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PARIS (AFP) - The rapidly mushrooming number of illegal sports betting websites is heightening concerns among authorities about global corruption, money laundering and gambling addiction.

There are now an estimated 15,000 such sites on the World Wide Web, including some 13,000 illegal ones, shuffling around 15 billion euros (23.6 billion dollars) a year, according to the authorities.

These dizzying figures have finally stung sports authorities into action.

Late last year, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge compared the gambling issue to the gangrene caused by doping in sports.

He proposed the creation of a world surveillance agency based on the model of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which leads the fight against drugs in sport.

The explosion of Internet sports betting, which has flowed across national borders that previously confined gamblers, has created a virtual market that is controlled mostly from Asia.

On these sites, gamblers have been known to lose large sums of money, either fairly or increasingly as victims of fraud, a trend that is threatening the credibility of sport.

Declan Hill, a journalist and British expert on the problem, says the amount of corruption in global sports has increased almost 100-fold in the past five years thanks to Internet-based gambling.

“Ten years ago, national lotteries controlled 100 percent of the sports (betting) market,” Hill said.

“Today, the French National Lottery, for example, controls only 25 percent of the French market, but their number of clients has multiplied by four times,” he said.

The problem has continued almost unabated since 2006, when a study conducted by the independent Information Systems Security Consulting firm warned of the criminalisation of Internet sports betting.

“The sector of online gaming is today mostly controlled by criminal groups,” the security firm said in the study commissioned by a group of European state lotteries.

Players had been approached and threatened, referees influenced, and matches bought, it found.

This is the form of corruption that threatens the credibility of sport the most but more common is money laundering, which seems to have become almost routine, based on the amounts of money paid through certain less profitable websites, even for sporting events of little significance.

Alarmingly, the amount of money traded on a single website can surpass 100,000 euros for a match in the third division football in Romania, or even the first division of the Czech women's league.

Experts estimate that 85 percent of these websites have been created for the sole purpose of “washing away” dirty money.

Sports federations — notably for tennis, football and cricket, the pioneers in the fight against harmful effects of illegal gambling — have become increasingly worried about the issue.

But, apart from fears about the tarnished image of their sport, at the same time they are trying to secure a financial stake for themselves from the booming phenomenon.

Each year, French gamblers place sports bets worth more than 510 million euros on the Internet.

Of this, only around 12 million euros is believed to be legal, by means of the French National Lottery, the only authorised online sports betting operator in the country.

Following the example of the French Tennis Federation, a number of sports bodies are trying to claim part of the lucrative Internet betting industry on the model of television broadcasting agreements.

The federation has accused various sites of offering illegal betting in violation of the exclusive rights it has to commercially exploit its events.

A court judgement is expected to set a legal precedent in the coming days, in the glare of the world media as Paris hosts the French Open.

NEW YORK - A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube’s ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, YouTube owner Google Inc. said.

Google’s lawyers made the claim in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as the company responded to Viacom Inc.’s latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to “an explosion of copyright infringement” by YouTube and others.

The back-and-forth between the companies has intensified since Viacom brought its lawsuit last year, saying it was owed damages for the unauthorized viewing of its programming from MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, including such hits as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

In papers submitted to a judge late Friday, Google said YouTube “goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works.”

It said that by seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”

Google said YouTube was faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying the federal law was intended to protect companies like YouTube as long as they responded properly to content owners’ claims of infringement.

On that score, Viacom says Google has set a terrible example.

In a rewritten lawsuit filed last month, Viacom said YouTube consistently allows unauthorized copies of popular television programming and movies to be posted on its Web site and viewed tens of thousands of times.

Viacom said it had identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of copyrighted programming — including “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “South Park” and “MTV Unplugged” episodes and the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” — that had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

The company said its count of unauthorized clips represents only a fraction of the content on YouTube that violates its copyrights.

It said Google and YouTube had done “little or nothing” to stop infringement.

“To the contrary, the availability on the YouTube site of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants’ business plan,” Viacom said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A court in Moscow suspended the main opposition website in the troubled south Russian region of Ingushetia on Monday while prosecutors investigate regional government's accusations it spreads extremist material.

