The charges filed against Francis and his bodyguard stem from an alleged January altercation that began when three women got into his limousine outside a popular nightspot. Prosecutors claim the women thought they were being driven to their car but were taken to Francis’ gated home, where a struggle ensued and he allegedly slammed one woman’s head on a tile floor.

He faces to five years in jail if convicted, but Francis said in a phone interview Tuesday that he is innocent.

He said he has eight eyewitnesses who will testify on his behalf and security footage from three cameras.

“This did not happen,” he said.

He claimed that police and the district attorney’s office rejected filing charges against him, but that City Attorney Carmen Trutanich is pursuing the case for political reasons.

District Attorney’s spokeswoman Jane Robison said county prosecutors declined to file felony charges against Francis in late July, but referred the case to Trutanich’s office for possible misdemeanor charges.

Francis said Trutanich is trying to prosecute him because the city attorney is considering a run for higher office, a claim that spokesman Frank Mateljan denies. “We filed charges based on the facts in the police report and nothing else,” he said.

Trutanich has not yet announced whether he will run for district attorney, but his name has been floated as a possible candidate.

“He is dead in the water,” Francis said. “He is going to get embarrassed.”

Francis’ friend, Mark Rousso, said he was in the limo with the women, and that two of them started fighting with each other on the way to Francis’ home.

“It was the other way around,” Rousso said. “Joe was trying to stop it.”

Another woman, Madi Matichak, said she first met Francis at the club on the night of the incident and that the soft-porn mogul was upstairs when the girls resumed their fight in the driveway of his home.

Francis’ bodyguard, Vagram Gegdzhyan, had offered to give them a ride home but called them a cab after one of the women hit him, Matichak said.

Both Francis and Gegdzhyan turned themselves in to police on Monday and were freed on bail. They were scheduled to appear for an arraignment on Sept. 16.

Gegdzhyan, who is also accused of impersonating a peace officer after allegedly flashing a sheriff’s deputy’s badge in the limo, could be jailed for up to six years if convicted.

In 2008, Francis pleaded no contest to child abuse and prostitution charges in Florida after spending nearly a year in jail. He later won a civil case filed by women who claimed he had caused them emotional distress by making them flash their breasts for some of his “Girls Gone Wild” videos.

The following year he was sentenced to time served and a year of probation after pleading guilty to filing false income tax returns and bribing Nevada jail workers.

Banderas plays a psychopathic doctor in Almodovar’s new film The Skin I Live In.

Their last collaboration was Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! back in 1990, when a young Banderas played a recently released psychiatric patient called Ricky.

It was a performance which put him on a trajectory towards Hollywood, where he now lives with his wife, actress Melanie Griffiths, but the 50-year-old wanted to return to an edgier kind of film-making.

“I just needed it after so many years in America,” he says. “They make beautiful movies there but they play it safer.

“Maybe it’s because of the money that’s involved, but for a director like Pedro, money is just for creation, it’s about exploring and experimentation.

“Experimenting is a forbidden word in the United States. You say: ‘It’s an experimental movie,’ and you’re kicked out.”

Banderas plays a Dr Frankenstein-like character, Robert Ledgard, who is holding a beautiful patient, Vera, captive in his house while he experiments with skin grafts. For much of the movie, Vera – played by Spanish actress Elena Anaya – wears a skin-coloured bodysuit.

Almodovar describes it as “a horror film without any blood”, and Banderas agrees.

“Pedro wanted me to show the monster within, to play the character so that even when I am doing terrible things, I would seem like a family doctor prescribing aspirin.”

Almodovar, 61, is Spain’s most prolific director, first coming to international attention with the grimly comic Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown in 1988.

Worldwide success came with movies like All About My Mother and Talk to Her, for which he won a best screenplay Oscar in 2002.

Almodovar the ‘genre’

He is also a starmaker. As well as launching Banderas’s career in the United States, he brought Penelope Cruz to the attention of Hollywood producers and secured her an Oscar nomination with his film, Volver.

His movies share certain characteristics: high melodrama, vivid colours, identity issues and mental instability. He dropped his first name from his credits a long time ago.

“He is a genre in himself,” says Banderas. “It used to happen with directors like Fellini, that you would explain away what you see as ‘oh it’s a Fellini film’. The same thing now happens with Almodovar. I think it’s priceless in our day when so much cinema is just a pattern.”

Almodovar argues that he never “sets out to be deliberately outrageous, or to provoke, although I maybe want to provoke sympathy for an outrageous character.

