My Daily Inquirer

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) – Oil from BP's out-of-control Gulf of Mexico oil spill could threaten the Mississippi and Alabama coasts this week, U.S. forecasters said on Monday, as public anger surged over the country's worst environmental disaster.

Government and BP officials are warning that the blown-out deepwater well feeding the catastrophic spill may not be shut off until August as the company begins preparations on a new but uncertain attempt to contain the leaking crude.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama will hold his first meeting with co-chairs of an oil spill commission he tapped to probe the worst oil spill in U.S. history and make policy recommendations about U.S. offshore oil drilling.

The commission will be similar to those that looked into the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

Also on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will meet with federal prosecutors and state attorneys general in New Orleans. It will be Holder's first trip to survey the damage before what legal experts believe will be a criminal investigation into the disaster.

U.S. officials are treating the disaster, in its 42nd day on Monday, as the country's biggest environmental catastrophe.

Although Louisiana's wetlands and fishing grounds have been the worst hit so far by the spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said moderate southerly and southwesterly winds this week may start moving oil closer to the Mississippi and Alabama coasts.

"Model results indicate that oil may move north to threaten the barrier islands off Mississippi and Alabama later in the forecast period," NOAA said in its 72-hour prediction on the expected trajectory of the huge oil slick.

Mississippi and Alabama have escaped lightly so far, with only scattered tar balls and oil debris reaching its coasts.

But the NOAA forecast was a sober reminder that oil from the unchecked spill, broken up and carried by winds and ocean currents, could threaten a vast area of the U.S. Gulf Coast, including tourism mecca Florida, as well as Cuba and Mexico.

Following the failure this weekend of BP's attempt to plug the spewing mile-deep well, public anger over the spill and how it occurred is growing, as tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents face a pollution impact on their livelihoods.

A group calling itself Seize BP, which has already staged anti-BP protests, said on Monday it would organize demonstrations in more than 50 U.S. cities from Thursday to Saturday to protest the damage from the leaking oil.

The group demands that BP's assets be immediately seized and held in trust to pay compensation for the spill triggered by the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

'JOBS VANISHING, CREATURES DYING'

"The greatest environmental disaster with no end in sight! Eleven workers dead. Millions of gallons of oil gushing for months (and possibly years) to come. Jobs vanishing. Creatures dying," Seize BP said in a statement.

The public anger and frustration over the spill poses a major domestic challenge for Obama, who has been forced to admit publicly that the U.S. government and military do not have the technology to plug the leaking well and must leave this to BP and its private industry partners.

Obama, who made his second visit to the Gulf disaster zone on Friday, is sending three of his top energy and environmental officials back there this week. He is trying to fend off criticism that his administration acted too slowly in its response to the spill.

The crisis could swell into a political liability for the Democratic president as his administration and party, bloodied by bruising healthcare and economic policy debates, head toward congressional elections in November.

Louisiana's commercial and recreational fishing industry already has been dealt a blow by the spill. Fishing boats bobbed idle on Monday at the Venice Marina in Louisiana, which would normally be a hive of activity during the long Memorial Day weekend.

"Just take a look around, it's quiet," marina owner Bill Butler said as he sat wistfully looking at the idle boats.

As a health precaution, U.S. authorities have closed all fishing in 25 percent of Gulf of Mexico U.S. federal waters.

The Gulf Coast is one of America's richest ecosystems and a vital breeding ground for a $6.5 billion seafood industry.

ULTIMATE HOPES IN RELIEF WELL

BP executives say the company will try several immediate options to try to control the leak, including the planned deployment of a containment cap in the next few days, but the ultimate solution may only lie in the drilling of a relief well that is expected to be completed in August.

The drilling of two relief wells, which began in May, is an expensive but more reliable way to intercept and cap the leaking well.

The Gulf spill has surpassed the Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska in 1989 as the worst U.S. oil spill, with an estimated 12,000 to 19,000 barrels (504,000 to 798,000 gallons/1.9 million to 3 million liters) leaking per day.

BP is now preparing a containment cap to place on top of a lower marine riser package (LMRP), a piece of equipment that sits atop the failed well blowout preventer on the seabed.

Remote vehicles have begun cutting away pipes atop the blowout preventer to allow a tight fit with the cap, and will saw through the main riser pipe in "next day or two," a BP spokesman said on Monday.

If the containment operation works -- and BP expects to know later this week -- then at least some of the leaking oil could be piped to the surface.

Source: News

Posted by Jessie James

UNITED NATIONS – The U.N. Security Council is calling for an impartial investigation of Israel's deadly commando raid on ships taking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and condemning the "acts" that resulted in the loss of at least nine lives.

After an emergency meeting and marathon negotiations, the 15 council members agreed early Tuesday on a presidential statement that was weaker than that initially demanded by the Palestinians, Arabs and Turkey.

They had called for condemnation of the attack by Israeli forces "in the strongest terms" and "an independent international investigation."

Source: News

posted by Jessie James

Bangkok, Thailand (CNN) -- Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said the country was calm Sunday morning after the first night without a government-imposed curfew in 10 days, state media said.

In his weekly television address, Abhisit said the state of emergency could be lifted, but did not say when a relaxation or removal of emergency regulations would take place, the Thai News Agency reported.

Officials implemented the state of emergency on April 7 in Bangkok and nearby provinces, when thousands of anti-government protesters had amassed in the capital's central shopping district. They imposed a curfew in Bangkok and 23 provinces May 19.

Violent clashes between the demonstrators and government troops broke out earlier this month, killing at least 50 people and injuring nearly 400, government officials said.

