Political Play: Obama dances for Ellen DeGeneres

MIAMI: They really will do anything to get elected. At the end of a long campaign day Tuesday in Florida, Democrat Barack Obama had one more stop: "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

DeGeneres got right down to business.

"Let's talk about dancing," she said. "Your wife, Michelle, was on the show and she was talking some smack about your moves."

DeGeneres played music and gave Obama 20 seconds to prove his spouse wrong. He complied, albeit in a decidedly awkward set of circumstances — standing alone on a patch of concrete and looking into cameras that were to beam him into the studio, as supporters and reporters watched.

He gamely grooved a little, though mostly with his arms, before calling off the operation with a smile.

"Michelle may be a better dancer, but I am convinced I am a better dancer than John McCain," Obama said of his Republican rival.

During the brief appearance, Obama revealed the Halloween costumes his two daughters have planned. Ten-year-old Malia will be a fairy and 7-year-old Sasha has chosen to go trick-or-treating as a "corpse bride," he said.

Obama also offered to help DeGeneres with her campaign to lure George Clooney onto her show, agreeing it would be one of the new president's most important priorities. If elected, he said he would appoint Clooney "ambassador to the Ellen show."

"We would have you and him sit down without preconditions and solve any differences that you may have," Obama said. "Just don't talk about my dancing anymore."

The interview is scheduled to air Wednesday

Princess Victoria invites Aamir Khan for dinner

MUMBAI: So much is happening around Aamir Khan these days. The stupendous success of his critically-acclaimed film Taare Zameen Par has made him popular all the more. Now, Princess Victoria of Sweden has invited him for a dinner with her.

It is said that the 31-year-old princess is aware of Aamir's works and very appreciative of his latest film Taare Zameen Par, India’s official entry to the Oscars this year.

She along with the Swedish ambassador will meet Aamir on Tuesday. It is said that she would call on him during her visit to Mumbai and congratulate him on his second entry to the Oscars. Aamir is all set to meet the princess. He said that it's a privilege to receive such special invitation.

Princess Victoria, the eldest daughter of Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf, is on a 10-day state visit to India for The Sweden India Nobel Memorial Week 2008 celebrations.

US suicide rate increases due to spike in Whites

WASHINGTON: The suicide rate in the United States has risen for the first in a decade largely due to an increase in the number of middle-aged white people taking their lives, according to a study published Tuesday.

The annual suicide rate rose by 0.7 percent between 1999 and 2005, but among white Americans between the ages of 40 to 64 it rose 2.7 percent, according to the study.

For middle-aged white women the suicide rate rose 3.9 percent, the study reported.

By contrast, the suicide rate among African-Americans decreased during the same period, and remained unchanged among Asian Americans and Native Americans, said the study, published in the online edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"The results underscore a change in the epidemiology of suicide, with middle-aged whites emerging as a new high-risk group," said co-author of the study Susan Baker, a professor with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School's Center for Injury Research and Policy.

"Historically, suicide prevention programs have focused on groups considered to be at highest risk -- teens and young adults of both genders as well as elderly white men," sh said.

The research, said Baker, "tells us we need to refocus our resources to develop prevention programs for men and women in their middle years."

Researchers found that firearms remain the predominant method for suicides, but that the rate of firearm suicides decreased during the study period. Suicide by hanging or suffocation soared among men, the study found, with a 6.3 percent annual increase.

Hanging or suffocation accounted for 22 percent of all suicides by 2005, coming in second place behind firearms. Poisoning took third with 18 percent.

Reasons behind the spike in the suicide rate remain unclear, the study said.

"While it would be straightforward to attribute the results to a rise in so-called mid-life crises, recent studies find that middle age is mostly a time of relative security and emotional well being," said Baker.

"Further research is warranted to explore societal changes that may be disproportionately affecting the middle-aged in this country," she said.

Obama and McCain cats in championship

NEW YORK: Barack Obama and John McCain will attend a New York cat show this weekend — Obama the Bombay cat and McCain the American Shorthair, that is.

The two felines are vying for the title of "Purr-fect President" at the Cat Fanciers' Association-IAMS 2008 championship that opens Saturday at Madison Square Garden.

More than 40 breeds are represented among the several hundred competing animals. The top title goes for "Best in Show."

In addition, hundreds of other kittens and cats will be available for adoption.

This year's show also features a rescued New Jersey shelter cat and member of the Iams Trained Cats that perform Olympic-style tricks.

NASA satellite to scan solar system outer limits

WASHINGTON: NASA is preparing to launch a satellite that will study in unprecedented detail the distant regions where the outermost reaches of our solar system collide with the cold expanse of interstellar space.

The U.S. space agency said that the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, satellite is scheduled to be launched into high-Earth orbit on Sunday for its two-year mission from a site at Kwajalein Atoll in the south Pacific.

