In Hong Kong, one residential hi-rise looks much like the next. Tiny box-like apartments are home to most of the city's seven million people. Architect Gary Chang is one of them, although his place is just a little different. Read More......
Showing posts with label (World News). Show all posts
Showing posts with label (World News). Show all posts
28 April 2010
A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms
In Hong Kong, one residential hi-rise looks much like the next. Tiny box-like apartments are home to most of the city's seven million people. Architect Gary Chang is one of them, although his place is just a little different. Read More......
19 June 2008
100 Philippine students run naked at university
Members of the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity gesture as they run naked inside the campus to mark the 100th year anniversary of University of the Philippines in suburban Quezon City, north of Manila, Wednesday, June 18, 2008. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
MANILA, Philippines (AP/yahoo) -- Members of a fraternity at the University of the Philippines held their annual ritual of running naked on campus six months early on Wednesday — by official request — to celebrate the state-run school's centennial anniversary. Hundreds of cheering students lined the main campus avenue, jostling for positions with their digital and cell phone cameras.
The "Oblation Run" — named for the university's iconic symbol of a naked man with outstretched arms that symbolizes his selfless offering of himself to the nation — started in 1977 as a gimmick by the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity to promote the screening of a movie about oppressed plantation workers called "Naked Hero." The film had been banned by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Since then, the fraternity has used the stunt to make political statements, from raising AIDS awareness to demanding the resignation of the Philippine president, said Armand Padilla, a fraternity alumnus and organizer of the centennial run.
He said the university's centennial committee requested the fraternity stage the annual nude demonstration as one of the activities to mark the school's 100th foundation year.
The fraternity mustered 100 members and alumni — the largest number of naked runners ever — for the event, he said.
The naked runners, who wore golden masks and wrapped T-shirts around their heads to hide their identities, offered roses to scores of giggling female students who they took their pictures as they jogged about half a mile (1 kilometer) from the student center to the Oblation statue in front of the university's administration building.
A student, who identified herself only as Bang, praised the runners' grit.
"It is not just a show of bodies, but they even carry the principles on the placards they were holding," she said.
Several runners carried placards saying "Serve the People," a rallying call for students of the university, who are called "Scholars of the People" for the state subsidies to their education.
Titanic life jacket to go on sale in New York
A life jacket from the Titanic is on display at the Christie's
auction house in New York June 18, 2008.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - An unused life jacket from the doomed Titanic ship will go under the hammer later this month in New York, Christie's auction house said on Wednesday.
The cork-filled life preserver -- still largely intact, but stained and torn in parts -- was thought to have been found by farmer John James Dunbar on the Halifax shoreline after the passenger ship sank off Newfoundland.
The liner sank during its maiden voyage from the British port of Southampton to New York in April, 1912 when it hit an iceberg, causing some 1,500 people to die.
Christie's, which estimated that the life preserver would sell for $60,000 to $80,000, sold another Titanic life jacket last year in London for $119,000.
Maritime specialist Gregg Dietrich said there was still huge public interest in Titanic memorabilia as the sinking of the ship, which had been billed as unsinkable, caused such a loss of life and was one of the first world-wide news events.
"The Titanic is really one of those bookmarks in time," he said during a press viewing of the item before the auction.
Dietrich said that after the London sale last year, Christie's was inundated with offers of what people thought were Titanic artifacts, but about 99 percent proved to be reproductions.
After getting a call in February from the Nova Scotia MacQuarrie family, who had kept the jacket safe for generations, Dietrich went to check its authenticity and found it had the correct dimensions and looked damaged by water.
He said the jacket -- believed to be one of six remaining -- appeared to have been unused because the shoulder straps were still intact whereas Titanic passengers tended to have had their life preservers cut off to avoid skin chaffing.
Dietrich said that the cork filling the jackets was so heavy that many of the survivors and victims of Titanic were found to have broken their jaws on the preservers when they hit the water after jumping from the ship.
The preserver will be the main item in Christie's Ocean Liner auction that also includes a second-class passenger list carried off by 12-year-old survivor Bertha Watt as well as her high school essay describing the night the Titanic went down.
