My Green Meadows

“Pretty exciting, eh?” Gates said with a sly smile, when he put his hand down on what looked initially like a low, black coffee table: At the touch of his hand, the hard, plastic tabletop suddenly dissolved into what looked like tiny ripples of water. The ‘water’ responded to each of his fingers and the ripples rushed quickly away in every direction.

It took a moment to appreciate what was happening. Every hand motion Gates or I did was met with an immediate response from the table. There was no keyboard. There was no mouse. Just our gestures.�

“All you have to do is reach out and touch the Surface,” Gates told me with barely concealed pride. “And it responds to what you do.”

China and India are both planning to launch moon shots within a year in the latest sign of the two Asian powerhouses’ intensifying rivalry and growing technological prowess.

Although both countries deny they are engaged in a 21st century re-run of the 1960s race to the moon between the cold war superpowers, their haste to launch suggests more than casual interest in the other’s progress.

China said this month that it expected to launch its first unmanned lunar orbiter, the Chang’e-1 (named after China’s mythological “lady in the moon”) before the end of this year, while India this week announced that it could send up a similar space probe as early as April 2008.

Everyone has come to see two hapless whales – a mother and her calf – that have stranded themselves far up San Francisco Bay
in the Sacramento River. The humpbacks have captured hearts across America and given many local residents their first close-up
view of a whale in the wild.

Every few minutes the crowd – English mingling with the immigrant sounds of Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, and Chinese – breaks into
excitement as the whale backs rise above the surface. It’s as if July 4 fireworks came early this year.

As of Tuesday, the Defense Department confirms that 377 service members have been killed under hostile circumstances since
Jan. 1 – with 265 of those deaths, or 70 percent, attributed to improvised explosive devices. That rate represents the average
normally attributed to deaths from the bombs, called IEDs.

But the trend line is not good. In each of the past two months, the share of deaths attributed to IEDs has jumped to 83 percent,
according to Pentagon data.

The simple explosives are hidden in cars, planted in the ground, or strapped to suicide bombers. But over the past month insurgents
have begun placing them in trucks to achieve greater impact, Defense officials say.

As the UN reports substantial progress in Iran’s nuclear program and US ships gather in the Persian Gulf, US and Iranian diplomats
prepare to meet in Iraq.

US and Iranian diplomats are slated to meet in Baghdad Monday, for the first time, to discuss security in Iraq. And key powers
are meeting to renew Western efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions after the UN’s nuclear watchdog reported substantial
progress in enrichment capability by Iran. The report has prompted calls from some countries for a third set of sanctions.

The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shows that Iran has stepped up uranium-enrichment efforts in defiance
of Security Council demands.

And now Nessie’s back.

An amateur scientist has captured what Loch Ness Monster watchers say is among the finest footage ever taken of the elusive mythical creature reputed to swim beneath the waters of Scotland’s most mysterious lake.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this jet-black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water,” said Gordon Holmes, the 55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, who took the video Saturday.

He said it moved at about 6 mph and kept a fairly straight course.

“My initial thought is it could be a very big eel, they have serpent-like features and they may explain all the sightings in Loch Ness over the years.”

Loch Ness is surrounded by myth and mystery, as it is the largest and deepest inland expanse of water in Britain. About 750 feet to the bottom, it’s even deeper than the North Sea.