GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli troops on Monday shot and killed a Palestinian near the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, the army and Gaza medical staff said.
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A Palestinian ambulance took his body to a hospital in Gaza. He was not immediately identified.
An Israeli army spokesman in Tel Aviv said troops had opened fire at a man whom they suspected was trying to plant a bomb on the Gaza side of the border fence.
Earlier, a missile fired by an Israeli aircraft destroyed a rocket launcher in the northern Gaza Strip which had earlier been used in an attack on southern Israel, the army said.
By Claudia Kade Reuters - Monday, August 27 06:57 am
BEIJING (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged China on Monday to do more to halt climate change, prompting the response that the developed West has been polluting the skies for much longer than the newly developing Chinese.
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Merkel is on her second visit to China as Chancellor and the trip comes four months before world environment ministers meet in Bali to try to launch new talks to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
She pressed for stronger protection of intellectual property rights and said the ground rules for gathering resources should be the same worldwide, an apparent criticism of China's relations with Sudan.
China has sizeable economic interests in Sudan and has been under pressure to take a more critical approach to Khartoum after accusations aid from Beijing feeds violence in Darfur.
Premier Wen Jiabao said China would do everything it could to fight product piracy but that there were differences concerning climate change.
"The Chinese wish, like all people, for blue skies, green hills and clear water," he told a joint news conference.
He said the task of reducing emissions was tougher in China than in Germany because it had more people had not yet reached economic growth of industrialised countries in terms of GDP per capita.
"China has taken part of the responsibility for climate change for only 30 years while industrial countries have grown fast for the last 200 years," he said.
Merkel will meet President Hu Jintao later on Monday and heads to Japan on Wednesday where she will also address climate change and economic issues.
At a June summit chaired by Merkel, G8 leaders agreed to pursue substantial, if unspecified cuts, in greenhouse gases and work with the U.N. on a new deal to fight global warming.
The Kyoto Protocol obliges 35 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but developing nations including China have no targets. China will overtake the United States by 2008 as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases.
China is overtaking the United States as the world's second-biggest exporter and steadily catching up with Germany, the world's biggest.
Digital music services try to nibble away at Apple
By Antony Bruno Reuters - Monday, August 27 02:54 am
DENVER (Billboard) - The digital music wars are entering a new phase.
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Several digital music service providers — including MTV's Urge, Rhapsody, Verizon Wireless, Wal-Mart and Yahoo Music — have unveiled new forays designed to shine light on their struggling services in the shadow of Apple's still-dominant iTunes.
While no individual effort is likely to dislodge Apple from its No. 1 position, all are clearly efforts to chip away at its commanding lead. According to data from NPD Group, Apple controls 73.7 percent of the retail digital-music market, with more than 3 billion tracks sold since it went live. iTunes is also the third-largest music retailer of any kind, surpassed only by Best Buy and Wal-Mart.
REALNETWORKS, MTV, VERIZON WIRELESS
In perhaps the most significant move, the three providers have joined forces to offer one integrated digital-music platform that includes Rhapsody's technology and music, editorial content and playlist programming from MTV's Urge and wireless distribution via Verizon Wireless. MTV brings strong marketing muscle — to the tune of $230 million during the next five years, not to mention its on-air channels — plus well-received blogs and other resources that should improve on Rhapsody's content. Verizon brings a mobile extension, something market leader iTunes still lacks. And Rhapsody brings the most popular subscription services on the market, its existing subscribers and back-end mobile technology.
The big bet, however, is on integration. Verizon will replace its Web-based digital music store with the new Rhapsody service and will send a copy of every song downloaded to a Verizon phone to the user's Rhapsody account. And Rhapsody subscribers will be able to transfer subscription-based music to Rhapsody-compatible Verizon phones once they're introduced later this year. But don't expect to download subscription tracks over the air from Verizon phones just yet.
On paper it's a strong alliance that emphasizes each partner's strengths and eliminates their weaknesses in what MTV Networks president Van Toffler called a "perfect storm" of capabilities. Whether they can execute it is another story.
