Yes, India’s Reliance is bankrolling Spielberg’s new studio, but the manager decision distil be in business with his old studio

Watch full size video:

It may have sounded like saber-rattling. But the year-old war betwixt Viacom’s (VIAB) Paramount Pictures and superstar adviser Steven Spielberg ended pretty quickly by a truce about his impending departure. Only three weeks after Spielberg teamed up with India’s Reliance BIG Entertainment to set up his acknowledge studio, he has agreed to make some as-yet-undetermined number of films for his old studio as well.

The deal, to be announced on Oct. 6, wish finalize the separation agreement between Viacom, and Spielberg and Stacey Snider, his produce participant and CEO of DreamWorks LLC. Dealmaker David Geffen, who served in the same proportion that DreamWorks’ chairman during its time at Paramount, lowly from that work at jobs and is not joining the new company Spielberg and Snider are expected to establish with a studio other than Paramount.

As part of the separation agreement with Paramount, Spielberg is still doing more projects with the studio. Spielberg decree continue to produce four films for Paramount, including a sequel to the blockbuster Transformers franchise and the upcoming sci-fi thin skin When Worlds Collide. Other projects to which Spielberg is "attached" will be produced with others in his place, yet his Reliance-funded company would have the option to co-finance them.

The "new" DreamWorks company that Spielberg and Snider will create with Reliance’s money have a mind make one unspecified number of non-Spielberg projects currently in unravelling at Paramount. Paramount will have the option to co-finance and co-distribute these new films.

Spielberg’session new company is expected to sign a strange distribution deal with NBC Universal (GE), where Spielberg’s offices have been for more than 30 years. Fox (NWS) is considered a long shot. A decision is expected within the month.

A body scan can save a lot of time in the fitting room, and fields from medicament to architecture are adopting 3D computing applications

by Rachael King

View Slide Show

Watch full size video:

No longer just the mixture of Hollywood movies and Silicon Valley video games, 3D technology is changing the method people do business everywhere. Consider Lori Coulter, a women’sitting swimsuit designer inner the Macy’s (M) at the Chesterfield Mall about 30 miles west of St. Louis.

Lori Coulter clients needn’t try on piles of swimsuits amid plain-speaking fluorescent lights in a cramped dressing room. Instead, they discreetly step into a stead in which place the shop uses a scanner to take 140 measurements in less than a minute, then uploads them to a computer, which builds a 3D image and suggests an array of figure-flattering styles. The client chooses a style and pattern, and in the limits of as few as three days a custom-made swimsuit is ready to wear.

Lori Coulter is one of the scores of businesses that are actuality transformed by technology that lets you build and manipulate computerized three-dimensional models. "What we’re vision increasingly is the greater use of computer simulations," says Boyd Davis, a marketing director at Intel (INTC).

The widening use of 3D technology is being aided by advances in computing that present graphics more realistic than ever. Even the most mainstream computers occupy 3D graphics capabilities, says Kathleen Maher, a elder algebraist at Jon Peddie Research, a consulting firm that researches graphics hardware developments. Such advances have been driven by chipmakers including NVIDIA (NVDA), AMD (AMD), and Intel. A typical workstation based without interruption two Intel Xeon processors delivers computing performance roughly equivalent to the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1993, according to Intel. Another catalyst in making 3D computing further mainstream is the video game assiduousness, which has helped prosecute high-end hardware out to consumers, Maher says.

One of the most common applications of 3D computing is what’s known in the same proportion that 3D computer-aided delineate, or CAD, which lets a business create an orderly replica or model of a product before it’s manufactured. While the automotive and aeronautics industries have worked with 3D computer-aided design for at least two decades, it’s at this moment spreading to other industries and smaller companies as it becomes more affordable.

As of this year, the 3D CAD market generated about $3.4 billion, or more than half of the roughly $6 billion CAD mart, according to a Jon Peddie Research report in March. Still, 3D computer-aided design users account for fair 37% of total computer-aided design users. Until recently, 3D products have been expensive, but that’session changing as more mainstream products such being of the kind which Dassault Systemes’ (ENXTPA:DSY) SolidWorks, Siemens’(DB:SIE) Solid Edge, and Autodesk’s (ADSK) Inventor become useful.

Even as computers set off other well-equipped to handle 3D technology, the software for computer-aided design and manufacturing remains taxing for many people. "We need to create better tools," says NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. "Right very lately it’session not not formal for the layman to use." Still, he sees hope in such areas taken in the character of video game design. In Spore, the new game by Electronic Arts (ERTS), the Spore Creature Creator, which lets players create their own 3D monsters, is quite user-friendly, he says. "Somehow the Spore creators have taken computer-aided design and made it in the way that simple that anyone could do it.

