Two a penny

.Stade Francais prop David Attoub has appealed against his 70-week ban for gouging in a Heineken Cup match against Ulster the previous month, competition organisers said overnight.
“David Attoub has today lodged an appeal against both the finding of foul play and level of sanction imposed by an independent disciplinary hearing last Tuesday,” said a statement posted on the ERC website.”
The 28-year-old, who played for France in 2006, was suspended for gouging flanker Stephen Ferris’s eyes in an ill-tempered game won 23-13 by Ulster in Belfast.
“The independent appeal committee will be appointed as soon as practicable.
“This is the worst act of contact with the eyes I have had to deal with,” judge Jeff Blackett said in a statement posted on the ERC website at the time. .
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.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

.France captain Thierry Henry’s infamous handball in the World Cup play-off win over Ireland will go under the microscope on Monday (local time) when FIFA’s disciplinary commission assess the incident.
Two months to the day since the Barcelona man’s controversial intervention secured the 1-1 draw that took France to South Africa and ended Ireland’s World Cup dream in the second leg of their play-off tie in Paris, Henry will face up to the possibility of a fine or even a ban.
“I had a phone conversation with Thierry Henry,” Blatter said.
The meeting of the 21-man disciplinary panel, an independent body chaired by the Swiss Marcel Mathier, was announced by FIFA president Sepp Blatter in Cape Town on December 2 following an extraordinary executive committee meeting. It was a conversation between sportsmen.
“We didn’t talk about guilty or not guilty.”
Blatter’s diplomacy can be explained by the lack of precedent regarding retrospective punishments meted out to players. I didn’t say that he would be punished, I said he’d be the subject of an investigation.
Despite the media storm that followed the match, with the goal dubbed “The Hand of Frog” in the Irish press and Irish prime minister Brian Cowen calling for a replay, Henry is likely to escape lightly.
The disciplinary commission is likely to issue a symbolic penalty, as FIFA’s rules do not explicitly address incidents of such a nature and a heavy punishment would create an unwelcome precedent for world football’s governing body.
Blatter, meanwhile, has raised the possibility of awarding “moral compensation” to the Irish team.
Article 57 of FIFA’s disciplinary code concerns “anyone who insults someone in any way, especially by using offensive gestures or language, or who violates the principles of fair play or whose behaviour is unsporting in any other way” and refers to punishments ranging from warnings to the return of awards.
France was losing 1-0 to Ireland at the Stade de France on November 18, having won the first leg 1-0, when Henry teed up William Gallas for what proved to be the decisive goal after illegally controlling the ball with his hand.
“That could be a special trophy or a prize, we’ll have to see,” he said.