Thai PM lifts curfew

More than 30 buildings -- including a bank, a police station, a local television station and Thailand's biggest shopping mall -- were set ablaze.

Abhisit said an independent committee would be established this week to examine the political unrest.

Thai investigators claim former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a bloodless military coup in 2006, helped mastermind and fund the Red Shirt anti-government protests, Thailand's state news agency said this week.

A Thai court issued an arrest warrant for Thaksin this week on terrorism charges connected to the clashes, the news agency said.

Thaksin has denied he was a leader of the Red Shirt demonstrations and said the charges in the arrest warrant show the government lacks legitimacy.

Source: NewsThai prime minister says state of emergency may be lifted

PARIS – A year after Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, families of some of the 228 victims are demanding a new search for the flight recorders — and for answers.

All 228 people aboard the flight, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, died when it crashed June 1, 2009, into the Atlantic Ocean after running into a strong thunderstorm.

Jean-Baptiste Audousset, president of the French families association Mutual Aid and Solidarity AF447, said Monday the families need to know what happened.

"Our grief and our distress remain constant," he said at a Paris news conference. "The trauma is even more terrible because we still do not know how their last moments of life were spent."

Families from victims' associations based in Germany, France, Italy and Brazil spoke to the press in Paris as they prepared to mourn the loss of loved ones one year after the tragedy.

The victims will be remembered in religious ceremonies across Paris, including a Monday night service at the Notre Dame, a ceremony at the Paris Floral Park on Tuesday and by a monument in their memory at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris.

A third, euro13 million ($15.8 million) search effort ended last week and failed to find the flight recorders. It is not clear whether the French accident investigation agency BEA will conduct a fourth search.

Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau wrote to the families on May 28, promising to do everything possible to find answers, but stopped short of guaranteeing another search.

Initial search efforts found 50 bodies and hundreds of pieces of the plane, including its torn-off tail.

But international search teams using specialized submarines and underwater robots failed to find the "black box" voice and data recorders. Without those, investigators may never learn why the plane crashed in a remote part of the ocean, in depths of up to 4,000 meters (13,120 feet).

Automatic messages sent by the plane's computers just before it crashed show it was receiving false air speed readings from airplane sensors known as Pitot tubes. Investigators have insisted that the crash was likely caused by a series of failures and not just the Pitot tubes.

Families are also asking to have access to all documents and data concerning the search, and the inclusion of international experts, and not only French experts, in the inquiry.

"We are certainly not satisfied with the speed in which the BEA has gone forward so far," said Bernd Gans, president of the German families association HIOP.

Source: News

BONN – A new round of climate negotiations kicked off in Germany on Monday with squabbling over money and procedural questions that some say could threaten progress at the two-week United Nations conference.

Climate activists from groups including Oxfam, Greenpeace, and WWF pressured industrial nations to live up to their promises of financial aid to poor countries as delegates from some 180 countries gathered in Bonn.

"The finance part has not been solved," Greenpeace expert Wendel Trio told The Associated Press at the outset of the expert-level meeting about six months after a disappointing climate summit in Copenhagen that ended with a nonbinding accord promising emissions cuts and immediate financing for poor countries.

While industrial nations at Copenhagen promised $30 billions in aid 2010-2012 to help poorer nations start more environment friendly development programs and adapt to the worst consequences of climate change, non-governmental organizations say developing nations remain skeptical.

They wonder when the money will come through and whether it is additional money rather than funds that were already pledged for other purposes that are being relabeled as climate aid, Trio said.

Oxfam said it is becoming clear that rich nations want to hand out much of the money as loans instead of grants, thereby saddling developing nations with new debts for a problem largely caused by industrial countries.

"It's like crashing your neighbor's car and then offering a loan to cover the damages," Oxfam's Antonio Hill said in a statement.

The $30 billion dollar pledge is one of the few concrete results from the Copenhagen conference. The U.N. climate secretariat has said that fulfilling that promise would be important to build new trust between developed and developing nations.

The Bonn talks center on a new, rather sketchy text with possible elements of a global climate deal expected to be finalized in 2011.

The envisioned treaty's main purpose is to drastically reduce the emissions of heat-capturing gases over the next decades. At the same time it is meant to set up a framework on how rich nations help poor countries deal with climate change, how technology is transferred, and how Earth's forests can be saved, among other things — making it an extremely complex document.

For the time being, the finance issue could hold up progress on other elements of the treaty, Trio said.

"Once that is cleared, we can take a real step forward," he said adding that "I am afraid that it is going to be difficult."

The most important point of contention still is how much industrialized nations and large emerging powers like China, India or Brazil must contribute to reducing emissions worldwide.

Nations in Copenhagen agreed that global temperatures must not rise more than by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) as compared to preindustrial levels.

Scientists say that means global emissions must at least be halved by 2050.

However, individual pledges from countries so far fall far short of reaching that goal.

Source: News

KAMPALA, Uganda – U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon is calling for African nations to cooperate with the International Criminal Court by arresting a fugitive Ugandan rebel leader.

The ICC seeks the arrest of Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and some of his commanders on charges of murder, rape, mutilation and forced enlistment of children.

Ban called Monday for other countries to join the Hague-based court. Delegates from more than 100 countries attended a summit in Uganda's capital to discuss the court.

Source: News

The Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (SIU) is an administrative agency under the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (KD), with its own Board of Directors. SIU is located in Norway's second largest city, Bergen.

SIU is a knowledge- and service organisation with the mission of promoting and facilitating cooperation, standardisation, mobility, and the overcoming of cultural barriers to communication and exchange within the realm of higher education on an international level.

