Nice Picture Lake Toba & Culture by "Hotdiman Sitinjak"

Toba Holbung-JanjiRaja-sosorpea-Samosir Island -Lake Toba (Foto : Hotdiman Sitinjak)

Traditional Transportation on Lake -Toba (Foto: Hotdiman Sitinjak)

Bring a Washed Out Effect to your Photos in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you shall see how you can add a drab oldies effect to any picture if you only learn how to smartly alter the picture’s color levels and its blend mode thus creating a washed out effect in Photoshop.

Image link 1. Open an image in Photoshop. Width 600 and Height 340.

Learn to Intensify your Images in Photoshop

Often you take pictures with your digital camera and you look at them and wonder what’s missing. The pictures just don’t look good enough. The obvious solution is to buy a better camera, but in all honesty, even pictures taken from the best of cameras require a little bit of Photoshop touch at some stage. In this tutorial you are going to take a seemingly ordinary picture and intensify its colors in Photoshop to give it “that” feel. It’s almost going to be like you are bringing your picture to life through Photoshop, and the best part is that it requires very little hard work and technical Photoshop skills; just a few little steps and you are done. Of course you need to make note that the same exact steps are not going to produce the same effect for every image in Photoshop, but with a little bit of alteration, you will be good to go.

Create a Trendy Retro Cityscape Design in Photoshop

Follow this step by step Photoshop tutorial to create a cool cityscape poster design with the trendy retro style and effects that are so popular at the moment. We’ll use a range of texture resources and Photoshop techniques to give the design an aged and distressed appearance and send it back in time a few decades.


The artwork we’ll be creating features a cityscape modified with cross processing colour effects and texture overlays to create the appearance of a retro poster or magazine ad left to age since the 70′s.

Create Pulpy Orange Text in Photoshop

Okay so this tutorial starts with the basics; we first set up a suitable background so that our pulpy orange text looks good on it, and then we proceed to creating the pulpy orange text in Photoshop. Just skip the first few steps if you are not interested in creating the background. Most of the text will be created using Photoshop’s 3D option; particularly Repousse. The actual point of this tutorial is not creating the pulpy orange text in Photoshop, rather to teach ourselves how we can manipulate Photoshop’s various tools to create a nice backdrop and make the text look good; it’s really sort of an all-purpose tutorial.

How to Create Your Own Fractal-Style Design Using Photoshop

Fractals in geometric terms, is a pattern or figure that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.  It is a concept called self-similarity and gives you highly similar patterns even as you close in on its different parts. In the end, the result is a beautiful pattern that looks totally organized or symmetrical, yet fragmented and askew at the same time. That is why some people actually want to use the same “style” of fractals for creative pursuits in print and web design.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create your own “fractal”-style design. Keep in mind that technically we are not creating a fractal; we are just copying the same aesthetic elements onto our design. Let us get started.
STEP 1
First, will we setup our document. In this tutorial, we will be using the preset values in Photoshop, but we will also set a high resolution so that you can also use this in print (if you need to). Once Adobe Photoshop is open, we just press CTRL+N to create a new document and then we alter the resolution setting. Compare your settings with the values below.

• Width: 1024 pixels
• Height: 768 pixels
• Resolution: 300ppi
• Color Mode: RGB (for web) or CMYK (for print), the choice is yours

Designing a Retro Flyer with Photoshop

Designing a Retro Flyer with Photoshop
Creating retro designs is pretty easy when you’re using Adobe Photoshop. Here, you will learn how to do this yourself based on a primary image. We will start with setting up a proper print-ready design then proceed to image processing and finish with the right design details for our flyer. Let’s get started.
STEP 1
Open Photoshop and create a new document (CTRL+N). Now, in the window that opens, you will need to setup the flyer dimensions. The values depend on the size and orientation of the flyer that you need. For this tutorial, we will be using these settings.
a.     Width: 8.5 inches
b.     Height: 5.5 inches
c.     Resolution: 300ppi
d.     Color Mode: CMYK

Creating the CLOVERFIELD text effect in Photoshop

Note: This tutorial has been carried out in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Some functions may be different in older versions.
Final Result:

Creating the Heroes Poster Text in Photoshop

Note: This tutorial has been carried out in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Before you continue, make sure you are familiar with the Smudge Tool and other basic tools in Photoshop. Due to copyright reasons, I have changed the “H” in HEROES to “Z”.
Final Result:

Create a Flat Earth Waterfall in Photoshop – Tuts+ Premium Tutorial

From time-to-time, we like to feature the work of artists that we think are doing a fantastic job in their field. Recently,

 we introduced you to the work of Garrigosa Studio. One work in particular from their portfolio attracted quite a bit of attention from readers wanting to know if we could show them how to produce something similar.

