YANGON, Myanmar – The legal team of Myanmar's jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was denied access to the 64-year-old Nobel laureate on Wednesday, two days before her trial is to resume for final arguments, her lawyer said.
Authorities in the military-ruled country denied permission for Suu Kyi's lawyers to meet her to finalize the draft of their 23-page closing argument, said Nyan Win, one of Suu Kyi's defense lawyers as well as spokesman for her party.
"This (refusal by authorities) shows that the judicial system in the country is very weak," said Nyan Win. "We need to see our clients to finalize the draft, and it was very bad that the right has been denied."
Suu Kyi is charged with violating the terms of her house arrest by harboring an uninvited American man who swam secretly to her lakeside home and stayed for two days. She is being detained at Myanmar's notorious Insein Prison.
The opposition leader, who has been under house arrest for about 14 of the last 20 years, faces a possible five-year prison term.
The refusal to allow legal access to Suu Kyi comes as Asian, U.S., and European ministers — including the top diplomat from Myanmar — meet in neighboring Thailand for security talks at which the military regime's human rights record is in the spotlight.
The trial has drawn condemnation from the international community and from Suu Kyi's local supporters, who worry the ruling junta has found an excuse to keep her detained through elections planned for next year.
Also on trial, and facing the same charges as Suu Kyi, are two female members of her party who were her sole companions under house arrest. The American, John Yettaw, 53, of Falcon, Missouri, is charged with trespassing.
Yettaw has pleaded not guilty and explained in court that he had a dream that Suu Kyi would be assassinated and he had gone to warn her.
Myanmar, also known as Burma, has been under military rule since 1962.
Suu Kyi's opposition party won national elections in 1990, but Myanmar's generals refused to relinquish power.

High Performance Driving

In North America, the cars used in the National Championship (currently the Indy Racing League IndyCar Series, and previously CART) have traditionally been similar though less sophisticated than F1 cars, with more restrictions on technology aimed controlling costs.

Production car racing or known in the US as showroom stock, is an economical and rules restricted version of touring car racing, mainly to restrict costs.

Life Insurance

Any risk that can be quantified can potentially be insured. Specific kinds of risk that may give rise to claims are known as "perils". An insurance policy will set out in detail which perils are covered by the policy and which are not.

Neither insurance consultants nor insurance brokers are insurance companies and no risks are transferred to them in insurance transactions.

WASHINGTON (AFP) –
US President Barack Obama welcomes Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to the White House on Wednesday hoping to push for stronger reconciliation efforts in the conflict-wracked country.

It will be the first meeting between Maliki and Obama since US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities at the end of June, a milestone in Iraq's rehabilitation since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Maliki also arrives in Washington having overseen a considerable transformation in his country from when he took office three years ago amid sprawling interfaith violence.

The leaders, who met in Baghdad in April, "will have frank conversations and we will have discussions on the need to keep the political process going (to avoid) any back-sliding or deterioration," said a senior administration official on Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The United States "will not dictate the solutions to the Iraqi government," stressed the official, but will offer to support Baghdad's "efforts to address political issues and build national unity."

Over the course of his visit, Maliki is also set to meet all of the top players in Obama's administration, including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"This visit is a sign of a comprehensive and long term partnership between Iraq and the United States; it goes beyond security cooperation, we are not just looking at the short term, this is the beginning of a long-lasting, normal bilateral relationship with the sovereign nation of Iraq," said the official.

Maliki is hoping to drum up investment for a country in dire need of rebuilding after years of sanctions and war, and his visit will include an investment conference at the US Department of Commerce.

The prime minister's visit "is an opportunity to make progress on questions (regarding security), and to discuss economic, industrial and education cooperation," Ali Moussawi, one of Maliki's advisors, told AFP in Baghdad on Monday.

The Iraqi president is keen to stress the early success of his country's security forces since the US pullback just weeks ago, although relations with Washington have hit a bump over Baghdad's failure to improve relations between its Shiite, Sunni and Kurd communities.

On a trip to the Iraqi capital earlier this month, Biden urged Iraqi leaders to make more progress on reconciliation between the Shiite, Sunni and Kurd communities.

But the Iraqi government at the time refused a US offer to intervene, describing the process as an internal matter and warned that outside interference could cause additional problems.

