North Korea Demands Peace Treaty With US

North Korea demanded Wednesday that the United States sign a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, as a senior North Korean diplomat visited New York to negotiate ways to restart six-nation nuclear disarmament talks. In an editorial marking the 58th anniversary of an armistice that ended the 1950-53 war, the North's official Korean Central News Agency insisted that a peace treaty could go a long way toward resolving a deadlock over Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons. North Korea has long called for a peace treaty with the United States since the armistice left the Korean peninsula in a technical state of war. Its latest push comes as North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan makes a fresh attempt to reopen six-nation talks that were last held in December 2008. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited Kim to New York to meet with U.S. officials later this week only after nuclear envoys from the Koreas held surprise talks last week. Seoul blames North Korea for two attacks that killed 50 South Koreans last year and has demanded that Pyongyang show remorse. The United States has insisted that its ally Seoul must be satisfied that inter-Korean ties are improving before it will pursue more nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang. Kim told reporters after landing Tuesday in New York that he was "optimistic of the prospects for the six-way talks and the North Korea-U.S. relationship," according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. "I believe North Korea-U.S. relations will improve, as now is the time for countries to reconcile." Despite Kim's positive tone, North Korea is making clear ahead of the New York talks that it wants a separate dialogue on signing a peace treaty, in addition to six-nation nuclear negotiations, said Kim Keun-sik, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University in South Korea. The six-nation talks group the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. They were initially designed to provide the North with security guarantees and economic assistance in return for its nuclear dismantlement. After months of tension heightened by the North's deadly shelling of a South Korean island last November, the nuclear envoys of the two countries met in a regional security forum in Indonesia last week and agreed to push for the resumption of nuclear disarmament talks. "The (Korean) peninsula stands at the crossroads of detente and a vicious cycle of escalation tension," North Korean media said Wednesday, likening the current cease-fire among the countries who fought in the Korean War to "a time bomb." Blasting the United States for its involvement in the war, North Korea's central television ran footage of veterans describing their fight against enemy forces as the official media marked what it called a victory anniversary. Reports also touted the wartime activities of the country's revered founder Kim Il Sung, whose son Kim Jong Il is now ruling the country and trying to hand over power to his own son. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea as a legacy of the Korean War, in which North Korea and China fought against U.S., South Korean and U.N. forces.

Retailers, Cash Rich, To Spend On IT

Retailers have cash on their balance sheets and nearly half of 100 top retail executives said they are planning to spend it on technology, a survey said on Tuesday. Forty-seven percent of executives said they will be investing primarily in calendar year 2012 in analytical tools to improve company growth, expansion and planning. The survey, conducted in May and June by audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG LLP, showed that 72 percent of the retailers said they have a great deal of cash on their balance sheets. Fifty-six percent of them said they only expect a modest improvement in the economy, revenue, and hiring in 2012. The outlook beyond 2012 does not appear promising either: 40 percent of the survey respondents said they don't expect a full economic recovery until 2013-2014 or later. And of the 100 retail executives, 23 percent said headcount would never return to pre-recession levels. According to Mark Larson, KPMG global retail leader, retailers and their growing, will spend money on analytical tools to examine the enormous amount of data captured online and at the cash register. "Analytics says let's use emerging technology to do a deep dive into that data to make it useful," he said. The survey shows that retail leaders do not expect spending to significantly increase in the next year. "The customer's wallet is not going to be growing, so the game has to be to grab more of that wallet," said Larson. "We need to neatly dive into their behavior to really understand what they value and what they're going to buy."

Major quakes strike in Pacific off Alaska

A major earthquake of 7.4 magnitude struck in the Pacific Ocean more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) west of Anchorage on Thursday, prompting a brief tsunami warning for part of the remote Aleutian Islands chain.
No damage or injuries were reported. The warning, which extended for roughly 800 miles (1,300 km) -- from Unimak Pass, northeast of Dutch Harbor, westward to Amchitka Pass, west of Adak Island -- was canceled after a little more than an hour.
A tsunami wave measuring just 6 centimetres tall was recorded at Nikolski, a tiny Aleut village on the island of Umnak, and a 10-centimeter wave was observed at Adak, said Becki Legatt, a spokeswoman for the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.
The coast of the entire Alaska peninsula and all of the Alaska mainland were never considered to be threatened.
The quake struck shortly after 7 p.m. local time (0300 GMT) at a depth of about 25 miles (40 km). A second tremor of magnitude 7.2 hit in the same vicinity of the Aleutians a half-minute later, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Quakes of 7 to 8 magnitudes and higher are relatively common in the Aleutians but are generally of little consequence because the island chain is so remote and sparsely populated.
"This is a very seismically active area," said Randy Baldwin, a USGS geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.
A tsunami warning means all coastal residents in the warning area who are near the beach or in low-lying regions should move immediately to higher ground and away from harbors and inlets, including those sheltered directly from the sea.

