Woman throws mug at 'Mona Lisa'

PARIS --- Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece the "Mona Lisa" was attacked with a mug earlier this month, but the world's most famous painting -- protected by thick glass -- emerged with its enigmatic smile undimmed.

French police say a woman "not in her senses" lobbed the mug at the 500-year-old painting, which hangs in the Louvre gallery in Paris.

The woman, a tourist, was later transferred from police custody to a psychiatric unit, a police spokesman told CNN. The spokesman declined to be identified, and did not say where the woman was from.

The "Mona Lisa," considered one of the world's most valuable paintings, sits behind bulletproof glass in a special wing of the Louvre, attracting visitors in their millions.

The Italian Renaissance masterpiece, which depicts a dark-haired young woman with an aloof facial expression, has been the target of attacks in the past.

In 1956 the artwork was damaged when acid was thrown at it. A rock was also thrown in a separate incident in the same year.

In 1911 it was stolen from the Louvre but was returned two years later.

Silence shrouds fertility treatment in China

We contacted multiple couples through hospitals, doctors, blogs, word-of-mouth and friends -- but nobody wanted to talk to us. Even parents with happy, healthy babies politely declined.

Infertility is still an incredibly private subject in China, in part due to a stigma of being a childless couple. Once couples marry, there is extreme cultural pressure to have a child from both family and friends.

If there is no baby after a couple of years of marriage, the blame usually falls on the woman. Husbands may divorce their wives within two to three years. This is even more common in China's rural villages, where a child is expected and needed to take care of the family later in life.

"If there's no children, that's one of the most common reasons to get divorced in China," said Dr. Jia-En Liu, the founder of a private fertility hospital in Beijing.

After days of searching, many calls and many "no thank yous," we finally found a couple who was willing to share their story with us.

Following 13 years of marriage and two miscarriages, 40-year-old Luo Hongwu and 38-year-old Sun Ling conceived thanks to in vitro fertilization. It took one successful treatment and they were blessed with twin boys, Ganggang and Yangyang

Kuwait 'foils US army base plot'

Kuwaiti officials say they have arrested six members of a "terrorist network", linked to al-Qaeda, who were planning to attack a US military base.

An interior ministry statement said that all six Kuwaitis had confessed to the crimes after they were arrested.

The statement said they had also planned to bomb the headquarters of Kuwait's internal security agency.

It mentioned other "important facilities" in the oil-rich emirate, but gave no further details.

"The state security has uncovered a terrorist network following al-Qaeda, and includes six (Kuwaiti) citizens who have planned to carry out a plan to bomb Arifjan Camp, the state security building and other important facilities," the ministry said.

Al-Arabiya television said the group was plotting the attack for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts on about 20 August.

Camp Arifjan, a vast, purpose-built $200m (£120m) camp south of Kuwait City, is the main US base in Kuwait.

The heavily protected camp houses 15,000 US soldiers and is used as a logistics base for troops serving in Iraq.

Previous attacks against Americans in Kuwait include an incident in October 2002, when two Kuwaitis opened fire on US Marines, killing one.

The following year, a civil servant killed an American contractor and severely wounded another when he ambushed their car near a US army camp.

Six Kuwaitis and stateless Arabs were sentenced to life in prison in 2007 for planning attacks on US troops and Kuwaiti security personnel.

Facebook in challenge to Google

Facebook has turned up the heat on Google by purchasing content-sharing service FriendFeed, say industry watchers.

Many expected Google or even Twitter to buy the company, which has been praised for its "real-time" search engine.

This type of search is valuable because it lets you know what is happening right now on any given subject.

"Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search," said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

"Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting," Mr Scoble told the BBC.

Back in May, Google founder Larry Page admitted that the search giant had fallen behind other services like that of Twitter, which boasts nearly 45 million users worldwide.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they (Twitter) have done a great job.

"We've done a relatively poor job of doing things that work on a per second basis," Mr Page said at the time.

'Warning shot'

Many in Silicon Valley agree that this deal has changed the game.

"Facebook was unable to acquire Twitter so this is the next best option," said Ben Parr, associate editor of Mashable, a news blog covering social media.

"FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

Mr Scoble noted that FriendFeed's real-time search could stretch back 18 months compared to a few days for Twitter.

Silicon Valley commentators have long regarded FriendFeed as an inspiration for many of Facebook's features.

These include the ability for users to import activities from third parties services like YouTube and Flickr to letting users comment or say they "like" something in another user's feed.

"FriendFeed has in effect been the R&D (research & development) department for Facebook for some time now," said Mr Scoble, who is one of the service's most popular users with nearly 46,000 subscribers.

"They have the best community technology out there and Facebook should continue to use them to try out new features and test them out before transferring them over to Facebook."

