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According to messages on AVG’s support forums and its own support site, an update released late Saturday for the company’s security software fingered the “user32.dll” file as a Trojan horse. As per the program’s settings, the AVG software, including the newest version 8.0 and its predecessor 7.5, shut the .dll away in quarantine. The result: A crippled computer.

The problem only affects users of the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP.

“If you have chosen ‘heal’ or ‘quarantine,’ your PC will no longer restart,” said a panicked user named “pa3bar” in a message Sunday. “It shows a blue screen at start up and tells you it cannot find winsvr, error c0000135. System recovery has no effect.”

The problem only affects users of the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP, according to the company. English versions of AVG are not affected.

AVG, best known for its free Antivirus, confirmed the error in a FAQ on its support site. “In case you are not able to run your Windows XP operating system after AVG 8.0 virus definition update, it may be caused by a false positive on a specific ‘user32.dll’ system file,” the company said. “The file was moved to the AVG Virus Vault and deleted. Therefore it is not possible to start Windows.”

Although some systems refused to boot, others rebooted endlessly instead.

On its support site, AVG posted instructions for affected users that involved running Windows XP’s Recovery Console, disabling several AVG services and restoring the user32.dll file by copying it from the operating system’s install CD. For users unable to locate their installation disc, AVG offered a utility that fixed the problem; those users also needed to create a bootable CD or USB drive.

“The U.S. might really have to look at a default on the bankruptcy reorganization of the present financial system” and the bankruptcy of the government is not out of the realm of possibility, Hennecke said.

“In the United States there is already a funding crisis, and they will have to sell a lot more bonds next year to fund the bailout packages that have already been signed off,” Hennecke told CNBC.

In order to solve or stem the economic slowdown, Hennecke suggested the US would have to radically reduce spending across all sectors and recall all its troops from around the world.

In their Science article “‘Who’ is Saying ‘What’? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech,” the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique ‘neural fingerprint’ in the listener’s brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition.

Seven study subjects listened to three different speech sounds (the vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/), spoken by three different people, while their brain activity was mapped using neuroimaging techniques (fMRI). With the help of data mining methods the researchers developed an algorithm to translate this brain activity into unique patterns that determine the identity of a speech sound or a voice. The various acoustic characteristics of vocal cord vibrations (neural patterns) were found to determine the brain activity.

Just like real fingerprints, these neural patterns are both unique and specific: the neural fingerprint of a speech sound does not change if uttered by somebody else and a speaker’s fingerprint remains the same, even if this person says something different.

Moreover, this study revealed that part of the complex sound-decoding process takes place in areas of the brain previously just associated with the early stages of sound processing. Existing neurocognitive models assume that processing sounds actively involves different regions of the brain according to a certain hierarchy: after a simple processing in the auditory cortex the more complex analysis (speech sounds into words) takes place in specialised regions of the brain. However, the findings from this study imply a less hierarchal processing of speech that is spread out more across the brain.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In early February, for example, the CDC reported the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states.

But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out.

The eviction, which took place before dawn on Sunday, comes after years of litigation that culminated in an Israeli supreme court ruling in July ordering the couple out of the house.

Several governments, including the United States and Britain, whose consulate is a few hundred yards from the house in east Jerusalem, had tried to intervene on behalf of Mohammad and Fawzieh al-Kurd but without success. Most of the international community has not recognised Israeli sovereignty over east Jerusalem, which was captured in the 1967 war and annexed.

Palestinians have long argued that evictions and demolitions are an attempt by Israel to reduce the number of Palestinians in east Jerusalem to allow settlement expansion and to pre-judge a final status peace agreement.

“It is damaging the peace between Palestinians and Israelis,” said Rafiq Husseini, chief of staff to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “They have to halt their settlers or they will not have peace with us ever.”

Starbucks fell 2.9 percent in late Nasdaq trading after saying 2009 earnings per share may be as low as 71 cents or as high as 90 cents, depending on how steeply sales deteriorate. In July it forecast earnings per share of 90 cents to $1. Analysts had estimated 87 cents.

Sales at stores open at least 13 months, a key measure of retail performance, declined 8 percent, which was more than the company expected, as consumers paying higher gasoline and grocery prices cut back on premium coffee. The slowdown has forced Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz to back away from his previous goal of opening 40,000 new cafes as he concentrates instead on making existing stores more profitable.

“The economy is not cooperating,” Emily Sanders, CEO of Sanders Financial Management in Atlanta, said in an interview today on Bloomberg Television. “They are fighting an uphill battle.”

The prototype vehicle, a zippy two-seat hatchback designed with more than a passing resemblance to the Volkswagen Beetle, can go about 60 miles on a single charge of its lithium battery and with practically zero emissions.

The secret?

“It’s the world’s first Stirling hybrid electric car,” its inventor said with a flourish.

Installed in the car’s trunk compartment is a Stirling engine invented at DEKA, Kamen’s technology company in the Manchester Millyard. It powers the features that would normally drain huge power from the battery, notably the defroster and heater.

That leaves the battery primarily for propulsion. “You’re running a pure electric, which is enormously cheaper to operate and enormously more environmentally friendly,” Kamen explained.

Stacks of baled paper, plastic and metal are mounting at the Sacramento Recycling & Transfer Station plant on Fruitridge Road because market prices are too low to turn a profit or, worse, no buyers can be found, its operators said.

Five miles to the west, Ming’s Recycling Corp. recently posted a sign at its entrance on 47th Avenue: “Ask for prices before you unload.”

“We got fed up reloading everybody’s pickup,” said Kevin Luong, the company’s marketing director, now in his seventh consecutive week of meager sales. “People are so shocked by the low prices. They think they are being ripped off here, but that’s not the case. It’s not us. It’s the market.”

If the scrap market doesn’t recover anytime soon, homeowners could see their garbage rates rise. Most recyclers pay for the materials cities and counties collect from residents’ blue curbside bins and then sell it for a profit. The proceeds help offset the government’s costs of collection.

“It helps keep our recycling rates low,” said Jessica Hess, a Sacramento city spokeswoman.

Local officials also see the buildup of unsold rubbish as a potential public health hazard. State waste regulators anticipate that dealers will ask that limits on the volume of stockpiled bales be relaxed.

“We’re wondering what can we do to provide some relief,” said Jon Meyers, spokesman for the state Integrated Waste Management Board.

Devalued recyclables easily could end up in the dump, making it harder for municipalities to comply with a state mandate to divert at least half of their waste from landfills, Meyers said.

As far as Sacramento County officials know, recyclers “are not landfilling it as yet,” said Paul Philleo, county director of waste management and recycling.

The scrap market took a nosedive in late September. At first, industry analysts thought they were seeing a short-term “Olympics effect” from the shutdown of Chinese paper mills and other big polluters during the Summer Games in Beijing. But as the weeks of rock-bottom prices wore on, the cause became clear.

China, a voracious consumer of West Coast scrap, has all but stopped buying used paper and plastic because international demand for Chinese products made from these recyclables has diminished. Much of the material goes to making cardboard and plastics for packaging everything from iPods to eyewear, computers and cars.

“A lot of the material was going to China to make boxes for all the things they were shipping back to the United States,” said Bruce Savage, spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries in Washington, D.C. “When they aren’t producing products, they don’t need the packaging materials.”

When the cavalcade of collapses in housing, credit, stocks and commodities hit the recycling industry, it plummeted.