If the financial crisis makes you want to poke a finger in your boss`s eye or unleash some high karate kicks in the office, a Japanese toymaker may have the -- virtual -- answer.

Bandai has created the `tuttuki bako` or poking box, a palm-sized plastic box with a simple digital display on the front, a coin-size hole on the side and a motion sensor inside.

Take a walk through a supermarket in any wealthy nation and the promise of omega-3 health benefits screams off food products from bread to milk to juice. But are consumers getting the superfood they paid for?

`Consumers don`t understand what it is,` Vivian Tysse, sales manager with Norwegian fish oil producer Denomega, said at a health ingredients trade show in Paris this month.

Three-dimensional films, once blamed for making audiences nauseous, are making a comeback and are likely to become the future of cinema thanks to digital technology, Hollywood studio moguls say.

Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo`s sprawling `America` fetched 6.8 million dollars, just under pre-auction estimate, at Sotheby`s Latin American art auction that showed the effects of the ongoing financial crisis.

Nordic people are the happiest Europeans, while their least-happy counterparts can be found in the Balkans, a European Union lifestyle survey released Wednesday suggests.

Danes` ranking of their own happiness came out tops, followed by Swedes, Finns and Norwegians. Bulgarians came bottom of the table, with Macedonians just ahead of them.

A Japanese professor on Wednesday launched what he said was the world`s first web-based psychotherapy sessions available via mobile phone, as the country grapples with a growing problem of depression.

A Japanese professor on Wednesday launched what he said was the world`s first web-based psychotherapy sessions available via mobile phone, as the country grapples with a growing problem of depression.

Need help setting up that home computer or Internet connection? Frustrated by that new cell phone?

You`re not alone.

A survey released on Sunday found that nearly half of Americans need help from others booting up their new devices, and an even larger percentage need outside assistance when they encounter technical problems.

HANOVER, Germany, Oct 22, 2007 (AFP) - They're young, beautiful, poised and ambitious -- and confined to wheelchairs. Meet the new stars of the catwalk, at a modelling competition for the disabled.

Ten young women from across Europe joined the competition in the northern German city of Hanover this month.

In smart casual togs or long evening dresses in brilliant colours, Milena of Macedonia, Gerardina of Italy and Germany's Ines relished the limelight as hundreds of spectators looked on and a professional jury sized them up.

LOS ANGELES, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - The slashing riffs of Metallica, the solos of Deep Purple, the rage of the Sex Pistols: an increasing crop of video games are inviting players to live out their dreams of being a rock star.

Pick up your mock guitar, plug in your gaming console and become Keith Richards or Kurt Cobain from the comfort of your own home.

CHICAGO, Oct 21, 2007 (AFP) - A century after the first electric washing machines promised to take the work out of laundry, it doesn't seem like today's multi-cycle magicians are saving us much time.

Sure we don't have to boil the water and lug it by hand over to big metal tubs. Nor do we have to strain our arms running sopping wet clothes through a wringer thanks the advent of the spin cycle.

But, somehow, the pile of washing has managed to grow ever larger with every seemingly time-saving advance.

NEW DELHI, Oct 21, 2007 (AFP) - Eighty-seven-year-old Indrani Warner sits in her room at one of India's new homes for the elderly surrounded by the mementos of a lifetime.

Western-style old age homes are new to India, where children have long been known for revering and caring for elderly parents in a extended family system.

But the elderly are increasingly regarded as a burden as nuclear families become the norm against the backdrop of economic development that is rapidly breaking down traditions.

LOS ANGELES, Oct 20, 2007 (AFP) - Imagine a video game in which characters evolve from primordial ooze, acquiring speed, claws, wings or other traits needed to survive.

Picture a 'Glass Cutter' murder mystery game in which a hero gleans psychic clues from graffiti etched into subway windows, barroom tumblers, taxi mirrors or other depicted glass surfaces.

Envision defending their 'colonies' by spreading or checking weaponized diseases.

WASHINGTON, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - A German university team was named on Friday the winner of the 2007 Solar Decathlon, a competition to design, build and run the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered home.

'I want to congratulate this year's Solar Decathlon champion, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, and the 19 other teams for their innovative designs and application of solar technologies,' US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the awards ceremony in Washington, where the decathlon began last week.

