 A 17 % drop in overseas travelers to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks has cost the country more than $15 billion in lost taxes and nearly 200,000 jobs, a study showed Tuesday. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has tightened security measures and toughened its visa and entry requirements. As a result, the country was ranked as the world’s most unfriendly to visitors in a survey conducted last year of travelers from 16 nations. “Our economic security is suffering from a drastic decline in overseas travelers and we are missing an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen America’s image around the globe,” said Stevan Porter, president of Intercontinental Hotels Group and chairman of the association’s Discover America Partnership. “We are in the midst of a travel crisis.” The study released Tue by the Travel Industry Association said the U.S. market share of the $6 trillion worldwide travel market had dropped to ...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
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Editor - 18:20:00 01-23-07
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 Fence cuts Palestinian cave dwellers off from wood |
Home sweet home for Suleiman Hawamdeh, a 73-year-old father of 10, is a deep cave in a barren West Bank hillside separated by a barbed-wire fence from a modern Jewish settlement. Hawamdeh and 120 other Palestinians inhabit the cluster of caves known locally as Quina Foq, which straddles the so-called "Green Line" that separated the Jewish state and the West Bank before the 1967 Middle East war. They draw their water from wells and gather wood for cooking much like their ancestors, who first settled here during Ottoman rule more than a century ago. Quina Foq's inhabitants eke out a living farming and herding sheep in the rocky hills about 40 km (25 miles) south of the West Bank city of Hebron. Many of the children go to school in the nearest Palestinian town, As-Samu': an hour's donkey trek. The cave dwellers share a satellite dish and a television set, which is powered a few hours each night by a car battery....
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2817467
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Editor - 18:12:00 01-23-07
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| Pig Farmer: Serial Murder Claims "Hogwash" In Largest-Ever Canadian Murder Trial, Man Denies Killing 26 Women, Despite Earlier Videotaped Confession |
A Canadian pig farmer whom prosecutors said confessed to killing 49 women told police in a videotaped interview shown to jurors Tuesday that the allegations against him were "hogwash," yet concedes he's "a bad dude." Robert Pickton, 56, is charged with killing 26 women, mostly prostitutes and drug addicts who vanished from a drug-ridden Vancouver neighborhood in the 1990s. He has pleaded not guilty to the first six counts. A separate trial will be held for the other 20 murder charges. If convicted, Pickton faces life in prison. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976. The jurors in the most sensational murder trial Canada has ever faced began watching 11 hours of videotaped interviews Tuesday. A day earlier, prosecutors said the interviews would go on to show Pickton telling an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 women and intended to make it "an even 50" before he got sloppy and was caught....
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/23/world/main2391892.shtml?source=RSSattr=World_2391892
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Editor - 17:02:00 01-23-07
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| Mummified baby found in storage unit |
The partially mummified body of a baby, wrapped in 1950s newspapers, was found Monday by a woman going through her deceased parents' belongings in a southeast Florida storage facility, according to police. "It was a baby boy, partially mummified," said Delray Beach police spokesman Jeff Messer. "The woman was pretty upset when she found it. You could make out the features pretty clearly." The child had hair, he said. The body was in a small suitcase, which was placed inside a larger suitcase, said Messer, who viewed the remains. "It was spooky," Messer said. The baby was wrapped in a newspaper called The Daily Times, dated January 9, 1957, police said. Authorities are not sure where it was published, but were checking the New York and New Jersey area because the couple lived there before retiring in Florida....
http://The partially mummified body of a baby, wrapped in 1950s newspapers, was found Monday by a woman going through her deceased parents' belongings in a southeast Florida storage facility, according to police. "It was a baby boy, partially mummified," said Delray Beach police spokesman Jeff Messer. "The woman was pretty upset when she found it. You could make out the features pretty clearly." The child had hair, he said. The body was in a small suitcase, which was placed inside a larger suitcase, said Messer, who viewed the remains. "It was spooky," Messer said. The baby was wrapped in a newspaper called The Daily Times, dated January 9, 1957, police said. Authorities are not sure where it was published, but were checking the New York and New Jersey area because the couple lived there before retiring in Florida....
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Editor - 16:58:00 01-23-07
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| Genetically modified chickens lay drugs in eggs |
British scientists have succeeded in producing multiple generations of genetically altered, or transgenic, hens that produce functional pharmaceutical proteins in the whites of their eggs.To transfer drug-making genes into chickens, Dr. Helen M. Sang, from the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, UK, and her associates used a lentivirus carrier from which all viral coding sequences were deleted. The genetic material was replaced with the gene regulating ovalbumin production combined with genes for making human interferon or an antibody targeting malignant melanoma. "This construct is used to incorporate new protein genes into the chicken chromosome," Dr. Sang told Reuters Health. ...
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2817472
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Editor - 16:56:00 01-23-07
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| Cyber criminals move focus to web |
Cyber criminals will increasingly turn their attention to the web & away from e-mail security in 2007, according to a new report. Security firm Sophos found that the US hosts more than a third of websites hosting malicious code, as well as sending more spam than other nations. Lax security on US-hosted websites is one of the key reasons the US remains a hotspot for cyber crime, said Sophos. The UK hosts 0.5% of so-called malware & sends out 1.9% of spam. The number of websites being infected with malware malicious software is on the rise with Sophos uncovering an average of 5,000 new URLs hosting malicious code each day. "The internet now represents the easiest way for cyber criminals to gain entry to corporate networks, as more users are accessing unregulated sites, downloading applications & streaming audio/video," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant for Sophos. "A great many businesses aren't geared up to gain insight into users' online behaviour, let alone control it"...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6290413.stm
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Editor - 12:06:00 01-23-07
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