LONDON: An oil leak at a North Sea platform caused it to be partially evacuated on Saturday, its Middle East operator said, the second such incident at the installation in less than two months.
The Alpha Cormorant platform and the pipeline system it services were shut down as a precaution, operator Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (TAQA) said in a statement.
The company said it had evacuated 71 of its 145 non-essential staff from the platform, situated 160 kilometres northeast of Lerwick on the Shetland Islands north of Britain, and that everyone was safe and well.
"TAQA Bratani can confirm that a hydrocarbon release detected in one of the Cormorant Alpha platform legs has now been contained, with no further hydrocarbon release," the company said.
"TAQA continues to monitor the situation on Cormorant Alpha and is working with its partners to have the Brent pipeline system operational as soon as possible."
The leak was discovered during maintenance work at 0940 GMT on Saturday morning, TAQA said.
The company said no oil was released into the environment during the leak.
A similar leak occurred at the platform on January 15, also causing the shutdown of the platform and the pipeline infrastructure.
Cormorant Alpha, which was built in 1978, handles about 90,000 barrels per day of crude oil, of which 42,600 are produced by TAQA.
(Credit: IBM/YouTube; screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
Great chefs are crazy.
There are many kinds of crazy. Some of these culinarians rant, rave, and spit fire and brimstone. Some pore over their ingredients like scientists: quiet, brooding, and deeply serious.
All believe they can create their own particular gastronomic dreams, ones nobody else can copy. Especially not a computer.
IBM thinks different.
Having seen its Watson computer crush mere humans at the trivial game of "Jeopardy," the company is now setting the machine's sights on bigger business.
According to The New York Times, the world of haute cuisine is one in which IBM would like to make a robotic incursion.
Indeed, Watson has already put a tiny part of his mind into creating something called the Spanish Crescent.
This breakfast pastry comprised cocoa, saffron, black pepper, almonds, and honey -- but not butter. Oh, yes, Watson is a very California chef.
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This little pastry was served only to insiders. And the cooks who had to execute it had to battle with the idea of using vegetable oil rather than butter.
So one can only imagine what the exalted palates of chefs like Jose Andres, Eric Ripert, and "Top Chef"'s Tom Colicchio might make of Watson's recipes.
However, what if the Watson name was put behind a restaurant concept? Wouldn't that be something that would fascinate?
Imagine the restaurant's interior design. There'd be servers all around the room. Large, lumpy computers, that is.
As for human servers, perhaps there'd be little need. Perhaps you'd just order on an iPad and the food would shoot up from below your table on a futuristic dumbwaiter.
And the food at Chez Watson? His handlers believe one of Watson's great strengths is to know very quickly what the wrong answers are.
So one can only hope that he would create inventive but wonderful combinations that would then be executed by compliant cooks who would bow to his HALness.
One can also hope that Chez Watson would get a better review in The New York Times than did Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar In Times Square.
But in case it didn't, IBM's engineers have already taken precautions. They discovered earlier this year that Watson had memorized the Urban Dictionary. Like so many chefs, he had a proclivity for profanity, which has now been dampened.
So Chez Watson's kitchen will be, in every sense, pristine.
FORT HOOD, Texas Public schools everywhere will be affected by the government's automatic budget cuts, but few may feel the funding pinch faster than those on and around military bases.
The still-fragile economy braced itself for the gradual but potentially grave impact of the across-the-board cuts, which took effect Friday night at the stroke of President Obama's pen. Hours earlier, he and congressional leaders emerged from a White House meeting no closer to an agreement.
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CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett reports that top White House officials predict Republicans will eventually cave and give in to higher taxes. Republicans say they've never been more unified and will withstand whatever pressure comes from the White House or from the public.
School districts with military ties from coast-to-coast are bracing for increased class sizes and delayed building repairs. Others already have axed sports teams and even eliminated teaching positions, but still may have to tap savings just to make it through year's end.
But there's little hope for softening any future financial blows.
"Next year is scarier than this year," said Sharon Adams, chief financial officer for Muscogee County schools in Georgia. The district serves the U.S. Army's Fort Benning and could lose $300,000 in federal funding out of its $270 million in general funds before the end of the school — and more than four times that in 2013-2014.
The schools' losses will come from cuts to a federal program known as "Impact Aid" that supplements local property tax losses for districts that cover federal land, including military posts and Indian tribal areas. About 1,400 school districts serving roughly 11 million children nationwide — including nearly 376,500 students from military families — benefit from the aid, said Jocelyn Bissonnette, director of government affairs for the Washington-based National Association of Federally Impacted Schools.
