

While the U.S. auto industry looks increasingly like a freeway pile-up, the world's largest market for car sales during the past three months has been China.

The bad news is that most people don't think the globe can afford another 300 million cars guzzling gas and spewing climate-altering exhaust.

The good news is the Chinese don't think they can afford it, either.

Ken DeWoskin says China is furiously working on an alternative transportation model, for both environmental and economic reasons.

The world's most populous nation is buying vehicles at a pace that belies its economic slowdown: April sales were up 25 percent from a year ago to 1.15 million.

Still, says DeWoskin, director of Deloitte's China Research and Insight Center in Beijing, the Chinese leadership is steering away from the U.S. approach of an all-points freeway network that carries single drivers in and out of cities.

Instead, it envisions a vast fleet of short-range personal electric vehicles that bring people to and from high-speed rail terminals; these trains will carry most people to and from work and between many metro areas, he says.

"They're thinking of it as a system, not a device," he says. "They are interested in how are you going to get from home to the train station."

China, deploying the incentives and imperatives available to a state-directed capitalist system, is pressing hard to leapfrog beyond the conventional gasoline engine. It hopes to move to all-electric or hybrid vehicles before most Chinese are ready to buy their first car.

The key motive: "Above everything else, China wants to control the amount of oil it has to consume" so it doesn't increase its reliance on imports, says DeWoskin, who addressed the Washington State China Relations Council in Seattle on Thursday.

That's one reason that "in the last 18 months — in the marketplace, in the hearts and minds of leaders and businesspeople — clean-tech has transformed from a talking point into a real imperative."

Despite the headlines generated by temporarily surpassing the U.S. in vehicle sales, DeWoskin says, "China is in the early stages of building what we would call personal mobility."

Its blueprint includes 500 miles of new subway for each of three major cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, capital of the Pearl River industrial region) — a plan even DeWoskin, accustomed to the scale of China, calls "just breathtaking."

Meanwhile, sales of conventional cars are robust.

"While automakers around the world are collapsing, China is making new automakers. And some of those automakers used to be watch makers, or battery makers," says DeWoskin. "The surge in sales in China has come from these 100-percent Chinese cars. It's a Chinese product and it's really selling."

But don't look for China's manufacturers to come rushing into the U.S. market, either as sellers of vehicles or as buyers of U.S. companies. For sales, they have plenty of potential right at home — just as American manufacturers did in the '50s and '60s, says DeWoskin. Safety and quality issues remain, too.

For companies, China's recent track record with buying into U.S.manufacturing or financial businesses "does not really encourage more investment;" if there is any appetite for acquisitions, it's likely to be for distribution operations or "newer, cleaner technologies."

The one thing China may want from the U.S. is clean technology — for cars, rail and, just as crucially, for coal. DeWoskin sees opportunities in these areas for American companies, although he notes that China's leadership sees buying foreign technology as "a channel for exporting capital."

REI chief gets White House call

REI Chief Executive Sally Jewell was sailing with her husband, Warren, off Port Townsend last Sunday when their daughter Anne reached her via cellphone with a bit of unexpected news.

"Mom, the White House just called," she begins. "Apparently, the president would like to meet with you on Tuesday. Just thought you should know."

Jewell laughs as she retells the story Tuesday afternoon just before a return flight to Seattle from D.C., where she had spent an hour discussing health-care costs with Obama and a handful of other business leaders.

Speaking to reporters, Obama saluted REI for providing health insurance to part-time as well as full-time employees, saying the Kent-based retailer can afford to do that because of innovative programs meant to make its work force healthier.

Jewell contributed $2,300 to Obama's presidential campaign last summer. But she suspects that her involvement with the Outdoor Industry Association — on whose behalf she made an earlier trip to D.C. — had more to do with her being there than anything else.

Before leaving the White House, Jewell gave Obama two "Passport to Adventure" envelopes, one each for his daughters, Malia and Sasha. Aimed at kids 5 to 12 years old, the packages include an adventure journal, information about local hiking and bike trails, games, outdoor tips and stickers. REI created the Passport program several years ago in hopes of stimulating childhood interest in the outdoors, despite their generation's fascination with such indoor pursuits as computers and video games.

Jewell also gave Obama a copy of the book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder," a recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal.

"He said, 'I've heard of this book. This is good. Thank you,' " Jewell recalls.

Millions of women 'buy dresses too small to lose weight'

2009-05-17T16:27:00.000+07:00

LONDON: Millions of British women splurge on too-small clothes as an incentive to help them shed flab, a new research has revealed.

According to the research, nearly a third of women deliberately buy dresses which are too small for them as they are determined to slim down enough to fit in to them one day, the British media reported.

The research, based on a survey of people across Britain, has also found that on average these women confessed to buying three under-size items of clothing each. This means about 24 million dresses, skirts, blouses and trousers hanging idly in the wardrobes as their owners battle to fit into them.

What's more interesting is that the survey has uncovered Scots as the biggest purchases women make, with one in six claiming to own ten or more items they have bought knowing they are too small.

"If slipping into a little black dress or a smaller jean size is something someone finds motivating, then buying an under-size garment could be a very sensible investment.

"Many people, women especially, have a daily reminder of their size in the form of an item of clothing they want to fit into one day. Deliberately buying these clothes could be an effective strategy.

"Taking control of weight loss is all about setting realistic goals and then taking action to achieve them," said Christine Evans of Lloyds Pharmacy's weight management specialist, which commissioned the survey.

However, it is not just women who buy small clothes as aweight loss incentive; according to the research by the chain, 12 per cent of men do so as well.

America's Got Talent' coming back with new host

2009-05-17T16:26:00.001+07:00

Q: Will "America's Got Talent" be shown again?

A: The fourth season of the NBC competition is scheduled to begin June 23, with a new host — Nick Cannon, husband of singer Mariah Carey — because Jerry Springer says other commitments have worked against his return. David Hasselhoff, Piers Morgan and Sharon Osbourne are expected back as judges.

Q: Several years ago, there was a television show called "Once and Again" starring Sela Ward and Billy Campbell. Has it ever been released on DVD?

A: The first two seasons of the Emmy-winning ABC drama are available. A release of the third and final season had been planned, but Buena Vista Home Entertainment ultimately decided against it — for a reason we haven't been able to determine. There's been no word on the studio reconsidering that since it was pulled from the release schedule; in the meantime, you should be able to find copies of seasons one and two via Internet shopping.

Q: Could you tell me how old Irene Ryan was when she played Granny on "The Beverly Hillbillies"?

A: She was in her 60s throughout the run of the sitcom. Admittedly, Ryan didn't do much other work during those years to prove just how extensive the makeup was on her when she was Granny, but there definitely was lots of makeup involved.

Q: I am looking for the movie "The Biscuit Eater," about two boys who turn a pointer into a champion bird dog.

A: Featuring Johnnie Whitaker —

alias Jody on the television series "Family Affair" — the 1972 drama from the Disney studio has been available for years in both DVD and VHS formats. Copies are still around; try an Internet search on the title, with the preferred format typed after it.

Q: Can you provide the name of the group that performs the main theme of "CSI: NY" and the name of that particular track?

A: As with the themes for all of CBS' "CSI" shows, it's the veteran rock group the Who. The tune is its classic "Baba O'Riley"; while the original version was used for early seasons of the show, a remix is now heard under the opening credits.

Q: Please tell us why James Lipton and "Inside the Actors Studio" were taken off the air. It was a great and interesting program.

A: The Bravo interview series actually hasn't gone off; it's just being scheduled a bit erratically. On some Monday nights, you'll find it, and on others, you won't. In fact, new episodes debuted this month, featuring conversations with Denis Leary and Danny DeVito.

Q: What is John Corbett, formerly of "Northern Exposure," doing these days?

A: He recently finished co-starring in the first season of Showtime's "United States of Tara." The series will be back and he'll be back in it.

Q: Is the television show "What About Brian" available on DVD?

A: Both seasons of the ABC show starring Barry Watson are available together in a "What About Brian: The Complete Series" set issued in 2007.

Q: I saw a movie years ago and have been looking for it ever since. Two women living in London plan a vacation, and to afford the villa they rent, they advertise for other women to share the costs. Joan Plowright is the only actress I recognized, and I think "April" is in the title. Can you help me?

A: It's "Enchanted April," and it just made its DVD debut — long awaited by many fans of the film — earlier this month. It's been available on VHS tape since 1992, also the year the movie was released theatrically; directed by Mike Newell ("Four Weddings and a Funeral"), it also features Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Polly Walker, Jim Broadbent and Alfred Molina.

True Blood' has some teeth

2009-05-17T16:06:00.000+07:00

It's a busy time for Sookie Stackhouse.

Dead and Gone, the latest of Charlaine Harris' books about the woman living in a world of Southern vampires, landed in stores recently. (See a review on Page E3.) True Blood, the HBO series adapted from the novels, begins its second season on June 14. And the 12-episode first season comes to DVD and high-definition Blu-ray on Tuesday (HBO Home Entertainment, $59.99 DVD, $79.98 Blu-ray).

Adapted by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), True Blood is a swampy, sweaty, tension-laden tale of Sookie (Anna Paquin), a young woman in the off-the-tracks town of Bon Temps, La., in a country where vampires have come out of the coffin. Thanks to the development of a synthetic blood, they no longer have to feed on humans, and are fighting for the same basic rights as the living.

Sookie, as we see soon enough, is different from other people as well, which helps draw her toward vampires, particularly the handsome and courtly Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), who is attracted to her. (I should note right here that, if you're thinking this sounds a lot like Twilight, True Blood is a much more graphic piece of work, full of raw sex and violence.) And the two of them are part of a larger, and often more frightening, world.

I didn't think much of True Blood when I first saw it, and I still find parts of it rather awful. But that does not make it unwatchable. When I revisited it on DVD, I was drawn in more by the pulpy energy of the story, the odd little jokes and the heat coming off the whole enterprise. Good cast, too.

The DVD has some nice extras, including ads for Tru Blood, the new vampire beverage; spots for hotels, lawyers and dating services catering to vampires, and a mockumentary about vampires in America. There are also commentaries on six episodes.

The Blu-ray version adds pop-up information and other material.

Russell Brand was very funny as the rock star Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, far funnier than he is on Russell Brand in New York City: Extended and Uncensored (Paramount, $16.99). I have to give him points for including as an extra his notorious Jonas Brothers-bashing monologue from the MTV Video Music Awards, since it caused him considerable grief.

But the biggest problem with his jokes and the brothers and their virginity pledges is that Brand wasn't funny. And you can see by comparing his stand-up special with the VMA bit that Brand was off his game at the VMAs — even with the jokes used in both places. But even game on, he's more outrageous than he is genuinely funny.

Besides the VMAs, as bonuses the DVD includes a deleted segment and bits shot around New York City.

