The term originally meant a small villa, summerhouse or pavilion built for pleasure, usually on the grounds of a larger Italian villa or palazzo. There are examples of such casinos at Villa Giulia and Villa Farnese. In modern Italian, this term designates a bordello (also called "casa chiusa", literally "closed house"), while the gambling house is spelled casinò with an accent.

During the 19th century, the term casino came to include other public buildings where pleasurable activities, including gambling and sports, took place. An example of this type of building is the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island.

Not all casinos were used for gaming. The Copenhagen Casino was a theatre, known for the use made of its hall for mass public meetings during the 1848 Revolution which made Denmark a constitutional monarchy. Until 1937 it was a well-known Danish theatre.^[2] The Hanko Casino at Hanko, Finland - one of that town's most conspicuous landmarks - was never used for gambling. Rather, it was a banquet hall for the Russian nobility which frequented this spa resort in the late 1800s, and is presently a restaurant.

Detained former Bangladesh Prime Minister and Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina is to appear before a court in Dhaka as her trial for alleged bribery involving Taka three crore is set to be started on Monday.

Dhaka Metropolitan Sessions Judge Azizul Hoque set the date for indicting Hasina and two other co-accused, her expatriate younger sister Sheikh Rehana and cousin and former health minister Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim.

Due to "safety reasons", the court moved to its makeshift premises at the Parliament complex, where Hasina has been kept turning a building into a temporary sub-jail.

The court decision came as police filed the charge sheet against Hasina, Rehana and Selim after investigations on a case filed by Bangladeshi businessmen Azam Jahangir Chowdhury on June 13.

Chowdhury alleged that Hasina and the two others forced him to pay Taka 2.99 crore in bribes in return for allowing him to build a power plant in suburban Naraynganj while her Awami League was in power in 1996-2001.

Police formally charged Hasina with extortion on July 24 after her arrest on July 16.

Just in time for runny nose season, new research suggests routine sinus infections aren't really helped by antibiotics and other medicine that's often prescribed.

In the British study, people suffering from facial pain and a runny nose with greenish or yellowish mucus generally improved within about two weeks -- whether they took the standard antibiotic amoxicillin, steroid nose spray or fake medicine.

The results, based on patients' reporting whether their symptoms had improved, echo previous findings in children.

Antibiotics, particularly the penicillin-like drug amoxicillin, are among the most commonly prescribed medicines for sinus infections.

Steroid sprays sometimes are used, but the study found they also were no better than dummy drugs, although they appeared to provide some relief for patients with only minor symptoms.

The study should lead to a "reconsideration of antibiotic use for acute sinusitis. The current view that antibiotics are effective can now be challenged, particularly for the routine cases which physicians treat," said lead author Dr. Ian Williamson of the University of Southampton in England.

"Physicians can focus on effective remedies that improve symptom control," which include ibuprofen and other over-the-counter painkillers, Williamson said.

perspective As the world of "new new media" unfolds, consumers are in the driver's seat, and the content they are creating--via blogs and social networks--is proving to be highly influential.

So how come advertising on blogs is so dirt cheap? Sure, not every blogger's content is designed or even appropriate for hosting ad listings. And certainly, not every blogger with killer content desires to run AdSense. All the same, as more bloggers continue opening their sites up to contextual ads in an effort to monetize traffic, the balance of power will shift.

My hope? That more individuals will have the incentive to develop and contribute quality content--and that bloggers will command the bigger ad revenue that they deserve.

There has to be a balance between advertisers accessing the social media inventory that will perform and the influential bloggers getting paid what they deserve for aggregating quality traffic. Right now, there is an imbalance. More often than not, independent publishers creating compelling content are getting the short end of the stick. Advertisers haven't found them yet because they are looking for the wrong things.

Recent trends speak for themselves. Consumers are leaving the major Internet hubs in droves and spreading themselves thinly across the very fragmented online media landscape. As people increasingly turn to blogs, social-networking sites, and other sources of user-generated media, the "big four"--Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner's AOL--have spent more than $10 billion this year to acquire companies and technologies to extend their network reach to new and differentiated areas online.

