Two a penny

.The Federal Government has ramped up warnings about Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer, which has come under attack from hackers.
The Government is warning that people risk having their computers infiltrated and passwords stolen unless they install temporary fixes from Microsoft or use alternative browsers.
The Government says Microsoft has acknowledged all recent versions of the program are vulnerable.
The French and German governments have warned internet users in Europe to avoid Microsoft’s popular web browser.
It also says people should remember to regularly update their security software and change passwords oftenly.
Senior lecturer in network engineering at Melbourne’s RMIT University, Mark Gregory, says industry and governments are not prepared for the changing threats to cyberspace.
The concern follows revelations that hackers used a crack in Internet Explorer to mount an attack on Google and a number of other companies.
“The digital network is like the wild west.
“It is being used in ways that it wasn’t meant to be used and we need to get organisations, companies and governments . It is unregulated,” he said…”
Bill Caelli, from the Information Security Institute at the Queensland University of Technology, says the Government and regulators must step in to protect internet users. focused on taking action to make the digital network more secure for the general public.
“How many builders have put smoke detectors in the new homes and houses? How many people have put fences around their pools to protect children?” he said.
“How many builders have put smoke detectors in the new homes and houses? How many people have put fences around their pools to protect children?” he said.”
The Government says Microsoft has not solved the security glitch and Australians should use alternative browsers. It’s always been driven by regulatory [sic], by society itself, and that’s the role of government.
“There are other browsers that are available that appear to be being targeted less by the hackers and by these organisations than what Internet Explorer is being targeted,” he said. .
“On that basis you’d have to argue that if security was a principal concern then using another browser would be wise until the incidence is reduced.
“I don’t think there was any inference in what they said that Internet Explorer was any more deficient in terms of security than any of the other browsers, just that it was being targeted more.

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Editor’s note (19 January 2010): This story has been amended to reflect the fact that web users can install temporary fixes from Microsoft to reduce their risk

.Services have returned almost to normal after three days of chaos on the Eurostar rail link between the UK and France.
But many parts of Europe continue to face severe transport disruptions and there have been more deaths as a severe cold snap sweeps the continent.
More than 80 people have died across Europe, including 42 in Poland and another 27 in Ukraine who have frozen to death.
Air, rail and road transport has been severely disrupted across northern Europe where as much as 50 centimetres of snow has fallen with more expected in the coming days.
Another 13 people died in car accidents in Austria, Finland and Germany, where temperatures dropped well below zero.
More freezing fog was expected at Stansted, north of London, and forecasters from Britain’s Met Office also issued severe weather warnings across the country, warning of icy roads and thick snow in eastern Scotland.
But after three days of cancelled services, Eurostar trains began running again between Brussels, Paris and London: an investigation has been launched into the disruption of services.
Britain’s Automobile Association said Monday was their busiest night for 25 years, with about 700 calls received every hour.
“There was no way that I was going to throw customers out into that,” said store managing director Deborah Strazza.
In Buckinghamshire, west of London, about 100 people, including 20 children, spent the night in the John Lewis department store after being snowed in.”

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.France will follow the United Kingdom by imposing a new super tax on bonuses paid to its country’s bankers.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said world leaders must impose tougher limits on remuneration, particularly given that bonuses for 2009 have only been made possible through government support for the banking system.
Britain announced on Wednesday it was slapping a one-off 50 per cent tax rate on bonuses above 25,000 pounds ($43,000) to recoup cash spent saving the financial sector during the global financial crisis.
“We propose a long-term global compact that will encapsulate both the responsibilities of the banking system and the risk they pose to the economy as a whole,” they wrote.
France and Germany have for months been united in their attacks on excessive pay in the financial sector.
Mr Sarkozy has now also committed France to a similar tax.
Meanwhile, US investment giant Goldman Sachs says it will pay its 2009 bonuses for top executives in stock instead of cash under a policy adopted amid a growing furore over banker pay. .
In 2007, despite a looming mortgage crisis, the company’s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, received a Wall Street record-setting $US68 million ($74 million) bonus payment on top of his annual salary of $US600,000.
The firm’s 30-member management committee will receive the shares, which cannot be sold for five years, under a new policy aimed at discouraging excessive risk-taking and to ensure employees are accountable for the impact of their decisions.
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank which became a bank holding company during the financial crisis, has already repaid the US government for a $US25 billion capital injection.