Computer software is so called to distinguish it from computer hardware, which encompasses the physical interconnections and devices required to store and execute (or run) the software. At the lowest level, software consists of a machine language specific to an individual processor. A machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. Software is an ordered sequence of instructions for changing the state of the computer hardware in a particular sequence. It is usually written in high-level programming languages that are easier and more efficient for humans to use (closer to natural language) than machine language. High-level languages are compiled or interpreted into machine language object code. Software may also be written in an assembly language, essentially, a mnemonic representation of a machine language using a natural language alphabet. Assembly language must be assembled into object code via an assembler.

The term "software" was first used in this sense by John W. Tukey in 1958. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all computer programs. The theory that is the basis for most modern software was first proposed by Alan Turing in his 1935 essay Computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

Club Management Software

HARTFORD, Conn. – ESPN reporter Erin Andrews was secretly videotaped in the nude while she was alone in a hotel room, and the video was posted on the Internet, her attorney said.
The blurry, five-minute video shows Andrews standing in front of a hotel room mirror. It's unknown when or where it was shot.
Andrews' attorney, Marshall Grossman, confirmed Tuesday that the video posted on the Internet shows the 31-year-old reporter. He said she decided to confirm it "to put an end to rumor and speculation and to put the perpetrator and those who are complicit on notice that they act at their peril."
Andrews plans to seek criminal charges and file civil lawsuits against the person who shot the video and anyone who publishes the material, Grossman said.
"While alone in the privacy of her hotel room, Erin Andrews was surreptitiously videotaped without her knowledge or consent," Grossman said in an earlier statement. "She was the victim of a crime and is taking action to protect herself and help ensure that others are not similarly violated in the future."
Andrews has covered hockey, college football, college basketball and Major League Baseball for the network since 2004, often as a sideline reporter during games.
A former dance team member at the University of Florida, Andrews was something of an Internet sensation even before the video's circulation. She has been referred to as "Erin Pageviews" because of the traffic that video clips and photos of her generate, and Playboy magazine named her "sexiest sportscaster" in both 2008 and 2009.
She last appeared on the network as part of its ESPY Awards broadcast on Sunday, and is scheduled to be off until September, when she will be covering college football, ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said.
"Erin has been grievously wronged here," Krulewitz said. "Our people and resources are in full support of her as she deals with this abhorrent act."
It was not clear when the video first appeared on the Internet. Most of the links to it had been removed by Tuesday.
Several TV networks and newspapers aired brief clips or printed screen grabs of it Tuesday. Grossman responded to an e-mail question about whether he plans to go after those outlets by reiterating his statement that Andrews plans to seek civil charges against "anyone who has published the material."
He would not say what law enforcement agencies might be investigating.
ESPN is based in Bristol, but Connecticut State Police were not involved in an investigation into the video, said Lt. J. Paul Vance, a department spokesman. Vance said investigations into Internet crimes often begin in the victim's home state or wherever the video was shot, if that can be determined.
A phone call to a listing for Andrews in Georgia went unanswered. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it was not involved in any investigation of the video.
Video voyeurism laws vary from state to state. In Connecticut, it is considered a felony and can result in a prison sentence of up to five years, Vance said.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the FBI was not involved in the case, and was unsure if there was any federal jurisdiction.
Ephraim Cohen, a spokesman for the video portal Dailymotion, could not confirm the video had actually appeared on his company's site, but said it may have been there months ago. He said a search for the name of the user who purportedly uploaded the video showed the person had opened an account in February, but had since closed it.
"As far as we can tell, the user took the account and the video down a while ago," he said.

Illegal videos often are posted to multiple sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion, which remove them as soon as they are found. The videos also often circulate on peer-to-peer or file-sharing sites, much like illegal music downloads.

Graham Cluley, who writes a blog for the antivirus software maker Sophos, wrote that several links purporting to send Internet users to the Andrews video actually sent them to sites with malicious software and computer viruses.

He said the some of the hackers actually include a portion of the video on their sites, apparently hoping that the malware gets passed along as users share the link with friends.

"They keep on using (videos like this) because it works," Cluley said. "If more people thought with their head rather than with their trousers, maybe less of these viruses would spread on our computers."

Krulewitz, the ESPN spokesman, said the network has decided not to cover the issue as a news story, "particularly since it has no bearing on her role as an on-air reporter."

VIENNA (Reuters) –
New studies have found direct evidence of a lung cancer risk from the presence of colorless, odorless radon gas in many homes, a United Nations committee said in a report released Tuesday. Officials on the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) said the finding provided the first quantifiable evidence of the risk in homes from radon, long seen as a potential health risk.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies were revising recommendations on maximum levels of radon in homes and workplaces based on the 20 studies involving tens of thousands of lung cancer patients in North America, Europe and China.

