SCOTTISH motorists continued to flout the ban against driving while using a mobile phone yesterday, despite the introduction of harsh new penalties.

Police forces across Scotland launched a crackdown to coincide with the introduction of new punishments which doubled fines to 60 and put three penalty points on a convicted driver’s licence. But despite the warnings, The Scotsman observed drivers flouting the ban, three of them in little more than 15 minutes in Edinburgh city centre.

Road-safety groups described the violations as “appalling”.

According to the RAC Foundation, half a million motorists break the mobile-phone law every day, unaware of the danger they pose. Experts say the habit can be as dangerous as drink-driving.

But yesterday’s evidence showed that a hard core of drivers would take more convincing to change their behaviour.

The first offender was spotted cruising his silver Land Rover on to the west end of Princes Street from South Charlotte Street at 12:09pm, taking the tricky turn with one hand. At 12:25, the driver of a black Honda 4×4 followed the same route, and even dropped both hands off the wheel to fiddle with the radio.

At 12:27, a woman in a Mercedes CLX turned from Princes Street on to South Charlotte Street, seemingly oblivious to the stricter enforcement laws. And later that afternoon, a man in a black Nissan Micra was spotted on the phone while driving swiftly through Holyrood Park.

A spokeswoman for the road-safety charity Brake said the picture was “absolutely shocking”.

She said: “We hoped that stricter penalties would raise awareness of the dangers of driving and talking on your mobile phone. But this appalling picture obviously catches the Edinburgh driver red-handed.

“It is high time the government took steps to ensure the law is properly enforced, and to extend the ban to reflect research which shows using a hands-free phone at the wheel can be equally deadly”.

Motorists found flouting the rules could also see their car insurance costs rocket. AA Insurance warned that drivers who ended up with points on their licence from using a mobile could end up paying more than four times the fine through higher premiums.

It has been illegal to use a hand-held mobile behind the wheel since 1 December, 2003.

Home Office figures show that almost 74,000 fixed penalty notices were issued for illegal use of a mobile phone while driving in 2004. Over three weeks in Lothian and the Borders, officers observing more than 5,500 drivers found an average of one driver every five minutes using a phone.

Van and lorry drivers were the worst offenders - one in 22 of them was caught talking on a mobile.

RANDOM breath tests are to be considered by the government in an attempt to cut drink-driving.

Ministers will launch a consultation later this year and insist they have an open mind on the issue.

But Stephen Ladyman, a UK transport minister, said: “If it helps us to improve enforcement and to really crack down on drink-driving, maybe it is something we have got to do.”

Currently, police can impose breath tests only on motorists they suspect of being over the limit.

Despite a decline in drink-related deaths in 2005, they were still higher than in 1998 and 1999, at more than 500.

The Department for Transport said better enforcement of the existing blood-alcohol limit was the priority, rather than cutting it from 80mg to 50mg. But it also said Britain had better enforcement than many countries with lower limits.

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March 2, 2007 — U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced legislation that would require public companies to let shareholders vote on the pay packages of their top officers.

The bill would provide for a vote on compensation awarded in the prior year to a company’s five most highly paid executives, a list that typically includes the chief executive officer and chief financial officer. Because the ballot would be nonbinding, managers wouldn’t actually lose any pay in the event investors opposed their compensation.

Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, couldn’t get similar legislation passed last year, when his party was in the minority. This year, as the chairman of the committee, he has made executive pay one of his legislative priorities. A hearing on the topic is scheduled for next week.

“I do not understand those who argue that the people who make up our stock markets are collectively very wise, but at the same time are somehow incapable of rendering a coherent opinion of what they should pay those they employ to run the corporations that they own,” Frank said.

The earlier legislation, introduced by Frank in November 2005 as the “Protection Against Executive Compensation Abuse Act,” said companies would have to hold a shareholder vote to approve compensation plans. Yesterday’s bill, called the “Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act” makes clear that the required ballot wouldn’t be binding and wouldn’t overrule board decisions.

(05-23) 14:50 PDT SAN FRANCISCO, (AP) —

Google Inc. planned to introduce a feature Wednesday that automatically translates Internet search requests and results in 12 languages, underscoring the rapidly growing company’s ambitions outside the United States.

The tools allow Google’s users to enter search requests in their native languages and then choose to have the phrases as well as the accompanying results automatically translated into another language.

Users can then click on a link and have the entire Web page translated through a service that Google had already been offering.

Google expects the new translation service for search results to be particularly popular outside of the United States and the United Kingdom because so much of the Internet’s content is published in English.

Besides English, Google’s search results translator works in Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese.

Yahoo Inc., which runs the Web’s second largest search engine behind Google, already offers a service that has been automatically translating search results in Germany, France and Japan since 2005, spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. The Sunnyvale-based company also offers translation tools through its BabelFish site.

More recently, Yahoo has been trying to woo more traffic outside the United States through its “answers” service, which relies on its users to respond to each other’s questions in nine different languages.

By making its search engine more appealing to people who don’t speak English, Google is angling to sell more advertising in international markets and maintain the impressive financial growth that has driven a more than fivefold increase in its stock price in less than three years. The Mountain View-based company’s shares fell $1.89 to $473.97 Wednesday.

Google’s family of Web sites, including online video pioneer YouTube.com, already attracts the world’s largest audience, according to comScore Media Metrix.

American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson is among those who believe Google is poised to cash in on its opportunities outside the United States and United Kingdom.

Google collected $7.6 billion, or 72 percent, of its 2006 revenue from sources in the United States and the United Kingdom, Sanderson said in a report issued Tuesday. If the company had fared as well in other key markets around the world, Sanderson estimated Google would had generated an additional $4.9 billion to $8.7 billion in revenue last year.

“Clearly growth in international markets can significantly move the needle for” Google, Sanderson wrote. “We believe it is only time that stands in the way of capturing this opportunity.”

In a separate move to boost its profits, Google reportedly is nearing a $100 million deal to buy privately held FeedBurner Inc., which helps Web logs and other online publishers attract traffic and advertising through a distribution channel known as “really simple syndication,” or RSS.

The acquisition, which has been rumored for the past week, is expected to close in early June, according to TechCrunch, a well-connected blog that revealed Google’s plans to buy YouTube three days before that deal was announced last October. Contacted Wednesday, Google declined to comment on its reported interest in Chicago-based FeedBurner.

In another move Wednesday that had long been anticipated, Google began experimenting with the distribution of video ads to a small group of Web sites. The company will share the video revenue with its partners, just as it does with the short, text-based ads that account for most of its profit.

The video ads, which will be limited to 30 seconds, can be skipped by a Web site’s visitors.