.Thousands of French internet users have flooded video sharing websites to enjoy a lampoon of their glamorous first couple, almost a week after they appeared on the US show, The Simpsons.
Cartoon caricatures of President Nicolas Sarkozy and first lady Carla Bruni starred in an episode of the animated show on November 15 in an episode entitled The Devil Wears Nada.
In the show, bungling paterfamilias Homer Simpson and his colleague Carl Carlson visit Paris and bump into Ms Bruni, a cigarette-smoking femme fatale in a stylish ballgown, at a high-society reception.
Their cameos passed largely unnoticed in France until Friday, when news websites started linking to pirated clips of the episode, creating a buzz which saw more than 117,000 fans linking to the DailyMotion site alone.”
Later, after Carl threatens to have Homer sacked, the hero declares: “You know that woman you’ve been playing hide the baguette with? That’s the first lady of France, Carla Bruni!
“If you fire me I’ll call President Sarkozy and he’ll be all over you like Truffaut on Hitchcock,” Homer warns, in a dig at French cinema’s supposed debt to American models.
After a brief exchange of pleasantries, the Bruni character throws herself into Carl’s arms and declares: “I want to make love, right now. .
When Carl doubts the threat, Homer calls Mr Sarkozy’s office and we see the French leader at his desk with a portion of camembert and his sultry wife.
But while Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair and Fox network owner Rupert Murdoch recorded their own voices for their appearances and escaped with a gentle ribbing, the harsher Sarkozy parody appeared without their consent.
This is not the first time The Simpsons has mocked the French - the show famously popularised the taunt “cheese-eating surrender monkey” - or leading world figures.
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.Ninety-six shoe addicts have signed up for Friday’s Stiletto Championship, which takes place after office hours on an indoor track in the old stock exchange building in central Paris.
The only rule is to be perched on heels at least eight centimetres high. The prize is boxes and boxes of shoes.
“Walking on heels is no piece of cake.
“The finalists are training very seriously,” said Caroline Gentien, who works for the online shoe sale site that came up with the idea.
“We came up with the idea just two years ago.”
The finalists hail from all over France and made it into the glam challenge after a series of regional races. This year, 400 candidates signed up for the regional races,” Ms Gentien said.
The race, being run at 9:30pm (local time), is a three-part relay over 180 metres involving 32 teams of three with names such as “Yes We Can”, “Sexpistols” and “Superwoman”.
The prize is 3,000 euros worth of shoes.
Winners of the 2008 race will be competing again this year - a TV journalist, a psychologist, and a lawyer competing under the name “Talk To My Foot”.
Volunteers from the Red Cross will be standing by in case of accident, but last year’s competition wound up without a single twisted ankle.
“The only training we do is running to catch a train or a bus every day.
“We all love shoes and we love having fun,” said journalist Dorothee Kristy, 29.”
Also taking part in the race is stiletto school “Talons Academy”, a private business that doles out tips on how to walk in heels without hurting one’s back or ankles.”
Also taking part in the race is stiletto school “Talons Academy”, a private business that doles out tips on how to walk in heels without hurting one’s back or ankles. They go to a rendezvous in flat shoes and put their stilettos on at the last minute,” she added.
“Or else they cheat.”
The trick for Friday’s contestants, she says, is “mastering the half-turn.
“It’s true that it is harder to find your balance on heels. You have to get it right for each foot. .”
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. Stilettos is all about technique

.The 16 nations of the Eurozone have officially grown their economies by 0.4 of a per cent, meaning the zone is officially out of recession.
The new figure means that on average Eurozone countries have emerged from recession faster than earlier predicted, but the powerhouse nations of Germany and France have recorded a recovery below expectations.7 per cent and France just 0.
The German economy grew by 0.
The Spanish economy is trailing and is still in recession.2 per cent.
Though not in the Eurozone, Britain too is lagging behind other European countries and is still in recession after recording six consecutive quarters of negative growth. .
It is Britain’s worst result since quarterly figures were first gathered in 1955

