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JAKARTA (AFP) - An apparent explosion has levelled high-rise buildings in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, triggering a security alert. It's the work of an Islamic superhero, a giant, confused teenager who sneezed.

abbar the Powerful, the alter-ego of teenager Nawaf Al-Bilali, is the first of 99 superhero characters in an Islamic culture-based comic book series called "The 99" just launched in Indonesia. The comic seeks to act as a metaphor for what's happening in the Islamic world, its creator, Kuwaiti-born Naif Al-Mutawa, told AFP during a recent visit to Jakarta to launch the colourful, action-packed comic.

"Islam or the Koran can be used for good or for bad," Al-Mutawa said, adding that when either are misused, people blame the Koran, "when in fact they should be blaming the person interpreting the Koran".

Each of the superheroes personifies one of the 99 attributes of God in Islam, with their individual powers derived from mystical gemstones originating from 13th-century Baghdad, and infused with lost ancient knowledge. Jabbar, for instance, has extraordinary strength that gives him "near-invulnerability and durability". Indonesia's own character, Fatah the Opener, can create a portal dimension used to travel anywhere on Earth.

The main struggle in the story happens between two characters representing the classic good-evil dichotomy, with each competing for the allegiance of "The 99". Even the superheroes themselves are sometimes deceived into crossing to the side of evil, Al-Mutawa explained.

But while the comic is based on Islamic archetypes and culture, there's nothing overtly Islamic in them, he said.

"They are as religious as Spiderman," Al-Mutawa quipped. "There's no mention of prayers or prophets, none of that."

The characters, who work in threes, do not carry weapons and are evenly split between males and females.

In a bid to represent Islam's spread around the world, characters frequently hail from two nations, which also helps to "make sense of the Islamic diaspora".

"For example, Bari is from Sudan but grew up in France, Hadya is from Pakistan but grew up in the UK," he said.

Al-Mutawa worked as a clinical psychologist for more than a decade before he started his own media company. He had treated former prisoners of war in Kuwait and worked with survivors of political torture in New York.

"The Iraqis that I treated were tortured by Saddam or his people. These are people who grew up with Saddam as their hero and yet they were tortured by (his people)," he said.

"What kind of message are we sending our children? Is this what heroes do?"

This disillusionment drove him to write several successful children's books and then to create and co-write "The 99," with former Marvel and DC comic artists helping out, hoping to fill a gap in the global market. The comic, co-written with Fabian Nicieza, who has worked on hit Marvel titles such as X-Men, is now published across the Middle East in Arabic.

"'The 99' is selling as well in Kuwait and the Emirates as Spiderman is. I know because I sell Spiderman," he said.

The comic will debut in the United States in October, followed by Malaysia next year, while Al-Mutawa is in talks with publishers in Turkey and France. Yudha Kartohadiprodjo, general manager of "The 99's" Indonesian license holder Femina Group, said he believed the comics would find a receptive audience in the world's most populous Muslim nation.

"In the market today there are no contemporary comics based on Islamic values," he said. "The creator understands Islamic history, and that's important for this Islamic-based story."

Indonesian Muslims can be sensitive when it comes to religious-based stories, with any criticism from Islamic groups potentially risking a nationwide boycott. A poem recently published in a newspaper in West Java, for instance, sparked outrage from a local religious group for its "un-Islamic" depiction of angels, forcing the writer and the newspaper to print a public apology. Kartohadiprodjo said he was confident in Al-Mutawa's Islamic credentials. The 68-page, full-colour first issue of "The 99" had a print run of 25,000 copies and is selling at bookstores for 18,000 rupiah (two dollars). A few national newspapers are considering printing extracts, Kartohadiprodjo said. And of course, merchandising is to follow soon, with the Islamic superheroes preparing to infiltrate homes via notebooks, T-shirts and mobile phone paraphernalia.

 KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A Malaysian doctor who will spend the last days of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in space has vowed to follow the rituals of his faith even as he hurtles around Earth at 17,000 mph.

Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor lifted off Wednesday in a Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan, en route to the international space station where he will spend about 10 days.

