Twitter has been HACKED

Hackers Briefly Bring Down Twitter

Internet-messaging service Twitter Inc. was hit by a cyber attack Thursday night that temporarily steered visitors to a Web site with an anti-American message from a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post Friday that the San Francisco company's site was "hijacked" and 80% of traffic to Twitter.com was redirected between 9:46 p.m. PST and 11 p.m. PST Thursday. Twitter was operating normally Friday.

During the attack, Twitter's home page was replaced with a Web site with a black background and a green flag, according to two people who saw it. The site's headline read, "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army."

There was no evidence that the hackers are actually linked to Iran. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in San Francisco said the department was aware of the incident but declined to comment about whether it was investigating the matter.

During the attack, people could still access Twitter through other software, although the site went down briefly in an apparent attempt to resolve the problem.

"The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users—we don't believe any accounts were compromised," Mr. Stone wrote.

Twitter, which lets users broadcast short messages, has periodically suffered cyber attacks that pulled the site offline, including an attack that appeared to be targeted at silencing a Georgian blogger earlier this year.

But attacks that redirect traffic to another site—by altering a site's Domain Name System, or DNS, records—are rarer. Twitter said it worked with its DNS provider, Dynect, to resolve the problem.

The attack comes as social media's role in Iran has been in the spotlight in recent months. Twitter was used by thousands of protesters in the U.S. and Iran following June's controversial re-election of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Claims of vote fraud spawned massive street protests, and a bloody crackdown.
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Sculptures Made Out Of Scrap Car Parts

Australian artist James Corbett has created these wonderful sculptures using old car parts salvaged from scrap yards. His sculptures are made from gears, radiators, spark plugs and exhausts. Just have a look and guess how creative they are!

Via Source

Health risk for rural children

CHILDREN living in rural towns in the Wimmera region, in Victoria's north-west, are the most vulnerable to poorer health and social skills, while those living in Shepparton are at greatest risk of having trouble at school.

In towns such as Nhill, Dimboola and Warracknabeal almost one in five children is at risk of poor physical health.

And those living in the suburbs of Greater Dandenong, including Springvale and Keysborough, are the most vulnerable of those in all the suburbs in Melbourne when it comes to health, emotional maturity, learning and communication skills.

The results come from the biggest Australian study, of 260,000 children in their first year of school, which compares how children are faring in different communities across the country.

Some results are surprising. Inner-city Melbourne, including Carlton and Kensington, has the second highest rate of children vulnerable to poor health in metropolitan Melbourne, behind Greater Dandenong. In inner-city Melbourne, 11 per cent of children are deemed vulnerable to poor health.

Frank Oberklaid, director of the Centre for Community Child Health and co-chairman of the national steering group, said of greatest concern were children who were vulnerable on more than one indicator.

''The vulnerability on two or more domains are the kids who are more likely to get into trouble, to get on to a trajectory where they have problems,'' he said.

He said disadvantage and remoteness were often linked.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard said these risk factors showed up later in life.

Source The Age

No Sign Of An End To Terrorists' rutality

A single terrorist assault would have been bad enough. But in the 50 weeks so far in 2009, Pakistan has suffered at least 40 attacks. The death toll from this steady stream of violence stands at more than 600. And if the past few days are any guide, that horrifying annual tally is not yet complete.

The past three months have been particularly bloody. More than half of Pakistan's terrorists attacks this year have occurred since the beginning of October, a few weeks after the Pakistan military launched an operation to drive the Pakistan Taliban out of its stronghold in South Waziristan.

The country has endured at least 23 terrorist attacks in that brutal nine-week phase. The latest one was in the central city of Multan, killing at least 12.

Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier province bordering Afghanistan, has been at the front line of the Taliban insurgency. Since early October, more than 280 people have been killed by repeated bomb attacks in the city of 3 million, making it one of the world's most dangerous cities.

Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's heartland state Punjab, has also been hit hard. The cosmopolitan city, with a reputation for being a centre for Pakistani arts and culture, had been mostly spared terrorist attacks until last year. But it has been targeted six times so far in 2009, including a commando-style assault on the Sri Lankan cricket team in March. Rawalpindi, the garrison town where Pakistan's army headquarters is located, has also been targeted frequently.

Most of the attacks have been linked to the Pakistani Taliban, an alliance of extremist groups based on Pakistan's long border with Afghanistan.

However, there are growing links between the Pakistan Taliban and other extremist groups from Punjab. Well-known Pakistani social commentator Ayaz Amir believes the repeated attacks are taking a psychological toll but he says morale in Pakistan has not collapsed.

