Venezuela's Chavez fighting severe lung infection

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) ? Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is being treated for "respiratory deficiency" after complications from a severe lung infection, his government said, pointing to a deepening crisis for the ailing 58-year-old president.

Chavez hasn't spoken publicly or been seen since his Dec. 11 operation in Cuba, and the latest report from his government Thursday night increased speculation that he is unlikely to be able to be sworn in for another term as scheduled in less than a week.

"Chavez has faced complications as a result of a severe respiratory infection. This infection has led to respiratory deficiency that requires Commander Chavez to remain in strict compliance with his medical treatment," Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said Thursday night, reading the statement on television.

The government's characterization raised the possibility that Chavez might be breathing with the assistance of a machine. But the government did not address that question and didn't give details of the president's treatment.

"It appears he has a very severe pneumonia that he suffered after a respiratory failure. It is not very specific," said Dr. Alejandro Rios-Ramirez, a pulmonary specialist in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, who is not involved in Chavez's treatment. "It does imply the gravity of his pulmonary infection that led to a respiratory failure. It doesn't mean yet that he is breathing with a machine."

Dr. Michael Pishvaian, an oncologist at Georgetown University's Lombardi Cancer Center in Washington, said such respiratory infections can run the gamut from "a mild infection requiring antibiotics and supplemental oxygen to life threatening respiratory complications."

"It could be a very ominous sign," Pishvaian said.

The government expressed confidence in Chavez's medical team and condemned what it called a "campaign of psychological warfare" in the international media regarding the president's condition. Officials have urged Venezuelans not to heed rumors about Chavez's condition.

The statement didn't point to any particular rumors but said "this campaign aims ultimately to destabilize the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ... and end the Bolivarian Revolution led by Chavez."

Venezuela's opposition has demanded that the government provide more specific information about Chavez's condition.

Chavez has undergone four cancer-related surgeries since June 2011 for an undisclosed type of pelvic cancer. He also has undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

He was re-elected in October to another six-year term, and two months later announced that the cancer had come back. Chavez said before the operation that if his illness prevented him from remaining president, Vice President Nicolas Maduro should be his party's candidate to replace him in a new election.

This week, the president's elder brother Adan and National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello joined a parade of visitors who saw Chavez in Havana, and then returned to Caracas on Thursday along with Maduro.

"In the past hours, we've been accompanying President Hugo Chavez and taking him the courage and strength of the Venezuelan people," Maduro said on television. Appearing next to Cabello visiting a government-run coffee plant in Caracas, he said they had been with Chavez together with the president's brother, his son-in-law Jorge Arreaza, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez and Attorney General Cilia Flores.

Chavez's health crisis has raised contentious questions ahead of the swearing-in set for Jan. 10, including whether the inauguration could legally be postponed and what will happen if Chavez can't begin his new term. The plans of Chavez's allies remain a mystery.

The Venezuelan Constitution says the presidential oath should be taken Jan. 10 before the National Assembly, and officials have raised the possibility that Chavez might not be well enough to do that, without saying what will happen if he can't.

The constitution says that if a president or president-elect dies or is declared unable to continue in office, presidential powers should be held temporarily by the president of the National Assembly, who is now Cabello. It says a new presidential vote should be held within 30 days.

Opposition leaders have argued that Chavez, who was re-elected to a six-year term in October, seems no longer fit to continue as president and have demanded that a new election be held within 30 days if he isn't in Caracas on inauguration day.

But some of Chavez's close confidants dismiss the view that the inauguration date is a hard deadline, saying Chavez could be given more time to recover from his surgery if necessary.

Aristobulo Isturiz, a state governor and leader of Chavez's United Socialist Party of Venezuela, said Thursday that if Chavez's swearing-in isn't held Jan. 10, it will be up to the Supreme Court to determine the place and date of the ceremony.

"The president has a right to recover," Isturiz said in remarks published by the state-run Venezuelan News Agency.

Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, an opposition politician, proposed on Thursday that a commission travel to Cuba to determine the state of Chavez's health. He said the delegation should be made up of doctors, lawmakers and other officials such as state governors, including opposition leader Henrique Capriles.

"I'm not asking for permission to go to Cuba. I think it's our right to go there and see what's going on," Ledezma said in comments reported by the television channel Globovision. "Enough mysteries. Venezuela isn't a colony of Cuba."

Some of the brewing disagreements could begin to be aired Saturday, when the National Assembly, which is controlled by a pro-Chavez majority, convenes to select legislative leaders. That session will be held just five days before the scheduled inauguration day.

___

Associated Press writers Jorge Rueda and Christopher Toothaker in Caracas and Adriana Gomez Licon in Mexico City contributed to this report.

___

Ian James on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ianjamesap

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/venezuelas-chavez-fighting-severe-lung-infection-075554939.html

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Secret US cybersecurity program to protect power grid confirmed

The National Security Agency is spearheading a program, dubbed Perfect Citizen, to develop technology to protect the power grid from cyberattack. The project worries privacy rights groups.

By Mark Clayton,?Staff writer / January 3, 2013

In this 2006 file photo, a worker connects fiber optic cable that will serve a home in North Bellmore, N.Y. The National Security Agency is spearheading a cloaked and controversial program to develop technology that could protect the US power grid from cyberattack.

Mark Lennihan/AP/File

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Newly released documents confirm that the National Security Agency (NSA), America's top cyberespionage organization, is spearheading a cloaked and controversial program to develop technology that could protect the US power grid from cyberattack.

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Existence of the program, dubbed Perfect Citizen, was revealed in a 2010 Wall Street Journal article. But intriguing new details are revealed in documents released by the NSA last month to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an Internet privacy group that petitioned for them in 2010 under the Freedom of Information Act.

Of the 188 pages of documents released by the agency, roughly half were redacted to remove classified information. Even so, the documents show Perfect Citizen to be in the fourth year of a five-year program begun in 2009. Valued at up to $91 million, the Perfect Citizen technology is being developed by Raytheon, the Waltham, Mass., the defense contractor in Waltham, Mass., that won it.

The released documents are the contract that the NSA drew up with Raytheon. A Raytheon spokesman referred all comments on the program to the NSA.

All along, the NSA has maintained that Perfect Citizen is "purely a vulnerabilities assessment and capabilities development contract" that "does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems," according to an NSA statement released in 2010 ? and now rereleased to the Monitor.

What the documents reveal is an apparently small but robust program authorized to hire 28 software engineers, program managers, and laboratory personnel. This includes a pair of "penetration testers" ? essentially good-guy hackers who specialize in breaking into networks.

Their assignment as part of the team: discover vulnerabilities that lie in the electronic interface that connects the computer networks of utility companies. Then the team can come up with software and hardware plugs to patch those digital holes.

"Sensitive Control Systems (SCS) perform data collection and control of large-scale distributed utilities or provide automation of infrastructure processes," says the Perfect Citizen contract's "Statement of Work" document. "The protection of SCS is essential to mission operations and has become a significant point of interest in support of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community."

Further, the document says, "prevention of a loss due to a cyber or physical attack, or recovery of operational capability after such an event, is crucial to the continuity of the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and the operation of [Signals Intelligence] systems."

While most might agree the program's national-security goal is laudable, the question of just how to go about protecting the power grid has been a controversial topic in Congress and among Internet privacy advocates leery of government control of the Internet. Of particular concern among such advocates is shielding privately owned corporate computer networks deemed to be "critical infrastructure" from potentially intrusive digital monitoring.