While interstellar space often is thought of as a vacuum, it actually contains traces of gas and dust.

The solar wind, a stream of electrically conducting gas continuously moving outward from the sun at 1 million mph (1.6 million kph), blows against this interstellar material and forms a humongous protective bubble around the solar system. This bubble is called the heliosphere.

As the solar wind reaches far beyond the planets to the solar system's outer limits, it encounters the edge of the heliosphere and collides with interstellar space. A shock wave is present at this boundary.

"These boundaries really protect us from the fairly harsh galactic environment," Boston University astronomer Nathan Schwadron, who heads science operations for the IBEX mission, said during a conference call with reporters.

NASA said IBEX will map the boundary region, which is important because it shields the solar system from dangerous galactic cosmic rays. IBEX is designed to detect atoms that are heated and thrown off from the boundary.

"Every six months, we will make global sky maps of where these atoms come from and how fast they are traveling. From this information, we will be able to discover what the edge of our bubble looks like and learn about the properties of the interstellar cloud that lies beyond the bubble," physicist Herb Funsten of the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, who is part of the mission, said in a statement.

Speak two languages and save your brain

ISLAMABAD: People who can speak two or more languages are said to be more imaginative, flexible and get distracted less.

"Speaking two languages save one's brain" is the formula of human life and the brain of bilingual and multilingual work fast as compared to the people who know single language.

Competency in more than one or two languages also saves the brain from getting weaker with age.

According to a recent research of Canadian University, the brain of a person who is frequent in speaking two languages work quickly and soundly for long period as compared to those who know single language.

The researchers of Canadian university have performed an experiment on 104 people between the age of 30 to 88 which proved that those people who are proficient in speaking two languages, their brains work more fast comparatively.

The research of Psychology and Over-aging tells that the mental condition of people who are proficient in speaking two languages is not affected with growing age factors as of others.

The research also revealed that the people who spend their time in playing musical instruments, study and dancing, their mental health decline passively as compared to others.

Solving queries and playing board games like chess also help sustaining mental health for a long time.

This modern research verifies the previous concept that language proficiency has the ability to protect the brain from decaying.

Last Titanic survivor sells mementos

LONDON: Millvina Dean was just two months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the deck of the sinking RMS Titanic.

Now, more than 95 years later, Dean, the last living survivor of the disaster, is hoping to help pay her nursing home fees by selling artifacts of her rescue — a suitcase and other mementos expected to auction for about $5,200.

Rescued from the bitterly cold Atlantic night by the steamship Carpathia, Dean, her brother and her mother were taken to New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before returning home to England, they were given a small wicker suitcase of clothing, a gift from New Yorkers, to help them rebuild their lives.

The suitcase and other mementos are to be sold Saturday at an auction organized by Henry Aldridge and Son, which specializes in Titanic memorabilia.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the key item was the suitcase that was filled with clothes and donated to Dean's surviving family members after the disaster.

"They would have carried their little world in this suitcase," Aldridge said Thursday.

Dean also is selling letters from the Titanic Relief Fund offering her mother one pound, seven shillings and sixpence a week in compensation.

Dean, 96, has lived in a nursing home in the southern English city of Southampton — Titanic's home port — since she broke her hip two years ago.

"I am not able to live in my home anymore," Dean was quoted as telling the Southern Daily Echo newspaper. "I am selling it all now because I have to pay these nursing home fees and am selling anything that I think might fetch some money."

In 1912, baby Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean and her family were steerage passengers emigrating to Kansas City, Missouri, aboard the giant cruise liner.

Four days out of port, on the night of April 14, it hit an iceberg and sank. Billed as "practically unsinkable" by the publicity magazines of the period, the Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all of 2,200 passengers and crew.

Dean, her mother and 2-year-old brother were among 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among more than 1,500 who died.

Aldridge said the "massive interest" in Titanic memorabilia shows no signs of abating. Last year, a collection of items belonging to Lillian Asplund, the last American survivor of the disaster, sold for more than $175,000. Asplund died in 2006 at the age of 99.

"It's the people, the human angle," Aldridge said. "You had over 2,200 men, women and children on that ship, from John Jacob Astor, the richest person in the world at the time, to a poor Scandinavian family emigrating to the States to start a new life. There were 2,200 stories."

Iran could make 60 nukes in two years: US expert

MILAN: Iran may have the capacity to produce up to 60 nuclear bombs within two years, a leading US non-proliferation expert said.

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), was taking part in a summit , "Preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East", organised by Italy's Institute for the Study of Foreign Policy (ISPI) and the Italian Foreign Ministry in Milan.

In an interview, Sokolski raised the alarm about Iran's intentions, claiming that it would have sufficient plutonium after the opening of the Bushehr plant to construct from 30 to 60 bombs.