WAL-MART
The big-box retailer has started a public relations initiative to highlight the availability of digital-rights-management-free (read: iPod-compatible) music from EMI and Universal Music Group. This is a particularly big deal for Wal-Mart, which has not been able to translate its success as a physical retailer to digital music. While it is responsible for about 22 percent of physical CD sales, Wal-Mart has less than 2 percent market share among music services, despite undercutting the competition on price. Protected tracks are 11 cents cheaper than on iTunes, while DRM-free tracks are 35 cents (0.17 pence) cheaper.
But this probably won't matter much until Wal-Mart can sell all its music without DRM, not just music from EMI and UMG. And the conservative company sells only edited versions of songs that otherwise would earn a parental advisory notice.
YAHOO MUSIC
Yahoo has unveiled plans to launch a Web-based music player that will allow current and non-subscribers to stream music from the service without requiring them to download the full Yahoo Music Unlimited software.
While its music portal receives more than 25 million unique hits per month, the Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service continues to struggle for mass-market attention, just like every other subscription service out there.
According to Yahoo Music general manager Ian Rogers, the idea is to give its broader Internet community access to the same tools as subscribers and eventually convert them into paying members. Non-subscribers can hear only 30-second samples, while members can listen to the entire track.
It started out innocently enough. Concerned about global warming and her family’s energy consumption, Michelle Baker wanted to hang her wash outside. She scoured stores for a clothesline durable enough to withstand Vermont winters and classy enough for her Waterbury backyard. She came back empty-handed every time.
So Ms. Baker and her husband made their own: a few lines of pristine white rope hung between two Vermont cedar poles. Soon, friends and neighbors were enviously asking where they got it. Born of enterprise, enthusiasm, and wet shirts flapping in the breeze, the Vermont Clothesline Co. debuted in April.
And just in time, as a national clothesline or “Right to Dry” movement escalates. In fact, Vermont is the latest state to introduce a bill that would override clothesline bans, which are often instituted by community associations loath to air laundry even when it’s clean. Now, clothesline restrictions may be headed the way of bans on parking pickup trucks in front of homes, or growing grass too long all vestiges of trim and tidy hopes that may not fit with the renewed emphasis on going green.
“This trend … is about people making a little change to help the environment as opposed to something like solar panels which is much more of an investment,” Baker says.
Baker’s orders have steadily risen. While most initial buyers were fellow Vermonters, the company now receives orders from across the United States, including such places as Tennessee, Texas and Arkansas.
Over in New Hampshire, clothesline activists have asked for legislative advice from Project Laundry List the first U.S. clothesline activist group, according to the group’s founder, Alexander Lee. And North Carolina recently passed a law invalidating city or county limitations on “energy devices based on the use of renewable resources.” In addition, the clothesline movement there is hoping to find a “test case” to legally establish clothesline rights in North Carolina, Mr. Lee says.
“We get e-mails and calls every day from people wanting to know where they can get the materials to hang out their clothes or how to deal with homeowners’ association rules,” says Bryan Wentzell, the group’s chairman of the board. “[The Right to Dry movement] could take off all across the country,” he says, noting that independent states like Vermont will be the first to jump on the bandwagon.”
Maybe. In June, Vermont’s Gov. Jim Douglas (R) vetoed an energy bill with Right to Dry language though not because of the clothesline clause, according to state Sen. Dick McCormack (D). Proponents are now revising a bill to be introduced in January, one similar to legislation in Florida and Utah that prohibits “state or local laws or regulations or private contracts from limiting the ability of dwellers to erect and use clotheslines for the drying of clothes.”
Dryer Data
At last count, in 2005, there were 88 million dryers in the US, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. Annually, these dryers consume 1,079 kilowatt hours of energy per household, creating 2,224 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions.
Besides the global-warming and cost-saving aspects of clotheslines, proponents say hanging out clothes requires exercise and time outside elements that are missing from many Americans’ lives. “So much of our lives have become automated,” Mr. Wentzell says. Plus, using a clothesline makes “your clothes last longer and smell better.”
Despite clotheslines’ purported benefits and a scent that can rival dryer sheets’ “fresh rain” fragrance “the overwhelming majority” of community associations regulate or ban them, says Frank Rathbun, vice president of communications for the Community Associations Institute in Virginia. Sixty million Americans belong to one of 300,000 homeowners’ associations, according to the institute, a national organization of community association leaders and management firms.
