MIAMI (Reuters) – Raising its forecast, the U.S. government’s weather agency on Thursday predicted the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season will produce 14 to 19 named storms, 7 to 10 of them becoming hurricanes.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said three to five of the storms could turn into major Category 3 or above hurricanes, with winds of more than 110 miles per hour (177 km per hour).

In May, NOAA projected 12 to 18 tropical storms, with 6 to 10 growing into hurricanes and 3 to 6 strengthening into big ones.

The season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, has already brought five tropical storms.

As NOAA updated its forecast, Tropical Storm Emily, the fifth named storm so far this year, hovered just south of earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Typically, there are only one or two in June and July, with peak activity occurring from August to October, said Dr. Gerry Bell, lead hurricane seasonal forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

“The peak of the hurricane season is upon us,” Bell said. “We’re expecting the activity to start picking up even more than it already has.”

MIAMI, July 19 (Reuters) – The Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a jury’s order that the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co pay nearly $30 million to a woman whose husband died of lung cancer after decades of smoking its cigarettes.

The court issued a brief ruling saying it would not review the product liability award nor entertain any further motions for rehearing. The tobacco company, a unit of Reynolds American Inc (RAI.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), argued the award was excessive.

The ruling could affect thousands of pending cases.

In 2009, a state court jury in Pensacola, Florida, ordered Reynolds to pay more than $3.3 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages to Mathilde Martin. Her husband, Benny Martin, died in 1995 of lung cancer that she blamed on his long-time smoking of Reynolds’ “Lucky Strike” cigarettes.

The jury said Reynolds was 66 percent responsible for Benny Martin’s death and that Martin, who started smoking in the 1940s before health warnings were added to cigarette packages, was 34 percent responsible.

The award was the by far the largest to date among the “Engle progeny” cases filed against tobacco companies by sick Florida smokers or their relatives. The cases stem from a landmark 1994 class-action lawsuit filed by a pediatrician, the late Dr. Howard Engle, that produced a $145 billion judgment against cigarette makers six years later.

The Florida Supreme Court overturned the Engle award in 2006 and ruled that Florida’s ailing smokers could not sue as a class, or group.

MIAMI (Reuters) – When the United States embarked on its shuttle program decades ago, it set out to build a workhorse vehicle that would make space travel routine and beat the Soviets during the Cold War struggle for dominance in space.

The resulting spaceship had 2.5 million parts and was nine times faster than a speeding bullet as it climbed heavenward. It was the first reusable spacecraft, capable of gliding back to Earth like an airplane.

“It was leading-edge stuff back then,” said NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry. “It was seen as a major leap forward.”

Other manned spacecraft did not fly home. They were ballistic missiles that splashed down into the sea or used thrusters and parachutes to control their plunge to Earth.

The shuttle program will end next month after three decades and 135 voyages when Atlantis returns from a mission set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 8.

NASA is consigning its shuttles to museums because they are too old and too expensive to keep flying, and the space agency plans to design and build something new with a farther reach.

To understand what relics the shuttles are, consider:

MIAMI (Reuters) – An American man who ran a home for impoverished boys in Haiti has been arrested on charges that he forced them to perform sex acts in exchange for food, shelter and schooling, U.S. prosecutors said on Friday.

Matthew Andrew Carter, the 66-year-old operator of the Morning Star Center in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, was arrested in Miami on May 8. He pleaded not guilty on Thursday to four counts of child sex tourism, or traveling in foreign commerce to engage in illicit sex with minors.

Carter, a resident of Brighton, Michigan, ran the Morning Star residential center at various sites in Port-au-Prince since the mid-1990s and lived there with the boys, according to charges unsealed on Friday.

At the time of his arrest, 14 boys lived at the center and three others spent weekends there. Some were orphans and others had living parents who were too poor to take care of them.

Court documents charged that Carter had illegal sex with at least eight boys, sometimes for years until they got older and left the home. A federal public defender assigned to the case was not immediately available for comment.

If convicted on all the charges, he could be sentenced to up to 105 years in prison.

In announcing the arrest, federal investigators called Carter a sexual predator whose alleged conduct was “particularly deplorable” and “despicable.”

MIAMI (Reuters) – U.S. military prosecutors have filed new charges against the self-described mastermind of the September 11 attacks in 2001, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four alleged co-conspirators held at the Guantanamo detention camp.

The conspiracy and mass murder charges were expected to be announced later on Tuesday, according to sources involved in the war crimes tribunals at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

During President George W. Bush’s administration, all five defendants had been charged in the tribunals with plotting the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.

The charges, which carried the death penalty, were dropped while President Barack Obama’s administration tried to move the trials into the federal civilian court in New York, near the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks by hijacked aircraft.

Obama yielded to political opposition and announced in April that the prosecutions would be moved back to Guantanamo.

The official overseeing the Guantanamo tribunals, retired Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, must sign off on the charges before the case can proceed to trial.

In addition to Mohammed, an al Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan in 2003, the defendants include his nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, as well as Walid bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – For the residents of Florida’s Space Coast, the approaching end of the shuttle program brings a mix of pride in what they helped build and frustration that America has no new spacecraft ready to launch the next generation of explorers.

NASA is set to launch the shuttle Endeavour on its final voyage Friday, and sister ship Atlantis will close out the 30-year-old shuttle program when it returns from a mission set for launch in June.

“I’ll cry when it launches. I’ll cry when it comes back.” said Laverne Woodard, who began working for NASA as a shuttle payload logistician in 1980, a year before the first shuttle flight. “When you watch them go up, you feel you’ve touched a piece of history.”

