Michael Bay's 'Pain & Gain' topped the Stateside box office with $20 million.
By Ryan J. Downey
A scene from "Iron Man 3"
Photo: Marvel
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1706453/box-office-iron-man-3-world-wide.jhtml
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DETROIT (AP) ? Ex-U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of Detroit and six other former Congress members are presiding over hearings on the existence of extraterrestrials.
The 30 hours of congressional-style hearings kicked off Monday and are scheduled to run through Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Those testifying hope to prove that aliens contact Earth ? and that the government is trying to keep it secret.
Kilpatrick tells The Detroit News (http://bit.ly/Y8HUMc ) she's been researching the topic and is "looking forward to the week's activities."
The News says Kilpatrick, who is being paid $20,000 plus expenses, will chair the panel on Tuesday.
Kilpatrick is a Democrat who served in Congress from 1997-2011. Her son, ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, is awaiting sentencing after being convicted on two dozen counts of corruption.
___
Information from: The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ex-mich-congresswoman-presides-over-et-hearings-175652330.html
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All Critics (91) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (89) | Rotten (2)
"Mud" isn't just a movie. It's the firm confirmation of a career.
"Mud" unfolds at its own pace, revealing its story in slivers. The performances are outstanding, especially from Sheridan, who plays tough, sweet, vulnerable and confused with equal conviction.
The film is drenched in the humidity and salty air of a Delta summer, often recalling the musical, aphoristic cadences of Sam Shepard, who happens to appear in a supporting role.
A wonderful, piquant modern-day variation on "Huckleberry Finn.''
One of the most creatively rich and emotionally rewarding movies to come along this year.
It's a movie that holds out hope for the movies' future.
I liked Mud. What's frustrating is feeling as if I could have loved it.
It's a lovely, coherent piece of storytelling, with a unique sense of place. Nichols has carved out a niche as a distinctive film-maker.
With Mud, Jeff Nichols demonstrates once again that he's that rare breed of filmmaker who prefers to bury himself in the dirt of rural America rather than carve his initials into the concrete of sprawling urbanity.
Nichols weaves it all together with consummate skill and a little black pepper.
It's rare that films manage to capture the actual experience of what it is like to be a child, but 'Mud' seems to nail the ethos.
Mud is a captivating drama with well-rounded characters and fantastic performances from its three leads.
...a respectful, storyteller's approach to rural America. No mockery, no Hollywood-knows-better, no nonsense. That kind of thing is in shorter supply than the universe's collective desire for McConaughey to return to rom-coms.
Jeff Nichols' script for Mud is a lot like the Mississippi River that serves as a backdrop for the tale of unrequited love. There are times it is big and powerful and other times when it becomes so serene it's easy to forget the depths that hide below.
Mud combines the poignance of a boy coming to terms with life's realities with the excitement of top-notch suspense.
This densely atmospheric film could have used more Mark Twain-like adventure and less dreary adult intrigue.
...a movie about relationships that are tenuous and inescapable, desperate and fraught with misplaced romance.
Set in Arkansas, Mud captures the rhythm of the South in a way few films do.
Mud, from the Austin-based writer/director Jeff Nichols, is many things at once, and all enriched by David Wingo's double-stop, aching, stringed score.
"Mud" is a powerful story of love, friendship and loyalties.
"Mud" is a terrific American film that is destined to be a classic. McConaughey is selecting superior roles as he matures into one of our finest actors. Now that's something no critic would have written 10 years ago.
The kind of film where small gestures and vignettes convey more than long speeches possibly could.
An evocative drama set at the precipice of adulthood.
McConaughey's resurgence is a glorious thing, and it continues with Mud.
Buy a boat in a tree, and you'll buy anything. And so we do in "Mud," Jeff Nichols's yarn about a charming outlaw on the run, drizzled with Tennessee Williams lyricism and Huck-and-Tom adventure.
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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mud_2012/
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WASHINGTON -- Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility of deploying American troops to Syria, while top Republican lawmakers called for increased U.S. intervention in the civil war there. The comments, made on various Sunday television programs, reflect an increased sense of urgency this week about the potential use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.
"I don't think you want to ever rule it out," McCaskill said of U.S. troop involvement in the Syrian conflict, which has claimed more than 70,000 lives over two years. Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," McCaskill, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, "We don't want to [deploy U.S. troops] unless it's absolutely necessary, [but] I don't think you ever want to say absolutely not."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took a more cautionary tack on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria," said McCain, who is a longtime advocate of greater American intervention in the Syrian conflict. He instead called on the U.S. to help establish "a safe zone," and to begin arming the Syrian rebels, to whom the U.S. has so far provided only nonlethal aid.
McCain also called for increased aid from Washington to assist with the growing refugee crisis in the region, and said the U.S. should help prepare an "international force" capable of securing Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons in the event Syrian President Bashar Assad is removed from power.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), appearing alongside McCaskill on "Face the Nation," said monitoring those chemical weapons was a top priority for the United States and the international community. "The greatest risk [to the U.S.] is a failed state with chemical weapons falling in the hands of radical Islamists," Graham said. "The longer [the conflict] goes, the more likely it is that you have a failed state, and all hell's going to break loose in the region."
Senators learned this week that American intelligence agencies have evidence that Assad's regime has deployed chemical weapons, but White House officials cautioned that this evidence is still being evaluated.
McCaskill, too, said the United States should be "ready if we need to take some kind of military action," but did not explicitly endorse sending weapons to the Syrian rebels, nor did she mention the creation of a "safe zone," as McCain advocated.
Graham appeared to go further than McCain or McCaskill in proposing direct U.S. action in Syria, saying, "One way you can stop the Syrian Air Force from flying is to bomb Syrian air bases with missiles. You don't need to go deep into Syria to do that." He said Assad's forces' aerial capabilities play a major role in the conflict, and "if you could neutralize the air advantage the Syrian government has over the rebels, I think you could turn the tide of battle pretty quickly."
