Pakistan, India to discuss CNG bus manufacturing :

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s offer to arch-rival India to invest in CNG bus manufacturing would be taken up in upcoming composite dialogue between the two sides, a senior govt official said on Friday.

Announcing the trade policy for 2008-09 last week, Commerce Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said a decision had been taken that if “Indian manufacturers of CNG buses make a firm commitment to manufacture such buses in Pakistan,” the ministry might allow import of 10 buses by road via Wagah from each potential investor as a test consignment.

World Oil prices Falls :

Barack Obama :

U.S. Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., left, speaks as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, right, looks on, during a press conference following their meeting at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, Friday, July 25, 2008.(AP

Halle Berry pushes back against paparazzi :

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Halle Berry said a paparazzi went too far to get a shot of her infant daughter, alleging that the shooter trespassed on her private property and snapped them hanging out in the backyard. The Oscar-winning actress was upset when pictures of her holding four-month-old Nahla Ariela Aubry showed up on the Internet and in two celebrity magazines. In a statement, Berry disputes the notion that the photos were taken when she was "out and about in Los Angeles."
Evan Spiegel, an attorney representing Berry, said a criminal complaint has been filed and an investigation is under way. He said there are witnesses who saw the photographers in the middle of a "very blatant and invasive trespass."
A person who answered the phone Friday at Fame Pictures, the agency that distributed the photos, said he had no immediate comment.

Angry man shoots lawn mower for not starting :

MILWAUKEE - A Milwaukee man was accused of shooting his lawn mower because it wouldn't start. Keith Walendowski, 56, was charged with felony possession of a short-barreled shotgun or rifle and misdemeanor disorderly conduct while armed.

White House threatens veto on bill to sell govt oil :

The White House on Thursday threatened to veto legislation that would require the government to sell 10 percent of the oil in the nation's emergency petroleum stockpile.

The House of Representatives was expected to vote on the bill later on Thursday. Democrats hope the legislation will lower oil prices by putting on the market more of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve's light, sweet crude that is sought by refiners.
"Drawing down our emergency oil reserve in the absence of a severe energy disruption is counter to the purpose of the SPR, and offers the nation a quick fix instead of much needed long-term, responsible energy solutions," the White House said in a statement.
The bill would require the government to sell 10 percent of the emergency stockpile's oil, or 70 million barrels, in the open market. About 40 percent of the stockpile's oil is light sweet crude.

GOP kills effort to release oil from US stockpile :

WASHINGTON - House Republicans on Thursday scuttled a bill that Democrats hoped would help lower gasoline prices by forcing the Energy Department to release 70 million barrels of oil — about a three-day supply — from the national stockpile.

Democrats promised that the action would have produced immediate relief at the pump, as was the case with similar releases in 1991, 2000 and 2005. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve now holds about 700 million barrels.
Despite winning a clear 268-157 majority, the measure still lost. Democratic leaders had brought the proposal up for debate under rules requiring a two-thirds vote to pass.
But passing the bill by just a majority would have meant allowing Republicans to force a vote on new offshore drilling leases.
"They're hiding from a vote," said GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio. "They're scared to death to allow us to ... force their members to vote on drilling."

FCC approves XM-Sirius satellite radio merger :

WASHINGTON - Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s $3.3 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. will mean millions of subscribers will be able to receive programming from both services, while executives say it will create huge cost savings for the industry.

Scientists expose mystery behind northern lights :

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Scientists have exposed some of the mystery behind the northern lights. On Thursday, NASA released findings that indicate magnetic explosions about one-third of the way to the moon cause the northern lights, or aurora borealis, to burst in spectacular shapes and colors, and dance across the sky.

PSM closure feared, as coke reserves exhausting tomorrow :

KARACHI: Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM)’s reserves of the coke vital for the production of steel is going to exhaust tomorrow, which has given rise to the fears that the production of steel might halt.PSM sources told Geo News that steel production process in such a situation might have to be stopped for 24 hours. PSM General Manager (BMR), Wasay Mahmood told Geo News that the existing stock of coke with PSM was sufficient for four days, while one ship carrying 40,000 tons of coke would take berth at Port Qasim day after tomorrow. He said that in such a situation steel production would not be affected. Sources said that if the arrival of the ship gets delayed, then the blast furnace of the Steel Mills would have to be closed for a longer period. PSM usually holds raw materials’ reserves for three months, but the failure of the floating of import tender in time triggered coke shortage.

