All New Nissan URGE : A Thunderball

Do you want to know the real concept behind the Nissan URGE. Its the presigious Xbox 360, which powers All-New Nissan URGE Car. A Motorcycle-inspired roadster which delivers a futuristic driving experience using "Project Gotham Racing 3."

In 2005 - Nissan North America Inc.(NNA) and Microsoft Corp. merged automobile design and gaming technology to create the first-ever fully integrated gaming system within a vehicle.

10th year for the EURO in the european markets

10 years ago, European countries have launched its grand experiment with a shared currency and watched it plunge in value before recovering.

As the anniversary approaches of the January 1st, 1999, arrival of the euro, economists say the new currency is finally fulfilling its promise as a way to lower borrowing costs, ease trade and tourism, boost growth and strengthen the European community.

And doing it amid a global financial crisis that, for the moment, underlines the safety in numbers that comes from joining one, big currency.

"After 10 years it has truly created a zone of security and stability," French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said in mid-December. "From all these points of view, the euro has in fact proven wrong the forecasts some made against the euro 10 years ago."

When it was launched for non-cash purposes in 1999, just 11 countries were on board Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Notes and coins were added on January 1, 2002, and the original 11 have been joined by Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Slovenia, with Slovakia slated to join on Jan. 1, bringing the total to 16. Now, some people in longtime holdouts such as Sweden and even strongly euro-skeptic Britain are beginning to reconsider the question. Full celebration here

Santa Clause killed at least 8 people at Covina party

LA Authorities said that Mr. Pardo, dressed in a Santa suit, opened fire at a Christmas Eve party and then set the house ablaze. He is later found dead of a gunshot wound.

As he had in years past, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo volunteered to serve as an usher at his church's midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

Pardo, however, was miles away from the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church as the religious service got underway. He drove a rental car from his home in Montrose to the Covina home of his ex-wife's parents. Shortly before 11:30 p.m., dressed as Santa Claus, he approached the front door with a large, wrapped package.

Inside the two-story home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, his ex-wife, her parents and about two dozen others were enjoying their annual holiday party.

An 8-year-old girl ran to answer his knock. When the door swung open, Pardo, 45, shot her in the face with a semiautomatic handgun, stepped into the house and opened fire on the revelers. Amid the chaos, he doused the house with a flammable liquid contained in the package -- a pressurized fuel tank, about 2 1/2 feet tall. Read full article

Celtics win 17th straight NBA records

Ray Allen scored 27 and Kendrick Perkins added a career-high 25 points as the Boston Celtics rolled to their 17th straight victory, 126-108, over the Chicago Bulls.

Rajon Rondo had 15 of Boston's 40 assists and the defending NBA champions improved to a league-best 25-2 this season. Kevin Garnett scored 17 and Paul Pierce had 16 for the Celtics, who can equal a couple of records if they win at home against the New York Knicks Sunday.

The 17-game run is the second-best in franchise history, joining the 1959-60 squad. The team record victory streak is 18, established during the 1981-82 campaign. Also, the best a team has ever started in the NBA before a third loss is 26-2, set by the 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers and equaled by the 1969-70 Knicks. Both of those teams went on to win the NBA title.

"Our mentality has always been, since last year, to take it a game at a time," said Garnett. "That's what we've been focused on. We have a Knick team that's coming in Sunday, better team, a more well-rounded team and a confident team."

Perkins went 12-of-15 from the field, all part of a 59.5 percent shooting effort for the Celtics, who forced 20 turnovers and used a 41-point third quarter to pull away. More photos

Barack Obama Focuses Domestic & Reshapes White House

President-elect Barack Obama has finished building a cabinet of prominent and strong-willed players on Friday, but he is putting together a governing structure that will concentrate more decision making over his top domestic priorities in the White House.

With new offices in the White House to coordinate health care, urban policy and energy initiatives, Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to keep real power over domestic issues close at hand. The collective moves shift the political center of gravity farther away from the cabinet, a trend that has accelerated under presidents of both parties in recent years.

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s reorganization suggests a willingness to tolerate, and even encourage, competing power centers within his administration, but it is unclear how that will work in practice. Not only is he creating new positions with authority over key areas, he is filling his West Wing with people of stature equal to or even greater than the members of his cabinet, including two former cabinet officers and a former Senate majority leader.

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said issues like health care and energy “are so fundamental to our ability to right the economy in the long term that he knows he’s going to have to drive a lot of that. And he wants a high-powered staff in the White House to help him do that.” Complete coverage here

Friday Night Brings "Year's Biggest Full Moon"

This Friday night will bring the biggest full moon of the year as Earth's natural satellite reaches its closest point to our planet. Earth, the moon and the sun are all bound together by gravity, which keeps us going around the sun and keeps the moon going around us as it goes through phases. The moon makes a trip around Earth every 29.5 days. But the orbit is not a perfect circle.

The moon's average distance from us is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km). Friday night it will be just 221,560 miles (356,567 km) away. It will be 14 percent bigger in our sky and 30 percent brighter than some other full moons during the year, according to NASA. See Moon Pictures here.

India with Limited Options, Presses Pakistan for Terrorism

On Thursday , Even as Indian officials lambasted Pakistan as the “epicenter” of terrorism and dismissed its crackdown on extremist groups as inadequate in the wake of last month’s attacks in Mumbai, they all but ruled out the prospect of a military confrontation.

Rather, Pranab Mukherjee, the Foreign Minister told members of Parliament that it would take time for India to turn off the tap of support for militant groups operating across the border, and that war was “no solution.”

“We shall have to patiently confront it,” he said. “We have no intention to be provoked.” His words signaled India’s delicate and somewhat circumscribed options. If it were to carry out even limited military strikes against Pakistan, it would be likely to lose the support of its allies, namely the United States, which fears that Pakistan would then divert troops from its western border with Afghanistan to its eastern one with India.

Second, India confronts a weak civilian government in Pakistan, which, as Indian officials have long acknowledged privately, has little muscle to counter the powerful military and spy agency. Complete story here

Bank of America : Cutting up to 36,000 jobs

On thursday, Bank of America said that it plans to cut up to 36,000 jobs over the next 3 years as the financial giant adjusts to a recession and completes the pending acquisition of brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co.

This comes as the latest wave of mass layoffs in the troubled financial sector, which has been crippled by the credit crunch and the failure of large institutions such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc . More than 220,000 jobs already have been lost across the sector this year, according to labor-tracking firm Challenger Gray & Christmas and to reflect the current recessionary environment," the bank said in a statement. The weak economy "is affecting the level of business activity," it added.

Still, the bank said it continues to do business actively with all of its clients and has attracted deposits and new customers. It also stressed that it's still actively offering loans through all of its credit product lines.
Bank of America's reductions represent one of the largest rounds of layoffs in the history of the financial-services industry. Citigroup Inc. said last month that it plans to cut about 50,000 staff.

Challenger Gray said last week that the financial sector cut 91,356 jobs in November, the second-worst month for industry layoffs since September 2001. The news from Bank of America came the same day that the U.S. Labor Department reported that the number of first-time filings for state unemployment benefits jumped by 11% to 573,000 last week -- marking the highest point for jobless claims in 26 years. The number of people collecting unemployment benefits rose by 338,000 to stand at 4.43 million. Full Article Read here

Britney's Circus Act Again Tops the Charts

This is happening for the first time in the last five years, Britney Spears topped the Billboard 200. Her new album Circus sold more than half a million copies for the week ended Sunday.

This gives Spears the second biggest female bow of the year, topping debut weeks by Mariah Carey, Miley Cyrus, Madonna, Janet Jackson and Beyoncé and only trailing Taylor Swift. Once the final retail receipts are counted, the album should claim the seventh biggest bow of 2008.

Back in October, Britney set the stage for her comeback when "Womanizer" became her first Hot 100 chart-topper since "…Baby One More Time" a decade ago. "Womanizer" also set the record for the biggest digital sales debut by a female artist (286,000 copies) since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking downloads in 2003. Watch Full coverage

40th birthday for Computer Mouse

This time computer mouse(three button) is celebrating its 40th anniversary today after first being unveiled by Douglas Engelbart at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in 1968.
The original mouse had two wheels set at right angles to each other and the computer plotted the distance each wheel moved. Then in 1972 Xerox PARC came up with a ball mouse, the design for which remained popular for decades.

Englebart developer the mouse while at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), one of the largest research institutes in the world. “Doug Engelbart once said, ‘the better we get, the better we get at getting better.’ That concept, combined with his creation of perhaps the most innovative interactive computing tools ever developed, has been a personal inspiration to me,” said Curt Carlson, Ph.D., SRI president.

“Doug and his team exemplified the disciplined approach to innovation used by SRI researchers today. By focusing on a very important problem, capturing the genius of the team, and continuously improving their tools, they accomplished a tour de force unlike any other in the field. Silicon Valley, the computing industry, and society are indebted to Doug and his team.”

The first mouse was made of wood and had a single button, a design copied by Apple until recently, and was used to highlight text on a written document. Complete history here..

Advanced YouTube : Less Sex, More Symphony

YouTube announces this week promising less sex and more symphony. Youtube Symphony Orchestra will accomplish the latter, offering classical musicians worldwide a chance to perform in an "online orchestra" packed with some of the industry's biggest names. As for the former, a set of new standards will attempt to keep adult-oriented content away -- or at least make it slightly harder to find.

YouTube is inviting musicians from across the globe to send in demo tapes of themselves performing two songs -- "The Internet Symphony," a composition written by Chinese composer Tan Dun for the competition, and a second piece of their own choosing. The winning performers will work with Dun and San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael to prepare for a performance at Carnegie Hall -- which, of course, will be broadcast worldwide on YouTube. Pianist Lang Lang and members of the London Symphony Orchestra will help lead the rehearsals.

Entries are being accepted from now through January 28, 2009. Professional classical musicians from all over the world will help select semifinalists from their own regions. Then, an online vote will determine the final Symphony Orchestra members.

The winners will spend three days at a YouTube-sponsored classical music summit in New York, which will end with the Carnegie Hall performance. Read full article

Condoleezza Rice arrives India to ease tension

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Foreign Minister) has arrived in India on 02 Dec,2008 hoping to ease tensions between India and Pakistan after last week's attacks in Mumbai. She is to hold talks with India's prime minister and foreign minister. She is due in Pakistan on Thursday.

Earlier, unnamed US officials said the US had warned India about a possible threat a month before the attacks. The head of the US intelligence has also implied that Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Toiba was responsible. Islamabad has denied Indian allegations that the attackers, who killed almost 200 people, had Pakistani links.

Last week's attacks at multiple locations in Indian's financial capital, Mumbai, stunned the country with many describing it as India's 9/11. A senior state department official said Ms Rice would pressure the two neighbours to co-operate to fight terrorism. She has urged India and Pakistan to remain in contact and work together to find those behind the attack.

On Tuesday, a US official told the Associated Press that the Indian authorities had been told of an apparent plot to launch an attack on Mumbai from the sea. Mumbai police chief Hassan Gafoor later appeared to confirm the report by saying that there had been a known threat to at least some of the locations targeted, including the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. Complete news here