28 dead in Papua New Guinea plane crash

Twenty-eight people are dead while four have survived a plane crash in the wilds of Papua New Guinea, according to Australian authorities.

The survivors include an Australian pilot and a New Zealand pilot, according to Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The Airlines PNG Dash 8 aircraft crashed yesterday while flying from Lae to Madang on the South Pacific island nation's north coast, Accident Investigation Commission spokesman Sid O'Toole said.

The twin-propellor plane crashed 20 kilometres south of Madang, he said.

Australian consular officials are planning to travel to Madang today.

"Initial indications are that there are no Australians amongst those killed," the department said in a statement.

Local villagers told the government-owned National Broadcasting Commission there were four survivors.

Police and ambulances had reached the crash site and investigators would travel there today, O'Toole said.

Australian Broadcasting Corp television cited Madang residents as saying there was a violent storm in the area at the time of the crash.

Most of the passengers were parents travelling to attend their children's university graduation ceremony in Madang this weekend, according to the Australian Associated Press news agency.

Rajaratnam handed 11-year jail sentence

Raj Rajaratnam (54), the billionaire hedge fund manager convicted in May on 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, was handed a 11-year jail term by a Manhattan court on Thursday, said to be the longest sentence imposed for insider trading in New York in twenty years.

Although the prosecution in the two-year case had pushed for a maximum jail term of over 24 years, the Sri- Lankan born boss of the Galleon Group had pleaded for a lenient sentence arguing that given his health problems a long prison term would amount to a “death sentence.”

Apple’s latest gadget on sale

Apple’s latest gadget the iPhone 4s officially goes on sale in the U.S. and in six other countries on Friday, but stronger than expected demand means that customers who failed to pre-order one of the devices may have difficulty finding any available for purchase.

Apple said it has sold over 1 million units of the iPhone 4S since it went on sale a week ago, just a day after the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs stoked massive attention on the company.

Initial reactions to the phone, which was unveiled two days earlier, had been tinged with disappointment since it represents an upgrade to the existing iPhone 4 rather than a completely newly designed iPhone 5.

Though it looks the same as Apple’s current model, it does feature a sharper screen, faster processor and better camera among other key upgrades.

The new device also runs Apple’s latest operating system iOS5 which was launched on Wednesday together with the company’s online file system iCloud. Demand for those services was so strong that it overwhelmed Apple servers causing many customers to get error messages.

In the U.S. the 16-GB model costs $ 199, the 32-GB model costs $ 299, and the 64-GB model costs $399. The phones are also on sale in France, Germany, Japan, the U.K, Australia and Canada.

Transport strikes hit Greek capital

Buses, metro trains, trams and taxis were not running in the Greek capital on Friday, snarling traffic as public transport workers striked for a second day in an unrelenting barrage of protests against government austerity measures.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos criticized the repeated strikes and protests, which have included the take-over of government buildings and risk slowing reforms the country needs to qualify for bailout loans.

Seven killed in bomb attacks in Baghdad

Iraqi officials say seven people have been killed in a string of attacks targeting security forces in Baghdad.

Two police officials say a suicide attacker blew himself up near a police station in western Baghdad while another targeted a police station in a northern Shiite neighbourhood. Six people were killed in the two bombings

Indians among pirate hostages freed after message in bottle

British and U.S. forces freed an Italian cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates in a dramatic rescue on Tuesday after retrieving a message in a bottle tossed by hostages from a porthole alerting ships nearby the crew was safely sealed inside an armoured area.All 23 crew members of the Montecristo cargo ship were brought to safety, the Italian Foreign Ministry said. The 11 pirates were taken into custody. The crew, seven Italians, six Ukrainians and 10 Indians, locked themselves inside an armoured area of the vessel when the pirates boarded the ship on Monday, Italian Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa said.

PSLV-C18 puts four satellites in orbit

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C18) demonstrated its reliability once again when it put successfully four satellites in orbit on Wednesday. The satellites were: Megha-Tropiques, an Indo-French satellite to study the weather and climate in the tropical region of the world; SRMSat built by the students of SRM university, near Chennai; Jugnu, built by the students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur; and Vesselsat from Luxembourg. This was the 19th consecutively successful mission of the PSLV out of 20 launches from 1993.

