Sony, battling Amazon and Apple in the electronic book reader race, unveiled its latest devices on Wednesday and expanded their availability to Australia, China, Italy, Japan and Spain.

Sony cut the size and weight of all three of its e-readers while expanding the use of touchscreens to all models – allowing users to turn pages with a swipe of the finger like the Apple iPad.

The Japanese electronics giant increased the price of its cheapest e-reader, the Reader Pocket Edition, by 29 dollars while adding a touchscreen.

At 179 dollars, the Reader Pocket Edition, which features a five-inch screen, is 40 dollars more than Amazon’s cheapest Kindle e-reader and 30 dollars more than US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble’s device, the Nook.

The cheapest iPad costs 499 dollars but boasts a colour screen and other features while the Sony Reader and the Kindle both use black-and-white e-ink technology.

The new Reader Touch Edition features a six-inch touchscreen and costs 229 dollars while the new Reader Daily Edition has a seven-inch touchscreen and Wi-Fi or 3G connectivity and costs 299 dollars.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division, said the company was also targeting “previously untapped markets.”

“We take a thoughtful approach to country expansion, including Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan and China, working with local bookstores to ensure content is compatible, relevant and in the appropriate language for each market,” he said.

Sony also said it was developing applications for the iPhone and Android mobile platform to allow users to read books from its Reader Store on those devices.

Sony said the new Reader Pocket Edition and new Reader Touch Edition are available immediately while the new Reader Daily Edition will be out in time for end-of-the-year holidays.

Amazon unveiled two new versions of the Kindle in late July, including one that sells for 139 dollars, its lowest price yet.

Staples announced on Tuesday it will begin selling the Kindle this year, making the US office supply chain the second brick-and-mortar store to offer the device after retail giant Target.

Apple unveiled a refreshed line of iPods on Wednesday and slashed the price of the Apple TV box that streams television shows and movies over the Web to high-definition TV sets.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, speaking at an event at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, also introduced “Ping,” a music-oriented social network that allows iTunes users to share their music preferences.

Jobs, dressed in his trademark long-sleeved black shirt, blue jeans and tennis shoes, said the second-generation of the Apple TV device would cost 99 dollars, down from 229 dollars.

Apple released the first version of its digital media receiver that routes TV show and movies to HD TVs in 2007 but it never really caught on with the public.

“Apple TV hasn’t been a big hit,” Jobs acknowledged as he revealed the palm-sized low-priced model he hoped will change that situation.

“But, we’ve learned a lot,” he added. “People want Hollywood movies and TV shows whenever they want them; they don’t want amateur hour, they want professional content.”

The device is plugged into television sets but also links wirelessly to Apple’s hot-selling iPad tablet computers so people could start watching shows on one of the devices and then switch to the other when convenient.

“Apple TV is a big reset,” said analyst Michael Gartenberg, a partner at Altimeter Group.

“This is to the TV what iPhone was to the phone. The way they taught consumers to use the phone they are now teaching them about the Apple way to use the TV set.”

Jobs said Apple TV owners will be able to rent HD movies for 4.99 dollars and television shows from the Fox and ABC networks for 99 cents. US users can also stream content from movie rental service Netflix, he said.

“We think the rest of the studios will see the light and get on board with this pretty fast,” Jobs said.

The new model Apple TV will be available in about four weeks.

Jobs also said he was rolling out the “strongest new line-up of iPods we’ve ever had.

“It’s the biggest change in the iPod lineup ever,” he said.

The new iPod Touch allows for video calling. It has front- and rear-facing cameras which let a user hold video chats with iPhone or other iPod Touch owners using Wi-Fi and an Apple programme called “FaceTime.”

Jobs also showed off a new iPod Shuffle for 49 dollars and a touchscreen version of the middle-range iPod Nano starting at 149 dollars.

The new iPod Touch costs 229 dollars for the eight-gigabyte model, 299 dollars for the 32GB model and 399 dollars for the 64GB version.

He said the new iPods would be available next week.

The Apple chief also previewed the latest version of online store iTunes, iTunes 10 and music-oriented social network Ping.

“It is sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” Jobs said, referring to the world’s top online social networking and microblogging services.

“It is not Facebook. It is not Twitter. It is something else we’ve come up with. It’s all about music,” he said.

Ping will automatically be available to the more than 160 million iTunes members worldwide when they update to the new version, which Apple made available as a free download at itunes.com.

“Apple is now in the social networking game, but it is music centric which is really cool,” Gartenberg said as he left the event.

“It is not about competing with Facebook or Twitter. This is about something they use in addition. When I want to hang with my music friends this is where I go.”

Samsung unveiled on Thursday what the South Korean electronics giant hopes will be the first major rival to Apple’s highly successful iPad tablet PC.

The Galaxy Tab, presented at the IFA electronics trade fair in Berlin, Germany, has a seven-inch (17.8-centimetre) touchscreen, slightly smaller than the iPad’s 9.7 inches, and uses Google’s Android 2.2 operating system.

“Samsung recognizes the tremendous growth potential in this newly created market and we believe that the Samsung Galaxy Tab brings a unique and open proposition to market,” said mobile communications unit head JK Shin.

Apple sold more than three million iPads in the 80 days after going on sale in the United States in April, and the device has since been launched in more than a dozen other countries.

The success caught California-based Apple’s competitors on the hop, and they have rushed to respond with their own tablet PCs, which give users video, music, games, Internet and electronic books.

“Samsung recognizes the tremendous growth potential in this newly created market and we believe that the Samsung Galaxy Tab brings a unique and open proposition to market,” said mobile communications unit head JK Shin.

The Galaxy Tab, weighing 380 grammes (0.8 pounds) will be launched in Europe in mid-September, and in other markets including South Korea, the United States and Asia in the coming months, Samsung said.

But Samsung gave no indication however of whether the Galaxy Tab will undercut the iPad on price, which retails from US$499 in the United States — or 499 euros in Europe — for the basic model.

Reports in the trade press said that the Galaxy Tab will be more expensive, at 799 euros (US$1,025) in Germany and 699 euros in France.

It is rumoured that Japan’s Toshiba will also unveil its own tablet PC in Berlin later on Thursday. US computer maker Dell has already unveiled its five-inch Stealth and other firms are poised to launch other rival products.

Tablets are smaller both in size and in memory than a desktop, notebook or netbook computer, but are bigger than smartphones, offering users video, music, games, Internet and electronic books — all with touchscreen.

“The biggest market (for tablets) is for leisure. The iPad is becoming the main computer, the first to be switched on in the morning and the last one at night,” Joerg Wirtgen from German tech magazine c’t told AFP.

“But you can’t do everything, only the pleasurable stuff. For lots of tasks you still need a PC or a notebook.”

He also said they offered much more than e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

Gadget website T3 said the Galaxy Tab is “coming for the iPad, and it means business,” saying it was on “everyone’s ‘must see’ list” for this year’s IFA, which opens to the public on Friday.

An Indonesian volcano spewed ash thousands of metres into the air Friday in its most violent eruption since rumbling back to life earlier this week for the first time in 400 years.

Thousands of people have fled their homes since the 2,460-metre (8,100-foot) Sinabung in northern Sumatra started to erupt on Sunday after centuries of inactivity.

“The volcano erupted at 04:38 am which has lasted for 13 minutes and sending a column of ash as high as 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) into the air. This is the biggest eruption,” government volcanologist Agus Budianto told AFP.

“We recorded continuous tremors since 7:00 pm Thursday that indicated an intense magma movement inside the volcano,” he said.

Police had evacuated people from the danger zone in a six-kilometre (four-mile) radius from the volcano peak.

“We’re afraid that some locals had returned back to their village from emergency shelters,” he said.

Budianto said the eruption was felt about eight kilometres (five miles) away.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity. It has more active volcanoes than any other country.

Lawmakers in Hong Kong passed a motion on Thursday, calling on the Philippine government to apologize for the Manila hostage crisis.