On the movie side, Tuesday brings Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, $28.96 for DVD, $38.95 Blu-ray, $24.94 UMD). The Kevin James film was a big success, taking in more than $145 million in North America with its tale of a deluded mall security man. Its relatively gentle humor proved far more appealing than the similarly themed but grimmer Observe and Report, as well as underscoring the box-office appeal of James, who co-wrote the film as well as starring in it.

The DVD adds deleted scenes, an audio commentary, featurettes on James, the stunts and other elements, and — so appropriate for a movie about a mall — a coupon for a free roll from Cinnabon. The Blu-ray release also includes a digital copy.

Make of this what you will, but Paul Blart: Mall Cop made more money in the United States than Valkyrie, the thriller with Tom Cruise. (Valkyrie topped Blart when you count foreign revenue.) Still, Valkyrie — based on the story of one of the attempts to assassinate Hitler — was a rebound for Cruise, posting respectable numbers and some decent reviews, as well as overcoming controversy during its making.

The movie arrives Tuesday on single-disc DVD ($29.98), a two-disc special edition ($34.98) and Blu-ray ($39.98). The basic DVD has two commentary tracks, one of which includes Cruise; a making-of segment; and a documentary about the real plot portrayed in the movie. The two-disc version adds a digital copy. The Blu-ray has the digital copy and adds more pieces about the making of the film.

Terminator Salvation, the latest film in the long-running movie and TV franchise, arrives in theaters on Thursday, and a couple of home-video sets tie in. One, on regular DVD, is The Arnold Schwarzenegger DVD Collection (Lionsgate, $29.98). Besides the two-disc ''extreme DVD'' version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it includes special-edition releases of The Running Man (one of my favorite Arnolds), Red Heat and Total Recall.

In addition, a Terminator 2 Skynet Edition will be released on Blu-ray by itself ($29.99) and in a Blu-ray T2 Complete Collector's Set with the Skynet, extreme and ultimate editions — six discs in all — in what Lionsgate calls ''a collectible 14-inch T-800 Endoskull bust'' with sound effects and eyes that light up. The limited edition set lists for about $175.

2009-05-07T21:09:00.002+07:00

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SC Man Is Latest Accused Recession Bank Robber

2009-05-05T19:40:00.001+07:00

Bruce Windsor lived the life of a respectable family man _ father of four, deacon in his South Carolina church, youth soccer coach, a volunteer who helped build orphanages in Brazil. Then four days after his 43rd birthday, he donned a mask, wig and sunglasses and tried to rob a bank at gunpoint.

Windsor brandished a black revolver inside Greenville First Bank on Feb. 26 and demanded that bank workers fill a bag and two boxes with cash, according to an FBI affidavit. But police caught on and trapped Windsor inside with the bank workers for 90 minutes before he surrendered to a SWAT team.

Windsor, it turns out, was falling down a financial hole. A real estate investor who ran several property business, his troubles predated the recession but continued as the housing bubble burst and easy credit for businesses and consumers dried up.

At his bond hearing, Windsor's tearful sister told a judge her brother must have fallen on hard financial times and cracked under the stress.

"This is something Bruce has never done," Lisa Weaver told the judge. "The only thing I can think of is he must've just snapped under the pressure. ... I can't imagine the desperation that must have caused this."

Clad in an orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed at his waist, Windsor calmly told the judge, "I've never stolen anything in my life."

Windsor is one of a growing list of unlikely suspects, ordinary people from ministers to ex-cops citing financial duress since the start of the recession in late 2007 for turning to a crime that targets fast cash _ bank robbery.

Money troubles, specifically job losses, have also been named as possible motives in at least four of the mass shootings that have scarred the country this winter, including the deaths of 13 people and a gunman in Binghamton, N.Y., the killings of three police officers in Pittsburgh and four more plus the shooter in Oakland, Calif., and the deaths of 10 people and a gunman in south Alabama.

Bank holdups haven't grabbed the same attention, but industry figures show they go up during recessions, and experts say the pressure inevitably pushes some otherwise law-abiding people to find themselves accosting a teller at a window.

"I would expect, as the downturn continues and lasts well over a year, that we will see more and more cases like this one, of someone without a record feeling they have no options and turning to crime," said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

There are no statistics that differentiate between first-timers and repeat criminals in bank heists.

But cases that have been in the news besides Windsor include a Georgia minister, an ex-cop in Florida and a single dad in St. Louis _ all blaming dire financial straits for their arrests.

James Creason, a 51-year-old music minister at a south Georgia church, was arrested in August on charges he used a handgun to force tellers to hand over $36,000 at a bank where he was known and where his ex-wife had worked. Authorities say Creason was caught after a brief car chase and told them he was sorry and had fallen on hard financial times.

Creason is being held without bond until his trial. His attorneys have said they plan to pursue an insanity defense.

In Ohio, retired bank teller Barbara Joly was sentenced in February to nine years in prison for robbing four banks. Her attorney, Chris Atkins, said the crimes were attempts to support an adult son who'd fallen on hard financial times. Joly and her husband decided they couldn't afford to give their son any more of their own money, so she robbed the banks to continue to help him financially.

A police patrolman in the southern Illinois university town of Carbondale was arrested and charged in January with robbing a bank there last October. Prosecutors said high school valedictorian James Gaddis, 27, carried out the crime with a friend because of money trouble as his home faced foreclosure. Gaddis is free on $1 million bond and has pleaded not guilty.

"If the charge is proven true, Mr. Gaddis not only violated the law but also betrayed his oath of office and the trust which his fellow officers and the citizens of this community placed in him," Mike Wepsiec, the county's state's attorney, has said.

Also in January, Donald Keith Giammanco was charged with robbing 12 St. Louis banks from November 2007 through last September. The unemployed, single father of twin teenage daughters told police he stole more than $100,000 to provide for his children. He had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in September 2007.

In South Carolina, Windsor filed for Chapter 7 protection in 2005, a year after he was handed more than $83,000 in fines in five separate lawsuits involving debt collection and contract disputes. At the time, he listed just over $3,000 in assets, with debts totaling more than a quarter-million dollars. A foreclosure case was dismissed, and a lawsuit filed in January over breach of contract is still pending.

But if Windsor's stress was building, those around him say they didn't see it.

"I'm confident that he just internalized a lot of feelings," said Ralph Carter, pastor at Brushy Creek Baptist Church, where Windsor and his family are members. "I have apologized to him that I wasn't more sensitive to the need. But no one here knew anything was about to trigger that kind of response from him."

Carter, who has known Windsor for nearly a dozen years, describes his friend as a disciplined, clean-cut man who never used profanity, took numerous mission trips to build orphanages in Brazil and even spent time in his youth as a fashion model.

The incident has left Windsor's wife stunned, the pastor said.

"She just feels so badly that she didn't recognize this coming," said Carter, who added Heather Windsor has told him she knew nothing about any troubles in her husband's mortgage and construction businesses. "She was absolutely shocked and devastated that it happened. You look back, and you say, 'Was this a sign, or was that a sign that something was coming?' But there was just no indication at all, on any of our part."

Windsor remains in jail, unable to pay the $3 million in state and federal bond set on charges including armed robbery and kidnapping. If convicted on all counts, he could face more than 60 years in prison.

Windsor's attorneys and his wife have declined to comment on the pending case. Carter, who has visited Windsor in jail, said he wishes he had known something was troubling his friend.

"We all make mistakes, some more costly than others," Carter said. "But one bad decision doesn't change who somebody is."

US moves to cut potent greenhouse gases

2009-05-05T19:14:00.000+07:00

Washington - The United States intends to work towards reducing emissions of potent greenhouse gases found in refrigerators and air conditioning systems, but has not yet decided which international venue to use to advance the issue, US officials said on Monday.

In a letter to a United Nations agency, the US State Department said hydrofluorocarbons, known as HFCs, "pose a very significant further threat to the climate system because of their high global warming potentials".

The letter, by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Reifsnyder, indicated that the United States wanted to reduce the gases but had not decided whether to do so under the Montreal Protocol, which regulates hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which are blamed for depleting the ozone layer, or through separate UN talks on climate change.

"The United States has been extremely interested in how best to address the projected future growth of HFCs and how to promote the development of technically and economically feasible alternatives," the letter said.

"While uses now of HFCs are relatively small, they are projected to increase dramatically in future years as (countries) transition out of HCFCs and as the market for air conditioning and refrigeration in developing countries grows."

Parties to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer decided in 2007 to speed up plans to phase out ozone-depleting HCFCs, but the most likely alternative to these gases are climate-warming HFCs.

"Thus, we risk solving one global environmental problem while possibly exacerbating another unless alternatives can be found," the letter said.

A senior administration official said the letter was meant to signal a US desire to move forward on the issue despite not having decided on the best venue.

"The purpose for doing this is to signal that we're really serious about reducing HFCs," the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Nations are meeting in Copenhagen in December to hammer out a climate treaty to take over for the Kyoto Protocol, which curbs greenhouse gas emissions. A Copenhagen agreement could also cover HFCs.

Reifsnyder wrote that Washington had not yet decided whether the Montreal treaty should be amended to gradually reduce HFCs but emphasised a US interest in addressing their expected growth promoting alternatives.

"We are conscious that alternatives exist today for some uses of HFCs, but not all. For this reason, seeking to phase down the consumption and production of HFCs would be preferable to phasing out such consumption and production," he said. - Reuters

GRB 090423 explosion '13 billion years old'

2009-04-29T13:32:00.000+07:00

ASTRONOMERS have spied a gamma-ray burst from the universe's infancy, making it the oldest event ever witnessed and shedding light on cosmic origins.

"This is the most remote gamma-ray burst ever detected, and also the most distant object ever discovered - by some way,'' Nial Tanvir at Britain's University of Leicester said.

Gamma-ray bursts, the universe's most luminous explosion, happen when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel.

Their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, and gas jets, in a process still not fully understood, punch out in a spectacular surge into space.

The so-called "GRB 090423'' explosion, which occurred when the universe was only 640 million years old - some five per cent of its current age - was seen by the NASA Swift satellite on April 23.

Subsequent analysis by teams of scientists, utilising the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, showed the satellite effectively looked back in time 13 billion years.

"Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts,'' Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland said.

"We've waited five years, and we finally have one.''

The event's capture has the potential of illuminating astronomy in its quest to unravel the mysteries of the early universe.

"At its most basic level this discovery tells us that there were massive stars at this moment in cosmic history,'' Andrew Levan at Britain's University of Warwick said.

"But equally importantly we can use events like this to probe how the universe evolves when it is less than five per cent of its current age.''

Dementia - A disease of the family

2009-04-29T13:28:00.001+07:00

Dementia is a disease that affects the brain. It can affect memory, thinking and intellectual functions, as well as the ability to carry out common tasks.