"There is no doubt business has suffered and many have become more careful about going out to places like bazaars to do their shopping," says Amir, who won a seat in Pakistan's national parliament last year.

"There is a feeling that we are living in a state of siege and that anything might happen. But people feel terrorism has to be tackled and there is no way out."

Polls show the Government is deeply unpopular and that many have little faith that political leaders from any party have any real solution to the country's terrorism nightmare. Many Pakistanis blame the US-led military action in Afghanistan for the surge in terrorism inside their own country and analysts point out the anti-American mood is intensifying.

But, ultimately, most Pakistanis have no choice but to get on with their lives.
And there is no sign that 2010 will be much safer than 2009.

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Biggest Bank Robbery In Pakistan

KARACHI: A private security company guard deputed at a bank on II Chundrigarh Road on Sunday carried out the biggest bank robbery in the country’s history, escaping with foreign currency worth Rs 310 million.

The guard is believed to have been helped by five accomplices.

Police said the security guard, Shahid, was the mastermind behind the bank robbery. After arriving at the bank early morning, Shahid called his five accomplices, tied up the other two guards — Imran and Zamir – and made off with the money.

According to police, the other bank guards were also involved in the robbery. Police had arrested Imran and Zamir and were raiding various locations across the city to arrest the robbers.

“They took at least two hours to complete the heist and used gas cutters and other equipment to break open safety vaults,” said CID DSP Israr Awan. Of the nine vaults in the bank, the robbers broke into the one that “contained euros, dollars and pounds”, the DSP said. They also tried to break open another vault, but later fled the bank with the foreign currency.

Meanwhile, a private TV channel reported the looted amount was Rs 520 million and that Karachi police had recovered Rs 5.5 million from a house identified by Imran, the guard allegedly tied up by the robbers before the heist.

Police officials, including Capital City Police Officer Waseem Ahmed, South Zone DIG Ghulam Nabi Memon, Saddar Town SP Abdullah Sheikh, CID SSP Fayyaz Khan and SIU Chief Raja Umer Khattab reached the scene soon after the robbery was reported. faraz khan/app.

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The Missing Word in Obama's Nobel Speech!

The man (and his wordsmiths) can write. President Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo was elegant, nuanced, and intelligent. Faced with accepting a peace prize while waging war, he chose not to salute his predecessor Henry Kissinger and leave it at that, but he dove instead into the intellectual thicket of defending warlike means to achieve peaceful ends.
He also took the time to rebut the previous Administration's approach to the issue:

  "I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.)"

Very moving, until you read that paragraph again and notice the missing word. He boasts of ordering Guantanamo Bay prison, but leaves unsaid the name of the American prison where our detainees have not only been mistreated, but have been killed. The name is Bagram, our prison in the compound of our large Air Force base in Afghanistan. It has been remodeled and spruced up lately, but it is still a place that exists outside all law, not covered by the Supreme Court decision that "gave" habeas corpus back to Gitmo detainees.

The President's continued refusal even to say the word, to name the place, to include it in his fine-sounding call to an American role as a "standard bearer" renders the rhetoric empty, the nuance devious, the intellect derailed. He continues this country's recent tradition as a sub-standard bearer until he dares to confront the challenge of Bagram.

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Multan News

12 killed as Taliban target ISI in Multan

* Attackers fire rocket, automatic weapons at checkpoint
* Security personnel among those killed
* Body parts of two suspected suicide bombers found

MULTAN: A group of Taliban launched a gun, rocket and suicide attack on the office of an intelligence agency on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people and injuring several others.

The blast in Multan ripped the facades off several buildings in a part of the city largely reserved for government and security agencies. The apparent target of the blast – a building housing an office of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – was also damaged. Senior police officer Agha Yusuf said at least three Taliban in a car carried out the attack.

He said one of them first fired a rocket and an automatic weapon at a police checkpoint, and then drove to the intelligence agency – where they blew it up. He said security personnel were also among the 12 killed. “It was a suicide attack. There were two attackers who were stopped at the checkpost, but they tried to flee and security personnel fired at them,” another police official, Arif Ikram told reporters. “The attackers returned fire and also launched two rockets, and later exploded their vehicle.”

Multan’s top administrative official, Syed Mohammad Ali Gardezi, said that one military building was badly damaged in the blast. “They did not succeed in hitting the target,” he claimed. Body parts: Gardezi said the body parts of two suspected suicide bombers were strewn over a road outside the ISI office.

“Our security agencies were on alert and they didn’t let the attackers reach their target,” said Gardezi, adding that 47 people had also been injured. President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani condemned the attack, and expressed sorrow over the loss of life. Meanwhile, the US embassy also condemned the terrorist attacks in Lahore, Quetta
and Multan. agencies