It was a flawless a mission with the PSLV-C18 rising from the first launch pad at the spaceport at Sriharikota at the scheduled time of 11 a.m. As the vehicle sped up from the launch pad, it disappeared briefly into the clouds to knife out into the sky again. Applause broke out in the Mission Control Centre as the four stages of the vehicle ignited on time and fell into the Bay of Bengal. At the end of more than 21 minutes of flight, the PSLV-C18 first catapulted the 1,000 kg Megha-Tropiques satellite into a precise orbit at an altitude of 867 km. The satellite was slung into orbit at a velocity of more than 26,000 km an hour. A few seconds later, SRMSat flew out, followed by VesselSat and Jugnu.

Myanmar grants amnesty to 6,300 prisoners

Myanmar state radio and television announced on Tuesday that the country’s president has granted amnesty to more than 6,300 prisoners in what appears to be the biggest step so far in a series of reform actions undertaken by the new elected government.

The broadcasts said the releases would begin Wednesday a religious holiday but did not specify how many political detainees were among the 6,359 receiving an amnesty from President Thein Sein.

The release of at least some of the country’s estimated 2,000 political prisoners has been hotly anticipated as a crucial step in liberalising measures implemented by the military-backed but elected government that took power in March.

Most prominent political prisoners are held in facilities far from the country’s main city of Yangon, a policy implemented under the previous military regime apparently to limit their ability to communicate through visiting family members and lawyers.

Rajaratnam faces 25-year jail sentence

Raj Rajaratnam (54), the billionaire hedge fund manager convicted in May on 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, this week faces a range of possible jail terms from 19 years and seven months to 24 years and six months as per recommendations of prosecutors in the case against him in New York.

Prior to sentencing, which will occur on October 13, prosecutors pressed for a longer jail term given current federal sentencing guidelines and the “historic nature of his crimes,” from which they alleged Mr. Rajaratnam made in excess of $70 million.

Italian ship with 10 Indians attacked off Somalia

State TV in Italy says pirates have attacked an Italian cargo ship carrying 23 crew members in the waters off Somalia.

The ship’s owner, D’Alessio Group, said five armed men conducted the attack on Monday morning. But to protect the crew, the company said it would not provide any other details.

Therefore, it was not known if the pirates had boarded the ship or taken hostages.

Pirates flourish off largely lawless Somalia by attacking passing ships, taking hostages and demanding ransoms to free them and the vessels.

D’Allesio’s statement said the attack on its Montecristo ship occurred 620 miles off Somalia as the crew seven Italians, six Ukranians and 10 Indians was hauling scrap iron to Vietnam on a journey that began Sept. 20 in Liverpool, England.

Two Americans share Economics Nobel

American economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims, both 68 years of age, were awarded the Nobel Prize on Monday for their path-breaking work on developing tools that policymakers are probably using frenetically today in their bid to extricate the economy from the persistent global economic downturn.

Recognising the two economists’ “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that it decided to award the so-called Economics Nobel to Professors Sargent and Sims for their seminal research during the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in “essential tools in macroeconomic analysis.”

Although Professor Sargent, from New York University, and Professor Sims, from Princeton University, carried out their research independently, their contributions were complementary in several ways, the Academy said, in presenting them with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2011.

Professor Sargent demonstrated how structural macroeconometrics could be used to analyse permanent changes in economic policy – including the complex modelling of reactive changes in the behaviour and expectations of households and firms. He examined, for example, the post-World War II era of high-inflation policies and the eventual introduction of systematic changes in economic policy that allowed a reversion to a lower inflation rate.

Professor Sims on the other hand used the advanced econometric technique of vector autoregression to study the impact of temporary changes in economic policy on the economy.

A common application of this scenario, and one that is likely used across the developed and eveloping world today, is the study of effects of an interest rate hike by a central bank.

A classic case that Professor Sim’s data tools could be applied to include the scenario where inflation decreases over several years as a result of lower money supply, but economic growth declines in the short run due to lower aggregate investment demand and does not revert to its normal development until after a couple of years.

The two economists’ tools are in vogue in mainstream macroeconometric analysis today and would probably resonate strongly with the tools used by the United States Federal Reserve. The Fed is facing an acute shortage of instruments to rev up the economy’s growth rate in the face of an already near-zero interest rate and a stubbornly high rate of unemployment.

Source   :   THE HINDU

String of blasts in Iraqi capital kills 10

Iraqi officials say a string of explosions targeting security officials has killed at least 10 people in western Baghdad.

A police official says the first explosion was caused by a roadside bomb in a Shiite neighbourhood today evening.

Minutes later, a second bomb exploded nearby, targeting a passing police patrol.