Blogs represent a fairly large chunk of that new or differentiated inventory, which is often referred to as the "long tail." Despite the phrase's hype and overuse, it's accurate to say "the tail" encompasses clusters of linking activity centered around influential hotspots--bloggers who command an audience on everything from tax advice and knitting to triathlon training and advice on high def TVs. The Internet, in a sense, has turned into a million "mini" Oprah Winfreys who have a strong pull with consumers. That is advertiser gold.

Despite being picked apart the last several years by marketers hungry to demystify their ad potential, blogs still have not attained real advertiser street cred. True, there have been some interesting industry developments on the blog monetization front--everything from pay per post to the birth of blog ad networks--yet, the jury is still out.

Online measurement complicates matters even further: no one can agree on how best to approach a standard of measurement, so marketers' collective comfort levels in dedicating budget to blog advertising is low. Page views got a real beating in the press last quarter, and, though the time-spent metric didn't fare much better, the overall take-away is that a popular site isn't necessarily an influential one. In this fragmented environment, the proxy for what a consumer is influenced by in terms of purchasing behavior is not necessarily tied to popularity.

That leaves advertisers asking big questions--how do we access quality blog ad inventory? How do we measure whether a blog is a good ad buy? How does this approach scale? And of course the biggie--is this safe for my brand?

One key to knowing how to answer these questions is understanding the influence of particular blogs on a particular topic. Isolating influence online is not as hard as it seems. Advertisers just have to know where to look, and what to look for--see beyond who the obvious leaders are, and instead focus on what these people are actually saying, who they go to for information, and who is listening in.

Unlike the offline world, influence online leaves a lasting footprint via links, trackbacks, and comments. These influential "conversations" become influential online content. And with more blogs looking to monetize, this influential content becomes quality ad inventory.

Russia will go to polls on March two next year to elect its new president for a four-year term to replace incumbent Vladimir Putin, who would be completing two successive terms and cannot seek re-election.

The date for the regular presidential polls was formally announced on Monday by the chairman of the Federation Council, Sergei Mironov as per the Constitutional norms.

The upper house unanimously voted for holding election on first Sunday of March 2008 as the second Sunday set for the presidential polls falls immediately after the March 8 holiday on International Women's Day.

The formal announcement of the election has cleared the ground for kick-starting the presidential campaign.

Fans and foes of President Putin are taking their election campaign to the Internet, battling for votes on blogs and websites -- a measure seen as freedom from the constraints imposed on Russia's broadcast media.

Putin's allies are also trying to woo Russia's young urbanites who have been surfing the net for years and are frequent guests to the blogosphere.

Meanwhile, Putin was due to meet voters later today in his hometown Saint Petersburg, the former Russian imperial capital, on a campaign trip ahead of parliamentary polls slated for Sunday.

The Russian leader was to meet youth activists from the dominant United Russia party in his home city, Kremlin officials said.

WordPress is growing quickly - both as a hosted platform and also via standalone blog installations. The rapid growth and its open, flexible approach to blog design, means it may become a target for hackers who embed malicious code within themes they distribute.

One of the reasons for its success is the flexibility it offers for customization. WordPress is built around a central engine, written in PHP, called The Loop. Every time a blog is viewed, The Loop processes each part of the page — a header, the body and posts, a sidebar, and a footer. Blog operators are free to change these elements: They can modify the stylesheets to change fonts and colors. They can change the PHP code to display things like author details, popular tags, and so on. And they can put in plug-ins to further extend the capabilities of their site.

Designers bundle up stylesheets, PHP code, and sometimes plug-ins, into themes. A WordPress theme isn’t just cosmetics: It’s code. If you change a theme in Powerpoint, you’re just changing fonts and colors. But when you change a theme in WordPress, you’re also modifying the underlying structure of the site, including database queries and PHP execution.

A woman who was given up for adoption while she was a child has tracked down her real mother after a time gap of 62 years.

After finding her mother, Annie Burriss also met her real 7 brothers and sisters about whom she had no knowledge.

Burriss, of Littlehampton, West Sussex, discovered that she had been adopted when she applied for a passport in 1973.

