Burj Khalifa

Burj Khalifa (Arabic: برج خليفة‎ "Khalifa Tower"), known as Burj Dubai prior to its inauguration, is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and is currently the tallest structure in the world, at 828 m (2,717 ft)

Burj Khalifa has been designed to be the centrepiece of a large-scale, mixed-use development that would include 30,000 homes, nine hotels such as The Address Downtown Dubai, 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of parkland, at least 19 residential towers, the Dubai Mall, and the 12-hectare (30-acre) man-made Burj Khalifa Lake.

The decision to build Burj Khalifa is reportedly based on the government's decision to diversify from an oil based economy to one that is service and tourism based. According to officials, it is necessary for projects like Burj Khalifa to be built in the city to garner more international recognition, and hence investment.

Firesale

A fire sale is an unpopular term from popular fiction describing a three-stage coordinated attack on a country's transportation, telecommunications, financial, and utilities infrastructure systems. The attacks are designed to promote chaos and foster a leaderless environment. The term "fire sale" is used because "everything must go".

The first part of a fire sale consists of shutting down transportation, street signals, aircraft, highways, trains. The goal for this first part of the attack is to throw the public into chaos, making roads inaccessible, possibly for preventing emergency services to assist.
The second part of the attack would consist of shutting down the financial system of a country, such as the stock market, government agencies, and local law enforcement.
The last part of a fire sale involves the termination of all utilities and telecommunications in the whole country including phones, sat-coms, electricity, water, nuclear, solar, and anything else that requires a power source (except batteries, as it would be difficult if not impossible to shut down all batteries). The final result of all three steps completed would leave the country or community in total chaos, making it extremely vulnerable.

Fourth of July

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the chamber will cancel its July 4th recess next week, a decision aimed at pressuring negotiators to reach a deal on the looming debt limit.While the move throws a wrench into long-held plans by senators on both sides of the aisle, it also shows Reid is aware of the optics of taking a week off while the nation careens toward a potential debt default.Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. Independence Day is commonly associated with fireworks, parades, barbecues, carnivals, fairs, picnics, concerts, baseball games, family reunions, political speeches and ceremonies, and various other public and private events celebrating the history, government, and traditions of the United States. Independence Day is the national day of the United States.

Canada Day

Typically, Canada Day celebrations include parades, fireworks, barbecues and other get-togethers. Get the complete Canada Day Checklist, including lyrics to O Canada in French and English.
Schools, banks, government offices and many other stores and businesses are closed on July 1st. Call ahead to restaurants, stores and tourist attractions to confirm Canada Day hours.
History
On June 20, 1868, Governor General the Viscount Monck issued a royal proclamation asking for Canadians to celebrate the anniversary of the confederation. However, the holiday was not established statutorily until 1879, when it was designated as Dominion Day, in reference to the designation of the country as a Dominion in the British North America Act. The holiday was initially not dominant in the national calendar; up to the early 20th century, Canadians thought themselves to be primarily British, being thus less interested in celebrating distinctly Canadian forms of patriotism. No official celebrations were therefore held until 1917—the golden anniversary of Confederation—and then none again for a further decade.
In 1946, Philéas Côté, a Quebec member of the House of Commons, introduced a private member's bill to rename Dominion Day as Canada Day. His bill was passed quickly by the House of Commons but was stalled by the Senate, which returned the bill to the Commons with the recommendation that the holiday be renamed The National Holiday of Canada, an amendment that effectively killed the bill.

Haiti Earthquake

Approximately 35,000 households in Haiti have received 'clean water' buckets - comprises a chlorine solution and an RFID tag of five liters bucket for handling and storage of water - the charity Deep Springs International (DSI).
On each bucket has an RFID tag is read during the regular visits of community-based health workers NFC-equipped Nokia 6212 phones. Just the phone reads the tag of the bucket and the administration of the visits, they are measuring the amount of chlorine in the water and key it into the handset.
The health of employees then answered a questionnaire on-device and sends the information back to the DSI headquarters via SMS. Previously this task was done using paper forms which was time consuming and error prone.
Given the limited financial and staff resources DSI, more accurate tracking of these families need careful monitoring (as opposed to those who are more diligent in cleaning their water) is expected to help the organization better allocate its resources.
Haiti has long struggled to provide clean drinking water to over 9.7 million inhabitants, a situation exacerbated by the devastating earthquake last January and more recently by a cholera outbreak that the United Nations says has claimed over 2,500 lives since October.
Whereas the most promising short-term solution to this problem is the treatment of household water with chlorine, getting these life-saving chemical families in a country held back by poor transport and communication very difficult.
Aid agencies like Oxfam have concentrated their efforts in make-shift camps set up for the tens of thousands who lost their homes set. But for those who stay in the more inaccessible rural areas, if only to them is a challenge in itself.
Aid workers have said that without regular visits - every month or so - rural Haitians to return to drinking impure water, which promotes spread of cholera and diarrhea.
Scientific American reported that Nokia has contributed to the project by providing the 6212-model specifically for this project because it is equipped with NFC, and because it is not desirable high-end features, such as a touch-screen interface, making it less likely to be stolen from DSI employees.
More recently Nokia has an additional U.S. $ 24,500 for the project to expand beyond the initial pilot phase. The mobile phone giant hopes to soon decide whether to stick with the now discontinued 6212 phone as the project grows or DSI to provide the newer C7 NFC-equipped device that has a touch screen.

Twitter Status

Social networking platform Twitter has suffered intermittent disruptions to its service and what it called an 'elevated error rate'.
Twitter said the social platform was having stability issues worldwide.
The company's status blog said users might experience some problems loading twitter.com and with Twitter clients.
Twitter support said it was aware of the elevated error rates and was taking action.
Earlier, the disruptions affected RTÉ.ie's General Election constituency service.This is the first time for an extended Twitter outage in quite a long time. In the old days of Twitter outages, we would all hop on the bus to Friendfeed but that is no longer an option since many have left that service.