The US Internet titan’s adCenter will target Chinese exporters wanting to advertise overseas, said Anderson Liu, general manager of Microsoft’s domestic joint venture MSN China.

“It’s time to join the market and let Chinese advertisers have more choices,” Liu was quoted by the China Daily as saying.

AdCenter helps businesses place advertisements online such as on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Microsoft hopes revenue from the pay-per-click ads will account for half of MSN China’s business in the future, Liu said, without providing further details.

In July, Google parted ways with two Chinese advertisers following its standoff with Beijing over censorship and cyberattacks the US search giant claims originated in China.

Google cut ties with Universal Internet Media and Xi’an Weihua Network, two major advertising agencies that worked in eastern and northwestern China, the China Daily said, citing Marsha Wang, Google China spokeswoman.

In January, Google said it would not buckle to Chinese government pressure to censor its content, and threatened to pull out of the country entirely.

It later effectively shut down its Chinese site google.cn, re-routing mainland users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong.

In March, a group of 27 Chinese advertising agencies sent Google a letter calling for talks over compensation for possible business losses amid the censorship wrangle.

Google’s share of China’s online market fell to 24.2 percent in the three months to June, from 30.9 percent in the first quarter, research firm Analysys International said in a recent report.

“Jonathan Zebina’s contract was terminated amicably,” read a statement on the Juventus website.

Zebina, 32, arrived in Turin in 2004 and played 99 games for the Italian giants, scoring no goals.

He began his career with French side Cannes before moving to Italy with Cagliari in 1998 and signing for Roma two years later. He is now expected to join Brescia.

Italian news agency Ansa reported that Juve have paid Arsenal 500,000 euros to take 20-year-old left-back Traore on loan from the English Premier League side.

The Turin club will have an option to make the deal permanent at the end of the season.

YouTube advertisers have been able to pick which videos they want their messages to accompany but the new tool lets them eliminate specific snippets or channels that might be considered by automated ad-targeting software.

“One of the most frequently requested features we’ve heard from advertisers is the ability to exclude individual videos and channels from the campaigns they run on our site,” YouTube senior product manager Baljeet Singh said in a blog post.

He gave examples such as a vegan bakery that might not want its ads to run with video of a culinary show specializing in meat dishes, and beer makers steering clear of videos popular with audiences below the legal drinking age.

For the same period of last year, the giant international group had reported a loss of 58 million euros.

“Carrefour posted solid growth in sales and operating profit before non-recurring items in a difficult environment and we are on track to achieve the objectives set as part of our transformation plan,” the company’s chief financial officer, Pierre Bouchut, said in a conference call.

Carrefour said it was on track to hit its target of an operating profit of 3.1 billion euros this year.

Carrefour shares gained 0.10 percent to 36.14 euros in trading following the announcement, and were heavily outperforming the Paris stock market, showing a 9.0-percent gain from the beginning of the year compared to a 12.0-percent loss for the CAC 40 index.

Analysts at the US bank Citigroup raised their recommendation for shares in Carrefour, which is about to launch a reinvention of its hypermarket model, to “buy” from “hold”.

Four soldiers were killed in eastern Afghanistan in a Taliban-style bomb attack, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

The fifth died in an insurgent attack in the south of the country, where the insurgency is at its fiercest, it said in a separate statement.

A spokesman confirmed to AFP that all the dead were Americans.

The deaths bring to 485 the total number of foreign troops killed in the Afghan war this year, compared to 521 for all of 2009, according to an AFP tally based on that kept by the independent icasualties.org website.

The deaths come a day after eight NATO troops — seven of them American — were killed in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.

The eighth soldier was a 20-year-old Estonian who died of his injuries on Monday after insurgents set off an improvised explosive device (IED) in Nad-e-Ali in Helmand province.

Estonia has a 160-strong contingent within the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, part of a troop deployment of almost 150,000 under NATO and US command.

It was the eighth Estonian soldier killed since the Baltic state first deployed troops to Afghanistan in 2003 after the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime.

Canada lost its 152nd soldier to die as a result of the Afghan war when a corporal died from injuries sustained from an IED on August 22.

He died in hospital in Germany, the military said.

With most of the boots on the ground, the United States is bearing the greatest burden, losing 1,267 soldiers since the war began in late 2001.

