<a href="http://12e68iv9tf6bcw14lixao6u2ie.hop.clickbank.net/" target="_top">Click Here!</a>
Friday, September 30, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Somali PM: We will eliminate Al shabaab from the country soon
MOGADISHU (Sh. M. Network) – The government of Somalia is determined and committed to eliminating and getting rid of Al shabaab from the horn of African nation, Somali prime minister aid on Monday.
In an interview with BBC Somalia service, the Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, the premier of the interim government said that during his one year mandate, the government will flush out Al shabaab fighters from the country completely.
Mr. Ali says that his government has made more developments and advances in its battles against the insurgent group.
He stated that he will fight against the corruption and mismanagement inside his administration for this year.
Some of world countries say Somali government officials are very corrupted and unreliable.
Talking his stance on Somaliland separation from Somalia, the prime minister said that they are ready to talk to that administration,
Source:Shebelle
India, U.S. agree to enhance maritime security cooperation: Nirupama
NEW YORK – India and the U.S. have agreed to enhance their maritime security cooperation, asserting safety of sea lanes of communication across the Indian Ocean is crucial for the economic growth for the entire region.
“One-fifth of the world’s energy supplies now travel across the Indian Ocean. The safety of the sea lanes of communication which criss-cross the Indian Ocean is crucial for the economic growth not just for India and the U.S. but for the entire region,” Indian Ambassador to the U.S. Nirupama Rao said.
“Maritime trade routes in the Indian Ocean are vital for international commerce and global energy security and we have a shared interest in combating threats such as piracy. Therefore we have agreed to enhance our maritime security cooperation,” Ms. Rao said in her remarks on ‘Is there a future for the U.S.-India partnership?’organised jointly by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Brookings Institute, a Washington-based eminent American think tank.
“For instance, we are working together with the U.S. and the international community to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia. Indian and U.S. navies are enhancing their collaboration to deal with natural disasters building on the experience gained so far from the coordinated action,” she said.
The diplomat said, “More broadly, our defence cooperation has grown significantly. The paradigm that we should visualise for defence cooperation should incorporate a strong component of joint production, research and co-development, which are all of strategic importance.”
Source: The Hindu
Dar court clears way for Dowans billions
Dar es Salaam. Tanzania Electric Supply Company (Tanesco) must pay Dowans the $65 million (Sh110 billion at yesterday’s exchange rate) awarded by an international tribunal for breach of contract, the High Court ruled yesterday.Mr Justice Emilian Mushi said it would be improper for the court to interfere with the findings of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which he added, addressed the issue adequately.“…this petition is hereby dismissed with costs. It is hereby ordered that the ICC’s final award filed in this court, be formally registered and should be a decree of this court and enforceable as such,” he said.
Commenting immediately after the ruling, the chairman of the parliamentary Public Organisation Accounts Committee, Mr Zitto Kabwe blamed the ruling CCM for Tanesco’s plight.“This is the cost of ill-advised politics and blind patriotism. We have caused this huge loss to the country due to poor leadership and infighting within CCM,” he told The Citizen.But Mr Kabwe said Tanesco was not supposed to pay the compensation as the firm was pressured into terminating the contract.
He said the committee had already directed that the debt should be paid by the government.
“Even the Controller and Auditor General has refused to sign Tanesco accounts for 2010 until the government agrees to shoulder the debt,” he added. The decision means Tanesco has to remit $65 million plus an interest of 7 per cent per annum, which could amount to about Sh118 billion.
Two weeks ago, Mr Justice Mushi dismissed a similar petition by four human rights activists, who challenged validity of the ICC order, arguing it was against the public interest.In his 89-page verdict he read for nearly three hours yesterday, Mr Justice Mushi said it would not be proper to interfere with ICC findings, saying doing so would amount to re-opening and re-arguing on the issues of fact and law that Tanesco and Dowans had agreed to submit to ICC for consideration and decision.
