Putin says Russia seeking IMF reform, battling offshores

By Steve Gutterman

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund needs "thorough reform" and Russia will push for deals giving developing countries more clout in time for a G20 summit it is hosting in September, President Vladimir Putin said in remarks published on Friday.

In an interview with Russian state news agency RIA before next week's G8 summit in Northern Ireland, Putin emphasized Russia's role as current G20 president and next year's leader of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

He mixed criticism and praise, getting in digs at the West but casting Russia as a constructive partner eager to help.

The IMF often responds too slowly to changes in financial markets and the implementation of its decisions "leaves much to be desired as well," Putin said. "A good example is the global financial crisis, which the IMF system failed to prevent."

Talks on revising the IMF quota and voting systems to enhance the role of the BRICS countries and other developing nations "are not going smoothly. I would say that they have actually come to a standstill since 2010," he said.

IMF member countries have wrangled for more than two years over specifics of a formula to determine member countries' voting power that would give emerging economies greater say in the global financial institution.

"We will make maximum efforts to persuade our partners to reach a compromise and find mutually acceptable solutions in the run-up to the G20 summit in St Petersburg," said Putin, who will host the meeting in his hometown.

He said that when Russia takes the helm of the G8 next year and holds the summit in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympics will take place next February, it will focus on "searching for responses to new security threats."

He had praise for next week's summit host, British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country is using its G8 presidency to push for a global clampdown on complex arrangements used to disguise wealth and minimize tax payments.

Putin, who pledged a "de-offshorisation" push to stem capital flight after returning to the Kremlin last year for a third presidential term, stressed that the problem is not Russia's alone.

"We have all seen how not long ago the head of Apple answered the awkward questions of senators about the fact that his company keeps tens of billions of dollars ... outside American tax boundaries," Putin said.

He said Russia advocates bilateral agreements with offshore jurisdictions aimed at curbing illegal tax-minimization schemes.

"DEPENDENCY MENTALITY"

Putin, who often contrasts Russia favorably with the West, said that some European countries were living beyond their means and many were seeing "a rise of dependency mentality, when not working is often much more beneficial than working."

"For Russia, such an approach is unacceptable," he said - but he added that leading European nations were carrying out structural reforms and said "we should not reject the European social model."

Putin said that there was a "certain stagnation right now within the World Trade Organization," which Russia joined last year after nearly two decades trying. "However, this is no reason to tear this structure down."

He said Russia is accused of falling short of fulfilling its WTO commitments but has its own complaints, saying it is unreasonably denied access to some markets in fertilizers, chemicals, automotive fuel and pipes, among other goods.

Putin, who skipped the G8 summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama last year and will meet Obama for the first time since last June, made only brief mention of global political and security issues in the interview.

G8 leaders "plan to talk about the situation in Syria, the Middle East and North Africa, Afghanistan and so on. We expect that the results of this discussion will be useful" he said.

(editing by Ron Askew)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/putin-says-russia-seeking-imf-reform-battling-offshores-200454986.html

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Markets settle down after recent volatility

LONDON (AP) ? Markets recovered their poise Wednesday, a day after investors around the world were spooked by the failure of the Bank of Japan to announce further easing measures.

On Tuesday, stocks were hit while the yen surged, particularly against the dollar, after Japan's central bank kept policy unchanged. Japan has been one of the main influences in the markets as investors have scrutinized the authorities' attempts to get the country out of its two-decade stagnation.

In April, the Bank of Japan announced a massive stimulus in an attempt to get inflation up to 2 percent. The euphoria that drove the Nikkei up to five-year highs has since dissipated and the index is now around 20 percent down on its recent peak.

The other major driver in markets has been the uncertainty over the future course of U.S. monetary policy following a solid, if unspectacular, improvement in the economic data.

The markets now expect some reduction in the Federal Reserve's monthly asset purchases sometime this year ? the stimulus has been one of the main reasons why many assets, such as global stock markets and emerging markets, have bounced back over the past few years.

Joshua Mahony, research analyst at Alpari, said the next crucial event in the markets is whether they recover to reach new highs ? prior to the recent weakness, many stock indexes around the world had hit all-time levels.

"Should the markets suffer significant losses within the coming week without reaching previous highs, the market perception would be that a lower high has been formed; the prerequisite for a reversal in the markets," said Joshua Mahony, research analyst at Alpari. "Subsequently, a shift below previous lows of last week is likely to be treated as confirmation of a move to the downside for many indices."

