Melbourne, Sept 28 (ANI): Consumer and drug research groups have slammed the plan of releasing of a caffeine-laden 'glamorous' soft drink called Cocaine.

Max Howard, Queensland Consumer Association state secretary, said that he found the "trivializing" of the illicit drug unethical.

Howard also said that he would seek advice from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as to whether the beverage can be marketed Down Under.

"Calling a drink Cocaine is just wrong," News.com.au quoted Howard, as saying.

The drink's Australian version won't be as strong as in Britain and the US, where it has been a hit, in part because it has 3 1/2 times the caffeine of other "energy" drinks such as Red Bull.

It won't have the 280mg jolt available overseas because Australian restrictions limit caffeine to 80mg per 250ml serve.

Jamey Kirkby, president of Cocaine manufacturer Redux Beverages, said that can't understand the fuss.

"I think that it is a silly proposition to think a soda pop . . . is going to lead anyone to do drugs. We hope that our drink will take some mystery and intrigue away from the drug," he said.

Paul Dillon, from Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia, said: "This reinforces what many young people tell us . . . on the image of cocaine - that it's a soft drug that's glamorous."

The drink is due to hit the Australian market in November. (ANI)

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London, Sept 27 (ANI): A British judge was shocked to discover that sex perverts could easily roam about unchecked by just registering their home address as a bus stop or park bench.

The glitch in the law could prove to be very dangerous, as it allows rapists and paedophiles, like rocker Gary Glitter, 64, to move about freely and to go about their activities undetected. Those convicted of crimes, but later released, need to sign the Sex Offenders' Register, which is designed to keep track of perverts.

Judge Anthony Scott-Gall has branded the loophole "astonishing", after he heard of it when a homeless sex offender appeared at Lewes Crown Court, Sussex, after going missing for nearly three years.

"How do the police keep track of people who have no fixed address?" Daily Star quoted the judge as asking.

Prosecutor Barbara Down further explained to him how the loophole worked.

"Apparently, it is perfectly acceptable to sign the register with a particular bus stop or public bench as your home address," she said.

"Offenders can even put down 'The third tree on the left in Friston Forest' if they want," she added.

Shaking his head, the judge said: "That's quite astonishing."

After the hearing, Yvonne Traynor, of the Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre UK, was quite furious that such a thing could be allowed to happen.

"This makes a mockery of the system," she stated.

"If the police are not keeping tabs on these people, we're all in big trouble," she added.

Mappa, which runs the Sex Offenders' Register, confirmed the bizarre addresses can be used, the only thing offenders need to do is to inform the police if they are moving. (ANI)

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London, September 27 (ANI): British children who are kept indoors for longer duration are more prone to online predators than their European counterparts, claims a new survey.

According to the study by co-author Dr Leslie Haddon, of the EU Kids Online project, worried parents, in order to safeguard their children against street dangers, are exposing their kids to dangerous online situations at home.

The experts said that by trying to confine the kids within the four walls, the parents were actually increasing their kids' number of online hours.

Based at the London School of Economics, the survey revealed that more than one in four young people in the UK has received "unwanted sexual comments" while using the internet as compared with just one in 10 in Germany and Ireland.

It also found that 17 per cent of children under six used the net in Britain, twice as many as in Europe in general.

"Our study has found that greater use of the internet results in more exposure to risk," Telegraph quoted Dr Leslie Haddon as saying.

"It's not the case, as some have assumed, that the more experienced you are online the more easy you find it to avoid risks," she added.

The study allots the cause of unsupervised kids using the Internet to factors such as single-parent families, divorces, and children born outside marriages that are greater in number in Britain than in other countries in Europe.

"Although more and more children and young people may be under greater supervision overall, by virtue of being in homes, within the privacy of their bedrooms their access to the online world is less easy to supervise," the study concluded. (ANI)

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London, Sept 27 (ANI): Florian Seiche, HTC (High Tech Computers) chief, the designers of Google's G1 phone, has claimed that with its high-tech features, the new phone could make the personal computer obsolete.

Florian Seiche, whose company designed Google's answer to the iPhone, believes the personal computer will soon join the 'dodo'.

Seiche insisted that the phone is set to transform the way we think about the internet, and could even kill off the PC.

Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the G1 phone amid a frenzy of excitement in New York this week.

"This is really big news for the entire mobile world. It is so fast, responsive and easy to navigate that you basically have the same browsing experience you would have on your desktop at home," Telegraph quoted him, as saying. He said that its just a matter of a couple of years that people will look back and remember how "awkward" it was that they could only go online when they were sat down in front of their PC, because "it will just be very natural that you can enjoy the internet wherever you are".

The G1 is touted as Google's answer to the iPhone, the image it may easily pull off by taking advantage of Google's wealth of applications that have already transformed the desktop.

It offers one-touch access to Google mail, which revolutionised web-based email services. It promises to make watching videos on the Google-owned YouTube a delight. Meanwhile instant-messaging via the Google Talk chat service could mean the end of back-and-forth text messaging.

The phone boasts so many "very, very cool and compelling features", including an mp3 player with access to Amazon's music download service, that he believes "many users will find it highly addictive".

"That is all available on day one of the platform going live. So you can just imagine within six months, within a year, the vast kind of choices consumers will have about what to turn their mobile device into," said Seiche.

And the most revolutionising feature is the phone's operating system which will allow the phone to evolve into the future. (ANI)

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