Gunshot-hit Britons die in Iraq

Two British hostages who died after being held by kidnappers in Iraq had been shot, a television channel reported on Tuesday.

The bodies of Jason Swindlehurst, 38, and Jason Creswell, 39, were handed over to the British embassy in Baghdad on June 19. According to the television channel, the coroners report concluded that the men had died from gunshot wounds.

The pair was among four guards protecting British computer consultant Peter Moore when around 40 heavily armed militants seized all five men in the Iraqi capital in May 2007.

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Super Tiny Keyboard

If what you’re looking for is a super small keyboard for your mobile device or your laptop, then a miniature device would be the perfect solution to your need. Maybe it’s easier for you to take it on the go wherever you travel, and it’s understandable. But show me the crazy man who’d like to torture himself to death by typing on a small keyboard, so small that the typing experience itself seems tinier than ever.

Ok, there’s nothing wrong with the keyboard. It’s a low keycap notebook keyboard with 56 keys including all the ones which are common to a standard keyboard like Caps Lock, Num Lock and function keys. Nothing unusual so far, isn’t it?



But let me tell you that this Super Tiny Keyboard measures 170 x 73 x 15mm and weighs 116 g. Pretty small, right? But it was you who wanted something small, lightweight and portable so that you wouldn’t have to worry about bringing the traditional, big and heavy keyboard when you are traveling.

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Bapu's statue to be unveiled in UK town today

Hundreds of Mahatma Gandhi's followers from across Britain are expected to attend the unveiling of his statue by Home Secretary Alan Johnson in the east Midlands town of Leicester on Friday.

The unveiling will mark the culmination of a two-year campaign by Samanwaya Parivar, an Indian charity organisation headed by Swami Satyamitranand.

Besides Swami Satyamitranand, the event will be attended by Indian High Commissioner Shiv Shankar Mukherjee and Labour MP from Leicester East Keith Vaz.

"It is absolutely wonderful that the new Home Secretary has agreed to attend and to unveil the new statue at this exciting occasion. I am so proud that only the second statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the United Kingdom will be based in Leicester," Vaz said.

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Most Stunning Typography Inspiration

Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading, tracking and kerning.

Designed by Chinad0ll

Designed by Islam Zayed

Designed by Anderson Maschio

Designed by Loica

Designed by Designed by ingermonkey

Designed by Lee25

Designed by Creative Tempest

Designed by Nicolas Alexander

Designed by Thekellz

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Even one racist attack is unacceptable: Aus PM

A day after news broke on the attack on two more Indians in Australia, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has told NDTV that no attack was acceptable to the government.


On Tuesday, two more attacks were reported against Indians in Melbourne . While a student from Hyderabad was mugged, an Indian taxi driver was attacked by passengers.

And in the backdrop of the continuing attacks, a new survey has said that 85 per cent Australians feel that racial discrimination is rampant in the country with one in five of them being a victim of verbal abuse.

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25 Free Download Design Programs

25 free must download design programs, the article features a range of different design programs including alternative programs for some of the most popular design programs such as Photoshop, flash and illustrator.

Image Editing

1) Paint.net

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

2) GIMP 2.6.6

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages

3) Xara Xtreme

Xara Xtreme is quite simply the best value and fastest all-in-one graphics package you’ll find. For drawings or photo work, for print or the web, it’s the perfect choice.

4) Active Pixels

Great free app which is very similar to Photoshop.

5) PaintStar

PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu.

6) Smooth Draw

The best free program which I’ve come across if your looking to test out your skills using a tablet. SmoothDraw NX is an easy yet powerful freehand drawing tool. It’s a limited yet free version of SmoothDraw. It produces the most smooth and expressive stroke through your tablet. It also smoothes mouse input for who don’t have a tablet.

7) Pencil 0.4.4b

Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

3D Modelling

Blender

This is the best 3D modelling program that I’ve come across Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

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Google Is Developing Artificial Intelligence

Co-founder Larry Page announced that Google is in the development stages of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and he claims the realization may not be far off.

Sci-Fi movies immediately come to mind and initial reactions may be curiosity-piqued-with-incredulity. However, some are very alarmed by this announcement calling into question the wisdom of such a move, in light of the moral and ethical questions and implications this advancement raises.

Yep, you read that right, Google is trying to build real AI. The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to Page it isn’t that far away either. ... true artificial intelligence not only has serious ethical and moral implications, self aware intelligence may also not be controllable, after all it thinks for itself and makes decisions based on that reasoning, as we all do.

PHP Frameworks To Consider

Using a framework is a great way to save time and effort on your next project—you’ll have a firm foundation to build upon, there will be pre-built modules to perform tedious coding tasks, and if you’re a learner, it’s a great way to learn about good coding practice. PHP’s massive popularity means that developers have a wide variety of frameworks to choose from.

Agavi: This PHP 5-based framework started off as a fork of the popular Mojavi project. While it can be used as a web site construction kit, its primary focus is on building fully-fledged applications.

CakePHP: The very well-known CakePHP is easy for coders of all skill levels to use. It’s based on the same principles that guide Ruby on Rails, and its heavy focus on rapid deployment methods make it a great choice for developers who are squeezed for time (see SitePoint’s beginner’s CakePHP tutorial to get started).

CodeIgniter: EllisLab’s CodeIgniter has won wide praise for its small footprint and speed, and has become a favorite amongst many developers. There’s extensive documentation and a large community of users to help you out.

eZ Components: OK, so we’re stretching the definition of framework here. eZ Components, as the name suggests, is a library of individual components for common tasks. If you’re familiar with the ezPublish CMS, you might have seen some of these components before!

Fuse: Fuse is based on Ruby on Rails and CakePHP, but has had many features added by the development team to make the most stable platform they could. There are frequent updates—development on version 2.0 is underway!

