World Vignettes

Cyber alert on terrorists
WASHINGTON: The United States has created a National Infrastructure Protection Centre to detect, deter, prevent, warn and respond to terrorist attacks on critical infrastructures within the country, according to a senior US intelligence official. NIPC would also share related information, technological expertise and technological developments on both national and international levels, deputy assistant director of the FBI, Michael Vatis, said. The provisional Irish Republican Army, he said, had used the Internet as a tool to organise plans to plant bombs in six electrical subway stations last year around London. If the plan had succeeded, it would have crippled the transportation system of much of London and southwest England.

Queen turns 72
LONDON: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 72nd birthday on Tuesday privately with members of her family at Windsor Castle. An absentee was her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, who is in Australia on officialbusiness. Her anniversary was marked with a special salute from the Gibraltar regiment which fired a 62-gun salute at the Tower of London. In a break with tradition, the honourable artillery company at the tower traded places with the Gibraltar gunners to commemorate the Queen’s birthday.

Sex sells best
WASHINGTON: Pharmaceutical companies are rediscovering that nothing sells like sex, with the possible exception of lotions to cure baldness, diet pills that promise to make fat people slim and trim, and anti-depressants. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the newly approved impotence pill, Pfizer company’s Viagra, is selling at the rate of some 40,000 prescriptions a day. “The sales are unbelievable,” said Hemant Shah, an independent drug industry analyst in Warren, New Jersey. “It is not just a pharmaceutical product, it is a social phenomenon”. With around 30 million American men said to be suffering from impotency, sales of Viagra was expected to top a billion dollars as a pillcost 10 dollars.