Another item going on sale is a Marconi Gram sent by another survivor, Helen, to her family, estimated to fetch $7,000 to $10,000.
Police arrest man running on trail in thong
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP/yahoo) -- Lincoln police have a message for local joggers with exhibitionist tendencies: The thong is wrong. Police arrested a man on Saturday night for running on a Lincoln bike trail in his thong underwear.
Police say the 26-year-old man was arrested for indecent exposure.
Officers said they found him running around Holmes Lake wearing his socks, shoes and, of course, the thong.
95 suffer food poisoning after eating lunches at Shinagawa Prince Hotel
(mainichi.jp) -- Ninety-five people who ate bento lunches during a training workshop at Shinagawa Prince Hotel earlier this month suffered food poisoning symptoms and five were hospitalized, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said.
Officials at the metropolitan government's Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health said the symptoms were light in all of the cases, and all of the people were recovering.
Mianto Public Health Center officials said the people appeared to have suffered food poisoning from bacteria called Clostridium perfringens. Cooking in the hotel kitchen that produced the lunches was suspended for six days from Tuesday over the incident.
A total of 495 people were at the workshop, which was held on June 12 and 13. The 95 people who experienced food poisoning symptoms all ate a bento lunch handed out on June 12.
Bali Bomber Warns Of Al Qaeda Attacks
A photo of one of the three Indonesian militants ondeath row for the 2002 Bali bombings. (CBS)
(AP/cbsnews)-- An Islamic militant awaiting execution in Indonesia for carrying out the 2002 Bali bombings has warned that al Qaeda would be "very likely" to launch revenge attacks if authorities kill him, a magazine reported.
Imam Samudra and two other Indonesian militants were sentenced to death in 2003 for their roles in the suicide attacks that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, at two nightclubs on the resort island of Bali.
The three - who have admitted to planning and taking part in the strikes - are awaiting a final legal appeal to their sentences.
Samudra was interviewed in prison by a local hard-line Islamist magazine, Jihadmagz.
Asked whether al Qaeda would send operatives to Indonesia to launch attacks if he were executed, he said, "That is very likely. God willing, hopefully that will happen. Everyone knows that the armies of Allah are (everywhere)."
The magazine, which has a circulation of 10,000, hit newsstands in Indonesia last week.
The Bali attacks were carried out by members and associates of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian militant group whose leaders came under the influence of al Qaeda in the late 1990s when they trained and fought in Afghanistan.
Since then, militants have launched three more attacks on Western targets in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. The latest attack, against restaurants in Bali in 2005, killed 12.
Indonesia does not announce executions in advance, but authorities have reportedly been preparing to carry out the punishment if the three men's appeal at the Supreme Court fails. Officials there have not said when they will rule on the appeal, which is known as a judicial review. Read More......
McCain wants 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030
Republican presidential candidate US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks
during a town hall meeting at Federal Hall in New York June 12, 2008.
SPRINGFIELD, Missouri (Reuters) -- Republican John McCain promised on Wednesday to put the United States on course to build 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030 if elected president as part of a plan to move the country toward energy independence.
McCain, his party's presumptive nominee in this fall's presidential election, is laying out a strategy to wean the United States from foreign oil, an issue that has risen to the top of voters' minds as gasoline prices soar.
The Arizona senator has argued forcefully for more nuclear plants, seeing them as part of a solution to fighting climate change and establishing U.S. energy independence.
There are 104 operating U.S. nuclear reactors at present, which generate about 20 percent of the country's power supply.
"If I am elected president, I will set this nation on a course to building 45 new reactors by the year 2030, with the ultimate goal of 100 new plants to power the homes and factories and cities of America," McCain told a campaign event in Missouri, an electoral battleground state.
"If we're looking for a vast supply of reliable and low-cost electricity -- with zero carbon emissions and long-term price stability -- that's the working definition of nuclear energy."
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, McCain's presumptive Democratic opponent, has issued supportive statements about nuclear power but has set no outright goal for building plants.
Though nuclear energy is key to meeting U.S. climate concerns, the issue of disposing of nuclear waste from U.S. plants and solving nuclear proliferation concerns are also paramount, Obama's campaign said on its website.