The government of Ingushetia brought the case against the ingushetiya.ru website owned by local businessmen Magomed Yevloev. Ingushetia has tried to control media outlets as it struggles to contain growing violence in the region.

“Today the Kuntsevsky district court in Moscow upheld a motion by the Republic of Ingushetia … to order Magomed Yevloev to close his Internet activities,” the court's statement said of the investigation.

Yevloev's lawyer, Kaloi Akhigov, said the accusations were political.

“The website shows Ingushetia as it really is and they don't like it,” Akhilgov said.

“We are going to challenge this court order.”

Akhilgov said the ingushetiya.ru website is hosted in the United States, meaning that the court has to order all Internet providers in Russia to switch off the website — a logistical challenge by the June 5 deadline, he said.

Ingushetia borders Chechnya, a scene of two separatist wars since 1994. While Chechnya has calmed, violence has increased in the neighboring regions of Ingushetia and Dagestan.

Ingushetia's government wants to present a picture of normality in the region and control the information flow. Eyewitness said police beat journalists at anti-government meetings and confiscated cameras earlier this year.

(Writing by James Kilner)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Japan is about to roll out the Lexus of space station labs, a whopper in size and sophistication.

The $1 billion Kibo lab — which means “hope” in Japanese — is poised for a Saturday launch aboard space shuttle Discovery. It will be the biggest and, by far, the most elaborate room at the international space station — a 37-foot-long scientific workshop as large as a school bus, with its own hatch to the outside for experiments and a pair of robot arms. Making it even bigger will be a closet and porch.

Kibo is so enormous that three shuttle flights were needed to get it all up.

Seven astronauts, one of them Japanese, will deliver the actual lab on the upcoming mission, along with the larger of the two robot arms. A separate storage room loaded with Kibo equipment went up in March. The porch for outdoor science experiments and the smaller robot arm will fly next year.

Kibo (pronounced KEE’-boh) dwarfs the two labs already in orbit — NASA’s modest-size Destiny and the even smaller European Space Agency’s Columbus.

“It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it? Japanese products should be smaller, but this time it’s the other way around,” Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide said with a chuckle.

Two decades in the making, the 16-ton Kibo is 9 feet longer than the U.S. Destiny lab, which was launched in 2001, and more than 14 feet longer than Europe’s Columbus, which flew to the space station in February.

Shuttle commander Mark Kelly calls it “the Lexus of the space station modules.”

“It’s big and it’s capable. I mean, it’s got its own dedicated robotic arm. It’s got its own air lock. Eventually, it’s going to have an external platform for experiments. It’s got a lot of capable science racks that are going in. So yeah, I think it’s pretty impressive.”

Kelly and his crew will install Kibo during the 14-day shuttle flight, then attach the Japanese storage compartment that was left in a temporary parking position in March.

Three spacewalks are planned to hook up Kibo and handle other space station work, like replacing an empty nitrogen gas tank and seeing how best to clean a jammed solar-wing rotary joint.

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s space operations chief, said it seems like simple tasks.

“But when you get into the details of what’s actually involved … it’s an extremely complicated mission,” he said.

Besides all that work, one of the Discovery astronauts, Gregory Chamitoff, will swap places with the space station’s current U.S. resident, Garrett Reisman, who will return to Earth on the shuttle following a three-month stay. Chamitoff will spend six months up there.

Just last week, NASA decided to proceed with its shuttle mission as planned, even as the Russians continue to investigate April’s rocky landing by a Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts home from the space station. A Soyuz constantly is docked at the orbiting outpost for use as a lifeboat in an evacuation.

Discovery’s flight will be a milestone for NASA in more than one way.

It will be the 10th shuttle mission since the 2003 Columbia tragedy and will leave just 10 more shuttle flights before the fleet is retired in 2010. That will mark the end of space station construction.

Discovery’s fuel tank is the first to incorporate all the post-Columbia changes from the start of construction instead of later in the construction phase. While shuttle managers expect this fuel tank to be the best one yet — i.e., with minimal insulating-foam loss — a full inspection of the spaceship’s thermal skin still will be required.