Altogether, the coalition has lost 2,053 soldiers in the Afghan war.

The insurgency is at its most intense in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, but it has rapidly spread to other regions in the past year.

NATO is struggling to turn the tide on the Taliban but officials say that the arrival of 30,000 extra troops, as part of US President Barack Obama’s surge aimed at speeding an end to the war, is having an impact.

The US commander of the Afghan war, General David Petraeus, acknowledged Tuesday that the Taliban were expanding their footprint across the country even as foreign forces close in on their traditional southern strongholds.

A sharp rise in attacks on international troops showed the hardline Islamist militia were feeling threatened in their safe havens after almost nine years of war, he told reporters.

The overall strategy against the Taliban was reaching its “final stages,” he told three foreign media organisations including AFP, with the number of US and NATO troops set to peak at 150,000 in the coming days.

Petraeus said the intensified fighting was a reflection of the militants’ desperation as the alliance poured in more resources.

“Levels of attacks have gone up and that’s a manifestation of us increasing our resources substantially and taking away safe havens that the Taliban have been able to establish over the course of the last several years,” he said.

“And when the enemy’s safe havens are threatened they fight back.”

The insurgency is concentrated in Kandahar and Helmand, which the Taliban consider their heartland, but is becoming increasingly intense along the eastern border with Pakistan.

Northern provinces are also becoming more unstable, as NATO supply lines from Central Asia traverse the previously peaceful region, drawing insurgent fighters who, residents say, are becoming embedded in villages and districts.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Obama will address Americans in a nationally televised speech at 8 pm (midnight GMT). Before that, he will travel to a military base in Texas to meet with soldiers who have recently returned from Iraq.

The size of the US force in Iraq has dropped below a symbolic threshold of 50,000 troops. Starting Wednesday, their mission will be to “advise and support” the Iraqi army.

Speaking on ABC television early Tuesday, Obama’s chief spokesman Robert Gibbs said that winding up US military operations in Iraq provides Americans the opportunity to put behind them one of the most divisive periods in recent history.

“We can thank the men and women who made tremendous sacrifices. We can heal the wounds that were opened… about whether we should go to Iraq,” he said.

“I think what you will hear tonight (are) the steps we have to take here at home to strengthen our security domestically,” Gibbs said.

Under a timetable set by Obama when he took office, all US troops are supposed to be out by the end of 2011, although officials have said a small residual military presence is likely to remain indefinitely.

Iraqi officials, worried about a surge in attacks and a five-month-old political impasse that has blocked the formation of a new government, have expressed concern that the US military may be moving to the exits too quickly.

Just last week, 53 people were killed and hundreds were wounded by a dozen coordinated car bombings in 10 cities and towns across the country, the latest in a rash of attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Iraq’s top army officer told AFP earlier this month that he feared worsening security problems after the Americans leave, and said they should stay until the Iraqi military is fully ready — in 2020.

But the White House has insisted that the Iraqis are capable of providing for their own security now, and the top US general said only a “complete failure” of the local security forces could lead to a resumption of US combat operations.

Obama assured Americans in an interview on NBC television Sunday that the timing was right for a drawdown.

“What you’ve seen is lower and lower levels of violence. The Iraqi security forces are functioning at least as well if not better than any of us had anticipated,” Obama said.

Alluding to the Iraqi’s failure to form a new government, Obama said the political difficulties were “natural in a fledgling democracy. But we are confident that that will get done.”

During his speech, only the second of his presidency to use the solemn setting of the Oval Office, Obama is expected to raise the other major theater of US military operations: Afghanistan, where the president chose to escalate, tripling the number of US troops since the start of his mandate.

Insurgent violence there has intensified as the United States has pivoted from Iraq.

Though a vehement critic of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he was a state legislator in Illinois, Obama argues the war in Afghanistan is justified because the Taliban’s Al-Qaeda allies pose a threat to the security of the United States.

The speech will also give Obama an opportunity to pay homage to US soldiers. More than a million have been deployed in Iraq since 2003 and some 4,400 lost their lives there.

He has consistently drawn a distinction between the political decision to invade and the performance of US troops on the ground.

With his checkered shirt, beard and pony tail, it was only his nationality that set Arash Jafari apart from other exhibitors at the industry show that ran from Thursday until Sunday in the German city of Cologne.