The spacecraft — which also carried an American and a Russian — will take two days to reach the station, a period coinciding with the last days of Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Sheikh Muszaphar has said he will fast and pray in space, even though clerics said he could delay the fast.

"I am not sure how it would be done but I will share my experiences (with) all the Muslims all over the world when I get back," the 35-year-old Sheikh Muszaphar wrote in his Web journal. "After all, Islam is a way of life and I am quite sure I would not face much difficulties."

Sheikh Muszaphar is taking vacuum-packed Malaysian food, including skewered chicken, banana rolls, fermented soybean cakes and ginger jelly to mark the end of Ramadan.

A bachelor who has become a national heartthrob, the orthopedic surgeon will not be the first Muslim in space — Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman joined the crew of the shuttle Discovery in 1985 and there have been several others since.

Still, the mission initially presented a dilemma about fulfilling religious duties such as fasting, kneeling for prayers in zero gravity or facing Mecca to pray.

After all, praying five times daily on a craft that goes around Earth 16 times a day would have meant praying 80 times in 24 hours. Also, it is virtually impossible to face Mecca continuously in a craft traveling at such high speed.

Muslims are required to wash their hands, feet, face and hair before prayers — a luxury on the Soyuz where water is so precious that even sweat and urine are recycled.

To get around these problems, 150 Malaysian scholars, scientists, and astronauts brainstormed and published an 18-page booklet of guidelines for Muslim astronauts.

If he follows the guidelines, Sheikh Muszaphar can forgo fasting in space and make up for it when he returns to Earth. He can pray three times a day instead of five, facing any direction, and he can do without the ritual washing.

On Tuesday, Sheikh Muszaphar told reporters his trip will be an inspiration for his Southeast Asian homeland as well as to other Muslims worldwide.

"It's a small step for me, but a great leap for the Malaysian people," he said, rephrasing Neil Armstrong's words after the 1969 moon landing.

Additional info: 

♣Malaysia's first cosmonaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, crew member of the 16th mission for the International Space Station, gestures just before the launch of the Russian Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz TMA-11 space ship at the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007. Shukor, 35, a medical doctor, will be Malasyia's first cosmonaut and will conduct experiments with microbes of tropical diseases and cancer cells. ♣

click here 2 see Raw video:Russian rocket blast off ♥

TOKYO (AFP) – Japan's Nissan Motor Co. on Friday unveiled a new version of its egg-shaped Pivo concept car that can drive sideways and has a small robot to assist with navigation or calm down angry drivers.

 The Pivo 2 three-seater electric car has wheels that can turn 90 degrees for easy parallel parking.

Like its predecessor, which was unveiled two years ago, the new Pivo has a cabin able to revolve 360 degrees, eliminating the need to reverse.

A round-eyed robot head sitting on the dashboard has cameras that can tell when
a driver is getting sleepy.

"You look tired. There's a coffee shop 500 metres ahead on the left," it told a driver with drooping eyelids during a recent demonstration.

It can also nod or shake its head, helping to improve the mood of irate or glum drivers.

The car has "by-wire" technologies that use electric signals in the steering and braking.

Unlike the first Pivo, it has no axles. Instead it has four separate electric motors, allowing the wheels to turn further than a conventional car.

The Pivo 2 will be exhibited at the Tokyo Motor Show near the capital from October 27.

Plants chatter amongst themselves to spread information,a lot like humans and other animals,new research suggests.

A unique internal network apparently allows greens to warn each other against predators and potential enemies.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form a set of connections to share information with each other through channels known as runners—horizontal stems that physically bond the plants like tubes or cables along the soil surface and underground. Though connected to vertical stems, runners eventually form new buds at the tips and ultimately form a network of plants.

“Network-like plants do not usually produce vertical stems but their stems lie flat on the ground and can hence be used as network infrastructure,” said researcher Josef Stuefer from the Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Stuefer and his team let loose caterpillars on white clover plants and watched them eat a single leaf on the network. Then a second set of caterpillars was allowed to choose between the damaged leaf—one that has been alerted to up its defense status—and leaves from an undamaged network.

