The one-eyed figures join the large family of mascots that includes the Five Fuwa of Beijing (2008), the bear Misha of Moscow (1980) and many others.

Wenlock is the name of the English village considered by many to be the birthplace of the modern Olympics. People think its local games inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the International Olympic Committee.

The other mascot's name is a reference to the village of Stoke Mandeville, where the Paralympic movement began.

The duet of mascots is a central part of London's merchandising strategy and will feature in everything from T-shirts to tea towels. No doubt they will be seen under children's arms as cuddly toys.

Some adult commentators think that the mascots are creepy and might scare youngsters.However, children were consulted during their creation.

The 2012 Committee Chairman, Sebastian Coe, said: "We want them to be part of our fan base. We want them to engage with young people. They have in large part been designed and driven by what young people want."

The organisers of the Games are keen to avoid another controversy like the one that surrounded the unveiling of the puzzle-style Olympic logo in 2007. It was criticised by a sceptical British public. The video used to promote it was even claimed to trigger seizures in a few people.

Young fans like their mascots to come with a backstory. Children's author Michael Morpurgo came up with the idea that the mascots origin,was from the last drops of molten steel left over from the construction of the Olympic Stadium.

Adults and organisers might argue but the most important audience for Wenlock and Mandeville are children. Ten-year-old Kira, from Essex in England, wrote to the BBC to say: "I think it is wicked! I love the Olympics and so does my sister!"

It was the ninth such death and the 11th such fall at the plant this year. Two Foxconn employees were severely injured in failed suicide attempts.

The death was confirmed by the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau Tuesday. But police have not yet determined whether the death was suicide or an accident.

The dead Foxconn employee is a 19-year-old male, and he fell from a building at Foxconn's Guanglan plant at 6:30 a.m., according to sources familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for Foxconn could not be reached Tuesday.

Foxconn is part of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. and makes computers, game consoles and mobile phones for companies including Hewlett-Packard Co., Sony Corp. and Nokia Corp.

Of Foxconn's 800,000 employees in China, 420,000 are based in Shenzhen. They work shifts and live inside the massive factory complex.

Talking or answering phone calls during work time is forbidden and workers are not allowed to leave production lines unless the line supervisor temporarily takes their place, said Foxconn employee Cheng Lin.

The mobile advertising space is shaping up as the latest battleground in an increasingly testy rivalry that led Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to step down from Apple's board of directors last year.

Schmidt may have been photographed recently chatting amiably with Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs at a Palo Alto, California, cafe but the technology giants are slugging it out on a growing number of fronts.

Google's Web browser, Chrome, competes with Apple's Safari and the Internet giant's computer operating system, also called Chrome, and its Android mobile phone operating system also pose competition to Apple products.

In a move that struck at Apple's core, Google launched a smartphone earlier this year, the Nexus One, as a rival to Apple's popular iPhone.

Apple struck back with a lawsuit against Taiwan's HTC, maker of the Nexus One, accusing it of infringing on iPhone patents.

Mobile advertising is the arena for their latest struggle and Apple's Jobs fired a few jabs at Google as he previewed a new mobile ad platform called "iAd" at an event Thursday to unveil the latest iPhone operating system.

Jobs said Google had "snatched" away AdMob, a mobile ad firm Apple had been seeking to buy last year, and made it clear he thinks the Internet search giant has it all wrong when it comes to mobile advertising.

Google has made its fortune from Web search advertising, placing relevant ads next to search queries, and its purchase of AdMob was a bid to extend its reach into the booming world of mobile devices.

But Apple, which announced its purchase of AdMob rival Quattro Wireless on the same day that Google unveiled the Nexus One, sees the future of mobile advertising in applications not search.

"On the desktop, search is where it's at, that's where the money is," Jobs said. "But on a mobile device search hasn't happened, search is not where it's at. People aren't searching on a mobile device like they do on a desktop.

"What's happening is they're spending all of their time on apps," Jobs said -- applications like the more than 185,000 that Apple currently offers for the iPhone and the iPod Touch through its App Store.

"They're using apps to get the data on the Internet rather than a generalized search," Jobs said. "This is where the opportunity to deliver advertising is. Not as part of search but as part of apps."

Apple's iAd platform allows software developers or ad agencies to embed ads directly into applications being offered for the iPhone, the iPod Touch and now the iPad, Apple's new touchscreen tablet computer.

Jobs said Apple will sell and host the ads and give developers 60 percent of the revenue while keeping the remaining 40 percent.

