UPDATE 3-hot air balloon crash kills 11 in New Zealand

* Balloon starts to fire crashes to the ground

* No survivors in the worst NZ aviation disaster in 33 years

* Investigation underway police notifier members (Dateline adds details and quotes, changes)

By Mark Coote

CARTERTON, New Zealand, Jan 7 (Reuters) - a balloon burst into flames and crashed in New Zealand on Saturday, killing all 11 passengers in the country of the worst air disaster in more than three decades.

Police said the balloon have cut off power lines appeared and caught fire before the crash in farmland near the town of Carterton, about 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Wellington on New Zealand's North Island.

"Unfortunately the pilot and 10 passengers on board not have survived," said Superintendent Mike Rusbatch Wellington District Commander.

The accident occurred just before 07: 30 (1830 GMT) in quiet, clear weather in a region known for hot-air balloon.

"I could not believe what I saw." There were flames licking at the side of the basket, right above the guy ropes, "said David McKinlay State television New Zealand."

When the flames reached the canopy, the balloon to the ground said McKinlay crashed.

"It was a great, long pencil-like flame perhaps 20 m (65 ft) long, towards the floor at a dreadful speed" he said.

Other witnesses reported, succeeding cries to hear and see, smoke and flame from the balloon before it hit the ground.

Rusbatch, said five couples out in the wider Wellington region, as well as the pilot on board were. Two victims had or fallen from the burning balloon, shortly before it crashed, said he jumped.

The names of the victims are police, who have sealed off from the crash site, not released until next of kin have been informed.

Local resident Sean Barnes said the pilot hopping, became known in the media as Lance.

"Everybody knew him, he brought a lot of people in the community to the top in the balloon the" Barnes of told of Reuters.

The accident was worst air disaster since an Antarctic New Zealand Erebus tourist flight crashed in Mt. in 1979, killing all 257 people on board.

"It's a very sad time for all the balloonist," said Martyn Stacey, President of the balloon Aviation Association of New Zealand.

"Total aviation-wise, ballooning is one of the safest forms of flying."

Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee, said that rules for commercial ballooning in New Zealand recently had examined.

"Experts find no lessons from the inquiries are improving safety for others in the future can help..." Brownlee said in a statement. (Writing by Lincoln firmly in Wellington;) Additional reporting by prophesy Kusjanto; (Editing from Andrew sky)

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UPDATE 1-Crowds hit U.S. stores for 'Black Friday' deals

* Shoppers bargain-hunting, retailers eye margins

* 152 million expected to hit stores this weekend-NRF

* 9,000 line up at Macy's Herald Square

* Some Occupy Wall Street pickets at Macy's By Dhanya Skariachan and Liana B. Baker Nov 25 (Reuters) - Bargain hunters flocked to U.S. stores late Thursday and overnight Friday, searching for deals on big screen televisions, video games and toys while fretting about their own shaky economic well-being.

Some stores, looking to grab as big a piece as possible of what is expected to be a middling holiday shopping season pushed post-Thanksgiving openings into Thursday evening or opened at midnight for the first time in years, getting a jump start on "Black Friday," the traditional beginning to the U.S. holiday shopping season.

The strategy appeared to be working, judging from the 300 people who were lined up at a Toys R Us store on Long Island, New York before it opened at 9 p.m. on Thursday, while shoppers and employees at other stores said the crowds were bigger than in the past.

Shoppers were looking for bargains, but customers like James McBreaty were just what retailers wanted -- those who will also buy things beyond the "doorbuster" deals that retailers offer to entice customers.

"We came for the deals but we were just discussing if we will buy things that aren't discounted," McBreaty, 32, a paralegal who was waiting with his wife Nicole, said. "Most likely the entire store isn't discounted but we're here so we'll probably buy some crap anyway."

The National Retail Federation expects 152 million people to hit stores this weekend, up 10.1 percent from last year.

In reality, the shopping period has been underway for some time as retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Toys R Us started early by offering layaway programs.

Retailers from Amazon.com to Wal-Mart were also offering online deals as Thanksgiving has become one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Retail executives and analysts are predicting a more competitive season than 2010. Unemployment still remains at 9 percent, European debt woes are weighing on the stock market and consumer confidence remains spotty.

NRF, an industry trade group, forecast a 2.8 percent increase in sales for the November-December holiday season, down from the 5.2 percent increase in 2010.

Some shoppers even feel as though the recession has returned, even if it has not shown up in economic data.

"This year, we are going to do shopping but I don't think it is going to be as much shopping as we usually do. Because of the recession, we are not going to shop as much," Desiree Schoolfield, 49, a public service profession from Queens who was shopping at the Toys R Us in Times Square, said.

REALLY EARLY START

Nelson Sepulveda, a building superintendent from Manhattan, was the first person in line at the Best Buy in Union Square, having queued up at 8 p.m. on Wednesday -- 28 hours before the store opened -- to get the $200 Sharp 42-inch LCD television, Play Station 3 games and other items he wanted.