Your feedback is important to us, so we decided to give it a shot.
In this reader-inspired Tuts+ Premium tutorial by author Ed Lopez, we will explain how to

create a flat Earth waterfall in Photoshop using a handful of stock images. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+

Hong Kong Observatory organises training course on weather observation (6 August 2012)

The Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) will hold a weather observation training course in October. Three experienced HKO weather observers will introduce basic weather observation techniques and methods, such as classification of clouds, to the participants. Members of the public are invited to join.

The course aims to enhance participants' understanding of weather conditions. It is particularly useful for those engaging in outdoor activities to respond more intelligently to weather changes. The course will also cover proverbs relating to sky conditions and weather changes. As such wisdom is often region-specific, HKO weather observers will explain how they can be applied meaningfully. During the course, participants will also learn how to make effective use of weather information available at the HKO's website, and will be given opportunities to practise weather observation.

PolyU study raises alert for further increase in city's temperature

the temperature in the inner urban areas of Hong Kong is predicted to rise by two to three Celsius degree in 30 years' time, according to the latest scientific study by researchers at the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU).

The study was done by PolyU Professor Janet Nichol and her research student Mr To Pui-hang, together with Chinese University's Professor Edward Ng Yan-yung, using remote sensing technology and satellite images. They have mapped the distribution of temperatures for both daytime and nighttime over Hong Kong at decadal intervals up to 2039, taking into consideration the temperature change due to greenhouse-induced warming as well as the impact of urbanization. The latter is known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
Professor Janet Nichol said the UHI effect means an urban area is significantly warmer than its rural surroundings. The temperature difference is usually larger at night and in winter. There are several causes leading to UHI. These include high-rise buildings which block thermal radiation at night, materials with thermal bulk properties such as asphalt and concrete, and the lack of vegetation in urban areas. With its densely populated urban area, Hong Kong provides a typical example of the UHI effect.

HKFE Announces Revised Margins for Esprit Holdings Futures

Hong Kong Futures Exchange Limited (HKFE), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx), has announced that with effect from the commencement of trading on Monday, 13 August 2012, the minimum margins to be collected by an Exchange Participant from its clients in respect of their dealings in the following futures contract will be as outlined in the table below.  The adjustments are based on the clearing company’s normal procedures and standard margining methodology.

Gunman wanted in SW China

Police in Southwest China's Chongqing municipality have issued an arrest warrant for a robber who shot and killed one person and injured two others on Friday afternoon.

A set of photos of Zhou Kehua, the suspect, provided by Chongqing police. [Photo/cq.cqnews.net]

China

China (ⁱ/ˈtʃaɪnə/; Chinese: 中国; pinyin: Zhōngguó; see also Names of China), officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.3 billion. Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, the East Asian state is the world's second-largest country by land area,^[13] and the third- or fourth-largest in total area, depending on the definition of total area.^[14]
The People's Republic of China is a single-party state governed by the

C++ Variables. Data Types.

The usefulness of the "Hello World" programs shown in the previous section is quite questionable. We had to write several lines of code, compile them, and then execute the resulting program just to obtain a simple sentence written on the screen as result. It certainly would have been much faster to type the output sentence by ourselves. However, programming is not limited only to printing simple texts on the screen. In order to go a little further on and to become able to write programs that perform useful tasks that really save us work we need to introduce the concept of variable.

Let us think that I ask you to retain the number 5 in your mental memory, and then I ask you to memorize also the number 2 at the same time. You have just stored two different values in your memory. Now, if I ask you to add 1 to the first number I said, you should be retaining the numbers 6 (that is 5+1) and 2 in your memory. Values that we could now -for example- subtract and obtain 4 as result.