12 June 2008
Wii Fit underwear girlfriend spoofed online
The "Wii Fit Girlfriend", the video clip of an attractive girl wiggling her bottom playing the motion-sensor video game, has drawn the inevitable attention of the internet's army of parodists.
(telegraph) -- The most famous spoof is a straightforward battle-of-the-sexes reversal – a salacious-looking woman leers at the camera before turning it to her boyfriend, clad in dingy yellow Y-fronts, who gyrates as he tries to guide his on-screen avatar down a ski slope.
The clip, entitled "Why every girl should buy their boyfriend Wii Fit", ends – as does the original – with the camera-operator sticking her tongue out lewdly.
Another version seems to have been made to undermine the sexy nature of the first clip. "Wii Fit Hula Hoop makes you look stupid", as it is uncompromisingly called, shows a woman in her pyjamas swinging her hips in a manner reminiscent of a young Shakin' Stevens.
Exasperated viewers have left a series of comments below the clip informing the hapless hula girl that "she's doing it wrong".
The original clip, in which 25-year-old Lauren Bernat is secretly filmed by her boyfriend Giovanny Gutierrez as she attempts a hula game, has been seen over two million times.
Rumours have since flooded the web that it is a clever piece of viral advertising by the game's creators Nintendo – a theory that gained ground after it emerged that both Miss Bernat and Mr Gutierrez work in advertising.
However, the couple strenuously deny any such intention, and a spokesman for Nintendo also rejected the accusation.
"This has and is absolutely 100 per cent nothing to do with Nintendo," he said.
"Nintendo did not create it and were not aware of it until it was brought it to our attention."
Lawmakers: Capitol computers hacked by Chinese
WASHINGTON (AP/bostonherald) -- Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said today, suggesting the Chinese were seeking lists of dissidents.
Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing’s record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world. One of the lawmakers said he’d been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials.
Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf said four of his computers were compromised, beginning in 2006. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said two of his computers were attacked, in December 2006 and March 2007.
Wolf said that following one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a dissident in Fairfax County, Va., outside Washington and photographed it.
During the same time period, The House International Relations Committee — now known as the House Foreign Affairs Committee — was targeted at least once by someone working inside China, said committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil.
Wednesday’s disclosures came as U.S. authorities continued to investigate whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers.
The Pentagon last month acknowledged at a closed House Intelligence committee meeting that its vast computer network is scanned or attacked by outsiders more than 300 million times each day.
Wolf said the FBI had told him that computers of other House members and at least one House committee had been accessed by sources working from inside China. The Virginia Republican suggested that Senate computers could have been attacked as well.
He said the hacking of computers in his Capitol Hill office began in August 2006, that he had known about it for a long time and that he had been discouraged from disclosing it by people in the U.S. government he refused to identify.
"The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue," he said. "Every time I’ve started to do something I’ve been told ’You can’t do this.’ A lot of people have made it very, very difficult."
The FBI and the White House declined to comment.
The Bush administration has been increasingly reluctant publicly to discuss or acknowledge cyber attacks, especially ones traced to China.
In the Senate, the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the Senate’s subcommittee on humanitarian issues, asked the sergeant at arms to investigate whether Senate computers have been compromised.
Wolf said the first computer hacked in his office belonged to the staffer who works on human rights cases and that others included the machines of Wolf’s chief of staff and legislative director.
"They knew which ones to get," said Dan Scandling, who currently is on leave of absence from his job as Wolf’s chief of staff. "It was a very sophisticated operation," he said. "The FBI verified that it had been done."
Smith said the attacks on his office computers were "very much an orchestrated effort."
He said that after the first intrusion in December 2006, "that was the last time" his office put the names of dissidents on its computers.
In Beijing, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no immediate comment on the allegations by Wolf and Smith.
Last week, China denied the accusations regarding Gutierrez’s laptop and the alleged effort to hack Commerce Department computers.
Wolf said he was introducing a House resolution that would help ensure protection for all House computers and information systems.
It calls for the chief administrative officer and sergeant at arms of the House, in consultation with the FBI, to alert members and their staffs to the danger of electronic attacks. Wolf also wants lawmakers to be fully briefed on ways to safeguard official records from electronic security breaches.