The rules exist for aesthetics, residents’ expectations and property values, Mr. Rathbun says: Environmental leanings have to be balanced against the desires of those who find their neighbors’ blue jeans, khakis, and the occasional flannel nightgown to be unseemly, unsightly, or both.
Senator McCormack dismisses such concerns. Amid growing concern about global warming, he says, governments have a responsibility to protect people’s right to voluntarily conserve, if not actively support energy conservation.
On Sept. 14, Project Laundry List will participate in an event at the energy company Hydro-Québec, protesting the diverting and damming of the Rupert River. Such damming would not have to occur, Lee says, if people adopted energy-saving methods like clotheslines. The group will display messages on T-shirts and sheets hung from what else? a 400-foot clothesline.
The group is getting the word out through other art forms, too. Several painters and quilters who specialize in depictions of clotheslines have donated work to Project Laundry List to be auctioned off, with proceeds going to the cause.
And, hoping for more, Wentzell is thinking outside the box and beyond the laundry room: “Hey, maybe we’ll get some celebrities taking up the cause by hanging out their laundry behind their mansions!”
TOKYO (Reuters) - Three men who met on an Internet site that matches up criminals were arrested after battering a woman to death and abandoning her body in a forest, police and Japanese media said on Monday. ADVERTISEMENT function pr_swfver(){ var osf,osfd,i,axo=1,v=0,nv=navigator; if(nv.plugins&&nv.mimeTypes.length){osf=nv.plugins[”Shockwave Flash”];if(osf&&osf.description){osfd=osf.description;v=parseInt(osfd.substring(osfd.indexOf(”.”)-2))}} else{try{for(i=5;axo!=null;i++){axo=new ActiveXObject(”ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.”+i);v=i}}catch(e){}} return v; } var pr_redir=”http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12huvbi46/M=611161.11254595.11824655.2498248/D=news/S=15194913:LREC/_ylt=A0WTcUeuatJG5iIB8hoh2.cA/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1188202190/A=4826003/R=0/id=CTURL/*$CTURL$”; var pr_s=”ads.pointroll.com/PortalServe/?pid=512216G66020070809165103&flash=”+pr_swfver()+”&redir=”+pr_redir+”&r=”+Math.random(); document.write(”"); if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d[’3wzJW0LEYrc-’]=’&U=13bckhsbk%2fN%3d3wzJW0LEYrc-%2fC%3d611161.11254595.11824655.2498248%2fD%3dLREC%2fB%3d4826003′;
The three arrested men swapped details on a "crime mates" site through their mobile phones, Kyodo news agency reported, and agreed to kidnap a 31-year-old office worker as she walked home late on Friday night.
They never told each other their names, and bashed the woman to death in a car park after she saw their faces, Kyodo said, adding the three robbed the woman of around 70,000 yen ($601).
Nagoya police said they had arrested two unemployed men and a newspaper salesman and charged them with abandoning the body of the woman, who was later found partially buried in sand in the forest around 300 km (190 miles) west of Tokyo.
Japanese media said the three would later be charged with murder, but police declined to comment on any further charges.
The Internet-based plot was uncovered when one of the men turned himself in to police on Saturday, saying he was "scared of capital punishment," Kyodo said.
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - US Internet titan Yahoo on Monday is introducing an upgraded free e-mail service with enhancements that include letting people send text messages from computers to mobile telephones. ADVERTISEMENT if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d[’U62zW0LEYuM-’]=’&U=13bc771pj%2fN%3dU62zW0LEYuM-%2fC%3d603398.10962363.11599733.1442997%2fD%3dLREC%2fB%3d4718561′;
The improved Yahoo! Mail being rolled out around the world in the coming weeks is the most extensive overhaul of the web-based e-mail service since it was launched a decade ago.
Because the text messaging feature depends on cooperation of mobile phone service providers its debuts are limited for now to India, Canada, the Philippines and the United States.
"We are really bringing text and instant messaging to a new audience," Yahoo! Mail vice president John Kremer told AFP.