The deal

The purchase caught many in Silicon Valley by surprise, even though the two companies had been talking on and off for the past two years.

"This is an 11th hour deal," admitted FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Industry commentators had expected Google to make a bid for the company, especially given the fact that its founders all used to work there.

"FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request" is how Mr Taylor described the buyout, in a tongue-in-cheek reference to how Facebook users ask one another to become part of their friend network.

He continued in a similar vein in his blog post.

"As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle.

"Our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was equally complimentary.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information.

"As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and the company's four founders will be given senior roles on the social networking site's engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed will continue as it is for the moment independently.

"Eventually, one way or another, it's hard to see FriendFeed as it stands now, continuing on," said MG Siegler of Silicon Valley news site Tech Crunch.

"Facebook will begin to take up too much of the FriendFeeders' time, and it will languish. It's sad, but that's the web. Not every service can flourish. There simply aren't enough users with enough time to use all of them."

SCI & TECH: Traces of planet collision found

A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a high-speed collision between two burgeoning planets orbiting a young star.

Astronomers say the cosmic smash-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth.

In this case, two rocky bodies are thought to have slammed into one another in the last few thousand years.

Details are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The collision involved one object that was at least as big as our Moon and another that was at least as big as Mercury.

The impact destroyed the smaller body, vaporising huge amounts of rock and flinging plumes of hot lava into space.

Infrared detectors on Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope were able to pick up the signatures of the vaporised rock, along with fragments of hardened lava, known as tektites.

Melted glass

"This collision had to be huge and incredibly high-speed for rock to have been vaporised and melted," said lead author Carey M Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory at Laurel in Maryland, US.

"This is a really rare and short-lived event, critical in the formation of Earth-like planets and moons. We're lucky to have witnessed one not long after it happened."

Dr Lisse and his team observed a star called HD 172555, which is about 12 million years old and situated about 100 light-years away in the far southern constellation Pavo (the Peacock).

The astronomers used a spectrograph instrument on Spitzer to look for the fingerprints of chemicals in the spectrum of light from the star.

The researchers identified large amounts of amorphous silica - melted glass.

Silica can be found on Earth in obsidian rocks and tektites.

Obsidian is black, shiny volcanic glass. Tektites are hardened chunks of lava thought to have formed when meteorites hit the Earth.

Large quantities of orbiting silicon monoxide gas were also detected, created when much of the rock was vaporised. In addition, the astronomers found rocky rubble that was probably flung out from the planetary wreck.

The two bodies must have been travelling at a speed of at least 10km/s (about 22,400mph) relative to one other before the collision.

Rocky planets form and grow in size by colliding and sticking together. This process merges their cores and causes some of their surfaces to be shed.

Though things have settled down in the Solar System today, impacts still occur, as was observed last month when a small comet or asteroid struck Jupiter.

"The collision that formed our Moon would have been tremendous, enough to melt the surface of Earth," said co-author Geoff Bryden of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"Debris from the collision most likely settled into a disc around Earth that eventually coalesced to make the Moon. This is about the same scale of impact we're seeing with Spitzer."

"We don't know if a moon will form or not, but we know a large rocky body's surface was red hot, warped and melted."

The Spitzer telescope has witnessed the dusty aftermath of large impacts before, but did not find evidence for rock that had been melted and vaporised.

Instead, large amounts of dust, gravel, and boulder-sized rubble were observed, indicating collisions that were slower-paced.

CCTV VIDEO: Typhoon Morakot bore down on Taiwan

Typhoons in East Asia kill 61, dozens missing

CHISHAN: Typhoons pummelling East Asia have killed at least 61 people, with rescuers in Taiwan battling to find survivors of a mudslide that may have buried about 100 villagers, officials said Tuesday.

A total of 41 people were confirmed dead in Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot unleashed the island's worst flooding in half a century over the weekend.

At least 20 were killed as landslides and flooding wreaked a trail of destruction in China and Japan, where officials feared more damage after a powerful earthquake loosened rain-soaked ground southwest of Tokyo.

The Taiwanese government's National Fire Agency said 'about 100 people may have been buried alive' in the remote village of Hsiaolin, which could only be reached by helicopter with all road access to the mountainous area severed.

'My house is gone. We have been trapped for four days and we are scared,' one man from Hsiaolin told reporters after being airlifted to safety out of the submerged village in southern Taiwan.

Rescuers said they had airlifted a total of 134 people to safety in southern Taiwan including about 70 from Hsiaolin.

Morakot lashed Taiwan with three metres of rain over the weekend, submerging entire streets and bringing down bridges, said the fire agency.

With another 62 people missing, rescue missions were in full swing with authorities rushing out helicopters to remote areas in the centre and south of the island cut off by the fallen bridges and raging rivers.

