Published in August 26th, 2007
ON ADVERTISING
LONDON: 'Please return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright and locked position - and start reading the advertisement that is staring you in the face.”
O.K., you won't actually hear that last part as the flight attendants prepare an aircraft for landing. But as airlines look for new sources of revenue to offset rising fuel costs, more carriers are turning planes into marketing vehicles, installing advertising in hard-to-miss places.
Several American carriers, including US Airways and AirTran, recently started selling ads on napkins or stickers that appear on open tray tables. Over the summer, Ryanair, the European low-fare carrier, has gone further, installing advertising panels on the covers of the overhead luggage compartments and in the backs of closed tray tables.
Ryanair, and the companies behind these advertising systems, say the new spots offer marketers an effective way to reach consumers who have cash to spend and who are increasingly difficult to influence via traditional media like television and newspapers.
InviseoMedia, which has sold the seat-back ads to Ryanair and another European low-fare carrier, Germanwings, says the system provides an average of 40 minutes of “dwell time” during a typical flight. In other words, the only ways for passengers to avoid the ads, which are placed behind tamper-proof plastic shields, is to open the tray or get up and stretch their legs. When they do that, they are confronted with the ads on the overhead bins, which are being sold by a separate company, Fourth Edition.
“It's a good medium, a good audience and they're captive to some extent,” said Dominic Stead, chief executive of Inviseo. “In this day and age, the opportunity to get someone's attention and hold it is invaluable.”
Inviseo started to install its panels in Germanwings planes about two years ago, and companies like Microsoft, DaimlerChrysler, Hewlett-Packard and HRS, a German travel Web site, have advertised on them.
Since the seat-back ad space became available in Ryanair planes this summer, it has attracted only one advertiser: Creative, a maker of digital entertainment devices. But Stead said the Inviseo system could be popular with advertisers that link ads to mobile phone call-in and text-message campaigns, because Ryanair and a number of other airlines plan to enable in-flight cellphone use soon.
The use of overhead bins for ads has been faster to catch on than the seat backs, with ads being place by companies like ING, the Dutch bank; Red Bull, a so-called energy drink; and Meteor Mobile Communications, an Irish cellphone operator. Martin Barry, managing director of Fourth Edition, said the ads could generate annual revenue of €6.5 million, or $8.8 million, if all 41 panels on every one of Ryanair's 137 planes were sold for an entire year. Like Inviseo, Fourth Edition splits an undisclosed portion of the proceeds with the airline.
Both Fourth Edition and Inviseo, which are privately held, say they have an advantage over potential rivals because they have already obtained approval for their systems, as required by safety regulators.
Will other advertisers and airlines climb aboard? Even though marketers are eager to connect with consumers in new ways, they are also wary about annoying them.
“A lot of brands are pretty skeptical about being associated with in-flight advertising,” said Ben Cunningham, a media planner at Vizeum, part of the London advertising company Aegis. “In general, it has been something pretty niche for us to advise our clients to get involved with.”
Other forms of airborne advertising have been around for some time. Carriers have turned the outsides of airplane fuselages into flying billboards. They have sold print ads in their magazines, and some offer video ads in their seat-back entertainment systems. Several carriers have even experimented with ads printed on airsickness bags.
Fourth Edition and Inviseo said they were talking with other airlines. But one budget carrier, easyJet, said it was not interested for now. “Onboard advertising is not something we're looking to at the moment,” said Marianne West, a spokeswoman. “I think we're quite happy to advertise our own brand onboard.”
Eric Pfanner can be reached at adcol@iht.com.
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Published in August 26th, 2007
MOSCOW: The wedding seemed peaceful until the first punch was thrown. Then the camera jumped between various fights, capturing men chasing one another and finally focusing on someone lying unconscious - and then the video faded to black.
Welcome to the world of EnglishRussia.com, the brainchild of a young Web designer that has become one of the most popular blogs on the Internet in less than a year.