President Obama said last year that the use of chemical weapons by Assad's regime was a "red line" for the U.S. and would have "enormous consequences." But late this week, White House officials sounded a cautious note, telling reporters on a background call, "If we reach a definitive determination that this red line has been crossed [we will be] consulting with our friends and allies and the international community more broadly, as well as the Syrian opposition, to determine what the best course of action is."
For House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the currently available evidence is conclusive, he said on ABC's "This Week."
"We have classified evidence, [which] strengthens the case [that] some amount of chemical weapons have been used over the last two years," he said, while acknowledging that "the options aren't huge, but some action needs to be taken."
Also on HuffPost:
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/28/claire-mccaskill-syria_n_3174673.html
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BOSTON (AP) ? The defense team representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect got a major boost Monday with the addition of Judy Clarke, a San Diego lawyer who has managed to get life sentences instead of the death penalty for several high-profile clients, including the Unabomber and the gunman in the rampage that injured former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Clarke's appointment was approved Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler.
Bowler denied, at least for now, a request from Miriam Conrad, the public defender of 19-year-old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to appoint a second death penalty lawyer ? David Bruck, a professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law.
Tsarnaev has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction during the April 15 marathon. Three people were killed and more than 260 injured when two bombs exploded near the finish line.
The suspect's lawyers could renew their motion to appoint another death penalty expert if he is indicted, the judge said.
Clarke's clients have included the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; Susan Smith, who drowned her two children; Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph; and most recently Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner. All received life sentences instead of the death penalty.
Clarke has rarely spoken publicly about her work and did not return a call seeking comment Monday. However, at a speech Friday at a legal conference in Los Angeles, she talked about how she had been "sucked into the black hole, the vortex" of death penalty cases 18 years ago when she represented Smith.
"I got a dose of understanding human behavior, and I learned what the death penalty does to us," she said. "I don't think it's a secret that I oppose the death penalty."
Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz said the decision to put Clarke on the defense team shows "they are going to litigate hard against the death penalty."
"They are not going to put on a jihadi defense," he said. "The client wants to live and he wants to avoid the death penalty. They are not going to say, 'I want to die, I want to join my brother.' "
Bruck has directed Washington and Lee's death penalty defense clinic, the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, since 2004.
In other developments in the Boston case:
? FBI agents visited the Rhode Island home of the in-laws of the suspect's brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and carried away several bags. The brother was killed in a gun battle with police.
Katherine Russell, Tsarnaev's widow, has been staying at the North Kingstown home and did not speak to reporters as she left her attorneys' office in Providence later in the day. Attorney Amato DeLuca says she's doing everything she can to assist with the investigation.
? President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed terrorism coordination Monday in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. Obama expressed his "appreciation" for Russia's close cooperation after the attack.
The suspected bombers are Russian natives who immigrated to the Boston area. Russian authorities told U.S. officials before the bombings they had concerns about the family, but only revealed details of wiretapped conversations since the attack.
___
AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/boston-suspects-defense-team-gets-major-boost-214107756.html
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By Aaron Maasho
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopian Airlines on Saturday became the world's first carrier to resume flying Boeing Co's 787 Dreamliner passenger jets, landing the first commercial flight since the global fleet was grounded three months ago following incidents of overheating in the batteries providing auxiliary power.
The flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi was the first since regulators grounded all Dreamliners on January 16 after two lithium-ion battery meltdowns that occurred on two jets with other airlines within two weeks that month.
U.S. regulators approved a new battery design last week, clearing the way for installation and a resumption of Dreamliner flights by airlines around the world.
The battery faults raised fears of a possible mid-air fire, drawing worldwide attention to Boeing and denting the reputation of its flagship plane.
"I wasn't aware that I was going to be on the 787 Dreamliner until on my way to the airport. It was a good service and the flight was pleasant," said Senait Mekonnen, an Ethiopian restaurateur, moments after the plane landed.
The fully booked flight arrived at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport just after 9.30 GMT, with passengers giving the crew a round of applause upon landing.
The grounding of the Dreamliner fleet has cost Boeing an estimated $600 million, halted deliveries of the aircraft and forced some airlines to lease alternative planes.
The Dreamliner cost an estimated $20 billion to develop and represents a quantum leap forward in design, offering a 20 percent reduction in fuel burn and added cabin comforts such as higher humidity, larger windows and modern styling.
But by sparking fears of a dangerous mid-air fire, the battery problems drew worldwide attention to both aircraft safety and the technology behind lithium-ion batteries, which are widely used in laptops, mobile phones, electric cars and other products.
The scrutiny turned from what are often called normal "teething pains" for a new plane into a serious crisis for Boeing. As the plane goes back into service, what caused the fire is still unknown.
The battery that overheated on a parked Japan Airlines 787 in Boston caught fire and burned for more than hour before firefighters put it out. The plane was on the ground and empty. The second incident, which has not officially been termed a fire, occurred during a flight in Japan.
An odor of smoke in the cabin and warnings in the cockpit prompted the All Nippon Airways pilots to make an emergency landing and evacuate the aircraft. Boeing said both incidents showed its safeguards had worked.
CAUSE NOT YET FOUND
After the second incident, airlines were swiftly barred from flying the 250-seat aircraft, which carries a list price of $207 million. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launched a full-scale investigation to find the root cause of the Boston fire and examine the process by which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved Boeing's design.
The NTSB has not yet found the cause, and after hearings last week the investigation continues.
The last time an airliner fleet was grounded was more than a generation ago, when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration banned the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jet in 1979 after a crash in Chicago killed 273 people.
Boeing spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars redesigning the battery system, drawing on its vast staff of engineers and experts in everything from fighter planes to rockets and satellites.
