16.08.2009
Attempt to auction Benny Hill's glasses scuttled
A pair of steel-rimmed glasses and a beret worn by comedian Benny Hill are to be auctioned in Wiltshire.
The glasses, which have a plastic cracked effect to the lenses, were used by the Southampton-born star when he portrayed the character Fred Scuttle.
The glasses and beret are expected to fetch up to £1,000 each.
A love letter to Britt Ekland written by her new husband Peter Sellers in 1964 is also being sold by Hendy Aldridge and Son in Devizes.
'Mad genius'
"His letter is a very sensitive, forthright, missing-you letter," said auctioneer Alan Aldridge.
"The estimate is £2,000-£3,000, but I have to be honest, I could see it going for more than that.
"I could see it going for £4,000, which is not bad for a typewritten letter from a mad genius."
The auction is scheduled to start at 1600 BST.
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India's water use 'unsustainable'
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Parts of India are on track for severe water shortages. according to results from Nasa's gravity satellites.
The Grace mission discovered that in the country's northwest - including Delhi - the water table is falling by about 4cm (1.6 inches) per year.
Writing in the journal Nature, they say rainfall has not changed, and water use is too high, mainly for farming.
The finding is published two days after an Indian government report warning of a potential water crisis.
That report noted that access to water was one of the main factors governing the pace of development in the world's second most populous nation.
"The situation has to stop today or tomorrow"
Dr Raj Gupta
CIMMYT
New crops needed to avoid famines
About a quarter of India is experiencing drought conditions, as the monsoon rains have been weaker and later than usual.
But weather and climatic factors are not responsible for water depletion in the northwestern states of Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, according to the Nasa study.
"We looked at the rainfall record and during this decade, it's relatively steady - there have been some up and down years but generally there's no drought situation, there's no major trend in rainfall," said Matt Rodell, a hydrologist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington DC.
"So naturally we would expect the groundwater level to stay where it is unless there is an excessive stress due to people pumping too much water, which is what we believe is happening."
State of Grace
The Grace (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) mission uses two satellites flying along the same orbit, one just in front of the other.
Minute differences in the Earth's gravitational pull cause the two craft to shift slightly in their positions relative to one another.
The Grace satellites provide a twin eye on Earth gravityGrace twins measure 'potato' Earth
The mission can measure groundwater depletion because the amount of water in aquifers has a small gravitational attraction for the satellites.
Three years ago, Grace scientists noted a loss of water in parts of Africa - but the Indian result is more striking.
"Over the six-year timeframe of this study, about 109 cubic kilometres of water were depleted from this region - more than double the capacity of India's largest reservoir is gone between 2002 and 2008," Dr Rodell told the BBC.
The northwest of India is heavily irrigated; and the Indian government's State of the Environment report, published on Tuesday, noted that irrigation increased rice yields seven-fold in some regions compared to rain-fed fields.
Dr Raj Gupta, a scientist working for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), said that the current drought would lead to more groundwater extraction.
"Farmers receive no rains so they are pumping a lot more water than the government expected, so the water table will fall further," he said.
"The farmers have to irrigate, and that's why they're pumping more water, mining more water. The situation has to stop today or tomorrow."
Dr Gupta noted that some farmers might be able to switch from rice to crops that demand less water, such as maize or sorghum.
But, he said, that would depend on government policies - which have traditionally promoted rice - and on market demand.
Climate change is likely to be a constraint too, with the area of South Asia suitable for wheat forecast to halve over the next 50 years.
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04.08.2009
US concern as Iran holds tourists
The US says it is using all available means to assist three Americans arrested inside Iran after apparently straying across the Iraqi border.
Iran accuses the three of ignoring warnings from border guards and crossing into its territory on Friday from Iraq's Kurdish region.
Washington has asked the Swiss, who look after US interests in Teheran, to seek consular access to the three.
The border between Iran and Iraq is reportedly poorly marked.
A Kurdish government official, Bayan Abdurahman, told the BBC the Americans had entered the region as tourists on a walking tour.
They had travelled to the resort of Ahmed Awa, where apparently they ignored local warnings not to climb a mountain close to the border.
The BBC's Jon Donnison, in Washington, says the detentions are possibly the last thing the US government wanted given how strained relations already are by the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions and its recent elections.
Tourist resort
Earlier, a senior security official in the Iraqi city of Suleymaniyeh, Qadr Hamajan, told Reuters news agency that the three US nationals and a fourth man had arrived there on Wednesday.
He said three of them had travelled the following day to the tourist resort of Ahmad Awa near the Iranian border. They went out hiking near Halabja.
The fourth was taken ill and stayed behind in a hotel in Suleymaniyeh.
"They phoned their friend ... and told him 'we are in trouble and are being held by soldiers who are not speaking Kurdish or Arabic'," Mr Hamajan said.
An official in the region told the BBC that the Iraqi border guards had seen three Americans with big backpacks crossing the border, but they did not stop them because they thought Americans were allowed to go anywhere.
The mountainous border region is popular for hiking, and the American walkers had no interpreter or bodyguards.
Reports earlier said American helicopters and vehicles searched the area amid fears the three had crossed the border.
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