2022 World Cup will be in Japan

Tokyo  – FIFA officials who examined the Japanese candidacy to host the 2022 World Cup gives thumbs up at the main soccer stadium outside Tokyo, according to the chairman of Japan’s candidacy. Five-member team from world soccer’s governing body had visited the 64 000 seat stadium in the satellite town of Saitama, north of Tokyo, after being two days in the city of Osaka. Saitama Stadium, which has been used in the nine-year-old World Cup 2002, organized jointly by Japan and North Korea, and became the headquarters of J-League club, Urawa Red Diamonds, who won the Champions League Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in 2007.

Fifa’s team, led by President of the Chilean Football Federation Harolds Mayne-Nicholls, check out the stadium, which is one of the 13 stadiums are included in the nomination list of Japan, about an hour and check the condition of the field, seating, and locker room.

“They check everything is rincidan seemed very impressed,” said President of the Japan Football Association, Motoaki Inukai, who led Japan’s nominating committee, told reporters. FIFA inspectors arrived in Japan Monday for a four-day visit. The visit is the first visit of the tour two months to nine candidates for World Cup 2018 and 2022.

A total of 24 officials of the FIFA executive will choose the host on December 2 in Zurich. In Osaka, they used a helicopter to inspect the field the former central railway station of the city, a place that will build the stadium with a capacity of 83 000 seats and will use solar-powered electricity and will be used for the opening and final matches in the year 2022.

They also attended the presentation of the candidacy of Japan, including a plan to serve football fans around the world to watch live matches are broadcast in three dimensions. In Tokyo, they visited the convention center in downtown, The Tokyo International Forum, before meeting with Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

The next visit was to South Korea, Australia, Holland and Belgium jointly nominate, Russia, UK, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Qatar. Japan, South Korea, and Qatar only nominate for the 2022 World Cup, while the lainnnya tried to nominate himself for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022.(AFP)

Nokia sold less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones

Nokia sold less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones in its first five months on the market, researcher Gartner said, indicating it has yet to mount a serious challenge to the iPhone and Blackberry.The chunky computer-like handset  with slide-out keyboard and a touch screen   has found support among hard-core technology specialists but failed to attract a wider audience.

A spokesman for Nokia, the world’s top cellphone maker, declined to comment on the sales number, saying the company was pleased with sales, but an executive was more bullish.”Sales have substantially exceeded expectations,” Alberto Torres, head of Nokia’s solutions business, told the Open Mobile Summit trade conference in London this week.

Nokia has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Apple three years after the iPhone’s launch. Its last hit smartphone model, the N95, was unveiled in 2006.The sales of less than 100,000 N900s compares with sales of 8.75 million iPhones in January-March alone.

The N900, which went on sale last November, is Nokia’s first phone running the Linux Maemo operating system, which analysts see as a key for Nokia to regain ground in the coming years.

In February this year Nokia unveiled a plan to merge Maemo with Intel’s Moblin operating system.Nokia sold 50,000 N900s in the last quarter of 2009, and quarterly sales fell in January-March, Gartner statistics showed. Gartner does not track phone sales per model, but as the N900 is the only phone using Maemo, the statistics for operating systems show sales for the model.(Reuters)

President Barack Obama said that Congress needs to enact comprehensive financial reforms to protect consumers

WASHINGTON President Barack Obama said Saturday that Congress needs to enact comprehensive financial reforms to protect consumers, keep banks strong and ensure the U.S. economy doesn’t sink into another Great Depression.In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said “we need commonsense rules that will our allow markets to function fairly and freely while reining in the worst practices of the financial industry.”

That, he said, is the central lesson of the current financial crisis that has cost millions of Americans their jobs and nearly caused the collapse of the entire financial system.”And we fail to heed that lesson at our peril,” Obama said.

The Senate Banking Committee is set to begin debate on a more than 1,300-page bill authored by its chairman, Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., that would give the government unprecedented powers to split up firms that threaten the economy, force the industry to pay for its most spectacular failures and create an independent consumer watchdog.

Already, Obama said, industry lobbyists are gearing up to spend millions of dollars in an attempt to defeat the legislation.”In fact, the Republican leader in the House reportedly met with a top executive of one of America’s largest banks and made thwarting reform a key part of his party’s pitch for campaign contributions,” Obama said.The president said he remains a “vigorous defender” of free markets.

“But what we have seen over the past two years is that without reasonable and clear rules to check abuse and protect families, markets don’t function freely,” he said. (AP)

The FBI is investigating a hacker attack on Citigroup Inc.

Citigroup Inc.

WASHINGTON The FBI is investigating a hacker attack on Citigroup Inc. that led to the theft of tens of millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.Citing anonymous government officials, the Journal reported that the hackers were connected to a Russian cyber gang. Two other computer systems, at least one of connected to a U.S. government agency, were also attacked.Citigroup denied the report. “We had no breach of the system and there were no losses, no customer losses, no bank losses,” said Joe Petro, managing director of Citigroup’s Security and Investigative services. “Any allegation that the FBI is working a case at Citigroup involving tens of millions of losses is just not true.”

The Journal reported that the attack on Citigroup’s Citibank subsidiary was detected over the summer, although it may have occurred up to one year earlier. The FBI, the National Security Agency, the Homeland Security Department and Citigroup worked together to investigate the attack.

Cyber crime is of increasing concern to businesses and the federal government, with President Barack Obama calling it one of the “most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.”Obama is expected on Tuesday to announce the appointment of Howard A. Schmidt, a former eBay and Microsoft executive, as the government’s cyber security coordinator.