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Bissonnette said slightly more than 5 percent of funding would disappear from nearly all U.S. Department of Education programs under the automatic cuts. But while most of the reductions wouldn't take effect until next fall, Impact Aid could be immediately cut, with many districts failing to receive a scheduled payment in March.
In all, the U.S. Department of Education estimates districts receiving Impact Aid could see $60 million evaporate this school year.
"Classrooms will be fuller," said Sara Watson, principal of 810-student Meadows Elementary on Fort Hood, one of the world's largest military installations. Watson stressed that she doesn't yet know the full impact, but said an extra teacher for fifth and sixth grade science hired this year could be reassigned — which may mean squeezing kids into fewer classes.
Ninety-nine percent of parents at Meadows are in the military and a quarter of the teachers are married to active-duty personnel. But the campus is run by the school district in the surrounding community of Killeen, which has 52 campuses in all — including seven elementary and two middle schools on Fort Hood and about total 42,000 students.
As soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan, enrollment has swelled, increasing by 1,200 students annually in recent years — though next year likely will only see 500 additional students.
Overall, the district stands to lose at least $2.6 million in Impact Aid funding before the end of the school year under the automatic cuts. Superintendent Robert Mueller said the cuts amount to more than 50 teachers' salaries, roughly one per school, or five months' worth of district's electric bills — and may mean tapping into Killeen's cash reserves to cover expenses.
Other military districts have made pre-emptive cuts that now may not be enough.
In San Antonio, Randolph Field school district educates about 1,200 students from military families at the local Air Force base of the same name and draws 45 percent of its budget from Impact Aid. Officials this year eliminated high school math and science teaching positions and cut baseball, cross-country and swimming.
But even then, the district expected to get $5.3 million in Impact Aid. Randolph Field may now get about $1 million less — meaning it will have to use reserve funds to finish the year.
"If we get it, we'll end the year in the black," Lorrie Remick, the district's chief financial officer, said of the year's final Impact Aid payment. "If not, we'll have a deficit for the first time in our history."
In North Carolina, Cumberland County Schools superintendent Frank Till, whose district has a total budget of $450 million and includes Fort Bragg, said he may forfeit about $800,000 for the remainder of the fiscal year — but that his primary concern is what might happen next year, when the district could be out about $3.2 million.
"If October comes and they've not restored our money, we'll have to completely eliminate schools from service and certainly have to cut back on staffing," Till said. "We'll have to cut back services to some of our most disadvantaged kids."
He volunteered some advice to policymakers: "Go out to Camp David and don't come back until you have a plan."
Ronald Walker, superintendent of Geary County Schools USD 475 in Kansas, which serves Fort Riley, offered a harsher sentiment: "I think it's arrogant for leaders to turn their backs on our soldiers."
Walker anticipated an Impact Aid cut as the country flirted with the "fiscal cliff" in January, so repairs were delayed on school roofs and air conditioning systems. But the coming funding reductions look worse than he prepared for — likely meaning living with longstanding school plumbing problems
"I'm just going to ignore them," Walker said, "and hope."
Rescuers early Saturday morning returned to the site where a sinkhole swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom after the home's foundation collapsed.
Jeff Bush was in his bedroom when a sinkhole opened up and trapped him underneath his home at 11 p.m. Thursday night.
While the sinkhole was initially estimated to be 15 feet deep on Thursday night, the chasm has continued to grow. Officials now estimate it measures 30 feet across and up to 100 feet deep.
MORE: How Sinkholes Can Develop
Rescue operations were halted Friday night after it became too dangerous to approach the home.
Bill Bracken, an engineer with Hillsborough County Urban Search and Rescue team said that the house "should have collapsed by now, so it's amazing that it hasn't."
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Using ground penetrating radar, rescuers have found a large amount of water beneath the house, making conditions even more dangerous for them to continue the search for Bush.
"I'm being told it's seriously unstable, so that's the dilemma," said Hillsborough County administrator Mike Merrell. "A dilemma that is very painful to them and for everyone."
Hillsborough County lies in what is known as Florida's "Sinkhole Alley." Over 500 sinkholes have been reported in the area since 1954, according to the state's environmental agency.
The Tampa-area home was condemned, leaving Bush's family unable to go back inside to gather their belongings. As a result, the Hillsborough County Fire Rescue set up a relief fund for Bush's family in light of the tragedy.
Officials evacuated the two houses adjacent to Bush's and are considering further evacuations, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, Bush's brother, Jeremy Bush, is still reeling from Thursday night.
Jeremy Bush had to be rescued by a first responder after jumping into the hole in an attempt to rescue his brother when the home's concrete floor collapsed, but said he couldn't find him.
