Newspapers online. 07-09-2013 | ScienceTechn

Obama will meet privately with his cabinet on Monday morning about the plan and then make public remarks at 11:50 a.m. (1550 GMT).

The White House said the plan would build on progress made so far in opening up government data to entrepreneurs and in modernizing government services.

SoftBank and Sprint received final regulatory approval for their deal from the Federal Communications Commission last week.

The new center will specialize in developing mobile apps for Matrix clients in China and around the world. Matrix said it expects to launch additional centers across China.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The centre is a joint venture of Matrix and PTL Group, a Chinese based company owned by Israeli shareholders, serving as a partner to Matrix and John Bryce in China.

Zvi Shalgo, chief executive of PTL Group and chairman of the Israeli Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, said an increasing number of Israeli and international companies are opening development centers in China to leverage the knowledge of the target market as early as the development stage and customize products for the Chinese market.

"This cuts the time to market and improves the competitive advantage," he said.

Bolivia says the four countries banned Morales' plane from their airspace on suspicions he was transporting Snowden to Bolivia in defiance of Washington, which wants the fugitive returned home to face espionage charges.

Outraged, Bolivia is now calling the incident an act of "state terrorism" by the United States and its allies against Morales, an outspoken critic of U.S. policies.

"We are simply asking the government of Spain and the other governments, of course, to clarify and explain where that version of Mr. Snowden being on the presidential plane came from. Who spread that fallacy, that lie?" Communications Minister Amanda Davila said.

Davila said the government believes the United States knew that Snowden was not on the plane and simply wanted to intimidate Morales, who has since offered unconditional asylum to Snowden.

"As experts in international law and human rights have said, this is a massive attack," she said. "It's the first case of state terrorism against a president, against a nation, against a people. That's what we're talking about now."

The conservative National Action Party (PAN) won a tight race for governor in its stronghold of Baja California, according to preliminary results on Monday.

The border state was the most closely watched contest as nearly half of Mexico's 31 states voted for a mix of local parliaments and mayors' offices.

The PAN had accused Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of trying to steal the election. So a PRI victory there could have destabilized the "Pact for Mexico" that the president made with the opposition to help strengthen his hand in Congress, where he lacks a majority.

But an initial vote count for the only state governor's office up for grabs showed the PAN won the Baja California race, about 3 percentage points ahead of the PRI.

By defusing tensions, the PAN's triumph is probably more useful to Pena Nieto than a win for his own party would have been, and helps foster consensus on the key planks of his legislative program: opening up state oil monopoly Pemex to more private investment and a reform to bolster tax revenues.

The news pushed up the peso more than 1 percent against the dollar in early trading.

Elsewhere in Mexico, the PRI notched up some notable victories in mayoral elections, allowing both sides to claim success at the ballot box.

"The outcome allows both the PAN and the PRI to say they had good results," said Jorge Buendia, head of polling firm Buendia & Laredo. By contrast, the main leftist group, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), had fared less well, he noted.

With 97 percent of the polling booths reporting in Baja California, the PAN gubernatorial ticket had won 47.2 percent of the vote against 44.2 percent for the PRI candidate, initial results from the local electoral authority showed.

PAN BLUES

Since it lost the Mexican presidency last year, the PAN has been bogged down in infighting that has rattled the stability of the pact Pena Nieto struck in December.

PAN chairman Gustavo Madero, whose leadership has been under attack, said the party would still have to evaluate its commitment to the pact after an election campaign he said was marred by attempts by the PRI to steal and buy votes.

But he said the results had vindicated the PAN. "We are still convinced that Mexico needs reforms," Madero told Mexican radio, referring to the energy and tax plans.

Greeted by a mass of fans as he arrived at UMP headquarters, Sarkozy called for donations to prop up the party after France's top legal body ruled last week that it overshot spending limits on his failed 2012 re-election campaign and must repay 11 million euros ($14.15 million) in state subsidies.

While Sarkozy denied the meeting marked the start of his political comeback, the former president has made clear that he is mulling a re-election bid for 2017 and opinion polls show more than half of UMP supporters want him to do so.

Many on the right see Sarkozy as the only person who can reunite a party that fractured into two feuding camps, one with a hardline stance on immigration and the other more moderate, after his May 2012 defeat to Socialist Francois Hollande.

"This is not my political comeback," Sarkozy tweeted as the meeting began - his first statement on Twitter since his election defeat. "When I return to the podium it will be to speak to the French people about France."

Recent surveys by pollster Ifop show only 40 percent of voters want Sarkozy back as president, but among UMP supporters 58 percent want him to run in 2017, leagues ahead of his closest rival and former prime minister, Francois Fillon, at 16 percent.