The goal of the Quota Scheme is to give students from developing countries in the South, Central- and East-Europe and Central-Asia, relevant education that would also benefit their home countries when they return after graduation.

The programme also contributes to strengthen Norwegian institutions of higher education's participation in global knowledge cooperation.

The Norwegian government provides scholarships for students from developing countries in the South and countries of Central- and East-Europe and Central-Asia under the Quota Scheme. The overall objective of the Quota Scheme is to promote the internationalisation of higher education.

Today, the scheme provides funding for a total of 1100 students, 800 of them from developing countries in the South and 300 from Central- and East-Europe and Central-Asia.

Each year universities and university colleges in Norway are allocated a certain number of quota students. Most of the universities and university colleges in Norway offer courses and educational programmes in English. The scheme normally includes courses at the Master and Ph.D. level, in addition to certain professional degrees. In order to locate a programme eligible under the scheme, please contact the Norwegian institutions directly.

Scholarships
The Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund ( Statens Lånekasse) is responsible for managing the financial support provided for the Quota students. Each student receives the same amount of money as a Norwegian student would do in an equivalent educational programme. About 30 per cent of the amount is given as a grant and 70 per cent as a loan. However, the loan portion is waived when the student returns to his/her home country after completing the course of study. Normally, the financial support will not not exceed a time span of four years for one definite study plan, or a combination of two programmes.

Institutions offering scholarships under the Quota Scheme

State universities:
· Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB)
· Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
· University of Bergen (UiB)
· University of Oslo (UiO)
· University of Stavanger (UiS)
· University of Tromsø (UiT)
State university colleges:
· Agder University College
· Akershus University College
· Bergen University College
· Bodø University College
· Buskerud University College
· Finnmark University College
· Gjøvik University College
· Harstad University College
· Hedmark University College
· Lillehammer University College
· Molde University College
· Narvik University College
· Nord-Trøndelag University College
· Oslo University College
· Sami University College
· Sogn and Fjordane University College
· Stord/Haugesund University College
· Sør-Trøndelag University College
· Telemark University College
· Tromsø University College
· Vestfold University College
· Volda University College
· Østfold University College
· Aalesund University College
State national academies of the arts:
· Bergen National Academy of the Arts (KHIB)
· Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO)
State specialised university institutions:
· MF Norwegian School of Theology
· Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH)
· Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH)
· The Norwegian School of Veterinary Science
· The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH)
· The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)
Private institutions of higher education
· Barratt Due Institute of Music
· BI Norwegian School of Management
· The Norwegian College of Eurytmy
· Bergen Deaconess University College
· The School of Mission and Theology
· Norwegian Teacher Academy
· Queen Maud`s College
· Diakonhjemmet University College Rogaland
· The Rudolf Steiner College of Education


Application procedures
The Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (SIU) is not the admission office for prospective quota students.

Applications forms are available from the websites of the universities and university colleges. All applications should be sent directly to the International Office at the university/college to which the student applies.

Deadline
The deadline for applying for the Quota scheme is usually December 1 every year. The Letter of Admission is normally sent to the successfull candidate by April 15 every year.

Contact detail: ingeborg.revheimSPAMFILTER@siu.no

Moreinfo: http://siu.no/en/Programme-overview/Quota-Scheme

A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward. This video reads
the exact opposite backwards as forward. Not only does it read the opposite,
the meaning is the exact opposite.

This is only a 1 minute, 44 second video and it is very clever. Make sure you
read as well as listen, forward and backward.

This is a video that was submitted in a contest by a 20-year old. The contest
was titled "u @ 50" by AARP. This video won second place.

When they showed it, everyone in the room was awe-struck and broke
into spontaneous applause. So simple and yet so brilliant.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The growing number of aircraft near-misses in US skies is making civilian aviation authorities increasingly concerned and has prompted them to reexamine air traffic control procedures.
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"Over the last weeks there have been a number of instances where separation was lost between aircraft and in some cases there was a bit of a delay of notification that obviously caused some concern," Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Lynn Lunsford told AFP.

He said that all these incidents, the latest of which occurred just on May 21, remain under investigation.

"Anytime you lose the required separation between aircraft, it's unacceptable, and we work to figure out what happen and what we can do to prevent similar ones," Lunsford pointed out.

More than half a dozen extreme near-misses have been reported by the FAA over the past two months, prompting the National Transportation Safety Board to launch an inquiry.

On Friday, the NTSB reported that an Airbus A319 passenger jet and a Boeing 747-400 cargo plane had been involved in an incident over Alaska a week ago.

The board said the Airbus, US Airways Flight 140, was carrying 138 passengers and crew and the cargo plane a crew of two when they "came within an estimated 100 feet (30 meters) vertically and a .33-mile (530-meter) lateral separation."

The May 21 incident occurred at night near Anchorage International Airport as the cargo plane took off for Chicago and the US Airways flight was coming in for a landing from Phoenix, Arizona, the NTSB said in a statement.

The Airbus pilots scrapped their initial landing attempt due to tailwinds and after requesting new landing instructions from the control tower, were told to turn right and report back when they saw the 747 departing.

Once the cargo plane was sighted, the Airbus was told to "maintain visual separation," climb to 3,000 feet (910 meters) and turn right.

But the Airbus pilots refused to obey "because the turn would have put their flight in direct conflict with the B747," the NTSB said.

Instructed to "monitor vertical speed" for a descent, the Airbus began dropping in altitude and lost sight of the B747.

At 1,500 feet the plane's Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System bellowed out a verbal warning: "traffic, traffic."

"There were no reported injuries or damage to either aircraft," the NTSB said, adding that a board investigator was heading to Anchorage to investigate the incident.

