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Hindi film channel UTV Movies will begin transmission in the US through DTH by January next year, officials said.

UTV Movies is the film channel of UTV Global Broadcasting Ltd (UGBL) and is currently available in countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It was also introduced in the Asia Pacific region recently.

‘Considering the US has a sizeable population of Indian origin and growing popularity of Bollywood movies among international audiences, we thought of introducing the channel there as well. The movies will be telecast through DTH,’ Shantonu Aditya, UGBL’s executive director, said in a press release.

An Indonesian city battling the effects of deforestation has come up with a novel way of tackling the problem. Would-be families must plant a tree.

“Everyone who wants to get married or apply for a birth certificate must plant a tree,” Syahrum Syah Setia, the head of Balikpapan city’s Environmental Impact Management Agency, said.

“The city’s condition is already worrying, and we must act to tackle global warming.”

The areas around Balikpapan city in East Kalimantan province have lost some of their forest cover to deforestation from the mining and timber sectors.

East Kalimantan loses 350,000-500,000 ha (865,000-1.24 million acres) of forest land a year and the government can only replant 30,000 ha (74,000 acres) of that, local environmental group Walhi said.

Indonesia has lost an estimated 70 percent of its original forest land, although it still has a total forest area of more than 91 million ha (225 million acres).

Canadian researchers claim to have developed a technique to get clues into the mystery of plasma - the most abundant form of matter in the universe.

Unlike general matter in which negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons are bound by electromagnetic force to form a neutral atom, plasma is that state of matter which can have surplus of negative or positive charge.

Also called ionized (or charged) gas, plasma can be as common as in fluorescent light bulbs or exotic in the extreme, as a thermonuclear explosion.

The earth’s upper atmosphere is a plasma, as are lightning bolts and virtually all stars that light up the night sky and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in our solar system.

Though scientists have found clues to the nature of general matter whose basic units called atoms comprise negatively charged electron tied to positively charged protons, they have no clues to the nature of plasma.

They have failed to understand how positive and negative charges can exist without recombining into one unit or atom.

They have tried to develop intricate mathematical theories to explain the plasma state, but have failed because plasmas are hot, complex and difficult to characterise either in the natural world or in the laboratory.

But now researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver claim to have found a way to create ultra-cold plasmas out of molecules, a weekend university statement said.

Starting with a gaseous sample cooled in a supersonic molecular beam, researchers led by chemistry department head Ed Grant have formed a plasma of nitric oxide that has ion and electron temperatures as cold as plasmas made from trapped atoms, the statement said.

These plasmas last 30 microseconds, it added.

“The ability to break out of the atom ‘trap’ is tremendously liberating and could lead to a whole new field of physics,” the statement said quoting Ed Grant.

“It’s amazing that our plasmas have sustained life at all,” he said.

“We think that the high charged particle density we create interferes with ion-electron recombination.”

Grant said further understanding of ultra-cold plasma on a molecular level could lead to new knowledge about gas planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in our solar system, white dwarf stars, thermonuclear fusion and X-ray lasers.

The technique has been published in the current issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Figuring out a prime-time schedule is usually one of CW network chief Dawn Ostroff’s most important duties. Never, however, has it seemed to matter less.

The promise inherent in digital video recorders — that viewers can be in control of their own TV schedules — is rapidly being fulfilled this fall, and the business is changing around it. Nearly 30 percent of the nation’s TV homes have at least one.

Nowhere is the impact more apparent than at the CW, where recording the shows and watching them later account for nearly 17 percent of the network’s viewership over a one-week period. Two years ago, it was less than 5 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The time-shifting is more dramatic for individual shows. The CW even had a week where the audience of 18-to-34-year-old women for “90210″ increased by a stunning 79 percent over the live broadcast.

Viewing for ABC, CBS and NBC programs are all more than 10 percent time-shifted now, too. Fox’s programming is only 8 percent time-shifted this fall, in large part because it has shown postseason baseball, which very few people watch later.

“More and more people are changing the way they consume television,” said Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s chief research executive. “In the next few years, we will rewrite all the rules.”

The most time-shifted show is NBC’s “The Office,” where 28 percent of its audience watched it sometime other than Thursdays at 9 p.m, Nielsen said. Action shows and serialized dramas, like “Fringe,” “Heroes” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” have big time-shifted audiences. Not surprisingly, young people are the quickest to adapt to new technology.

Among the least time-shifted shows this fall were “Deal or No Deal,” “60 Minutes” and “King of the Hill.”