"(Up to now) radon has been a typical health risk no one wants to accept or take note of," Wolfgang Weiss, UNSCEAR's vice chairman, told a news conference.

He said the report was significant because previous estimates of radon risks to the public were extrapolated from studies of uranium miners exposed to high levels of the gas.

"In the meantime we've done 20 studies in homes where concentrations are very low, and there we can see a risk, it is small, but it is certainly there," said Weiss.

"You can avoid smoking by just taking personal decisions," he said, referring to the leading cause of lung cancer.

"(But) radon is everywhere. So (you need to) develop strategies to avoid the influx of radon into houses ... It's very simple to seal basements, for example with plastic foil.

Radon is a hard-to-detect radioactive, noble gas that comes from natural decay of uranium. It can accumulate in buildings, seeping in from the ground through cracks in cellars, and may also be emitted by spring waters and hot springs.

Weiss said UNSCEAR's findings had caused a rethink at the WHO and other health policy agencies. "There will be consequences in regulation through the lowering of recommended levels of radon in workplaces and homes."

Some developed countries like Switzerland and Germany have conducted surveys or drawn up maps identifying radon-prone and low-radon regions, but many others provide no such information.

The report said radon concentrations in indoor air were lowest in the Middle East and highest in some European nations, where uranium is highly present underground.

UNSCEAR was set up in 1955 and reports to the U.N. General Assembly. Its research helped bring about the 1963 treaty that banned atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and underpins global standards on radiation protection.

(Editing by Myra MacDonald)

Koko the gorilla is one of few examples of a non-human animal which has had an explicit pet. Using sign language, she requested a cat; her first pet was a kitten named All Ball, to which she was reported to be quite attached and mourned for several days after the cat escaped and was killed by a car.

Raptors, such as eagles and falcons, must be handled very carefully to avoid attacks on their handlers; the sport of falconry is to a large extent ways of avoiding such outcomes, and so they are not really pets in the sense meant here. Large cats cannot become pets, as they do not reliably restrain their impulses (although cheetahs are an exception and have been kept as pets in the past). Nor do the large bears, for similar reasons. Small monkeys can be human companions, but they are notoriously unable to defer their curiosity which leads to much destruction. Several of the ferret and otter varieties can be human companions. Raccoons also fit this example. They adapt easily to almost any environment, but resist domestication.

http://www.boomerangtags.com/

LINCOLN, Neb. – Lincoln police arrested a man who they said made up a story about being robbed to explain why he was walking around a city park naked. Police spokeswoman Katie Flood said the man was arrested and jailed Wednesday night on suspicion of indecent exposure and making a false statement to police.
Police found the man naked in a southwest Lincoln city park on Monday. He told police a man with a gun tried to rob him, but he did not have any money, so the robber took his clothes.
Flood said the man really took off his clothes because he was hot. He walked around naked for about an hour, but afterward, he couldn't find his clothes.
___
Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com

TEHRAN (Reuters) –
In apparent defiance of Iran's supreme leader, a powerful cleric declared his country in crisis after a disputed poll, and tens of thousands of protesters used Friday prayers to stage the biggest show of dissent for weeks.

Clashes erupted later in central Tehran between police and followers of opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi, who still contests the election result that showed hardline President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had been re-elected by a wide margin.

"Police fired tear gas and beat supporters of Mousavi in Keshavarz Boulevard," a witness said, adding that protesters were carrying hundreds of green banners -- Mousavi's campaign color -- and chanting 'Ahmadinejad, resign, resign'."

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate who backed Mousavi's election campaign, said many Iranians had doubts about the official result of the June 12 vote.

"I hope with this sermon we can pass through this period of hardships that can be called a crisis," said the influential cleric, leading prayers for the first time since the poll.

Live state radio broadcasts of Friday prayers at Tehran University, with a dual religious and political sermon delivered by a top cleric, have been a staple of revolutionary Iran.

No senior establishment figure has previously described the post-election turmoil as a crisis for the Islamic Republic.

Rafsanjani's remarks posed a clear challenge to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has upheld the election result and accused foreign powers of fomenting the unrest.

In the streets outside Tehran University, police used tear gas and batons to disperse Mousavi supporters who had flocked to the prayers. At least 15 people were arrested, a witness said.

Mousavi, prime minister in the 1980s, attended the ceremony in his first official public appearance since the presidential vote, which he says was rigged. The authorities deny any fraud.

