South China ravaged by floods, densely populated north in danger

BEIJING (AFP) — Large areas of southern China were hit by the worst storms and floods in decades, the government said on Tuesday, as warnings emerged that the Yellow River in the north could also wreak havoc for millions.

The prosperous Pearl River Delta was being ravaged by rising waters, with parts of the major urban centres of Guangzhou and Shenzhen submerged by flooding.

“We must remain clear-headed and not underestimate the serious nature of the current flood and disaster situation,” Vice Premier Hui Liangyu said in comments posted on the website of the state flood prevention headquarters.

The entire Pearl river was flooded, while some of its tributaries were experiencing the biggest floods ever recorded, Hui said.

Chinese mainland tourism delegation starts inspection tour of Taiwan

BEIJING, June 17 (Xinhua) — A delegations of 33 travel agency managers began an inspection tour of Taiwan on Tuesday, Taiwan-based media reported.

The group will inspect tourism facilities following an agreement last week on mainland tourist travel to the island, Fan Guishang, head of the delegation was quoted as saying.

Fan, also deputy secretary of the mainland based Cross-Strait Tourism Association said they would have extensive contact with Taiwan’s tourism industry and lay a sound foundation for exchangesand cooperation.

On Monday, the delegation visited the National Palace Museum inTaipei at the start of their ten-day visit.

Parallels Server for Mac to Become Available June 17

Parallels, a developer of desktop and server virtualization software, will announce the availability of Parallels Server for Mac on June 17th. This will mark a move out of a beta-only phase, now being offered with Leopard support and a SDK, and beating rival VMware to market with the first server virtualization solution for Intel-based Macs.

Parallels Server is designed for virtualization of heterogeneous environments with multiple OSes and applications. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, which complements Parallels Server, is designed for homogeneous environments partitioned to handle multiple containers per physical server. It supports guest virtual disk sizes up to 128 GB.

Like other virtualization software, Parallels Workstation uses hypervisor technology, which is a thin software layer between Primary OS and host computer. The hypervisor directly controls some of the host machine’s hardware resources and provides an interface to it for both virtual machine monitors and primary OS. This allows virtualization software to reduce overhead. Parallels Workstation’s hypervisor also supports hardware virtualization technologies like Intel Virtualization Technology (”VT”) and AMD Secure Virtual Machine (”SVM”).

LTE technology expected to be the successor to GSM technology

MONTREAL — The technology is promising a faster experience for consumers who surf the Internet, watch videos or play games on their mobile devices and is expected to have global reach.

It’s called LTE, or Long Term Evolution, and is a wireless broadband technology that will be launched commercially in the United States by Verizon Wireless and AT & T Inc. by 2010.

LTE is primarily aimed at mobile devices and the data they carry, such as video, said U.S.-based ABI Research analyst Nadine Manjaro.

“When you pull up a web page on your hand-held mobile device, it takes a little longer now,” said Manjaro. “In the future it will be more instantaneous.”

Devices that have LTE technology will also be easier to use and navigate, making Internet access less “cumbersome,” said Manjaro, who’s based in Kansas.

Coffee drinking not harmful and may help against heart disease: study

Drinking copious amounts of coffee is not harmful to your health, and particularly if you’re a woman, may actually protect you from heart disease, new research suggests.

Researchers from Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid studied the effects of coffee consumption on 41, 736 men and 86, 214 women over 18-year and 24-year periods respectively.

Participants with a history of heart disease or cancer at the onset of the study were excluded.

They discovered that women who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day had a 25 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease during the study’s followup period (1980 to 2004) than non-coffee drinkers. They also had an 18 per cent lower risk of dying from an illness other than cancer or heart disease during followup.

Women who drank five to seven cups of coffee per week had a seven per cent lower risk of death from all causes than non-drinkers.

In men, researchers saw non-statistically significant benefits and no downsides to drinking two to three cups of coffee, or five to seven cups of coffee daily.

Holocaust survivor donates $10M to Toronto education centre

A 79-year-old Holocaust survivor has donated $10 million to rebuild and renovate the Holocaust education centre in Toronto.

Michael (Chaim) Neuberger turned the ground on Monday for the new centre. It is being built on a 27.5-acre site at Bathurst and Sheppard as part of the new National Centre for Jewish Heritage, a campus of buildings that will house a number of community services.

Neuberger, a Polish Jew, lost his parents, four brothers and a sister in the Holocaust. Another family hid him during the Second World War and he survived.

He came to Canada in 1948 while still a teenager and created a building business in Toronto.

The education centre will be called the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, after Neuberger and his late wife.

The centre, created in 1985, currently is visited by about 60,000 people at year. It is housed in the Lipa Green Building for Jewish Community Services, which is also to be renovated and upgraded.