Forrester technology analyst Julie Ask said Apple's iAds has "raised the bar on quality of mobile ads by keeping consumers within their existing application or experience."

Analyst Rob Enderle of Silicon Valley's Enderle Group said "iAds looks brilliant to me and solidly in Google's space.

"This is something that Google should have done," Enderle said. "It's funny to have Google chasing Apple on ad revenue."

"Because we're increasingly living on mobile devices this could actually be a better source of revenue than typical PC Web-based ads because often we find ourselves away from our desks and unwilling to open up a laptop," Enderle said.

"As we look at the future of advertising this kind of concept could be much more lucrative than what's come before it," he said.

Estimates of mobile advertising growth vary widely. A report by the Kelsey Group put the mobile advertising market at 3.1 billion dollars in 2013 while another report, by Juniper Research, put it at 5.7 billion dollars in 2014.

Now as the government awards the money, some phone and cable companies complain that not all of it is being used to bring broadband to places that lack it. Instead, these companies say, much of the money will fund new networks in places where they already offer service.

From the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Great Plains, some local phone and cable companies fear they will have to compete with government-subsidized broadband systems, paid for largely with stimulus dollars. If these taxpayer-funded networks siphon off customers with lower prices, private companies warn that they could be less likely to upgrade their own lines, endangering jobs and undermining the goals of the stimulus plan.

"It is extremely unfair that the government comes in and uses big government money to harm existing private businesses," says Gary Shorman, president of Eagle Communications, a Kansas cable company with about 16,000 customers.

Eagle is bracing for competition in its hometown of Hays from Rural Telephone Service Co., a phone company awarded $101 million in stimulus grants and loans to bring broadband to rural Kansas. Shorman's prediction: "This hurts our company."

Yet government officials handing out the awards and the backers of the projects being funded insist the money is being well spent. They contend that the stimulus dollars should be used to expand high-speed Internet access not only to places where it is totally unavailable, but also in regions where what is available is not good enough.

Many existing systems, they note, lack the capacity to meet mushrooming demand for bandwidth. The new stimulus-funded networks will provide far more robust connections — many with speeds of up to 100 megabits or even 10 gigabits per second to schools, libraries and other "anchor institutions." That's roughly 20 to 2,000 times faster than the DSL and cable wires linking most American homes today.

"It's a little disappointing that companies that aren't adequately serving these areas are trying to undercut those of us who are trying to step in and get the service where it's needed," says Lawrence Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the arm of the Commerce Department handing out much of the stimulus money.

The NTIA and the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service have given out more than $2 billion in stimulus grants and loans and now are sorting through piles of applications for the remainder of the money. The funding is going for high-speed networks, computer centers and broadband adoption programs, and the recipients include government agencies, rural cooperatives and private companies.

Of the 140 awards made so far, 108 will help pay for broadband networks. And roughly 70 percent of them cover areas already served at least in part by existing broadband providers, according to a U.S. Telecom Association analysis of data that existing carriers have filed with the government.

One such project is the North Georgia Network Cooperative, a coalition of county economic development authorities, a state university and two electric co-ops. It got a $33.5 million NTIA grant to build a 260-mile fiber-optic ring across 12 Georgia counties in the Appalachian foothills.

The system will form the backbone of a so-called "middle-mile" network that will provide connections as fast as 10 gigabits per second to schools, government offices and other "anchor" institutions, as well as telecommunications carriers that want to serve their own customers. It will also reach as many as 20,000 homes.

Some of those homes can get service now from Windstream Corp., a rural phone company with 3 million customers in 21 states. Windstream says it has invested $5 million in network upgrades across the area covered by the Georgia project over the past three years.

The stimulus-funded project undermines the economics of those investments, maintains Michael Rhoda, Windstream's senior vice president of government affairs. In particular, he points to low-density areas where Windstream will now have to share a limited pool of customers with a subsidized competitor.

Windstream today offers broadband to 89 percent of its 3 million customers, with typical connection speeds ranging from 3 megabits to 12 megabits per second and 1-gigabit connections available to high-volume users. The stimulus money, Rhoda believes, should be targeted at places where it is uneconomic for private companies to provide broadband — "the last 11 percent," in Windstream's case. Windstream has in fact applied for $238 million in stimulus funding to reach many of those customers.

FairPoint Communications Inc., a phone company with operations in 18 states, has voiced similar concerns about a $25.4 million NTIA grant to build three interconnected fiber rings in Maine.

The so-called Three Ring Binder project is backed by the state government, the state university system and small telecommunications companies. The 1,100-mile network will also be "middle mile" — bringing 1-gigabit connections to University of Maine campuses and other anchor institutions and Internet service providers that need bandwidth.

