Dubai The consumer protection department at the Ministry of Economy has said removing cans of Coca-Cola and Pepsi from supermarket shelves across the UAE will take a month.

A statement from the consumer protection department, said both companies were selling their products without putting the price or the Arabic labelling of the ingredients on the products, in clear violation of Article (8) of the Consumer Protection Law.

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Vietnam, a one-party Communist state, has one of south-east Asia's fastest-growing economies and has set its sights on becoming a developed nation by 2020.

A visit to Vietnam by US President Bill Clinton in November 2000 was presented as the culmination of American efforts to normalise relations with the former enemy.

Vietnam struggled to find its feet after unification and tried at first to organise the agricultural economy along strict collectivist lines.

But elements of market forces and private enterprise were introduced from the late 1980s and a stock exchange opened in 2000.

Foreign investment has grown and the US is Vietnam's main trading partner. In the cities, the consumer market is fuelled by the appetite of a young, middle class for electronic and luxury goods. After 12 years of negotiations the country joined the World Trade Organization in January 2007.

But the disparity in wealth between urban and rural Vietnam is wide and some Communist Party leaders worry that too much economic liberalisation will weaken their power base.

Vietnam has also struggled to restrain its trade and budget deficits. Its inflation rate reached double digits at the start of 2010 and approached 20 per cent by the end of 2011, as food prices doubled.

Despite pursuing economic reform, the ruling Communist Party shows little willingness to give up its monopoly on political power.

Vietnam stands accused of suppressing political dissent and religious freedom. Rights groups have singled out Hanoi's treatment of ethnic minority hill tribe people, collectively known as Montagnards.

The human rights advocacy group Amnesty International says in a 2011 report that ''more than a dozen activists were convicted in faulty trials simply because they had peacefully voiced criticism of government policies''.

Diversity is a key feature of South Africa, where 11 languages are recognised as official, where community leaders include rabbis and chieftains, rugby players and returned exiles, where traditional healers ply their trade around the corner from stockbrokers and where housing ranges from mud huts to palatial homes with swimming pools.

The white government which came to power in 1948 enforced a separation of races with its policy called apartheid. It dictated that black and white communities should live in separate areas, travel in different buses and stand in their own queues.

The government introduced grand social engineering schemes such as the forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people. It poisoned and bombed opponents and encouraged trouble in neighbouring countries.

The apartheid government eventually negotiated itself out of power, and the new leadership encouraged reconciliation. But the cost of the years of conflict will be paid for a long time yet, not least in terms of lawlessness, social disruption and lost education.

South Africa faces major problems, but having held four successful national elections as well as local polls since the end of white rule, a democratic culture appears to be taking hold, allowing people at least some say in the search for solutions.

Very much Africa's superpower, South Africa has the continent's biggest economy, though this went into recession in May 2009 following a sharp slowdown in the mining and manufacturing sectors. The construction industry, on the other hand, benefited from a huge programme of government investment ahead of the 2010 World Cup.

South Africa is, along with China, Brazil, Russia and India, a member of the BRICS club of emerging world economic powerhouses.

Many South Africans remain poor and unemployment is high – a factor blamed for a wave of violent attacks against migrant workers from other African countries in 2008 and protests by township residents over poor living conditions during the summer of 2009.

Land redistribution is an ongoing issue. Most farmland is still white-owned. Having so far acquired land on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis, officials have signalled that large-scale expropriations are on the cards. The government aims to transfer 30% of farmland to black South Africans by 2014.

South Africa has the second-highest number of HIV/Aids patients in the world. Around one in seven of its citizens is infected with HIV. Free anti-retroviral drugs are available under a state-funded scheme.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – This week’s revelations that Google Inc, Twitter and other popular Internet companies have been taking liberties with customer data have prompted criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers, along with apologies from the companies.

They are the latest in a long line of missteps by large Internet companies that have faced little punishment for pushing privacy boundaries, which are already more expansive than most consumers understand.

Despite all the chatter about online privacy and the regular introductions of proposed data protection laws in Congress, Silicon Valley is in the midst of a veritable arms race of personal data collection that is intensifying.

