LPG lorry tanker explodes, two seriously injured

PORT DICKSON: An LPG lorry tanker parked at the vehicle store yard in Kampung Kuala Lukut here exploded and burst into flames, seriously injuring two people.

Residents in the area ran out of their homes on hearing the loud explosion in the 9.20pm incident.

A spokesman from the Fire and Rescue station here, said the two victims who had not been identified yet had 80 per cent burns on their body.

They were sent to Tuanku Ja'afar Hospital in Seremban and are now being treated in the intensive-care unit.

The spokesman said three fire-engines with 2O firemen from here and Lukut took 20 minutes to put out the flames.

The cause of the explosion and fire and loss are being investigated.(NST)

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Yossi Benayoun overwhelms Burnley with second Liverpool hat-trick

Yossi Benayoun (R) shoots to score his third goal against Burnley during their English Premier League soccer match in Liverpool. Sept 12, 2009. – Reuters pic

Liverpool – On the eve of this match, José Reina had described Liverpool’s chances of winning the league title as “unrealistic”. That may be the case, but on a sun-kissed day at Anfield, the hosts’ attempts to at least be contenders this season continued to warm up.

Gone here were the horrors of Liverpool’s last home league match – the 3-1 defeat to Aston Villa – instead, Rafael Benítez’s side displayed the relentlessness and deadliness to suggest they can, after all, better last year’s second-place finish. Bar a first-minute strike from Martin Paterson that slid just wide of Reina’s near post, the men in red were rarely threatened by Burnley.

It will have pleased Benítez that his side kept a clean sheet after a series of poor defensive displays. Three of their goals also came from a player who has become a firm favourite of the home support and perhaps now deserves wider recognition.

Yossi Benayoun was superb throughout this contest, as he has been since the tail end of last season, and played a defining role in releasing Liverpool from their initial sluggishness. His clever running worried Burnley throughout, and it was fitting that the Israeli should score his second hat-trick since arriving on Merseyside from West Ham in July 2007.

“He is a player with lots of quality,” said Benítez of the 28-year-old. “We have seen how good he can be from the bench and now he is showing how good he can be from the start.”

Benayoun’s first goal was undoubtedly his best. Collecting Glen Johnson’s pass, he snaked by the Burnley captain Graham Alexander before sliding the ball past a diving Brian Jensen into the far corner.

The second was a tap-in following a superb charge into the area by Steven Gerrard and the third similarly comfortable after the player found himself onside and in space having collected Andriy Voronin’s through pass.

But that should not take away from his achievement nor the class displayed by Liverpool, who briefly moved into fourth place before Manchester United’s win at Tottenham.

Burnley, meanwhile, should not be too despondent. Theirs was an encouraging display before Benayoun scored the first, and had they gone in at half-time 1-0 down, they perhaps would have achieved more.

But that was made impossible by a second Liverpool goal on 40 minutes, and again Benayoun was involved. It was his shot that the Jensen spilt into the path of Dirk Kuyt, who finished with ease. “I’m disappointed that we lost four-nil, as we started well,” said the Burnley manager Owen Coyle. “But we switched off and, with the quality that Liverpool have, they were always going to punish us for that.”

Gerrard and Voronin would have added to the rout had they scored with clear chances late on, but that was of little concern to the home supporters, whose only frustration came when it was announced that Chelsea had scored a winner at Stoke. – Guardian

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Motorola unveils Google phone to muted response

SAN FRANCISCO— Motorola Inc unveiled yesterday the first of many cellphones to be developed in partnership with Google, but analysts questioned if it could revive the once-dominant handset maker’s fortunes.

Wall Street sees the phone as Motorola’s last big hope to regain the market share it has lost to rivals like Apple Inc’s iPhone, Nokia and Samsung.

Analysts were unimpressed by the phone’s design, but many hoped that a focus on integrating social networking sites from Facebook to Twitter might help prop up sales.

Shares of Motorola were up around 1.5 per cent at US$7.97 (RM28), but barely more than the overall market and off their earlier high of US$8.15 before the phone was shown. In contrast, when Palm Inc unveiled the Pre phone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, its stock rose 35 per cent.

Motorola’s stock had risen over 10 per cent in the past month in anticipation of the new phone.

“This is just the first salvo in the whole discussion about where they are going to place, but it sounds like they’ve done a good job here,” said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. “It’s nothing really to write home about from a physical aspect, but they don’t really need to knock it out of the park to do much better.”

The phone, which uses Google’s Android software, has a slide-out mini-keyboard and a five megapixel camera.

“It’s not really a threat to iPhone because it doesn’t look distinctive enough,” said Macquarie Research analyst Phil Cusick. “It’s pulling back here because really what they launched was essentially in line with what we’d been expecting.”

While many analysts agreed the phone’s physical appearance was none too exciting, they liked Motorola’s efforts to simplify managing contacts and the sending and receiving of messages from online social sites on the phone.

“They did a good job on the social networking element,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff.

The phone will be called Cliq in the United States, where it goes on sale at Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA in the fourth quarter, and branded as Dext when it goes on sale in the rest of the world. France Telecom’s Orange plans to sell the phone in the United Kingdom and France; Telefonica will launch it in Spain; and America Movil in Latin America, Motorola said.

Snyder said the phones may help the company regain profitability, but market share gains may be limited.

“More than likely these phones will substitute for very unprofitable phones that Motorola is selling, so they will probably cannibalize some of Motorola’s own phone sales and probably not show up as huge market share gains initially,” he said.

Motorola’s announcement was anticipated by many as a make-or-break event for the company, which has cancelled other phones slated for this year in order to devote most of its development resources into the Google Android devices.

Co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha, who revealed the Android strategy three months after he took the helm at Motorola’s mobile devices unit in August 2008, said the phone was “a very important starting point.”

The centrepiece of Motorola’s Android development is its MOTOBLUR software, which integrates contacts, emails and text messages along with postings and photos from social networks.

For example, Motorola’s live “Happenings” application automatically delivers updates posted by friends on multiple social sites to one place, and gives the user a choice of ways to immediately reply to those updates.

Contacts, messages and log-in information will be backed up on a MOTOBLUR secure server, so that when a user gets a new phone all the information will show up after the entry of a username and password on the phone.

A phone owner could also wipe data from a lost or stolen phone remotely or even find out where the phone is by using the device’s Global Positioning System technology.

But ABI Research’s Kevin Burden said it was insufficient.

“It’s got to do something more, because that alone is not going to make people go out and rush to buy this phone,” he said. — Reuters

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