Paes ready to join Bhupathi for Beijing Olympics

Leading tennis player Leander Paes is ready to team up with Mahesh Bhupathi to bid for a doubles medal at next year's Beijing Olympics.
The duo have had a stormy relationship and criticised each other following their successful defence of the Asian Games doubles title last December.
"The obvious choice is for Mahesh and myself to play. I am looking forward to that," multiple grand slam winner Paes told reporters on Wednesday.
Bhupathi, who is recovering from a back surgery, has already expressed his interest in a reunion.
The pair, nicknamed "Indian Express", who won three men's doubles grand slam titles together, split on the tour after a high of reaching the final of all grand slams in 1999, winning two of them.

Beijing is considered the final chance for the two to claim Olympic glory after they lost the bronze medal playoff at Athens in 2004. Paes, 34, said he would partner Australian Paul Hanley in the new ATP season.

Cyclone Sidr damaged 40% of Sundarbans: UNESCO

Cyclone Sidr that left more than 3,000 people dead as it raged through Bangladesh in November has devastated the Sundarbans World Heritage Site, UNESCO has said.
A report prepared by the UN body found "serious damage" after its experts visited the mangrove forest on the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, spread between Bangladesh and India.
"The experts found that 40 per cent of the site has been seriously damaged by Cyclone Sidr. It struck at the heart of the East Sundarbans, the biologically richest part of the Bangladeshi World Heritage property," UNESCO said.
"Foliage has been stripped from the branches of trees in over 30 per cent of the property. Large trees have been felled by the wind and the crowns of many others have been severely damaged," it added.
A complex network of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands intersects the 140,000-hectare Sundarbans, one of the largest mangrove ecosystems in the world.
It is home to a wide range of fauna, including 260 species of birds, the Bengal tiger and other threatened species such as the estuarine crocodile and the Indian python.
UNESCO experts who visited the world heritage expressed their concern that this development would help poachers do further damage to the ecosystem.
"Poaching and other intrusions could jeopardise the regeneration of the Sundarbans ecosystem, which should normally take 10 to 15 years," the report stated.
The November 15 cyclone that left Orissa and West Bengal untouched - contrary to meteorological predictions - damaged field stations and many boats in Bangladesh.
Several pieces of equipment of the Bangladeshi forest department in the area have been washed out to sea by the storm, severely compromising the authority's capacity to manage the site, which was inscribed in UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1997.
The Sundarbans are breeding grounds for fish, shrimp and crab, which migrate to areas beyond the site boundary, providing livelihood for 300,000 people in the area, the UN body explained.

Sania bows, apologises for ad shoot at mosque

Tennis star Sania Mirza bowed before public sentiment on Thursday and tendered an 'unequivocal' apology for shooting a commercial at the historic Mecca Mosque in Hyderabad and hurting religious sentiments.
Sania's public apology came barely hours after a case had been registered against the tennis star and the advertising agency, charging them with trespassing on the Mecca Masjid.
The tennis star later sent an e-mail to Hyderabad's Police Commissioner, apologising for the ad shoot "with a deep sense of remorse".
Sania also sent a letter to the Imam of the Masjid, saying: "I would like to apologise to all my brothers and sisters and respected elders who are anguished by my unwittingly entering a portion of the land belonging to Mecca Masjid."
"While I am fully aware that a woman must not enter the sanctity of the mosque, I was unaware that even entering the outside gates of a mosque was seriously objectionable, specially without permission, which I was assured by the agency they possessed."

tender my apology to all my brothers and sisters for hurting their sentiments," she said.
She, however, maintained that the commercial was aimed at promoting the heritage monument of Charminar, which is a symbol of Hyderabad.
Sania and the ad agency had upset local groups by shooting for an ad at the mosque without taking the requisite permission from the authorities concerned. The shoot evoked strong protest from the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.
Mosque employees had alleged that the attitude of some of the members of the shooting unit was objectionable. They were reportedly wearing shoes when they entered the mosque and pushed away a watchman who tried to stop them.
The complaint was filed by the District Minority Welfare Officer Kareemullah, who said: "Sania has hurt the religious sentiments of people visiting the mosque."
Assistant Commissioner of Police (Charminar), B Reddenna, however, said it was a "petty case" involving unauthorised entry and photography. He, however, insisted that "the law will take its course in the matter."
The superintendent of the mosque, Khaja Nayeemuddin, had earlier claimed that he had no information about the shooting and that the advertisement had already been shot before he or other custodians could reach the mosque.
Reddanna says that the unit had obtained permission to shoot in and around Charminar, but not inside the Mecca Masjid.
The ad shoot has also evoked strong protest from the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), a powerful Muslim political party in the Muslim-majority old Hyderabad city. The MIM also objected to Sania Mirza's participation in it.

Love chatting? Your online suitor could be a comp

Internet chatroom romantics beware: your next chat may be with a clinical computer, not a passionate person, trying to win your personal data and not your heart, an online security firm says.
A Russian website called CyberLover.ru is advertising a software tool that, it says, can simulate flirtatious chatroom exchanges. It boasts that it can chat up as many as 10 women at the same time and persuade them to hand over phone numbers.
An Australian anti-virus software firm, PC Tools, has warned that the software could be abused by identity fraudsters trying to harvest people's personal details online. The Russian site denied it was intended for identity fraud.
The program, so far available only in Russian, will go on sale around February 15, just after St Valentine's Day, said the CyberLover.ru website.
"Not a single girl has yet realized that she was communicating with a program!" it said, adding that the program could also simulate virtual sex online.
"It's happened - a program to tempt girls over the internet!" said the site. "Within half an hour the CyberLover program will introduce you to ... girls, exchange photos and perhaps even a contact phone number," it states.
Chatrooms have developed into a popular social networking section of the internet, where people can converse anonymously by keyboard on any topic, from flirting to fishing.
CyberLover's website explains that the settings on its program can be changed to attract men, persuade people to visit a website or encourage them to top up mobile telephone credit, and that all the data collected will be stored.
CAN FOOL USERS
A spokesman for PC Tools said the program had a "terrifyingly well-organized" interaction that could fool users into giving up personal details and could easily be converted to work in other languages.
"As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering," Sergei Shevchenko, Senior Malware Analyst at PC Tools, said in a statement.
"It employs highly intelligent and customized dialogue to target users of social networking systems."
He said the program "can monitor Internet browser activity, automatically recognize and fill in the fields in the web pages, generate keystrokes and mouse clicks, and post messages, URLs, files and photos."
"It can do exactly what users normally do when they are online, only in an automated pre-programmed way."
The CyberLover.ru site denied the program did anything wrong, saying it only gathered information that chatroom users themselves were volunteering.
"The program can find no more information than the user is prepared to provide," one of the site's employees, who gave his name only as Alexander, said in an emailed reply to Reuters questions.
"It maintains a dialogue with a person, but is not engaged in hacking or any other such schemes, I think this should be obvious," he said.
If you have someone who is ready to hand over secret information to the person they are chatting to after having known them for all of five minutes, then in that case a leak of information is possible."