NRF expects 152 million people to hit stores this weekend, up 10.1 percent from last year.

Wal-Mart, Old Navy, which is part of Gap Inc, and KMart, owned by Sears Holdings', were among the few retailers open on Thanksgiving.

Wal-Mart began offering Black Friday deals at 10 p.m. on Thursday.

To narrow the gap in store hours with rivals, discounter Target Corp, electronics chain Best Buy and department store chains Macy's Inc and Kohl's Corp will open at midnight - their earliest starts ever.

About 1,000 people were waiting in line at the opening of the Target in Farmingdale,

Those midnight openings drew online petition protests from store workers, and some shoppers also did not like the early openings.

"Tonight all the stores decided to open at midnight which is difficult when you're trying to enjoy dinner with your family," said Louis Clapper, 24, as he shopped at the Walmart in Farmingdale, New York. "Normally I leave the house at midnight, or 3-4 a.m. for a 5 a.m. opening. The stores are opening earlier and earlier."

For others, staying up late beat waking up for a 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. opening.

"Nobody really has to be out so early to come into the store. I really feel like that's better," Tosha Smith, 21, hotel attendant, lives in Queens, said while shopping at Macy's.

At Macy's in Herald Square, four Occupy Wall Street activists chanted "boycott Macy's" and "stop supporting big corporations" even as about 9,000 people lined up to shop at the store.

Others retailers, including J.C. Penney Co Inc, are opening early Friday morning as they did last year.

Wal-Mart started its Black Friday "doorbuster" deals on Thursday at 10 p.m. at its stores. Amazon.com Inc, not to be outdone, will offer its deals online at 9 p.m.

The knock-down-drag-out fight comes as the rebound in sales cooled in October, when many top chains like Macy's and Saks reported disappointing sales.

It will be even tougher for chains that have struggled with sales declines lately, like Gap and Penney.

Last year, after a strong Black Friday weekend, shoppers sat on their hands until closer to Christmas.

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UPDATE 2-New test finds neutrinos still faster than light

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

* Suggests Einstein's relativity theory may be wrong

* New test supports startling findings of previous experiment

* Experts still sceptical, say more independent checks needed (Adds fresh expert comment, paras 12 and 13)

By Kate Kelland

LONDON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - A new experiment appears to provide further evidence that Einstein may have been wrong when he said nothing could go faster than the speed of light, a theory that underpins modern thinking on how the universe works.

The new evidence, challenging a dogma of science that has held since Albert Einstein laid out his theory of relativity in 1905, appeared to confirm a startling finding that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster.

The new experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory, using a neutrino beam from CERN in Switzerland, 720 km (450 miles) away, was held to check findings in September by a team of scientists which were greeted with some scepticism.

Scientists at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) said in a statement on Friday that their new tests aimed to exclude one potential systematic effect that may have affected the original measurement.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the INFN.

"The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

An international team of scientists shocked the scientific world with the original findings in September.

That first finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from CERN to Gran Sasso, an underground Italian laboratory near Rome.

Physicists on the experiment, called OPERA after the initials of its formal scientific title, said they had checked and rechecked over many months anything that could have produced a misreading before announcing what they had found.

If confirmed, scientists say the findings may show that Einstein -- seen as the father of modern physics -- was wrong when he set out in his theory of special relativity that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and nothing can go faster.

This would force a major rethink of theories about how the cosmos works and even mean it would be possible, in theory, to send information into the past.

EAT MY SHORTS?

Jim Al-Khalili, a physics professor at Britain's Surrey University whose reaction to the first "faster-than-light" results was that he would eat his shorts if they turned out to be true, said on Friday he remained unconvinced.

"I am not yet ready to get out my knife and fork," he said. "Ideally, the experiment would have to be done somewhere else entirely to try to verify the controversial result that these tiny particles really are going faster than light."

The Italian scientists, whose second set of results were published in online science journal ArXiv at arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v2, said one potential source of error in the first results was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by CERN were relatively long at around 10 microseconds each, so measuring their exact arrival time at Gran Sasso could have had relatively large errors.

To account for this, the beams sent by CERN in this latest experiment were around three nanoseconds shorter, with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them, meaning the scientists at Gran Sasso would time their arrival more accurately.

"In this way, compared to the previous measurement, the neutrinos bunches are narrower and more spaced from each other," the scientists said. "This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity at the price of a much lower beam intensity."

Jacques Martino, director of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, who worked on the second experiment, said while this test was not a full confirmation, it did remove some of the potential errors that may have occurred in the first one. "The search is not over," he said

Christos Touramanis, who heads a neutrino research team at Britain's Liverpool University and is involved in scrutinising the OPERA result as part of CERN's scientific committee, agreed the new test with short beam bunches had excluded one possible source of systematic errors, but said "a number of other possible effects" still needed to be checked.

"Ultimately, full independent confirmation will be required before accepting this result as accurate," he said in an emailed comment. (Editing by Richard Balmforth)

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