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G4S is set to become one of the world’s biggest employers after agreeing to buy ISS , the Danish services provider, in an ambitious 5.2 billion pound ($8.2 billion) deal that seeks to create a global leader in outsourcing with combined staff of 1.17 million.BP TO END PAYMENTS TO OIL SPILL FUND EARLYBP will be able to cease payments into a $20 billion compensation fund to help meet claims from last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill one year earlier than expected after striking an out-of-court settlement with Anadarko Petroleum .OLYMPUS TENSIONS RISE AMID THREAT OF LEGAL ACTIONThe ousted chief executive of Olympus has taken his case to the Britain’s white-collar crime agency while the Japanese camera maker - whose shares slid a further 24 percent over the debacle - said it could take legal action against him.IMPROVEMENT IN U.S. MORTGAGE DELINQUENCIES ENDSFears about the health of U.S. consumer balance sheets grew on Monday as Citigroup and Wells Fargo joined JPMorgan Chase in reporting new signs that homeowners and credit-card borrowers are falling behind on their payments.SAINT GEORGE DROPS DTZ TAKEOVER PLANSDTZ’s biggest shareholder has scrapped plans to take the global property consultancy private after more than five months of takeover talks, raising questions about the future of the debt-laden company.BLACKBERRY SAYS SORRY WITH APPS REWARDResearch In Motion is to give BlackBerry users more than $100 worth of free applications as a way of apologising for the outage that took down the smartphone’s email service for three days last week across many parts of the world.IPHONE 4 SALES HIT RECORD ON LAUNCHApple has sold a record 4 million of its latest incarnation of the iPhone in its first three days on sale in spite of criticism that the new product was a more limited technological leap forward than its predecessors.FRENCH COURT RULES L’OREAL HEIRESS MENTALLY UNFITLiliane Bettencourt, the 88-year-old L’Oreal heiress who is France’s richest woman, has lost her bitter three-year battle against her own daughter Francoise Meyers-Bettencourt to retain control of her 15 billion euros ($21 billion) ­fortune.

By Leonora Walet Suntech Power may be the world’s biggest solar panel maker but it trails Sharp, Kyocera, Panasonic and Mitsubishi Electric in the fast-growing Japanese solar market. Now, the company is set to take on these Japanese rivals on their home turf and aims to double its market share in the country to 10 percent next year. The catalyst? The expected adoption of a special tariff, now being discussed by lawmakers, on power from solar panels to lure investors to bigger projects. Japan’s ambitious plan, if implemented, to get solar panels on the roofs of every new building would of course also give the market a hefty boost. “We need to take market share from the top four. Our immediate goal is to pass Mitsubishi,” Yutaka Yamamoto, Suntech Power Japan president, told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit in Tokyo. Suntech entered Japan’s solar market — the world’s fastest growing after Europe — in 2006, and last year ranked as the No.5 panel supplier in the country. Yamamoto said Suntech would win more market share once the so-called feed-in-tariff scheme starts. Under such a scheme, utilities would have to buy surplus electricity at higher rates from large-scale solar projects. He also expects to clinch larger solar panel supply deals. Once spending on commercial-use solar projects picks up in Japan, Suntech would be able to underbid Japanese rivals in price, Yamamoto said. Suntech’s rise to the top was no accident. Capitalising on the billions the Chinese government is pouring into green technologies and low production costs, manufacturers like Suntech can supply among the cheapest solar panels in the world. Suntech, along with other Chinese suppliers like Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar, supply over 60 percent of the world’s solar panels. Japan’s solar market is expected to grow 20 percent this year, Yamamoto said, and could double in the coming years depending on how quickly Japan builds its policy on solar, presenting Suntech with further opportunities for growth. Photo credit: Hoon