The site warrants regular visits for those who want to see the weird, sometimes freakish side of Soviet life because, as the slogan reads, “something cool happens daily on 1/6 of the Earth's surface.”
“It is Russian culture - there are many fights at weddings,” said the founder of the Web site, a 28-year-old Russian who goes by the name Tim. “Probably 50 percent of weddings in villages have fights. It's fun.”
Tim refused to give his full name, saying by telephone that, as a serious Web designer, he did not want his name associated with the site.
On high-traffic days, more than 200,000 people visit EnglishRussia.com. Half come from the United States, with only 5 percent from Russia.
Tim said the idea for the site popped into his head one day.
“Just imagine how many unknown stories and photos are hidden in Chinese Web sites and available only to a Chinese audience,” he wrote in an e-mail. “So we decided to start from the country we know, or, to be exact, Russia and the countries comprising the former Soviet Union.”
The site is in English so that the rest of the world can have a look at the oddities of Russia. It is a smorgasbord of photos and videos from other Russian Web sites, plus those sent in by readers, which both confirm and undermine national stereotypes.
On a recent day, there were photographs of a heavy-metal wedding, Russian students playing Tetris by turning on and off the lights in their hostel, Belarussian police tractors and drunks sleeping on the subway, along with the more mundane - cars buried under snow and trucks with wheels missing.
One video shows two people from the Russian republic of Dagestan who stop their car in the middle of the capital city, Makhachkala, and start to do the lezginka, a traditional dance, before getting back in their car and driving away.
Some people have attacked the site, calling it anti-Russian and a disgrace.
“Someone always claims that it is anti-Russian propaganda,” Tim said. “I assure you we didn't receive any financial support from any foreign state or secret service. It was started just for fun. Even now that it earns money, we don't treat it seriously.”
Tim, who lives in Russia and Israel, refused to say how profitable the site was a year after its creation.
The money, however, has allowed him to hire one employee, who spends most of his day searching for things to post.
The rules for picking a post are simple: The material must simply be “cool,” he said. He does not worry about whether visitors might deem a posting pro-Russian or anti-Russian.
EnglishRussia.com was recently rated the 155th most popular blog in the world by Technorati, a search engine that indexes more than 94 million blogs. Tim said he had turned down one offer to buy the site. He said he wanted to see the blog break into the top 100 on Technorati, an outcome he thinks is likely.
The most popular posting is a fish caught in the Far East that resembles a dinosaur. Pictures of strange people on the subway, like a Stalin impersonator, are not far behind in popularity.
A recent hit is a video of a woman who lives with 130 cats in what appears to be a surprisingly clean Moscow apartment.
The latest entries have moved away from what Tim called “yellow” postings, using the color normally associated with sensationalist newspapers. There are fewer pictures of the freakish and more of the nostalgic - like pictures of a dozen Soviet cigarette packages.
“At the beginning, we were working out the style,” he said. “We noticed some people are very fond of some stories of old Russia. We try to satisfy those people as well.”
The site clearly has struck a chord, although it has not impressed everyone.
“There's nothing original,” said Mikhail Chekanov of Rambler Media, owner of the Russian search engine Rambler.ru. Chekanov said the site just picks up items from other Russian Web sites.
The captions on the site are often deliberately obtuse, playful or simply untrue. Under a picture of what looks like nuclear missiles, the caption reads: “While we all are peacefully sleeping, there are people in Russia who don't sleep. They work.” Under pictures of police officers with their eyes closed on the subway it reads, “Just another example of how you can get tired after the righteous job.”
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Published in August 26th, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO: A Chinese technology company has expressed interest in buying a maker of computer disk drives in the United States, raising concerns among U.S. government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China.
The overture, which was disclosed by William Watkins, the chief executive of Seagate Technology, one of the two remaining drive makers in the United States, has resurrected issues of economic competitiveness and national security raised three years ago when Lenovo, a Chinese computer maker, bought the personal computer business branch of IBM.
Tensions have been increasing lately between the two countries over ambitions by China in developing its military capabilities and advanced technologies for industrial and consumer uses.
Although disk drives do not fall under a list of export-controlled technologies, the attempted purchase of an American disk drive company would require a security review by the U.S. government, according to several government officials.
In recent years, disk drives have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.
That could raise the specter of secret tampering with hardware or software to make it possible to pilfer information via computer networks, intelligence officials have warned.
Seagate has recently begun selling drives with hardware encryption capabilities.
Watkins did not identify the Chinese company. But he said that the possibility of an acquisition had sent alarm bells ringing at some government agencies.
“The U.S. government is freaking out,” Watkins said Thursday.
Reached Friday night, Treasury officials declined to comment on possible Chinese overtures for the American company.
While Watkins said Seagate, which is the largest drive maker in the United States, was not for sale, he also said that if a high enough premium was offered to shareholders it would be difficult to stop.
With a booming economy and $1.33 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, Chinese companies are in a position to acquire American companies, the same position Japanese and West European companies were several decades ago.
While those earlier acquisitions were often opposed out of fear they would damage American economic competitiveness, the acquisition of U.S. companies by Chinese companies is regarded with more suspicion, particularly in the high-technology sector.
Since the Lenovo sale, the government has become increasingly concerned about technology security, according to members of federal advisory committees.
“Seagate would be extremely sensitive,” said an industry executive who participates in classified government advisory groups. “I do not think anyone in the U.S. wants the Chinese to have access to the controller chips for a disk drive. One never knows what the Chinese could do to instrument the drive.”
The transfer of advanced disk drive manufacturing technology would give the Chinese a major advantage in competing in the information technology sector.
China, however, still lags behind in basic manufacturing skills, like semiconductor design and manufacturing.
“This is clearly a critical component of a computer system and the purchase by the Chinese or other nations merits a full review to determine what our risks are,” said Michael Wessell, a commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group that monitors the national security implications of trade with China for Congress.
IBM sold its disk drive business to the Japanese computer maker Hitachi in 2002, leaving just two American disk drive makers, Seagate and Western Digital, both based in California.
Two other Japanese makers, Fujitsu and Toshiba, and a division of Samsung, a South Korean electronics conglomerate, are also major manufacturers of the storage devices.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
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Published in August 26th, 2007
WASHINGTON - After six decades in which the venerable greenback never changed its look, the U.S. currency has undergone a slew of makeovers. The most amazing is yet to come.
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A new security thread has been approved for the $100 bill, The Associated Press has learned, and the change will cause double-takes.
The new look is part of an effort to thwart counterfeiters who are armed with ever-more sophisticated computers, scanners and color copiers. The C-note, with features the likeness of Benjamin Franklin, is the most frequent target of counterfeiters operating outside the United States.
The operation of the new security thread looks like something straight out of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This magic, however, relies on innovations produced from decades of development.
It combines micro-printing with tiny lenses — 650,000 for a single $100 bill. The lenses magnify the micro-printing in a truly remarkable way.
Move the bill side to side and the image appears to move up and down. Move the bill up and down and the image appears to move from side to side.
“It is a really complex optical structure on a microscopic scale. It makes for a very compelling high security device,” said Douglas Crane, a vice president at Crane & Co. The Dalton, Mass-based company has a $46 million contract to produce the new security threads.
The redesign of the $100 is about one-third of the way complete. The bill is expected to go into circulation late next year.
___
On the Net:
Bureau of Engraving and Printing:
A history of U.S. currency from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:
Published in August 26th, 2007
Security forces sent to India state
Reuters - Sunday, August 26 06:07 am
HYDERABAD, India (Reuters) - Officials sent extra police and special bomb detection equipment to an Indian state after bombs packed with metal pellets killed 43 people at a packed street food-stall and an amusement park.
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Police have found another dozen bombs — fitted with timers and placed in plastic bags — at bus stops, cinema halls, road junctions and pedestrian bridges across Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh state, after Saturday night's blasts in the city.
