First ever web page is restored 20 yrs on

THE world's first web page will be dragged out of cyberspace and restored for Internet browsers as part of a project to celebrate 20 years of the Web.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had begun recreating the website that launched that World Wide Web, as well as the hardware that made the groundbreaking technology possible.

The world's first website was about the technology itself, according to CERN, allowing early browsers to learn about the new system and create their own web pages.

The project will allow future generations to understand the origin and importance of the Web and its impact on modern life, CERN web manager Dan Noyes told AFP.

The project was launched to mark the 20th anniversary of CERN making the World Wide Web available to the world for free.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, also called W3 or just the Web, at CERN in 1989 to help physicists to share information, but at the time it was just one of several such information retrieval systems using the Internet.

While CERN was not promoting any specific ideology, "we want to preserve that idea of openness and freedom to collect and collaborate," said Noyes.

The first browser, Noyes said, was "actually very sophisticated, with images and features that don't really exist anymore, like being able to edit web pages as well as read them."

"We would like to somehow enable people to try this," he said.

The world's very first web page was meanwhile cruder and dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself. It was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer.

The CERN team has restored the files using a 1992 copy of the first website, which can be viewed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, but hopes to find earlier copies.

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Police probe Prague gas blast

CZECH police say they will open an investigation into a powerful gas blast that injured 43 people when it ripped through a four-storey building in Prague's historic centre.

"Investigators have not yet been able to make it to the scene of the blast, as the rubble is still being cleared and the work could continue until tomorrow," Prague police spokesman Jan Danek told AFP.

Danek added that Monday's blast would likely require a lengthy enquiry but denied there were signs pointing to anything but an accident.

Czech media reported two people were still hospitalised on Tuesday following the explosion, said to be the most serious of its kind in the Czech Republic in recent years.

The blast, which occurred on the ground floor of an office block in a popular tourist area, heavily damaged the building, blew out windows in nearby streets and shook apartment blocks across the Vltava river.

Police evacuated 230 people from the area, fearing further gas leaks, and 43 people were injured, mostly with cuts from shattered glass.

Two Kazakhs, two Portuguese, one German and one Slovak were among those hurt.

The Generali insurer on Tuesday revised up its estimate of damage done to the 19th-century building to 30 million koruna ($A1.48 million).

Gas was still turned off on Tuesday in around 20 buildings in the area, home to the ornate National Theatre whose modern section was also damaged by the blast.

Another gas blast in February completely destroyed an apartment block in the eastern town of Frenstat pod Radhostem, killing six people including three children.

A male resident who was facing eviction for not paying rent is suspected of intentionally causing that blast, in which he died.

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Lives at risk, Vic paramedics say

VICTORIAN paramedics say emergency response times are blowing out and putting lives at risk.

The paramedics, who are in the middle of negotiating a new enterprise bargaining agreement with Ambulance Victoria, say Premier Denis Napthine's refusal to budge from the 2.5 per cent wage increase is fuelling a crisis in the ranks.

Ambulance Employees Australia state secretary Steve McGhie says the current offer amounts to a one dollar a week wage increase for paramedics and is insulting, considering how many lives they save.

"Emergency call takers and despatchers are in the eye of the storm of our worsening ambulance crisis. The crisis is right there on their computer screens every moment of every day," Mr McGhie said.

In March, the Productivity Commission revealed that average ambulance response times to Code 1 emergencies in Victoria had blown out to almost 19 minutes.

Some rural ambulance stations are seeing average response times as long as 30 minutes, and many patients across Melbourne and Victoria are being forced to wait hours for an ambulance.

"These communications staff point to a slew of incidents in which staff shortages have left patients waiting hours for an ambulance," Mr McGhie said.

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US consumer confidence rebounds in April

US consumer confidence picked up in April after falling the prior month, the Conference Board has reported.

The Conference Board's consumer confidence index rose to 68.1 points from a revised 61.9 in March.

Consumers' expectations about the short-term economic outlook and their income prospects improved, but the research firm cautioned that the effects of the January 1 payroll tax hike and the sharp government spending cuts that began March 1 were weighing on sentiment.

Confidence rose slightly in the present situation, but consumers were considerably more upbeat about the outlook over the next six months.