They also demanded compensation for the families of the eight Hong Kong tourists who were killed.

LegCo House Committee chairwoman Miriam Lau moved a motion to demand a public apology and compensation for the families of the eight Hong Kong tourists who were killed in the bus hijacking.

The motion is non-binding, meaning it will have no legislative effect.

Nonetheless, lawmakers were determined to make a clear statement about the botched rescue mission.

Albert Ho, Chairman of Democratic Party, said: “The bungled rescue operation on the part of the Philippine government has shown systemic problems as well as the mentality within the Philippine government.”

Lawmakers demanded that the Philippine authorities get to the bottom of exactly what happened, and find out why the situation ended in a bloodbath.

They also praised the Hong Kong government’s swift response by flying over a team to Manila and offering assistance to the victims.

But they said the government needs to adopt contingency measures to deal with similar incidents in the future, involving Hong Kongers overseas in distress.

During the crisis, Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang repeatedly tried to call Phillipine President Benigno Aquino, but was never put through that day.

The communication breakdown has raised concerns that Hong Kong needs to clearly define its negotiation channels.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Thursday visited Afghanistan for military and government talks that highlighted tensions and disagreement between President Hamid Karzai and his top Western sponsor.

The trip came a day after US combat operations ended in Iraq, shifting attention to America’s war in Afghanistan, where troop deaths are at record highs and rampant corruption underscores the challenges facing the West.

Karzai held a press conference with Gates and the head of international forces in Afghanistan, US General David Petraeus, and hit back at accusations he had undermined attempts to clamp down on corruption in the country.

Blaming Western media, Karzai said: “The American public see the press they see and not the reality of Afghanistan. Corruption has to be fought correctly, not in violation of the rights of the people.”

The president has been criticised for intervening in a corruption case against the administrative head of the National Security Council, who was arrested in July but released on Karzai’s orders after seven hours in prison.

Mohammed Zia Salehi was arrested after Afghan police said a wiretap caught him soliciting a bribe in exchange for holding up a US probe into a company suspected of moving money for Afghan leaders, drug traffickers and insurgents.

“I asked for his release for his arrest was illegally done, wrongfully done,” said Karzai on Thursday.

“The detention base and the investigative procedures were run by foreign elements, and there was serious concerns about human rights abuse… they were not respecting the Afghan laws,” he told reporters.

Gates sounded a more conciliatory tone, saying that he and Karzai agreed on the “principles” for the running of two Western-backed anti-corruption units.

“We believe that the investigative rules of these units need to have credibility in the international community,” he said.

“President Karzai is the first to know more has to be done (on corruption),” added Petraeus, characterising his relationship with the Afghan leader as one with “candour”.

“We do not come at every issue from the same perspective but I think that’s a reflection of the strength of the relationship,” he said.

The press conference was held hours after Karzai strongly condemned a NATO airstrike he said killed 10 civilians, but which the alliance force said hit only militants. Gates backed NATO’s account on Thursday.

The issue of civilian casualties is sensitive as they are seen as greatly weakening support for the US counter-insurgency strategy among Afghans.

Petraeus recently issued updated guidelines to troops that further insisted upon the avoidance of civilian injuries.

On Sunday, Karzai said Washington’s war strategy needed a rethink, telling a visiting German politician that fighting the Taliban in Afghan villages “has been ineffective and is not achieving anything but killing civilians”.

The coalition has been responsible for a fifth of civilian casualties this year, with most of the rest of the 1,300 deaths caused by militants, according to UN figures.

Last week, the Western-backed Karzai told American officials that Washington and its NATO allies must shift their military focus to insurgent hideouts on the Pakistani side of the border.

In Iraq, Gates said on Wednesday that America’s war there is over but that the outcome would remain “clouded” by the reason it was waged in the first place.

President Barack Obama late Tuesday officially announced the end of the US combat mission in Iraq, where US forces are now down to around 49,700, for an advisory and training mission, with the last forces to leave in 2011.

As Obama drew a veil over the seven-year conflict in Iraq, the annual death toll of American soldiers in Afghanistan reached its highest point since the war began almost nine years ago.

With momentum there increasingly seen to have turned in the Taliban’s favour, Obama appeared to step back from an earlier pledge that US forces would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011.

“The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground, and our support for Afghanistan will endure,” Obama said in an address to the nation on Tuesday.

“But make no mistake, this transition will begin, because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”

His words echoed those of Petraeus, who told AFP in Kabul on Tuesday that the withdrawal would be gradual, starting in small secure areas.

The United States and NATO are building up their troop numbers in Afghanistan to almost 150,000, with Obama’s surge of an additional 30,000 soldiers almost complete, Petraeus said.

The US government placed Anwar al-Awlaki, a key leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, on its list of terrorism supporters, froze his financial assets and banned any transactions with him.

The measures were outlined in Executive Order 13224 issued Friday by the US Treasury Department.

“Anwar al-Awlaki has proven that he is extraordinarily dangerous, committed to carrying out deadly attacks on Americans and others worldwide,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey.

“He has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism — fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents.”

Awlaki, now based in Yemen, rose to prominence last year after it emerged he had communicated by email with Major Nidal Hasan, a US army psychiatrist accused of opening fire on colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13.

The imam has also been linked to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian student accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound flight with explosives in his underwear on December 25.

A US official said in April that President Barack Obama’s administration had authorised the targeted killing of Awlaki, after American intelligence agencies concluded the cleric was directly involved in anti-US plots.

Awlaki was imprisoned in Yemen in 2006 on charges of kidnapping for ransom and being involved in an Al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a US official but was released from jail in December 2007 and subsequently went into hiding in Yemen.

“Awlaki has sought to encourage his supporters to provide money for terrorist causes,” Levey pointed out. “Those who provide material support to Awlaki or AQAP violate sanctions and expose themselves to serious consequences.”

Suspected drug gang members launched a car bomb attack on police in Mexico’s border city of Ciudad Juarez for the first time, killing two police and two medics, a general said Friday.

The attack marked an escalation in Mexico’s brutal drug violence, which has left some 7,000 people dead so far this year, official figures showed Friday, compared with 9,000 killed in the whole of 2009.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes said that gang members had set a trap late Thursday using a wounded person dressed as a municipal police officer to lure federal police to a main intersection, before a car bomb exploded.

“The supposed police officer had his mouth open, and his hands tied behind his back, which is why medical workers approached him,” Reyes said.

Police initially said that attackers had rammed a police convoy in Mexico’s murder capital.

General Eduardo Zarate said the attack left two policemen, a paramedic and a doctor dead, and wounded 11 others. It was not clear if one of the deceased was the decoy police officer.

“Residue from 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of an explosive known as C4 and the remnants of a mobile telephone device were found” near the burned-out cars and damaged buildings at the scene, Zarate told reporters.

Attacks between feuding drug gangs and with security forces mostly involve guns and grenades, as well as gruesome mutilations and beheadings.

Zarate said Thursday’s attack was the first car bombing in the city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas, and the first in Mexico directed at the police.

The city’s public security ministry said the attack had been in retaliation for the capture of Jesus Armando Acosta, a leader of La Linea gang, the armed wing of the city’s notorious Juarez cartel.

Acosta allegedly had taken part “in at least 25 executions of Sinaloa cartel members,” the ministry said in a statement.

Most killings in the border city are attributed to disputes between the Juarez and Sinaloa gangs over control of lucrative trafficking routes into the United States.

Earlier Friday, Federal Attorney General Arturo Chavez insisted Mexico’s drug cartels were not involved in terrorism.

“We don’t have any evidence in the country of narcoterrorism as it has occurred in other countries,” he told reporters in Mexico City.

He said that the objective of the Juarez attack had been “not to destabilize the state, but to frighten society.”

A deadly grenade attack on a crowd of Independence Day revelers in the central city of Morelia aroused fears almost two years ago that drug gangs were turning to terrorism.