"My mother now instant messages through mail to my children. She can send messages to my son while he is at soccer practices; he carries his mobile phone everywhere."
Yahoo doesn't charge for sending or receiving text messages, but mobile telephone users may be charged fees by carriers that provide their services.
Yahoo is making its upgraded service available to the more than 250 million users of its e-mail as it competes with rivals Google and Microsoft for "eye balls" that can be parlayed into advertising revenues.
Improvements include making the service faster and enabling users to have instant message conversations with people using Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger service.
"These are all important features they have to keep adding to the platform in the face of Hotmail, Gmail, or whatever," Gartner Research analyst Michael McGuire told AFP.
"But this is more than keeping up with competitors. They have added value."
Yahoo will continue to offer its old e-mail platform, dubbed "Classic," for those that don't want to switch to the new program, Kremer said.
"Consumer inertia is a powerful force," McGuire said. "You are not going to get everybody wanting to learn the new one."
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - A majority of teens see movies within the first two weeks after their release, and despite the surging popularity of the Internet among 13- to 17-year-olds, most find out about the latest films from TV ads and in-theater trailers, according to a new study from consumer research firm OTX and teen social networking site eCrush. ADVERTISEMENT if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d[’OvkVW0LEYpQ-’]=’&U=13bc5mnbt%2fN%3dOvkVW0LEYpQ-%2fC%3d576373.11029373.11736883.2896325%2fD%3dLREC%2fB%3d4794336′;
The "Teen Topix" study, which surveyed 750 teens nationwide, also found that most in the age group are viewing movies they missed in theaters by renting or buying DVDs, with only 1 percent to 5 percent choosing to see them via downloads, depending on the title.
According to the study, 27 percent of teens usually go to a film on opening weekend and an additional 44 percent go within the first two weeks. About 61 percent of teens find out about the latest movies from TV ads and 46 percent from in-theater trailers. Another 15 percent discover new films from entertainment Web sites, 15 percent from social networking sites, 13 percent from video-sharing sites and 8 percent from movie-ticket sites.
The survey asked teens to list all the ways they find out about new films, which explains why the percentages add up to more than 100 percent. The "buzz factor" also is key to influencing movie going decisions for teens, with 70 percent saying that people talking about a movie makes them want to see it in the theater.
The teens in the survey chose Zac Efron as the hottest male movie star of the summer, followed by Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Shia LaBeouf and Daniel Radcliffe. The hottest female movie star of the summer was Jessica Alba, followed by Jessica Biel, Keira Knightley, Megan Fox and Emma Watson.
Among the fall/winter movies teens most want to see are "Saw IV," "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," "Mama's Boy," "Fred Claus," "I Am Legend," "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and "Enchanted."
The top five movies teens want to see sequels for are "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "Transformers," "Spider-Man" and "Shrek."
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo said on Sunday it was giving its e-mail users more ways to reach friends and online contacts by allowing them to trade messages with mobile phone users.
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The new e-mail-to-phone connection is one of the features the Internet media giant plans to add as it makes available to the more than 250 million Yahoo Mail users a new version of the world's most popular e-mail program in coming weeks.
The Yahoo Mail overhaul is part of a drive to transform its e-mail franchise into more of a social activity that blends the convenience of instant communication with the implicit network of relationships found in one's online address book.
Already this year Yahoo has been testing another feature that lets its e-mail users communicate using conventional e-mail or via instant messages using either Yahoo Messenger or Microsoft Live Messenger.
"Our goal is to make (Yahoo) Mail a more social experience," John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said in a phone interview. "We really look at ourselves as sitting on top of the largest dormant social network out there."
Kremer said by upgrading the e-mail service technology, the Sunnyvale, California-based company aims to lay the groundwork for adding more social-networking features later this year.
Yahoo is scrambling to make its services more relevant as many Internet users spend more and more time on social networks like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook and less time passing through portals like Yahoo, AOL.com or Microsoft Corp's MSN.
The new version of Yahoo Mail gives users three options for communicating with contacts — e-mail, online instant-messaging or text-messaging to mobile phone users. Users can switch between the three, depending on which is most convenient.
