President Hugo Chavez on Sunday dispatched the navy to Venezuela’s seaports, warning that state governors who challenge a new law bringing transportation hubs under federal control could end up in prison.
Speaking during his weekly television and radio program, Chavez ordered naval vessels to seize control this week of Port Cabello in Carabobo state and Maracaibo Port in Zulia state — two of Venezuela’s largest seaports.

Then he singled out the opposition-sided governors of those states — Carabobo Gov. Henrique Salas and Zulia Gov. Pablo Perez — and told military officers they might decide to flout the newly approved law.

"If he gets smart … that deserves prison," Chavez said of Salas. "The same goes for the governor of Zulia."

Lawmakers loyal to Chavez voted last week to bring all airports, highways and seaports under federal control, a move government adversaries said was designed to expand the president’s power.

"This is a national security issue," Chavez said Sunday, defending the law.

The socialist leader accused "corrupt" governors of allowing drug smuggling through airports and seaports previously under their administration to thrive, and he promised a government crackdown.

"We’ve given drug trafficking tough blows, but we must recognize that they still have some bases in the ports and airports," Chavez said.

Opposition governors warned that the law approved last week by the  National Assembly is designed to strangle the president’s foes financially and to undermine support from constituents who elected them in November.

Under the law, states and municipalities can no longer collect tariffs at transportation hubs or establish tolls along highways, meaning governors and mayors will have less money for local public projects.

Chavez’s allies won 17 of 22 gubernatorial races in November elections. But opposition leaders gained ground, winning five gubernatorial posts and the Caracas mayor’s office.

Following the vote, Chavez signed a series of decrees giving his government control over hospitals, sports stadiums and other public institutions in states won by the opposition.

China is emerging as one of the strong global economy since the last two decade and is the world’s biggest holder of foreign exchange reserves with the reserves touching 1.2 trillion US dollars few months back (March, 2007). Many countries around the world are interested in business with China and are actively involved in learning Chinese language to understand and enhance the business opportunities.

Napoleon Bonaparte has once said that "China is the sleeping giant. Let her lie and sleep for when she awakens she will tremble the world." Nearly two century after the visionary statement of the legend, China’s dormant economy emerged so drastically that economic power that country holds now directly affects and facilitates the pace of global market.

People around the world and countries are now deliberately moving forward to exchange business relation with world’s fastest growing nation, a nation which is experiencing huge transition from a central-planned economy to a global-oriented market and has become a dominant player in the international economy and financial system. Hence for better business understanding, business opportunity and cultural exchange, learning Chinese language has become an all time high with approximately thirty million people are studying Chinese in universities, colleges or private courses.

Chinese is considered to be one of the world’s most popular languages and is a simple structured and tonal language where a single word can have different meaning depending upon the way it is pronounced. There are number of dialects in Chinese spoken in different province but the popularity is gaining by Mandarin language and this has also been recognized as the official language of China.

To follow the suit, the United States is investing huge sums in establishing Chinese learning schools and passing bills to encourage the Chinese language programming in schools across the U.S. and cultural exchanges to improve the ties between the two countries.

Despite learning Chinese language in home countries, people often prefer to travel to China and spend time there to get acclimatized with their tradition, culture and to gather experiences of being like a Chinese. With huge demands of Chinese language, major cities in China are overcrowded with Mandarin learning schools and many of which provides superb accommodation facilities, native Chinese speaking teachers and well qualified individuals to teach Chinese as foreign language.

Furthermore, students can choose Chinese language with a hope of getting easy employment in areas like banking, trade, financial, diplomatic work, academics, news media, content management, tours and travel and many more. Each of these fields is very challenging and gives one an enough exposure to Chinese society, culture and tradition.

Hence, if you are feeling the urgency of learning Chinese language and align yourself in the fast track of business by learning Chinese language, this is the right time to start. If you cannot afford to go to Chine to learn typical Chinese language, there are plenty of online resources such as free online Chinese learning course, audio guidelines and other scripts which can make you perfect in Chinese language and help you actively participate in various business processes.

Sharon Lepcha is a writer and this article wrote by her for online portal Chinastudyabroad.org which is a leading online resource that provides complete information on learning Chinese language in China and Mandarin Chinese. People can view details like course duration, course fee, seasonal details, accommodation facility, travel details and can apply for the course online.

Search engine optimization is a very critical task in the success of any website. In recent times search engines seem to have complicated this task further by their frequent changes in rules. This has caused lots of anxiety as some of these changes have seen some sites lose virtually all their regular traffic instantly as their rankings have tumbled.
This has further added to the confusion amongst webmasters about search engines and their motivations. But no matter how mad one gets at the search engines, there is little that they can do to change the statistics which clearly indicate that well over 75 per cent of the traffic that most sites receive comes directly from search engines.