Almost 25,000 people have died in suspected drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a military crackdown on organized crime three and a half years ago, according to official figures released Friday.

A series of shootouts meanwhile paralysed the northeastern border city of Nuevo Laredo for several hours on Friday, killing at least one and provoking scenes of panic, according to local media.

Exchanges of gunfire occurred in at least four parts of the city, and the attackers blocked some roads with buses and trucks.

Violence in that border city is blamed on battles between the Gulf Cartel and their former allies the Zetas.

A cap sealed over a leaking Gulf of Mexico well was holding back gushing crude for a second day on Friday, amid hopes BP may have nearly staunched the worst oil spill in US history.

The cap, sealed off on Thursday to enable tests on the well below, has stopped oil from flowing into the ocean for the first time since an April explosion on a BP-leased drilling platform just off Louisiana.

US President Barack Obama said the halt to the oil flow was “good news,” but cautioned on Friday it was not a final solution to the leak which has triggered the nation’s worst ever environmental disaster.

“It is important that we don’t get ahead of ourselves,” Obama told reporters at the White House.

A permanent end to the spill is not expected before mid-August, when two relief wells should enable BP to fill the ruptured wellbore with cement, drowning the oil flowing up from a huge undersea reservoir.

But Gulf residents now hope new attention will be given to the clean-up operation, with the shorelines of five states ravaged, Gulf fishing waters closed and tourists shunning the usually popular beaches.

Estimates suggest anywhere between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels of crude have been leaking every day since the rig sank April 22, two days after an explosion on the platform, which killed 11 workers.

The International Energy agency has calculated there are between 2.3 million and 4.5 million barrels of crude sloshing around in the sea.

The British energy giant has so far spent at least 3.5 billion dollars dealing with the spill, and compensation claims could eventually cost 10 times that amount.

BP senior vice president Kent Wells said Friday he was “encouraged” by the initial results of pressure tests trying to determine whether the wellbore was damaged in the April explosion.

“The current monitoring that we’re doing shows no negative evidence,” he told reporters as the complex operation continued 1,600 metres on the seabed.

The wellbore stretches for several miles below the floor of the sea and any underground damage could lead to new leaks as the cap contains oil from the top of the leak, forcing it back down into the wellbore.

Wells warned the current pressure readings fell into an range that gave no immediate indication of whether there was any damage to the wellbore, saying further tests and analysis would be needed.

The tests are due to finish on Saturday, when crews plan to resume capturing and siphoning away the oil while the results are examined.

News on Thursday that BP had sealed the container cap was met with elation by Gulf Coast residents, many of whom face financial ruin as a result of the spill.

But a grim, complicated and expensive clean-up process, likely to take years, remains ahead for the region’s oiled beaches and marshlands.

“It is an enormous relief to learn that the flow of oil that led to America’s worst environmental disaster has finally been stemmed,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, an environmental group.

“We hope we can now turn more resources and attention to responding to the devastation that this oil disaster has already caused, and to making sure this sort of preventable tragedy never occurs again.”

Endangered wildlife has also been increasingly threatened by huge ribbons of oil fouling the shores of five states – Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Obama acknowledged there was still “an enormous amount of work to do,” but called on Americans to remain positive.

“We are making steady progress and I think the American people should take some heart in the fact that we’re making progress on this front.”

The disaster prompted the Obama administration to quickly issue a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

A first six-month freeze was overturned by a Louisiana judge amid stiff opposition. But the White House issued a new moratorium this week, halting deep-sea drilling through November.

BP has so far spent at least 3.5 billion dollars dealing with the spill, and compensation claims could eventually cost 10 times that amount, with BP agreeing to set up a 20-billion-dollar fund to pay any damages.

The British energy giant said on Friday it has paid out more than 200 million dollars in compensation to Gulf residents so far, meeting some 32,000 claims. Another 61,000 claims are waiting to be processed.

Guests leapt desperately to their deaths from upper-floor windows as a fire tore through a hotel in northern Iraq killing 30 people, 14 of them foreigners, police and medics said on Friday.

Citizens of Australia, Britain, Canada and several Asian and South American countries were among those killed in Thursday night’s blaze in Sulaimaniyah, which raged for seven hours before being brought under control, officials said.

A preliminary report prepared by the city’s hospital said people from 12 nations had died and a medical official said the bodies of the foreigners were identified by colleagues from the respective companies they worked for.

Visiting telecommunications engineers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Cambodia, were among the victims, according to hospital officials and the chairman of the telecoms company.

“The number killed is 30, among whom there are 14 foreigners,” said Rikot Hama Rasheed, the director of Sulaimaniyah hospital, following the fire, which rose rapidly from the second floor of the six-level Soma hotel.

“The regional government will contact the embassies of the foreigners who were killed,” said Rasheed, listing Iraq, Ecuador, Venezuela, Lebanon, South Africa and Bangladesh as among the victims’ nationalities.

He said 22 survivors were receiving treatment at the hospital.

Witnesses told AFP at least three of those who died did so after leaping from the hotel’s windows in a desperate bid to save themselves as flames and smoke engulfed their rooms.

Mirwan Saeed, 30, who was visiting friends in the hotel, broke both his legs after making his way to the roof and jumping towards a nearby lower building to save his life.

“We were in the hotel when the smoke started coming in,” he told AFP from his hospital bed. “I had no choice but to jump.”

Colonel Araz Bakr, chief of Sulaimaniyah rescue services, confirmed the death toll and said 42 people were injured, including seven firefighters. He said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke.

A city council official said an electrical fault caused the blaze, which also damaged several adjacent buildings.

“Women and children are among the victims of the incident which happened in the Soma Hotel,” said the official, Razgar Ahmed.

Sulaimaniyah, 270 kilometres north of Baghdad is the capital of one of three northern provinces that make up Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

It is popular with tourists and business has flourished in recent years as it is peaceful, unlike much of Iraq which remains wracked by violence seven years after a US-led invasion toppled now executed dictator Saddam Hussein.

The victims from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Cambodia worked for telecoms operator Asiacell, one of three major mobile communications companies in Iraq.

“We lost four engineers from our company, one of them a lady from the Philippines, and three of them men from Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Iraq,” said Faruk Mula Mustafa, chairman of Asiacell.

Two other Iraqi employees were injured in the fire, he said.

A US embassy spokesman in Baghdad said two American citizens received medical treatment after the fire, but none were killed.

Israeli forces on Saturday boarded the Rachel Corrie after it ignored orders not to head for Gaza, but there was no repetition of the bloody violence when commandos stormed an aid boat earlier this week.

The military said its troops had boarded the ship “with the full compliance” of the crew and passengers in a peaceful operation in which there was no use of violence by either side.

“Our forces boarded the boat and took control without meeting any resistance from the crew or the passengers. Everything took place without violence,” a spokeswoman told AFP, saying no shots had been fired.

The ship and the 15 people on board, most of them Irish or Malaysian activists, was being escorted into the southern Israeli port of Ashdod from where the aid would be transferred to Gaza through land crossings, the military said.

Speaking to an AFP reporter in Ashdod, army spokeswoman Avital Leibovitz said the operation had been conducted peacefully.

“They didn’t storm the ship – they boarded it with the agreement” of the people on board, she said. “They are on the way here and it will probably take a few hours.”

The decision to commandeer the Rachel Corrie came after the vessel refused to respond to four requests to head for Ashdod, instead staying its course for Gaza Strip and risking a potentially explosive confrontation with the navy.

Israel promptly warned the 1,200-tonne cargo ship that it would boarded by naval forces if it did not change course.

“Our soldiers will board you if you refuse to change course… We are ready to use force to defend ourselves,” Leibovitz told the BBC, quoting the message relayed to the vessel.

Israeli forces intercepted the ship in international waters shortly after dawn but only contacted the Rachel Corrie several hours later when it was 28 nautical miles from the coast but did not specify exactly where.

International waters begin some 20 nautical miles off the shoreline.