Dementia has become a major problem as more people are living longer and the ageing brain may develop Alzheimer's disease. Common features of dementia include the following:

1. Memory loss: People with dementia often forget. They may forget where they have placed their keys, money, clothes, important documents and other personal possessions. They may accuse others of stealing or hiding things which they have mislaid. They often ask the same questions over and over. Some people may have difficulty remembering the names of spouses, children and other close family members and friends. It can be very painful for family members when a loved one can no longer recognise them.

2. Disorientation: They may become disoriented and not able to recall the year, month and day of the week.

3. Inability to function: Dementia may affect one's ability to carry out basic tasks such as cooking, bathing, brushing of one's teeth and feeding oneself.

4. Poor judgement: Judgement may be affected and the individual may do things that are out of keeping with their character and nature.

5. Getting lost: I have had to deal with many people who have got lost due to poor memory.

Tips for family members

1. Look out for it and accept it: In many people, dementia comes on slowly. Listen to the caregivers and other family members. They live with it and are able to appreciate the subtle changes which others may not be able to pick up.

2. Dementia is a family problem: It affects the family emotionally, socially and financially.

3. Deal with denial: It is painful to accept that a loved one has dementia. Denial may help to cushion some of the pain but it does not allow for problem solving. The earlier you accept it, the better it is for everyone.

4. Deal with your pain: It is very painful to stand by and watch when your loved one is afflicted by dementia. You may need counselling to deal with the problem.

5. Ensure safety: Put measures in place to ensure the safety of your family member suffering from dementia.

6. Caregivers need support: In many homes, we have one person caring for the family member with dementia. When the condition is severe and the person needs 24-hour supervision, it can be very demanding on one person. Caregivers are often at risk for burnout. You may need to have more than one person taking care of the family member.

7. Deal with property: As the condition progresses, the person suffering from dementia will not be able to make appropriate decisions. They may not be able to sign a document or even make a will. If you realise that someone is in the early stages of the disease, the family may want to discuss these issues. You may want to consult a lawyer as the law makes provisions to protect the property and money of people so affected.

8. Join a support group: There is an Alzheimer's support group in Jamaica. We would encourage you to join this group if you have a family member with dementia as it can be a great source of information and emotional and psychological support.

9. Seek medical advice early: Seek early medical advice to ensure that your family member is properly assessed and receives the best care possible.

10. Have family meetings: When a family member has dementia, the entire family should discuss how it is affecting each member and, more important, discuss plans to care for the affected member. Many families end up quarrelling and sometimes anger and bitterness ensue. This does not help.

Fed takes fresh stock of economy

2009-04-29T13:12:00.000+07:00

WASHINGTON - Taking fresh stock of economic and financial conditions, Federal Reserve policymakers are considering whether they need to take additional measures to ease the recession.

Most economists are betting there won't be any major announcements Wednesday at the end of a two-day meeting given the Fed's bold $1.2 trillion move just last month to revive the economy.

Still, analysts aren't ruling anything out as credit and financial stresses persist and a new potential danger has arisen to the economy in the form of the swine flu outbreak.

"Never say never with these guys. But I don't think they have a real reason to increase support at this time," said Michael Feroli, economist at JPMorgan Economics.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are all but certain to leave the targeted range for its key bank lending rate between zero and 0.25 percent.

Economists predict the Fed will hold its key rate at that record-low level well into next year, although some would like to see the Fed provide a more explicit commitment on the front. The Fed has been pledging to hold the rate at super-low levels for "an extended period."

With the Fed's key rate near rock bottom, policymakers will examine the effectiveness of existing programs to help the economy. They also will weigh whether those initiatives need to be changed or expanded, while keeping options open for new relief measures.

The Fed hopes its various efforts will get banks to lend again, lower interest rates and increase Americans' appetites to spend, which would help lift the country out of a recession that began in December 2007.

Some analysts said it's possible , but not likely , the Fed would decide to boost its purchases of government debt beyond the $300 billion announced last month. Others said the Fed might make changes to a consumer lending program that's gotten off to a rocky start in order to make it attractive to investors.

Much hope is riding on the program called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF. It's been hobbled by rule changes, investor worries about financial privacy and fears that participants might become ensnared in an anti-bailout backlash from the public and Congress. Just $1.7 billion in loans was requested for the second round of funding in April , down from $4.7 billion in March.

Investors use the money to buy newly issued securities backed by auto and student loans, credit cards and other debt. The program will be expanded to include commercial real-estate loans.

On the economic front, the Fed is expected to strike a somewhat less dour note than it did at its mid-March meeting. Policymakers are likely to note some tentative signs that the recession is easing.

Some more hopeful signals emerged Tuesday. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index rose far more than expected in April, jumping over 12 points to 39.2, the highest level since November. And a housing index showed that home prices dropped sharply in February, but for the first time in 25 months the decline was not a record.

The U.S. economy has sunk sharply, although analysts are hopeful the rate of decline is lessening.

In the final three months of 2008, the economy contracted at a 6.3 percent rate , the worst showing in a quarter-century. Economists predict it probably declined at a 5 percent rate in the first three months of this year. The government will release its initial estimate for first-quarter economic activity Wednesday morning.

Bernanke has said the recession probably would end this year if the government is successful in repairing broken banking and credit systems.

Before the swine flu outbreak, many analysts were predicting the recession would ease further, with the economy shrinking at a rate of 1 to 2.5 percent in the current quarter.

However, analysts warn that any severe outbreak of the swine flu would not only clobber tourism, food and transportation industries, but crimp spending on other things if consumers get spooked. For now, analysts are hopeful that any economic fallout will be limited and short-lived. But much hinges on the scope of the flu infections and how they affect consumer behavior.

Even if the recession ends this year, the jobless rate , now at a quarter-century high of 8.5 percent , is expected to keep rising and top 10 percent early next year.

Fitch upgrades bond rating for New Orleans

2009-04-14T07:32:00.001+07:00

NEW ORLEANS - Fitch Ratings upgraded its investment-grade bond rating for New Orleans Monday, saying the financial picture for the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina less than 4 years ago has stabilized.

This comes less than a month after Moody's Investors Service affirmed its investment-grade rating and is seen as another sign of recovery. But with local officials hoping to sell $80 million in bonds for infrastructure work this year, the big question is: What will Standard & Poor's will do?

Standard & Poor's had rated the city at below investment-grade after the 2005 hurricane, and officials see an upgrade to investment grade as critical to the bond sale prospects.

Without that upgrade, "market access will be extremely limited and very expensive," Peter Kessenich, a financial adviser to the Board of Liquidation, City Debt, said in an e-mail Monday.

Before Katrina, voters approved a $260 million bond issue for roads, public infrastructure and other work. The city sold $75 million in bonds in 2007 and hoped to sell $80 million in 2008.

But the board in October delayed the planned $80 million sale due to the Standard & Poor's rating and what Kessenich called "lousy" market conditions. City officials hoped for a sale in early 2009 to keep public works and other projects on track, but the board has been waiting to hear from the rating agencies before deciding its next step.

Representatives of the three agencies visited the city in March. The findings by Standard & Poor's are expected soon and Kessenich said he's optimistic about the city's prospects for the desired upgrade.

Public Works Director Robert Mendoza said about one-third of his $600 million rebuilding program is dependent on bond funds, and that segment of projects would essentially grind to a halt if the planned sale does not take place this year. He said he's already running out of funds from the previous sale and is waiting on a new infusion of cash to put out some bids for work and begin design on others.

Other segments of the public works' program include projects that are federally backed and not affected by the bond funding.

Fitch, in its report Monday, noted that the city still faces years of recovery and plenty of work in key areas such as housing, health care, public infrastructure and education.

But it also cited gains in property tax collections, a population at about 70 percent of the pre-Katrina level and rebuilding aid in its assessment that New Orleans' financial profile had stabilized. The city, which has relied on federal loans to prop up its budget since the storm, also hopes to be self-sufficient by 2011.

The level of rebuilding aid flowing to the region "is providing a measurable boost to economic activity during the current (national) recession and will establish a solid foundation for future economic growth," the agency said.

David Attenborough argues the planet cannot handle more people

2009-04-14T07:19:00.000+07:00

SIR David Attenborough has become a patron of an organisation that campaigns to limit the number of people in the world, arguing that the growth in global population is frightening.

The television presenter and naturalist said the increase in population was having devastating effects on ecology, pollution and food production.

"There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programs only a mere 56 years ago," Sir David, who has two children, said after becoming a patron of the Optimum Population Trust think-tank.

"It is frightening in the sense that we can't go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of the space and food production.

"I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more. Population is reaching its optimum and the world cannot hold an infinite number of people."

The OPT counts among its patrons the environmentalist Jonathon Porritt and the academic Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. However, Sir David's appointment has already been criticised.

Austin Williams, author of The Enemies of Progress, said: "Experts can still be stupid when they speak on subjects of which they know little. Sir David may know a sight more than I do about remote species but that does not give him the intelligence to speak on global politics.

"I have a problem with the line that people are a problem. More people are a good thing. People are the source of creativity, intelligence, analysis and problem-solving.

"If we see people as just simple things that consume and excrete carbon, then the OPT may have a point, but people are more than this and they will be the ones to find the solutions."

Sir David said the OPT was drawing attention to the issue of population and being a patron seemed a worthwhile thing to do.

Roger Martin, the chairman of the trust, said the appointment would put pressure on organisations to face up to what he said was the taboo issue of population.

"The environmental movement will not confront the fact that there is not a single problem that they deal with which would not be easier with fewer people."

The trust campaigns for global access to family planning and for couples to be encouraged to stop having more than two children. In Britain it wants to stabilise the population by bringing immigration into balance with emigration and making greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies.

Mr Martin said the UK population must be reduced to a sustainable level because Britain was already the most overcrowded country in Europe.

He said the world could not increase production to meet the needs of a growing population.

"We can't feed ourselves with some of the most intensive agriculture in the world - we're only 70 per cent self-sufficient."

Mr Martin said that Britain could not rely on the world food market because, when food runs short, exporters do not export it.

"It's completely cuckoo to imagine that these globalised economies are going to keep us fed when we can't do it ourselves," he said.

100,000 electric cars for capital in London

2009-04-09T04:22:00.000+07:00

Article history

A Tesla Roadster electric car at its charging point. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty

London mayor Boris Johnson announced today his intent to make the city the electric car capital of Europe. He said he wanted to introduce 100,000 electric cars to the capital's streets and to build an infrastructure of 25,000 charging points in public streets, car parks and shops.

Johnson said he would pay for a third of the £60m plan from the budget of the Greater London Authority (GLA), and challenged the government to fund the rest and make good its enthusiasm for electric vehicles, which Gordon Brown today said would feature in the upcoming budget announcement.

