Image depicting North Korea rocket on launch pad

A North Korean rocket slated for launch sometime early next month can be clearly seen in a satellite photograph taken Sunday, the Institute for Science and International Security said Sunday.

The latest satellite i mage shows a rocket sitting on its launch pad in the north east of the country.
The satellite imagery, obtained by the ISIS from DigitalGlobe, is said to show the rocket at the Musudan-ri launch site in northeastern North Korea. The image casts a shadow on the ground below.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday there is little doubt that the planned launch is designed to bolster that North Korea’s military capability.
He also indicated that the U.S. military could be prepared to shoot down a North Korean missile if the rogue regime develops the capability to reach Hawaii or the western continental United States in a future launch.
The North Korean government says it will launch a commercial satellite atop a rocket sometime between April 4 and April 8.
“I don’t know anyone at a senior level in the American government who does not believe this technology is intended as a mask for the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile,” Gates said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”
Gates noted that while the United States believes it is North Korea’s “long-term intent” to add a nuclear warhead to any such missile, he “personally would be skeptical that they have the ability right now to do that.”
Japan recently mobilized its missile defense system — an unprecedented step — in response to the planned North Korean launch, Japanese officials said.
The move, noteworthy for a country with a pacifist constitution, is aimed at shooting down any debris from the launch that might fall into Japanese territory.
In a concurrent response, U.S. Navy ships capable of shooting down ballistic missiles are being moved to the Sea of Japan, a Navy spokesman said Thursday.
Gates said that the U.S. military could shoot down “an aberrant missile, one that was headed for Hawaii … or something like that, we might consider it, but I don’t think we have any plans to (do) anything like that at this point.”
He does not believe North Korea currently has the technology to reach Alaska or Pacific coast.
Gates said that impending missile launch is a clear demonstration of the failure of the recent six-party talks to disarm the North Korean regime.
“It’s very troubling. The reality is that the six-party talks really have not made any headway any time recently,” he said.

Rahman Soon At Kerala

A.R.Rahman, the renowned music director and the Oscar winner, to perform live at Kozhikode on May to express solidarity with HIV Positive orphaned children.

A.R.R, the short man with huge generosity will be performing the show titled ‘Jai Ho’. This is the ‘first mega music show’ by Mr. Rahman after he won two oscars for ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.

Over fifty top musicians will be joining the show, which is being organized by NGO Global Kerala initiative-‘Keraleeyam’ for rehabilitating HIV positive orphaned children.

Mr. Rahman said he was glad to be associated with ‘the cause’ ‘Discrimination has no end– between states, religions and between nations. That’s the main cause. I am moved by the cause’, he said.

“I had been waiting to perform in Kerala for the last 15 years” says Rahman. Apparently, he had to cancel seven of his appointments this year to make this happen. Rahman had all his words of praise for the malyalam singers. They are gifted, dedicated and their foundation very strong, he said.

The Chennai-based star composer said he would be joining Rasool Pookutty, who also won the Oscar for sound for the same film for a Rs 100 crore film called ‘Blue’.

On scoring music in Malayalam films, he said it all depended on opportunties and timing. “During the 90’s I thought opportunties will come. Definitely, there will be opportunties in the future,” he said.

Asked if he had gone into hiding after the Oscars, Mr. Rahman said he took time off to be away from the media glare as he had to make six trips in three weeks to Los Angeles and wanted his body clock to come back to normal. On whether he had increased his remuneration after the Oscars, he quipped that following the recession, he had been asked to reduce it by 10 per cent.

Asked if he was chasing any other dream after the Oscars, Mr. Rahman said he was still living the dream.

“I am happy”. He was expecting another Oscar only after 10 years, he sai

Amisha Patel to contest from Rajkot

Amisha Patel to contest from Rajkot Ahmedabad, March 21 (IANS) Bollywood actress Amisha Patel will contest the Lok Sabha election from Rajkot in Gujarat on a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) ticket, a party official said Saturday.

“I called up Amishaji yesterday and sought her consent. She agreed immediately,” NCP chief for Gujarat Jayant Patel told IANS. He said Amisha has her roots in Gujarat.

