'Lord of the Rings' volcano erupts in New Zealand

WELLINGTON: A New Zealand volcano used as a backdrop to "The Lord of the Rings" films erupted on Wednesday, spewing a column of ash three kilometres (1.9 miles) above the North Island, scientists said.

Vulcanologists said Mount Tongariro rumbled to life at 1:25 pm (0025 GMT), in a five-minute burst that briefly closed roads, put aviation authorities on high alert and sent nearby hikers scrambling for safety.

"It was completely unexpected, there were no warning signs beforehand," a spokeswoman for official monitoring service GNS Science told.

"We were watching (neighbouring volcano) Ruapehu waiting for an eruption and instead this came out of nowhere."

The mountain in the centre of the North Island was dormant for more than a century until August this year, when a massive blast ripped a new vent in its side and hurled boulders the size of cars more than two kilometres.

While officials said the latest eruption was minor by comparison, they still closed a number of roads for a time and warned aircraft to stay away from the area as a precaution.

About 50 people, including schoolchildren, were hiking in the Tongariro National Park when the eruption occurred but police said they were not in danger and there were no injuries.

Park guide Stuart Barclay said there was a sense of "not quite panic, but getting there" among students as they heard a loud bang and saw a billowing ash cloud rise before them.

"We got them out of there quick-smart," he told national radio.

The national park, which was used to depict the desolate wasteland of Mordor in Peter Jackson's hugely successful "The Lord of the Rings" movies, attracts 800,000 visitors a year to its ski-fields and hiking tracks.

Its three volcanoes do not directly threaten population centres, with the nearest town Taupo some 80 kilometres (49 miles) away, but they have proved deadly in the past.

A eruption at Mount Ruapehu in 1953 caused New Zealand's worst rail disaster when it trigged a massive mudslide that washed away a bridge, causing a passenger train to plunge into the Whangaehu River with the loss of 151 lives.

Further north from the park, Mount Tarawera erupted in 1886 with a death toll estimated at 120-150.

New Zealand lies on the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire", where the Earth's tectonic plates collide, making it a hotspot for volcanic and earthquake activity.

Local resident Clint Green said the latest eruption was "pretty spectacular".

Soccer team FC Thun's coach takes players' advice and quits

BERNE: Bernard Challandes has quit as coach of Swiss Super League side FC Thun after the players told him they did not want to work with him anymore.

"After losing against Sport Lausanne, coach Bernard Challandes took the confidence test and asked if the players were 100 percent behind him," the club said in a statement.

"The team told the coach that a large majority were against a future with him. Therefore, the coach accepted the consequences and has given up his position."

The 61-year-old coach has done the rounds of Switzerland's top clubs, coaching Young Boys, Servette Geneva, FC Zurich, FC Sion and Neuchatel Xamax in his lengthy career.

Thun, from the small lakeside town of the same name, are ninth in the 10-team Swiss Super League after a six-match winless run.

The club rose from third tier amateur football in the 1990s to the heady heights of the Champions League in 2005/06, only to drop back down to the second tier two seasons later.

They have finished the last two seasons in fifth after being promoted again in 2009/10.

FC Basel, FC Lucerne and Servette Geneva have changed coaches once each this season while Sion have parted company with two coaches. 

4D scans show fetuses yawn in the womb

LONDON: Growing into a fully formed human being is a long process, and scientists have found that unborn babies not only hiccup, swallow and stretch in the womb, they yawn too.
Researchers who studied 4D scans of 15 healthy fetuses also said they think yawning is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors a new way to check on a baby's health.
While some scientists have previously suggested that fetuses yawn, others disagree and say it is nothing more than a developing baby opening and stretching its mouth.
But writing in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday, British researchers said their study was able to clearly distinguish yawning from "non-yawn mouth opening" based on how long the mouth was open.
The researchers did this by using 4D video footage to examine all the times when fetuses opened their mouths.
Nadja Reissland of Durham University's department of Psychology, who led the study, said the function and importance of yawning in fetuses is still unknown, but the findings suggest it may be linked to fetal development and could provide a further indication of the health of the unborn baby.
"Unlike us, fetuses do not yawn contagiously, nor do they yawn because they are sleepy," she said. "Instead, the frequency of yawning in the womb may be linked to the maturing of the brain early in gestation."
The study was carried out on eight female and seven male fetuses from 24 to 36 weeks gestation. The researchers found that yawning declined from 28 weeks and that there was no significant difference in how often boys and girls yawned. 

Aussie scientists un-discover Pacific island

SYDNEY: A South Pacific island identified on Google Earth and world maps does not exist, according to Australian scientists who went searching for the mystery landmass during a geological expedition.

The sizeable phantom island in the Coral Sea is shown as Sandy Island on Google Earth and Google maps and is supposedly midway between Australia and the French-governed New Caledonia.

The Times Atlas of the World appears to identify it as Sable Island. Weather maps used by the Southern Surveyor, an Australian maritime research vessel, also say it exists, according to Dr Maria Seton.

But when the Southern Surveyor, which was tasked with identifying fragments of the Australian continental crust submerged in the Coral Sea, steamed to where it was supposed to be, it was nowhere to be found.

"We wanted to check it out because the navigation charts on board the ship showed a water depth of 1,400 metres (4,620 feet) in that area -- very deep," Seton, from the University of Sydney, told AFP after the 25-day voyage.

"It's on Google Earth and other maps so we went to check and there was no island. We're really puzzled. It's quite bizarre.

"How did it find its way onto the maps? We just don't know, but we plan to follow up and find out."