Many innovative companies, most prominently Facebook, base virtually all of their services on the ability to personalize, which requires them to know their users well. Their business models likewise depend to an increasing degree on the ability to target a banner advertisement or other marketing pitch to an individual. Millions of times each day, the right to advertise to a specific user is auctioned off in a fraction of a second by computers talking to one another.

For both the buyers and the sellers of the advertising, the business advantage goes to the participant with the most knowledge, and that race is driving companies like Google to learn as much about its users as Facebook does.

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Video-Is Google tracking you: r.reuters.com/tat66s

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Few U.S. laws prevent those companies and others from collecting all manner of information – ranging from credit cards numbers and real names and addresses to buying patterns and Web surfing habits – then selling the data to advertisers and other third parties.

“Companies are feeling along in the dark, trying to figure out how to serve consumers with cool new toys and while protecting consumer interests,” said Jim Harper, a privacy policy specialist at the libertarian Cato Institute. “More often than not, they fall in love with their cool new toys and forget the privacy interests.”

Aside from special protections for credit report information, medical records and a few other narrow categories, virtually anything is fair game.

Companies generally face legal threats or a user backlash only after violating their own published privacy policies or being discovered subverting consumer wishes.

Last week Twitter, Path and other firms were found to be vacuuming users’ iPhone contact lists even though Apple Inc’s policies forbade it. On Friday, a Wall Street Journal report showed that Google was tweaking ads on Apple’s Safari Web browser to install tracking cookies which, while commonplace on other browsers, are blocked on Safari unless the user specifically allows them.

Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), co-chairmen of the Congressional Privacy Caucus asked for a Google probe by the Federal Trade Commission, which declined to comment. Google said Friday that its intentions were innocuous but it nontheless dropped the practice. Twitter and Path said they would seek explicit permission before grabbing address-book contents, and Apple said it would update its software to prevent further leaks.

PROMISES, PROMISES

The developments fit what is by now a well-established pattern that has thus far kept major new laws off the books, longtime policy specialists said.

A company over-reaches, gets caught, and promises to do better. If a greater than usual display of outrage prompts introduction of plausible legislation, the industry counters with a new plan for self-regulation, such as the publication of privacy policies that users seldom read.

Sooner or later, the plan is rendered obsolete by new technologies in the data arms race, and the cycle repeats.

Google and Facebook last year both agreed to 20 years of privacy audits by the Federal Trade Commission after they made public customer information that users had considered private. But with few restrictions on data collection, the audits are not likely to have a major impact on business practices.

Internet companies and their investors argue that data-collection is essential to their businesses, and enables them to provide services that would otherwise be impossible. Consumers get more accurate search results, more relevant advertising, and more intimate connections with friends and others when Internet companies know something about them.

“For that value tradeoff, they’re willing to provide information,” said Ron Conway, a well-known Internet investor.

“I don’t like people tracking my location, but I want to know, ‘what are some nearby Italian restaurants that my friends have liked,’” said Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf, which compiles profiles of Internet users.

The equation is different in Europe, which has long-standing data protection laws that limit some practices that are standard in the United States. The European Union is now weighing updated rules that would allow any resident to ask companies to delete the information on file about them; the United States only has equivalent rights for those under age 13.

Privacy advocates in the United States say they do not expect big changes anytime soon.

“Trying to pass a bill through Congress that’s actually going to safeguard user records, especially when you’ve got huge advertiser lobbies trying to defang that law, is an incredible challenge,” said Rainey Reitman, activism director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

At best, they say, a law might allow consumers to opt out of some tracking.

“That is more likely today than it was 24 hours ago,” said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, which gets funding from foundations and major technology companies.

“But the ‘right-to-be forgotten,’ erase-button thing, you would see more of a fight.”

(Reporting by Joseph Menn. Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Richard Chang)

Unilever Food Solutions, a leading worldwide company in the food service industry with presence in over 74 countries, has announced that it will have a bigger and enhanced presence at Gulfood 2012 – the region’s largest annual food and hospitality show to be held in Dubai from February 19 to 22, 2012 at the Dubai World Trade Centre.

