Cloud of worry gathers over wireless health risks
While major cities around the world rush to blanket neighborhoods with free wireless Internet access, critics are questioning the health risks that might be created by a wired London or a Paris transformed from the City of Light to City of Hot Spots.
- Exposure to the invisible cloud of energy called electrosmog is rising

Gamers, on your marks: Halo 3 arrives
Hoping to make entertainment history, Microsoft plans to release the latest video game in its hit Halo franchise on Tuesday.

Battle joined for cellphone ads
British cellphone users will get their first look Monday at a new mobile service called Blyk, which will offer some free calls and text messages in return for agreeing to accept advertising on their phones.

British broadcasters trying to ring more true
British television broadcasters, who have acknowledged recent deceptions involving everything from quiz shows to the Queen, last week reported new examples of misleading programming, with the BBC disclosing that it had played fast and loose with the name of a cat.

For a simpler cellphone system, add software
Vanu Bose is the son of a fabled engineer, but he garnered no mercy when he presented his big idea at a technical conference in 1996.

Bridging the political divide with technology
Mukhles Sowwan, a Palestinian, founded the Nanotechnology Research Laboratory at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. His mentor is an Israeli physicist at Hebrew University in West Jerusalem.

Lawsuit by Rather says CBS made him a 'scapegoat'
Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ended last year over his role in a report questioning President George W. Bush's National Guard service, filed a lawsuit against the network for violation of contract.

AT&T, owner of the biggest U.S. wireless carrier, suspended a feature that helped parents control their children's phone use because it blocked emergency calls.

Phones with the function can make calls to the emergency number 911, but they cannot receive calls back from dispatchers if they get disconnected, Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman, said Sunday in an e-mail message. AT&T, based in San Antonio, Texas, will stop the service, introduced this month, to fix the problem, he said.

AT&T offered call-blocking to reassure parents and prompt them to give their children phones as growth slowed among older subscribers. The number of U.S. wireless users between 5 and 9 years old is expected to grow from fewer than 800,000 in 2005 to more than 8 million in 2010, according to a report last year from the research firm IDC.

Customers who used the $4.99-a-month plan will get credits, Coe said.

European Union regulators said Monday that they would decide by Oct. 26 whether to clear the €2.29 billion takeover bid by Google for the online ad tracker DoubleClick, or to study the issue further.

The European Commission set the initial review deadline Monday. Regulators could decide, however, to open an in-depth investigation, which could take up to four months, to examine how the creation of a new company would affect rivals and customers - and if any changes made to the deal could eliminate antitrust concerns.

Google is the world's largest Internet search engine. The proposed deal, worth $3.1 billion, has prompted complaints from Google's rivals Yahoo and Microsoft as well as from data privacy advocates because of the control they say it would give Google over Internet advertising and personal information.

In particular, consumer advocacy groups in the United States and Europe have asked regulators to look into their concern that the company would have access to a great deal of information on what people search for that is valuable to the online advertisers it sells to.

Europeans' interest in watching mobile television is as small as cellphone screens, a new study showed Monday, even though the industry has been buzzing about offering television programming on handsets for years.

Mobile operators hope that mobile television could encourage users to spend an extra €5 to €10, or $7 to $14, a month, compensating for declining revenues from voice calls, but mobile television and video downloads ranked close to the bottom of consumer interest in a Gartner study in Europe.

Only about 5 percent of Europeans expressed interest in watching television or video on their cellphones in the next 12 months, the study said. At the same time, some 20 percent of Asians said they would watch television on their phone screens.

"I think the main reason is the compromise you are making on the device you need to carry to watch TV - either too big if you want a nice experience, or too small and you do not have a good experience," said Carolina Mi***si, an analyst for Gartner.

Other factors hampering the take-up of mobile television have been a lack of consensus on business models, the variety of different technologies and a shortage of airwaves.

France Telecom began offering free cellphone services Monday in Britain through Blyk to customers who have agreed to receive text messages from advertisers like Coca-Cola.

Blyk, founded by the former president of Nokia, Pekka Ala-Pietila, will give customers 43 minutes of voice calls and 217 text messages a month if they agree to receive text advertisements, the company said Monday.

Users will get six messages a day from the more than 40 companies that have agreed to work with Blyk, including Adidas, Alliance Boots and McDonald's.

Boursorama, the French financial services company controlled by Société Générale, agreed to buy its German rival OnVista for €138 million, or $194 million, to expand its German operation into an online brokerage. Boursorama agreed to purchase 77.4 percent of the company, based in Cologne, from four major shareholders for €20.60 per share, the French Internet brokerage said.

MySpace, the social networking Web site, is establishing a free, advertising-supported cellphone version Monday as part of a wider bid by its parent, News Corp., to attract advertising for mobile Web sites. Fox Interactive Media, which oversees News Corp.'s Internet properties, said it also planned to roll out versions of FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen and its local TV affiliates in the coming months.