Sergey Brin's New Lover Amanda Rosenberg

• Amanda Rosenberg last night named as the new lover of Sergey Brin

The Google co-founder is one of the world's richest men with £15bn fortune

He and wife Anne Wojcicki, both 40, married in 2007 and have two children

Miss Rosenberg went to the same £31,000-a-year school as the Middletons

She is marketing manager for Google's Glass computerised spec

tacles

The 27-year-old came up with the 'Ok, Glass' command to activate the device

Brin and his wife reportedly have a prenuptial agreement in case of divorce 

By Neil Sears and David Gardner

Google gossip: Amanda Rosenberg is the 27-year-old British woman who has struck up a romance with multibilionaire Google co-founder Sergey Brin

A British woman who left London in search of fame and fortune with Google is at the centre of Silicon Valley gossip after striking up a romance with the search engine’s married multi-billionaire founder.
Only last year, Amanda Rosenberg was so friendless after moving to San Francisco that she spoke of eating her lunch alone in the toilets.

But the 27-year-old, who boarded at £31,000-a-year Marlborough College with Princess Beatrice and Kate and Pippa Middleton, certainly seems to  have turned things around – for she was last night named as the new lover of Sergey Brin, 40.
Google has been rocked by talk of the romance, and a spokesman yesterday confirmed that Brin – one of the world’s richest men with a £15billion fortune – has for several months been living apart from his wife of six years Anne Wojcicki, the mother of his two children.
If they divorce, Californian law suggests their massive fortune would have to be halved – although they reportedly signed a strict pre-nuptial agreement.
While the internet was agog with talk of Brin romancing his much younger employee, the Daily Mail tracked down a distinctly unsurprised former boyfriend of Miss Rosenberg – who said she ‘knew the power of her womanly ways’.
Ewan Butler, 28, a trainee teacher living with his parents in Darlington, said: ‘Amanda’s a good looking girl, and she knows she is.
'And she’s good at “playing” men – she played me.’
Brin’s relationship with Rosenberg emerged only yesterday – but the pair were pictured together earlier this year at a New York Fashion Week event, both wearing the controversial Google Glass computerised spectacles for which she is marketing manager.
An employee of Google since she graduated with a communications degree from Leeds University, she initially worked for the internet giant in London before last year moving to San Francisco to work at its Silicon Valley nerve centre.
She soon won a role promoting Google Glass, widely criticised as the glasses which enable users to film and broadcast over the internet everything they see non-stop, worrying privacy campaigners.

Miss Rosenberg wrote an online blog soon after she arrived – describing herself as a ‘misanthropic Brit struggling to come to terms with Californian optimism’.

Split: Mr Brin, who is worth a staggering £15billion, has separated from his wife of six years, Anne Wojcicki, left

A good looking girl... 'who knows she is': Miss Rosenberg, shown left wearing the Google Glass device and right in a picture from her Google+ profile, previously dated Ewan Butler, 28, a trainee teacher living from Darlington

Employee: Miss Rosenberg pictured in a YouTube marketing video for Google Glass. She won her role promoting the controversial spectacles after coming up with the voice command ‘Ok, Glass’ to activate them

Glasses promotion: Rosenberg with boss Brin and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg in New York

She wrote: ‘I’d been living a beautifully choreographed life in London for pretty much my entire life; family, friends, job, life. Then one day I realised the beauty had faded.

‘So I applied for a transfer with my company to a different country. Yes! The romance of a transfer!
‘Luckily for me this all worked out like I dreamed it would...NOT. Of course it didn’t work out like that!
‘I remember having conversations with people about moving countries, and no one talks about how it felt to be alone.
'I wanted to grab them and scream “Why are you not telling me about how you ate lunch in the toilets at work for the first week because no one talked to you?”.’