"Definitely some terrorist organisation is behind these attacks, which wants to weaken our unity and peaceful co-existence," Junior Home Minister Sri Prakash Jaiswal said late on Saturday.
Nearly 80 people, including women and children, were wounded by the three blasts that went off within the space of a few minutes. Some of the wounded were in critical condition.
"The metal pellets in the bombs had worked as deadly missiles, killing more people," said Dr. K. Shastry, a senior doctor at a large hospital, which received many dead and wounded.
The police said each of the bombs also contained ammonium and were rigged with alarm clocks.
Eleven people died in two blasts at the Lumbini amusement park during a laser light show, while 32 died in the explosion at the street food stall in the heart of the city's commercial district, police said.
The blasts in Hyderabad, one of India's biggest cities, are the latest in a series of militant attacks in large urban centres in the past two years, including New Delhi and the commercial hub of Mumbai. Hundreds have died.
Police were probing the role of Islamist militants, blamed for other recent bombings in different cities.
Hyderabad is an information technology hub where foreign firms have made large investments.
GRIEF NEAR MORGUE
At a big city hospital, sobbing relatives and friends of victims held on to each other for support while standing outside a morgue, waiting for police to call them in to identify the bodies, many badly mutilated.
"They had come to shop and had stopped for a bite. Now they are all gone," said Bhaskar, 41, a family friend of two teenage girls and a young woman, who died at the food stall.
Outside the hospital, Hyderabad residents, including victims' families, shouted anti-government slogans.
Among the dead were seven engineering students from the neighbouring state of Maharashtra as well as a mother and her two daughters.
New Delhi has often blamed Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups for attacks in India. Indian officials say Pakistan needs to do more to curb the groups based in its territory.
Both nuclear-armed countries are involved in a cautious peace process, which continues to inch ahead despite attacks in India.
Saturday's bomb attacks in Hyderabad come three months after a bomb went off in a historic mosque in the southern city in May, which killed 11 people.
On Saturday, police patrols were visible in the city as many marriages are planned for Sunday with August 26 seen as an auspicious day for Hindus.
(Additional reporting by Rina Chandran)
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Published in August 26th, 2007
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - United States soldiers facing trial for war crimes allegedly committed in Iraq are enlisting the power of the Internet to help defend themselves against prosecution.
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The steady stream of investigations into the conduct of US forces in Iraqi cities like Haditha and Hamdania has been mirrored by the mushrooming of websites set up to aid soldiers involved in the cases.
In the past year around a dozen sites have been started by sympathetic military veterans who have expressed anger that troops are facing criminal prosecution for decisions taken in a war-zone.
Several of the sites, such as the Boston-based Military Combat Defense Fund () have been set up to raise donations to help soldiers pay mounting legal fees.
"The only thing we want to do is get these kids lawyered up as soon as possible," says Patrick Barnes, a Vietnam veteran whose son has served three tours of duty in Iraq.
Barnes said he decided to set up the site after paying a hospital visit to Marines wounded in Haditha in November 2005 during fighting which eventually left 24 Iraqis dead and four Marines facing murder charges.
"After visiting with those kids I talked to a friend, and said 'This is not right. We're all combat veterans. We've got to do something about this,'" Barnes told AFP.
Prosecutors have alleged that Marines in Haditha embarked on a killing spree, shooting men, women and children indiscrimately after a popular comrade was torn in half by a massive roadside bomb.
Lawyers for soldiers involved in the case have argued they followed the rules of engagement.
While there have been several clear-cut cases of US troops carrying out atrocities in Iraq — most notably when soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division admitted raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her family — several websites claim that in other cases the evidence is too flimsy to warrant prosecution.
"There's a line in 'Apocalypse Now' where a character says that charging people with murder in Vietnam is like giving speeding tickets at the Indy 500 (motor race), and that's exactly what is happening now," Barnes said. "It's insane."