.There is fresh evidence about the potential cause of an Air France Airbus crash which killed all 228 people on board when it plunged into the Atlantic while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
The Airbus A330 disappeared on June 1, when it flew into a notoriously stormy area of the South Atlantic.
One of the biggest problems for investigators has been their failure to find the all important black box flight data and voice recorder.
But before the plane crashed it did send a routine maintenance message back to France.
It stopped transmitting a location signal a few days after the plane crashed and is now on the bottom of the ocean, probably four kilometres down.
They read the outside air pressure and convert it to measure the all important speed of the plane.
The message indicated a failure of the aircraft’s air speed indicators, known as pitots. .
As it headed into the stormy area, known as the inter-tropical convergence zone, it is possible the radar which is designed to pick up water droplets was blinded.
The kind of pitots used on Air France flight 447 were known to have problems icing up, particularly at the super cold high altitudes where modern jets like the Airbus fly to save fuel.
He said the Airbus had weather radar which picked up a lot of information.
Airbus vice-president of the flight test division, Fernando Alonso, admitted to Foreign Correspondent that the Airbus onboard radar could not “see” ice particles.”
If the plane did fly into an ice storm, blocking the pitots and giving a false air speed indication, it is possible the Airbus stalled.
But when asked if it was correct to say that the ice could not be detected as easily by the radar as rain, he said: “I believe that the ice could not be detected.
According to Air France pilots, the pilot would have had to wrestle not just with the plane, but contradictory advice on how to deal with a stall warning from the aircraft.
According to Air France pilots, the pilot would have had to wrestle not just with the plane, but contradictory advice on how to deal with a stall warning from the aircraft.

Watch Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8:00pm (AEDT) on ABC 1.”
Shortly after the crash the pilots threatened to strike if Air France did not change the pitots and they did, the next day.

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REUTERS - The body of Mehdi ben Barka, an opponent of Morocco King Hassan II who was abducted in Paris in 1965, was burnt in Essonne, south of the French capital, author Georges Fleury told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

Fleury was given secret police documents on the Mehdi ben Barka affair 25 years ago, the former marine commando told the paper in an interview to be published on Sunday.

In any case, for me, that is what happened, I believe a lot in this lead.

The person who handed over the dossier was convinced that his body was incinerated in Essonne, Fleury said.

Mehdi ben Barka, a hero for the international left, was kidnapped in broad daylight in front of the smart Lipp restaurant in the heart of Paris and his fate remains unknown. Was it looked into at the time? Can it be verified today? I ask myself the question, Fleury was quoted as saying.

The case has been a cause celebre for Moroccan advocates of greater political freedom in the kingdom, but it remains politically sensitive in Rabat, where Hassan son Mohammed succeeded him as king in 1999. French investigators believe he was tortured and killed. 2 for four Moroccans over the abduction but later suspended them, citing a request for information from Interpol, the international police organisation.

France issued international arrest warrants on Oct.

Fleury said he had since lost contact with his source and was ready to had over the documents in his possession to prosecutors if they asked him.

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An employee at France Telecom jumped off a bridge on Monday morning, bringing the number of suicides at the French group since February 2008 to 24, the company management confirmed. .

The action plan included delaying any relocation plans until October 31 and an internal inquiry into the suicides which have shocked France.

Further reading

&raquo Focus on the string of suicides at France Telecom
&raquo State intervenes as suicides mount at France Telecom
This latest death comes just over a fortnight after a suicide on September 11, after which the company, which employs around 100,000 people in France, bowed to governmental pressure, and agreed to adopt more humane methods of management.

Once entirely state-owned, France Telecom is now semi-privatised, though the state is the group majority shareholder.

Unions in France are demanding an end to site closures, redundancies and forced relocations, but the company chief executive, Didier Lombard, has said that the company’s big restructuring programme - brought on by the economic crisis - will continue.

France - suicide - telecommunication

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Some 15,000 French churches, castles, hot springs, parks, archeological sites, and even the Moulin Rouge cabaret are opening their doors this weekend for the 26th annual European Heritage Days.

The national culture ministry, which organises the event in France, is even itself opening its doors. It will be presenting a special exhibition of a marble bust of Julius Caesar, discovered in the Rhone River in 2007 and usually housed in the Mus&eacutee D&eacutepartemental de l’Arles et de la Provence antiques. The ministry is promoting different kinds of accessibility to national monuments and other cultural sites. .

Europe - France - heritage
. This includes - and is free for young people - a series of events designed for the handicapped, and other events geared toward parents with children