In late March, a Boeing 777 operated by United Airlines that took off from San Francisco airport with 268 passengers came within just 60 meters of a small single-engine plane.

A month later, two similar incidents occurred at Hobby Airport in Houston. The first involved a helicopter and a Southwest Airlines jet, the second a small tourist plane and another Southwest carrier.

Two other collisions were narrowly avoided at an airport in Burbank, California, earlier this month.

FAA administrator Randy Babitt recently brought together a group of experts to study the problem and come up with a solution.

Normally, these incidents have to be reported to the FAA within 24 hours, but in some cases the agency had not been notified for several days.

Source: News

Bangkok, Thailand (CNN) -- Thailand's prime minister said Saturday that the curfew imposed during anti-government protests has been lifted.

Emergency law was still in place in 24 of Thailand's 76 provinces, including Bangkok, said Maj. Gen. Prawut Thavornsiri of the police.

Officials imposed the curfew last week after government troops moved to quell the protests by Red Shirt demonstrators. They extended the curfew this week.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said last weekend that "everything is calm and returning to normalcy" following the weeks of protests, which were called off after troops surged in.

At least 50 people were killed in clashes between the demonstrators and government troops and nearly 400 people injured, government officials said.

More than 30 buildings -- including a bank, a police station, a local television station and Thailand's biggest shopping mall -- were set ablaze.

Thai investigators claim former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a bloodless military coup in 2006, helped mastermind and fund the Red Shirt protests, Thailand's state news agency said this week.

A Thai court issued an arrest warrant for Thaksin this week on terrorism charges connected to the clashes, the news agency said.

Thaksin has denied he was a leader of the Red Shirt demonstrations and said the charges in the arrest warrant shows the government lacks legitimacy.

Source: News

Web search engines make our lives easier: They connect us with what we're searching for in a matter of seconds, and sometimes they bring us to places we didn't even know we were looking for.

But they can also teach us a lot about ourselves, as more than half of adult internet users already know.

About 57 percent of adult internet users in the United States said they have entered their name into a search engine to assess their digital reputation, according to a new Pew Research Center study "Reputation Management and Social Media."

That's a significant increase since 2006, when only 47 percent of adult internet users said they had looked their name up on a search engine. The findings show "reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life," the study says.

This probably doesn't come as a surprise to many, considering a new story about Facebook's privacy settings surfacing each day.

And the concern about people's digital reputations will most likely continue to grow as posting and sharing information over the internet becomes more and more widespread.

The study also found that young adults are more apt to "restrict what they share" and manage their online reputations more closely than older internet users. This is "contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations," wrote Mary Madden, a senior research specialist.

The Pew Research Center study, which took place by phone between August 18 and September 14, sampled 2,253 adults 18 and older. The margin of error is 2.3 percentage points.

Have you ever Googled yourself? Were you surprised by what you found?

Source: News

(CNN) -- A Michigan woman who fell asleep during a flight and woke up locked in an empty plane filed a lawsuit Thursday against United Airlines and a partner airline.

Ginger McGuire, 36, spent nearly four hours on the plane after United Express Flight 8080 landed before she was discovered by a cleaning crew, according to the complaint filed in Wayne County Circuit Court.

"Waking up on an empty airplane and not being able to get out was very horrifying. It's a very dramatic word, but it was a little much," McGuire said at a news conference. Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, of Fieger Law in Southfield, Michigan, is representing McGuire.

United Airlines and Trans States Airlines, the carrier operating the United Express flight, are investigating the incident.

Trans States spokesman Fred Oxley said he could not comment on the suit's allegations without reviewing the documents.

"On the incident itself, I can tell you that it did occur and certainly that investigation is ongoing," Oxley said.

"Our procedures would call for the flight attendant before leaving the aircraft to do a sweep of the aircraft to ensure that there are no passengers left on. So our focus is certainly on whether or not that procedure was accomplished in this case," he said.

United Airlines said in a statement that it is working with Trans States "to investigate the cause and remedy the situation with the customer."

McGuire is seeking between $25,000 and $75,000 in the suit which alleges negligence, infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment and breach of contract.

The complaint outlines a series of delays that led up to McGuire falling asleep on the airplane. McGuire was originally scheduled to leave Detroit, Michigan, at 6 a.m.Monday with a brief layover in the Washington area before continuing to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She didn't leave Washington for Philadelphia until 11:40 p.m.

United Express Flight 8080 arrived in Philadelphia just before 12:30 a.m. Tuesday. McGuire was asleep when the plane landed and passengers and crew disembarked, the complaint said.

When a cleaning crew discovered McGuire four hours later, it alerted the Transportation Security Administration and McGuire was "wrongfully detained and interrogated," the complaint alleges.

James Harrington, an attorney working with Fieger on the case, said the incident highlights a major safety issue.

"If my client, a completely unassuming person who was just exhausted ... and falls asleep, could go undetected, what if somebody is really trying to go undetected?" Harrington said.

"All the explanation could be is that it was just pure laziness. There's no other explanation or excuse," he said.

Source: News

The University of Groningen was awarded both the Diploma Supplement label and the ECTS label as the first and only higher education institution in the Netherlands. The labels are a ‘certification’ awarded by the European Commission to those institutions that have properly implemented these two aspects of the Bologna agenda.

The introduction of the Bologna system in higher education in Europe comprises various aspects. Issuing a Diploma Supplement and properly applying the ECTS system, including the relevant documents, are services offered to the student, plus they make an international comparison of education systems and certificates possible.

