Italy's Berlusconi says only coalition can end deadlock

By James Mackenzie

ROME (Reuters) - Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi insisted on Friday the only way out of Italy's political deadlock was for his center-left rivals to accept a coalition deal that would give him a share in power.

Berlusconi met President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday after center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani failed to end a month-old stalemate since an election last month that has fuelled worries about the stability of the euro zone's third largest economy.

The 76-year-old billionaire said there was "no other solution" than a coalition and he ruled out backing a technocrat government like the one led by outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti, whom he blames for pushing Italy into recession.

"Our position has not changed. We expressed it with absolute clarity to the president," center-right leader Berlusconi told reporters after the meeting with Napolitano.

"Our position is the one the polls dictate: a broad coalition between the available forces... an absolutely political government, given the negative and tragic experience we had of a technocrat government," he said.

A senior official from Bersani's Democratic Party (PD) rebuffed the offer, saying it was "very difficult" to imagine a coalition with Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party.

"There are too many important issues in PDL policies that are light years from those of the Democratic Party," Luigi Zanda, head of the PD group in the Senate told SkyTG television.

After five days of talks this week, Bersani, who won the biggest share of the vote in the election but fell short of a majority, failed to get a deal with either Berlusconi, or Beppe Grillo's 5-Star Movement which holds the balance of power.

The anti-establishment 5-Star group, which meets Napolitano later on Friday, refuses to back a government led by any of the big parties it blames for Italy's social and economic crisis.

However a deal between center-right and center-left has been blocked by Bersani's refusal to accept Berlusconi's demand to name the successor to Napolitano, whose mandate expires in May.

Berlusconi said there had been no deal on the presidency but it was "in the logic of things that if you form a coalition government you discuss the best president of the Republic".

NAPOLITANO CONSULTS PARTIES

After Bersani's failure, the 87-year-old Napolitano is holding a quick round of meetings with the main parties to assess what options remain to prevent another election.

The refusal by Berlusconi and his allies in the Northern League to back a technocrat government appears to narrow his options greatly and made it much less likely that an independent figure will be able to lead a non-political administration - which many see as the only way out of deadlock.

"We were against the Monti government and if there is to be another government of that type it's a thousand times better to have new elections," League leader Roberto Maroni said.

Among the names which had been considered possible candidates as a technocrat leader are Fabrizio Saccomanni, director general of the Bank of Italy or the head of the constitutional court Franco Gallo.

The political gridlock has fed growing worries about Italy's ability to confront a prolonged economic crisis that has left it in deep recession for more than a year, with a 2-trillion-euro public debt and record unemployment, especially among the young.

Rumors have been circulating for days that ratings agency Moody's is preparing to cut its rating on Italy's sovereign debt, which is already only two notches above "junk" grade, partly due to the uncertain political outlook.

The immediate pressure from the bond markets has been taken off during the Easter break but failure to make progress in securing an agreement could lead to new turbulence next week after a steady rise in Italy's borrowing costs in recent days.

Napolitano has made clear that he does not want Italy to go back to new elections immediately, not least because the widely criticized election law is likely to just repeat the deadlock.

But many are already preparing to vote again, with Berlusconi's center-right confident that the momentum created by the 76-year-old media magnate's surge in the final weeks of the last election campaign will continue.

A poll by the SWG company on Friday showed the center-right had pushed Bersani's bloc into second place since the vote.

(Additional reporting by Naomi O'Leary; Editing by Barry Moody and Andrew Heavens)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/italys-president-seeks-way-political-deadlock-091517168.html

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Cyprus financial crisis boosts demand for digital dollars

Jeff Cox , CNBC.com ? ? ? 16 hrs.

They won't make a sound no matter how many of them you try to toss in a bucket, and you can't pitch them in a fountain and wish for good luck. But make no mistake, bitcoins are getting big.

The online alternative currency, previously little more than a curiosity in financial markets since its 2009 inception, has zoomed in trading value since the Cyprus banking crisis erupted two weeks ago.

With fears spreading that even insured deposits might not be safe in similar nations hit by banking crises, those looking for a haven to store their wealth have fled to the complicated world of digital cash.

"Incremental demand for bitcoin is coming from the geographic areas most affected by the Cypriot financial crisis?individuals in countries like Greece or Spain, worried that they will be next to feel the threat of deposit taxes," Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx, said in a report on the startling trend.

Read More: It's Back! Dark Cloud From Europe Stalls US Stock Market Bull Run

Bitcoins operate on a network that, at least on the surface, resembles a typical exchange on the capital markets. Buyers can exchange their paper currencies for bitcoins and use them wherever they are accepted. Sellers can exchange their bitcoins back for their original currency.

But the value of the currency has been anything but typical.

Bitcoincharts.com lists the value of bitcoins compared to other currencies, including U.S. and Canadian dollars, euros and pounds.

