Fifa is considering legal action against a Dutch brewery it accuses of using women fans to advertise its beer at the World Cup.

All were dressed identically in tightly hugging short orange dresses, sold as part of a gift pack by a Dutch brewery.

Bavaria board member Peer Swinkels told Reuters news agency that Fifa's reaction was "ridiculous".

"Fifa does not have the monopoly on orange and people have the freedom to wear what they want," he said.

Afghanistan may have more than a trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral deposits, a spokesman for the ministry of mines has suggested.

The New York Times cited an internal Pentagon memo which said Afghanistan could become "the Saudi Arabia of lithium".

If Afghanistan's strategic value suddenly increases, so too might the battle for influence between regional giants India and China, and of course the United States, our correspondent adds.

A year ago, the .cn county code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for China was gaining fast and looked like it might overtake .com. In 2010, that's not quite the case, as overall demand for ccTLD registrations slowed, and VeriSign is reporting that .cn was actually on the decline.

"Many of these are low-priced promotional names that have now come up for renewal at a higher price," Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign, told InternetNews.com. "The .cn registration decline was also based on the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) registry's implementation of the real names directive from the Chinese government primarily around verifiable 'whois' data."

The iPad manufacturer has come under media scrutiny in recent months after a wave of suicides at its huge Shenzhen plant.

According to a report on MIC Gadget, Foxconn CEO Guo Tai-ming has said workers commit suicide for the money, and the company will no longer compensate the families of Foxconn workers who take their own lives.

Deepwater Horizon is spewing oil at about 40,000 barrels per day according to a new US government estimate - eight times the 5000-barrel figure that stood for most of May.

To deal with the extra flow, BP will begin to change the hoses that were previously used for the "top kill" effort into another riser system, bringing more oil to the surface.

The hoses could bring 10,000 barrels of oil up to a surface rig, but because the rig has no storage capacity, the oil will be burned off along with the natural gas.

A breakthrough in small, high-powered magnets could lead to handheld magnetic resonance scanners with similar capabilities to those of today's room-sized medical and scientific instruments.

This could mean that a lot of procedures which nowadays involve sending samples off to labs or patients to hospitals could instead be done in the field using devices no bigger than a Star Trek Tricorder.

Although the code is functional and available for download (but not production-ready yet), it cannot be merged upstream or shipped in binary form with the Linux kernel due to a licensing conflict.

In a message on the ZFS-Fuse mailing list, Behlendorf says that his team has unsuccessfully been urging Oracle to change the ZFS license in order to resolve the compatibility problem.

Sun (and now Oracle) has declined to do so for Solaris, creating artificial barriers for adoption of the code in Linux. A native Linux ZFS port has considerable technical value, but it won't see much adoption as long as the licensing conflict exists.

As BP sweats to clean up the oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, it is simultaneously waging a public relations (PR) war, trying to fend a wave of negative attention, by buying search phrases like "oil spill" on Google and Yahoo.

While a host of companies resort to this strategy in crisis situation, BP has received flak from many critics who condemned the move as unethical.

HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allow people to print from devices such as smartphones and the iPad.

That will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own - or someone else's - printer.

HP predicted it will sell 15 million of the web-ready printers by next year.

The Federal Trade Commission has come to an agreement with Florida-based CyberSpy Software that allows it to resume sales of its Remote Spy commercial spyware application.

RemoteSpy is a commercial spyware application that registers keyboard inputs, records instant messages, regularly takes screenshots, logs visited web pages and sends all the data it collects to a server. The users of RemoteSpy can log into the server and retrieve the data collected about the victim from there. RemoteSpy is said to employ rootkit techniques to hide from virus scanners.