With recession expectations growing, some companies are taking unusual steps to hold put on to customers

by David Bogoslaw

Watch full size video:

Even before the U.S. economic outlook darkened as the heaviness of the monetary crisis came into focus, companies started to get more aggressive in their attempts to hold onto old customers and attract new ones. Telephone companies’ offers for two months of free service and reduced rates, discounted gym membership renewals, and generous gift cards from high-end department stores all underscore a pervasive fear on Main Street: With the uncertainty on every side the evidence of debt seize-up, consumers may be digging in for a long hibernation.

In upstate New York and other country communities it serves, Frontier Communications (FTR) is even sending sales representatives door-to-door to persuade customers to lock in another year’s worth of service at a rebate rate. Those visits are effective where customers are often two-income families with busy lives, and many of those drop-ins are scheduled in advance, says Brigid Smith, a company spokeswoman. "We’re sensitive to what this financial crisis means to them and we have to communicate with them," she says.

It’s not barely because of the gloomier economic picture that Frontier and other telephone companies are trying harder to hold onto customers. Ongoing friction of users to more advanced technologies, be pleased with wireless, and poaching by cable companies bear also called for more aggressive detention efforts. Verizon Communications (VZ) estimates an mean proportion loss of 8% to 9% of its buyer landlines a year over the past small in number years, in the greatest degree of them going exclusively wireless or switching to service from a mode of speaking over IP (VOIP) or cable company, says prolocutor Bill Kule. The barrage of competition from cable operators was a key force for Verizon’sitting fiber-optic service, called FiOS, which bundles voice, high-speed Internet, and television service together into a triple-play package, that had been connected in more than 7 million households by the end of June.

Verizon has prolix been pitching promotional offers at "customers on the clift of leaving," says Kule, but those became more urgent after the company saw bigger than expected departures of both broadband and mode of speaking customers during the second quarter. Since July, it’s been offering all three services in opposition to the price of two to keep customers belief about switching and to win back residential and diminutive business customers who have already left, says Kule. Verizon is furthermore urging customers to symbol up for at minutest a one-year plan, hoping it will help them remain, he adds.

The tougher economy may have put cable service providers more squarely in the catbird seat, relieving some pressure to offer perks to customers. Their exposition: Subscribers to premium cable channels and pay-per-view events have arguably even now chosen to cut their entertainment expenses and trade down—through staying home, says Christopher King, a telco analyst at Stifel Nicolaus (SF).

Long before the financial crisis tripped off new alarms last month, DirecTV (DTV) had initiated a program to retain customers, who sign up for one or the other 18 months of standard service or two years in opposition to advanced service through features so as high-definition. "We’re always looking at customers who are about to roll off their commitment, and there are groups we do go after with commitment-renewal efforts," using free digital video recorders or HD boxes because incentives, says Paul Guyardo, DirecTV’s chief sales and marketing official.

WASHINGTON - Attorneys for Sen. Ted Stevens are again trying for an early end to their client’sitting corruption trial.

Watch full size video:

SHKODRA, Albania — Drene Markgjoni spent 12 years in a hard-labor camp, punished for her fiance’s attempt to flee Albania’s regime, then one of the world’s greatest in number repressive and isolationist. She swore she would not at any time suffer probable that for somebody else again.

She pledged to forgo sex and marriage for the surplus of her living beings, and declared herself a man.

That was six decades ago. Now 85, with close-cropped white hair, dressed in a man’s blue-striped shirt and sombre trousers, she greets visitors with a manly handshake. The tendency of action she walks, her certain gestures, everything about her is masculine.

Only her voice — soft and feminine — reveals her to be one of the continue sworn virgins in Albania: Women who set, act and are treated as men.

“I am happier like this,” she says. “I don’t regret it at all. Not a hair on my head does.”

In this strongly patriarchal the world where for centuries women had in effect no standing, sworn virgins enjoyed the same rights and respect as men. They could inherit property, work for a living and sit on the village diet, albeit without the right to vote.

The privileges came at a price. They took an oath of celibacy so could never have sexual relations. And they could never go back to being women.

There are no official figures, but Antonia Young, a inquiry equal at the University of Bradford in Britain who has studied the custom during more than a decade, estimates that Albania had about 100 sworn virgins in the early 1990s. That number is at this moment almost certainly a great deal of lower, as the practice and the women die out.

The reasons for becoming a sworn virgin can have being practical — the head of the family dies with not one male heir. Or they be able to be emotional — the woman does not want to marry the man chosen for her.

In Albania, particularly in the impoverished rural north, it was practically unimaginable in spite of a woman to remain single and live lonely.

But by neat a body, Markgjoni was free. She could earn a living and eat and drink with men instead of being restricted to the kitchen. And she could take to one’s self two habits denied to a traditional Albanian woman: smoking and wearing a pocket timepiece.

The practice of sworn virgins stems from the Kanun, medieval laws handed into disgrace in words for generations before being codified in the early 20th century.

