Security strike hits German airports

BERLIN: Airport security personnel in Germany staged warning strikes on Monday in a dispute over pay, bringing disruption to several German airports and causing dozens of flight cancellations.

Around 1,000 security staff went on strike at airports including Berlin and Frankfurt, Europe's third-busiest, the giant services union Verdi said, although some resumed work shortly afterwards.

A spokesman for Berlin's airports said 42 flights had been cancelled at Tegel Airport but passengers at the capital's other hub, Schoenefeld, experienced only delays.

At Duesseldorf Airport, where the strike lasted six hours, 11 flights were shelved and 45 others were hit with delays of three hours maximum. Cologne Airport was forced to cancel three flights and also experienced delays.

However, there were no cancellations at Frankfurt, according to a spokesman from Fraport, which manages the airport.

Air traffic was also affected by heavy snowfall in several parts of Germany.

Verdi said it called the warning strike over what it said were stuttering negotiations on a collective wage bargaining agreement for its 15,000 members employed as security staff at airports in Germany.

"We want employers to work with us towards a constructive agreement," a Verdi spokesman told AFP.

"Then there will be no need to strike," added the spokesman.

-AFP/ac

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Google saves $2B in taxes by sheltering $10B in revenue in Bermuda

Google avoided about $2 billion in global income taxes last year by shifting $9.8 billion in revenue into a Bermuda shell company, Bloomberg reported.

That level is almost double the total from three years ago, Bloomberg said, citing a Nov. 21 regulatory filing by a Google subsidiary in the Netherlands. And it allowed Google to cut its overall tax rate almost in half.

Google's action -- moving about 80 percent of its total pretax profit from 2011 to tax-free Bermuda -- isn't illegal. On the contrary, many companies have taken similar steps in recent years to avoid paying steep taxes.

Some, like Cisco and Qualcomm, have pushed for tax holidays that would allow them to bring foreign-held cash back to the U.S. at much lower tax rates. They have argued that such holidays would allow them to create more jobs and help the economy, but critics say that's often not true. Instead, companies often institute dividends and other policies to reward investors and executives.

As Bloomberg noted, outrage over corporate tax dodging has been spreading across Europe and the U.S. as the nations grapple with tough economic times. During the recent economic downturn, many companies have been reporting record financial results but paying low amounts of tax.

As a result, Bloomberg noted that governments in France, the U.K., Italy, and Australia are probing Google's tax avoidance as they seek to boost revenue during the tough times.

Just last week, the European Union's executive body, the European Commission, recommended that member states maintain blacklists of tax havens and adopt anti-abuse rules, Bloomberg said. Tax evasion and avoidance costs the EU 1 trillion euros a year, the publication said.

According to Bloomberg, Google's tax rate in 2011 totaled just 3.2 percent on the profit it earned overseas. That amount came even as most of its foreign business was in European countries with corporate taxes of 26 percent to 34 percent.

Its overall effective tax rate dropped to 21 percent last year from about 28 percent in 2008, Bloomberg said, well below the average combined U.S. and state statutory rate of about 39 percent.

Google told Bloomberg that it complies with all tax rules and that its investment in various European countries helps their economies.

We've contacted Google and will update the article when we hear back.

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Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity

When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.

Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't need it to flourish. The research team from the University of Florida in Gainesville thinks this ability is related to a plant's inherent ability to orient itself as it grows. Seeds germinated on the International Space Station sprouted roots that behaved like they would on Earth—growing away from the seed to seek nutrients and water in exactly the same pattern observed with gravity. (Related: "Beyond Gravity.")

Since the flowers were orbiting some 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth at the time, the NASA-funded experiment suggests that plants still retain an earthy instinct when they don't have gravity as a guide.

"The role of gravity in plant growth and development in terrestrial environments is well understood," said plant geneticist and study co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, with the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What is less well understood is how plants respond when you remove gravity." (See a video about plant growth.)

The new study revealed that "features of plant growth we thought were a result of gravity acting on plant cells and organs do not actually require gravity," she added.

Paul and her collaborator Robert Ferl, a plant biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, monitored their plants from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using images sent from the space station every six hours.