Power couple: If Brin and Wojcicki, his wife of six years, divorce, Californian law suggests their massive fortune would have to be halved - although they reportedly signed a strict pre-nuptial agreement

Marriage on the rocks: A Google spokesman confirmed that Brin – one of the world’s richest men – has for several months been living apart from Wojcicki, the mother of his two children

Miss Rosenberg, who previously lived in Wimbledon, adding tellingly that her first thought in her new office was: ‘Hello new boss, hello new team...LIKE ME IMMEDIATELY.’ 

A RELATIONSHIP RIDICULED

Sergey Brin, 40, is being roundly mocked on the internet over his apparent relationship with Amanda Rosenberg.

One of numerous websites ridiculing the reported affair draws particular attention to his recent enthusiasm for the ‘Google Glass’ computerised spectacles.
The website jibes: ‘Since Google Glass launched the company’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, hasn’t been spotted without a pair.
'He’s placed himself atop the privacy-eroding project, publicly, and inside Google’s secret labs.
'Maybe it’s because he’s f****** the Glass marketing manager, Amanda Rosenberg.’
The blog goes on: ‘Knowing that one of the most vital, powerful men at the company has been using Google’s most ambitious product as a dating pool won’t be smooth news for the rest of the team.’

She also wrote that she was initially so shy she failed to turn up at her first work drinks invitation, fearing she would be ‘the weird loner in the corner’, so stayed in eating biscuits alone on her sofa instead.

In an internet profile Miss Rosenberg wrote of herself: ‘I’m part of the master race that is the Chinese Jew or Chew, if you will.
'Born in Hong Kong but bred in the UK. A misanthrope who’s bad at maths, so I got the worst of both worlds.’
Elsewhere she declares that her motto is: ‘He who hesitates is a damned fool.’
Miss Rosenberg is understood to have an English father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother who worked as an investment banker.
After leaving Marlborough, where Pippa Middleton was two years above her, and Princess Beatrice was just a year below, she soon began a year-long relationship with fellow Leeds University student Mr Butler.
Told his ex was being linked to the Google tycoon, he said: ‘It wouldn’t surprise me in the least – she’s that kind of girl.’
He added: ‘Although Amanda did have a posh crew she knocked around with she wasn’t stuck up like you might expect from a Marlborough girl.
'With me I think there was a fascination with me being northern – I was pretty much the only person in our student halls who went to a comprehensive.’

More than a marketing manager: Miss Rosenberg also appears in promotional shots for Google Glass 

California dreamin': She wrote on her blog that she was initially so shy in her new role in Google's Silicon Valley HQ she failed to turn up at her first work drinks invitation, fearing she would be 'the weird loner in the corner'

Mixed-race heritage: Miss Rosenberg is understood to have an English father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. She describes herself as 'part of the master race that is the Chinese Jew or Chew, if you will'

Geek chic: Miss Rosenberg's blog details how she made every effort to fit in with Google's in-crowd

Celebrity lifestyle: Miss Rosenberg poses with British rapper and iconic glasses-wearer Tinie Tempah

Romantic link: Hugo Barra, Google's product management director for Android. Miss Rosenberg was previously linked to the Google executive, who recently announced he was leaving the firm to take a job in China

Intriguingly Miss Rosenberg had already had a high-flying Google boyfriend in America – senior executive Hugo Barra, who recently announced he was leaving to join a Chinese computer firm.
Last night Miss Rosenberg – who got her Google Glass job after coming up with the voice command ‘Ok, Glass’ to activate the device - could not be contacted for comment.
A spokesman for Brin – who founded Google with Larry Page in 1998 – said that he was not legally separated from his wife and that ‘they remain good friends and partners’.

How I Smuggled 'Porn' Out of North Korea

By Isaac Stone Fish


On Wednesday, the occasionally reliable South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that a dozen performers, including Kim Jong Un's ex-girlfriend, were executed for making sex tapes, some of which "have apparently gone on sale in China," violating North Korean laws against pornography.

The story has been picked up by FoxNews and theTelegraph, among others, though it's impossible to judge its veracity. Still, this seems as good a time as any to tell the story of how I smuggled pornography out of Pyongyang.