As part of its participation, Unilever Food Solutions will also be the Platinum Sponsors of the Gulfood Conference, to be held on the sidelines of the exhibition. The conference will bring together leading speakers and experts from across the globe on a common platform to discuss the latest trends in vogue in the F&B industry.

Moreover, Unilever Food Solutions’ Vice President for South Africa, Middle East, and Pakistan, Mr Eelco Camminga, will also be speaking in the Gulfood Conference, on February 19. His address will shed light on ‘Leading Brands’.

Talking about its participation, Mr Mohammad Shanawani at Unilever Food Solutions, said, “The decision to be a part of Gulfood 2012 follows the unprecedented success achieved at the event over the years. Gulfood is a very strategic exhibition for our industry. It brings together the key players and companies within the food and hospitality sector on a common platform, and gives us a great opportunity to showcase our products and services to a wider audience from the region and beyond.”

He added, “This year, we aim to take our participation to the next level – reasons why we engaged with the Gulfood Conference as Platinum Sponsors. We will reinforce our leadership by actively participating and contributing to the Gulfood Conference using our industry knowledge and expertise.”

Unilever Food Solutions has been part of Gulfood exhibition and conference for the past three years; and the company has benefited immensely from the networking opportunity. “The organizers have done a great job in building the reputation of the exhibition, by adding special services and dedicated conferences to the exhibition – from Salon Culinaire, Gulfood Majlis to Gulfood Awards, thus giving it an edge over other food exhibitions around the globe.”

Unilever Food Solutions works closely with businesses of all sizes, from independent restaurants through to hotels chains and contract caterers, in 74 countries; and understands the critical balance between impressing guests and making a profit. The company uses its knowledge to help chefs and caterers keep up with people’s changing tastes, helping them find the right balance of great tasting and nutritious food served up to high standards. The company is equally committed to the impact on environment; and it uses ingredients and packaging that are sustainably sourced, generate less waste and consume less energy.

Get to know more about Unilever Food Solutions by visiting Gulfood 2012, Zabeel Hall, Booth Z-C6.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Three Indian politicians from a morally conservative party, including a women’s affairs minister, resigned on Wednesday after being caught watching pornography on a mobile phone during a session of state parliament.

News channels broadcast footage showing Karnataka state Minister for Cooperation Laxman Savadi sharing a porn clip with his colleague C.C. Patil, the minister for women and child development, while sitting in the state assembly.

The owner of the phone, state Minister for Ports, Science and Technology Krishna Palemar, also quit.

“We are requesting the honorable Speaker of the House to conduct an inquiry and we’ll come out with a clean chit,” Patil said, denying that they were deliberately looking at porn.

The three men said they did not want to cause any embarrassment for their party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the state and is in opposition at a national level.

There has been outrage over the incident not just from rights activists and right-wing Hindu groups in conservative India, but also from the riling Congress party which called for the assembly to be dissolved.

“We live in a country where there already is this social mindset that women are disposable commodities and are seen as transferable properties,” Renuka Chowdhary, a former federal minister for women’s development and a member of the Congress Party.

“It really is troubling that the people who are in positions of power and have the responsibility to change things actually have the same mindset and are busy watching porn,” she told the CNN-IBN news channel.

Girls and women in largely patriarchal India face a barrage of threats including rape, dowry-related murder, forced marriage, domestic violence, honor killings and human trafficking.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and European Union expressed cautious optimism on Friday over prospects that Iran may be willing to engage major powers in new talks, but underscored any resumed negotiations must be sustained and focus on the nuclear issue.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told reporters that Iran’s recent letter to Ashton might mark a step forward.

“We think this is an important step and we welcome the letter,” Clinton said in a joint meeting with Ashton. She stressed that the major powers were still reviewing their formal response to Tehran’s offer.

Ashton, who handles contact with Iran on behalf of the “P5+1″ group comprised of the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, said the letter showed “a potential possibility that Iran may be ready to start talks.”

Iran’s letter to Ashton, which was obtained by Reuters on Thursday, proposed resuming the stalled talks and said Tehran would have “new initiatives” to bring to the table.

But the brief letter, which responded to a letter Ashton sent to her Iranian counterpart in October, offered no specific proposals, leaving a question mark over Tehran’s willingness to enter substantive negotiations on its nuclear work.

