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Armed thugs have robbed about 1.6 million U.S. dollars in four different crimes committed on Sunday and Monday, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry said.

The most successful attack was done at the first minutes on Monday in Sofia when unknown bandits entered unnoticed in office rooms of one of the largest Bulgarian supply chain for groceries, crushed a metal safe and stole 1.5 million dollars found there.

“This theft is similar to other ones, but they were not revealed so far,” head of Sofia police Valery Jordanov told reporters. He added that at least ten criminal groups specializingin robbery act in the Bulgarian capital.

Ten hours after the big hit, two masked men rushed into a shop for mobile phones and vouchers, threatened the cashier with a gas gun, got 40,000 dollars available there and escaped.

Early Sunday morning another crime group smashed a metal door of the town-hall of the Black Sea resort Saint Vlas, three kilometers north of Sunny Beach, entered the banking office there, and stole a metal case with 35,000 dollars in it. In addition, the offenders broke several offices belonging to the local municipality and stole about 3,300 dollars.

The police have not got any clear information up to now concerning the perpetrators of the three crimes. Investigation is going on.

In another incident, Bulgarian police killed a highway bandit several minutes after he and his two companions robbed 7,500 dollars from a Turkish citizen on a Trakia highway, about 30 kilometers from Sofia.

A police patrol noticed two suspicious cars on the road at midnight on Monday and tried to stop them. The bandits, who just robbed the Turkish man, began to shoot at police officers with automatic weapons. The fire response of the patrol shot in the head one of the offenders. The other two escaped.

The Interior Ministry seeks for ten people in total to check their alibi for the time of the gunfight, regional police head Todor Iliev told reporters, while Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said the rest two bandits were believed to belong to the so called “Crocodiles Group.”

Crimes always increase in the days before the New Year, Tsviatko Tsvetkov, former deputy interior minister, told reporters.

Chinese police have detained more than 3,470 suspects this year in a harsh crackdown on Internet pornography.

The Ministry of Public Security said Friday that more than 1.25million items of on-line lewd content and nearly 7,000 pornographic websites and columns were eliminated from the Internet this year. The police also cracked more than 3,500 erotic cases.

The ministry said they also busted several large-scale overseas pornographic website alliances, and detained more than 500 staff working on the mainland.

A new round of harsh crackdown on spreading pornographic content through Internet or mobile WAP sites, was initiated earlier this month through next May, to purify social environment and protect minors’ mental health, the government said.

U.S.-based mobile telecommunication producer , Motorola, introduced its latest Bluetooth gadget embedded with its brand new bone conduction technology for Indonesian customers on Thursday.

Unlike the other ones currently available in the market, Motorola’s bone conduction Bluetooth gadget, codenamed HX-1, offers a particular technology that uses highly sensitive censor to transfer vibrations resulted from human ear’s bones while they are talking, into clearer voice vibrations that received by inner hearing organs.

According to Tracy Yeo, a Motorola’s senior official who oversees Motorola’s retail sales operation in the Southeast Asian region, with such a technology HX-1 is particularly different from the other Bluetooth gadgets that are still using eardrums to transfer voice vibrations to human inner hearing organs.

“The bone conduction technology is derived from military telecommunication technology that demands high-quality and accurate performance in such an extreme condition to help succeed military operations,” Tracy said on the sidelines of Motorola’s MoU signing with Indonesian mobile telecommunication gadget vendor, Wellcomm, here.

The Singapore-based Motorola official said that Indonesia becomes the third country in the Southeast Asian region, after Malaysia and Singapore, where Motorola launched its HX-1 Bluetooth gadget.

China became the first Asian country to see the launching of the gadget in the continent that was conducted in June this year, she added.

According to Tracy, besides offering super clarity voice, Motorola HX-1 Bluetooth gadget also offers superb noise reduction technology that allows users to have comfortable phone conversation amid extremely noisy background.

The gadget is able to completely eliminate extreme noises around the user while he was talking through the gadget that makes his talking counterpart receives the clear voice of the gadget user only.

Wu Liwei, a postgraduate major in journalism from Renmin University of China, has been trying to find a job for some time. And though the 24-year-old is yet to get a satisfactory offer, Wu said yesterday that she still felt lucky and hopeful.

“Next year looks better than even this year,” Wu said. “A friend who majored in the same subject last year said many big companies had stopped recruiting then.”

But this year, staff from a lot more companies, including big names, visited her university for campus recruitment. “I have attended about 10 such recruitment fairs, and many of my classmates have got offers. I am waiting for the right one,” she said.

Most university graduates like Wu feel the same. And it’s true that China’s recruitment prospects are better now than last year or early this year.

