Yasser Arafat's condition is 'critical'
Ramallah: In an early morning development Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is said to be in a critical condition in his Ramallah compound. Arafat collapsed on Wednesday evening and was unconscious for about ten minutes and remained in a "very difficult situation".

According to reports one of Arafat's bodyguards who was in the compound at the time said that the leader had been eating soup during a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and official Yasser Abed Rabbo when he vomited. A team of Jordanian doctors was urgently summoned to treat the ailing Palestinian leader.

Arafat had been ill over the past two weeks, suffering from what Palestinian officials said was a lengthy bout of the flu. Arafat has not left his compound in Ramallah since 2002 for fear of being snatched by Israeli troops.
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NASA's 'Project Columbia' is world's fastest supercomputer
Houston: The U.S. space agency NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer at its Ames Research Center in California, where the India-born astronaut Kalpana Chawla worked for years, and has dubbed it 'Project Columbia,' in honour of the seven-crew members of spacecraft Columbia that crashed last year.

The $50 million computer, built by Silicon Graphics, is composed of 10,240 processors in 20 units, making it one of the world's most powerful supercomputing system.

The system was built and installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames in less than 120 days. NASA had earlier named its unit No. 1 Kalpana after their fallen colleague.

The project is helping NASA scientists conduct studies on weather, including tracking hurricane movement, and in other scientific fields.

"This amazing new supercomputer system dramatically increases NASA's capabilities and revolutionises our capacity for conducting scientific research and engineering design,'' Ames Research Center Director, G. Scott Hubbard, said. "It will be one of the fastest, largest and most productive supercomputers in the world, providing an estimated 10-fold increase in NASA's supercomputing capacity.,'' Mr. Hubbard said.

'Project Columbia' uses Intel Itanium chips, and can perform about 43 trillion computations per second, surpassing the record of 36 trillion computation set recently by IBM's BlueGene/L supercomputer.
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China 'socks' US
Beijing: China, the world's leading textile-maker, has lashed out at a US decision to limit imports of Chinese socks and has threatened retaliation under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) framework.

China holds that Chinese exports of socks "have not disrupted the US market," and the US industry's appeal for the limit does not meet the minimum condition stipulated by WTO rules.

The US Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements, an interagency group chaired by the US Department of Commerce, said in a statement that the US will impose a quota on imports of Chinese socks to limit growth of the country's market share.
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