With “The Office,” time-shifting has kept alive a show that might otherwise be dead. The comedy has the week’s toughest time slot, competing directly against CBS’ more popular “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The flip side is that DVRs make it harder for new shows like NBC’s just-canceled “My Own Worst Enemy” to get established. Given the choice of trying something new or watching a recorded version of a favorite show, the DVR usually wins out.

“I call the DVR our frien-emy,” Wurtzel said.

Time-shifting has played a prominent part in the decline of the 10 p.m. time slot, where a powerhouse like NBC’s “ER” ruled television not too long ago. Only three of Nielsen’s top 20 prime-time shows a week ago started at that hour, all of them on CBS.

Many viewers are recording shows from 8 or 9 p.m. and watching them later, after dinner or when the kids go to bed, instead of what’s on live at 10 p.m. This phenomenon hurts late-night programming, too.

“The biggest single competitor to network programming in any time slot now is (pre-recorded) network programming,” said David Poltrack, chief researcher at CBS.

Networks will likely continue to concentrate their top shows in an earlier hour. Some executives can even see a day when networks stop putting high-cost scripted series at 10 p.m. altogether, although there’s pressure from local stations to provide strong lead-ins to their late-night news shows.

There was a time, not too long ago, when network executives slept with laptops or fax machines by their beds so they could rise before dawn to check the previous night’s ratings.

Now, Ostroff said, “it’s a system that’s no longer relevant.”

She got a peek at the new TV world last spring. CW executives were getting an anecdotal sense that “Gossip Girls” was catching on, even though it wasn’t reflected in the overnight ratings. It had a big DVR pickup, and many young fans watched free video streams. The CW briefly stopped streaming the show in order to increase the TV ratings, but fans quickly found illegal versions online, so CW streamed again.

The problem: the CW isn’t earning as much from the show as it should, considering how many people are watching it.

“We’ve got to figure out a way to monetize this content being consumed,” Ostroff said.

The networks’ weekly ratings scorecard, a traditional psychic barometer, also means less. It’s based on live viewing, plus playbacks within 24 hours. One recent week the broadcast networks were down 10 percent from the previous year — an alarming sign of failure on its face — but add in a week’s worth of time-shifters and the decline was only 3 percent, Poltrack said.

Asked whether the increased time-shifting helped the networks, Fox chief scheduler Preston Beckman was as ambivalent as Wurtzel.

“It’s a little of both,” he said. It’s always encouraging that viewers watch the shows, whenever they do it. But advertising rates are calculated based on people who watch a show within three days of its original airing. So if you tape “House” on Tuesday to watch Saturday night, Fox gets nothing for it.

He worries that the ease of DVRs may get people out of the habit of watching their favorite shows. First, they don’t have to worry about being at the TV at a certain hour because their shows are being recorded. Then they forget to watch the playback. Before you know it, they’ve stopped seeing the shows regularly.

It isn’t simply more houses getting DVRs that is making a difference these days, it’s houses getting their second or third DVRs, the experts said.

CBS’ Poltrack believes that DVR usage will continue to grow until the machines are in about half of the nation’s homes with TVs. He expects the technology to become obsolete soon after that, because more people will have televisions and computers working together to give them even more freedom to program their personal networks.

“We basically have reached the point now where everyone realizes that it’s in everyone’s best interests to make popular programming available so people can watch it any time they want to watch it,” he said.

A team of French astronomers has used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) to detect a planet-like object located very close to the star Beta Pictoris, and which apparently lies inside its disc.

With a projected distance from the star of only 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, this object is most likely the giant planet suspected from the peculiar shape of the disc and the previously observed infall of comets onto the star.

It would then be the first image of a planet that is as close to its host star as Saturn is to the Sun.

The hot star Beta Pictoris is one of the best-known examples of stars surrounded by a dusty ‘debris’ disc.

Debris discs are composed of dust resulting from collisions among larger bodies like planetary embryos or asteroids.

Earlier observations showed a warp of the disc, a secondary inclined disc and infalling comets onto the star.

“These are indirect, but tell-tale signs that strongly suggest the presence of a massive planet lying between 5 and 10 times the mean Earth-Sun distance from its host star,” said team leader Anne-Marie Lagrange.

In 2003, the French team used the NAOS-CONICA instrument, mounted on one of the 8.2 m Unit Telescopes of ESO’s VLT, to study the immediate surroundings of Beta Pictoris.

Recently, a member of the team re-analysed the data in a different way to seek the trace of a companion to the star. Infrared wavelengths are indeed very well suited for such searches.

“For this, the real challenge is to identify and subtract as accurately as possible the bright stellar halo,” explained Lagrange. “We were able to achieve this after a precise and drastic selection of the best images recorded during our observations,” she added.

