Virgin spaceport runway completed

Virgin spaceport runway completed

Virgin spaceport runway completed

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 12:44 AM PDT

Commercial spaceflight has taken a step closer to reality with the completion of the runway at the world's first spaceport.


Five dead, 17 missing in Indonesia ferry accident

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 12:58 AM PDT

KUPANG, Saturday 23 October 2010 (AFP) - Rescuers found five dead bodies Saturday and were searching for 17 people missing after a passenger boat sank in eastern Indonesia.

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Indian PM proud of Indians in M'sia

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 12:36 AM PDT

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, scheduled to make a two-day visit to Malaysia beginning Tuesday, is set to witness a progressive Indian diaspora in the country.

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Penang wants special committee formed to look after students in the Middle East

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 12:16 AM PDT

A special committee, comprising the various agencies under the Prime Minister's Department, should be set up to forge closer link and look after the welfare of Malay students in the Middle East countries.

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Typhoon Megi hits south China, flights cancelled

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 12:24 AM PDT

TAIPEI/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A typhoon initially feared to be among the worst in 50 years to hit China has weakened as it hit the southern Fujian province on Saturday, official media reported.


Call for multiracial teaching staff at Tamil, Chinese schools

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:56 PM PDT

KUALA LUMPUR, Saturday 23 October 2010 (Bernama) -- National-type Chinese and Tamil schools should allow more teachers from other races to teach in their schools to strengthen unity among the people, a Wanita Umno delegate said today.

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Government urged to restructure national education system

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:24 PM PDT

The government should restructure the existing national education system to make it more holistic and can be used for the next 20 to 30 years, a Puteri Umno delegate, Idamoerni Zakaria said today.

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PM Najib flags off 1Malaysia convoy to Galas

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:22 PM PDT

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak today flagged off the 1Malaysia Kuala Nerus-PWTC-Galas motorcycle convoy at the compound of Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC) where the 2010 Umno General Assembly is underway.

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US seeks US$2b in military aid for Pakistan

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:15 PM PDT

WASHINGTON, Oct 23 — The United States announced US$2 billion (RM7 billion) in military aid for Pakistan today as the two countries sought to dispel doubts about Islamabad's commitment to uprooting Islamist insurgents from safe havens on its soil. "The United States has no stronger partner when it comes to counterterrorism efforts against the ...


Clinton to meet Japan foreign minister first on Asia trip

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:03 PM PDT

Washington, Oct 23 — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet Japan's Foreign Minister next Wednesday in Hawaii at the start of a trip meant to emphasise strong US ties throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The US State Department said today that Clinton will also visit Vietnam, where she will launch formal US participation in the East Asia ...


Globetrotting Chavez cozies up to US foes

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 02:35 PM PDT

By Helmut Reuter

FEATURE CARACAS: The itinerary of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez must seem, at least in part, like a "who's who" of rogue state chiefs to US government officials.

Chavez rubbed shoulders with authoritarian Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenko in Minsk, fraternised again in Tehran with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, demonstrated harmony in Damascus with his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad and then flew to Libya for a tete-a-tete with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

None of the above exactly enjoys a reputation as a model democrat.

The jam-packed international tour -- seven countries in 10 days -- has also included Russia and Ukraine with a final stop in European Union member Portugal.

The sharpest critic of the United States among South America's leaders, Chavez is seeking allies for his project of "21st century socialism."

And finding them, too.

Russia is Venezuela's principal arms supplier, granting billions of dollars in credits that allow the country to fill its arsenals.

Venezuela has Kalashnikovs, helicopters and fighter aircraft already. On its shopping list now are tanks and rocket launchers.

Regular guest

Chavez and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev struck a deal in Moscow that will help Venezuela build its first nuclear power plant.

"Don't be afraid. Don't worry. It'll be a small reactor and not for military purposes," said Chavez in anticipation of international unease.

The Caracas-Moscow axis is strong, especially since Venezuela did Russia a favour by recognising the independence of the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia after the brief 2008 Russia-Georgia war.

Besides Russia itself, the only other countries to do so have been Nicaragua and the South Pacific island of Nauru.

Chavez is almost a regular guest in Tehran and Damascus. It was his ninth visit to Iran and third to Syria.