"My own suspicion is I was targeted by China because of my long history of speaking out about China’s abysmal human rights record," Wolf said in a draft of remarks he prepared to give on the House floor.
He said Congress should hold hearings, specifically the House Intelligence Committee, Armed Services Committee and Government Operations Committee.
Speaking generally in May 2006, Wolf called Chinese spying efforts "frightening" and said it was no secret that the United States is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services.
Wolf thinks that President Bush should stay away from the Olympics because of China’s human rights record.
He also has been outspoken on the subject of violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, where China has major oil interests.
Smith has introduced the Global Online Freedom Act which would prohibit U.S. Internet companies from cooperating with countries such as China that restrict information about human rights and democracy on the Internet.
Wolf and Smith both traveled to Beijing 17 years ago seeking the release of 77 people imprisoned or under house arrest because of their religious activities.
Suicide recruits dropping in Iraq
Iraqi Army soldiers search a car at a newly-opened checkpoint
into the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq
(washtimes) -- The United States is seeing a sharp drop in the number of foreigners entering Iraq to become al Qaeda suicide bombers, according to intelligence and Bush administration sources.
An administration official and a military adviser to Iraqi commanders attribute the decline to a fairly new phenomenon: Al Qaeda's call for mass killings in the name of Islam is losing some of its appeal with young Arabs in North Africa and Saudi Arabia, where most of the bombers originate.
The decline also parallels the battlefield losses al Qaeda has suffered in the past 12 months in Iraq's Anbar province and the greater Baghdad region. This has made it more difficult for al Qaeda in Iraq to facilitate the secret movement of foreigners from the Syrian border to safe houses where they are trained and assigned a target.
"There has been a sharp decline in the amount of suicide bombers coming into Iraq," said a senior intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's harder for suicide bombers to get into the country. The al Qaeda in Iraq is a shadow of what it once was. And Iraq is a more hostile area for suicide bombers to operate."
The senior official said al Qaeda suicide attacks averaged 50 per month last year, but are as low as 20 a month now.
"They are still cause for concern," the official said.
According to the latest Pentagon report on stability in Iraq, the number of all attacks in Iraq dropped from 1,500 a week in February 2007 to 450 a week in February 2008.
Last year, U.S. military officials say, Sunni Arab Iraqis in large numbers began rejecting al Qaeda's harsh ways and started aiding allied troops in ridding terrorists from their neighborhoods.
A Bush administration official who monitors Iraq confirmed the sharp decline. This official depicted it as a long-running trend that began last year and continues today, rather than just brief dip. "There is no question there are fewer suicide bombers inside Iraq," the official said.
A military intelligence officer previously has told The Washington Times that interrogations of captured foreign fighters showed that most bombers came from Saudi Arabia and North Africa.
Serbia snares top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive
(AFP/breitbart) -- Stojan Zupljanin, wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal in connection with atrocities against Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war, has been arrested near Belgrade, officials said Wednesday.
He was among the most-wanted Serbs indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia -- alongside Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, who remain at large.
"One of The Hague indictees, Stojan Zupljanin, was arrested on the outskirts of Belgrade" shortly after noon (1000 GMT), Bruno Vekaric, prosecution spokesman for Serbia's war crimes court, told AFP.
Zupljanin, 56, was armed, but there were no casualties during his arrest, according to a source who requested anonymity.
In The Hague, the UN tribunal confirmed the arrest, but was unable to say when he would be transferred to its custody.
"That will depend on a number of formalities in the country where he was arrested," said ICTY spokeswoman Olga Kavran.
"Once in the detention unit, within a day or two, he will make his first appearance before the judges, and he will be given the opportunity to enter a plea," she explained.
Zupljanin has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged central role in the hostilities and the destruction of the Muslim and Croat communities in northwestern Bosnia during the 1992-95 war.
The ICTY had also fingered him for genocide, but that indictment was later dropped.
Zupljanin was a former aide to Karadzic, who remains at large along with Mladic and another ICTY indictee, Goran Hadzic, wartime president of the self-proclaimed Croatian Serb republic of Krajina.
His indictment accused him of participating in the planning, ordering or committing of the "execution of a campaign designed to destroy Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, in whole or in part".
