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A floating pier being constructed by the U.S. military in Gaza as a means to deliver lifesaving humanitarian aid is estimated to cost $320 million. The estimated cost was provided to Reuters by a U.S. Department of Defense official and a source close to the project, according to the outlet. While the estimated cost has not previously been announced, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) told the outlet that “the cost has not just risen. It has exploded,” from an initial estimate. Wicker questioned “how much” taxpayers would be “on the hook” for once the pier was finally constructed. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina...

Two bodies believed to be migrants trying to illegally cross into the US were found in the Rio Grande River in Texas on Wednesday — one caught in the recently installed floating border barrier. The gruesome discovery of the body caught in the buoy barrier in the middle of the river was made by the Texas Department of Public Safety around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday near Eagle Pass, Texas.

A statement said the FNPP was towed out of the St. Petersburg shipyard where it was constructed for travel to its final destination to the port of Pevek in Russia's extreme northeastern region of Chukotka. It is to be towed through the Baltic Sea and around the northern tip of Norway to Murmansk, where its reactors will be loaded with nuclear fuel, said Rosatom, who are the equipment suppliers and consultants for the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project in Tamil Nadu. "Akademik Lomonosov will replace Pevek's aging Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant and Chaunsk coal-fired power plant, saving about 50,000 tons of...

NASA thinks it might have a solution that will allow sending humans up to check it out, though: Cloud City. The High Altitude Venus Operational Concept -- HAVOC -- is a conceptual spacecraft designed by a team at the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA Langley Research Center for the purposes of Venusian exploration. This lighter-than-air rocket would be designed to sit above the acidic clouds for a period of around 30 days, allowing a team of astronauts to collect data about the planet's atmosphere.

Researchers say life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in the Milky WayA few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science. The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that...

A toddler has miraculously survived after he drove his toy jeep into a river and then floated nearly eight miles downstream. Demetrius Jones, who turned three yesterday, let himself out of his grandmother's holiday trailer while his family slept and took his battery-operated truck down to the Peace River in British Columbia, where he was swept away by the current. The red miniature Chevrolet Silverado truck flipped over but the boy - who was only wearing a nappy and T-shirt - floated on it, along swirling waters. When his family woke up and realised he was missing police were called...

WASHINGTON -- Jose Luis, a 28-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who did not want his last name used, helped build many of the newly constructed homes in Herndon, a town of 22,000 residents in Virginia located about 20 miles west of the nation's capital. Jose Luis, a construction worker, and an estimated 12 million other illegal immigrants across the nation, including many in North County, are caught in the middle of an increasingly heated political debate over the country's immigration policy. Most political leaders in Congress appear to agree that the immigration reforms being debated should include stricter border enforcement...

MOSCOW - Russia began construction of its first floating nuclear power plant Sunday, and plans to build at least six more despite long-standing environmental concerns that they are vulnerable to accidents at sea, Russian news agencies reported. Russia justifies the program as a way of bringing power to some of the country's most remote areas, also saying some of the plants could be sold to other nations. The head of Russia's atomic energy agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, said the plants will be safe. "This plant is much safer than atomic energy stations on the ground," the RIA-Novosti news agency quoted him...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A young Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of 1.2 million euros ($1.54 million). Janjaap Ruijssenaars took inspiration for the bed -- a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth -- from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 cult film "2001: A Space Odyssey." "No matter where you live all architecture is dictated by gravity. I wondered whether you could make an object, a building or a piece of...

anuary 13, 2006 3-MW - 40-MW Floating Nuclear Plant construction to start this year Rosatom has established, under Rosenergoatom, a directorate of floating nuclear power plants under construction. The former deputy presidential representative in the Volga Federal District, Sergey Obozov, has been appointed director of this department and deputy director-general of Rosatom. The cost of the building of a floating NPP with a capacity of 3 MW amounts to just 20m dollars. The service life of such floating NPPs is 50 years. Fuel is reloaded once every 10-12 years. Rosatom noted that "the [degree of] enrichment of uranium in fuel...

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) crashed his car near the Capitol early Thursday, and a police official said he appeared intoxicated. Kennedy said he had taken sleep medication and a prescription anti-nausea drug that can cause drowsiness. Kennedy, D-R.I., addressed the issue after a spate of news reports. His initial statement said: "I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident."'Later, however, he issued a longer statement saying the attending physician for Congress had prescribed Phenergan on Tuesday to treat Kennedy's gastroenteritis.Kennedy said he returned to his Capitol Hill home on Wednesday evening after a final series of votes...

  May 7, 2005 China Braces for a More Valuable Yuan Nelson Ching for The New York Times Leon Liu said a higher-valued yuan might force him to import materials.   By KEITH BRADSHER GUANGZHOU, China - As speculators across Asia place ever larger bets on a revaluation of China's currency soon, investors and corporate executives alike are trying to prepare for what a more valuable yuan will mean for stocks and companies.For Romeo Dator, the portfolio manager of the U.S. Global China Region Opportunity Fund, a no-load mutual fund in San Antonio, a 20-minute departure by the yuan from...

PENANG: While thousands of people lost their lives when a tsunami hit the region, a 20-day-old baby survived, thanks to a floating mattress. When the tsunami hit the popular Miami Beach in Batu Ferringhi here at about 1.15pm, S. Tulasi was sleeping in a room behind her father’s western food outlet along the beach. “We were all caught off guard when the wave hit us. I was thrown several metres away but managed to hold onto one of the posts but my 12-year-old daughter was swept by the wave,” said A. Suppiah. Suppiah, 55, said his wife, Annal Mary, 40,...

LaGRANGE, Ky. -- Tuesday appeared to be an average day on the Ohio River northeast of Louisville until a house floated by. The unoccupied two-story house floated atop 24 55-gallon plastic barrels. The house had a bedroom upstairs and a living room downstairs, as well as an attached kitchen. It was filled with household items and debris, North Oldham Fire Chief Rick Albers said. Inside the house, authorities found 4-year-old mail addressed to a man from Frankfort, Ky. Officials suspect recent storms may have swept the floating structure away from the banks and down the river. Firefighters and the U.S....