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FIFA have revealed that more than half of the players treated on the pitch during this summer’s World Cup were not actually injured. 

  
The world body’s chief medical officer, Professor Jiri Dvorak, presented his findings to the FIFA referees committee today and they showed a cheating culture at the highest level of the game.

According to Professor Dvorak, there were too many players feigning injury in Germany, with tactical reasons presented as the most likely cause of their action.

Where injuries were confirmed, the number per match was down to 2.3 per match, from 2.7 at the 2002 World Cup.

That amounted to a total of 145 injuries in 64 matches at the 2006 tournament, among them the cruciate knee injury which may mean Newcastle and England striker Michael Owen does not play again until next season.

‘Fifty-eight per cent of the players who were treated on the pitch during the 2006 World Cup eventually turned out not to be injured,’ confirmed FIFA in a statement.

Referees were praised for keeping the number of injuries down, by protecting players and ensuring elbowing offences were properly punished.

The meeting was chaired by Spanish FA chief Angel Marma Villar Llona, a vice-president of the FIFA executive committee.

He said: ‘The referees and assistant referees fulfilled the high expectations placed on them and complied with the instructions to protect players and thus the game better. The preparation period of almost four years for the World Cup in Germany paid off.’

FIFA president Sepp Blatter added: ‘I am very satisfied with the referees’ performances at the 2006 World Cup. They achieved more than their counterparts in Korea/Japan in 2002.’

via ESPN.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis Presley ceded his crown to Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain on Forbes.com’s list as the top-earning dead celebrity.

The list, published on Tuesday, said grunge rocker Cobain earned $50 million between October 2005 and October 2006. Presley wound up in the No. 2 slot with $42 million, down from last year’s $45 million.

Forbes.com bases its dollar amounts on licensing deals for using the deceased celebrities’ work or image in advertising or elsewhere.

This was Cobain’s first time on the list in its six years of publication. Presley has ruled the roost since its inception, said Forbes.com staff writer Lacey Rose.

Cobain’s coup was due to his widow, actress and singer Courtney Love, who sold a 25-percent stake in the Seattle grunge group’s song catalog to New York music publishing company PrimeWave.

Ranked after Presley is "Peanuts" cartoon strip creator Charles Schulz at $35 million.

Rounding out the top five were Beatle John Lennon at $24 million and groundbreaking physicist Albert Einstein at $20 million, whose estate profited from such licensing deals as the popular "Baby Einstein" educational videos.

Other celebrities on the list include Theodore Geisel, better known as children’s book author Dr. Seuss; rhythm & blues pioneer Ray Charles, silver screen legend Marilyn Monroe and reggae superstar Bob Marley.

Past top earners include songwriter Irving Berlin and actor Marlon Brando.

JAPANESE engineers have designed a novel solution to childcare - a 38cm robot that can send pictures of your child to your mobile phone on demand.

The new ‘humanoid’ robot, called PaPeRo - short for Partner-type Personal Robot - has a camera in each eye and uses image recognition technology to remember and identify people. It can move at 20cm per second to track children around the house or nursery.

The futuristic robot also has an inbuilt mobile phone. When a parent calls it will locate the child and start to play with them. Parents can also send text messages and talk to children using PaPeRo’s inbuilt microphones and speakers.

As part of a deal between computer giant NEC and Japanese telecommunication company NTT the new service will be trialled in a Tokyo nursery school from this week. 

But the company is also marketing the product to busy executives as a personal assistant.

"It checks your email, tunes the TV to your favorite channel, and dances with your children," NEC says on it’s website.

"This egg-shaped robot named PaPeRo knows your favorite football team and searches the Internet for the day’s lineups and scores when you get home. It will also develop a personality depending on how you treat it. Speak to it nicely and stroke its head sensors and PaPeRo will learn to love you."

NEC’s Multimedia Research Laboratories senior manager Yoshihiro Fujita said the robot has been designed to remove typical ‘computer’ features like keyboards.

"We envision a future with simpler interactions with technology," he said. "You don’t need to learn to use PaPeRo like a PC, you just need to talk to it"

via News.com.au

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from download music stores other than Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes, his company said on Tuesday.

Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses.

"What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay," she said. "This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod."

At the moment, Apple aims to keep music bought from its iTunes online music store only available for Apple products, while songs bought from other online stores typically do not work on iPods.
 

But Johansen’s technology could help rivals sell competing products that play music from iTunes and offer songs for download that work on iPods as they seek to take a bite out of Apple’s dominance of digital music.

ITunes commands an 88 percent share of legal song downloads in the United States, while the iPod dominates digital music player sales with more than 60 percent of the market.

Cupertino, California-based Apple, whose profits have soared in recent years on the strength of the iPod, declined to comment.

Johansen, known as DVD Jon, gained fame when at the age of 15 he wrote and distributed a program that cracked the encryption codes on DVDs. This allowed DVDs to be copied and played back on any device.

His latest feat could help companies such as Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which have all announced plans over the past few months for music download services combined with new devices to challenge Apple.

© Reuters 2006.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - After a whirlwind courtship and the birth of a baby, Hollywood’s most famous unmarried couple, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, have set a date for their wedding.

Their representative, Arnold Robinson, said on Tuesday that the couple will get married on November 18 in Italy, with Giorgio Armani designing Holmes’s wedding dress.

Robinson declined to give other details.

The couple became engaged in June 2005 after a very public courtship. Holmes, 27, gave birth in April to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Suri.
 

Good Housekeeping magazine quoted Cruise, 44, the star of the "Mission Impossible" series, as saying in June that he and Holmes would delay getting married until Suri could attend the wedding.

"In many ways," he added, "we feel like we already are married. I know I’m with the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. So the wedding, that’s just the party," he told the magazine.

People magazine said that Holmes recently flew to Italy, "perhaps to scope out wedding destinations" after a shopping trip to Paris." She told People she’d already crossed one thing off her list — her wedding gown — saying: "I already have my dress."

© Reuters 2006.