By Susan Spano Los Angeles Times VENICE, Italy ~ Pianissimo, pianissimo. That’s how morning comes on Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Pigeons dawdle around a trash can. The woman who tends the newsstand gives her dog a bowl of water. Then the grate at the Bar all’Orologio clangs open, a sure sign that another summer day [...]

BEIJING ~ Beijing hotels that had hoped to cash in on an Olympic boom by hiking rates said this week they were having to slash prices in a last-ditch bid to fill empty rooms. Occupancy rates for the hotel industry were lower than expected in the run-up to next month’s Games after many hotels more [...]

Annual Paris Beach Party Kicks Off PARIS ~ A three-kilometer stretch of the banks of the river Seine turned into a palm-lined sandy beach on Monday for a few weeks as the seventh annual Paris Plage kicked off. The usually busy roads lining the river in central Paris have been closed to traffic until August [...]

Half Million Dollars Found in Diapers MEXICO CITY ~ A package of baby diapers yielded an unlikely load in Mexico, according to the Defense Ministry: nearly half a million dollars in cash. Soldiers conducting a routine check last Friday “found in a tractor-trailer a packet of diapers containing US$490,300,” the ministry said in a statement. [...]

If your understanding of Chinese is limited to takeout menus, you need a friend fluent in Mandarin. With a telephone interpreter and translation service, English-speaking visitors to China can get directions, make reservations and basically avoid embarrassment. We tested two interpreter services in the market: chinaONEcall, a British company started in 2006 that promotes itself [...]

By Amy Chavez For The Bali Times The other day my husband went out to cut down some bamboo. This bamboo is all around our house and gets so tall it starts hitting the roof tiles and eventually works them loose till they fall off. Now keep in mind that this is Jakarta Bamboo, so [...]

By The Mark Ulyseas For The Bali Times This is my 50th column for The Bali Times. It would have been the 52nd but for Christmas week, when there is a double edition, and the fact that I missed a deadline this year. All in all, it has been one invigorating, vibrating, intensive year that [...]

By Robert Goldman For The Bali Times Longevity News and Review provides readers with the latest information in breakthroughs pertaining to the extension of the healthy human lifespan. These news summaries are compiled by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M; www.worldhealth.net), a non-profit medical society composed of 20,000 physician and scientist members from 90 [...]

Blame the DJ: loud bar music makes people drink more and drink faster, a new study has found. “Previous research had shown that fast music can cause fast drinking, and that music versus no music can cause a person to spend more time in a bar,” said Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at [...]

WASHINGTON ~ Obesity continued to creep up in the United States last year and now affects more than one in four US adults, a US government report shows. In 2005, 23.9 percent of adults in the United States were obese, or had a body mass index greater than 30, while in 2007, the percentage had [...]

WASHINGTON ~ American scientists have scrapped plans for a large trial of a HIV vaccine due to concerns about its effectiveness, the government’s medical research agency said. The decision on the government-developed vaccine comes less than a year after a trial for a similar vaccine from the pharmaceutical company Merck failed – marking another setback [...]

UNITED NATIONS ~ More than two billion people around the world still lack adequate sanitation, according to a UN report. It warns that barring major gains over the next seven years, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed. The report was prepared [...]