In switch, cable operators want to go "a la carte"

* Operators want to give consumers choice to lower costs

* Programmers will resist attempts to unbundle programs

* Sports rights and retransmission fees are biggest costs

By Yinka Adegoke

NEW YORK, Sept 27 (Reuters) - U.S. cable operators are privately working on a plan to force programmers to unbundle their networks and allow customers to subscribe to channels on an individual basis.

The plan represents a complete reversal from cable operators' long-held opposition to what is known as "a la carte" programming. Over the last decade, the cable industry battled ferociously with regulators to protect the right to bundle programming, arguing it offered customers the best value.

But executives now say the change is a necessary response to shifting dynamics such as higher carriage costs and using the Web to watch programs, as well as a weak economic recovery that has forced many consumers to cancel cable television subscriptions.

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Women in Saudi Arabia to vote and run in elections

Women in Saudi Arabia are to be given the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, King Abdullah has announced.

He said they would also have the right to be appointed to the consultative Shura Council.

The move was welcomed by activists who have called for greater rights for women in the kingdom, which enforces a strict version of Sunni Islamic law.

The changes will occur after municipal polls on Thursday, the king said.

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Baffling CERN Results Show Neutrinos Moving Faster Than the Speed of Light

Don’t go throwing out your physics texts just yet, but there’s some strange and unprecedented news brewing at CERN today that could potentially undo large parts of the Standard Model, and it has nothing to do with particle collisions at the LHC or elusive god particles. Physicists running routine neutrino experiments between CERN’s Geneva HQ and the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy 455 miles away have found that their neutrinos seem to be traveling faster than the speed of light. That’s right: faster than the fastest known speed in the universe. It's certainly not something we could have predicted when putting together our latest FYI, which investigates whether anything can move faster than light.

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Palestine: 'After 63 years' suffering – enough, enough,' says Abbas

It was the United Nations that determined the fate of the Palestinian people more than six decades ago – and on Friday it was the UN that heard an impassioned plea to change the destiny of Palestine once more.

It came from Mahmoud Abbas, who was 12 years old when the UN general assembly of November 1947 voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.

Abbas's predecessors, the Palestinian leaders of that earlier generation, famously rejected the partition plan – which envisaged a state on 44% of the land. So the Palestinian president came back to the same body on Friday, asking the UN to bless a Palestinian state on a terrain about half that size.

He did it with a flourish, holding up the formal letter of application he had submitted that hour to the UN secretary general, asking for full membership of the United Nations – a gesture that brought sustained applause from some delegates, impassive silence from others, including the United States and, inevitably, Israel.

"It is a moment of truth and my people are waiting to hear the answer of the world," Abbas said. "After 63 years of suffering: enough, enough, enough."

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Deep space manned exploration just moved a little closer to reality with the announcement of that development is beginning on the new Space Launch System (SLS). The first developmental flight is targeted for end of 2017.

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