News of the invisible island sparked debate on social media, with tweeter Charlie Loyd outpointing that Sandy Island is also on Yahoo Maps as well as Bing Maps "but it disappears up close".

On www.abovetopsecret.com, discussions were robust with one poster claiming he had confirmed with the French hydrographic office that it was indeed a phantom island and was supposed to have been removed from charts in 1979.

Another claimed: "Many mapmakers put in deliberate but unobtrusive and non-obvious 'mistakes' into their maps so that they can know when somebody steals the map data."

Google was not immediately available for comment. But the Google Maps product manager for Australia and New Zealand told the Sydney Morning Herald a variety of authoritative public and commercial sources were used in building maps.

"The world is a constantly changing place, and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour," Nabil Naghdy told the newspaper.

The closest landmass to the invisible island is the Chesterfields, a French archipelago of uninhabited coral sand cays. 

Facebook to share data with Instagram, loosen email rules

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc is proposing to combine user data with that of recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram, and will loosen restrictions on emails between members of the social network.
Facebook also said on Wednesday it is proposing to scrap a 4-year old process that can allow the social network's roughly 1 billion users to vote on changes to its policies and terms of services.
Facebook said it may share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates that Facebook owns to "help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services."
One of Facebook's most significant affiliate businesses is Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that Facebook acquired in October for roughly $715 million.
The change could open the door for Facebook to build unified profiles of its users that include people's personal data from its social network and from Instagram, similar to recent moves by Google Inc. In January, Google said it would combine users' personal information from its various Web services - such as search, email and the Google+ social network - to provide a more customized experience.
Google's unified data policy raised concerns among some privacy advocates and regulators, who said it was an invasion of people's privacy. A group of 36 U.S. state attorney generals also warned in a letter to Google that consolidating so much personal information in one place could put people at greater risk from hackers and identity thieves.
Facebook also wants to loosen the restrictions on how members of the social network can contact other members using the Facebook email system.
Facebook said it wanted to eliminate a setting for users to control who can contact them. The company said it planned to replace the "Who can send you Facebook messages" setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.
Asked whether such a change could leave Facebook users exposed to a flood of unwanted, spam-like messages, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said that the company carefully monitors user interaction and feedback to find ways to enhance the user experience.
"We are working on updates to Facebook Messages and have made this change in our Data Use Policy in order to allow for improvements to the product," Noyes said.
Facebook's changes come as the world's largest social networking company with roughly 1 billion users has experienced a sharp slowdown in revenue growth. The company generates the bulk of its revenue from advertising on its website.
The changes are open to public comment for the next seven days. If the proposed changes generate more than 7,000 public comments, Facebook's current terms of service automatically trigger a vote by users to approve the changes. But the vote is only binding if at least 30 percent of users take part, and two prior votes never reached that threshold.
Facebook has said in that past that it was rethinking the voting system and on Wednesday Facebook moved to eliminate the vote entirely, noting that it hasn't functioned as intended and is no longer suited to its current situation as a large publicly traded company subject to oversight by various regulatory agencies.
"We found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality," Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of communications, public policy and marketing, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Instead of the vote, Facebook will look for other forms of user feedback on changes, such as an "Ask the Chief Privacy Officer" question-and-answer forum on its website as well as live webcasts about privacy, safety and security.
Facebook, Google and other online companies have faced increasing scrutiny and enforcement from privacy regulators as consumers entrust ever-increasing amounts of information about their personal lives to Web services.
In April, Facebook settled privacy charges with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it had deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. Under the settlement, Facebook is required to get user consent for certain changes to its privacy settings and is subject to 20 years of independent audits.

OGRA increases petrol price by Rs1.57/litre

ISLAMABAD: The Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) has notified an increase in petrol and a decrease in diesel as well as kerosene oil price with immediate effect, Geo News reported.
According to notification the petrol price has gone up by Rs1.57 per litre.
On the other hand the price of diesel and its light form have come down by Rs3.52 and Rs3.79 a litre respectively.
Kerosene oil price has also seen a cut of Rs4.23/litre.

Asian markets rise, China manufacturing picks up

HONG KONG: Asian markets mostly climbed Thursday as Chinese manufacturing data indicated the economy continues to pick up, while the euro extended its gains on hopes a deal on Greece's bailout will be agreed.
Japanese shares hit at six-month high at one point, as the yen weakened further against the dollar and euro on expectations the country's central bank will unveil fresh monetary easing measures.
The Nikkei was up 1.05 percent by the break while Hong Kong added 0.31 percent, Sydney advanced 1.21 percent and Seoul was 0.71 percent higher. However Shanghai fell 0.67 percent, with investors still fretting over corporate woes.
Banking giant HSBC said China's manufacturing activity grew for the first time in more than a year in November, reinforcing recent views that the economy is beginning to pick up after several months of slowdown.
The bank's purchasing managers' index (PMI) stood at 50.4 this month, compared with 49.5 in October. Anything above 50 points to growth and anything below indicates contraction.
It is the first reading above 50 since October 2011 and adds to a slew of upbeat trade, investment and sales figures released this month and last that have fuelled optimism.
"This confirms that the economic recovery continues to gain momentum towards the year end," Qu Hongbin, HSBC's chief economist for China, said in the bank's release.
In Japan the Nikkei surged 1.46 percent to its highest point since May as it continues to benefit from the weakening yen.
Traders have been selling the Japanese unit since Shinzo Abe, the country's opposition leader and the man likely to become prime minister after next month's election, said he would press for unlimited monetary easing to lift the economy.