Sometimes going undercover in Texas means no cover at all. Houston police, long thwarted in their campaign against prostitution by an internal policy that barred officers from removing their clothes, have reaped results by shedding that unwritten rule. The change in tactics that allows vice squad officers to undress in pursuit of evidence is part of a crackdown on suspected brothels that advertise themselves as day spas, lingerie modeling studios, massage parlors and “stress relief clinics.” Two investigations using the new rules have resulted in organized crime charges against six...

The last four British men held as terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay have arrived back in the UK, after almost three years in US custody. The men, one from Birmingham and three from London, were held after the US accused them of having al-Qaeda links. The RAF C-17 plane carrying Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar and Feroz Abbasi landed at RAF Northolt in west London at about 1700 GMT. They were arrested on arrival and taken to Paddington Green police station. Protests are taking place outside the high-security station where the men are now being held, but police say they have to investigate...

BetaPlayer v0.5 has been released. BP is one of the most advanced Open Source Media Players for Mobile Devices available today. [ article ] – Bug Reports here: http://corecodec.org/tracker/?atid=117&group_id=9&func=browse – Suggest features here: http://corecodec.org/tracker/?atid=120&group_id=9&func=browse - Please uninstall previous version before updating Download it here: http://betaplayer.corecodec.org I must say that this is probably the best multimedia player for pocket pc’s around! I give it 5/5 and highly recommend it to anyone using a Pocket...

GOOGLE revolutionised the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with our phones. The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer. The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it. BT, which connects seven out of ten British households, has developed...

Intel’s ‘Smithfield’ dual-core desktop Pentium 4 processor will ship as the 8xx series, Taiwanese motherboard maker sources claim the chip giant has said. And it has set 20 February as the launch date of the P4 6xx series – the first 64-bit Pentium chips aimed at mainstream desktops systems. It’s already known from internal Intel roadmaps that Smithfield will ship at three clock frequencies – 2.8, 3.0 and 3.2GHz – with model numbers x20, x30 and x40. Only now has the missing first digit been filled in, courtesy of a DigiTimes report citing said sources. To...

Only one in six users of internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Sunday that adults online in the United States are generally naive when it comes to how search engines work. The major search engines all return a mix of regular results, based solely on relevance to the search terms entered, and sponsored links, for which a website had paid money to get displayed more prominently. Google marks such ads as “sponsored links,” Yahoo terms them “sponsor...

Excessive text messaging may be bad for you, or at least for your fingers. That’s what some Italian doctors think. They are telling people, particularly the young, that furious typing on mobile phones could lead to acute tendonitis. Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Messaggero dedicated about half a page each to the problem Monday. A 13-year-old girl in the northern Italian city of Savona needed treatment from an orthopedic specialist after typing at least 100 short message services (SMSs) a day. She was prescribed anti-inflammatory medicine and ordered to rest her hands. According...

A Frenchman lost in a labyrinth of disused mushroom caves said he had survived 35 days by eating rotten wood and clay, after being rescued only thanks to a teachers’ strike. Jean-Luc Josuat-Verges, 48, told French newspapers he had gone to the deserted caves at Madiran in the Pyrenees in December seeking isolation during a spell of depression which had left him considering suicide. While wandering through the cave network his flashlight stopped working, and he was unable to find his way out. His abandoned car was found 35 days later by three children who were not at school because their teachers...