Latest news about Home And Garden and News And Events and more

English singer songwriter Amy Winehouse missed out on the three-day Rock En Seine festival in Paris, as she was ill and unable to travel.

Winehouse, who was supposed to be the star performer at the festival, was confined to her house in London.

However, she is still expected to perform at the Bestival festival on Isle of Wight on September 6.

“Amy Winehouse was regrettably unable to perform at the Rock En Seine show in Paris tonight, Friday August 29, due to illness,” the Daily Telegraph quoted her spokesman as saying.

“She was taken ill at her house and wasn”t able to travel to France for the concert,” he said.

The Rehab singer has not been in the best of health, having spent a stint in rehab before emerging for a well-received performance at the Grammys in February.

Winehouse had in June developed the chronic lung disease emphysema and was rushed to the hospital, and then just last month she had to be taken back to the hospital after a reaction to medication.

India’s leading coal producer South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL) has curtailed coal supply to private parties in nine states to help the state-run power plants tide over the present coal supply crisis, a company official said Saturday.

“Following the order of the union government, SECL has curtailed coal supplies to the private parties up to 30 percent to ensure reserves for the state-run power plants that are reeling under severe coal crises,” SECL spokesperson Alok Sinha told IANS.

According to Sinha, the crisis, coupled with delay in shipping of imported coal, is temporary and the company will soon restore normal supply to the private parties.

SECL, the highest profit making subsidiary of Coal India Ltd, has an annual production of about 93.79 million tonnes from its 93 mines - 72 underground, 20 open cast and one mixed mine spread out in five districts of Chhattisgarh and three of Madhya Pradesh.

Industries in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh are getting coal from SECL.

Chhattisgarh’s sponge iron industry, which is already facing a severe iron ore supply crisis, will be hit hard by the SECL decision. Nearly 36 percent of the total coal produced by the SECL is going to Chhattisgarh.

“The sponge iron industry in Chhattisgarh is yet to overcome iron ore shortage and now we have to deal with coal crisis. If SECL continues to curtail the supply, the majority of state’s 125 sponge units will have to be closed down by Sep 15,” Chhattisgarh Sponge Iron Manufacturers Association president Anil Nachrani said.

The 125 sponge iron units in the state contribute about 35 percent of the country’s total annual sponge iron output of nearly 20 million tonnes.

Sponge iron is an alternative to steel scrap and is used as a raw material for manufacturing steel products.

Comcast Corp., the nation’s second-largest Internet service provider, Thursday said it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.

On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.

Comcast has already reserved the right to cut off subscribers who use too much bandwidth each month, without specifying exactly what constitutes excessive use.

“We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive,” the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Customers who go over the limit are contacted by the company and asked to curb their usage.

“We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily,” the company said.

Comcast floated the idea of a 250 gigabyte cap in May and mentioned then that it might charge users $15 for every 10 gigabytes they go over, but the overage fee was missing in Thursday’s announcement.

Curbing the top users is necessary to keep the network fast and responsive for other users, Comcast has said.

Comcast stressed that the bandwidth cap is far above the median monthly usage of its customers, which 2 to 3 gigabytes.

Very few subscribers use more than 250 gigabytes, it said. A user could download 125 standard-definition movies, about four per day, before hitting the limit.

The cap is also above those of some other ISPs. Cox Communications‘ monthly caps vary from 5 gigabytes to 75 gigabytes depending the subscriber’s plan. Time Warner Cable Inc. is testing caps between 5 gigabytes and 40 gigabytes in one market. Frontier Communications Co., a phone company, plans to start charging extra for use of more than 5 gigabytes per month.

Having banned from its App Store an application that turned an iPhone 3G into a wireless modem, is Apple ready to enable just such an application itself?

That’s the rumor based on an e-mail response allegedly from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to an inquiring user. The questioner forwarded the response to the Gizmodo blog, which posted the question and Jobs’ purported response.

The question: Why, since AT&T offers a plan by which users can pay an extra $30 to tether their laptops to their BlackBerry, don’t Apple and AT&T offer a similar plan for iPhone 3G users?

The response: “We agree, and are discussing it with ATT.” The message is signed “Steve” and includes the familiar tag, “Sent from my iPhone.”

E-Mail Legit?

Gizmodo thinks the response is “legitimate-looking,” but concedes “that ‘Sent from my iPhone’ kicker either makes this e-mail completely legitimate or illegitimate.” On the other hand, Wired News engaged in a little grammatical sleuthing, noting that a message, purportedly from Jobs, posted on the MacRumors site contained a similar construction.