A recovery of sorts was evident in much of Europe and the U.S.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was steady at 6,341 while Germany's DAX fell 0.4 percent to 3,820. The CAC-40 in France was 0.3 percent higher at 3,820.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 0.5 percent at 15,198 while the broader S&P 500 index rose the same rate to 1,634.

Earlier in Asia, stocks faltered though the scale of the retreat, particularly in Tokyo, was relatively modest. The Nikkei 225, the regional heavyweight, shed 0.2 percent to 13,289.32 ? the steady calm masks another wild ride for the index during the session.

The yen too, which surged around 3 percent against the dollar on Tuesday, was relatively calm too ? the dollar was up 0.1 percent at 96.19 yen, a modest rebound from the previous day's retreat.

"The fact that investors were disappointed (on Tuesday) by the lack of fresh BoJ measures does highlight how addicted the market has become to the promise of a continual flow of cheap money," said Jane Foley, senior currency strategist at Rabobank International.

South Korea's Kospi shed 0.6 percent to 1,909.91 while Sydney's ASX S&P 200 fell 0.7 percent to 4,724.50. Singapore's FTSE Straits Times index lost 0.5 percent to 3,154.53 while India's Sensex lost 0.3 percent to 19,077.56. New Zealand also fell.

Markets in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan were closed for a holiday.

Elsewhere, the euro was flat at $1.3311 while a barrel of benchmark New York oil was up 83 cents at $96.16.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/markets-settle-down-recent-volatility-110511861.html

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10 Things to Know for Today (Providence Journal)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

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Scientists size up universe's most lightweight dwarf galaxy

June 10, 2013 ? The least massive galaxy in the known universe has been measured by UC Irvine scientists, clocking in at just 1,000 or so stars with a bit of dark matter holding them together.

The findings, made with the world's most powerful telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory and published today in The Astrophysical Journal, offer tantalizing clues about how iron, carbon and other elements key to human life originally formed. But the size and weight of Segue 2, as the star body is called, are its most extraordinary aspects.

"Finding a galaxy as tiny as Segue 2 is like discovering an elephant smaller than a mouse," said UC Irvine cosmologist James Bullock, co-author of the paper. Astronomers have been searching for years for this type of dwarf galaxy, long predicted to be swarming around the Milky Way. Their inability to find any, he said, "has been a major puzzle, suggesting that perhaps our theoretical understanding of structure formation in the universe was flawed in a serious way."

Segue 2's presence as a satellite of our home galaxy could be "a tip-of-the-iceberg observation, with perhaps thousands more very low-mass systems orbiting just beyond our ability to detect them," he added.

"It's definitely a galaxy, not a star cluster," said postdoctoral scholar and lead author Evan Kirby. He explained that the stars are held together by a globule called a dark matter halo. Without this acting as galactic glue, the star body wouldn't qualify as a galaxy.

Segue 2, discovered in 2009 as part of the massive Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is one of the faintest known galaxies, with light output just 900 times that of the sun. That's miniscule compared to the Milky Way, which shines 20 billion times brighter. But despite its tiny size, researchers using different tools originally thought Segue 2 was far denser.

""The Keck telescopes are the only ones in the world powerful enough to have made this observation," Kirby said of the huge apparatus housed on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. He determined the upper weight range of 25 of the major stars in the galaxy and found that it weighs at least 10 times less than previously estimated.

Fellow authors are Michael Boylan-Kolchin and Manoj Kaplinghat of UC Irvine, Judith Cohen of the California Institute of Technology and Marla Geha of Yale University. Funding was provided by the Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution (a multicampus research program of the University of California) and by the National Science Foundation.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/FOzedUakllU/130610133535.htm

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When will my computer understand me?

June 10, 2013 ? It's not hard to tell the difference between the "charge" of a battery and criminal "charges." But for computers, distinguishing between the various meanings of a word is difficult.

For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software. Driven initially by efforts to translate Russian scientific texts during the Cold War (and more recently by the value of information retrieval and data analysis tools), these efforts have met with mixed success. IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system and Google Translate are high profile, successful applications of language technologies, but the humorous answers and mistranslations they sometimes produce are evidence of the continuing difficulty of the problem.

Our ability to easily distinguish between multiple word meanings is rooted in a lifetime of experience. Using the context in which a word is used, an intrinsic understanding of syntax and logic, and a sense of the speaker's intention, we intuit what another person is telling us.

