Part of Wal-Mart’s continuing effort to update its once-dowdy image, the new logo for signs and building facades includes white letters on a burnt-orange background followed by a white starburst, according to an artist’s rendering that the company filed recently with planning officials in Memphis, Tenn.

In a change, the name will appear as one word: Walmart. When the company first started in 1962, the name was hyphenated by a dash. But in the past decade, the dash has been replaced by a star on stores and the corporate letterhead.

Carlson Consulting Engineers

Initially, the store logo included white letters on a brown brick exterior. About 20 years ago, Wal-Mart moved to a sign that affixed white letters onto a battleship blue/gray background, bordered by red strips.

Wal-Mart hasn’t officially unveiled the new design, and the company didn’t return repeated calls for comment.

The new white-and-orange logo came to light when it was used for a new store prototype proposed last week for a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Shelby County outside Memphis.

Chip Saliba, a manager with the Memphis/Shelby County office of planning and development, said engineers for the company told him that this was the new sign package that the company is unveiling soon. Casey Wilder, an engineer at Carlson Consulting Engineers Inc. in Bartlett, Tenn., confirmed the conversation.

"They have had the most dull, boring signs for 30 years," Mr. Saliba said. "The new one is kind of funky looking, but I like it," he added.

Dennis Alpert, senior manager of public affairs and government relations for Wal-Mart in Tennessee, referred calls to Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. But the Memphis Business Journal reported Thursday that Mr. Alpert said Wal-Mart’s new corporate logo would be officially unveiled this coming week.

On the bottom of graphics accompanying the Wal-Mart application, the corporate logo is written in blue letters followed by an orange starburst.

The store signs on Wal-Mart’s approximately 3,600 existing U.S. stores won’t be taken down wholesale, but they will be changed over time, says a person close to the company.

Wal-Mart’s new starburst logo mimics the cleaner, brighter sign of competitor Target Corp., with its iconic red-and-white bull’s-eye.

Wal-Mart has attempted in several ways to update its image in recent years. Gone from almost all its signage is the once-ubiquitous yellow smiley face.

Last year, Wal-Mart also changed its corporate uniform for store workers, retiring bulky blue polyester vests in favor of khakis and polo shirts similar to those favored by Target and other retail chains.

In the past decade, as Wal-Mart ramped up store growth and moved from rural areas into suburban and urban markets, it encountered increasing opposition from neighborhood groups and city planners who objected to what they contended was the uniformly ugly look and size of the stores, which averaged about 200,000 square feet.

In recent years, Wal-Mart has tried to assuage neighborhood groups, making concessions on size and offering facades that better blend into the surrounding neighborhoods, from timber gables in Colorado to pastel stucco in Florida.

North Korea has submitted a long-awaited declaration about the extent of its nuclear activities, and the United States responded by announcing it would drop trade sanctions and intends to remove the Pyongyang government from a terrorism blacklist.

George Bush (File photo)

The day after a sweaty debut appearance at the Borderline in London, assorted members of Dengue Fever are grouped around a table in the bar of the Columbia Hotel in Lancaster Gate. Plans are afoot: food for some, for others, music. Senon Williams, the bassist whose home studio is where much of their new album, Venus on Earth, was recorded, is still in the twilit world of jet lag, grazing on Kronenbourg in the shabbily grand confines of London’s premier rock’n'roll hotel.

For many US bands, the Columbia is akin to Rick’s Café in Casablanca. Since the Seventies, virtually everyone in rock’n'roll has passed through. "It’s kind of stinky and damp, and the lights flicker, and there must be ghosts in the rooms because they keep creaking," says Williams, "but we love it here. I could stay here every time I come to London."

The uninitiated might be forgiven for thinking that Dengue Fever is the result of some feverish hallucination in a tropical emergency. But they’re the real thing, an inspired combination of soaring Cambodian vocals from lead singer Chhom Nimol, and West Coast psychedelia as seen through the colour-drenched lens of Cambodia in the swinging Sixties.

Picked up here by Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, Dengue Fever’s latest album, Venus on Earth, is their first UK release, much of it recorded on analogue tape using the same generation of decks that The Beach Boys used in the Sixties at Oceanways Studios. These are songs that cross multiple time zones, with sonic textures ranging freely from psychedelia to surf, mariachi to garage rock, and even Berber rhythms and Ethiopique sax. And as well as the record deal with Real World, they’ll be performing at this year’s Womad, whose organisers describe them as nothing less than "the grooviest band you don’t yet know".

"We’re really delighted to have them perform at Womad this year," says festival programmer Nicola Henderson. "They are going to be the must-see band for this summer."

The Dengue Fever story begins with Ethan Holtzman, the man behind the humid, floating sound of the Farfisa organ. After visiting Cambodia in 1997, he returned to LA loaded with vintage Sixties Cambodian pop, a hitherto unknown genre of world music, steeped in the sounds pumped out by the American Forces that were then in Vietnam. A classic case of musical blowback.

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