LOS ANGELES, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - A US surgeon working on a 'tele-health' breakthrough has devised a way for video game warriors to feel shots, stabs, slams, and hits dealt to their on-screen characters.

A vest designed by doctor Mark Ombrellaro uses air pressure and feedback from computer games to deliver pneumatic thumps to the spots on players' torsos where they would have been struck were they actually on the battlefields.

NEW DELHI, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - The south Indian city of Chennai is planning to videotape and webcast Catholic funerals for the benefit of overseas mourners unable to attend, the city's cemeteries board said Friday.

'We are talking to a few software companies to undertake this project,' said Bosco Alagar Raj, the treasurer of the Madras Cemeteries Board, which still uses the former Anglicised version of the city's name.

NEW YORK, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - New York nightclubs are to introduce video cameras, identity checks and police intervention at the smallest altercation in measures aimed at providing top security even if it risks stifling the fun.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly on Thursday announced a 58-point program for keeping bars and nightclubs safe, and at combating drug sales, bar fights, underage drinking, prostitution 'and other illegal activity.'

TOKYO, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - A Japanese company is launching fake shark fins in China, hoping to tap a market as prices for real ones rise amid concerns the species is being hunted to extinction.

Shark fin is considered one of the highest-end delicacies in Chinese cuisine and also fetches high prices in select Japanese restaurants.

Nikko Yuba Seizo Co. a Japanese food-processing company, said it had developed artificial shark fins made out of pork gelatin. Its top executives returned Friday from a two-day trip to China to introduce the products.

LOS ANGELES, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - Hardcore US gamers say a fresh price cut and a blockbuster stealth shooter title exclusive to PlayStation 3 will breathe new life into moribund sales of Sony's video game consoles.

Sony on Thursday trimmed 100 dollars from its top model PS3 consoles in the United States, making 80-gigabyte hard drive versions available for 499 dollars each.

The Japanese electronics giant also announced that beginning November 2 it will sell a less sophisticated 40-gigabyte PS3 console in the United States for 399 dollars.

HONG KONG, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - A new Hong Kong apartment has sold for a record 14.1 million US dollars, a report said Friday, as the city's booming market for luxury homes continues to strengthen.

The 3,205 square foot (298 square metre) duplex apartment on Hong Kong island fetched 109 million Hong Kong dollars, or 34,000 Hong Kong dollars per square foot, according to a report in the South China Morning Post.

WASHINGTON, Oct 19, 2007 (AFP) - Bans on low-hanging trousers that display parts of underwear are hitting already alienated black US teens below the belt, African-American experts say as more US cities lined up to ban 'saggy pants'.

'This affects a certain population that always gets picked on,' said Wilhelmina Leigh, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think-tank that focuses on African American issues.

PARIS, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - The French people have watched enraptured as the marriage of President Nicolas Sarkozy has collapsed before them.

But the story of Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy's reported separation is also a new chapter in the modernisation of French politics.

The French public is not surprised at the split but at the access they have been given to it.

NEW YORK, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - The Internet is fertile ground for genealogy websites branching out to connect the dead and the living with a shared dream of drawing humanity's family tree.

Spectrum Equity Investors underscored the success of online lineage-tracing websites on Wednesday by paying 300 million dollars for a majority stake in the parent company of Ancestry.com.

Founded in the US state of Utah in 1983, The Generations Network operates FamilyHistory.com, publishes Ancestry Magazine, but is for the most part the Internet heritage-tracking portal Ancestry.com.

WASHINGTON, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - Move over, junior. Grandma and grandpa are joining the wave in video and computer games as makers step up efforts to promote the software as brain-healthy exercises.

Based on growing scientific evidence, certain types of game-playing is increasingly being viewed as calisthenics for the brain that can especially be useful for seniors at risk of memory loss, dementia and various vision problems.

PARIS, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - From hair cropped short, to smoking cigarettes and making-up in public, the Roaring 20s revolutionised women's wear and lifestyles like no other era before, according to a show kicking off in Paris this weekend.

It was the decade that saw the rise of the fashion magazine, the mass production of shoes and cosmetics, the baring of the body and the birth of rayon stockings -- at first so shiny that women had to powder their legs.

