A US general who reported on abuse by US forces against detained Iraqis is being questioned by a committee of Congress investigating the scandal.

Maj Gen Antonio Taguba found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" in his report.

Correspondents say it has grown ever more embarrassing for George W Bush ahead of the US presidential election later this year and appears to be having a severe effect on the American public's view of the entire Iraq war.

Gen Taguba's report says detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison were forced to commit sexual acts, were threatened with torture, rape or attack by dogs, and were hidden from Red Cross visits, "in violation of international law".

The investigation was completed on 3 March, the Pentagon said, but by 4 May the defence secretary had still not read it fully.

The report was originally kept secret but later leaked to the media.

Australian research suggests that about half of complaints emailed to companies fail to be addressed

Melbourne-based online benchmarking company Global Reviews found during a recent research exercise that 50 percent of complaints that it sent to companies via email were "either not addressed or ignored altogether".

In contrast, Global Reviews director, Adir Shiffman, said that businesses were very efficient when it came to handling sales enquiries over the same contact medium.

Schiffman conceded that while the research finding may only have confirmed what many consumers might have expected intuitively, however, he said the inconsistency was noteworthy.

Last month we wrote about how the music industry was, inexplicably, looking to (a) raise prices on digital downloads and (b) force people to buy a bad song to get a good song. They clearly have no clue that they're basically killing the one, very minor, success they've had in the world of digital downloads. Now, even folks in mainstream magazines like Newsweek are screaming about how the labels just don't get it. Steven Levy takes a look at a number of downloadable albums that cost more than their CDs, while giving the user less (one of the CDs comes with a DVD as well). He also can't believe that the industry hasn't pushed to make downloadable songs play on a variety of devices, as that would encourage more people to buy. However, the folks who run the labels don't get it. They only look at digital downloads and see piracy. They are blind to the idea that it might be an opportunity, and thus they have no real reason to come up with reasons to encourage it. Of course, all this really does is push end-users to seek less than legal alternatives.

You may remember that last fall the entertainment industry began a project where they went into schools to teach a "lesson" on why file sharing was bad that included the lesson, "if you didn't pay for it, you stole it." Of course, to hammer this lesson home, the industry gave away for free DVD players and trips to Hollywood to those students who could come up with the best essays to express why anything free must be stolen (sort out the irony for yourself).

"Los Angeles police arrested Ruben Centero Moreno, 34, after the projectionist used night vision goggles to spot his video camera in a showing of The Alamo. He has been charged under the new California anti-camcorder law, and could face up to 1 year in jail if convicted. The BBC reports that 'The MPAA has established a nationwide telephone hotline for cinema employees to report violations, and studios and cinemas are also investing in metal detectors and night-vision goggles'. Motion Picture Ass. Head Jack Valenti said he hoped it would 'send a clear signal such crimes will not be tolerated'. Clearly, the 'War on Copyright Violation' is following the successful strategy used for the War on Drugs, with significant resources of technology and police time mobilised to send violators to jail for a long time. Soon, copied films will be as rare as students lighting up a joint after their exams."

The lesson is clear: stay out of movie theaters and you won't get arrested.

Advertising software company Claria, formerly known as Gator, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday to go public, in a sign of further momentum for Internet IPOs.

Claria, whose advertising platform (or adware) has come under legal fire from multiple Web site operators, filed an S-1 document with the SEC, seeking to raise an unspecified sum through an initial public offering. According to its filing, the company said it had a net income of about $35 million on revenue of $90 million in 2003.

Claria said that it has 43 million people active on its ad network. The company has eight offices in the United States and Europe.

Claria is fighting many battles in court over its practices.

For example, a European court recently issued a preliminary injunction against Claria that prohibits the company's pop-up and pop-under ads from appearing over German rental car Web site Hertz Autovermietung without the agency's permission.

A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America's closest allies.

The move will affect visitors from 27 countries - including the UK, Japan and Australia - whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.

The US-Visit (US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) security system is meant to identify travellers who have violated immigration controls, have criminal records or belong to groups listed as terrorist organisations by the US.

Citizens from the 27 countries will still be allowed to visit the US without a visa, although they will now have to be fingerprinted and photographed before they enter.

Asked whether the data on visitors would be kept, Mr Hutchinson said it would - in part to "facilitate travel" for frequent visitors to the US.

Terrorist attacks are very rare. So rare, in fact, that the odds of being the victim of one in an industrialized country are almost nonexistent. And most attacks affect only a few people. The events of September 11 were a statistical anomaly. Even counting the toll they took, 2,978 people in the US died from terrorism in 2001. That same year, 157,400 Americans died of lung cancer, 42,116 in road accidents, and 3,454 from malnutrition.

Even defending against a specific threat is very difficult. Security is only as strong as its weakest link; three locks on the front door do little good if the back door is open. Likewise, the air transportation system is only as secure as the country's most insecure airport, because once someone passes through security at one location, they don't have to do so at another.

Many of the security measures we encounter on a daily basis aim pinpoint the bad guys by treating everyone as a suspect. The Department of Homeland Security counts on technology to come to our rescue: databases to track suspected terrorists, facial recognition to spot them in airports, artificial intelligence to anticipate plots before they unfold. But that creates a problem similar to the one you see when airport security screeners waste their time frisking false alarms. Terrorists are so rare that any individual lead is almost certainly a false one. So billions of dollars are wasted with no assurance that any terrorist will be caught. When an airport screener confiscates a pocketknife from an innocent person, security has failed.

Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson cannot film The Hobbit until legal problems are resolved between two movie studios, he said.

Jackson said that while New Line Cinema owns the rights to make the Lord of the Rings prequel, MGM has the rights to distribute it.

"Their lawyers are going to have a huge amount of fun over the next few years trying to work it all out," he said.

Jackson added that if he directed the Hobbit, he would like it to fit in with his Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

"I'd want Ian McKellen to be back as Gandalf, I'd want it to feel like it was part of the same mythology that we've done with Lord of the Rings."

OTTAWA - People caught illegally buying foreign satellite television service could face stiffer penalties if proposed legislation is passed.

Bill C-2, an amendment to the Radiocommunication Act, would increase penalties on individuals from maximum fines of $10,000 and six months in prison to $25,000 and a year in prison.

Critics of the legislation say the bill makes no distinction between people who take Canadian satellite signals without paying and those who pay U.S. providers for channels the Canadian industry isn't willing to offer.

Most of the channels involved offer programming in foreign languages such as Russian, Arabic or Spanish. Canadian providers say the Canadian market is too small to make it worth their while to offer a wide selection of these channels.

Fitzgerald says the government is selling out Canadians' freedom of choice and freedom of expression, in order to please an industry lobby that has recently donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party of Canada.