The whole process that you have just done with your mental memory is a simile of what a computer can do with two variables. The same process can be expressed in C++ with the following instruction set:

1 2 3 4

a = 5; b = 2; a = a + 1; result = a - b;

C++ Structure of a program

Probably the best way to start learning a programming language is by writing a program. Therefore, here is our first program:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

// my first program in C++ #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main () { cout << "Hello World!"; return 0; }

Hello World!

The first panel (in light blue) shows the source code for our first program. The second one (in light gray) shows the result of the program once compiled and executed. To the left, the grey numbers represent the line numbers - these are not part of the program, and are shown here merely for informational purposes.

The way to edit and compile a program depends on the compiler you are using. Depending on whether it has a Development Interface or not and on its version. Consult the compilers section and the manual or help included with your compiler if you have doubts on how to compile a C++ console program.

The previous program is the typical program that programmer apprentices write for the first time, and its result is the printing on screen of the "Hello World!" sentence. It is one of the simplest programs that can be written in C++, but it already contains the fundamental components that every C++ program has. We are going to look line by line at the code we have just written:

The Python Tutorial

Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented programming. Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms.
The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are freely available in source or binary form for all major platforms from the Python Web site, http://www.python.org/, and may be freely distributed. The same site also contains distributions of and pointers to many free third party Python modules, programs and tools, and additional documentation.

Russian Nesting Dolls

 Russian Nesting Dolls Nesting dolls are most popularly associated with Russia and are the quintessential Russian souvenir. They are also called matryoshka dolls. Russian nesting dolls are made in various shapes, sizes, and numbers and are decorated with many different themes and techniques.

What Types of Nesting Dolls Are Available?

Russian nesting dolls are typically painted to look like women in traditional Russian clothing. However, Russian nesting dolls can also depict Russian fairy tales, world leaders, cartoon characters, pop culture icons, sports heroes, or animals. Russian nesting dolls can be painted with particular themes like holidays or religion.
Russian nesting dolls are usually brightly colored, but some can be plain, decorated with a wood burning technique, or embellished with gold paint.

Ancient Russia

W ith the dissolution of the Soviet Union there has been an enormous resurgence of interest in Russia's pre-Soviet past, as well as a great deal of debate and reconsideration of the Soviet era itself. This shift has not resulted in a simple vilification of everything Soviet or a naive embrace of all that preceded it, but it has spurred an unprecedented effort to regain the ancient Russian national heritage. Churches are being restored all across the country, great Russian writers and artists whose works were banned are once again being honored, and the individual character of ancient cities and communities is once again becoming established. Next year, the city of Moscow is celebrating its 850th Anniversary, a celebration that will mark the recovery, as well as the commemoration, of its glorious past.

The middle-class pupils giving university a pass

As rising tuition fees take their toll, more and more potential students have decided that a degree isn’t everything

 

Between one and two youngsters in every classroom in England may choose not to go on to university when previously they would have Photo: Getty Images

By Peter Stanford

7:30AM BST 10 Aug 2012

Comments

Martha Hanks was already having doubts about university, she says. That was before, like every other 18-year-old waiting for A-level results later this month, she had to factor in 2012’s massive hike in tuition fees from around £3,300 to £9,000 a year for many of the courses she was considering.

Rebels pull back in Syria's Aleppo, U.N. says no one will win

ALEPPO, Syria (Reuters) - Syrian forces have pushed rebels back from a strategic district of Aleppo, but skirmishes continued in the city and the United Nations said the conflict engulfing Syria would have no winner.

