Kites may be flown for recreation, art or other practical uses. Sport kites can be flown in aerial ballet, sometimes as part of a competition. Power kites are multi-line steerable kites designed to generate large forces which can be used to power activities such as kite surfing, kite landboarding or kite buggying. Kites towed behind boats can lift passengers which has had useful military applications in the past.

Some kite fighters pass their strings through a mixture of ground glass powder and glue. The resulting strings are very abrasive and can sever the competitor's strings more easily. The abrasive strings can also injure people. During the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, kite flying was banned, among various other recreations.

Kites

HELSINKI (Reuters) –
The world's top cellphone maker Nokia Oyj on Thursday charged Apple with infringing Nokia patents in its iPhone.

Nokia dominates the global handset market but it has lost some ground to new smartphone entrants like Apple which entered the market with its iPhone in mid-2007.

The 10 patents in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. state of Delaware, relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (LAN) standards, Nokia said.

"Nokia's enormous patent portfolio doesn't make this a big surprise but it could have severe repercussions for Apple and its component supplier," said CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber. "Once again intellectual property has become the secondary battleground in a highly competitive mobile phone market."

Last year, Nokia ended a more than three-year legal battle with U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm which spanned three continents and involved more than a dozen separate cases. "It's too early to tell, but it's likely to be a drawn out battle. We have a hard time seeing a material risk to either company," said Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton.

"They're both big companies, they have lots of cash and they can fight it and in the end I don't really see a dramatic impact to Apple's financial profile."

Legal battles over as many as 10 technology patents can easily take several years.

The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Nokia said.

Nokia said 40 main handset vendors have licensed its technologies, but it has not reached agreement with Apple.

"By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation," Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President for Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia, said in a statement.

Apple Inc shares trading in the U.S. dipped on the news and were 0.34 percent lower at $204.21 by 1715 GMT (1:15 p.m. EDT). Nokia shares closed in Helsinki 0.3 percent lower at 8.82 euros.

Apple was not immediately available for comment.

(Additional reporting by Gabriel Madway in San Francisco; editing by Elaine Hardcastle and Karen Foster)

WASHINGTON – NASA needs to make a major detour on its grand plans to return astronauts to the moon, a special independent panel told the White House Thursday.
Under current plans, NASA has picked the wrong destination with the wrong rocket, the panel's chairman said. A test-flight version of the rocket, the new Ares I, is on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, awaiting liftoff later this month for its first experimental flight.
Instead, NASA should be concentrating on bigger rockets and new places to explore, the panel members said, as they issued their final 155-page report. The committee, created by the White House in May to look at NASA's troubled exploration, shuttle and space station programs, issued a summary of their findings last month, mostly urging more spending on space.
On Thursday in a news conference, panel Chairman Norman Augustine focused on fresh destinations for NASA, saying that it makes more sense to put astronauts on a nearby asteroid or one of the moons of Mars. He said that could be done sooner than returning to the moon in 15 years as NASA has outlined.
The exploration plans now under fire were pushed by then-President George W. Bush after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. The moon-Mars plan lacks enough money, thanks to budget diversions, the panel said in a 155-page report. Starting in 2014, NASA needs an extra $3 billion a year if astronauts are going to travel beyond Earth's orbit, the panel said.
The Augustine commission wants NASA to extend the life of the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. Space shuttles are due to retire Oct. 1, 2010, but should keep flying until sometime in 2011 because they won't get all their flights to the space station done by that date. And the space station itself — only now nearing completion — should operate until at least 2020, allowing for more scientific experiments, part of its reason for existence. NASA's timetable calls for plunging it into the ocean in 2015.
However, the overall focus of the panel's report is on where U.S. space exploration should be headed.
The White House will review the panel's analysis "and then ultimately the president will be making the final decision," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in an e-mail comment.
The committee outlines eight options. Three of those involve a "flexible path" to explore someplace other than the moon, eventually heading to a Mars landing far in the future. The flexible path suggests no-landing flights around the moon and Mars.
Landing on the moon and then launching back to Earth would require a lot of fuel because of the moon's gravity. Hauling fuel from Earth to the moon and then back costs money.
It would take less fuel to land and return from asteroids or comets that swing by Earth or even the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, Augustine said.
Eventually, Augustine said NASA could return to the moon, but as a training stepping stone, not a major destination, as the Bush plan envisioned.
Panel member Ed Crawley, a professor at MIT, said NASA should explore the inner solar system "to interest the American public in new destinations."
He noted that so many new asteroids and comets are being discovered each year that the potential first landing spot "is probably one we don't know about yet."
Augustine said landing astronauts on such a near-Earth object could occur in the early 2020s.
In a news conference to discuss their report, Crawley and Augustine said the current NASA plans were well conceived at the time, in 2005. But when money got diverted and launch dates delayed, NASA's new Ares I rocket began to look like it lost one of its major purposes: ferrying astronauts to the space station.
Crawley said the panel liked the idea of a commercially operated, more basic rocket-taxi to get astronauts into the low-Earth orbit of the space station. If NASA spent about $5 billion to help kick-start the embryonic commercial space business to do the people-carrying, then the space agency could concentrate on heavier rockets that do the real far-off exploring, he said.
Those commercial rockets should be ready in about six years, Crawley said.

