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Rome  - Former AC Milan football star Gianni Rivera said he was worried by Italy's 3-0 defeat against Brazil at the Confederations Cup although he did not find it humiliating.

"The (actual) value of our national team lies between that of the (2006) World Cup and that of (today's) squad," the ANSA news agency Monday quoted Rivera as saying.

Madrid  - Spanish Liga club Espanyol announced on Monday the signing of Israeli teenage striker Ben Sahar from Chelsea, for an undisclosed fee.

Ben Sahar, 17, has agreed to a four-year contract with the Catalan club. He was also wanted by Dutch giants Ajax.

Chelsea have loaned out Ben Sahar in the past two years to Queens Park Rangers, Sheffield Wednesday, Portsmouth and De Graafschap.

Espanyol are also close to signing Japanese midfielder Shunsuke Nakamura, 30, from Celtic, according to British and Spanish press reports.

Johannesburg - The organizers of the football World Cup in South Africa on Monday sought to ease concerns about the safety of visitors at the tournament, pointing to the relatively low incidence of crime at the Confederations Cup as proof there was nothing to fear.

The chief executive of the World Cup organizing committee Danny Jordaan and deputy police minister Fikile Mbalula were responding to questions from the international media as the Confederations Cup, a test run for the World Cup, passes the half-way mark.

London  - The British parliament Monday launched the process of electing a new Speaker in an attempt to modernize and clean up its image following a damaging scandal over parliamentary expenses.

Members of parliament (MPs) were able to choose from 10 candidates running for the post in a secret ballot. The position is equivalent to that of parliamentary president in other democracies.

Google's search engine's capacity has been enhanced to Index Adobe's Flash files which are very common on the Web.

Now the search spiders of the company are smart enough to be able to index external content which is loaded by Adobe Flash components. Indexing of content in HTML, text and XML formats will also be included.

According to Google, this new potentiality amends search quality by permitting applicable content comprised in external resources to appear in response to user's queries.

With both Google and Yahoo, Adobe has been working to improve the indexing of Flash content online.