Latest news about Entertainment And Music and Environment and more

A new report from security services provider ScanSafe finds that companies are at increasing risk of having employees inadvertently download backdoors and password stealers onto corporate computers from Web sites that have malicious software hidden on them.

A company in ScanSafe’s focus group faced a nearly 500 percent greater risk of exposure to those threats in September than was faced in January of this year, according to ScanSafe’s Global Threat Report released on Tuesday.

Companies in the energy sector are at greater risk from Web-based malware than other industries, the report concludes. The energy sector, worldwide, faces a 189 percent higher risk of exposure from workers visiting sites with malware on them than other industries, followed by the pharmaceutical and chemicals industry, construction and engineering, and media and publishing.

“On a more positive note, government agencies were at 0 percent, which indicates they were at neither higher nor lower rates of exposure compared to other verticals,” Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe, writes in a blog post.

The industry with the lowest rate of exposure was aviation and automotive. Landesman says she can’t say exactly why one sector is more at risk than another but expects to release more findings soon that could help answer that question.

Overall, there was a flattening in the volume of threats in August and September, although ScanSafe is seeing a spike in October. Landesman says things could get ugly from a malware perspective throughout the rest of this year.

The holidays tend to be busy for socially engineered-types of malware, Landesman said. Plus, “the economy is hurting people’s finances and this could encourage criminals to up their efforts to gain more money through illicit means,” she said.

Also on Tuesday, security firm MessageLabs released statistics on the numbers of phishing attacks related to the banking crisis.

MessageLabs intercepted 7,000 phishing attacks exploiting Bank of America on October 16 and 15,000 on October 17, reaching 125,000 total e-mails over that weekend. American Express was the focus of a phishing attack that started on October 20 and reached 35,000 e-mails for the day.

The Cutwail botnet, which controls more than 1 million active unsuspecting zombie computers on the Internet and is believed to be the largest botnet, is responsible for those phishing attempts, MessageLabs said.

If you are feeling itchy, the cause may be stress, you are facing.
Stress may activate immune cells in your skin and cause the familiar yet irritating sensation.

It’s found in a study that
stress can trigger an outbreak in patients suffering from
inflammatory skin conditions.

Researchers lead by Petra Arck of Charité, University of Medicine, Berlin and McMaster University in Canada, hypothesised that
stress could exacerbate skin disease by increasing the number of immune cells in the skin.

The researchers found that skin provides the first level of protection from infection, where white blood cells (WBCs) attack the invading bacteria and viruses. Immune cells in the skin, however, can over-react resulting in inflammatory skin diseases.

This cross talk between the
stress perception, which involves the brain and the skin, is mediated through the “brain-skin connection”. Yet, little is known about the means by which
stress aggravates skin diseases.

The report will appear in the November issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

Gold hit a one-week high as the dollar weakened sharply on Wednesday, and the precious metal stayed firm after the Federal Reserve cut U.S. interest rates, as markets had expected.

Gold’s rise came amid strength across the entire commodity sector as global markets welcomed the Fed’s recession-fighting rate cut. Silver and palladium, sometimes seen as industrial metals, also rallied as stocks kept rising.

The U.S. Federal Reserve lowered its target for overnight bank lending rate by half a percentage point to 1 percent, the lowest since June 2004.

“I think it has already been factored into the market, honestly. That’s why gold had these substantial rallies,” Bruce Dunn, vice president of trading at New Jersey-based Auramet Trading.

Dunn, however, contended that a rate cut alone would do little to boost the ailing U.S. economy.

“Nothing has changed in the last 48 hours. They cut rates, so what? They have been cutting rates for a long time, and things have progressively gotten worse,” Dunn said.

Spot gold rallied to $773.40 an ounce and was at $749.85 an ounce at 3:06 p.m. EDT (1906 GMT), against its Tuesday close of $744.30.

U.S. gold futures for December delivery settled up $13.50, or 1.8 percent, at $754.00 an ounce on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement that “The pace of economic activity appears to have slowed markedly, owing importantly to a decline in consumer expenditures.”

The Fed said it expected inflation to moderate in coming quarters due to declining prices for energy and other commodities and prospects for weaker economic activity.

Gold has fallen about 20 percent since it hit a high of $931 on Oct. 10 as financial market losses prompted investors to liquidate commodities and other assets.

“Now with more interest rate cuts and more aggressive action by central banks, the indiscriminate selling of financial assets, including gold, has subsided,” said Jeffrey Nichols, managing director of American Precious Metals Advisors.

The dollar fell against other major currencies, as rising stock markets boosted risk appetite and traders factored in a substantial Fed rate cut later in the day.

Rises in other commodity markets help boost gold prices. The broad-based Reuters/Jefferies CRB index jumped 6 percent.