The nuclear facility at Bushehr is being built under an agreement between the Russian and Iranian governments for 800 million dollars and is expected to begin production in early 2009.

Sokolski said Iran was putting in place the necessary technology and knowledge to recover the new plant's waste using a chemical process that does not need complex installation or specific structures.

"Plutonium that could be used to make atomic bombs," he said. "The fuel for Bushehr will be supplied by the Russians who also said they would dispose of the waste products from it."

But he said few people know that this waste will remain in Iran for two years before being taken away.

"In this time frame the Iranians, with an excuse to analyse the waste, can transfer it to a chemical factory and extract the plutonium," he said.

He said in the first 18 months the plant would use between 22 to 25 tonnes of fuel, from which 300 kilogrammes of plutonium could be recovered from the waste to make from 30 to 60 bombs.

Henry Sokolski heads the nonprofit organisation founded in 1994 to promote a better understanding of strategic weapons proliferation issues among policy-makers, scholars and the media.

He also serves as an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington and is a member of the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, to which he was appointed in May 2008.

Elephants send text messages to rangers

OL PEJETA, Kenya: The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir's screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.

The huge bull elephant had a long history of raiding villagers' crops during the harvest, sometimes wiping out six months of income at a time. But this time a mobile phone card inserted in his collar sent rangers a text message.

Lesowapir, an armed guard and a driver arrived in a jeep bristling with spotlights to frighten Kimani back into the Ol Pejeta conservancy.

Kenya is the first country to try elephant texting as a way to protect both a growing human population and the wild animals that now have less room to roam. Elephants are ranked as "near threatened" in the Red List, an index of vulnerable species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The race to save Kimani began two years ago. The Kenya Wildlife Service had already reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy who refused to stop crop-raiding, and Kimani was the last of the regular raiders. The Save the Elephants group wanted to see if he could break the habit.

So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani's collar, then set up a virtual "geofence" using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory's boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers.

They have intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began. Once almost a nightly raider, he last went near a farmer's field four months ago.

It's a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for food and cash for school fees. Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of two, lives a stone's throw from the conservancy fence. She and her neighbors used to drum through the night on pots and pans in front of flaming bonfires to try to frighten the elephants away.

Once an elephant stuck its trunk through a window into a room where her baby daughter was sleeping and the family had stored some corn. She beat it back with a burning stick. Another time, an elephant killed a neighbor who was defending his crop.

"We had to go into town to tell the game (wardens) to chase the elephants away or we're going to kill them all," Mwasu remembered.

Fishing can heal Icelands financial wounds

REYKJAVIK: The debt hurricane that tore across the Atlantic has devastated Iceland's banks, but down in Reykjavik port the fishermen say it is time for the country to turn back to the industry that kept the country alive for centuries.

Some even see fishing providing a lifesaving boost in exports as the country battles bankruptcy and licks the self-inflicted wounds caused by its once marauding banks.

Bjorn Gunnarsson, an agent for the Thorvaldur Jonsson Shipbroker company in Reykjavik, said he had seen no "negative impact" on the fishing industry from the financial crisis which has forced the government to nationalise the country's three biggest banks.

"Actually it will be probably quite the opposite because the exports are paid in euros and then when we convert into kronas, the fishermen will get a lot of money," Gunnarsson said.

Gunnarsson's company is just a stone's throw from the massive Reykjavik market where trawlers leave their fish to be sent out across the globe.

Gunnar Haraldsson, director of the Institute of Economic Studies at the University of Iceland, shares the optimistic outlook for an industry that is 90 percent geared towards exports and needs no state subsidies.

While's Iceland's population of about 320,000 consumes about 44 kilogrammes (98 pounds) of fish a year each, it is difficult to find cod in Reykjavik restaurants because so much is sent abroad.

Fishing and tourism are Iceland's best bet for the future, said Haraldsson.

With the collapse of the financial sector, that once weighed in at nine times the size of the country's gross domestic product, Icelandic media are already making calls for an increase in the country's fishing quota.

Holmjeirs Jonsson, a spokesman for the main association of small fishermen, said activity had not increased because there are strict rules on what fish and how much can be caught.

The catch has generally gone down in recent years. According to the most recent government statistics, in 2006, some 1.32 million tonnes of fish were caught by Icelandic fishermen, down from 1.98 tonnes in 2001 and 2.05 millions tonnes in 1996.

The psychological boost from the return to Iceland's traditional industry may be the most important effect for the workers in Reykjavik port who have seen their prestige overshadowed by the country's bankers and financiers in recent years.

In the 1930s, about a quarter of the working population was in the fishing industry. Now about three percent work as fishermen and another three percent are in the fish processing industry, according to government figures.

The finance industry overtook fishing as an employer in the early 2000s.