"I just started digging and started digging and started digging, and the cops showed up and pulled me out of the hole and told me the floor's still falling in," he said.
"These are everyday working people, they're good people," said Deputy Douglas Duvall of the Hillsborough County sheriff's office, "And this was so unexpected, and they're still, you know, probably facing the reality that this is happening."
ANKARA: US Secretary of State John Kerry held talks with Turkey's leaders on the Syria crisis Friday amid a row over comments by the Turkish premier branding Zionism a "crime against humanity."
"Obviously we disagree with that, we find it objectionable," Kerry said at a joint press conference in Ankara, referring to a speech delivered by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that likened Zionism to fascism and anti-Semitism.
Kerry said he would raise the issue "very directly" with Erdogan and express Washington's hopes to see the two "vital allies" work together.
He met later Friday with Erdogan and had a "respectful but frank discussion of the prime minister's speech in Vienna," a senior State Department official said.
"The Secretary made US concerns very clear. The US and Turkish side agreed to stay in very close touch about the whole range of related issues, including their shared commitment to Middle East peace," the official said..
The top US diplomat's visit to Turkey came a day after Washington announced that it would for the first time provide direct aid to Syrian rebels in the form of food and medical supplies as well as $60 million in extra assistance to the political opposition.
But the discussions were overshadowed by renewed tension between Turkey and Israel, two major US allies, following comments Erdogan made earlier this week at a UN-sponsored forum in Vienna.
"As is the case for Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it is inevitable that Islamophobia be considered a crime against humanity," Erdogan said on Wednesday.
Kerry said it was essential for Turkey and Israel to rekindle their "historic cooperation" but the situation got more complicated "in the aftermath of the speech that we heard in Vienna."
Turkish-Israeli relations have remained in free fall since Israeli troops raided a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship in 2010, killing nine people.
"We have never made any hostile remarks against any nation," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in response to a question over Erdogan's remarks.
"If you want to talk about hostile you can call Israel's attitude that, after it killed nine civilians on high seas," he added.
"If some countries acted in a hostile way against our citizens' right to life, allow us to reserve our right to make a statement."
The incident strained bilateral military and diplomatic ties and left Washington in a bind to mend relations between its two key allies in the region.
Erdogan's comments were branded as "a dark and mendacious statement," by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while Washington said "characterisation of Zionism as a crime against humanity... is offensive and wrong."
A US official travelling with Kerry on his first trip abroad since taking over as secretary of state from Hillary Clinton said Washington was "dismayed" to hear Erdogan's remarks.
"This was particularly offensive frankly," said the official who requested anonymity.
Dealing with Syria, terrorism
As part of their agenda, Kerry and Davutoglu also discussed the nearly two-year civil war in neighbouring Syria which has killed at least 70,000 people according to the UN.
"Together we work to strengthen the Syrian opposition so that we are in a position now to be able to do more," Kerry said, adding that the US and Turkey were trying to reduce the money "flowing to Assad regime's war machine."
"There is no legitimacy in a regime that commits atrocity against its own people," he said.
Turkey, once a close ally of Syria, has joined the United States in its campaign to oust the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and has given shelter to Syrian rebels and to nearly 200,000 refugees along its volatile border.
In January, the US began deploying Patriot missiles, along with Germany and the Netherlands, as part of a NATO mission to protect Turkey from any spillover of the Syrian conflict.
Turkey had requested the measure after several cross-border shelling incidents, including one in October that killed five civilians.
Kerry also attended a memorial ceremony in Ankara, in honour of the US embassy guard who was killed in a February 1 suicide attack claimed by the fiercely anti-US Marxist group the Revolutionary People's Liberation Front (DHKP-C).
"The United States stands strongly with Turkey, our NATO ally, in the fight against terrorism in all its forms," including DHKP-C, al-Qaeda and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Kerry said.
Also on the agenda during the talks was Washington's pressure for increasing sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear programme.
Yahoo Avatars didn't make the cut and will be shut down on April 1. (Credit: Yahoo)
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is honing the product focus of the company she has been running for seven months, eliminating several products that were deemed insufficiently popular with the company's 700 million users. Yahoo is discontinuing development and support of its mobile app for Blackberry and Yahoo Clue, a tool introduced in Nov. 2010 that shows detailed search trends, for example.
Mayer has described Yahoo's core business as personalizing content, and the company goals as increasing user engagement, boosting the company's international audience and broadening its demographic base. Products that don't fit into that agenda won't get the resources to stay afloat.