"In the past, people have tried to hand-code all of this knowledge," explained Katrin Erk, a professor of linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin focusing on lexical semantics. "I think it's fair to say that this hasn't been successful. There are just too many little things that humans know."

Other efforts have tried to use dictionary meanings to train computers to better understand language, but these attempts have also faced obstacles. Dictionaries have their own sense distinctions, which are crystal clear to the dictionary-maker but murky to the dictionary reader. Moreover, no two dictionaries provide the same set of meanings -- frustrating, right?

Watching annotators struggle to make sense of conflicting definitions led Erk to try a different tactic. Instead of hard-coding human logic or deciphering dictionaries, why not mine a vast body of texts (which are a reflection of human knowledge) and use the implicit connections between the words to create a weighted map of relationships -- a dictionary without a dictionary?

"An intuition for me was that you could visualize the different meanings of a word as points in space," she said. "You could think of them as sometimes far apart, like a battery charge and criminal charges, and sometimes close together, like criminal charges and accusations ("the newspaper published charges..."). The meaning of a word in a particular context is a point in this space. Then we don't have to say how many senses a word has. Instead we say: 'This use of the word is close to this usage in another sentence, but far away from the third use.'"

To create a model that can accurately recreate the intuitive ability to distinguish word meaning requires a lot of text and a lot of analytical horsepower.

"The lower end for this kind of a research is a text collection of 100 million words," she explained. "If you can give me a few billion words, I'd be much happier. But how can we process all of that information? That's where supercomputers and Hadoop come in."

Applying Computational Horsepower

Erk initially conducted her research on desktop computers, but around 2009, she began using the parallel computing systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Access to a special Hadoop-optimized subsystem on TACC's Longhorn supercomputer allowed Erk and her collaborators to expand the scope of their research. Hadoop is a software architecture well suited to text analysis and the data mining of unstructured data that can also take advantage of large computer clusters. Computational models that take weeks to run on a desktop computer can run in hours on Longhorn. This opened up new possibilities.

"In a simple case we count how often a word occurs in close proximity to other words. If you're doing this with one billion words, do you have a couple of days to wait to do the computation? It's no fun," Erk said. "With Hadoop on Longhorn, we could get the kind of data that we need to do language processing much faster. That enabled us to use larger amounts of data and develop better models."

Treating words in a relational, non-fixed way corresponds to emerging psychological notions of how the mind deals with language and concepts in general, according to Erk. Instead of rigid definitions, concepts have "fuzzy boundaries" where the meaning, value and limits of the idea can vary considerably according to the context or conditions. Erk takes this idea of language and recreates a model of it from hundreds of thousands of documents.

Say That Another Way

So how can we describe word meanings without a dictionary? One way is to use paraphrases. A good paraphrase is one that is "close to" the word meaning in that high-dimensional space that Erk described.

"We use a gigantic 10,000-dimentional space with all these different points for each word to predict paraphrases," Erk explained. "If I give you a sentence such as, 'This is a bright child,' the model can tell you automatically what are good paraphrases ('an intelligent child') and what are bad paraphrases ('a glaring child'). This is quite useful in language technology."

Language technology already helps millions of people perform practical and valuable tasks every day via web searches and question-answer systems, but it is poised for even more widespread applications.

Automatic information extraction is an application where Erk's paraphrasing research may be critical. Say, for instance, you want to extract a list of diseases, their causes, symptoms and cures from millions of pages of medical information on the web.

"Researchers use slightly different formulations when they talk about diseases, so knowing good paraphrases would help," Erk said.

In a paper to appear in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Erk and her collaborators illustrated they could achieve state-of-the-art results with their automatic paraphrasing approach.

Recently, Erk and Ray Mooney, a computer science professor also at The University of Texas at Austin, were awarded a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to combine Erk's distributional, high dimensional space representation of word meanings with a method of determining the structure of sentences based on Markov logic networks.

"Language is messy," said Mooney. "There is almost nothing that is true all the time. "When we ask, 'How similar is this sentence to another sentence?' our system turns that question into a probabilistic theorem-proving task and that task can be very computationally complex."

In their paper, "Montague Meets Markov: Deep Semantics with Probabilistic Logical Form," presented at the Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (STARSEM2013) in June, Erk, Mooney and colleagues announced their results on a number of challenge problems from the field of artificial intelligence.

