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Saturday, April 25, 2009

Hot air balloon

A hot air balloon is partially inflated with cold air from a petrol-driven fan, before the propane burners are used for final inflation

Hot air balloons are the oldest successful human flight technology, dating back to the Montgolfier brothers' invention in Annonay, France in 1783. The first flight carrying humans was made on November 21, 1783, in Paris by Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes. Balloons that can be propelled through the air rather than just being carried along by the wind are known as airships.

Attractive aspects of ballooning include the exceptional quiet (except when the propane burners are firing), the lack of any perceptible feeling of movement and the birds-eye view. Since the balloon moves with the wind, the passengers feel absolutely no wind, except for brief periods during the flight when the balloon climbs or descends into air currents of different direction or speed. Recently, balloons have been made in fantastic shapes, such as hot dogs, rocket ships, and the shapes of commercial products.

History

A hot air balloon is inflated by its propane burners, just before dawn

Unmanned hot air balloons are mentioned in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang in the Three Kingdoms era used airborne lanterns for military signalling. These lanterns, known as Kongming lanterns (孔明灯) nowadays, are still being flown in China, despite the risk of causing a fire upon landing.

There is also some speculation that hot air balloons were used by the Nazca Indians of Peru some 1500 years ago as a tool for design vast drawings on the Nazca plain.

The first clearly recorded instances of balloons capable of carrying passengers used hot air to obtain buoyancy and were built by the brothers Josef and Etienne Montgolfier in Annonay, France. They were from a family of paper manufacturers who had noticed the ash rising in fires. After experimenting with uncrewed balloons and flights with animals, the first balloon flight with humans on board took place on 21 November 1783. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but a young physicist named Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis Francois d'Arlandes successfully petitioned for the honor. Hot air balloons were basically paper bags with a smoky fire built on a grill attached to the bottom, so they had a tendency to catch fire and be destroyed on landing.

The first hot air balloon flight in the United States took place on January 9, 1793. The 45 minute flight started in Philadelphia and ended in Gloucester County, New Jersey. The flight was witnessed byGeorge Washington.

Balloons were the first manifestation of air power. Hot air balloons such as The Enterprise were used by the North for artillery observation in the American Civil War and were used for communication during the Siege of Paris in 1871. They were also used for observation of trench warfare in World War I. However, as the development of balloons that used unheated gases (such as hydrogen) became more refined, hot air for ballooning receded to obscurity for most of the 1800's and the first half of the 1900's. Only with advances in material and fuel technology did hot air ballooing return to the fore.

A hot air balloon takes off

The first modern hot air balloon was designed and built in 1960 by Ed Yost. Yost used a modified propane powered "weed burner" to heat the air and lightweight nylon fabric for the envelope material. He made the first free flight of such an aircraft in Bruning, Nebraska on 22 October 1960.

Today, hot air balloons are used primarily for recreation. There are some 7,000 hot air balloons operating in the United States.

Hot air balloons are able to fly to extremely high altitudes. On November 26, 2005, Vijaypat Singhania set the world altitude record for highest hot air balloon flight, reaching 69,852 feet (20.29 km). He took off from downtown Bombay, India and landed 150 miles south in Panchale. The previous record of 19,811 meters (64,980 ft) had been set by Per Lindstrand of Sweden on June 6, 1988 in Plano, Texas.

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26/04/2009

Iran urges US to change
‘domineering methods’

Iran called on the United States on Saturday to change its ‘domineering methods’ after the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, warned of ‘very tough’ sanctions if dialogue on Iran’s nuclear drive fails.

‘The era of threats and political pressure is over and we believe in resolving issues through dialogue and interaction,’ government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters.
‘What we are talking about is a real change in their behaviour and they should change their domineering methods,’ he added.
In testimony to Congress on Wednesday, Hillary said Washington supported efforts by world powers to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue diplomatically.
‘But we are also laying the groundwork for the kind of very tough, I think you said crippling, sanctions that might be necessary in the event that our offers are either rejected or the process is inconclusive or unsuccessful.’
On Friday, Iran’s influential former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani warned Hillary that she risked undermining the new prospects for dialogue between Tehran and Washington.
‘Hillary says ‘we are ready for talks but beside that we prepare for paralysing sanctions against Iran’,’ Rafsanjani said.
‘What can they expect of us when such things are said?... They’d better not repeat these comments so the atmosphere existing in Iran today for talks is not ruined.’
Hillary’s comments came the same day that chief nuclear negotiator Said Jalili said that Iran was ready for a ‘‘constructive dialogue’ with world powers.
The five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany have been seeking to persuade Iran to accept a package of political and economic incentives in return for ending its efforts to master the nuclear fuel cycle.
Western governments fear that Iran’s nuclear programme is cover for a drive for a bomb, something Tehran strongly denies.

Khamenei accuses US, Israel over Iraq bombings
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed Israel and the United States on Saturday for persistent violence in Iraq after two suicide attacks left scores of Iranian pilgrims dead.
‘The American and Israeli intelligence apparatuses are the number-one accused... for the spread of the poisonous seeds of terrorism in Iraq,’ Khamenei said in a message of condolence to the victims’ families broadcast on state television.
‘Those evil brains and sinful hands that established this blind, unbridled terrorism in Iraq should know that this fire will end up burning them,’ the Iranian leader added.
Twenty Iranian pilgrims were among at least 58 people killed when two women suicide bombers attacked a Shia shrine in Baghdad on Friday. Some 80 Iranians were among the 125 people wounded.
Another 52 Iranian pilgrims were among at least 56 people killed in a suicide attack on a roadside restaurant in Muqdadiyah, northeast of Baghdad, the previous day.

Frustration grows at
Georgia protests

Nerves are fraying in the Georgian capital Tbilisi as local residents grow increasingly frustrated with opposition protests that have blocked city streets and disrupted daily life.

Launched on April 9, the protests have been the biggest and longest demonstrations against president Mikheil Saakashvili’s rule since a war last year with Russia.
As the number of protesters has dwindled from some 60,000 on the first day to about 3,000 on Friday, opposition leaders have sought to boost pressure on Saakashvili through a campaign of ‘civil disobedience.’
Protesters have erected mock jail cells along Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and outside the offices of public television, blocking traffic on several of the city’s main thoroughfares.

Iceland votes as left tipped to win

Iceland’s general election got underway Saturday seven months after the country’s economic collapse, with voters expected to snub the party seen as responsible for the crisis in favour of the interim leftist government.
The country’s 228,000 eligible voters began casting their ballots in chilly springtime weather as polling stations opened at 9:00am (0900 GMT) across the country.
‘Rarely before has been more at stake in general elections. The future of the nation is at stake, whether it will rise again from the recession,’ an editorial in daily Morgunbladid said.

Lanka hospitals overwhelmed by
wounded civilians: MSF
Tigers say civilian starvation ‘imminent’

The flood of wounded civilians from the conflict in Sri Lanka is overwhelming doctors and nurses in hospitals near the war zone who said Saturday people risk dying from lack of proper attention.

A British surgeon working for Medecins Sans Frontieres, Paul McMasters, said his team in the state-run hospital in Vavuniya had performed 71 operations in one recent 24-hour period.
In an MSF statement, McMasters said the hospital was struggling to provide adequate post-operative care.
‘One of the patients I have seen is a little girl of about seven or eight who has a severe leg injury. Her elder sister is in the same bed with wounds on her arms and legs,’ McMasters said.
‘Their sister has burns to her face. Their mother has been killed and their father is in intensive care. With the level of aftercare that we can provide at the moment, he has a fifty-fifty chance of making it, at best.’
‘It’s so crowded that the nurses cannot physically walk around the ward,’ he said, estimating the number of patients in a 45-bed ward at around 320.
‘There are simply too many people to treat them all. We are not able to save some people because we need to provide more aftercare,’ he said, adding: ‘There are simply not enough nurses.’
Most staff were already putting in 20-hour days, he said.
McMasters said MSF had heard reports of chicken pox outbreaks in the makeshift camps housing tens of thousands of displaced civilians.
According to the Sri Lankan government, nearly 110,000 people have fled the war zone since Monday and are now housed in temporary shelters.
Eeashwara Kottegoda, a disaster-preparedness coordinator with the Health Ministry said medical teams were being rotated out of Colombo to deal with the situation.
‘We are doing our best and preparing ourselves to treat many more wounded that are expected in the coming days,’ Kottegoda said.
Meanwhile, Tamil Tiger rebels on Saturday said 165,000 civilians still living in the small area under their control were nearly out of food, comparing the situation to the crisis in Darfur.
Amid international concern for people trapped in the northern war zone, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, said in a statement starvation among innocent people was ‘imminent’ and accused the government of blocking supplies.
The Tigers, facing imminent defeat after nearly four decades of fighting, said the military has blocked land routes leading to the rebel areas, leaving sea transport the only option to deliver food and medicine.
‘We fear that further delay can result in a crisis similar to that faced in Darfur or even deadlier,’ the LTTE said, urging the United Nations and the international community to ensure uninterrupted supplies to the region.
It is not clear how many people are trapped in the small rebel-held area, with the UN putting the number at 50,000 and the government at 15,000-20,000.
The Tigers said they welcomed the scheduled visit of UN rights chief John Holmes to Sri Lanka.
‘We are prepared to engage in a constructive dialogue to address the humanitarian crisis,’ the rebels said.

