United Kingdom

“On the edge” Pak going through worst crisis of its history, say Nawaz, Imran

London, Oct 23 : Top Pakistan Opposition leaders have said that the country was heading towards its worst ever crisis, and with the renewed insurgency it was “on the edge”.

“Pakistan is going through the worst crisis of its history,” said to a leaked letter signed by the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the main opposition leader in Pakistan.

A similar view is shared by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, another opposition leader, who says that the political and economic meltdown "is leading to a sort of anarchy in Pakistan". “How does a country collapse?” the former cricketer asked.

Faster than a bullet - Britons plan a 1,000 miles-an-hour car

London - The British team that already holds the world land speed record said Thursday it plans to build a 1,000-miles-an-hour (1,600 kilometres) car in the next three years.

The Bloodhound SSC (supersonic car) will be 13 metres long, six metres wide and be powered by a jet engine normally used on the Eurofighter, plus a rocket, said project leader Richard Noble.

"We have to defend our record," said Noble, whose team in 1997 produced the current record-holder which reached a speed of 1,228 kilometres (785 miles) an hour, breaking the sound barrier.

Noble said the new car would be faster than a bullet, covering the distance of four football fields in a second.

Slovakia excited about British queen's first visit

Bratislava - Britain's Queen Elizabeth II was to arrive in Slovakia Thursday for her first visit to the ex-communist country that went independent 15 years ago and became an economic success story.

The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, were coming off a trip to Slovenia, a smaller country to the south that once was part of Yugoslavia.

In Slovakia, the queen was to meet Thursday with President Ivan Gasparovic, Prime Minister Robert Fico and Sir Nicholas Winton, 99, a Briton who saved hundreds of mostly Czechoslovak Jewish children from Nazi concentration camps on the eve of World War II.

US military wants James Bond type flying submarine for its Special Forces

London, Oct 23 : The US military has launched a competition to find a design for a flying submarine, a week before the release of the latest James Bond film.

Bond drove a submersible Lotus Esprit in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and villain Scaramanga drove a flying AMC Matador coupé in “The Man With The Golden Gun” but the US group is looking for a vehicle that can do both, The Telegraph reported.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, wants a flying submarine to help small teams of Special Forces to approach coastlines undetected.

The agency said that it wants the craft in order to “maintain its tactical advantage for future coastal insertion missions”.

Russians may have been the first potters on Earth

London, Oct 23: Russian archeologists have claimed that the Russians were the first people on the planet to cultivate land, breed cattle and make earthenware.

Russian tribes inhabited Khabarovsk Region in the Stone Age, the archeologists said after finding a 15,000-year-old hunters’ settlement on the bank of the Amur River in Khabarovsk.

According to a report in Press TV, stone axes, knives, scrapers, arrowheads and baked earthenware have so far been unearthed in the area.

“It was the first earthenware on the globe, and though it was primitive, with plain decoration, and poorly baked, yet it was a significant landmark in the history of mankind,” said Andrei Malyavin, an employee of Khabarovsk Archeology Museum.

Storage breakthrough brings quantum computers closer to reality

London, Oct 23 : Scientists have now made it possible to store information inside the nucleus of an atom—a breakthrough that has paved the way for a quantum computer which could crack problems unsolvable by current technology.

Touted as the holy grail of computing, quantum computing involves individual piece of information, or ‘bit’, which can have more than one value at once, as opposed to current technology which is limited to either 1s or 0s. This can dramatically escalate the processing power and thus widens the scope of what computers can do.

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