In one problem, Longhorn was given a sentence and had to infer whether another sentence was true based on the first. Using an ensemble of different sentence parsers, word meaning models and Markov logic implementations, Mooney and Erk's system predicted the correct answer with 85% accuracy. This is near the top results in this challenge. They continue to work to improve the system.

There is a common saying in the machine-learning world that goes: "There's no data like more data." While more data helps, taking advantage of that data is key.

"We want to get to a point where we don't have to learn a computer language to communicate with a computer. We'll just tell it what to do in natural language," Mooney said. "We're still a long way from having a computer that can understand language as well as a human being does, but we've made definite progress toward that goal."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/7QeHx5EQCWQ/130610113051.htm

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aboard the Amadeus Princess - what to expect on your river cruise ...

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Never having been on a cruise of any kind before, I was not quite sure what to expect as we joined the Amadeus Mozart ship at Basel for our Rhine River Cruise with L?ftner Cruises. I?d heard that the European river cruise ships have the intimate atmosphere of a small hotel, but that everything is on the compact side as the boats are restricted in height and width so that they can fit through the locks and under the bridges as they pass down the rivers of Europe.

Amadeus Princess is moored at Cochem

The ship proved to be an extremely comfortable base for our cruise and had all the conveniences we required in our cabin and in the public areas of the ship. So if you?re considering taking a European river cruise, here?s what you might expect based on our our experience with L?ftner?Cruises;

I hope you enjoy the video tour below of the Amadeus Princess river cruise ship

If you can?t see the video above about the Amadeus Princess ship, view it on my blog here or on YouTube here

Who will my fellow passengers be?

The Amadeus Princess is one of a fleet of 11 ships owned by L?ftner?Cruises and with 80 cabins the guest list will typically be 150-160 people, making it easy to make friends on board while mingling in the bar lounge and on the excursions. The languages used on board were English and German and on our cruise there were a couple of large tour groups from the USA and Israel as well as couples and groups of friends from the USA, Canada and Germany. We learned that large tour groups often use river cruise ships for bookings, so the nationalities of the passengers may vary between cruises, but there?s typically an international mixture. With a few exceptions, most of the passengers on the cruise were in their 50s, 60s and 70s and typically seemed to be the active retired who were keen to get out and explore the history and landscape of the Rhine. As one American guest put it ?This cruise is history come alive for me?

What will my cabin be like?

Our cabin was on the Mozart deck, the highest of the 3 levels of cabins and one below the open sun deck, with floor to ceiling French windows that we could open to give a balcony effect. The cabins on this deck were in the highest price band, but I would have been equally happy to have a cabin on the Strauss deck below, which were slightly cheaper, although the few cabins on the lowest Hayden deck had smaller windows. The room was compact by hotel standards but had everything that we needed for a pleasant stay; a large double bed with bedside lights; a narrow dressing table with a mirror above and cupboards below, 2 power points and just room to perch my laptop. We had room to stow our cases under the bed and for clothes storage there was a double wardrobe and a total of 6 drawers. In a cupboard there was a small safe which was suitable to store smaller valuables although not large enough for my laptop.

Our cabin on the Amadeus Mozart with Lueftner Cruises

Like the bedroom, the bathroom, with shower, sink and toilet was compact but had everything that we needed, some nice mini toiletries, a cupboard under the sink and a well-lit mirror. I wondered whether there might be a problem if everyone on the boat decided to take a shower at once, but this was never a problem as the ship has huge water tanks and we had a good hot shower whenever we wanted.

Where can I relax on board?

Our first evening started with a welcome cocktail in the Panorama Bar when the crew were all introduced and we felt that the cruise was well and truly underway. This lounge bar occupied the front end of the ship on the top level with access to a small deck area where you could sit and get a view as the ship progressed down the river. The Panorama Bar was a little crowded if all the cruise guests were in there at once, but normally this was not an issue as guests filtered in an out for a pre or post-dinner drink, for afternoon tea or for evening talks about the next day?s events and excursions. It was a pleasant place to socialise and to make friends with other guests.

For those who wanted a quieter place to read or play games, there was the Amadeus Club at the back of the ship with comfortable leather seats, a TV area and a couple of computer stations where you could connect to the Internet for an additional charge. The upper sun deck stretched the whole length of the ship with plenty of chairs to sit outside, and space to play games such as chess. Because we were travelling in May when the weather was changeable and because we spent a lot of time on excursions, we didn?t spend much time on the sun deck, but in summer I think this would be a lovely place to sit in the sun and take in the scenery as it drifts by.