Shortly after the navy took over the ship, an Israeli warship was seen heading out of Ashdod port and turning south, indicating the boat was somewhere to the south of the city which lies some 30 kilometres (20 miles) north of the Gaza border.

Activists on board the ship had made clear they would not heed Israeli calls to change course, but had also said they would not put up any resistance to Israeli forces should they board the vessel.

They said they would allow their 1,000 tonnes of cargo to be inspected, preferably by an international force.

In a last communique issued at around 5:38 am (0238 GMT), activist Jenny Graham, who is on board the Rachel Corrie, told organisers the vessel was being approached by two Israeli warships.

Graham said equipment on board had been “jammed by the Israeli navy, and that they expected their satellite phone to be jammed soon as well”.

Meanwhile, as news of the standoff on the high seas reached Gaza City, people began streaming towards the port in anticipation of the ship’s arrival, with officials hailing what they saw as the imminent end of the Israeli blockade which has been in place for nearly four years.

“We are in the last 15 minutes of the siege,” said Ahmed Yussef, deputy foreign minister in the Hamas-run government, describing Israel’s attempts to block the ship’s passage as “a major violation of naval laws” and a “crime against the international community”.

Yussef, who also head of the government’s committee for breaking the siege, predicted there would be a flood of attempts by international activists to break Israel’s naval blockade on the territory.

“There will be a lot of ships sent to Gaza by international solidarity organisations in the next few weeks in the name of justice and human rights,” he said.

Israel had warned it would stop the Rachel Corrie, which had been due to join the flotilla of ships which attempted to run the blockade earlier this week but was held up for technical reasons.

Israeli naval commandos raided the flotilla before dawn on Monday in a bungled operation which left nine foreign activists dead, most of them Turkish, and scores wounded, among them seven Israeli soldiers, and sparked an international outcry.

James Bond’s famous Aston Martin car from the films “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” is expected to raise more than five million dollars when it goes on sale, auctioneers said Wednesday.

The 1964 Aston Martin DB5 was driven by Sean Connery when he played the fictional British spy.

The customised car, which had the original British registration number FMP 7B, is one of two and the sole remaining DB5 featured in “Goldfinger” (1964) and “Thunderball” (1965).

It is expected to raise more than 3.5 million pounds (5.1 million dollars, 4.2 million euros) when it is sold by RM Auctions in London on October 27.

Bond’s motor has around 30,000 miles (50,000 kilometres) on the clock.

“This authentic Bond movie car is factory-fitted with the full complement of operational ‘Q-Branch’ gadgets,” RM said.

They include machine guns, a bullet-proof shield, revolving number plates, a tracking device, a removable roof panel, an oil slick sprayer, a nail spreader and a smoke screen.

The gadgets are controlled by “toggles and switches hidden in the centre arm-rest”.

Its US owner, Pennsylvania broadcaster Jerry Lee, bought the car for 12,000 dollars in 1969 and hopes the sale will raise money for his charitable foundation.

“The James Bond car has brought me much enjoyment for some 40 years,” he said.

“The car will continue to give me great pleasure as it furthers the mission of the foundation to do good around the world.”

US software giant Microsoft inaugurated a research centre in Taiwan Thursday focused on cloud computing, a new technology attracting significant interest among the island’s high-tech firms.

Cloud computing refers to applications or data storage hosted online by technology firms instead of being installed and maintained on users’ machines.

The opening of the centre was a “milestone… in the era of cloud computing”, said Steven Guggenheimer, a Microsoft vice president, at Computex Taipei, Asia’s largest IT trade fair.

Microsoft Corp declined to say how much it would invest in the centre, or how many people would be employed there.

The company says it plans to spend US$9.5 billion in research and development projects in 2010, a considerable portion of which will go to cloud-computing technologies.

More than 1,700 exhibitors are taking part in the five-day Computex Taipei, which opened Monday.

The trade show features 4,861 booths and is expected to greet around 120,000 visitors, including 35,000 international buyers, organisers say.

They expect the fair to generate around US$20 billion in business.

British energy giant BP was hit Thursday by two ratings downgrades over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and admitted that it had been ill-prepared for the worst spill in US history.

International ratings agency Fitch said it had cut BP’s long-term issuer default rating and senior unsecured rating from AA+ to AA and had placed them on negative watch, citing risks from the enormous oil spill.

“The downgrade of BP’s ratings reflects Fitch’s opinion that risks to both BP’s business and financial profile continue to increase following the Deepwater Horizon accident in the US Gulf of Mexico,” Fitch said.

“The company has so far repeatedly failed to stop the resultant oil leak and has instead reverted to containment methods that are yet to be fully implemented and are subject to potential weather related disruption.”

Moody’s Investor Service also lowered BP’s long-term debt ratings, from Aa1 to Aa2 and placed them on review for further possible downgrade.

“Today’s downgrade of BP’s long-term debt ratings reflects Moody’s expectation that the protracted oil spill … caused by the explosion on the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, will result in significant containment and clean-up costs as well as litigation costs,” it said.

“Moody’s expects these costs to weigh significantly on BP’s free cash flow generating capacity and to constrain its ability to focus on other key areas of the company’s business in the near to intermediate term.”

In a further twist, Moody’s will seek to ascertain how the disaster will affect BP’s long-term US business prospects, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico where it is the biggest operator and producer.

It will also look to assess BP’s future drilling and producing costs in the United States and elsewhere, as well as the group’s business profile and future financial performance.

For the last six weeks, the BP has failed in all its attempts to cap or contain the leak since an April 20 explosion ripped through the BP-leased rig.

The White House announced Thursday that President Barack Obama will make his third trip to the Gulf of Mexico region on Friday to survey the latest efforts to respond to the massive oil spill there.

Earlier on Thursday, BP pledged 360 million dollars for the construction of six sand barriers to help keep oil from reaching Louisiana’s fragile wetlands, in a move which will push its total costs to 1.35 billion dollars.

Fitch forecasts that BP’s costs could reach between 2.0-3.0 billion dollars this year, depending on how much oil hits the US shoreline.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward admitted Thursday that the oil giant had not been prepared for a deep-water leak.

“What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool-kit,” Hayward told the Financial Times newspaper.

Although he said BP had been “very successful” in keeping oil away from the coast, he accepted it was “an entirely fair criticism” to say the firm had not been fully prepared for a deep-water oil leak.

BP has meanwhile successfully cut an underwater wellpipe using hydraulic shears and will now work to place a containment vessel over the leak, the senior US official overseeing the response said Thursday.

The London-listed giant added that it will pay for the construction of six sand barriers to help keep oil from reaching fragile wetlands, supporting the US government’s Louisiana barrier islands proposal.

US officials had ordered the company on Wednesday to pay for five more sand barriers in the Mississippi Delta to help minimize potential damage to vulnerable shorelines.

Fitch also warned Thursday that an official US investigation was another negative factor for BP, while it could still face more downgrades.

Israel began deporting all the foreign activists detained during a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, as international pressure mounted for a full investigation of the incident.

Pro-Palestinian activists behind the aid convoy meanwhile vowed to renew their bid to break the Israeli blockade and deliver their cargoes to the Palestinian territory in the coming days.

“All foreign nationals who were on board the fleet and were arrested will be deported from Tuesday night,” said a statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The operation was expected to be completed within 48 hours, it added.

Early Wednesday, an Israeli government official told AFP that a first group of around 50 Turkish nationals were headed to Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, from where they would be deported.

The decision to release the activists came after mounting international pressure to free the detainees.

The UN Security Council called for the ships and the civilians who had been on board to be released and to transport the aid to Gaza.

It also called for “a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards.”

Israeli troops said they had killed nine of the activists during Monday’s operation to capture the six-ship flotilla, which had 682 passengers from 42 countries.

Pierre Wettach, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation, said his group was checking on the condition and whereabouts of those wounded and those detained by Israeli authorities.