Yet FairPoint, which bought the phone lines in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont for $2.3 billion from Verizon Communications Inc. two years ago, insists the project would duplicate much of its system. According to FairPoint President Peter Nixon, the company has built more than 400 miles of fiber and invested more than $100 million in broadband since it bought the Verizon network. Today, roughly 75 percent of FairPoint's customer base has access to broadband, primarily DSL with speeds ranging from 7 megabits to 30 megabits per second.

FairPoint complained to Maine lawmakers, but recently called a truce. It has reached a deal that will enable it and other phone companies to expand broadband with fees collected from users of the new fiber network.

Still, FairPoint argues that the Three Ring Binder distorts the market. "We support broadband expansion," Nixon says. "We support competition. All we are asking for is a level playing field."

Government officials say such arguments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the stimulus program.

The $101 million Kansas project, for instance, will bring connection speeds of up to 1 gigabit to businesses and up to 100 megabits to as many as 23,000 homes. While the network will cover the population center of Hays, where both Rural Telephone and Eagle Communications already offer broadband, that accounts for just eight of the 4,600 square miles to be reached. Much of the area has no broadband at all, says Larry Sevier, Rural Telephone's chief executive.

The goal is to "close the digital divide between Hays and the outlying areas," says Jonathan Adelstein, head of the Rural Utilities Service, which awarded the money.

Meanwhile, in Maine, Fairpoint is struggling. The company wrestled with service problems when it bought the Verizon network, which needed major upgrades. It also took on over $2 billion in debt to buy the system, which ultimately helped push the company into bankruptcy protection.

That has left FairPoint unable to bring broadband to wide swaths of rural Maine, says Dwight Allison, chief executive of Maine Fiber Co., which was created to build and operate the stimulus-funded network. The project, he says, represents a serious competitive threat to a company that "feels its monopoly is being attacked."

One irony of the phone and cable company complaints, Strickling argues, is that these companies could benefit from the new government-funded networks. These networks must be open to other carriers that want to lease bandwidth, which could enable existing carriers to reach new customers.

Strickling adds that while basic residential broadband may already be available in some places getting stimulus dollars, the program is designed not only to bring access to homes. It also aims to ensure that hospitals, schools, businesses and other community institutions have the ultra-fast connections needed for cutting-edge applications such as real-time video chats with doctors and educators.

Indeed, Bruce Abraham, executive director of the Lumpkin County Development Authority, a partner in the Georgia cooperative, has pinned his hopes for economic development on the stimulus. A lack of affordable high-speed connections, he contends, has made it difficult to attract new businesses to an area dependent on low-wage manufacturing jobs that are disappearing.

The new network, he says, could change all that.

"We have a failing economy," Abraham says. "We have no railways, no highways here in the mountains. ... Broadband is the best infrastructure solution to get better-paying jobs here."

Google Inc.'s Jan. 12 announcement that it would no longer censor search results in China prompted concern about possible commercial fallout. The company postponed the launch of its own smart phone in China but others are developing Android-based phones and could be hurt if Beijing tries to penalize Google by barring its use.

"As long as it fulfills Chinese laws and regulations and has good communication with telecom operators, I think its application should not have restrictions," said Zhu Hongren, a spokeman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, at a regular news briefing when asked whether Beijing would permit use of Android.

The comments reflect the conflicting pressures on the communist government, which insists on controlling information but needs foreign companies like Google to help achieve its goal of making China a technology leader.

The operating system is the foundation of a mobile phone's features and changing it after products have been launched would require expensive basic redesigns, said Ted Dean, managing director of BDA China Ltd., a Beijing research firm.

"There's a pretty significant upfront investment in developing a phone on one operating system," Dean said. "So you don't want to change course on so basic a system as what opeating system it works on."

Google is in sensitive talks with the government, trying to keep an important Beijing development center, a lucrative advertising sales team and access to China's booming market for its fledgling mobile phone business.

A Google spokesman, Jessica Powell, declined Wednesday to comment on the status of talks or confirm whether top managers from the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters were in Beijing.

Zhu gave no indication of the possible fate of Google's own phone, planned with local carrier China Unicom Ltd.

China is the world's most populous mobile phone market and any restrictions on Google might hamper its effort to expand into mobile. The country has more than 700 million accounts and strong demand for advanced services.

State-owned China Mobile Ltd., the world's biggest phone company by subscribers, is developing its own smart phone, the OPhone, which uses a system that has Android as its foundation.