Are you being tracked right now? If you thought you were just browsing aimlessly, doing a little shopping or checking sports scores without identifying yourself, you could be mistaken about your level of privacy. A new study from a Stanford University researcher has found that a lot of  the little bits and pieces of supposedly anonymous data being deposited by your web browser are actually being gathered and reassembled by dozens of companies and sold. And stopping that from happening takes more than a little bit of effort, helped by a growing movement for “do not track” legislation. More companies know more about you than previously thought and stopping them from secretly building profiles of you is a lot harder than just pressing a button, researcher Jonathan Mayer says. He adds: “Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you. Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity… Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn’t a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical. This is what’s happening today.” Mayer, of Stanford’s Computer Security Laboratory, says more than half of the sites surveyed share your information with other sites. As an example, he notes that  even when you’re on a typical commercial news site there will be multiple companies collecting information as a matter of course: including the site itself, a video delivery service, advertising networks and social networks. Previously, privacy advocates suggested that opting out of so-called behavioral advertising was a means of avoiding having your online usage patterns tracked. But Mayer says that stopping targeted advertising doesn’t stop the data collection. Consumers Union regulatory counsel Ioana Rusu says companies can not only find out who you are and where you’ve been, but also alter offers that you see based on nothing other than the websites you’ve visited — something that can paint a grossly distorted picture of someone. She cited the example of a credit card company that presented different offers to users based on their online profile. “These decisions are not made based on actual credit reports, but on the users’ browsing patterns,” she says. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, speaking at the same privacy forum, says the potential impact to consumer privacy with today’s technology goes far beyond targeting you for advertising. “Your tracked information doesn’t have to stop there; it could be traded throughout an invisible lattice of companies, snowballing into an exhaustive profile of you (that is) available to those making critical decisions about your career, finances, health, and reputation.” What are supposed to do? If you’re ok with companies assembling profiles of you based on your web browsing habits, you needn’t do a thing. But if you want to keep your email address and name and what you do online as a personal experience, you’ll have to take a series of steps to try to close that window. Mayer says you could take the most extreme option — untenable to most of us — simply stop going on the web. If you want to stay online, he first suggests is to set your browser’s privacy settings  to say you don’t want to be tracked. That option, he says, is available through Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, but not Google Chrome. A “Do Not Track” site Mayer is affiliated with walks you through the steps you need to take stop tracking. You can also go through the manual steps of stopped the behavioral advertising by choosing to opt-out through the Network Advertising Initiative as well as through the Digital Advertising Alliance. The FTC has backed the creation of a do not track law that would limit what information could be collected about you online. For now, it’s up to consumers to protect themselves. Mayer says only an estimated 5 percent of Firefox users have shut off tracking. Is that because they don’t know how to do this, or because they don’t really mind being tracked? That’s a subject for another study.

Taobao Mall, China’s largest business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce platform, said on Monday it will increase its annual membership fees from 6,000 yuan ($944) to between 30,000 yuan to 60,000 yuan depending on the type and scale of the business.The fee hike caused thousands of Taobao Mall shop owners to protest online Tuesday night by buying up goods from bigger stores and then asking for refunds, Xinhua said. Asking for refunds would lower the rankings of the shops and prompted some big outlets to temporarily stop selling products, it said.On Wednesday, 40,000 people claiming to be Taobao Mall businessmen gathered in an online chat room to discuss more ways of disrupting the website, the report said.Taobao Mall said in a statement on Wednesday that the matter has been referred to the police.”We are willing to accept any views and suggestions towards our rules but we will not tolerate serious harm committed against innocent businesses because of different views,” Taobao Mall said in the statement.Alibaba Group, which is 40 percent owned by Yahoo Inc , operates Taobao, Taobao Mall and Alibaba.com .The business owners claimed that the fee increase would cripple their businesses but will have little effect on the bigger brands that have stores on the platform, Xinhua reported.A portion of the new fees will be returned to the shop owners if they satisfy certain standards and criteria.Taobao Mall had 32.8 percent of China’s 54.2 billion yuan B2C online marketplace in the second-quarter, according to data from Analysys International. 360buy, Taobao Mall’s nearest rival, had 12.4 percent of the market.

Canon has been using robots to replace workers at its Oita Prefecture commercial toner facility, and will expand such efforts to the United States and Europe. The company plans to lift its current global automation rate for office toner from 70-80 percent to about 90 percent in five years, the daily said.At its toner plant in the Virginia, United States, the company will use robots to speed up production and cut labor costs, the Nikkei reported.It will also raise the number of automated production lines from three to 10 over the medium term, the business daily said.In Europe, Canon plans to build a factory that will be automated from production through recycling, and expects to run the facility from 2012, Nikkei said.

Two previous Super Bowls have been played in the Phoenix area, most recently in 2008 when the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots in Glendale. Tempe hosted the game in 1996 when the Dallas Cowboys beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.Arizona’s bid to host the biggest annual sporting event in North America topped one from the Tampa, Florida, area.Indianapolis will host the Super Bowl in 2012, followed by New Orleans in 2013 and the New York/New Jersey areas in 2014.