The changes include a revamped battery less prone to heat build-up, a redesigned charger and a stainless-steel enclosure capable of withstanding an explosion and equipped with a metal exhaust tube to vent fumes and gases outside the jet, if the battery overheats.
International airlines have been slowly putting the Dreamliner back into their schedules. United Airlines, the only U.S. carrier with the jet, said it will begin commercial flights on May 31. All Nippon Airways plans to conduct its first test flight of the revamped 787 on Sunday but has yet to decide when to resume passenger flights.
Ethiopian Airlines previously said its fleet did not suffer any of the technical glitches experienced by other Dreamliner jets, though it withdrew the planes from service to undergo the changes required by the FAA.
(Additional reporting by Alwyn Scott in Seattle and Tim Kelly in Tokyo; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Greg Mahlich)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ethiopian-airlines-flies-first-787-dreamliner-flight-since-081658780.html
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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A 35-year-old Dutch man has been arrested in Barcelona by Spanish police over last month's massive cyber attack which disrupted global internet services, the Dutch public prosecutor's office said on Saturday.
The man, who was identified by the Dutch public prosecutor only by the initials "S.K.", was arrested in connection with attacks on Spamhaus, the public prosecutor's office said, adding that the house where he was staying was also searched, and that the police seized computers and mobile phones.
Spamhaus, a London and Geneva-based non-profit group which helps weed out unsolicited "spam" messages for email providers, said last month it had been subjected to "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attacks on an unprecedented scale for more than a week.
"(S.K.) is suspected of unprecedented heavy attacks on the non-profit organization Spamhaus, where anti-spam databases are managed. These so-called DDoS attacks last month were also performed on Spamhaus partners in the United States, the Netherlands and Great Britain," the prosecutor's office said.
The man is expected to be expected to be handed over to the Dutch authorities, according to the statement.
Spamhaus publishes blacklists used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to weed out spam in email traffic.
The group is directly or indirectly responsible for filtering as much as 80 percent of daily spam messages, according to Cloudflare, a company that said it was helping Spamhaus mitigate the attack.
(Reporting by Sara Webb; Editing by Stephen Powell)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dutch-man-arrested-spain-connection-cyber-attack-205011534.html
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NASA is exploring ways to send a flotilla of small satellites to a destination, rather than one large orbiter. In a first test, three tiny satellites are now on orbit and beeping back at Earth. Why the idea could be an aid to scientific research.
NASA's Phonesat aims to demonstrate the ability to launch one of the lowest-cost, easiest-to-build satellites ever flown in space ? capabilities enabled by using off-the-shelf consumer smart phones.
Courtesy of NASA
EnlargeThat's no smart phone in your pocket or purse; that's the heart and soul of a satellite.
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Three satellites, to be exact, released into orbit on Sunday with the launch of Orbital Sciences Corp.'s new Antares rocket, the latest addition to NASA's stable of space-station resupply vehicles.
The tiny satellites, each occupying a cube four inches on a side, represent an experiment in using cheap but powerful off-the-shelf technology to run a new generation of small, affordable science satellites.
Two of these orbiters, which NASA has dubbed Phonesat 1.0, use the electronics and sensors packaged in a Google Nexus One smart phone to serve as on-board computers. Accelerometers that normally tell the phones which way you've oriented the screen now gather information on the satellites' orientation in space. And the cameras? Yep, snapshots of Earth from 156 miles up.
The third satellite, a prototype for Phonesat 2.0, uses a more powerful Nexus S, which also has a built-in gyroscope. Ultimately, engineers plan to use that extra capability to control solar panels and to control the spacecraft's orientation, instead of just recording it.
The notion of using a smart phone's innards to run a satellite grew out of informal hallway chatter, recalls James Cockrell, project manager for Phonesat at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.
The benchmark people often use as a point of comparison for the power of their favorite laptop or smart phone is the primitive computing power used in the Apollo program, which landed humans on the moon and brought them back safely in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Indeed, Mr. Cockrell describes a trip to the Internet that netted him the electronic-circuit diagram for the navigation and control computer used in Apollo's Lunar Excursion Module.
"Oh my goodness, you could build it in your basement" with a circuit board and a few transistors, he says.
A couple of years ago, he says, an engineer at NASA-Ames was drawing a similar comparison between his smart phone and today's satellites during an informal hallway chat. The engineer noted that a smart phone's processor is 10 to 15 times more powerful than the processors used in a conventional satellite's computer. A smart phone has much more memory. And it boasts a GPS receiver, gyroscopes, and accelerometers ? the sensors needed for navigation and to control a satellite's orientation.
"He said: 'I don't know why we couldn't make a satellite our of a smart phone,' " Cockrell recalls. Although it took a bit of additional salesmanship to convince folks higher up the organizational food chain, the Phonesat project was born.
The satellites cost about $3,500 each. The initial goals were modest: Survive the launch and beep at Earth.
So far, the satellites have successfully relayed their health ? operating temperatures, battery status, and other key indicators ? via small external transmitters.
"We call this our Sputnik moment," Cockrell says, referring to the simple "I'm alive" beeps that the world's first artificial satellite sent back to Earth in 1957.
As of Monday night, the two Phonesat 1 orbiters started taking pictures. Each satellite selected one image to beam back to Earth.
Before the beaming could begin, the image had to be cut into pieces. And yes, there's now an app for that.
And where NASA's flagship missions to the far reaches of the solar system use the agency's global Deep Space Network for communications, Phonesats are using what you could call NASA's cheap-and-not-so-deep space network ? ham-radio operators worldwide.
So far, some 100 hams have registered at www.phonesat.org, a site the program has set up to receive the packets. As of Tuesday evening, Cockrell estimated that the website had collected more than 300 packets, which computers on Earth must sort through to eliminate duplicates. Ultimately the mosaic will be assembled and displayed online.
The three Phonesats are expected to reenter the atmosphere and vaporize at the end of their 10- to 14-day romp on orbit.
