High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.

“No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks," said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.

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Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

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Top 10 New Year's Resolutions

For many people their New Year's Resolution are the same every year. Here is the list of 10 most popular New Year's Resolutions on Ask.com

1. Spend more time with family
2. Get more regular exercise
   
3. Loose Weight
4. Quit Smoking
5. Enjoy Life More
6. Quit Drinking
7. Get out of Debt
8. Learn Something New
9. Help Others
10. Get Organized

What is your New Years Resolution?

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Merck Recalls Children's Vaccines

Merck announced that it is voluntarily recalling 1 million doses of two common childhood vaccines, PedvaxHIB and Comvax, routinely given to children under 5.

During a routine inspection of their manufacturing process, Merck officials found that some equipment was contaminated with a bacteria called Bacillus cereus.

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Hackers Launch Cyberattack on Federal Labs

A "sophisticated cyberattack" has been detected at Oak Ridge National Laboratory over the last several weeks, and authorities suspect the hackers are based in China.

The breach might have compromised the personal information of thousands of visitors to the lab.

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Russian Elections was not democratic

President Vladimir Putin's party, United Russia, overwhelmingly won the parliamentary elections in Russia. But many believe that elections were 'not free and fair' and 'not democratic'. Now EU calls on Russia to answer election criticism.

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Russian Election is a Joke

As it has been expected by everyone, polls conducted by Russian state-controlled companies show President Vladimir Putin's party winning more than 60% of the vote in parliamentary elections. The communist party was running with about 12% of the vote and other parties followed.

Critics also note that "United Russia" was the only party allowed to campaign on national television.

Earlier Sunday, after opposition leader Garry Kasparov cast his vote, he accused the ruling party of, in his words, "not just rigging the vote, but raping the whole electoral system."

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FDA to regulate salt content in food

It's not a secret that the excessive salt in diets is a major factor in high blood pressure and increases risk for heart disease and most Americans exceed recommended limits

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) cited these factors in urging stricter regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at a public hearing, held on Thursday at the FDA.

Reducing the salt content in processed and restaurant foods by half could save up to 150,000 lives a year by reducing heart-related disease, according to the consumer group, whose petition to the FDA prompted the public hearing.

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Elections without choice in Russia

There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin's party (United Russia) will win an overwhelming majority in Russia's parliamentary election on Sunday but non in a democratic way.

State-run media brainstorms people to vote for president and United Russia. State employees being pressured to vote at work or to fund United Russia and even of schools encouraging parents to do their patriotic duty and back the president.

"Elections without choice", commented the New Times, an independent political weekly, above an article illustrated by a Soviet-style poster urging the masses to back Putin.

"The old Soviet mentality is alive and well and people are returning to their former ways," echoed political analyst Georgy Bovt in a newspaper article.

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Police Break Up Anti-Putin protesters in Russia

There no fredom of speech in Russia and there is still many people arrested for political reasons.

Many of opposition activists were arrested by police Sunday as they tried to rally against President Vladimir Putin's government in central St. Petersburg.

Demonstrators were chanting "Russia without Putin!" "What we are seeing now in St. Petersburg resembles a military operation," said Olga Kurnosova, a coordinator of the Other Russia coalition of opposition groups that organized the rally. "It shows the authorities' fear."

Opposition activist Daria Makukhina said that several party activists running for parliament in next Sunday's vote were beaten and detained.

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CBS Giving Free Wi-Fi to Manhattan

CBS has announced its upcoming CBS Mobile Zone, which is a free Wi-Fi network for laptops and other wireless devices, granting Internet access. From Times Square to Central Park South, and 6th Ave. to 8th Ave., the free wireless zone is an experiment between CBS and the MTA.

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Yahoo and Google will Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network

Google and Yahoo are moving to to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.”

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Health Insurer Tied Bonuses To Dropping Sick Policyholders

One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies.

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Hackers install maleware on Alicia Keys MySpace Page

MySpace pages of several musicians, including the personal page of R&B songstress Alicia Keys, were targeted this week by hackers. Experts warn that they're now very dangerous places to visit online.

Among the attacks being served by Keys' page (and those of French funk band Greements of Fortune and Scottish rock band the Dykeenies) are Trojan horses disguised as new video codecs.

When someone tries to access one of the hacked sites, an exploit first attempts to install malware on the visitor's computer. If that doesn't work, the user is next asked to install a fake codec to view a video posted on the page, according to the Times.

