Communications Technology

In a new blow for France’s increasingly tough fight to find foreign buyers for its Rafale jet fighter, a leaked US cable reports the King of Bahrain mocking it as “yesterday’s technology”.

King Hamad of Bahrain met US General David Petraeus on November 1 last year to discuss defence cooperation in the region, according to one document from a slew of secret US diplomatic traffic released this week by the WikiLeaks website.

“King Hamad asked General Petraeus for his help in encouraging US aircraft manufacturers to participate in the inaugural Bahrain Air Show, scheduled for January 2010,” the cable, written by the US embassy in Manama, reported.

“He said that France was pushing the Rafale and would be there in force although he agreed with Petraeus that the French fighter was yesterday’s technology,” the leaked diplomatic cable said.

France considers the Rafale a state of the art warplane but has struggled to find any foreign buyers to support the project. Paris’s main hope now rests on Brazil agreeing in the coming weeks to buy 36 of them.

A French navy Rafale F3 crashed on Sunday into the Arabian Sea as it returned to its aircraft carrier from a mission over Afghanistan.

At the meeting, Hamad also correctly predicted that France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy would lose out on an attempt to sell nuclear reactors to Bahrein’s neighbour, the United Arab Emirates.

“Warming to the subject of French commercial diplomacy and referring to President Sarkozy, King Hamad said, ‘The UAE will give him a hard time soon, they’re not happy with the project he’s offered them’.”

Paris learned a month after the Manama meeting that France’s Areva had not won the 20 billion euro ($27.3 billion) contract with Abu Dhabi, despite Sarkozy’s determined push to make nuclear technology the centre of his trade strategy.

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LONDON: A spacecraft has tasted oxygen in the atmosphere of another world for the first time while flying low over Saturn’s icy moon, Rhea.

NASA’s Cassini probe scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the planet’s moon while passing overhead at an altitude of 97 kilometres in March.

Until now, wisps of oxygen have been detected on planets and their moons only indirectly, using the Hubble space telescope and other major facilities.

Instruments aboard Cassini revealed an extremely thin oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is sustained by high-energy particles slamming into the moon’s surface and kicking up atoms, molecules and ions.

Astronomers have counted 62 moons orbiting Saturn. At 1500 kilometres wide, Rhea is the second largest and is thought to be made almost entirely of ice.

”This really is the first time that we’ve seen oxygen directly in the atmosphere of another world,” said Andrew Coates, at University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory. He is a co-author of the study published in Science.

”Active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe,” said Ben Teolis of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, the team leader.

”Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it.”

Rhea’s atmosphere makes it unique in the Saturn system. Only Rhea and Titan, the largest Saturnian moon, have enough mass to hold on to an atmosphere with their gravity. Titan, however, has a very thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere, with very little carbon dioxide and oxygen.

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BNEI BEREK, Israel: From a drab office in this ultra-Orthodox Jewish stronghold, three devout young women hunch over computers and surf the internet - looking for pornography, celebrity gossip and a list of other items banned by their rabbis.

It is odd work for this trio, dressed modestly and wearing wigs in keeping with their beliefs. But it is their job at Israel’s first ultra-Orthodox internet provider, Nativ, as it tries to launch a product that could transform the traditionally sheltered community: kosher internet.

Because racy images of women are the most common offensive content found, the company decided it would be less objectionable to hire women to scour the internet.

Lea Bernat, 22, a former kindergarten teacher, clicks through hundreds of web pages a day, using specialised software to open links and disable problematic content.

”If it’s clean, we release it,” she said. ”If it’s really unclean, we tell the customer that the site isn’t approved.”

But is it kosher?

That is the question facing many ultra-Orthodox Jews as they move online and are greeted by a fast-growing industry seeking to cater to their special needs.

There’s Koogle, a Google-inspired searchable directory of kosher businesses offering, say, bargains on ”modest” wedding dresses. Many rabbis frown on YouTube, so Yideotube offers a ”daily online source of carefully screened videos”, ranging from spoofs of anti-war activists to tips for buying a ceremonial kittel robe.

Worried about violating prohibitions against working on the Sabbath? Software vendor SaturdayGuard sells technology that enables websites to block access for users, depending upon their time zone, between Friday and Saturday night.

There’s even an online support group, GuardYourEyes.org, specialising in helping Orthodox Jews break ”lust addictions” arising from internet access. The group offers tips for curtailing inappropriate surfing, including using software that automatically sends lists of visited websites to your spouse or rabbi.

Ultra-Orthodox rabbis initially labelled the internet as the biggest threat yet to Judaism, likening it to eating pork and calling it ”1000 times worse” than TV. As the technology spread, rabbis softened their stance and by 2005 allowed limited use for work purposes.

Now, as the internet permeates most aspects of life, from banking to registering children at school, more Haredi families have no choice but to go online. About one-third admit to having internet access at home, though the actual figure is believed to be about 50 per cent.

”The overwhelming majority understand that if you can’t fight it, join it,” said Avi Greenzeig, believed to be Israel’s first ”kashrut monitor” - similar to those who inspect kosher restaurants.

He was hired by rabbis to edit and censor one of Israel’s most popular Haredi websites, Behadrei Haredim.

”People can live without television, but the internet is different,” he said. ”It’s impossible to tell people to go back to the caves. Technology is moving forward and people must move with it. But there are limits.”

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