The project already has Phonesats 3.0 and 4.0 on the drawing boards, an effort that eventually could pay dividends for space research, explains Bruce Yost, who heads the Edison Small Satellite Flight Demonstration Program at NASA-Ames.
NASA is exploring concepts for sending a flotilla of small satellites to a destination, rather than one large orbiter. The arrangement would allow sensors from several satellites to take measurements simultaneously around an entire planet to unravel the processes at work on the surface or in an atmosphere.
"If each one of those little pieces of the puzzle costs millions of dollars, then you're not really making any headway" toward getting such a mission approved, Mr. Yost explains. Given the private sector's heavy investment in phone R&D and the capabilities that have emerged, the argument goes, why keep satellite-control technology development in-house and reinvent the wheel?
Earth is likely to be an early target for such "swarm" exploration, Yost says. Scientists studying and forecasting space weather are interested in lofting a flotilla of satellites that could make simultaneous measurements of the solar wind or solar storms and their influence on various parts of the Earth's magnetic field.
Cockrell and his team also are working on an eight-spacecraft flotilla to test the feasibility of this idea of satellite swarms, Yost says.
Perhaps it's fitting that the first smart phones in space run on the Android operating system. There's no word on when or if iPhones will get a crack at serving as the seed around which a satellite grows. ?
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ESPNcricinfo IPL Fantasy League guide: Dos and Donts
While a lot of people contend that a lot of luck if involved in the ESPNcricinfo Indian Premier League (IPL) Fantasy League and doing well in it, this is not entirely true.
Yes, luck does play a huge role in determining how well a person fares after selecting his playing 11, putting the players with the highest probability of performing well in those 11 slots is what requires a lot of skill and judgement.
There are lot of things that a person should keep in mind while selecting a team for the IPL match.
The first thing that a person needs to do is open up the recent results of both the teams that will be playing a match on a given day and take a look at their recent performance. Take a look at the players that scored the most runs and the rate at which they scored these runs. Also look at the bowlers and their economies. There is no better way to determine the best player to have in your IPL Fantasy Team on a given day than to look at the recent performances of the players and becoming aware of their current form.
Another thing that you must do before every match is to take a look at the pitch on which the match would be played. Look at the runs that were scored by the teams that recently played a match there. This will give you an idea about whether the pitch assists the batsmen or the bowlers. Also take a look at the bowlers who took the most wickets on that particular pitch. If pacers have taken most of the wickets, you would know that putting a fast-bowler in your IPL Fantasy League team can bring plenty of points. If it has been the spinners that have troubled the opposition and ended up with excellent figures, then put choose a bowling attack comprising of spinners.
Selecting the right balance of batsmen, all-rounders and bowlers is very important on any given day. Everyone wants to put the best players in their team, but there is not enough budget to make that possible. Therefore, you have to take a bit of risk and spend your budget on the players that, if on song, can make the maximum amount of impact in the game. In most scenarios, it is the all-rounders that should be given preference over specialist batsmen and bowlers.
While choosing a captain, do not make a huge gamble. Look at the recent forms of the players and then decide if a certain player would be able to perform really well on the particular pitch and in the given conditions.
No matter what happens, never panic during the season, even if you are sitting at the bottom of your league. All it takes is an outstanding performance from one player to get you back in the contention for the top spot.
Use your transfers carefully instead of wasting them to play as many players on a given day as possible.
Source: http://blogs.bettor.com/ESPNcricinfo-IPL-Fantasy-League-guide-Dos-and-Donts-a214824
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? U.S. intelligence agencies added the mother of the Boston bombing suspects to a government terrorism database 18 months before the bombings, two officials told The Associated Press. She called it "lies and hypocrisy" and said she has never been linked to crimes or terrorism.
The CIA asked for the oston terror suspect and his mother to be added to a terrorist database in the fall of 2011, after the Russian government contacted the agency with concerns that both had become religious militants, according to officials briefed on the investigation. About six months earlier, the FBI investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, also at Russia's request, one of the officials said. The FBI found no ties to terrorism.
The revelation that the FBI had also investigated Zubeidat Tsarnaeva and the CIA arranged for her to be added to the terrorism database deepened the mystery around the family.The Tsarnaevs are ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who immigrated to the Boston area in the past 11 years. Tsarnaeva, a naturalized U.S. citizen who has appeared on television interviews since the attacks and reversed her decision to return to the U.S. after the bombings, has said her sons could never have been behind the deadly attacks and believes they were framed.
The officials spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly about the ongoing case.
Tsarnaev, who died in a gun battle with police last week, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, are accused of carrying out the bombings. Officials said that before he was advised of his constitutional rights to remain silent or consult a lawyer, Dzhokhar admitted to FBI interrogators that the brothers committed the bombings and that he was recruited by his brother to participate only a week or two before the attacks.
Previously U.S. officials have said only that the FBI investigated Tamerlan. But in March 2011, the Russians asked the FBI to look into Tsarnaev and his mother because of concerns they were religious militants who planned to travel back to Russia, the official said.
The FBI found nothing to link either person to terrorism, and the FBI closed the investigations in June 2011. Then, the Russians in the fall sent the same warning to the CIA. The CIA asked the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center to add the mother's and son's names to its huge, classified database of people known to be terrorists and those who are suspected of having terror ties, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE.
Being in that database does not mean the U.S. government has evidence that links someone to terrorism. About a year ago, there were some 745,000 names in the database. Intelligence analysts add names and partial names to TIDE when terror-related intelligence is shared with them.
Tsarnaeva said it would not surprise her if she was listed in a U.S. terror database.
"It's all lies and hypocrisy," she told the AP from Dagestan. "I'm sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I've never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism."
