Tabitha Berg

KIRKLAND, Wash. -- Starting this year, long term care insurance, which enhances the security of longer-living Americans, will indirectly improve lives in AIDS-plagued Africa also. Today LTC Financial Partners LLC, the nation's most experienced long term care insurance brokerage, announced that it would contribute 2% of its profits each year to the Rabuor Village Project, a comeback model for villages throughout Africa.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- GeckoSystems, Inc. (OTC: GKSY) is pleased to announce that the Board of Directors has appointed Mr. Neil T. Wallace to the position of Vice President, Legal and Public Affairs. Mr. Wallace holds a J.D. and an economics degree and has held several senior management positions domestically.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Recognizing the need for another effective medium, H. Lewis Smith, author of "Bury that Sucka" (ISBN: 1413792693), is the founder of a new non-profit organization, United Voices for a Common Cause, Inc. The organization pledges and holds true "to not use the n-word as they strive toward cultural integrity and mutual respect for all Americans."

FREMONT, Calif. -- TeamF1, Inc., the leader in embedded security, today announced that V-IPSecure - its high-performance implementation of IPsec and IKE protocols for IPv4 and IPv6 - successfully passed all the Virtual Private Network Consortium's (VPNC) interoperability tests for IPsec VPN systems. This certification continues the company's long-standing commitment to provide the embedded market with lean and robust security software complying with stringent industry standards.

HOUSTON, Texas -- This year's holiday "Cyber-Monday" showed an unprecedented 26% increase over the same day last year as internet shoppers handed over $608 million to internet sellers. The modern shopping boom is accompanied by interest in modern products, at least in one area where a brand new diamond shape is receiving what we should call "X-plosive" attention over its traditional counterparts, say the folks at Whiteflash.com.

PENSACOLA, Fla. -- So, you want to be a P.I.? Florida Private Investigator, John Krause, has re-released "The Private Investigator's Guide," (ISBN: 0-615-13411-4, printed version; and ISBN: 0-615-12404-6; CD-ROM version) previously published in 1997. "The Private Investigator's Guide" is the most comprehensive guide on the market; it teaches the novice P.I. the tricks of the trade and provides basic information for business start-up.

KANAGAWAKEN, Japan -- KAYAC Co.Ltd. CEO Daisuke Yanagisawa announced that the company has launched a new blog widget "THANKS" from their blog widgets site "BlogDeco." According to Yanagisawa: "This blog widget 'THANKS,' is our fist release targeted abroad, in both Japanese and English versions."

CHICAGO, Ill. -- The LJR Group today announced publication of a revised edition of the book "Our Uncle Sam: The Sam Cooke Story From His Family's Perspective" (ISBN: 1-4120-6498-8, www.ourunclesam.com). Written by Cooke's great-nephew Erik Greene, Our Uncle Sam not only emphasizes Cooke's accomplishments in music history, but gives the reader an inside look on the childhood influences that drove him to excel.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- Buying and servicing a boat has become a much easier task for consumers around the country, thanks to Boating Industry magazine's second annual Top 100 Dealers, a ranking of an incredibly powerful group of marine dealers that generated more than $2.88 billion in retail sales, or nearly 8 percent of the entire $37 billion marine market.

HARTFORD, Conn. -- The psychological thriller "TO THE BONE" (ISBN: 0-9769688-3-5) by Mark Vann is based on an astonishing medical case history and offers readers a villain like no other in the annals of crime fiction. The strands of the plot are darkly and deftly intertwined like the DNA helix of the killer. In addition, this groundbreaking novel brings to the forefront a subject that has always been considered taboo.