The Military Combat Defense Fund has raised around 180,000 dollars in donations since its foundation. Most of the donations have come from veterans or people with a connection to the military, Barnes said. "The biggest donation was 25,000 dollars, the smallest was five dollars," he said.
Another site, the Marine Defense Fund, has focused largely on providing assistance to Marines implicated in the Hamdania and Haditha investigations.
The site's administrator, Maralee Jones, whose son is a Marine, said she believed the websites had struck a chord with people who believed soldiers in Iraq were being betrayed by their leaders.
Jones, a mortgage officer based in Utah who taught herself web design, said the website () was launched after eight servicemen were arrested over the death of an Iraqi civilian in Hamdania last year.
Seven Marines and a Navy medic were eventually prosecuted in the case.
Jones said many visitors to the site expressed "sympathy and outrage" that Marines had been charged.
"Many believe that what happens in combat should stay in combat. War is a brutally ugly business," she said. Other visitors posted hate mail, she added.
"I get stuff like 'The only good Marine is a dead Marine' and 'These are atrocities of war — they deserve death themselves.'
"I just don't believe people really understand the naivete of the men that are recruited, who are being sent into a war zone to be policemen, which they are not trained to do, who are then prosecuted," Jones said.
"It's Vietnam all over again in every sense."
Published in August 26th, 2007
IBM Corp. is hoping to broaden the appeal of its Sametime enterprise IM software by expanding the current stand-alone offering into a family of products in a bid to better compete with other unified communications players like Microsoft and Cisco.
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Software vendors and telephony companies are betting that customers will rush to adopt unified communications, an emerging technology area they believe will turn into a multi-billion dollar business. Unified communications aims to blur the distinctions between voice, e-mail, IM and video messages, allowing users to access them via a single in-box. When IBM relaunched Sametime about a year ago, the company positioned the IM software as the basis for its unified communications offerings.
Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Lotus division, announced plans for three new Sametime products last week during a keynote address at the VoiceCon conference in San Francisco.
The next release of IBM's current Sametime software, which follows on from Sametime 7.5.1, will be known as Sametime Standard 8.0 and is due out towards the end of this year, according to Bruce Morse, IBM's vice president for unified communications software. The new version includes support for Microsoft's Office 2007 desktop suite and the ability to run Sametime server in VMware's virtual environment.
Sametime Entry 8.0 and Sametime Advanced 8.0 debut in the first calendar quarter of 2008.
Sametime Entry takes the IM capabilities already embedded in some IBM products and turns them into a stand-alone offering. The aim is to seed the market and encourage corporate users new to IM to use Entry and later move up to the Standard and Advanced flavors, Morse said. Pricing is not yet set but will be on a per-user basis, he added.
The move is all about combating Microsoft, said E. Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research LLC. He estimates that about half of IBM's customers use Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange groupware, not IBM's Notes and Domino alternatives. Those users are ones Microsoft would hope to see embrace its enterprise IM as embodied in Office Communications Server 2007, which has just been released to manufacturing. However, the software giant doesn't have a low-end version of OCS, so IBM has the opportunity to try and win new business among corporate users keen to try out basic IM functionality, he said.
Sametime Advanced builds on the Standard version and adds in features like the ability to share one's desktop with others and ways to store and reuse geographic information. The software also includes persistent chat so that a person can log onto their company's group chat and be able to browse what was discussed earlier, particularly useful in the financial services business where staff in different time zones are continually tracking the markets.
The third new member of the Sametime family is still at an early development stage and is known under the working title of "Sametime for Unified Telephony," Morse said.
Analyst Kelly said that IBM has lagged Microsoft and Cisco when it comes to tightly integrating its IM with telephony systems. Instead, IBM has offered separate integration with switches from Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and Siemens.