.Snow and icy weather has disrupted travel across Europe, closing Geneva airport on one of its busiest tourist weekends of the year and prompting a state of emergency on part of Germany’s Baltic coast.
Thousands of passengers were stranded at Geneva’s Cointrin airport after heavy overnight snow kept it closed until noon.
“It was the first time we had so much snow on the runway since 1985,” said airport spokesman Bertrand Staempfli as departures began at midday.
Many British, German and other European skiers use Geneva airport to reach popular Swiss and French ski resorts in the close toby Alpine region, including Verbier.
Delays were expected as frustrated passengers queued to re-book flights at the airport, where 100,000 people had been due to transit over the weekend.
Schools across the state will stay closed on Monday.
Hundreds of motorists had to abandon their cars in the north-eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where 25 centimetres of snow fell and the district of Ostvorpommern declared a state of emergency, local authorities said.
Levees in parts of the neighbouring state of Schleswig-Holstein showed cracks on Sunday, threatening low-lying areas with floods, police said.
In Poland, at least 200,000 households suffered a power outage and shoppers and workers were evacuated from a shopping centre in the western city of Leszno when its roof began to give way under 1. Coastal towns like Flensburg and Travemuende had suffered flooding by afternoon.
A police spokesman said that since the onset of cold weather in October, 152 people had been found frozen to death in Poland.5 metres of snow, rescue services said. .
- Cars trapped -
On Germany’s Baltic island of Fehmarn, some 5,000 residents were shut in by the blizzards, while scores were trapped in their cars for hours on the A20 autobahn because normal snow ploughs could not reach them, authorities said.
The weather had caused over 1,100 road accidents between Saturday and Sunday morning in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, according to the regional government.
The weather had caused over 1,100 road accidents between Saturday and Sunday morning in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, according to the regional government.
In the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, snow caused more than 900 road accidents between Friday and midday on Sunday, seriously injuring 15 people and causing 4 million euros of damage, the regional interior ministry said. At least 16 people have been badly injured in the state due to the snow since Saturday.
In Britain, chemical firm Ineos said it had diverted 12,000 tonnes of salt for use on British roads that had originally been destined for Germany.
Ninety-one flights were cancelled on Sunday at Frankfurt airport, Germany’s busiest, compared to 225 the day before.
The government told local authorities to reduce the amount of salt they put on roads by a quarter at the end of last week in a bid to conserve supplies.
“Because we’ve been inundated with calls from local authorities, we’ve decided to retain the supplies in the UK,” a spokesman said.
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.A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.
Fabrice Bellard said he used an inexpensive desktop computer - and not a supercomputer used in past records - to calculate Pi to close toly 2.
That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.7 trillion decimal places.577 billion digits.
Professor Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.
The gear cost “a bit less than 2,000 euros” ($3,123), Mr Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.
Mr Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.
“It is a completely standard PC. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk.5-teraoctet hard disks.
Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Mr Bellard said.”
Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation. .
Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organisation keen on hosting the record, he said..14159. in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end..
“Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge,” he said.
Bellard said he was “not especially interested” in Pi’s digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.
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.France has deported to Egypt a radical imam who for months had been inciting followers in Paris area mosques to rise up against the West, the government said.
Described as dangerous, Ali Ibrahim Al-Sudani was detained and sent back to Egypt under an emergency deportation order, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said in a statement. .
The Egyptian national was the 29th imam or Islamic preacher to have been deported from France since 2001, according to the interior ministry.
Mr Sudani, aged around 27, showed “contempt for our society’s values and incited violence,” he added.
French security agencies had been tracking Sudani since 2008 and found his Jihadist teachings to be “quite hardline,” said an official close to the case.
In all, 129 Islamic radicals have been expelled from French territory, it added.
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.Two women have died and 47 others were hurt in a bus crash in the south of England as ice and snow continues to throw the UK’s transport systems into chaos.
Snow and ice on the runways caused many flights to be cancelled.
All 129 passengers were taken off the plane and no injuries were reported.
A Ryanair plane overshot the runway as it landed at Prestwick Airport in the west of Scotland.
Thousands of people left stranded by a three-day Eurostar service cancellation formed long queues at London’s Saint Pancras International Station in the hope of finally getting to the continent.
As snow turns to ice, traffic conditions have become treacherous.
All Eurostar’s trains for Wednesday filled up by lunchtime.
Tempers frayed amid confusion over who would get priority on the reduced number of trains that began running on Tuesday.
Passengers were urged to turn up an hour early. The operator said it would continue to run a modified timetable on Thursday.
Meanwhile, floodwaters drenched most of Venice, as a combination of wind, rain and the lagoon city’s periodic tidal phenomenon saw water levels rise by 143 centimetres, a record for the year, officials said.
Many online shoppers shoppers in the UK have been told not to expect their goods by Christmas after snow stalled deliveries.
Heavy rains closed motorways in southern Spain and Portugal, where power lines were also cut by heavy winds overnight. .
In northern Germany, a seven-year-old boy was stopped by police, driving back to a parking lot having ploughed the snow off the street with his parents’ front loader.
Snowfall also forced school closures in northern Spain.
- ABC/AFP