Citing unnamed sources, the original Wall Street Journal article said that the program did indeed involve placing sensors that can detect illegitimate cyberactivity. But the new documents don't clarify this point. Deploying such sensors would be especially sensitive since the NSA is an arm of the Pentagon charged with collecting and analyzing foreign communications and defending US government communications and computer networks ? not domestic spying.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/HheyB7w1p_o/Secret-US-cybersecurity-program-to-protect-power-grid-confirmed

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scurvy byplay: Wagering On Auto Racing ? Recreation and Sports

Auto Racing is a well-liked sport in a America and one that draws quite a crowd when it comes to high stakes gambling. The unpredictable nature of car racing makes it a fun and exciting sport to bet on even for gamblers that don?t follow it routinely. Auto racing picks can be found easily on the internet.

Making bets on Auto Racing is easy and involves very little understanding on the sport other than knowing some of the big names in the race. The drivers in each race are scored based on their past performances in other races and bets are weighed accordingly. Big time drivers, such as Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon are popular picks.

Usually, there is a system in place that gives ranking to each driver. If a bet is wagered on a favorite winning driver such as Jimmie Johnson, the winnings will not be as much as a driver that isn?t anticipated to do as well. The ranking are set up on a scale of 100-1000, with each point giving a return to the bet placed. If a driver is ranked a 1000, they are not predicted to place well and if a wager of $10 is placed on the driver, the winnings will be $100 if that driver happens to win the race. A bet placed on a 100 point driver will only return the amount placed as a bet .

Other options include betting on whether a driver will place in the top 3, or will beat another driver in a head to head bet . Also, wagers can be made on the ?field?, which is a pool of less likely drivers , and could be a huge payout for anyone betting on them.

With a lot of options, this is a sport that attracts gamblers to play in a variety of ways and always looking for free picks to help them make the betting more exciting, profitable and fun for each person involved.

Tags: auto racing picks, free picks

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2013 at 1:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Source: http://recreationandsports.flyfishing-guide.net/uncategorized/wagering-on-auto-racing/

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Source: http://scurvy-byplay.blogspot.com/2013/01/wagering-on-auto-racing-recreation-and.html

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Governor announces suit vs NCAA over Penn State scandal

(Reuters) - Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett said on Wednesday he will seek to have the costly sanctions levied by the NCAA against Penn State University over the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal thrown out, saying the punishment threatens to cause devastating damage to the state's residents and economy.

The sanctions, which included an unprecedented $60 million fine, are "overreaching and unlawful," the governor said at a news conference in State College where the university is located. He said a lawsuit would be filed asking a federal court to throw out all Sandusky-related sanctions against Penn State.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body of U.S. collegiate sports, fined Penn State $60 million in July and voided its football victories for the past 14 seasons in a dramatic rebuke for its failure to stop Sandusky's sexual abuse of children.

"This was a criminal matter, not a violation of NCAA rules," Corbett said. He added that he believed the NCAA acted as it did because it benefited from the sizable penalty.

"These punishments threaten to have a devastating, long-lasting and irreparable effect on the state, its citizens and its economy," the governor said. "I cannot and will not stand by and let it happen without a fight."

The Republican governor has come under criticism for his handling of the scandal, which was revealed by a grand jury he convened in 2009 when he was Pennsylvania's attorney general.

State Attorney General-elect Kathleen Kane, a Democrat, said during her campaign last year that by convening the grand jury, Corbett failed to protect children by delaying prosecution for more than two years. She has vowed to probe his handling of the case. Corbett has said he would welcome such an investigation.

In a statement, Kane said she had not been consulted on the filing of the lawsuit and would reserve comment.

Pennsylvania voters too have expressed dissatisfaction with Corbett's handling of the case. Nearly two thirds of registered voters said he did a fair or poor job, according to a Franklin & Marshall College survey in September.

Sandusky, Penn State's former defensive coordinator, was convicted in June of 45 counts of sexually abusing 10 boys over 15 years, some in the football team's showers. He is serving a prison term of 30 to 60 years.

The scandal sparked a national discussion of child sex abuse, embarrassed the university and implicated top officials in a cover-up, including the late Joe Paterno, the legendary football head coach.

The NCAA said it was disappointed by Corbett's move.

