Bratislava's 'Old Bridge' to get a new look

The mayor of Bratislava announced Tuesday that the Slovakian's capital's "Old Bridge", a 118-year-old city icon that spans the Danube, is to undergo a costly reconstruction starting next year.

"The construction is expected to cost about one billion koruna (33 million euros, 53 million dollars)," Bratislava mayor Andrej Durkovsky told a press conference.

The "Stary most" (Old Bridge), which dates back to the Austro-Hungarian empire, does not meet road and water transport requirements. The narrow bridge is currently still used by cars and pedestrians.

Around 26,000 of the town's 400,000 inhabitants voted in an Internet survey to choose one of three options and over 11,000 -- the most -- had voted to change its current design, the mayor said.

The preservation of the bridge's old architecture was not possible due to the requirements of the Danube shipping commission, he added.

The bridge will double its width to 34 metres (120 feet) and raise its height over the water so that ships do not get trapped when the water rises. The distance between its pillars also has to be extended because of the construction of a hydro project in Austria.

The bridge will serve a new fast tram line expected to be finished by 2011 to link the city-centre to the communist-era suburb Petrzalka.

Opened in 1890 and originally named after the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph I, the bridge was renamed after World War I in honour of one of Czechoslovakia's founders, Milan Rastislav Stefanik.

In 1945 the German troops blew up the bridge. The Soviet soldiers reconstructed it and changed its name again to "Red Army Bridge". The bridge was initially supposed to be temporary but lasted for many decades. It got its current name after the fall of the communist regime.

Bratislava now has five bridges spanning the Danube with the newest opened in September 2005.

7/22/2008

Name change for French wine to avoid link with nuclear plant

French wine could soon change its name before next year's grape harvest to avoid being associated with a uranium leak at an eponymous nuclear power facility.

"The idea is making progress and I hope it will be achieved before the 2009 harvest," said Henri Bour, president of the Coteaux du Tricastin controlled term of origin, or "appellation d'origine controlee".

"It is only a question of image," he said, adding that any association with the Tricastin nuclear site -- one of the biggest in the world, with four reactors -- was likely to be harmful to local wines.

A uranium leak at Tricastin on July 11 received extensive media coverage, although the authorities said later it had not posed any risk to public health or the environment.

Bour said a name change was first mooted around 10 years ago, but the French nuclear group Areva showed little interest in renaming its facility, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Avignon.

A meeting of the AOC administrative council is to be held August 5 to discuss a name change "as a precaution for the image," said Bour, with Grignan -- the name of a local village -- mooted as one possibility.

7/23/2008

Facebook expands winning open platform formula

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg painted a vision of an Internet future with the website in its soul to a faithful throng of software developers at the Internet firm's annual "F8" conference..

"Last year everyone here started a movement," Zuckerberg said Wednesday after cheers subsided.

"We changed the social graph from being an abstract concept to a social movement."
The social graph to which he referred is the network of family, friends, co-workers and casual associates in people's lives.

Facebook sees its role as using Internet technology to let people easily share personal information how and with whom they wish.

Last year, Facebook freed third-party developers to created hip, fun and functional applications that website members can put in profile pages.

"The last year has been pretty crazy," Zuckerberg said. "The results show that a lot of people all over the world are joining this movement and doing it using the applications we all built in this room."

The number of Facebook users has grown to 90 million people from 24 million people in the past year, Zuckerberg sad.

MySpace remains the most popular social-networking website with Facebook in second place but closing the gap, according to figures from industry-tracker Hitwise.

A multi-billion-dollar "ecosystem" has grown up around Facebook, with custom application creators including Zynga, Flixster and LivingSocial recently winning millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists.

Zuckerberg humbly told the gathering that Facebook plans to work more closely with outside developers.

"We've made a lot of mistakes and there is a lot we have to learn," Zuckerberg said.

"We haven't done enough to reward the good citizens in our ecosystem and, on the flip side; we haven't done enough to punish the applications that have been abusive."

Facebook this week rolled out revamped profile pages and will launch a "Great Apps" program to give priority to programs that are "meaningful, trustworthy, and well designed."