Over the course of 20 trials, most or all of the approximately 15 caterpillars in each trial preferred the undamaged leaf to the leaf from a damaged network.

“The feeding caterpillars will be deterred and walk off to feed on other non-induced plants,” Stuefer told LiveScience. “[They] understand plant defense language very well as it is directed exactly to them.”

Here is how it works: If one of the network plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal to upgrade their chemical and mechanical resistance—making their leaves hard to chew on and less desirable. This system works to spread the information amongst the plants and to ward off caterpillars.

“This is an early warning system, very much like in military defense, but then more effective: each member of the network can receive the external signal of impending herbivore danger and transmit it to the other members of the network,” Stuefer said. The attacked leaf is lost. However, the remaining leaves are protected against predators.

The study is detailed in this month’s issue of the journal Oecologia.

According to the researchers, the principle of network transfer of substances is known for very many species, including numerous invasive plants such as bracken and reed and commercial crop species such as bamboo.

The downside to these connections is that viruses often use the runner infrastructure to quickly spread. They enter the plant via the leaves, find their way into the stems and are then passively transported to all the network members where they cause new infections.

“Many pathogens are host specific, meaning that they can infect only very specific plant species,” Stuefer said. “Their main challenge for survival is to find a new host after one has been infected. Such specialists have an especially big advantage from network infections as the physical connection between plants enables them to find genetically identical copies of the original host.”

This, Stuefer explains, is comparable to a computer virus specialized to infect computers with a certain version of the Windows operating system. “Such a virus spreads very fast if all terminals on a network have the correct Windows version while its spread is slowed down if there is variability in the systems,” he said.

• Top 10 Poisonous Plants
• Life’s Little Mysteries: Do Plants Have Sex?
• Plants Shun Parents' Faulty Genes

• Original Story: Plants Communicate to Warn Against Danger

The brilliant planet Venus arrives at the pinnacle of its current morning apparition next week, rising at, or shortly before 3:20 a.m. local daylight time, its earliest rising time this year or next. That works out to more than two hours before the first sign of dawn begins to light up the eastern sky.

At sunrise, Venus will have climbed nearly 40 degrees above the east-southeast horizon (10 degrees is roughly equal to your clenched fist held at arm's length. So at sunup, Venus will stand nearly "four fists" up from the horizon).

Meanwhile, a much dimmer planet, Saturn, glowing with a mellow yellow light, rises shortly after Venus. And right in between the two planets shines the blue-white 1st-magnitude star, Regulus, in Leo, the Lion.

Next week, an ever-changing "Celestial Summit Meeting" will greet early risers as Venus interacts with Regulus, Saturn and a lovely crescent Moon in some very interesting celestial configurations.

The eye-catching array kicks off this weekend. On Saturday morning, Oct. 6, Venus, Regulus and Saturn will form a wide triangle with the Moon hovering high above them.

On Sunday morning, Oct. 7, the Moon will be strikingly positioned inside of the Venus-Saturn-Regulus triangle.

Venus will appear to speed to the south of Regulus on Monday, Oct. 9. Then finally, on Sunday, Oct. 14, Venus will pass to the south of Saturn.

Crescent Venus

In telescopes and even steadily-held binoculars, Venus is revealed this week as a wide crescent, but as it pulls ahead of Earth and speeds away in its orbit, its disk will shrink and it will display an apparent half-moon phase as seen in a telescope, soon after the start of November.

Saturn, in contrast appears much dimmer – about 1/120 as bright as Venus – primarily because it's located about 17 times farther out in space than Venus as seen from here on Earth.

Another factor is that the famous ring system, which can be seen in any telescope magnifying over 30-power, is gradually closing as seen from our Earthly perspective. Their angle of inclination diminishes from 8.8 to 7.4-degrees during October. By the summer of 2009, the rings will appear edge-on to us and will be difficult, if not impossible to see, even in large telescopes.

Heart of Leo

As for Regulus, it marks the heart of Leo, a star pattern whose origins trace back to the earliest Mideastern peoples, especially those of the Tigris and Euphrates area. Among virtually all civilizations there, this constellation was accorded king-of-the-beasts status and regal symbolism.