Thousands were held in horrific conditions in Serb-run camps during the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated.
Many did not survive -- and in the Prijedor area alone, more than 1,500 people were murdered in three notorious camps.
The Serbian war crimes office said the arrest of Zupljanin was headed by its chief prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, and carried out by police and Serbia's police intelligence agency.
"Zupljanin was arrested in a flat" less than 10 kilometres (five miles) from central Belgrade, said Vekaric, adding he would be handed his ICTY indictement and likely be transferred to the Hague within three days.
The ICTY has been seeking Zupljanin since 1999, and having over the four Serb war crimes fugitives to its custody is the main condition for Serbia's integration into the European Union.
Zupljanin's arrest comes just days after chief UN war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz urged Serbia to do more to locate and arrest the remaining indictees.
"We strongly believe that the remaining fugitives -- Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, Stojan Zupljanin and Goran Hadzic -- are within reach of the authorities in Serbia and that the Serbian authorities can do more to locate and arrest them, " Brammertz told to the UN Security Council.
"With the exception of a genuine but, alas, failed attempt to arrest Stojan Zupljanin, there has been no notable progress in this critical area of cooperation within the past six months."
09 June 2008
Indonesia's mud volcano 'unnatural disaster'
The erupting mud volcano in Sidoarjo, which is located about 30 km south of Surabayain East Java, Indonesia has been producing large quantities of hot water and mud.
Paris (AFP/iol.co.za) -- Scientists on Monday delivered a rebuttal to claims that an earthquake, and not drilling for gas, unleashed a "mud volcano" that has been spewing sludge in Indonesia for the past two years.
"We are more certain than ever that the Lusi mud volcano is an unnatural disaster and was triggered by the drilling of the Banjar-Panji-1 well," said British professor Richard Davies.
The volcano in Sidoarjo district of East Java has been spewing the equivalent volume of scores of Olympic-sized swimming pools of mud a day since erupting to life on May 29, 2006.
The drilling was carried out by oil and gas company Lapindo Brantas, owned by the family of wealthy welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie.
In January 2007, Davies, of Durham University in northeastern England, argued that the drilling was most likely to blame, an accusation refuted by Lapindo, which pointed the finger at an earthquake two days earlier in the city of Yogyakarta 250 kilometres away.
The new study, published in the peer-assessed academic journal Earth Planetary Science and Letters, outlines and analyses a detailed record of operational incidents in the drilling of Banjar-Panji-1.
Lapindo "has confirmed that the data is correct," Durham University said in a press release. The lead author of the study is Davies, and includes British, Indonesian and Australian investigators.
The authors said they were "99 percent" certain that the Yogyakarta quake could not have caused the mud volcano to start up, as any underground pressure it exerted could only have been tiny.
"We have known for hundreds of years that earthquakes can trigger eruptions. In this case, the earthquake was simply too small and too far away," the university quoted co-author Michael Manga, a professor of University of California at Berkeley, as saying.
Davies added: "We show that the day before the mud volcano started there was a huge kick' in the well, which is an influx of fluid and gas into the wellbore. We show that after the kick the pressure in the well went beyond a critical level."
"This resulted in the leakage of the fluid from the well and the rock formations to the surface - a so called underground blowout'. This fluid picked up mud during its ascent and Lusi was born."
If there had been more protective casing in the borehole, the drillers would have had more chances of controlling this pressure, he said.
Lusi is still flowing at 100 000 cubic metres per day - enough to fill 53 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the researchers added.
In separate research published in May, Davies said that Lusi was collapsing under its own weight as so much mud had been excavated from underneath.
Twelve villages have been affected by the spreading mud and at least 36 000 people have been forced to flee their homes. Read More......
Seven dead in stabbing spree in downtown Tokyo
Tomohiro Kato, wearing glasses, is detained by police officers in Tokyo's Akihabara
district Sunday. (AP Photo/Anonymous pedestrian photo via Kyodo News)
TOKYO (AP/chicoer) -- A man plowed into shoppers with a truck Sunday and then stabbed 17 people within minutes, killing at least seven of them in a grisly attack that shocked a country known for its low crime rate.
The lunchtime violence in the Akihabara district, a popular electronics and video game area, sent thousands of people fleeing.