Israel’s decision to back down and release the detainees followed two days of stinging international criticism.

It was all the more remarkable given that just hours earlier, Netanyahu had described some of the activists as “terrorists armed with cold weapons such as axes, knives, clubs, bars and the like.”

The White House declined to specifically condemn Israel, but US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the situation in Gaza was “unsustainable and unacceptable.”

“Israel’s legitimate security needs must be met just as the Palestinians’ legitimate needs for sustained humanitarian assistance and regular access for reconstruction materials must also be ensured,” she added.

Clinton backed an Israeli probe of the raid, while stressing that it had to be “prompt, impartial, credible and transparent.”

Israel insists the boarding would have been peaceful if the commandos had not been attacked by dozens of club-wielding activists on the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara, which carried most of the passengers.

Organisers of the aid convoy meanwhile insisted they would push ahead with a fresh bid to break the blockade.

“We knew what the risk would be and we will continue to run these flotillas,” said Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement.

“The Rachel Corrie will probably be there within the week.”

The aid-laden cargo ship, currently off the east coast of Italy, is named after a US activist crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli army bulldozer during a protest on the Gaza Strip.

Greta Berlin said organisers were also working on plans for a new flotilla that would leave for Gaza in July.

But Israel was adamant it would not let any ships through.

“We will not let any ships reach Gaza and supply what has become a terrorist base threatening the heart of Israel,” deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai told public radio.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for Israel to be punished for its “bloody massacre” and urged international sanctions against its “lawlessness.”

Israel has informed Turkey that at least four of the nine passengers killed were Turkish nationals, a Turkish diplomat said.

And while Israel blamed the activists for the confrontation, passengers had an entirely different story.

“Personally, I saw two and a half wooden batons that were used… There was really nothing else. We never saw any knives,” former MP Norman Paech, 72, said on his arrival back in Berlin.

“This was a clear act of piracy,” said Paech, who was on the Mavi Marmara, where the worst of the violence took place.

Netanyahu, who consulted with his security cabinet after calling off White House talks with US President Barack Obama, insisted the commandos had “defended themselves from a lynching.”

But the Israeli press was scathing about the botched operation, criticising the failure of the political and military leadership to anticipate such a scenario.

Flotilla organisers said the ships carried some 10,000 tonnes of aid destined for Gaza, which has suffered a crippling blockade imposed by Israel in 2006 and largely backed by Egypt.

Israeli authorities said some of the fleet’s supplies had been trucked to Gaza and more would follow.

The political fallout from the incident continued late Tuesday, as Nicaragua suspended diplomatic relations with Israel.

Japan’s centre-left Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned on Wednesday, less than nine months after taking power following a landslide election win.

Hatoyama, who took office in September, has seen his poll ratings plummet from more than 70 per cent to below 20 per cent amid a row over an unpopular US army base on the southern island of Okinawa.

Hatoyama initially promised to move the base off the island but backtracked and decided to keep it there, caving in to Washington but enraging Okinawans and his pacifist coalition partners the Social Democrats.

The left-leaning group quit his three-party coalition on Sunday, weakening the government in the upper house ahead of July elections, while Hatoyama’s poll ratings plunged to a new low of below 20 per cent.

A tearful Hatoyama made the announcement at a special parliamentary meeting of lawmakers from his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), telling them: “I will step down” while also vowing to “create a new DPJ”.

“The government’s work has not reflected the public’s wishes,” the premier said, adding that he had also asked party heavyweight and secretary general Ichiro Ozawa to quit.

Ozawa has been embroiled in a funding scandal that has seen three of his current and former aides indicted. Prosecutors have also in the past questioned Ozawa and raided his offices.

Hatoyama, 63, named Ozawa’s and his own funds problems and the Okinawa issue as the two main reasons for his resignation.

“I have caused trouble for the people of Okinawa,” Hatoyama said. “We will need to make efforts to move the US base outside of Okinawa. But the result was that we could not deliver.”

Speculation that Hatoyama would quit had dominated newspapers this week, and calls for him to resign as leader of the world’s second largest economy have grown within the DPJ ahead of upper house elections expected on July 11.

Hatoyama met Tuesday with Ozawa, the chief election strategist often dubbed the “Shadow Shogun” and the power behind the premier’s throne, and his party’s upper house caucus leader Azuma Koshiishi.

Hatoyama, who last summer ended more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule, was Japan’s fourth prime minister in four years.

Tipped as the most likely successors was Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Naoto Kan, with Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada and Transport Minister Seiji Maehara also seen as possible contenders.

A Stanford-trained engineering scholar, Hatoyama has a scholarly bent that often saw him criticised as lofty and out of touch with the common people.

Hatoyama hails from one of Japan’s most powerful political and business clans, a family sometimes dubbed “Japan’s Kennedys”.

He became embroiled in a funding scandal over large donations made by his millionaire mother into his electoral warchest, a scandal in which a close aide received a suspended jail term.

The UN Security Council called Tuesday for an impartial investigation into the Israeli attack against a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the immediate release of all civilians.

The statement came at the end of an emergency session that lasted more than 12 hours, pitting Turkey against the United States in calling for a strong and specific condemnation of Israel, diplomats said.

In the end, the statement read by council president Claude Heller, Mexico’s ambassador the United Nations, condemned “those acts which resulted in the loss of at least 10 civilians and many wounded.”

“The Security Council took note of the statement of the UN Secretary General on the need to have a full investigation into the matter and it calls for a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards,” the statement said.

The statement fell short of a call for an independent investigation, with the United States backing an Israeli investigation.

“We have every confidence that Israel can conduct a credible and impartial and transparent, prompt, investigation internally,” Alejandro Wolff, the deputy permanent US representative, said.

Israeli commandos carried out the pre-dawn raid Monday in international waters on a convoy of vessels carrying activists from a variety of countries who were bringing food and medical supplies to Gaza to circumvent an Israeli blockade.

Accounts of what happened conflicted. Israeli officials said the commandos acted in self defence after being attacked with clubs and knives, while activists charged that the commandos fired on sleeping civilian passengers.

The Security Council requested the immediate release of all ships and civilians held by Israel. Israeli public radio earlier reported, however, that Israel would hold 480 of the activists and expel 48 others.

“The Council urges Israel to permit full consular access, to allow the countries concerned to retrieve their deceased and wounded immediately and to ensure the delivery of the humanitarian assistance from the convoy to its destination,” the statement said.

The council reiterated its grave concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which it said was “not sustainable.”

It stressed the need for a “sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza as well as unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.”

Emphasizing that the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a two state solution, the statement expressed concern that the incident occurred at a time when indirect talks were underway between the sides.

It urged the parties “to act with restraint, avoiding any unilateral and provocative actions, and all international partners to promote an atmosphere of cooperation between the parties and throughout the region.”

The closed-door negotiations on the statement followed a public debate in the council, during which Israel was vehemently attacked by Turkey, the country from which the flotilla departed. Many of those aboard the convoy were Turkish nationals.

In individual statements made ahead of the emergency session, almost all 15 council members condemned the Israeli assault.

“It is clearer than ever that Israel’s restrictions on access to Gaza must be lifted in line with Security Council Resolution 1860. The current closure is unacceptable and counterproductive,” British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said.

France, Russia and China — also veto-wielding permanent council members — also called for the blockade to be lifted and for an independent inquiry.

The United States, Israel’s traditional ally which often uses its veto power to shield the Jewish state — did not request specifically that Israel end its blockade on the Gaza Strip. But it hinted that the measure at least should be eased.

Wolff said Washington was “deeply disturbed by recent violence and regrets tragic loss of life and injuries. We are working to ascertain the facts.”

Israel’s UN envoy Daniel Carmon, meanwhile, insisted that the flotilla was not on an aid mission.

“What kind of peace activists use knives, clubs and other weapons to attack soldiers who board a ship in accordance with international law?” Carmon said.

But Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told delegates that Israel had “lost all legitimacy” through the deadly raid.