Platinum fell to close at $789 an ounce from its Tuesday close of $809.00, but rebounded smartly in late trade from a session low of $755.50 an ounce.

Reports of production cutbacks and falling sales among car manufacturers have erased 65 percent from platinum’s value since March. The automotive industry, which uses the metal in catalytic converters, accounts for more than half of global platinum demand.

Palladium was at $189.50, up from its Tuesday close of $176, having surged more than 10 percent to a two-week high of $195 on speculation the sell-off in the metal was overdone.

Spot silver was at $9.82 an ounce, after rising to a one-week high of $10.02, against its previous finish of $9.16.

The much-delayed launch of a European satellite designed to monitor Earth’s gravitational field is unlikely to take place before February, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday.

The Gravity field and state-steady Ocean Circulation Explorer, or GOCE, should have been launched on September 10 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome 800 kilometres (500 miles) north of Moscow.

The operation has been postponed several times, after a problem was identified in the guidance and navigation subsystem in the launcher’s upper stage, called the Breeze KM.

“The necessary hardware changes will require a minimum of two months of additional work by the manufacturer,” ESA said in a press release here.

“As a consequence, the launch of GOCE cannot take place earlier than February 2009; however, the exact launch date will only be decided at a later stage once the corrective measures have been fully implemented and validated.”

GOCE is part of ESA’s “Earth Explorer” programme, initiated in 1999, to deepen understanding about some of the fundamentals of the planet — its atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and interior.

The satellite’s launcher is a Rockot, a derivative of a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile operated by a joint venture between EADS Astrium and the Khrunichev Space Centre.

Major Australian food and drink manufacturers Friday agreed not to advertise junk food during children’s television programs, as they face growing public pressure about childhood obesity.

The Australian Food and Grocery Council’s voluntary code commits companies to directly targeting children under 12 only when it promotes healthy dietary choices and lifestyles.

But the code, which is supported by some 150 companies accounting for 80 percent of Australian sales in highly processed food and drink sectors, will not include hamburger giant McDonald’s and competitor KFC.

The council said the new rules will apply to all television, radio, print, cinema and internet advertising as well as the use of licensed cartoon and other characters aimed at children.

“The aim of the initiative is to ensure that only healthy foods and beverages are advertised during television shows predominantly watched by primary school-aged children,” the council’s chief executive Kate Carnell said.

The self-regulating code comes as governments in several state governments move to introduce tough laws banning junk food advertising targeting children as they attempt to counter childhood obesity.

Carnell said the self-regulated code, which will start by early 2009 and be overseen by an independent arbiter, would be more effective than new laws.

But the Obesity Policy Coalition, which campaigns for obesity prevention, said children would still be exposed to television and other fast food advertising while watching mainstream programmes.

“That’s a real problem because the highest rating programs for kids aren’t programs that are made for kids,” the coalition’s Jane Martin told national news agency AAP.

A report issued by Baker Heart Institute in June found that obesity was the major threat to Australia’s future health, with an estimated nine million of the 21 million population obese or overweight.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide India with a loan of $800 million to make Himachal Pradesh the country’s ‘hydropower state’, the lender said Thursday.

The eight-year loan package will help finance the construction of several run-of-river hydropower generating plants that will bring in combined capacity of 808 MW for the small mountainous state, ADB said in a statement.

Himachal Pradesh has abundant water resources, with five major rivers flowing from the western Himalayas. Its power generation potential is 20,415 MW, about 25 percent of India’s total hydropower potential, out of which only 6,150 MW has been developed, according to the statement.

In 2006, the state government approved a hydropower policy that aims to make Himachal Pradesh the ‘hydropower state’ of India.

‘Himachal Pradesh’s focus on hydropower development will provide jobs to state residents and will further the state’s and the country’s goal of maximizing this clean, indigenous resource to help meet its energy needs,’ said Andrew Jeffries, an energy economist at ADB’s South Asia Department.

The multi-tranche financing facility, which will be allocated based on the readiness of the project, allows ADB to engage the state government in a continuous long-term dialogue on its clean energy policies, said the Manila-based development bank.

The projects will provide affordable and reliable power supply to local residents and industrial users in the state, ADB said.

Any excess supply can be exported to other parts of India, It added.

At present, ADB and the Himachal Pradesh government have identified two projects ready for financing through the first loan tranche of $150 million, including the construction of the 111-MW Sawra Kuddu Hydroelectric Project on the Pabber river in Shimla district, and civil works for the 65-MW Kashang I Hydroelectric Project located in Kinnaur district.

Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is looking at a tieup with the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) to give real-time information to farmers through the just launched cell phone-based agricultural information service.

Rahul Mirchandani, national vice-chairman of the CII’s Young Indians, who was also the conference chairman of Agromax 2008, said: “We are talking to the MCX for a probable tieup for commodity price alerts.”

