Apple may replace Google with Bing on iPhone

WASHINGTON : Apple is in talks with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone instead of Google, BusinessWeek magazine reported on Wednesday.

BusinessWeek, citing two people familiar with the matter, said the talks have been under way for weeks and reflect the growing rivalry between Apple and Google, which is currently the default search engine on the iPhone.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt resigned last year from Apple's board of directors and the Internet search and advertising giant recently came out with a smartphone of its own, the Nexus One, seen as a rival to Apple's iPhone.

Apple also recently bought mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless, two months after Google purchased Quattro Wireless rival AdMob.

BusinessWeek said the discussions between Apple and Microsoft on replacing Google with Bing, which Microsoft launched in June, could still unravel and may not be concluded quickly.

The magazine noted that being the default Web search engine on the iPhone carries financial benefits for Google, which collects money from advertising placed alongside search results and shares it with Apple.

BusinessWeek, which was bought recently by Bloomberg financial news agency, said that making Bing the default search engine on the iPhone could require users to adjust the phone settings if they want to search the Web using Google.

The magazine also said that Apple is looking at providing a search option itself and that a deal with Microsoft may be "about buying itself time."

Google is the overwhelming Web search leader with a 65.7 per cent share of the US search market in December compared with just 10.7 per cent for Bing, according to tracking firm comScore, and also dominates in mobile search.

Amid daily battle to survive, Haitians eye the future

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Hundreds of thousands of Haitians will be living off foreign aid and in temporary housing for years to come, as experts warn rebuilding the quake-ravaged nation may take at least a decade.

Almost two weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake shattered the lives of the nine million people in one of the world's poorest countries, a massive aid operation has cranked into place to provide food, water and shelter.

With the government on Saturday officially calling off the search and rescue efforts for any more survivors beneath the rubble, the focus for international aid organisations has switched to helping hundreds of thousands left destitute.

The Haitian government estimates more than 112,000 people were killed in the January 12 quake - making it the deadliest ever recorded in the Americas.

Most of the bodies which lay rotting for days on the streets in the chaotic aftermath of the quake have now been collected in a grim operation, and buried in mass graves outside the Caribbean nation's capital.

Almost 200,000 people were injured, when for almost a minute the plates along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault shook with such force that buildings in the capital Port-au-Prince, and other towns like Leogane and Jacmel, toppled like decks of cards.

US naval vessels and floating hospitals have backed up an army of field and tents hospitals set up by aid organisations, amid accusations that scores may have died in the first few days because medical aid was too slow to arrive.

Isabel Lopez, of the World Health Organization, said 150 health facilities were now up and running in the city, but she added: "There is still a strong need for post operative care."

Around a million people were left homeless, the interior ministry estimates, and the government has embarked on a massive relocation programme to move 500,000 people to camps hastily erected in the countryside.

Chief UN spokesman Nicholas Reader said the Haitian government had identified 500 sites where tented encampments might be set up for those now living in squalid, makeshift camps.

"Haiti's recovery must begin with its people, strong, resilient and impatient to get to work rebuilding their lives and their country," UN chief Ban Ki-moon has said.

According to UN data, more than US$1.2 billion dollars has been pledged in funding to help Haiti.

Some 62 foreign search and rescue teams are still in Port-au-Prince, and helped pull a young man out of the rubble Saturday 11 days after the quake.

But with hopes almost extinguished of finding more survivors, the aid operation led by the United States and the United Nations is now concentrated on distributing tonnes of food and water to the needy.

And the needs are enormous. Even before the quake, 70 per cent of Haitians were living on less than two dollars a day.

But fears of an eruption of violence in a nation which has known decades of bloodshed and political upheaval have failed to materialize, with many praising the Haitians' dignified response among their despair.

There have been tales of neighbours sharing out their meagre supplies, and organising watches to keep looters and pillagers at bay.

"I think the people have been heroic," said former US president Bill Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, as he toured one hospital last week.

Despite damage to the main airport in Port-au-Prince, it has been kept open under US military control, and aid flights are also now unloading on three other airstrips - including two in neighbouring Dominican Republic.

US forces, due to reach 20,000 troops, have also worked to reopen the damaged port to unblock logjams of aid, which has poured into the country from overseas.

"Haitians are grieving, but they are also buoyed by the generous outpouring of support from around the world," said Mark Fried of Oxfam.

"Despite the losses they have suffered, they are working hard to turn the empty lots, golf courses and churchyards where they have taken refuge into places where they can live in dignity."