Left: The Panorama Bar Right: The Amadeus Club on the Amadeus Princess

What is the food like on board?

Immediately below the Panorama Bar at the front of the ship, was the Panorama restaurant, where we took all our meals, with breakfast, lunch and dinner being included in the cruise. On our L?ftner?Cruise the table seating plan had been pre-arranged but there was an opportunity to go and talk to the restaurant manager about your table when you boarded. I?ve heard that some other cruises have a free seating arrangement, enabling you to sit at different tables each day, however on our cruise there was a fixed restaurant table for the duration of the cruise. ?Our table worked well for us as we had a location by the window and pleasant table companions, but I spoke to some guests who were disappointed that they didn?t have a table with a river view.

We were very impressed with the quality of the food on board as we had a three course lunch and a four course dinner every day as well as a breakfast buffet with hot dishes, pastries, fruits, cereals and yogurts, cheese and cold meats. There was a wide variety and even though some elements of the meal, such as the cheeses and cold meats at breakfast or the salads at lunch were standard, I noticed that each day the selection was slightly different. Our typical lunch menu would be an entr?e of salad and soups from a buffet, followed by a choice of three hot dishes including a fish and vegetarian option from the menu and a desert buffet of fruits and gateaux. For dinner a typical menu was a salad or meat entr?e?and soup course followed by a meat dish such as medallions of pork or roast beef in a mustard crust or alternatively a fish or vegetarian option. ?All the food was beautifully presented and the service was excellent with the same waiters and bar staff serving us throughout the cruise. Table wine was served with the evening meal but you could also purchase bottles from the wine menu with all meals.

What will I need to pack?

The dress code on board the ship was relaxed, with no requirement to dress formally. As much of the day was spent on walking tours and excursions, comfortable flat shoes, layers of clothes to cope with the changeable weather and waterproofs in case of showers were the order of the day. For dinner most passengers dressed up, but even so it was more smart-casual than dressy and only a few gentlemen wore a jacket at dinner ? certainly no need to pack your evening gown or dinner jacket!

In terms of other things that you might need, there were a couple of sockets in the cabin which would be sufficient for most people but as I had a fair amount of electronic equipment to charge, I took an extension lead with 4 extra sockets as well as my normal European plug adaptor. Although I would normally pack a guide book, I found that if you were planning to take excursions this was unnecessary, as every tour we took had an excellent local guide and a lot of information was also provided on board about the places we would be visiting. There was no money exchange or banking facility on board, but we found that there was an ATM at almost every place we visited and that this was the best way to get local currency.

Borrowing bikes from the Amadeus Princess

What will my typical cruise day look like?

We quickly we got into the rhythm of the cruise which for us involved tours of the interesting towns and villages where we stopped, so we didn?t spend too much time on board the ship during the day. After breakfast each morning we would join our tour group on the quayside with a local guide, who would either take us on a walking tour directly from the boat, or we would be driven by coach, mini-bus or even tourist train to our starting point. Having always been an independent traveller I?ve never much gone for guided tours, but found that the quality of the tour guides was really excellent and that they filled the tour with plenty of interesting information, anecdotes and local knowledge that you could never have gleaned from a guidebook.

If you opted not to take every tour, you might spend more time on board and enjoy the afternoon tea served in the Panorama Bar, or do your own sightseeing directly from the boat, as most times we were were moored within walking distance of the towns we were visiting. Bicycles were also available for guests to borrow, with locks and helmets, which was another good way to get out on your own and explore or take a ride along the river, as we did from Cochem on our last day.

I was surprised that the ship did most of the sailing by night, and it was only when we passed through the famous Middle Rhine section with the castles and Loreley rock that we were all on deck to admire the scenery. However, the first part of the Rhine Cruise was not particularly scenic with a flat landscape dotted with industrial complexes and quite a few locks.

The key time that we learned to listen out for was ?All on board time?, normally 15 minutes before the ship was due to sail, as if you were late the boat couldn?t wait. Having said that, the ship had an efficient system for checking guests in and out of the ship with a shore pass that gave a phone number to contact the ship and details of mooring locations, and they also took our mobile phone numbers as part of the booking process.

The Amadeus Princess Reception area

What about the excursions?