.Tens of thousands of European travellers have been stranded in rail stations, traffic jams and airports as heavy snow and ice continues to cause massive disruptions at the start of the Christmas holiday season.
A deadly blizzard has also blanketed much of the eastern United States, cutting power to tens of thousands of homes, paralysing air traffic and stranding many motorists amid the worst storms to hit the region in decades.
Another homeless Pole froze to death while sheltering in a doorway in the French Mediterranean port of Marseille, and a Frenchman was found dead in his ice-cold caravan close to the northern town of Arras.
In Poland, at least 15 people have died of exposure, mainly the homeless or careless drunks caught outside in temperatures that plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius, according to police.6C. .
Forecasters across the continent are expecting more snow and freezing rain over the next couple of days, but with temperatures rising slightly and the outlook gradually improving.
Two more Germans died in road accidents caused by the icy conditions.
The most crippling problems hit cross-Channel transport between Britain and France, amid chaotic scenes after the Eurostar passenger service from London to Paris was shut down for a second day after at least five breakdowns.
Roads and railways have been closed or disrupted by snow drifts, black ice or floods across northern and western Europe, from Portugal to the Netherlands, and flights from London, Brussels and Paris airports were delayed.
The company said it would send test trains along the route to see if they could withstand the sub-zero temperatures in northern France which are believed to have caused trains to break down in the tunnel on Friday (local time).
Eurostar, the operator of the Channel Tunnel passenger trains, admitted it could not say when services would resume, with more than 24,000 passengers attempting to travel ahead of Christmas already affected. They all got through the tunnel OK, but one or two of them showed symptoms of the problem that happened on Friday night,” Eurostar director Richard Brown said.
“We did run two or three trains yesterday.”
More than 2,000 passengers spent Friday night trapped in the undersea tunnel, some without anything to eat or drink.
“We will not start services again until we’re sure that we can get them through safely.
Approach roads to the ports of Dover and Calais were snarled by tail-backs as a result of heavy snow and queues of trucks waiting for delayed shuttle trains through the Channel Tunnel. There were reports of heated rows and some passengers bitterly criticised the company.
- Deadly blizzards -
In the United States, the governors of Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia and Delaware have declared states of emergency following the snowstorms.
At Paris Charles de Gaulle, 40 per cent of flights have been cancelled and the remaining services were leaving an average of one hour late, while the city’s second airport, Orly, was the scene of a strike by security staff.
Officials reported many drivers and passengers had been stranded in their vehicles, some for more than 12 hours.
Three people have died on Virginia roads, with around 3,000 accidents forcing the closure of Virginia interstates for several hours.
In the bull’s eye of the weather, Washington shattered a 1932 December snowfall record, with 40 centimetres covering streets and homes.
Emergency services delivered heated meals and 400 bottles of water for stranded motorists, while others were moved to shelters.
The massive storm at one point stretched 800 kilometres across a dozen states, affecting around a quarter of the US population.
The massive storm at one point stretched 800 kilometres across a dozen states, affecting around a quarter of the US population.
President Barack Obama, after attending the climate change summit in Copenhagen, raced home to avoid the worst of the storm that hammered the East Coast with more than 61cm of snow in some places.
He got back before dawn on Saturday, two days before winter’s official arrival. By Saturday afternoon, the capital region’s three main airports - Reagan National, Washington Dulles International and Baltimore Washington International - had cancelled all incoming and outgoing flights, stranding thousands of passengers.
It was bleak news for millions hoping to drive or fly ahead of Christmas on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.
With close to white-out conditions forcing many residents to stay home and shopping malls shuttered or closing early, the extreme conditions also looked likely to take a bite out of retail sales.
The major shopping day usually accounts for some $US15 billion of all nationwide sales on the last weekend before Christmas.
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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.

.Former All Blacks winger Jonah Lomu returned to rugby union overnight with French semi-professional side Marseille-Vitrolles.
Once the most feared man in world rugby, the 34-year-old, who played 63 Tests for New Zealand between 1994 and 2002 before his career was cut short by kidney disease, returned in a 63-18 win over Montmelian in the equivalent of the third division.
Playing at centre, the former winger did not really shine and failed to score a try but said he was happy to have played again.
Lomu, who burst into the limelight at the 1995 World Cup, signed a two-year contract for the Marseille side earlier this year.
“I need to feel more confident and be able to communicate with my team-mates better but this was a first match and I wasn’t expecting miracles.
“I’m rather satisfied,” Lomu told reporters.”
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. I did my best