Russian firm plans hotel in space

A hotel in orbit, lunar sightseeing flights and luxury rides into the cosmos all are part of Russia s vision to ensure it is not left behind in the growing space tourism industry.

Russian firms unveiled their plans at the country s premiere air show this week at Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, saying the race was on to build a new craft to take people into space following the retirement of NASA s space shuttle in April.

RKK Energia unveiled plans for a replacement shuttle and Orbital Technologies said it hoped to build an orbiting hotel with room for seven guests by 2016. Other plans include flying tourists to the dark side of the moon and, by 2030, to Mars.

Although Russia currently holds a monopoly on rides to space aboard its Soviet-designed Soyuz, it starts at a disadvantage.

Foreign experts say they doubt Russian firms can achieve their ambitious goals because they lack funding and even Russian officials said it would be hard to rival US private sector firms now competing for contracts with NASA.

Termites eat millions of rupees in bank

According to police, an army of termites munched through 10 million Indian rupees in currency notes, stored in a steel chest at a bank, in Barabanki, a town 30 kilometres southwest of Lucknow.

Police officials said that the bank manager discovered the damage when he opened the reinforced room in an old bank building. The currency was equivalent to about US$ 250,000.

The police have registered a case of negligence against bank officials. The termites had damaged bank furniture and documents in the past.

World Cup Trophy Lifted By India Is Fake

India won the world cup final match on Saturday and lifted the world cup trophy. According to media reports the world cup trophy presented to India was fake. Trophy was not real it was replica.  It never happened in 36 year history of cricket. It means that the world cup trophy lifted and kissed by Indian players was replica.

Perfect weather in Mohali after thunderstorm

MOHALI: Ahead of the crucial Pakistan-India semifinal, the skies cleared up on Wednesday morning after a thunderstorm followed by light rain in Mohali.

Met officials said the skies would remain clear for most of the day. They added, however, that there was possibility of light showers towards the evening.

The high-voltage semifinal clash between India and Pakistan starts at the Punjab Cricket Association (PCA) stadium at 2.30 p.m. It will be a day-night encounter.

Seven Afghan civilians killed in NATO air strike

KABUL: Seven civilians, three of them children, were killed and five others wounded in a NATO air strike targeting insurgents in restive southern Afghanistan, a local official said Saturday.

The governor of Helmand province said the two men, two women and three children died when the car they were travelling in was hit by NATO fire late Friday.

Earlier, NATO said its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) called in an air strike on two vehicles believed to be carrying a Taliban leader and his associates, but later discovered they were transporting civilians.

“ISAF forces fired on a vehicle carrying insurgents,” said a statement from Helmand governor Muhammad Gulab Mangal”s office.

“The explosion hit another vehicle in which civilians were travelling, and as a result two men, two women and three children were killed and a man, a woman and three other children were wounded.”

NATO said it had launched an investigation into the incident, which came after nine people — who Afghan officials said were children collecting firewood — were killed in a NATO airstrike in eastern Kunar province this month.

Civilian casualties in military operations are highly sensitive in Afghanistan as coalition troops battle to curb a Taliban-led insurgency ahead of a planned handover of security to Afghan forces.

The Kunar strike unleashed public fury, leading the US troop commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, to issue a rare public apology. (AFP)

Less invasive body scanner software being tested at US airports

As the uproar over the government’s use of pat-downs and full-body scanners at airports ebbs, new technology is being tested that is designed to allay privacy concerns over the grainy nude images produced by the machines.

The technology displays a generic stick figure instead of a grainy nude image when passengers are scanned. The TSA hopes it will allay privacy concerns raised over the new security procedures.

Scanners being tested in three US airports starting this week will display for screeners a generic stick figure, and any suspicious object on a passenger’s body will be flagged for inspection by a pale red box on the drawing. A passenger cleared to go will see the screen flash green and read OK. The software debuts as complaints by air travelers over the new security measures have remained relatively low. Of the 100 million fliers that have passed through airport checkpoints since Nov. 1, the Transportation Security Administration has received fewer than 5,500 complaints about the procedures.And most of those complaints, TSA officials said, were not from individuals who were flying. Fewer than 800 complaints about the pat-downs and 300 complaints about the full-body scans were lodged by actual travelers. The rest came from individuals who had not gone through the procedures but nonetheless complained about them, TSA officials said.The software being tested would be used to replace the revealing images generated by millimeter wave scanners and currently viewed by a TSA agent in a separate room. The new computer program identifies hidden foreign objects and indicates to TSA searchers where to look during a pat-down. Full-body scanners are able to detect non-metallic items, such as the explosives used in the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009, TSA Administrator John Pistole said at a demonstration of the new software Tuesday. The TSA instituted the new procedures in response to an elevated threat to airlines after a thwarted mail bomb plot originating in Yemen in October.Though the new software could address privacy concerns, it does not answer complaints about the radiation from another type of scanner, called a backscatter, that works using low-dose X-rays. Studies have shown that passengers would have to pass through a backscatter machine 5,000 times before being exposed to the same amount of radiation in a single chest X-ray.There are 486 body scanners in use in 88 airports, according to the TSA, up from 365 in 68 airports in November. TSA officials said publicly in November they hoped to have more than 1,000 body scanners in place by the end of 2011, but uncertainty over budget negotiations in Congress could hamper that goal.

