DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 Reaches Full Operational Capability With National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Industry: Remote Sensing & Image Processing, Satellite Image Data
LONGMONT, Colo.,DigitalGlobe, provider of the world's highest-resolution commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information products, today announced that WorldView-1 has completed its commissioning, meets all of its requirements, and is delivering imagery to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as part of the NextView program. Full Operating Capability (FOC) with NGA began on November 17th. Following a controlled roll-out with NGA, DigitalGlobe will begin taking orders for WorldView-1 imagery from its global resellers, partners and customers on January 3, 2008. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 18, and delivered its first sample set of high-resolution images on October 15.
"We are thrilled to announce that we have started delivering WorldView-1 imagery to NGA and we are excited for the general availability of WorldView-1 imagery" said Jill Smith, chief executive officer of DigitalGlobe. "This is truly a fabulous milestone for DigitalGlobe, we are proud to be serving the NextView contract and excited to be operating a new imaging satellite that addresses the worldwide demand for map accurate satellite imaging capacity."
WorldView-1 is part of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) ...   more »

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican plans to respond positively and very soon to an appeal by Muslim scholars for an unprecedented dialogue between Christianity and Islam, Roman Catholic cardinals and Islam experts say.
The Catholic Church, representing more than half the world's two billion Christians, has not yet officially answered the call made last month and hailed by most other Christian leaders.
 But cardinals in Rome and Vatican officials told Reuters many Catholic leaders wanted a serious dialogue with Muslim leaders to help overcome misunderstandings.
"The Vatican will respond positively, and quite soon," said Dakar Cardinal Theodore-Adrien Sarr, whose homeland Senegal is 95 percent Muslim. "We will not miss this opportunity."
"Watch out for this week," said a veteran cardinal, who asked not to be named. The prelates were in Rome for a ceremony to install 23 new members of the College of Cardinals.
Paris Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois said a serious and broad Christian-Muslim dialogue would help inter-faith relations in France, which has Europe's largest Muslim minority.
"This is a significant step," he said of the Muslim appeal. "I remember that only a few years ago, we regretted there weren't any Muslim leaders who could take a public stand, ...   more »

By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO, Nov. 22 — Many in Japan are starting to speak of “quitting America,” but they are not talking about a rise in anti-American political fervor. Rather, they mean a move away from American investments that is altering global capital flows and helping to weaken the dollar.
The move is seen in decisions of individual investors like Daijo Okudaira, a 66-year-old clerk at a Tokyo consulting company. Like many Japanese, Mr. Okudaira had long limited his overseas investments to the relative safety of securities from developed countries, particularly the United States.
Starting late last year, however, Mr. Okudaira made drastic changes to his portfolio, putting $50,000 into mutual funds focusing on stocks in China and other emerging economies. He said he had been drawn to these countries because they seemed to hold much brighter growth prospects than the United States.
“People say the engine of the global economy is shifting from the United States to emerging countries,” Mr. Okudaira said. “Emerging countries have growth and energy that America and Europe lack. They remind me of Japan 40 years ago.”
Japan’s legions of individual investors like Mr. Okudaira have emerged as a global financial force to be reckoned ...   more »

Staffers from the USDA will travel to Surfers' Paradise in Queensland, Australia, to participate in a meeting of the Codex Alimentarius, Nov. 26 – 30. Why? To continue developing international rules and regulations that govern what you eat.
USDA says "The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established in 1963 by two United Nations organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, and the World Health Organization, or WHO. Through adoption of food standards, codes of practice and other guidelines developed by its committees, and by promoting their adoption and implementation by governments, Codex seeks to protect the health of consumers and ensure that fair practices are used in trade."
Among the several interesting agenda items is this: "Discussion Paper on the Need for Further Guidance on Traceability/Product Tracing."
This is U.N.-speak for "let's tighten the regulations on animal identification and trace-back." This item has been on the Codex agenda for several years now. Whether the USDA took the idea of animal identification to the Codex, or brought the idea home from a Codex meeting, cannot be determined for certain. What is certain is this: The idea was cultivated by the members of the National Institute for Animal Agriculture, consisting of organizations ...   more »

Ruth Gledhill's
The Roman Catholic Church has called for women to be allowed to give birth to human-animal hybrids created in the laboratory.
Embryos injected with animal cells, or chimeras, should be treated as human beings where they have a preponderance of human genes, the bishops say in a sumbission to a Government committee.
And there should be no ban on implanting such hybrid embryos in the womb of the woman who supplied the original egg, they say in their submission on the Draft Tissue and Embryos Bill.
“Such a woman is the genetic mother, or partial mother, of the embryo; should she have a change of heart and wish to carry her child to term, she should not be prevented from doing so,” the bishops say.
The Bill proposes overhauling the regulation for embryo research and fertility treatment.
At present it is illegal in Britain to create embryos using a mix of human and animal genetic material, but the government is proposing to allow scientists to create human-animal embryos for research as long as they are destroyed within two weeks.
In their submission, the bishops say that most of the procedures covered by the bill should not be licensed ...   more »