Equateur Province spokeswoman Ebale Engumba said Sunday the boat hit a rock early Saturday in northwest Congo. She says 15 people survived among more than 100 estimated passengers.

Another boat tipping in Kasai Occidental Province left 200 people feared dead after the overloaded boat caught fire Saturday evening.

Congo is a vast country of jungles and huge rivers in Central Africa with little more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) of paved road. Many people prefer to take boats even if they do not know how to swim.

The boats are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity, and the industry is poorly regulated.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) – A riverboat loaded with passengers and fuel drums caught fire and capsized in southern Congo, and 200 people were feared dead, a survivor said Sunday. Another survivor confirmed the account and said local fishermen refused to help drowning passengers who jumped off the crowded boat.

The incident that happened Saturday evening would be the deadliest boat accident in the Central African nation this year, and among the worst in Africa this year.

The boats that traverse Congo’s rivers are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity, with little regard for safety. The industry is not well-regulated and boat operators are known to fill boats to dangerous levels.

A local official confirmed the boat had tipped but said the passenger manifest apparently vanished in the fire.

Fabrice Muamba, who said he was on the boat when it caught fire Saturday night on the Kasai River, said he thought only 15 of the more than 200 people he thought were aboard were able to swim to safety. He said passengers began to jump overboard when the engine caught fire as it passed the remote village of Mbendayi, some 45 miles (70 kilometers) from the town of Tshikapa, which is north of Congo’s border with Angola.

Another survivor, a woman named Romaine Mishondo, said the boat was already packed with “hundreds” of passengers when it stopped some 10 minutes before the fire to pick up more people.

She said she did not know exactly how many people were aboard, but said the boat was so crowded it reminded her of “a whole market in the village full of people.”

But when the fire started and people began jumping overboard, she said nearby fishermen ignored drowning passengers’ pleas for help.

“Fishermen attacked the boat and started beating passengers with paddles as they were (trying) to loot goods,” she said. “The fishermen refused save passengers, instead taking goods into their pirogues. … I survived because I hung onto a jerrycan until another vessel passed by the scene and rescued us.”

Boat owner Mwamba Mwati Nguma Leonard said a survivor and an employee called to tell him the boat caught fire when workers spilled fuel and ignited the engine.

“At the moment I am crying after learning my boat caught fire,” Leonard said. “I was just told on phone that it was while seamen were putting fuel into the tank that an explosion occurred after the oil touched the vessel’s battery.”

He said he has asked police to arrest the boat’s managers as he believes they employed unskilled workers.

But he said he had no further details because he was in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, some 500 miles (800 kilometers) from the scene, and because his employees on the scene did not answer his calls Sunday.

“Since I am far away in Kinshasa, I cannot confirm at the moment the exactly what happened,” he said.

Leonard also confirmed Muamba’s account that the boat was carrying many drums full of fuel on its journey through Kasai Occidental Province. Leonard said the boat also was carrying sacks of maize. He said he did not know how many people were aboard.

Francois Madila, an official from the navigation department in the province, said police arrested two of the vessel’s sailors and are investigating the incident. Madila said the sailors have not said how many people were aboard and that the passenger list appeared to have disappeared in the fire.

Other officials and witnesses in the remote area could not be reached for comment Sunday.

The incident is the deadliest of several boating incidents reported this year in Congo.

In July, officials said at least 80 people died when a boat ferrying about 200 passengers to Congo’s capital capsized after hitting a rock.

In May, dozens of people died when an overloaded canoe capsized on a river in eastern Congo. And last November, at least 90 people were killed after a logging boat sank on a lake in Congo. The timber-carrying vessel was not supposed to be carrying passengers.

Congo is a vast country of jungles and huge rivers in Central Africa with little more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) of paved road. Many people prefer to take boats even if they do not know how to swim.

The Google-owned video-sharing site is expected to earn revenue of 450 million dollars this year, most likely because of the rise in advertising found on YouTube. Although Google doesn’t release figures for YouTube, which it bought for 1.65 billion dollars in 2006, senior executives have suggested recently that it is near profitability.

The newspaper reported that anonymous analysts said this would be the year that YouTube will turn the corner and start making money.

