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The technology giant said it spent more than $1.5 billion on research and development of the new technology, which is driven by businesses’ needs to manage soaring loads of data and transactions.

The company cited Berg Insight data that indicated the number of users in the mobile bank and related services alone are expected to skyrocket to 894 million in 2015 from 55 million last year.

The new microprocessor system, dubbed zEnterprise 196, contains 96 of the world’s fastest chips and can execute more than 50 billion instructions a second, according to IBM - more than 17,000 times the rate of IBM’s high-end system in 1970, the company said.

The new system has 60 per cent more capacity than its predecessor, the System z10, and uses about the same amount of electricity.

It also has new software that IBM says can deliver a 60 per cent improvement in dealing with data-intensive Java workloads.

The company in March said the goal of the advance was to use use pulses of light rather than copper wires to exchange information between chips and to build the needed components out of silicon rather than costly, esoteric materials.

IBM’s advance involves a key component called an avalanche photodetector, which converts light into electricity.

The company’s researchers say they used silicon and a material called germanium to create an avalanche photodetector that is among the fastest and least power-hungry of its kind.

PORT MORESBY, PAPUA NEW GUINEA (Worthy News)– Amid death threats, over a dozen members of the Mengen tribe in the jungles of Papua New Guinea were baptized after “testifying their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ,” missionaries told Worthy News Monday, August 30.

“Last week 16 courageous Mengen believers in Papua New Guinea were baptized” including “six married couples,” said missionary Rebecca Preheim of mission group New Tribes Mission (NTM). They, “demonstrated their faith in Christ by stepping into the jungle pool the missionaries were using to baptize the group” on this Pacific island nation, she added.

Missionaries said that at least some of the believers received “death threats” from unbelievers, especially from the Shaman tribe in a neighboring village.

“Yet the believers chose to publicly declare their faith,” explained Preheim. “What joy it has been to see both husbands and wives take this step of faith together.”

LARGE CROWDS

Large crowds of friends and family members, who NTM described as still “unsaved", gathered at the small pond in the jungle to watch the service, witnesses said. The first believer to step into the water was reportedly a young man named Edward who said he had previously been a “troublemaker", creating difficulties for missionaries.

“In the past, I was not a good person. Everyone in the village knew that I was a person who stole and drank and fought,” Edward was quoted as saying in a statement distributed by NTM. “But when I placed my trust in Christ’s death [and resurrection], He completely changed me and for that reason. I want to follow Jesus’…and become baptized.”

After baptizing several believers, missionaries Lourens Laureti, Dave Wright and Simon Flanagan turned over the task to four Mengen men. “It was amazing to see these guys baptizing their wives and brothers and in-laws and friends,” wrote Becky.

“I want to become baptized to show people that I have placed my trust in Jesus…” said Bruce, a man who reportedly had been transformed from a thief and troublemaker into what Christians called “a dedicated man of God.”

He said, “My sins are all gone because of Jesus’ death alone. When I die, I will go to be with Him.” All tribes members were identified by one name, a common practise in the region.

Joe, an older man in the village reportedly told the crowd: “All of us here are gathered today for one reason and that is Jesus’ death alone. And we are gathered together with joy that comes from Jesus.”

MARY, TURKMENISTAN (Worthy News)– A Pentecostal pastor remained in police custody Tuesday, August 31, in Turkmenistan where he faces five years imprisonment and confiscation of properties for “large-scale swindling", charges his wife and church members strongly deny, rights activists said.

Police arrested Ilmurad Nurliev, pastor of Peace to the World Pentecostal Church, for allegedly swindling money from two women who attended church meetings, although church members deny that ever happened.

“I was out at work when the police arrested my husband,” said Maya Nurlieva, “and the first I knew was when he was allowed to call me from the investigator’s office.”

She said police refused to allow her to meet her husband and have also refused to give her any document certifying his arrest or detailing the reasons for it.

Maya said after her husband was arrested, police confiscated his certificate in preaching and refused to return it; they also took 150 dollars he had in his pocket.

“All they gave back to me were the keys to our flat,” she said.

Maya said that police and the investigators refused to discuss her husband’s case with her.

INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE

Turkmenistan, which has a heavily Muslim population, is under international pressure to improve religious rights and to protect its tiny Christian minority.

The government is seen as the region’s most autocratic. Christians and other devoted religious groups are often seen as a threat to its power base, rights groups have suggested.  The government has made clear however it wants to distance itself from former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov. Last week, a prominent 12-meter golden statue of Niyazov was taken down in the capital Ashgabat – a move further eroding the personality cult around the late Central Asian leader.

Workers removed the statue on August 25 and were dismantling the base on August 26, said Radio Free Europe. The Arch of Neutrality was a centerpiece of the capital, Ashgabat, and the most distinctive monument built in honor of Niyazov.

The statue stood on a 70-meter white tile-clad tripod and rotated to face the sun. Niyazov – who renamed himself the Great Turkmenbashi, the “Father of All Turkmen” – died in 2006 after two decades of iron-fisted rule.

(With additional reporting from Worthy News International Correspondent Stefan Bos.)

(Reuters) - God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity.

Since 1974, the scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics – Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.

His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.

He wrote in A Brief History … “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.”

In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.

“That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he writes.

Hawking, who is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, has a neuro muscular dystrophy that has progressed over the years and left him almost completely paralyzed.

He began suffering the disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world’s leading scientific authorities, and has also made guest appearances in “Star Trek” and the cartoons “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.”

Last year he announced he was stepping down as Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Newton and one he had held since 1979.

“The Grand Design” is due to go on sale next week.