The service will be provided to around 20,000 farmers across 20 states and 325 districts in India at a nominal fee of Rs 100 a year.

“Registered farmers will get alternate-day weather alerts on their mobile phones, apart from soil consultations done by us,” said Mirchandani. “They can also send their queries to us. The idea is to provide a two-way platform.”

“The target is to tap farmers aged between 25 and 40 who are opinion-builders in a region. They will help educate other farmers in the region,” Mirchandani said.

He was speaking at the Agromax, a national agribusiness conference organised by the CII.

On soil consultation, he said, “We will give the farmers code numbers for the samples given by them. We can advise them by using that code.”

Mirchandani said the CII is also planning to launch a mobile soil-testing laboratory soon.

U.S. Special Forces soldiers conducting a daring nighttime operation freed a kidnapped American working for the Army Corps of Engineers — the first known hostage rescue by American forces in Afghanistan.

The American, who was abducted in mid-August, had been held in a growing insurgent stronghold 30 miles west of Kabul, U.S. military officials told The Associated Press. They said several insurgents were killed in last week’s mission to free him.

Taliban militants have kidnapped dozens of international aid workers, journalists and other foreigners in recent years and have demanded large ransoms or the release of imprisoned Taliban fighters for their freedom. Increasingly aggressive crime syndicates have also raked in big money by kidnapping wealthy Afghans and foreigners and demanding ransoms.

Hostage rescues are rarely attempted and are difficult to pull off successfully. Only two such missions are known to have occurred, both in 2007. In one, both Italian captives were wounded in a raid by Italian commandos.

Last week’s rescue came to the attention of the AP after a U.S. military official sought to bring its successful outcome into the public eye. Officials declined to reveal even the smallest detail or the captive’s identity, saying they did not want to compromise military tactics or the man’s safety.

Three U.S. military officials told the AP that Special Forces troops were able to locate the kidnapper’s hideaway in the Nirkh district of Wardak province outside Kabul, but would not specify how. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

In the case of the rescued American, who had lived in Afghanistan for several years, it was not known whether any ransom demands were made. But a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan said growing insecurity imperils its work to rebuild the country.

“This guy didn’t have any money at all. It was like a personal life mission for him to help others,” said Bruce J. Huffman, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan.

“We all felt sick about it, because he was never going to be able to pay a ransom. He’s over here helping people and they’re trying to make a buck off him.”

News of the rescue comes on the heels of the targeted killing Monday of a British-South African aid worker by Taliban gunmen who accused her of spreading her Christian faith.

“The hard reality is that more areas are insecure today than they were a year ago. There continues to be a wave of kidnapping — even in the last few days,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born U.S. ambassador to the U.N. told the U.S.-Afghan Business Matchmaking Conference in Washington on Tuesday. He said attacks are up 30 percent this year.

Mohammad Hazra Janan, the head of the provincial council in Wardak, where the American was kidnapped, said the number of abductions are “rising every day.” He said he knows that large ransoms are being paid.

“There’s no rule of law. The government can’t prevent these crimes,” he said. “Of course the paying of a ransom only encourages that business to grow. But one effect on society is that the businessmen will flee the country.”

The Army Corps of Engineers’ work building roads and projects that provide clean water and power helps extend the reach of the Afghan government and stimulates economic growth.

“Security has been a real problem, and the Corps of Engineers has been working diligently to build facilities for the Afghan National Army and police in order to foster a secure and stable environment,” Huffman said.

The Corps takes precautions to mitigate risk, he said, though he provided no details.

“No one would want to come over here and work if they thought something was going to happen to them,” Huffman said. “All our folks are volunteers. Everyone has different reasons why they volunteer and come, but I think most of the people we have get a lot of joy knowing they’re making a difference and helping to build a nation.”

Chris Klawitter, a German entrepreneur working in Afghanistan, said he knows several Afghan businessmen or their relatives who have been kidnapped.

“Routes are checked more carefully now,” he said. “The issue is not the Taliban or al-Qaida, it’s more criminal activity which is the main obstacle in traveling nowadays.”

Six farm employees were charged with animal abuse and neglect Wednesday in connection with a video obtained by an animal-rights group that showed workers abusing pigs.

Authorities in rural Greene County northwest of Des Moines began investigating about a month ago after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a video of workers at a farm in Bayard hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about jamming rods into the anuses of sows. The farm is owned by MowMar Farms LLP of Fairmont, Minn., and supplies Hormel Foods Corp. of Austin, Minn.

Sheriff Tom Heater said warrants have been issued for the workers, who are facing misdemeanor charges that include livestock abuse, aiding and abetting livestock abuse and livestock neglect. The most serious counts carry a maximum two-year sentence.