And although it shines only 1/229th as bright as Venus and ranks at the bottom on the list of the 21 brightest stars, we know today that Regulus is also regal in an astrophysical sense. It's a highly luminous blue-white star, and just as earthly kings were uncommon personages among the human population, a star like Regulus is also uncommon among the stellar population. Its spectral class is B7; one of the very small minority of those born with enough mass to occupy an exalted station near the top of the main sequence of star classification.

And lastly, its distance of 78 light-years means the light you see arriving from Regulus now started on its journey to Earth right around the time of the great stock market crash in 1929.

• Online Sky Maps and More
• Sky Calendar & Moon Phases
• Astrophotography 101

Some men have absolutely NO sense of etiquette when they're trying to contact women online. During all my years of coaching, women have told me some amazing things men have written to them in emails.

Many men feel they can just say anything in an email when they are trying to get a woman to go out with them. If they said those same things to a woman in a bar or on the street, they might get arrested, or at least slapped. But when they're hiding behind the secrecy of their computer, too many men get abrasive and crude.

Here's my list of 10 things NEVER to do when you're online trying to get a woman to go out with you. Some of these are obvious; some you'll swear I'm making up! But all of them are things men actually do.

Top 10 email turnoffs for women

1. Don't ask her how much she weighs or what her measurements are. You might as well just tell her you only want to sleep with her and you have no interest in getting to know her, because that's what she's going to think if you ask her this.

2. Don't email her seven times asking her why she hasn't responded to your first email. Women get far more email than men do, so you need to be patient.

Instead of harassing her, relax and be confident that she's going to respond to you.

Instead of harassing her, relax and be confident that she's going to respond to you.

3. Don't ask her how many other dates she's been on from Yahoo! Personals. How many other dates someone has been on is not important. What is important is finding out whether the two of you click when you hang out.

4. Don't send her a nasty email if she hasn't responded to you after several emails. It's her prerogative whether or not she desires to be in contact with you. If she doesn't want to meet you, why get angry and nasty? There are plenty of other women out there who you can contact.

5. Don't ask her if she wants to have sex with you on the second email exchange, and don't send her dirty pictures of you. Women are all about connecting with their minds. Just because you're looking for a quick fling, that doesn't mean she's going to respond.

6. If she gives you her phone number, don't wait a week to call her. By extension, if you do wait a week to call her and she doesn't call you back, don't be shocked. Women have many options online. If she gives you her phone number, I suggest calling her that day. It keeps the momentum going.

7. When asking for more pictures, do so without any references to "Can you please send me a picture so I can see your body?"

Ask her if she'd like to exchange more pictures

Ask her if she'd like to exchange more pictures, which means you send some and she sends some. Several women have complained to me that men ask them to send pictures of themselves in bikinis or other such things, so that men can see their body. Men, don't do this!

8. Don't get offended if she doesn't want to talk to you on the phone right away and/or wants to talk to you via email first to get to know you. You need to be flexible and open to her suggestions. Sometimes you may need to email back and forth for a week, and sometimes she'll give you her phone number right away. Either way, don't be rude.

9. Do not email-stalk her.

Many of my women clients have complained to me about men who will email them several times a day

Many of my women clients have complained to me about men who will email them several times a day for three weeks, until they are forced to block emails from those men. Men, she got your email the very first time. She just may have chosen not to open it. By sending emails several times a day, not only are you turning her off, you're freaking her out! You've become an online stalker. That's a guarantee she'll never go out with you.

10. Don't send cut-and-paste emails. When connecting with her for the very first time, don't cut and paste an email message in July that you've been sending out for six months with a tagline that says, "I love the holidays." By doing that, she knows you didn't read her profile – and that you're really, really lazy!

Want to find out what works, check my Daily Dating Blog. If you need any more online dating tips, email me. I have another batch in my blog waiting for you to devour. I always enjoy hearing your comments.

