Cold Snap Freezes Europe: Many Dead

A homeless man warms up near an outside coal fire on a street in Warsaw as temperatures dropped.

A girl looks out from a bus window covered with frost in the Ukrainian city of Lviv.

 

Scores of people have died in a cold snap across Eastern Europe, authorities said on Tuesday, forcing some countries to call in the army to help secure food and medical supplies and set up emergency shelters for the homeless. The temperature in Ukraine sank to minus 33C, the coldest in six years, while eastern Bosnia experienced lows of minus 31C and Poland, Romania and Bulgaria minus 30C.

Forecasters said the cold spell would last until Friday with further heavy snow expected across the region on Wednesday.
January temperatures in Ukraine do not normally sink below minus 15C. The ministry said 1600 centres had been set up to provide shelter and hand out food for the homeless.Five people died in Bulgaria and 8 in Romania, where troops were called in last week to rescue hundreds of people stranded in cars by blizzards. The Black Sea was frozen around the Romanian resort of Mamaia, and across the border in Bulgaria a salt lake froze for the first time in 58 years.Five people were reported dead in Poland overnight, bringing to 15 the number to have died since temperatures dropped at the weekend. Several suffered carbon monoxide poisoning from old or faulty heaters, the Interior Affairs Ministry said.
At least three people have died in heavy snow in Serbia's mountain regions to the south and southeast. Authorities declared a state of emergency in 13 municipalities and deployed the army and firefighters to get supplies to remote villages."The situation is gradually being restored to normal," said Predrag Maric, head of the Interior Ministry's emergency situations department.
Dozens of villages were cut off by two metres of snow in eastern Bosnia, where the frozen body of a man was found at the weekend.

At least 30 people, most of them homeless, have died in Ukraine in the past five days, the Emergencies Ministry said. Another 500 people were treated in hospital for frostbite and other cold-related ailments.

 

Assange's In Court Today In Last Stand Against Extradition

For more than a year the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has remained closeted at secret locations in the English countryside, surrounded by friends and admirers but shackled on the right ankle with an electronic monitor to ensure he remains within reach, until the law this week hears a case that will decide his future.Assange will appear in London today before seven of the 12 judges of Britain's Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, for his appeal against his extradition to Sweden, where is accused of rape, sexual molestation and coercion involving two women.The legal action against the Australian-born Assange, 40, has generated considerable public and legal interest worldwide, since he was taken into custody in England in December 2010 under a controversial European Arrest Warrant (EAW). A Swedish public prosecutor issued the warrant on allegations that Assange had sexually assaulted two women during a visit to Stockholm, Sweden, in August that year. Assange is alleged to have had unprotected sex with one woman when she allegedly had insisted he use a condom, and also to have had sex with another women when she was asleep. He denies strenuously the claims and says any sex was consensual.

US Returns Stolen French Artwork

The United States has returned a long-missing work of art to France, the third such handover in little more than a year.
The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned over to the French ambassador what the embassy described as a rare, historic and precious work by Impressionist Camille Pissarro titled The Fish Market. It had been taken in 1981 from the Faure Museum in Aix-les-Bains.
In returning The Fish Market, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, said his agency's cultural property, art and antiquities unit was set up to identify, investigate and return cultural treasures such as the stolen painting to their rightful owners and countries of origin.

Lego Man Launch A Success

Two Canadian high school students have launched a Lego man almost 25 kilometres above sea level - high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.
Now the results of their experiment have gone viral, racking up more than 600,000 views on YouTube in just two days and inspiring a Facebook page.
The Toronto Star reports that the two teens, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed spent 4½ months working on the project.They told the Star the hardest part was hand sewing the parachute.
They also constructed a lightweight Styrofoam box to carry three point-and-shoot cameras, a wide-angle video camera and a mobile phone with a downloadable GPS app.
They purchased a professional weather balloon for $85 online while the helium that would lift it up came from a party supply store.
For launch, they put two mitten warmers in the Styrofoam box to keep the cameras working at altitude.
The project cost about $400.
The two waited until weather conditions would ensure the Lego man would land in Canada and not somewhere in the US because they didn't want to take their chances with US Homeland Security, the Star reported.