However, there is a secret that an increasing number of webmasters have discovered and are putting to good use. Whatever regular changes search engines instigate, their motivation remains the same. Most webmasters forget that there is currently very stiff competition between the leading search engines. More so because it has become abundantly clear that none of the top search engines are interested in the runners up position.

The search engine motivation
This stiff competition between search engines is focused on the customer, that is the person who uses search engines to find information online. The preferred search engine and therefore the top one will always be the one that most satisfies the needs of that customer.

So whatever changes search engines make they will always be focused on improving the search engine experience for surfers. It is not too difficult to figure out what those who use search engines want, or even more important, what they do not want. Anybody using a search engine wants to be able to find what they are looking for quickly. Most will be looking for the most detailed quality content on the subject or information that they seek.

This simply means that any website that places its’ focus on the end consumer using search engines, rather than on the search engines themselves is guaranteed to retain their high ranking whatever changes search engines keep on making.

Can you dare assume that search engines do not exist?
So the most effective way to ensure that a website owner focuses on the surfers is for them to direct their focus on them, just like search engines are. It would help tremendously for them to start operating as if search engines did not exist and fully concentrate on ensuring that their sites have quality detailed content.

The dangers and harmful effects of webmasters focusing on search engines are very evident. We have sites that use keywords so heavily that it affects the quality of writing on their sites. Some sites have even done worse, leaving their quality content intact but creating keywords that are hidden to the human eye but visible to search engines.

In fact there are a whole lot of schemes on the net created to fool search engines, which have no regard for the surfer or what information they are looking for. For instance there is plenty of software on sale online whose promoters bluntly state is designed to fool search engines.

These are the sort of schemes that are causing so many constant changes in the rules of leading search engines as they seek for ways to combat any tricks that would favor undeserving sites in their rankings.

Content will always be king
What all this means is that content remains the most important search engine optimization tool. Just take a closer look at all the leading google websites and try and trace a common thread running through them all. You will quickly discover that the quality of writing and content in these sites is extremely high.

This means that any webmaster that makes an effort to provide quality, relevant and detailed content on their site with the experience of the surfer as their central focus will be using an extremely powerful search engine optimization tool.

If your content is good, then you can post it at other websites complete with a detailed resource box that directs traffic to your website. Quality articles will usually end up being re-posted all over the net in an endless viral effect that will create quality links back to your site. Search engines still rank websites based on the links from other sites leading to it so quality content has a double advantage.

A relentless sell-off in the stock market Monday blew through barriers that would have been unthinkable just weeks ago, and investors warned there was no reason to believe buyers will return anytime soon.
The Dow Jones industrial average plummeted below 7,000 at the opening bell and kept driving lower all day, finishing at 6,763 — a loss of nearly 300 points. Each of the 30 stocks in the index lost value for the day.

And the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index, a much broader measure of the market’s health, dipped below the psychologically important 700 level before closing just above it. It hadn’t traded below 700 since October 1996.

Investors were worried anew about the stability of the financial system after insurer American International Group posted a staggering US$62 billion loss for the fourth quarter, the biggest in US corporate history — and accepted an expanded bailout from the government.

But beyond daily headlines, Wall Street seems to have given up the search for a reason to believe that the worst is over and the time is ripe to buy again.

 "As bad as things are, they can still get worse, and get a lot worse," said Bill Strazzullo, chief market strategist for Bell Curve Trading, who said he believes the Dow might fall to 5,000 and the S&P to 500.

The Dow’s descent has been breathtaking. It took only 14 trading sessions for the average to fall from above 8,000 to below 7,000. For the year, the Dow has lost 23 percent of its value.

Its last close below 7,000 was May 1, 1997 — a time when the market was barreling to one record high after another because of the boom in technology stocks, but often suffered big drops as investors worried about inflation and rising interest rates.

This time around, Wall Street analysts seem to believe that a stock market recovery will first require signs of health among financial companies, and on Monday those signs seemed further away than ever.

AIG, whose reach is so vast that the government warns letting it fail would cripple the very world financial system, will get another US$30 billion in loans on top of the US$150 billion already invested by the government.

HSBC PLC, Europe’s largest bank by market value, said it needs to raise about US$18 billion, reported a 70 percent drop in earnings for last year, and announced plans to scale back US lending and cut 6,100 jobs.

The banking sector helped drive the market lower. Citigroup stock lost 20 percent of its value and fell to a paltry US$1.20 per share. HSBC lost 19 percent. Bank of America lost 8 percent

I had one of the best laughs of my life recently while reading a page explaining what Google’s homepage would look like if they had to Search Engine Optimization their site like everyone else.

It was beautiful, and I’m so jealous I didn’t think of it first.

As I normally do, I went out and scoped out the seo services companies to see what was happening…

Above: SearchMasters outranks google.co.nz for the term "search engine"