Australia to Invest $50 Million More in Joint Fund

NEW DELHI:  Australia will invest an additional $50 million in an Australia-India strategic research fund, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Thursday, underscoring the country's initiative to collaborate to combat climate change issues.

The fund will be spent over a five-year period from the fiscal year that began April 1, Mr. Rudd said while speaking at Tata Energy Research Institute.
The investment toward the joint research initiative seeks to support more applied research and greater participation of industry partners to help address some of the climate change challenges, according to an Australian government statement.
"Climate change is a fundamental change to us all," Mr. Rudd said. "There is a need for a collaboration, unprecedented in human history."
Australia has already invested $20 million in the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund -- its largest bilateral research fund -- since 2006 to enable Australian scientists engage in collaborative research with Indian counterparts.
Australia will also invest $1 million in a joint solar cooling research project and an additional $20 million in dryland farming research, according to the statement.
The solar cooling project aims to develop a zero emissions cooling system targeted at remote rural communities in non-electrified areas and the fund allotted toward dryland farming will be staggered over five years.
"Of course there is a group of people who deny the reality of climate change. They are the enemies of us all," Mr. Rudd said.
Write to Sunil Raghu at Sunil.Raghu@dowjones.com

German Courtroom Killer Gets Life Sentence

A Russian-born German has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a pregnant Egyptian woman stabbed to death earlier this year in a German courtroom.

Defendant Alex Wiens admitted to stabbing Marwa El-Sherbini to death during a July 1 court hearing in Dresden. El-Sherbini was in court at the time pressing a case against Wiens for insulting her with ethnic slurs.

El-Sherbini was stabbed at least 16 times and died at the scene as her 3-year-old son looked on. Her husband was also stabbed repeatedly as he tried to come to her aid.

Defense lawyers insisted during the trial that the killing was not premeditated and that a psychiatric condition mitigated the crime.

Prosecutors argued that Wiens was driven by what they called "an unbridled hatred of foreigners."

Obama Rejects all Four Afghanistan Plans

USA: President Barack Obama has rejected the Afghanistan war options presented to him by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

President Obama is still close to announcing his overhauled war strategy which most likely will be announced shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.

The questions and scenarios that the President raised at his war council meeting on Wednesday could very well change the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

President Obama is considering options that include adding 30,000 or more U.S. forces to take on the Taliban in key areas of Afghanistan, and to buy some time for the Afghan government's small and ill-equipped fighting forces to take over and take control. The other three options on the table are ranges of troop increases, from a relatively small addition of forces to the roughly 40,000 that the top U.S. General in Afghanistan prefers, according to military and other officials.

As always, the Examiner.Com is interested in what you think. Is President Obama on the right track by rejecting his national security team’s request for more troops without an exit strategy? Can the United States afford to fight a war with no end in sight for another 8 years? Inquiring minds want to know. Sound off.

No regrets from Aussie IPhone virus creator

SYDNEY: The Australian programmer who claims to have created the world's first Apple iPhone virus as a prank said does not regret writing it.

First IPhone Worm Spreads Rick Astley Wallpaper

The worm, 'Ikee' changes iPhone owners' wallpaper and replaces it with a photo of '80s pop star Rick Astley and the message "ikee is never going to give you up".

Twenty-one-year-old Wollongong resident Ashley Towns, said he created the virus out of curiosity and boredom.

"I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that," Towns said.

"So I ran a scan on my 3G network and there was 26 phones running the service that's vulnerable, and out of that 26, 25 hadn't changed their passwords."

Towns said he loves the iPhone so there was no vendetta against Apple, just disbelief that many users had failed to change their passwords when requested to do so.

"It's the simplest thing to change your password, it's not hard and if you're going to install something like SSH...I could have gone through and read people's messages and emails -- all their barter was up for grabs," Towns said.

Although Ikee does not appear malicious, it has the potential to be modified and perform tasks such as stealing sensitive information from iPhone users. The worm can affect jailbroken iPhones running a Unix utility called SSH (Secure Shell) with the iPhone's default password, "alpine," still in use.

Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again.

Towns admitted he was targeting phones on both Telstra and Vodafone, as well as Optus, however he soon discovered that Telstra and Vodafone are behind NAC firewalls, making their SSH inaccessible.

However, he said the worm can spread between phones on the same Wi-Fi network.

Despite admitting the virus was a form of vandalism, Towns said he stands by his decision to release the worm.

"All the worm does is change your background to Rick Astley, so it's not malicious, it's not going to harm anyone's phone other than people having to look at Rick Astley until they remove it," Towns said.

Although so far confined to Australia, Towns said the virus has the potential to spread globally and claimed to have read reports the virus turned up in China

Australian iPhone users have reported their experience with the worm, flooding Internet forum Whirlpool with posts about their experience.

Zardari allegedly made big money in sub-marine sale

PARIS: Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is suspected of having received millions of dollars in kickbacks from the 1994 sale of three French submarines to the Pakistani Navy, a French daily reported.

In addition, investigators believe that the non-payment of the full amount of the agreed kickbacks may have led to the deaths of 11 French nationals in a 2002 terror attack in the city of Karachi.

The report says the French daily acquired documents that allegedly show that Zardari received 4.3 million dollars in kickbacks from the sale of three Agosta 90 submarines for 825 million euros (currently 1.237 billion dollars).

The documents were sent to the Pakistani National Accountability Bureau (NAB) by British authorities in April 2001 and indicate that Zardari received several large payments into his Swiss bank accounts from a Lebanese businessman, Abdulrahman el-Assir, in 1994 and 1995.

According to a former executive of the French naval defence company DCN, French authorities chose el-Assir to act as intermediary in the deal. He allegedly deposited a total of 1.3 million dollars in Zardari’s bank accounts between August 15 and 30, 1994, one month before the submarine contract was signed, and then 1.2 million dollars and 1.8 million dollars one year later.

According to DCN employees who testified in the terror attack investigation, the kickbacks to Pakistan in the deal totalled 10 per cent of the purchase amount, with 6 per cent, or 49.5 million dollars, going to the military and 4 per cent, or 33 million euros, being funneled to political circles.