“We are working on some bugs which affect around two percent of the iPhones shipped, and hope to have a software update soon,” the message read. Wired points out that both messages incorrectly use a comma before the “and.” (A comma is appropriate to separate independent clauses; in both cases the phrases after the comma are dependent clauses.)

“I don’t mean to draw a conclusion based on this nitpicky observation, but I just thought it’d be interesting to point out,” Wired writer Brian Chen pointed out.

AT&T Terms of Service

Any tethering application would require a change to AT&T’s terms of service. Those terms state: “Furthermore, plans (unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to-computer accessories, Bluetooth or any other wireless technology) to personal computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose.”

Software company Nullriver had released an application for tethering a laptop to an iPhone 3G, but it was banned from the App Store by Apple. The application was initially approved but then pulled for “technical review,” according to a note Nullriver CEO Adam Dann received from Apple.

It now appears that Apple pulled the application after AT&T complained, blogged Jason O’Grady on ZDNet. “This new iPhone tethering rumor confirms that Apple pulled NetShare from the App Store at the behest of AT&T who [sic] is trying to protect a huge potential revenue stream,” O’Grady said.

He added this request of Jobs: “Don’t insult us by requiring the stupid, proprietary and expensive dock cable to tether. Tethering should be available via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.”

A new study says that 13 percent of American seniors suffer mistreatment from various forms of abuse.

The University of Chicago researchers said the chief forms were verbal abuse (9 percent), being taken advantage of financially (3.5 percent), and physical abuse (0.2 percent). The team also found that seniors with physical impairments were most likely to suffer verbal abuse.

“Older people with any physical vulnerability are about 13 percent more likely than those without one to report verbal mistreatment, but are not more likely to report financial mistreatment,” study co-author Linda Waite, a professor of sociology, said in a university news release.

The analysis of national survey data from 3,005 community-dwelling adults, ages 57 to 85, also found that adults in their late 50s and 60s are more likely to report verbal or financial mistreatment than those who are older.

“Perhaps the respondents are including fairly routine arguments, perhaps about money, with their spouse, sibling or child in their reports, or perhaps older adults are more reticent to report negative behavior,” lead author Edward Laumann, a professor of sociology, said in the news release.

Women were twice as likely as men to report verbal abuse; Hispanics were about half as likely as whites to report verbal abuse and 78 percent less likely to report financial mistreatment; and blacks were 77 percent more likely than whites to report financial mistreatment.

Of those who reported verbal abuse, 26 percent said their spouse or romantic partner was responsible, 15 percent said it was their children, and the remainder of respondents said friends, neighbors, co-workers or bosses were responsible. Of the respondents who reported financial abuse, 57 percent said a relative other than a spouse, parent or child was taking advantage of them.

The study was published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

“The population of this country is aging, and people now live with chronic diseases longer. So, it’s important to understand, from a health perspective, how people are being treated as they age,” Laumann said.

A security flaw in Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) iPhone allows unauthorized users to gain easy access to private contacts and e-mails even when the device is locked, but the company said a fix is on the way.

Popular technology blog Gizmodo and an online forum run by the Mac Rumors site showed that it took only three taps to gain access to locked iPhones, which run the latest 2.02 iPhone software.

A spokeswoman said in an e-mail that Apple was aware of the problem and was readying a software update to fix it. In the meantime, she recommended users set the iPhone’s “Home” button to open up the phone’s iPod music collection rather than the phone’s “Favorites” menu.

The spokeswoman did not say when the software update would be made available.

The flaw could be seen as a momentary setback in Apple’s ambitious plans to compete against Research In Motion (RIM.TO), whose BlackBerry smartphone has become a standard issue device in corporate businesses around the globe.

Earlier in August, technology research firm Gartner issued a report that said iPhone’s software had met Gartner’s minimum requirements for business support, although some issues persisted. The author of the report, Ken Dulaney, was not immediately reachable.

Last week, Apple released a software update for the iPhone that reportedly helped fix problems connecting to faster third-generation (3G) wireless networks, after receiving a flurry of online complaints from customers around the world.

Apple, which started selling the new 3G iPhone on July 11, has said it expected to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008.

Tropical Storm Gustav homed in on Jamaica Thursday after claiming some two dozen lives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with officials here opening emergency shelters and urging coastal residents to head to higher ground.

