Total chosen as Gazprom partner

Russian gas company Gazprom has chosen French energy firm Total as a partner to develop the Shtokman gas field.

Gazprom chief executive Alexei Millar said the Total would hold a 25% stake in the company controlling the infrastructure of the field.

The two firms are expected to sign an agreement on the project on Friday.

The gas field in the Barents Sea - holding an estimated with 3.2 trillion cubic metres of gas - could become the world's largest offshore gas field.

As the project gets under way further partners could be given a 24% share in the development, Mr Millar added.

Other companies that could join the project include Norway's Statoil and Norsk Hydro as well as US group ConocoPhillips.

Rising demand

Gazprom is the monopoly supplier of gas in Russia, and is playing a key role in supplying the rest of Europe with gas supplies.

Demand for natural gas is expected to rise sharply, while other European sources of natural gas, such as the North Sea, are likely to decline.

And much of the gas in the Shtokman field could be sent to meet Europe's growing needs, either through a pipeline or through tankers sailing from the ice-free port of Murmansk and carrying liquidifed natural gas (LNG).

"The agreement that has been reached is the latest important step in developing mutually beneficial cooperation and partnership relations between Gazprom and the world's biggest energy companies," Mr Millar said in a statement.

Gazprom's choice of a partner for the Shtokman field is a distinct turnaround from its position in October 2006 when the Russian firm said it had decided that it alone would exploit the huge untapped gas reserves.

U-turn

However, earlier this week one of the group's top executives Alexander Medvedev signalled that Gazprom had once again changed its mind about the project.

In an interview with the Financial Times newspaper he said Gazprom was in talks with foreign companies to allow them to "share in the economic benefits of the project, share the management and take on a share of the industrial, commercial and financial risks".

The cost of the operation has been estimated at between $20bn (£10bn) and $30bn which Gazprom would have to foot if it decided to go it alone.

Commentators claim that the complexities of the project - including Gazprom's lack of experience with LNG, harsh weather conditions and lack of infrastructure to transport the gas to market - had led to Gazprom's U-turn.

NY firefighters attack Giuliani

Firefighters who lost colleagues in the 9/11 attacks in New York have strongly criticised Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani.

They released a video claiming that failures by the then-mayor of New York led to the deaths of 121 men.

The video says Mr Giuliani failed to provide working radios for crews and halted the recovery effort too soon.

His campaign denounced the footage, saying the union behind it was known to support Democratic candidates.

Mr Giuliani is seen as one of the frontrunners in the race for the Republican nomination.

'Taking the hit'

The 13-minute footage was made by the 280,000-strong International Association of Firefighters (IAFF).

It says Mr Giuliani pushed for a faster clean-up at Ground Zero before all the remains had been recovered, and placed an emergency centre in a building that later collapsed.

It also accuses the former mayor of failing to provide working radios for firefighters, saying it made it impossible for them to learn that the Twin Towers were about to collapse.

"Virtually the whole thing goes back to him with the radios," Jim Riches, a fireman whose son was killed on 9/11, says in the footage.

"He's the guy on the top, and he's the guy you yell at. He takes the hit. And my son is dead because of it."

The video - which also offers testimony from other firefighters and their relatives - says Mr Giuliani is exploiting the disaster as a theme for his presidential candidacy.

'Disgrace'

In response, Mr Giuliani's camp accused the IAFF - who has feuded often with Mr Giuliani since the attacks - of playing partisan politics.

Former firefighter Lee Ielpi, whose son died in the attacks, called the footage a "disgrace", dismissing the allegations against Mr Giuliani.

"I was there. I saw it. I experienced it. I'm not going to let lies like this go," he said.

Mr Giuliani's campaign also said he had a long history of supporting firefighters on health and safety issues.

US Open gets record prize money

The men's and women's singles champions at this year's US Open will receive a record £688,000 ($1.4m) apiece.

Last year's winners Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova won £590,000 ($1.2m) for their victories at Flushing Meadow.

The US Tennis Association has also said that the total prize money will pass £9.6m ($19.6m) for the first time.

The prize fund of is an increase of £492,000 ($1m) on last year's total and is the largest annual rise in the history of the tournament.