According to a news release from Heater’s office, four of the workers no longer work at the plant, while two others are still employed there. Once they are arrested, they will have hearings before a Greene County magistrate.

PETA had sought the prosecution of 18 people on animal cruelty violations.

Heater said some workers shown in the video using electric prods won’t be charged because there is debate on whether the devices are reasonable for use in livestock farming.

Daphna Nachminovitch, vice president of PETA’s Cruelty Investigations Department, said the group respects the sheriff’s judgment and trusts that a solid case has been built based on its undercover video.

“Charges against any number of pig factory farmers in the nation’s top pork producing state should deter the industry’s workers from continuing to abuse and neglect these intelligent, playful and sensitive animals,” she said in a statement.

The sheriff said MowMar Farms has been cooperative in the investigation. The company has said it had owned the farm for less than a month before the video came out.

“I think once the charges are out they will proceed with anything they need to do — firings, restructuring, training,” Heater said.

Earlier this week, PETA released additional video allegedly showing the manager of the farm kicking and shocking an injured sow. PETA said it confirmed that the manager still works at the farm through a telephone call to the facility.

MowMar didn’t indicate what might happen to the manager, but has said it has fired other workers that have been documented abusing pigs. It said its investigation is continuing.

“It is important that the investigation is allowed to complete its work to ensure that any termination and/or discipline is justified and the rights of employees are respected,” the company said in a statement this week.

Heater said his department knew nothing about the abuse at the farm until the PETA footage was released last month. Asked what he thought of the video images, Heater said some of the workers’ actions were “uncalled for.”

“I was a farm boy. The deputy investigating is a farm boy. You don’t have to beat animals … you just have to deal with them and wait,” he said.

The Peace Corps will return to war-ravaged Liberia on Sunday for the first time since fighting erupted nearly two decades ago, its goal to help rebuild the West African nation’s shattered education system.

Liberia, founded by freed American slaves in the 19th century, has struggled to turn itself around since the brutal war ended in 2003 and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took office two years later. The return of the Peace Corps, which pulled out shortly after rebels invaded the country in late 1989, is a sign of confidence in Sirleaf, a Harvard-edcuated economist and Africa’s first elected female head of state.

“Sirleaf has done a tremendous job of bringing this country back from chaos and we want to be part of moving her country forward as rapidly as possible,” Peace Corps director Ronald A. Tschetter told The Associated Press in an interview from Washington, D.C. “This is a huge step for us to go back.”

Liberia’s back-to-back wars, which lasted from 1989 to 2003, sparked vicious factional fighting that killed an estimated 250,000 and displaced millions. Charles Taylor, who launched the 1989 invasion, is now jailed in The Hague facing war crimes charges.

Tschetter said Sirleaf had been calling for the Peace Corps to return and urged it to focus on what she saw as the most crucial need: education.

The 12 volunteers arrive Sunday and will be sworn in the following day. They come from a program called Peace Corps Response, which mobilizes former volunteers for short-term humanitarian assignments worldwide. Tschetter said he hopes their experience will enable them to “hit the ground running” and get the program moving faster.

Volunteers normally serve two-year stints, but the first group will stay eight or nine months — about the same length as the school year — as the program begins rebuilding. Their numbers are expected to double or triple by the end of 2009, and if all goes well, the program will reach 75 to 200 volunteers within a few years, Tschetter said.

The volunteers, aged 24 to 68, will be assigned to rural teacher training institutes where they will mentor administrators attempting to revitalize the country’s teacher training infrastructure, the Peace Corps said in a statement. Others will work with local libraries, parent teacher associations, local high schools, and health training programs.

The statement quoted Sirleaf as saying “such short-term projects aimed at raising the capacities and capabilities of Liberian teachers would have a profound impact upon civil society as a whole.”

Earlier Wednesday, Tschetter met with Sirleaf in Washington and said two officials with her — the Economics minister and Liberia’s U.S. ambassador — had been taught by Peace Corps volunteers in the 1980s. “Clearly the 4,400 who have served (before in Liberia) have made a tremendous impact,” Tschetter said.

Late U.S. President John F. Kennedy founded the Peace Corps in 1961, challenging college students to serve their country in the cause of peace. Since then, the Peace Corps has sent more than 190,000 volunteers to 139 countries around the world to help people in developing nations and serve as goodwill ambassadors for America.

About 8,000 American volunteers are currently serving overseas.

Political spats or conflict have forced the suspension of several programs this year. After Bolivia’s president expelled the U.S. ambassador for allegedly inciting opposition protests in September, the Peace Corps pulled out its 113 volunteers.

The Corps’ program in Georgia was also suspended when Russian tanks and warplanes invaded in August. The Kenya program was suspended at the start of this year after disputed presidential elections sparked nationwide violence, but volunteers began returning in June, Tschetter said.