International Comm & Culture 2009

Australia and India agreed to an extradition treaty in June last year, but the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it is not yet in force.

"Once the extradition treaty enters into force, Indian authorities would be bound to uphold and process the extradition request, and to seek to lodge an arrest warrant within India to seek out and detain this individual."

"In 2008 in addition to the extradition treaty, Australia also concluded a mutual assistance treaty dealing with matters of criminal interest between the two countries, and since then of course we've had the terrorist events in Bombay and no doubt the Australian Federal Police have got interests in matters that are occurring in India,"

Over the past six weeks at Disney World, a 21-year-old monorail driver, a 47-year-old actor portraying pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow's henchman "Mack," and a 30-year-old stuntman practicing for the Indiana Jones' Epic Stunt Spectacular died in on-the-job accidents.

community's grief is apparent on their Facebook pages. "We lost another one of our own at Disney. Too many, too young. Just wish it made some sense,"

"Mark lived for that magic. That's when Mark was most Mark," Babel says. "One's person's life can touch, in Mark's case, millions of guests. And he would make a special connection with each and every one of those kids that he came into contact with. He was amazing. The shining example of someone like Mark is inspiring, and so I kind of take extra care to make the magic in honor of Mark."

Australia is disturbed by China's detention of an Australian executive; China is angry that Australia allowed a Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, to visit.

Australia sells huge amounts of natural resources to China and, despite hitches in the relationship, signed a new gas deal this week with PetroChina.

"China has significant interests in Australia. China's interests in Australia go to its long-term needs for its resource security," Mr Rudd said.

out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshme

Pan," at least in Adam Reeder's version of the mythological figure, dances to the iPod

"Technology has changed the context but not the nature of humans or art," says Reeder. "Classical sculpture is typically very serious and everyday people come in and they're kind of ready to be bored. Then, they see this and say 'Dude, this is great.'

If you have had any exposure to adolescent or teenage girls over the past decade, then you are all too familiar with the phenomenon known as Hello Kitty, the mouthless cartoon cat that decorates the paraphernalia (usually done in garish pink) that has made Tokyo-based parent Sanrio Co. Ltd. an 83-billion-yen-a-year company (about $795 million).

Why would Japanese cartoon characters appeal to American youth? Why stuff that is, to put it mildly and to use an American expression, cheesy?

What allows some products or concepts to travel around the world, while others can't get out of the house?

Beijing is boosting demand for pirated products by limiting access to legitimate goods

The WTO said Beijing should allow foreign companies to import and distribute master copies of books, magazines and newspapers and to receive the same conditions and charges as Chinese companies for distributing reading materials.

The WTO said Beijing should allow foreign companies to import and distribute master copies of books, magazines and newspapers and to receive the same conditions and charges as Chinese companies for distributing reading materials.

the oriental "neglect'' of the mouth can lead to more mistakes in interpreting a person's emotion, said the study, describing how feelings can be ``lost in translation.''

Asian participants had difficulty recognising facial expressions of fear and disgust, mistakenly interpreting them as surprise and anger instead

Students to dump textbooks for e-books Carmel EganAugust 16, 2009 HEAVY book-filled school bags could soon be a thing of the past, with the e-book industry claiming most of students' textbooks will be contained in light hand-held portable devices within three years. The internet-linked reading devices will store hundreds of e-textbooks bought online or borrowed from school libraries. ''E-textbooks will be mainstream within three years,'' the executive director of DA Direct, Australia's largest distributor of portable reading devices and e-books, Richard Siegersma, predicted. Mr Siegersma said digital technology would lead to the costs of e-textbooks falling in a year to 18 months. ''There will be just-in-time and customised delivery to flexible, full-colour screens; textbooks with audio and video components; touch screens for handwriting and margin note-taking and text highlighting,'' he said.

HEAVY book-filled school bags could soon be a thing of the past, with the e-book industry claiming most of students' textbooks will be contained in light hand-held portable devices within three years.

