easyjet

EasyJet lowers earnings outlook after ash easyJet (EZJ 68.20, +3.67, +5.69%) said Tuesday that its first-half net loss narrowed to 58.9 million pounds, from 85.9 million pounds recorded at the same point a year ago. Revenue rose to 1.2 billion pounds, from 1.0 billion pounds last year. The firm said that capacity, measured in seats flown, for the second half of the year is expected to increase by 7%, and by 7.5% for the year. This is lower than the planned 10% growth due to the impact of volcanic ash related disruption. Prior to the disruption, the firm was expecting to report a 2010 pretax profit in a range of 175 million pounds to 200 million pounds.

An easyJet statement said it expected annual pre-tax profit of £100-150m instead of £175-200m because of the ash cloud fallout, which continues to force the closure of airports.
But the company’s outgoing chief executive Andy Harrison said the airline was still on course to ‘deliver substantial profit growth in 2010′.

EasyJet was hoping for between £175 million and £200 million in profits this year but put the cost of the cloud at between £50 million and £75 million, forcing it to adjust its annual profit expectations to between £100 million and £150 million based on current fuel prices and exchange rates.

Britain extends flight ban until 1200 GMT Sunday

LONDON: Britain has extended a ban on most flights in its airspace until at least 1200 GMT Sunday due to the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, air authorities announced.

“The volcanic ash cloud from Iceland is moving around and changing shape,” the National Air Traffic Services said in a statement Saturday.

“Based on the latest information from the Met Office, NATS advises that the restrictions currently in place across UK controlled airspace will remain in place until at least 13:00 (UK time) tomorrow.”

“We will continue to monitor Met Office information and review our arrangements in line with that,” it said.

Sarkozy cancels trip to Kaczynski funeral: office

PARIS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy will not attend the funeral of Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski due to the disruption caused by the huge cloud of volcanic ash over Europe, his office said Saturday.

“Because of the exceptional weather conditions which are disrupting air traffic over most of Europe the president will not be able to travel to Krakow to attend the funeral of president Kaczynski and his wife, as planned,” the Elysee palace said in a statement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US President Barack Obama, Britain”s Prince Charles, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other leaders have also cancelled their planned trip.

Kaczynski, his wife Maria and 94 other people died in a plane crash in Russia on April 10.

Iranian Cyber Army and Twitter Hacked

Twitter Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,?:- Popular micro blogging Twitter was briefly shut down overnight, its home page replaced with an image claiming the site had been hacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army.”

Technology blogs including TechCrunch said Twitter went down around 0600 GMT for about an hour.

The website’s official blog acknowledged the disruption. “As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed,” the site’s co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the blog.

“We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully,” he added.

Visitors to the site at that time reached a page with an image of a green flag under red text reading “Iranian Cyber Army” and “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.”

Screengrabs posted on Flickr clearly showed additional text below the image in English.

“U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But They Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To,” the text said.

“NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST. Take Care,” it read.

TechCrunch reported that the disruption also affected Google searches for Twitter. It posted a screengrab showing that searches for a time returned a result reading “This Web Site Has Been Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,” above Farsi script.

Iranian demonstrators protesting the results of June presidential elections used Twitter extensively, both to organize marches and to release information about their movement.

Their use of the microblogging site led some to dub the pro-democracy action against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “Twitter revolution” and made the Iranian election one of the top “trends” on the site this year.