Small Talk With Strangers Disappear

The art of making small talk with strangers is fast disappearing as more and more people prefer to communicate through social networking site Facebook, reveals a new survey. The survey carried out by organic tea brand Clipper revealed that two-thirds of Britons regularly talk to people on Facebook who they would never see in person. A staggering 70 percent of the 1,000 people polled said they thought the art of conversation was dying because of texting, email and social media. A third would strike up a conversation with a stranger only if they were lost and needed directions, and just over half said they see the same people every day on the way to work, at lunch or walking the dog. But four out of 10 said it would be "weird" to say hello, while others said they were shy or "could not think of anything to say", so ignored them. The problem is particularly bad among those aged under 30, with 58 percent saying they avoid talking to people they see often, but do not really know. However, their parents' generation appeared friendlier with 63 percent of people aged between 45 and 59 happy to strike up a conversation with people they see regularly. Pensioners were friendlier still with 74 percent happy to talk to people they see on a daily basis. "There is a great nostalgia about manners and a sense there was some golden age, but what people really crave is that we all treat each other with respect," the Daily Express quoted etiquette expert and former 'That's Life!' presenter Simon Fanshawe as saying.

Netizens Sore Rules

In the age of internet-fuelled information explosion, the government's new rule allowing telecom companies and blogging sites, among others, to remove 'objectionable' content from the web without informing users is a violation of the right to freedom of speech, say netizens and cyber law experts. The Information Technology (Due Diligence Observed by Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, say that intermediaries - which include telecommunication companies, internet service providers (ISP), blogging sites, search engines, as well as cyber cafes - can remove 'objectionable' content without notifying the user. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced the rules last month. Pavan Duggal, cyber law expert and Supreme Court advocate, said: 'It (the new rules) is in direct violation to the freedom of speech, which is a fundamental right and mentioned in article 19 of the constitution.' 'The new rules say that intermediaries should remove such kind of objectionable items within 36 hours without informing the users. They have the right to remove any post on a blog or site, work with the user to correct the post or disable access to their services altogether,' Duggal told IANS. According to InternetWorldStat.com, India stands fourth in the world in internet surfing with 8.5 percent of the country's population using the internet. Nishant Shah, director (research) of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, said the government should recognise blogging as the right of the people and that the new rule is 'against the fundamental right of freedom of speech'. Pushkar Raj, general secretary of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), plans to knock the door of the Supreme Court in a week's time on the issue. 'The biggest problem of this rule is that it gives a lot of power to lower-ranking police officials without any kind of supervision. In this era of information flow, it is very hard to define the term 'intermediaries',' Raj told IANS. The rules also say that the intermediaries will preserve such kind of information and maintain records for at least 90 days for investigation purposes. Taha Sahil, a management student in Amity University, said the internet was the only weapon to spread the truth and these rules would curb that. 'It's like snatching away our freedom of speech. We all know that the media is biased and blogs and other web portals are the only unbiased source through which people can write and spread the truth. Moreover, this rule does not give any opportunity to the user to defend his work or even appeal,' Sahil said. The new IT rule specifies that the intermediaries should not display, upload, modify or publish any information that is 'harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, pornographic, libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, disparaging, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, relating to money laundering or gambling'. Bloggers say the new rule is too tedious and will discourage them from blogging. Shivam Vij, a Delhi-based journalist and blogger, said: 'This rule is so vast that it causes confusion and annoyance. Who defines that the content is objectionable and how?' The new rule also gives the government easier access to content from the intermediaries. The intermediaries will be required to provide information to authorised government agencies for investigation and cyber security. Ghulam Muhammed, a Mumbai-based blogger, is one of the net users who partly agreed with the reasons behind the government's initiative. 'The government's control on internet is in essence a draconian measure. But on the good side, it will control things like the spread of pornography,' Muhammad said. Internet service providers argue that the rules are transparent enough and it was high time such legislation was put in place as people had suffered in the past because of malicious content being posted against them. 'There are sets of words defined and most of them are illegal under the law, though there are a few loose words which need to be taken care of,' said Subho Ray, president, Internet and Mobile Association of India. 'If the user has a problem with his content being removed, he can move court and if the court agrees to his appeal his content can be put back again,' he added.