What are women's fatal online dating errors? See them here

Dating Coach, Blogger and Author David Wygant has been featured on more than 2,000 radio and television shows including Dateline, CBS Good Morning, and MTV. Get more sex and dating tips on David's interactive blog at davidwygant.com

Overview

Liverpool have maintained their status as a domestic and European force since the Premier League began in 1992, rarely finishing outside the top positions. The club have won seven major trophies since then, including the Champions League, Uefa Cup, two FA Cups and three League Cups.

Indeed, 2001 saw the Reds claim an unprecedented League Cup, FA Cup and Uefa Cup treble. Having won more domestic and European trophies than any other English club, Liverpool's status as giants of the domestic game is undisputed.

Under Rafa Benitez, Liverpool have secured Champions League football in each of the last three seasons. The Spaniard guided them to third place last season and an appearance in the Champions League final where they were beaten 2-1 by AC Milan.

Liverpool's first-ever competitive game was in the Lancashire League, where a predominantly Scottish team defeated Higher Walton 8-0 on 23rd September 1892.

Club Heritage

In 1891, John Houlding purchased Anfield after Everton left the ground for Goodison Park following a seven-year tenancy. With an empty stadium and only three players remaining, Houlding formed Liverpool Football Club on March 15th 1892. Everton FC and Athletic Grounds, Ltd, or Everton Athletic was to be the name, but the Football Association refused to recognise the team as Everton. Liverpool won their first title in 1901 after gaining promotion to the First Division in 1894.

The appointment of Bill Shankly in 1959 was the beginning of a golden era for Liverpool. He led the club to promotion to the First Division in 1962 and they have stayed their ever since. The title was secured in 1964 and 1966, with a first-ever FA Cup final victory sandwiched in between. A year after winning the Uefa Cup, Shankly retired and was replaced by his assistant Bob Paisley.

Within two seasons, the Reds had won the league, and the Uefa Cup for a second time. Paisley's nine-year reign saw Liverpool win 21 trophies, including three European Cups, six league titles, a UEFA Cup, and three League Cups. Joe Fagan took over in 1983 and inspired the club to the European Cup, League title, and League Cup in his first season.

Premier League History

1993-94 – Roy Evans replaced Graeme Souness
1994-95 – League Cup victory
1998-99 – Gerard Houllier joined Evans as joint-manager
1998-99 - Houllier takes sole charge in Nov 1998.
2000-01 – FA Cup, League Cup and Uefa Cup
2002-03 – League Cup victory
2003-04 – Houllier departs by mutual consent in May 2004.
2004-05 – Rafa Benitez takes over
2004-05 - Djibril Cisse joins from Auxerre for a club record £14million
2004-05 - Champions League victory in May 2005
2005-06 – FA Cup victory in May 2006
2006-07 – American businessmen George Gillett and Tom Hicks become owners in a deal worth £470million.
2007-08 – Fernando Torres becomes Liverpool's record signing at an initial fee of around £20.2million from Atletico Madrid.

The following is a list of all the ad networks and affiliate programs I use to make money online. They were chosen from this exhaustive list of 130 ad networks. I have used all the following networks at one time or another and can highly recommend them. They have proven to provide good service/support and most importantly, on time payments.

Kontera ContentLink

Kontera ContentLink allows you to make money from advertising without giving up any current advertising spots. Their technology reads your post and turns certain words into an ad. The highlighted words are double underline and an ad pops up when you hover over it. Normally Kontera requires a site have a minimum 500,000 page views per month before being accepted into the program. However, I have a partnership with Kontera that will allow smaller blogs to use their ContentLink service.

Fill out the application and enter “John Chow Kontera partnership” into the Comments field. The application is sent to my personal account representative. He will approve you based on your blog content and not your traffic level. This is a great way to use a service that is normally only available to high traffic sites.

Sign up for Kontera

Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads is one of my favorite ad networks. They help me make money online by selling those text links you see under “Featured Sites.” The links offer advertisers traffic and search engine benefits and readers don’t seem to mind them at all because they are not intrusive. Your link price is set by Text Link Ads and is based on Alexa, Google PageRank, number of RSS subscribers, and other factors.

Sign up for Text Link Ads

Google AdSense

If you don’t know what Google AdSense is then you’ve been living under a rock. This is pretty much a must have if you want to make money from a blog. Google display simple text and image ads on your blog that are targeted to what you’re writing about. Google has been a consistent money maker for this blog.