NATO forces kill 4 civilians in Afghanistan :

KABUL: NATO forces killed four civilians and wounded three others Saturday when they fired at a vehicle that did not stop at a checkpoint in Afghanistan's volatile south, the alliance said.The latest incident occurred in the Sangin district of Helmand province in the south, the hub of the resurgent Taliban militant movement.A NATO statement said the vehicle was directed to stop but drove on. NATO forces fired warning shots away from the vehicle but were`` forced to fire at it when it refused to stop, fearing an insurgent attack,'' it said. NATO medical personnel tended to the wounded civilians, including taking them by helicopter to a hospital, it said. The bodies of the dead were taken to their village by two civilians who were not hurt during the encounter. NATO said it ``deeply regrets this unnecessary incident caused by the reckless actions of the vehicle driver.''

Indian troops fire at Battal check post in Rawalakot :

ISLAMABAD: Indian forces fired on Pakistani troops deployed at a check post of Battal in Daramsal area along Line of Control on Saturday. Pakistani troops returned fire but there was no report of casualties. "Indian troops fired mortars and machine gun at Battal in Rawalakot sector at 11 am (0500 GMT) Saturday but there were no casualties on our side," ISPR spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said.

Investigators examine hole in jumbo jet :

MANILA, Philippines - Australian investigators on Saturday began examining a Qantas jumbo jet which had to make an emergency landing after a large hole opened on its fuselage, a Philippine aviation official said.
The Boeing 747-400 was cruising at 29,000 feet with 346 passengers Friday when it was shaken by an explosive bang. The plane descended rapidly before landing safely minutes later at the Manila airport.
There were no injuries among the passengers and crew, but some of the passengers suffered nausea.

The New Craze: Facial Yoga :

Everyone knows the importance of exercise in keeping our bodies fit and healthy. There are exercises for the muscles from the neck down, including those which focus on the upper, core, and lower body. We have body specific exercises for body sculpting, aerobic exercises to benefit our heart, yoga and more. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to have exercises to tone and strengthen the 57 muscles of our face, neck and scalp.

Here are some basic facial exercises you can try at home. Dermatologists stress that good form is key in obtaining desired results.
Eyes and Crows FeetPlace three fingers around outside corner of eye. Pull gently toward temples. Close and open eyes, repeat 20 times.ForeheadPlace index fingers just above eyes and pull down while trying to raise your eyebrows, repeat 10 times.
Area between EyebrowsPlace fingers on bump of nose between eyes. Apply pressure with fingers and hold. Move eyebrows up and down, repeat 20 times.
CheeksPush your lips out and make a round shape, stretching forward, now smile as wide as possible. Hold for a second and resume the round shape, repeat 10 times.LipsSuck on your finger as hard as possible and then slowly remove it, repeat 10 times.
Neck and Chin*Jut your lower lip out as far as possible, place your fingers on your collarbone and point your chin as high as possible, then pull the corners of your mouth down.
*Tighten your chin muscle as firm as you can by pushing your lower lip up and out as though pouting. Tighten as hard as you can so chin turns white and dimpled. Before you go for Botox injections or schedule an appointment for plastic surgery, try turning back the clock with facial exercises.
You can tighten the muscles in your face and regain a more youthful appearance—and you might have fun along the way!

Health & Beauty Column Debuts Today at Health News :

Please help us in welcoming the newest addition to our Health Experts, Beth Shapouri. Beth's weekly column, Beauty Buzz: The Scoop on Natural Beauty, debuts today and will run every Tuesday. Beth believes pampering yourself is key to a healthy lifestyle, and we hope you will follow her quest to make the world a lovelier place with good-for-you products, treatments and techniques.