The grant is usually awarded for a maximum of 2 years for a Master’s degree programme, and a maximum of 4 years for a PhD. For PhD, part of the research should be conducted in the home country and part in Groningen.

See more: Scholarship

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) - – The shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth Wednesday from the final space flight of its 25-year career, marking the beginning of a bittersweet end for NASA's storied space shuttle program.

Shuttle commander Ken Ham touched the spacecraft down at 8:48 am (1248 GMT), completing a flawless landing on the runway at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

As it descended toward Earth, Atlantis glided over the south Pacific, Panama and the western tip of Cuba before reaching Florida and the space center, and was "rock solid on the final approach," center director Robert Cabana said.

Space officials had words of high praise for Ham's handling of the space vehicle.

"That looked pretty sweet," said Charlie Hobaugh, who as NASA's "capsule communicator" is generally the only person who interacts directly with a shuttle crew during a spaceflight.

Wednesday's landing caps the 25-year career of one of NASA's iconic spacecrafts.

Two more shuttle flights are currently scheduled including one by Discovery in September and one for Endeavour in November.

Then, the three orbiters are set to be retired after three decades of service with the US refocusing its space program.

Officials from NASA, however, have not ruled an additional mission for Atlantis fly once more. Atlantis will be in a backup role during the Endeavour mission, and could also make an additional space flight if the White House and Congress agree on this, noted Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator.

NASA officials celebrating the end of the Atlantis mission also lamented the approaching end to the shuttle program.

"I think we were all struck by the fact that it might be the last landing of Atlantis," said launch director Mike Leinbach.

"We have doing the launching and landing for 30 years... so there is not just a technical fascination... there is an emotional tie to it," he added.

"But the budget is what it is and the next mission will dictate the architecture of that vehicle whatever might be, I just hope it comes quickly."

The shuttle uncoupled from the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday after delivering 12 tonnes of supplies and equipment.

The ISS, a joint project involving 16 countries, has cost around 100 billion dollars, mostly funded by the United States.

The six-member shuttle crew unloaded a crucial communications antenna, power storage batteries and a radiator during their rendezvous with the orbiting space station.

The biggest single item was the five-tonne Rassvet research module, or MRM-1, which will provide additional storage space and a new docking port for Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft.

The Rassvet -- "Dawn" in Russian -- was permanently attached to the bottom of the space station's Zarya module. It carries important hardware on its exterior including a radiator, airlock and a European robotic arm.

Atlantis astronauts completed three spacewalks during the mission. During the final one on Friday, they plugged a new ammonia jumper cable into the station, transferred a grapple fixture from the shuttle to the station and reconfigured some tools.

Atlantis logged some five million miles on the mission, its 32nd. Officials said that as of Wednesday it had logged a total of 120 million miles during its quarter-century long career.

US President Barack Obama has opted not to fund a successor program, which would have sent humans back to the moon, and instead opted to encourage development of private spacecraft. He also laid out plans to send astronauts into Mars orbit within the next three decades.

Once the shuttle program ends, the United States will rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to carry its astronauts to the space station until a commercial US launcher can be developed. That is scheduled for 2015.

Source: News

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that "more is needed" from Facebook to address privacy criticisms.

In a blog post, the civil liberties group praised Facebook for a "great first step" towards giving members of the site more control over their data.

However, it warned members against choosing the site's recommended privacy control setting.

Doing that shares "a substantial amount" of information widely, the group claimed.

"The changes are pretty good, though more is needed," wrote Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the EFF.

Facebook's decision to enable users to either select one setting to cover all information or to choose individual settings for different types of information (such as making photos more private than status updates for example) struck a "good balance" said Mr Bankston.

The foundation still had concerns about third-party access to individual profile information though.

"Facebook is a site that many people joined because it was a more private alternative to sites like MySpace and Twitter," wrote Mr Bankston.

"To keep in line with user expectations, no information should be required to be publicly available."
'Monolithic approach'

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, also questioned whether Facebook had gone far enough with its new arrangements.

"I don't know whether these reforms on their own are going to satisfy the overwhelming force for change and reform," he told the BBC.

"Perhaps people are unable to reconcile the two worlds they live in," he added, explaining that the concept of Facebook friendship is not as arbitrary as it is in face-to-face life.

"Facebook has a monolithic approach to friendship - but as you build friendship you build the privacy along with it. Perhaps a privacy model should follow that," he said.

Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at net security firm Imperva, said that services such as Facebook were ultimately designed for information sharing.

"The essence of social networks is to provoke solicited, and unsolicited, interactions between individuals," he said.

"Privacy does not coincide with the interests of Facebook creators or with the attitude of many Facebook users."

However the site must now fight to regain the trust of its members, he added.

"Today, Facebook is at a serious crossroads. If it continues giving the impression that user privacy is a football, it risks further alienating them."

Source: News

WASHINGTON – An experimental aircraft has set a record for hypersonic flight, flying more than 3 minutes at Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound.

The X-51A Waverider was released from a B-52 Stratofortress off the southern California coast Wednesday morning, the Air Force reported on its website. Its scramjet engine accelerated the vehicle to Mach 6, and it flew autonomously for 200 seconds before losing acceleration. At that point the test was terminated.

The Air Force said the previous record for a hypersonic scramjet burn was 12 seconds.

[Related: Secret X-37B space plane spotted by amateur skywatchers]

"We are ecstatic to have accomplished many of the X-51A test points during its first hypersonic mission," said Charlie Brink, an X-51A program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

"We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War II jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines," Brink said.

The Waverider was built for the Air Force by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Boeing Co.

Joe Vogel, Boeing's director of hypersonics, said, "This is a new world record and sets the foundation for several hypersonic applications, including access to space, reconnaissance, strike, global reach and commercial transportation."