Sign up for AdSense.

Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser, a CPC ad network that competes with Google AdSense. It main advantage over AdSense is its low $10 payout. You only need to make $10 in order to be paid. Big publishers wouldn’t care about this but for many small blogs that are still waiting to hit that magic $100 Google payout level, getting pay at a lower level is quite attractive.

Sign up for Bidvertiser

AzoogleAds

AzoogleAds is one of the largest performance-based online advertising networks in the world. They offers some of the best and highest paying affiliate deals in the industry. No matter what topic your blog covers, you can find a deal that matches your site. The payout range from $1 to over $100 per action. Affiliate marketing is one of this blog’s biggest moneymaker and AzoogleAds is the affiliate network that offers us the best payouts.

Sign up for AzoogleAds

AuctionAds

AuctionAds is one big eBay affiliate. What AuctionAds does is put all their publishers into one big “collective” to go after the higher revenue share. Publishers can leverage AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and AuctionAds’ ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own eBay affiliate relationship. Right now, affiliates will get 100% of any money they make from the system. As the collective moves up the eBay revenue share tiers, AuctionAds will start to take a cut of revenues. The goal is for you to make more with AuctionAds than directly with eBay’s affiliate program, which will be the case as the network increases its volume.

Sign up for AuctionAds

ReviewMe

ReviewMe is this blog’s biggest money maker, accounting for $2,400 of the $8,545.25 March income. ReviewMe allows advertisers to buy sponsored reviews on your blog. Review prices are based on your blog’s Alexa, Technorati and estimated RSS numbers. Publishers can set their own pricing if they don’t like the price ReviewMe set. Reviews can be positive or negative. The only requirement is the post must be at least 200 words long.

Sign up for ReviewMe

TTZ Media

This is my own ad network. It’s ideal for technology and shopping related sites. TTZ Media Network offers a comparison shopping search engine for its affiliated sites. Right now, we’re working on a completely new ad engine that will allow me to accept sites with traffic that is lower than the current 250,000 page views requirement. I’ll make an update on this blog when the network comes out of beta.

FeedBurner Ad Network

FeedBurner provides CPM ads for both site and RSS feeds. The CPM rate can be get as high as $10 and publishers get 70% of the money. However, the fill rate is pretty low. If you’re looking to monetize your RSS feed, then FeedBurner is probably the best of the RSS ad networks. To join the FeedBurner Ad Network, you must first have FeedBurner power your RSS feed.

Sign up for Feedburner

AGLOCO

AGLOCO offers a toolbar that display advertising. If you run the toolbar, they will give you a share of the ad money. They also pay you if you refer other people to use the toolbar. The more people you refer, the more you can potentially make. Currently, my network has over 13,000 people in it and it’s increasing by over 100 per day. AGLOCO is a startup and unproven. However, since the cost of entry is zero, you can’t lose anything for signing up. AGLOCO is also the only network here that doesn’t require you to have a site.

Sign up for AGLOCO

If u guys like this.. plss buy me a drink, roti canai also can..hehe^^

According to the anti-virus manufacturing Panda Software, a new worm is infiltrating malicious code into PCs through YouTube videos. The bug with the name SpreadBanker. A changes the registry of the victim's PC such that the task manager no longer gets started, disable various options in the start menu and blocks access to website of IT security manufacturers. Moreover, the bug acts as a data swindler for the programmer, by recoding the passwords entered by the users for online transactions of the certain banks, and also the access data for internet games (such as RO, WOW, all MMORPG games).

 …This occurs most frequently  through P2P network….

    The worm infects the computer in two stages. In the first step, it loads itself on the local computer. This occurs most frequently  through P2P network when the user downloads a file using the name "sexogratis" or "crackwindowsvista". In the second stage, the missing worm module enters the PC through a manipulated YouTube video. At time of writing, only the proactive scanner had identified the worm. All the large anti-virus manufacturers are working on creating an update this virus signature.

info: http://www.pandasoftware.com ♥♥