"Of course the financial crisis has affected everyone as individuals, but I think it will have a good influence because now Icelandic people realise it's not finance but industry which creates real value," said Gunnarsson, the shipping agent.

He said the fishing industry could provide jobs for people thrown up in the financial storm.

"Icelanders will probably see fishermen with less arrogance because they will offer jobs to thousands of people who lose their jobs," said Gunnarsson.

Hackers using fake YouTube pages to attack computers

SAN FRANCISCO ( 2008-10-10 10:34:14 ) :Computer security specialists warn that hackers are using fake YouTube pages to trick people into opening their machines to diabolical software.

A deceptive YouTube attack evolving as it spreads on the Internet is part of a growing trend of hackers to prowl popular online social networking communities in which people trustingly share web links and mini-programs.

"We are seeing tools like this not just for YouTube, but for MySpace, Facebook, America Online instant messaging ...," Trend Micro software threat research manager Jamz Yaneza told AFP on Thursday.

"All the various social networking sites have been hit with some page or another."

Hackers using the YouTube attack send people links to what are said to be must-see snippets at the Google-owned video-sharing website.

The links, instead, connect to convincingly realistic replicas of YouTube pages and tell people that a software update is needed to view a requested video.

Agreeing to the update lets the hacker install malicious software that could log keystrokes, steal data, or even take over people's computers, according to David Perry of Trend Micro.

Victims are not likely to catch onto the invasion since the hackers' software is able to stealthily link to the real YouTube website and play a promised video.

"This works as your typical drive-by download," Yaneza said of hackers planting malicious software in machines while rerouting online traffic.

"Essentially this can be used as a tool to serve up everything -- botnets, key loggers. Visually, you can't differentiate this from your regular YouTube page, it is done so well."

While some computer users might be able to spy something unusual about the online address, or "URL," of a bogus page, the safest thing to do is not trust links and instead go directly to YouTube for recommended videos.

"The reason they are using YouTube now is that during the elections we are looking at YouTube a lot," Perry said of hackers. "It is using social networking software in an anti-social way -- anti-social networking."

Hackers at a recent gathering of software savants in Las Vegas told AFP that social networks are prime places to take advantage of people's trust.

While people may be wary of links or programs emailed to them by strangers, they eagerly open such offerings from "friends" in social networking communities.

Online evil doers can easily create false social networking profiles and even impersonate people who may be well known or respected. The imposter can then build a network of trusting contacts in online communities.

Estimates are that as much as 40 percent of social networking profiles are fakes, according to figures cited by Cloudmark Inc., a company specializing in protecting Internet messaging systems from spam and hackers.

A poll conducted in the United States in June for Cloudmark concluded that 83 percent of the people using social networking accounts received unwanted "friend" invitations or messages steering them to dubious websites.

"Friends" are granted access to pictures, message boards, contact lists and other personal data stored in social networking profiles.

"Unfortunately, the very qualities that make social networks successful -- the wide variety of communication channels, the openness of the networks and the size of the audience -- are also powerful lures for spammers and hackers," Cloudmark says.

Be wary of taking strangers in as friends at social networking websites and only install trusted applications when customizing profile pages with mini-programs, sometimes called "widgets," according to Cloudmark.

Security specialists say to also limit the amount of personal information revealed to the Internet through profile pages.

"Understanding the risks and knowing how to protect yourself is critical to avoiding scams and other threats" said Cloudmark chief technical officer Jaime de Guerre.

"As spammers, hackers and other online criminals broaden their scope to social networks (people) must be especially vigilant and employ safe practices while engaging in online communities."




Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2008

Global warming sending tropical species uphill: study

WASHINGTON ( 2008-10-10 02:56:35 ) :Global warming is driving tropical plant and animal species to higher altitudes, potentially leaving lowland rainforest with nothing to take their place, ecologists argue in this week's issue of Science.

In a rare study on the impact of global warming in the tropics, University of Connecticut ecologist Robert Colwell and colleagues worked their way up the forested slope of a Costa Rican volcano to collect data on 2,000 types of plants and insects.

"Half of these species have such narrow altitudinal ranges that a 600-meter (2,000 feet) uphill shift would move these species into territory completely new to them," said a summary of their article released Thursday.

Many species would be unable to relocate at all, as most tropical mountainside forests have become "severely fragmented" by human activities.

Tropical lowland forests -- the warmest on Earth -- would meanwhile be challenged by the absence of replacement species. Flora and fauna unable to move uphill could also perish, unless it turns out they they can bear higher temperatures.

"Only further research can estimate the risk," the summary said, "but Colwell's report indicates that the impact of global climate change on some tropical rainforest and mountain species could be significant."

In another article, Science reports this week on a similar uphill trek by squirrels, mice and other small mammals in Yosemite National Park in California, one of the oldest wilderness parks in the United States.