The lively shuttle diplomacy goes both ways. Assad was in Caracas as recently as June and Ahmadinejad in November 2009. As for Gaddafi, he travelled to Venezuela's Caribbean island of Margarita in September last year, bringing his Bedouin tent.

During the course of his trip, Chavez has not lost sight of the big picture for a minute.

"We're in a position to vanquish Western imperialism and create a more balanced world," he asserted in Damascus.

His message in Tehran was similar: "Imperialism has entered a decisive phase of decline. No matter how much it resists -- despite the swipes of its paws and the threats that it issues -- it's headed, like elephants, to its graveyard."

To secure Venezuela's place in the "new world order", Chavez has sought to expand trade ties and cement strategic alliances. His latest tour has also produced many agreements.

Venezuela has shown interest in Ukraine's Antonov cargo and passenger aircraft. It plans to form a joint shipping venture with Iran for delivery of Venezuelan crude oil.

Both Iran and Belarus are helping with housing construction. And Venezuela aims to help fund construction of an oil refinery in Syria expected to open in 2012, when Venezuela holds presidential elections.

Despite United Nations sanctions against Iran's nuclear activities, Chavez has promised Tehran full support. He demands the return to Syria of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel, and he declares his solidarity with the Palestinians.

From all of his partners, Chavez receives praise. "I swear we'll do so much for Venezuela that you'll never regret our good relations," Lukashenko effused.

- dpa

Google apologises for privacy lapses, to tighten controls

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 02:17 PM PDT

By Chris Lefkow

WASHINGTON: Google pledged today to strengthen its privacy and security practices after its "Street View" mapping service gathered private wireless data, including e-mails and passwords, in dozens of countries.

"We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we're acutely aware that we failed badly here," Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice-president of engineering and research, said in a blog post.

"So we've spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices," he said.

Eustace provided Google's most detailed description yet of the private data on unsecured wireless networks scooped up by Street View cars as they cruised through cities around the world taking pictures.

"While most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," he said. "We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place.

"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users," Eustace said.

He said Google was appointing Alma Whitten, a Google expert on privacy and security, as director of privacy "to ensure that we build effective privacy controls into our products and internal practices".

Google would also enhance privacy training and require employees to take part in a new "information security awareness program", Eustace said.

In addition, Google will require that a "privacy design document" be included as part of all of its engineering projects, he said.

Google announced in May that Street View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries had inadvertently gathered data sent over unsecured WiFi systems.

Captured information

Canada's privacy commissioner said on Tuesday the data collected included "complete e-mails, e-mail addresses, usernames and passwords, names and residential telephone numbers and addresses.

"Some of the captured information was very sensitive, such as a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, along with their telephone numbers and addresses," it said.

Google has since stopped the collection of WiFi data, used to provide location-based services such as driving directions in Google Maps and other products, by Street View cars.

In June, Google said it has already deleted private wireless data collected by its Street View cars in Austria, Denmark and Ireland.

Google is facing civil suits in Oregon and several other US states demanding millions of dollars in damages over its collection of personal wireless data and a number of countries have taken action against Street View.

Spain's data protection authority has filed suit against Google and the Czech data protection authority last month banned the company from taking Street View pictures, saying they violated privacy.

Google this week said that nearly a quarter of a million Germans have asked the Internet company to pixel out images of their houses on Street View.

Street View, which was launched in 2006, lets users view panoramic street scenes on Google Maps and take a virtual "walk" through cities such as New York, Paris or Hong Kong.

Until the practice was stopped, Street View cars were collecting WiFi data in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States.

- AFP

Runway unveiled for world's first tourist spaceship

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:07 PM PDT

SPACEPORT AMERICA, Saturday 23 October 2010 (AFP) - The world's first commercial passenger spaceship moved a step closer to takeoff, as tycoon Richard Branson unveiled a new runway at a remote New Mexico spaceport.

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Yong Teck Lee is SAPP's man in Batu Sapi

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 10:41 PM PDT

The Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP) has named its president Datuk Yong Teck Lee as the party's candidate for the Batu Sapi parliamentary by-election.