Root Growth

Grown on a nutrient-rich gel in clear petri plates, the space flowers showed familiar root growth patterns such as "skewing," where roots slant progressively as they branch out.

"When we saw the first pictures come back from orbit and saw that we had most of the skewing phenomenon we were quite surprised," Paul said.

Researchers have always thought that skewing was the result of gravity's effects on how the root tip interacts with the surfaces it encounters as it grows, she added. But Paul and Ferl suspect that in the absence of gravity, other cues take over that enable the plant to direct its roots away from the seed and light-seeking shoot. Those cues could include moisture, nutrients, and light avoidance.

"Bottom line is that although plants 'know' that they are in a novel environment, they ultimately do just fine," Paul said.

The finding further boosts the prospect of cultivating food plants in space and, eventually, on other planets.

"There's really no impediment to growing plants in microgravity, such as on a long-term mission to Mars, or in reduced-gravity environments such as in specialized greenhouses on Mars or the moon," Paul said. (Related: "Alien Trees Would Bloom Black on Worlds With Double Stars.")

The study findings appear in the latest issue of the journal BMC Plant Biology.

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Royal Hoax: DJs 'Shattered' After Nurse's Suicide

The two Australian radio DJs who prank-called the London hospital where Kate Middleton was being treated last week said they were "shattered" and "gutted" after the nurse who answered their call apparently killed herself.

Shock jocks Mel Greig, 30, and Michael Christian, 25, cried as they spoke to Australia's Channel 9 overnight in their first public interview since Jacintha Saldanha, 46, the nurse who last week connected the pair to the duchess' room, was found dead Friday morning.

"I'm shattered, gutted, heartbroken," Christian said. "Mel and myself are incredibly sorry for the situation and what's happened. I had the idea. … It was just a simple harmless phone call. It was going to go on for 30 seconds. We were going to get hung up on."

FULL COVERAGE: Royal Baby

The host of the "2Day" FM radio show pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, asking for an update on Middleton's condition when they called up King Edward VII Hospital in central London. With no receptionist on duty overnight, Saldanha answered the prank call and put it through.

"It was just something that was fun and light-hearted and a tragic turn of events that I don't think anyone had expected," Christian said.

A Current Affair/ABC News

Jacintha Saldanha Dead: Could DJs Face Charges? Watch Video

Jacintha Saldanha Outrage: DJs Responsible for Prank Are in Hiding Watch Video

Saldanha was found dead Friday morning after police were called to an address near the hospital to "reports of a woman found unconscious," according to a statement from Scotland Yard.

Investigators have not said how she might have killed herself.

Greig cried today when asked about the moment she heard of the death of Saldanha, a mother of two.

"It was the worst phone call I've ever had in my life," she said through tears. "There's not a minute that goes by that we don't think about her family and the thought that we may have played a part in that is gut-wrenching."

The DJs said they never expected to get through to Middleton's nurse and assumed "the same phone calls had been made 100 times that morning," Christian said.

Grieg said, "We wanted to be hung up on with our silly voices and wanted a 20-second segment to air of us doing stupid voice. … Not for a second did we expect to even speak to Kate or even have a conversation with anyone at the hospital. We wanted to be hung up on."

The global backlash against the duo has been fierce, from online death threats to calls for prison time. Their radio station has announced it is banning phony phone calls altogether, and suspending advertising indefinitely.

Max Moore-Wilton, the chairman of Southern Cross Austereo, said in a letter Sunday to Lord Glenarthur, chairman of King Edward VII's Hospital, that the company is reviewing the station's broadcast policies, the AP reported.

"I can assure you we are taking immediate action and reviewing the broadcast and processes involved," Moore-Wilton said in the letter. "As we have said in our own statements on the matter, the outcome was unforeseeable and very regrettable."

Greig and Michael have been taken off the air, silenced indefinitely.

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Female lemurs avoid the wrong love in the dark

IT IS the ultimate voice-recognition system. Without ever meeting him, a female lemur still knows the call of her father.

The ability to identify family members is important to avoid inbreeding. For large-brained mammals like apes that engage in complex social interactions this is relatively straightforward. Now, a team has shown that nocturnal grey mouse lemurs appear to do the same, even though lemurs are reared exclusively by their mothers (BMC Ecology, doi.org/jvx).