ASHEVILLE, N.C. - The gloves are off, the heels are on, and the presidential race is dredging up infamous events from 20, 30, even 40 years ago.

Watch full size video:

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin defended her claim Sunday that Barack Obama “pals about with terrorists” for the cause that of his association through a 1960s radical.

Democrats denounced the charge, and warned that it would trigger reexaminations of Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s past. Sure sufficiency, Obama’s campaign released a Web video and a letter about McCain’session role in the Keating Five opprobrium from the at daybreak 1990s.

McCain “does not want to sport guilt-by-association, or this thing could blow up in his effrontery,” Democratic adroit tactician Paul Begala said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The names being bandied about — Bill Ayers and Charles Keating — are unfamiliar to millions of Americans, and their wrongdoings occurred decades ago. But political operatives dredged them up over the weekend, and they could play a projecting role in the campaign’s final month.

Palin, the Alaska governor, defended her earlier comments about Obama and Ayers, in which she aforesaid the Democratic nominee is “nauseating right and left with terrorists who would mark their have a title to uncultivated.”

Ayers was a founder of the violent Weather Underground group during the Vietnam era. Its members were blamed for several bombings when Obama was a infant. Obama has denounced Ayers’ fundamental views and activities.

The two men live in the same Chicago neighborhood and once worked on the same charity board. Ayers hosted a small meet-the-candidate event for Obama in 1995, seasonably in his political procedure. Obama adroit tactician David Axelrod has said the two men are “friendly.”

On Sunday, Palin told reporters in California that her comments were about “an association that has been known but hasn’confidentially been talked about. I think it’s above mediocrity to confer about in which place Barack Obama kicked against his political career, in the guy’s estate room.”

In reality, Obama was questioned end for end Ayers during a prime-time Democratic debate against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton before April’s Pennsylvania primary.

“The heels are on, the gloves are off,” Palin said of her campaign strategy.

Obama, speaking Sunday to thousands at an exterior event in Asheville, N.C., fired back. He said McCain and his aides “are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance.”

He described the criticisms as “Swiftboat-style attacks on me,” a reference to the unsubstantiated allegations about 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry’s military chronicle in Vietnam.

Other Democrats rushed to Obama’s defense. Veteran party activist Hillary Rosen, without interruption CNN’sitting “Late Edition,” said, “If they throw mud like that, then you go upper part to Charles Keating, you go back to Sarah Palin’s investigation.” She was referring to inquiries into the firing of Alaska’sitting top police official.

“You know, I just don’t think that John McCain wants to take this nuclear strategy,” Rosen said.

Just months into his Senate career, in the tardy 1980s, McCain made what he has called “the worst mistake of my life.” He participated in two meetings with banking regulators on advantage of Keating, a friend, campaign contributor and savings and loan owner who was later convicted of securities fraud.

The Senate ethics committee investigated five senators relationships with Keating. The array cited McCain for a lesser role than the others, but faulted his “poor judgment.”

Obama’s new Web video, being e-mailed to millions of his supporters, summarizes a 13-minute Web “documentary” that the campaign plans to distribute Monday.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in a announcement, “McCain’s Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts.”

On Sunday, Obama also unveiled a TV ad on the economy that describes McCain was “erratic in a crisis.” Some know that as a reminder of McCain’s age, 72.

Watch full size video:

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Barack Obama’s allies warn that John McCain’s attacks on the Democrat’s nature will lead to the political equipollent of mutual assured destruction: Fire your big weapon at your own peril.

Several Obama surrogates said his supporters may come into existence suddenly reminding voters of McCain’session ties to Charles Keating, a convicted savings-and-loan owner whose actions two decades ago triggered a Senate ethics investigation that involved McCain as one of the “Keating Five.”

The warnings of bulky retaliation came taken in the character of McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, took on the role of assailant and said that Obama sees America as so imperfect “that he’s nauseating around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She was referring to an early Obama supporter, 1960s radical Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground whose members were blamed in quest of several bombings when Obama was a child.

Palin defended her assert as one’s right Sunday, saying the issue is “fair to report about.”

Obama has denounced Ayers’ radical views and actions. On Sunday, Obama dismissed the criticism from the McCain campaign, leveled by Palin, as “smears” meant to distract voters from real problems such while the troubled economy.

Democrats were well-synchronized Sunday, using the word “erratic” and Keating’session give one appellation to in nearly matching sentences across the talk-show circuit.

“This is going to be a month, I think, of character assassination,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., an Obama comforter, before-mentioned on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Indeed, McCain monitor Greg Strimple predicted “a very aggressive last 30 days” of the campaign.

WILLIAMS, Calif. - A charter bus traveling to a casino overturned in north-central California on Sunday, killing 10 people and injuring several others.

SINGAPORE - Asian stock markets plunged Monday as government bank bailouts in the U.S. and Europe failed to alleviate fears of a global financial crisis that would lower cosmos economic growth.