Respondents gave the UMP's president, Jean-Francois Cope, a Sarkozy ally who says he will only run if his mentor does not, just 10 percent support. Other potential candidates had single-digit support.

Cope told Monday's meeting that since the constitutional council's ruling on Thursday, some 4,000 people had joined the UMP and it had raised 2.3 million euros in donations out of the 11 million it needs to raise before end-July.

Sarkozy only fanned speculation he is plotting his return by telling the audience that it was not the moment to talk about the next election. "The day that I make a comeback, I'll make it known," he said.

Any comeback will hinge, however, on the outcome of a rash of legal cases involving people close to him, including allegations of illicit campaign financing and political rigging in an arbitration payout to a high-profile businessman.

Spitzer, a 54-year-old Democrat, has set his eye on a less prestigious job - New York City comptroller, a post akin to chief financial officer. He said he wanted to reinvent the position by taking a more activist role, similar to his transformation of the state attorney generalship.

He used that office as a springboard for a successful 2006 run for governor. But his time in Albany was cut short after he was identified as a client of a prostitution ring, a revelation that prompted him to step down from office in 2008.

In launching a new bid for office, Spitzer is betting that New York City voters are ready to forgive sexual indiscretions.

His run will not be the only such test this year. Former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner, who resigned two years ago after admitting that he had sent lewd pictures of himself over Twitter and lied repeatedly about doing so, is running for mayor of New York.

Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor who specializes in politics, said there was a difference between the two scandals.

"Weiner's scandal involved sending a picture, while Spitzer's was breaking the law, all from the guy who was supposed to uphold the law," he said. "We'll see if the public sees the difference."

Weiner, who announced his candidacy in May, quickly rose in recent polls to near the front of a pack of candidates.

"Combined with Anthony Weiner, Spitzer gives the Democrats an image problem," said Kenneth Sherill, professor of political science at Hunter College in New York. "While either one of them might have saved himself, we might see the spectacle of two drowning men pulling one another down."

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said members and supporters of the Women of the Wall group were escorted by police to a spot a short distance from the Western Wall "to make sure there would be no incidents".

A spokeswoman for the movement, which is challenging the Orthodox monopoly over rites at the Western Wall, called the incident a setback after a court decided in April the women could legally don prayer shawls that Orthodox ritual says are meant for men only.

Prayer rites at the site, revered by Jews as a perimeter wall of the Biblical Temple, are part of a long struggle between Israel's secular majority and ultra-Orthodox minority over lifestyle in the Jewish state, where institutions such as marriage, divorce and burial are controlled by rabbis.

Women pray at a separate section, set apart from men. Women of the Wall want to be able to practice the rituals reserved by Orthodox law for men - such as wearing prayer shawls and reading out loud from the Torah, or holy scriptures - in their section.

"It's the first time in 25 years we could not reach the plaza," of the wall, Shira Pruce, a group spokeswoman said. "They (police) held up back. It's our right to go there."

The 300 activists instead prayed some 50 meters (yards) from the Western Wall. Some of the ultra-Orthodox protesters, who included women, threw eggs at the group, and cursed them and police. Rosenfeld said four of the ultra-Orthodox demonstrators were arrested.

Tensions were running high at the Western Wall, a day after the Israeli cabinet approved a draft law to abolish wholesale military draft exemptions for Jewish seminary students.

"We hope soldiers will die," one ultra-Orthodox youth shouted at a member of the paramilitary border police trying to block him from entering the Western Wall plaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked former cabinet minister and Jewish leader Natan Sharansky to seek a compromise to permit the Women of the Wall to hold prayers without exacerbating tensions with the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Sharansky has proposed a formula to widen a separate zone at the Western Wall once designated for egalitarian prayer, a suggestion neither side nor the government has yet embraced.

In a way, it doesn't matter which conclusion one draws. The fact is that, as I argued two weeks ago, the metadata is what the spooks want for the simple reason that it's machine-readable and therefore searchable. It's what makes comprehensive internet-scale surveillance possible.

Why hasn't there been greater public outrage about the cynicism of the "just metadata" mantra?

One explanation is that most people imagine that metadata isn't really very revealing and so they're not unduly bothered by what NSA and its overseas franchises are doing. If that is indeed what they believe, then my humble suggestion is that they think again.

We already know how detailed an account of an individual's daily life can be constructed from metadata extracted from a mobile phone. What people may not realise is how informative the metadata extracted from their email logs can be.

In an attempt to illustrate this, MIT researcher Ethan Zuckerman published an extraordinary blog post last Wednesday. Entitled "Me and my metadata", it explains what happened when two of his students wrote a program to analyse his Gmail account and create from the metadata therein a visualisation of his social network (and of his private life), which he then publishes and discusses in detail. En passant, it's worth saying that this is a remarkably public-spirited thing to do; not many researchers would have Zuckerman's courage.