Study leader Sharon Kessler of Arizona State University in Tempe, believes that the young lemurs may associate calls similar to their own, or to those of male siblings, with their fathers.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Merkel rival fires up party for election battle

HANOVER, Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel's rival, Peer Steinbrueck, on Sunday kicked off his bid to topple her in next year's German election, pledging social equality and a clear pro-European policy.

In a speech lasting almost two hours and punctuated with frequent bursts of enthusiastic applause, Steinbrueck said: "Freedom, justice, solidarity... with a commitment to these values, I am running to be chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany."

"It is time for a change," thundered the 65-year-old former finance minister, rewarded with an almost 10-minute standing ovation from his Social Democratic Party (SPD) supporters in the northern city of Hanover.

With 93.45 percent of the vote, SPD delegates officially nominated Steinbrueck as their candidate for the unenviable task of unseating Merkel, often called the world's most powerful woman, at federal elections expected in September.

Steinbrueck accused Merkel's party, the conservative CDU, of having no election strategy apart from relying on her and said her political slogans were "stickers on empty bottles" with little substance behind them.

"Mrs Merkel said she is running the best and most successful government since reunification (in 1990). I have rarely laughed so much," said Steinbrueck to tumultuous applause.

He pledged to put an end to what he said was "an increasing trend toward parallel societies" in Germany, the haves and the have-nots.

While he was forced to acknowledge that Europe's economic powerhouse currently enjoyed low unemployment, he stressed that many of those in work were not being paid fairly and pledged a legal minimum hourly wage of 8.50 euros ($10.98).

On the international stage, he vowed to "show his colours and go into the federal election with a clear pro-European stance."

"Europe is more than a common market, it is more than a currency union... it is more than a club of 27 European leaders. Europe is civilisation," he said.

He accused Merkel of fostering "isolation" in Europe with her policies against the debt crisis.

German media had seen Steinbrueck's speech as a final chance to kick-start his campaign after damaging revelations that he had pocketed some 1.25 million euros ($1.63 million) in fees for making speeches at private functions.

This topic continued to dog him even on Sunday, as a handful of campaigners from Greenpeace briefly interrupted the speech.

Steinbrueck himself briefly touched on the issue, saying: "My fees for speeches were rocks in my backpack that you have also had to carry on your shoulders."

But commentators seemed broadly impressed with what had been billed as "the most important speech of Steinbrueck's life."

The Bild mass circulation daily said Steinbrueck was "very focused, relaxed, very well prepared."

"Steinbrueck really got into his stride, became freer, more acerbic and more self-assured, but remained statesman-like," commented Europe's most widely read paper.

Newsweekly Spiegel said Steinbrueck clearly achieved the new beginning he wanted. "Now the SPD needs some success," wrote the influential magazine in its online edition.

Opinion polls point to the scale of the task facing the centre-left SPD against Merkel, who continues to be Germany's most popular politician.

A survey released by ARD public television ahead of the party conference showed the SPD still languishing some nine points behind Merkel's conservative CDU and CSU sister party from Bavaria.

Germans do not directly elect their chancellor but if they could, 49 percent would plump for Merkel and only 39 percent would vote for Steinbrueck in the election, the poll showed, although the gap appears to be narrowing slightly.

Steinbrueck vowed he would not join with Merkel in a so-called "grand coalition" and called on party members to "trust in ourselves and others will trust in us.

"If we stand side-by-side, then we'll get there," he pledged.

-AFP/ac

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Thief steals iPhone from quadriplegic

Washington's pointer in action.

(Credit:
NBC New York Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Some thieves like to believe they have scruples. They even talk of honor among themselves.

Some, though, see an iPhone and just can't help themselves. Earlier this year, footage emerged of a man stealing an iPhone from a baby in a store. Yet even that pales with a theft that occurred in a Staten Island apartment building lobby.

William Washington, 38, is a quadriplegic. He has cerebral palsy. The only way he communicates is through an iPhone that he keeps on the tray of his wheelchair. He uses a special pointer attached to a headband in order to tap out messages that are then converted into voice.

