World Cup goes into cool-down mode

The prospect of a winter World Cup in 2022 looks set to become a reality after Europe's football associations voted against holding the tournament in the Qatari summer. All 54 member associations of UEFA, Europe's governing body, backed the decision at a meeting in Croatia on Thursday. "They all agreed that this competition could not take place in the heat of Qatar in the summer," FIFA vice-president Jim Boyce told CNN. "At the end of the day common sense has to prevail here and I'm glad at long last common sense has prevailed," he added. FIFA, the game's world governing body, has been considering the option of moving the tournament because of fears that players and fans would be adversely affected by the searing heat, which can reach 50 degrees Celsius during the summer. If you want to cool down the stadiums for health and safety reasons, that's probably the right thing to do, but one must remember that this is a World Cup and there is no cooling down the ambience of a World Cup, especially if nobody has been able to successfully defend it since 1962. That won't matter when you go shopping for your next phone, though, because when it comes to new iPhones, bling is the thing. Early buyers of the iPhone 5S, which went on sale yesterday morning, appear to be overwhelmingly choosing the gold-colored model over the two other color options. People trying to buy a gold phone in Apple's online store yesterday saw a message stating the phone will not ship until October. By contrast, Apple said the silver and "space gray" models will be shipped in 7 to 10 business days. That's true for all three disk sizes of the phone, be they 16, 32, or 64 gigs of storage. But I won't be shelling out cash on those babies until they're cheaper.