Egypt has described Israel's building permits for 238 new housing units in East Jerusalem as a provocative step and a sign the direct peace talks could collapse, the foreign ministry said Saturday.
Construction renewed in the settlement of Ariel.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said that Egypt considers this step as a negative Israeli response to all efforts made to save the direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
"The Israeli side withdraws day after another from its commitments to peace efforts, and it clearly prefers to increase the pace of colonial settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian land than to engage seriously in the negotiation," he added.
The building tenders sparked angry Palestinian and U.S. reaction, with worries that the move that could further jeopardize the uncertain resumption of the direct talks.
The Palestinians and their Arab supporters are contemplating turning to the United Nations for recognition of their right to a state within the border of before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
President Barack Obama signed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010 on Monday, giving an additional flight to the space shuttle fleet before it is retired.
"It is important bipartisan legislation that charts a new course for space exploration, science, technology development, and aeronautics," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.
On top of the extra trip, the act extends the life of the international space station until at least 2020. It authorizes $58.4 billion for NASA programs over the next three years, although the specifics of how and where the funds will be used have yet to be determined. The allocation will also speed up the development of a heavy-lift rocket, expected in 2011,it will go toward commercial space programs, and it will help earth science education programs.
The bill was passed by the Senate in August and by the House last week. President Obama's signature on it signifies the end of months of debate over the future of NASA.
"We have been given a new path in space that will enable our country to develop greater capabilities, transforming the state of the art in aerospace technologies," Bolden continued. "We will continue to maintain and expand vital partnerships around the world. It will help us retool for the industries and jobs of the future that will be vital for long-term economic growth and national security."
According to a CNN blog post, the two remaining space shuttle missions are slated for this November and February, and the extra launch would likely lift off in June of 2011.
The rise of the world’s middle powers was on display at the United Nations Tuesday as India, South Africa, and Germany were all elected to join the big guns on the United Nations Security Council for two years, starting in January.
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The arrival of the South Asian and African regional powers as two of the five new nonpermanent members elected to the Security Council Tuesday could bring new clout to the council – in developing nations, in particular.
But adding India and South Africa to a council where Brazil already holds one of the 10 total nonpermanent seats could also pose new challenges to the council’s old guard, including the United States. Iran, for example, could find a new base of support in the troika of developing powers, all of which have resisted mounting US-led pressures on Iran over its nuclear program.
Brazil voted against the latest round of UN sanctions against Iran in June, and India indicated at the time that it did not favor the resolution and considered sanctions “counterproductive.”
Brazil, India, and South Africa "want to be among the big players, they want to be the ones who get permanent seats [on the Security Council] eventually," says Steve Groves, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
The UN General Assembly elected five new nonpermanent members to join the five nonpermanent members that still have a year on their revolving terms. Together the 10 will join the council’s five permanent and veto-wielding members: The US, China, Russia, France, and Great Britain.
India, South Africa, and Colombia ran unopposed for the two-year terms reserved for their regions, while Germany and Portugal were elected to two seats reserved for the “Western” regional group.
Portugal won over Canada in what in the end was the election’s only hotly contested race.
With the addition of India, the Security Council will include all of the world’s major emerging powers known as the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. At the same time, the newly configured council will also include five of the six countries that are pressing for a permanent seat on a proposed expanded Security Council.
The gathering of so many powerful developing countries on the council at once has some diplomatic experts predicting trouble for the US agenda, be it Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Burma (Myanmar). But Heritage's Mr. Groves says the US should take this "rather unprecedented opportunity" to test the kind of world powers these countries want to be.
"I would hope the US would take this as an opportunity to say, 'OK, Brazil, India, and South Africa, you are among the rising powers of the world and want to play a bigger role, let's see how responsible you are now,' " he says, "When the question is Iran or North Korea, will they act with international security in mind or follow the same regional and parochial interests? Let's see if they really want the responsibility."
The confluence of potential permanent members onto the council – Germany, India, South Africa, Brazil and Nigeria (like Brazil an existing nonpermanent member) – is likely to boost pressure for a reform of the council, which has operated under the same five post-World-War-II powers since the UN’s founding in 1945. Japan, which is also a likely candidate for an expanded council, finishes up its current nonpermanent term in December.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that Germany would “want to use this seat to increase our influence on the reform of the UN.”
Germany already is a member of the group of nations – the council’s five permanent members plus Germany, or the so-called “P5 + 1” – that are attempting to address the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomatic means.
The Iran issue remains unresolved, with Tehran continuing to pursue a nuclear program that it says is peaceful but which world powers suspect is aimed at delivering a nuclear weapon. With Iran moving forward just as the Security Council balance appears to be shifting away from favoring additional punitive action, some diplomatic experts suggest the Iran portfolio could eventually be taken up outside the council by an ad-hoc “collation of the willing.”
