Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products Co. and inventor of instant ramen, died of heart failure Friday evening at a hospital in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, his family said. He was 96.

Born on March 5, 1910, in Taiwan, Ando initially ran clothing companies in Taipei and Osaka while he was a student at Ritsumeikan University. In 1948, he founded the precursor to Nissin and in 1958 unveiled Chicken Ramen, the world's first instant noodle product.

Ando was inspired to develop the instant noodle after coming upon a long line of people on a cold night shortly after World War II. They were waiting to buy freshly made ramen at a black market food stall.

Kei Kizugawa, head of the journal Kamigata Geino, said Ando was a great food product inventor whose accomplishments equaled that of Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. "I believe generation after generation will talk about Chicken Ramen," Kizugawa said. "I don't think there will ever be an instant noodle product that beats the taste of Chicken Ramen."

A 17-year-old Chinese youth, disappointed his online girlfriend turned out not to be the woman of his dreams, has killed himself, state media reported Friday.

The youth from a town in northeast China "hung himself after a catastrophic meeting with his online sweetheart," the Xinhua News Agency said.

"To his intense disappointment, his dream girl turned out to be a plain lady who was more than 10 years older than him," Xinhua said.

The disappointed youth immediately returned home, and told his parents what had happened only after the woman telephoned him.

They tried to console him, but he was found four days later hanging from a tree.

A firm has developed technology which can cool computer chips with an Ionic wind.

Kronos uses an ionic wind pump to create a corona discharge which draws air across the chip.

With a bit of cash from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington and Intel, it created several working prototypes of a corona discharge CPU cooler, which can silently but effectively cool a modern CPU.

Corona-based coolers have no moving parts and are more reliable. They could cool down the most demanding processors without making a sound. They also do not need much power to do the job either, Kronos claims.

Silicon Valley is packed with foreign spies eager to steal technology secrets, according to a report prepared by the Pentagon.

According to Reuters, the Pentagon fears that spies from the Asian-Pacific area are doing overtime to capture US defence secrets.

The Defence Security Service Counterintelligence Office recorded an annual rise of 43 percent in the number of suspicious incidents reported to US authorities. Since 2005 the total number of suspicious foreign contacts climbed to 971, the report said.

A proposed order in a file-sharing lawsuit would force the recording industry to divulge closely-held details of their wholesale pricing arrangements. UMG v. Lindor is one of the highest-profile file-sharing cases in the news today, due in no small part to the efforts of Marie Lindor's attorney Ray Beckerman, who maintains the Recording Industry vs The People Blog along with Ty Rogers.

The record labels are strenuously opposing Lindor's attempts to gain access to the pricing information. They have argued that it shouldn't be divulged, and if it is, it should only be done so under a protective order that would keep the data highly confidential. The RIAA regards the wholesale price per song-widely believed to be about 70¢ per track-as a trade secret.

The pricing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into price fixing by the record labels, alleging collusion between the major labels in their dealings with the online music industry.

The pricing information could be crucial for Lindor as she makes the argument that the damages sought by the RIAA are excessive. In this and other cases, the labels are seeking statutory damages of $750 per song shared. Lindor argues that the actual damages suffered by the RIAA are in line with the wholesale price per song, and if that is indeed the case, damages should be capped accordingly-between $2.80 and $7.00 per song-if infringement is proven.

AIDS researchers said a new drug shows promise for inhibiting the HIV virus in patients new to treatment or those currently taking a drug cocktail.

Clinical studies of the drug, called an integrase inhibitor, showed that, when combined with two existing drugs, it reduced the virus to undetectable levels in nearly 100 percent of HIV patients prescribed a drug regimen for the first time, The Los Angeles Times said Tuesday. It had a similar effect in 72 percent of salvage therapy patients, who take a mixture of existing medications aimed at stalling the virus until new drugs appear.

"They tested it on some people who were in deep, deep salvage therapy, and even those people did remarkably well," Dr. Steven Deeks, a University of California, San Francisco salvage therapy authority, told the Times. "It seems to be a truly phenomenal drug that ... is changing the whole way we think about the management of these patients."

Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington.

By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account.

The extent of the demands were disclosed in "undertakings" given by the US Department of Homeland Security to the European Union and published by the Department for Transport after a Freedom of Information request.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, expressed horror at the extent of the information made available. "It is a complete handover of the rights of people travelling to the United States," she said.

In October, Brussels agreed to sweep away the "bureaucratic hurdles" preventing airlines handing over this material after European carriers were threatened with exclusion from the US. The newly-released document sets out the rules underpinning that deal.

Saddam Hussein's supporters have vowed to take revenge for his execution as hundreds of Iraqis travelled to his burial site to pay tribute.

While celebrations in Iraq's Shiite neighbourhoods continued, Saddam loyalists, mostly from the Sunni community, vowed to take revenge.

It also emerged that, although Saddam met his fate calmly, he had been taunted minutes before his death and had a frosty exchange with one of his guards.

A new video showed Saddam exchanging taunts with onlookers before the gallows floor dropped away.

Saddam appeared to smile at those taunting him.

Saddam Hussein's execution has closed a dark chapter in Iraq's history, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has said.

The former Iraqi leader was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November over the killings of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail in the 1980s.

Iraqi state TV showed images of Saddam Hussein, 69, being taken to the gallows in a Baghdad building his intelligence services once used for executions.

However the moment of his execution was not shown. Pictures of his body wrapped in a shroud were later broadcast on TV.

Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player.