On a trip to North Korea in September 2011, my tour group stopped in the city of Kaesong near the South Korean border. One of the few North Korean cities open to U.S. tourists, Kaesong is perched near the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily fortified, 160 mile-long border separating the two Koreas.

Tourism in North Korea involves minders shuttling you between Kim family monuments, punctuated by pre-arranged restaurant meals and, occasionally, opportunities to shop. Right around the time we were allowed to photograph a rock memorializing Kim Il Sung's last known calligraphy, our guides took us to a little stand. And in one of the few places selling goods to foreigners, amid bitter ginseng candies and wooden backscratchers and berry liquors, I purchased a silkscreen that, to my untrained eye, looked a lot like topless women bathing by a lake.

Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, tells me the silkscreen, pictured above, is a reproduction of a well-known painting by 18th century Korean artist Sin Yun Bok, called "AScenery on Dano Day." For North Koreans, "this will have a soft porno appeal," he says.

This probably wouldn't be remarkable anywhere else, but North Korea is one of the world's most conservative countries. It was shocking when Kim Jong Un appeared on television in July 2012 with (unlicensed) Disney characters, but more because the video also included women in strapless dresses -- bare shoulders in public are practically unheard of in Pyongyang, outside of a gymnastics outfit. In The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, defector Chol-hwan Kang gushesabout his first experience with erotic film in South Korea. "One night seemed too short a time to make up for a lifetime of North Korean prudishness," he wrote in his 2000 memoir. We had entered a fairyland. We couldn't believe our eyes."

Obviously, porn exists in North Korea. Former CIA official Henry Crumpton, in his 2012 book The Art of Intelligence, wrote "I've never met a North Korean diplomat who did not want porn, either for personal use or resale." And in 2009, South Korean media released a video, allegedly for internal North Korean use, featuring scantily clad women dancing to pop tunes.

As I was leaving the country, a border guard at the Pyongyang Airport, perhaps suspecting I was a journalist, gruffly and methodically searched through my bag. He unpacked my clothes, ruffled through my books, and peered into my Dopp kit. When he came across the red bag housing my silkscreen, I grew nervous and smiled awkwardly. He unfolded it and stared at the image. If memory serves, I was the last one of my tour group to go through security, and my mind briefly raced through the consequences of spreading illicit materials in the world's most repressive country. He looked up at me, only to flash a delighted grin, gently return the silkscreen to its bag, and wave me through.

source: foreignpolicy.com

Which Organs Can I Live Without, And How Much Cash Can I Get For Them?

First, a disclaimer: Selling your organs is illegal in the United States. It’s also very dangerous. Handing off an organ is risky enough when done in a top hospital, even more so if you’re doing it for cash in a back alley. No, really: Don’t do this. OK? OK.

There are many organs one can theoretically do without, or for which there’s a backup. Most folks can spare a kidney, a portion of their liver, a lung, some intestines, and an eyeball, and still live a long life. That said, donating a lung, a piece of liver or a section of intestines is a very complicated surgery, so it’s not done frequently on the black market. And no one’s going to make much cash on an eyeball. “In the U.S., there’s a fairly steady supply of donated corneas from corpses,” says Sean Fitzpatrick, director of public affairs at the New England Organ Bank. “There’s pretty much no market demand for eyes.” Giving up a kidney, though, is a relatively simple surgery that has netted desperate people a few bucks.

No one’s going to make much cash on an eyeball. Now, black-market organ dealers don’t do a great job of filing taxes, but here are some prices based on rumored deals and reports from the World Heath Organization. In India, a kidney fetches around $20,000. In China, buyers will pay $40,000 or more. A good, healthy kidney from Israel goes for $160,000.

Don’t expect to pocket all that dough, though. “The person giving up the organ only gets a fraction of the fee,” says Sally Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank who studies the prices paid by legal and illegal organ-donor operations. After the organ broker—the guy who sets up your kidney-for-cash transaction—takes his cut, he needs to pay for travel, the surgeon, medical supplies and a few “look-the-other-way” payoffs. Most people get $1,000 to $10,000 for their kidney (probably much less than you were hoping for).