Customer feedback caused IBM to rethink that approach, Morse said. What users said they really wanted was a nonspecific version of Sametime able to run across heterogenous telephony environments. IBM is still working out how to develop the software, which it hopes to ship in the middle of next year. One option is licensing components of OpenScape, a range of unified communications products from Siemens. IBM is in discussions with several companies, but has yet to sign an agreement with anyone.
Published in August 25th, 2007
The Playboy bunnies have a message for college students returning to campus this fall: We want you.
Riding a wave of renewed popularity among consumers around the globe, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire is set to launch a sexy social networking site dedicated solely to college students, its latest online venture as it tries to reinvigorate its stagnant finances.
The launch of Playboy U, which has similar features to those found on Facebook, comes as Playboy’s 54-year-old magazine continues to lose money and readers.
To compensate, Chicago-based Playboy Enterprises Inc. is embarking on a one of its biggest expansion efforts in years.
“This is one brand that is relevant to 18 through 81-year-olds,” said Scott Stephen, executive vice president of operations for Playboy’s entertainment division. “We’re looking at this as a way to introduce and escort someone through their adult life.”
Playboy has cozied up to collegians before, featuring parties, promotional events and pictorials of student bodies from across the country. Now, executives hope Playboy U will help build brand loyalty among young consumers.
Backed by a hit cable TV show featuring Hefner’s three girlfriends, a Sirius radio channel and the adoration of young Hollywood stars again flocking to parties at the Playboy mansion, the company is trying to grow its licensing business and online presence and build an international fan base that includes a surprising legion of female fans.
Thanks in part to those initiatives, Playboy is gradually returning to profitability after years of operating in the red.
Last year the company eked out a $2.3 million profit, its second-best since posting a $47.6 million loss in 2000. So far this year, Playboy has earned $5.7 million.
But growth has been slow as Playboy wrestles with other struggling units, like its domestic television business that’s facing increasing competition and losing favor to other video-on-demand offerings. (Playboy executives said they’re working to stabilize the TV unit by offering their own on-demand lineup.)
“They definitely haven’t had the blowout kind of success that you would expect a big brand like Playboy to have,” said Rick Munarriz, a senior analyst with the investment advisory service The Motley Fool. “The brand seems to be having some kind of renaissance around the world yet, financially speaking, it’s not really contributing to the top and bottom line.”
The latest statistics compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show the magazine’s average paid circulation has fallen to just under 2.9 million readers, less than half of the 6.25 million readers who bought the magazine during its heyday in 1974. During the first six months of the fiscal year, the magazine unit lost $4.7 million, 15 percent more than it lost during the same period last year.
Playboy executives said there are no plans to eliminate the publication, even as the company turns its attention to other parts of the bunny empire that include Playboy-themed casinos, clubs and apparel. Next month, Playboy will open its ninth retail store, stocking jeans, jewelry, T-shirts and cosmetics.
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Published in August 25th, 2007
San Francisco (IDGNS) - Fear of litigation has led to an indefinite delay in the .
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John McLaughlin, founder of Uniquephones, based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, said Saturday that he received a phone call about 3 a.m. Saturday local time from a man claiming to be from O'Melveny & Myers LLP, an international law firm, calling on behalf of AT&T. The firm has worked with Apple in the past.
The man informed McLaughlin that if he posted the unlock code, he could be sued for copyright infringement and for dissemination of Apple's intellectual property (IP).
McLaughlin was not completely awake when he took the call and did not get the full name of the person on the other end, he said. The man presented "friendly advice," but because of the timing of the call and the fact that it came on a personal mobile phone that McLaughlin never uses for business, it felt more threatening than friendly.
"If he wants to give me advice, he could have sent me an e-mail," McLaughlin said.
Spokespeople with O'Melveny & Myers, AT&T Wireless and Apple could not be immediately reached for comment Saturday.
McLaughlin and his team had planned to release software by 2 p.m. EDT that he claims would unlock the iPhone so it could work with SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards from carriers other than AT&T Wireless.
right after the iPhone's release on June 29 and had been working on the software since then.