Clinton, however, said the Iranian letter “appeared to acknowledge and accept” the western countries’ longstanding condition that any talks begin with a discussion of its nuclear program.

“We must be assured that, if we make a decision to go forward, we see a sustained effort by Iran to come to the table, to work until we have reached an outcome that has Iran coming back into compliance with their international obligations,” Clinton said.

REAL TALKS VS BUYING TIME

The United States and its allies suspect Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons capability under cover of a declared civilian nuclear energy program, and believe Tehran has used talks only as a time-buying tool, not a pathway to agreement.

Iran says it is enriching uranium only for civilian purposes.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Washington and its allies would be on guard against any more “false starts” to the negotiation process.

“We’ve had negotiations that started and fizzled, or negotiations that ate up a lot of time and didn’t go where they needed to go,” Nuland said.

“We want to make sure … if we go forward, and a decision has not been made, that it is well-planned, well-coordinated among us and that we’re absolutely clear as unified group about our expectations.”

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Thursday that a February 20-21 visit to Iran by top U.N. nuclear watchdog officials would help determine whether Tehran was serious about tackling international concerns.

The U.N. team, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief inspector, will again try to extract Iranian explanations, after three years of stonewalling, for an IAEA investigation driven by intelligence reports that suggest Tehran has researched sophisticated ways to build atomic bombs.

Following an IAEA report in November that cast new doubts over Iran’s nuclear work, the United States and EU adopted sanctions meant to shut down Iran’s oil export industry, the world’s fifth largest.

The clampdown on Iranian oil would take full effect in July, and would join an escalating range of U.N. and unilateral sanctions which western officials say are putting unprecedented pressure on Iran’s economy.

Ashton said the P5+1, which made no headway in its last talks with Iran on the nuclear issue in Istanbul in January 2011, said the letter from chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili contained “no preconditions and a recognition of what we’ll be talking about.”

“The next question really is to look at then where we left off in Istanbul,” Ashton said, noting a series of suggested confidence-building measures such as greater scope for inspections.

“We also said at that time they could come forward with their own ideas about what they wanted to do, so that this was a genuine, open process,” Ashton said, saying it was crucial to ensure that any talks, once started, are sustained.

“Therefore we need to set in train the process whereby we can be clear what it is we need to achieve and what we are expecting from the Iranians and that’s what we are in the process of doing right now,” she said.

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

Nokia Smartphone owners in the UAE can update their current phone with the latest Nokia’s Belle software update. The new software delivers the latest innovative technologies to enhance the consumer experience and improve smartphone performance while allowing users to upgrade their existing mobile handsets. The upgrade will allow Nokia N8, E7, E6, X7, C6-01, C7, Oro, Nokia 500 devices to experience a whole load of enhancements.

The latest version of Nokia’s smartphone operating system looks and works better than ever before.

Nokia Belle delivers more personalization options than before. You can have up to six home screens that are easy to personalize, leaving all your favorite applications and services only a few taps away.

Headline features include eye catching new widgets, more customisation options, new apps and built-in NFC functionality. All these innovative features are readily available for free for all Nokia Belle smartphone users.

Nokia users will benefit from the following new features:
Free-form, differently-sized, live widgets: widgets like the clock, email, music player, favourite contacts and the calendar have been redesigned and now come in five different sizes and rearranged to create a completely personalised set of screens. There are also new ‘Toggle’ widgets for tasks like switching on Bluetooth and changing profiles.

Improved Imaging: The new and improved Nokia Belle interface also includes new features like imaging applications with HD video recording at 30 frames per second and a visually improved browsing and viewing of Web videos. The menus have been simplified and a notifications abar has been added to make accessing key settings or features, very fast.

More homescreens: with Nokia Belle the maximum number of homescreens rises from three to six, so now you can have absolutely everything close at hand.

Improved status bar: the status bar sport a modern, flat look and incorporates a pull down notifications tab that integrates common settings and notification of incoming messages, missed calls and the rest.

Modernised navigation: the navigation and options bar at the bottom of the screen sports a modern, new look, similar to that first seen on the Nokia N9.

