For the last decade the big three — pink packets of saccharin, aspartame in blue and sucralose in yellow — have fought to a kind of stalemate. But now a new player, dressed in green, hopes to shift the balance of power, opening up the $1.2-billion-a-year world of fake sugar to all kinds of changes.
The Food and Drug Administration agreed in December that rebaudioside A, an extract from the leaves of the stevia plant, is safe to add to food and drinks.
The stakes are high. Despite nagging health concerns and flavors that are about as much like sugar as margarine is like butter, almost half of all American households use some kind of no-calorie sweetener, according to 2007 figures compiled by Packaged Facts, a market research firm. Although finding a no-calorie sweetener that tastes exactly like sugar remains the holy grail, the street fight is getting people loyal to the distinct flavors of one fake sugar to jump to another.
The stevia products that are coming on the market now are not without problems. They cost five times as much as Sweet’N Low, the oldest and least expensive of tabletop brands…But stevia has one distinct advantage over all the rest. Because it comes from a plant, marketers can call it a natural sweetener. And that allows companies that have invested millions in new stevia products to tap into two powerful markets at once: natural ingredients and low-calorie products.
Hackers have crossed into new frontiers by devising sophisticated ways to steal large amounts of personal identification numbers, or PINs, protecting credit and debit cards, says an investigator. The attacks involve both 
A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called 
Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.