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OJ Simpson loses appeal of 2008 robbery conviction

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 01:51 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES: Nevada's Supreme Court yesterday refused to overturn OJ Simpson's 2008 robbery conviction for a bungled attempt to recover his own sports memorabilia.

The former US football star, serving a prison sentence of up to 33 years, appealed citing judicial misconduct and racial make-up of the jury and other grounds. But in a 24-page ruling, the Nevada court dismissed all eight issues raised in the appeal.

Simpson, 63, was found guilty of the hold-up at gunpoint of two sports collectors in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2007. He said he was trying to retrieve possessions that were stolen from him.

Simpson's lawyer, Yale Galanter, suggested at the time that the Las Vegas jury was giving Simpson a payback for his controversial 1995 acquittal on charges of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in Los Angeles.

"We are extremely disappointed with the court ruling today, however it is not unexpected," Galanter said yesterday, adding that he planned to continue the fight.

Simpson is serving his sentence in Nevada and is eligible for parole in seven years.

The Nevada Supreme Court judges ordered a new trial for one of Simpson's co-defendants. They said that Clarence "CJ" Stewart was not given a fair trial because of "the spill-over prejudice from Simpson's notoriety".

- Reuters

French Senate defies strikes to pass pensions reform

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 01:48 PM PDT

By Dave Clark

PARIS: French senators defied mass strikes, riots and fuel blockades yesterday to pass President Nicolas Sarkozy's fiercely contested Bill to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

The vote all but sealed the reform, the centrepiece of Sarkozy's agenda, and government now expects the text will next be reconciled with a lower house version before being definitively adopted in a final vote on Wednesday.

"The day will come when former opponents will thank the president and the government... for acting responsibly," Labour Minister Eric Woerth predicted just before the upper house approved the Bill by 177 votes to 153.

"It's not by looking to the past that we will protect our social model."

But amid street battles, and with strikes disrupting fuel supplies, labour unions vowed further protests over what they regard as an unfair reform, hoping to force Sarkozy to back down even at this late stage in the game.

The protests have become the biggest battle of the right-wing president's first term. With his poll ratings at an all-time low, he staked his credibility on a reform he says is essential to reduce France's public deficit.

Opponents say the reforms unjustly penalise workers for the failures of global finance and have called instead for tax rises on banks and the rich.

"You're voting for a reform that's unfair, brutal and inefficient. This reform will be 85% paid out of salaries, when we're scarcely scraping the surface of capital gains," declared left wing Senator Guy Fischer.

Feul standoff

More than a million people took to the streets on Tuesday, the sixth day of nationwide action since early September, and this week rioters burned, smashed and looted while police fired tear gas and arrested hundreds.

Tension over the fuel standoff escalated dramatically ahead of yesterday's vote, when police broke up pickets besieging oil refineries and fuel depots.

Officers fired tear gas to disperse 200 demonstrators trying to block a fuel depot near the southern city of Toulouse, and moved in to seize control of the Grandpuits refinery, the main one serving the Paris region.

Strikers said three protesters were injured as the police went in, although at Grandpuits they did so without helmets or batons. Unions said a state official had issued them with a "requisition" ordering them back to work.

Strike leaders denounced the orders as an assault on the constitutional right to strike -- one even compared them to the tactics of France's World War II fascist regime -- and union lawyers lodged legal challenges to them.

Late yesterday their move appeared to have worked when the orders were suspended on the grounds that they illegally countered the right to strike. But a union official later said a second "requisition" had been issued to prevent a fresh blockage of the site.

The government said it acted to secure access to the refinery's fuel depot for emergency services and to protect "freedom of movement". Prime Minister Francois Fillon's office promised more action as half-term holidays begin.

"At a time when many French people wish to travel for the Nov 1 holiday weekend, it is in everyone's interest to make all necessary efforts to return the situation to normal, which will take several more days," it said.

Running battles

Transport Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said no nationwide fuel rationing was yet envisaged, but state representatives in two northern districts imposed limits on how much petrol each motorist could buy.

Hundreds of riot squad officers stood by in Lyon to try to prevent a repeat of Thursday's violence that saw security forces fire water cannon and fight running battles with rampaging youths in the east-central city.