"The largest node in the graph, the person I exchange the most email with, is my wife, Rachel," he writes. "I find this reassuring, but [the researchers] have told me that people's romantic partners are rarely their largest node.

The craft set off at 04:56 (08:56 GMT) on Saturday from Washington DC, and landed about 23:15 (03:45 GMT Sunday).

A Statue of Liberty fly-pass had to be cancelled, due to a 2.5metre (8ft) tear in the fabric of the left wing.

The Across America transcontinental bid began in San Francisco in early May - at a top speed of 70km/h (45mph).

It included stopovers in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas, and St Louis, Missouri.

Neither the pilot nor the plane appeared to be in any danger because of the wing tear, officials said.

The Solar Impulse HB-SIA has the same wingspan as an Airbus A340 but at a weight of just 1.6 tonnes. By comparison, a fully laden A340 weighs about 370 tonnes.

The plane's wing and stabiliser are covered with nearly 12,000 solar cells, which drive its four propellers and charge the plane's 400kg of lithium-ion batteries for night-time flying.

The project has been billed as the first time that a solar-powered plane capable of flying day and night has attempted a journey across the US.

Andre Borschberg and his fellow pilot Bertrand Piccard have been alternating flying duties on the single-seat craft, with each leg of the trip designed to be under 24 hours in length. The prior leg was complicated by high winds and air traffic, so it was re-routed via Cincinnati at the last minute in order to stay under this limit.

"It was difficult to find all these 'weather windows' in the States - especially this last one," Mr Borschberg told BBC News prior to the flight.

"We had so much to organise to make it feasible - to integrate an experimental airplane like Solar Impulse in the busiest air traffic in the world, flying from Washington to Kennedy (airport) was extremely hard."

The Across America project is the last outing for the HB-SIA prototype craft.

Mr Piccard's and Mr Borschberg's intention is to finish a larger, two-seat plane, the HB-SIB, and fly it around the world in the spring of 2015.

That, Mr Borschberg said, would be "many times more complex than what we did here in the US".

"Working in one country with one language makes it of course easier than working internationally on different continents with all the logistics," he said. "The unpredictable side of the project requires a lot of preparation."

The HB-SIA craft carried out the first inter-continental flight in 2012 and holds the world record for the longest manned solar-powered flight at 26 hours.

That was the incendiary view being championed by an angel investor called Sveinn Valfells last week, as investors, computer programmers and users of the online currency gathered at Canary Wharf to attend the Bitcoin London conference. Despite the unorthodoxy of Valfells' points, he was actually making his argument from a position of some kind of strength in that he is a) Icelandic, and b) comes from a family with a history of running unofficial currencies.

"My grandfather co-founded a construction company in 1947 called Steypustodin – "the ready-mix factory" – and my father and his cousins were running the company in the 1970s and 1980s, a time of double-digit, and then triple-digit, inflation," he said. "In Iceland, people liked to build their own houses at the time, but they couldn't put the money they were saving to build their homes into the bank, because it disappeared. Somebody had the idea to buy certificates in building materials in advance, and those certificates were denominated in cubic metres of concrete.

"It became very popular on payday, and our company would issue the certificates. One day the company got a call from the inland revenue asking if we had issued these vouchers. We confirmed it, but asked why they wanted to know. The official said somebody was trying to use the vouchers to pay his taxes."

That the Icelandic revenue eventually accepted the vouchers shows, Valfells argued, that there are moments in history when people are keen to try out innovative alternative currencies.

This fascinating view was aired during a week in which the Bitcoin currency started to attract more mainstream publicity, with support from a pair of high- profile backers.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the former Olympic rowing twins who famously alleged that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their website idea, revealed plans to float an investment fund based on the digital currency. Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust would, they said, initially sell $20m of shares, with each share worth a fraction of a Bitcoin. The shares are aimed at investors looking for a "cost-effective and convenient means to gain exposure to Bitcoins", according to a filing with US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Murray, who was beaten in last year's final by Roger Federer, triumphed 6-4 7-5 6-4 against six-time grand slam winner Djokovic. The World No.2 won Olympic gold on Centre Court last year before going on to win the 2012 U.S. Open.

Murray, 26, is the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936. Serving for the match at 5-4 in a dramatic third set, Murray wasted three match points before being forced to stave off three break points. But the home favorite finally, at the fourth time of asking, secured the point to ensure his place in Wimbledon history.

"It feels slightly different to last year," Murray told fans on Centre Court. "Last year was one of the toughest moments of my career, so to manage to win the tournament today.

"It was an unbelievably tough match, so many long games. "My head was everywhere in that last game, he was hitting some unbelievable shots and I think that is why at the end of the match I almost didn't know what had happened.