Bill Gates Gives away $750M In AIDS Fight

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $US750 million ($707 million) to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to help ensure the organisation can keep supplying AIDS drugs while it tries to adjust to the economic downturn.
The Global Fund, which has paid $US15.1 billion to low-income countries in the past decade, said in November it would not award any new grants until 2014. Most of the fund's money comes from governments in the industrialised world, but many are now unwilling to increase their donations and a few to fulfil earlier pledges.
There are fears some AIDS programs in Africa might run out of money, forcing patients to stop taking the life-saving antiretroviral drugs.
''These are tough economic times, but that is no excuse for cutting aid to the world's poorest,'' Mr Gates said in announcing the contribution at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His foundation had previously contributed $US650 million to the fund in a decade.
A fund spokesman, Andrew Hurst, said the Gates donation would pay for 164,000 people to continue receiving AIDS drugs; buy 11.4 million mosquito nets and treat 427,000 cases of tuberculosis if their costs remain at the level they have averaged since the fund's inception.
As well as antiretroviral drugs, The Global Fund has underwritten 8.6 million tuberculosis treatments and provided 230 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets for the prevention of malaria. During its existence, the fund has paid for 1042 programs in about 150 countries.
Also in Davos, former Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan said Japan would contribute $US340 million to the fund this year. Two years ago, it contributed $US200 million, but last year because of the March earthquake and tsunami it contributed only $US110 million. This would be a 'catch-up' contribution.

Temple For Athiests Sparks Controversy

Plans to build a £1 million ($1.47 million) ''temple for atheists'' among the international banks and medieval church spires of London have sparked a clash between two of Britain's most prominent non-believers.
The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre tower to celebrate a ''new atheism'' as an antidote to what he describes as Richard Dawkins's ''aggressive'' and ''destructive'' approach to non-belief.
Rather than attack religion, Mr de Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.
''Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha but you can build a temple to anything that's positive and good,'' he said. ''That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective … Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has become known as a destructive force.''
Professor Dawkins criticised the project, indicating the money was being misspent and that a temple of atheism was a contradiction in terms.
''Atheists don't need temples,'' the author of The God Delusion said. ''I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, sceptical critical thinking.''
The spat came as Mr de Botton revealed details of the temple. Each centimetre of the tapering tower's interior has been designed to represent 1 million of the 300 million years of life on Earth and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet. The exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.

Fried Food Not To Blame For Heart Attacks, Study Shows

Regularly eating fried food does not cause heart attacks, provided that olive oil or sunflower oil is used in the cooking, researchers say.

A study published in the British Medical Journal says there is mounting research that it is the type of oil - and whether it has been used before - that really matters.

It found no association between the frequency of eating fried food in Spain - where olive and sunflower oils are prevalent - and the incidence of serious heart disease.

Spanish researchers studied more than 40,000 people from the mid-1990s to 2004 to see if regularly eating fried foods increased the likelihood of suffering coronary heart disease that led to a heart attack or angina requiring surgery.
Dividing participants into four groups, from lowest fried food intake to highest, they found no significant difference in heart disease.
The authors concluded: ''In a Mediterranean country where olive and sunflower oils are the most commonly used fats for frying, and where large amounts of fried foods are consumed both at and away from home, no association was observed between fried food consumption and the risk of coronary heart disease or death.''
Fried foods from US-style takeaways were different because they tended to have been cooked in re-used oils higher in transfats.

Dozens Killed In Papua New Guinea Landslide

Destruction ... villagers search the site of the disaster, which is reported to have killed at least 40 people, with more missing..

As many as 60 people are feared dead after a massive landslide wiped out an entire village in a scene of ''utter devastation'' in Papua New Guinea, according to reports and aid workers.
The disaster struck near a huge ExxonMobil liquefied natural gas project in the country's rugged southern highlands on Tuesday as people slept, leaving a trail of destruction. An aerial shot showed mud and other debris extending for at least one kilometre across a forested area.
Papua New Guinea's media said 40 bodies had been recovered and another 20 people were still missing. The director of the country's National Disaster Centre, Martin Mose, said it appeared lives had been lost but he could not verify how many.
''It was a big landslide and it covered a big area where there used to be small hamlets, so we are expecting a number of deaths,'' he said.
The area's MP, Francis Potape, said the landslide completely covered two villages while people slept. ''There are people buried underneath and a number of them are, from what I have heard, children,'' he reportedly told the The National. The Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill, was reportedly rushing to the scene, near Tari.
Nanduka Yandi, an aid worker for the US non-government organisation Population Services International, was at the scene of the landslide soon after it happened. He said many people were killed and few had escaped.
''It covered 42 houses and only three or four people managed to escape. Everyone else died,'' he said by telephone. ''It is quite remote and yesterday there was hardly anyone here to dig out the bodies or help people. People lost their entire families. They are in shock.''