Cypriots fear run on banks as branches prepare to reopen

On one of the U.S. currency exchanges, labeled "Mt. Gox," the bitcoin value has zoomed to more than $87 in Wednesday trade. That represents close to a 20 percent gain over just the past week, a one-month gain of 41 percent and nearly a quintupling of value in the past year.

The "Mt. Gox" euro trading has seen numbers nearly identical to the dollar pairing.

Read More: Cyprus Controls to Hit Foreign Transactions

A more sober perspective might suggest that bitcoins are at best a momentary bubble and at worst a risky chance to take considering their novelty.

But the trend also exemplifies just how nervous cash-holders are over the European situation.

"This is a clear sign that people are looking for alternative ways to get their money out of the country," said Christopher Vecchio, currency analyst at DailyFX. "If we're going to talk about the stability of the euro and whether or not there are going to be capital controls in place not just in Cyprus but around the euro zone, I think there is some efficacy behind bitcoins as an alternative liquidity vehicle."

The role of alternative currency had been falling largely to gold over the past several years. But the precious metal has been on a pretty aggressive downward path since its most recent peak in October.

Gold advocates, though, continue to stress its importance as a safe haven and store of wealth.

"Why would anyone trust an electronic form of money that could get hacked and then diluted into oblivion?" said Michael Pento, president of Pento Portfolio Strategies. "We already have a form of money that is indestructible and whose supply cannot be increased by any government or individual decree. It's called gold."

Yet currency pros are at least willing to give bitcoins the benefit of the doubt as a legitimate trading vehicle as situations like Cyprus continue to crop up.

The $964 million bitcoin network pales to the $4 trillion a day in total currency trading, but it's clearly growing.

"Right now it seems safe. Personally it wouldn't be my preferred vehicle to trade money because it's unregulated," Vecchio said. "But people are deeming it legitimate even though it's not backed by a sovereign. That could be the attraction behind it. There's no sovereign credit risks to bitcoins."

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653351/s/2a10569b/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cbusiness0Ceconomywatch0Ccyprus0Efinancial0Ecrisis0Eboosts0Edemand0Edigital0Edollars0E2B9111490A/story01.htm

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Elusive 'Superman' particle caught changing flavor

Paolo Lombardi INFN-MI

The Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, located nearly a mile below the surface of the Gran Sasso mountain about 60 miles outside of Rome, detects tiny particles called neutrinos.

By Tia Ghose
LiveScience

Physicists at an underground laboratory have caught an ultra-rare particle in the act of reappearing.

For only the third time, scientists have detected elementary particles called neutrinos in the act of changing from one type, called muon, to another, called tau, on the several-hundred-mile trip between two laboratories.?

"It proves that the muon neutrinos are some kind of Superman-type particle: They get into a phone booth somewhere in between and change into something else," said Pauline Gagnon, a particle physicist at Indiana University, who was not involved in the experiment.

The new discovery bolsters the theory that the sneaky neutrinos oscillate from one type to another, which is why physicists detect fewer coming from the sun than predicted. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles In Nature]

Sun particles
The nuclear reaction that powers the sun also produces massive numbers of solar neutrinos, tiny, uncharged particles that reach Earth and pass virtually undetected through ordinary matter, said researcher Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and a member of the team that conducted the experiment, called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus).

"Each square centimeter of your body is touched every second by 60 billion neutrinos from the sun," Ereditato told LiveScience.

But for the last two decades, scientists have detected fewer neutrinos from the sun than they expected.

The dominant explanation for this neutrino shortage, proposed in 1957 by Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, argued that neutrinos oscillate between three flavors, or types: electron, muon and tau.

As a result, neutrinos seem to disappear, because detectors try to measure them in one flavor when they have oscillated to another one.

Scientists have caught many neutrinos in the act of disappearing. But catching neutrinos as they appear has been far more elusive ? since 2010, only two other tau neutrinos have been discovered.

Reappearing particles
To find these rare events, physicists with the OPERA project shot a beam of muon neutrinos from the physics lab CERN in Switzerland 454 miles (730 kilometers) through the Earth's crust to Gran Sasso Laboratory, buried underneath a mountain in Italy. ?

During the travel, a very small fraction of the neutrinos naturally changed flavor, and when they reached the laboratory some tiny fraction of them were detected by a 4,000-ton "camera," transforming into a similar flavored particle and then decaying after a short distance. These fleeting events produce a faint blip of light recorded by one of 9 million photographic plates, Gagnon told LiveScience.

Because neutrinos have no charge, they only interact with matter through the weak force, which doesn't happen very often, Gagnon said.

Tau neutrinos morph into tau particles that travel for?just a few millimeters before decaying into hadrons, so they are even harder to detect.

The newly discovered tau neutrino bolsters the notion that the discovery of two others, in 2010 and 2012, were real.

This detection is statistically quite strong: The chance that the researchers are mistaken is about one in a million, Ereditato said.

The findings could provide other insights into tau neutrinos.

"Neutrinos have a mass and measuring this mass is quite difficult, because it's extremely small," Gagnon said.

