Pirates, like gangsters, highwayman, and other colorful outlaws, have always carried a certain romantic appeal and, thanks to "Pirates of the Caribbean", they are the most appealing of the outlaws at this moment.

In a swashbuckling article for the Journal of Political Economy, Peter Leeson explored the fascinating “golden age” of piracy during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and finds that these criminal organizations were able to establish a remarkably stable form of self-government.

LONDON, September 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambian Healthcare and re:source won the 2008 Independent Healthcare Award for their ground-breaking partnership to improve the lives of patients with mental illness. The award was judged by the Healthcare Commission.

The award recognises a new innovative programme that enables long-stay hospital patients to return to their communities.

In 2007, 47 patients from the East Midlands were transferred to Cambian's Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Programme. The programme uses high staff ratios and intensive clinical inputs to work closely with these patients to rebuild their daily living skills and confidence.

LONDON, September 19 /PRNewswire/ --

The spate of ATM withdrawals on customer accounts with fraudulent cards has sparked widespread concern across the Middle East. The incidents that happened in UAE have rattled many banks and have instilled fear in the minds of cardholders.

Dubai is maturing into a major leisure and business destination and this means that many foreign-issued cards will be used at local ATM machines. Middle East-issued cards also have a very high level of out of country spending since a large portion of cardholders are expatriates.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland, September 19 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 200 participants from 72 companies assembled at the exclusive annual international platform for sustainable energy solutions at Hilton Nordica Reykjavík September 18 and 19.

"In the next five years or so we have to lay the fundamental groundwork of a comprehensive transformation of our traffic system, our transport, how we use the roads, how we move from one place to another, whether it is a household or a city or a country." said Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, President of Iceland, in his opening address at Driving Sustainability at Hilton Reykjavik Thursday.

TORONTO, Canada, September 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Addax Petroleum Corporation (TSX: AXC and LSE: AXC) ("Addax Petroleum" or the "Corporation") will host a management presentation to financial analysts and investors on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 in London, U.K. The Corporation's senior management team, including Mr. Jean Claude Gandur, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. James Pearce, Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Michael Ebsary, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Jeff Schrull, General Manager Exploration, will discuss the Corporation's most recent operating results and expectations regarding future operations.

LONDON, September 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Integer, a leading business consultancy in the area of global emissions regulations, today announced its latest speaker lineup for the Diesel Exhaust Fluid Forum (DEFF '08) to be held in San Diego, California, on November 11-12. The aim of this independent forum is to give exclusive insight into the commercial opportunities and concerns created by stricter heavy duty diesel vehicle emissions regulations from January 2010.

Identity thieves can learn a lot about you from your trash and so it goes that a cell's "trash" can yield treasures for biologists.

Using a new technique they developed, scientists at University of Delaware's Delaware Biotechnology Institute analyzed the cellular waste of one of the world's most-studied plants and discovered formerly hidden relationships between genes and the small molecules that can turn them off.

Precise measurements by the ESO instrument HARPS now show that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought - the much debated, apparent 'fall' of neighborhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves, say a group of astrophysicists led by Nicolas Nardetto in a Astronomy & Astrophysics article.

Since Henrietta Leavitt's discovery of their unique properties in 1912, the class of bright, pulsating stars known as Cepheids has been used as a distance indicator. Combined with velocity measurements, the properties of Cepheids are also an extremely valuable tool in investigations of how our galaxy, the Milky Way, rotates.

"The motion of Milky Way Cepheids is confusing and has led to disagreement among researchers," says Nardetto. "If the rotation of the Galaxy is taken into account, the Cepheids appear to 'fall' towards the Sun with a mean velocity of about 2 km/s."

Nature had her own ideas about testing the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) near Geneva last Friday. A thunderstorm knocked out some transformers that are part of the helium cooling system, which cools the magnets that keep the proton beams travelling at near light speed on a circular path through the collider. Technicians have been scrambling to fix the problems, but not before some magnets warmed well above standard operating temperatures, some reaching almost 7K from the usual ultra-cold 1.9K . Electromagnets at the LHC need to be this cold to be superconducting, or at peak efficiency, in order to deliver extremely high magnetic fields in the 27 km ring of 1200 giant magnets and thousands of smaller ones, at 8.33 Teslas or about 200,000 times the earth's magnetic field strength.

NEW YORK, September 19 /PRNewswire/ -- What: GoldenSource Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise data management (EDM) solutions, is actively participating in presentations at the Financial Technology Congress 2008. During a panel discussion, Neil Edelstein, vice president of product solutions, will discuss best practices for data integration within an organization. Attendees can visit the GoldenSource booth in the exhibition hall to talk one-on-one with Neil and other GoldenSource representatives.

Where: Financial Technology Conference 2008, The Four Seasons Hotel, Boston, MA