Taliban ‘leave’ Pak district,
US warns of attacks

The Taliban said Saturday it had pulled back from a Pakistan district to shore up a peace deal as a US commander warned extremists were plotting more attacks to destabilise the country.

Scores of Taliban fighters moved into Buner, a district only 100 kilometres from Islamabad, sparking US warnings that Islamist advances pose ‘an existential threat’ to the nuclear-armed Muslim nation bordering Afghanistan.
Officials confirmed the Taliban ‘withdrawal’ but said local Taliban remained in Buner. Neither did the Taliban show any sign of lessening their grip on neighbouring Swat, a former tourist resort plunged into brutal insurgency.
‘I do not know the exact number of my men who left the area but they all boarded in 15 vehicles to return to Swat,’ said Muslim Khan, the main Taliban spokesman in the area who presented the ‘withdrawal’ as a goodwill gesture.
‘We have withdrawn from Buner to show our commitment to make the peace deal a success,’ Khan said referring to a controversial agreement to enforce Islamic law in part of northwest Pakistan in exchange for an end to fighting in Swat.
He did not disclose how many ‘local Taliban’ remained in Buner.
The government in North West Frontier Province slammed the Taliban advance on Buner as a violation of that agreement, which the authorities have come under increasing Western and domestic pressure to rescind.
The Taliban has shown no sign of disarming as demanded by the government.
‘We will not exhibit arms as part of the deal. But our government should stop its policy of appeasing the US,’ the Taliban spokesman said.
Fear and uncertainty reigned in Buner despite the apparent withdrawal.
‘I have resigned. I will never go to my job as I don’t want my parents to be sent my body,’ said Hafsa, a charity worker who called herself by a single name.
‘Shops are open and there are no signs of armed Taliban patrolling streets in Buner but people face uncertainty and fear that they may come back,’ local resident Nisar Khan said by telephone from the district.
‘We used to see women going to their offices before the Taliban arrived in the area, but today they did not go to their jobs,’ he added.

Hillary on surprise
visit to Iraq

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, met top American military commanders in Baghdad on Saturday on a surprise trip to assess and discuss the country’s fragile security situation with Iraqi leaders.

America’s top diplomat landed in the Iraqi capital a day after two suicide attackers killed 55 Shia pilgrims at a shrine in the city, and less than 48 hours after a similar attack killed dozens in a northern town.
A spike in bombings has claimed more than 250 lives so far this month in a wave of violence that has engulfed the country just nine weeks before US troops are due to leave Iraqi cities and major towns.
Hillary was met at Baghdad international airport by the newly-arrived US ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill, the US military commander Admiral Michael Mullen, and Iraq’s foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari.
Hillary flew in from Kuwait and was immediately whisked off to meet General Ray Odierno, the senior US army officer in Iraq, at the US embassy in Baghdad.
‘I want his evaluation of what these kinds of rejectionist efforts mean and what can be done to prevent them by both the Iraqi government and the US forces,’ Clinton said, referring to suicide attacks on Thursday and Friday.
The secretary of state was scheduled to meet the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the president, Jalal Talabani, and the United Nations secretary general’s special representative to Iraq Staffan de Mistura.
‘We want to display and reinforce our continuing commitment to the Iraqi people and to the stability, security and self reliance of Iraq,’ Hillary said on her fourth trip to the war-torn nation, but her first as secretary of state.
‘The Iraqi government has come a long, long way,’ she added, noting that the recent level of attacks was regrettable but not on a par with the violence that brought the country to the brink of civil war in 2006.
‘I see no signs of that at this time, in part because in any conflict there comes a point; sometimes it’s far later than we would wish, where a critical mass of people on all sides just says enough,’ Hillary said.
‘The suicide bombings that are lethal and terrible in the loss of lives and injuries they inflict are, in an unfortunately tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction.’
US soldiers are due to withdraw from Iraqi cities and major towns by the end of June under an agreement signed between Washington and Baghdad last November.
Hillary’s trip also came two weeks after the president, Barack Obama, visited Baghdad and warned that the next 18 months in Iraq would be ‘critical’.
In February, Obama announced a new strategy that will see most combat troops withdraw by August 2010, although a force of up to 50,000 will remain until the end of the following year.

