Bhubaneshwar: In a move aimed at boosting the disaster preparedness activities and including more disasters in the recognised list of disasters for extending compensation, the State Government has decided to update the Orissa Relief Code of 1980.

The draft code will be prepared soon for clearance. It was last updated in 1996. Disaster management committees in the district and block-level would be involved in a big way under the new code. The new recognised list of disasters will include tsunami, lightning and earthquake among others.

OSDMA has identified about 328 places along the coastal place in Orissa,which are prone to tsunami, said OSDMA project coordinator Gyana Ranjan Das, adding, the new relief code is expected to be implemented by the year-end.

Tsunami vulnerability mapping of six coastal districts has also been initiated on GIS platform and preparedness programme will be taken up in 328 villages in six coastal districts with the support of UNDP.

OSDMA would soon sign an MoU with Orissa Remote Sensing Application Centre for development of GIS-based Orissa Disaster Management Information System. The data on GIS platform will act as a decision support system for disaster management.

Das said, the ISRO has also approved setting up of 220 automated weather stations in the State, and their locations are being finalised in consultation with the district collectors.

Addressing mediapersons here on Wednesday on the sidelines of a workshop on disaster reduction, he informed that measures have already been initiated to implement the urban earthquake vulnerability reduction programme in Cuttack, Bhubaneswar and Sambalpur.

Similarly, the Government of India-UNDP assisted disaster risk management programme is being implemented in 23,263 villages under 3,210 gram panchayats of 155 blocks in 16 districts.

USA - The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] today announced that it received the Satellite Industry Leadership Award on Wednesday at the 2008 International Satellite and Communications exchange (ISCe) in San Diego, Calif.

"More than 2,500 years of cumulative on-orbit service demonstrates that, for more than four decades, Boeing continues to design and deliver superior satellites," said David Bross, ISCe conference chairman. "Boeing was selected by the distinguished members of the ISCe Advisory Board based on the company's consistent and significant leadership in the advancement of the satellite and communications sector."

Boeing Satellite Systems International President Stephen T. O'Neill accepted the award on Boeing's behalf.

ISCe is the premier West Coast satellite and communications event. It highlights satellite-based services, technologies and solutions for the commercial, civil and military industries. Past winners of the Leadership Award are DIRECTV Inc. (2002), News Corp. (2003), U.S. Strategic Command (2004), SES Global (2005), JSAT Corp. (2006) and Intelsat General Corp. (2007).

Boeing is competing for the Transformational Satellite Communications System program for the U.S. Air Force and for the next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, known as the GOES R series, for NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The company is committed to program execution and quality on commercial, civil and military satellite systems.

Spain - When Greenpeace brought out a book showing famous Spanish landscapes submerged in water, they said they "wanted to create alarm and launch a call for action". Those words were truer than they knew. Now the digitally altered pictures are at the centre of a looming legal action.

A group of property developers and owners in the popular Mediterranean resort of La Manga have threatened to sue Greenpeace for millions of euros, over their dramatic predictions of the effects of global warming, which they say have caused house prices in the area to plunge.

The threatened legal action comes eight months after La Manga del Mar Menor, a sandy spit at the heart of Murcia's tourist region, featured prominently in the Photoclima book published by the ecological organisation to jolt Spain into action on climate change.

Greenpeace's initiative "has provoked the collapse of the property market and the services of the affected area", a group of developers say in letters to the organisation, quoted in the Spanish press. They will "take legal action" if Greenpeace refuses to accept an out-of-court settlement amounting to €27m (£21m) in damages.

Photoclima, published last November, showed aerial shots of La Manga alongside digitally modified photographs of the same scenes submerged in water, with only the tops of high-rise hotels, apartment blocks and palm trees visible above the sea.

"Greenpeace manipulated the expected rise in sea levels of half a metre to cause alarm. Their action has sunk the real estate market: no one is buying and everyone has put their flats up for sale," Jose Angel Abad, a lawyer championing the cause of the area's aggrieved developers, told reporters. He said prices had plunged by 50 per cent in recent months and that his clients were seeking €27m to cover the drop in value of their properties.

Greenpeace said its book accurately portrays the conclusions reached by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), which predicted that global warming would cause sea levels to rise worldwide in coming decades. The book also shows modified images of a dried-up river Ebro in Zaragoza and Valencian orange and lemon groves shrivelled to a desert.

Spain is currently suffering a housing slump after enjoying a 12-year building boom. Greenpeace said the developers and owners were trying to "blackmail" the organisation into footing the bill for their own speculation in real estate and it would not settle out of court. The matter was in the hands of its lawyers. "They're trying to blame Greenpeace and its campaign for the urban destruction of La Manga and problems they've encountered in a market saturated by real estate speculation," said Juan Lopez de Uralde, Greenpeace's director in Spain. "We will not be intimidated. The photos correspond to scientists' predictions."

The IPCC met in Valencia in November to present its report. With this information, Greenpeace used photomontage techniques on images of six sites in Spain, showing the devastating impact of climate change unless urgent measures were taken.