Comparing a landmark 1918 study against fresh data about Yosemite's wildlife numbers, it found that small mammals have moved to higher altitudes, or reduced their ranges, in response to warmer temperatures.

"We didn't set out to study the effects of climate change," said Craig Moritz, a zoologist and integrative biology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who led the study.

"But the most dramatic finding in the Yosemite transect was the upward elevation shift of species," he said. "When we asked ourselves what changed, it hit us between the eyes -- the climate."

While such population movements have not altered Yosemite's biodiversity, Moritz's research team felt that rapid changes to the climate in less than a century could be a problem, a summary of the article said.

While half of the small mammal species at Yosemite have shifted their ranges, the other half has not. That means wildlife communities -- and the way in which species interact -- have changed, the summary explained.

If such change happens too fast, said James Patton, a member of the study, "elements of the (ecosystem) may start to collapse because a keystone element gets pulled out too quickly".

The study used as its starting point a detailed 1918 survey of Sierra Nevada wildlife by a Berkeley professor, when the snow-capped mountain range was under threat from gold mining and overgrazing.




Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2008

Sea levels could rise one metre by 2100: German institute

BERLIN ( 2008-10-10 22:38:56 ) :Sea levels could rise one metre (3.3 feet) by 2100, a leading German research institute said Thursday, much more than even the most pessimistic projection by the UN climate panel.

"We should prepare for a rise of sea levels of one metre this century," said Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which advises the German government on environmental policy.

The rates that glaciers in the Himalayas and the Greenland ice-sheet have doubled or even tripled in recent years, due partly to the increased greenhouse gas emissions by Chinese power stations, Schellnhuber said.

In February 2007, in the first volume of a landmark report, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted the oceans would rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres (seven and 23 inches) by 2100.




Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2008

Bollywood legend Amitabh hospitalised

MUMBAI: Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, who turned 66 Saturday, was taken to hospital after reportedly suffering abdominal pain, an international news agency photographer at the scene said.

The actor, who has superstar status in India, was seen leaving his home in the northern Mumbai suburb of Juhu with his actor son, Abhishek, and daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai, in an ambulance.

Huge crowds that had gathered outside his house to wish him happy birthday anxiously watched him leave, television pictures showed.

Bachchan, wearing a brown-coloured woollen cap and blue ensemble, was spotted lying down inside the vehicle before being supported by Abhishek and another man as he walked into hospital, the photographer said.

A news channel said Bachchan had complained of stomach pain since Friday evening.

Unnamed sources quoted by the Press Trust of India described his admission to hospital as a "routine medical check-up". Hospital officials said x-rays were taken of his stomach and chest, they added.

Bachchan was later transferred to a private hospital where he spent three weeks, including one in intensive care, after undergoing bowel surgery in November 2005.

There was no immediate comment from the hospital when contacted by a French news agency.

With a career spanning four decades in India's movie industry, doctors have warned Bachchan to slow down.

He also suffered a severe stomach injury in 1982 while shooting the film "Coolie".

Bachchan, known as "The Big B" with a distinctive white beard, flowing grey hair and baritone voice, was last seen in his first English-language movie, "The Last Lear" and has been on a world tour with his family.

Indian newspapers marked Bachchan's birthday Saturday with a series of interviews. A MUMBAI-based newspaper commented that he had "never looked better. Or fitter" when they spoke to him two days ago on a film shoot.

"I enjoy being alive, I look for a new struggle, a new experience every day. An artiste has no right to say he is satisifed, that's being defeatist," he was quoted as saying.

Species under threat by climate change

ISLAMABAD: Around 35 percent of the world's birds, 52 percent of amphibians and 71 percent of warm-water reef-building corals are likely to be particularly susceptible to climate change, the first results of an IUCN study has revealed.

The report identified more than 90 biological traits which are believed to make species most susceptible to climate change. It found that 3,438 of the world's 9,856 bird species have at least one out of 11 traits that could make them susceptible to climate change.

Albatross, penguin, petrel and shearwater families are all likely to be susceptible to climate change, while heron and egret families, and osprey, kite, hawk and eagle families are among those least likely to be susceptible to climate change.

"This is the first time that a systematic assessments of species' susceptibility to climate change has been attempted," says Wendy Foden of IUCN's Species Programme.

"Climate change is already happening, but conservation decision makers currently have very little guidance on which species are going to be the worst affected."

The study found 3,217 of the 6,222 amphibians in the world are likely to be susceptible to climate change. Three salamander families could be particularly susceptible, while 80-100 percent of Seychelles frogs and Indian Burrowing Frogs, Australian ground frogs, horned toads and glass frog families were assessed as susceptible.

Specialized habitat requirements, such as species with water-dependant larvae, and those unable to disperse due to barriers such as large water bodies or human-transformed habitats are most at risk.