A search of U.S. criminal records showed only that Tsarnaeva was arrested in June 2012 in Natick, Mass., on a shoplifting charge over the theft of $1,624 worth of women's clothing from a Lord & Taylor department store. She was arrested and charged with larceny over $250 and two counts of malicious or wanton property damage. Tamerlan had traveled to Russia in January 2012 and returned in July.
Tsarnaeva accused U.S. law enforcement of killing her elder son.
"They are already are talking about that we are terrorists, I am terrorist, they've told that I was doing something terroristic," Tsarnaeva said.
Some lawmakers in Washington have questioned whether the FBI adequately investigated Tsarnaev and his mother in 2011. Over the course of that year, the FBI reached out to Russia three times for more information, U.S. officials said. The first time was in March 2011, when they received the initial tip from the Russians. The second was in June 2011 when they were preparing to close the investigation. The third time was in the fall of 2011 after the CIA received the same tip from the Russians.
One of the officials said the FBI never found the type of derogatory information on Tsarnaev and his mother that would have elevated their profiles among counterterrorism investigators or would have formally placed them on a terror watch list.
___
Associated Press reporters Pete Yost and Kimberly Dozier in Washington and Arsen Mollayev and Max Seddon in Dagestan contributed to this story.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bombing-suspects-mom-terror-database-170007222.html
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APThe Jets used a high second-round pick on quarterback Geno Smith.? G.M. John Idzik said that this development has only one meaning for Mark Sanchez.
?What this means for Mark is competition,? Idzik told the media on Friday night.
But are there plans to cut him, as reported by Adam Schefter of ESPN?
?There are plans to let him compete,? Idzik said.
Still, Idzik declined to say that this means Sanchez will get a chance to compete in training camp.? ?I look at that one day at a time,? Idzik said.
That?s a message Sanchez possibly hasn?t gotten from Idzik, because Idzik said the Jets haven?t talked to Sanchez on Friday, either before or after drafting a quarterback in round two.? (This directly conflicts with comments from Sanchez?s brother/agent, Nick, to Sal Paolantonio of ESPN.)
So the incumbent starting quarterback once again has been undermined via the acquisition of a new quarterback.? And the General Manager won?t commit to Sanchez being on the team when camp opens.
This may not end well, but it sure feels like, sooner than later, Sanchez?s time in New York will end.
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The next big Twitter feature? Finding out what your neighbor's talking about, 140 characters at a time, of course. According to All Things D, the service is working on exactly that, a location-based feature that was reportedly developed at a hack week held by the company earlier this month. Twitter, predictably, isn't commenting on the reportedly upcoming feature, but D has says that this information is coming from "multiple sources." No word on how close they all are to one another.
Source: All Things D
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/uvMM3ax_k2A/
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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Anglo American Platinum's shareholders gave the world's largest platinum producer the go ahead to buy back up to 10 percent of its shares during its annual general meeting on Friday, a spokeswoman for the company said.
Share buy backs are common during times of stock market decline, allowing the company to reduce the number of shares in issue and thereby boost per share earnings and dividends.
The company's shares have shed almost 31 percent of their value in the past year, underperforming the Johannesburg bourse's platinum index, which has fallen more than 20 percent over the same time.
Amplats, a unit of Anglo American, is battling to remain profitable after violent labour strikes in South Africa hurt already marginal operations, pushing them to the brink of closure.
It is also wrestling with soaring costs, 50 percent of which are wages, and weak prices.
Amplats is expected next week to announce whether it will press ahead with its review plan, which initially called for the cutting of up to 14,000 jobs, the mothballing of two mines and the sale of another.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/amplats-shareholders-agree-share-buy-back-151733777.html
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Indonesia has set itself up nicely for fair presidential elections next year, but corruption and party oligarchs threaten the its future.
From a distance, Indonesia over the past decade looks like an unalloyed success story.
Skip to next paragraph Dan MurphyStaff writer
Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East.?Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.
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But the country's gains remain fragile as the country prepares for a pivotal election next year, the outcome of which will either ratify both the democratic and economic gains of the past decade, or signal a return to money politics at its worst.
This week, Indonesians ? and foreign investors ? are most concerned about the appointment of a new finance minister without a background in finance, who also happens to be the son-in-law of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. They speculate the appointment has more to do with freeing up funds for next year's elections than it does with the nation's financial management.
Fifteen years ago, longstanding dictator Soeharto was forced out of power by an economic crisis that galvanized student protesters and millions of workers who had lost their jobs in the monetary crisis. In May 1998, a combination of democratic opposition and bloody rioting, some of it encouraged by ambitious generals eager to grab a greater share of power for themselves, opened the door to fundamental political change in the world's fourth largest nation, and most populous Muslim one.
The early years after Soeharto were rough. The country's small cadre of militant Islamists, forced into the shadows by Soeharto's police state, emerged from hiding at home and exile abroad, helping to fuel religious conflicts on Sulawesi and the Maluku islands, while their allies in big cities like Jakarta carried out vigilante raids on nightclubs and bars. Churches, hotels, and nightclubs were also bombed by a terrorist group inspired by Al Qaeda, most famously the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people.?
Democratization also brought a mad rush of decentralization without sufficient legal reform, which saw local leaders and their business partners across this nation of 240 million people try to set up their own smaller version of the corrupt system that served Soeharto so well.
In essence, Soeharto had gathered all the strings of power and influence in Indonesia to his hand, which enabled vast fortunes to be amassed by a small number of people around him, but also left Indonesia's corruption somewhat controlled and understandable for foreign and local investors alike. When his hand was symbolically cut off by the 1998 uprising, those strings snapped and twanged out in different directions, toward new potential seats of power. At the time, restoring order appeared to be such a formidable task that many wondered if Indonesia might have to survive a break up into a set of new states drawn along ethnic or regional lines.