The best bet is to wait until compensation for organs is legalized in the U.S.—the Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act of 2009 would allow payment to donors, but it stalled in Congress—because there’s certainly a market for kidneys. Last summer, a man offering one of his for $100,000 (plus medical expenses) on Craigslist received several offers until the Web site removed his post. And you could probably hold out for even more. In 1999, before eBay delisted a kidney put up for auction, bidders drove the price up to $5.75 million.

Bang with Friends Returns

Three Months After Being Banned From The App Store, Bang With Friends Returns As “Down”

By Greg Kumparak

They’re baaack.

Bang With Friends, the Facebook friend hookup app that seemed to be endlessly engulfed in one controversy or another earlier this year, is returning to the iOS App Store (albeit in a slightly toned-down form) after gettin’ the boot back in May.

For those who missed all the hubbub, even the concept behind Bang With Friends tends to get some people worked up: you open the app, and select which of your Facebook friends you’d want to have over for a romantic steak dinner followed by a screening of The Notebook hook up with. It’s all kept anonymous, unless that same person picks you as a would-be fling in turn.

If there’s a match, Bang With Friends attempts to connect the dots. After a recent update, users can also mark a friend as someone they’d like to “hang” with. Why anonymity is required to say you’d want to hang out with someone you’re already friends with on Facebook, I have no idea.

Back in May, Bang With Friends wiggled its way into the App Store as the moderately more mild “BWF” (on Android, it ditches the acronym in favor of its full name.) Ten days later, however, Apple dropped the banhammer.

As you might expect, the app’s creators — who once tried to remain anonymous themselves, though their identities eventually leaked — protested the decision. They argued that they limited use of the app to adults, contesting that plenty of other apps served the same purpose, just without being quite as blatant.

“We’re working with Apple to get BWF back into the App Store shortly,” promised BWF’s site.
“Shortly”, here, eventually proving to mean “in three months”.

The app returned this morning, though not without its fair share of tweaks and changes to appease the powers that be. Gone are all traces of the word “Bang”; gone is the app’s uber suggestive launch screen imagery. The app is now called “Down”, its namesake “Down To Bang” button now reading just “I’m Down”.


Down to what, you ask? Down to share a pop? Down to go kiteboarding? It’s left open to interpretation (at least theoretically), vague and innocuous enough that it’d be hard to get too offended without already having been offended by the app’s earlier iterations.

The name change also works out alright in a few other ways. After the influx of users from their early controversies, the company had seemingly been trying to steer the app into less of a straight up hookup app into something a bit more broad, like a general dating/friend finding service — hence the introduction of the “Down To Hang” button.

Plus, there’s that whole Zynga lawsuit over the “with friends” trademark. It’s unclear as to whether or not the potential legal battle had any influence on the name change; while it gets them away from using “with Friends” on the App Store, the name remains unchanged for the company’s Android and web variants as of this morning. Their company name in the App Store is still listed as “Bang With Friends, Inc.”

The new, self-censored app is up on the App Store here.

Mary Kom To Take Year Long Break From Boxing

Imphal, Aug 29 : Internationally- acclaimed boxer Mary Kom, while interacting with media on Wednesday said, ” The facilities provided by Madhya Pradesh government to promote boxing are much better in comparison with Manipur.

Otherwise, Manipur would have produced more boxers.” May Kom had won bronze medal in Beijing Olympics.

She denied that she was leaving Manipur because of disturbances and other social reasons. She said that she would shift to Bangalore just for better education for her kids. She said she would like to keep away from boxing for one year because she had to take care of her twin babies.

In reply to volley of questions about sexual assault on female Mumbai photojournalist, boxer Mary Kom said, ” Girls should learn boxing, Judo Karate and other such arts to maintain their physical fitness so that they can defend themselves under such situation instead of surrendering.”

Commenting on dispute between Indian Olympic Association ( IOA) and International Olympic Committee ( IOC), Mary Kom said that she hopes that the dispute would be settled when she returns to boxing field after one year.