"The time for simply talking about electric vehicles is over – we need real action on the ground to make the electric vehicle an easy choice for Londoners," said Johnson. "I am today committing millions to install the infrastructure needed for when, in just a few years time, these vehicles become much more widely available."

Among the proposals are a change to the London Plan, ensuring all new building developments install charging points and at least a fifth of all new parking spaces are equipped with charging facilities.

He also wants to keep the exemption from the congestion charge enjoyed by electric cars and replace at least 1,000 of the GLA's fleet of vehicles with electric equivalents by 2015.

"This is an unprecedented package of measures to make London the electric car capital of Europe," said Johnson. "By taking these steps, we will not only create green collar jobs, but also smooth the way for less polluting transport choices which will improve our air quality, reduce traffic noise and contribute significantly to my carbon emissions reduction target. It is time for the government to put its money where its mouth is and back my plan to make electric vehicles the first choice for Londoners."

In January, transport secretary Geoff Hoon said the government would make £250million available for consumer incentives to bring electric cars to market in the UK. Johnson said he would lobby to capture as much of this fund as possible for London, the UK's biggest car market. In February, Johnson had said he wanted to take a "sizeable chunk" of the fund, and floated the concept of an electric car hire scheme.

Friends of the Earth executive director Andy Atkins said the London Mayor's vision was admirable, though was missing the point. "Electric cars are only as green as the energy they run on and the UK's renewable energy industry is drastically underfunded.

"The government must urgently ramp up its support for renewable energy to ensure these cars – and our homes and businesses – all make efficient of use clean green fuel. And Boris Johnson must invest in public transport, cycling and walking as well as electric cars. Only this holistic approach will be enough to cut London's emissions by 60 per cent by 2025 and bring the whole of London within EU limits on air pollution."

Boeing defense projects face threat of budget axe

2009-04-09T04:10:00.000+07:00

US aerospace giant Boeing would be hit harder than other defense contractors if the Pentagon's proposed cuts to major weapons programs are approved, analysts said Tuesday.

Boeing's stock fell 2.65 percent to 37.15 dollars in trading a day after Defense Secretary Robert Gates presented a "reform budget" that calls for deep cuts in some big projects led by the company.

Gates' recommendations call for ending production of F-22 Raptor fighter jets, scaling back the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program of hi-tech vehicles and robots, canceling plans for more C-17 transport planes and cutting elements of the missile defense program.

All of those proposed cuts would deal a blow to Boeing's defense division, which generates about 32 billion in sales.

Gates also recommended canceling contracts that Boeing had hoped to secure, including plans for a new CSAR-X search and rescue helicopter, a long-range Air Force bomber and a series of communications satellites.

"Boeing could face difficult times," the investment firm Collins Stewart wrote in an analysis.

"FCS (Future Combat Systems), C-17 (transport planes) and missile defense are key programs for the company and all face cuts," it said.

Apart from Boeing, the outlook for other defense contractors was not as bleak as anticipated and in some cases encouraging, as budget recommendations removed uncertainty, analysts said.

The defense secretary's budget offered more funding for certain weapons programs, including additional F-35 fighter jets and close-to-shore naval ships from Lockheed Martin as well as more unmanned drones.

"For Lockheed Martin, the news was good. In our opinion, the key to the company's revenue and earnings growth is the F-35, and the F-35 received strong support," the according to Collins.

Chicago-based Boeing "appears to be most at risk on the downside, with several programs under pressure," Fitch ratings agency wrote.

The planned cuts in defense contracts came on top of bad news for Boeing's commercial operations, which have suffered from a drop in orders for new planes amid a global economic crisis.

The Pentagon's recommendations still need to be formally endorsed by the White House and then approved by Congress, where some lawmakers have already blasted the suggested cuts in weapons projects.

The stakes will be high for Boeing when bidding resumes this summer on a contract for a new aerial refueling tanker.

Gates confirmed on Monday that bidding would go ahead after a dispute last year pitting Boeing against Northrup Grumman and its partner the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the parent company of Boeing rival Airbus.

A previous contract for the tanker was awarded to Northrup and EADS but was cancelled after an appeal from Boeing.

The company said Monday it would examine the Pentagon's budget plans.

"We will be studying Secretary Gates' announcement for potential impact to Boeing," company spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement.

Giants closer Wilson ready for opener

2009-04-03T16:52:00.001+07:00

SAN FRANCISCO — As it turns out, Brian Wilson will be ready for the season opener. Heck, he will be ready to pitch tonight.

The Giants closer tested his ailing finger during a bullpen session before the game Thursday and earned a thumb's up from his manager.

"He's good to go," Bruce Bochy said.

Wilson dismissed published speculation that an infected middle finger jeopardized his status for Opening Day. Wilson said he planned to make his scheduled appearance tonight against the A's and then pitch again Sunday against the Dodgers.

"It wasn't a factor and it hasn't been a factor," Wilson said of his finger. "They're just being cautious."

Wilson, who finished second in the National League with 41 saves last season, has an infection on the middle finger of his throwing hand. He said he isn't sure whether the infection came from a small cut or a spider bite.

Questions emerged about his health after Wilson went eight days without appearing in a Cactus League game. But the pitcher pointed out that he wasn't sidelined: Wilson pitched 22/3 innings in a minor league game March 27.

The time off since is no big deal, he said.

"If this were the regular season, I wouldn't miss anything," Wilson said.

Guzman in future plans

Bochy remains bullish about Jesus Guzman's future. The infielder hit .412 with a .922 slugging percentage in 51 at-bats

during spring training before being reassigned to minor league camp.

"If he wasn't hitting home runs, he was hitting the ball off every banner on our outfield fence," Bochy said.

Defensive improvement as a corner infielder is the key to Guzman earning a major league job, Bochy said.

Short hops

Left-hander Jonathan Sanchez will throw a bullpen session today to test his left index finger. Sanchez said he burned the finger while cooking rice and beans. If all goes well in the bullpen, Sanchez will pitch Sunday in the Giants' final exhibition game. ... Bochy said "there's a good chance" that Thursday's lineup is the same one fans will see on Opening Day: RF Randy Winn, SS Edgar Renteria, LF Fred Lewis, C Bengie Molina, 3B Pablo Sandoval, 1B Travis Ishikawa, CF Aaron Rowand, SS Emmanuel Burriss and P Tim Lincecum. ... The Giants' first game back at AT&T Park represented the first chance to see an intriguing locker room alignment: Barry Zito's stall is next to Randy Johnson's. The two enjoyed a long conversation before Thursday's game. ... Johnson faces the A's tonight in his final tune-up start before the regular season. He is 1-2 with a 2.38 ERA this spring, with 12 strikeouts in 111/3 innings. ... The Giants held a moment of silence before the game to honor former manager Herman Franks as well as the four Oakland Police officers killed on March 21.

Dinosaurs on the move for extended stay at zoo

2009-04-03T16:46:00.000+07:00

Featuring 18 animatronic dinosaurs created by Canada's Dinosaurs Unearthed, "Dinosaurs," which will run through Oct. 31, has denizens that range in size from 4 to 30 feet tall that will populate a forest setting near the Children's Zoo.

Andre Copeland, interpretive programs manager, is excited about the exhibit.

"It's about an awesome adventure where history comes to life," he said. "The experience is going to be great for everyone; we have something for everybody there."

All zoo visitors will be able to take a gander at a replica of the largest dino ever found, the Ruyang Yellow River dinosaur discovered in China in 2007. The beast measured nearly 60 feet long, 14 feet wide and 30 feet high. The animatronic version will be displayed beside Roosevelt Fountain (and will periodically spray water from its mouth into the fountain).

The interactive, multisensory exhibit is the zoo's first-ever animatronic exhibit. Within "Dinosaurs Alive!" visitors will hear the sounds dinosaurs made -- from loud roars to chirps -- and will be able to touch their fleshy skin when the dinosaurs move close to the path on which visitors walk (Copeland cautioned that hugging and climbing on the dinosaurs will not be permitted).

Visitors also will be able to manipulate the movements of four dinos -- an Apatosaurus baby, Baryonyx, Dilophosaurus and Parasaurolophus -- from remote-control consoles. Other interactive stations include a dig site on the East Mall where junior paleontologists can excavate replica dinosaur fossils in two shallow sandboxes, and an egg-laying dinosaur will provide souvenirs (inside the eggs) at the exhibit exit.

Interpretive signs along the walking path will provide information about each animal displayed, along with general information about dinosaurs. The information is designed to help visitors draw connections between these blasts from the past and current zoo residents.

So the exhibit asks visitors to think about which zoo animals might have evolved from which dinosaurs by considering hunting styles, body parts and behavior. Copeland hopes that after exiting "Dinosaurs Alive!" visitors will wander through the zoo and look for animals that share characteristics with the dinosaurs in the exhibit.

Sydney Ready for Big Switch-Off as Earth Hour Goes Global

2009-03-28T23:02:00.000+07:00

Sydney, the home of Earth Hour, is preparing to celebrate the global environmental movement's second anniversary. In 2007, more than two million Australians took part in the symbolic event to draw attention to climate change. Organizers say more than 3,400 towns and cities in 88 countries will participate in this year's Earth Hour.

Scotland's Edinburgh Castle, the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing and the pyramids in Egypt will join the Sydney Opera House in dimming their lights as part of Earth Hour.

The global event has been endorsed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Ban Ki-moon has said it was the biggest climate change demonstration ever attempted. Mr. Ban urged people everywhere to pressure their governments to take decisive action to cut carbon pollution.

Organizers are hoping that up to a billion people from small villages in Namibia to sprawling cities in Asia will participate in an international effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which many scientists blame for a warming climate.

One of the architects of Earth Hour, Andy Ridley from the conservation group World Wildlife Fund (WWF), says the current financial meltdown should not be used as an excuse to delay environmental reforms.

"The global economic crisis has proved that we are a global community, so when America goes bad, we all go bad and climate change is going to be on a scale that is way, way beyond our global economic crisis at the moment and we need to put in place the measures to a) slow that down and ideally halt it, b) be ready for economies that will have to change. So, the longer we procrastinate the more we pay the penalty so we need to move quickly," he said.

Earth Hour was started by environmentalists in Sydney in 2007. It encourages households, businesses and governments to switch off all non-essential lights for 60 minutes in a show of unified concern for the health and future of the planet.

In two years, the event has become a large global movement and its aim is to create an enormous wave of public pressure that will influence delegates at a meeting in Copenhagen later this year, which hopes to establish a new U.N. climate treaty.

However, critics of Earth Hour have insisted it is simply a symbolic gesture that will not affect significant environmental change.

The event will officially begin on the international dateline in the remote Chatham Islands south-east of New Zealand and will conclude in Hawaii.