Diplomats told Reuters that veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi could be named next week to replace the U.N.-Arab League Syria envoy Kofi Annan, who resigned in frustration at the international deadlock on how to end the violence.
But they warned there could be last-minute changes if a key government had concerns or the candidate had second thoughts.
Assad, engaged in an all-consuming fight with his mostly Sunni opponents, appointed a Sunni as his new prime minister on Thursday after his predecessor fled on Monday in the highest-level defection so far in the uprising that began 17 months ago.
Wael al-Halki, from the southern province of Deraa where the revolt began, replaces Riyad Hijab, who had spent only two months in the job before making a dramatic escape across the border to Jordan.
Assad's authority was already shaken by the assassination last month of four of his top security officials and by rebel gains in Damascus, Aleppo and swathes of rural Syria.
But he has persevered with a crackdown on opponents seeking to end half a century of Baathist rule and topple a system dominated by members of the president's minority Alawite sect.
He has focused his fierce army counter-offensive on Syria's two main cities, reasserting control over much of the capital Damascus before taking the fight to the northern commercial hub.
Rebels fighting in the Aleppo district of Salaheddine, a southern gateway to the city, said they had been forced to fall back from frontline positions on Thursday by a fierce bombardment which had reduced buildings to rubble.

Russia losing out in space race warns Dmitry Medvedev

The failure of a workhorse Proton rocket after launch on Monday caused the multimillion-dollar loss of Indonesia's Telkom-3 and Russia's Express-MD2 satellites, according to Russia's space agency.

Russian space agency Roskosmos said an engine failure in the rocket's upper stage, called the Briz-M, meant the craft went into the wrong orbit. A similar problem caused the loss of a $265 million communications satellite last year.

Date set for Alexander Litvinenko inquest

Mr Litvinenko, 43, was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 while drinking tea at a meeting, allegedly with two Russians - former KGB contacts Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun - at the Millennium Hotel in London's Grosvenor Square in November 2006.

High Court Judge Sir Robert Owen was appointed as an Assistant Deputy Coroner and will hold a pre-inquest review in public on September 20, the Judicial Communications Office said.

Sir Robert will give "directions as to the conduct of the inquest" at the hearing, the JCO spokeswoman said.

Prosecutors named Lugovoy as the main suspect but he was later elected as a Russian MP and a diplomatic rift developed with Moscow which refused to send him to the UK for questioning.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said the issue - which he has discussed with President Vladimir Putin - still stands between Britain and Russia.

Read more

guardian.co.uk

Russia

Top story

• 

  Russian Islamist sect kept children underground for a decade

  9 Aug 2012: Children from sect led by self-proclaimed prophet Faizrakhman Satarov found by police investigating murder of moderate cleric

Russia

Russia ⁱ/ˈrʌʃə/ or /ˈrʊʃə/ (Russian: Россия, tr. Rossiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijə] ( listen)), also officially known as the Russian Federation^[7] (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijskəjə fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨjə] ( listen)), is a country in northern Eurasia.^[8] It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects.

From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, and the U.S. state of Alaska by the Bering Strait. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. Russia is also the ninth most populous nation with 143 million people as of 2012.^[3] Extending across the whole of northern Asia and most of eastern Europe, Russia spans nine time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources^[9] and is the largest producer of oil and natural gas globally.^[10][11] Russia has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.^[12]

Photographs Recreated Using Crayons

Using a novel technique he developed himself, artist Christian Faur turns photographs into giant prints created by using crayons as pixels. When exhibited, the size and three-dimensional nature of the work make for an interesting viewing experience for visitors. The space appears to be full of photographs, but the images turn into abstract and colorful sculptures as the visitor gets closer. Each piece is composed of hundreds of crayons of different colors.

Woman's missing digits grow back in phantom form

A woman born missing a finger and a thumb has grown them back – albeit as part of a phantom limb. This extraordinary occurrence shows that our brain contains a fully functional map of our body image, regardless of what our limbs actually look like.

The woman, RN, was born with just three fingers on her right hand. Aged 18, RN had the hand amputated after a car accident. She later began to feel that her missing limb was still present, and developed a "phantom" hand.

Why aren’t we all tall?

There’s a fair amount of social science and anecdata that tall males are more reproductively fit. More precisely, males one to two standard deviations above the norm in height seem to be at the “sweet spot” as an idealized partner (e.g., leading males). And, short men often have fewer children. Short women will pair up with tall men. Tall women will generally not pair up with shorter men. The question then has to be asked: why isn’t natural selection producing a situation where we’re all tall?
As it is, height is a highly heritable trait where there’s a lot of genetic variation present in the population. One hypothesis might be that short(er) people are simply individuals with a higher mutational load. In other words, there’s going to be variation in the load of deleterious alleles from person to person, and one’s value on quantitative traits (intelligence, height) is a reflection of one’s genetic fitness. There are problems with this model, starting with the fact that one you need to tease apart inter-population variation. Also, within families there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between height and intelligence, which you would expect to see if quantitative traits are reflections of variation in mutational load.