But many organisations warn the coming weeks will be crucial in a race to provide more permanent shelter before the rainy season comes.

Michael Delaney, director of humanitarian response at Oxfam America, said there were serious fears of disease.

"There's concern over sewage, human waste. Very few of the hundreds of sites where people have set up camp have latrines set up," he told AFP, warning that if waste was washed into other areas "it will create a public health mess."

International donors meet Monday in Montreal to prepare a summit on rebuilding Haiti, amid hopes the quake may prove a turning point in the nation's history.

The UN, which suffered its worst ever disaster in the quake with the deaths of more than 40 UN staffers, has launched a programme to create 220,000 jobs in rubble removal and reconstruction, paying each person some five dollars a day.

"There is going to be a long and challenging recovery and we need sustained support," said Jonathan Reckford, chief executive officer of the organisation, Habitat for Humanity. "People need to think in terms of a 10-year time frame."

Another massive quake threatens Haiti, seismologists warn

WASHINGTON : Another earthquake is threatening to hit Haiti with as much, if not more force than the massive temblor that levelled Port-au-Prince, seismologists said, urging the country to rebuild with strict norms.

Aftershocks have already rattled the impoverished Caribbean nation in the days following the January 12 quake that killed over 110,000 people, left nearly 610,000 homeless and injured scores more.

On Wednesday, a magnitude 5.9 temblor struck a people already scrambling to rebuild their tattered lives.

But more are likely on their way. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated on Thursday that there was a 25 per cent probability that one or several magnitude 6 aftershocks could strike in the coming weeks, although they will space out more and more over time.

If the devastating magnitude 7 quake that hit nearly two weeks ago freed much of the tension accumulated on one portion of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, another segment east of the epicentre and adjacent to Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince has barely moved, according to the USGS.

Yet part of this fault zone accumulated more strain due to the sliding of North American and Caribbean tectonic plates that could unleash all that strength at any moment without warning.

The geological agency based its predictions on preliminary measures of deformations using radar, satellite and aerial imagery.

"We just know from other earthquakes worldwide and from the history of Haiti that large earthquakes can occur close in time," USGS seismologist David Schwartz told AFP. "Not one of us would be surprised."

Citing Turkey, which experienced two earthquakes above magnitude seven just three months apart in 1999. Schwartz warned a similar scenario could take place in Haiti.

The Enriquillo fault zone, which runs along the southern portion of the island of Hispaniola shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, could generate a tremor measuring up to 7.2 - slightly higher than the original quake - according to Eric Calais, a seismologist at Purdue University.

"Earthquakes in this region tend to repeat themselves in sequences," he said in an interview, noting that similarly large temblors have shaken Haiti at least four times in the past three centuries, including those of 1751 and 1770, which completely destroyed Port-au-Prince.

"Port-au-Prince must be rebuilt according to strict seismic norms."

Some nuclear plants that can resist magnitude 8 earthquakes are now being built, he noted.

The USGS said an in-depth evaluation of the quake risk for Haiti and other Caribbean countries would provide the basis to establish and improve construction norms in order to eventually erect more resistant buildings.

But this would require extensive geological assessments of faults, soil conditions, strain accumulations, and studies of recent seismic patterns and activity.

Calais lamented the scant attention seismologists have paid to Haiti in recent years. Only two teams of experts, including one from Purdue University where he teaches, have worked in the country in the past 15 years. They had already warned about the risk of a new powerful quake.

He planned to travel to Haiti on Monday with a battery of instruments to coordinate the first seismic study since the quake. - AFP/ms

46 injured as Iran plane catches fire while landing

TEHRAN: An Iranian passenger plane caught fire while landing on Sunday in the northeastern city of Mashhad, injuring at least 46 people on board, state television reported.

Iranian officials told local news networks that the rear end of the Russian-built Tupolev 154 plane owned by Taban Airline caught fire as the aircraft was landing at Mashhad airport.

"The plane caught fire while landing," state television quoted Javad Erfanian, head of disaster management of Khorasan Razavi province of which Mashhad is the capital, as saying.

"Forty-six people have been injured, but most of them are not serious," he said, adding that emergency services evacuated the passengers after which the rear end of the aircraft broke up.

The English language state-owned Press TV said the plane, travelling from Abadan in southwest Iran to Mashhad, had 157 passengers on board. Erfanian said the plane also had 13 crew members on board.