The USTA is also completing a renovation to player areas including new locker rooms, an upgraded player lounge and new state-of-the-art fitness centre.

"Today's players are some of the most talented, competitive, and hard working athletes in sports," said Arlen Kantarian of the USTA.

"The increased prize money and upgraded player facilities reflect the tremendous excitement and entertainment they bring to the US Open."

This year's tournament takes place from 27 August to 9 September.

Astronomers claim galaxy record

Astronomers say they may have detected the light from some of the earliest stars to form in the Universe.

They have pictures of what appear to be very faint galaxies that shone more than 13 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The remarkable claim dramatically exceeds the current, broadly accepted record for the most distant detection.

The Caltech-led team behind the work recognises there will be sceptics but says it believes its data is strong.

It has published details in The Astrophysical Journal; and the group leader, Professor Richard Ellis, has been arguing the case at a conference in London, UK.

"We've had these galaxies for over a year and we have gone back to the telescope and revisited them, to prove their signals are robust," he explained.

"We feel confident now that we have done all that is humanly possibly to show the community that these galaxies are at these great distances," Professor Ellis told BBC News.

Big zoom

The international team of astronomers found its six "candidate" galaxies using one of the 10m Keck telescope twins sited on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

The researchers employed a technique known as gravitational lensing to achieve the detections.

This makes use of the gravity of relatively nearby objects (in this case galaxy clusters) to magnify the light coming from much more distant objects (the six candidates). Astronomers from Caltech (California Institute of Technology) have helped pioneer this field; and they say they know how to select just the right "zoom lens" to see back into the required period in cosmic history.

The team then further refined its search by only looking for a very narrow wavelength of light where its target galaxies - if they existed - would be expected to shine.

It has taken three years' painstaking work to make and check the observations.

"Using Keck II, we have detected six faint star-forming galaxies whose signal has been boosted about 20 times by the magnifying effect of a foreground cluster," said Caltech co-worker Dan Stark.

"That we should find so many distant galaxies in our small survey area suggests they are very numerous indeed."

It's a crowd

This is perhaps the most significant implication of the study.

Astronomy is now engaged in a major drive to tie down the timings of key events in the early Universe.

Scientists would like to see extensive evidence for the very first populations of stars. These hot, blue giants would have grown out of the cold neutral gas that pervaded the young cosmos. The behemoths would likely have burned brilliant but brief lives, producing the very first heavy elements.

They would also have "fried" the neutral gas around them to produce the diffuse intergalactic plasma we detect between nearby stars today.

But this theory demands the earliest star-forming phase in the Universe was a busy one - and the significance of the latest study is that it suggests the numbers of stars required did indeed exist.

"The area of sky we surveyed was so small that for us to find anything at all suggests to us these objects must be very numerous," Professor Ellis told the BBC News website.

"Obviously it's a bit of a stretch to estimate a population from just six objects - but if you went out into a London street, looked at one piece of pavement and found six people standing there, I think you could reasonably conclude London was a crowded place."

Redshift hunters

It has been known for a while that the Caltech-led group had some very interesting pictures. In the past 12 months, knowledge of their existence has been shared at scientific conferences and hinted at by popular publications such as Time Magazine and the BBC News website.

But Ellis and colleagues have deliberately held back from formal publication of their work. Theirs is a field which has burned the reputations of others who have rushed forward with announcements that could not be confirmed by subsequent, independent observation.

Even so, to get an idea of how big a leap in detection is now being claimed can be illustrated by the "ruler" astronomers use to describe far-off sightings.

They will often be heard referring to "redshift". It is a measure of the degree to which light has been "stretched" by the expansion of the Universe. The greater the redshift, the more distant the object and the earlier it is being seen in cosmic history.

The current, widely accepted distance record-holder is the IOK-1 galaxy detection announced last year which had a redshift of 6.96. Its light was being seen when the Universe was little more than 700 million years old (Current estimates have the Universe coming into existence about 13.66 billion years ago as a "hot soup" of elementary particles).

Getting to this mark was a process of steady, incremental steps through redshifts in the lower-sixes and fives. The Caltech-led group has now suddenly jumped into the redshift region of eight to 10.