The strategy proved very rewarding, as the astronomers were able to discern a feeble, point-like glow well inside the star’s halo.

To eliminate the possibility that this was an artifact and not a real object, a battery of tests was conducted and several members of the team, using three different methods, did the analysis independently, always with the same success.

Moreover, the companion was also discovered in other data sets, further strengthening the team’s conclusion that the companion is real.

“Our observations point to the presence of a giant planet, about 8 times as massive as Jupiter and with a projected distance from its star of about 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, which is about the distance of Saturn in our Solar System,” said Lagrange.

Whenever someone was put behind the bars, everyone could hint what the reasons could have been for such an act. The accused either had been responsible for a theft, rape, murder or any other anti-social activity that one could think about.

Have you heard of a man being jailed for having transmitted micro-organisms like chlamydia and deadly Hepatitis B to a woman while indulging in unprotected sex?

Well, this is indeed an unheard of thing and the first of its kind case in Gloucestershire. Ercan Yasar, 29, a Turk by origin is the man who has been imprisoned and sentenced for two years in the jail for infecting a woman by not informing her of his medical condition. DNA tests have been performed to support this allegation.

Yesar had befriended the victim in August last year when the two met at Cheltenham night club. The two exchanged numbers followed by exchange of text messages and eventually started dating. The two indulged in unprotected sex one afternoon. Thereafter the woman took ill and was hospitalized. On investigation it was revealed that she had contracted the harmful Hepatitis B virus.

Yesar was therefore prosecuted on grounds of causing harm to the woman’s health. He is likely to be
deported back to his country once he finishes serving his sentence.

Arab stock markets continued their downward journey this week, with financial analysts Friday citing unjustified ‘panic and psychological pressures’ from the turmoil on global markets.

According to a report by the Kuwait-based Global International Investments House released Friday, the stocks of the oil-rich six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, lost 47.5 percent of their value, or $538 billion since the beginning of the year.

The report put the losses since the beginning of the global financial crisis in October at $373 billion.

The Economist magazine put the losses of all Gulf sovereign funds over the past six weeks at about $400 billion.

‘I believe regional markets are still a captive of lack of confidence, panic and psychological pressures due to the spillovers from the tampering world markets,’ Wajdi Makhamreh, chief operating officer at the Amman-based Sanabel International Holding, said.

‘I think the psychological situation has been aggravated by rapidly falling crude prices and the feeling of investors that the governments are unable to liquidate their surplus petrodollars invested in the West,’ he said.

Makhamreh believed that ‘when the dust of the world economic turmoil settles, oil-rich Arab countries will find it plausible to divert their investments in the West to the Arab world, where the risk could turn out to be less.’

Saudi shares slid anew this week under selling pressures from the petrochemical and banking sectors.

The Tadawul All Share Index (TASI) of the Arab world’s largest bourse plummeted 11 percent this week to 4,880.44 points, the first time the Saudi benchmark has broken the psychological 5,000-point-barrier downward in 56 months, analysts said.

TASI has lost 55.7 percent of its value since the beginning of the year.

Jordanian shares plunged further this week, led by blue chip firms, particularly the Arab Potash Co., the Jordan Phosphates Mines Co. and the Jordan Petroleum Refinery.

The all-share price index of the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) tumbled 7.55 percent this week, closing at 2,771 points.

The Kuwait stock exchange, which has been the scene of extensive losses since the beginning of October, was the only Arab stock market to close the week in positive territory.

The KSE all-share price index gained 2.1 per cent this week, closing at 8,691 points.

This week’s gains were attributed by the Gulf Invest brokerage to a report that Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, could be mulling dissolution of parliament if the row between the government and the opposition worsens.

The state-owned Kuwait Investment Corporation (KIC) also reportedly entered the market to buy battered stocks over the past couple of days.

Egypt’s CASE 30, measuring the performance of the market’s 30 most active stocks, sank 19 percent this week, to 3,878 points due to continuing sell-off by foreign investors, analysts said.

McAfee and Symantec could be affected as Microsoft moves to provide free antivirus software. If the software, code-named Morro, successfully protects against viruses, analysts said, it could mean an exodus from well-known security brands.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a security offering focused on protecting against malware. The software giant is addressing what it sees as a growing need for a security solution that meets the unique needs of emerging markets and smaller PC form factors.

“This could be third-time lucky for Microsoft in regards to an antivirus product,” said Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos. “They tried with MSAV in Windows 3.11/MSDOS 6.2, which wasn’t terribly successful — especially when it detected Windows 95 as a virus.”

A Smaller Footprint

The secret sauce for Morro is in the architecture. It will offer comprehensive protection from various forms of malicious software, including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans, by focusing on a smaller footprint that uses fewer computing resources.