But then in 2004, the retired general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected president, ending a period of bumbling national leadership. While not without his flaws, SBY (as he's universally called here) helped bring the country under control, didn't have much of a reputation for corruption himself, and set Indonesia on a path for renewed prosperity. In 2009, he won 60 percent of the vote in a three-way election, a stunning mandate that showed Indonesians were well pleased with what he'd done in his first five years.
But today, if you talk to Indonesians about SBY, you are far more likely to get an earful about the rampant corruption that many long-time businessmen and bankers here insist is worse than ever.
"Under Soeharto, they'd come to you and ask you to put some money on the table for them, and they'd take the money, says the owner of a furniture factory in the Central Java city of Surakarta. ?Now, they ask the same but then they take the money, the table, and everything else they can find in the room," he says.
Another factory owner in Tangerang, an industrial town on the outskirts of Jakarta, has a similar view. He makes clothes, mostly for export, and is grumbling about a 45 percent increase in the minimum wage in the province this year, from 1.5 million rupiah a month ($154) to 2.2 million ($226). His principal complaint is that the surge in labor costs year-to-year made managing his cash flow and margins almost impossible. He's in the process of cutting 2,000 of the 6,000 jobs at his factory (with plans to open up a new factory in a province with lower wage costs). But he finishes his complaint by saying the following: "Of course, I'd be happy to pay 2.2 million a month if all the bribes I have to pay were ended ??my margins would go up. But the bribes, I have no control over."
A foreign visitor expecting high praise for SBY now has to look hard to find it. Bankers, street peddlers, businessmen, and shopkeepers have soured on the president, who is term-limited out next year and appears to be spending as much of his time managing the affairs of his scandal plagued Democratic Party as he does the affairs of state.
Anas Urbaningrum, the chair of SBY's party, was forced to quit earlier this year after he was named a suspect in a kickback scheme involving the construction of a sports complex in the city of Bogor, West Java.
In 2011, party treasurer Muhammad Nazarrudin fled the country ahead of a corruption indictment, but was ultimately extradited from Colombia to face trial. Party member and Sports Minister Andi Mallarangeng, a former democracy activist, was forced to quit over corruption charges in late 2012 and in January of this year, Democratic Party MP Angelina Sondakh was given a four year jail sentence for demanding kickbacks in exchange for awarding government education grants.
And it isn't just SBY's party, it's almost everyone.
If you look at the constellation of Indonesia's political parties, it's hard to find strong ideological differences. There's a group of vaguely Islamist parties and a group of vaguely nationalist ones, but almost all of them are indistinguishable when it comes to performance in parliament ? which often seems largely about looking for ways to collect rent and strengthen the positions of the individuals at the top of the party.
Juwono Sudarsono, an urbane defense scholar who has served in the cabinets of four different Indonesian presidents, including SBY, says that while democracy in Indonesia is working in a formal sense, with regularly scheduled, mostly-fair elections, the practical outcomes are frequently disastrous. The national political parties appear to represent business oligarchs (many of whom lead the parties) rather than national interests, and Indonesia's legal institutions are fairly powerless to reign in their behavior, he says.
He recalls 2007, when he was serving as defense minister in SBY's first cabinet. He was trying to get a defense budget passed, which included measures to improve the pay and conditions of low-ranking soldiers. Separately, representatives of the eight largest parties in parliament all approached him, and said that he would have to find a way for some of the contracting and procurement for the military to flow through the hands of businessmen they would appoint before they'd vote in favor. Essentially, they wanted a promise of payment in exchange for doing the nation's business.
With his hands tied and worried about at least controlling the graft, he worked for weeks on a deal in which 10 percent of the defense budget could be skimmed, but not more, and quietly sold the idea to Indonesia's international lenders. "I didn't like it, but I had to protect against it becoming 60 percent or something like that," he says. Juwono left government service after the 2009 elections.
Stories like his are common here, and it?s part of the reason the appointment of Hatta Rajasa as finance minister this week has prompted so many skeptical responses.
Indonesia's key economic ministries, particularly the Finance Ministry and the Central Bank, have almost always been reserved for so-called technocrats since the Soeharto years. While many ministries were said to be "wet" in the local parlance (that is, providing ample opportunity for graft), the government has always worked hard to keep the more technical financial ministries "dry" as a way to ease international concerns about the stability of the currency and the chances of a ballooning budget deficit.
Hatta, who was already serving as coordinating economic minister, heads the National Mandate Party (PAN) a vaguely Islamist party that also has close ties to SBY. Hatta's daughter Siti Ruby Aliya Rajasa married SBY's son Edhie "Ibas" Baskoro Yudhoyono in 2011.
Indonesian bankers and politicians say Hatta had repeatedly clashed with outgoing finance minister Agus Martowardojo over the latter's reluctance to bump up government spending until better corruption and accountability measures were put in place.
Martowardojo's predecessor, the highly regarded Sri Mulyani Indrawati, was pushed out in 2010 after repeatedly clashing with powerful business and political interests over reform measures, perhaps chief among them Aburizal Bakrie, the Indonesian billionaire who also heads the Golkar Party, which is the second largest party in parliament and has named Mr. Bakrie its candidate for president next year. Sri Mulyani was immediately named the director of the World Bank Group.
"The consensus among everyone I talk to is this is about shaking loose money for the elections," says a long-time Jakarta banker who asked not to be named.
It's not just in that area.
A researcher into Indonesia's booming forestry industry says in the past few months he's seen a large uptick in clear-cutting of natural forest that the government long-ago licensed for "conversion" into acacia or eucalyptus plantations. His read on the situation was that forest that have been left alone for years are being mulched for cash now because of the electoral needs of various political parties.
Running campaigns in a country like Indonesia ? with hundreds of inhabited islands, stretching a distance equivalent to that between London and Baghdad ? is always an expensive business, and money tells.
Juwono, the former defense minister, and many others here worry that Indonesia's dominant political parties effectively control the money game, and are in turn controlled by entrenched business interests who see no value in the kind of economic competition that could help bring the tens of millions of Indonesians still living on less than $2 a day out of poverty.
