FDA to regulate salt content in food

It's not a secret that the excessive salt in diets is a major factor in high blood pressure and increases risk for heart disease and most Americans exceed recommended limits

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) cited these factors in urging stricter regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at a public hearing, held on Thursday at the FDA.

Reducing the salt content in processed and restaurant foods by half could save up to 150,000 lives a year by reducing heart-related disease, according to the consumer group, whose petition to the FDA prompted the public hearing.

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Elections without choice in Russia

There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin's party (United Russia) will win an overwhelming majority in Russia's parliamentary election on Sunday but non in a democratic way.

State-run media brainstorms people to vote for president and United Russia. State employees being pressured to vote at work or to fund United Russia and even of schools encouraging parents to do their patriotic duty and back the president.

"Elections without choice", commented the New Times, an independent political weekly, above an article illustrated by a Soviet-style poster urging the masses to back Putin.

"The old Soviet mentality is alive and well and people are returning to their former ways," echoed political analyst Georgy Bovt in a newspaper article.

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Police Break Up Anti-Putin protesters in Russia

There no fredom of speech in Russia and there is still many people arrested for political reasons.

Many of opposition activists were arrested by police Sunday as they tried to rally against President Vladimir Putin's government in central St. Petersburg.

Demonstrators were chanting "Russia without Putin!" "What we are seeing now in St. Petersburg resembles a military operation," said Olga Kurnosova, a coordinator of the Other Russia coalition of opposition groups that organized the rally. "It shows the authorities' fear."

Opposition activist Daria Makukhina said that several party activists running for parliament in next Sunday's vote were beaten and detained.

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CBS Giving Free Wi-Fi to Manhattan

CBS has announced its upcoming CBS Mobile Zone, which is a free Wi-Fi network for laptops and other wireless devices, granting Internet access. From Times Square to Central Park South, and 6th Ave. to 8th Ave., the free wireless zone is an experiment between CBS and the MTA.

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Yahoo and Google will Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network

Google and Yahoo are moving to to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.”

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Health Insurer Tied Bonuses To Dropping Sick Policyholders

One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies.

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Hackers install maleware on Alicia Keys MySpace Page

MySpace pages of several musicians, including the personal page of R&B songstress Alicia Keys, were targeted this week by hackers. Experts warn that they're now very dangerous places to visit online.

Among the attacks being served by Keys' page (and those of French funk band Greements of Fortune and Scottish rock band the Dykeenies) are Trojan horses disguised as new video codecs.

When someone tries to access one of the hacked sites, an exploit first attempts to install malware on the visitor's computer. If that doesn't work, the user is next asked to install a fake codec to view a video posted on the page, according to the Times.

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Mattel recalls Mexican-made toy kitchens

Mattel Inc, the world's largest toymaker, is recalling over 170000 Mexican-made toy kitchens sold in the United States and Europe because small pieces pose a choking hazard to young children.

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Apple's Leopard early bugs

Although most of Mac OS X Leopard,the latest version of Apple's operating system, users seem satisfied, there have been a fair amount of complaints from those who were first down the road to Leopard.

Most are relatively minor, some were quite annoying, and a few raise questions about how Apple's operating system strategy might be different when it's time to ship the next release.

The "blue screen" problem got the most attention.

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