Budgets and Stock Markets

Stock markets react differently to budgets even on an individual sector basis. For instance, the budget is NEVER kind to cigarettes, so there is bound to be some underperformance in ITC. The Tech sector benefits from anything that involves lower direct taxes, and we saw a massive rise in these stocks through the early part of the last decade just after the budget, as taxes were slashed and flattened. Lately, though, there isn't that much to cheer about, and the coming budget will be a very marginal player in the direct tax space (since most of that is being moved into the Direct Tax Code, applicable only from 2012 onwards) On indirect taxes - such as excise, customs and service tax - the idea is to move to GST, which is being discussed separately from the budget; again, expect no major fireworks here. Government spending impacts infrastructure, so those stocks will react as the government tries to steady FDI in a year that it seems to have slows down. Better financial visibility - even from securitization or through impetus for the corporate bond market - will be a huge positive. Yet the government needs to balance between that and a reasonably large fiscal deficit next year - helping corporate bond means, to an extent, reducing demand for its own bonds, which must be sold to finance the deficit. 3G auctions gave a big fillip to revenues this year, and so did public sector IPOs. But the next year may not yield that much in terms of benefit - most of the IPOs sold are today quoting below their IPO prices, with the extreme example of NHPC being about 30% lesser. With no IPOs and no 3G, there must be either new ways for the government to make money (revenue) or curb spending (expenses); extreme measures to either goal are negative for stocks. There must also be ways to incentivize investment in the country, be it FDI or private corporate investments. While some of this has to do with taxes, it's more important to create policy that provides more visibility to investors; you can't have a Jairam Ramesh scuttling projects after enormous sums have been invested. (I don't disagree that the projects may be at fault, but there needs to be clarity right at the beginning of these projects) Overall, this isn't meant to be a great budget in terms of announcements: it's mid-term, there aren't too many elections, the main contenders of income and indirect taxes are being handled separately, and the budget is increasingly unimportant to even policy nowadays. Yet, there will be something or the other that will impact the stock you know, and with the recent drop in markets, it may be useful to position yourself in sectors that the government is likely to favour. For a long term value investor, the budget may throw up juicy opportunities to buy excellent stocks, especially if there is a negative bias. For the traders, the market volatility will go up even further, and if you can handle the butterflies in the stomach, there's never been a better time to be in the markets.

Go For Pay Per Click Search Engines

Most of us are using search engines when we are looking for something in the internet. But did you know that there are "Pay per click search engines"? Pay per click search engines offers a company or a business firm to list their websites at the top of every search engine results. The company will then pay for every user that clicks on the listing that connects to your website. Pay per click search engine is an effective way to advertise your products though it is highly expensive. Pay per click search engines works through with pay per click advertising.
But what is Pay per Click? It was popularized by search engines as one form of paid advertising. Pay per Click engines works when a business goes through a bidding process if they want their websites to be on top of every search results. The basis of this bidding is done per click which only means that every time the search engine gives them a visitor, the company will pay for it. If your company is high on budget and is willing to pay any amount, the higher your website will appear in the search results. Selection of good key phrases is one factor considered in pay per click search engines. A company should choose key phrases or keywords that they think the users will most likely search for.
Pay per click search engines does not limit you from choosing how long the keyword is or how many keyword phrases you need for the target. Thus, making the process of keyword selection easier.
One good site which provides Pay per Click advertising is the Google. Though it is not directly a pay per click search engine, Google includes ad boxes below or above each searches that offers pay per click. Google also delivers pay per click ads to other content websites. The advantage of this pay per click search engines is that as long as you are willing to pay, no changes in the top position will occur. Pay per click search engine is also very fast, your target can be reached in just a few minutes, compared to the traditional advertisings that can sometimes last for months. Pay per click is also easy. You do not have to be very good in a certain program or does not require any specific familiarity. But of course, there are still disadvantages laying beneath pay per click advertising. You will need a huge amount of money to satisfy the bidding process in a pay per click search engine. If there are new bids, the tendency is to lower other organizations position, and when this happens, you will now bid higher to retain your previous position in the pay per click search engine. To cut it short, this kind of advertising will cost you high.

Pay per Click also involves several important considerations. Before you start bidding in a certain pay per click search engine, be sure that your choice of pay per click search engine is a highly visited one. Try asking yourself this questions before anything else:

1. Is this pay per click search engine often visited by users? If so, how many times?

2. Does it have major search associates? How many?

3. Does the pay per click search engine partners generate searches in here? How many times?

These are some questions you might want to ask yourself before spending a lot of money. Monitoring your Pay per click search engine is also a must. Your pay per click should be monitored regularly for your positions may change everyday. There are also many pay per click search engines that is why the competition for the spots can be stern. Checking and analyzing also your preferred keywords is needed at least monthly to see how often users use this keywords in searching. This will be of help in improving your Pay per click advertising.

Pay per click search engines is a great help in establishing your business. Target visitors will be brought easier to your websites. Though you this will be needing a massive amount of money to spend. Be sure to look for pay per click search engines that offers a good deal with their search associates and of course, make sure that you are able to watch out for your position to retain your maximum exposure.