The government had hoped rushing through a vote to cement the law would end the protests but, even as the Senate met, unions called for workers to join two new days of nationwide demonstrations on Thursday and on Nov 6.

University students -- traditionally a radical force in French protests -- intensified their own fight, with France's main student union UNEF calling on its members to take to the streets on Tuesday.

The government said the Senate's amended Bill would be reconciled with the lower house's version on Monday and then face formal final votes by both houses, with the lower National Assembly having a final vote on Wednesday.

This will allow Sarkozy to sign the Bill into law, but the unions hope political pressure could still force him to back down.

An opinion poll published yesterdsay by the BVA institute showed that most French voters back the strikes, by a margin of 69% to 29% -- but 52% oppose the blockade of refineries.

- AFP

Leaked Iraq war files detail torture, civilian killings

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 01:16 PM PDT

LONDON: Graphic accounts of torture, civilian killings and Iran's hand in the Iraq war are detailed in hundreds of thousands of US military documents made public yesterday on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

Across nearly 400,000 pages of secret military field reports spanning five years, the largest military leak in history, a grisly picture emerges of years of blood and suffering following the 2003 US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Many of the classified documents, which span from 2004 to 2009, chronicle claims of abuse by Iraqi security forces, while others appear to show that American troops did nothing to stop state-sanctioned torture.

The documents comprise the second such release from the controversial website, which accused the United States of "war crimes" and earlier released some 92,000 similar secret military files detailing operations in Afghanistan.

Website founder Julian Assange said the files reveal a "bloodbath" in previously unseen detail.

"These documents reveal six years of the Iraq war at a ground level detail -- the troops on the ground, their reports, what they were seeing, what they were saying and what they were doing," he told CNN.

"We're talking about a five times greater kill rate in Iraq, really a comparative bloodbath compared to Afghanistan."

Single room

WikiLeaks made the files available to the Guardian newspaper, the New York Times, Le Monde and Der Spiegel weeks ago, then just before their publication sent a Twitter message to select journalists, in a secretive invite that turned out to be a three-hour lock-in preview of the documents.

In one report, US military personnel describe detainee abuse by Iraqis at a facility in Baghdad that is holding 95 detainees in a single room where they are "sitting cross-legged with blindfolds, all facing the same direction".

It says "many of them bear marks of abuse to include cigarette burns, bruising consistent with beatings and open sores... according to one of the detainees questioned on site, 12 detainees have died of disease in recent weeks".

Other reports describe Iraqis beating prisoners and civilian women being killed at US military checkpoints.

The Guardian newspaper said the leak showed "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished".

It added that "more than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents", going on to say that "US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities".

And the Guardian said the "numerous" reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, "describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks." It added: "Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death."

Tragic and mundane

The Guardian said WikiLeaks is thought to have obtained the electronic archive from the "same dissident US army intelligence analyst" who leaked 90,000 logs about the war in Afghanistan this year. WikiLeaks has not revealed its source.

Al-Jazeera concluded that major findings of the leaked papers, dating from Jan 1, 2004 to Dec 31, 2009, included a US military cover-up of Iraqi state-sanctioned torture and "hundreds" of civilians deaths at manned American checkpoints after the US-led invasion of 2003.

On Iran's role in the conflict, the secret US files show Tehran waging a shadow war with US troops in Iraq, with a firefight erupting on the border and Tehran allegedly using militias to kill and kidnap American soldiers.

The documents describe Iran arming and training Iraqi hit squads to carry out attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi government officials, with the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps suspected of playing a crucial role, the Times and the Guardian reported, citing the files.

Attacks backed by Iran persisted after US President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, with no sign that the new leader's more conciliatory tone led to any change in Tehran's support for the militias, the New York Times wrote.

The documents describe accounts from detainees, the diary of a captured militant and the discovery of numerous weapons caches as proof of Iran's designs.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned "in the most clear terms" the leaks of any documents putting Americans at risk, while the Pentagon warned that releasing secret military documents could endanger US troops and Iraqi civilians.

"By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

He said the documents were "essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story".

- AFP

After 500 years Bolivian silver mountain risks collapse

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 01:01 PM PDT

By Jose Arturo Cardenas

FEATURE POTOSI: The mountain holding one of the world's greatest silver deposits is at risk of collapse after five centuries of exploitation, Bolivian officials say, calling for moves to save the historic site.