"Not only does this forthcoming lawsuit appear to be without merit, it is an affront to all of the victims in this tragedy - lives that were destroyed by the criminal actions of Jerry Sandusky," NCAA General Counsel Donald Remy said in a statement.

Pennsylvania residents have also been unhappy with the NCAA sanctions. The Franklin & Marshall poll showed more than half the respondents believed they were unfair.

Although Corbett might be seen as pursuing the lawsuit to further his own political ends, "this decision will be popular among Pennsylvanians," said Terry Madonna, a professor of public affairs at Franklin & Marshall and director of the poll.

At Wednesday's press conference Corbett rejected any political motivation for the lawsuit.

James Schultz, general counsel for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, who will be handling the case for the governor, said by suing, Corbett was acting on behalf of state residents and businesses "collaterally damaged" by the NCAA sanctions.

The sanctions hurt businesses and residents, particularly in State College where football games bring lots of visitors, he said.

"In the wake of this terrible scandal, Penn State was left to heal and clean up this tragedy that was created by the few," Corbett said.

In State College, Kathy Punt, manager of a motel used by football fans, said her business dropped 30 to 40 percent this past fall as fewer people attended Penn State games.

"We didn't get the Penn State fans who usually come in," she said.

The university recently made the first payment of $12 million of the sanctions toward a national fund to support the victims of child abuse. Other sanctions included a ban on its football team from appearing in bowl games for four years.

According to the governor's office, Penn State football was the second most profitable collegiate athletic program in the nation in 2010-11 when it brought in $50 million, generating more than $5 million in tax revenue.

Penn State released a statement saying it was not party to the lawsuit and reiterated its commitment to comply with the NCAA sanctions.

The governor was asked about the report into the Penn State scandal produced by former FBI director Louis Freeh that was the basis of the NCAA sanctions. The report was scathingly critical of the university and said Penn State leaders covered up Sandusky's sexual abuse of children for years.

"The Freeh report is an incomplete report," Corbett said.

The family of Joe Paterno, who was fired by Penn State trustees who said he failed to do enough when he was alerted to suspicions about Sandusky, said: "The fact that Governor Corbett now realizes, as do many others, that there was an inexcusable rush to judgment is encouraging."

The family, which took strong exception to the Freeh report, had said it was convening its own experts to review the case and the actions of the board and school administration. Paterno died a year ago of lung cancer.

His family said on Wednesday it expects to release its findings "in the near future."

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta, Dan Burns and Peter Rudegeair in New York and Dave Warner in Philadelphia, Writing by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Kenneth Barry and Claudia Parsons)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pennsylvania-governor-sue-ncaa-over-penn-state-sanctions-014732558--nfl.html

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Microsoft May Get Home Advantage

Microsoft could be cutting new inroads into the world of home automation, based on rumors that it has purchased id8 Group R2 Studios. This acquisition will reportedly bolster Microsoft's Xbox division, which is likely to introduce a next-generation game console later this year. Aside from an Android application that can control heating and lighting systems, R2 Studios currently does not have any products.

Source: http://ectnews.com.feedsportal.com/c/34520/f/632000/s/272c0480/l/0L0Stechnewsworld0N0Crsstory0C770A0A70Bhtml/story01.htm

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The Opposite of Mining: Tar Sands Steam Extraction Lessens Footprint, but Environmental Costs Remain

MELTING TAR: A production well, like the one pictured here at Cenovus's Christina Lake facility, sucks bitumen melted by steam out of the ground--an alternative to strip mining for tar sands. Image: ? David Biello

CONKLIN, Alberta?The challenge of pulling oil from sand near here has typically required scraping away the boreal forest and underlying peat to expose the tar sand deposits below. The thickened sand is scooped out, then boiled to separate out the bitumen, with the leftover contaminated water and muck dumped in vast holding ponds the size of small lakes. From orbit the enormous strip mines and tailings lakes created by this process stand out, like a spreading sore?a scar on the planet evidencing the American thirst for oil. But the future of this Canadian province's oil sands leaves less of a visible mark, as can be seen near this town that is not so much a community as an intersection of roads that lead to camps for oil sands workers. That means fewer strip mines, tailings lakes and even giant trucks, but it also means more of the invisible greenhouse gas carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

This future is melting bitumen where it lies at least 200 meters below the surface rather than mining tar sands. In 2011 more than 11,000 barrels of bitumen were melted out of the frozen ground not far from here each day, where the airstrip sees more human traffic than the town as workers commute in and out by plane from as far away as Newfoundland.