“It is murder committed by a state. It has no justification whatsoever,” he said.

The founder of City Harvest Church and 16 other individuals and staff involved in the handling of the church’s financial affairs are being investigated by the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD).

Police confirmed on Monday evening that Reverend Kong Hee and 16 others are assisting in an on-going investigation arising from complaints made to the Commissioner of Charities (COC) on the misuse of church funds.

CAD officers in the morning visited various premises, including the homes and offices of the individuals involved. They secured items such as financial records and computers for their investigation.

As to how long the investigation will take, the police have given the assurance that while it will be thorough, it will be without undue delay.

Earlier in the afternoon, the COC and CAD said in a joint statement that they were investigating some financial transactions involving several individuals and companies related or connected to the church.

They assured the public that despite ongoing investigations, the normal services and religious activities of the City Harvest need not be disrupted.

City Harvest is one of the largest churches in Singapore, with a congregation of over 30,000 who regularly pack its venues at Jurong West and the Singapore Expo during sermons.

The church’s reach online is even greater – through live webcasts, podcasts and its own broadcast channel. Much of it is driven by its charismatic founder, Reverend Kong.

The pastor keeps a Facebook page that has over 30,000 fans, and has his own YouTube channel. He lives in the US with his son and wife, Sun Ho, a successful pop singer.

This is not the first time City Harvest Church has made headlines. It was just in March that eyebrows were raised over the church’s S$310 million stake in Suntec City Convention Centre, and the Commissioner of Charities was called in to investigate.

In a statement to MediaCorp, the charities watchdog stressed that this round of investigations is not related to the earlier Suntec case.

It added that the case involved more than just City Harvest – it included companies and individuals connected either directly or indirectly with the church. That is why, it said, the police have to be involved.

Depending on the findings, the charity’s trustee may be suspended.

The statement continued: “While there was a governance review conducted on City Harvest Church in 2007, the objective and the scope are different from that of an inquiry.

“The governance review essentially looks at the organisation’s corporate governance with the objective of assessing and helping the charities to improve the way they are run.

“The inquiry on the other hand is a formal investigation into allegations and complaints received to ascertain that there is no mismanagement or misconduct in the administration of a charity.”

When asked to comment, the National Council of Churches of Singapore, of which City Harvest is a member, said it was too premature to do so at this point.

On the City Harvest’s website, a notice to members by Executive Pastor Reverend Derek Dunn stated that the church was “cooperating fully” with investigations, and that services and operations would continue as usual.

MediaCorp understands the church has engaged Christina Ng from law firm Rajah and Tann to represent it.

The government will be giving out the last tranche of GST credits on July 1 for all eligible Singaporeans who have already signed up or who sign up by 18 June.

Singaporeans can receive between S$100 and S$250 in GST Credits for this year, if their Annual Assessable Income for Year of Assessment 2009 is not more than S$100,000.

The Finance Ministry said Singaporeans who have yet to sign up for their GST Credits have until December 31 to do so.

Those who do not sign up by then will not be eligible for the last tranche of the GST Credits.

You can sign up here here or by filling up the GST/1 form available at any CC, CDC or CPF Service Centre.

Singaporeans who have already signed up need not do so again.

GST Credits and Senior Citizens’ Bonus are being paid out from 2007 to 2010 as part of the GST Offset Package announced in Budget 2007.

South Korea Tuesday stepped up its campaign to hold North Korea responsible at the UN Security Council for sinking a warship, briefing visiting Russian experts and sending an envoy to the United States.

A team of Russian naval experts arrived Monday to review the findings of a multinational investigation team, which concluded last month that a North Korean submarine torpedoed the South Korean ship with the loss of 46 lives.

The Russians, including experts on torpedoes and submarines, will stay in South Korea until June 7 to debrief investigators, inspect the wreckage and visit the site of the sinking, defence and foreign ministry officials said.

“Russia’s direct trust in our investigation results will make this case clear, and it’s part of our stepped-up effort to muster international support,” one official told AFP.

South Korea has announced a series of reprisals including cutting off trade with its communist neighbour.

The hardline state furiously denies involvement and has responded to the reprisals with threats of war, sending regional tensions sharply higher.

The South, with US and Japanese support, will ask the Security Council to sanction — or at least to censure — the North for the sinking, one of the worst military attacks since the 1950-53 war.

Seoul needs support from veto-wielding Council members, including Russia and China, which have traditionally been close to Pyongyang.

The foreign ministry in Moscow has said it needs “100 percent proof” of the North’s involvement.

Seoul has also asked China to send its own experts but Beijing has not responded, according to local media, some of which said the offer had been rejected.

At a three-way weekend summit, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao resisted pressure from the Japanese and South Korean leaders to publicly support the UN move or to condemn the North.

Wen instead called for efforts to ease regional tensions.

Despite China’s unclear stance, South Korea continued its campaign by sending Second Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-Woo, in charge of UN affairs, to the United States Monday for discussions with US officials.

With the US government reviewing how to step up its own actions against North Korea, South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan said restricting cash flows to the North was an effective punishment.

“If the cash inflow into North Korea is restricted, I think it will lower the possibility of nuclear weapons development and deter belligerent behaviour,” he said in a BBC interview aired early Tuesday.

South Korea estimates that its own reprisals will cost the cash-strapped North between 260-300 million dollars a year.

President Lee Myung-Bak instructed his cabinet Tuesday to draw up a long-term strategy for reunification of the peninsula despite the tensions over the Cheonan corvette’s sinking.

“National security has emerged as an important task since the Cheonan incident,” Lee told them. “With regard to security, people usually think of confrontation. Fundamentally, however, we should draw up a strategy on security bearing reunification in mind.”

Toys “R” Us is seeking to raise $800 million in stock through an initial public offering, hoping to clear some debt from its balance sheet, the company said in a securities filing Friday.

The Wayne, N.J.-based toy retailer did not say how many shares it plans to sell.

Toys “R” Us will use most of the capital raised from the offering to repay its “substantial indebtedness,” the filing said. As of January 2010, the company had more than $5.2 billion in debt.

This will be the second entry into the public market for Toys “R” Us, which was bought for $6.6 billion in 2005 under pressure of slumping sales. The company was taken private by the investor group owner, which is led by Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, and Vornado Realty Trust.

The company wants its stock to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “TOYS.”

BP engineers scrambled on Sunday to implement another high-risk plan to stem the devastating Gulf oil spill now being described as likely the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Hours after the British oil giant acknowledged failure in its “top kill” attempt to plug the underwater well, company officials said it could take a week to implement the next bid — placing a cap over the leak.

“Right now we are going to a containment operation,” BP Managing Director Bob Dudley told CNN’s “State of the Union” program of the latest attempt to deal with the ruptured well nearly a mile (1,600 metres) under water.

“Because this is being done at 5,000 feet with robots, we’re going to take our time, do it extremely carefully. By the end of the week, we should have this in place,” Dudley said.

While the “top kill” plan would have sealed the well using a combination of heavy drilling fluid and eventually cement, the new effort aims only to reduce the leak, and might temporarily increase the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, officials said.

The well will only be sealed when BP finishes drilling two relief wells, but they are not expected to be ready until August.

In the meantime, thousands of gallons of oil spew uncontrolled into the sea each day.

At least 20 million gallons are now estimated to have leaked into the ocean since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and sank, killing 11 workers.

President Barack Obama’s top environmental advisor, Carol Browner, said on Sunday that the spill was “probably the biggest environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country.”

“I think what the American people need to know is that it is possible that we will have oil leaking from this well until August when the relief wells will be finished,” she said.

The bid underway Sunday involves using robots to sever a damaged “riser” pipe carrying oil the from the wellhead and placing a containment device called a Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) over the leak.

Oil would then be siphoned from the device up to a container ship at the surface.

But the process could actually increase the amount of oil leaking into the sea, and it is uncertain how much oil would be contained, Browner said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.