Buoyed up by the ongoing economic recovery and domestic consumption, the willingness of potential employers to hire people in 2010 will be stronger than this year, with companies in second-tier cities showing greater interest, a Manpower survey released yesterday said.

According to the survey, conducted by the world’s leading employment service provider, 19 percent of the potential employers said they would hire people in the first quarter of next year - 2 percentage points higher than in the fourth quarter of 2008, and also the highest since late last year.

Those who aim to cease recruitment in the next quarter add up to only 5 percent of the total, 1 percentage point lower than in the previous quarter and the lowest in a year.

Manpower has done such quarterly recruitment studies in China for five years. This time, it interviewed 4,317 enterprises from home and abroad for the survey.

“Actually, the recovery helped improve China’s labor market from the second quarter of this year,” said Danny Yuan, managing director for Manpower China. “Now, employers are more confident of hiring people next year,”

Xu Zhixue, senior consultant with Beijing-based Zuoyou Consulting Group, a leading local human resource service provider, corroborated Yuan.

Zuoyou’s clients are usually big State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in telecom, aerospace and mining sectors, such as Beijing Mobile. “They (SOEs) were worried over the economic trend and most of them had scaled back their recruitment,” Xu said.

“But since the last quarter, they have recovered their confidence. Now, we are much busier than before,” he said.

China’s economy began showing strong signals of recovery in the third quarter of this year, with GDP growth reaching 8.9 percent. Decline in exports began easing off, too, and the sector is expected to have taken to the growth trajectory in late 2009.

According to Manpower, employers in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors could be the biggest recruiters next year, with the mining and construction industries registering the fastest growth in the past quarter.

The survey also shows employers in cities like Chongqing, Xi’an, Qingdao, Wuhan, and Suzhou expect to see a stronger hiring environment than their counterparts in major cities.

Philippine troops on Sunday arrested dozens and discovered a second weapons cache as they continued to disarm a local political clan linked to last week’s massacre of 57 people in the volatile south.

A military and police team during a raid to a ranch owned by Maguindanao Governor Andal Ampatuan Sr. found a stash of 39 assorted high-powered guns including two M-60 light machineguns, a grenade launcher and a cal.50 and cal.30 machineguns, the authorities said.

A latest study made by Nordic researchers found no apparent link between cell phones and brain cancer, according to the online edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on Thursday.

Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology at the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen based their conclusion on a 30-year examination of the incidents of brain tumors in Scandinavia.

For the study, the researchers collected data on 60,000 people diagnosed with glioma and meningioma in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden between 1974 and 2003.

The researchers found that the incidence of brain tumors over this 30-year period were stable, starting before cell phones became popular.

In addition, there was no change in the incidence of brain tumors between 1998 and 2003, a period of rapid increase in cell phone usage, the researchers noted.

“If mobile phones were to cause brain tumors we would expect to see a sudden rise in the number of brain tumors at some point in time, and we don’t see it,” said lead researcher Isabelle Deltour.

However, Deltour leaves the door open to the possibility that widespread cell phone use has not been around long enough to see an increase in brain tumors.

“Either it means that mobile phones don’t cause brain tumors or it means that we don’t see it yet or we don’t see it because the increase is too small to be observed in this population, or it is a risk that is limited to a small subgroup of the population,” she said.

Despite new findings, doubts linger about whether cell phones cause brain cancer.

Commenting on that study, Dr. Deepa Subramaniam, director of the Brain Tumor Center at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, D.C., said: “We cannot make any definitive conclusions about this. But this study, in addition to all the previous studies, continues to leave lingering doubt as to the potential for increased risk. So, one more time, after all these years, we don’t have a clear-cut answer.”

Deltour said her team will continue to look at the rates of brain tumors in the study group.

What separates Liu Zige from other Chinese swimmers is not only the fact she has broken several world records but also that shuns media attention and commercial activities.

“I don’t like to show off and I don’t like to attend too many social engagements,” the 20-year-old Beijing Olympic champion said.

Liu’s amazing story started at last year’s Games where she clocked 2:04.18 to win the gold medal in the 200m butterfly, smashing Australian Jessicah Schipper’s world record by more than a second.

Her achievement was considered a surprise as she was relatively unknown before the Olympics. The world’s lastest “butterfly queen” made her international debut at the 2005 World Championships, where she placed 20th in the 200 butterfly in 2:14.25. She progressed steadily afterwards and, before the Olympics, her best time was 2:07.76, set at the Chinese Olympics Trials.

Liu’s record was rewritten by Mary DeScenza of the US in the heats at the Rome Worlds a year later - before Schipper upped the mark in the final. But Liu regained the record by clocking 2:01.81 at China’s National Games in Jinan last month.