But because neutrinos' mass determines how quickly they oscillate, and in turn how frequently they should be detected, finding tau neutrinos could help physicists nail down these elusive particles' mass, she said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose.?Follow?LiveScience @livescience, Facebook? and Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2a1b2621/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A30C280C1750A3810A0Eelusive0Esuperman0Eparticle0Ecaught0Echanging0Eflavor0Dlite/story01.htm

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Google Maps now delivering live transit info in New York, DC and Salt Lake City

Good news for us mass transit riders -- well, those of us in a couple of select US cities, at least. Google Maps is getting more live contextual info in New York, Salt Lake City and Washington DC. Riders will be able to check out live departure times for seven subway lines in the Big Apple and buses and trams in Utah's most populous city. Over in our our nation's capitol, Metrorail passengers will get access to alerts including unplanned delays and track work. Maps now has transit info for 800 cities in 25 countries, accessible through the company's Android and iOS apps.

Comments

Source: Google

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/nZi9A-kgsXY/

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'Fisker Defies The Boundaries Of Automotive Design'

Hey look how busy it is at Fisker! They are certainly on the up and up!

This was three years ago, when Fisker was still a company with a hope and dream. Since then, they've had a lot of problems. Many of them fires.

The Karma looked so promising. What happened? Find out here... kind of.

MotorWeek Theater is our showcase of some of our favorite classic reviews from public television's finest motoring program. How does this video only have 85,416 views? Actually, that's a lot.

Source: http://jalopnik.com/fisker-defies-the-boundaries-of-automotive-design-459561148

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GOP ponders long list of names, policies for 2016 (The Arizona Republic)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

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SpaceX Dragon splashes into Pacific Ocean

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) ? The SpaceX Dragon capsule returned to Earth on Tuesday with a full science load from the International Space Station ? and a bunch of well-used children's Legos.

The privately owned cargo ship splashed down in the Pacific right on target, 250 miles off the coast of Mexico's Baja Peninsula, five hours after leaving the orbiting lab. The California-based SpaceX confirmed the Dragon's safe arrival via Twitter.

"Special delivery! Dragon now being recovered in the Pacific," the company said in a tweet.

The capsule brought back more than 1 ton of science experiments and old station equipment, as well as 13 toy sets of Lego building blocks that were used by space station crews over the past couple years to teach children about science.

It's the only supply ship capable of two-way delivery. With the space shuttles retired, NASA is paying SpaceX more than $1 billion for a dozen resupply missions.

The unmanned capsule will be shipped to Los Angeles ? arriving Wednesday night ? and then trucked to Texas for unloading.

Earlier in the day, astronauts released the unmanned capsule from the end of the space station's giant robot arm. The 250-mile-high parting was a poignant moment for the three space station's residents, who helped to snare the Dragon three weeks earlier.

"Sad to see the Dragon go," astronaut Thomas Marshburn told Mission Control. "Performed her job beautifully. Heading back to her lair. Wish her all the best for the splashdown today."

The Dragon used old-NASA-style parachutes to plop into the ocean; company officials indicated all appeared to go well during the re-entry.

SpaceX launched the capsule from Cape Canaveral at the beginning of March. Mechanical trouble delayed the capsule's arrival at the space station by a day. SpaceX flight controllers at company headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., managed to fix the problem within hours.

Bad weather at mission's end in the Pacific recovery zone kept it in orbit an extra day.

Once the Dragon pulls into port, NASA will retrieve the science samples meticulously collected over the weeks and months by space station astronauts, as well as experiments that flew up with Dragon, including hundreds of flowering weeds. Mouse stem cells stayed behind on the space station, at the request of the Japanese researchers.

Old space station equipment and other items aboard the Dragon will be removed by SpaceX in McGregor, Texas. In all, more than 1 ton of gear ? 2,668 pounds ? was loaded into the capsule.

SpaceX ? Space Exploration Technologies Corp. ? is run by billionaire Elon Musk, who made his fortune as a co-creator of PayPal. He also owns the electric car maker Tesla Motors.

This was the second flight of a Dragon to the space station under the $1.6 billion contract with NASA, and the third delivery mission altogether for SpaceX. The next flight is slated for late fall.

A competitor, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., plans a test flight of its Antares rocket and a dummy payload next month. That launch will be conducted from Wallops Island, Va. Orbital, too, has a NASA contract to deliver supplies.

Russia, Japan and Europe also periodically send up supplies, but SpaceX has the only craft capable of returning goods. All the others burn up upon re-entry.

Three astronauts are aboard the space station right now. They will be joined by three more following Thursday's Soyuz launch from Kazakhstan.

With its space shuttles now museum pieces, NASA is paying Russia to launch U.S. astronauts until SpaceX or another American company comes up with spaceships than can safely fly crews. Musk anticipates that happening by 2015 with a modified Dragon.

___

Online:

SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/spacex-dragon-cargo-ship-splashes-pacific-163843426.html

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