Sun's Radiation Release Could Disrupt GPS

Smoking sun … a solar flare that took place on Sunday.

Fast on the heels of a solar storm that delivered a glancing blow over the weekend - triggering bright auroras in Canada and Scandinavia - the sun has released an even more energetic blast of radiation and charged plasma that could disrupt GPS signals and the electrical grid, space weather experts warned.

Already, the storm could be disrupting satellite communications as streams of radiation from the sun bounce across the Earth's magnetic field.

''With the radiation storm in progress now, satellite operators could be experiencing trouble, and there are probably impacts as well to high-frequency communications in polar regions,'' said Doug Biesecker, a physicist at the US Space Weather Prediction Centre in Colorado.

In Australia, the effects are expected to be lighter, as the shockwave hits some time before 9am AEDST Wednesday.

''It could cause quite a few problems with shortwave radio, at some frequencies, and the power grid operators have been warned and they can compensate for it,'' Dave Neudegg, the manager of Australia's Ionospheric Prediction Service, said. Auroras may be visible from southern Australia, including Hobart and possibly Victoria.

The solar storm is the biggest since 2005.



Daughter Locked In Bathroom For A Decade

Father Keeps Daughter Locked In A Bathroom - For A Decade.

Palestinian police have freed a young woman whose father kept her locked in the bathroom of their West Bank house for about a decade.

Spokesman Adnan Damiri saidthe 20-year-old woman was in a "deplorable" condition when she was found on Saturday. Damiri said on Monday it remains unclear why she was locked up.

The 49-year-old father, an Arab citizen of Israel, was detained and handed over to Israeli police.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the father was suspected of physically abusing the young woman.

He is being held in an Israeli jail pending a court hearing on Wednesday.

Rosenfeld said the woman's mother, who did not live with the family, had also been detained for questioning.

 

Radiation Rice Deemed Safe To Eat

Vegetable Cafe Harmonize, in Fukushima, sells produce grown far from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Onami sits just 35 miles northwest of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which spewed radioactive cesium over much of this rural region last March. However, the government inspectors declared Onami’s rice safe for consumption after testing just two of its 154 rice farms.

Then, a few days later, a skeptical farmer in Onami, who wanted to be sure his rice was safe for a visiting grandson, had his crop tested, only to find it contained levels of cesium that exceeded the government’s safety limit. In the weeks that followed, more than a dozen other farmers also found unsafe levels of cesium. An ensuing panic forced the Japanese government to intervene, with promises to test more than 25,000 rice farms in eastern Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is located.

The uproar underscores how, almost a year after a huge earthquake and tsunami caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan is still struggling to protect its food supply from radioactive contamination. The discovery of tainted rice in Onami and a similar case in July involving contaminated beef have left officials scrambling to plug the exposed gaps in the government’s food-screening measures, many of which were hastily introduced after the accident.
The repeated failures have done more than raise concerns that some Japanese may have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation in their food, as regrettable as that is. They have also had a corrosive effect on public confidence in the food-monitoring efforts, with a growing segment of the public and even many experts coming to believe that officials have understated or even covered up the true extent of the public health risk in order to limit both the economic damage and the size of potential compensation payments.

Japanese Tsunami Debris Found In Alaska

A half dozen large buoys suspected to be from Japanese oyster farms have appeared at the top of Alaska's panhandle and may be among the first debris from Japan's devastating tsunami last year.
Robert Johnson, a photographer in Yakutat, said at least six barrel-shape buoys 3 feet in diameter and 4 feet long have shown up on beaches in the last two weeks. Hard plastic football-shape buoys also are showing up, he said.
He had seen a dozen of the floats in his 30 years in the community and he's confident they're tsunami debris.
"It's not coincidence," he said.
As more debris shows up, there's little need to be worried that it will be contaminated by radiation, state health and environmental officials said Friday.
They have been working with federal counterparts to gauge the danger of debris, including material affected by a damaged nuclear power plant, to see if Alaska residents, seafood or wild game could be affected.
"From what we found from the data that is available, the answer is no," said Kristin Ryan, environmental health director for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
"There is no concern to us that there's any radiation impacts in Alaska, to our environment, that we should be worried about at this time."

MegaUpload Website Closed Down By FBI Raids

In what authorities have called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have seized the Web site MegaUpload (http://www.megaupload.com/) and charged seven people connected with it with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy.

From left: Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Kim Dotcom appeared in court in Auckland, New Zealand

Megaupload, one of the most popular so-called locker services on the Internet, allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. Media companies have long accused it of abetting copyright infringement on a vast scale. In a grand jury indictment, Megaupload is accused of causing $500 million in damages to copyright owners and of making $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions.