Monsters vs. Aliens' delivers on family fun

2009-03-28T22:32:00.000+07:00

"MONSTERS VS. ALIENS" with the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogan, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett and Kiefer Sutherland. Directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. PG for sci-fi action, some crude humor and mild language. 1 hour, 34 minutes.

3 1/2 Stars

It's Susan Murphy's wedding day. The weather is perfect, the dress is spotless. She's all ready to get hitched to the man of her dreams, Derek, a TV weatherman.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, she could get hit by a meteorite, grow to 50 feet tall from the radiation, have her hair turn white and be shipped off to a top secret government holding pen for monsters and other weird creatures.

That would certainly put a crimp in the bridal bouquet.

So begins "Monsters vs. Aliens" a smart, funny animated comedy that doesn't once trade sweetness for laughs.

While in captivity Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) meets a quartet of other unlikely creatures, like a 350-foot grub named Insectosaurus, the half-man, half-insect mad scientist Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), the fish-man known only as "Missing Link" (Will Arnett), and B.O.B. (Seth Rogan), a gelatinous blob whose utter cluelessness and amicability provide some of the film's biggest laughs.

Susan and the others get a chance at freedom when an enormous alien robot lands in California with hostile intentions. Defeat the robot, Gen. W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) promises, and they'll gain their freedom.

Of course, that's easier said than done, but along the way the formerly retiring Susan gains confidence in herself and finds a surrogate family amongst her new misfit friends.

The jokes are quick and plentiful in the film, sending up various sci-fi and B-movie conceits, and are aided abundantly by the stellar voice work, most notably by Witherspoon, Rogan, Sutherland and, filling in as a vainglorious president, Stephen Colbert.

More significantly, it's nice to see a movie where the heroine doesn't have to trade in her femininity in order to kick alien tail.

The film, it should be noted, uses the latest 3-D technology and is full of meteors, bouncing balls and other things flying out at the audience. It all looks rather snazzy, though it still feels like little more than a gimmick to me.

If you do go see it, however, try to catch it on an IMAX screen, where the visuals and 3-D effects really come to life.

"Monsters vs. Aliens" is no gimmick though; it's a sweet, funny family film that even the occasional off-color joke can't derail.

Jenny likes a little bit of botox

2009-03-23T20:15:00.000+07:00

Actress-model Jenny McCarthy says she likes botox but "just a

little bit".

Jenny, who is dating actor Jim Carrey, said she knows that her comments on cosmetic procedures have shocked fans, reports contactmusic.com .

"People were surprised I was so open about (it) but when people see everyone in Hollywood, they look up to them and I think everyone should be honest about what they're doing. I like Botox, but only a little bit."

"A lot of doctors will do it so people are frozen... but you wanna still be able to have wrinkles... The key is just a little and it's really hard to find a doctor to only put a little bit in. I'm not promoting it, but anything that makes people feel good..."

Walgreen 2Q profit down 7 percent on restructuring

2009-03-23T20:13:00.000+07:00

The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Drugstore operator Walgreen Co. says its profit fell 7 percent in the fiscal second quarter because of costs for its restructuring plan.

The Deerfield, Ill., company says it earned $640 million, or 65 cents per share. That compares compared with $686 million, or 69 cents per share, a year ago. That includes restructuring expenses of 6 cents per share, which saved the company 2 cents per share. Sales grew 7 percent, to $16.48 billion from $15.39 billion.

Thomson Reuters says analysts expected earnings of 66 cents per share and sales of $16.42 billion.

Walgreen says retail prescriptions grew, bucking an industry trend.

In January, Walgreen said it would cut 1,000 jobs to reduce overhead, part of a plan to save the company $1 billion per year by 2011.

Female robot heads for the catwalk

2009-03-16T17:23:00.000+07:00

A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has slimmed down to appear at a fashion show.

But it hasn't even cleared safety standards to share the catwalk with human models.

Developers said their "cybernetic human" wasn't ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people.

"Technologically, it hasn't reached that level," said Hirohisa Hirukawa, one of the robot's developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. "Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure."

The black-haired robot is more than 60 inches tall and weighs 95 pounds. Code-named HRP-4C, the robot's predecessor had weighed 128 pounds.

Developers said the robot may be used in amusement parks, events to attract attention and simulations of human movement such as exercise instructor.

HRP-4C was designed to look like an average Japanese woman, although its silver-and-black body makes it appear to be wearing a space-suit. It will appear in a Tokyo fashion show, although without any clothes, in a special section just for the robot next week.

Japan boasts one of the leading robotics industries in the world, and the government is pushing to develop the industry as a road to growth. Honda has developed Asimo, which can walk and talk, although it doesn't pretend to look human.

Other robots, like the ones from Hiroshi Kobayashi at the Tokyo University of Science and Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, have more human-like faces and have been tested as receptionists.

But demands are growing for socially useful robots, such as those for caring for the elderly and the sick, said Yoshihiro Kaga, a government official in the trade and industry ministry.

Chelsea beats Man City 1-0, Spurs beat Villa 2-1

2009-03-16T17:16:00.000+07:00

LONDON — Chelsea moved within four points of Manchester United in the Premier League standings by beating Manchester City 1-0 Sunday, and Tottenham beat Aston Villa 2-1 to climb into 11th place.

Michael Essien scored Chelsea’s winner at Stamford Bridge with his second goal in two games as the Blues made it four league victories in a row since temporary coach Guus Hiddink replaced Luiz Felipe Scolari.

After Manchester United lost at home to Liverpool 4-1 Saturday, both chasing teams are four points behind the defending champion Red Devils, who have a game in hand.

"The door is a little bit open," Hiddink said. "It gives them a blow and now all depends on their calmness. Let’s see how they react in the coming games, but they have a lot of experience. We have to keep winning."

Frank Lampard had the ball in the City net in the second minute but was clearly offside before his free kick led to an 18th-minute goal. He found Essien unmarked inside the City box and the Ghanaian swung at the ball, miskicked it and it looped into the net. Now fully fit after being out for six months with a knee injury, Essien also scored in Wednesday’s 2-2 draw with Juventus as Chelsea reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League.

As Chelsea threatened again, Juliano Belletti’s left foot shot from 25 meters (yards) struck the foot of the post and City defender Richard Dunne kicked off the line from Florent Malouda.

Tottenham’s victory at Villa Park eased its relegation worries and helped north London neighbor Arsenal in the race for the fourth spot in next season’s Champions League. Arsenal beat Blackburn 4-0 Saturday to climb into fourth and now is ahead of Villa on goal difference.

"We’ve been battling all season and we’ve no reason to give it up," Villa manager Martin O’Neill said. "We’re still there. The players have done terrifically well. Now they’ve got to try and get over the disappointments that we’ve had in recent weeks and fight on until the end and I think we are capable of doing that."

When manager Harry Redknapp replaced the fired Juande Ramos, Spurs were last in the standings with only two points. Now it is up to 11th and six points clear of the relegation zone.

"We’re playing well," Redknapp said. "To come to Villa, which is one of the most difficult places to come, and win is superb.

"Since I’ve been here we’ve lost one game at home out of 16. We took 33 points from 21 games, which is top seven form over the whole season."

Spurs took the lead after only five minutes. Aaron Lennon crossed from the right, Villa goalkeeper Brad Friedel could only get one hand to the ball and it came to Jermaine Jenas, who headed home.

After Spurs survived a long spell of Villa pressure, the visitors should have gone further ahead before halftime but Friedel blocked a shot from Luka Modric. Emile Heskey almost equalized in first-half injury time, but his header hit the Spurs bar.

After Friedel had blocked a low shot from Wilson Palacios in the 50th minute, Robbie Keane’s angled follow up shot appeared be to going in but Darren Bent made sure by sliding in at the far post to push the ball over the line.

Melody Gardot at the Union Chapel, London N1

2009-03-13T19:19:00.000+07:00

Audacious, truly audacious. In her brief career, the American singer-songwriter has already established a reputation as a low-key performer, but the notion of building a performance around an extended sequence of ballads might have seemed a step too far. No doubt one or two fans who are not yet familiar with her new album, My One and Only Thrill, will have found the experience daunting. Still, this was a triumphant performance by a singer-songwriter who is becoming one of the major talents of our time.

Is she a jazz vocalist? Not exactly. Her classy musicians certainly come from the jazz tradition, but the songs themselves draw on a fascinating amalgam of styles. There is a touch of Peggy Lee's poetry, a hint of Norah Jones and Joni Mitchell, not to mention the spare bossa nova guitar chords of Caetano Veloso. On her new project she adds violins to the blend, Vince Mendoza's glorious arrangements often conjuring echoes of those Hollywood masters Bernard Herrmann and David Raksin. Reproducing that lush ambience in such a tricky venue, acoustically speaking, was no easy task.

But Gardot's band - augmented by a compact string section directed by Guy Barker - coped superbly. The bassist Ken Prendergast and drummer Charlie Patierno knew exactly how to make the most of the smallest gestures, while the two-man horn section - perched almost out of sight at the corner of the crowded stage - added mere wisps of embellishment.

Lots has been wr itten about Gardot's struggle with the after-effects of devastating injuries sustained in a traffic accident some years ago. The cane and the medically prescribed dark glasses are a constant reminder of her frailty. If Tina Turner occupies the louder end of the introvert-extrovert scale, the newcomer seldom strays out of the twilight zone: her singing on the new record's title tune, for instance, had a sotto voce quality that was simply mesmerising.

Nevertheless, she broke loose at the encore, adding a driving gospel edge to Who Will Comfort Me?.

American Idol rules pop culture

2009-03-13T18:33:00.000+07:00

Los Angeles - In 2001, Simon Cowell figured a singing contest snapped up by British TV would be an easy sell in America. Instead, network responses ranged from lukewarm to hostile.

"I was thrown out in one pitch meeting. After 30 seconds, the guy told me to get out," recalled Cowell, making the rounds with entertainment mogul Simon Fuller.

"The main thing we were being told was music doesn't work on TV in prime-time. We tried to explain that there's lot more than music on the show."

So much for Hollywood acumen: The international Idol empire founded by Fuller has made a hit TV show seem an obvious, even puny ambition as Idolmania has swept across the pop culture realm.

The talent contest has "created this whole zeitgeist, and it's really about Americans and participating in creating a celebrity of their own," said media analyst Shari Ann Brill of Carat USA.

Instant careers

Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Jennifer Hudson are among the singers rewarded with instant careers in music, movies and in theatre.

A chorus of enterprises has gotten a dusting of Idol magic as well, from Dreyer's ice cream (Cookies N Dreamz among the novelty flavours) to a Disney World attraction to the Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol video game.

A deal with iTunes for exclusive show video and song downloads last season coincided with Apple's emergence as the leading music retailer in the US.

