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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Magnitude 6.5 earthquake rattles Eureka in Northern California

The temblor snaps power lines, shatters windows and is felt over a wide area, but no major injuries are reported. 'It was a monstrous one,' a merchant says.
A magnitude 6.5 earthquake rocked the Northern California city of Eureka on Saturday, snapping power lines, toppling chimneys, knocking down traffic signals, shattering windows and prompting the evacuation of at least one apartment building.

There were no reports of major injuries, but the temblor, which struck at 4:27 p.m. about 33 miles southwest of the coastal city of 26,000, was powerful enough to send people running into the streets, some fearing a tsunami.

Centered offshore about 13 miles deep, the quake was felt as far north as central Oregon, as far south as Santa Cruz and as far east as Reno, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

"It was a monstrous one," said Phil Burns, owner of Mity Nice Bakery Cafe Restaurant in Eureka, which is about 80 miles south of the Oregon border. "Usually, they're sharp, but this one was very wiggly. It was rolling in all directions."

In the south Eureka fishing village of King Salmon, the 10 seconds of shaking broke power lines and knocked out electricity throughout the isolated seaside community of about 750 people.

When it stopped, people gathered in the street. Some were visibly distraught. Shouts of "You all right?" were heard. Then car engines began revving up as residents raced to the only access road to the closest higher ground, the 150-foot-high Bell Hill, in case of a tsunami, said William Bowman, a resident. None materialized, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Residents of Northern California coastal communities have reason to worry about tsunamis. In 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake off the Alaskan coast sent a catastrophic tsunami to Crescent City, north of Eureka, killing 11 people.

On Saturday, 25,000 customers lost power, according to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Water and gas lines were also disrupted.

Frayed nerves were evident throughout the Humboldt County region as dusk fell. Rooms at Mad River Community Hospital in Arcata, 15 miles north of Eureka, were in the dark, and patients in robes were sitting in the hallway. Generators provided only enough power to keep vital machinery working, said nursing supervisor Annie Conkler.

"Everyone's shaken, but fine," she said, adding that there were no patients with quake-related injuries coming into the emergency room.

At Myrtle Avenue Pet Center on Hubbard Lane in Eureka, owner Melanie Noe spent the evening picking up shampoo bottles and shattered dog bowls. The only other casualties were the cats' nerves, she said.

On the other side of town, lamps and dishes crashed down at Antiques and Goodies, causing a couple to run out of the store, while two women took cover under a table. "We've been through a lot of earthquakes, but I can't recall there ever being any this bad," said store owner Sandra Hall.

To the south, floodlights fell at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds, and windows shattered in Ferndale. Farther south, in Redway, shoppers abandoned their carts in a grocery store and raced to their cars.

State officials said authorities in the county have not asked for additional assistance from Sacramento.

"It looks like they will be able to handle it on their own," said Kelly Huston, a spokesman for the California Emergency Management Agency. "Our big concern now is aftershocks."

At least 10 aftershocks were reported in the hours after the temblor, the strongest of them registering 4.2.

Richard Allen, a UC Berkeley seismologist, said the area where the earthquake occurred was in the Mendocino Triple Junction, where three tectonic plates collide: the Pacific, North American and Juan de Fuca. It is one of the most seismically active parts of the San Andreas fault system that runs through the state.

"Although 6.5 is a large event, it is not uncommon there by any means," said Richard Buckmaster, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist.

The last major quakes in the offshore region, Buckmaster said, were magnitude 7.2 and 6.6 temblors in June 2005.

Source: www.latimes.com

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Nexus one google phone, google nexus one vs iphone & google nexus one review: no iphone killer

New York: Nexus One Google phone, Google Nexus One vs iPhone & Google nexus one review: No iPhone killer. Long at last search engine giant Google has decided to launch its much-talked about gadget, Nexus One, in the market. At the moment, users have very little option than to buy it directly from the giant company’s headquarter in California

www.khabrein.info

Monday, January 4, 2010

20 Most Beautiful People

Interview Magazine has picked the 20 most beautiful people of the past decade. Those that made list are Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johannsson, Zac Efron, Colin Farrell and Jessica Alba.

Two stars from The Twilight Saga made the list. Ashley Greene and Robert Pattinson. Too bad! No Kristen Stewart though.

To see the others, visit www.e-board.tk

Johnson & Johnson heiress dies

Just in: TMZ is reporting that Casey Johnson, 30, the party girl heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, who on Dec. 9 was online showing off the engagement ring she gave Tila Tequila (right), has died in Los Angeles. Her father is Woody Johnson -- owner of the New York Jets.