“Gustav could become a hurricane before moving over Jamaica,” the US-based National Hurricane Center said in a statement, after the government of Jamaica issued a hurricane warning for island.

In addition to issuing dire warnings to inhabitants of flood-prone areas, officials here suspended government-run bus service in anticipation of the storm’s arrival. Motorists began to clear the roads of traffic while businesses shuttered and boarded up their storefronts.

Meanwhile, the southern US state of Louisiana also was battening down, amid warnings that hurricane-scarred Gulf coast could be struck early next week by Gustav, the worst storm since Katrina leveled the region almost exactly three years ago.

The storm at 1500 GMT was packing maximum sustained winds of 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour and was expected to become more powerful “during the next couple of days,” the NHC said.

The hurricane center said Gustav was centered about 45 miles (75 kilometers) east of Kingston, moving west at about five miles (seven kilometers) per hour and is expected to reach Jamaica sometime during the day Thursday, before moving on to the tiny British overseas territory Cayman Islands Friday.

Gustav struck the island of Hispaniola, shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as a Category One hurricane on Tuesday.

The storm is expected to produce rainfall of as much as 25 inches in some areas, which was likely to produce life-threatening mudslides, flash floods and tidal flooding of as much as three feet (one meter) above normal levels.

Cuba is also on track to be hit by the storm, especially the western side of the island according to the most recent forecasts.

Forecasts have it passing south of Jamaica as a tropical storm and reaching Grand Cayman Island as a hurricane later in the week before passing between Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and Cuba’s western tip, the center said.

News that Gustav could reach the Gulf of Mexico early next week worried industry analysts.

“Even if the damage from the approaching storm is fractional, it could still be significant,” said Mike Fitzpatrick, an oil industry analyst at firm MF Global.

“Sparse capacity means that every barrel of oil lost to the marketplace will be felt, particularly as the northern hemisphere’s winter is just around the corner,” he said.

With memories of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 still fresh, US federal and Louisiana state authorities prepared for the worse to avoid repeating the slow disaster response of three years ago.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Wednesday and announced plans to begin evacuating coastal areas ahead of the storm.

“As long as there is a chance that we’ll be in this storm, I’ll be here in Louisiana,” said Jindal, warning he may miss next week’s Republican National Convention to name John McCain the party’s presidential nominee.

The US Department of Homeland Security urged Gulf Coast residents to get ready for the storm.

“Regardless of its predicted path, it is important for citizens in the Gulf Coast region to listen to what their local officials are advising over the course of the next few days and to take these simple steps to prepare,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who was criticized for his administration’s botched response to Katrina, made plans to leave the Democratic National Convention early so he could also help the city prepare for the storm.

The NHC also announced that a new tropical storm, Hanna, is brewing in the Atlantic, the eighth so far this hurricane season.

Jamaicans deserted the streets and government offices closed as a strengthening Tropical Storm Gustav took aim at the island on Thursday on a path toward the Gulf of Mexico oil fields as a powerful hurricane.

As Gustav churned through the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Hanna formed in the Atlantic Ocean with 40 mph (65 kph) winds and a track that could take it toward the Bahamas and Florida next week, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Energy companies prepared for a direct hit in the heart of the U.S. Gulf oilpatch and crude futures rose more than $2 at one point to $120.50 a barrel before falling back to as low as $114.08.

Energy traders were anxiously watching Gustav’s track, which could take it deep into a concentration of oil and natural gas platforms off Louisiana and Texas.

The area, which provides the United States with a quarter of its crude oil and 15 percent of its natural gas, was battered in 2005 by two major hurricanes, Katrina and Rita.

The seventh storm of what experts expect to be an unusually busy Atlantic hurricane season was 45 miles east of Kingston, Jamaica, by 11 a.m. EDT and its top sustained winds had risen again to 70 mph (110 kph), just short of the 74 mph (119 kph) hurricane threshold.

New Orleans, the southern U.S. city devastated by Katrina three years ago, remained near the middle of the Miami-based hurricane center’s range of possible landfall locations on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal put New Orleans residents on alert for possible evacuations from Friday, the third anniversary of Katrina’s strike.

In Jamaica, post offices, schools and tax offices shut their doors and authorities ordered nonessential workers to stay home as Gustav neared after taking an unexpected jog south toward the capital and the southern coast.

“It was not raining heavily, so I decided to go out to work, but my employer said that I should go back and prepare for Gustav just in case it develops into a hurricane,” said Trevor Bryan, a Kingston welder.