There's even altruistic value in the franchise: The charity initiative Idol Gives Back raised $64m in 2008 for groups including Children's Health Fund and Malaria No More.

Fuller, who started it all with Britain's Pop Idol and carried the concept to the United States and more than 35 TV markets worldwide, told The Times of London that "pure, simple television is not that interesting for me; what's far more interesting is trying to create a cult effect".

It's been a lucrative exercise for Fuller and others. His 19 Entertainment, a division of CKX Inc, reported an operating profit of $92.5m, a 37% increase over 2008's $67.4m.

Fuller's net worth in 2008 reportedly approached $1bn.

Money machine

FremantleMedia, which teams with 19 Entertainment in producing the US version, exporting the format and licensing, is another winner. FremantleMedia North America CEO Cecile Frot-Coutaz is an executive producer of American Idol.

For Fox, which gave American Idol a modest summertime tryout in 2002 at the urging of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns the network, the show is a money machine.

A 30-second commercial on Idol costs around $500 000 and rises to more than $600 000 for the finale, said Ray Dundas, an analyst for ad-buying firm Initiative.

By comparison, he said, other top 10 shows, such as Grey's Anatomy, get closer to $240 000 per half-minute ad.

The difference reflects both the size of the Idol audience and the fact that it can deliver the elusive young adult viewers preferred by advertisers, Dundas said.

American Idol, in short, big-foots broadcasting.

It has dominated as the most-watched series since its third year, a pattern that's holding true this season even as ratings dip in an overall TV slump.

Trendsetter

Two-hour American Idol episodes on Tuesday have averaged 58% more viewers than the closest competition.

"I don't believe there will ever be another show like this. It's the last of its breed as the consumer pool is increasingly splintered by broadcast, cable, DVRs and the internet," said Mike Darnell, Fox's president of alternative entertainment.

As a trendsetter, Idol has served as blueprint for a generation of shows in which contestants - whether singing, dancing, skating, playing the fiddle or swallowing fire - are vetted by a triad that includes one wasp-tongued TV judge, preferably with a foreign accent.

Len Goodman of Dancing with the Stars and Nigel Lythgoe of So You Think You Can Dance (and a former Idol producer) are part of the elite group.

Idol singers remain irresistible gossip fodder, with unknowns such as this year's drama queen Tatiana Del Toro heaped with water-cooler and online attention, at least for the moment.

Some Idol alumni have earned the ultimate - if unwelcome - proof of fame: They've become newsmakers, whether by dint of tragedy (Hudson, who lost family members to murder) or sexual orientation (Clay Aiken came out as gay when he announced the birth of his son).

Whatever the headlines, the Idol brand itself remains coveted by major companies.

Multiple Grammy winners

Underwood has sold 10 million record albums; Clarkson is just shy of that with sales of 9.5 million.

And both are multiple Grammy winners and critical favourites - not bad for a talent show that critics say is guilty of cheesy exploitation of the overtly untalented.

"American Idol for the record industry is one of the few bright spots over the last seven, eight years. No one else has figured out the magic formula for selling records, and American Idol has one," said Steve Knopper, author of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.

"It's old-fashioned when you think of it: TV helps you sell records," Knopper said, a lesson as old as the 1960s US introduction of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Hudson's album sales are under one million, but she's doing okay: She won an Academy Award for Dreamgirls.

"How long did American Bandstand last - 30 years, 40 years?" Knopper said. "I think Idol is built in that universal way. It's a talent show. It's not reinventing the wheel."

Music Notebook

2009-03-12T18:48:00.000+07:00

JAMAICAN REGGAE STAR PRINCE THEO AT SOUTHWEST CC

Soon after Patrice Bey and Kendric Bedell put their heads together to form The People's Stride concert series in Syracuse, Bey knew just whom to call to get the project off to a rousing start.

A couple of years ago, Bey "had the privilege of performing alongside" Prince Theo when Bey returned to her and Theo's native Jamaica to stage a tribute concert to Garnet Silk. "I've been following Prince Theo since then," says Bey, whose life has taken her to Brooklyn, Harlem and now Syracuse, where she's senior economic developer and Empire Zone coordinator for the city.

Bey called Prince Theo, asking the reggae star if he'd like to be part of a positive concert for the community. "He agreed right away," said Bey.

Prince Theo will headline the series debut, a show that starts at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Southwest Community Center, 401 South Ave., Syracuse. He'll be preceded onstage by Bey, Syracuse rapper Jimmy Black (that's Bedell's performing name) and another Syracuse rapper whose identity Bey wants to keep a mystery until the show.

The People's Stride is a series that promises music free of profanity and sexual content.

Bey says the idea was fostered in February, when the Jamaican government passed a law keeping music that includes those sore points from radio airplay.

"A statement I'd like to make to the community is: We can keep it clean and inject a positive message to the community," Bey says. "Hip-hop and reggae have a history of keeping it clean."

Bey is aware of the other side of the music's reputation, too.

"This is controversial," she says. "You do have quite a bit of artists in hip-hop and reggae that do not keep it lyrically clean, and that is their bread and butter. Which means they have a fanfare."

Bey wants artists to look at a bigger picture than commercial success.

"What I'm saying is, as artists we have to watch our content. For community building, we have to face issues. Let's choose carefully. Let's choose wisely," Bey says.

She says November's election proves that the nation is ready for such increased social awareness. "This was about (President Barack Obama's) content. He was elected because his content is good. His message was strong. Why shouldn't our music be reflective of our nation?"

Tickets are $20, available in advance at the center and also at the door on Saturday.

Bey says she hopes to stage the second concert of the series in about a month and a half and plans to move it among Syracuse's community centers.

Devo plan first album in 20 years

2009-03-12T18:44:00.000+07:00

US new wave pioneers Devo have announced plans for their first album in nearly 20 years.

The as-yet-untitled record is the long awaited follow up to 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps.

Formed in Ohio in 1973, the band were famed for wearing yellow boiler suits and flowerpot style hats on stage which they called "power domes".

The new LP, set for release in autumn 2010 will feature their first new material since 2007.

On their official website the band said: "De-evolution has finally arrived and who better to guide us through the mess than Devo."

Devo have also announced a gig at the Forum in Kentish Town, north London on 6 May that will see them play their debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo? in its entirety.

It reached number 12 in the UK album chart in 1978.

Champions League video previews: Bernabeu hero Yossi Benayoun out

2009-03-10T19:32:00.000+07:00

Juventus (0) v Chelsea (1)

Chelsea will give late fitness tests to Nicolas Anelka and Deco for the last-16 second-leg match in Turin. Anelka has a bruised toe while Deco is struggling with a hamstring tear.

Ricardo Carvalho is still not fully recovered from his hamstring problem and is unlikely to start. Michael Essien is fit after six months out with knee ligament damage. Chelsea are without Joe Cole (knee) and Paulo Ferreira (ligaments) for the rest of the season.

Chelsea (from): Cech, Hilario, Taylor, Bosingwa, A Cole, Alex, Ivanovic, Terry, Mancienne, Lampard, Ballack, Obi, Deco, Kalou, Anelka, Drogba, Quaresma, Malouda, Di Santo, Belletti, Essien.

Liverpool (1) v Real Madrid (0)

Rafael Benitez, the Liverpool manager, has three fitness concerns for the last-16 second leg at Anfield. Fernando Torres (ankle) has been in light training for two days, while Alvaro Arbeloa (hamstring) is also close to being involved. Yossi Benayoun, however, is almost certainly out with a hamstring injury.

Benitez will give all three every opportunity to prove their fitness for the tie, with Liverpool 1-0 up from the first leg a fortnight ago in the Bernabeu. Albert Riera is suspended after being booked in the first match.

Liverpool (from): Reina, Arbeloa, Carragher, Hyypia, Skrtel, Dossena, Aurelio, Kuyt, Gerrard, Mascherano, Alonso, Lucas, Babel, Torres, Benayoun, Ngog, Cavalieri, Darby, Irwin, Spearing.

WEDNESDAY

Manchester United (0) v Inter Milan (0)

Manchester United team news to follow.

Roma (0) v Arsenal (1)

Kolo Toure will return to the Arsenal side following a calf problem. Samir Nasri and Denilson also come back into contention after being rested for the FA Cup win over Burnley on Sunday, but Andrei Arshavin is ineligible for the European tie after his move from Zenit St Petersburg.

Eduardo and Theo Walcott could feature, but Mikael Silvestre (calf) is not yet match fit, while Emmanuel Adebayor (hamstring), Cesc Fabregas (knee) and Tomas Rosicky (hamstring tendon) continue their rehabilitation.

Arsenal (from): Almunia, Sagna, Gallas, Toure, Clichy, Nasri, Denilson, Song, Walcott, Van Persie, Eduardo, Fabianski, Djourou, Ramsey, Vela, Bendtner, Diaby, Eboue.

Ancient footprints stir debate over early humans' strides

2009-03-10T19:19:00.000+07:00

By Tom Avril

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

PHILADELPHIA -- One-and-a-half million years ago, a few of our ancestors walked beside a muddy African river with powerful, modern strides -- a gait that let them forage over long distances, paving the way for evolutionary advances that make us human.

The evidence, reported by a team that included U.S. university students in Friday's issue of the journal Science, comes from a rare anthropological discovery: their footprints.

Among those who helped uncover the tracks, preserved for the ages when a gently flowing river changed course and covered them with sand, were undergraduates from Rutgers University in New Jersey. Supervised by scientists, they used brushes to clear away sand bit by bit, retreating to their tents at night after days under the merciless Kenyan sun.

"You realize these are made by our human ancestors," marveled Andrew Du, now a Rutgers senior. "It's a pretty surreal experience."

The find has set off a small debate over whether the creatures who made these prints -- thought to be Homo erectus -- are truly the earliest "modern" walkers, as the authors propose. Other fossils show that by the time of these footprints, our ancestors probably had been spending most of the time on two feet for millions of years.

Yet there is no doubt that the new prints are a rare find, and that the creatures who made them were spending not most, but all of their time on two feet, said Nina Jablonski, head of the anthropology department at Penn State University.

Their long, efficient strides would have allowed them to stray from the wood's edge, crossing open spaces to find other sources of food and possibly to hunt, said Jablonski, who was not involved with the research.

This would, in turn, allow for the continued development of a larger brain. That process already was under way as early humans spent less time in trees, freeing their hands to accomplish more-complex tasks.

Harvard University anthropology professor Daniel Lieberman said the arched, springy feet that made these prints could even have enabled the creatures to run for long distances -- the first appearance, perhaps, of a trait that makes modern humans rare in the animal kingdom.

"Looking at these footprints, I get very excited," said Lieberman, who was not involved in the research.

The authors of the research first discovered what they thought might be footprints in 2005, while digging a trench to study the site's geology.