Four X-51A cruisers have been built for the Air Force, and the remaining three will be tested this fall.

"No test is perfect," Brink said, "and I'm sure we will find anomalies that we will need to address before the next flight."

Source: News

NEW YORK – In Facebook's vision of the Web, you would no longer be alone and anonymous. Sites would reflect your tastes and interests — as you expressed them on the social network — and you wouldn't have to fish around for news and songs that interest you.

Standing in the way is growing concern about privacy from Facebook users — most recently complaints that the site forced them to share personal details with the rest of the online world or have them removed from Facebook profiles altogether.

Facebook responded to the backlash Wednesday by announcing it is simplifying its privacy controls and applying them retroactively, so users can protect the status updates and photos they have posted in the past.

"A lot of people are upset with us," CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged at a news conference at Facebook's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters.

The changes came after Facebook rolled out a slew of new features in April that spread its reach to the broader Web. Among them was a program called "instant personalization" that draws information from a person's profile to customize sites such as the music service Pandora. Some users found it creepy, not cool.

Privacy groups have complained to regulators, and some people threatened to quit the site. Even struggling MySpace jumped in to capitalize on its rival's bad press by announcing a "new, simpler privacy setting."

To address complaints its settings were getting too complex, Facebook will now give users the option of applying the same preferences to all their content, so that with one click you can decide whether to share things with just "friends" or with everyone.

For those who found it complicated to prevent outside websites and applications from gaining access to Facebook data, there's now a way to do so in a couple of clicks.

Source: News

Ten people have been injured, including some with broken bones, when a flight from London to Los Angeles hit severe turbulence, officials said.

United Airlines spokeswoman Sarah Massier said United Flight 935 reported severe turbulence over the Atlantic Ocean and was diverted to Montreal, Canada.

The airline said nine passengers and one crew member were treated. None of the injuries are considered to be life-threatening.

The Boeing 777 aircraft was taken out of service and inspected for possible damage.

Ms Massier said another plane was sent from Chicago to Montreal to take the passengers and crew to Los Angeles.

The plane landed in Los Angeles at around 10pm (0500 GMT), about nine hours later than originally scheduled.

Source: News

Faced with a backlash that wouldn't go away, Facebook announced changes Wednesday that will make it easier for users to change privacy settings and block outside parties from seeing personal information.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that feedback from users over recent privacy changes, which made some user information public by default, was crucial in the decision to tighten controls.

"We think that they're the right thing to do," he said. "We listened to the feedback, and we agree with it."

Facebook will begin rolling out the new privacy controls Wednesday, he said, and they should be in place for most users within the next few weeks.

Zuckerberg said Facebook's new settings will give users "one simple tool" to control how their information is shared: with friends only, with friends of friends or with everyone.

A single click also will let users block all of their information from being accessed by third parties, such as game or application developers.

"All of the controls we had are still there if you want to use them," Zuckerberg said. "But we just wanted to make it easy for people who want to put themselves in one bucket very easily with just a couple of clicks."

The announcement marks a rare double-back for Facebook, the nearly ubiquitous networking site that has made a habit of rolling out changes and then weathering user grumbling until it subsides.

Among other changes, the site implemented a new tool last month that spreads user preferences and data across the Web. The tool allows Facebook users to more easily share articles and other Web pages they like but at the same time makes those picks easier for others to see.

Some Facebook users also have been vocally opposed to changes that switched default settings for much of their information to "public."

The Web information-sharing function requires users to sign up for it. And privacy settings can be reset. But the current setup of about 170 settings requires negotiating what The New York Times called "a bewildering tangle of options" to make the switch.

Wednesday's announcement addressed what Zuckerberg had acknowledged have been missteps with the site's recent changes.

Source: CNN

Global geothermal energy use and development has increased significantly over the last five years, with over 10,000 megawatts of installed capacity providing power to over 52 million people, according to a report by the Geothermal Energy Association.

Entitled Geothermal Energy: International Market Update, the report states that 24 countries increased their geothermal capacity by 20 percent since the release of a report by International Geothermal Association in 2005.

Seventy countries currently have geothermal projects under consideration, representing a 52 increase from the last international report compiled by the Geothermal Energy Association in 2007.

The association cited Europe and Africa as the regions with the most projects under development. Twenty-four European countries were listed to have geothermal projects under development, compared with the 10 countries in 2007. For instance, Turkey intends to bring 550 MW of geothermal power online by 2013.

Meanwhile, there are 11 African countries producing geothermal energy compared to only six identified by the association three years ago. Kenya, for example, plans to produce 490 MW of geothermal power by 2012 and as much as 4,000 MW over the next 20 years.

While the United States remains the world leader in geothermal electricity production, with about 3,086 MW of installed capacity from 77 power plants, countries from the Pacific Ring of Fire are catching up in the geothermal market.

The Philippines, in Southeast Asia, is still the second highest geothermal power producer with 1,904 MW, which makes up nearly 18 percent of the country’s electricity generation. On the other hand, neighboring Indonesia has set a goal of 9,500 MW of geothermal capacity, an 800 percent increase from its current installed capacity.

The report emphasizes that regional institutions play key roles in global geothermal development by financing projects as well as enhancing regional cooperation within the renewable energy sector. In France, Germany, Latvia, Britain and other European countries, government policies such as feed-in tariffs make highly risky and expensive projects more feasible.

However, although the study sees that the geothermal market is expanding to encompass most of the countries worldwide, this colossal growth only represents a small fraction of the geothermal potential that the world can use, said Karl Gawell, executive director of the association.

