“This Is It” by Michael Jackson

An unheard Michael Jackson song is to be released as a single next month.

“This Is It”, which features backing vocals by Jackson’s brothers, will go on sale on 12 October.

Jackson’s record label Sony Music said the song would also appear on a new album, as will unheard versions of his classic hits.

It is not clear when Jackson wrote and recorded the new track. The pop star had been working with artists like Akon and Will.i.am before his death in June.

The song will be the first new material to see the light of day since he died.

It takes its name from the ill-fated series of comeback shows that were to have been held at London’s O2 arena.

“This song only defines, once again, what the world already knows – that Michael is one of God’s greatest gifts,” said John McClain, the music executive who is co-executor of his will and has co-produced the new two-disc album.

The first disc will feature his greatest hits, ending with the new song.

The second disc will include previously unreleased versions of his best-loved tunes. 

The new song will also feature in the closing credits of a film, called This Is It, which has been made using footage of rehearsals for his O2 concerts.

Southern Australia faces massive dust storm

A massive dust storm swept through parts of southern Australia on Wednesday, bathing them in a reddish haze and prompting health officials to warn asthma patients to take cover.

Health officials in Sydney warned residents to stay in indoors if possible, especially if they had asthma or heart and lung conditions.

“Avoid spending too much time outdoors due to the high particle levels and hazardous air quality,” the New South Wales Department of Heath Web site said.

The Ambulance Service of New South Wales said the dust storm had kept it busy with emergency calls.

“We have already seen an increase in calls to people suffering from asthma and other respiratory problems,” the agency said in a statement.

On Wednesday, the country’s meteorology bureau issued a severe weather warning of “widespread damaging winds” for Sydney and other areas.
The wind had pushed the dust storm out of many areas in Sydney by Wednesday afternoon.

World’s Most Expensive Cities To Live

Think your morning commute is expensive? Think again. The ride on a bus or subway in Tokyo costs $3.25. Grab a newspaper and a cup of coffee on the way and the total comes to $11.70. That’s more than anywhere else in the world–24% more than what those same things cost in New York, even.

Tokyo is the world’s most expensive city, according to Mercer’s 2009 Worldwide Cost of Living survey released today, with the cost of living up 13.1% from 2008; the city ranked at No. 2 in 2008’s survey. Japan’s capital is followed by Osaka and Moscow, which held the top spot in last year’s rankings. Geneva comes in fourth.

Michael Jackson Dead

How many people does it take to break the internet? Just one. The web suffered a number of slowdowns on Friday as people rushed to verify  accounts of Michael Jackson’s death.

The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe, the BBC News portal reported. Search giant Google confirmed to that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a virus or spyware application”.

“It’s true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page,” said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.

It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead. Google’s trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called “hotness” gauge the topic was rated “volcanic”.

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at 0400 BST was 48% higher than average. Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information.

…tops Twitter charts too


The news of Michael Jackson’s death rocked Twitter as fans of the star sought the latest information and posted their reactions.

Ethan Zuckerman, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, said Jackson was a more popular topic on Twitter than the Iran poll or swine flu ever were. “My twitter search script sees roughly 15% of all Tweets mentioning Jackson,” he said. “Never saw Iran or H1N1 reach over 5%.” On Friday all other mentions were repla-ced on Twitter’s trending topic colu-mn by those of Jackson.

NYT NEWS SERVICE As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with requests.

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke. Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches.

But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its wellknown outages. According to initial data from Trendrr, a webservice that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour.