Safest Car is it a Volvo?..[ 1957 ]

World’s Safest Car

By Mike

Think it’s a Volvo?  Think again…

There’s only a handful of countries known for building cars. Most of them are in Europe or the Far East.  Colonel Muammar Gaddafi wants to add Libya to that list, and this is what he’s cooked up to do it.  Called the Libyan Rocket, the car was designed to solve the problem of high instance of road deaths in the north African country.  Gaddafi’s people say it’s the safest car ever made, but don’t go into any details to back up the claim.  Still, the Colonel’s revolutionary government is building a plant in Tripoli to put it together.  

Gaddafi’s car seats five, has a 230-hp V6 and the nose and tail of a rocket. The Libyan Rocket does come with airbags, an electronic defense system and collapsible bumpers that supposedly help out in a crash. So what is the “electronic defense system”? Apparently, nobody knows what it is or how it works. So even the secret is safe with this car!

You may want to add some diamond studded rims complete with their own bodyguard if you want to make this car even safer.

Source: Autoblog

Sharp's Galapagos tablet computer ..[ 1956 ]

Sharp to start marketing Galapagos tablet computer overseas in 2011

Sharp's Galapagos tablet computer

(Mainichi Japan) December 30, 2010

 

Sharp Corp. will start selling its Galapagos tablet computer in the U.S., China, India, Brazil and other areas from next year, the company has announced.

In the U.S., where sales will initially begin, the device will be equipped to handle the EPUB digital book format, which the company hopes will appeal to U.S. publishers and consumers purchasing e-books.

Early next year, Sharp will make a joint announcement with at least one major U.S. communications company on the launch of sales in the U.S.

In Japan, the Galapagos uses Sharp's XMDF format to read digital books, but the company hopes that by also catering to the EPUB format, which is becoming the world standard, the device will appeal to U.S. customers.

Furthermore, the U.S. models will add a 3G mobile communications function, and Sharp is expected to jointly operate a website offering downloads of digital books with a major U.S. communications firm.

Japanese models have only a wireless local area network connection, but for the U.S., which with its much larger land area has a poorer wireless network environment than Japan, the company decided to add 3G functionality.

The company will later sell the device in China, India, Brazil and other emerging countries, hoping to spread the tablet computer around the world.

Click here for the original Japanese story

NASA Image of the Day, Dec 30th..[ 1955 ]

The latest NASA "Image of the Day" image.

Sparkle

This Hubble Space Telescope image of galaxy NGC 1275 reveals the fine, thread-like filamentary structures in the gas surrounding the galaxy. The red filaments are composed of cool gas being suspended by a magnetic field, and are surrounded by the 100-million-degree Fahrenheit hot gas in the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. 

 

The filaments are dramatic markers of the feedback process through which energy is transferred from the central massive black hole to the surrounding gas. 

 

The filaments originate when cool gas is transported from the center of the galaxy by radio bubbles that rise in the hot interstellar gas. At a distance of 230 million light-years, NGC 1275 is one of the closest giant elliptical galaxies and lies at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The galaxy was photographed in July and August 2006 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

 

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration; Acknowledgment: A. Fabian (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK)

Πέμπτη, 30 Δεκέμβριος 2010 7:00:00 πμ

Athens ,Greece: Stupid and dangerous anarchists..[ 1954 ]

Bomb explodes near Athens courthouse

By the CNN Wire Staff

December 30, 2010 -- Updated 1237 GMT (2037 HKT)

Explosion rocks heart of Athens

(CNN) -- A strong bomb blast shook one of the main courthouse buildings in central Athens on Thursday morning, Greek police said.

Also Thursday morning, a bomb exploded in front of the Greek Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is not known whether the blasts are linked.

The explosion in Athens occurred about 40 minutes after an unidentified person placed warning calls to a local TV station and newspaper, saying a bomb would explode outside the "administrative first instance courthouse." The advance notice gave police enough time to evacuate the building.