12 October 2010 Last updated at 06:36 ET By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider: the future of motoring? Google's engineers have tested a self-driving car. But could motorists ever really let go of the wheel?
No more pile-ups, no more road rage, no more exasperated cursing as you stall at the lights.
Reading the paper during the morning commute, enjoying the scenery rather than staring at the tarmac, cutting your transport costs down to a fraction.
The promises of automatic, driver-less cars like those currently being tested by Google in California are many and varied.
Environmentalists say they could slash carbon emissions. Safety campaigners hope the removal of human error could reduce the number of road casualties which, in the UK alone, numbered 2,222 deaths and 24,690 serious injuries in 2009.
But, like a sticky clutch, the nagging doubts persist.
Could a planet with 350 million Top Gear viewers ever willingly surrender the joy of pushing down on the accelerator, the thrill of the open road? Will we ever have enough faith in technology to step inside 2,500kg of motor vehicle with no-one at the controls?
It's not as though the idea is especially novel. The notion of a "smart", driver-free motor vehicle has long persisted in science fiction, most memorably - at least, among aficionados of kitsch 1980s tea-time television - in the form of KITT, David Hasselhoff's sentient car in the series Knight Rider.
And real-life scientists, too, have been intrigued by the idea for many years.
As far back as 1977, engineers at the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering laboratory in Japan produced a self-driving car which reached speeds of 20mph (32km/h).
In the following decade, a robotic Mercedes-Benz tipped the speedometer at more than 60mph (97km/h) on traffic-free streets. By 1994, scientists had developed a vehicle that was able to negotiate its way through three lanes of Paris traffic.
The Darpa Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the US defence department, pits driverless cars against each other over courses nearly 100km (60 miles) long. And driverless taxi pods are already transporting passengers around London's Heathrow airport.
Most recently, Google's cars have negotiated 140,000 miles (225,260km) - including navigating San Francisco's streets and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge - using radar sensors, roof-mounted video cameras and a laser range finder which lets it "see" other vehicles, according to the company.
This long lineage prompts the question: why aren't we, already, abandoning our cars and hailing self-driving taxis to take us to work? Surely it would be cheaper, more fuel-efficient, and leave us less vulnerable to dangerous drivers.
Undoubtedly, many technical issues still need to be ironed out. If a desktop computer bluescreens the crash is metaphorical. If the complex network of computers required to navigate a car through a typical urban commute fail, it's all too real.
Dr John Baruch, of the University of Bradford's school of computing, informatics and media, believes the automotive industry has deliberately refrained from investing in such technology.
He notes that air passengers are more than happy to fly in craft steered by auto-pilot, and is confident that all it would take to transform our way of getting around would be a dedicated team of engineers and a few million pounds of investment.
But this, Dr Baruch believes, would bring its own set of negatives - undermining the very concept of private car ownership and drastically reducing the number of vehicles on the road. He envisages robotic taxis summoned on demand replacing cars sitting idle in driveways for most of the day.
Continue reading the main story
Any system would have to be 150% reliable before anyone would put their faith in it”
End Quote Quentin Willson Motoring journalist As a result, he suspects the major car manufacturers have dragged their wheels when it comes to development.
"They're against it because it would make cars into white goods," he says. "They couldn't sell you the experience of driving - but it would cut costs, we wouldn't need so many cars on the road, and there would be fewer accidents.
"I don't believe people would miss driving to their offices. I'd rather read or get on with some work than sit in a traffic jam staring at someone's exhaust pipe."
All the same, many remain sceptical. The motoring journalist Quentin Willson believes the idea is a potentially valid one that deserves research and investment. But he says we will have to go a long way before we put our such a level of trust on a daily basis in robot drivers.
"The pleasure of driving is already being eroded in this country, anyway," he concedes. "But I suspect that any system would have to be 150% reliable before anyone would put their faith in it.
"The human brain can react quickly to the blizzard of information we're confronted with on the roads. By contrast, we know what sat nav is like - it takes you on all sorts of circuitous routes.
"It's a terribly laudable idea but I don't think it's going to work."
Only time will tell whether this utopia will come to pass - and, indeed, whether motorists will be prepared to surrender the pleasures and frustrations of life behind the wheel.
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See a sample reprint in PDF format.Order a reprint of this article nowOCTOBER 8, 2010, 3:31 P.M. ETMicrosoft, Adobe Could Partner On Mobile, Cloud Businesses ArticleCommentsmore in Business »
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--The reported visit by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to the headquarters of Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE) spurred takeover talk, but the more likely result could be increased collaboration between the two companies, especially in the hot areas of cloud and mobile computing.
For example, analysts said, Microsoft could help drive the adoption of Adobe Systems' Flash on mobile devices such as phones and tablets, while Adobe could help drive business for Azure, Microsoft's cloud-computing development platform and service.
"We believe the most likely outcome of any potential deal between Microsoft and Adobe would be ...
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