Rafsanjani, who heads the Council of Experts -- a powerful body that can in theory dismiss the supreme leader -- attacked the way authorities had handled the poll and its aftermath.

"When people are not in the scene and their votes are not there, that government is not Islamic," he said, referring to opposition charges of vote-rigging. "Today is a bitter day."

Rafsanjani said it was vital to restore voters' faith in the system. "That trust cannot be brought back in a day or a night ... We have all been harmed," he added, calling for unity.

He criticized the Guardian Council, a clerical body which vets candidates and considers election complaints, for failing to do its job even though it was given five extra days to make its assessment. The council has denied any irregularities.

HARSH LANGUAGE

Using harsh language against the use of security forces to quell protests, Rafsanjani, who was a close aide to Iran's late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said:

"I speak as a person who has been with the revolution on a daily basis ... We knew what Imam Khomeini wanted. He didn't want the use of terror or arms, even in fights (for the revolution)."

The election stirred the most striking display of internal unrest in Iran, the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, since the 1979 revolution and exposed deep rifts in its ruling elite.

"If the Islamic and Republican sides of the revolution are not preserved, it means we have forgotten the principles of the revolution," said Rafsanjani, who was enraged during the election campaign when Ahmadinejad accused him of corruption.

At least 20 people died in post-election violence. Mousavi and the authorities blame each other for the bloodshed. Riot police and religious Basij militia eventually suppressed the street demonstrations, but Mousavi has remained defiant.

Rafsanjani also demanded the immediate release of people detained in the unrest and called for press curbs to be relaxed. Some of his own relatives, including his daughter Faezeh, were arrested briefly for joining pro-Mousavi rallies.

"It is not necessary for us to have a number of people in prisons ... we should allow them to return to their families," he said, in an emotional tone. "It is not necessary to pressure media. We should allow them to work freely within the law."

Earlier people inside the hall could be heard chanting "Mousavi, Mousavi, we support you," briefly interrupting Rafsanjani's sermon before he quieted the crowd.

Rafsanjani's robust stance appeared to set him on collision course with Khamenei, who has overtly backed Ahmadinejad in a departure from the supreme leader's accepted role as a lofty clerical arbiter above the political fray.

The election has further strained ties between Iran and the West, already at odds over Tehran's nuclear program. Western powers criticized the crackdown. Iran accused them of meddling.

(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian; writing by Alistair Lyon)

For years the workplace commentariat has been nattering on about the no-collar workplace, in which technology would turn the globe into one giant Wi-Fi-enabled kibbutz. A post-face-time world where everybody can TiVo their work.
But there's a growing awareness, buttressed by new research, that working remotely is a more nuanced affair. Some people are simply not wired for the life of the digital nomad. What is to some a broadband paradise is to others an exercise in alienation. "If I work at home for more than two days, I feel a bit isolated," says Cisco Systems (NasdaqGS:CSCO - News) European Marketing Manager Tim Stone. "I tend to go to the office a couple of days a week just to have human interaction."
Three years ago, Stone, along with a group of other Cisco executives, hired the British consultancy Pearn Kandola to help Cisco and its clients better understand the psychological issues at play in mobile work. Pearn Kandola's chief researcher, Stuart Duff, led a team that studied hundreds of workers at Cisco and at other companies worldwide.
Duff assumed it would be the quants, introverts, and reclusive types who would thrive in a virtual work situation. After all, they're the ones who keep their heads burrowed in their cubicles. But it turns out it's the extroverts -- the office gabbers, the life of the break-room party -- who thrive in the land of virtual work. Left on their own, these types of employees are the ones who work closely with clients, chum around with colleagues, and talk it up with bosses. They stay connected no matter where they are.
Shy, disorganized types are better kept in-house. The office environment is more forgiving of the scatterbrained; its structures help provide external reinforcement -- as in your comrade popping his head into your office to remind you that you are late for the meeting (again). There's also something to be said for the social interactions of an office environment. It doesn't require much to keep up basic relationships when you are physically at work.
Duff also thought that mobile workers would tend to be seat-of-the-pants types. Again, the opposite turned out to be true. "Mobile workers are far more organized, personally, than their office-bound counterparts," he says. "They have to be on top of their game the whole time."
Now executives like Stone are rethinking virtual best practices. In light of Duff's research, Stone, whose direct reports are scattered across the globe, is having more face-to-face contact with introverted types, or buddying them up with execs in the same geographic area. For some virtual workers, the key to being productive may be creating an office-like environment in cyberspace. Social network, anyone?