“I like it if people are still trying to work out what went on in my movie days after seeing it.”

But being described as a “genre” also insinuates seeing the same thing repeatedly – and the classic Almodovar characteristics can also tip into self-indulgence, according to some critics.

Not all his films have achieved success, including his first movie with Banderas Tie Me Up Tie Me Down!, which was described as “too strange”. Even his first film with Penelope Cruz – 1997′s Live Flesh – did not translate at the box office.

2004′s Bad Education, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, was criticised in some quarters as being Almodovar’s “flabby” exploration of parts of his own childhood.

‘Suicidal’ directing

However, when The Skin I Live In was presented at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it received almost uniformly positive reviews, the Telegraph describing it as “the work of the master near the top of his game”.

“He is not as baroque as he used to be,” Banderas replied, when asked if Almodovar had changed much in the intervening two decades.

“He is more profound in certain ways, more serious, more solid as a director. But he still has the same engine – the same alive personality.

“Sometimes I feel he is almost suicidal on what he is trying to achieve on screen, I kept saying on set: ‘Can I do that? Can I really just go out there and put my arm inside the mouth of this lion?’”

For Banderas, The Skin I Live In might be a welcome interruption to his normal Hollywood schedule – in his next role, he is the voice of Puss in Shrek spin-off Puss In Boots.

“I enjoy my profession, and a movie can serve many purposes,” he says.

“But by working again with Pedro, it was refreshing. It was to get out of the pattern I have been playing for the last 20 years and to do something where I recognise my roots and the taste of acid in my mouth.

“It’s the bitter but good taste of danger when you’re going to places you’ve never been before.”

Steve Jobs, the mind behind the iPhone, iPad and other devices that turned Apple into one of the world’s most powerful companies, resigned as the company’s chief executive, saying he can no longer handle the job.

The move appears to be the result of an unspecified medical condition for which he took an indefinite leave from his post in January. Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, has been named chief executive.

In a letter addressed to Apple’s board and the Apple community, Mr Jobs said he “always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come”.

Apple said Mr Jobs was elected board chairman and Mr Cook is becoming a member of its board.

The company said Mr Jobs gave the board his resignation and suggested Mr Cook be named the company’s new leader.

The January leave was Mr Jobs’ third medical leave over several years. He had previously survived pancreatic cancer and received a liver transplant.

Their brief walk down a sidewalk outside a restaurant in the wealthy enclave of Malibu followed a story published online Tuesday by In Touch Weekly magazine saying the pair, who have two superstar children, were headed for a separation.

That story was attributed to an unnamed “insider” and was followed by a public denial in a statement issued on behalf of the Smiths.

“Although we are reluctant to respond to these types of press reports, the rumors circulating about our relationship are completely false. We are still together, and our marriage is intact,” the pair said in the joint statement.

But the rumors persisted Wednesday with singer Marc Anthony, who co-stars with Jada Pinkett Smith on TV show “Hawthorne” and who recently split up with singer Jennifer Lopez, surfacing in reports as a possible suitor to his TV co-star.

In Malibu, Will Smith was asked by a reporter for celebrity news website TMZ.com to comment on the “ridiculous rumors” in the media, and Smith answered, “you just did.”

However, Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios Noulas and Cecilia Mascolo, of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, have devised a new approach that not only looks at friends of friends, but also the places people visit – with incremental weightings given to different places such as airports and gymnasiums.

 Scellato said: “Essentially this is a way in which we can predict how people will make new friends. We know that we are likely to become friends with ‘friends of friends’, but what we find is there are specific places which foster the creation of new friendships and that they have specific characteristics.”

Historically, the problem facing social networks has been the sheer volume of users. While millions of users may represent good news from a business perspective, it means the task of recommending friends can become an exponentially difficult one, if, as in the case of Facebook, you have 750 million active users.

The standard two-hop approach – sharing at least a common friend – has, to date, ignored the possibilities of recommending new friends based on the places where users ‘check-in’.

The trio’s research is an extension of long-standing sociological theory that people who tend to frequent the same places may be similarly-minded individuals likely to form a connection with one another – but applied to social networking sites.

Added Scellato: “For our research we analysed the location-based social network Gowalla to see how users created social connections over a period of four months. We discovered that about 30 per cent of all new social links appear among users that check-in to the same places. Thus, these ‘place friends’ represent disconnected users becoming direct connections.

“By combining place friends with friends-of-friends, we can make the prediction space about 15 times smaller and yet, cover 66 per cent of new social ties.