The report found that 566 of 799 warm-water reef-building coral species are likely to be susceptible to the impacts of climate change. The Acroporidae family, including staghorn corals, had particularly high numbers of susceptible species, while the Fungiidae family, including mushroom corals, and the Mussidae family, including some brain corals, possess relatively few.

Coral species qualified due to their sensitivity to increases in temperature, sedimentation and physical damage from storms and cyclones. Poor dispersal ability and colonization potential were used as further important indicators.

According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 32 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction. Of these, 75 percent are susceptible to climate change. For birds, the overall percentage of those threatened with extinction is lower – 12 percent.

However, 80 percent of those are susceptible to climate change.

"There is a large overlap between threatened and climate change susceptible amphibian and bird species," says Jean-Christophe Vi Deputy Head of IUCN Species Programme.

"Climate change may cause a sharp rise in the risk and rate of extinction of currently threatened species."

"But we also want to highlight species which are currently not threatened but are likely to become so as climate change impacts intensify. By doing this we hope to promote preemptive and more effective conservation action," Christophe said.

More than 60 artists band together to fight for rights

LONDON ( 2008-10-04 16:25:45 ) :More than 60 artists, including Radiohead, Robbie Williams and the Kaiser Chiefs announced on Saturday they had banded together to seek more rights over their music and break free of record labels.

The Featured Artists' Coalition (FAC) aims to "give artists the voice they need to argue for greater control over their music," amid new opportunities provided by Internet, the group said in a statement.

"It is time for artists to have a strong collective voice to stand up for their interests," said Brian Message, co-manager of Radiohead and Kate Nash.

"The digital landscape is changing fast and new deals are being struck all the time, but all too often without reference to the people who actually make the music."

Message said the FAC would "help all artists, young and old, well-known or not, drive overdue change through the industry in their interests and those of fans."

Thus far, 61 artists have signed up to the coalition, which will be officially launched on Sunday in the northwest English city of Manchester.

It is fighting for changes to laws that govern business in the music industry so that artists always ultimately own the rights to their music, rather than record labels.

The FAC is also calling for, among other things, artists to receive "fair compensation whenever their business partners receive an economic return from the exploitation of the artists' work."

Several groups have recently used the Internet to promote their music directly to fans, often bypassing record labels entirely, including Radiohead, which launched their latest album "In Rainbows" in October 2007 on the web.

This week, Oasis posted their new album "Dig Out Your Soul" on Internet social networking site MySpace in advance of its commercial release, allowing fans to listen to the whole compilation, but they could not buy it.




Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2008

Top 12 prettiest wallpapers of Katrina Kaif

Katrina-The Man of the Family

MUMBAI: Nobody in Bollywood was betting on the outsider Katrina Kaif, but a surging need to forge stability for herself and her siblings has driven her to the top finds Shoma Chaudhry.

The clipped, self-possessed 24-year-old in the untidy hotel room is almost a disconcerting surprise. Curled into the corner of a sofa, hair pulled back in a tight pony tail, Katrina exudes an aloof, slightly irascible air that is difficult to penetrate at first. She has just returned from a set on a windy mountain top — a shot that required her to wear a tiny cotton dress in a chill wind — and is nursing a bad headache.

Katrina came to India at 17 as part of director Kaizad Gustad’s film Boom: he had spotted her as a model in an ad in London. It should have been a grand debut, boasting as it did a cast that included Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff, Madhu Sapre and Padma Lakshmi. But, for all its apparent star and skin power, the film flopped badly. That could have been the end of Katrina’s Bollywood career — she was young, an outsider, and incapable of a word of Hindi. Instead, in barely six years, she has grown to be a commercial female superstar, moving from the anonymity of bit roles in Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi films to mainstream directors and producers like Vipul Shah, Rajkumar Santoshi and Yash Raj Films. She has learnt Hindi, taken Kathak lessons, and is spoken of in the same breath as Aishwarya Rai and Kareena Kapoor. Far from the minor-league deals of her early years, she now charges between Rs 2 to 3 crores for product campaigns and, at last count, signed a two-film deal with Studio 18 for Rs 6 crore. What explains this singular story? Who is Katrina Kaif off-screen?

One of seven siblings — six sisters, one brother, she exactly in the middle — Katrina was born to a British mother, Suzanne, and a Kashmiri Muslim father, Mohammad Kaif. “My father is not an influence, he was not part of our family; my parents separated when I was very young and I have never met him since.”

Her mother, Suzanne, had deeper impacts. A polyglot lawyer who knew five languages, she gave up a successful legal practice to devote herself full time to international charity work (she now works in Madurai with orphaned children).

She had married again, but that did not last either, and as her work took her to far-flung places, the children followed — homeschooled for the most part by a series of tutors. Hong Kong, Japan, China, Ukraine, Romania, France, Hawaii, America, Poland, Belgium, Austria, South Africa, England: more than 13 countries in almost as many years.