NEW YORK (Reuters) –
Mattel Inc (MAT.N) posted a higher-than-expected quarterly profit on Friday as the world's top toy company cut costs to make up for a dearth in products based on summer movies and the impact of foreign exchange.

Net profit for the owner of Hot Wheels and Barbie rose to $21.5 million, or 6 cents per share, in the second quarter from $11.8 million, or 3 cents per share, a year earlier.

Analysts on average expected 1 cent per share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Sales fell 19 percent to $898.2 million, Mattel said.

(Reporting by Aarthi Sivaraman; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

WASHINGTON – Candidates can't use campaign money to improve their wardrobes, the Federal Election Commission said Thursday in a ruling that nonetheless dismissed a complaint against four congressional candidates who did just that.
The FEC said candidates cannot use campaign money for expenses they would have had whether they were running for office or not, such as clothes. The commission said it decided against punishing the four because the amounts spent were modest and the candidates reimbursed their campaigns.
The four included two Democratic House members — Reps. Loretta Sanchez of California and Rob Andrews of New Jersey — and two former House candidates, Republicans Bill Dew of Utah and William Breazeale of North Carolina.
The ruling was released by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed the complaint against the four congressional candidates and former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr. The FEC found that in Barr's case, a $500 expenditure for a staffer was mistakenly called a clothing allowance rather than compensation.
Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made news last year after the Republican National Committee spent more than $150,000 on designer clothing and accessories for her and her family. The RNC and Palin have said many of the items were returned to stores and the rest would be given to charity.
The commission earlier this year dismissed a CREW complaint over the Palin purchases, saying the ban on use of donations to buy clothing doesn't apply to party money. The commission has asked Congress to add political party funds to the ban.
___
On the Net:
FEC: http://www.fec.gov/
CREW: http://www.citizensforethics.org/

WASHINGTON – Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who recently won his reverse discrimination case at the Supreme Court, said Thursday that an unfavorable ruling by Sonia Sotomayor and other judges "divides people who don't wish to be divided along racial lines." Ricci and his firefighting colleague from New Haven, Conn., Lt. Ben Vargas, denounced the appeals court ruling by Sotomayor and two other judges on the federal appeals court in New York. But in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, neither man voiced opposition to Sotomayor's confirmation as a Supreme Court justice.
Vargas, in fact, identified himself as Hispanic and congratulated the 55-year-old judge who would be the high court's first Hispanic.
Ricci, Vargas and other firefighters sued New Haven after the city threw out the results of a promotion exam for lieutenants and captains after too few minorities did well.
A trial judge dismissed the lawsuit, a decision upheld by Sotomayor's appellate panel in a one-paragraph opinion that has been criticized as much for its brevity as the result.
Late last month, the Supreme Court found in favor of the complaining firefighters in a 5-4 ruling that reversed the appeals court. Given the topic — race discrimination — Sotomayor's nomination and the timing, the decision has become a focus of her confirmation hearing.
Sotomayor testified repeatedly that she was bound by earlier rulings to reach the conclusion she did. Her appeals court colleague and one-time mentor, Jose Cabranes, issued an unusual opinion after Sotomayor's panel decision disagreeing with her.
Senate Republicans invited the men to testify on a panel that included witnesses both for and against Sotomayor's confirmation. Their appearance followed the conclusion of Sotomayor's four days in the witness chair.
Ricci told the panel that "achievement is neither limited nor determined by one's race, but by one's skills, dedication, commitment and character."
The court rulings against him reflected a flawed belief "that citizens should be reduced to racial statistics," he said. "It only divides people who don't wish to be divided along racial lines."
Ricci said that the appeals court ruling also called attention to his dyslexia even though the case "had nothing to do with it."
"It had everything to do with ensuring our command officers were competent to answer the call and our right to advance in our profession based on merit regardless of race," he said.
Vargas, one of only two Hispanics who scored well enough to be considered for promotion, said in response to questions from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that he had been called disloyal to the Hispanic community for joining the lawsuit.

Creatures that are the most common choices for live foods, ranging from feeder mice to crickets and mealworms, generally are bred and raised in captivity themselves, and can often be found both through local pet stores and from wholesalers or "farms" that breed them specifically for live food sales.

Animals that are commonly fed live food include bearded dragons and other lizards, various types of snake, turtles, and carnivorous fish, though other animals, such as skunks (which are sometimes kept as pets), being omnivorous, can also eat some live food, though it is unknown how common this is in practice.

Bluebirds