US missile ‘kills up to seven in Pakistan’s Khyber’

PESHAWAR: A US missile strike killed seven militants in Pakistan’s tribal district of Khyber on Thursday, local security officials said, in an apparent expansion of America’s covert drone campaign.

The United States does not as a rule confirm drone attacks, but its military and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy the aircraft in the region.

Washington considers Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda and says eliminating the militant threat is vital to winning the nine-year war against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials said a US drone fired a missile that destroyed a vehicle carrying up to seven militants in the Spin Darang area of the Tirah valley in Khyber, which borders Afghanistan.

“It was a drone attack. Seven militants travelling in the vehicle were killed in the attack,” a security official in Peshawar told AFP.

Another security official said all the dead were local Taliban militants.

They were thought to be from Waziristan, Pakistan’s most notorious Al-Qaeda and Taliban hub on the Afghan border, and the northwestern district of Swat, where Pakistan launched a major operation last year to clear out the Taliban.

Pakistani security officials were divided over whether it was the first or second US drone strike in Khyber, close to the teeming northwestern city of Peshawar.

Local media reported a US drone strike in Khyber in May, although Pakistani officials at the time were reluctant to confirm the attack.

A new US policy review on Thursday concluded that President Barack Obama’s troop surge has made progress in curbing the Taliban in Afghanistan and severely weakening Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

The report says that after a relentless US campaign, Al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan is weaker than at any stage since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

Progress will permit a “responsible reduction” of US forces in Afghanistan, currently nearly 100,000-strong, to begin next July, though a full handover to Afghan security is not envisaged until at least 2014, the review said.

The report also said that the US anti-terror alliance with Pakistan had been “substantial” but “uneven” in the last year, since Obama vowed to forge a new relationship of mutual trust and respect with Islamabad.

On Thursday, Britain said it was looking into media reports that two British men, possibly Muslim converts, were killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region last week.

“Our High Commission in Pakistan is seeking further information on these reports,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.

Channel Four News and The Guardian newspaper claimed that the Britons died in a strike near the town of Datta Khel on December 10.

The men were aged 48 and 25 and reportedly had English names but used the pseudonyms Abu Bakr and Mansoor Ahmed.

If confirmed, the men would be the first white British converts to have been killed in the area, The Guardian said. AGENCIES

Railway track stolen near Sheikhupura

Three bogies of Shorkot-bound train derailed near Sheikhupura, trendpk.com reported on Thursday.

However, no loss of life or injury has been reported in the incident. Railway officials said that derailment was result of track plates theft the other night.

The work to repair the track has been initiated and it would be cleared till 2pm, they added.

Punjab: CNG stations remain closed on second consecutive day

LAHORE: Several areas of Punjab, including Lahore, face suspension of gas on the second consecutive day on Tuesday (today).

Sui Northern officials said that due to the National Energy Saving Campaign, gas suspension to Lahore, Gujranwala, Multan, Sahiwal and Faisalabad will continue on the second day also; more than 2000 CNG stations will remain closed till Wednesday morning.

CNG stations in Potohar and Bahawalpur will remain closed on Friday and Saturday.

On the other hand, several industrial units of Punjab, including Lahore, face gas outage on the fifth day today, leaving laborers jobless.

Sui Northern sources say that the suspension of gas is for an indefinite period. TrendPK

Russia probes navigation system spending after crash

MOSCOW: Russia launched a probe Tuesday into whether the money assigned to create a satellite navigation rival to the US GPS system was being wisely spent, prosecutors said, after the latest launch ended in failure.

The decision followed the failed launch Sunday of three Glonass satellites that were to have completed a satellite constellation whose development had been begun by the Soviet Union back in 1976.

Space officials said the rocket carrying the payload had failed to reach its initial low-earth orbit of 180 kilometers (112 miles). The satellites were then to have been boosted into a permanent 19,130-kilometre orbit — but instead splashed back down into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

The Russian prosecutor general’s office said it was following instructions from President Dmitry Medvedev to investigating any potential misappropriation of the Glonass

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