International Olympic Committee ( IOC) had slapped a ban on the Indian Olympic Association ( IOA) after dispute cropped up after allegation of ‘ possible manipulation in the elections.’

The move led to subsequent bans on several national sports federations with clouds of uncertainty hanging over the participation of our players in various international competitions.

Mizo Liquor Prohibition Law To Be Reviewed

By Adam Halliday

Aizawl, Aug 29 : Mizoram Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla has said the government will review the state's prohibition law, adding that "outsiders" are attacking Mizoram with drugs and spurious liquor and that it is sometimes necessary for the government to condone moves by voluntary outfits against such elements in the best interest of the "sons of the soil".

"Things like prostitution and alcohol are not really going to disappear as long as the world exists. Our governor's contention that 'Mizoram is the wettest dry state' is true and we all know it well, there's no denying it," Lal Thanhawla said in an interview on a popular talk show.

"Is it (prohibition) good? Are our youths dying (from spurious liquor) or taking to drugs? These need to be examined and we have set up a state council to look into it... The government will take necessary action at the appropriate time," he said.

"No one should take the law in their own hands but if someone is trying to repair our people then the government will make exceptions," he said.

Zoramthanga Promises 3 New Districts in Mizoram

Aizawl, Aug 28 : Mizo National Front (MNF) will create three new districts if the party comes to power after the next assembly elections.

Former Mizo militant leader and ex-chief minister of Mizoram Zoramthanga pledged that three new districts namely Hnathial, Saitual and Khawzawl will be created if the MNF comes to power. 

"We must form the next government," said MNF president while delivering a speech at South Tuipui MNF Block-I Conference.

It can be recalled here that the MNF had announced to create the new three districts during its last regime but failed to materialise it.

"This time, we will not fail to create the three new districts," Zoramthanga said. The former militant leader said during the MNF regime, it was in the process of creating the three new districts "but our tenure got over."

Meanwhile, the ruling Congress party is heavily depending on the state government's pilot project, the New Land Use Policy (NLUP) as its vote plank in the run-up to the forthcoming assembly polls likely to be held in November. Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla has been making claims of relieving the poor farmers in the state by the New Land Use Policy (NLUP).

NLUP is a pilot project of the Congress led Mizoram government under the leadership of chief minister Lal Thanhawla. Under this scheme, the government of Mizoram attempts to provide alternative means of livelihood to the farmers who are heavily dependent on jhumming which is detrimental to the environment.

Piggery, bee-keeping, fish-farming, grape-cultivation etc., are some of the fields the government is encouraging the local people to pursue by providing financial assistance.

Source: Newmai News Network

14 Girls Raped by Hostel Warden

 Violent Protest in Arunachal

Itanagar, Aug 29 : A shocking case of rape of 14 minor girls allegedly by the hostel warden of a private school in Likabali in West Siang district has come to light after a few students reported the matter to police.

The rape of the girls in the age group of four to 13 for over three years has triggered protests with local residents, students and members from the civil society hitting the streets last evening to protest against the crime.

They also gheraoed the Likabali Police Station demanding capital punishment for the culprits. The incident came to light when a few students of the school yesterday managed to report the crime to the Likabali Police Station, police said here today.

Vipin Wisvan, a non-Arunachalee teacher in the school, who also serves as the warden of the hostel, was arrested yesterday in this connection. The school principal and two other staff were also detained for interrogation. A case had been registered at the Likabali Police Station and an investigation was on, the police said.

According to police, the molestation and rape of students were going on at the school for the last three years. After committing the offence, the accused had threatened the girls with dire consequences if they disclosed his act to the parents.

It was alleged that when the matter was brought to the knowledge of the school principal by the students yesterday, the principal tried to hush up the matter. Then a few students mustered courage to scale the boundary wall and reported the matter at the police station.

The Arunachal Law Students Union, Galo Students’ Union, All Galo Students Union condemned the incident and appealed to the authorities not to grant bail to the culprits. Other organisations too demanded harsh punishment to the offenders.