"We will continue to campaign against climate change, because time is running out for taking measures to prevent La Manga from becoming submerged," said Mario Rodríguez, Greenpeace's campaigns director in Spain. "To try to solve specific problems by attacking the messenger, whose only aim is to defend the environment, is a wrong strategy, as well as being unworthy and unfair."

Miami, FL: Tele Atlas, provider of digital maps and dynamic content for navigation and location-based solutions, unveiled Tele Atlas MultiNav, the company’s newest digital map platform that is designed to allow navigation application developers even greater speed and flexibility for building next generation mapping applications. MultiNav features all of the benefits of Tele Atlas’ rich digital map database, delivered with a smaller data footprint to help decrease time-to-market, enable developers spend less time in the development process and allow a smaller run-time format for their innovative applications for a competitive advantage. Tele Atlas’ comprehensive map content spans across 27.2 million kilometers in more than 70 countries, to the front doors of 1.9 billion people around the world.

Developed with Tele Atlas’ comprehensive and advanced data collection processes, MultiNav is available immediately to offer partners broad, comprehensive worldwide coverage. Developers can leverage the MulitNav platform in concert with Tele Atlas’s suite of digital map content and enhancements products, including millions of points of interest (POIs), Tele Atlas Digital Elevation Models, Tele Atlas 3D Landmarks and Tele Atlas Voice Maps. Tele Atlas plans to incorporate additional innovative functionality and content into the new MultiNav platform, including map data enriched with qualified community content.

“The market demands an ever-increasing amount of invaluable features and attributes in our digital maps and concurrently, our partners need to quickly and efficiently deliver competitive products. Tele Atlas’ engineers attacked this challenge head-on, streamlining the footprint to create a more nimble, feature-rich option to suit the needs of developers in our community,” said Tele Atlas Global Product Director Purvi Rajani. “Pilot users are reporting that MultiNav has successfully helped reduce development time, without sacrificing quality or richness of the data. Our global partners have relied on us to deliver solutions that repeatedly raise the bar for the digital mapping industry. With MultiNav, we continue this legacy.”

Responding to navigation application development requirements, Tele Atlas engineered MultiNav with an array of powerful, out-of-the-box features, designed to enhance performance, including:

· Optimized data structure to enable developers to compile data faster and more easily;

· Reduced data footprint to optimize device cost and efficiency, with superb results seen across European, North American and Asia Pacific maps;

· A single global data specification with out-of-the-box indexing to incorporate a single global map solution.

Pilot user Sygic, a GPS navigation software provider for a range of mobile devices and smartphones, began working with Tele Atlas MultiNav in late 2007 to develop the next version of its software for OEMs, distributors, car manufacturers and logistics companies. “Through the development process with Tele Atlas MultiNav, we significantly reduced our data footprint, allowing our development team to easily build and deploy with MultiNav’s features, attributes and relationship models,” said Sygic CEO and Founder Michal Stencl. “We’re also seeing bottom-line benefits with this faster development cycle. After switching to the MultiNav platform, we were able to fully deploy in early 2008, well ahead of schedule, leading to significantly increased revenues. Q1 2008 revenue exceeded revenue from Q1 2007 by more than 426 percent.”

Reports from pilot users have shown that the streamlined MultiNav platform helps developers to:

· Compile digital map data faster and more easily. One trial user noted complete data compilation at the application level within one week, marking a major reduction in compilation time;

· Leverage existing data compilers to process the data successfully, with minimal configuration effort required.

· Significantly reduce data size, with a reported reduction of approximately 30-40 percent in the overall data footprint on devices; for example Tele Atlas digital map data for all available European countries can fit on SD cards with less than 2 gigabytes of memory — with full functionality and quality included.

Norcross, GA – ERDAS announces Transform Your Data into Information: Author, Manage, Connect and Deliver, a free webinar on Thursday, June 19 at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. (EDT).

This webinar will address several business problems, illustrating the most efficient means for running change detection, synchronizing and mosaicking imagery, connecting to Oracle databases and more. This webinar includes interactive demos, highlighting each of the specific components and capabilities of a Geospatial Business System, including how to author, manage, connect and deliver your geospatial information. ERDAS’ interoperable geospatial solutions are for desktop and enterprise use, extending information to and from the field, to business partners and across the Web.

Each month, ERDAS is offering at least two different webinar topics. To meet the needs of ERDAS’ global audience, each webinar will be hosted twice on a scheduled day. Each webinar features an ERDAS solution, addressing user needs while also showcasing key features. In addition to a live presentation and demonstration, each webinar also includes the ability for customers to interact directly with the presenter. Scheduled to last forty-five minutes, each webinar will include approximately thirty minutes of presented material and fifteen minutes for Q&A.

Below is a schedule outlining the next three ERDAS webinar topics and the solutions featured:

· June 19 – Transform Your Data to Information: Author, Manage, Connect and Deliver! (Multiple solutions)

· June 26 – Rapidly Connect & Share Your World (ERDAS TITAN)

· July 2 – Rapidly Connect & Share Your World (ERDAS TITAN)

To register for Transform Your Data into Information: Author, Manage, Connect and Deliver, or find out more about other upcoming webinars, please visit: www.erdas.com.