YouTube has been slowly adding new content to its popular video-sharing site, including full-length TV shows and feature films to its vast sea of amateur videos in an attempt to attract more advertising dollars.

“YouTube is a big component of our display (advertising) revenue, and display is our next big business,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in an interview with The New York Times.

Schmidt said he asked YouTube’s management team about 18 months ago to start focusing on revenue
Click here to find out more!
. He said the strategy had been to amass “an audience first, then figure out the tools that will create the revenue.”

There is talk of YouTube being in negotiations with Hollywood film studios to launch a global pay-per-view video service by the end of 2010.

The service would stream videos rather than have viewers download them and newer movies would cost about five dollars. New movies would also be available at the same time as their release on DVD, according to Britain’s Financial Times.

Well good things may come in small packages, but as far as cars go, electric is the wave of the automobile industry future, and Kia is stepping up with the its own unique electric car concept, The POP, which will be unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in late September, 2010.

The POP is a lot of things; innovative, funky, cool, sleek and powerful, just to name a few. Ultra small, the POP Concept is less than ten feet long, is powered by an electric motor and seats three. Boasting zero emissions, Kia’s new electric car features LED headlights and taillights.

The POP concept should not be considered a typo for a Pop concert, although the name probably couldn’t be any stranger. It remains a marketing mystery and interesting aspect of this new concept. The “O” is deliberately italicized and no one seems to know why that is the case or why Kia selected this weird moniker for its electric vehicle.

Many of the details concerning the POP still remain under wraps but some images have emerged. The seating is a bit different from other electric cars as the driver in the POP is situated on the left and not in the center. There is also a bench seat in front.

But this morning, Salahi’s media liaison Michael Cruz spoke to CNN to downplay the report.

“It’s another rumor,” Cruz said. “We have no information about any official offer from Playboy.”

While plenty of reality stars rocket to fame via risque photos or sex tapes, Salahi first made headlines as an accused threat to national security, when she and husband Tareq Salahi walked into a White House party in November 2009, dressed to the nines but (allegedly) sans invitation. The scandal led to a tense congressional hearing before the Homeland Security Committee, and plenty of free publicity for the new D.C. ‘Housewives’ spinoff on Bravo.

Whether or not Michaele Salahi ever takes it all off for Playboy, she has parted with the famous red sari she wore to the presidential party she’s accused of crashing: The ensemble was recently donated by Salahi to be auctioned off Oct. 2, with proceeds reportedly going to the Bush-Clinton Haiti fund.

In “Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab” (which roughly translates as “Germany Does Away With Itself”) Sarrazin argues that the right kind of German women are having too few babies, while less-worthy citizens — Muslims and others with little education — are having far too many. The result, he claims, is that Germany is getting dumber and its economy being undermined. “With higher relative fertility among the less intelligent, the average intelligence of the population declines,” he writes.

Sarrazin, 65, goes on to argue that Germany’s national character is being watered down by its 4 million Muslims (that’s about 5.5 percent of the population), many of whom, he says, refuse to integrate. “I don’t want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in a mostly Muslim country where Turkish and Arabic are widely spoken, women wear headscarves and the day is measured out by the muezzin’s call to prayer,” he writes. “If I want that experience, I can just take a vacation in the Orient.”

In his latest book, German central bank board member Thilo Sarrazin, shown during an appearance on German TV, says Muslim immigration and a high birth rate among Turkish immigrants would end up impoverishing Germany, Europe’s biggest economy.

Although he has claimed he’s no racist, Sarrazin told the Welt am Sonntag paper last Sunday that all Jews “share a particular gene.” Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that Sarrazin should apply for a job as spokesman for race issues in the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party.

Politicians from both the right and left have condemned the senior banker. “I cannot accept [Sarrazin's] accusations,” conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Turkish daily Hurriyet. “Entire segments of our population feel insulted by them.”

The leadership of the opposition Social Democratic Party, meanwhile, has said it will begin proceedings to revoke Sarrazin’s membership. And the board of the Bundesbank on Thursday unanimously voted to dismiss him — a move that must now be approved by German President Christian Wulff. That should happen fairly swiftly, as the bank made its decision just hours after Wulff warned that Sarrazin’s remarks threatened to “damage Germany — above all internationally.”

