WASHINGTON | Thu Jan 31, 2013 11:32am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Chesapeake Bay, North America's biggest estuary, is still ailing but making some progress as it struggles to recover from over-fishing and pollution, a partnership overseeing its revival said on Thursday.

The number of juvenile crabs is the highest in two decades, rockfish are stable and last year's "dead zone," the part of the bay without enough oxygen to support life, seems to be the smallest since 1985, the Chesapeake Bay Program said in its 2011-12 "Bay Barometer."

On the down side, water clarity was very poor and only a third of the bay met standards for dissolved oxygen, a measure of water's health. The oyster population also was at less than 1 percent of historic levels.

"While we clearly have a lot of work to do, the bay is resilient and we have reason for hope," Nick DiPasquale, director of the federal and state program, said in a statement.

The Chesapeake Bay, home to more than 3,600 species of plants and animals, has been fouled by decades of over-fishing and pollution. Pollutants include sediment, manure, trash and chemicals that flow into it from its 64,000-square-mile (166,000-square-km) watershed across six states.

The Chesapeake Bay Program was formed in 1983 to restore the estuary, where salt water from the ocean mixes with fresh water. It includes Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia, the Environmental Protection Agency and citizens groups.

The group said that most of the bay's feeder freshwater streams were in poor or very poor condition. Water murkiness and algae levels in 2011 were the worst since 2009.

But the big Susquehanna Flats grass bed survived Tropical Storm Lee in 2011. In another sign of health, grasses in the middle of the Chesapeake showed "dramatic increases," the program said.

The adult female crab population was still within the sustainable range in 2012 despite falling for two years.

Nitrogen and phosphorus, components in fertilizers that contribute to algae growth, each moved about 20 percent closer to their targets from July 2009 to June 2011 under a bay "pollution diet."

Sediment was about 30 percent nearer its target, helped by more forested buffers being planted to limit runoff into streams and rivers.

In a separate report, the U.S. Geological Survey said this month that nutrient and sediment trends at nine bay monitoring sites had shown an overall lack of improvement through 2010.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Wed Dec 26, 2012 7:28pm EST

n">(Reuters) - A Christmas Eve glitch traced to Amazon.com Inc that shuttered Netflix for users from Canada to South America highlights the risks that companies take when they move their datacenter operations to the cloud.

While the high-profile failure - at least the third this year - may cause some Amazon Web Services customers to consider alternatives, it is unlikely to severely hurt a fast-growing business for the cloud-computing pioneer that got into the sector in 2006 and has historically experienced few outages.

"The benefits still outweigh the risks," said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

"When it comes to the cloud, Amazon has got it right."

The latest service failure comes at a critical time for Amazon, which is betting that AWS can become a significant profit generator even if the economy continues to stagnate. Moreover, it is increasingly targeting larger corporate clients that have traditionally shied away from moving critical applications onto AWS.

AWS, which Amazon started more than six years ago, provides data storage, computing power and other technology services from remote locations that group thousands of servers across areas than can span whole football fields. Their early investment made it a pioneer in what is now known as cloud computing.

Executives said last month at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas they could envision the division, which lists Pinterest, Shazam and Spotify among its fast-growing clients, becoming its biggest business, outpacing even its online retail juggernaut. Evercore analyst Ken Sena expects AWS revenue to jump 45 percent a year, from about $2 billion this year to $20 billion in 2018.

The service has boomed because it is cheap, relatively easy to use, and can be shut off, scaled back or ramped up quickly depending on companies' needs. As the longest-running player in the game, Amazon now boasts the widest array of datacenter products and services, plus a broader stable of clients than rivals like Google Inc, Rackspace Inc and Salesforce.com Inc.

Outages such as the one that took down Netflix and other websites on the eve of one of the biggest U.S. holidays are part and parcel of the nascent business, analysts say. Moreover, outages have been a problem long before the age of cloud computing, with glitches within corporate datacenters and telecommunications hubs triggering myriad service disruptions.

COMING SOON: POST-MORTEM

Amazon's latest service failure comes months after two high-profile outages that hit Netflix and other popular websites such as photo-sharing service Instagram and Pinterest. Industry executives, however, say its downtimes tend to attract more attention because of its outsized market footprint.

Netflix - which CEO Reed Hastings said relies on AWS for 95 percent of its datacenter needs - would not comment on whether they were pondering alternatives. Analysts say the video streaming giant is unlikely to try a large-scale switch, partly because all cloud providers experience outages.

"Despite a steady stream of these service outages, the demand for cloud services offered by AWS, Google, etc. continues to escalate because these services are still reliable enough to satisfy customer expectations," said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of consultancy ThinkStrategies Inc.

"They offer cost-savings and elasticities that are too attractive for companies to ignore."

But "Netflix and other organizations which rely on AWS will have to reexamine how they configure their services and allocate their service requirements across multiple providers to mitigate over-dependency and risks."

AWS spokeswoman Rena Lunak said the outage was traced to a problem affecting customers at its oldest data center, run out of northern Virginia, which was linked also to the June failure.