Facebook has been expanding internationally and announced third-party developers can use its translation program to match languages to the those used everywhere the social-networking site is available.

Digg, Moveable Type and City Search have adapted their websites to connect with Facebook, and a software kit was made available on Wednesday.

Agence France-Presse - 7/24/2008 5:19 AM GMT

Arctic 'holds 90bln barrels of oil, mostly offshore'

Within the Arctic circle there are 90 billion barrels of oil and vast quantities of natural gas waiting to be tapped, most of it offshore, the government-run US Geological Survey said.

The top of the world, shared by half a dozen countries including the US, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Greenland, holds an estimated 90 billion barrels of crude, 1,670 trillion cubic feet of gas and 44 million barrels of natural gas liquids, the USGS said in a report.

Eighty-four percent of that potential energy resources is expected to lie offshore, said the report, which comes a week after the US government lifted a 17-year ban on offshore drilling hoping to ease a spiraling fuel price crisis.

"The resources account for about 22 percent of the undiscovered, technically recoverable resources in the world," the USGS said, meaning the estimated volume is not added to the world's known recoverable resources.

The Arctic estimate, said USGS geologist Donald Gautier, includes some degree of uncertainty.

Broken down, the Arctic energy reserves would account for about 13 percent of the undiscovered oil, 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas, and 20 percent of the undiscovered natural gas liquids in the world, the report said.

The majority of the undiscovered 90 billion barrels of crude oil, USGS experts estimate, are lying in Alaska, where 30 billion are hiding, Russia's Barents Basins, East and West Greenland and East Canada.

"The Alaska platform really looms as the most obvious place to look for oil in the Arctic right now," said Gautier.

Some 40 billion barrels of oil and 1,100 trillion cubic feet of gas have already been found in the Arctic region.

By comparison, US oil reserves stand at 22 billion barrels, and its production level at 1.6 billion barrels per year.

Across the world, proven oil reserves stand at a record 1.24 trillion barrels. Production is stable but consumption -- some 30 billion barrels per day -- is on the rise.

The natural gas the Arctic region is estimated to hold, 1,670 trillion cubic feet, is potentially a more important find since it would represent nearly one third of all the undiscovered gas reserves in the world.

Most of the untapped gas reserves in the Arctic region (70 percent) lie in the West Siberian Basin and East Barents Basin, in Russia, and Arctic Alaska, the USGS said.
One cubic foot equals 0.028 cubic meters.

Agence France-Presse - 7/24/2008 8:27 AM GMT

Filipinos expelled from Malaysia's Sabah returning

Many Filipinos expelled from Malaysia's resource-rich state of Sabah for working illegally have already or planned to return despite fear of arrest, media reports said Thursday.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer said many were deciding to return to Sabah on Borneo island to work despite a Malaysia crackdown on illegal immigrants who risk being "arrested, jailed, humiliated and caned."

Sabah, which lies between the Philippines to the north and Indonesia's Kalimantan to the south, is a magnet for immigrant workers who for decades have travelled there to work on construction sites and oil palm plantations.

Malaysian authorities say 130,000 illegal migrants are in Sabah, but local politicians put the figure as high as 500,000.

According to the Philippine government, an estimated 200,000 Filipinos are living and working in Malaysia without valid visas and nearly 3,000 are in jail waiting to be deported.

The southern Philippine port city of Zamboanga has received more than 1,000 deportees since the crackdown, announced by Malaysian authorities this month, and has asked the government for help to house and resettle them.

The paper said many of those deported see little future in the Philippines and have expressed their intention to return.

The Philippines has a long-standing claim to Sabah which has been sitting with the international courts for years.

Basit Nur, 40, who worked as a carpenter in Sabah but was expelled after three months in a detention centre, said the risk of being rearrested was better than the alternative of seeing his family mired in poverty in the southern Philippines.

"Even if I don't have the money for processing of my (travel) papers ... I will find other ways to return. And I will make sure that I will outsmart the police there," he told the Inquirer.

Carpenter Maximo Abduraid, deported from Sabah just three weeks ago, has already slipped back there last week, his relatives told the paper.

Agence France-Presse - 7/24/2008 4:07 AM GMT