Beth is a beauty and lifestyles writer who believes that knowing what's in the products you're putting on your body is as important to how you look as picking the right makeup colors. A self-proclaimed health nut, she blends her two loves of beauty and wellness by finding ways to look and feel fantastic while taking care of your body.

Functional Human Blood Vessels Grown in Lab Mice :

Imagine being able to replace failing heart blood vessels without surgery! That is the ultimate goal of a research team at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston who have, for the first time, grown functioning blood vessels in laboratory mice using cells taken from human bone marrow, blood and umbilical cords. Juan M. Melero-Martin, a research fellow at Harvard and co-author of the study, said they envision a day when "a patient has need to vascularize ischemic tissue, we can get cells from the patient ahead of time, grow them and inject them back into the patient.

"The cells were mixed with nutrients and growth factors in a culture dish and then implanted into the cells of mice with weakened immune systems. After one week, the cells grew into a network of vessels that connected to each other and the blood vessels of the mice, without genetic alteration or manipulation to improve their growth. They continued to transport blood during the four-week study. "It's kind of a self-assembly process; they do the job on their own," Dr. Bischoff said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. "We mix them together and they talk to each other and give directions on how to form a blood vessel."

Incentives Offered to Doctors for Using Electronic Prescriptions For Medicare Patients :

As of January 1, 2009 the federal government will give doctors an incentive when they send prescriptions electronically to a pharmacy instead of giving handwritten ones to patients. Only 10 percent of physicians currently transmit prescriptions to pharmacies electronically. The main culprit in the system's lack of use is the expense of buying and setting up the equipment and software necessary, which runs about $3,000 per doctor. In addition, it costs between $80 and $400 a month to maintain and operate a system.
To motivate physicians to incur the expense and move forward with technology, Congress has agreed to pay doctors just a little more for the next five years if they choose to implement and utilize the electronic system. These physicians will get an extra 2 percent on top of their reimbursement rates for treatment of Medicare patients in the years 2009 and 2010. The amount will decrease to 1 percent in 2011 and 2012 with only a 0.5 percent boost in 2013.

The Soy-Sperm Connection :

Calling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006

Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range.

'Golden Girls' Actress Estelle Getty Dies :

"She was loved throughout the world in six continents, and if they loved sitcoms in Antarctica she would have been loved on seven continents." Estelle Getty's son offers up thoughts on his mom, the 'Golden Girls' matriarch who died Tuesday just three days shy of her 85th birthday.

The FBI confiscated Anne Hathaway's personal diaries during a raid on her ex-boyfriend Rafaello Follieri's apartment as evidence against Follieri, who

As the exhaustive headline states, actress Sienna Miller has filed a breach of privacy lawsuit against a major British news agency and a photo distributor just days after the publication of nude photos showing her kissing married-with-four-kids actor Balthazar Getty.

The nude kisses seen 'round the gossip world likely have Sienna Miller filing legal action claiming breach of privacy. The actress who was photographed nude and kissing 'Brothers & Sisters' actor Balthazar Getty filed the claims against News International and Big Pictures photo agency. The infidelity and sheer raciness of the photos sent bloggers into a tizzy ... see for yourself:

FBI Swoops In for Hathaway Diaries :

The FBI confiscated Anne Hathaway's personal diaries during a raid on her ex-boyfriend Rafaello Follieri's apartment as evidence against Follieri, who has been charged with 11 counts of fraud and money laundering after allegedly impersonating a Vatican official in order to sell Catholic properties.

DMX Serenades Reporters With His Own Special Song of Freedom :

Bob Marley he is not. After pleading innocent to felony theft charges, rapper DMX did what any musician possibly facing jailtime would do -- he launched into a song for reporters waiting outside. "If and when you ever fall down, get back up," the song began, continuing with the sage advice of "drop something, stop fretting, pick that ... back up, stand for something or fall for everything, wait for the right pitch or miss with every swing." That DMX, so insightful, be it in baseball or getting arrested

Marissa Jaret Winokur Is a Mama :

'Hairspray' and 'Dancing With the Stars' alum Marissa Jaret Winokur and her husband may be off of the dancefloor for a little while now that they have Zev Isaac Miller to care for.