The expectations index jumped to 73.3 in April from 63.7 in March.

"While expectations appear to have bounced back, it is too soon to tell if confidence is actually on the mend," said Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's economic indicators.

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Russia art museums feud over revival plan

RUSSIA'S two greatest art museums are engaged in an unsightly public feud over an idea to revive a Moscow museum of Western art that was shut down by Stalin in the late 1940s.

The State Museum of New Western Art gathered the impressionist and early modern art collected by renowned Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in the late Tsarist era.

But it was closed on Stalin's orders in 1948 as the Soviet authorities rejected anything reeking of "cosmopolitanism" in a drive to play up the importance of Soviet art.

Its collection was divided between the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow and the famed Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the pictures can be seen to this day.

The redoubtable director of the Pushkin Museum, Irina Antonova, 91, last week personally asked President Vladimir Putin during his annual phone-in with Russians to consider reopening the museum in Moscow with its original collection.

However the idea did not in the least impress the Hermitage museum, which under the plan could see some of its most prized Matisse, Degas and Picasso pictures transferred back to Moscow.

"This new attempt to break up the Hermitage is a crime against the stability of the whole museum landscape in Russia, whose unity and riches have been preserved with such difficulty," fumed Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky, quoted by the government Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily.

Antonova however launched a stout defence of her position saying the recreation of the museum was a question of "historical fairness".

"The state destroyed this museum. The state has the chance to revive it. This is my opinion," she said.

In response to Antonova's request, Putin on Tuesday asked the government to draw up by June 15 a report on the viability of recreating the Western art museum in Moscow.

Morozov and Shchukin amassed two of the greatest collections anywhere of European art.

But like other private collections, their holdings were nationalised after the Russian revolution and used to form the basis of the Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI) which was founded in 1928.

The dispute has highlighted the rivalry between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage, with the much older Saint Petersburg institution keen to affirm its supremacy over the Moscow museum which was opened only in 1912.

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Tymoshenko jailing unlawful: court

THE European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Ukraine's detention of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko is unlawful, in a decision the opposition leader's camp saw as a key step towards her release.

Tymoshenko herself said she hoped the decision by the Strasbourg-based court would put paid to the "dirt and black lies" against her.

"The court considered that the detention had been arbitrary and unlawful during the entire period," the judges said.

The European Union is mulling a trade and association accord with the ex-Soviet republic and has clearly said it wanted Kiev to release the charismatic Tymoshenko.

Her daughter described the court's decision as a "first victory" and her lawyer argued that her nemesis President Viktor Yanukovych now had no option but to release her.

Tymoshenko herself, who has dismissed all charges against her as politically motivated, welcomed the ruling in a statement from jail.

"I am happy all the dirt and black lies the authorities have been drowning me in over the past years have been removed," she said, adding that the decision meant the court had "de-facto" acknowledged her as a political prisoner.

"I do not know what Viktor Yanukovych will do after this decision," she said. "Most likely, nothing. But after the decision of the European court I am already morally free."

"Free despite all their bars, cells, walls, fences and tinted windows," she said.

The judges also found that the legality of her detention had not been properly reviewed by the Ukrainian judiciary and that she had no possibility to seek compensation.

However they threw out a complaint over alleged ill-treatment during her transfer to hospital last year.

Tymoshenko, who lost a disputed presidential election to Yanukovych in 2010, was jailed for seven years on what she says are trumped-up charges of overstepping her authority while premier to sign a gas deal with Russia.

Western governments have condemned her jailing as the result of selective persecution by the authorities and it has led to a sharp deterioration in ties with the European Union, which Kiev wants to join.

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Peru finds hot air balloon pilot's body

PERUVIAN rescuers have found the body of the pilot of a hot air balloon that plunged into the Pacific, but another person remains missing, police say.

Five women were rescued from the sea as they clung to pieces of the balloon after it went down Sunday. They and the missing man were on board as tourists taking a ride over the sea.

Police official Luis Praelli said the pilot had been identified through the national identity card found on his person.

The search for the missing man goes on, he said.

The balloon went down a few miles off the coast of Canete province in southern Peru.

The tourists did not have life vests on, and the balloon did not have a GPS system to track it down, authorities say.

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