But despite that high-level criticism, Sarrazin’s statements seem to have found favor with a large number of ordinary Germans — who are, after all, the target audience for his book. A survey for Stern magazine revealed that 46 percent of Germans agree with Sarrazin’s claim that they are becoming “strangers in their own country” (51percent disagreed). His tome instantly hit the No. 1 spot on Amazon.de’s best-seller list when it was released Monday, and his publisher expects sales to exceed 150,000 copies, The New York Times noted.

The book’s success is partly because of growing concerns among some Germans about the parallel society inhabited by immigrants from Muslim countries. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s guest-worker program with Turkey, when Turkish citizens were invited to West Germany to make up for its postwar manpower shortage. The original idea was that those workers would return home, but in the 1970s the West German government allowed their families to move to the country.

Little thought was given to integrating or educating these new arrivals, leaving them with poor career prospects and few incentives to mingle with ordinary Germans. “We invited the guest workers and thought they would leave again soon,” Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, told German weekly Der Spiegel last year. “For too long we were used to the fact that we have primary school classes where 80 percent of children can’t speak German.” That’s now slowly changing, thanks to a 2005 law that compels new arrivals to master the German language or risk losing their residency permits.

So there is some truth in Sarrazin’s claim that a disproportionate number of immigrants have little education — government statistics show that 9.6 percent of people with an immigrant background, who make up around 18 percent of the population, have no secondary-school diploma, compared with just 1.5 percent of Germans. But that’s largely because of the faults of the German state, not — as Sarrazin argues — because immigrants inherently lack brainpower.

And in coming years, Germany is going to need more, not fewer, hard-working migrants. The Federal Statistical Office predicts that even with a steady net immigration of up to 200,000 people a year, the German population will fall by 12 million by 2050. That same year, the average age in Germany will hit 60 years old. “Such a society would no longer be capable of playing a role in the global economy,” Klingholz wrote in Der Spiegel this week.

Some commentators hope that Sarrazin’s loud and clumsy comments will force the government to rethink issues of race and culture — something it has understandably shied away from since the end of World War II — and develop integration policies that will ensure that the next wave of desperately needed immigrants aren’t treated as outsiders.

“A clever man has got on the wrong track here with his desire to provoke and with his theories about the rapid decline of the German people,” noted the centrist Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “But he has addressed a problem that will remain long after the waves of outrage have subsided: the enormous integration deficit of the Muslim minority in Germany.”

Google celebrated Chrome’s second birthday by releasing an improved version of the Internet search giant’s Web browser on Thursday.

Looking back on Chrome’s second anniversary, “it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time,” Brian Rakowski, Google’s product manager, said in a blog post.

Google simplified the Chrome interface and made its color scheme “easier on the eyes” while making it run faster. The online search company also improved safety features such as warnings about websites that may have malicious software, according to Rakowski.

Von D shot the ‘Adora’ promo photos a few months ago in New York City and later blogged about the whole experience, revealing she’s not quite the bad-a** she portrays on TV. “My goal was to just do my best and ignore whatever self-consciousness loomed over me,” she wrote.
“I came to the conclusion that if I wanted these pictures to convey a certain realness I had to let go of a lot of my self criticism, relax, and enjoy the process. This is much harder for me than it sounds. Instead of trying to project an attitude or an image that I thought others would want to see, I just had to be myself.”

Adora is not Von D’s first foray into the world of fragrance. Last year, she released her Sinner and Saint perfume line.

A species of acacia tree in Eastern Africa seems to be protected from elephants by ants, according to new research from scientists at the Universities of Wyoming and Florida.

The researchers conducted a series of studies in Kenya, and found that the acacia trees in areas heavily trafficked by elephants simply get pummeled without protection from their tiny ant bodyguards.

“It really is a David-and-Goliath type of story, where these little ants are up against these huge herbivores, protecting trees and having a major impact on the properties of the ecosystems in which they live,” said Todd Palmer of the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya and the University of Florida.

“In the words of the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, ‘It’s yet another example of how the little things run the world.’”

The ants seem to be major ecosystem players in the African savanna, said Palmer and his colleague Jacob Goheen at the University of Wyoming.

The researchers stumbled onto the finding after observing that one species of acacia tree, Acacia drepanolobium, which houses ant guardians, did not appear to be bothered by elephants.