They noticed curious deformations in a layer about 8 feet below the surface and suspected they were seeing the cross section of footprints, said anthropologist David R. Braun, who is affiliated with Rutgers and the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. Three-dimensional images of the prints enabled detailed analysis of foot dimensions and the amount of pressure exerted by different parts of the feet.

Rutgers professor John W.K. Harris said several characteristics set these feet apart from those of an earlier human ancestor, the short-legged Australopithecus afarensis, whose 3.7 million-year-old prints were found in Tanzania in 1978.

First, the big toes in the new prints are pointed in a direction that is more nearly parallel to the axis of the foot, enabling a stride with a powerful push-off. Also, the arches in the new prints are more pronounced than those in the earlier prints, Harris said.

One of the excavators of those earlier prints, Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, questioned whether the feet of the two human ancestors were all that different. He said the authors of the new paper are overstating the supposedly "primitive" characteristics of the earlier prints, making their new find seem more dramatic.

The new prints were dated in part by analyzing nearby bits of feldspar, a mineral formed by the cooling materials from a volcanic eruption.

The electric Vauxhall car with 300-mile range that could save Britain's motor industry

2009-03-08T15:35:00.000+07:00

This is the vehicle being billed as one which could rescue the British car industry from the brink of disaster.

Vauxhall bosses hope their £20,000 Ampera will represent the coming of age for electric cars and rescue thousands of jobs.

A £1 overnight mains charge is enough to take the Ampera 40 miles on battery power alone.

The Vauxhall Ampera - which can fully charge from a typical household plug in just three hours and for under £1 - is to go in on sale in the UK from 2012

It can travel a further 260 miles by using a petrol-driven generator tucked under the bonnet.

Vauxhall is planning to produce the car at its threatened Ellesmere Port plant in Cheshire, which employs 5,000.

Staff would switch from a two-shift four-day week to three full shifts five days a week.

But Vauxhall's U.S. owner, General Motors, is battling bankruptcy and there are grave doubts over its future.

The firm warned today that three of its European factories are at risk of closure.

The Ampera runs off electricity charged from the mains and stored in a 16 kilowatt lithium-ion battery

It is fast running out of cash and credit, has 30 per cent more capacity than it needs and wants workers to take significant pay cuts.

GM is asking ministers to back a network of plug-in charging points to help the push for electric cars.

It claims the Ampera could help fulfil the Prime Minister's ambition of making the UK the 'electric car capital of Europe'.

More...

Visiting the Geneva Motor Show today, where the car was launched, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson offered a positive response to GM's pleas.

He said: 'I think Ellesmere Port is a brilliant plant. So does General Motors. The Government will stand behind it.'

GM Europe Vice President Alain Visser with the car being hailed as a new category of car that closes the gap between hybrids and electric vehicles

The Ampera uses battery-powered electric motors. A full, three-hour charge from a domestic socket will take the car 40 miles - ten more than 80 per cent of drivers do in a day, according to Vauxhall.

When the battery is used up, the petrol-powered electricity generator - a sort of mini-power station - produces enough electricity to extend the range to 300 miles.

Enlarge

A Vauxhall spokesman said: 'Electricity drives the Ampera's wheels at all times and speeds. For trips up to around 40 miles, power is supplied by the electricity stored in the lithium ion battery.

'While driving on electricity from the battery, it emits zero carbon dioxide. We predict the Ampera will cost roughly a fifth the current cost per mile of an equivalent petrol-engined car.

'Building it in the UK would be a massive boost for Ellesmere Port and for the UK. We are talking to the UK Government but we need their support to make it a reality.'

The Ampera is scheduled to go into production in September and hit showrooms in 2012.

General Motors Europe directly employs 50,000 workers across the continent and supports up to 300,000 more jobs.

It plans to hive off its Vauxhall and Opel subsidiaries as a separate company open to outside investors - but wants £3.3billion in state aid from EU countries to help finance the plan.

In a statement, GM Europe said: 'It was highlighted during an official press conference at the Geneva Motor Show that Vauxhall was a very strong and successful brand in the UK and there are no plans for it to be axed.'

A watery mission: NASA's first planet-hunting telescope heads into space

2009-03-08T15:28:00.000+07:00

NASA has successfully launched its first planet-hunting telescope, Kepler.

The rocket launch took place in Cape Canaveral, Florida just before 4am GMT on Friday night.

It will spend 3½ years orbiting the sun as it watches 100,000 stars situated near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, between 600 and 3,000 lights year away.

Relief: The successful launch of the Kepler telescope comes just a week after a satellite crashed due to rocket failure

It will watch for any dimming, or winks, in the stellar brightness that might be caused by planets orbiting stars in a 'habitable zone'.

Scientists are not looking for planets holding life, but Earth-like planets where liquid water could be present on the surface.

Astronomers already have found more than 300 planets orbiting other stars, but these are largely inhospitable gas giants such as Jupiter.

Night sky: An artist's impression of how the Kepler telescope will look as it does its job

Bill Borucki, Kepler's principal scientist, said: 'It was just magnificent. It looked like a star was being formed in the sky.

'Everybody was delighted, everybody was screaming, "Go Kepler!"'

He added: 'If we don't find any [hospitable planets], it really means Earths are very rare.

Pictured: The Milky Way Galaxy and where Kepler will be looking for habitable planets

'We might be the only extant life and, in fact, that will be the end of Star Trek.'

The successful launch will boost spirits at NASA, who last week lost their Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which crashed into the Antarctic thanks to rocket failure.

The Hubble telescope here shows a newly developing cluster of years located near the constellation of Cygnus

making the right decision calls for the heart as well as the head

2009-03-01T16:53:00.002+07:00

I once bought a pair of shoes that didn’t fit. I blame my brain. I was a victim of a dopamine rush. That pesky neurotransmitter had been primed by previous shopping highs to flood my brain with the desire to take another hit. High as a kite, I made a stupid decision. I knew the shoes didn’t fit as I was buying them and, a few days later, too ashamed to go back to the shop, I chucked them away.

I learnt nothing from this. I still chuck away almost new stuff. This is because dopamine is stronger than my will. It likes the shopping high and there’s no way it’s going to let my pathetic ideas of common sense, rationality or correct shoe size get in the way.

Don’t get all superior with me. I’m not even a shopaholic; I’m just normal. Your dopamine probably makes you play fruit machines. Listen carefully. You cannot win: you are 100% certain to lose — in the long term. You know this but you still do it. The only reason I don’t play the things is I’ve never actually won so, at the sight of a fruit machine, my dopamine just shrugs and looks for more shoes.

That’s what dopamine does. It rewards successful strategies and, as soon as it finds one, it looks for more. So here’s the problem: dopamine is rational — it finds things that work and tries to do them again. But that makes you take irrational decisions.

The message here is: decisions are never what we think they are. Western civilisation has laboured under a delusion that runs from Plato to Lieutenant Commander Data, the robot in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The delusion is that suppressing our emotions is the best way to make decisions. Data has no emotions and makes perfect decisions. When they give him an “emotion chip”, he breaks down, unable to decide anything.

Emotionless Data is a fantasy, though. Ask Elliot, a patient of the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Doctor and patient met a few months after a tumour had been removed from Elliot’s brain. In the process, his orbitofrontal cortex was damaged. This is the area that handles emotions: now Elliot had no emotions. He was Data made flesh.

Before the surgery he had been a model father and husband, with a management job in a large corporation. The operation changed everything: he was still highly intelligent, but he was incapable of taking a decision. Deciding where to eat lunch paralysed him. Without emotions you can’t make decisions.

This example comes from an important and lucid new book by an infuriatingly young — he’s 27 — American neuroscientist turned writer, Jonah Lehrer. The book is The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. There are many pop neuroscience books around at the moment, which almost all — like, say, Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology, about “neuromarketing” — come to glib, premature and unsustainable conclusions, usually on the basis of making people do tasks while stuck in an MRI machine having their brain scanned. Since people don’t live their lives inside MRI machines, the results are, to say the least, of dubious applicability.

Lehrer comes to no such conclusions and he goes to some lengths to point out to me that neuroscience is in its infancy and we know next to nothing about how the brain works. What we do know, however — usually from real-world as opposed to MRI experiments — chimes with my deep-seated sense that we’re unbelievably tricky creatures with dodgy wiring.

And, since we are in the middle of a crisis caused by the dodgy wiring and dumb decisions of various crazed alpha males, it might be as well to think about how decisions come to be made.

Lehrer started the book after he returned to America from Oxford — he was a Rhodes scholar. He went into a supermarket with his wife. “As great as Sainsbury’s is,” he says, “the American supermarket takes the surreal abundance of capitalism to a whole new level.”

At the checkout, the Lehrers realised they had forgotten to pick up breakfast cereal and his wife sent him to get some Cheerios. Faced with an aisle full of different cereals, he was paralysed. He didn’t know which to choose: “I started wondering: what’s going on inside my head?” He ended up buying basic Cheerios. “Wrong choice — I saved a dollar but they tasted like cardboard. I’ve now settled into a perfectly satisfying solution: I buy both multigrain and honey nut and mix them in the bowl.”

The point is that at the level of the trivial and the not-so-trivial, decisions are at the heart of who we are. So what can we conclude about how we should behave?

Well, first, be careful what you say to your children. An experiment by the psychologist Carol Dweck in New York City schools involved giving children tests in which there was only one variable. After the test some were told they were clever; others were congratulated for working hard.

Those told they were clever slumped into a kind of intellectual torpor; those told they had worked hard bounded ahead. In one group the scores of those called clever dropped by 20% and the scores of those called hard-working rose by 30%. There’s a big point here about how they chose: they self-corrected. While the clever group thought all they had to do was turn up, the hard workers considered their own mistakes. This is an aspect of something called metacognition. I’ll come back to it.

Another sound piece of advice is: don’t trust your brain to do the right thing. In one experiment students were given a test that was, in fact, a distraction. They had to move from one room to another, some having to remember a long number and some a short number. On the way they were offered snacks — chocolate cake or fruit. Those remembering the long number tended to take cake; those with the short, fruit. The cake eaters would under normal circumstances have gone for the healthy option, but, preoccupied, they took decisions against their own interests.

So be very careful about distractions. But, again, matters are not as simple as that. Sometimes it’s best to be distracted. A Dutch experiment involving getting people to choose the most suitable car found that they made the right decision more often if they stopped thinking, distracted themselves and then chose the car that popped into their head when they started thinking about it again.

The point here is that the balance between reason (that is, assessing each aspect of the car) and emotion (choosing the first one you think of) is not what it seems. As I said, dopamine is rational; it’s just that you don’t have any access to its rationality. Basically dopamine — and many other aspects of the brain — are ticking over all the time, assembling information. When the moment of decision arrives, this hidden database is accessed and its findings are transmitted to your conscious mind as emotions. So what we call emotion is, in fact, rationality of another, deeper type.