“It turns out that the properties of the places we interact can determine how likely we are to develop social ties. Offices, gyms and schools are more likely to aid development rather than other places such as football stadiums or airports. In those places, it’s highly unlikely people will develop a social connection.

“Our results show it’s possible to improve the performance of link prediction systems on location-based services that can be employed to keep the users of social networks interested and engaged with that particular website.”

Provided by University of Cambridge (news : web)

Adam Laurie and Zac Franken of computer security firm Aperture Labs used a homemade software program and an easily bought iPad audio wire to trick Square in a way that could be a bonanza for crooks.

 Laurie could type credit card numbers into his laptop, which converts to sound data sent to Square, where the transaction registers as if a real card were swiped in a dongle.

“Traditionally, the way you make money from stolen credit cards is sell the data to someone else or buy goods on it, then resell the goods and get the cash,” Laurie said while demonstrating the hack at a Black Hat computer security gathering in Las Vegas.

“This really takes the hassle out of it… I can put the money right in the account and it only costs me 2.75 percent.”

The percentage he cited was the fee charged by Square, which was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, a Silicon Valley star who helped create popular micro-blogging service Twitter.

Square markets a pocket-sized credit card reader that can be plugged into a smartphone to allow anyone to accept credit or debit card payments on the spot.

Franken and Laurie, whose hacker name is “Major Malfunction,” said that they were waiting for a flight at an airport when then figured out how to convert Square into a handy tool for cashing in on stolen credit cards.

Laurie realized that the Square “dongle” used to swipe credit cards plugged into an iPad audio jack, indicating that the small device essentially converted magnetic stripe data to sound then interpreted by the service’s software.

He quickly modified software he wrote five years earlier for reading and replicating magnetic stripe data.

Franken and Laurie strolled to an airport shop and bought a wire to plug his laptop into the iPad jack where the dongle would have gone.

“Credit card data is getting skimmed all the time,” Laurie said, holding up a pre-paid credit card he used for the demonstration. “Instead of buying this I could have bought it on the Internet from a criminal gang.”

Funds are dumped into an individual’s Square account to be removed before anyone catches on, according to the hackers.

“You’d have to set up dodgy accounts that don’t trace back to you,” Laurie said. “But, that is standard practice.”

Laurie and Franken said that they shared their findings with Square in February only to be told that it wasn’t seen as a threat and that traffic analysis would expose those kinds of transactions.

The hackers had also heard unconfirmed reports that Square planned to release new dongles that encrypt transaction data.

“Encryption would be a good thing,” Franken said. “The way it is at the moment a cable between two devices and you can inject credit card numbers right into the system,” he continued.

Since Square promises to have money from transactions in accounts within a day, money milked from stolen credit card data could be made off with quickly provided amounts were extreme enough to be noticed, Franken said.

(c) 2011 AFP

Canada’s federal government currently uses more than 100 different email systems, 300 data centers and 3,000 network services.

Email will be merged into one system in an effort to make the information more secure as well as less costly, Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose said in a statement.

The government will also reduce its information systems from the current 300 to less than 20.

The changes will “strengthen security and the safety of government data to ensure Canadians are protected,” Ambrose added.

Ottawa plans to streamline the more than 3,000 electronic networks within and between government departments and agencies.

Over 70 international organizations, including the United Nations and other governments, were victims of a large-scale cyber attack orchestrated over the past few years, cyber security firm McAfee revealed this week.

Canada, which was among the cyber-attack victims, will consolidate over the course of two years in order to transform the defense architecture of its information systems.

The Conservative government hopes to save $100-200 million dollars by reducing overall costs.

 View of the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The Canadian government announced plans Thursday to consolidate email programs and network services to boost cyber security, after revelations of breaches in network security.

(c) 2011 AFP

Google’s top lawyer accused Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and other companies of using “bogus patents” to wage a campaign against the Internet giant’s Android mobile platform.

In a blog post, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond said Google’s rivals were seeking to “make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices.”

“Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation,” Drummond said.

 He said 550,000 Android devices were being activated every day and its success has resulted in a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”

Drummond pointed to last year’s $450 million acquisition of 882 patents from software maker Novell by a consortium made up Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle and the more recent purchase by a group led by Apple and Microsoft of 6,000 patents held by bankrupt Canadian firm Nortel.

Google was a bidder for the Nortel patent portfolio but it lost out to a $4.5 billion bid from the consortium made up of iPhone maker Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Blackberry maker Research in Motion and Japan’s Sony.