ICC had in November last year awarded Dowans Holdings SA (Costa Rica) and Dowans Tanzania Limited $65.8 million for wrongful termination of a power generation contract in 2008.Tanesco was asking the court to set aside the award or remit it to ICC for reconsideration for, among other reasons, being against public policy and disregarding its evidence at the hearing.The public utility alleged that public procurement rules were grossly flawed 2006 when the government directed Tanesco to award the contract to Richmond Development Company (RDVECO), which later passed the contract to Dowans.
Tanesco argued that the tribunal did not consider its evidence that Richmond lacked capacity to honour the contract. It also dissatisfied with what it described as ‘erroneous interpretation of the Public Procurement Act, 2004’ by the tribunal.
Commenting immediately after the ruling, the chairman of the parliamentary Public Organisation Accounts Committee, Mr Zitto Kabwe blamed the ruling CCM for Tanesco’s plight.“This is the cost of ill-advised politics and blind patriotism. We have caused this huge loss to the country due to poor leadership and infighting within CCM,” he told The Citizen.But Mr Kabwe said Tanesco was not supposed to pay the compensation as the firm was pressured into terminating the contract.
He said the committee had already directed that the debt should be paid by the government.
“Even the Controller and Auditor General has refused to sign Tanesco accounts for 2010 until the government agrees to shoulder the debt,” he added. The decision means Tanesco has to remit $65 million plus an interest of 7 per cent per annum, which could amount to about Sh118 billion.
Two weeks ago, Mr Justice Mushi dismissed a similar petition by four human rights activists, who challenged validity of the ICC order, arguing it was against the public interest.In his 89-page verdict he read for nearly three hours yesterday, Mr Justice Mushi said it would not be proper to interfere with ICC findings, saying doing so would amount to re-opening and re-arguing on the issues of fact and law that Tanesco and Dowans had agreed to submit to ICC for consideration and decision.
ICC had in November last year awarded Dowans Holdings SA (Costa Rica) and Dowans Tanzania Limited $65.8 million for wrongful termination of a power generation contract in 2008.Tanesco was asking the court to set aside the award or remit it to ICC for reconsideration for, among other reasons, being against public policy and disregarding its evidence at the hearing.The public utility alleged that public procurement rules were grossly flawed 2006 when the government directed Tanesco to award the contract to Richmond Development Company (RDVECO), which later passed the contract to Dowans.
Tanesco argued that the tribunal did not consider its evidence that Richmond lacked capacity to honour the contract. It also dissatisfied with what it described as ‘erroneous interpretation of the Public Procurement Act, 2004’ by the tribunal.
According to Tanesco, ICC deliberately disregarded the evidence that the procurement of the power agreement was done without a valid tender after Tanesco’s tender board cancelled the initial tender award.
The petitioner also argued that the enforcement of the ICC final award was contrary to public policy
But yesterday, Mr Justice Mushi said he was satisfied that all the questions of fact and law decided by the tribunal were those which the parties specifically asked the tribunal to decide on and were rightly decided.He said the court could not allow the petitioner to challenge the matter of facts and law that were directly asked by parties to be determined by the arbitration tribunal.
Outside the court, a lawyer who represented Dowans, Mr Kennedy Fungamtama, said his clients were still willing to sit with the government to negotiate the payment. One of the lawyers who represented Tanesco at ICC and in the petition, Dr Hawa Sinare, said he would advice Tanesco to appeal against the decision. “This is a kind of case that has to go to the Court of Appeal. We are shocked on how the judge addressed the issues of public policy and erroneous application of laws,” visibly upset Dr Sinare said.
Before Tanesco and rights organisations rushed to challenge the award, the Attorney General, Mr Frederick Werema had cautioned that Tanzania could not avoid paying Dowans for wrongful termination of the contract.