Different cruise lines have different approaches to excursions, some including free walking tours in the cruise price, while others like L?ftner Cruises?offer a range of excursions as a bookable extra. We had pre-booked our excursions as a package and there were typically 2 tours per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon with lunch on board the ship. So that we could easily hear the guide, we were all issued with personal headsets, and were given radio sets each time we left the ship, which was great when I got distracted taking photos and got a bit behind the main party, but could still listen to the commentary.

The advantage of taking all the tours on offer was that we really saw a lot and learned about the fascinating history along the Rhine, but the downside was that we didn?t have a lot of time to just relax on the ship or to just sit in a caf? and let the world go by. This was our choice of course, but those who want a more relaxing cruise might want to just do one excursion per day and spend the other half day exploring on their own or relaxing on the ship (and take advantage of the afternoon tea).

The other benefit of the tours was that we had immediate entry to things that we might not have had time to see on our own, with no queues or transport worries. For instance we had a private viewing of the Jewish Baths at Speyer, were first into the castle at the top of the hill at Cochem and enjoyed the private tasting of Alsace wine at Domaine Hering. The excursions varied in price between ?15 per person for a walking tour up to ?46 per person for a wine tasting tour, but there was a pre-booked excursion package of ?225 per person which saved around 25% on the individual prices and I?d recommend this option if you are the sort of person that wants to see as much as possible on your cruise.

An excursion to the castle at Heidelberg

How green is my cruise?

The L?ftner?Cruise company is very proud of its eco-credentials and has a ?Green Globe? accreditation which is a certification issued by the UN World Tourism organisation. Michael Heller, the Hotel Manager explained to me that this extends not only to things like reducing waste water, recycling of garbage and the energy efficient lighting system, but also to the training of the staff in eco-friendly practices. At certain ports, the ship switches to shore supply of electricity which means the ships does not constantly have to run its engines, as it is quieter and better for the environment, even though it costs the company more. The company also collaborates with the Atmosfair climate protection organisation to enable ?passengers to make a donation to offset their CO2 emissions while on board.

Leaving the Amadeus Princess at Cologne

What extras do I need to budget for?

The main extras that we needed to budget for over an above the price of the cruise were excursions and tips. Tips are not an obligation but are customary on cruises for good service and the suggested amount was ?5-7 per person per day, which was given in an envelope at the end of the cruise to be shared among the staff. Most guests, especially the Americans, also gave a tip of a few Euros to the local tour guides who were really excellent. As wine and coffee was served with dinner each evening and afternoon tea was served every day, we didn?t spend much extra on board, although we did indulge ourselves?with a bottle or two of the local wines. You might also need to cover the odd coffee or snack while out sightseeing, but since lunch was served on board and the tours left little time for independent wandering we didn?t spend a lot on these either. If you need to use the Wifi, the costs can be expensive and the charge on board the Amadeus Princess was ?3 an hour. Overall, we found that a lot was included in our cruise price, especially if you had pre-booked the excursions, so we didn?t spend much extra on our cruise.

We really enjoyed our first ever cruise with?L?ftner?Cruises, and although we are normally independent travellers, we found that it was a fantastic way to see a lot of interesting things in a short space of time, while always having a comfortable, friendly base to return to.

?More tales from our Rhine River Cruise

Read my?Cruising the Rhine daily diary?at The Online Travel Journal
Photo Diary of my Rhine River Cruise
From Riesling to Gew?rztraminer ? our wine tasting on the Alsace Wine Route

About?L?ftner Cruises

My thanks to L?ftner Cruises who hosted our Rhine River Cruise ? L?ftner Cruises specialise in European river cruises on the Rhine, Danube, Rh?ne and other destinations in Europe, with personal service and Austrian hospitality. You can also follow them on their Facebook Page. We travelled on the Amadeus Princess on a 7 day Classical Rhine Cruise which travelled from Basel to Amsterdam, although we disembarked at Cologne.

This article by Heather Cowper is originally published at Heatheronhertravels.com ? Read the original article here.

You?ll also find our sister blog with tips on how to build a successful travel blog at My Blogging Journey

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Source: http://www.heatheronhertravels.com/amadeus-princess-lueftner-cruises/

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These Awesome Maps Show Off All the World's Geo-Tagged Tweets

There's only so many place you can tweet from, and Twitter's been diligently indexing them all. These new visualizations from the Twitter team show the history of all geo-tagged tweets since 2009 (when the feature was born) by location. We're talking billions of them.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/0iPZ5Y4mUoA/these-awesome-maps-show-off-all-the-worlds-geo-tagged-510840167

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