"Most of what's going on happens 375 meters below the surface," says Greg Fagnan, director of operations and production at Cenovus's Christina Lake oil sands production facility, during a recent tour. Cenovus extracts bitumen by employing a technique called steam-assisted gravity drainage, which can be thought of as the opposite of mining. Instead of melting the bitumen out of sand in an industrial plant after clawing the tar sands out of the ground, Cenovus melts it out in place with steam. That means Christina Lake is, in a sense, a giant water-processing facility "that happens to produce oil," Fagnan says. "It's not a complicated business, it's just complex."

Conklin is one of the frontier towns of a new tar sands boom, given that 80 percent of the at least 170 billion barrels in the Canadian province's tar sands are only accessible this way rather than by mining. In 2011, for the first time, oil production from such in situ operations surpassed that of mining for oil in the tar sands?a trend that is only likely to increase as more oil sands production comes online in Canada. Already, plumes of steam billow from the boreal forest across northeastern Alberta where a host of developers work?from Nexen, recently acquired by the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), to oil majors such as Royal Dutch Shell?like mushrooms springing up from the ground after rain.

But this recovery of bitumen in place will have to continue to improve its efficiency and cost if it is going to compete with other fast-growing oil recovery technologies, such as fracturing rock with high-pressure water, or fracking, to release trapped oil. As it stands, Alberta is estimated to hold more than 400 billion barrels of such "tight oil," which is already being produced in places like North Dakota's Bakken Shale by the number-one customer for Canada's tar sands oil: the U.S.

Melting tar
Steam dominates the Christina Lake facility, where mushroom clouds rise into the wintry blue sky, pierced only by the orange glow of a flare near the bitumen processing plant. Nine industrial boilers, powered by natural gas, heat treated brine from nearby aquifers to 350-degree-Celsius to inject it as steam into what can be likened to three giant, underground sandboxes?vast rectangular blocks of oil-bearing sand. Each sandbox is pierced by pairs of pipes, one perforated to release pressurized steam along its 800-meter length and melt oil from the tar sands, another to suck melted bitumen, bits of sand, water and natural gas with electric pumps back up to the surface. The pipes are strung with sensors, gauges and fiber optics, or "jewelry" in the industry jargon, that allow well operators back at the surface to continually monitor conditions under the earth, such as the steam pressure that starts out at a crushing 120-kilogram-force per square centimeter. Christina Lake pumps out a barrel of oil for every 2.3 barrels of injected steam.

Cenovus claims to use just 0.07 barrel of freshwater to produce each barrel of oil at Christina Lake, thanks to the recycling and almost exclusive use of brackish waters. According to the Royal Society of Canada's 2010 report on such tar sands development, a typical facility uses 0.6 barrel of freshwater and 0.4 barrel of brine per barrel of oil. "Conventional oil from the Saudis uses more water than the [steam-assisted gravity drainage] process," says geologist John Zhou, executive director of environmental management at Alberta Innovates, a government-funded technology innovation effort.

Drilling the wells themselves presents the first challenge. During installation, the pairs of wells in each sandbox site are drilled simultaneously, rigorously maintaining a spacing of only five meters apart, with a rig specially modified for this kind of oil sands exploitation. At each site, or well pad, roughly eight such wells are drilled, lining up side by side?on one side eight or more steam injectors and on the other a matched number of oil-producing wells.

