Three massive bombs, one of them a cement-mixing truck packed with explosives, blew up outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad - home to many foreign journalists in Iraq Police said at least 20 people were killed. The dead included civilians and Iraqi police, said Assistant Interior Minister Major General Hussein Kamal. At least One bomb exploded not far from the police post which sits on the northeast side of Firdous Square, just east of the hotel grounds. Dramatic television pictures showed the cement mixer exploding in a huge ball of flame and a cloud of smoke billowing into the central Baghdad sky. The scheme is set to run until 2015, when the target is for 15 per cent of Britain's electricity to come from renewable sources.. As Italy and the UK continue to edge above 100 per cent, mobile penetration in France, as forecast by Pyramid Research, will reach just 78 per cent this year.. The government scheme which guarantees a market for renewable energy such as wind power should be scrapped from 2015 and replaced with a "zero carbon obligation" to pave the way for a new generation of nuclear power stations, a report urges today. The manufacturers organisation, the EEF, says ministers must back a replacement nuclear programme as part of a balanced and sustainable long-term energy policy for the UK. But it also cautions the Government against putting "all its eggs in a small number of baskets", saying other options should be kept open to help Britain meet its emissions targets, such as clean coal and capturing the carbon from gas-fired power stations.At present, developers of renewable energy projects such as wind or wave farms are guaranteed a market for their power through the "renewables obligation", which requires electricity suppliers to take a fixed proportion of their requirements from green sources or buy certificates from other suppliers to cover any shortfall.
Based on the launch costs of Virgin Mobile in the UK, it is likely that the two companies will invest a total of about £50m over three years.Carphone Warehouse already has 176 retail outlets in France under the Phone House brand name and a mobile service in Brittany called Omer.It is understood that the new service will be launched under the Virgin name, which already has a strong presence in France through its megastores. It will launch no later than June next year.Last week, it emerged that Sir Richard Branson, Virgin's founder, had shelved a planned $2.5bn (£1.4bn) flotation of his fast-growing US mobile phone venture.Earlier this month, Carphone Warehouse unveiled a 35 per cent increase in its pre-tax profit for the first half of the financial year. At the time it played down speculation that it was interested in bidding for either One.Tel, the home phone business of Centrica, or the Your Communication business of United Utilities.France has long lagged behind its western European neighbours in mobile penetration. He said 15 more US helicopters and more troops would be arriving soon to help the relief effort.. Virgin Mobile is to launch a service in France next year in a joint venture with Carphone Warehouse, the two companies will announce today. The new service will inject competition into a market that is currently dominated by just three players and boost the penetration of mobile telephony in France. In a joint statement to the stock market, they will announce plans for a "virtual" network that will buy spare airtime on France Telecom's Orange network. Meanwhile, as a strong aftershock measuring six on the Richter scale struck the quake zone, General John Abizaid, chief of US Central Command, toured the destruction in Pakistan's half of the divided Himalayan region and promised to "do whatever is possible to help Pakistan".
Pakistan and India are planning to allow earthquake victims across the disputed Kashmir border, bringing the nuclear-armed rivals closer in the wake of a shared tragedy that killed nearly 80,000 people on both sides of the heavily fortified frontier. After the bombing, Iraqi forces opened up with heavy automatic weapons fire, apparently firing at random There was no sign of a further assault on the hotel. The Associated Press journalists had to evacuate their bureau in the hotel and take refuge in the corridor.. The number of American soldiers killed in Iraq was climbing inexorably towards 2,000 yesterday, with the announcement of the 1,996th casualty since the invasion in 2003 US forces suffered 15,220 wounded over the same period.