The latest glitch involved a service known as Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically allocates incoming Web traffic across multiple servers in order to boost the performance of a website. She declined to provide further details about the outage, saying the company would be publishing a full post-mortem within days.

AWS has traditionally been used by start-up tech companies and smaller businesses that anticipate rapid growth in online traffic but are unwilling or unable to shell out on IT equipment and management upfront.

The company has more recently started winning more and more business from larger corporations. It has also set up a unit that caters to government agencies.

Regardless, Amazon's clientele would do well not to put all their eggs in one basket, analysts say.

"Service outages do occur, but they are not common enough to cause users of these services to abandon today's Cloud service providers at significant rates. In fact, every major Cloud service provider has experienced outages," Kaplan said.

"Therefore, organizations that rely on these services are putting backup and recovery systems and protocols in place to mitigate the risks of future outages."

(Additional reporting; editing by Edwin Chan and Richard Chang)

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1 of 2. The sun sets behind Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England January 7, 2010.

LONDON | Tue Oct 9, 2012 7:38am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - A cutting-edge laser scan of Stonehenge has shown how Britain's enigmatic neolithic monument was built to enhance the dramatic passage of sunlight through the circle of stones at midsummer and midwinter.

The slabs were intended to appear at their best in the dawn light on the longest day of the year and at sunset on the shortest, the scan for English Heritage found.

The two solstices attract thousands of visitors to Stonehenge, which dates back some 5,000 years.

The 3-D scan showed the stones to the northeast were carefully "pick-dressed" - worked to be smoother and neater than the other columns - creating a more dramatic spectacle from that angle.

Those stones were set where they would be seen first by people approaching the monument from the northeast along the Avenue, a processional route that would have been particularly spectacular at the midwinter sunset.

The scan uncovered 71 new images of axe-heads carved into the surface, doubling the number of known such carvings recorded in Britain. It also showed up damage and graffiti from Georgian and Victorian visitors.

In the 19th century, visitors could hire chisels at the site to hack off their own souvenirs from the stone.

According to the new evidence, the axe-head carvings were made in the Early Bronze Age, around 1,000 years after the first builders got to work at Stonehenge.

The lofty stones were transported some 400 km (miles) to the site in around 2,100 BC. Archeologists are still puzzled as to how the stones, weighing up to 45 tonnes, were made to stand upright.

(Reporting By Isla Binnie, editing by Paul Casciato)

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SOFIA | Wed Aug 8, 2012 1:08pm EDT

SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgaria hopes to draw tourists intrigued by ancient tombs, mosaics and sewage systems later this year, thanks to engineers excavating a new line for the Sofia metro who stumbled across a street of prime real estate - from the 4th century AD.

Beneath modern Sofia lie the remains of Serdica, a lively, cosmopolitan city where Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, lived for a year while looking for a new capital for his empire.

City officials plan to put an array of Roman remains on display in the next month, from bath houses to mosaics and tombs, and hope this will attract foreign tourists and help revive the Balkan nation's struggling economy.

Some 750,000 foreign tourists a year visit Sofia, and the opening of the new Roman attractions should increase this number, says Rumen Draganov, head of Sofia's Institute for Tourism Analysis and Assessment.

"We expect about 320,000 tourists to visit the new sights in the first year alone," he said. Bulgaria, the poorest member of the European Union, earns some 1.7 billion euros, 5 percent of its gross domestic product, from the 8.5 million tourists a year who flock to its Black Sea and mountain ski resorts.

Until recently archaeologists wrongly regarded countries such as Greece, Italy and Turkey as the only classical areas worthy of study, said Philip Kiernan, Professor in Roman Archaeology of U.S. Buffalo University.

"Serdica was a major metropolis and contains the physical remains of Thracian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine cultures - so it should not be any less significant," he said.

"It's time to stop thinking about cities like Serdica as being peripheral to the classical world, and take them for the important sites that they really are".

'CONSTANTINE LIVED HERE'

Emperor Constantine lived in Serdica for over a year while looking for a new capital in 316 AD as he could no longer effectively control his empire from Rome, a choice Kiernan said was based on Serdica's geographical position.

"From there he could react fast to problems on the border as it was near the Danube frontier but also close to Asia Minor".

Little was known about his stay in the provincial city until a whole street of 4th-5th century AD houses were found during excavations for a new Sofia metro line.

"The constructions are mainly from the time when Serdica was the capital of the Roman province Inner Dacia - it was then that the city was at its largest and most flourishing," said archaeologist Mario Ivanov.

A museum due for completion this summer will display the mosaics, early sewage systems and private bath houses of the ancient Romans who lived there, giving a flavor of the life of a provincial Roman nobleman.

"We found floor mosaics containing symbolic Roman vine leaves, but also a wheel of fortune and the words 'Felix' inscribed, which were most likely to bring good fortune to the inhabitants," said Ivanov, who heads the excavation team.

Bulgaria hopes the remains of ancient Serdica will be one of the capital's biggest attractions, and aims to link the ancient Roman finds with remains from the medieval and Renaissance periods over an area of around 19,000 square meters.

Cafes and bookshops will be incorporated into the ancient complex, and visitors will also be able to explore the ruins through a marked path through the historic site.

