A Mexican sports daily is seeking help for the national soccer team against the United States using voodoo dolls, despite losing support for the stunt from a US-based electronics chain.

Radio Shack on Wednesday ordered its Mexican division not to distribute some 8,700 voodoo dolls wearing US soccer shirts.

The dolls were promised in a promotion in the sports newspaper Record in exchange for printed cut-out dolls, Katia Santiago, at the Mexican Radio Shack's publicity department, told AFP.

Radio Shack argued "that a US company cannot support a situation that goes against the (national) team," Record said on its web site.

Record, which is supporting Mexico in regional knockout matches ahead of the 2010 South Africa World Cup, said the promotion would still go ahead and that it would shortly inform its readers of new distribution points.

"Imagine that it's a player from the opposite team and put pins where you want to," the newspaper said, calling the dolls a "secret weapon."

Mexico has not beaten the United States since 2000.

Mexico plays the United States on February 11 in Columbus, Ohio, in the CONCACAF qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup.

Record said it plans to expand the promotion to include dolls representing the other CONCACAF finalists: Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador and Trinidad and Tobago.

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Google Maps has blacked out a Street View image showing one of Google’s vans running down a baby deer on an American road.

The images, taken near Rochester, New York, showed a deer being mowed down by the van taking images of the area for Google Maps.

The pictures appeared on several news blogs before Google deleted the image.

Google Australia have contacted LIVENEWS.com.au and explained the incident, saying police were contacted after the accident but that the deer was able to leave the area before they arrived.

credited to livenews.com.au

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Roger Federer took another giant stride towards tennis immortality with an at-times breathtaking Australian Open semi-final win over Andy Roddick on Thursday night.

Federer outgunned Roddick 6-2 7-5 7-5 to close to within one tantalising victory of equalling Pete Sampras's all-time record 14 grand slam titles.

The Swiss freak will now await the winner of Friday night's all-Spanish semi-final between world No.1 Rafael Nadal and 14th seed Fernando Verdasco.

Knowing the fiercely competitive Federer, he will be hoping it is Nadal who joins him for his date with destiny on Sunday night.

The two great rivals have fought out six of the past 11 grand slam finals, with Nadal holding a 4-2 edge in major deciders.

Who better for Federer to conquer than the man who stole his long-held top ranking and Wimbledon crown from him last year.

A beaten semi-finalist at last year's Open as he suffered unknowingly from mononucleosis - a debilitating virus similar to glandular fever - Federer has played like a man on a mission at Melbourne Park this year.

After clawing back from two sets down against Tomas Berdych in the fourth round, the second seed destroyed Juan Martin del Potro 6-3 6-0 6-0 in the quarter-finals before setting his sights on Sampras and 14-times major golf champion Tiger Woods.

A good friend of Federer's, Woods has been in regular text contact with the Swiss superstar during the Open.

"He's happy for me that I'm doing well. He loves when I dominate so he's hopefully pumped up for me," Federer said.

"So hopefully I can equal his 14, and Pete's 14 as well."

It seems only Nadal can stop him.

Contesting his 19th consecutive grand slam semi-final - another of his countless records - Federer at times toyed with Roddick.

He nabbed the first set with two easy service breaks in just 32 minutes and yet was even more comfortable in the second, despite almost being pushed into a tiebreaker.

The three-times champion conceded a meagre three points in six service games for the set and took a stranglehold on the match when he pocketed the set on a Roddick backhand error.

Growing increasingly frustrated as his title hopes slipped further and further away, Roddick engaged in a running battle with chair umpire Enric Molina and, at one stage after disagreeing with a call, told the Spanish official to "have some sack, dude".

His taunt, though, and anything else he tried, didn't work as Federer struck again with another demoralising 11th-game break in the third set to complete his 16th job on Roddick two hours and seven minutes.

No-one has beaten Roddick more times, the seventh seed's only consolation being that he won more than the paltry six games he managed against his Nemesis in their 2007 semi-final mismatch.

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128-year-old woman from Uzbekistan claims to be the world's oldest living person, a spokesman for the Central Asian country's Interior Ministry said on Monday.

RIA Novosti reported Tuty Yusupova, born in 1880, had worked at a canal construction for years and was awarded the Shukhrat ("Glory") medal by President Islam Karimov.

"Tuty Yusupova turned 128 this year," a spokesman for local administration said. "Locals respect her for honesty and creativity and listen to her advice."

According to the Gerontology Research Group, Maria de Jesus dos Santos from Portugal, whose age has been verified as 115, is the world's oldest living person.

credited to uzdaily.com

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If you live in Gmail, but don’t always have a broadband connection available, today should be a happy day for you. Google is rolling out a new system for letting Gmail users access their accounts offline. Google will cache your messages on your system using Google Gears. You’ll be able to open your browser to Gmail.com, see your inbox, read and label messages and even write replies without a Net connection. Your messages will send once your system reconnects to the Web.

The system is beta (of course) and accessible through Gmail Labs. But it won’t be immediately available to everyone – Google is parsing out access as it experiments with the new feature. I don’t have access to the new feature yet, so I’ve still got lots of questions. But Google’s post makes it sound like the experience will be almost indistinguishable from using Gmail normally.

“Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you're used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection,” Gmail Engineer Andy Palay wrote.

There will also be a “flaky connection mode” that’s supposed to give you the best of both worlds. It’ll assume that you’re disconnected and use the local cache to store your data, but whenever your connection is working, it’ll sync with Google’s servers in the background.

This all sounds pretty good, but here are my questions:

How much will Gmail cache? Just my inbox, my entire 6.2GB mail file or something in between? I work pretty hard to keep my inbox clear, so I hope that it’ll cache more than just my inbox.

How extensively can you search? The biggest reason I use Gmail is that I can find a message I got two years ago in just a few seconds with the right search terms. But depending on just how much gets cached, your search capability could be severely limited.

Will you work the same way in Gmail whether you’re offline or online? That’s certainly the way Google makes it sound. If so, that’ll be a big step forward from other attempts to bring webmail offline. You’ve long been able to access your Gmail account through a client like Mozilla Thunderbird. But that doesn’t give you all the Gmail functionality like labels. Yahoo Mail has offered offline access since last summer using Zimbra Desktop. But that also involves using a client on your desktop. For offline access to Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft suggests using their Mail client software.

Is Gears up to the challenge? Google launched this system for creating offline access to Web apps nearly two years ago. For a long time, the only apps that used it were Google Reader and to do list Remember the Milk -- an indication that developing for and implementing Gears wasn’t quite as simple as Google would have you believe. In fact, bringing Gmail offline was an obvious use of Gears that has taken 21 months to come to fruition.

(Google also says it's readying an offline version of Google Calendar, also presumably using Gears, though the company didn't specifically say that. Offline Calendar will initially be available only for users of Google Apps Standard Edition and there's no firm release date.)

Is Gears ready now? We’ll see soon. I’ll check back in once I get a chance to play with Gmail offline. And let me know what questions you have. I’ll do my best to answer them. In the meantime, you can watch this relatively lame video from your friends at Google.

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