In Pingtung county in southern Taiwan, thousands of people remained trapped in three coastal townships without electricity or drinking water.

The Apple Daily said one man in a flooded Pingtung town had single-handedly rescued about 100 people with a bamboo raft over the past two days.

In eastern China, a massive landslide triggered by torrential rain from Typhoon Morakot toppled seven older houses in one town, killing two people and injuring four, firefighters and residents said.

The four-storey buildings collapsed around 10:00 pm Monday night in the town of Pengxi in the coastal province of Zhejiang, which lies north of Taiwan.

Local resident Tang Zhonghai, whose house sits opposite the collapsed buildings, said he was startled awake by the landslide.

'At about 10 o'clock at night I heard a very loud noise. I thought it was an earthquake but I saw through the window that the old buildings had fallen down,' Tang told AFP.

'When I saw what had happened, I left home and tried to help the rescue.'

Typhoon Morakot has left a further six people dead and three missing on the Chinese mainland, the civil affairs ministry said late Monday, adding it also destroyed more than 6,000 houses.

Japan, following its early-hours 6.4 magnitude tremor, rushed out hundreds of troops after Typhoon Etau brought floods and landslides that killed at least 13 people and left 18 missing, police and officials said.

Heavy downpours have drenched Japan since the weekend and caused flooding in the worst-hit city of Sayo, in western Hyogo prefecture, where 12 of the deaths were reported after a swollen river burst its banks.

Typhoon Etau was Tuesday churning through the Pacific Ocean but veering east and away from Japan's coast. The typhoon, packing winds of up to 126 kilometres an hour, had originally been forecast to veer close to the densely populated region around Tokyo.

Japan's weather agency issued an alert for more 'possible landslides and sediment disasters' in the quake-hit areas, warning that the water-soaked earth may be unstable after being jolted by the strong tremor.

SPORTS: Steyn’s dope test proved positive

CAPE TOWN: Dope test of South Africa's fast bowler Dale Steyn, taken during the IPL has now been proved positive. Team manager defended fast bowler Dale Steyn on Tuesday, saying the player had shown elevated levels of morphine in a random drugs test in April because of medication he was taking for migraines. "This is not a doping offence," Mohammed Moosajee, the team's manager and doctor, said after the Indian Premier League (IPL) contacted Steyn about a test carried out while the world's number one test bowler was playing in the league. "This is not a failed drugs test, this is an adverse analytical finding, which is a different matter. "Dale had been suffering from chronic migraines and had been taking painkillers called Myprodol which contain codeine and resulted in a higher-than-normal level of morphine in his urine test." Moosajee expected the "routine matter" to be cleared up quickly. "The IPL asked Dale to write a letter explaining what medication he took, for what reason and in what dosage, which he did last week," Moosajee said. "He was careful to consult with Evan Speechley, the Bangalore Royal Challengers (team) physiotherapist, and he kept a record of all the medication that he took. "We have absolutely no doubt that his explanation will satisfy the IPL."

Musharraf faces arrest on return to Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Former president Pervez Musharraf would face arrest if he returned to Pakistan after police registered a case against him on Tuesday over his detention of judges during a political crisis in 2007.

The military dictator, who came to power in a coup in 1999, left Pakistan more than two months ago, having been forced to quit as president in August last year in order to avoid impeachment by a hostile parliament.

‘He could either be arrested on his return or through Interpol,’ Hakam Khan, head of a police station in Islamabad where the case was lodged, told Reuters.

If convicted he Musharraf could be jailed for three years, Khan said.

This is the first time that such a case has been brought against a former military ruler.

‘He detained judges and ousted them illegally so he has to be tried for his illegal and unconstitutional actions,’ Mohammad Aslam Ghuman, the lawyers who filed the case against Musharraf, told Reuters.

Earlier this month the Supreme Court ruled that Musharraf had violated the constitution by imposing emergency rule and purging the judiciary in November 2007 in a desperate move to hold onto the presidency.

The court left it up to parliament whether Musharraf, once a vaunted ally of the United States, should be tried for treason for his actions.

With the knives out for him at home the old general has spent most of his time since late May in London and he is believed to be looking to settle in Europe.

Outrage over the use of emergency powers and detention of opposition figures, including the judges, contributed to the defeat of Musharraf's allies in an election in 2008.

The fragile civilian government is faced by acute economic and security crises, with the army fighting a Taliban insurgency in the northwest.

Although Musharraf is regarded as yesterday's man, the ruling coalition led by President Asif Ali Zardari's party has shown little appetite for prosecuting him.

Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister Musharraf overthrew and Zardari's greatest rival, is pushing for his usurper to be brought to justice.

But, analysts say the still powerful army would be uneasy if Musharraf's humiliation became too great, as many serving generals had backed him. — Reuters