She hails from Sarsa assembly segment near Anand district. “I have known the family of the actress for years and can say with confidence that her contesting will be a winning proposition for NCP in Saurashtra region,” Jayant Patel said.

Where ‘Undo Send’ and other Gmail ideas are born

Instead of hitting “reply” to an e-mail, we accidentally push “reply all,” sending a potentially embarrassing or insulting message to those we didn’t intend to see it.

To address this problem, Google Inc.’s Gmail Labs has launched an experimental feature called “Undo Send” that gives users a chance to rewrite their message, correct settings or simply fix typos.

When a Gmail user who enables this feature sends an e-mail, a button that says “Undo” will pop up on their screen for five seconds. If the user hits the button within that time, the service will retrieve the e-mail in draft form — allowing the user to make changes or cancel the message altogether.

“Sometimes … I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake,” said Michael Leggett, a Gmail Labs designer and the creator of the “Undo Send” feature, in the Gmail blog. “I forget to attach a file, or e-mail the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.”

Leggett added that he’s had “Undo Send” turned on for a while “and it’s saved me several times.”

This may be good news to Gmail’s tens of millions of users as people in the digital era look to connect with others over the Web in a more efficient manner. “Undo Send” is also just the latest example of the dozens of creative — and sometimes downright wacky — online features developed at Gmail Labs to address common e-mail problems.

Ratan Tata unviels Nano

Mr. Ratan N. Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group and Tata Motors, today unveiled the Tata ‘NANO’, the People’s Car from Tata Motors that India and the world have been looking forward to. A development, which signifies a first for the global automobile industry, the People’s Car brings the comfort and safety of a car within the reach of thousands of families. The People’s Car will be launched in India later in 2008.

The People’s Car, designed with a family in mind, has a roomy passenger compartment with generous leg space and head room. It can comfortably seat four persons. Four doors with high seating position make ingress and egress easy.

Yet with a length of 3.1 metres, width of 1.5 metres and height of 1.6 metres, with adequate ground clearance, it can effortlessly manoeuvre on busy roads in cities as well as in rural areas. Its mono-volume design, with wheels at the corners and the powertrain at the rear, enables it to uniquely combine both space and manoeuvrability, which will set a new benchmark among small cars.

When launched, the car will be available in both standard and deluxe versions. Both versions will offer a wide range of body colours, and other accessories so that the car can be customised to an individual’s preferences.

The People’s Car has a rear-wheel drive, all-aluminium, two-cylinder, 623 cc, 33 PS, multi point fuel injection petrol engine. This is the first time that a two-cylinder gasoline engine is being used in a car with single balancer shaft. The lean design strategy has helped minimise weight, which helps maximise performance per unit of energy consumed and delivers high fuel efficiency. Performance is controlled by a specially designed electronic engine management system.

Cancer Stricken Jade Goody Passes away

Jade Goody, the British reality TV star whose battle against cancer had been followed around the world, has died.

She passed away in her sleep early Sunday – Mother’s Day in the U.K.

Max Clifford, her publicist and friend, confirmed the news to PEOPLE. “She had been pretty much asleep for the last 24 hours,” he says, adding she died “just before 4 o’clock this morning.”

Her husband Jack Tweed – who she married in a ceremony filmed by a British TV channel in February – and mother Jackiey Budden were at her bedside, Clifford adds.

Clifford says Budden told him, “My beautiful daughter has gone to sleep, has gone,” when they spoke soon afterwards.

He adds, “Jackiey is obviously as you would expect a mom to be at the loss of her daughter. We’ve all known it was coming but she’s devastated.”

Goody, 27, rose to fame on the British version of the reality show Big Brother in 2002, and was rarely out of the British newspapers and gossip magazines in the years that followed. But her story went global when she discovered she was suffering from cervical cancer – while appearing on the India version of the reality show in August.

Natasha Dies Off On Epidural Hematoma

The seemingly mild head injury that killed actress Natasha Richardson was an epidural hematoma, the New York City medical examiner’s office announced today.

The death was ruled an accident. Richardson was reported to have slipped and fallen while taking a skiing lesson at a Canadian resort. Although she is said to have appeared unhurt, she later developed a headache and was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

That’s entirely consistent with the diagnosis of epidural hematoma, says Eugene Flamm, MD, chairman of neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.