Police said the blast came from a motorbike rigged with explosives that was parked in the median across from the courthouse in the Ambelokipi district. The caller provided the plate number on the bike.

A cloud of smoke was visible in the area and there was some damage to the front of the building and nearby cars from the explosion.

In the Argentine capital, no one was injured in the blast at the Greek embassy, the state-run Telam news agency reported.

The explosion happened about 2 a.m. (midnight Wednesday ET), police said, according to Telam. The bomb was left at the entrance to the embassy. The blast broke some windows on the embassy building and other properties on the block, the news agency reported.

About the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad..[ 1953 ]

Denmark holds 'Muhammad cartoon plotters'

 

Police said they had been trailing the suspects for several months

 

( BBC )30 December 2010 Last updated at 01:06 GMT

Five suspected Islamist militants have been arrested for planning a gun attack at the Copenhagen offices of a Danish newspaper that printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, police say.

The men intended to burst into the Jyllands-Posten office and kill as many people as possible, officials said.

Denmark's justice minister said the attack would have been "outrageous".

Police later evacuated a building where one of the men was held after finding what were thought to be explosives.

Four of the suspects were held in Denmark and the fifth was detained in Sweden.

Denmark's security agency Pet said the suspects included two Swedish residents with Tunisian backgrounds, one Lebanon-born Swede, and an Iraqi. The other was described only as Swedish.

Earlier this month, an Iraq-born Swedish Muslim blew himself up in Stockholm - apparently as he was preparing a suicide bombing.

Swedish police say the suspects held on Wednesday are not thought to be linked to the Stockholm bomber.

The publication of the cartoons in 2005, one of which depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, caused mass protests among Muslims across the world.

Muslims regard any visual representation of the Prophet as blasphemous.

Cartoons used 'efficiently'

The four held in Denmark were picked up in raids on flats in the Greve and Herlev suburbs of Copenhagen.

Police searches uncovered an automatic weapon, a silencer and live ammunition.

A property in Greve, where one of the suspects, an Iraqi asylum seeker, was arrested, was evacuated at about 2100 local time (2000 GMT) after police discovered a suspicious item they thought could be explosives.

• What the cartoons portray

One resident of the building told the Politken newspaper a police officer had ordered her to evacuate immediately.

"He also said we should bring plenty of warm clothes, because this was going to take a long time," she added.

The newspaper said the area had been sealed off up to 100m away and that a bomb-clearing robot had been sent in.

Jakob Scharf, head of Pet, said the men had been planning to enter the building housing the Jyllands-Posten and "kill as many of the people present as possible".

He said an "imminent terror attack" had been foiled, and that the suspects belonged to a "militant Islamist group and they have links to international terrorist networks".

"Obviously the cartoons have been used very efficiently by militant Islamist groups worldwide in targeting Denmark specifically and trying explain why the violent extremism is necessary," he said.

Sweden's security chief Anders Danielsson said they had known for months that the group was planning an attack, but the authorities had to wait until they had enough evidence for a prosecution.

Justice Minister Lars Barfoed said the "outrageous" plot was "the most serious attempt at terror so far in Denmark".

Cartoonist under guard

As a result of the row over the cartoons, Saudi Arabia recalled its Copenhagen ambassador, Danish firms were forced to scale back operations in some parts of the world, and gunmen raided an EU office in Gaza to demand an apology.

But many in the West have defended the media's right to publish the caricatures, and several European newspapers have republished some of the drawings.

Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who drew the image of the turban bomb, has been honoured with awards by free-speech groups, but he now lives under police guard amid death threats from radical groups.

He was the subject of an attempted attack in January when a Somali man got into his home armed with a knife and an axe.

And police across Scandinavia have arrested several groups of people in raids linked to the cartoons.

Three men detained in Norway in July were suspected of planning attacks to avenge the cartoons.

In September, a Chechnya-born Belgian was arrested after a small explosion in Copenhagen, which police linked to the cartoons.