The arrests were greeted almost immediately with digital Molotov cocktails. The hacker collective that calls itself Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the United States Justice Department and several major entertainment companies and trade groups in retaliation for the seizure of Megaupload.

Computer Prices To Rise Because Of Thailand Flooding

THAILAND - The floodwaters receded weeks ago from this sprawling industrial zone, but the streets are littered with detritus, the phones do not work and rusted machinery has been dumped outside warehouses that once buzzed with efficiency.
Before Thailand’s great flood of 2011, companies like Panasonic, JVC and Hitachi produced electronics and computer components that were exported around the world. Now of the 227 factories operating in the zone, only 15 percent have restarted production, according to Nipit Arunvongse Na Ayudhya, the managing director of the company that manages the Nava Nakorn industrial zone, one of the largest in Thailand and located just north of Bangkok.
“The recovery has not been that easy,” Mr. Nipit said in an interview Friday on the sidelines of a meeting where he sought to soothe anxious foreign factory managers.
The slow recovery here is having global consequences. Before the floods, Thailand produced about 40 percent to 45 percent of the world’s hard disk drives, the invaluable and ubiquitous storage devices of the digital age. It is now becoming clear that it will be months — significantly longer than initially expected — before production of hard drives returns to antediluvian levels.
The upshot for consumers worldwide is that they may face a prolonged period of higher prices for hard drives. In the United States, certain models are currently 40 percent to 50 percent more expensive than before the floods, levels that may remain for several months, analysts say.
“By the end of the year, HDD price could come back to preflood level for certain drives,” said Fang Zhang, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, a market forecasting company based in the United States. He used the acronym for hard disk drives.
John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September. About 60 other companies that produce hard drives and components were flooded, he said.

Kodak Files For Bankruptcy

Eastman Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneer that has been struggling for years to adapt to an increasingly digital world, has filed for bankruptcy protection.

The American icon had tried a number of turnaround strategies and cost-cutting efforts in recent years, but the company — which since 2004 has reported only one full year of profits — ultimately ran short of cash.

“Since 2008, despite Kodak’s best efforts, restructuring costs and recessionary forces have continued to negatively impact the company’s liquidity position, ” Kodak’s chief financial officer, Antoinette P. McCorvey, said in the court filing. Citigroup is providing Kodak with $950 million in financing to allow the company to keep going. Kodak plans to continue operating normally during bankruptcy.

The company will also seek to continue selling a portfolio of 1,100 digital imaging patents to raise cash for its loss-making operations.

Kodak has become the latest giant to falter in the face of advancing technology. The Borders Group liquidated last year after having failed to gain a toehold in e-books, while Blockbuster sold itself to Dish Network last year as its retail outlets lost ground to online competitors like Netflix.
Founded in 1880 by George Eastman, Kodak became one of America’s most notable companies, helping establish the market for camera film and then dominating the field. But it has suffered from a variety of problems over the past four decades.

First came foreign competitors, notably Fujifilm of Japan, which undercut Kodak’s prices. Then the onset of digital photography eroded demand for traditional film, squeezing Kodak’s business so much that in 2003 the company said that it would halt investing in its longtime product.

The Chapter 11 filing was made in United States bankruptcy court in lower Manhattan. Kodak said that its non-American subsidiaries are not part of the filing.

iPad3 Coming In March

The new iPad3, expected to go on sale in March, will sport a high-definition screen, run a faster processor and work with next-generation wireless networks, according to those people familiar with the product.

The company’s manufacturing partners in Asia started ramping up production of the iPad 3 this month and plan to reach full volumes by February, said one source, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. The tablet will use a quad-core chip, an enhancement that lets users jump more quickly between applications.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is counting on the new model to ward off mounting competition in a market that Apple pioneered two years ago. After its debut in 2010, the iPad emerged as the company’s second-biggest source of revenue - after the iPhone - and inspired rival products from Amazon.com and Samsung Electronics.
Apple has sold more than 40 million iPads, generating at least $US25.3 billion in sales. Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple, said the company doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation.