After a few years of production, such as at Cenovus's older Foster Creek facility started up in 2001, additional wells are drilled to recover oil from the wedges of tar sand between each steam-created balloon-shaped melt zone. Such wedge wells have enabled Cenovus to add 20,000 barrels of production per day to Foster Creek without requiring any additional steam?and a given well is expected to produce for roughly 20 years, though no well is yet that old.

"These fields are really like laboratories," says Cenovus spokesman Brett Harris, and operators are making continual adjustments and suggesting improvements, such as pumps that can withstand the high temperatures underground but also run on electricity rather than natural gas. Operators are also constantly adjusting the flow of steam, closing off sections of the perforated pipe to shut off heat to certain sections and ensure even melting throughout. Such in situ production has always been experimental, starting with the first attempt back in 1926: The pipes available at the time could not withstand the steam's heat and pressure, resulting in a steam explosion that destroyed the start-up plant and injuries to entrepreneur Jacob Owen Absher, among others.

That is not a problem that has entirely disappeared. Oil company Devon Canada actually used too much pressure on its subterranean sandbox and caused a blowout that shot scalding steam and bitumen into the sky in the summer of 2010 near here, and Total Energy caused a similar explosion of steam, oil and rock north of Fort McMurray in 2006. The steam pipelines themselves have also blown as a result of cooled water trapped inside. Such a "water hammer" has tossed pipelines as much as a kilometer, Cenovus's Fagnan says, leaving them sticking out of the ground like toothpicks embedded more than three meters deep. The steam "packs a pretty big punch," he says.

Better engineering
The engineering challenges faced by in situ projects range from a lack of a sufficient seal above the oil sands deposit?allowing steam to escape without melting oil or, even worse, the oil itself to flow away?to underlying aquifers, or "thief zones," that can quench barrel after barrel of steam heat. And that's after the expensive well pairs have been put in place. At Christina Lake the reservoir sits below a layer not of rock, but of natural gas?and that means Cenovus operators must continually inject air to ensure that the gas pressure matches or exceeds the pressure of the pumped in steam, so the steam doesn't escape without doing its melting work.

The ultimate engineering challenge of the tar sands, however, may be coping with greenhouse gases. As a result of increasing in situ production, greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta's tar sands rose by 1.7 percent last year, and are up 16 percent since 2009, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The newly dominant in situ technology produces oil at a cost of 2.5 times more CO2 emitted to the atmosphere than the more brute-force, conventional mining. Whereas this may be equivalent to what's emitted when using steam to flood out heavy oils in California or Nigeria, neither of those sources of greenhouse gases is growing as fast as the tar sands.

In an effort to get ahead of this climate challenge, Alberta has invested more than $1.5 billion in developing CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology. But it has yet to be applied to an in situ operation; the one current project in the oil sands involves capturing CO2 emissions from mini-refineries at Shell's operation near Fort Saskatchewan, a project dubbed Quest. That project is slated to open in 2015 and there are, as yet, no plans for CO2 capture and storage at any in situ facilities.

The Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental group, estimates that it would cost more than $200 per metric ton of CO2 to add CCS to tar sands production facilities like Christina Lake. Alberta's current price on CO2 is $15 per metric ton. "The trick is to find a way to make capture and storage economic," Harris says, noting that Cenovus has done exactly that at its Weyburn enhanced oil recovery project in Saskatchewan. The company uses CO2 captured at a gasification plant across the border in North Dakota to scour more oil out of the ground?and the extra oil produced helps pay for the CO2 capture process, although the oil also ends up contributing to the growing greenhouse gas burden when burned.

Reducing energy use, then, may prove a better route. By using solvents, such as the hydrocarbon butane, in situ producers can boost the bitumen recovery ability of the steam itself. Cenovus has been testing the process at Christina Lake since 2004 and will implement it at the company's newly approved Narrows Lake project, slated to start producing oil in 2017. Using such solvents "can drop the energy consumption by as much as 50 percent," says chemical engineer Murray Gray, scientific director of the Center for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta.

