Fury at new crop of Net nude photos

A fresh set of semi-nude photographs said to depict a pop star circulated on the internet yesterday - as a suspect arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of posting earlier pictures appeared in court.

The latest pictures, of a woman resembling Canto-pop singer Joey Yung Cho-yee, were found on a mainland internet forum.

Yung joins a list of celebrities including singer-actor Edison Chen Koon-hei, Gillian Chung Yan-tung of girl duo Twins, actress Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi and former actress Bobo Chen, all of whom have been rumoured to be previously romantically linked to Chen.

Women's rights groups condemned the internet community, warning that ordinary women also suffer. One group said it received calls for help concerning personal photos being shared on the internet after breaking up with boyfriends.

Yung's record company, Emperor Entertainment Group, did not return calls for comment. Yung and Chung are managed by the same company, which was the first to report the case to the police this week. Chen's management also made a report.

The Women's Foundation said circulating such pictures was disrespectful to women. The Federation of Trade Unions said it was no different from sexual harassment of women.

Association Concerning Sexual Violence Against Women executive director Linda Wong Sau-yung said she was worried more photos, digitally manipulated or not, would be uploaded because of the debate. Her group had been receiving calls for help from women whose private photos had been uploaded.

"On average we receive two to three cases each month. These pictures were taken when they were in love with their boyfriends but after breaking up, these photos were uploaded [by their ex-boyfriends] as revenge," she said. "Women should be extremely cautious if they are asked to pose for these photos."

Meanwhile, Edison Chen, who was said to be overseas, updated his internet blog yesterday for the first time since last Saturday, before the photographs started appearing.

He posted still shots from his new film Sniper, directed by Dante Lam. The pictures show a fierce-faced Chen posing as if about to fire a rifle, with the cryptic caption: "CAPS GET PEELED and ya boy EDC claps back."

Internet service providers (ISPs) have been asked to keep a close eye on the circulation of indecent or obscene articles.

Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association chairman York Mok said the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority suggested suspending membership if an ISP failed to comply with the code of practice, which includes guidelines on circulating indecent material.

He said this would be impossible because "there are too many internet forums and too many users... It is unfair to transfer all the responsibilities to the ISPs. It works better if we act on complaints."

Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares.

The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo's board, is 62% above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday.

Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.

It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.

In a conference call, Microsoft's Kevin Johnson said that the combination of the two companies would create an entity that could better compete with Google.

"Today the market [for online search and advertising] is increasingly dominated by one player," he said.

Chairman quit

Yahoo confirmed that it has received an unsolicited offer and said that its board would evaluate the proposal, "carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders."

If Yahoo accepted the offer, competition authorities both in the US and the European Union would be likely to investigate the tie-up.

Yahoo chief executive, Jerry Yang, announced on Tuesday that he intended to lay off 1,000 staff as part of a restructuring plan.

Terry Semel, who stepped down as chief executive last June, also quit as non-executive chairman on Thursday.

Microsoft said that Yahoo shareholders could choose to receive either cash or shares.

Yahoo shares have fallen 46% since reaching a year-high of $34.08 in October. They opened 51.2% higher.

Microsoft opened 4.3% lower while Google shares fell 6.8%.

"Ultimately this corporate marriage was forced by the rise of Google, which has grown into a serious competitor for both Microsoft as a software company and Yahoo as an internet portal," said Tim Weber, business editor of the BBC News website.

"It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google."

'Exorbitant premium'

According to its letter to Yahoo, Microsoft attempted to enter talks about a deal a year ago, but was rebuffed because Yahoo was confident about the "potential upside" presented by the reorganisation and operational activities that were being put in place at the time.

"A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved," Microsoft's letter said.

But there has been some concern about the price that Microsoft is offering.

BBC News

Don't eat too much over the Lunar New Year

Festive fare will pile on pounds

A dietitian has warned people about eating too much over the Lunar New Year, pointing out that a typical holiday meal packs an extra 400 calories.