New apps: a new suite of powerful business apps from Microsoft includes Lync (IM for businesses, like Microsoft Communicator), SharePoint, OneNote, Exchange ActiveSync and PowerPoint Broadcaster.

NFC devices: With Nokia Belle, Near-Field Communications (NFC) is now deeply integrated into the operating system, so you can share pictures, connect with accessories, and check-in – all with just a tap. The new upgrade allows smartphone users to share videos, images and contacts with friends and family by simply tapping two NFC-enabled devices together, as well as pairing with Nokia’s wide range of NFC accessories including the Nokia Luna Bluetooth headset, Nokia Essence Bluetooth stereo headset and Nokia Play 360°, a wireless speaker.
Visual multitasking: Now you can flick between larger live images of your open apps to see what’s going on at a glance and move quickly between your apps.

Commenting on Nokia Belle, Vithesh Reddy, General Manager of Nokia Middle East said: “With Nokia Belle, we are providing a totally fresh experience to new and existing users as part of our belief that the future of mobile will focus on further developing and strengthening existing ecosystems. Today’s smartphone users demand handsets that can respond to their ever changing lifestyle requirements and keep up with their on-the-go lives. Today’s upgrade does just that. By introducing an operating system that looks and works better than ever before, Nokia is meeting and anticipating future demand of users in the Middle East.”

To upgrade Nokia Belle, users need to run the latest version of Nokia Suite 3.3 on their PC and connect their handset to take full advantage of the all new Belle experience.

BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Belgium-based SWIFT, which provides banks with a system for moving funds around the world, bowed to international pressure on Friday and said it was ready to block Iranian banks from using its network to transfer money.

Expelling Iranian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication would shut down Tehran’s main avenue to doing business with the rest of the world – an outcome the West believes is crucial to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

SWIFT, which has never cut off a country before, has been closely following efforts in the United States and the European Union to develop new sanctions targeting Iran that would directly affect EU-based financial institutions.

The United States and EU have already moved to sanction Iran’s central bank.

“SWIFT stands ready to act and discontinue its services to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions as soon as it has clarity on EU legislation currently being drafted,” the company said in an emailed statement.

The United States has been pushing the European Union to force SWIFT to evict the Iranian firms but it was unclear whether the EU would reach an agreement.

For one, SWIFT’s home country, Belgium, does not think the global banking firm should be the only company of its kind required to comply with sanctions.

The Obama administration said it welcomed SWIFT’s intention to stop transactions involving designated Iranian banks. “We will continue to be in contact with our EU partners to urge action on this issue,” a U.S. Treasury official said.

SWIFT, with headquarters just outside the Belgian capital Brussels, is vital to international money flows, exchanging an average 18 million payment messages per day between banks and other financial institutions in 210 countries.

NUCLEAR STAND-OFF

The United States and Europe accuse Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

The United States recently enacted sanctions that would punish countries and institutions if they do not reduce their purchases of Iranian oil by mid-year.

One of the lawmakers who has pushed for the sanctions said she was pleased SWIFT would move to cut Iran out of the global banking system, but said the United States needs to ensure it enforces all its sanctions laws.

“In addition, we must sanction Chinese energy companies that throw Iran an economic lifeline by continuing to do business as usual,” said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee ref.

The National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group, criticized efforts to expel Iranian firms from SWIFT.

“Kicking Iran out of SWIFT is both unprecedented and another dangerous step toward turning a financial war into a military conflict,” said Reza Marashi, the council’s research director.

Nineteen banks and 25 affiliated institutions from Iran sent and received some 2 million messages in 2010. They included banks the U.S. accuses of financing Iran’s nuclear program or terrorism – Mellat, Post, Saderat and Sepah.

SWIFT, founded in 1973, said its decision reflected the extraordinary circumstances of international support for the intensification of sanctions against Iran.

The company said it had informed its regulators, the world’s largest central banks, of its decision.

SWIFT’s general counsel is slated to visit Washington next week to meet with lawmakers who have proposed new sanctions targeting its services.

(Additional reporting Roberta Rampton in Washington; editing by Luke Baker and Todd Eastham)