New Xbox to Launch Within 18 Months, Says Microsoft Job Listing

Microsoft's job listings have been a little leaky lately. First came news of next-generation Surface PCs, and now there's word of a new Xbox coming within a year and a half.
"Over the next eighteen months Microsoft will release new versions of all of our most significant products including Windows (Client, Server, Phone and Azure), Office and Xbox," a Microsoft job listing said, before Microsoft deleted the post from its Careers Website.

Humans on Mars: The Craziest, Weirdest, and Most Plausible Plans in History

As every space enthusiast knows, we will land people on Mars within 20 years.
Of course, we’ve been 20 years away from Mars for the last half-century. Between 1950 and 2000, NASA and various independent groups have come up with more than 1,000 detailed studies for manned Mars missions. Yet not a single one has come very close to fruition. At least on paper, Mars remains an eventual NASA goal, with their latest Curiosity rover seen in some ways as a precursor to human missions.
“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars,” said the agency’s administrator Charles Bolden after the rover’s successful landing on Aug. 5.

Kiss Me Again

The sex Issue

Seven People Shot During NYC’s Night Out Against Crime

Mayor Bloomberg toured some of New York City's most dangerous police precincts to celebrate the community event National Night Out Against Crime yesterday and stressed, "Since 2001, the NYPD had cut crime citywide by 32 percent and made this the safest big city in the nation." But the bloody summer continued unabated as at least seven people were shot across the five boroughs, all of whom are fortunately expected to survive.

Wikipedia Tries to Keep the Riffraff Out of Veepstakes Entries

By now, everyone and their respective mothers, and probably fathers too, are aware that someone working for a certain android candidate for president might try to edit the Wikipedia entry of the GOP's

vice-presidential candidate before such a selection is announced and the nation's lazy voters immediately flock to that person's first Google result. This includes Stephen Colbert, who helpfully exhorted his viewers last night to "make as many edits as possible to your favorite VP contender." In response, Wikipedia decided to lock the pages of Rob Portman,

The BBQ Recovery Gets a Little Worse

The U.S. economy expanded by 1.5 percent last quarter, according to figures released today by the Department of Commerce.
A growth of 1.5 percent in GDP is good in some very limited sense (economists had predicted a 1.4 percent expansion) but bad news for most people, since, compared to last quarter's GDP growth of 2 percent, it means that the economic recovery is slowing.
GDP figures for previous years were also revised in today's data dump, giving a sharper picture of a Great Recession that was not as deep as previously thought, but that has been harder than expected to pull out of.

Some are calling our national economic situation the "BBQ recovery," since growth has been low and slow for a long time.

Sikh Temple Shooter Wade Michael Page Killed Himself

While previous reports said Wisconsin gunman Wade Michael Page was killed by an officer outside the Sikh temple where he murdered six people, the FBI announced today that Page actually "died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." He had been shot in the stomach by police, an FBI agent said, at which point video from the parking lot shows Page turning the gun on himself.

Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards, meanwhile, reported that Lieutenant Brian Murphy, the first officer on the scene and a New Yorker, is walking again after being shot nine times.

Frank Rich on the National Circus: Harry Reid Is No Joe McCarthy

Last week, Harry Reid claimed on the Senate floor that Mitt Romney hadn't paid any taxes for ten years. The head of the RNC called Reid a "dirty liar." What's Reid trying to do here?It’s entirely possible that Reid’s incendiary charge has nothing to back it up but (at best) an unsubstantiated rumor. That’s why the GOP is likening him to Joe McCarthy.