Reza Jafarzadeh, spokesman for Iranian civil aviation, said the plane had left Abadan on Saturday, but bad weather in Mashhad led to the aircraft landing in the central city of Isfahan for the night before it took off again for Mashhad early Sunday.

"The captain had a critical patient on board and so had to do an emergency landing (in Mashhad) which is why the aircraft met with an accident," he was quoted as saying on the website of state television.

Iran, which has been under years of international sanctions, has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade.

Its civil and military fleet is made up of ancient aircraft in very poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance.

In its worst air accident, a plane carrying members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards crashed in February 2003, killing 302 people on board.

In July last year, a Soviet-designed Tupolev had caught fire mid-air and plunged flaming into farmland northeast of Tehran, killing all 168 people on board.

In December 2005, a total of 108 people were killed when a Lockheed transport plane crashed into a foot of a high-rise housing block outside Tehran.

In November 2006, a military plane crashed on takeoff at Tehran's Mehrabad airport, killing all 39 people on board, including 30 members of Revolutionary Guards.

Rachel Uchitel has had no contact whatsoever with Tiger Woods, says her lawyer

Don't believe those reports that Tiger Woods has been hooking up once again with Rachel Uchitel, the woman alleged to be his original mistress.

At least that's what Uchitel's high powered lawyer, Gloria Allred, has insisted to RadarOnline.com.

"Ms. Uchitel has had absolutely no contact with Tiger Woods for quite some time, and has not seen him or had any communication with him since she has been in Palm Beach," Allred told the Web site.

Allred's statement comes in response to stories, like the one that appeared in the pages of In Touch Magazine last week, which reported that Woods and Uchitel have been sleeping with each other ever since the scandal broke over the Thanksgiving weekend.

The embattled golf great turned 34 on Wednesday.

U.S. seeks answers after Afghanistan bombing that killed 7 CIA operatives

Reporting from Washington and Rochester, N.Y. - The suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees at a U.S. base will temporarily slow U.S. intelligence-gathering in eastern Afghanistan, but the agency will not retrench on its ambitious buildup in the country while it conducts a security review, officials said Thursday.

Military and intelligence officials were scrambling to determine how the bomber penetrated a forbidding network of barriers, barbed wire and watchtowers at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khowst province near the Pakistani border, and made his way deep inside to set off a thunderous blast.

Western officials were deeply concerned that the assailant had insider's knowledge of the base layout and security practices, according to an official familiar with the investigation. Some reports said that the attacker was wearing a uniform of the Afghan National Army and carried an identification card, and that officials were trying to determine whether the uniform was stolen or the ID card fake."Does this mean we have a guy who went postal?" asked one U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Or is there any element within the ANA that is extremist?"

Other reports suggested that the bomber may have been brought onto the base by CIA operatives who wanted to turn the Afghan into an informer.

U.S. officials said they believed a Taliban claim of responsibility for the attack was legitimate.

Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense vigorously denied that the suicide bomber was an Afghan soldier. But the allegation clearly stung, because there have been several recent instances in which members of the Afghan security forces turned guns on their Western mentors.

Intelligence operations at the base target extremist groups including Al Qaeda, the network of Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other militants aligned with the Taliban, officials said. Taliban fighters from both Afghanistan and Pakistan find refuge in the adjacent tribal areas of Pakistan.

Officials declined to provide a more detailed account of the work, but one senior U.S. official said the attack would have a short-term effect on intelligence-gathering in eastern Afghanistan.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the agency would conduct an assessment to determine how security procedures at the base broke down. But officials insisted that the agency would not suspend operations in Afghanistan for the review.

"There's no talk -- none -- of retrenching or slowing the pace of CIA activities," said a U.S. intelligence official. "There are plenty of people ready, able, and in place to pursue the fight. The atmosphere at Langley is one of even greater focus and determination. The place is galvanized."

The CIA has been building up its presence in far-flung parts of Afghanistan, particularly in areas such as Khowst, to gather intelligence as the military prepares to add 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to about 100,000. Officials said in fall that the CIA was deploying spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives, and that the agency's station in Afghanistan would become one of the largest in agency history.

Officials initially reported that eight CIA employees had been killed in the attack Wednesday. But CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, in a note to the agency workforce Thursday, said seven had died and six were wounded.

"Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism," he said.

The attack is the deadliest for the CIA since the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, in which eight operatives reportedly were killed.

