Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Beijing: A leading Chinese match making portal will check the age, marital status and other personal details of prospective cyber daters against an official database to prevent deception. The portal, Baihe.Com will screen its eight million online daters from Monday against an “ID authentication system”. The new system was jointly developed by the website and the ministry of public security. “In the long run, we’ll arrange dates only for those who are proven to be telling the truth,” company Ceo Jason Tian said. Tian said the move would enhance trust among online daters, improve credibility and prevent deception, and employees of the website would keep the daters’ personal information strictly confidential. Most Chinese rely on friends and relatives to find a partner, and lack of trust is often cited as a major reason for spurning Internet services. “People tend to misrepresent themselves online and you never know if you are being told the truth,” said schoolteacher Sun Wei. A surve

British actress Elizabeth Hurley and her husband, Arun Nayar, arrived in Mumbai on Monday for the next leg of their nuptial celebrations — six days of traditional Indian festivities that will culminate in a ceremony at a maharaja’s lavish palace. Photographers snapped shots of Hurley, wearing a short white dress, and Nayar, in a jacket, blue shirt and jeans, arriving at Mumbai’s airport from London early on Monday. The celebrations are to continue from Wednesday to Saturday in the city of Jodhpur at Umaid Bhavan Palace, the Maharaja of Jodphur’s palace-turnedluxury resort. The couple were married on Friday in a private civil ceremony at Sudeley Castle in Winch combe, London. The organisers have hired a local pandit for the rituals. The Umaid Bhavan has 40 suites and 24 rooms. The couple will stay in the Maharaja suite, the most luxurious one. Staff and crew of the hotel are tightlipped about the function. The Mehrangarh Fort is expected to host the reception ceremony. Some functions wi

Los Angles: Britney Spears appeared in a tattoo parlour in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles with her head shaved completely bald. Video on KABC-TV showed the newly shorn Spears with tiny tattoos on the back of her neck as she sits on Friday night for a new tattoo, a pair of red and pink lips. Derrik Snell, who works at the tattoo parlour, said Spears showed up without notice and stayed for about 90 minutes. “I didn’t really notice (the hairdo) at first, she had a hood on when she showed up.” Before heading to the tattoo parlour, Spears grabbed an electric clipper and shaved her own head at a San Fernando Valley salon. “I tried to talk her out of it. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re not having a bad day and tomorrow you’ll feel differently about it?” salon owner Esther Tognozzi said. “She said ‘No, I absolutely want it shaved off right now’. Next thing I know, she grabbed the buzzer and she went to the back of my salon and she was shaving off her own hair,” Tog nozzi said.

Samsung Electronics new Co. has unveiled a mobile phone that features some of the sleek design and functions of Apple Inc.’s much-hyped iPhone . Samsung’s Ultra Smart F700 will be exhibited at next week’s 3GSM World Congress, a telecommunications exhibition in Barcelona, Samsung spokeswoman Sonia Kim said on Friday. (AFP) M ? usic firm EMI Group PLC has been talking with online retailers about possibly selling its entire digital music catalogue in MP3 format without copy protection, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing numerous people familiar with the matter. (AFP) ? A stelephones and mobile picture-taking digital movie cameras grow ubiquitous, Internet users worldwide are being recruited as citizen news reporters. In December, Yahoo launched YouWitnessNews, a website that posts offerings from users after the submissions pass muster with pro fessional editors.

GPS_Embedded_Shoes : Isaac Daniel calls the tiny Global Positioning System (GPS) chip he’s embedded into a line of sneakers “peace of mind.” He wishes his 8-year-old son had been wearing them when he got a call from his school in 2002 saying the boy was missing. The worried father hopped a flight to Atlanta from New York where he had been on business to find the incident had been a miscommunication and his son was safe. Days later, the engineer started working on a prototype of Quantum Satellite Technology, a line of $325 to $350 adult sneakers that hit shelves next month. It promises to locate the wearer anywhere in the world with the press of a button. A children’s line will be out this summer.

If a screeching buzzer is not enough to get you moving in the morning, consider Clocky. This alarm clock doesn’t just make noise, it breaks the snooze-button habit: after the first snooze period, Clocky rolls off the nightstand and runs away. Clocky generated Internet buzz in 2005 when it was just a conceptual design project by Gauri Nanda, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is now an actual product, available for $50 at www.nandahome.com . The clock can survive a two-foot drop and the alarm beeps randomly, ensuring that its frantic squalling won’t be easily forgotten. It comes in white, light blue and light green.

Hollywood: Former Playboy model and oil heiress Anna Nicole Smith died Thursday after collapsing at a hotel. She was 39. According to her attorney. Smith, was unresponsive and was rushed to the hospital on Thursday while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., hotel officials said. Smith was mourning the death of her 20-year-old son who died in her hospital room last year . Anna Nicole Smith, the pneumatic blonde whose life played out as an extraordinary tabloid tale — Playboy centerfold, jeans model, bride of an octogenarian oil tycoon, reality-show subject, tragic mother. She was stricken while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and was rushed to a hospital. Edwina Johnson, chief investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office, said the cause of death was under investigation and an autopsy would be done on Friday. Just five months ago, Smith's 20-year-old son, Daniel, died suddenly in the Bahamas in what