Dr Andy Bunker is a high-redshift hunter with Exeter University, UK. He has worked with the Ellis group in the past but was not involved in this study.

He commented: "Richard is a careful worker and he knows the burden of proof is very high.

"His group is aware of the history of the field and that's why they are being a little bit cagey; but I think this is a significant paper and unlike many that have gone before, I believe this will stand the test of time and at least some of the six candidates will be confirmed by others in due course."

The Caltech-led group hopes soon to get some confirmation of its own by looking at a different wavelength of light using the Spitzer Space Telescope and through the use of a new spectrograph instrument which is being installed at the Keck.

A refurbished Hubble Space Telescope is expected to be able to reach up to redshift 10; and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, due for launch early in the next decade, should be capable of redshift 15 observations.

Richard Ellis, the Steele Professor of Astronomy at Caltech, Pasadena, US, delivered a talk at the From IRAS to Herschel and Planck Conference. The meeting was organised to celebrate the 65th birthday of Royal Astronomical Society President Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson.

Even the powerful Keck struggles to see the greatest distances It uses a trick - a gravitational zoom lens to magnify far-off objects The candidate galaxies are among the first to form in the Universe Their stars would have helped end a period dubbed the 'Dark Ages' In this cold phase the Universe was filled with neutral gas atoms The stars of the 'Cosmic Renaissance' changed their environment These giants' nuclear cores synthesised the first heavy elements Their intense ultraviolet light also 'fried' the neutral gas atoms The resulting plasma - free electrons and protons - is evident today

Red Mosque 'cleared of militants'

The Pakistani army says it has cleared a mosque compound in Islamabad of militants, a day after troops stormed the complex.

At least 50 people inside the Red Mosque and eight soldiers died during the operation, the military said.

The mosque's militant cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, and some of his supporters were among those who died.

The mosque was besieged by troops for a week amid spiralling tension between radical students and the government.

Students at the mosque and its attached religious schools had waged a campaign for months pressing for the imposition of strict Islamic Sharia law.

It is not clear how many people were inside the complex when it was stormed.

Red Mosque siege area

In addition to those killed, about 70 militants had been captured or surrendered, the army said earlier.

"The first phase of the operation is over. There are no more militants left inside," army spokesman Maj Gen Washeed Arshad told the Associated Press news agency.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said no bodies of women or children had been found inside the mosque compound yet, AP reported.

The troops attacked the mosque on Tuesday morning and took control of the complex during heavy fighting as they went from room to room throughout the day.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said Mr Ghazi was killed as troops were flushing out militants still inside a madrassa (religious school) for women and girls inside the mosque compound.

Security forces began a full-scale siege of the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, last Tuesday, not long after mosque students abducted seven Chinese workers they accused of running a brothel.

The government had said it wanted to detain a number of people on a wanted list, and also a number of foreigners whom it said were inside.

Baby mammoth discovery unveiled

A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.

The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.

The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.

The animal's trunk and eyes are still intact and some of its fur remains on the body. Mammoths are an extinct member of the elephant family. Adults often possessed long, curved tusks and a coat of long hair.

The 130cm (4ft 3ins) tall, 50kg Siberian specimen dates to the end of the last Ice Age, when the great beasts were vanishing from the planet.

It was discovered by a reindeer herder in May this year. Yuri Khudi stumbled across the carcass near the Yuribei River, in Russia's Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.

Missing tail

Last week, an international delegation of experts convened in the town of Salekhard, near the discovery site, to carry out a preliminary examination of the animal.

"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, vice director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the delegation.

"In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery," he said.

Larry Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs research centre in South Dakota, US, said: "To find a juvenile mammoth in any condition is extremely rare." Dr Agenbroad added that he knew of only three other examples.

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth.

Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning

"When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News.

Lucrative trade

Efforts to get viable DNA from that specimen were not fruitful. But some researchers believe it may only be a matter of time until the right find emerges from Siberia.

Bringing mammoths back from the dead could take the form of injecting sperm into the egg of a relative, such as the Asian elephant, to try to create a hybrid.