That inspection will occur much later in the flight than usual. That’s because Kelly and his crew won’t get their inspection boom until they arrive at the space station. The 50-foot laser-tipped pole was left there in March by the previous shuttle visitors; it couldn’t fit in Discovery’s payload bay given the size of Kibo.

Another milestone for Discovery’s upcoming mission: Astronaut Karen Nyberg, the lone woman on the crew, will become the 50th woman to fly in space. She will be rocketing into orbit just a few weeks before the 45th anniversary of the first woman in space, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, and the 25th anniversary of the first American woman in space, Sally Ride.

“What I’m really looking forward to is the time when we’re not counting anymore,” Nyberg said.

___

On the Net:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

Japanese Space Agency: http://www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html

SYDNEY (Reuters) - When Jane Coloccia set out to find her soul mate online she had no idea that eight years and 200 dates later she would end up an expert on the topic, writing a book and setting up a course to teach the pitfalls of Web love.

Coloccia, now 45, was living in Manhattan and struggling to meet single, straight men when one of her friends met a man online and married him. She decided to give it a go.

Over the next few years, she was swamped with emails and instant messages from attentive men, some who told her she was beautiful, others who lied about their age, weight, hair, and marital status, and one who became her therapist.

Learning along the way how to spot the liars, Coloccia has written a book, “Confessions of an Online Dating Addict: A True Account of Dating and Relating in the Internet Age,” tracking the highs, lows — and addiction — of online dating. She is also developing an online course on Web dating.

“I would go on three or four dates a week. One Sunday I had three dates - brunch, lunch and dinner,” said Coloccia, who has her own public relations and marketing communications agency.

“It does get very seductive as it is nice to open up an email and someone to say you are beautiful and they want to meet you.”

The growth in the online dating industry has been massive and is expected to continue. Figures from market analyst Jupiter Research show revenue has almost doubled in the past three years to $1.04 billion in the United States alone and is expected to rise 16 percent a year until 2012.

MARRIAGE, FRIENDSHIP OR SEX?

Coloccia said at first, she was nervous about going to meet the men she was talking to online. “My impression before I did this was that the people online were weirdos but that is just not the case,” she said.

But among the good people there were those who were dishonest about themselves and their reason for being online — as there are always creeps in any bar.

Coloccia said married men, for example, tended not to post a photograph of themselves, would not give a cell phone number and tended to instant message late at night.

Some men were just after one-night stands. Others would post old photographs when they were slimmer and had more hair.

“When I met one man for a date he was bald and fat and his photo must have been from 20 years ago. I told him he looked different and he explained it by saying he was wearing glasses and just had a haircut but that was the end of that,” she said.

She was once pawed on a first date, stood up on another, but over the years Coloccia said she honed her technique to ensure she did not waste time on men that were not suitable.

First dates were usually over coffee, with dinner only booked once the man proved to be likeable. She set geographical limits which knocked out the men in Russia, Malaysia or the west coast of the United States.

She advises would-be daters to really question people before they meet and read their profiles well. She says steer clear of free dating sites where married men and ones after sex reside.

Coloccia has been with her current boyfriend Victor — whom she met online — for 18 months.

She said there is no stigma attached to online dating any more but it can be addictive. Her therapist even wrote a section in her book about how the ability to build a fantasy life online can be hard to leave.

“Find out why people are there. People date online for a lot of reasons — some are lonely, some just want to IM (instant message) and never meet, some want friendship, marriage or just sex,” she said.

“But it is not a real experience unless you are prepared to get out from behind your computer screen and go live it.”

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

(To read more about our entertainment news, visit our blog “Fan Fare” online at http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare)

SEOUL (Reuters) - LG Electronics (066570.KS), the world's No.4 handset maker, is closely watching rival Nokia (NOK1V.HE) amid talk the top-ranked mobile phone maker may cut its prices and re-enter the South Korean market later this year.

Shares in LG Electronics tumbled more than 8 percent on Monday as investors gauged the impact of potential price cuts by Nokia. But an LG executive said the firm was generally positive about the industry this year.

“We are interested in the Korean market and investigating it, but we have not unveiled any products for that market,” said Nokia spokesman Kari Tuutti, declining comment on future pricing.