He noted that majority of countries do not fully use their geothermal resources. In 1999, the association identified 39 nations that could source 100 percent of their electricity needs from geothermal energy, but only nine of these countries actually have geothermal projects online.

“It’s as if we discovered a huge deposit of oil underneath our feet, enough to put gas in our cars forever, and didn’t use it; except this is a totally clean, renewable and constant energy source,” Mr. Gawell said.

Source: Environment

This year is on track to be the hottest ever after data published by America’s climate agency this week showed record global temperatures in April and the first four months of 2010.

“The combined April global land and ocean average surface temperature was the warmest on record at 58.1°F (14.5°C), which is 1.37°F (0.76°C) above the 20th century average of 56.7°F (13.7°C),” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report on its Web site dated Monday.

These temperatures surpassed the previous record set in 1998, the agency added.

The agency said April’s global land surface temperatures were the third warmest according to its records, which date back to 1880.

It noted warmer-than-normal conditions in Canada, Alaska, Eastern United States, Australia, South Asia, Northern Africa and Northern Russia.

“Cooler-than-normal places included Mongolia, Argentina, far eastern Russia, the western contiguous United States and most of China,” the agency said, adding global snow cover was the fourth-lowest on record.

China had its coolest April since 1961, but wettest since 1974, it said.

April was the largest since 2001, they were still below average for the 11th consecutive April as a result of warmer-than-average ocean surface temperatures.

The agency said Arctic ice covered around 5.7 million square miles (14.7 million square kilometers), 2.1 percent below the average extent from 1979 to 2000.

The El Niño weather pattern warming the Pacific Ocean weakened in April and is expected to continue through June, the agency said, echoing a March report by the World Meteorological Organization.

Scientists said El Niño was partly responsible for 2009 being the fifth warmest year on record.

Source: Environment

The Center awards approximately 20-25 residential fellowships annually to individuals with outstanding project proposals in a broad range of the social sciences and humanities on national and/or international issues. Topics and scholarship should relate to key public policy challenges or provide the historical and/or cultural framework to illuminate policy issues of contemporary importance.

Eligibility

*
Citizens or permanent residents from any country (foreign nationals must be able to hold a valid passport and obtain a J1 Visa)
*

Men and women with outstanding capabilities and experience from a wide variety of -backgrounds (including government, the corporate world, professions, and academia)
*

Academic candidates holding a Ph.D. (Ph.D. must be received by the application deadline of October 1)
*

Academic candidates demonstrating scholarly achievement by publications beyond their doctoral dissertations.


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Sydney is indeed a cosmopolitan world city that is surrounded by the iconic beaches, lush hinterland, and World Heritage areas. It is in fact acclaimed as wine regions of the State of New South Wales.




Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre on Bennelong Point in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

MANGALORE, India – Human error might have caused the crash of an Air India Boeing 737-800 plane that killed 158 people over the weekend, India's civil aviation minister said Monday.

Weather conditions and other factors at the time the plane reached its destination "looked absolutely normal for a regular touchdown and a safe landing," Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told the CNN-IBN television news channel.

"You can't rule out a human error factor," Patel said.

Only an inquiry could establish what exactly went wrong as the aircraft overshot the hilltop runway and crashed and plunged over a cliff and into a ravine at dawn Saturday on the outskirts of the southern Indian city of Mangalore, he said.

Of the 166 passengers and crew aboard, only eight people survived the crash.

Patel said there was no rain in the area and visibility was good at the time of the plane's landing.

Investigators and aviation officials searched through the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 strewn across a hillside to try to determine the cause of India's worst air disaster in more than a decade. They recovered the cockpit voice recorder, which they hope will give them important clues, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

A four-member U.S. forensic team also arrived in India to help in the investigation, said Harpreet Singh, an Air India spokeswoman.

By Sunday evening, 146 of the 158 bodies had been identified and given to grieving relatives for burial, said Arvind Jadhav, Air India's chairman and managing director.

Doctors were conducting DNA tests on 22 bodies that were so badly burned that relatives could not identify them, said Suresh Babu, an official at Wenlock hospital in Mangalore. They included a 2-year-old boy.

In nearby Uppala village, the relatives of brothers Mohammed Basheer and Aboo Backer Siddeeq were told it could take more than a week for the bodies of the two men to be identified, said their uncle B.K. Mohammed Haji.

"For two days we waited at the airport for the bodies," said Haji. "All the bodies were badly charred and very difficult to recognize."

The two men were returning home from Dubai for the wedding of their younger sister Sunday. The wedding was canceled and instead friends and relatives joined the grieving family under a canopy erected for the wedding to pray for the dead men.

The black box would be sent to New Delhi for decoding and further investigations, officials said.

The flight from Dubai to Mangalore carried some of the millions of Indians who work as cheap labor in the Middle East back to their families for a rare visit during India's summer holiday season.

Aviation experts said the eight survivors were seated in the center of the aircraft, near where it broke open, and they managed to get out before a fireball engulfed the plane.

"In this case it was pure luck of the draw," said Sidney Dekker, a professor of flight safety at the School of Aviation at Sweden's Lund University. "The luck of where you are in the airplane relative to how the fuselage disintegrates going into the ravine."

The crash was the deadliest in India since a November 1996 midair collision killed 349 people. Saturday's crash happened when the plane overshot the runway, airline officials said. Aviation experts said the Mangalore airport's "tabletop" runway, which ends in a valley, makes a bad crash inevitable when a plane does not stop in time.

