10.   Ohio

9.    Texas

8.    Iowa

7.    Illinois

6.    Missouri

5.    Washington

4.    Georgia

3.    District of Columbia

2.    New Jersey

1.    Alaska

Source:

Warning that alcohol is being "marketed through increasingly sophisticated advertising and promotion techniques," the WHO endorsed a strategy Thursday opposing advertising aimed at youths and encouraging taxes on alcoholic beverages, the Associated Press reported.

The online presence of liquor makers and brewers is booming, the report noted. Absolut vodka and Smirnoff Ice have nearly 500,000 Facebook fans each, and Heineken boasts 400,000 users who "like" the beer, the AP said.

Each year, alcohol causes 2.5 million deaths worldwide, including 320,000 deaths of people under the age of 30, WHO says. A 21-year-old man died in France last week at a booze bash publicized on Facebook and attended by 10,000 young people.

While not a legislative document, the WHO report will alert the powerful liquor industry that countries are ready to collaborate on developing tougher international laws, the AP said.

The Global Alcohol Producers Group, which represents Heineken, Anheuser-Busch and others, called WHO’s effort an "important and constructive step forward in helping address alcohol issues around the world."

Source:

Researchers at London’s City University found that about three million "tweets" that contained the word "flu" were posted on Twitter between May and December 2009, during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic.

"The numbers of tweets we collected by searching by keywords such as ‘flu’ or ‘influenza’ has been astronomical," study co-author Patty Kostkova told Agence France Presse. "What we’re looking at now is, what is the potential of this enormous data set for early warning systems? Because it’s a real time media, it can call for an immediate response if required."

The study was presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

Source

Microsoft has told consumers it is ready patch a hole in its Internet Explorer browser.
The firm, which normally issues patches each month at the same time, has decided to go ahead with a special patch to prevent hackers gaining to e-mail accounts.
This month, Chinese hackers were accused of having attacked more than 30 companies including Google and Adobe.
Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the attacks, while the French and German governments advised citizens to use other browsers.

Big News Network.com     Wednesday 20th January, 2010

Microsoft offers new patch to customers

CDC has received reports of fraudulent emails (phishing) referencing a CDC sponsored State Vaccination Program.

The messages request that users must create a personal H1N1 (swine flu) Vaccination Profile on the cdc.gov website. The message then states that anyone that has reached the age of 18 has to have his/her personal Vaccination Profile on the cdc.gov site.

The CDC has NOT implemented a state vaccination program requiring registration on www.cdc.gov. Users that click on the email are at risk of having malicious code installed on their system. CDC reminds users to take the following steps to reduce the risk of being a victim of a phishing attack:

• Do not follow unsolicited links and do not open or respond to unsolicited email messages.
• Use caution when visiting un-trusted websites.
• Use caution when entering personal information online.

An example of the Phishing email follows:

CDC – Health Related Hoaxes and Rumors

Have a safe and fun Labor Day Weekend everyone.

In the wake of reports that malicious users have found a way to trick Adobe Reader 9 into triggering an exploitable crash in Adobe Flash 9 and 10, the US Dept. of Homeland Security’s CERT cybersecurity team is asking users and administrators everywhere to turn off Flash video in their Web browsers.

This prompted Adobe, which has recently been seeing perhaps the onset of a deluge of security issues, to update its security advisory, now rating the exploitable issue as "critical." Adobe is not advising users to take such drastic measures as disengaging Flash in their browsers (which would make it very hard to watch YouTube). What it’s suggesting instead is that users manually delete the file %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\authplay.dll, which is a library that Adobe Reader and Acrobat use to trigger embedded Flash and Shockwave videos.

Follow link to read entirety.

US DHS advises users to turn off Flash pending Adobe security fix | Security News – Betanews

So here you go folks…simple and it works!

1. R click by task tray to bring up task manager
2. On processes tab find “Explorer.exe”
3. Click End Process
4. Click on applications tab……>File……>New Task
5. Type Explorer.exe

By restarting this executable corrects the settings.

Icons are all back and the area that was previously grayed out in the task manager notification are now working. Still wish I knew why this happened though.