“We thought that was really interesting, because we often see elephants feeding on other species of trees that do not harbor ants,” Palmer said

“In fact, the number of elephants in the central highlands of Kenya has become high enough in recent years that we see severely elephant-damaged trees all over the place these days.”

The researchers wanted to further investigate their observation.  They began by testing whether the elephants would eat those acacia trees if they were stripped of their ant defenders.

The answer, they found, was yes.  In fact, in the absence of ants, the elephants enjoyed eating the ant-plants just as much as they did their favorite tree food.

“When either tree species had ants on them, the elephants avoided those trees like a kid avoids broccoli,” Palmer said.

When ants were removed from the acacia trees in their natural environment on the African savanna, the elephants did much more damage than they otherwise would have over the course of a year.

“We had solved that part of the mystery—swarming groups of ants that weigh about five milligrams each can and do protect trees from animals that are about a billion times more massive,” said Palmer.

It appears that an elephant’s long trunk, which has a highly sensitive interior loaded with nerve endings, is its Achilles’ heel.

“It seems that elephants simply do not like ants swarming up the insides of their trunks, and I can’t say I blame them,” Palmer said.

By comparison, the ants don’t provide much protection against giraffes, which merely swipe the ants away with their long, rough tongues.

The study’s results have larger implications, the researchers say, because elephants at high enough densities can “literally convert woody areas into areas of open grassland.”

It might be that ants could prevent that type of long-term change in savannas.

Indeed, the researchers showed that ant-acacia numbers don’t decline when elephants move in.

“Because tree cover strongly regulates a host of ecosystem processes, including carbon storage, fire-return intervals, food web dynamics, nutrient cycling, and soil-water relations in our [study] system and others, these tiny bodyguards likely exert powerful indirect effects at very large spatial and temporal scales,” the researchers wrote in a report about their study.

“As elephants and other large mammals in Africa exhibit chronic declines in some habitats and overabundance in others, identifying the ecological consequences of such landscape change remains an important challenge for wildlife managers in the future.”

At a ceremony in the State Department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin room, Clinton said the Obama administration was committed to forging a settlement in a year’s time. But, she stressed that the heavy lifting must be done by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

“We will be an active and sustained partner,” she said. “But we cannot and we will not impose a solution. Only you can make the decisions necessary to reach an agreement and secure a peaceful future for the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

Netanyahu and Abbas pledged their seriousness to securing an agreement and overcoming decades of mutual hostility and suspicion.

“This will not be easy,” Netanyahu said. “True peace, a lasting peace, will be achieved only with mutual and painful concessions from both sides.”

“We do know how hard are the hurdles and obstacles we face during these negotiations – negotiations that within a year should result in an agreement that will bring peace,” Abbas said.

Abbas called on Israel to end Jewish settlements in the West Bank and other areas that the Palestinians want to be part off their own state. Netanyahu insisted that any agreement must assure Israel’s security.

Thursday’s negotiations are the first since the last effort broke down in December 2008 and are fraught with complications, including recent violence in the West Bank and Israeli settlement activity. Expectations are low and U.S. officials have said success may be only an agreement to hold a second round of negotiations.

Officials say they are hoping to arrange that meeting for Sept. 15 in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik and top aides to the leaders are expected to meet later Thursday to iron out final details of the next step.

Sitting at the top of a U-shaped table between Netanyahu and Abbas, Clinton congratulated the two for agreeing to resume negotiations but warned of difficult days to come in the effort to create an independent Palestinian state.

“I know the decision to sit at this table was not easy,” Clinton added. “We understand the suspicion and skepticism that so many feel borne out of years of conflict and frustrated hopes.”

She noted two recent attacks on Israelis in the West Bank claimed by the militant Hamas movement underscored the difficulties facing the two leaders.

“But, by being here today, you each have taken an important set toward freeing your peoples from the shackles of a history we cannot change and moving toward a future of peace and dignity that only you can create.”

Hamas gunmen killed four Israeli residents of a West Bank settlement on Tuesday as Netanyahu, Abbas and the leaders of Egypt and Jordan convened in Washington. And on Wednesday, hours before the leaders ate dinner at the White House, Hamas gunmen wounded two Israelis as they drove in their car in another part of the West Bank.