Yet, as NBC New York reports, this seems to have elicited no sympathy from someone who encountered him in the apartment building. While an utterly helpless Washington watched, the thief swiped the iPhone from his wheelchair tray and ran off.

Typing into a computer, Washington told NBC New York: "You shouldn't steal from a disabled person who relies on a special device to reach out to the world."

I'm not sure you should steal from anyone, really. But the idea that no sense of guilt might have crossed the thief's mind is quite stirring.

Thefts of iPhones and iPads are up 40 percent in New York.

More Technically Incorrect

London has seen a similar trend. The wife of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason declared yesterday that she is too scared to use her iPhone in public after hers was ripped from her by a man on a bike.

Yet to imagine that someone would have no conscience stealing one from a quadriplegic truly makes one wonder that the iPhone has become a peculiarly sad object of desire. The only way that Washington was able to inform police of the theft was by e-mail.

Police examined the surveillance video in the apartment building and this week arrested an 18-year-old who lives in the same apartment building. The Staten Island Advance identified him as Nakiem Sanders.

Washington didn't get his iPhone back. The alleged thief no longer had it. However, friends have bought him a new one.

You might imagine that the thief was attracted by a new
iPhone 5. However, Washington's was an iPhone 3G.

One can only hope that he doesn't have to live through anything like this again. And yet how will he ever be able to secure his iPhone to his wheelchair tray?

Perhaps he should try and employ the same technology as the shock-giving handcuffs that have recently been patented.

Read More..

Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity

When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.

Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't need it to flourish. The research team from the University of Florida in Gainesville thinks this ability is related to a plant's inherent ability to orient itself as it grows. Seeds germinated on the International Space Station sprouted roots that behaved like they would on Earth—growing away from the seed to seek nutrients and water in exactly the same pattern observed with gravity. (Related: "Beyond Gravity.")

Since the flowers were orbiting some 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth at the time, the NASA-funded experiment suggests that plants still retain an earthy instinct when they don't have gravity as a guide.

"The role of gravity in plant growth and development in terrestrial environments is well understood," said plant geneticist and study co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, with the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What is less well understood is how plants respond when you remove gravity." (See a video about plant growth.)

The new study revealed that "features of plant growth we thought were a result of gravity acting on plant cells and organs do not actually require gravity," she added.

Paul and her collaborator Robert Ferl, a plant biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, monitored their plants from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using images sent from the space station every six hours.

Root Growth

Grown on a nutrient-rich gel in clear petri plates, the space flowers showed familiar root growth patterns such as "skewing," where roots slant progressively as they branch out.

"When we saw the first pictures come back from orbit and saw that we had most of the skewing phenomenon we were quite surprised," Paul said.

Researchers have always thought that skewing was the result of gravity's effects on how the root tip interacts with the surfaces it encounters as it grows, she added. But Paul and Ferl suspect that in the absence of gravity, other cues take over that enable the plant to direct its roots away from the seed and light-seeking shoot. Those cues could include moisture, nutrients, and light avoidance.

"Bottom line is that although plants 'know' that they are in a novel environment, they ultimately do just fine," Paul said.

The finding further boosts the prospect of cultivating food plants in space and, eventually, on other planets.

"There's really no impediment to growing plants in microgravity, such as on a long-term mission to Mars, or in reduced-gravity environments such as in specialized greenhouses on Mars or the moon," Paul said. (Related: "Alien Trees Would Bloom Black on Worlds With Double Stars.")

The study findings appear in the latest issue of the journal BMC Plant Biology.

Read More..

Colorado Springs Doctor Rescued from Taliban

Dec 9, 2012 6:34am

ABC

The American doctor rescued from the Taliban in Afghanistan Saturday by U.S. Special Operations Forces is the medical adviser for a Colorado Springs NGO, his employer confirmed today.

Dr. Dilip Joseph and two colleagues were kidnapped by a group of armed men while returning from a visit to a rural medical clinic in eastern Kabul Province, according to a statement from their employer, Colorado Springs-based Morning Star Development. The statement said the three were eventually taken to a mountainous area about 50 miles from the border with Pakistan.