But there are two important distinctions between Reid and McCarthy. (1) Reid isn’t accusing Romney of being a traitor or even of breaking the law; he’s accusing him of paying no taxes, which can be perfectly legal for the super-rich if loopholes and ingenious accounting schemes align in their favor. (2) While McCarthy’s victims couldn’t empirically and instantly prove that they were not subversives,

The Unnecessary Lies of the Obama and Romney Campaigns

Two of the most recent TV ads of the presidential campaign are also both two of the most dishonest ads of the presidential campaign. A Romney commercial makes it sound as if President Obama has decided to mail a welfare check to everyone in America. That is not the case:

[D]oes the memo do what the Romney campaign charges — that it guts welfare reform, gets rid of work requirements entirely, and would “just send you your welfare check”?
Not exactly. The memo states, for instance, that HHS “will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF."

Romney: Sick People May Live, If They Move to Massachusetts

You know the woman in the Priorities USA ad, the one who Mitt Romney sorta-kinda-indirectly-eventually killed? Her husband was laid off by a Bain-controlled firm in 2001, when Romney was technically in charge of the firm but not making day-to-day decisions. She still had health care through her job, but then she lost it, and — with both spouses having lost their insurance — got sick and died. Intel Dan calls the ad a lie. I’d call it an extremely tenuous chain of causality.
Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul offered up a different rebuttal. She would have had health insurance, if she had lived in Massachusetts:

“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Andrea Saul,

New York

New York is the most populous city in the United States of America^[11] and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world.^[12][13][14] The city is referred to as New York City or The City of New York^[15] to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part.^[16] A global power city,^[17] New York exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. The home of the United Nations Headquarters,^[18] New York is an important center for international diplomacy^[19] and has been described as the cultural capital of the world.^[20]

Located on one of the world's largest natural harbors,^[21] New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which comprises a state county.^[22] The five boroughs—The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten 

Egypt army declares success in Sinai crackdown

CAIRO: Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi sacked his spy chief and two generals on Wednesday after a deadly ambush on soldiers prompted the military to launch unprecedented air strikes on militants in the Sinai.

The government appeared set on regaining control of Sinai, where 16 soldiers were killed in a militant ambush on the weekend which exposed Egypt's weak grip on the lawless peninsula despite a bolstered military presence since last year.

NY firefighters tackle World Trade Center incident

NEW YORK: Dozens of New York firefighters rushed to the World Trade Center skyscraper early Wednesday after a member of the public mistook welding for a fire.

Initial reports from the New York Fire Department suggested a minor blaze on the 88th floor of One World Trade Center, the centerpiece in the project to replace the Twin Towers destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

A spokesman told AFP the fire was brought under control in less than an hour.

Mexico destroys 8 million chickens amid bird flu outbreak

MEXICO CITY: Eight million chickens have so far been slaughtered in Mexico and 66 million more were vaccinated in a bid to contain a bird flu outbreak in the west of the country, authorities said Tuesday.

The agriculture ministry said in a statement that during the vaccination process in the Los Altos region of Jalisco state, diseased chickens were identified, leading to the destruction of the flu-carrying fowl.

Food safety officials said the outbreak, which was first detected on June 20, is confined to Los Altos, which is an egg-producing area. Inspections in other parts of the country have not turned up any signs of the disease.

YouTube dropped from iPhone-iPad operating system

SAN FRANCISCO: Applications to let users watch YouTube videos will not be pre-installed on the next generation of iPhones, iPads and iPod devices, in another sign of mounting rivalry between Apple and Google.

People will still be able to watch YouTube videos on Apple's globally popular products by linking to the service through a Web browser, but will not have the viewer software architecture pre-loaded in the unit.

Google is expected to design a feature-rich YouTube application for Apple's online App Store as an alternative.

India can monitor BlackBerry without codes: report

MUMBAI: India has found a way to monitor BlackBerry corporate emails without asking developer Research in Motion (RIM) to hand over encryption codes, a report said Wednesday, which could help end a standoff with the Canadian company.

RIM and the Indian government are at loggerheads over access to Blackberry's secure corporate email service, with New Delhi fearing it could be utilised by extremists to plot attacks.

Multiple deadlines have been issued to the firm to comply with government requests for monitoring, but to no avail.

British invasion hits US online media

WASHINGTON: The British are coming, not by land or by sea, but on the Internet.

British media have been making inroads in the US market by invading online space, seizing readers who might otherwise visit websites of domestic outlets like Fox News or The New York Times.

And, even though US news organisations are widely respected around the world, the Brits are peeling away American readers.