The talks will face their first test within weeks, at the end of September, when the Israeli government’s declared slowdown in settlement construction is slated to end.

Palestinians have said that a renewal of settlement construction will torpedo the talks. The Israeli government is divided over the future of the slowdown, and a decision to extend it could split Netanyahu’s hawkish coalition. Netanyahu has given no indication so far that it will continue beyond the deadline.

Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations broke off nearly two years ago, in December 2008, and the Obama administration spent its first 20 months in office coaxing the two sides back to the bargaining table. Despite the success in launching the talks, gaps between the sides are wide, distrust remains after years of violence and deadlock, and expectations are low.

After listening to the Mideast leaders he convened Wednesday night, Obama pronounced himself carefully optimistic. “I am hopeful, cautiously hopeful, but hopeful,” he said.

If Iron Maiden harbored any thoughts of sending their zombie mascot Eddie back to the grave after the release of their 15th studio album, ‘The Final Frontier,’ they’ve likely reconsidered following their recent run of sold-out arena shows and the chart success of the new album, which entered at number four on the Billboard Hot 200 this week.

“People are gonna think [it's our last album], I suppose, because the band has had a really long career, and who knows when it’s gonna stop?” bassist and songwriter Steve Harris told Noisecreep. “But we don’t feel like we’re there yet.”

Right before the North American release of the album, Harris talked about the thrill of spontaneity, his interest in science fiction, the dazzling video for the title track, his affinity for modern technology and why Maiden probably won’t play ‘The Final Frontier’ front to back any time soon.

‘The Final Frontier’ ups the ante compared to ‘A Matter of Life and Death.’ It’s both heavier and more progressive, yet it’s filled with memorable musical sections. Was it challenging to create?

Not really, no. It was rather enjoyable. We wrote the album in Paris when it was pissing down rain and cold, so we didn’t even want to go outside and we focused on what we were doing. And then we recorded in the Bahamas [at Compass Point Studios], which we hadn’t done since ’86. So that was good as well.

For Iron Maiden, four years is a long time to go between albums. Were you in a good head space going into this one?

Yeah, we all felt good. We toured for a while for the last record, and we did the film ['Iron Maiden: Flight 666] as well, so the time passed quickly. We took some time off to spend with our families, and before we knew it, it was time to make another record. And the fact that we were all in the same room as well kept the vibe strong. [Producer] Kevin Shirley put all the equipment in the other room to keep it separate, and we had a fantastic headphone system rigged up. For the first time, it made a big difference, and we could all be in the same room. And that meant we could all communicate better, which was fun.

Did you track the whole album live?

It was pretty well live. It worked really good because we could see each other when we were playing, and it worked really well. We’d definitely record like that again. There were no scratch tracks or anything. We did the songs live, and then we added bits on top as well. For some songs we did a few more takes than others, but then we did some tracks in just one or two takes, which helped keep things sounding really fresh.

Did you intend to write such an expansive, progressive record?

We just did what we did. Some of the songs are very proggy, especially the ones toward the end of the album. It’s weird because if you talk about one song, it doesn’t really represent what’s on the rest of the album. It’s so diverse, which I think is good. It’s one of the things that make the album enjoyable for me.

The opening of ‘Satellite 15 … the Final Frontier’ has an atmospheric, cinematic vibe to it that sets a nice tone for the rest of the record.

The beginning part was mainly Adrian’s idea. And to me, it really had the feel of film theme music. It’s very dramatic, very sci-fi and we just went from there, really. We put it together and went into the second part of the song. It felt really good. I was really excited about it when that was together. And Adrian was kind of surprised with what I did with it because he didn’t anticipate it being like that. But I was very excited because it basically gave us everything. It gave us an intro, it set the tone for the album and it gave us imagery as well to work with.

You released a striking effects-laden video for the song. Did you always know the title track would yield the first video?

Once we had the second part of the song, we knew that would be a good — well, not really a single because we don’t have singles anymore — but we knew that it would make a good promo. So we got some ideas together and we were really, really pleased with it. The company Darkside Films that did it were really, really good.

Whose idea was it to work with Darkside Films?