Alternatively, scientists could attempt to clone a pure mammoth by fusing the nucleus of a mammoth cell with an elephant egg cell stripped of its DNA.

But Dr Agenbroad warned that scientifically valuable Siberian mammoth specimens were being lost to a lucrative trade in ivory, skin, hair and other body parts.

The city of Yakutsk in Russia's far east forms the hub for this trade.

Local people are scouring the Siberian permafrost for remains to sell on, and, according to Dr Agenbroad, more carcasses could be falling into the hands of dealers than are finding their way to scientists.

Japan transfer

"These products are primarily for collectors and it is usually illicit," he explained.

"Originally it was for ivory, now it is everything. You can now go on almost any fossil marketing website and find mammoth hair for $50 an inch. It has grown beyond anyone's imagination."

Dr Agenbroad added: "Russia says that any mammoth remains are the property of the Russian government, but nobody really pays attention to that."

The Yamal mammoth is expected to be transferred to Jikei University in Tokyo, Japan, later this year.

A team led by Professor Naoki Suzuki will carry out an extensive study of the carcass, including CT scans of its internal organs.

Mammoths first appeared in the Pliocene Epoch, 4.8 million years ago.

What caused their widespread disappearance at the end of the last Ice Age remains unclear; but climate change, overkill by human hunters, or a combination of both could have been to blame.

One population of mammoths lived on in isolation on Russia's remote Wrangel Island until about 5,000 years ago.

US Senate steps up Iraq pressure

Some 30,000 extra US troops have been deployed to boost security

The US Senate is debating amendments to the annual military budget designed to put pressure on the White House to start withdrawing US forces from Iraq.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said the president's troop "surge" strategy was not working.

He urged those high-profile Republicans who have broken with President George W Bush in recent weeks to vote with Democrats to end the war.

The administration is to report to Congress on Iraq progress by 15 July.

The interim report on 18 measures of progress is required by law under a previous funding bill. Bush administration officials say the picture will be mixed.

Reports quoting unnamed officials have said it will conclude that the Iraqi government has failed to meet any of the political and economic benchmarks it has been set.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari has warned that a premature withdrawal of US troops from Iraq could trigger a civil war and wider Middle East conflict.

The US military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, says fighting the insurgency there is a long-term endeavour which could take many years.

Gen Petraeus and US ambassador Ryan Crocker will give a progress report in September on the strategy, under which some 30,000 extra US troops have been deployed in Iraq.

Support 'collapsing'

Support for Mr Bush is wavering just as the Senate discusses the military spending bill.

Among those to defect are high-profile Republican Senators Pete Domenici and Richard Lugar, a senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

According to the New York Times newspaper, White House officials who previously thought they could wait until September to begin discussions on withdrawal from Iraq now think Mr Bush must act quickly to forestall more unrest in his party.

Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, spoke of his frustration.

"We're now in the fifth year of ground combat operations in Iraq, and this deck of cards is coming crashing down.

"And it's landing heavily on the heads of the soldiers and the marines who have been deployed again and again, while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise," he said

'Security vacuum'

The White House has denied claims it is contemplating pulling US troops out imminently.

President Bush's Iraq policy is losing support within his own party

Mr Bush had repeatedly stated that he held the goal of withdrawing troops from Iraq as conditions on the ground made it possible, spokesman Tony Snow said.

"But the idea of trying to make a political judgement rather than a military judgement about how to have forces in the field is simply not true," Mr Snow said.

He also sought to lower expectations ahead of the interim report on progress in Iraq, saying it was unrealistic to expect all the benchmarks to have been met already.

Democratic leaders may hope to capitalise on the growing divisions in the Republican ranks to make progress on their demands for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

One amendment, sponsored by Democrat Jim Webb and Republican Chuck Hagel, would require troops to spend the same amount of time at home as in combat, making extended deployments more difficult.

Another proposed amendment, by Democratic Senator Carl Levin, would require that troop withdrawals begin within 120 days of the bill being passed.

Gen Petraeus told the BBC's John Simpson that more time was needed to see the results of the surge because all the troops had only been in place since mid-June.

But with US casualties mounting and questions over how much progress is being made, many US lawmakers are under pressure from constituents to pursue a change of strategy.