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...woman bundled into a blue Toyota Corolla by unidentified armed men. She is the first foreigner to be abducted in Kabul since Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni was seized in front of her compound in May of 2005. Cantoni was eventually released unharmed 24 days later; it is still unknown if a ransom was paid. Meier may not be so lucky. One of the German engineers was shot within a few days of his abduction, and while two of the South Korean volunteers have been released as a sign of good will, two were killed and negotiations for the remaining...
...acceptable but considered it "prudent" to try to patch the hole to increase safety margins and decrease the risk of further damage to the shuttle on re-entry. But Shannon says he's more comfortable with the known risks associated with the gouge than with the unknown risks of an untried repair job, which would have required the astronauts to coat damaged tiles with heat-resistant paint and fill the hole with a caulk-like goo. The next shuttle mission, Shannon said, will likely include an in-space test of repair options, so mission managers can better understand what they...
...strategy, considering how consumers respond to names that they recognize. A flurry of new research is shedding light on people's tendency--when presented with a known object and an unknown one--to assign more value to the thing they've heard of, even if they don't know anything else about it. It's easy to imagine the evolutionary roots of a go-with-what-you-know principle--avoiding poisonous plants, say--but these mental shortcuts suit certain modern problems as well. For example, studies have shown that people are able to pick which of two foreign cities...
That's true even when the stakes are high. A study published last year looked at how we choose an airline. Researchers at Germany's University of Cologne asked participants to pick between two carriers--one familiar and one unknown. Predictably, an overwhelming number chose the airline they recognized. What was surprising was that many stuck with it even as the researchers gave negative cues about its safety. With three troubling bits of information--like past accidents--67% of study participants remained loyal to the airline they knew...
...spine of the island that will deliver oil and natural gas to the one of the biggest liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals in the world, from which it will be exported to the energy-hungry economies of East Asia. Unlike the rest of Russia, unemployment on Sakhalin is virtually unknown, and money is pumping through an island economy once impoverished even by the grim standards of post-Soviet Russia. "If you visited this island 10 years ago and compare it now, you would see a big, big improvement," says SE CEO Ian Craig...