"It looks like an hour glass that is slowly sinking," said Celestino Condori, president of the civil committee of Potosi, an organisation dedicated to enforcing sustainable procedures for the rampant mining that is hollowing out the mountain in a bid to reach its silver, lead, zinc and tin.

Potosi, once South America's wealthiest city due to the silver mine within the conical mountain which looms above it, is now even more treacherous for miners than usual, because of regular landslides prompted by some 90km (55 miles) of tunnels within the hulking Cerro Rico, or "rich hill".

Around 12,000 workers enter the mines each day, including many children from poverty-stricken homes who lie about their age in order to earn a daily wage of just over US$1.

The vast wealth hidden within the hill was once said to be enough to build a bridge of silver from this town all the way to Spain -- thousands of kilometres away across the South American continent and the Atlantic Ocean.

The process sees some 4,300 tons of mountain -- earth and precious minerals -- removed every day. After five centuries of continuous operation, there are now 619 open pit mines, including 120 that are currently in use, and an extensive tunnel network.

Landslides, tunnel collapses, falling rocks and the unpredictable release of toxic gases have led to 20 miner deaths since early 2009, according to the Federation of Mining Cooperatives (Fedecomin).

On Tuesday, a 17-year-old miner died after inhaling a lethal dose of carbon monoxide while retrieving zinc deep in the Cerro Rico hillside.

The deaths have left Fedecomin head Julio Quinones wondering: "What is the national government doing" to help?

The demand for better safety regulations and to prevent further deterioration of Cerro Rico kicked off a 19-day civic strike in Potosi in August, prompting the government to launch a study on how to save the mountain.

Incalculable wealth

The dismay of local residents and officials alike at the reticence of President Evo Morales to uphold stricter regulations has only sharpened, however, since the triumphant rescue this month of 33 trapped miners in neighbouring Chile.

Morales gave Carlos Mamani, the 23-year-old Bolivian miner who was trapped with his Chilean comrades for a record 69 days, a hero's welcome this week at the Quemado presidential palace in La Paz.

"What bothers us," Quinones said, "is that the president can mobilise immediately to get involved (in the Chilean saga), but when such accidents occur in Potosi or elsewhere in Bolivia, which sees collapses with tragic results, (Morales) never gets involved."

Mining generates billions of dollars in revenue for mineral-rich Bolivia, and the government has taken an especially hands-off approach to this historic symbol of wealth, in operation since 1545.

First exploited by the Incas, it was taken over by Spanish colonists and their tens of thousands of indigenous and African slaves, then the Bolivian government and now by private firms.

Despite the centuries of mining, authorities however estimate vast riches still remain to be found.

Arnulfo Gutierrez, secretary of mines for the Potosi department, said the exploitation has "exposed eight levels of the mountain," each measuring some 30 metres (98 feet) deep within the structure, yet there are still "10 levels more" containing the precious minerals.

"The mountain is huge, and its wealth is incalculable," he said.

- AFP

 

Rescuers search for 22 missing in Indonesia ferry accident

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 12:59 PM PDT

KUPANG: Rescuers were today searching for 22 people missing after a passenger boat sank in eastern Indonesia, nearly double the number announced previously.

The ferry, called Karya Terang, sank yesterday afternoon during bad weather in East Nusa Tenggara province.

"We're still searching for 22 missing people. We've found 44 people and they all survived," Kupang search and rescue chief Herman Da Gomes said.

Rescuers had originally said only 12 people were missing, but revised the toll and the total number of passengers on board the boat to 66.

"About 50 people, consisting of rescue teams, marine police, navy members and fishermen, are searching for the missing people," he said.

The Indonesian archipelago of more than 17,000 islands is heavily dependent on maritime services but the industry has a poor safety record and fatal accidents are common.

Up to 335 people were killed when a heavily overloaded ferry sank off Sulawesi island in January last year.

- AFP

 

Two factories found using dangerous chemicals to produce quality bird's nests

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 09:25 PM PDT

Two swiftlet nest processing factories have been identified to use dangerous chemicals to make the nests look reddish and be categorised of the best quality to cheat buyers.

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