Showing posts with label World-News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World-News. Show all posts
11:46 PM

Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie Engaged Finally

Finally! Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt get engaged

After seven years as a couple, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are finally engaged.

Pitt's manager, Cynthia Pett-Dante, confirmed the news to The Associated Press in an email yesterday.

There isn't a wedding date yet. The engagement "is a promise for the future," Pett-Dante said.

Pitt, 48, and Jolie, 36, have six children together, including three who are adopted.

"Their kids are very happy," Pett-Dante also said. Pitt and Jolie have been partners since they began a relationship while working on the film "Mr & Mrs Smith."

Jolie was briefly married to Billy Bob Thornton, but they divorced in 2003. She was also married to British actor Jonny Lee Miller before they divorced in 1999.

Pitt was previously married to Jennifer Aniston, but they divorced in 2005 after five years of marriage.

Jolie won an Oscar for her role in 1999's "Girl, Interrupted." Pitt was recently nominated for an Academy Award for his role in last year's "Moneyball."
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11:39 PM

Earthquake Tremors Felt in Maharashtra & Gujarat | Pune, Mumbai & Kutch

14 April 2012: An earthquake measuring 4.0 on the Richter scale was felt in Kutch, Gujarat at 8:53am on Saturday morning, news channels reported.

Some minor tremors were also felt in Mumbai, Pune and other parts of Maharashtra. The time of the earthquake was reported to be around 11 a.m.

There are no reports of any casualty.
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12:05 AM

Google Glasses Launched by Google


Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality

It wasn’t so long ago that legions of people began walking the streets, talking to themselves.
What’s next? Perhaps throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.

That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

“It will look very strange to onlookers when people are wearing these glasses,” said William Brinkman, graduate director of the computer science and software engineering department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “You obviously won’t see what they can from the behind the glasses. As a result, you will see bizarre body language as people duck or dodge around virtual things.”

Mr. Brinkman, whose work focuses on augmented reality or the projection of a layer of information over physical objects, said his students had experimented on their own with virtual games and obstacle courses. “It looks really weird to outsiders when you watch people navigate these spaces,” he said.

They have not seen the Google glasses. Few people have, because they are being built in the Google X offices, a secretive laboratory near Google’s main Mountain View, Calif., campus where engineers and scientists are also working on robots and space elevators.

The glasses will use the same Android software that powers Android smartphones and tablets. Like smartphones and tablets, the glasses will be equipped with GPS and motion sensors. They will also contain a camera and audio inputs and outputs.

Several people who have seen the glasses, but who are not allowed to speak publicly about them, said that the location information was a major feature of the glasses. Through the built-in camera on the glasses, Google will be able to stream images to its rack computers and return augmented reality information to the person wearing them. For instance, a person looking at a landmark could see detailed historical information and comments about it left by friends. If facial recognition software becomes accurate enough, the glasses could remind a wearer of when and how he met the vaguely familiar person standing in front of him at a party. They might also be used for virtual reality games that use the real world as the playground.

People flailing their arms in midair as they play those games is a potentially humorous outcome of the virtual reality glasses. In a more serious vein is the almost certain possibility of privacy issues and ubiquitous advertisements. When someone is meeting a person for the first time, for example, Google could hypothetically match the person’s face and tell people how many friends they share in common on social networks.

This month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research and advocacy group for Internet privacy, asked the Federal Trade Commission to suspend the use of facial recognition software until the government could come up with adequate safeguards and privacy standards to protect citizens.

Mr. Brinkman said he was very excited by the possibilities of the glasses, but acknowledged that the augmented reality glasses could pose some ethical issues.

“In addition to privacy, it’s also going to change real-world advertising, where companies can virtually place ads over other people’s ads,” he said. “I’m really interested in seeing how the government can successfully regulate augmented reality in this sense. They are not really going to know what people are seeing behind those glasses.”

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12:43 PM

Rare Pink Diamond Found in Australia

Mining group Rio Tinto has unearthed an extremely rare pink diamond, Australia's biggest rough pink diamond weighing 12.76 carats at its Argyle mine.








More than 90 percent of the world's pink diamonds come from the Argyle mine in the East Kimberley region in the far northeast area of Western Australia.The diamond, discovered in the Argyle open pit, will be known as The Argyle Pink Jubilee, Rio Tinto said in a statement. It is a light pink diamond, similar to The Williamson Pink, the diamond Britain's Queen Elizabeth received as a wedding gift and which was later set into a brooch for her Coronation.

Diamond polisher Richard How Kim Kam, who has worked for Argyle for 25 years, has started work on polishing the diamond in Perth, Australia.After two months of careful assessment and planning, it will take about 10 days to cut and polish it as a single stone.Richard said: "I'm going to take it very carefully. I know the world will be watching."When the diamond has been cut and polished it will be graded by a team of experts and promoted internationally before being sold as part of the Argyle pink diamonds tender later this year.Argyle pink diamonds manager Josephine Johnson said: "This rare diamond is generating incredible excitement.

"A diamond of this calibre is unprecedented - it has taken 26 years of Argyle production to unearth this stone and we may never see one like this again." She added: "The individual who gets to wear this remarkable pink diamond will be incredibly lucky indeed."

Large pink diamonds tend to go to museums, are gifted to royalty or end up at auction houses such as Christie's. Christie's has auctioned 18 polished pink diamonds over 10 carats in its 244 year history.Extremely high quality pink diamonds could fetch in excess of US$1 million per carat, meaning it is likely to go for at least $10 million.Text

Courtesy: REUTERS
Source: YAHOO.COM
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