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Football legend Sir Bobby Charlton has launched a new campaign he calls "There Must be a Better Way" to find a faster method to clear anti-personnel landmines. The initiative which comes under his "Laureus Sport for Good Foundation" and involves physicists, mathematicians and electronic engineers from the University of Manchester and Lancaster University. In addition the Mines Advisory Group, a mine clearance charity, and the security systems company Rapiscan are involved. Charlton first became interested in the problem of clearing anti-perso

This week the United Kingdom's Ofcom ruled that ITV2 "breached standards" with a repeat of The Montel Williams Show in which Pam and Craig Akers asked "psychic" Sylvia Browne where their son, Shawn Hornbeck, was. Browne told the Akers their son was dead and his body "was in a wooded area near two boulders," but he was later found alive in January 2007. As a result, Browne and Montel Williams not only received heavy criticism for the failed prediction, but the airing of the show in the U.K. concerned "breaching rule 2.1 of the Broadcasting Cod

Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal signed a controversial bill hailed by intelligent design supporters, such as the Discovery Institute, and Louisiana Family Forum, a creationist group. Critics of the bill, including several major science organizations, say it allows for the teaching of "creationism" in public schools. The law, Louisiana Science Education Act, allows teachers to use "supplemental materials" when discussing evolution, but it does not state what the materials would be. Citing the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v.

After 33 years of managing software giant Microsoft, founder Bill Gates will retire from day-to-day management today. Gates will retain the title of Chairman but without executive functions and will only report for work once a week. The man who took a gut feeling of seeing personal computers in every household, each requiring a stable operating system will now pursue philanthropic activities under the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Microsoft did not announce any major event to mark the day when its founder steps down but internal private

The process of reconciliation and unifying the Democratic party started at the ballroom of the Mayflower hotel in Washington, DC with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and his wife both individually issuing a check amounting to $2,300 to the Hillary Clinton for President committee. New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton introduced to her fund contributors Illinois Senator Barack Obama as the first step of unifying the two sides who quite recently bitterly fought over winning the Democratic party's

A Casa-212 aircraft owned by the Indonesian air force disappeared while on a flight from the capital Jakarta to Bogor in West Java Friday morning. The plane was carrying 12 Indonesian military personnel and 6 civilians including a British, Singaporean and Indian national. The plane was tasked to test a new digital camera designed to conduct aerial mapping and topography. The aircraft was last sighted on radar in the Salak moutain region on the main island of Java, 90 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of the Indonesian capital. The Indonesian

At 23:59 GMT yesterday, a Russian Proton rocket, with a Block DM-3 upper stage, launched from Site 81/24 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, placing a Prognoz satellite for the Russian Ministry of Defence into a geosynchronous orbit. Prognoz satellites are used for missile detection, as a defence against nuclear attacks. The Proton-K configuration was used for this launch. The Proton-K, also known as the Proton 8K72K, is an old configuration, which is out of production. It is believed that three more Proton-K rockets are in storage. The

A CNN producer reported that the North Korean authorities did indeed destroy the cooling tower of the Yongbyong nuclear facility and admitted on global television that they did extract plutonium in the said facility to build nuclear weapons. Five television networks from countries party to the six-nation talks that constructively engaged North Korea to disengage in its nuclear weapons program were invited into the country to cover and televise the destruction of the cooling towers. Specialists in nuclear science confirmed that the implosion o

Newspaper The Guardian reports today that the sale of the BBC subsidiary BBC Resources Ltd., has cost £3.4m in consultancy fees — over £1m more than the £2.3m trading profit the commercial division is estimated to have made for the last financial year. Details of the failed privatisation were released by the BBC following a freedom of information request, and prior to publication of its annual report on July 8. Fourteen months after advisers were appointed to try to sell BBC Resources Ltd., only one of the three main business units has been s

To showcase achievements of Taiwan's Internet industry, the Institute of Information Industry of Taiwan (III) held the 2008 IDEAS Show this Wednesday June 25. The IDEAS Show is similar from the DEMO, an Internet investment trade show in United States since 2006. Chris Shipley, Producer of DEMO Conference, was invited to make a speech in the opening keynote. She mentioned about evolutions and transformations of the Internet, especially on business models and change of leaders. Her words mostly echoed some theories proposed during the 2008 Googl

A former Polish Foreign Affairs Minister and the current Secretary of State at the President's Chancellery, Anna Fotyga, is reported to have flown to the United States with a "secret mission" regarding the "last chance" negotiations about the location of the anti-missile shield in Poland. According to Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Fotyga's trip hasn't been acknowledged by either the Prime Minister's Office, or the Foreign Affairs Ministry, who are responsible for the negotiations. Wyborcza also claims that this misunderstanding — accordin

The United States claim to have killed the head of al-Qaida in Iraq along with two other insurgents in a Tuesday gun battle in Mosul. The man, who an official military statement identified only by his nickname of 'Abu Khalaf', was described by US forces as the "emir" of terror in Mosul, al-Qaida's last Iraqi stronghold. The statement identified one of the others by the nickname of 'Abu Khalud' and said he was a Syrian, while the third was said to be an unnamed woman shot while attempting to detonate an explosive belt attached to a killed colle