He said during the swearing in ceremony of Chief Justice Mohamed Othman Chande that it was wrong to give people false hope of opting for an appeal, adding that “any attempt to use public resources in pursuing the matter further was likely to be a waste of taxpayers’ money.”At the hearing of the petition, Tanesco blamed the arbitrator of failing to address it overwhelming evidence that proved how the power contract was improperly procured.
The petitioner also argued that the enforcement of the ICC final award was contrary to public policy
But yesterday, Mr Justice Mushi said he was satisfied that all the questions of fact and law decided by the tribunal were those which the parties specifically asked the tribunal to decide on and were rightly decided.He said the court could not allow the petitioner to challenge the matter of facts and law that were directly asked by parties to be determined by the arbitration tribunal.
Outside the court, a lawyer who represented Dowans, Mr Kennedy Fungamtama, said his clients were still willing to sit with the government to negotiate the payment. One of the lawyers who represented Tanesco at ICC and in the petition, Dr Hawa Sinare, said he would advice Tanesco to appeal against the decision. “This is a kind of case that has to go to the Court of Appeal. We are shocked on how the judge addressed the issues of public policy and erroneous application of laws,” visibly upset Dr Sinare said.
Before Tanesco and rights organisations rushed to challenge the award, the Attorney General, Mr Frederick Werema had cautioned that Tanzania could not avoid paying Dowans for wrongful termination of the contract.
He said during the swearing in ceremony of Chief Justice Mohamed Othman Chande that it was wrong to give people false hope of opting for an appeal, adding that “any attempt to use public resources in pursuing the matter further was likely to be a waste of taxpayers’ money.”At the hearing of the petition, Tanesco blamed the arbitrator of failing to address it overwhelming evidence that proved how the power contract was improperly procured.
Source The Citizen
Monday, September 26, 2011
NASA spots first planet in binary star system
NASA's Kepler space telescope, searching for planets around distant suns, has discovered a Saturn-size world orbiting two stars 200 light years from Earth, a long-sought "circumbinary" planet reminiscent of the fictional world Tatooine in the Star Wars saga.
"This is the first definitive detection of a circumbinary planet and the best example we have of a Tatooine-type world," said Laurance Doyle, a researcher at the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe and lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.
"Now, we don't expect Luke Skywalker or anything else to be living on Kepler-16b, but if you could visit there, you would see a sky with two suns, just like Luke did."
An artist's concept of Kepler-16b, a Saturn-size world orbiting two stars some 200 light years from Earth. The discovery by NASA's Kepler space telescope is a first in the ongoing search for planets beyond Earth's solar system.
(Credit: NASA)Launched in March 2008, Kepler trails the Earth in its orbit around the sun, aiming a 95-megapixel camera at a patch of sky the size of an out-stretched hand that contains more than 4.5 million detectable stars. Of that total, some 300,000 are the right age, composition and brightness to host Earth-like planets. Over the life of the mission, more than 150,000 of those will be actively monitored by Kepler.
The spacecraft's camera does not take pictures like other space telescopes. Instead, it acts as a photometer, continually monitoring the brightness of candidate stars in its wide field of view, on the lookout for the minute dimming that occurs when a planet passes in front of the star.
By studying subtle changes in brightness from such planetary transits--comparable to watching a flea creep across acar's headlight at night--and the timing of repeated cycles, computer analysis can identify potential worlds in habitable-zone orbits.
The probability of finding sun-like stars with Earth-like planets in orbits similiar to ours--and aligned so that Kepler can "see" them--is about one-half of 1 percent. But given the sample size, that still leaves hundreds of potential discoveries.
Last February, the Kepler team announced the discovery of 1,235 potential "exoplanets." At that time, 15 were confirmed and since then, five more confirmations have been announced. Another batch of candidates is expected to be announced next month. But as it now stands, Kepler-16b is the spacecraft's 21st confirmed planet and the first found orbiting a binary star system.
Given that binary stars abound, the Kepler discovery likely opens the door for additional findings.
A family portrait showing the Kepler-16 binary star system and its one known planet. Given the abundance of binary systems across the Milky Way, the Kepler discovery likely opens the door to additional findings.