McLaughlin is concerned that fighting a lawsuit with AT&T or Apple would sink his small company, which does a modestly successful business unlocking wireless handsets in the U.K. and Europe. At the same time, he and engineers in several countries have invested time and money to come up with the unlock software.
"It really annoys me," he said. "We have the solution sitting there and we have the customers there, but if you connect the two you could lose everything."
About 550,000 people have signed up on Uniquephones' iPhone unlocking site as of Saturday afternoon in the U.K.
McLaughlin said he still plans to release the software eventually, but is not sure when. "We'd be happy to let another company take the heat and be the second or third company to post [the software]," he said.
In addition to Uniquephones' software, there have been two other reports of ways the iPhone can be unlocked. On Friday, blogger George Hotz posted a step-by-step tutorial for unlocking the iPhone that involves both hardware and software modifications. At another site, , a company claims it can unlock iPhones through software only.
has been a hot target for unlocking since its launch, both because of its advanced design and features and because AT&T has an unusual long-term exclusive relationship with Apple. It's common for U.S. mobile operators to lock the phones they sell, but in some cases they will later unlock the phones free or for a small fee.
Published in August 25th, 2007
Limited curfew in Baghdad ahead of pilgrimage
By Peter Graff Reuters - 1 hour 44 minutes ago
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq ordered a limited curfew in Baghdad on Saturday ahead of a Shi'ite pilgrimage, but the measure fell short of a ban on cars and trucks imposed at other religious ceremonies to reduce the risk of bombs.
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Iraqi television initially announced a ban on all vehicles, but Brigadier-General Qassim al-Moussawi, the military's security spokesman for Baghdad, later said the ban covered only bicycles, handcarts, animal carts and motorcycles.
"There is no curfew on cars and pedestrians. The curfew is only on handcarts, animal carts, motorcycles and bicycles," he said on Iraqiya state television.
During previous pilgrimages authorities had banned all vehicles to prevent attacks. They did not make clear why they did not think that was necessary for the forthcoming ceremony.
Tens of thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims are expected to converge on the southern holy city of Kerbala next week to mark the birth of Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi, a 9th-century figure Shi'ites believe will return to save mankind.
Hours before the limited curfew was imposed, a car bomb killed seven people and wounded 30 in the mainly Shi'ite northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Kadhimiya.
U.S. President George W. Bush, faced with growing calls to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, pleaded with Americans for patience and said progress was being made on the ground.
"The success of the past couple of months have shown that conditions on the ground can change — and they are changing," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "We cannot expect the new strategy we are carrying out to bring success overnight."
Washington has sent thousands of additional troops to Iraq this year and moved its forces into neighbourhood outposts.
TARGETS
U.S. officials say the tactic has improved security somewhat, but complain that Iraqi politicians have failed to take steps toward sectarian reconciliation in that time.
Bush has faced growing calls from Democrats and some leading Republicans to begin withdrawing troops. A report due on September 15 by the U.S. ambassador and top military commander in Iraq is expected to prove pivotal in determining U.S. policy.
Shi'ite pilgrimages are major targets for al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab militant groups. Pilgrims walking from Baghdad and other cities to Kerbala are often vulnerable to attack.
The last major Shi'ite religious ceremony was held in Kadhimiya earlier this month when hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites converged on a mosque. A show of force by Iraqi troops and three days of a total vehicle ban prevented major attacks.
U.S. forces said they had found an execution site apparently used by Sunni Arab al Qaeda militants in the Arab Jabour area on the capital's southern outskirts.
"The ground forces found human skulls, decomposing bodies and bones wrapped in bloody clothes. Wild dogs were rampant around the area," the U.S. military said in a statement. "Inside a nearby building, the ground forces found blood spatter and other signs indicating executions had taken place there."
(Additional reporting by Waleed Ibrahim, Wathiq Ibrahim and Ross Colvin in Baghdad and Jeremy Pelofsky in Crawford, Texas)
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