''E-textbooks will be mainstream within three years,''

Twitter taken down to silence one man New York August 9, 2009 CYBER attacks on Twitter and other popular web services last week disrupted the lives of millions of internet users, but the real target was one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

The attacks were ''the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don't like one of the newscasters'', said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at internet security company F-Secure.

The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of infected personal computers, to direct massive amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu's pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them.The millions that were affected were, in a sense, simply bystanders, experiencing shrapnel from an internet blitzkrieg that took aim at one person and knocked out an entire community.

Fairfax, News to charge for online Tom Hyland August 9, 2009 THE loyalty of readers accustomed to getting their news online free is about to be tested, as Australia's largest newspaper groups prepare to charge for access to their websites.Fairfax Media is considering two levels of access, one free and the other incurring a charge, as newspapers move to protect declining revenues.Last week, News Limited chief executive Rupert Murdoch announced that sites featuring the news content of his stable of papers would no longer be free.The plan to erect pay-walls around their online sites comes as newspaper companies confront a decline in the advertising revenue that has financed print production.

Monetisation will have to happen, because without monetisation of the online sites that the newspaper industries have operated very successfully, we can't afford to keep the big newsroom staffs we have,'' he said.Fairfax was looking at a number of pay models, including offering readers two levels of access - free entry for a mass audience, with a charge for ''more upmarket, high quality data''.

The move is a risk for both publishers, which are gambling on readers being prepared to pay for news they have been receiving free - and will remain free on sources such as the ABC.While newspaper websites carry advertising, they do not finance the news content, most of which comes from the papers

A comment thread attached to a report about the announcement contained about 140 replies from readers – most of then opposed to the move and many of them threatening to quit News Corp websites when charges are applied.

"'Quality reporting does not come cheap.' I agree," reads a comment posted by Dean of Brisbane. "But we are talking about News Corp here - not quality reporting. I currently pay exactly what I think it is worth - FREE."

News that Germany and France have, with a mini-bound, escaped recession must be the most ominous development of the week.

For those within this system, Germany had been an extremely comfortable place until the downturn. But the apparent failure of its export-driven social model changed all that. As a result, Germans had begun to campaign for a responsive political system.

In all sorts of ways,  Germans had begun to realise that the economy - and thence German society - had reached the end of the post-war path. The worry is that today’s GDP figures will drive them back to the old, familiar way of thinking.

The latest Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll is a significant blow to President Obama’s flailing presidency, just 7 months since taking office. According to Rasmussen, a highly influential pollster, Obama’s approval rating now stands at just 47 per cent, with 52 per cent disapproval, and 37 per cent strongly disapproving.

At the same time in his first presidency in August 2001, George W. Bush’s approval ratings stood at around 55-59 per cent in most major polls, with roughly 35-38 per cent disapproval. It was not until Spring 2004 that Bush’s ratings were as low as Obama’s figures in today’s Rasmussen poll – more than three years into his first term of office. The White House will point to other surveys that show stronger approval for Obama, but all leading polls demonstrate that support for the president is eroding. The Obama presidency is sinking faster than almost any other in recent US history, largely because he is trying to force a radical left-wing agenda on a nation that is still far more conservative than liberal, that overwhelmingly believes in limited federal government, free enterprise and decentralization of power.

It is hardly surprising that Obama’s standing in the polls is declining. He has launched a highly ambitious, ideologically driven agenda to transform the United States by expanding the role of the state at the expense of the individual, while at the same time weakening America’s defences and undercutting its standing on the world stage. It is a recipe for failure, and a left-wing vision for the future which fortunately is being rejected by the American people.

Among the treasures hidden from sight at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History are the world’s biggest egg, Stephen Jay Gould’s seashells and Vladimir Nabokov’s collection of butterfly genitalia. So when the museum’s curator asked photographer Mark Sloan if he’d be interested in photographing the most unique specimens from their behind-the-scenes collection, Sloan was glad to oblige. In exchange, he got the tour of a lifetime.

“It came with its own curator. He sat there with that egg for the entire duration of my photo shoot, which was quite long. He had white gloves on and was the only one who could touch it,” said Sloan. “The one time the curator went out to the bathroom, my assistant pretended to flick the egg.” The museum preferred the flick-free version.