Daily Archives: March 13, 2014

Ο εικονικός γάμος πραγματοποιήθηκε στο σπίτι του πατέρα του κοριτσιού, ο οποίος είχε προσηλυτιστεί στο Ισλάμ πριν από 18 χρόνια.

Σε κέντρο κράτησης μεταναστών του Σίδνεϊ μεταφέρθηκε 26χρονος Λιβανέζος που κατηγορείται ότι παντρεύτηκε 12χρονο κορίτσι στην Αυστραλία.  Στο ίδιο κέντρο κρατείται και ο μουσουλμάνος θρησκευτικός ηγέτης που κατηγορείται για τον παράνομο γάμο του 12χρονου κοριτσιού με τον 26χρονο, ο οποίος είχε επισκεφθεί την Αυστραλία από το Λίβανο με φοιτητική βίζα.

Ο εικονικός γάμος πραγματοποιήθηκε στο σπίτι του πατέρα του κοριτσιού, ο οποίος είχε προσηλυτιστεί στο Ισλάμ πριν από 18 χρόνια. Ο 35χρονος θρησκευτικός ηγέτης κατηγορείται ότι τέλεσε τον παράνομο γάμο. Ο Λιβανέζος φοιτητής αντιμετωπίζει 25 κατηγορίες για σεξουαλική συνουσία με ανήλικο παιδί. Ο πατέρας του 12χρονου παιδιού δήλωσε ότι κατά την αντίληψή του για το Κοράνι, ο μόνος τρόπος που το ζευγάρι θα μπορούσε να βρίσκεται ταυτόχρονα στο ίδιο δωμάτιο ήταν εάν παντρεύονταν. Είπε, επίσης, ότι δεν «ήθελε να σταθεί εμπόδιο στην ευτυχία της κόρης του».

Ο παράνομος γάμος ήρθε στην επιφάνεια όταν ο 26χρονος προσπάθησε να γράψει το κορίτσι σε ένα σχολείο κοντά στο σπίτι όπου διέμεναν μαζί στο Σίδνεϊ.

Πηγή: Νέος Κόσμος

Olympia Valance

Greek Australian Olympia to follow in her half sister Holly Valance’s footsteps.

Greek Australian Olympia Valance, the half-sister of Holly Valance is following in her footsteps and will be the latest person to move into Ramsay Street after she scored a role of the famous Australian soapie Neighbours.

Valance is set to play fiery Paige Novak on the hit show. In her first acting role, Valance had to go through a long daunting audition process before securing the part. Already a successful model, the 21-year-old is no stranger to Neighbours after visiting the set as a child to see Holly in action.

Holly joined Neighbours in 1999 as Felicity ‘Flick’ Scully and left the series in 2002 to pursue a music career.

Valance will appear on Australian television on June 2 when her character Paige will make her debut in Ramsay Street.

source: Neos Kosmos

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is determined to distribute the bulk of a projected primary surplus to vulnerable social groups as promised, Kathimerini understands, despite reports that the troika has shifted its stance on the matter, putting the government on a possible collision course with the foreign inspectors as negotiations resume.

According to sources, Samaras is determined to stick to his guns and give 70 percent of the primary surplus for 2013 – the size of which will not be determined until April – to low-income pensioners and members of the police and armed forces, as he has repeatedly promised. The troika is understood to object to this plan, proposing instead that the handouts be drawn from the amount by which Greece overshoots its primary surplus target for 2014, which is 2.9 billion euros. The alleged shift has irked the government, which is preparing for local and regional authority elections in May and cannot afford to be seen to be breaking promises.

The foreign creditors’ insistence on a deal in negotiations by Sunday has also annoyed Greek officials who note that a deadline should not be imposed before a deal is reached.

A key sticking point in the talks is the enforcement of certain structural reforms, which are aimed at lifting barriers to competition and are set out in a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and have rattled special interest groups. The government is pushing back against troika demands for supermarkets to be given the right to sell non-prescription medicines. Also, as regards demands for an extension to the shelf life of milk, the Greek side has said it will not consent to reforms that harm the interests of Greek producers.

Troika mission chiefs are due back in Athens on Thursday to resume talks following a three-day break prompted by Monday’s Eurogroup summit in Brussels, where eurozone officials urged Athens to quickly conclude a long-running review of its economic review.

In a speech in the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn praised Greece for the extent of its fiscal adjustment, referring to “tangible signs of growth” and noting that the country was on course to post a primary surplus for the first time in years.

Source: Kathimerini

Akis Gerontopoulos, Deputy Foreign Minister of Greece.

But there are claims he will not sign the long awaited Work and Holiday Visa agreement on behalf of the Greek government.

Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Greece and Minister responsible for the Hellenic Diaspora, Akis Gerontopoulos, is expected to visit Melbourne next Saturday 22 March.

Mr Gerontopoulos is coming to Melbourne in order to represent Greece in the annual Greek Independence Day parade and celebrations that take place at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. He will also have meetings with representatives of the Greek Australian community as well as Australian officials.

However, Neos Kosmos understands that Mr Gerontopoulos will not sign on behalf of the Greek government the long awaited Work and Holiday Visa agreement (subclass 462), which is to allow approximately 500 Greek and Australians (18 to 30 year old) to work in each other’s countries for 12 months.

This agreement is planned to be signed by the Greek Minister for Tourism Ms Olga Kefalogianni, who is expected to visit Australia most probably in April.