The assault, which occurred on the seventh anniversary of a mass stabbing at a Japanese elementary school, was the latest in a series of knife attacks that have stoked fears of rising violent crime in Japan.
A 25-year-old man, Tomohiro Kato, was arrested with blood on his face.
"The suspect told police that he came to Akihabara to kill people," said Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
"He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything," Akaogi said.
The violence began when the man crashed a rented, two-ton truck into pedestrians. He then jumped out and began stabbing the people he had knocked down with the truck before turning on horrified onlookers, police said.
Police confirmed seven deaths — six men and one woman — but they could not say whether the victims had died of injuries from the truck or were stabbed to death.
Reports said the attacker grunted and roared as he slashed and stabbed at Sunday shoppers crowding a street lined with huge stores packed with the latest in computers, electronics, videos and games.
"He was screaming as he was stabbing people at
random," a male witness told national broadcaster NHK.
Another witness told NHK that the suspect dropped his knife after police threatened to shoot him. Amateur video filmed by mobile phone showed policemen overpowering the bespectacled, bloodied suspect.
The attack paralyzed the district known as Electric Town and sent thousands of Sunday shoppers into a panic. Amateur video taken five minutes after the rampage showed shoppers helping victims and a man screaming, "Ambulance, Ambulance!"
At least 17 ambulances rushed to the scene, and rescue workers feverishly tended to victims in the blood-pooled street.
As night fell on Akihabara, several pedestrians stopped by and prayed at the crime scene. A bouquet of flowers, bottles of green tea and incense sticks were placed at the site.
Japan boasts a low crime rate compared to other industrialized nations and Tokyo, with a population of 12.7 million, is considered relatively safe. But stabbings, once rare in the country, have become more frequent in recent years.
In March, one person was stabbed to death and at least seven others were hurt by a man who went on a slashing spree with two knives outside a shopping mall in eastern Japan. In January, a 16-year-old boy attacked five people in a shopping area, injuring two of them.
RAF first as Taliban leader is killed by plane ... piloted remotely in Las Vegas
(dailymail) -- The RAF has used an unmanned drone to kill a Taliban leader for the first time, the Mail has learned.
Two 'pilots', controlling the robot via satellite from an airbase outside Las Vegas, spotted a target thousands of miles away in southern Afghanistan.
They ordered the £10million Reaper drone to carry out an airstrike.
Sources at the Ministry of Defence said the strike, which took place in the last ten days, killed a 'high value' Taliban target, but officials would not confirm the insurgent's identity.
The attack marks a symbolic watershed in Britain's use of military airpower.
Many in the Armed Forces believe that the drones - also known as unmanned aerial vehicles - represent the future of aerial combat.
The technology is now so advanced that the current generation of bomber pilots is likely to be the last.
Guided missiles have been in use for years against ground targets.
However, this is the first time that British forces have used a flying drone to locate a target, monitor it while the airstrike is planned and authorised and then launch the weapons to destroy it.
U.S. Air Force Senior Airman William Swain operates a sensor control station during a training mission
The drones came of age in the 1980s and 1990s as computers became smaller and more powerful.
The RAF recently signed an urgent deal to buy three U.S-built Reapers and send them to the frontline in Afghanistan, where spy-drones have proved vital in giving allied forces an edge over the Taliban.
Flying from Kandahar Airbase in the south of the country, Britain's Reapers can cover the entire area where UK forces are locked in battle with the Taliban.
The drones are about the size of a small executive jet, and they take off from conventional runways.
They can fly above a battlefield for up to 14 hours, beaming high-definition images to commanders on the ground.
They are used to act within seconds against targets such as key terrorist leaders - instead of waiting up to an hour for a conventional strike jet to arrive.
They are guided via satellite link by RAF 'pilots' sitting 7,000 miles away in a control centre at Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas.
A pilot's display in a ground control station
One senior insider said: 'It is a slightly strange existence for them.
'They are intimately involved in the war in Afghanistan, but at the end of their shift they drive out of their base in Nevada, go home and live a normal life.'
The RAF is due to buy its own control system for the Reapers, and in future the drones will be 'flown' by aircrew based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.