Her performances in short-course events are equally remarkable.

At the World Cup short course series in Stockholm, Sweden, on Nov 11, Liu claimed gold with a record time of 2:02.50 and improved it to 2:00.78 in Berlin, Germany, four days later.

“Liu is different from other swimmers as she is low key out of the pool but when she jumps in she turns into a tiger and is aggressive enough to beat anyone,” said her coach, Jin Wei.

Unlike many young women her age, Liu leads a simple life, which is focused solely on swimming. There is no computer or telephone in her dormitory and she doesn’t even use a mobile phone. In her spare time she likes to read books but cares little for flashy clothes or make-up. Her pet is a slow tortoise, which is in sharp contrast to the speed she displays in the water.

“Don’t assume I should like what other girls like,” Liu told China Daily. “The reason why I’m different is simple - I don’t like those things.”

Unlike other Olympic champions who were busy attending various functions after the Games, Liu said ‘no’ to most of those invitations. She and coach Jin even went to train in Australia for a while after the Games to avoid disturbances from media and fans.

“As an athlete, training conscientiously is the basic task. If I leave the swimming pool, I would not be able to achieve so much. So I only focus on training and that makes me happy,” she said.

“Liu leads a similar life to the one she had before (winning at the Games) she still trains hard but quietly,” said Jin. “She just wears tracksuits and never spends money liberally. Such moral qualities are the key to her success.”

After the Games, Liu only took part in the shooting of two advertisements, which were arranged by China’s Swimming Administrative Center (CSAC), and attended hardly any social events.

“In order to prepare for competitions and avoid disturbances, Liu will not attend commercial and social activities,” said Shang Xiutang, vice-director of CSAC. “But to show her gratitude for the support she has received, she may attend some community events.”

After easily winning the 200m butterfly at the Asian Swimming Championships last week in Foshan, Guangzhou province, Liu’s next competition will be the East Asian Games in Hong Kong, which start next week. She and her coach are also planning to train in Europe next year.

Nokia plans to install Linux software on just one new smartphone next year, according to foreign media reports Tuesday.

The Finnish firm has started to invest more in Internet services in recent years, seeking to counter falling handset prices and increased competition in smartphones from the likes of Apple and Blackberry-maker RIM.

The Linux Maemo operating system is seen as key for Nokia in its rivalry with Apple Inc’s iPhone, and many analysts and industry players have been expecting the firm to roll out numerous Linux models already next year.

Nokia started to sell its first Linux phone, the top-of-the-range N900 model, this month.

“The potential of Linux computer operating system is in the high-end, and we have not yet fully harnessed that,” said Ari Jaaksi, head of Maemo at Nokia.

Nokia has used open source Linux Maemo since 2005 in its niche range of Internet tablets - sleek phone-like devices without connection to mobile networks.

“The key lesson we have had - almost everyone asked for a phone: ain’t there a cellular connection?” Jaaksi said.

The Maemo operating system will be updated in 2010, with full integration of Qt technology, which enables software developers to create one application for different operating systems, iPhone-like capacitive touchscreen support and a tighter integration of Nokia’s services.

Turkey’s telecommunications watchdog said Saturday the country is developing its own Internet search engine and aims to launch it in 2010, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.

All major search engines used worldwide are based in foreign countries, which can not meet Turkey’s needs and could bring security problems, said Tayfun Acarer, chairman of Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communications Authority Board.

“I believe that our search engine will be popular in Turkic and Muslim countries and I am confident that these countries will trust our search engine,” Acarer was quoted as saying.

Turkey also initiated another project to allocate an e-mail address with a quota of 10 gigabytes to each of Turkey’s 70 million citizens to build a mobile network that matches citizens’ identity numbers, said Acarer.

He said the project is being tested and that its software infrastructure was already completed.

The network could replace foreign mail networks such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail in Turkey, Acarer was quoted as saying.

Russia plans to deploy another five battalions equipped with the advanced S-400 Triumph air defense systems in 2010, the Air Force commander said on Thursday.

“So far we have two S-400 battalions and both were deployed in the Moscow region,” Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass news agency.

“We are due to arm another five battalions with S-400s next year, but everything would depend on the industry’s capabilities,” Zelin said.

The S-400 Triumph is designed to intercept and destroy airborne targets at distances of up to 400 km. The system is also believed to be able to destroy stealth aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.

A regular S-400 battalion comprises at least eight launchers with 32 missiles and a mobile command post, RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Russia’s new state arms procurement program stipulates the purchase of enough S-400 air defense systems to arm 18 battalions by 2015.