In other words, fair elections by themselves don't make fair societies.
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A massive explosion at 3 a.m. EDT on one of the two barges still ablaze in the Mobile River in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Three people were injured in the blast. Fire officials have pulled units back from fighting the fire due to the explosions and no immediate threat to lives. (AP Photo John David Mercer) Three people were hospitalized with burns. Information on their conditions was not immediately available.
A massive explosion at 3 a.m. EDT on one of the two barges still ablaze in the Mobile River in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Three people were injured in the blast. Fire officials have pulled units back from fighting the fire due to the explosions and no immediate threat to lives. (AP Photo John David Mercer) Three people were hospitalized with burns. Information on their conditions was not immediately available.
A massive explosion at 3a.m. EDT on one of the two barges still ablaze in the Mobile River in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Three people were injured in the blast. Fire officials have pulled units back from fighting the fire due to the explosions and no immediate threat to lives. (AP Photo John David Mercer) Three people were hospitalized with burns. Information on their conditions was not immediately available.
Fire burns aboard two fuel barges along Mobile River after explosions sent three workers to the hospital. Fire officials have pulled units back from fighting the fire due to the explosions and no immediate threat to lives. (AP Photo/Press Register, Glenn Baeske)
A massive explosion at 3 a.m. EDT on one of the two barges still ablaze in the Mobile River in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Three people were injured in the blast. Fire officials have pulled units back from fighting the fire due to the explosions and no immediate threat to lives. (AP Photo John David Mercer) Three people were hospitalized with burns. Information on their conditions was not immediately available.
Fire burns aboard two fuel barges along the Mobile River after explosions sent three workers to the hospital Wednesday April 24, 2013. Fire officials have pulled units back from fighting the fire due to the explosions and no immediate threat to lives. (AP Photo John David Mercer)
MOBILE, Ala. (AP) ? A large fire that began with explosions aboard two fuel barges in Mobile, Ala., was rocked by a seventh explosion early Thursday and fire officials said they planned to let the fire, which has injured three, burn overnight.
Firefighters from Mobile and U.S. Coast Guard officials responded after 8:30 p.m. CDT Wednesday to a pair of explosions involving the gas barges in an area of the Mobile River east of downtown, authorities said.
As they were responding, a third explosion occurred around 9:30 p.m., Mobile Fire and Rescue spokesman Steve Huffman wrote in an email to The Associated Press. Additional explosions followed over the next few hours.
The Coast Guard said early Thursday that a one-nautical-mile safety zone had been established around one barge, which it said was "at the dock for cleaning."
Authorities said three people were transported to University of South Alabama Medical Center after suffering burn-related injuries. Huffman identified them as workers with Oil Recovery Co. The three were in critical condition early Thursday, according to hospital nursing administrator Danny Whatley.
Across the river, the Carnival Triumph, the cruise ship that became disabled in the Gulf of Mexico last February before it was towed to Mobile's port, was evacuated, said Alan Waugh, who lives at the Fort Conde Inn in downtown Mobile, across the river from the scene of the explosions. Waugh saw the blasts and said throngs of Carnival employees and others were clustered on streets leading toward the river as authorities evacuated the shipyard.
"It literally sounded like bombs going off around. The sky just lit up in orange and red," he said, "We could smell something in the air, we didn't know if it was gas or smoke." Waugh said he could feel the heat from the explosion and when he came back inside, his partner noticed he had what appeared to be black soot on his face.
U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Carlos Vega said the initial blast took place in a ship channel near the George C. Wallace Tunnel ? which carries traffic from Interstate 10 under the Mobile River. The river runs south past Mobile and into Mobile Bay, which in turn flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
Video from WALA-TV (http://bit.ly/15NEYJl) showed flames engulfing a large section of the barge, and a video that a bystander sent to AL.com (http://bit.ly/13vWz4G) showed the fiery explosions and billowing smoke over the river.
The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear, Huffman and Vega said.
"Once (the fire) is out and safe, a full investigation will take place," Huffman wrote.
Mobile Fire Chief Steve Dean told AL.com he was confident the fire wouldn't spread to nearby industrial properties, including the shipyard where the Carnival cruise ship is docked.
Huffman said the ship is directly across the river from the incident ? about two football fields in length.
The barges are owned by Houston-based Kirby Inland Marine, company spokesman Greg Beuerman said. He said the barges were empty and being cleaned at the Oil Recovery Co. facility when the incident began. He said the barges had been carrying a liquid called natural gasoline ? which he said is neither liquefied natural gas or natural gas. He said the company has dispatched a team to work with investigators to determine what caused the fire.
The explosion comes two months after the 900-foot-long Carnival Triumph was towed to Mobile after becoming disabled on the Gulf during a cruise by an engine room fire, leaving thousands of passengers to endure cold food, unsanitary conditions and power outages for several days. The ship is still undergoing repairs there, with many workers living on board.
Carnival didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment late Wednesday.
Earlier this month, the cruise ship was dislodged from its mooring by a windstorm that also caused, in a separate incident, two shipyard workers to fall into Mobile Bay. While one worker was rescued, the other's body was pulled from the water more than a week later.
___
Associated Press writer Phillip Lucas in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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A proposed ban of pesticides called neonicotinoids is gathering scientific support as some experts are calling for more field studies. The goal is to reverse massive honeybee hive die-offs, which also afflict U.S. farming
Image: Flickr/Karunakar Rayker
Across the globe, hives of honeybees are dying off in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Among the proposed culprits are pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are supposed to be less harmful to beneficial insects and mammals than the previous generation of chemicals.
Debate over neonicotinoids has become fierce. Conservation groups and politicians in the United Kingdom and Europe have called for a ban on their use, but agricultural organizations have said that farmers will face hardship if that happens. Next Monday, European governments will take a crucial vote on whether to severely restrict or ban three neonicotinoids.