Johnson, whose pals include Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, was arrested in November for grand theft. The cause of death is unknown. TMZ reports her body was found this morning in L.A.

SOURCE: www.content.usatoday.com

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Justine Henin of Belgium reaches wide for a forehand against Nadia Petrova of Russia


The procession of successful comebacks at the Brisbane International has continued on Pat Rafter Arena with former world number one Justine Henin ousting second seed Nadia Petrova in straight sets this afternoon.

In her first professional outing since her shock retirement in May 2008 the seven-times grand slam champion – a wildcard in the field at the Queensland Tennis Centre – defeated the 20th-ranked Russian 7-5 7-5.

The entire women’s field had waited with a mixture of nervous anticipation and dread as the singles draw was made on Saturday with no one safe as Henin lurked as a floater in the 32-strong main draw.

The unlucky was ultimately the tournament’s second-highest ranked entrant, Petrova, and any fear she may have felt at the prospect of facing the rejuvenated Belgian was well justified.

In a close-fought encounter with the strongly-built Russian, Henin broke her opponent at 5-5 in the first and second sets and refused to surrender those advantages in clinically converting on both occasions.

She now faces Sesil Karatantcheva of Kazakhstan in the second round after her three-set defeat of Australia’s Casey Dellacqua earlier today.

Source: brisbanetimes.com.au

James Cameron Profile


James Francis Cameron born August 16, 1954, is a Canadian film director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and inventor. His writing and directing work include The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). To date, his directorial efforts have grossed approximately US$1.5 billion in North America and to $3.68 billion worldwide. After several feature films, Cameron turned his focus to documentary filmmaking, and to co-developing the digital 3-D Fusion Camera System. He returned to feature filmmaking with Avatar, which made use of the Fusion Camera System technology.

MAJOR FILMS:
  • The Terminator (1984)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)
  • Aliens (1986)
  • The Abyss (1989)
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
  • True Lies (1994)
  • Titanic (1997)
  • Spider-Man and Dark Angel (2000–2002)
  • Documentaries (2002–2009)
  • Avatar (2009)
  • Future projects

Wes Welker Injury

HOUSTON - Wes Welker suffered a left knee injury yesterday that added a significant loss to yesterday’s 34-27 defeat to the Texans, one that will have serious repercussions for the Patriots [team stats]’ playoff hopes.

According to a league source, initial tests indicated the Pro Bowl wide receiver tore both his anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments, which is the same season-ending injury Tom Brady [stats] suffered in the opener last year. Welker is expected to undergo more tests today to confirm the initial finding.

Welker caught a pass from Brady on the team’s fourth offensive play, with 9:39 left in the first quarter. As he was making a cut from left to right to avoid Houston’s Bernard Pollard - the former Chiefs safety whose hit tore Brady’s knee - Welker’s knee gave way on the turf. Welker looked to be in considerable pain, as teammates immediately called for medical help.

While he did get to the bench under his own power, he was later carted to the locker room. Based on Welker’s reaction - he buried his face in a towel - and that of his family back home in Oklahoma City, the news didn’t appear very good from the get-go.

“We’re pretty shook up,” Shelley Welker, Wes’ mother, told the Herald after speaking with her son. “He is, too . . . I mean, it’s one of those where it’s a cut he makes all the time.”

The grass was said to be a bit soggy from rain during the week. Welker was on the move, and trying to gain more yards than the dozen he already had, but the knee collapsed during the cut.

All Patriots coach Bill Belichick would say following the game was that he didn’t have an update on Welker. His teammates, however, had plenty to say about their fallen teammate.

“(Losing Welker) hurts. It’s no secret how important Wes is to us,” said veteran defensive back Shawn Springs. “My prayers are with him. Wes is just one of those guys who want to be out there all the time, and we are going to miss him.”

As Welker sat for a brief time on the bench before being taken to the locker room, players went up to him, offering pats on teh back and words of encouragement. Springs and Jonathan Whilhite came over, as did Benjamin Watson [stats], Randy Moss and Brady once the offense was forced to punt.

“He means a lot to this offense. He makes a lot of plays for us, but it’s part of football,” Watson said. “It happens on every team. We’ve had guys go down and come back. It’s part of the deal.”

Rookie Julian Edelman, considered by many a mini-Welker, seentially took over as the slot receiver and had his finest day, catching a career-best 10 passes for 103 yards.

Along with Moss (five catches, 75 yards) and Edelman, the Pats also used Sam Aiken (two catches, 9 yards), Isaiah Stanback and Matthew Slater at wide receiver.