(Credit: NASA)
"This discovery is stunning," Alan Boss, a member of the Kepler team, said in a statement. "Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality."
The two stars at the heart of the system are some 200 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The larger, yellow star is 69 percent as massive as the sun and the smaller red star is 20 percent as big. Kepler-16b orbits the system's center of mass every 225 days.
"When you have a binary star with planets orbiting that, the binary star produces gravitational perturbations that can be very severe for planets," said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Planets can get tossed out of the system, or tossed into one of the stars.
"This particular planet is far enough out, it's far enough away from the two binary stars that it effectively is feeling them as a single gravitational attraction. And while there are perturbations, those perturbations aren't severe enough to actually cause problems for the orbit."
But unlike Tatooine, Kepler-16b, orbiting beyond the system's habitable zone where water can exist as a liquid, is not habitable. Even so, it clearly sparked the imagination of the science team.
"This is an example of another planetary system, a completely different type that we've never seen before," Doyle said. "That's why everybody's making a big deal of it. Nobody's ever seen a place like this before, with one exception. I seem to remember seeing a place like this about 30 years ago in a galaxy far, far away."
John Knoll, a visual effects supervisor for film maker George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic for three Star Wars movies, told reporters no one worried at the time that Tatooine did not reflect prevailing scientific theory.
"I don't think George particularly concerned himself that the leading theory of planet formation made this setting somewhat unlikely," he said. "But Kepler-16b is unambiguous and dramatic proof that planets do form around binaries. It's possible there's a real Tatooine out there, a planet like that could really exist."
Re-imagining a scene from the first Star Wars movie, Doyle described a sunset on Kepler-16b: "Sometimes, the red star would set first, sometimes the orange star, sometimes they'd set touching each other, sometimes set together. So you'd get this very dynamic sunset. It's never two sunsets are the same."
If Skywalker could stand on Kepler-16b, he would see two shadows, Doyle said, adding that "if you wanted to tell the time by sundial, you'd need calculus, you know?
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20106952-239/nasa-spots-first-planet-in-binary-star-system/#ixzz1Z4NCB5i7
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20106952-239/nasa-spots-first-planet-in-binary-star-system/#ixzz1Z4NCB5i7
Dead satellite likely fell into Pacific Ocean--maybe
NASA's derelict Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell to Earth Saturday, presumably into the Pacific Ocean west of Canada. But it's not yet a sure thing.
(Credit: NASA)
NASA's decommissioned 6.3-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, out of gas and out of control after two decades in space, plunged back into the atmosphere early Saturday, heating up, breaking apart, and presumably showering chunks of debris along a 500-mile-long Pacific Ocean impact zone.
Maybe.
U.S. Strategic Command radar tracking indicated re-entry would occur around 12:16 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) Saturday as the satellite was descending across the Pacific Ocean on a southwest-to-northeast trajectory approaching Canada's west coast. If re-entry occurred on or before the predicted time, any wreckage that survived atmospheric heating almost certainly fell into the Pacific Ocean.
"Because we don't know where the re-entry point actually was, we don't know where the debris field might be," said Nicholas Johnson, chief orbital debris scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
"If the re-entry point was at the (predicted time) of 04:16 GMT, then all that debris wound up in the Pacific Ocean. If the re-entry point occurred earlier than that, practically the entire pass before 04:16...is over water. So the only way debris could have probably reached land would be if the re-entry occurred after 04:16."
Johnson said amateur satellite watchers in the U.S. northwest and the Canadian southwest were "looking to observe UARS as it came over. Every one of those attempts came up negative. That would suggest that the re-entry did, in fact, occur before it reached the North American coast, which, again, would mean most of this debris fell into the Pacific."
But it's not yet certain and it's equally possible a delayed re-entry resulted in debris falling somewhere in northern Canada or elsewhere along the trajectory.
"We may never know," Johnson told reporters in an afternoon teleconference.