Horde: This mainstay of the PHP framework world grew from the Horde webmail and groupware suite. If you’re a developer who speaks a language other than English, you may be interested in the fact that the framework is designed specifically to be localization-friendly.

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UK reports its first swine flu death

It is the first swine flu

death in the United Kingdom; the victim is a 38-year-old woman who gave birth prematurely at a hospital. It is the first death reported outside the US.

As many as 1,261 cases of swine flu has been confirmed in the UK and an increasing number of sporadic cases are being reported from across the country.

AP adds:

This was also the first death from the H1N1 strain of influenza reported outside the Americas by the World Health Organisation in Geneva or the European Centers for Disease Control in Stockholm, which both keep tabs on confirmed cases of swine flu and deaths from the illness in countries around the world.

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Twin suicide blasts in Pakistan, 4 killed

LAHORE: A prominent anti-Taliban Pakistani Muslim cleric was killed on Friday in a suicide bomb attack in the city of Lahore, police said. In another blast at around the same time, a suicide car-bomber set off explosives near a mosque in the northwestern town of Nowshera, killing at least three people, police said.

The blasts came as Pakistani forces stepped up attacks on militants across the northwest after the US House of Representatives approved tripling aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years.

Security forces have made progress in more than a month of fighting against Taliban militants in the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, and in recent days have begun operations in several other parts of the region. The militants have responded with a series of bomb attacks. Moderate cleric Sarfraz Naeemi was attacked at his mosque complex just after leading Friday prayers.

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Gunman opens fire, kills guard at Holocaust museum

The Holocaust museum in Washington DC is a place where one goes to learn more about one of the most horrific chapters in human history. It is a museum built to commemorate the millions killed by the Nazis in World War II in Washington DC.


On Wednesday, its somber sanctity was shattered by the sounds of gunfire.

An 89-year-old man, now identified as James von Brunn, of Maryland entered the museum, armed with a rifle and opened fire, killing a security guard.

He was then shot and disarmed by other guards.

Brunn is believed to be an anti-Semitic World War II veteran with links to white supremacist groups.

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Youngest 26/11 witness identifies Qasab as CST gunmen

A ten-year-old girl, rendered disabled during 26/11 terror strikes, on Wednesday identified in court arrested gunman Mohammed Ajmal Amir Qasab as one of the two gunmen who had fired indiscriminately at passengers inside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

Devika Rotawan, the youngest eyewitness to depose in the terror strikes trial, was asked by the court if she could identify the gunman among the three accused present in the dock.

All three accused, including Qasab stood in the dock, and the ten-year-old pointed at the Pakistani gunman.

He, however, did not react.

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Naxals blow up vehicle in Jharkhand; 11 killed

Eleven security personnel were killed and six others injured in a landmine blast triggered by Maoists in a Naxal-affected district in Jharkhand on Wednesday, police said.


The incident took place in Serengda-Aruanga village in West Singhbhum district when a joint team of CRPF and local police was returning in a mini truck after a two-day patrolling in extremist-infested Saranda forest, Director General of Police (DGP) V D Ram said. He said the Maoists triggered the blast killing 11 policemen, including a CRPF Inspector.

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Making of Obama: The inside story

It was only to be expected - just months after his election as the President of America, the first journalistic account of Obama's candidacy and historic presidency has been published. The book titled Renegade: The Making of a President, is flying off shelves across America.

At book stores across America, those wanting to know the inside story of Barack Obama's run for the presidency are having to return empty-handed.

"We are getting a lot of people asking for the book," said Henry Zook, Owner, Book Court.

When asked what he was telling those people, he answered, ''That we sold out immediately, our publisher is out of stock and they are reprinting it."

Renegade: The Making of a President, written by Richard Wolffe, a British journalist who covered the 2008 presidential campaign for Newsweek, is full of tidbits.

From his frustration over former President Bill Clinton's statements to the press, to revelations that his marriage was strained by an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2000, the book contains many facts about Obama's life.

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Search to trace missing IAF aircraft begins

An Air Force

plane has crashed over Arunachal Pradesh with 13 people on board. The plane had taken off at 2 pm on Tuesday, and was supposed to land in Jorhat in Assam. It went missing within 10 minutes.

It had eight Air Force crew members and six Armymen on board. Air Force had carried out a preliminary search but could not trace the aircraft. Ground patrol search parties have also been sent search will resume again on Wednesday.

PTI adds: The transport aircraft, AN 32, was on a routine air maintenance sortie and was carrying 13 personnel, including seven IAF personnel and six army jawans, an IAF spokesman said.

IAF helicopters were scouting the Mechuka-Jorhat route from where the aircraft crashed.

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More bodies found from Air France crash

RECIFE, Brazil (CNN) -- Eight more bodies have been recovered from last week's crash of an Air France jetliner in the Atlantic Ocean, bringing the total to 24, Brazil's military announced Monday.
Recovery efforts have found several items confirmed to have come from Air France Flight 447.



The bodies were found floating about 440 kilometers (273 miles) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha archipelago northeast of the Brazilian coast on Monday, military officials said Monday evening.

Air France 447 disappeared over the Atlantic early June 1. The jet was en route to Paris, France, from the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro with 228 passengers and crew aboard.

The military said earlier Monday that 16 bodies had been recovered.

Items found in the same area Saturday were confirmed to have come from the jet, including pieces of the aircraft's wing section, luggage and a leather briefcase containing an airplane ticket with a reservation code for the doomed flight, Brazilian air force spokesman Jorge Amaral said.

The exact location of the crash has not been determined, because ocean currents probably caused the bodies and debris to drift in the days since the crash. Two key pieces of evidence -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- remain missing and could lie on the ocean floor.

Read Original story at CNN.com...