NASA is slowly delaying some parts of the old moon program. It's rethinking its future annual $10 million spending on a still-unbuilt lunar lander as it awaits Obama's decision on the Augustine panel recommendations, said NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma.

George Washington University space scholar John Logsdon praised the report as "more comprehensive" than NASA's current program.

Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright said he worries about changes that will cause a loss in momentum in NASA's exploration plans. "You've got to make a decision and you've got to stick to it if you are ever going to get to Mars."

Senator Richard Shelby, R-Ala., criticized the idea of using unproven commercial carriers instead of the Ares, which was designed in his state. He said the report was "unsatisfactory and disappointing."

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Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html

WASHINGTON – The White House on Thursday forcefully rejected criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans that President Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision is taking too long.
"What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously."
Obama is nearing a decision on whether to significantly expand the U.S. war posture in Afghanistan by honoring a military request for thousands of additional forces. The decision had been expected as early as mid-August, when Obama's new war commander prepared a harsh assessment of deteriorating conditions in the 8-year-old conflict, and now is expected in what Gibbs calls "the coming weeks."
Obama is also weighing with his national security team whether to focus more narrowly on al-Qaida terrorists believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
Top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's still-secret troop request outlines three options — from as many as 80,000 more troops to as few as 10,000 — but favors a compromise of 40,000 more forces, officials have told The Associated Press. There now are 67,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and 1,000 more are headed there by the end of December.
The previous top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, submitted a request for more troops that went unfulfilled by former President George W. Bush. Obama partly granted that request in March when he ordered an additional 21,000 U.S. troops to go to Afghanistan this year.
Cheney said in a speech Wednesday night that Obama needs to "do what it takes to win" and that "signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries."
Taking a similar tack on Thursday, former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized the administration during a speech in Fort Worth, Texas, suggesting Obama has projected confusion onto the Afghanistan conflict in his public statements.
Gibbs said such comments were curious "given the fact that an increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president's, for more than eight months, a resource request filled by President Obama in March."
Other Democrats chimed in to defend the president, despite opposition among congressional Democrats to a major expansion of the U.S. war effort.
"Republicans have developed a troubling pattern of blaming President Obama for trying to fix all the problems that they created," said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., also defended Obama, when asked about Cheney's criticism. "I think President Obama is entitled to take sufficient time to decide what our long-term role ought to be in Afghanistan," he said on MSNBC. "I want him to take the time to get it right."
Cheney had also taken issue with statements out of the White House that the Obama administration had to start from scratch to develop a strategy for a conflict begun in 2001, the first year of the Bush presidency.
The Bush administration presented to Obama's transition team the review of the Afghanistan war that it undertook just before leaving office and was asked to keep it under wraps, Cheney said. A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, later disputed that characterization and said the report was not kept under wraps.
Meanwhile, Obama worked Thursday on a strategy to prevent fraud from occurring in Afghanistan in its runoff presidential election set for Nov. 7.
In an hourlong videoconference from the White House Situation Room, Obama and other top advisers heard a briefing and recommendations from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry. Gibbs would not specify what steps the U.S. is taking with Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission to avoid the problems that marred the original election on Aug. 20.
President Hamid Karzai faces his main challenger, ex-Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, in the runoff.
Obama is not necessarily going to put off his decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan until after the run-off election, as some — including Democratic Sen. John Kerry — have strongly suggested he do.

"It could be before the runoff. It might be after the runoff," Gibbs said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he will prod NATO allies this week for more economic and security aid to Afghanistan while trying to sidestep the debate over more troops.

NATO nations have supplied 36,000 troops, and NATO officials have signaled they won't ask their nations to send more until Obama makes a move.

Gates said there are enough other topics to discuss with NATO allies during a defense chiefs' gathering in Bratislava, Slovakia, this week.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the allies must do more to enable Afghan forces to eventually assume responsibility for security in their country.

NATO currently has 59 training teams working with the Afghan army. Alliance officials say they need the allies to come up with nine more to fulfill present plans that call for an expansion of the Afghan forces from the present 94,000 to 134,000. But if a future expansion plan boosting the Afghan army to 400,000 troops is approved, NATO will need a total of 103 training teams on the ground.

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Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes contributed to this report from Bratislava, Slovakia.