The centerpiece of a $750 million mission, the Upper Atmosphere Research satellite was launched from the shuttle Discovery at 12:23 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Sept. 15, 1991. The solar-powered satellite studied a wide variety of atmospheric phenomena, including the depletion of Earth's ozone layer 15 to 30 miles up.
The long-lived satellite was decommissioned in 2005, and one side of its orbit was lowered using the last of its fuel to hasten re-entry and minimize the chances of orbital collisions that could produce even more orbital debris. No more fuel was available for maneuvering and the satellite's re-entry was "uncontrolled."
As with all satellites in low-Earth orbit, UARS was a victim of atmospheric drag, the slow but steady reduction in velocity, and thus altitude, caused by flying through the tenuous extreme upper atmosphere at some five miles per second.
UARS' final trajectory as it neared the discernible atmosphere proved difficult to predict. The descent slowed somewhat Friday, presumably because the spacecraft's orientation changed. As the day wore on, the predicted impact time slipped from Friday afternoon to early Saturday.
Johnson said falling satellites typically begin breaking up at an altitude of around 50 miles. In the case of UARS, computer analysis indicated about 26 pieces of debris would survive to reach the surface, spread out along a 500-mile-long down-range footprint. Johnson said the heel of the footprint, the area where the lightest debris might fall, is typically 300 miles or so beyond the breakup point.
But so far, "we've got no reports of anyone seeing anything that we believe are credible," Johnson said.
Johnson told reporters last week he expected most of the satellite to burn up as it slammed into the dense lower atmosphere at more than 17,000 mph. But computer software used to analyze possible re-entry outcomes predicted 26 pieces of debris would survive to impact the surface, the largest weighing some 330 pounds. Impact velocities were expected to range from 30 mph to 240 mph.
"We looked at those 26 pieces and how big they are, and we've looked at the fact they can hit anywhere in the world between 57 north and 57 south, and we looked at what the population density of the world is," he said. "Numerically, it comes out to a chance of 1 in 3,200 that one person anywhere in the world might be struck by a piece of debris. Those are obviously very, very low odds that anybody's going to be impacted by this debris."
For comparison, some 42.5 tons of wreckage from the shuttle Columbia hit the ground in a footprint stretching from central Texas to Louisiana when the orbiter broke apart during re-entry in 2003. No one on the ground was injured and no significant property damage was reported.
Apple slashes fourth-quarter iPad orders, report says
Apple has cut iPad orders from manufacturing partners, Bloomberg is reporting, citing an investment report from JP Morgan Chase.
Apple has reportedly cut fourth-quarter iPad shipments by 25 percent per JP Morgan Chase. The analysts at JP Morgan said that this is the first time they've seen Apple slash iPad shipments since thelaunched last year.
If Apple has, in fact, cut iPad shipments for the fourth quarter, it will have a profound impact on many of its suppliers, including Hon Hai Precision. According to the analysts, Bloomberg says, Hon Hai was planning to ship 17 million iPads in the fourth quarter, but will now only ship 13 million units.
It's unclear why Apple might want to cut back on iPad shipments, if that is in fact what's happening. Perhaps it ordered too many iPads in previous quarters, or it's slowing down iPad 2 production to prepare for the eventual iPad 3, or there might be other supply chain management and spending issues involved.
What's more, even with those purportedly reduced shipments, analysts aren't ready to say that Apple will sell fewer iPads in the fourth quarter. According to Bloomberg, JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz will maintain estimates that Apple will ship up to 12 million iPad units in that quarter, even with reduced orders to suppliers.
If Apple can keep up its momentum, and sell as many iPads as researchers expect, this could be another big year for the tablet. Last week, research firm Gartner reported that it expects Apple to sell nearly 47 million iPads this year, up from the 14.7 million it sold last year. Even more impressive, Gartner believes Apple will ship nearly 149 million iPads in 2015.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment on the Bloomberg report.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)