Defence chiefs also hope to buy another nine drones in the coming months, with the overall project costing around £500million.
Lost cameras "phone home" to catch thieves
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.
Then a funny thing happened: her camera "phoned home."
Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon's camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.
"I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras," said DeLauzon, a native of New York's Long Island suburb. "Not only is it the guy who stole our camera ... but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera."
DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.
Priced at about $100, the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.
Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of DeLauzon's home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.
Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data -- from family phone numbers to business budgets -- that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.
MACS E-MAIL VIDEO TO VICTIMS
Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.
An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder -- an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.
A few years ago, there was a well-publicized case of a Sidekick mobile phone that was first lost in a New York taxi, then found by a 16-year-old who used it to take pictures and send instant messages.
But the device's mobile service provider automatically backed up such data on remote computers, allowing the owner's friend, Evan Guttman, to uncover a trail -- and launch an online shaming campaign against the 16-year-old, who was eventually arrested.
While passive systems have helped reunite missing gadgets with their owners, more aggressive measures can be employed to protect everything from laptops to iPods and BlackBerrys.
GadgetTrak, of Beaverton, Oregon, sells software that can be loaded onto any of those devices. If a BlackBerry, for example, falls into the wrong hands, the software grabs information from the new user's SIM data card and e-mails it to the rightful owner.
With an Apple Mac computer, the software instructs the built-in camera to take video of the thief and sends to the owner, along information about nearby wireless networks.
Some 20,000 GadgetTrack licenses have been purchased in about one year -- including 10,000 from storage company Seagate.
"The reason we have been so successful is that people are not expecting this kind of software to be installed," said Ken Westin, the company's founder. "No security solution is 100 percent -- there are always going to be work-arounds. But your average thief is not going to be a computer expert."
DeLauzon didn't want to press charges against the people who had her camera: Both were employees at the restaurant where she dined and accidentally left her photo equipment.
Sure, they were fired -- but getting justice was not as important to her as retrieving her memories of her baby boy.
"When we finally got it back, my husband and I spent the night just sitting and watching the videos -- stupid videos, like him feeding himself for the first time or him pulling himself up in his crib for the first time. We sat down one night and just relished it."
08 June 2008
Divers rescued from Komodo dragons
(scienceblogs) -- A group of five European recreational divers separated from their dive boat in Komodo National Park, Indonesia later came ashore on a nearby island only to find themselves fending off a Komodo dragon and scraping mussels from the rocks for food. The group was rescued two days later. Read more here at CNN Asia.
The currents can rip in the Flores Sea, so when diving Indonesia, stay close to your dive buddy, and stay close to the boat. Oh, and pack a lunch. Failing that, prepare to do battle with dragons and pirates.
Man threatened with arrest at Heathrow for wearing Transformers T-shirt
(dailymail) -- An airline passenger claimed that a security guard threatened to arrest him because he was wearing a T-shirt showing a cartoon robot with a gun.
Brad Jayakody, 30, from London, said he was stopped from passing through security at Heathrow's Terminal 5 after his Transformers T-shirt was deemed 'offensive.'
The IT consultant was set to fly off on a business trip to Dusseldorf in Germany when he was pulled to one side.
Brad Jayakody wearing the Transformers T-shift which caused offence at Heathrow
Mr Jayakody said the first guard started joking with him about the Transformers character depicted on his French Connection T-shirt.
'"Then he explains that since Megatron is holding a gun, I'm not allowed to fly,' he said.
'It's a 40ft tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm. There is no way this shirt is offensive in any way, and what I'm going to use the shirt to pretend I have a gun?
He was cooperative with the supervisor and took off the the 'offensive' T-shirt, replacing it with another shirt in his carry on luggage.
A spokesman for Heathrow operator BAA said: 'If a T-shirt had a rude word or a bomb on it, for example, a passenger may be asked to remove it.
'We are investigating what happened to see if it came under this category.
'If it's offensive, we don't want other passengers upset.'
He said there was no record of the incident and the passenger 'certainly didn't make a formal complaint at the time.'