Current and former U.S. officials said that two or three were contractors working for the CIA, and that the rest were career agency employees.

Among those killed was a female officer who served as chief of the CIA base near Khowst, and was a long-time officer in the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, according to agency veterans. Her name was not disclosed.

Former CIA officials said some of those killed worked for the CIA's paramilitary branch, known as the Special Activities Division.

One official said that by casting suspicion on the Afghan National Army, perpetrators were trying to drive a wedge between U.S. intelligence personnel and Afghans.

The director of military intelligence in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, has been pushing for greater information sharing and cooperation. Military officials said plans to hire Afghans to guard U.S. forward operating bases would not be canceled. Under that program, which is beginning in eastern Afghanistan, Afghans will guard towers, patrol perimeter fences and man checkpoints.

Military officials say that hiring Afghans will improve ties, provide jobs and build trust with local tribes, helping erode support for the Taliban. Equally important, officials believe that by taking Americans and international forces off mundane guard tasks, commanders will be able to put more forces in the field.

The disclosure that the base was home to a major CIA presence was disconcerting to some Afghan officials who work closely with the civilian reconstruction and development officials also based at Chapman.

"We were surprised to hear the CIA are there," said Gul Jamil, a member of Khowst's provincial council. "But the most important thing now is how this base was infiltrated despite tight security."

Afghans living and working near the base, which lies just outside Khowst city, the provincial capital, recounted hearing an extremely loud explosion about 4:30 p.m., as winter darkness was already falling.

Thousands welcome 2010 in Times Square; brave cold and terror fears

Three, two, one . . . It's 2010!

Hundreds of thousands of revelers from all over the globe braved freezing drizzle Thursday night to ring in the new decade in Times Square.

"Look at all the people," gushed Peter Kalkzewiak, 32, of Warsaw, Poland, who was visiting New York for the first time. "A million people. I've never seen anything like it."

Bundled up against the cold rain, the masses of people wearing funny hats started gathering early in the afternoon.

Despite a rotten forecast and fears of terrorism, nothing could dampen the party mood in the famed Crossroads of the World.

"We made it. It's amazing," said Enid Boyd, 51, of Miami, hugging five members of her family after the crystal-covered ball came down. "What a terrific way to spend the new year."

"It's great. I can't explain it," said Katie Holley, 23, of Virginia, sharing a midnight kiss with her boyfriend, Daniel. "It's so pretty, so fun, so much confetti."

"Last year, my resolution was to be in Times Square for New Year's, so I'm here," said Lucrecia Theobald, 40, of the Dominican Republic. "It's beautiful, exciting, the best place to be."

Navy reservists Jamie Pisano, 21, and Ryan Laurentus, 21, both of New Milford, Conn., wanted to party before they both get sent overseas.

"This is America," said Pisano. "It's a good time."

An army of cops, vigilant against trouble, greeted crowds with hand-held metal detectors.

Even with the Christmas Day terror attempt weighing on the nation, few admitted giving a second thought to fulfilling what for many is a lifetime dream.

"It's a little worrying, but not enough to not come," said Lisa Winter, 26, of Fresno, Calif.

"You have to do this at least once in life," said Javier Trevino, 31, of Monterrey, Mexico. "Times Square is the middle of the world."

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly expected fewer partygoers in Times Square because of the damp weather, but vowed to have his troops out in full force.

"Our security regimen remains the same," Kelly said. "We have the most comprehensive counterterrorism program anywhere."

Jordan Diddle, 13, of Greensboro, N.C., thought it was a bit much to need a police escort from an NYPD-barricaded area near 42nd St. to a portable toilet.

"I feel like I'm being held hostage," Jordan said.

Jordan's father, Tony Diddle, 48, said he and his family were eagerly anticipating the midnight hoopla they only knew from television.

"We decided it's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and this is our once," Tony Diddle said as "New Year's Rockin' Eve" host Ryan Seacrest walked by.

Selle Suppan, 55, a hospital administrator from Ohio, said she and her friends brought a box of Depends adult diapers to eliminate the worry of rest room emergencies.

"That's the big super secret at these kinds of functions," Suppan said.

Bob Rucker, 35, of Selden, L.I., was among the few locals to join the sprawling crowd. His friend Mick Dekranes, 19, of Atlanta talked him into going.

"I've lived in New York my entire life and I've never been here," Rucker said.

"It's pretty crazy to be in the mix with all these people," Dekranes said. "It's insane."