Jafari’s story began on a college campus, at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

With a basketball teammate who had also studied in California, he founded a company that developed professional software.

Because of their love of video games, the pair invested profits from that company into creating Garshasp, an adaptation of the US video game Gods of War, that has a Persian warrior as its star.

In a dark, medieval universe that resembles many video games on the market, Garshasp must battle a series of bloody monsters and is armed with an array of bladed weapons.

The “game has to be fun” said Jafari, who acknowledged he had collaborated with Iranian rating’s authorities to get the game launched.

“As with the music, there are red lines,” he said.

His hero fights only monsters for example because it is forbidden to kill other human beings, even if they not real.

Another video game producer, Amir Salmazadeh, who sells educational content for very young players, skirted the Islamic veil issue by using only children or animals in his work.

In Iran, the ESRA commission works with psychologists and sociologists to rate video games according to their “conformity with the Iranian and Islamic cultures.”

Its logos, which closely resemble those of US counterpart ESRB, authorise the most benign games for those at least three years old, and the most sensitive for those who are at least 25 years old and married.

“Porn and drugs are forbidden,” as is alcohol, unless associated with an evil entity, said Behrouz Minaei, managing director of the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games.

“We are working for better quality in video games,” he said.

Iran has 35 design studios, a fledgling industry of which the government sometimes has “a negative point of view,” Minaei added.

“We are here to find investors. Our games, based on Iranian history, are unique,” he added.

The Iranians are present for the second year at Gamescom, which bills itself as Europe’s biggest trade fair for interactive games and entertainment, and have presented their work at a fair in Dubai.

Happy to be presenting his work in Europe, Jafari said he hoped “to show Westerners the true culture of Iran, not the distorted one they can see in the media.”

Western children wanted to be exposed to different kinds of video games, he added.

In Cologne, he said he had made contacts with industry figures from Britain, Germany and Italy, but had not signed any contracts so far.

The mass stranding of a pod of 73 whales was discovered mid-morning and Carolyn Smith from the Department of Conservation said the whales probably beached overnight, which was why so many died before a rescue operation was launched.

The area around Kaitaia beach, in the far north of New Zealand, was experiencing heavy rain and wind which Smith said helped the surviving whales by ensuring they did not dry out but made it difficult for rescuers preparing to refloat the mammals.

At least five people are needed to work with each of the whales, which weigh up to 1.5 tonnes.

Whale beachings are not uncommon along the New Zealand coast and more than 100 pilot whales died in a stranding in the South Island last December.

The 33-year-old French defender is due to undergo a medical on Friday after agreeing to cross from the Emirates to White Hart Lane, The Times reported.

Gallas was left looking for new employers after Arsenal baulked at his high wage demands, reportedly 80,000 pounds (124,000 dollars, 97,000 euros) a week.

But they have not put off Spurs manager Harry Redknapp who said last week: “His wages aren’t a problem. He has not been greedy at all.

“His people have rung up and we spoke about it.”

Traffic between Arsenal and Spurs has been light over the years, aside from Sol Campbell’s acrimonious transfer to join Arsene Wenger’s team also on a free transfer in 2001.

But Redknapp shrugged off any controversy there could be from Gallas crossing the north London divide.

“He’s been an Arsenal player but he was at Chelsea before that and playing abroad before he arrived there.

“It’s not like we would be signing Tony Adams. He’s a good player and he would be a very useful addition to our squad.”

With Jonathan Woodgate still out with a long-term groin injury and captain Ledley King plagued by knee problems that have the potential to limit his playing time, Redknapp has been keen to bolster his defensive resources.

Should Gallas complete a move, he would be Spurs’ second summer signing, following that of Sandro.

The Brazilian midfielder’s arrival in the UK is imminent after he helped Internacional win the Copa Libertadores.

About one-quarter of China’s 420 million web users live in rural areas where Internet access exists in 91.5 percent of communities, the People’s Daily said, citing the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences study.

About half of the Chinese population still live in rural areas, where the standard of living is far below that of the country’s thriving cities.

Across the nation, 70 percent of high schools, more than 60 percent of vocational schools, about 40 percent of middle schools and 12 percent of primary schools have Internet access, the study said.

Beijing operates a vast system of web censorship, sometimes referred to as the “Great Firewall of China”. It blocks access to any content the communist authorities deem unacceptable, ranging from pornography to political dissent.