Morning Star’s crisis management team in Colorado Springs was in contact with the hostages and their captors almost immediately, the statement said.

On Saturday evening in Afghanistan, two of the three hostages were released. Morning Star did not release their names in order to protect their identities. Dr. Joseph remained in captivity.

Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, ordered the mission to rescue Joseph when “intelligence showed that Joseph was in imminent danger of injury or death”, according to a military press release.

Morning Star said Joseph was in good condition and will probably return home to Colorado Springs in the next few days.

A Defense Department official told ABC’s Luis Martinez that Joseph can walk, but was beaten up by his captors.

Joseph has worked for Morning Star Development for three years, the organization said, and travels frequently to Afghanistan.

“Morning Star Development does state categorically that we paid no ransom, money or other consideration to the captors or anyone else to secure the release of these hostages,” the organization said.

Joseph can be seen here in a Morning Star Development video:

“Due to security concerns, some cannot be named but their help will never be forgotten. Among these who cannot be named we include all of the courageous members of the U.S. military who successfully rescued Mr. Joseph as they risked their own lives doing so,” the statement said.

SHOWS: World News

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Italy's Berlusconi announces fresh run for PM

ROME: Silvio Berlusconi on Saturday ended weeks of speculation by announcing he would run again for the job of prime minister, the post he was forced out of last year.

"I am running to win," the leader of the right-wing populist People of Freedom (PDL) party told journalists in Milanello, near the northern city of Milan.

He had called a meeting of the PDL for Sunday and had opened talks with his former coalition allies the Northern League to try to agree on a joint campaign backing a single candidate, he added.

"When I did sport, when I worked and studied, I never entered into a competition to be well-placed but always to win," he said.

"I hope to be in a position to be able to explain to Italians that there is a need for a force that enjoys a majority to change the rules of the constitution."

In the coming campaign he wanted to present several new faces, "because there are numerous people who have the right to feel tired," he added.

He had been in contact with a number of figures in the world of business, sport and university, he said.

"I hope to be in a position to be able to explain to Italians that there is a need for a force that enjoys a majority to change the rules of the constitution."

A general election is expected to be held in March or April of next year but the precise date has not been set, nor is there any agreement on a reform of an election law widely seen as unsatisfactory.

Berlusconi's announcement confirmed comments by leading members of his party and strong hints that he had himself made over the past few days.

In October, he had said that he would not run again for the premiership. On Wednesday evening however, the 76-year-old media tycoon said he had been assailed by requests to return to the field as soon as possible."

This will be his sixth bid to become prime minister, a post he has already held three times over a political career spanning two decades.

A parliamentary revolt forced him from office in November last year as he was fighting a series of scandals that had damaged his reputation and, said critics, the country's standing. The financial markets had reacted so badly that Italy was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Mario Monti took over as prime minister at the head of an unelected government of technocrats. He set about introducing a policy of tax rises and austerity measures to get the economy under control.

On Thursday, PDL lawmakers abstained from confidence votes in the government to protest Monti's policies, but stopped short of bringing down the executive they have supported until now.

The renewed political tension has once again spooked the financial markets and Pier Luigi Bersani, the newly-nominated leader of the centre-left Democratic Party accused Berlusconi of "incoherence".

"It's clear that you have not reflected on past mistakes and that for you the Monti government has not been a transition but a parenthesis that opens and closes and everything is like before," he told PDL lawmakers in parliament.

"You are being irresponsible!" he said.

Responding on Saturday however, Berlusconi dismissed the criticism.

"Bersani has already started his election campaign and, so far as I am concerned, we have acted in a very responsible manner."

Bersani was voted in as the leader of the Democratic Party only last weekend. Recent opinion polls put him comfortably ahead in the run-up to the spring election.

Monti's government is in any case due to end its term of office next spring, but the PDL's change of tack has raised the possibility that it might not last that long.

President Giorgio Napolitano was due to meet Monti later Saturday for talks.

Napolitano has sought to reassure the public, describing recent developments as "pre-election tensions".

But it has been enough to shake the markets: the yields between benchmark Italian and German 10-year sovereign bonds at one point on Friday widened to 330 points, from around 300 points on Monday.

- AFP/fa

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