"The problem is not the ingredients themselves but the sauce and seasoning, as well as how the dishes are prepared," said Leslie Chan Kwok-pan, a registered dietitian and consultant with the Hospital Authority's Health InfoWorld.

He used steamed fish as an example. "Fish itself doesn't have much fat, but soy sauce and oil used for flavouring contain a high volume of salt and energy."

Other common dishes include mushroom and vegetables in oyster sauce, fried chicken and deep-fried crab claws. After the eight hot dishes, restaurants serve fried rice, yifu noodles and desserts such as rice balls in sweet soup.

Chinese restaurants usually offer eight or nine hot dishes on a Lunar New Year dinner menu because these two digits are considered lucky numbers.

"A person will take 1,200 to 1,400 calories from a meal in such a menu - 400 more than the average amount of calories in a normal meal," Mr Chan said, adding the extra calories gained were equivalent to a 45-minute walk.

A man needs between 2,000 and 2,500 calories a day, while a woman should consume 1,500 to 1,800 calories, and a 12-year-old 1,800.

Mr Chan suggested that people could replace high-fat dishes with some healthier options if they wanted to keep the lucky numbers. They could also refrain from forcing themselves to finish all the food on the table. "Elderly people love to encourage youngsters to clear the dishes because they don't want to waste the food. In fact, they can take the leftovers away."

He suggested that people who planned to cook their own dinner stick to the "three low, one high" principle: low sugar, low salt, low oil and high fibre.

"Many food ingredients in Chinese cuisine are good for health, it's just the way we cook them that gives them too much fat and salt."

SCMP Jan 31, 2008

Nikon D60 hitting in February for US$800?

We had all the vitals last night except for the price. Lucky for us, the D60 showed up today over at Henry's with a pricetag of $800 (HK$6,240), not bad at all for this low-end DSLR. Nikon still hasn't said anything officially beyond "pricing information will be available approximately 30 days prior to sales availability," and we haven't seen the camera, which arrives in February, available for pre-order elsewhere, but $800 seems like as good a guess as any.

Engadget.

Asteroid to make close approach

An asteroid some 250m (600ft) across is about to sweep past the Earth.

There is no chance of it hitting the planet, but astronomers will train telescopes and radar on the object to learn as much about it as they can.

The asteroid - which carries the rather dull designation 2007 TU24 - will pass by at a distance of 538,000km (334,000 miles), just outside Moon's orbit.

Scientists who study so called near-Earth objects say similar-sized rocks come by every few years.

The moment of closest approach for 2007 TU24 is 0833 GMT. The asteroid is only expected to be visible through amateur telescopes that are three inches (7.6cm) or larger.

Detailed observations of 2007 TU24 could reveal whether the asteroid is a solid object or simply a loose pile of space rubble.

Knowledge of how asteroids are put together will be key to working out how we might defend ourselves against future, more threatening rocks.

An explosive attack - so popular with Hollywood scriptwriters - may not be the most effective approach. Many scientists believe that giving a hostile object a gentle nudge over a long period of time may in fact be our best strategy.

Given the estimated number of near-Earth asteroids of this size (about 7,000 discovered and undiscovered objects, says the US space agency), an object similar to 2007 TU24 would be expected to pass this close to Earth, on average, about every five years or so.

The average interval between actual Earth impacts for an object of this size would be about 37,000 years, Nasa adds.

A little over a year-and-a-half ago, a 600m-wide (2,000ft) asteroid known as 2004 XP14 flew past the Earth at just about the Earth-Moon distance.

The asteroids' names include the year in which they were first identified.

BBC News

Weekend snow storms wreak havoc across the mainland

The worst snows to hit parts of the mainland for 50 years killed at least a dozen people at the weekend, state media said, with thousands more injured as they headed home for the Lunar New Year holiday.