Woodard retired five years ago but came right back to the Kennedy Space Center as a volunteer and has attended all 133 shuttle launches to date.

She is awed by the scope of the shuttle’s scientific research and can recite a list of everyday innovations that evolved from the space program — cordless power drills, certain medical lasers, improved prosthetic limbs, and GPS devices to guide motorists.

“We are going to miss the shuttle program and the research that it’s generated,” said Bob Elder, facilities manager at the Cocoa Beach Pier, which juts out into the turquoise Atlantic Ocean south of the spaceport. Thousands of spectators jam the pier and adjacent sandy beach to watch the shuttles go up.

Elder said he would miss “the excitement, the American pride, for the youth and the aviation industry.”

MIAMI (Reuters) – The United States violated global trade law by shutting down Internet gambling sites based in Antigua and elsewhere and prosecuting their owners, according to Antigua and Barbuda officials considering action in the World Trade Organization.

Antigua and Barbuda, which licenses Internet gambling companies, has waged a long battle in the WTO over U.S. efforts to keep Americans from patronizing offshore betting sites. Last week’s shutdown of the three biggest online poker sites has the Caribbean nation ready to go another round.

It contends U.S. crackdowns against foreign betting sites are illegal and protectionist, since gambling for money is permitted in U.S. casinos and since online betting is allowed for state-regulated horse racing in the United States.

“I don’t think there’s another country in the world that puts people in jail for engaging in trade that’s lawful under international law,” Mark Mendel, the Caribbean government’s legal advisor, told Reuters by telephone Thursday. “It’s as if Antigua would put Americans in jail for selling pineapples.”

U.S. prosecutors in New York seized the domain names of three online poker sites last week, shutting them down and charging their owners with $3 billion of fraud and money laundering.

Prosecutors charged that the three foreign-registered companies tricked regulators and banks into processing illegal online gaming proceeds from U.S. customers.

U.S. prosecutors allowed two of the companies — PokerStars, which is incorporated in the Isle of Man, and Full Tilt Poker, which is incorporated in Ireland — to reopen their websites Wednesday so players could withdraw funds from their accounts and so people outside the United States could resume playing.

, March 15 (Reuters) – Rising fuel prices and political upheaval are creating headwinds for the global cruise industry but the recession left a few legacies that have made cruise company executives optimistic about their future.

With people forced to work harder and longer during the downturn, they have come to value their vacations more, Celebrity Cruises Chief Executive Daniel Hanrahan told the Cruise Shipping Miami conference in Miami Beach on Tuesday.

“Vacations or holidays became an inalienable right,” Hanrahan said.

A flood of new ships were ordered during the boom years but came on line during the downturn, forcing cruise lines to cut prices by as much as 15 percent to fill their growing fleets.

“The lower pricing had a silver lining. We were able to introduce new people to cruising and those people will come back in the future,” said Gerald Cahill, president and chief executive of Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the world’s largest cruise company.

The Cruise Lines International Association calculates that 50 percent of first-time cruise passengers will cruise again. But the discounts that lured them are vanishing.

Twelve new ships joined CLIA’s 25 member lines in 2010, and 15 more set sail this year. After that, supply drops sharply, and should allow the lines to rebuild pricing, the CEOs said.

NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – A U.S. military jury sentenced an admitted al Qaeda conspirator from Sudan to 14 more years in prison on Friday but he will serve far less if he keeps his promise to help prosecutors in cases against other Guantanamo captives.

All but 34 months of the sentence will be suspended if defendant Noor Uthman Muhammed keeps his agreement to help prosecute his former colleagues, the judge in the war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base said.

That means Noor, who has already spent nearly nine years in U.S. custody, could go home in December 2013.

The weapons trainer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism. The jury of nine U.S. military officers issued the maximum — but largely symbolic — sentence.

Noor’s case is the last one pending in the Guantanamo tribunals that have completed only six trials in nine years, but prosecutors expect to file more charges as soon as Defense Secretary Robert Gates signs off on them.

Noor has valuable information and his plea deal calls for him to assist U.S. civilian prosecutors as well, said the chief prosecutor, Navy Captain John Murphy.

Congress may have constrained Noor’s usefulness by passing laws that ban him and other Guantanamo prisoners from going to the United States for any reason, even to testify at trials.

NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – A U.S. military jury sentenced an admitted al Qaeda conspirator from Sudan to 14 more years in prison on Friday but he will serve far less if he keeps his promise to help prosecutors in cases against other Guantanamo captives.

All but 34 months of the sentence will be suspended if defendant Noor Uthman Muhammed keeps his agreement to cooperate with prosecutors, the judge in the war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base said.

That means Noor, who has already spent nearly nine years in U.S. custody, could go home in December 2013.

The weapons trainer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism. The jury of nine U.S. military officers deliberated more than five hours before issuing the maximum — but largely symbolic — sentence.

Noor’s case is the last one pending in the Guantanamo tribunals that have completed only six trials in nine years, but prosecutors expect to file more charges soon.

Much of this week’s sentencing hearing focussed on laying the groundwork to prosecute a “high-value” Guantanamo prisoner Noor was captured with, Abu Zubaydah. The U.S. military calls him a terrorist facilitator who funnelled recruits to al Qaeda training camps, then supplied them with money and forged passports as they left to carry out attacks.

“Noor is not a small piece of the puzzle, he’s a sliver,” said his defence lawyer, Marine Captain Christopher Kannady. “Very little of this evidence ever refers to or even mentions Noor.”