Such new technology means more cost to develop and produce what is already among the most costly forms of oil, Gray notes. At present, Cenovus spokesman Harris says that the company needs to earn at least $35 per barrel of oil. With West Texas Intermediate grade oil at $85, that is not a problem, except for the atmospheric warming. And it's not as if in situ development has no impact on the land: there's the industrial plant for producing steam and processing bitumen, tank farms to hold the final product, and big, boxy clearings for well pads kitted out with machinery like an elongated caterpillar with wells for legs that also connects to multiple pipelines snaking through the boreal forest. So do row after row of clear-cut lines for the seismic testing that reveals where the tar sand deposits lie, cuts that take a long time to heal given the slow growth rate of trees this far north.

But the technology for melting bitumen out of the ground is still developing. The first commercial steam-assisted gravity drainage facility only started up in 2001. Already experiments have started with potential advances such as microwaving the ground to loosen the oil, as attempted in tests by U.S. defense contractor Harris Corp. this year. "This industry is so young," says Scott Wenger, manager of government relations at original oil sands company Suncor, which hosted Harris's electromagnetic sand-heating effort. "Who knows what will happen with new technology?"

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=b99d8096b032effc8309d6e286f70735

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Food & Drink Innovation Network ? PIZZAEXPRESS LAUNCHES ...

January 2nd, 2013

This January two new skinny pizzas are being launched by restaurant chain PizzaExpress.

The new Light range, available in supermarkets from 7 January, has been inspired by the 500-calorie, Leggera range, which can be enjoyed in PizzaExpress restaurants.

Giardiniera Light and Pollo Piccante Light contain fewer than 500 calories each and 40 per cent less fat than other PizzaExpress pizzas.

Due to a thinner, crispier dough, low calorie mozzarella and selected ingredients, waistline watchers can choose toppings which might otherwise be off limits.

Two new skinny pizzas are being launched by PizzaExpress

Giardiniera Light is mades with typical Italian vegetables and pesto and topped with cherry tomatoes, garlic mushrooms, red peppers, artichokes, olives and light mozzarella.

The spicy Pollo Piccante Light also contains light mozzarella and is topped with slices of Cajun chicken and chargrilled yellow and red peppers.

Claire Mitchell at PizzaExpress said:

?Giving our customers what they want, whether that?s in our restaurants or at home, is our focus.

?We know that, in the New Year, people typically look for lower calorie alternatives and, because we use the same ingredients in our Light pizzas as we do in our restaurants, we haven?t compromised on taste.?

PizzaExpress is already a known brand in supermarkets, selling over 31 million pizzas and the leading light salad dressing, PizzaExpress Light Dressing.

PizzaExpresss? retail offering range is designed around its best-loved restaurant dishes.

Other products include Garlic Bread starters, Dough Balls, Fresh pastas and a range of signature pizzas such as the American Hot and Sloppy Giuseppe.

Both pizzas will be available in Tesco and Waitrose from 7 January with RRPs of ?4.00 ? ?4.50.

The Pollo Piccante light will be available in Sainsbury?s also from 7 January with a RRP of ?4.00 ? ?4.50.

For more information click here to visit the website.

Related posts:

1. PIZZAEXPRESS LAUNCHES MORE RETAIL PRODUCTS
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3. CHICAGO TOWN PIZZA CREATES INNOVATIVE CUTLERY
4. PIZZAEXPRESS LAUNCHES NEW LEGGERA & ROMANA RANGES
5. PIZZAEXPRESS LAUNCH NEW PASTA SAUCES RANGE
6. MARY BERRY & DAUGHTER RELEASES LIGHT SALAD DRESSING
7. DOMINO?S LAUNCHES NEW MEXICANO PIZZA RANGE
8. DR. OETKER LAUNCHES CASA DI MAMA PIZZA RANGE

Source: http://www.fdin.org.uk/2013/01/pizzaexpress-launches-new-light-range-into-uk-supermarkets/

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