“It is a common syndrome where someone gets hit on the head, seems fine, and then falls down unconscious,” Flamm tells WebMD. “It takes that much time for the pressure to build up on the brain.”

The dura is the membrane between the brain and the skull. If blood collects in the area in between, it presses harder and harder against the brain. Eventually it causes herniation: the whole brain shifts.

“When something large makes the brain shift, the blood supply gets cut off and the whole brain dies,” Flamm says.

Flamm did not examine Richardson, and he is quick to note that his comments on her case are speculation based on media reports. But Flamm has treated many patients with similar case histories.

“If someone has a significant-size epidural hematoma that you can see on a CAT scan, you would operate and remove it,” he says. “Sometimes you see a smaller one, and I don’t operate. But that is rare — I usually operate because of the potential for the brain moving and putting pressure on a vital structure.”

From media reports, Flamm speculates that Richardson was already brain dead by the time she reached a local hospital — well before she was flown to New York.

Despite Richardson’s death, Flamm notes that an epidural hematoma is not always fatal and may not even cause lasting brain damage.

“It all depends on how severe the neurological problem is at the time of surgery,” he says. “If a patient is deeply comatose, it is more serious than if the symptom is just sleepiness or pain on the side of the head. If there has not been a lot of brain damage, there can be full recovery.”

Obama Plans Small-Business Lending Boost

Seeking to counter a chorus of unhappy Republicans and nervous Wall Street investors, President Obama and his economic team are taking a cheerier tone while making billions in federal loans available to the nation’s struggling small businesses.

Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plan to announce a broad package Monday that includes reduced small-business lending fees and an increase on the guarantee to some Small Business Administration loans. A day earlier, the president’s advisers said in TV interviews that they remained confident in the nation’s economic fundamentals, at times adopting upbeat rhetoric the president once mocked.

“The fundamentals are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology,” said Christina Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Obama, for his part, has embraced the role of “confidence-builder in chief,” as one business leader asked him to become. One week after the president’s budget director declared “fundamentally, the economy is weak,” economic advisers offered up a buoyant assessment.

Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council and an Obama adviser, quoted the president: “It’s never as good as people say it is when they say it’s good and it’s never as bad as people say it is when they say it’s bad.”

Dealing with a severe recession, Obama has turned to a public face that emphasizes the potential for recovery instead of its limits.

To that end, the government plans to take aggressive steps to boost bank liquidity with more than $10 billion aimed at unfreezing the secondary credit market, according to officials briefed on the plan who demanded anonymity to avoid pre-empting the president’s announcement.

“We know that small businesses are the engine of growth in the economy, and we absolutely want to do things to help them,” Romer said Sunday, speaking broadly on the outline of the plan. “There are already a lot of things to help them in the recovery package, and some of what will be coming out are the things that were in the recovery package: increasing the SBA loan guarantees, lowering fees.”

The move comes as Republicans have sought to build on some bipartisan misgivings over Obama’s ambitious spending blueprint. In particular, Republicans say Obama’s budget proposal to raise taxes, starting in 2011, on individuals earning more than $200,000 and on households earning more than $250,000 will hurt small businesses, which face higher dividend taxes and limits on itemized deductions.

“We’ve got to do something to help these small-business people. We know that they’re the job creators in this economy,” Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republicans’ No. 2 official, said Sunday on NBC. “And the problem … I think we’re seeing out of the Obama administration is a lack of focus on how to get things going again.”

The new measures taking effect Monday focus on opening up small-business lending, seen as critical to cities’ growth. While the SBA typically guarantees $20 billion in loans annually, new lending this year is on track to fall below $10 billion, according to the administration.

Under the two-month-old administration’s new initiative, the government will step in to buy these loans to help unlock the frozen credit market, using money from the recently passed bailout package in the range of between $10 billion to $20 billion, according to one official briefed on the plan.

The other measures are part of Geithner’s financial stability plan announced last month. They involve temporarily eliminating upfront fees of up to 3.75 percent and some processing charges on certain SBA loans that lenders typically pass along to borrowers. It also increases the government guarantees on certain loans to 90 percent, up from 85 percent for loans below $150,000 and 75 percent for larger loans.