ALICE SPRINGS, Australia, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - Bouncing on a trampoline at an Aboriginal camp in Australia's red centre, two-year-old Danae Moore faces a future filled with first and third world health problems, which an army of foreign doctors has been recruited to treat.

In the remote Northern Territory, patients are as likely now to be attended to by an Indian, an African or a European as an Australian doctor.

ORRVILLE, Ohio, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - For more than 125 years, the Schantz family has been hand building church organs one pipe at a time in this small Ohio town.

While the business has expanded in recent years as American churches return to traditional sounds, little else has changed.

There is a massive cauldron where the Schantz family and their 85 employees mix the tin, lead and zinc used for the organ pipes.

The molten metal is poured onto a long table and spread into a thin sheet.

TALLMADGE, Ohio, Oct 18, 2007 (AFP) - Tired of waiting for big auto to come up with a truly clean car, Dana Myers has developed a tiny solution to the carbon crisis.

Tucked into a corner of his family's factory, behind an industrial crane and giant transformers, sits a fleet of what look like three-wheeled technicolor shoehorns.

Unlike the hybrids currently on offer, his No More Gas runs entirely on electricity. And its engine is powerful enough to zip down the highway.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - Apple revealed plans Wednesday to open iPhones to computer programs made by outsiders in a move that could quiet complaints that its lock on the devices' workings is over zealous.

'Let me just say it,' Apple's renowned chief executive Steve Jobs said in a posting on the Northern California company's website. 'We want native third party applications on the iPhone.'

Apple intends to have an iPhone software kit in the hands of developers in February, according to Jobs.

LONDON, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - Bury me naked. Put a mobile phone in the coffin. Cremate me with my pet's ashes. Bury me with my teeth in. And do make sure I'm actually dead.

Those were some of the most popular requests by people planning their funerals, according to research by the British charity Age Concern, which promotes the interests of elderly people.

Britain is known for being a nation of animal lovers and it seems Britons cannot bear to be separated from their beloved pets -- even when both parties are dead.

PARIS, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - At Paris's Ethical Fashion Show, currently the world's largest event spotlighting eco and fair-trade fashion, California's Maia Anderson concluded her first European order, for a store in London.

'I think Brits like well-designed but down-to-earth urban wear,' she said of her Convoy label clothing made of recycled, organic and sustainably grown materials. 'But tell me, why London or Switzerland, why not orders for Paris?'

HONG KONG, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - The number of dollar millionaires in Asia has swelled by 8.6 percent, with Japan home to more than 1.47 million, a report published Wednesday found.

Japan has 43.7 percent of the region's High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) -- those with assets of more than one million dollars excluding their primary house -- according to the annual Asia Pacific Wealth Report, published by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.

The report found there were 2.6 million HNWIs across the region.

PARIS, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - At Paris's Ethical Fashion Show, currently the world's largest event spotlighting eco and fair-trade fashion, California's Maia Anderson concluded her first European order, for a store in London.

'I think Brits like well-designed but down-to-earth urban wear,' she said of her Convoy label clothing made of recycled, organic and sustainably grown materials. 'But tell me, why London or Switzerland, why not orders for Paris?'

PARIS, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - Originally from the Andes where archeologists trace it 8,000 years back, the potato launched its conquest of the world after the colonisation of America, winning pride of place in kitchens across the globe and helping to fight famine in Europe.

First cultivated in the Andean mountains in 4,000 BC, the starchy plant tuber was a food staple across the Inca empire, with its own god and special ceremonies, though the 'papa' never quite won the celebrity status of corn.

NEW YORK, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - The United Nations on Thursday officially launches 'International Year of the Potato 2008', an initiative mocked in private by some diplomats but enabling governments to raise much-needed funds for agricultural research.

The move to 'increase awareness of the importance of the potato as a food in developing nations' was proposed by the UN's Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and adopted by the General Assembly in 2005.

PARIS, Oct 17, 2007 (AFP) - Call it the potato conundrum: why does one batch of homemade chips, or French fries, taste like deep-fried slivers of heaven while the next -- cooked in the same kind of oil and at the same temperature -- has all the allure of greasy cardboard?

Potato chemistry is a bedevilingly complex affair, and a small army of scientists around the world work full time on unlocking the inner secrets of the lowly spud.

US botanists even sent potato seedlings into orbit to see how they would grow in zero-gravity.