Google merges online and offline worlds in Maps

SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Wednesday took another step in its quest to merge the Internet with the real world with Maps and put itself at the heart of mobile gadget lifestyles in the process.

The California technology titan added Poland and the Ukraine to the list of more than 200 countries and regions where people can correct, update, or enhance Google Maps with local insights or expertise.

"Google has been about searching the online world, but most people live in the offline world, the physical world," Google Earth and Maps vice president Brian McClendon told AFP.

Chanel News Asia-Olympics: Dutch shoot-out all black for New Zealand

LONDON: Defending champions the Netherlands won the Olympics' first ever hockey shoot-out Wednesday to beat dogged New Zealand and reach the women's final.

After the teams were locked at 2-2 at full-time and after extra-time, the Dutch dominated the shoot-out as they put away three strikes to New Zealand's one.

New Zealand, in the last four for the first time, were given a seventh-minute lead by their captain Kate Sharland from a penalty corner.

Royal Brunei

Royal Brunei

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Brunei

Brunei ⁱ/bruːˈnaɪ/, officially the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace^[8] (Malay: Negara Brunei Darussalam, Jawi: نڬارا بروني دارالسلام, Arabic: دولة بروناي، دار السلام‎), is a sovereign state located on the north coast of the island of Borneo, in Southeast Asia. Apart from its coastline with the South China Sea, it is completely surrounded by the state of Sarawak, Malaysia, and it is separated into two parts by the Sarawak district of Limbang. It is the only sovereign state completely on the island of Borneo, with the remainder of the island belonging to Malaysia and Indonesia. Brunei's population was 401,890 in July 2011.^[9]

Vatican Internet Sites

Congregations

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: http://www.doctrinafidei.va
Pontifical Commission for Latin America (Congregation for Bishops): www.americalatina.va
Pontifical Mission Societies (Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples): www.ppoomm.va
Museum of Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples): www.museopropagandafide.va
Historical Archive "de Propaganda Fide" (Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples):  www.archiviostoricopropaganda.va

Tribunals

Apostolic Penitentiary: www.penitenzieria.va

Pontifical Councils

Pontifical Council for the Laity: www.laici.va
Pontifical Council for the Family: www.familia.va
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace: www.justpax.va
Pontifical Council for Culture: www.cultura.va
Pontifical Council for Social Communications: www.pccs.va
The Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization
     Year of Faith: www.annusfidei.va

www.ekaristi.org

Misi Ekaristi Dot Org adalah untuk menyediakan sarana pastoral dan informasi Katolik didunia maya seiring dengan semangat Mirifica Kon.Vat II.  Milis ini kami sediakan sebagai ajang pembuka diskusi/ komunikasi/ pendalaman iman dan untuk menambahkan wawasan umat Katolik dan umat lainnya, dengan harapan dapat membawa persatuan  kehadapan-Nya Kami menyadari Kabar Gembira kedatangan Yesus Kristus untuk Keselamatan karena cinta kasih Allah Bapa yang tidak pilih kasih, kami meneruskan Injil (Kabar Gembira) dan dalam nama-Nya Mat28:19-20 kami dengan senang hati melayani anda.

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Welcome to Vatican II—Voice of the Church

The mission of this website is to promote and explain the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) which was the most significant event in the modern era of the Catholic Church. The Council was instrumental for renewal in the self-understanding of the Church, its inner life and its relationship to other Christian traditions, other religions and the world. Those participating in or who lived through the time of the Council felt a profound, exhilarating sense of renewal and virtually experienced a new Pentecost. Pope John XXIII set the tone when opening the Council:

The Church should never depart from the sacred treasure of truth inherited from the Fathers. But at the same time she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and the new forms of life introduced into the modern world.

Vatican.com

The Pope exercises ultimate legal, executive, and judicial power over the Holy See and the State of the Vatican City. Established in 1929 to administer properties belonging to the Holy See in Rome, the State of the Vatican City is recognised under world law and enters into global agreements. As the "central government" of the Roman Catholic Church, the Holy See has a legal nature that permits it to enter into treaties as the juridical equal of a state and to send and receive diplomatic delegates.

Pope Benedict XVI  Read More