London, Nov 12  Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers, a technique which is being touted as the most secure form of identification.

According to a report in the Times, finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method.

Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person’s identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin.

The pattern of blood vessels is captured by transmitting near-infrared light at different angles through the finger, usually the middle finger.

London, Nov 12 : A smiling photograph of the American President-elect Barack Obama on a Tehran news weekly front cover has resulted in ban of the weekly by Iranian authorities.

The news weekly featured Obama on its front cover last week and asked “Why doesn’t Iran have an Obama?” has been closed down, The Times reported.

It appeared to be a taunt too far for Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and saw the magazine Shahrvand-e Emrouz (Today’s Citizen) promptly banned by Iran’s Press Supervisory Board.

London, Nov 12 : Two Muslim sisters have won a multi-million pound settlement on the verge of an explosive tribunal which threatened to make public claims of widespread drug abuse and racial bigotry in London.

Samira and Hanan Fariad, 31, had made more than 200 sensational claims like top brokers used cocaine, and subjected them to unbearable levels of race and religious discrimination.

They alleged that former bosses at Tradition Securities and Futures turned a blind eye to the deplorable behaviour.

But just days after the case began last week the two sides settled for what is believed to be a staggering 10million pound. It dwarfs all previous payouts, The Sun reported.

London, Nov 12: French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, arrived late to commemorate 1918 Armistice at the battlefield of Verdun, where more than 300,000 French and German soldiers were killed and more than one million wounded in 1916.

London, November 12 : A study conducted at the University of California in San Diego has confirmed that a spoken phrase seems to morph into a song when repeated, throwing new light on the difference between speech and song.

Lead researcher Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the university, says that she first observed this effect while recording her own voice in the mid-Nineties.

She has revealed that one phrase behaved so strangely that it began to sound like a song, upon being replayed several times.

In her latest study, Deutsch tested the illusion on proficient singers.

The participants were asked to play the phrase just once, and to repeat what they had heard.

London, Nov 12 : A pretty face is liked by everyone – except for women of childbearing age – that’s what a new study suggests.

The study has found that fertile women rate other attractive women consistently lower than women who have entered menopause

"It''s almost as if they''re putting down other attractive women," New Scientist quoted Benedict Jones, a psychologist at Aberdeen University, UK, who led the study of 97 middle-aged women, as saying.

To reach the conclusion, the lead researcher and his colleagues showed pre- and post-menopausal women pictures of men and women, digitally manipulated to make them more masculine or more feminine looking.