Initially, the text-messaging feature will be available to Yahoo Mail members in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines. To text a friend, users simply enter a mobile phone number, type a text message in Yahoo Mail and hit send.
Yahoo Mail had 254 million users in July, according to audience measurement firm comScore Inc, while Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail had 224 million. Yahoo Messenger was used by 93 million in July.
Yahoo plans to make its upgraded e-mail program the standard option for all new users of the free service. It will upgrade users worldwide over a six-week period, Kremer said.
Existing users will be prompted to upgrade, although users of slower dial-up connections or those comfortable with Yahoo's "classic" e-mail can continue to use the older version.
The key difference with the older e-mail program is how the new service lets users "drag and drop" e-mail into folders, speeding the time it takes to sort through incoming messages.
Search features are also improved, allowing Yahoo Mail users to narrow results to find a specific sender, folder, date, attachment type or message status. So a search can, say, find all photos in Yahoo Mail tagged with a person's name.
In the United States, Yahoo Mail will detect dates, addresses and proper names and allow users to link quickly to Yahoo Calendar, Yahoo Maps or Yahoo Search for that data. The look-up feature is optional and can be turned off.
October is the 10th anniversary of Yahoo Mail's launch.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China rejected on Sunday a German magazine report that computer hackers believed to be linked to the Chinese army had infected German government ministries with spying programmes.
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The Der Spiegel magazine, in a report ahead of a visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to China, said that top German government ministries, including Merkel's office, had been infected by the attack.
"The Chinese government consistently opposes and strictly prohibits all criminal activities that damage computer network performance, including "hackers" behaviour," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement posted on the ministry's Web site (www.fmprc.gov.cn).
"China's relevant regulations and laws make clear stipulations on this," the statement said.
Jiang said China itself was frequently victim to hacker attacks.
"China hopes to strengthen cooperation with the German side on this problem."
Merkel is to meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday, where she is expected to press China for help in ending human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region.
She has also said she would address human rights issues as well as protection of intellectual property rights during her three-day trip.
SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: - )/span>. will introduce new features Monday for its popular Web-based e-mail program, including software that allows computer users to type text messages on a keyboard and send them directly to someone’s cell phone. ADVERTISEMENT if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d[’mwmQWkLEYrE-’]=’&U=13b5228fv%2fN%3dmwmQWkLEYrE-%2fC%3d610197.11312590.11854739.1414694%2fD%3dLREC%2fB%3d4843061′;
The enhancements make it easier to send e-mail, instant messages or text messages from a single Web site — no need to launch or toggle between separate applications or devices. It will take up to six weeks for all the new features to become available to all 254 million Yahoo Mail subscribers in 21 languages worldwide.
The most obvious beneficiaries will be parents, who will be able to use their keyboards to type messages sent to their children’s cell phones — no thumb-twisting typing on a dial pad, said Yahoo Vice President John Kremer.
“We’re giving you the right way to connect at the right time with right person,” said Kremer, whose two preteen sons vastly prefer text and instant messages to e-mail.
The changes come amid fierce competition among providers of free, Web-based e-mail services. Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail have long dominated the niche, but Google Inc.’s Gmail has grown quickly since its introduction in April 2004.
In February, Yahoo announced that it would provide unlimited storage space, and earlier this month Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said Hotmail would increase free storage from 2 to 5 gigabytes. Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, the fourth largest e-mail provider, began offering unlimited storage last summer. Google provides nearly 3 gigabytes.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo bills the changes as the most significant overhaul of Yahoo Mail since its launch in 1997. The new version replaces a one-year-old beta program and adds new features, including text messaging, a more comprehensive e-mail search engine and an easier to read and edit contacts database.
Users who don’t want the upgrades — or whose computers are too slow to handle them — can opt to remain with the current version, which Yahoo will call “Classic.”
The new version allows users to click on a contact and then select whether to send that person an e-mail, instant message or text message. You could send an e-mail or instant message if you know the recipient is at the computer — or a text message if the recipient is on the road with a cell phone.
“This gives people the ability to reach anybody in their contact database anytime,” said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at industry analysis firm Gartner Inc. “For good or evil, it’s going to be much easier for anybody to get a hold of you.”