Emergency officials on the lush, mountainous island urged residents to avoid gullies and flooded waterways, evacuate low-lying areas and wrap important documents in plastic to protect them from water.

REGAINING STRENGTH

Gustav barged ashore as a hurricane in Haiti on Tuesday and its torrential rains killed at least 23 people there and in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

The storm slowed over Haiti’s mountains but began to strengthen quickly on Thursday.

“It is expected that Gustav will be a powerful hurricane as it moves into the southern Gulf of Mexico on Sunday,” the hurricane center said.

Gustav is the first serious Atlantic storm since the devastating 2005 hurricane season to threaten New Orleans and the Gulf oil installations.

Katrina and Rita slashed Gulf oil production that year when they swept through as Category 5 storms on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, damaging platforms and severing pipelines.

Energy companies shut down production and pulled workers from offshore rigs on Thursday. The International Energy Agency said member nations were prepared to release strategic oil stocks if Gustav deals a blow similar to Katrina and Rita.

Forecasters said Gustav could graze the southern coast of Jamaica as a hurricane, then threaten the wealthy Cayman Islands offshore financial center and western Cuba before entering the Gulf between Cuba and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Energy traders also warily watched newborn Hanna, 305 miles

northeast of the northern Leeward Islands. The storm was moving to the west-northwest at 12 mph (19 kph) and was expected to become a hurricane by Sunday.

Some computer models indicated Hanna would eventually turn to the west or even southwest and projected it would become an “intense” or “major” Category 3 or higher storm that could take aim at Florida or the Caribbean islands.

Katrina came ashore near New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane and flooded the city after swamping its protective levees. The hurricane killed 1,500 people along the U.S. Gulf Coast and caused at least $80 billion in damage.

National Guard troops stand ready, batteries and water bottles are selling briskly, and one small-town mayor has spent a sleepless night worrying. The New Orleans area is skittishly watching as a storm marches across the Caribbean on the eve of Hurricane Katrina’s third anniversary.

With forecasters warning that a strengthening Gustav could slam into the Gulf Coast as a major hurricane early next week, a New Orleans still recovering from Hurricane Katrina’s devastating hit drew up evacuation plans.

“I’m panicking,” said Evelyn Fuselier of Chalmette, whose home was submerged in 14 feet of floodwater when Katrina hit. Fuselier said she’s been back home only a year and nervously watched as Gustav swirled toward the Gulf of Mexico. “I keep thinking, ‘Did the Corps fix the levees?,’ ‘Is my house going to flood again?’ … ‘Am I going to have to go through all this again?’”

Taking no chances, city officials began preliminary planning to evacuate and lock down the city in hopes of avoiding the catastrophe that followed Katrina in 2005.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin left the Democratic National Convention in Denver to return home for the preparations. Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency to lay the groundwork for federal assistance, and put 3,000 National Guard troops on standby.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is expected to meet with Jindal in Baton Rouge on Thursday and with Nagin in New Orleans later in the day, according to a department spokesman.

A day after stalling off Haiti’s coast, Gustav was closing in on Jamaica, with the center about 45 miles east of Kingston around 11 a.m. EDT Thursday. Gaining strength over warm Caribbean waters, Gustav was expected to again become a hurricane later Thursday, according to the National Hurricane Center. It said maximum sustained winds rose from about 50 mph to near 70 mph overnight.

Meanwhile, a new tropical storm, Hanna, formed farther east in the Atlantic.

Forecasters said Wednesday that Gustav could strengthen to a Category 3 hurricane with winds of 111 mph or higher in coming days before hitting somewhere between the Florida Panhandle and Texas.

If a Category 3 or stronger hurricane comes within 60 hours of the city, New Orleans plans to institute a mandatory evacuation order. Unlike Katrina, there will be no massive shelter at the Superdome, a plan designed to encourage residents to leave. Instead, the state has arranged for buses and trains to take people to safety.

It was unclear what would happen to stragglers. Jerry Sneed, the city’s emergency preparedness director, said officials are ready to move about 30,000 people. Nearly 8,000 people had signed up for transportation help by late Wednesday.

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, its storm surge blasting through the levees that protect the city. Eighty percent of the city was flooded. After the destruction, many people never returned, and the city’s population, around 310,000 people, is roughly two-thirds what it was before the storm, though estimates vary wildly.