The one catch allowed Welker to close out the 2009 season wiht an NFL-best 123 receptions, despite missing two games to injury. The 123 grabs match Herman Moore (Detroit, 1995) for the second-most in a season in NFL history. His average of 8.8 receptions per game (123 receptions in 14 games) also ranks second in NFL history, behind the 8.9 receptions per game by Marvin Harrison in 2002.

www.bostonherald.com

Japan Airl Lines Decides On Capital Tie-Up With Delta - Report

TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- Japan Airlines Corp. (9205.TO) and the state-backed Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation of Japan Monday decided to pick Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) as a capital alliance partner for the struggling airline, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported in its Monday evening edition.

Without citing where it obtained the information, the paper said the airline will join the SkyTeam Alliance and is now working to terminate tie-up negotiations with AMR Corp.'s (AMR) American Airlines.

A tie-up with Delta will likely help JAL in its revival efforts, the paper said. While Delta's market share of trans-Pacific routes linking Japan and North America stands at 32%, that of American Airlines amounts to 8%. A tie-up with Delta will enable JAL, whose market share in these routes stands at 22%, to slash its own services and boost code sharing services with Delta, the paper added.

Burnley defender Bikey understands Bolton wanting Coyle

Burnley defender Andre Bikey can understand why Bolton Wanderers want their manager Owen Coyle.

Bikey has just jetted off to Angola to join Cameroon's African Nations Cup squad.

But after their FA Cup win at MK Dons, he said of Coyle: "He is very relaxed and very good at motivating players. That’s why Burnley got promotion."

It was only Burnley’s second away win of the season but Bikey insisted this will improve, saying: "It’s important for us to win away and we have started here. I think we are going to be safe."

SOURCE: Tribalfootball.com

Burj Dubai


DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - If ever a skyscraper was burdened with great expectations, it is the Burj Dubai, the colossal, half-mile-high tower designed by Chicago architects that opens here on Monday. This high-rise isn't simply meant to shatter height records. It is supposed to be a national icon, a symbol for a madly exuberant, now debt-ridden, city-state that mixes the manufactured spectacle of Las Vegas with the helter-skelter growth of Houston.

In the wrong hands, the 160-story, mixed-use skyscraper - the world's tallest building and the world's tallest free-standing structure, whose height is roughly double that of Donald Trump's Chicago tower - could have been a monstrosity, an extra-extra-large version of the architectural cartoons that blight the skyline here. Yet, as designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and its former design partner, Adrian Smith, the Burj Dubai represents a great leap forward in height and, especially for Dubai, in design quality.

It is a luminous, light-catching skyscraper that looks like a skyscraper - ridiculously tall, but exquisitely sculpted, elegantly detailed and unapologetically exultant. Nothing so perfectly summarizes the bigger-is-better outlook of Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and the tower's developer, the state-backed Emaar Properties.

In contrast to Dubai's preposterous collection of architectural cartoons - here, a big-bellied tower that suggests an oversize perfume bottle; there, a paper-thin skyscraper that looks like someone sliced a giant hole in its top with a pair of scissors - the Burj Dubai offers God-is-in-the-details articulation along with its dazzling shape. Fittingly for this waterfront tourist mecca, the shape recalls a giant sandcastle in the sky.

Writing from thousands of miles away, some critics have taken note of the tower's spiraling shape and branded the skyscraper an act of hubris - a modern-day version of the biblical Tower of Babel. Yet, to be here is to realize that the genius of the Burj Dubai is that it does not stand aloof from the zany, Xanadu-in-the-desert character of Dubai, but channels that energy into a work of architecture that is, if not profound or especially adventurous, then at least serious and almost noble.

Rising improbably from what was desert just six years ago and housing an Armani hotel, about 1,000 condominiums, small offices for jetting-setting magnates and an observatory for the masses, the $1.5 billion Burj Dubai is by no means immune from this emirate's maddening "build now, plan later" mentality. It is far easier to reach by car than by foot, and even the roads leading to it are a maze. A nearby rail stop on Dubai's new transit line will open Monday, but that is about as green, or energy-saving, as this project gets. In addition, little effort has been made to have the skyscraper culminate long urban vistas, as the Eiffel Tower does so magnificently in Paris.

Even so, the Burj Dubai succeeds as an Eiffel Tower that people live in - not a pure symbol, but a working icon that anchors an emerging city within a city called (what else?) Downtown Burj Dubai a few miles from the alluring waters of the Persian Gulf. Compared with other parts of Dubai, where high-rises are crammed so closely that people in one apartment building can practically reach out the window and shake hands with their neighbors, the district has an appealing openness, a quality accentuated by a shallow man-made lake built to one side of the giant tower. As if the spectacle of the world's tallest building was not enough, the lake flaunts a crowd-pleasing, Las Vegas-style fountain that shoots dancing jets of water 500 feet into the air (accompanied, naturally, by music). Yet it also sets off the Burj Dubai, allowing the tower to be glimpsed from head to toe.