“When you cut the riser, the kink may be holding some of the oil in and so we could see an increase, experts are saying, of as much as 20 percent,” she said, adding the increase could last four to seven days as the cap is prepared. “Once the cap is on, the question is how snug is that fit? If its a snug fit then there could be very, very little oil, if they’re not able to get a snug fit then there could be more.”

That is a nightmare scenario for a region under siege and increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress.

On Friday, Obama visited Louisiana for the second time since the spill began, and he pledged Saturday to do whatever it takes to help those whose livelihoods have been upended by the catastrophe.

“We will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimized by this manmade disaster are made whole,” he said.

He ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and other top environmental officials to return to the region next week.

Since the spill began, an estimated 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of crude have leaked into the Gulf each day.

The disaster has already closed stretches of coastal fishing waters, endangering the seafood industry and tourism, and threatening a catastrophe for Louisiana marshes, home to many rare species.

Government data released Thursday suggested between 18.6 million gallons and 29.5 million gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf — far more than the roughly 11 million gallons of crude spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

The spill has been a public relations nightmare for BP, which faced new allegations of negligence Sunday after The New York Times said internal company files showed the firm had serious concerns about the Deepwater rig weeks before the April accident.

Congressman Ed Markey, who forced BP to make available a live video feed of the oil leak, said Sunday he had “no confidence whatsoever in BP.”

“BP has been making it up as they go along the whole way,” he said on “Face the Nation.” I don’t think that people should really believe what BP are saying.”

Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister George Yeo will host the 2nd ASEAN-Gulf Cooperation Council Ministerial Meeting on June 1.

The meeting underscores the strengthening relations between ASEAN and Gulf countries.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The meeting here will be co-chaired by Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hor Namhong and Kuwait’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Dr Mohammed Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah.

The meeting is expected to endorse a two-year Plan of Action aimed at bolstering partnerships in the areas of economy, education and culture.

As part of the visit ASEAN and GCC Foreign Ministers will call on Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Mr Yeo will also host a welcome dinner for the delegates at the National Library, where they will visit the exhibition of “Rihlah – Arabs of Southeast Asia”.

There’s good news on efforts to contain and clean up an oil slick caused by the collision of two vessels in Singapore.

The spill came from the Malaysian-registered tanker MT Bunga Kelana 3, which was carrying nearly 62,000 tonnes of crude when it collided on Tuesday with the MV Waily, a bulk carrier registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines. About 2,500 tonnes of crude leaked from a gash in the double-hulled tanker.

Authorities said on Sunday that the slick, which closed public beaches on Singapore’s eastern coastline, has been mostly contained. Waters off East Coast Beach and Changi Beach are now clear of oil stains.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) said there are also no oil patches visible at sea. The agency said the petroleum-like smell at both beaches is now hardly detectable.

But work is still underway to clear the 60.4 tonnes of contaminated sand removed from the affected beaches. The contaminated sand will be disposed off at the Semakau Offshore Landfill.

Since Wednesday, nearly 500 workers have been mobilised to clean up the oil on the affected beaches.

Though the situation is improving, NEA said that the two beaches will still be closed pending ongoing checks on the water quality, which is expected to return to normal in a few days.

Till then, the public has been advised to refrain from swimming and engaging in water activities.

But some beach-goers were already having a go. One of them said: “We were looking at the beach and it seems that they have cleared up most of the oil stain, so we thought that it is ok to go back into the water.”

“I don’t think the water is that bad. The past two days, I have also been sailing. I came back with some oil slick on the board and on the sail….just do some cleaning. I think that will do,” said another.

Beach-goers were also heading to unaffected areas like Pasir Ris. “We were supposed to go to East Coast Park to have a barbecue, but in the end we moved here because of the oil spill.”

The NEA added that cleaning efforts at the vulnerable natural reserve at Chek Jawa were also almost complete. “At Chek Jawa, 98 percent of cleaning is complete. Only small patches of oil film are visible on the water surface,” the agency said.

But oil absorbent booms are in place to minimise the impact on the eco-system.

Visitors can still go to Chek Jawa, but guided walks have been suspended for two weeks (from 29 May) to allow NParks to better monitor the situation.

The NEA said it will continue to carry out surveillance at East Coast Park, Changi Beach and Pulau Ubin.

Meanwhile, the damaged vessel has been moved to a Johor anchorage.

And the Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) of Singapore said containment and
clean-up efforts will continue.

The MPA said that further patches of oil slick were observed in Malaysian waters and in the Traffic Separation Scheme to the east of Singapore by passing ships and aircraft on Sunday.

Malaysian counterparts have been informed and MPA is offering assistance in line with the Standard Operating Procedure for Joint Oil Spill Combat in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.

Separately, no oil slick was reported in the Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) off Changi East or within the anchorages of Singapore’s port waters.

Isolated patches of oil with debris were sighted in the waters just outside SAF Yacht Club and Changi Naval Base but were promptly cleaned up.

The MPA said that the possibility of small isolated patches of oil with debris surfacing remains and that response craft remain in place ready to deal with any oil patches.

China resisted pressure on Sunday from South Korea and Japan to censure North Korea publicly for the sinking of a warship, calling only for regional tensions over the incident to be defused.

Host President Lee Myung-Bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama teamed up at the two-day summit to nudge China’s Premier Wen Jiabao to declare Pyongyang responsible for the March sinking of the South Korean corvette.

But Wen gave no sign that China is ready to back United Nations Security Council action against its ally over the sinking, which cost 46 lives.

“The urgent task now is to defuse the impact of the Cheonan incident, change the tense situation and avoid clashes,” Wen told a joint press conference on the southern resort island of Jeju.

“China will actively communicate with relevant parties and lead the situation to help promote peace and stability in the region, which fits our common and long-term interests best.”

South Korea announced reprisals including a trade cut-off after international investigators reported on May 20 that a North Korean submarine fired a heavy torpedo to sink the Cheonan.

The North denies involvement and has responded to the reprisals with threats of war.

In Pyongyang on Sunday, 100,000 North Koreans held a rally accusing Seoul of heightening cross-border tensions over the sinking, according to the North’s state broadcasting network monitored by Yonhap news agency.

Wen, whose country is the North’s economic lifeline, has been cautious since arriving in South Korea Friday.

At a meeting with Lee that day, he said Beijing would, before determining its position, review the results of the international investigation into the Cheonan’s sinking but would not protect whoever was responsible.

Lee said in Jeju that he expected “wise co-operation” from neighbouring countries in handling the disaster.

According to his senior spokesman Lee Dong-Kwan, Lee also told the summit: “We are not afraid of war, but we do not want war either. We have no intention to go to war.”

Hatoyama, whose government Friday announced new sanctions against the North, said the three leaders agreed that “this is a serious issue related to peace and stability in Northeast Asia”.

South Korea, at least in public, appeared fairly satisfied with the outcome of the Jeju summit.

“The inclusion of those remarks on the Cheonan in the joint press announcement in itself has significance,” Lee’s spokesman said.

But Paik Haksoon, of the Sejong Institute think-tank, said Wen’s comments “indicate that China is still questioning the authenticity and authority of the investigation.”

“There would be no point in taking this issue to the UN Security Council without securing support from China in advance,” Paik told AFP.

Numerous countries have condemned the North for the sinking, one of the worst military attacks on the South since the 1950-53 war.

The North says Seoul faked evidence to incite tensions and boost its support before local elections this week.

South Korea, the United States and Japan need the support of veto-wielding member China to sanction — or, at least, to censure — the North at the Security Council.

Admiral Michael Mullen, the top US military officer, said later Sunday he was concerned about a possible North Korean “follow-on” to the torpedo attack on the Cheonan.

The South’s reprisals include preparations to resume cross-border loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts. The North has threatened to shell the loudspeakers if the broadcasts go ahead.

The North has cut all ties with the South, scrapped pacts aimed at averting accidental flare-ups along their disputed sea border and vowed to attack any intruding ships.