ANC wins polls, Zuma to
become president

South Africa’s ruling ANC swept general elections with just short of two-thirds of the vote, the final count showed Saturday, putting party leader Jacob Zuma at the doorstep to the presidency.

The election commission was expected to certify and announce the results later Saturday, but the final tally showed the African National Congress taking 65.9 per cent of the vote.
That left the former liberation movement just short of the two-thirds majority it would need to change the constitution, and below the nearly 70 per cent it scored in the last polls in 2004.
The opposition Democratic Alliance won 16.68 per cent, while the upstart Congress of the People, which broke away from the ANC late last year, landed third with 7.42 per cent.
Zuma was expected to arrive at the results centre later in the day to receive the final vote count and declare victory.
He is now certain to become president when the new parliament convenes early next month to elect the head of state, riding a wave of support from the nation’s poor who backed his pledges to create more jobs and expand the social safety net as the economy is slipping into recession.
The ANC also swept the provincial elections, except for the Western Cape that is home to Cape Town, where the Democratic Alliance won a majority for the first time.
‘The DA has retained its status as the champion of the minorities, in the same way as the ANC has maintained its status as the champion of the majority,’ political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi told Business Day.
Thousands of ANC supporters have celebrated the victory since Thursday night, and party leaders held a rally Friday night to map out the road ahead.
‘Immediately after the counting finishes, the real work starts. We must all roll (up) our sleeves and start working,’ said Paul Mashatile, premier of Gauteng, the country’s economic hub that includes Johannesburg.

Tsunami aid often bypassed
conflict victims

Distribution of billions of dollars in aid after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami often ignored victims of conflicts raging in Sri Lanka and Indonesia at the time, a report on the lessons of the disaster said on Friday.

The report, commissioned by a consortium of five of the hardest-hit countries — Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives — said this was due in part to restrictions by aid donors on how their money could be spent.
The December 26, 2004, tsunami, caused by an undersea earthquake, killed more than 228,000 people and provoked a huge international response, with some $13.5 billion pledged worldwide to fund recovery.
But the 105-page report, ‘The Tsunami Legacy: Innovations, Breakthroughs and Change,’ said that in Sri Lanka and Indonesia’s Aceh region, both hard hit, there was a need to aid the victims of conflicts as well as those of the tsunami.
‘However, most post-tsunami organisations largely ignored the post-conflict context, in part due to donor-stipulated restrictions on how they could use their funds,’ said the report. This led to local grievances over perceived inequalities in aid provision.
‘If conflict sensitivity had been more widespread and funds not restricted to tsunami victims only, building back better could have been more equitable all along,’ the report said.
The report was presented to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and former US president Bill Clinton, former UN special envoy for tsunami recovery, at a conference at UN headquarters.
Commissioned by the Tsunami Global Lessons Learned project, the report also faulted authorities throughout the tsunami-hit area for other forms of discrimination, because it said the need to deliver aid fast outweighed the need for equity.
‘Many tsunami-affected communities were still unable to adequately access assistance immediately after the disaster because of barriers associated with their gender, ethnicity, age, class, religion or occupation,’ it said.
The report, however, also found much to praise in the aid operation, including a willingness by governments to delegate the task to local organisations and a determination to combat corruption.
‘Despite the influx of billions of dollars in tsunami-affected countries, corruption levels across the board were kept remarkably low,’ it said.
‘Key to this success was a commitment to view corruption, not as a nuisance or unfortunate side effect of the recovery, but as a core threat to the reconstruction effort as a whole.’
Since the tsunami, governments and international agencies have set about creating national and regional early-warning systems, with 24 early detection buoys placed in the Indian Ocean.