The Optimus Prime character on Mr Jayakody's T-shirt is the most well known of the series
06 June 2008
Guinness: Japanese TV host is world's busiest
Japan's TV personality Monta Mino holds a new Guinness World Record certificate for most live hours by a host in one week TV, breaking his own record set two years ago by 18 minutes, 15 seconds, at Nippon Television Network Corp in Tokyo, Thursday, June 5, 2008.
TOKYO (AP/google) -- Flick through a few channels on Japanese TV and Monta Mino is most likely there. And the world's most prolific television presenter, who just broke his own record for the most hours of live television in one week, says he wants to work even more.
Mino, whose real name is Norio Minorikawa, received a Guinness World Record certificate Thursday acknowledging his 22 hours and 15 seconds of live TV broadcasts in April. He broke the previous record — also set by Mino in November 2006 — of 21 hours and 42 minutes.
In counting the hours for the record, Guinness included Mino's appearances on various live shows on several TV channels.
The hyperactive 63-year-old, who claims he only needs four hours of sleep every night, hosts 11 TV programs, including news shows, talk shows, wildlife shows and quiz shows, and appears on television every day of the week except Sunday. But apparently that isn't enough.
"How about a live show on Sunday?" Mino said at Thursday's award-giving ceremony at Nippon Television Network Corp., where he hosts an early morning news program.
On the Net:
Rare Sherlock Holmes manuscript could fetch £250,000
Statue of Sherlock Holmes at Meiringen, Switzerland.
Created by British sculptor John Doubleday.
(timesonline) -- The name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on a manuscript usually spreads feverish chequebook writing among book collectors.
But the latest to come on the market will test the bank balance of even the most ardent fan. The complete manuscript of a Sherlock Holmes short story, written in Conan Doyle's elegant hand and bound for the author himself, will be one of the highlights of the Antiquarian Book Fair in London today, with a price tag of £250,000.
The 28-page edition of The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, written in 1911, is one of the few complete Sherlock Holmes stories to survive the squabbles, scandals and mysterious deaths that have cursed the Conan Doyle estate.
The story follows the cocaine-snorting, pipe-smoking sleuth as he solves the case of a rich, unmarried aristocrat who has vanished on the continent and is later found in a secret section of an old woman's coffin. If sold, it will be the most expensive piece of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia since the original manuscript of The Sign of Four fetched $470,000 (£243,000) at Sotheby's in New York in 1996.
“I think the price is justified,” said Mark Hime, the Beverly Hills-based dealer who purchased the manuscript from an American businessman who had bought it at auction in the 1970s.
“There isn't another equal manuscript out there for less, or a better one for the same price.”
Mr Hime sold another rare Holmes manuscript - a handwritten copy of the novel The Valley of Fear - for a similar price seven years ago and is optimistic that he will find a buyer.
Last month a rare first edition of the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study In Scarlet, fetched £15,500 at auction after it was discovered in an Oxfam shop in Yorkshire.
In May 2004 a long-lost collection of the author's notebooks, sketches and correspondence was sold by Christie's in London for nearly £1million.
Flying man smashes distance record as he beats local plane to the airport
The Swiss flyer poses before his jump
(dailymail) -- A winged stuntman has completed a daring 17km unaided flight over the west coast of Ireland, beating local plane times.
Swiss flyer Ueli 'Sputnik' Gegenschatz, donned a specially designed wingsuit and glided from above the Aran Islands over Galway Bay to Connemara regional airport.
The dare-devil completed the journey in 5.45mins beating the average flight time by more than a minute.
Scroll down for more
"I was fortunate to have very strong tailwinds on the day which increased my chances of making the long distance," he said.
"It enabled me to reach an average speed of 250km/hr (155mi/hr) and make the crossing. I was happy not to land in the ocean as I've heard the Irish waters are very cold."
More...
Sputnik jumped from a skydiving aircraft 4,500m high and helped by a strong tailwind flew over the Atlantic at an average speed of 250km/hr.
An Aer Arann passenger plane, which travels the 17.6km route everyday with a top speed of 193km/hr (120mi/hr), took off from Inis Mor airstrip but landed at Inverin Airport, Connemara seven minutes later.
It is believed to be a new distance record for an unaided flight.
Sputnik has made a series of daring leaps in the winged-suit around the world including The Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps and Popocatepetl, the second highest peak in Mexico.
