83.825 
The Week in Review: July 18-24, 2010
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- British Airways to create airline "Monopoly"
Airline giants British Airways, American Airlines and Iberia announced a three-way partnership Tuesday, after the long-awaited approval of the U. S. Government. The deal, reports claimed, will not reduce competition or limit other transactions or partnerships between the newly-merged firms and other airlines in the world. Instead, it will definitely end up with the two carriers having a Oneworld trans-Atlantic alliance, joining America and Europe, and allowing both airlines to, , "jointly set prices, sell tickets and schedule international flights" according to the United States Transportation Department. The deal will also reduce the costs and duplications, which were weighing down the airline companies, as well as the travelers, during the intense economic atmosphere. Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic's President, expressed his worries from the market monopoly after this merger, accusing the U. S. regulators of putting "the interests of BA and AA before those of the flying public".
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- Media link Lockerbie-bomber release to BP
Claims were made this week that BP lobbied for the release of the bomber of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, but UK Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted that blame should not be placed on the oil company. The fact the the firm, who is already facing widespread criticism in the US for its handling of the enormous oil leak from one of its platforms in the Mexican Gulf, recently signed an $800 million agreement for a major oil drilling lease in Libya- has sparked huge scrutiny from American press. Some 270 people died in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland, most of them Americans. Standing alongside US President Barack Obama, Mr Cameron said he had seen no evidence the Scottish Government- which made the decision to free terminally ill cancer patient Meghrahi on compassionate grounds- had been 'swayed' by lobbying from BP.
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- Barack Obama overhauls US financial regulations
On Wednesday, President Obama signed into law the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The signing followed Obama's promise last week to rein in the US banking industry, including settling a limit on the size of banks and restricting the investment activities of retail banks. Obama stated that "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history." This financial reform is the biggest put into place since the 1930's.
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- Pipeline burst in China creating oil spill
China the world’s largest oil and power consumer now has it’s own oil spill to deal with after two oil pipelines exploded on Friday, July 16, 2010 the leaking oil then burst into flames. The oil spill was located off the coast near the industrial city of Dalian in the north China. The clean up has started, and at least one rescue worker has died in the operation to date. Greenpeace have reported that the oil is still leaking and an area of ocean covering 430 sq km – 165 sq miles is now polluted. All reports indicate that this oil spill is the worst in recent Chinese memory. High seas and very strong winds are spreading the oil slick over a vast area of the ocean, these issues are making the clean up more difficult. Despite the setback, China's spill remains relatively small. The current U.S. headache in the Gulf of Mexico stretches across roughly 2,700 square miles of water, requiring a whopping 5,600 vessels to clean up the destruction.
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- 500 million people on Facebook
Facebook officially became the world's fastest growing company with the addition of it's 500 millionth active user yesterday. To put it into perspective, if Facebook were to be a "country", its population would surpass that of the United States and Indonesia, making it the third largest country in the world. In a blog post, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 26, who started the company six years ago wrote, “I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago. I want to thank you for being part of making Facebook what it is today.”
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- Scientists find Star 320 times the size of the sun
Astronomers have discovered the most massive, brightest stars to date. One of them weighs in at about 265 solar masses and is almost a staggering 10 million times more luminous than the Sun. The observation is surprising, since stars are not thought to grow heavier than 150 solar masses--see the 2005 Nature News article about the solar-mass limit. The discovery was made using the European Organisation for Astronomical Research's aptly named "Very Large Telescope". It is the first time that individual stars in such dense clusters have been resolved. In addition to the VLT, the team used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope to study the clusters. The new-found stars are not only more massive and luminous than the Sun—they’re also hotter. In fact, several stars in the clusters have a surface temperature of 40,000 degrees—about seven times hotter than the Sun. Paul Crowther, from the University of Sheffield in England, who led the research team of says: ”Owing to the rarities of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon”
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- U.S backs Kosovan independence regardless of UN ruling
The US has pledged to back Kosovo's 2008 unilateral declaration of independence regardless of a UN court verdict on its legality due today. The vice-president, Joe Biden, who met Kosovo's prime minister in Washington yesterday, "reaffirmed the United States' full support for an independent, democratic, whole and multi-ethnic Kosovo whose future lies firmly within European and Euro-Atlantic institutions", according to a White House statement. The judgment from the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague – to be issued at 2pm – is not legally binding, but is likely to have profound consequences for Kosovo and other de facto states and territories that might secede in the future. Formerly the southernmost province of Serbia, Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority rebelled against rule from Belgrade in 1998 after years of political repression, triggering an intervention by Nato in the conflict that followed.
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- Forensic scientists exhume Romanian dictator
Scientists on Wednesday briefly exhumed the remains of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, from a military cemetery in west Bucharest to take DNA samples and verify their identities.The exhumation takes place today and we're taking samples of the remains," Mircea Opran, the husband of the Ceausescus' late daughter Zoia, told television station Realitatea. "I don't know what will happen if it is discovered that the Ceausescus are not in these graves," he said. "Probably we will sue the Romanian state." A team of pathologists and cemetery officials hoisted the wooden caskets of Ceausescu and his wife, taking samples from the corpses, before reburying the coffins. Some Romanians doubt that the Ceausescus, who were executed in 1989 after fleeing mass protests in Bucharest, were really buried in the cemetery. The couple's three children, of whom just one son, Valentin, is still alive, have repeatedly said they doubted their parents had actually been buried there. Wednesday's exhumation is the latest development in a five-year court case that has seen Ceausescu's children battling to identify the bodies.