And what a view it is, at both close range and from afar - a feat that architect Smith, who left SOM in 2006 to start his own firm, and his chief collaborator, SOM's chief structural engineer Bill Baker accomplished through a classic Chicago synthesis of architecture and engineering.

The tower is remarkably tall and remarkably thin because of its innovative structural system: a six-sided core of concrete buttressed by massive concrete walls that support the three wings of the Y-shaped skyscraper. These cost-efficient, wind-resisting bones are sheathed in a sophisticated skin of double-layered glass and aluminum that strongly resembles the exterior of the SOM-designed Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. At the 156th floor, the concrete is replaced by an inner structure of steel, which carries the glass-sheathed, mostly unoccupied portion of the skyscraper - all 600-plus feet of it - to the summit, which reportedly rises 2,684 feet above the desert floor. (Emaar Properties is expected to reveal the exact height Monday.)

A spire that tall sounds silly, the ultimate folly, yet somehow it works. From a distance, the Burj Dubai looks like a Middle Eastern version of Oz - not oppressive, but beckoning; inevitably, not freakishly, tall. Smith kept reworking the top to get the proportions right and his tweaking paid off. Here, in contrast to the disappointing flagpole-like spire at Chicago's Trump Tower, the skyscraper and its subtly spiraling setbacks mount rhythmically to a thrilling climax. Yet, as at Trump, the silvery Burj Dubai reflects the sky beautifully - only more so because the exterior, its curving contours subtly evoking the pointed arches of Islamic architecture, has so many gem-like facets.

Smith is known for the philosophy of contextualism, which preaches the virtues of adapting a building to its surroundings, so it is no surprise that the Burj Dubai meets the ground equally well. The foot-like extensions of its Y-shaped floors step down humanely to a surrounding plaza. Three lozenge-shaped entrance pavilions, with precisely-detailed, cable-supported glass walls that enclose an air pocket and sunshades, lead to the respective lobbies for the tower's offices, hotel and condos. In the bargain, the projecting pavilions will prevent wind downdrafts from knocking pedestrians off their feet.

Along with lush gardens that extend the tower's helical geometry into the landscape, these features transform the gargantuan Burj Dubai into a gentle giant - not unlike New York's Empire State Building, whose setback profile has long exemplified how a tall building should meet the ground. Unlike so many towers here, the Burj Dubai seems rooted in its site, not plopped onto it. It simultaneously stands out and looks like it belongs.

The skyscraper's interior remained incomplete as of Sunday, and, therefore, was impossible to fully evaluate, yet a brief look at one of the tower's residential floors suggested that SOM's design will likely succeed in function as well as form. The Y-shaped floor plan creates narrow apartment depths that keep interiors close to prized views of the Persian Gulf, the Dubai skyline and the desert. Widely-spaced columns, as opposed to the narrowly-clustered piers of Chicago's Aon Center, smartly accentuate those vistas. Why build so high if you can't see to the end of the Earth?

Under the leadership of Nada Andric, SOM's interiors department has wisely chosen restrained, elegant finishes to provide relief from Dubai's visual cacophony. In the residential floor's elevator lobby, bands of Brazilian rosewood on the walls create a warm, domestic feel - as close to "home sweet home" as one can reasonably expect in a half-mile-high skyscraper. Within the apartments are the usual top-drawer brands (Sub Zero refrigerators, Miele range hoods). Kitchens are open to living spaces and views, American style.

How many people will actually be living and working in the Burj Dubai? That, along with the tower's exact height, remains a mystery. An Emaar spokeswoman declined to answer whether Dubai's real estate bust and plummeting property values have led some buyers to walk away from their deals. The first residents are scheduled to move in to the Burj Dubai next month. The 124th floor observatory (the world's highest lookout point, naturally) opens Tuesday.

The prospect of a partly-empty skyscraper invariably opens the Burj Dubai to charges of overbuilding. Surprise: It's happened before. As the history of the Empire State Building reveals - when it opened in 1931, it had so few tenants that it was known as the "Empty State Building" - today's white elephant is often tomorrow's beloved landmark. Like the Empire State, the Burj Dubai reflects the exuberance and overreaching ambition of its age. Thanks to its Chicago-based architects and engineers, it possesses the quality and artistry that will enable it to take its place not only in the record books but also among the pantheon of the world's iconic skyscrapers.

Nothing succeeds, it seems to defiantly declare, like excess.

SOURCE
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