Marissa Jaret Winokur and Judah MillerIt's a Boy!Zev Isaac Miller, the couple's first child together, was carried by a surrogate mother.

Finally Battle for Britney's Children Ends :

Trial averted, Britney Spears and Kevin

Federline have agreed to keep sole custody of the

pair's kids with their rapping dad. Spears, who

will pay Federline $5,000 more a month in

child support, also gets more time with the

couple's two sons.

Independent judiciary ensures economic stability:

MULTAN: Deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan, Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has said that only an independent judiciary can ensure economic stability in the country. Addressing a dinner reception hosted in his honour by the Multan High Court Bar here, the deposed CJ stated that independence of judiciary strengthens the Parliament and democracy. Justice Iftikhar said only an independent judiciary can defend the Parliament against any conspiracy an ... Full Story

Karadzic appeal deadline passes :

A deadline for ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to appeal against extradition to the Netherlands on genocide and other charges has expired.
An appeal notice is said to have been posted by his lawyer just before 2000 (1800 GMT) at an unknown location in Serbia in order to delay the process.
Any appeal is expected to fail and Mr Karadzic is likely to be sent to The Hague within days, correspondents say.
Mr Karadzic was captured on Monday after more than 12 years in hiding.
He had been posing as an expert in alternative medicine, using the name of Dragan Dabic.
The real Mr Dabic told the BBC that he had never lost his identity card, which correspondents say raises suspicions that it was cloned by high-ranking Serb officials with access to the country's databases.

Complete Baby Tyrannosaurid Unearthed in Mongolia :

TOKYO — Japanese and Mongolian scientists have successfully recovered the complete skeleton of a 70-million-year-old young dinosaur, a nature museum.
The scientists uncovered a Tarbosaurus — related to the giant carnivorous Tyrannosaurus — from a chunk of sandstone they dug up in August, 2006 in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, said Takuji Yokoyama, a spokesman for the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences, a co-organizer of the joint research project."We were so lucky to have found remains that turned out to be a complete set of all the important parts.The latest find would be a major step toward discovering the growth and development of dinosaurs.

French Scientists Find New Alien World :

Scientists have discovered a new Jupiter-sized planet orbiting around a distant sun-like star.

This planet takes 9.2 days to orbit its star, the longest period for any transiting explonet ever found.The planet, called CoRoT-Exo-4b, was discovered by the European Space Agency's CoRoT space telescope, which was designed to search for extrasolarplanets by looking for transits, or tiny dips in the light output from a star when a planet passes in front of it.By tracking the time between transits, a team of scientists led by the French space agency CNES measured how long the planet takes to revolve around its star, and found that it is the same period of time its star, which is slightly larger than our sun, takes to rotate 360 degrees.

U.S., NATO Press Pakistan to Fight Terror On Afghan :

PERTH, Australia — Pakistan needs to do more to prevent Taliban militants from launching attacks into Afghanistan from its territory, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday, echoing earlier remarks made by the chief of NATO.Speaking in Australia, Rice suggested to reporters that a surge in Taliban-related violence in Afghanistan had its source in the restive semiautonomous tribal areas along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. "We understand that it's difficult, we understand that the northwest frontier area is difficult, but militants cannot be allowed to organize there and to plan there and to engage across the border," Rice said. "So yes, more needs to be done."

1 Dead in N.H. Storms That Levels Several Homes :

1 dead in N.H. storms that levels several homes; door-to-door search under wayViolent storms on Thursday in a 25-mile-long swath of central New Hampshire destroyed several homes, damaged dozens of others and left at least one person dead, authorities said as police and firefighters went door-to-door searching for more possible victims. Other people were hurt, including the husband and baby grandson of the woman killed. Gov. John Lynch said at an evening news conference that about a dozen people were injured. There was no immediate word on how serious their injuries were.The National Weather Service was trying to determine whether a tornado was responsible for the damage, which stretched from about 10 miles east of Concord to beyond the eastern end of Lake Winnipesaukee near the Maine border.Around Northwood Lake in Epsom, many homes in one area were badly damaged or destroyed by the storm, which tossed couches and refrigerators along with downed trees and other debris.