UN Accuses Serbs of Encouraging Violence

PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — The United Nations accused Serbian officials Tuesday of complicity in the violence in northern Kosovo that left a U.N. policeman from Ukraine dead and dozens of people hurt.

Larry Rossin, the deputy U.N. administrator for Kosovo, told reporters in Pristina that “it is clear to us that the violence … was orchestrated.”

At the very least, Rossin said, Serbia’s government failed to use its influence to prevent ethnic Serbs in Kosovo from launching the attacks, which left more than 60 U.N. and NATO forces and 70 Kosovo Serb protesters wounded.

The U.N. pulled out of the Serb-dominated part of Kosovska Mitrovica because of Monday’s violence. Additional U.S. troops trained in riot control were sent to reinforce NATO peacekeepers stationed in Kosovo’s north, a NATO official said.

China: Tibet protesters ’surrender’

China’s government says 105 protesters involved in last week’s riots against Chinese rule in Tibet have surrendered, following a pledge of leniency towards those who turned themselves in.

Those who surrendered had been “directly involved in the beating, smashing, looting and arson last Friday”, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency

Foreign media are barred from Tibet and the figures cannot be independently confirmed.

Industry Giants Try to Break Computing’s Dead End

Intel and Microsoft said Tuesday that they planned to finance two groups of university researchers to start over and design a new generation of computing systems intended to break the industry out of a technological cul-de-sac that threatens to end decades of performance increases in computers.

If the research efforts succeed, this would enable the development of new kinds of portable computers and would help computer engineers tackle areas as diverse as speech recognition, image processing, health care systems and music. For example, a music professor at the University of California, Berkeley, David L. Wessel, envisions a new era of digital musical instruments that would begin to match the rich versatility of acoustic instruments like violins and pianos.

Facebook Plans New Privacy Controls

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) — The social networking site Facebook said on Tuesday that it was introducing new privacy controls to give users the ability to preserve social distinctions between friends, family and co-workers online.

While part of Facebook’s appeal has been the greater degree of privacy controls it offers users, compared with other major social network sites, the site has also come under strong criticism twice in response to new features that many users felt exposed previously private information to wider view.