“The biggest thing I learnt from her is to be completely non-judgemental.” There is very little that squares the Katrina off-screen with the one on-screen.

Online, she is unabashed eye-candy, Kiss Me, Kiss Me: a bit role in Sarkar, a pretty prop in Welcome, some cool moves in Race, some razzmatazz in Singh is Kinng, more of the same in Partner and Apne. It’s only in Namastey London, that you get a hint there could be something more to the girl.

A single dynamo then seems to drive Katrina and her choices: the need to make money and forge stability. “She wants to be the man in her family,” Reshma Shetty — owner of Matrix, the agency that has handled her since she first came to India. Katrina is by nature low profile, gentle and intensely private, says Shetty. “She wants to secure things for her siblings.

“I love comedy films. I love playing these light characters. It gives me a chance to be a teenager and have all the fun I missed out on. I feel old because of all I’ve been through, but I am just 24.”

Stardom has brought many panaceas. Three years ago, Katrina bought herself a house in Bandra; a year later, she bought one in London. Most recently, she has bought herself a Porsche. But stardom has also brought fresh set of pressures: the irascible edge, the panic of 360 degree demands, the sense that everything will be sucked out of you. “Everyone reacts differently to this pressure. I don’t react very well, I get frantic, I snap, I feel the stress very easily. People might think, what a difficult woman she is, and I feel like saying, no, no, no, this is not me, I’m just under too much pressure.”

“I believe very strongly in God, I am in a really good place today and I feel he has watched over my journey and given me so much.” Probe her for more essential DNAs and she says, “I have seen so much, I feel old. The other day, a friend was going through a problem and asked me, ‘how long does it take to get over being heartbroken?’ And I really wanted her to understand my words — I wanted the words to have meaning. I said, ‘I have been in a position where I felt I could not live without something, I would not be able to breathe without something — and everything has changed.’ I said, ‘Just understand one thing — you will be surprised how quickly everything can change in this world.’ There’re no laws, no logic. I have seen unbelievable things happen: when I came here, I had nothing. But everything has changed — that is pretty incredulous in itself.”

In all of this, conversation about Salman Khan, Katrina’s tumultuous superstar boyfriend, sits like an unopened box between us. But no embroidered question is going to yank that open. It’s the mix of thaw and reserve that seems quintessentially Katrina. What you are left with then, is stories of her focus.

(Courtesy: Tehelka magazine, India)

Smoking, coal set to claim tens of millions of lives in China

PARIS ( 2008-10-04 09:40:49 ) :Tobacco use and smoke from coal and wood are likely to claim tens of millions of lives in China over the next quarter-century, according to a study published online on Saturday by the British journal The Lancet.

Smoke from tobacco, biomass and coal will kill 53.3 million Chinese from chronic respiratory illnesses and 13.5 million from lung cancer during the period from 2003 to 2033, its authors calculate, using the current rate of exposure as a benchmark.

Half of Chinese men smoke and more than 70 percent of Chinese households use solid fuels, such as wood, crop residues and coal for heating and cooking, providing a potent source of indoor air pollution, the study says.

Smoke from these sources will account for 82 percent of the likely 65 million deaths in China from respiratory disease from 2003 to 2033, and 75 percent of the probable 18 million deaths from lung cancer, it projects.

The paper is lead-authored by Hsien-Ho Lin and Majid Ezzati of the Harvard School of Public Health in Massachusetts.




Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2008

US House approves sweetened finance deal

WASHINGTON ( 2008-10-04 00:01:52 ) :The US House of Representatives on Friday approved a revised 700-billion-dollar Wall Street bailout, bowing to intense pressure to help avert a global economic meltdown.

The House, which sparked market and political turmoil by rejecting an earlier version of the bailout on Monday by 228 votes to 205, voted 263 in favor to 171 against in favor of the largest US government economic intervention since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Congressional leaders had worked together to win over more Republican and Democratic votes amid signs that businesses are already being hurt by a failure to procure credit, triggered by the US subprime mortgage crisis.

Three Democratic lawmakers said earlier they would switch their votes. Several revealed that calls from White House nominee Barack Obama played a key role in their decision. A House source said four other Democrats were also switching.

House Minority whip Roy Blunt said the pain of the deepening credit squeeze was now being felt by the public.

"Calls to members officers are beginning to even out, people are beginning to realize this has impacts on their pension plans."

Rahm Emanuel, a senior member of the House Democratic leadership spoke out in support the bill from the House floor.

"This is only the first step. While we address the balance sheets of banks, the next step must now address the checkbooks for middle class families and the struggles that they face," he said.