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Mattel recalls Mexican-made toy kitchens

Mattel Inc, the world's largest toymaker, is recalling over 170000 Mexican-made toy kitchens sold in the United States and Europe because small pieces pose a choking hazard to young children.

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Apple's Leopard early bugs

Although most of Mac OS X Leopard,the latest version of Apple's operating system, users seem satisfied, there have been a fair amount of complaints from those who were first down the road to Leopard.

Most are relatively minor, some were quite annoying, and a few raise questions about how Apple's operating system strategy might be different when it's time to ship the next release.

The "blue screen" problem got the most attention.

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Google Launches OpenSocial

Google Launches OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a set of APIs that will allow independent developers to build applications that run on any participating network, using the data stored by that network.

Techcrunch, which posted the first details of the announcement, claims that OpenSocial’s hosts, or the participating social networks, include Google’s Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

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Key HIV strain 'came from Haiti'

Key HIV virus which predominates in the United States and Europe has been traced back to Haiti by an international team of scientists.

The strain passed from Haiti to the US in about 1969 before spreading further, says the team in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences.

They hope knowing this could help find a cure for HIV, which can lead to Aids.

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Microsoft Pays $240 Million for 1.6% Stake in Facebook

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it will pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which puts a $15 billion valuation on the less than four-year-old online social network.

Microsoft also sells online ads for Facebook.

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KickApps Enables Mobile User-Generated Content Authoring

KickApps, a hosted social media platform, announced new, Mobile User-Generated Content (UGC) Authoring functionality for sites powered by the KickApps platform.

“By supporting mobile phone media capture we've expanded user-generated content authoring to a new and very broad community,” said Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps. “Together with today’s announcement about our collaboration with VeriSign to design and develop new multi-screen solutions that will work on the broadest set of mobile devices and networks across the world, KickApps continues to set the bar for the industry around innovative new features that further eliminate the barriers for both publishers and their communities."

One of the inaugural clients to take advantage of the Mobile UGC Authoring functionality is the Cleveland-based, CBS affiliate, 19ActionNews

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Woman sues Facebook over Unwanted Text Messages

An Indiana woman has sued online social network Facebook, claiming the company is profiting when its users mistakenly send unwanted text messages to mobile phones whose numbers previously belonged to other consumers, the Associated Press reported.

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Hiring managers use social networking sites to screen job candidates

A CareerBuilder survey of 1,150 hiring managers in 2006 found that 12% of the respondents said they have used social networking sites to screen job candidates. Of these hiring managers, 63% said they did not hire the person based on what they found.

So, be careful what you post on those site :)

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House Passes Bill Shielding Journalists, Some Bloggers in Court

The U.S. House on Tuesday passed a bill that would shield journalists and bloggers from having to identify their confidential sources in the course of federal investigations.

"Freedom of the press protected by the First Amendment has been a cornerstone of our democracy, one that we cherish and promote around the world," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said before the vote.

Justice Department opposes the proposed "shield law," and the Bush administration has threatened a veto.

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AOL will lay off about 2,000 employees

AOL LLC will lay off about 2,000 employees, or approximately 20 percent of its staff, as it continues its transformation into an online, ad-supported business and moves further away from its traditional revenue model based on dial-up Internet access fees.

The layoffs will begin on Tuesday and will continue over the coming months.

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Kickapps, social media platform now integrates with Joomla

KickApps, social media platform, announced the integration of the community-building platform with one of the industry’s most commonly used open source content management systems (CMS),
Joomla! Developers and web publishers using Joomla CMS can now easily integrate their KickApps powered communities with their existing websites to fuel audience growth and engagement via social networking, user-generated content, programmable video, and Widgets for content syndication.


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Staten Island Councilman James Oddo's Profanity Tirade Caught On Video

Staten Island Councilman James Oddo's Profanity Tirade Caught On Video
Councilman James Oddo of Staten Island was recently caught on video issuing a profanity-laced tirade at a Norwegian TV comedy crew.

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Airport Video Shows Woman Causing Disturbance

Arizona authorities release surveillance tape from the Phoenix airport, showing the behavior of a New York woman. She was taken into custody and was later found dead in a holding cell. Her family is questioning how police handled the incident.

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FDA warns companies marketing cold and cough medicine with hydrocodone for kids

Hydrocodone hasn't been safety-tested for children under six, but some cough syrups are marketed to children as young as two, the FDA said.

"Companies marketing these unapproved products have not demonstrated the safety and efficacy of these drugs," director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said.

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