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Full Story At Yahoo! News

DENVER – Passengers expecting a flight to Texas instead had to flee their burning airliner, sprawled in a smoke-filled ravine off a runway with the fuselage partially buckled and one engine and part of its landing gear ripped off.

There was no official word yet Sunday on the possible cause of the crash of Continental Flight 1404 at Denver International Airport.

The entire right side of the Boeing 737 was burned in the Saturday evening accident and melted plastic from overhead compartments dripped onto the seats.

Thirty-eight people suffered injuries including broken bones. The conditions of two people who had been in critical condition at the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver were upgraded Sunday, one to serious and one to fair, spokeswoman Tonya Ewers said.

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Full Story At  CNN.com

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Pirates holding a ship full of tanks and ammunition off the coast of Somalia are likely to be paid millions of dollars in ransom within days, senior U.S. military officials said.
Somali pirates holding the MV Faina stand guard on the merchant vessel’s deck on October 19.

Somali pirates holding the MV Faina stand guard on the merchant vessel’s deck on October 19.

The pirates have been holding the Ukrainian-operated, Belize-flagged MV Faina and its 20-person crew in the Gulf of Aden since September 25.

Military officials said the cash payment will be brought on the ship, directly to the pirates. Such a procedure is common because of the lack of electronic banking in Somalia.

The officials would not say how much ransom is being paid or who is paying it because it would be up to the individuals or company to make that announcement.

What’s known is that the pirates originally asked for a $35 million ransom, but lowered their demand to $20 million, Andrew Mwangura of the Kenya Seafarers Association told CNN in November.

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Full Story At Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ever wondered how Santa Claus can travel around the world in just one night on his reindeer-pulled sleigh and deliver toys to all the children?

“He exploits the space-time continuum,” says Larry Silverberg, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University.

Santa’s magic may go far beyond merely traveling across 200 million square miles (322 million sq km) to visit hundreds of millions of homes of believing children in just one night, Silverberg said.

“He understands that space stretches, he understands that you can stretch time, compress space and therefore he can, in a sense, actually have six Santa months to deliver the presents,” Silverberg told Reuters.

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Full Story At  Reuters

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Fourteen crew and officers, mostly from the Philippines, have been stranded for three months in an Argentine river on a cargo ship abandoned by its owner, surviving on charity donations of food and water.

The Philippine consulate was working to help the crew, who had not been paid, leave the ship and fly home, a coast guard official told Reuters.

The Symphony I, a Liberian-flagged vessel owned by Greek-based Harmony Navigation, sailed into Argentina’s River Plate in September, planning to load soy oil, the coast guard said.

But local authorities detained the ship because of lawsuits against its owner for not paying clients and providers. The company abandoned the vessel and the crew anchored it in the huge river, a few miles from the city of La Plata.

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Boston.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mobile phone calls distract drivers far more than even the chattiest passenger, causing drivers to follow too closely and miss exits, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Using a hands-free device does not make things better and the researchers believe they know why — passengers act as a second set of eyes, shutting up or sometimes even helping when they see the driver needs to make a maneuver.

The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, adds to a growing body of evidence that mobile phones can make driving dangerous.

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Full Story At  washingtonpost.com

A glimpse of our changing natural environment and how humans may be impacting it.

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Full Story At  CNN.com

(CNN) — Things didn’t go quite according to plan for astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during her spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday.
Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper maneuvers by the tail of the docked space shuttle Endeavour.

Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper maneuvers by the tail of the docked space shuttle Endeavour.

First, a grease gun inside her tool bag leaked, coating everything inside with a film of lubricant.

While she was trying to clean it up in the absence of gravity, the whole bag floated away.

Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve Bowen were outside the space station on the scheduled six-hour spacewalk, the first of the space shuttle Endeavour’s stay at the station.

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Full Story At msnbc.com

NEW YORK - Oil prices plunged to the lowest level in five months Tuesday, falling to within sight of $100 a barrel on signs that Hurricane Gustav only grazed U.S. energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.

Light, sweet crude for October delivery fell $5.75 to settle at $109.71 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after earlier dropping as low as $105.46. It was the lowest trading level since April 4, just before oil began an unprecedented march above $147 per barrel.

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