LG shares ended down 3.8 percent, while Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), the world's No.2 handset maker, closed down 4 percent. The main Korean market (.KS11) fell 1.5 percent.

“We are carefully watching Nokia,” Chang Ma, LG's vice president for marketing strategy, told Reuters in an interview.

Analysts were split on the impact of a Nokia move.

“Nokia's handset price cuts, if they actually happen, will certainly not be applied universally to all its models,” said Lee Sung-june, an analyst at SK Securities.

“Besides, Nokia and LG's handset strategies are different in that while Nokia is more about offering cheaper models, LG is more focused on technologically advanced models.”

John Park, analyst at Daishin Securities, noted that since LG had benefited from Nokia losing market share in North America, the Finnish firm's possible expansion in that market could be a factor to watch for LG.

Ma said LG was also ready to seize any opportunities arising from difficulties at third-ranked Motorola Inc (MOT.N) and No.5 manufacturer Sony Ericsson (6758.T) (ERICb.ST).

Motorola has been losing market share to rivals after failing to follow up its blockbuster Razr phone, and Sony Ericsson saw its profit halved in the first quarter as demand slowed for its more expensive camera and music handsets.

“We see some risks from the economic slowdown, the rise of raw material prices and the possibility of unexpected moves by competitors, but we will compensate these risk factors with our product portfolio and our marketing strength,” Ma said.

LG sold a record 24.4 million phones in January-March and looks set to beat its target of 100 million phones for the year.

First-quarter operating profit margin on handsets was 15.9 percent on a parent basis, almost double the previous quarter's 8.3 percent and against 6.6 percent a year earlier.

Ma said he expected the handset division to post a “double digit” operating profit margin in the second quarter.

“The handset business remains strong in LG's overall earnings, accounting for as much as 80 percent of operating profit throughout 2008,” said Daishin's Park, though he added that handset marketing costs would likely grow and eat into margins in the third and fourth quarters.

In a separate interview, the head of LG's display division said the company's plasma business had suffered from lower than expected demand this year, but hopes to improve operating profits during the rest of the year.

“We are aiming to post better second-quarter operating profit … from the first quarter,” said Simon Kang, responsible for LG's plasma business, which makes screens for LG's own televisions and for external customers. “We also expect to post better operating profit in the second half from the first.”

Kang acknowledged that demand from China had been slower than initially expected due to the snowstorm early this year and the recent earthquake.

LG is expected to post 2008 net profit of 2.5 trillion won, more than double last year's 1.2 trillion won, according to Reuters Estimates.

(Additional reporting by Tarmo Virki in HELSINKI and Park Jung-yun and Park Ju-min in SEOUL; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

IBM has set up a Language Translation Services Center in Pune in western India that will translate documents from French, German, Italian and Spanish to English.

The new center is part of IBM's strategy to set up similar centers in Europe and Asia that will offer document translation in multiple languages, an IBM spokeswoman said on Monday.

Besides having staff translate documents, such as e-mail messages, Web pages, and contracts, the center in Pune will also use technology developed by IBM's research lab in India, and tools available in the market, to automate some of this translation work, she added.

The center will be part of IBM's fourth delivery center for application services and consulting in Pune, inaugurated Monday. The new Pune center is spread over 180,000 square feet and will house close to 2,000 employees once fully staffed, IBM said.

IBM has been expanding fast in India, and at the end of December it had 73,000 staff in the country.

SEOUL (AFP) - Samsung Electronics Co, the world's largest computer chip maker, said Monday it has developed a new solid-state drive which is expected to replace hard disk drives in laptop computers.

Samsung said its 256-gigabyte solid state drive (SSD) for data storage is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives. The company plans to begin production of SSDs this year.

The new SSD “represents a bold step in the shift to notebooks with significantly improved performance and larger storage capacities,” the company said in a statement.

Samsung described the new SSD, 2.5 inches long and 9.5 millimeters thick, as the world's smallest of its kind. It can read up to 200 megabytes of data per second.

It said, citing market research agency iSuppli, that 35 percent of notebook computers would use the SSD by 2012.