The huge sum spent on the patents and the involvement of many of the world’s top tech companies reflected the fierce battle for intellectual property in the tech industry, where firms are often hit with patent-infringement lawsuits.

Google is currently being sued by software giant Oracle over technology used in its Android smartphone operating system.

Drummond said Google’s rivals were “banding together” and were seeking a $15 licensing fee for every Android device.

He said they were also “attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android,” which Google provides for free to handset makers.

“Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it,” Drummond said.

“A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a ‘tax’ for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers.

“Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop,” he continued.

Drummond said Google was encouraged that the US Justice Department is looking into whether Microsoft and Apple acquired the Nortel patents for “anti-competitive means.”

“We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio,” he said. “We’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it.”

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith responded to the Google accusations with a message on his Twitter feed.

“Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no,” Smith said.

Apple or Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(c) 2011 AFP

Prof. Judy Tsui, PolyU’s Vice President (International and Executive Education), Director of the Graduate School of Business and Chair Professor of Accounting, Prof. Ferdinand A. Gul, Chair Professor of Accounting and Corporate Governance, and Prof. Bin Srinidhi of the City University of Hong Kong, have co-conducted a research project entitled “Female Directors and Earnings Quality”.

Drawing on a sample of US listed firms from 2011-2007, the researchers tested the relationship between female participation in corporate boards and earnings quality. They employed two measures of earnings quality. Their first measure is discretionary accruals quality which is the estimation error in accruals after controlling for current, past, and future cash flows, sales and long-term assets, and operating cycle and volatility in sales. Their second measure of earning quality is the propensity of firms to beat earnings benchmarks by a small amount. When a firm’s unmanaged earnings are just shy of earnings benchmarks such as prior-year earnings or analyst-forecasted earnings, managers have an incentive to manipulate earnings to meet/beat those benchmarks. These small increases (over the prior year’s earnings) and surprises (over analysts’ forecasts) constitute earnings management that is unrelated to firm performance. The researchers also conducted additional tests using performance-adjusted discretionary current accruals.

 The results of this research project reveal that female directors are willing to tackle tough issues that are often considered unpalatable by all-male boards. Female board participation is also found to lead to more effective board communication with investors. The presence of female directors in monitor positions on audit and corporate governance committees also makes for more transparent reporting and earnings quality. There is evidence that boards with female directors promote greater vigilance over financial reporting, exhibit greater independence of though and ensure a more rigorous monitoring process.

The study reveals a positive relationship between female participation in corporate boards and earnings quality. After controlling for endogeneity, firm-level board governance, and other known firm and industry characteristics, the study finds significantly higher earnings quality in firms with female board participation.

This article was first appeared on PolyU Milestone, June 2011 edition

Provided by ResearchSEA

Whether it was surprise for the world or for the Ashley, no one knows the inner story but the truth is that Cheryl wanted to remarry Ashley just after 9 months of their official break up.

Cheryl wanna include everyone in her happiness and therefore she is showing it to all on a romantic day out with Ashley. Cheryl is seen jumping into Ashley’s arms, wrapping legs around him, can’t take off her eyes from his face and is ready for a lukewarm smooch.

In another picture, the singer is found gazing at the player from across dinner table and enjoying holding his hand as the couple enjoys a glass of wine.

The pair got extremely intimated together that they could not keep their hands away from each other. Cheryl was so desperate to love him that she could not keep her hands away from his back and she lifted up Ashley’s white t-shirt to expose her back while the same expression was displayed by Ashley when he firmly gripped Cheryl’s denim-clad bottom.

Now the story opens up as you may not have guessed but the pictures are not actually of the famous exes but instead of lookalikes and pictures are taken by Alison Jackson for celebrity magazine Heat.

Jackson used to take pictures which apparently lookalike famous celebrities such as Princess Diana, Dodi Al-Fayed and so on. She described her work takes a lot of time but she enjoys working like it.

Describing how she sets up for a shot, Jackson said: ‘I draw up lists of what is needed, contact the various experts such as wig and clothes-makers, make-up artists and lookalike models – and then work closely with them to achieve the exact look I’m seeking.

‘Ultimately, though, it’s up to me to capture the right moment where they all look as I envisaged.

‘All this is very expensive; consequently, I don’t take many photographs, maybe one or two a month.’

The lookalikes work will not be objected as Ashley declared his intention to re-marry Cheryl again.