Beirut Building Collapse Kills 26

At least 26 people were killed when an old six-storey building in the Lebanese capital of Beirut collapsed, with more people still trapped under the rubble.
"26 Bodies have been recovered and we believe there are more buried under the building that collapsed Sunday evening," Red Cross official Georges Kettaneh said on Monday.
A dozen people were also injured, none of them seriously. Civil defence chief General Raymond Khattar said the bodies recovered by rescuers who worked through Sunday night and Monday included those of seven Lebanese, six Sudanese, two Filipinos and two Egyptians.
Among the dead was a 15-year-old Lebanese girl, and those hurt included her grandmother as well as a 73-year-old Lebanese man, at least two Sudanese, an Egyptian and a Filipina.
The building housed some 50 people, many of them labourers from Sudan and Egypt, Khattar said, adding that at least eight people were known to have escaped as the building came down.
A Syrian labourer at a nearby building site said debris started falling from the building in the early evening before the entire block came crashing down.
"We saw small pieces of stone falling down but no one paid any attention at the start," he said. "Then large chunks of stone started falling and people began screaming for everyone to get out. Within minutes, the building was on the floor."
One resident who escaped with her mother said the building was extremely rundown and the owner had warned tenants not to remain there shortly before it disintegrated. AFP.

Honeymooners Found Alive On Cruise Ship

GIGLIO, Italy —  Rescue workers scouring a partly sunken Italian cruise ship off the Tuscan coast found glimmers of hope and tragedy on Sunday, pulling three survivors from the luxury liner, including a couple on their honeymoon, as well as two more bodies, bringing the total of confirmed deaths to five. The number of passengers still missing from the accident on Friday, when the massive Costa Concordia struck a rock-like object and capsized, fell to between 34 and 17, as passengers previously listed as missing were accounted for.

Divers searching submerged cabins found the bodies of two elderly men, trapped at an assembly point, on Sunday, the Italian Coast Guard said.
Throughout the day, Italian fire brigades circled the ship, resting on its side with a gash just below the waterline and a rock stuck in the hull, in small craft, tapping the hull and listening for responses from people trapped inside.
A couple, honeymooners from Korea, was found alive inside a cabin of the ship, said Luca Cari, a brigade spokesman, and taken to a local hospital.
Later, onlookers witnessed a dramatic helicopter rescue take place above the half-submerged ship off the coast of this resort island; an Italian man, later identified by media reports as a crew member, was airlifted from the ship, thought to have broken his leg.
The ship, carrying 4,200 passengers and crew on a weeklong Mediterranean cruise, slammed into an object, described as either a rock or coral, near the island on Friday night as passengers for the late seating had just started dinner, tucking into appetizers of grilled mushrooms and scallops.

Space Probe To Crash Into Earth

A failed Russian probe designed to travel to a moon of Mars but stuck in Earth orbit will crashing back to earth, the Russian space agency said on Sunday.

Roscosmos said the unmanned Phobos-Ground was expected to crash between 11:41am and 4:05pm EST. It could crash anywhere along the route of its next few orbits, which would include Europe, southeast Asia, Australia and South America. The US, Canada and much of Russia are outside the risk zone.
A large part of each orbit is over water, and scientists have estimated that the risks of the probe crashing into any populated areas are minimal. Thousands of pieces of derelict space vehicles orbit Earth, occasionally posing danger to astronauts and satellites in orbit, but as far as is known, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris.

  Phobos-Grunt lifts off on November 9.

At 13.5 metric tons, the Phobos-Ground is one of the heaviest pieces of space junk ever to fall on Earth, and one of the most toxic too.

The bulk of its weight is a load of 12 tons of highly toxic rocket fuel intended for the long journey to the Martian moon of Phobos. It has been left unused as the probe got stuck in orbit around Earth shortly after its November 9 launch.
Roscosmos predicts that only between 20 and 30 fragments of the Phobos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms will survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth. It said all of the fuel will burn up entirely in the atmosphere.
The probe's fuel tanks are made of aluminum alloy and should melt early on re-entry, backing up the official assurances.
By comparison, NASA's Skylab space station that went down in 1979 weighed 85 tons and Russia's Mir space station that deorbited in 2001 weighed about 143 tons. Their descent fueled fears around the world, but the wreckage of both fell far away from populated areas.
The $170-million Phobos-Ground was Russia's most expensive and the most ambitious space mission since Soviet times. The spacecraft was intended to land on the crater-dented, potato-shaped Martian moon, collect soil samples and fly them back to Earth, giving scientists precious materials that could shed more light on the genesis of the solar system.
Russia's space chief has acknowledged the Phobos-Ground mission was ill-prepared, but said that Roscosmos had to give it the go-ahead so as not to miss the limited Earth-to-Mars launch window.
The Phobos-Ground also contains a tiny quantity of the radioactive metal Cobalt-57 in one of its instruments, but Roscosmos said it poses no threat of radioactive contamination.
AP