Microsoft said Morro is ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less-powerful PCs. By targeting the core anti-malware features that most consumers don’t keep up to date, Microsoft said, Morro will provide the essential protection that consumers need without overusing system resources, and provide better protection against online threats.

As Morro comes on the scene, Microsoft will discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service, effective June 30, 2009. OneCare was Microsoft’s second attempt at security. Although it was much better at detecting malware, Cluley said, it didn’t capture a large home-user audience.

“Anything which encourages more home users to defend their PCs has to be encouraged, provided innovation and competitiveness is not stifled,” Cluley said, “but consumers will have to wait until next summer to find out how good the product actually is.”

Sleepless Nights?

Microsoft is moving early to educate the market about the product. Morro is built on Microsoft’s malware-protection engine and will leverage the same core anti-malware technology that fuels the company’s current line of security products.

Microsoft is promising Morro will deliver the same core protection against malware as Microsoft’s enterprise solutions, but won’t include many of the additional non-security features found in consumer security suites.

Morro will be available as a stand-alone download and offer malware protection for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. But not until next summer.

“In the meantime, I would expect McAfee and Symantec to have a few sleepless nights,” Cluley said. “They will be worried that home users will be seriously tempted to switch their allegiances from a paid-for product to a free one.”

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Thursday said its investigations did not find any evidence of manipulative trading in ICICI Bank shares. SEBI had conducted the probe on the basis of a complaint by the ICICI Bank on September 17.

ICICI Bank MD and CEO KV Kamath had demanded a probe by SEBI, alleging conspiracy by market manipulators to destbilise the bank’s shares through rumours. SEBI said none of the major sellers were observed to be placing orders successively at lower price and there was no pattern observed regarding placement of successive orders at lower price by sellers to hammer down the price.

Also, there was no pattern observed of booking intra-day profits by major clients or brokers during this period. ICICI Bank had on September 16, disclosed that ICICI Bank UK had an exposure of euro 57 million ($80 million) to the failed Lehman Brothers and that the UK subsidiary already held a provision of about $12 million against investment in these bonds.

Considering a 50 per cent recovery estimate, the additional provision required would be about $28 million. SEBI analysed the trading pattern of shares of ICICI Bank for the period September 8, 2008 to October 10, 2008.

The client category-wise breakup of turnover in the shares of ICICI Bank in the cash market shows that FIIs accounted for 23.57 per cent and 18.61 per cent of the value of shares sold and bought, respectively, whereas rest of the investors accounted for 76.5 per cent and 81.4 per cent of the value of shares sold and bought, respectively.

Shares of Yahoo Inc soared 10 percent on Tuesday on hopes that the departure of Jerry Yang, its embattled chief executive, would clear the way for a deal with Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo announced late on Monday that Yang, whose leadership had come under growing criticism from shareholders after he failed to agree to a deal with Microsoft, would step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement.

Yahoo is evaluating both internal and external candidates for the top post, and has hired executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles to run the search process.

Analysts said Yang’s decision to step down is a sign that the board was frustrated with his efforts to turn around the company, which he co-founded. Yang took on the CEO role in June 2007.

“Jerry’s resignation as CEO reflects failed promises he made while fighting off Microsoft’s offers, and the board’s displeasure with his go-it-alone strategy,” wrote Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali in a research note.

Microsoft on January 31 offered $31 a share, or $44.6 billion, to buy all of Yahoo, an offer the Internet company rejected. Microsoft later sweetened its bid but withdrew it in May after being turned down by Yahoo again.

Analysts said Yahoo’s board could now grab the opportunity to approach Microsoft under a new CEO.

“The departure of Yang could signal a new position by the board to reconsider the terms of a merger with Microsoft,” said Needham & Co analyst Mark May in a research note.

He said the move was “appropriate” after Yahoo failed to strike a deal with Microsoft, teaming up with rival Google Inc to do a search advertising partnership that Google eventually abandoned.

Yahoo’s shares rose 10.3 percent, or $1.10, to $11.73 in midday trading on the Nasdaq.

The shares have fallen roughly 65 percent this year while Yahoo has struggled to find a way to make money as advertisers have scaled back on spending amid a wider economic downturn.

Trading volumes were running higher than usual in the options market on Tuesday, with investors actively buying Yahoo call options on expectations that the stock will continue to move higher during the rest of the year, said Frederic Ruffy, options strategist at New York-based Web information site WhatsTrading.com.

“Yahoo shares are up as investors applauded news that its CEO Jerry Yang is stepping down,” Ruffy said.