"We hope that this venture will become the emblem of our capital," said Hristo Ganchev, head of Cultural Heritage, who is in charge of the 16 million lev EU-backed project.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN TOMBS

Work is also forging ahead on an underground museum in one of the oldest functioning churches in Europe, which is due to open in September.

The Basilica of St Sophia dates back to the 5th century. Repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, it served as a mosque during the Ottoman rule and is a remarkable mixture of Byzantine architecture, Islamic arches and Orthodox Christian icons.

Beneath the red-brick building, archaeologists found one of the first Christian catacombs. A well-preserved necropolis from the 4th century AD, containing around 100 tombs, will soon be ready for visitors.

Glass screens on the floor of the church will allow a view of the tombs from above, and narrow underground passages will allow visitors to explore the lighted crypts of the necropolis.

"The burial ground contains rich wall paintings made up of vine leaves, Maltese crosses and other early Christian symbols," said Yunian Meshekov, lead archaeologist of the excavations under the St Sophia Church.

Sofia has thousands of ancient sarcophagi scattered beneath the city centre, and the tombs discovered below the church are thought to hold the remains of early Christian dignitaries.

"They are most likely to be of wealthy citizens of Serdica who were related either to the new religion or to the actual church and there is a possibility that the remains of an early bishop are there," says Meshekov.

(Editing by Tim Pearce)

(This story was refiled to fix spelling mistake in first paragraph)

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Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei pulls up his shirt bearing a portrait of himself as he chats with journalists at the courtyard of his studio before his verdict hearing in Beijing, July 20, 2012.

LOS ANGELES | Tue Jul 31, 2012 4:09pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Artist Ai Weiwei has made headlines worldwide since his detention in China last year, but outside art circles few people in western countries such as the United States know of his efforts to push for a more open government in his country.

As an artist, he is an eclectic talent who draws, paints, sculpts and does conceptual art, photography, cultural criticism and architecture.

Now, a film documentary, "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" sheds light on the man behind the dissident artist, with a goal that U.S. and other audiences might learn more about Chinese culture and, perhaps, about themselves.

Ai, 54, disappeared in his country in April 2011, and after an outcry by art lovers, free speech activists and politicians, he was found to have been jailed by Chinese officials.

He was released after 81 days in detention, and this month, a Chinese court upheld a $2.4 million tax evasion fine against him that is largely considered a way to muzzle his voice.

Those are the headlines, but who is the man?

"For me, that was one of the driving questions. Who is this guy?," Alison Klayman, the filmmaker of "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," now playing in U.S. theaters, told Reuters.

"I really feel like what I found, and what is reflected in 'Never Sorry,' is someone who is...an incredibly effective communicator, a political organizer, a social commentator. But above all, he is an artist, and an artist who is motivated by the desire to push his country forward," Klayman said.

Klayman first met Ai while living in China and working for National Public Radio, PBS show "Frontline" and other US media outlets. She had been asked to tape an interview with Ai following his role as artistic consultant for the 2008 Beijing Olympic stadium, dubbed the Bird's Nest for its striking design.

While Ai's work on the Bird's Nest vaulted him to worldwide fame, he was already well-known in China for his art, design, activism and family. His father is Chinese poet Ai Qing, and after spending the 1980s studying in the United States, Ai Weiwei returned to China to be with his dad, who died in 1996.

In the 1990s, Ai Weiwei published a series of underground books about young and emerging artists who were bucking convention. In the 2000s, he challenged official China's version of life behind the Great Wall with, among other work, paintings that showed a hand giving the middle finger to images symbolizing Chinese authority such as Tiananmen Square.

In 2007, he denounced the Bird's Nest and the Beijing Olympics as political propaganda, and in 2008, Ai began work to expose the names of more than 5,000 children killed in a massive earthquake -- names the government did not want disclosed.

SPEECH IS FREE

"The question: 'Why is he not in jail?' was one that I asked pretty much all of my interviewees, certainly all the ones that were done before his (2011) detention," Klayman said. "Actually, it's something that I asked Weiwei within the first week or two of us filming together...And his response was, 'I don't know...It's not up to me whether I'm in jail or not.'"

Ai's answer is simple and complex at the same time because it requires understanding societal shifts in modern China, and his life and work seem a fitting vehicle to explore the country's changing cultural landscape.

What emerges in "Never Sorry" is a portrait of a man who deeply loves his country and fellow citizens, yet also wants to expose his government's suppression of individual rights.

Following his work on the Bird's Nest, Ai exploded onto the international art scene, but it was his use of Twitter that gave his voice even wider reach around the globe and earned the wrath of Chinese officials who'd already shut down his personal blog.

"Weiwei was talking about all of the exciting possibilities of the Internet well before the Arab Spring and Wikileaks and all these things in current affairs," said Klayman.

Yet, as much as "Never Sorry" paints a portrait of an artist and sheds some light on Chinese life, Klayman also hopes it challenges western audiences to express themselves without fear of retribution, whether by family, friends or governments.

"It really makes people inspired to think, 'What can I do in my world, and where do I need to put it out there, put it on the line, risk something to make my world a better place," she said.

(Additional reporting by Alicia Avila; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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