The conditions brought traffic to a standstill in eight provinces, cut off a key rail link and left thousands of vehicles marooned on icy highways, reports said, with the cold snap causing power cuts across more than half the country.

A bus that overturned on an icy freeway in eastern Jiangxi Province left five dead early on Sunday, including at least two children, Xinhua news agency said, with sub-zero temperatures forecast for the next three days.

Heavy snow in south central China, meanwhile, snarled roads, railways and airports with the bad weather expected to worsen as millions of travellers head home for the Lunar New Year holiday, known elsewhere as Chinese New Year.

In the mountainous Guizhou Province in the southwest, a hospital in the capital city of Guiyang has received at least 1,500 patients in the last five days, most suffering fractures after falling on slippery roads.

The local government said bad weather had also stranded more than 40,000 passengers in at least 5,000 broken-down vehicles on highways between Guizhou and the neighbouring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

'We're trying to provide them with food and water, but several have passed out in the cold, including a new mother and her one-month-old baby,'€ said Huang Zhengfu, secretary-general with the prefectural government.

Elsewhere, up to 150,000 passengers were stuck at the Guangzhou railway station, the southern end of the key rail link to the capital Beijing, with numbers expected to grow to up to 600,000 by Monday, the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported.

The city has issued emergency orders to help cope with the swelling crowds and called on local universities and other public facilities to provide shelter for stranded passengers, it said.

Lunar New Year, which falls on February 7, is China's most important holiday, when millions of people travel for annual family reunions.

Authorities expects more than 2.2 billion trips will be made by either rail, air or bus during the Lunar New Year travel period that runs from January 19 to March 2.

According to Xinhua, up to 60,000 people in 20,000 vehicles were stranded on a stretch of highway in the central Hunan province, one of the worst hit areas where seven people have died.

Senior government officials held an emergency teleconference late Sunday to discuss the power disruptions, Xinhua said.

'So far, 17 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have suffered blackouts, and power grids in central China's Hubei, Hunan provinces and south China's Guizhou and Guangdong provinces have been seriously damaged,'€ Xinhua quoted Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan saying.

According to China Central Television, seven airports in the hardest hit regions, including those in the major cities of Changsha, Nanjing and Hefei were closed on Saturday due to icy conditions.

Some airports were expected to reopen soon, but the one in Changsha would remain shut throughout Sunday, reports said.

Major highways in Guizhou, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Fujian and Anhui provinces reopened by around noon Sunday, but were expected to be closed in the evening, with more heavy snow and freezing rain forecast throughout the region, the China News Service said.

Due to icy roads, long-distance bus travel was largely curtailed for much of the last week in the areas hardest hit by the snowfall.

State television showed footage of thousands of motorists and long-distance truck drivers stranded on stretches of road as heavy snow brought traffic to a standstill.

SCMP Jan 28, 2008

Australian girl changes blood group, immune system

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian teenage girl has become the world's first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a "one-in-six-billion miracle."

Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed.

"It's like my second chance at life," Brennan told local media, recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of transplant surgery. "It's kind of hard to believe."

Brennan's body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her body's immune system.

Her new liver's blood stem cells then invaded her body's bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.

Doctors from Sydney's Westmead Childrens' Hospital said they had no explanation for Brennan's recovery, detailed in the latest edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

"There was no precedent for this having happened at any other time, so we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants," Michael Stormon, a pediatric hepatologist, told local radio.

Stuart Dorney, the hospital's former transplant unit head, said Brennan's treatment could lead to breakthroughs in organ transplant treatment, because normally the immune system of recipients attacked the transplanted tissue.

"We now need to go back over everything that happened to Demi-Lee and see why, and if it can be replicated," said Dorney.

"We think because we used a young person's liver and Demi-Lee had low white blood cells, that could have been a reason," he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Rejection is normally treated with a combination of drugs, although chronic rejection is irreversible.

Only seven-in-10 transplant operations in Australia are successful after a five-year period due to rejection complications.

Reuters