It has threatened to shut down a jointly run industrial park at Kaesong, the last reconciliation project still operating.

The South plans to send a letter to the chairman of the UN Security Council this week, an unidentified official told Yonhap news agency.

Japan’s Hatoyama had promised to fully support Seoul when the case is referred to the council, his spokesman told AFP.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was set for summit talks in Japan on Monday dogged by high-seas dramas involving North Korea and jostling between Beijing and Tokyo for territory and underwater resources.

The talks between Wen and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama come after their weekend summit with South Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak, at which Wen resisted pressure to publicly castigate North Korea over a warship sinking.

Hatoyama was set to keep pushing efforts by his government, Seoul and Washington to persuade Beijing to punish its communist neighbour, which has been blamed for torpedoing the South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors.

Japan and China have their own naval incidents to discuss after a series of confrontations in the East China Sea, where the two countries have longstanding territorial rivalries and are competing for control of oil and gas deposits.

In recent weeks, Chinese helicopters have twice buzzed Japanese naval vessels and a Chinese marine survey ship pursued a Japanese coastguard vessel, prompting protests from Tokyo.

“We are concerned by this very active Chinese naval presence and activities, both in the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean,” foreign ministry press secretary Kazuo Kodama said in a pre-summit briefing.

Japan will push Beijing to set up a military hotline to prevent maritime incidents from escalating, Kodama said.

Two years ago both countries agreed to drill jointly for oil and gas in the north of the East China Sea, with Japanese companies meant to take part in
exploiting the Shirakaba oil and gas field, known as Chunxiao in Chinese.

Since the June 2008 agreement, the talks have stalled and Japan says China has started unilateral operations on the Chinese side of the median line, with ships reportedly observed taking equipment to the area.

“No progress has been made so far to translate this agreement into an actual operational agreement… What China should do is to expedite this process rather than to go it alone,” said Kodama.

Joint development of the oil fields by Asia’s two biggest economies would help promote Hatoyama’s vision of turning the East China Sea into a “Sea of Fraternity”.

Since taking power last September, the centre-left leader has signalled greater engagement with China and promoted the goal of a European-style Asian community.

East Asian leaders have welcomed the new tone in Tokyo, where previous conservative leaders often caused anger by visiting the Yasukuni war shrine, which they see as a symbol of Japan’s past imperial aggression.

While the wartime past can still strain relations, Wen is expected to focus on the economic ties of the future when he meets Japanese business leaders.

China is set to overtake Japan as the world’s number two economy as early as this year. While this may pique Japan’s pride, its business community is eagerly targeting China’s fast-growing middle class as Japan’s own population ages and shrinks.

China is Japan’s top trade partner, with total two-way volume of around US$230 billion last year, exceeding Japan’s two-way trade with the United States for the third year in a row.

It has been a while, but Motorola has finally returned to the mobile phone scene – its first Android smartphone, the Dext, was launched here last week.

Running on the older Android operating system version 1.5, the Dext packs a 3.1-inch touchscreen display, a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera capable of video capture in H.264, and Assisted-GPS. It touts connectivity options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and comes with a 2GB microSD card (it supports microSD cards up to 32GB) for you to immediately store your captured photos and videos.

The still camera’s quality is not bad, but videos look pixelated. Audio quality in those videos, however, is good.

The highlight of the phone really lies in its Motoblur user interface platform. As its name implies, Motoblur tries to blur the boundaries among various social networks.

You only need to register once and add your multiple accounts, and Motoblur will synchronise all your emails, feeds, messages and photos from sites like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, pushing all updates to your home screen.

Simply tap on the screen to activate a window that allows you to add the various widgets, from Facebook to weather. You can keep up to date with all the happenings around you with one glance on your home screen.

The phone’s contact list is also automatically updated from your various accounts. You can choose to call, email, Twitter or Facebook your friend when you view their contact. It’s pretty neat to have such options, especially when you can view your friends’ current status. So, you might want to refrain from calling your wife when her Facebook status says “In a very bad mood”.

Meanwhile, the competent Web browser can keep you occupied with an unlimited number of open windows. While the rendition of the websites is good, scrolling on the touchscreen interface is a little sluggish. Texting on the touchscreen is not as responsive as we would have liked, too.

But the Dext has a secret weapon. Slide it open and you get a qwerty keyboard. The display also changes to landscape mode automatically. The keyboard provides great tactile response and is a much faster way to type emails and SMSes.

Though somewhat bulky, the built of the Dext is really solid. The SIM card, microSD card and the battery are situated beneath the back cover, which might be a bother.

Also, with all that constant “pushing” of updates, the phone battery lasts a day at best.

Social media addicts might care less about these little quirks though. Get the Motorola Dext from SingTel at prices ranging from S$0 to S$348, depending on subscription plans.

US book publishers are smiling again, after years of watching digital versions of their titles sell for below what they thought they were worth.

A host of rivals to the market-dominating Kindle electronic reader has given newfound hope to publishers that they will finally be able to dictate their own terms after being at the mercy of Amazon.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. stable includes publisher Harper-Collins, could hardly contain his glee during an earnings call last week.

“Without content, the ever larger and flatter screens, the tablets, the e-readers and the increasingly sophisticated mobile phones would be lifeless,” Murdoch said. “Without content these ingenious and wonderful devices would be unloved and unsold.”

One new arrival in particular has Murdoch and other publishers excited — Apple’s iPad tablet computer, which doubles as a full-colour e-reader of books, newspapers and magazines.

“We’re at a happy point, not just with Apple, but with Barnes & Noble and the ‘Nook,’ the 23 devices that have been launched, and Google Books seems to be just around the corner,” a source in the publishing industry said.

“Now we have that many more distribution outlets coming,” said the source, who requested anonymity out of fear of antagonizing Amazon, which may be facing competition but remains the undisputed e-book leader.

Although the iPad will not be available to consumers until the end of March, Apple is shaking up the digital book market like it did the music industry with the iPod and iTunes music store.

Unveiling the iPad, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced deals with five major publishers and an agreement that allows publishers to set higher prices while Apple settles for a 30-percent cut.

The so-called “agency model” is a departure from the way Amazon has been doing business with book publishers.

Since the release of the Kindle two years ago, Amazon has sold digital versions of hardcover new releases and bestsellers for 9.99 US dollars, a move primarily aimed at driving sales of the online retail giant’s e-reader.

Publishers were generally opposed, believing the price was too low, but were not in a position to argue while Amazon was the only game in town.

That is no longer the case and the revolt against Amazon was immediate.

Just days after the wraps were taken off the iPad, Macmillan informed Amazon it wanted to begin charging between 12.99 and 14.99 US dollars for e-book versions of most hardcover new releases and bestsellers.

Macmillan said it would give Amazon a 30-percent cut, as with Apple.

Amazon protested, temporarily pulling Macmillan titles — both print and e-books — from its online bookstore, but acknowledged that “ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms.”

Another major publisher, Hachette Book Group, quickly followed Macmillan.

“It’s important to note that we are not looking to the agency model as a way to make more money on e-books,” Hachette chairman and chief executive David Young said in a letter to literary agents.

“In fact, we make less on each e-book sale under the new model,” he said. “We’re willing to accept lower return for e-book sales as we control the value of our product — books, and content in general.

“We’re taking the long view on e-book pricing, and this new model helps protect the long-term viability of the book marketplace,” Young said.

Gartner analyst Allen Weiner said it remains to be seen whether consumers, having gotten used to paying 9.99 US dollars for a bestseller or a new release, will pay more.

“The precedent may have already been set,” Weiner said. “Consumers may not pay more than 12 dollars.”

“The damage that Amazon has done may be irreparable,” he said. “The cow is out of the barn. I don’t know how you get the cow back in the barn.”

At the same time though, “we’re in the process of having all distribution lines and pricing models redrawn,” Weiner said. “It’s Chapter One in all of this, but it may or may not dictate what happens at the end.”