The Senate passed a revised version of the bailout package 74-25 on Wednesday, including sweeteners on extending bank deposit insurance and expired tax breaks in order to get more Republicans behind the legislation.

Maryland Democratic representatives Donna Edwards and Elijah Cummings said they had received calls from Obama after voting against the original package.

"It meant a lot to me that somebody who at least has a 50-50 shot at being the next president of the United States would take time," Cummings said.

Obama said during the call that he would push attempts to reform bankruptcy laws to help ill-fated homeowners escape foreclosure, Cummings said, but stressed urgent action to save the US financial system was vital.

Edwards said Obama reached out to her on Thursday morning, as she was considering how she would come down in Friday's looming vote.

"I had a very good conversation with Senator Obama yesterday morning, and I had to weigh on that the entire day in coming to this decision," Edwards said.

There were still many holdout lawmakers though, who voiced deep skepticism whether the new measure would work, while bleakly concluding that the bill was a necessary evil.

The debate resumed amid more shocking news for the world's largest economy which shed some 159,000 jobs in September as the weight of the housing collapse and credit crunch hit a broad swath of industries.

The unemployment rate held at 6.1 percent, a five-year high, with payrolls having fallen by 760,000 this year, the Labor Department said.

Global stocks had sank heavily early Friday with losses in Asia as some lawmakers continued to make known their opposition to using vast amounts of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street firms.

The amended version of the plan is laced with 150 billion dollars in tax breaks to coax reluctant lawmakers from both the Democratic and the Republican parties to get on board.

The bailout gives the US Treasury power to buy up toxic mortgage debt which has been choking the financial industry and would create a 700-billion dollar federal program to buy bad assets from banks and other financial firms.

The Senate raised the ceiling on federal insurance for bank deposits from 100,000 dollars to 250,000 dollars, and added up to 150 billion dollars in tax break extensions for middle class families and business.

They also retained limits on "golden parachute" severance payments to disgraced Wall Street executives.




Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2008

Dead Man Good to go for Obama benefit

LOS ANGELES: First Barack Obama raised the Dead. Now he's healing the sick.

Despite a TMZ report that Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir was suffering from recently broken ribs, as well as a killer cold, the musician has no intention of missing a fundraising concert for the Democratic presidential contender.

As for the TMZ item, which said Weir backed out of a weekend concert due to broken ribs suffered during a mishap on his tour bus, the rocker's publicist tells newsmen that the injury has been greatly exaggerated.

"It's about as bad a case of reporting in terms of taking minor facts and, by the method of communicating them, completely misrepresenting the situation," says Dead spokesman Dennis McNally. "He had a cold, which is why he really couldn't do the event on Sunday."

The gossip site reported Wednesday that the 60-year-old axeman had fallen on his tour bus when the driver slammed on the brakes and then quoted McNally—out of context, he says—claiming it hurt for Weir "to breathe, hold the guitar, and laugh."

McNally says that Weir's "getting better" and he should be well enough to reunite with the three surviving members of the Dead — bassist Phil Lesh, drummer Bill Kreutzmann and percussionist Mickey Hart — for their first gig in four years on Oct. 13 at Penn State University in State College, Penn., to support the Obama-Biden ticket.

Weir, Lesh and Hart previously played together at a February show dubbed Deadheads for Obama in San Francisco in advance of California's Democratic primary.

But this will be the first time the quartet will take the stage since the summer of 2004, when they toured as the Dead (they retired the "Grateful" moniker following the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia). Allman Brothers Band member Warren Haynes, who also plays with Gov't Mule, will fill in for Garcia.

As for the possibility of a future Dead trek, McNally didn't rule it out completely.

"They want to see how it feels," he said, "but as of now, no."

China to set up APSCO by end of 2008

BEIJING: China said it will set up the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO) at the end of this year.

Pakistan was one of the three first countries along with China and Thailand that had proposed the setting up of APSCO early 1992.

The establishment of APSCO is part of a major effort to promote joint space exploration, the chief of the China National Space Administration, Sun Laiyan said, adding that the organization would focus on satellite applications and training.

Sun, delighted from the success of the country's first space walk on Sept 27, made the remarks at the 59th International Astronautical Congress held in Glasgow, Scotland, the state media here reported.

The organization, already joined by nine countries - Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand and Turkey - welcomes the participation of more nations, Sun said.

According to the Convention of the APSCO, signed by these nine countries, the organization aims to promote multilateral cooperation in space science and technology and regional economic and social development among Asia-Pacific nations.

Since space projects require huge financial input and research work, Sun appealed to countries to work together on the development of space resources.

“China is willing to conduct international space cooperation on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and common development," Sun said.

Sun said China plans to develop a new generation of carrier rocket by 2013 and to research and develop spacecraft docking technologies.

Elements of a space station will be in orbit by 2011 before a robotic landing is attempted on the Moon two years later.