A blog post by platforms chief Jay Rossiter about the product eliminations indicated that Yahoo is going to focus only on core products and experiences, meaning those that are daily habits for users, such as the Yahoo home page, Flickr and Mail, all of which were recently updated.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in January, Mayer outlined the "daily habit" business model: "So the nice thing at Yahoo is that we have all of the content that people want on their phone, we have these daily habits. And I think that whenever you're dealing with a daily habit and providing a lot of value around it there is an opportunity not only to provide a lot of value to the end user but to also create a great business."
Below is the list of the products from Yahoo that will cease to exist in April:
Yahoo! Avatars
Effective April 1, 2013, we will no longer support Yahoo! Avatars across our properties. If you like your existing avatar and want to keep it, please go to the Avatars download page, pick a picture size and format, and click the appropriate download button. Similarly, if you want to edit your avatar, you can download the image and then use a photo editing service of your preference. If you want to continue using your avatar with our products, go to Yahoo! Profile and upload the avatar you downloaded. For more details, please click here. Additionally effective April 1, we will no longer support the Avatars YQL table.
Yahoo! app for BlackBerry
Effective April 1, 2013, the Yahoo! app for BlackBerry will no longer be available for download. For those of you who have already downloaded the app, you can continue to use it but it will no longer be actively supported.
Yahoo! Clues (beta)
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! Clues (beta) will shut down.
Yahoo! App Search
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! App Search will shut down.
Yahoo! Sports IQ
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! Sports IQ will shut down. Your final lifetime Sports IQ score and rank will be automatically transferred to and preserved within your Yahoo! Fantasy Profile.
Yahoo! Message Boards website
Effective April 1, 2013, the Yahoo! Message Boards website will shut down. Our message boards on individual properties (like Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Fantasy Sports) will remain active. We also encourage you to ask and answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, and discuss issues in the comments section on Yahoo! News.
Yahoo! Updates API
As of April 16, 2013, we will no longer support the Yahoo! Updates API.
SEFFNER, Fla. A man was missing and feared dead early Friday after a large sinkhole opened under the bedroom of a house near Tampa.
His brother says the man screamed for help before he disappeared.
The 36-year-old man's brother, Jeremy Bush, told rescue crews he heard a loud crash around 11 p.m. Thursday, then heard his brother screaming for help.
"When he got there, there was no bedroom left," Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico said. "There was no furniture. All he saw was a piece of the mattress sticking up."
The brother called 911 and frantically tried to help his brother. He said he jumped into the hole and dirt was quickly up to his neck.
"The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother," Jeremy said. "But I just couldn't do nothing."
An arriving deputy pulled the brother from the still-collapsing house.
"I reached down and was able to actually able to get him by his hand and pull him out of the hole," Hillsborough County Sheriff's Deputy Douglas Duvall said. "The hole was collapsing. At that time, we left the house."
Engineers worked to determine the size of the sinkhole. At the surface, officials estimated it was about 30 feet across. Below the surface, officials believed it was 100 feet wide.
"The entire house is on the sinkhole," Damico said.
Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Rogers told a news briefing that extra-sensitive listening devices and cameras were inserted into the sinkhole. "They did not detect any signs of life," he said.
By early Friday, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue officials determined the home had become too unstable to continue rescue efforts.
Neighbors on both sides of the home have been evacuated.
Sinkholes are common in seaside Florida, whose underlying limestone and dolomite can be worn away by water and chemicals, then collapse.
Engineers condemned the house, reports CBS Tampa affiliate WTSP.
From the outside of the small, sky blue house, nothing appeared wrong. There wear no cracks and the only sign something was amiss was the yellow caution tape circling the house.
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office spokesman Larry McKinnon said authorities asked sinkhole and engineering experts, and they were using equipment to see if the ground can support the weight of heavy machinery needed for the recovery effort.
Jeremy Bush stood in a neighbor's yard across the street from the house Friday and recounted the harrowing collapse.
"He was screaming my name. I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him," he said of his brother.
Jeremy Bush's wife and his 2-year-old daughter were also inside the house. "She keeps asking where her Uncle Jeff is," he said. "I lost everything. I work so hard to support my wife and kid and I lost everything."
Janell Wheeler told the Tampa Bay Times newspaper she was inside the house with four other adults and a child when the sinkhole opened.
"It sounded like a car hit my house," she said.
The rest of the family went to a hotel but she stayed behind, sleeping in her car.
President Obama and congressional leaders today failed to reach a breakthrough to avert a sweeping package of automatic spending cuts, setting into motion $85 billion of across-the-board belt-tightening that neither had wanted to see.
Obama met for just over an hour at the White House today with Republican leaders House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic allies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Joe Biden.