A nephew of hers helped her to trace her roots through genealogy websites.

“Mum touched my face and said, ‘You’re beautiful – I’m sorry,’” The Sun quoted Burriss, as saying.

“She suffers from short-term memory loss but she knew who I was straight away. She held my hand – it’s all I’ve ever wanted.

“It was quite overwhelming, I was so happy that I just wept. I’ve wanted to touch her for as long as I can remember,” she said.

Burriss was born after her mother Hilda Berry, now 91 years, had an affair while her husband was away at war, and was put up for adoption weeks later.

The reunion took place at a pub in Cheltenham.

Sister Trixie Foster, of Burriss said: “I could tell it was her as soon as she got out of the taxi. She looked so much like us.”

Mum-of-two Burris said: “The joy is that I’ve got all my brothers and sisters to get to know. It’s a fairytale. I’ve got two lovely families now – my children are delighted.”

An Atlasjet plane carrying 56 people crashed just before landing in central Turkey early on Friday, and all aboard are believed to have died, officials said.

A rescue helicopter had reached the wreckage of the plane and reported back that no one had survived the crash, airline CEO Tuncay Doganer said.

The plane's wreckage was seen near the town of Keciborlu in Isparta province, and search teams were headed to the area, local governor Alper Faruk Gungor said.

The plane went missing after it reported approaching toward the airport near the city of Isparta.

The MD 83 jetliner took off from Istanbul at around 7 pm EST and headed to Isparta.

The World Bank has recently (25.06.05) released a draft report on "India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future."

By reducing water to an "economy" and further reducing the water economy to "a market economy", the World Bank's worldview makes water privatization and commodification inevitable. In this worldview there is no "water ecology", no "water culture", no "water democracy".

In fact, dismantling structures of democracy, the public good, ecological sustainability, and protection of the water commons and defense of community rights is the prime objective of the World Bank approach. According to the World Bank, "the major liability is a public water sector". For people, defense of the public water sector is necessary for the defense of people's water rights. A public water sector includes both the community-managed systems of self-provisioning, as well as the public utilities like municipal water supply and irrigation. In spite of privatisation having failed in country after country, and in spite of community-based approaches having been successful in different parts of India, the World Bank is aggressively pushing for water privatisation, the dismantling of community rights, and the enclosure of the water commons.

The proposal is to replace community rights and the common good with individual rights and the private interest. Under conditions of inequality, this implies that powerful individuals get exclusive access to the water commons through water markets. In effect the Bank would like water monopolies instead of water democracy. In the case of irrigation, the World Bank report states, "Here an approach, which begins with acknowledgement of and respect for the private interests of individual farmers will be for more successful than approaches which resort to command and control, or ones based on a communitarian ideal."

What the Bank refers to as "command and control" is public services. Its own "command and control" reform process is, however, the real problem for the people of India. The report also clearly states its vision for the future, "Large members of people will move from the informal, self-providing, water economy into the formal service sector."

The self-organized community based water systems are the backbone of India's water democracy and water culture. By deliberately destroying community-based systems, the World Bank is ensuring total dependence of people on water markets controlled by water corporations and water mafias.

This is the equivalent of the Seed Act of 2004, which aims at preventing farmers from saving their own traditional seeds, thus forcing them to buy patented, genetically engineered or hybrid seeds every year.

When seeds are a community resource, shared, saved and exchanged in a biodiversity commons, farmers have access to quality seeds at zero cost, biodiversity is conserved and quality food with high nutrition is produced. When seeds are corporate property, and a commodity farmer must buy each year, farmers are pushed into debt and suicides, biodiversity disappears and malnutrition, hunger and poverty grow. The market grows, the farmers die.

What happens with seed happens with water. When the water commons are destroyed, and community managed self-provisioning structures dismantled, a common resource accessible to all at zero cost disappears. People are forced into the water market. The poor, the marginalized get excluded. The water market grows; people's water rights are extinguished, the water commons is enclosed.