5 cops killed in Afghan
suicide attacks

Three suicide bombers detonated at the gates of a government compound in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing five policemen, an official said.
The bombers struck at the governor’s compound in the city of Kandahar, said Ahmad Wali Karzai, head of the provincial council and a brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
‘There were three explosions. One of the suicide bombers exploded on the outer side of the gate and two others on the inner side of the gate,’ he said.
‘Five policemen have been martyred and three others injured. No senior official was hurt,’ Ahmad Wali Karzai said.
An interior ministry spokesman in the capital Kabul earlier confirmed three explosions, with at least two carried out by suicide bombers, and put the initial death toll at three policemen with another three wounded.

Pakistan still aiding Kashmir
rebels: India

India’s army on Saturday accused Pakistani forces of helping Muslim guerrillas attempting to sneak into its disputed Kashmir region from the Pakistani side.
The Indian army produced a man they said was a Pakistani national who was among 120 people who had infiltrated into the Himalayan region this month, including around 30 militants, 40 porters and guides.
Most of the militants were killed in separate gun battles, Brigadier Gurmit Singh, a senior army officer, told a news conference in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital.
‘The weapons, communication equipment ... the method of communication between infiltrating militants and the launch pad, it is quite evident that the armed forces across (Pakistan) do support them (militants),’ Singh said.
He said large quantity of arms and ammunition, including 30 AK-47 rifles, 13,000 rounds and 245 grenades were recovered from a militant hideout near the Line of Control, a military control line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
India consistently accuses Pakistan of aiding a violent separatist revolt in Muslim-majority Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since a revolt against New Delhi’s rule broke out in 1989.

North Korea begins
extracting plutonium

North Korea has started to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods at its nuclear arms plant, its foreign ministry said on Saturday, further raising regional tensions already stoked by its defiant rocket launch this month.
The announcement came hours after a UN Security Council committee on Friday placed three North Korean companies on a UN blacklist for aiding Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programmes, eliciting a sharp rebuke from a North Korean envoy.
Reclusive North Korea has lashed out at being punished for the April 5 launch, widely seen as a disguised long-range missile test that violated UN resolutions, saying it would boycott six-way nuclear talks and bolster its nuclear deterrent.
‘The reprocessing of spent fuel rods from the pilot atomic power plant began as declared in the Foreign Ministry statement dated April 14,’ North Korea’s official news agency KCNA quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
‘This will contribute to bolstering the nuclear deterrence for self-defence in every way to cope with the increasing military threats from the hostile forces,’ it said.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said it had no immediate comment on the North’s announcement and Japan said it would urge Pyongyang to resume international nuclear talks.
‘The UN Security Council... is telling North Korea to respond to the calls for resuming the six-party talks at an early stage. Japan will also try to persuade (North Korea),’ Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman at the Japanese foreign ministry, said.
North Korea, which was hit with UN sanctions after missile tests in July 2006 and its only nuclear test a few months later, has used its military threat for years to gain global attention and squeeze concessions out of regional powers.

US reporter in Iran’s prison
on hunger strike

Tehran US-Iranian reporter Roxana Saberi, who has been handed an eight-year jail sentence on charges of espionage, has been on hunger strike for the past five days, her father said on Saturday.
‘She has started (a hunger strike) and today is the fifth day,’ Reza Saberi said. ‘Her lawyer lodged an appeal over the sentence today,’ he added.
Saberi, 31, was convicted by an Iranian revolutionary court in a closed-door trial last week of spying for the United States, which along with Israel is Tehran’s main foe.
Saberi has been held since late January, when she was initially reported to have been arrested for buying alcohol, an illegal act in the Islamic republic.
US-born Saberi, who is also of Japanese descent, has reported for US National Public Radio, the BBC and Fox News, and has lived in Iran for the past six years.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009

History

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26/04/2009

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