The Army Corps of Engineers has since spent billions of dollars to improve the levee system, but because of two quiet hurricane seasons, the flood walls have never been tested. Floodgates have been installed on drainage canals to stop any storm surge from entering the city, and levees have been raised and strengthened with concrete in many places.

Robert Turner Jr., the regional levee director, said the levee system can handle a storm with the likelihood of occurring every 30 years, what the corps calls a 30-year storm. By comparison, Katrina was a 396-year storm.

Gustav formed Monday and roared ashore Tuesday as a Category 1 hurricane near the southern Haitian city of Jacmel with top winds near 90 mph, toppling palm trees and flooding the city’s Victorian buildings.

The storm triggered flooding and landslides that killed 23 people in the Caribbean. It weakened into a tropical storm and appeared headed for Jamaica, though it has begun to grow stronger again by drawing energy from warm, open water.

Scientists cautioned that the storm’s track and intensity were difficult to predict days in advance.

But in southern Louisiana, there was little else to do except prepare as if it were Katrina.

In Grand Isle, tractor loads of dirt and mud were being hauled in to fill portions of the levee system damaged by Katrina, said Grand Isle Mayor David Camardelle. The coastal community south of New Orleans historically is one of the first to evacuate when tropical weather threatens.

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” Camardelle said. “We just came back from so much.”

Emergency preparations also were under way along Mississippi’s coast. The eye of Hurricane Katrina pushed ashore near the small towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, Miss., and along the 70-mile coastline, roughly 65,000 homes were destroyed and thousands of businesses and casino barges were wiped out. Up to 5,000 temporary housing units are still in use, and emergency officials say the agency could decide as early as Thursday whether residents of those temporary homes should evacuate.

Meanwhile, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said state agencies were keeping a close watch on Gustav as he urged his state’s Gulf coast residents to review personal emergency plans and enter storm-preparation mode.

More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming “tipping point” in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes: Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is at its second lowest level in about 30 years.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles set last September.

With about three weeks left in the Arctic summer, this year could wind up breaking that previous record, scientists said.

Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But over the years, more of the ice is lost to the sea with less of it recovered in winter. While ice reflects the sun’s heat, the open ocean absorbs more heat and the melting accelerates warming in other parts of the world.

Sea ice also serves as primary habitat for threatened polar bears.

“We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said senior scientist Mark Serreze at the data center in Boulder, Colo. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.”

Within “five to less than 10 years,” the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.

“It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody’s really taken into account that change yet,” he said.

Five climate scientists, four of them specialists on the Arctic, told The Associated Press that it is fair to call what is happening in the Arctic a “tipping point.” NASA scientist James Hansen, who sounded the alarm about global warming 20 years ago before Congress, said the sea ice melt “is the best current example” of that.

Last year was an unusual year when wind currents and other weather conditions coincided with global warming to worsen sea ice melt, Serreze said. Scientists wondered if last year was an unusual event or the start of a new and disturbing trend.

This year’s results suggest the latter because the ice had recovered a bit more than usual thanks to a somewhat cooler winter, Serreze said. Then this month, when the melting rate usually slows, it sped up instead, he said.

The most recent ice retreat primarily reflects melt in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast and the East Siberian Sea off the coast of eastern Russia, according to the center.

The Chukchi Sea is home to one of two populations of Alaska polar bears.

Federal observers flying for a whale survey on Aug. 16 spotted nine polar bears swimming in open ocean in the Chukchi. The bears were 15 to 65 miles off the Alaska shore. Some were swimming north, apparently trying to reach the polar ice edge, which on that day was 400 miles away.

Polar bears are powerful swimmers and have been recorded on swims of 100 miles but the ordeal can leave them exhausted and susceptible to drowning.

And the melt in sea ice has kicked in another effect, long predicted, called “Arctic amplification,” Serreze said.

That’s when the warming up north is increased in a feedback mechanism and the effects spill southward starting in autumn, he said. Over the last few years, the bigger melt has meant more warm water that releases more heat into the air during fall cooling, making the atmosphere warmer than normal.

On top of that, researchers were investigating “alarming” reports in the last few days of the release of methane from long frozen Arctic waters, possibly from the warming of the sea, said Greenpeace climate scientist Bill Hare, who was attending a climate conference in Ghana. Giant burps of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, is a long feared effect of warming in the Arctic that would accelerate warming even more, according to scientists.

Overall, the picture of what’s happening in the Arctic is getting worse, said Bob Corell, who headed a multinational scientific assessment of Arctic conditions a few years ago: “We’re moving beyond a point of no return.”