The involvement of such a major state company, a key player in Beijing's technology development plans, could add to pressure on authorities to contain the commercial consequences of the Google dispute.

Dell Inc., Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Corp. also plan to sell Android-based phones in China.

Google allows use of Android for free, which might boost costs for manufacturers and phone carriers if they switch systems, Dean said.

Microsoft Inc., Nokia Corp. and others charge royalties for their mobile operating systems.

"It's a significant enough share of the price of a phone that it changes the economies of the smart phone business if you're paying someone else for the operating system," Dean said.

___

On the Net:

Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (in Chinese): http://www.miit.gov.cn

1. MySpace.com
2. Facebook.com
3. YouTube.com
4. Playboy.com
5. Ebay.com
6. Meebo.com
7. Friendster.com
8. Orkut.com
9. AdultFriendFinder.com
10. Espn.com

These are currently the ten most-blocked Web sites on home, school, and small business networks. Most of the blocked or blacklisted sites are about social networks, shopping, sex, religion and pop culture. This is not the same as China. In China, websites that talk about Porn, Tibet or Democracy are blocked.

Buses were seen torched on a street of Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in this picture taken on the early morning of Monday, July 6, 2009. The violence in Urumqi has led to the death of "a number of civilians and one armed police officer" on Sunday.

Look at the article. My heart is very heavy. We are all Chinese. Why did they want to make incidents and hurt our fellow citizens.

We had the some name——Chinese people. So why we not living in harmony. All of us need peace, aren't we?

A shop was seen torched in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in this picture taken on Sunday, July 5, 2009.

The death toll has risen to 156 following Sunday night's riot in Urumqi, there are 129 males and 27 females. At least 1080 people were injured in the deadly violence that erupted Sunday night.

Rioters burned 261 motor vehicles, including 190 buses, at least 10 taxis and two police cars

A shop was seen smashed at Tianchi Road,in Urumqi.

An injured person was taken to hospital for treatment in Urumqi

To quell that threat, those authorities said on Tuesday that they had issued new regulations aimed at restricting the trade and use of virtual money.

China is one of the world’s biggest markets for huge so-called multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, and tens of millions of young people are believed to be trading virtual goods and credits for real goods and cash.

The coin of fantasy realms have already moved markets here. So-called QQ coins — a form of currency produced by the Chinese Internet giant Tencent — have sometimes risen sharply in value against China’s official currency, the renminbi, alarming officials at the nation’s Central Bank.

Some people have even traded virtual currencies in China, and exchanged them for clothes, cosmetics and other goods.

Last year, nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. Some experts say they believe there is a much larger underground economy in the virtual world.

Most of China’s big Internet companies — like Sohu.com, Netease and Tencent — have some gaming component and virtual currencies have grown up alongside many of them.

Some smaller gaming companies have even set up what are called virtual sweatshops, cramped quarters where young people play online games to earn credits that the companies then sell at a profit to overseas customers in Taiwan, South Korea and even the United States.

This practice is popularly known in the online gaming community as gold farming.

Many online marketplaces, like eBay and China’s Taobao, even have online advertisements offering virtual goods for sale, like World of Warcraft gold coins and virtual swords for the game Legend of Swordmen.

Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington who says he believes virtual currencies could pose a threat to world economies, applauded Beijing’s move.

“This action shows that at least one government is concerned about the way virtual worlds challenge its control of society,” Professor Castronova said in an e-mail message Tuesday. “As virtual currencies take over more and more purchasing power, control over the effective money supply shifts from the central bank to the game developers."

On Tuesday, China said that new regulations would restrict the trading and use of virtual money, and that virtual currencies would be banned from being exchanged for goods.

The government also said it was moving to fight online gambling and disputes over virtual coins.

In a release, Beijing said that while virtual currencies had helped promote online gaming, they have “also brought new economic and social problems.”

Beijing has repeatedly sought to tame the online gaming market with new regulations (and even Internet addiction camps) but the activity continues to grow.

The new rules, issued jointly last weekend by the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, are the government’s strongest effort yet to tame virtual money.

The regulations were widely circulated just as Beijing announced it would delay adoption of a widely criticized plan to install software that was supposed to censor pornographic and other “unhealthy” Web sites in all personal computers sold in China.

Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley, released a brief report Tuesday saying he expected only limited financial impact on Chinese gaming companies because much of the trading in virtual currencies and goods does not occur on the sites of big, publicly listed gaming companies, he says; it occurs on other Web sites.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/technology/internet/01yuan.html

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.