Ferrari has created a special version of the flagship V12 four-seater 612 Scaglietti liveried in police colors to be used when Ferrari’s 60th Anniversary relay starts the UK leg on 18th April.

The relay is part of the celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of when the first Ferrari car was produced in 1947 by Enzo Ferrari. The relay began on 29 January 2007 in Abu Dhabi and has already visited the Middle East, China, Japan, North America, Spain, Portugal and Holland and will involve over 10,000 Ferrari owners and their cars of all ages. The cars are symbolic ‘bearers’ of a specially commissioned relay baton adorned with 60 badges symbolizing the most extraordinary events in the Marque’s 60- year history which is traveling across the world. British fans can follow the tour on-line by visiting www.ferrari60relay.co.uk with daily updates and pictures.

Ferrari has provided a dedicated 612 Scaglietti HGTS liveried in police colors, which will be driven by police officers at the front of the UK tour throughout the 1500 miles from Belfast to London. All of the police officers driving the 612 are volunteers from five forces across the UK, and are driving in their free time (not as part of their normal duty) to support the tour.

Representatives from police forces across the UK will also visit the various handover and meeting points throughout the UK promoting the government backed ‘Think!’ campaign on road safety.

Massimo Fedeli, Managing Director of Ferrari GB said: ‘Ferrari is the world’s ultimate high performance luxury car but we are very focused on ensuring that clients enjoy that performance in a safe and responsible way. We offer driver training course for all customers through our Pilota program, and also in the UK a track-driving experience called Fiorano Ferrari.

‘Our 60th anniversary tour is the perfect opportunity to provide this special 612 Scaglietti HGTS for the police service of England, Ireland and Wales to drive. This reinforces Ferrari’s commitment to responsible driving and promoting road safety. The 612 Scaglietti HGTS is the ideal car for this activity with four full-seats and the Ferrari Grand Touring heritage as the flagship of our range.’

PC Paul Atkin, ACPO Liaison Officer for Roads Policing said: ‘Ferrari have worked closely with ACPO to ensure the relay has been organized responsibly and we are very impressed with their approach to the issue of road safety and their considerations of the effect the relay would have on other road users. The tour provides a perfect platform for the police forces across the UK to promote the ‘Think!’ campaign.’

Ferrari 612 Scaglietti HGTS

The car provided to the British Police for the tour is in Blu Tour de France with a Beige interior. The car features the HGTS (Handling GTS package) and also has Daytona style seats, personalized stitching and leather details, yellow rev counter, yellow brake calipers and Scuderia Ferrari shields. The price of the car as featured is £200,411 including four year warranty. Ferrari GB would also like to thank Woodway Engineering for their assistance with the emergency lighting bar.

The Association of Chief Police Officers

One of the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti participating in the Ferrari 60 Relay UK Tour appears in police ‘livery’ and will be driven by members of the police from the various regional police forces through which the tour passes.

The Association of Chief Police Officers have worked with Ferrari to ensure that their vehicle is liveried in a purely generic way. Officers have also been consulted and advised on the route that the 60 Relay will take to ensure minimal disruption to other road users during the course of the event.

The police service of England, Wales and Northern Ireland is pleased to be represented during Ferrari's relay tour. As the tour passes through a number of police force areas various road safety messages will be highlighted including the danger and enforcement implications of using a mobile phone whilst driving.

In many areas of the world you can phone switch carriers but keep your phone number. This is known as phone number portability. Caller id and cell phones have encouraged many people to stop memorizing phone numbers, because simply by hitting a button, a person can connect to someone who recently called. It is easy to see that some phone numbers are easier to remember than others. In May of 2006 the most expensive phone number was sold in a charity auction in Doha, Qatar.

The expensive phone number 666 6666 reportedly sold for 10m Qatari riyals or £1.5m, or around $2,750,000 US. In the West some consider 6 the imperfect number, but this is apparently not the consensus in Qatar.

The Register reports that the Chinese number 8888 8888 was previously the most expensive phone number, selling for £270,000 to Sichuan Airlines.

INDIA is set to expand its military ties with Israel following a secret visit to the Jewish state by the chief of India's 1.2 million-strong army.
General JJ Singh is believed to be in Israel discussing training for elite special forces, joint military exercises and anti-terrorism and infiltration strategies - all issues that go to the heart of India's current security problems with its Islamic neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Until now, Indian leaders - despite Israel's emergence as the second-biggest arms supplier to the country after Russia - have been wary of openly building ties with Israel for fear of inciting unrest among the country's 150million Muslims and the displeasure of leftist groups within the ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition.

Both the Defence Minister AKAntony and his predecessor, Pranab Mukherjee, who is now Foreign Minister, have been on the verge of buying airline tickets to Israel, only to change their minds.