It was mine because I knew them, anyway. They did the interface for the ‘Visions of the Beast’ [DVD, which came out in 2003]. That was really good, but since then they’ve come along and done so much other really interesting stuff. I just thought knew they would be a really good choice and I knew what they capable of. And the main guy there, Andy Bishop, I knew him personally as well, so it made it an easy choice.

Is there a theme to ‘The Final Frontier?’

Well, it’s not a concept album, but as with a lot of our albums, you don’t really realize when you’re doing stuff, but there are common threads. It’s like when we did ‘Fear of the Dark’ [in 1992]. There seemed to be ‘fear’ mentioned through the album a few times. I just think when you do an album, whatever train of thought you’re in at the time, there does seem to be a loose thing going through that ties it all together somehow.

The cover art of Eddie as a space alien encountering dead alien astronauts is great. Did you want the album to have a sci-fi feel?

Yeah, the space theme is there for the artwork, but lyrically there are all sorts of different things going on. Each song tells an individual short story, really, as always with our stuff apart from [1988's] ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,’ which was a concept album. All our other albums have been short stories.

‘Space, the final frontier,’ is, of course, a phrase from the introduction to the TV show ‘Star Trek.’ Are you guys big fans?

I wouldn’t say I was a massive fan, but I’ve always liked ‘Star Trek.’ I don’t think any of us are Trekkies as such, but all like the show. Personally, I’m more into something like ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but I also like ‘Star Wars’ and other of sci-fi as well — anything that’s exciting and takes you on a bit of a journey.

Is there a meaning to the title?

It was Bruce’s idea. He had the title before we even started the album. And when it worked on the first song I felt, “Well, this totally ties in.” And it gave us a bit of a direction. I suppose he was being a bit tongue in cheek [implying that this might be our last album], but we all thought that was sort of funny.

What was the greatest challenge you faced making ‘The Final Frontier’?

Writing is always the hardest part. Recording is sort of academic, to a certain degree. We approached ‘When the Wild Wind Blows’ in a slightly different way. Basically, I wanted to try something where the guys didn’t know much what they were playing much before we did it. We just learned parts and then did them and we saw where it went to a certain degree, or how many parts we did. Nobody knew which order they were coming in, and nobody except me knew where I wanted to take it. So I just thought it was good to play with a bit of spontaneity like that. We got some really interesting takes for that.

How did you approach your bandmates with that idea?

Well, I said to the lads, “I hope you don’t mind indulging me with this because I want to try something different.” And they were like, “Mmm, OK, that sounds ominous, but sure.” And we did it and it worked out really well so everyone was pleased.

How is working on an album today different than when you were working on something like ‘Number of the Beast’ or ‘Piece of Mind’?

We’re more wise to the ways of recording, I suppose. I’m a lot more knowledgeable and confident when we’re in the studio now. I know more what I want and how to get it now as opposed to then. We’re jut more experienced. If we don’t know what we’re doing by now, we never will.

How do you feel about the way technology has developed since the ’80s?

I love the technology that’s around today. I think it’s amazing what you can do these days. And it’s amazing you can fit so much information on a small hard drive and carry it about. All those years ago we obviously had to worry about taking all those big reels of tape. It was a nightmare, really, in a lot of ways. And if you wanted to cut something you had to splice it by hand with a razor. It was pretty scary.

On the tour for ‘The Final Frontier’ you have been playing a good amount of music from the past three or four albums as well as some new songs. You didn’t play much written before 1986′s ‘Somewhere in Time.’

Well, we did a lot of the old stuff on the last tour, so we just like to mix it up. And the tour before that one, we did the whole album ‘A Matter of Life and Death.’ So, we like to keep things fresh for us and the fans, really. There are always going to be people that complain no matter what you do, but we just do what we think is right at the time.

Would you want to play ‘The Final Frontier’ in its entirety?

I don’t know. I think we’ll decide that when we get in rehearsals, but I doubt if we would do that again. We did it once and it was great, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily the right thing to do again. It’s was nice to do it the first time, but you can only do it with an album that’s appropriate for that kind of performance. Also, other people have been doing that [recently, including Megadeth, Testament and Slayer], so maybe it’s a good thing not to do right now. We always like to do our own thing and not think about what’s going on around us.