Sportsmen know this. Lehrer uses examples from American football and golf. Players train and train until the most complicated manoeuvres can be executed without conscious thought — they are embedded in the unconscious. And if they do start thinking, their game falls apart. It happened to the Frenchman Jean Van de Velde at the last hole of the 1999 Open. He started thinking about his swing, blew a three-stroke lead and lost.

Women, at this point, may be crowing that they can no longer be dismissed as hopelessly emotional decision makers. They shouldn’t be. Few sexual differences have emerged in this research. One, however, has. It is very familiar. Men make a decision and then stop thinking about it. Women keep thinking about it. Lehrer says when he gets home from a party he just wants to go to bed, whereas his wife wants to conduct a post-mortem examination.

The big message is: metacognition. Think about your thinking. Lehrer is a little hard on the Greeks — pointing out the flaws in Plato’s model of rationality — but here he is closer to them than he thinks. Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Lehrer’s idea is not so different: the unexamined life may make you buy, like him at 18, a $3,000 motorbike that you crash a week later — “my worst decision”.

Two great modern thinkers summed up the quandary, identified by neuroscience, of our brains’ desperate attempts to make sense of the world, to make decent choices. The first was the American psychologist William James, who said: “Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal.” Impulses, note, not thoughts. The second is the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “You will never be able to control randomness.” Put the two together and you will never again be able to choose a box of cereal. But you will be wise.

Evolution of HIV poses problem for scientists

2009-02-26T18:56:00.000+07:00

By Michael Kahn

London - HIV is quickly adapting across large groups of people to avoid triggering the human immune system, posing another challenge in the search for a potential vaccine, researchers said on Wednesday.

Scientists know the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, constantly mutates within individual people to find ways to attack cells.

But the study published in the journal Nature suggests changes that help the virus do this are increasingly passed on in the wider population.

"What was previously clear is the virus could evolve within each infected person but that doesn't really matter from a vaccine perspective if the virus at the population level is staying the same," said Philip Goulder, an immunologist at Oxford University who led the study.

"The implication is that once we have found an effective vaccine, it would likely need to be changed to keep pace with the rapidly evolving virus."

There is no cure for Aids and 33-million people globally are infected with HIV. Cocktails of drugs can control the virus and keep patients healthy. Aids has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Researchers are trying to find vaccines that either prevent infection or would control the virus so that patients are less likely to transmit it - a so-called therapeutic vaccine.

"The process of the virus adapting is happening before our eyes at quite a speed, and it is something we need to take into account when making our vaccines," Goulder said.

HIV attacks the immune system, the body's natural defences. Like other viruses, it cannot replicate on its own but must hijack a cell and turn it into a virus factory.

HIV must evade several genes to do this, including an immunity gene called HLA.

The team, which included researchers from Australia and Japan, analysed the genetic sequences of HIV and versions of HLA genes known to control the virus in 2 800 people.

Some people have a version of the gene that is more protective. In the study, the researchers found that mutations that allow HIV to evade immune responses directed by HLA were more common in people with the protective variant of the gene.

This was strong evidence for HIV adaptation to the human immune system among the wider population, Goulder added in a telephone interview.

This means the so-called escape mutation is circulating in more and more people and accumulating in the wider population of those infected with HIV, he said.

"We saw similar effects in every mutation that we looked at," Goulder said. "This shows that HIV is extremely adept at adapting to the immune responses in human populations that are most effective at containing the virus." - Reuters

B vitamins may reduce risk of age-related vision loss Cancer patients who ask more likely to receive

2009-02-24T17:50:00.001+07:00

Taking B vitamins can prevent a common type of vision loss in older women, according to the first rigorous study of its kind.

It's a slight redemption for vitamin supplements, which have suffered recent blows from research finding them powerless at preventing disease.

Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people 65 and older. It causes a layer of the eye to deteriorate, blurring the center of the field of vision and making it difficult to recognize faces, read and drive. There's no cure, but treatment, including laser therapy, can slow it.

Prevention has been more elusive.

"Other than avoiding cigarette smoking, this is the first suggestion from a randomized trial of a possible way to reduce early stage AMD," said Dr. William Christen of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who led the research and said the findings should apply to men as well.

The women in the study who took a combination of B vitamins -- B-6, folic acid and B-12 -- reduced their risk of macular degeneration by more than one-third after seven years, compared to women taking dummy pills.

The study, involving more than 5,000 women ages 40 and older at risk for cardiovascular disease, appears in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers suggest some give 'socially desirable' answers

2009-02-23T14:47:00.000+07:00

By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service One third of teens who say they use condoms regulary actually do not. Photograph by: Getty Images, Getty Images Recent research suggesting more teens are using condoms may be misleading, according to a study that shows more than one-third who say they consistently use protection actually aren't -- or aren't doing so correctly. "Sexual behaviour is a really hard thing to document and get good self-report on, historically," says Eve Rose, research...

boost our intelligency

2009-02-07T23:00:00.002+07:00

We each have a unique set of talents ... many of which often go undiscovered. But once you suddenly REALIZE you have a special talent -- THEN that talent has the immediate potential to blossom and grow!
Make sense? For example: If you have a hidden talent for inventing, but never tried to invent, would you ever boost your inventing skill? Of course not! But if you make a commitment to invent something, your potential suddenly shifts. Your Potential for Genius So here's a wake up call about something you may have overlooked about yourself: Your brain contains the seeds of genius. You have personal potentials so far beyond what you're are achieving today, it's virtually staggering! Yes. I am talking about YOUR amazing brain … and YOUR amazing yet-untapped potential!

Once you contemplate the following facts, your brainpower WILL be permanently altered. The new neural tracts that will be build while absorbing the implications of this knowledge WILL change your physical brain -- forever.

I can compare this to my personal experience walking on fire for the first time. You are NEVER again the same.

So take a few minutes and immerse yourself in the implications ofwhat follows. You are about to change your mind forever about who you are, and your natural potential for genius.

1. Your brain has an unlimited potential to learn. It absorbs an estimated 7 to 10 new pieces of information every second - and can continue to do so for the rest of your life, yet still have plenty of room left to learn more. And each time you have a new experience or learn something, your brain physically grows new inter-neural (brain cell) connections. Your brain is actually so growth-friendly, that this now has a new scientific term - “brain plasticity.”

2. Your cortex is wrinkled for a reason. Ever wonder why our grey matter is a mass of "wrinkles?" It's nature's answer to housing huge capacity. You have billions and billions of brain cells packed into your 3-pound brain. If all of your brain cells were laid out end-to-end, they would stretch at least 800,000 kilometers (496,000 miles). This is roughly the distance to the moon and back.

3. Your brain is not limited to your skull. Your intelligence is actually distributed throughout the cells of your body. The body-mind barrier does NOT exist. We are thinking beings on every level. There is even a current scientific theory that our brain is holographic - and is duplicated right down to a sub-molecular level. You (all of you) is intelligence in action!

4. You actually have TWO centralized brains. You have more brain cells in your second brain than you do in the portion encased in your skull. Where is that second brain? In your gut. And those two brains are connected by a huge nerve (the Vagus nerve) that carries messages back and forth between those two brains.

5. YOUR brain is as unique as your fingerprint. Of the six billion people currently living, and the ninety billion people who have ever walked the Earth, there has never been a brain quite like yours. YOU are truly unprecedented and totally unique. You are! Think about that!

6. Your brain is capable of unlimited thought patterns. Back in 1968 a student of the great scientist Pavlov shocked the scientific community when his research proved the smallest number of potential thought patterns an average brain can create is the number 1 -- followed by 10.5 million kilometers of typewritten zeros.

7. Intelligence has very little to do with your IQ score. Neuroscientists and neuropsychologists now know that IQ tests only measure very limited “rational and logical” thinking skills. Such skills are in many ways the most limited portion of your intelligence. We now know that there is also your emotional intelligence (EQ), and your all-important higher intelligence (HQ). And many researchers now identify as many as 25 sub-intelligences.

8. You can learn to think like Einstein. Recent research clearly demonstrated that the basic thing that set Einstein’s brain apart was the number of connections between his neurons. This is not a birth condition. Such a densely packed brain is actually created by challenging yourself mentally!
9. You are NOT born smart or dumb. Your intelligence is NOT fixed at birth. A recent in-depth review of more than 200 scientific studies of IQ performed by Bernard Devlin (published in the Nature journal) established that your genes account for only about 48 percent of your IQ. The remaining 52% percent is a function of your prenatal care, environment, and education. And, it should be added, this includes education at any age!

10. Your intelligence can be raised through appropriate training. Although your early upbringing and genetic background may predispose you to have certain natural talents -- many researchers have shown that intelligence scores can be raised significantly through appropriate training.

11. This knowledge has already changed your brain. Now here's a real surprise for you! Just reading this information created immediate synaptic changes in your brain. Now if you actually spend a little time contemplating what this information means to you, you will then immediately strengthen those new neural connections. And the stronger they get, the more easily they will override any old limiting thoughts you may have about your own mental potential!

2009-02-07T22:43:00.000+07:00

I would like to share experience ni ...
for this I often ngenet in the Center, soalnya free .. tis .. ti .. hehehe ... ngemat monthly. I was still free ampe like how the clock, but a few months ago that the time quota adminnya make only 1 hour to be able to turn gantian that I ama nunggu long. indeed it is a good joint, but I fit kepikiran we want more-want ngerjain pr, ato Reviews blog, tiba2 company we die. is the underdog .. So even though dikasi quotas ngak ngaruh time I do the same, but what the other friend?
kasian kan! nah for that I will share how the science of time off the quota page.

actually it was created from the program in the store in c: / windows/system32/shutdown.exe and running with the command that is made at startup, so when windows was first starting up the program before running. That also can be made with the program or bat from the command prompt. how to make it into the command prompt from the Run and then type
shutdown-t * fill time

example

shutdown-s-t 60

-t denotes the time indicates that the computer will die within 60 seconds
-s is shutdown, restart if you want to replace with the option-r
nah how to cancel?
To cancel live type

shutdown-a

option-a is a landmark that is abort to cancel.

Well we like to make about the investigation and cancel the program automatically by using the shutdown command promt. Well how I Runnya ama Command restrict the promptnya by the admin from regedit?
ngak apa2 now we use the second moment.

Basically the functions in the command prompt can be run from the bat file berekstensi. So we need only to open the notepad and then type a command that will be run to turn misalkan type: shutdown-t * fill time and to cancel this type shutdown-a. then save the nama.bat on the save as type select All files. double click file.bat ago that we created earlier then ...
TAADDDAAA ... program will run. ssssttt but do not help kill quota biasakan time, the admin ntar angry lho ...