The program of Mr Gerontopoulos visit to Australia is to be announced within the next few days.

source: Neos Kosmos

US investigators believe MH370 flew for hours longer than first thought based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing 777’s engines. Photo: Reuters
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/malaysia-airlines-plane-may-have-flown-for-hours-after-dropping-off-radar

US investigators suspect the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight stayed in the air for about four hours after its last confirmed location, the Wall Street Journal reports, raising the possibility the search area for the plane should expand even further.

Two people familiar with the investigation told the publication’s Asia edition that the plane may have flown for a total of five hours based on automatic data sent by the on-board monitoring system to engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce.

However, Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Tun Hussein has called the Wall Street Journal report “inaccurate” during a press conference at 8.30pm Thursday.

Malaysia Airlines chief executive officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the engine’s last transmission was 1.07am local time on the day the plane vanished.

“It did not run beyond that,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal initially said they could not reach Rolls-Royce for comment but later updated the story with a response.

“We continue to monitor the situation and to offer Malaysia Airlines our support,” a Rolls-Royce representative told the publication.

This shot from Boeing’s website shows the equipment hidden beneath the engine’s casing.

“The disappearance is officially not an accident and all information about this is strictly handled by investigators,” a Rolls-Royce executive is reported to have said.

Also quoted was a Boeing executive who declined to comment except to say: “We’ve got to stand back from the front line of the information.”

It was reported that live data from the plane’s Trent 800 engines is recorded in 30-minute increments and sent to Rolls-Royce for analysis, with the information showing details such as altitude and speed of the jet.

Rolls-Royce says on its website that engine data is routinely used “so that plane operators can easily view the health of their fleet of engines”.

“Snapshots” are sent from the aircraft to the ground during take-off, during a climb, once the aircraft is in cruise and at the end of the flight – and are also triggered by unusual engine conditions, the website states.

“The snapshot data is always ‘trended’, so that subtle changes in condition from one flight to another can be detected.”

The comments revise earlier estimations that the plane flew for one hour and 10 minutes after it vanished from radar over the South China Sea, according to a Malaysian air force official quoted by CNN.

A total flight time of five hours means the Boeing 777 could have travelled about 2200 nautical miles after leaving Kuala Lumpur and potentially have reached the Indian Ocean, the border of Pakistan or even the Arabian Sea, the Wall Street Journal said.

The massive search for the plane has already expanded to an area of several hundred kilometres as Malaysia’s military revealed it tracked a missing jetliner by radar over the Strait of Malacca on Wednesday.

However, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief said no signs of the missing Malaysian plane have been found in an area where Chinese satellite images have shown what might be debris.

“This morning we sent two AN-26 aircraft to inspect the maritime areas near Con Dao island, where three suspicious objects were detected by Chinese satellite. Both have returned and we found nothing so far,” Dinh Viet Thang, deputy director of Vietnam Civil Aviation Authority, said on Thursday.

The hunt for the Boeing 777 has been punctuated by false leads since it disappeared with 239 people aboard just hours after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing early on Saturday.

The plane was heading east over the South China Sea when it disappeared, but authorities believe it may have turned back and headed into the upper reaches of the Malacca Strait or beyond.

source: smh.com.au

A rare diamond that survived a trip from deep within the Earth’s interior may have confirmed some theories that beneath the planet’s crust is an ocean’s worth of water.

In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists have found a battered-looking diamond from Brazil actually contains a water-rich inclusion of the olivine mineral ringwoodite, suggesting there is a very large amount of water held in the transition zone of the Earth’s mantle.

Samples from the transition zone are considered to be “exceedingly rare” and are only found in a small number of unusual diamonds, geochemist Hans Keppler said.

Most diamonds form at depths of about 150 to 200 kilometres, but ‘ultradeep’ diamonds come from the transition zone, which is 410 to 660 kilometres below the surface, Graham Pearson, a mantle geochemist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton said.

This particular diamond weighs just one tenth of a gram.

Mr Pearson said their discovery was almost accidental as his team had been looking for another mineral when they paid about $20 (£12) for a three-millimetre-wide brown diamond from the Juína district in Brazil in 2008.

His team studied the diamond and discovered a grain 40 micrometres across that turned out to be ‘ringwoodite’ — a high-pressure form of olivine, a mineral that makes up much of the upper mantle of the Earth.

The upper mantle is a layer that lies between the planet’s crust and lower mantle.

Unlike other forms of olivine, ringwoodite can hold a substantial amount of water, meaning the sample could potentially resolve a long-standing debate over just how much water the transition zone contains.

The team found that its tiny speck of ringwoodite contained about one per cent  of its weight in water – a significant amount.

“That may not sound like much,” Mr Pearson told Nature News, “but when you realise how much ringwoodite there is, the transition zone could hold as much water as all the Earth’s oceans put together.”

“It’s actually the confirmation that there is a very, very large amount of water that’s trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth,” Mr Pearson added.

However, the results taken from one single crystal may not represent the entire transition zone, according to some scientists.

Speaking to Nature, Norm Sleep, a geophysicist at Stanford University in California compared the situation to panning for gold and discovering a large nugget. “It would be unwise to assume that all the gravel in the stream is gold nuggets,” he countered.

Mr Pearson agreed that further analysis is needed to test his theory, as other studies of the mantle have shown the water content in the transition zone is ‘spotty’, and this sample may have come from one of the wet spots.

But tests could prove difficult because of the very small size of the mantle ringwoodite. “We have to think really carefully on what we do next on this sample because it’s very small: 40 micrometres,” he said. “That means you can only think of doing one or two additional analyses.”

source: independent.co.uk