The official says a third blast then struck as fire-fighters arrived on the scene of the first blast.

He says 19 people were wounded. A hospital official confirmed the casualties.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

SFI protest turns violent in Kannur

A protest organised by the Students Federation of India (SFI) in Kannur on Tuesday against the police action on students in Kozhikode on October 10 turned violent. The traffic police station here and vehicles of the Kannur municipality were pelted with stones.

The SFI activists who blocked the highway around noon turned their ire at the traffic police station. The police said that nearly 10 windowpanes of the station were smashed in stone-pelting. The protestors hurled stones at a nearby camp office of the Director-General of Police. Stones were also hurled at nearby camp offices of the Superintendent of Police and the District Collector.

The irate SFI activists smashed the windscreen of a jeep of the municipality that passed through the area. Several street lamps were also damaged, the police said.

Mediapersons also came under attack allegedly from the protesting activists. Cameramen of the Indiavision and the Reporter Channel suffered injuries while capturing the incidents on their cameras.

At Taliparamba, SFI activists damaged a police aid post at the municipal bus stand. The attack followed a protest march taken out by SFI workers in the town. The protesting students reportedly forced educational institutions in the town to close. They reached the bus stand in procession and vandalised the police aid post, the police said.

Facebook releases iPad app

One of the enduring questions of the technology world: “When will iPad users get their very own Facebook app?”

That questioned was answered Monday as Facebook said it was set to release an updated version of its iPhone application, one that’s also designed to fill out the iPad’s larger screen.

The lack of an iPad app for the world’s most popular social network has confounded users ever since Apple launched its tablet computer a year and a half ago. Third—party developers have made money selling their own apps that show Facebook pages.

“We’re releasing it now because it’s done,” Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said in an interview Monday.

Two weeks ago, Facebook engineer Jeff Verkoeyen announced on his personal blog that he was leaving to take a job with Google and that the iPad app he had worked on was nearly complete in May. It was then “repeatedly delayed through the summer,” he said, without saying why.

Rumours have swirled that Apple and Facebook were in talks about deepening the integration of the social network into the system software of the iPhone and iPad. But Apple’s updated system software, announced this summer, will feature integration with Twitter, another social networking service, rather than Facebook. That will make it easier to “tweet” from other applications besides Twitter’s.

Like the previous Facebook app for the iPhone, the new “universal” iPhone and iPad app is free.

The updated Facebook app deals with one shortcoming of the old iPhone app, which didn’t play well with apps developed for Facebook’s website. They simply weren’t available.

In the new iPhone and iPad app, some applications developed for Facebook will work.

Lunar spectacle on Wednesday

Stargazers will witness the smallest and faintest full moon of this year as the celestial body reaches the farthest position from the earth on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s full moon will appear around 12.5 per cent smaller and its light intensity 20 per cent lesser as compared to a ‘supermoon’ (the biggest full moon).

“The moon will be farthest from the earth tomorrow and, therefore will appear smallest,” Director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) C B Devgun said.

“The moon will be 4,06,434 km away from earth, an event known as apogee. In astronomy, the two extremes of an ellipse are called ‘apogee’ (far away) and ‘perigee’ (nearby),” Devgun said.

Popularly known as Hunter moon, the earth’s satellite will be best seen just after moon rise.

The biggest and brightest full moon of the year was a special phenomenon this year as it came closest to the earth in 18 years. The supermoon was around 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter as compared to other full moons.

“Wednesday night we will have the astronomical opposite of the supermoon. The supermoon was 3,56,577 km from earth but tomorrow’s moon will be almost 50,000 km more farther away from us as compared to its closest approach in March,” Devgun said.

Ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh passes away

Ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh was bid a tearful adieu by family, friends and admirers on Tuesday.

The mortal remains of the 70-year-old legend were brought from Leelavati Hospital to his Pedder Road residence in South Mumbai, where people paid their last respects.

The funeral took place at the Chandanwadi electric crematorium in Marine Lines. The last rites were conducted by Singh’s brother Kartar Singh Dhiman in the presence of his grandsons —— Armaan and Umer Chowdhary.

Lyricist-composer Gulzar, Javed Akthar, actor-politician Raj Babbar, singer Roopkumar Rathod, Sonu Nigam, filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar were prominent among those who attended the funeral.

A Padma Bhushan recipient, Singh was admitted to the hospital on September 23 and was in the ICU since then. His condition had deteriorated in the last few days and he was on life support. The veteran singer breathed his last on Monday at 8.10 am.