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BEIJING (AP) — An Olympic flame reached, and was lit up on, the top of the world Thursday. The 19-member mountaineering team was comprised of both ethnic Han Chinese and Tibetan members and also included university students - the team captain, Nyima Cering, is a Tibetan, while deputy Luo Shen is Han Chinese. All dressed in red parkas emblazoned with Olympic logos, broke camp before dawn and reached the top of the 29,035-foot mountain a little more than six hours later.

The Everest torch is separate from the main Olympic flame, which was not taken up the mountain because of weather concerns. A delay due to bad weather would have thrown the schedule off for the whole torch relay. The Olympic flame had been carried in a special metal canister during the ascent. As the team neared the top, they used a wand to pass the flame from the canister to the torch, which had been designed to withstand the strong winds and low oxygen levels at the top of Everest.

A colorful Tibetan prayer flag lined the path and fluttered in the wind. The climbers could be heard struggling for breath (live television) as five torchbearers each inched a few feet before passing on the flame to the next person. The final torchbearer, a Tibetan woman named Cering Wangmo, stood on the peak with the torch while other team members unfurled flags Chinese and Olympic flags. They then clustered together, cheering "We made it," and "Beijing welcomes you." One person was heard breathing heavily, murmuring "not enough oxygen." The head of the Everest leg of the relay, Li Zhixin, was overcome with emotion as the flame reached the top. "It's so hard," he said at the CCTV studio set up at base camp, choking on tears.

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Photos courtesy of Xinhua News

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BERLIN: Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone operator, and Telecom Italia Mobile, the leader in the Italian cellphone market, said they had reached agreements with Apple to sell the multimedia telephone. Vodafone also said it would sell the iPhone in nine other countries: the Czech Republic, Greece, Portugal, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

"It was going to be difficult for Apple to continue on an exclusivity basis," said Carolina Milanesi, the research director for mobile devices at Gartner in London. "Opening up to more operators will widen their addressable market and therefore their overall sales potential."

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SYDNEY: "Vodafone Australia is enormously pleased to be included in the agreement to sell the iPhone to our customers later this year," Vodafone chief executive Russell Hewitt said.

"The iPhone has already proved to be extremely popular with customers in other parts of the world and Vodafone is confident that today's announcement will be well received by all Australians who are keen to get their hands on their own iPhone."

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Original Source

Photos courtesy of AP and Reuters

"YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar's official media said Tuesday that 10,000 people were killed by a cyclone in just one town, confirming fears of a spiraling death toll from the storm's 12-foot tidal surges and high winds that swept away bamboo homes in low-lying coastal regions... Fishing boats were crushed by the tropical cyclone in the port of Yangon, Myanmar, on Sunday. Winds reached 120 miles per hour."

Images courtesy of Associated Press

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"Records stretching back to 1960 prove what climate models had predicted: warmer oceans contain less oxygen. Oceanographer Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and his colleagues report in Science that an analysis of historical records and recent samples show that as the globe has warmed, waters with low oxygen content have expanded in the tropical Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans.

"The oxygen concentrations in these oxygen-minimum zones have decreased with time," says oceanographer and study coauthor Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash. "The regions of low oxygen have also expanded vertically by both extending deeper into the ocean and closer to the surface."

Fish and other sea life cannot survive in such waters—and this expansion reduces the area where fish can thrive, says oceanographer Janet Sprintall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who also coauthored the study. She notes that fisheries may be affected as well."

Image courtesy of Scientific American

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