Kapil Kaul, an aviation expert at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, said while India's air safety record is good, he hopes the crash will push officials to establish an independent national safety board to ensure standards remain high as the booming economy drives more traffic into the skies.

___

Associated Press writers Rafiq Maqbool in Mangalore, Ashok Sharma and Ravi Nessman in New Delhi and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

Source: News

Centre for the Resolution of Emergency Situation (CRES) on Thursday extended curfew in Bangkok and 23 other provinces for three more nights in a bid to end the riots which broke out after red shirts leaders surrendered to police on Wednesday.

The curfew will be from 9pm to 5am from Thursday to Saturday night to allow people more time to conduct their businesses. The curfew imposed on Wednesday was from 8pm to 6am.

CRES spokesman Col Sansern Kaewkamnerd announced the extension of the curfew in Bangkok and 23 provinces after 39 key places were set on fire by red shirt hardliners who were angry with the end of the rally at Ratchaprasong and the surrender of their leaders.

The provinces that are also under curfew are; Nakhon Pathom, Chon Buri, Nonthaburi, Samut Prakan, Pathum Thani, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, Khon Kaen, Udon Thani, Chaiyaphum, Nakhon Ratchasima, Si Sa Ket, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Nan, Lampang, Nakhon Sawan, Kalasin, Mukdahan, Nong Bua Lamphu, Roi Et, Sakhon Nakhon, Ubon Ratchathani

In terms of tourist attractions and destinations popular with South Asians, the curfews affect the following places:

- Bangkok - Entire city
- Nakhon Pathom - Entire province including Rose Garden Riverside
- Chon Buri - Entire city of Pattaya, Si Racha (Sriracha Tiger Zoo)
- Samut Prakan - Entire province including Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm, Ancient
- City, accommodation around Suvarnabhumi Airport. During the curfew, visitors must arrive at the airport before 21.00 hrs. and depart only after 05.00 hrs.
- Pathum Thani - Entire province including Dream World
- Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya - Entire province including Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya
- Historical Park,
- Bang Pa-in Summer Palace
- Chiang Mai - Entire province
- Chiang Rai - Entire province
- Nakhon Ratchasima - Entire province including Khao Yai National Park and nearby wineries.

Source: Travel

IFS Research Grants

IFS is a NGO (non-governmental organisation) founded in 1972. Funding comes from governmental and non-governmental sources, as well as national and international organisations. The annual budget is approximately USD 5 million. IFS has 135 Affiliated Organisations in 86 countries, of which three-quarters are in developing countries and one-quarter in industrial countries. IFS has an international Board of Trustees. The IFS Secretariat is located in Stockholm, Sweden. An eligible candidate for an IFS Research grant is a citizen of a developing country.

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CIPE-Youth Essay Contest

The Center for International Private Enterprise invites young people to share their ideas on how to create opportunities for youth to strengthen democracy and the private sector in their own countries.
Who can participate: Students and young professionals aged 18-30.
Contest Deadline: June 18, 2010
Winners Announced: Fall 2010
Essay Length: 2,000 - 3,000 word

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Scholarship

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MANGALORE, India – Eight people escaped the crash of an Indian jetliner with 166 people on board that overshot a hilltop runway in southern India and plunged over a cliff, officials said. At least some of the survivors managed to jump from the wreckage just before it burst into flames.

Firefighters struggled to reach the twisted, smoking wreckage of the Boeing 737-800, which was scattered along the hillside of thick grass and trees just outside Mangalore's Bajpe airport.

But after the first few minutes, there were no more survivors to be found around what remained of the Air India Express flight from Dubai to this port city. Instead, scores of burned bodies were pulled from the blackened tangle of aircraft cables, twisted metal, charred trees and mud at the crash site. Many of the dead were strapped into their seats, their bodies burned beyond recognition.

Air India, the country's national carrier, runs inexpensive flights under the Air India Express banner to Dubai and other Middle Eastern destinations where millions of Indians are employed.

Relatives of the victims, who had been waiting at the airport for the plane's arrival, stood near the wreckage weeping.

More: News

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In a seemingly never-ending string of damaging disclosures about its users' privacy concerns, Facebook has reportedly been releasing user data to ad companies that hadn't even asked for the info.

Facebook isn't alone this time: rival social-media site MySpace has also been called out in Friday's Wall Street Journal report by Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro — together with the content-sharing sites Livejournal and Digg.

The report says that the companies have delivered user data to major online advertising companies such as Google's DoubleClick and Yahoo!'s Right Media, despite explicit pledges to protect such information. The released material includes user names and ID numbers, together with data that could be used to accumulate a host of additional information on individual users, such as where they live, their names, occupations, incomes and places of employment.

As Steel and Vascellaro write:


"Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people's real names."

Representatives of both DoubleClick and Right Media told the Journal reporters that they were unaware they were receiving such data — and stressed that they hadn't tried to make use of any of it.

After the Journal contacted Facebook, the company announced a change in software to prevent transmission of the identifying code, the Journal said. MySpace announced that it's in the process of adopting the same user protections. Digg, Livejournal and other sites named in the report are apparently holding off on enhancing privacy safegaurds because they don't require users to register with real names.

Still, the report is another black eye for Facebook, which has already caused such an uproar that four U.S. senators — not exactly your typical Web activists — entered the fray over the company's user privacy standards. Meanwhile, Facebook is generating plenty of bad PR all by itself, with an executive's backlash-provoking Q&A at the New York Times and recent reports that users who posted comments critical of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have seen their profiles mysteriously deleted.

These episodes may well explain the company's other piece of bad news this week: a poll disclosing that 60 percent of Facebook users have considered deleting their accounts because of qualms about the site's privacy policy.

— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.