But the parties emerged from their first face-to-face meeting of the year resigned to see the cuts take hold at midnight.
"This is not a win for anybody," Obama lamented in a statement to reporters after the meeting. "This is a loss for the American people."
READ MORE: 6 Questions (and Answers) About the Sequester
Officials have said the spending reductions immediately take effect Saturday but that the pain from reduced government services and furloughs of tens of thousands of federal employees would be felt gradually in the weeks ahead.
Federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the Pentagon, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education, have all prepared to notify employees that they will have to take one unpaid day off per week through the end of the year.
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The staffing trims could slow many government services, including airport screenings, air traffic control, and law enforcement investigations and prosecutions. Spending on education programs and health services for low-income families will also get clipped.
"It is absolutely true that this is not going to precipitate the crisis" that would have been caused by the so-called fiscal cliff, Obama said. "But people are going to be hurt. The economy will not grow as quickly as it would have. Unemployment will not go down as quickly as it would have. And there are lives behind that. And it's real."
The sticking point in the debate over the automatic cuts -- known as sequester -- has remained the same between the parties for more than a year since the cuts were first proposed: whether to include more new tax revenue in a broad deficit reduction plan.
The White House insists there must be higher tax revenue, through elimination of tax loopholes and deductions that benefit wealthier Americans and corporations. Republicans seek an approach of spending cuts only, with an emphasis on entitlement programs. It's a deep divide that both sides have proven unable to bridge.
"This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over," Boehner told reporters after the meeting. "It's about taking on the spending problem here in Washington."
Boehner: No New Taxes to Avert Sequester
Boehner says any elimination of tax loopholes or deductions should be part of a broader tax code overhaul aimed at lowering rates overall, not to offset spending cuts in the sequester.
Obama countered today that he's willing to "take on the problem where it exists, on entitlements, and do some things that my own party doesn't like."
But he says Republicans must be willing to eliminate some tax loopholes as part of a deal.
"They refuse to budge on closing a single wasteful loophole to help reduce the deficit," Obama said. "We can and must replace these cuts with a more balanced approach that asks something from everybody."
Can anything more be done by either side to reach a middle ground?
The president today claimed he's done all he can. "I am not a dictator, I'm the president," Obama said.
SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook agreed Thursday to buy Atlas Advertiser Suite from Microsoft as part of an effort to boost ad revenues at the massive social network.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"Atlas is a leader in campaign management and measurement for marketers and agencies. We believe this acquisition will benefit both marketers and users," Facebook's Brian Boland said in a blog post.
Atlas was part of the aQuantive group acquired by Microsoft, which ended up in a writedown and loss for Microsoft last year.
Microsoft's Dave O'Hara said the deal "will strengthen our existing partnership" with Facebook "for the benefit of both companies and their respective long-term visions."
Facebook has become the world's biggest social network with more than one billion users, but its stock has been hit by concerns about its ability to boost revenues and profitability.
The California group has been working on a number of advertising initiatives for both desktop and mobile Facebook applications.
Facebook shares rose 1.4 percent to end Thursday at $27.25.
The Catholic Church is one of the few remaining organizations that believes in absolutes.
Sometimes, though, this gives an impression of harshness.
No sooner had the pope bid farewell to his flock than his tweets were summarily removed from Twitter. Pope Benedict XVI officially left office today.
It's true that last week the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI's last tweet would be on February 27.
Yet to see the @Pointifex account deserted feels a little severe.
Currently, the account is open, but is marked simply with the words "Sede Vacante," the Latin for "vacant seat."
It's hard not to think that the decision to remove Pope Benedict's tweets was taken by a vacant seat, an apparatchik of absolutism.
The pope's tweets had always been reverential. Would it have truly hurt to leave them there until the next European came to take his place?
More Technically Incorrect
The tweets have not entirely disappeared. They have been archived by the Vatican here.
The pope currently has 1,613,653 followers. Which, to my eyes, is a surprisingly small number for such a universal religion.
But there's a curious sense of discomfort to this action that might disturb some.
It's odd enough that Pope Benedict is the first pope to resign in around 600 years. Rumors -- some concerning his health, some even more concerning -- have been rife over this peculiar departure.
Forbes reports that it will be up to the next pope to decide whether to tweet. This seems curious in itself. If he didn't, many would imagine this was the Church taking a retrograde step at a very difficult time.
Currently, it may well be that the church is still relatively new to social media. But one might have imagined that leaving Pope Benedict's tweets be would have offered some sense of both pride and continuity.
Instead, they leave a tinge of dark mystery.
Thin is the line between absolution and absolutism.
