Dubai has settled on a use for the Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise liner it bought for £64 million, with plans to make it into a floating hotel fitted with the original furnishings.
The 300-room hotel is expected to open within 18 months at the city’s Port Rashid.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman of the company that bought the ship, said they realised visitors wanted to see the QE2 as it originally looked, so they are not planning major changes as part of the conversion.
The ship’s fate has been the subject of intense speculation since Dubai bought it in 2007. Original plans to completely overhaul it as a luxury hotel were scrapped when Dubai’s economy tumbled into crisis.
Solar-powered plane to take off for Spain
An experimental solar-powered plane, flying without using any fuel, will leave the Moroccan capital today for Madrid on its return journey to its home port in Switzerland, organisers said.
The Swiss-made Solar Impulse will take off at 10 a.m. from the Rabat-Sale airport and is due to land in Madrid’s Barajas airport after midnight tomorrow on its way home, organisers said yesterday. Solar Impulse arrived late on Friday in Rabat on a return journey to Switzerland after its successful flight over the Moroccan desert.
The giant high-tech aircraft, which has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but weighs no more than a medium-sized car, is fitted with 12,000 solar cells feeding four electric motors driving propellors.
‘Leap second’ wreaks internet havoc
Adjusting a mere second in the official global clock sent dozens of websites crashing in an incident reminiscent of the Y2K bug more than a decade ago.
The ‘leap second’ was added to the Coordinated Universal Time to adjust clocks to the earth’s rotation the night of June 30, delaying for one second the transition to July 1. The extra second was too much for some software to handle.
Reddit, a social news network, posted a Twitter message saying: “We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second.”
A later message by Reddit attempted to make fun of the issue: “You ever wish you had an extra second or two? This is not one of those times.”
Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, also had problems.
GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn in US
GlaxoSmithKline was socked with $3 billion in fines by US authorities on Monday over charges it marketed drugs for unauthorized uses, held back safety data, and cheated the government’s Medicaid program.
The Justice Department said GSK was fined over misbranding its drugs Paxil and Wellbutrin, and for holding back data while making unbacked claims for its diabetes drug Avandia.
GSK pleaded guilty and agreed to the fines in what the department called the largest health care fraud settlement in US history.
Science almost finds ‘God particle’
Scientists are poised to announce they have enough evidence to show that the long-sought ‘God particle’ answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly exists.
But after decades of work and billions of pounds, researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, say they are not quite ready to say they have “discovered” the particle.
Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN’s vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson – all but proving it exists – but does not allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.