The World Bank's myopic focus on water markets portrays the scarcity imposed on the poor as "growth". Water does not exist in the Bank's vision, nor do people with inalienable, fundamental rights to water. All that exists is markets. Markets can grow while water resources shrink. Corporate profits can grow, while people's water rights shrink.

Examples of the World Bank's ontological confusion are its obsession to shift from supply management to demand management and its promotion of limitless consumption of water through 24 x 7 schemes in the context of limited water supplies and a deepening water crisis. By ignoring the ecological and hydrological limits of water availability and allowing water access and water distribution to be driven by insatiable markets, the Bank is prescribing a deepening of the water crisis and a growing polarization in access the water. The Bank's future vision is the vision for a hydro-apartheid.

It is also a vision that promotes non-sustainability. In an era when the high ecological and social costs of large dams are well known, the Bank promotes large dams. Its Madhya Pradesh water sector loan is supporting the Ken-Betwa link, the first link in the $200 billion River Linking Project based on large dams, and long distance canals, which reroute rivers from rural areas to urban and industrial centres where water markets can be easily established because of higher purchasing power.

The Bank is using fraudulent figures like per capita storage to push its agenda for large dams. "Whereas arid rich countries (such as the U.S. and Australia) have built over 5000 cubic meters of water storage per capita, and middle income countries like South Africa, Mexico, Morocco, and China can store about 1000 cubic meters per capita, India's dams can store only 200 cubic meters per capita. These figures are misleading because they leave out the millions of tanks and ponds managed by communities, which store more water than the dams and serve people in a more decentralized and democratic way. If large dams have displaced 40 million people since independence a five-fold increase in dam storage will mean the displacement of 200 million, i.e. a fifth of India's population.

Since neither nature, nor communities exist in the World Bank's vision, the social and ecological costs of its recipes are totally discounted. And to push its agenda of giant corporations controlling India's water through gigantic water projects, the Bank transforms its failures into successes.

It cites the Sonia Vihar Plant, which has been privatized to the Suez Corporation as a success, which is serving the people of Delhi. However, not a drop of water has reached Delhi citizens. The Sonia Vihar has not been functioning because it is based on bringing Ganga water from Tehri Dam, 300 kms away, and Uttar Pradesh has refused to divert Ganga water from its farmers for corporate water markets in Delhi. The contract for the Sonia Vihar Plant is based on the public utility, Delhi Jal Board, providing free water and electricity to Suez, and paying a fine of Rs. 50,000 a day if bulk supply is not provided. Failures thus generate corporate profits.

Similarly, the Veeranam project, which was to bring water 235 kms from Chennai, has totally failed. It is cited by the World Bank as another success story.

In our report "Financing the Water Crisis: World Bank, International Aid Agencies and Water Privatisation", we have shown how the Bank has created India's water crisis and how its water sector reform conditionalities imposing privatisation will leave our water culture in ruins, our water ecology disrupted, and our communities disenfranchised.

In common usage, an image (from Latin imago) or picture is an artifact, usually two-dimensional, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.

Images may be two-dimensional, such as a photograph, screen display, and as well as a three-dimensional, such as a statue. They may be captured by optical devices—such as cameras, mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. and natural objects and phenomena, such as the human eye or water surfaces.

The word image is also used in the broader sense of any two-dimensional figure such as a map, a graph, a pie chart, or an abstract painting. In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing, painting, carving, rendered automatically by printing or computer graphics technology, or developed by a combination of methods, especially in a pseudo-photograph.

A volatile image is one that exists only for a short period of time. This may be a reflection of an object by a mirror, a projection of a camera obscura, or a scene displayed on a cathode ray tube. A fixed image, also called a hardcopy, is one that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textile.

A mental image exists in an individual's mind: something one remembers or imagines. The subject of an image need not be real; it may be an abstract concept, such as a graph, function, or "imaginary" entity. For example, Sigmund Freud claimed to have dreamt purely in aural-images of dialogues. The development of synthetic acoustic technologies and the creation of sound art have led to a consideration of the possibilities of a sound-image comprised of irreducible phonic substance beyond linguistic or musicological analysis.Image:Jordan!.jpg

A collection of non-volatile images providing an image changing with time is a film or motion picture