Not so the no-nonsense, tough-talking General Singh, even though, unusually, no official announcement has been made of the visit.

All indications last night were that, as a key figure in the New Delhi power establishment, he is working to build the relationship, even in the face of accusations from al-Qa'ida that India is part of the global "Zionist conspiracy".

After years of fierce, anti-Israel rhetoric by successive Indian socialist governments, India's armed forces are now hugely reliant on military supplies from Israel, preferring them to the clapped-out equipment historically bought from Russia.

India now buys more than $10billion worth of military equipment each year, and as one commentator noted yesterday: "The Israeli imprint is now visible in almost all spheres of the Indian defence forces."

But General Singh's clandestine trip to Israel signals that India is now moving well beyond buying military hardware and is extending co-operation into key areas such as military training.

Israel is seen to be dealing successfully with many of the problems that India is now experiencing with terrorism - cross-border infiltration from neighbouring Pakistan into Kashmir, and into the northeast of the country by separatist groups based in Bangladesh.

According to reports in New Delhi last night, General Singh is likely to set up a scheme for joint operations between special forces of the two countries fighting terrorism.

He will also seek Israeli help with surveillance to stop cross-border infiltration, especially along the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-31477,00.html

NEW DELHI: India just became a trillion-dollar economy. And with that it moved into the elite club of 10 economic powerhouses that enjoy this distinction.

This is not expected to be a statistical blip, even though India crossed the trillion-dollar threshold as a result of the US dollar slipping below Rs 41 on Wednesday. India's gross domestic product (GDP) at market prices is officially estimated to be just over Rs 41,00,000 crore for 2006-07 and that, on current exchange rates, translates into a little more than $1 trillion.

Considering that, as recently as in 2000-01, India's GDP was under $500 billion, this means it has more than doubled in the last six years. Successive years of 8-9% growth have obviously helped, but ironically so has the fact that inflation has been relatively high, which means the growth in nominal GDP is much more than in real terms.

The recent strengthening of the rupee against the dollar has provided the final push to take the economy beyond the trillion-dollar mark. So, is it just a temporary statistical blip? Perhaps not.

Even if the economy grows by as little as 5% in the current year and inflation stays at around 5%, the country's GDP for 2007-08 would be of the order of Rs 45,00,000 crore. So, even if the exchange rate were to move back to around Rs 45 to the dollar,we would still end the year with a trillion-dollar economy.

India is already the 10th largest economy in the world in nominal dollar terms and this development means that all of the 10 biggies will be over a trillion dollars in size, the US leading the list with over $12 trillion as its GDP.

In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms - which converts rupees to dollars on the basis of what the two currencies can actually buy in their respective economies rather than on what the nominal exchange rate is — India has been for some time the fourth-largest economy in the world behind the US, China and Japan and its size is closer to $4 trillion.

In fact, given the much faster pace at which India is growing compared with Japan, it should be the third-largest economy in PPP terms by the end of this year. It isn't just at home, however, that India is counting in trillions these days. According to the report of the high-powered committee on making Mumbai an international financial hub, Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) are estimated to own over $1 trillion.

The report says that the 20-million strong NRI community has an estimated financial wealth of over $500 billion. Factor in other assets like real estate, gold and art and the total estimated wealth of the NRI community, the report says, is over $1 trillion. India does seem poised, doesn't it?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/I...ow/1962343.cms

WASHINGTON (AP) -- European astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our solar system, and here's what it might be like to live there:

The "sun" wouldn't burn brightly. It would hang close, large and red in the sky, glowing faintly like a charcoal ember. And it probably would never set if you lived on the sunny side of the planet.

You could have a birthday party every 13 days because that's how fast this new planet circles its sun-like star. But watch the cake -- you'd weigh a whole lot more than you do on Earth.

You might be able to keep your current wardrobe. The temperature in this alien setting will likely be a lot like Earth's -- not too hot, not too cold.

And that "just right" temperature is one key reason astronomers think this planet could conceivably house life outside our solar system. It's also as close to Earth-sized as telescopes have ever spotted. Both elements make it the first potentially habitable planet besides Earth or Mars.

Astronomers who announced the discovery of the new planet Tuesday say this puts them closer to answering the cosmic question: Are we alone?

"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the new body. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is learned about it. But as galaxies go, it's practically a neighbor. At only 120 trillion miles away, the red dwarf star that this planet circles is one of the 100 closest to Earth.

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wavelengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.

The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth, and gravity there would be 1.6 times as strong as Earth's. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 11/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.

Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right -- or at least that's what scientists think.

"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."

Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one -- simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves -- will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.

Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."

Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.

"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."

The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the mid-evening in the Northern Hemisphere.

Even so, Maran noted, "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime."

But, oh, the view, if you could. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.

The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.

Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.

A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates