Planetsave

LONDON (Reuters) - The delicate balance of the Caribbean’s coral reefs is in jeopardy as more parrotfish end up on dinner plates, international scientists said on Wednesday.

The colorful grazing fish, named for their parrot-like beaks which are used to scrape up algae, play a vital role in stopping seaweed from smothering coral. But their numbers are now being threatened by over-fishing.

New research based on computer modeling shows parrotfish are a key defense in preventing the vulnerable Caribbean reefs from becoming a very different ecosystem — one dominated not by living coral but by blooms of algae or seaweed.

Read More 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc, which is used to dominating the Web search advertising business, may find negotiating its way into the cell phone market a tougher task.

Dealing with America’s largest mobile companies, which keep control of devices and features, could force the Web search leader to make concessions that cut into future revenue from wireless, an area Google has long said would be key to growth.

So far no U.S. carrier has confirmed working with Google on a new mobile platform. No. 2 U.S. carrier Verizon Wireless is in active talks about putting Google applications on phones it offers, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Read More 

OSLO (Reuters) - Nordic nations sounded the alarm on Wednesday about a quickening melt of Arctic ice and said the thaw might soon prove irreversible because of global warming.

Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland also urged all governments to agree before the end of 2009 a broader U.N. plan to curb greenhouse gases in succession to the Kyoto Protocol.

“The Arctic and the world cannot wait any longer,” environment ministers from the five nations said in a joint statement after talks in Oslo. The five all have Arctic territories.

Read More 

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The taxman in Iowa is going after jack-o’-lanterns this Halloween.

The new department policy was implemented after officials decided that pumpkins are used primarily for Halloween decorations, not food, and should be taxed, said Renee Mulvey, the department’s spokeswoman.

“We made the change because we wanted the sales tax law to match what we thought the predominant use was,” Mulvey said. “We thought the predominant use was for decorations or jack-o’-lanterns.”

Previously, pumpkins had been considered an edible squash and exempted from the tax. The department ruled this year that pumpkins are taxable — with some exceptions — if they are advertised for use as jack-’o-lanterns or decorations.

Read More 

MALIBU, California (AP) — Pierce Brosnan is being investigated by sheriff’s officials for an alleged battery in Malibu.

Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said the 54-year-old former James Bond star allegedly committed the battery Friday night outside a Mexican restaurant.

Whitmore said Brosnan wasn’t arrested or detained. He identified the alleged victim as Robert Rosen, but declined to give more details because the investigation is ongoing.

Messages left Tuesday for Brosnan’s publicist, Jennifer Allen, weren’t immediately returned.

Rosen couldn’t be reached for comment.

Read More 

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - A 19-year-old man suspected of killing a woman who answered an online ad for a baby sitter was charged Tuesday with second-degree murder.

Michael John Anderson is accused of shooting Katherine Ann Olson in the back at his home in suburban Savage, according to the criminal complaint filed in Scott County District Court.

Bail was set at $1 million.

Olson had gone to Anderson’s home Thursday to inquire about a baby- sitting job she had seen advertised on the popular Internet bulletin board Craigslist, authorities said.

Read More 

LAKE LANIER, Georgia (Reuters) - A large, man-made lake in north Georgia is at the center of a political storm over how to distribute water resources between three states in the face of the region’s worst drought in decades.

Lake Lanier stands near the head of a watershed that feeds the booming city of Atlanta about 45 miles to the south, leading to accusations that the city is consuming more than its fair share of water.

Also relying on the lake are other towns, industries and power plants in parts of Georgia, Alabama and Florida before the water drains south into the Gulf of Mexico.

Read More 

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - “The Exorcist” was voted the scariest movie of all time in a Halloween poll published on Wednesday.

The 1973 horror classic, starring Linda Blair as a possessed child, came out ahead of the Jack Nicholson movie “The Shining” in a survey conducted online among 6,500 customers of British music retailer HMV.

John Carpenter’s “Halloween” took third place ahead of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

HMV executive Mark Frampton said: “The horror genre was not really taken seriously for a long time but it’s moved on from the slightly camp Hammer stereotypes that many of us remember and now enjoys the respect it fully deserves.”

Read More 

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore Airlines, the first operator of the new Airbus A380, has dashed the hopes of sexual thrill-seekers planning to engage in amorous activity aboard the world’s biggest jumbo jet.

The carrier said it would ask passengers on the A380 to refrain from sex while ensconced in one of its 12 first-class suites, which boast the world’s first airborne double beds.

“All we ask of customers, wherever they are on our aircraft, is to observe standards that don’t cause offence to other customers and crew,” the company told Reuters in a statement.

Read More 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hospitals seeking to keep patients from picking up infections should focus as much on cleaning up invisible germs as on removing the visible dirt, a British doctor argued on Tuesday.

Clean hands can only go so far in protecting patients from infection if doorknobs, bed rails and even sheets are covered with bacteria and viruses, Dr. Stephanie Dancer of South General Hospital in Glasgow writes in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

But other infection experts differed on whether clean equipment and telephones affect a patient’s biggest risk of acquiring a “superbug” such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

Read More