Scientists, meanwhile, are vigorously debating whether the studies on neonicotinoids and the health of honeybees and bumblebees, mostly conducted in laboratory settings, accurately reflect what is happening to bees in the field.
Neonicotinoids, which poison insects by binding to receptors in their nervous systems, have been in use since the late 1990s. They are applied to crop seeds such as maize (corn) and soya beans, and permeate the plants, protecting them from insect pests. But a growing body of research suggests that sublethal exposure to the pesticides in nectar and pollen may be harming bees too ? by disrupting their ability to gather pollen, return to their hives and reproduce (see ?The buzz over bee health?).
In January, the European Food Safety Authority in Parma, Italy, Europe?s food-chain risk-assessment body, concluded that three commonly used neonicotinoids ? clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam ? should not be used where they might end up in crops that attract bees, such as oilseed rape and maize. The European Commission then proposed a two-year ban on the use of these chemicals in such crops. That proposal failed to gain sufficient support last month in a vote by European Union member states, but on 29?April, ministers will vote again.
Some scientists say that there is insufficient evidence to implicate these compounds. Ecotoxicologist James Cresswell, who studies pollination at the University of Exeter, UK, says that ?one can still equivocate over the evidence? because many of the lab studies that have shown harm may have fed bees unrealistically high doses of neonicotinoids. The problem, he adds, is that data are lacking on what doses bees actually encounter in the field. ?Everyone is focused on hazard,? he says. ?We know there is hazard there. But risk is a product of hazard and exposure.?
However, David Goulson, a bee researcher at the University of Sussex, UK, thinks that most of the major studies have used realistic doses. ?I couldn?t say I am certain these impacts really occur in the field, but it seems to me very likely that they do,? he says.
Even if neonicotinoids are not directly responsible for colony collapse disorder, they could play a part by making bees more susceptible to the parasitic mite Varroa destructor and the parasitic fungus Nosema apis, both prime suspects, adds Christian Krupke, an entomologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He says that, on the basis of current evidence, neonicotinoid use should be restricted immediately as a precaution.
One of the few studies to be conducted in the field served only to stoke the controversy after its release in March. Conducted by an agency within the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), it exposed 20?bumblebee colonies at three sites to crops grown from untreated, clothianidin-treated or imidacloprid-treated seeds. It found ?no clear consistent relationships? between pesticide levels and harm to the insects.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=2925c415b4e32fc7109c781578b62652
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Alistair McDermott, Director of Knowledge Services at the University, and Shena Mitchell, Director of Innovation Warehouse, at the newly opened Innovation Centre on Hampshire Terrace
A one-stop shop for innovation, entrepreneurship and the creation of new jobs for the city opened at the University of Portsmouth yesterday.
The University has invested ?500,000 into the Innovation Centre, on Hampshire Terrace to help ignite the growth of entrepreneurship and businesses in the region.
The centre has two floors dedicated to help business owners and managers work alongside academics to develop new products or routes to markets, and two floors dedicated to the Innovation Warehouse, an engine room for individuals and start-up companies looking for serious growth and new business opportunities.
Vice-Chancellor Professor John Craven officially opens the Innovation Centre
The combination of the two elements is a first for the University, which has never before provided space for businesses, and a first for Portsmouth, which is now the second city in the UK to be home to the Innovation Warehouse, a concept designed and tested in its London headquarters and which has, in 18 months, helped eight new business ventures to launch.
The launch of the centre was attended by local business and civic leaders, including businesses from the Isle of Wight, academics whose research has potential to deliver a boost to businesses, local media and strategic managers from the University and Innovation Warehouse.
The University?s new Innovation Centre aims to help fledgling and medium-sized businesses
Alistair McDermott, Director of Knowledge Services at the University, said: ?The launch of Innovation Space is about the University bringing wealth and jobs to the region and promoting engagement with experts from University.
?Together with the Innovation Warehouse, we are now in a position to help support local entrepreneurship and growth, which the city and region needs.?
The University?s goal for the centre is to put like-minded people in science and innovation together side by side to find new ways of solving problems or to come up with answers to help businesses make a step change in the development of new products or services.
Alistair said: ?We are committed to offering businesses direct access to researchers who are experts in their field to help create sparks of innovation and business growth. The businesses which have already joined us will be working with our experts in artificial intelligence to help improve their profit margins.?
The top two floors are dedicated to the Innovation Warehouse, which launched in London in 2011 after a philanthropist saw a need for those with entrepreneurial spirit and ideas to be given space to develop and fine-tune their ideas, products and goals.
The co-founders and directors offer mentoring, coaching and support help in writing business plans which stand a chance of working and, crucially, regular meetings with successful business directors and potential funders. In return for investment, they can take a share in businesses they help develop.
Tony Fish, Director of London?s Innovation Warehouse, said: ?We are about giving direct access to market for entrepreneurs with progressive and novel ideas.
?What we offer is not for everyone but it is a strong launch-pad for businesses which have brilliant potential but also some gaps or hurdles ahead of them.
?The gaps could be anything from understanding business concepts including intellectual property or company and product law, access to finance, pitching for funding, marketing and technical skills such as software development.
?You could say we are de-risking people who already have ideas worth millions.?
The Innovation Warehouse has plans to open eight more centres in the next two years and is working with partners to develop these in Leeds, Oxford, Croydon and New York.
Shena Mitchell, director of Innovation Warehouse Portsmouth, said: ?When the co-founders and co-directors were looking to invest and start a new Innovation Warehouse I persuaded them to consider Portsmouth.
?Having worked in the city for the last 20 years, I believe there are many people in Portsmouth ready to start their own businesses and who just need the kind of support we have to offer.?
Source: http://www.port.ac.uk/uopnews/2013/04/24/small-businesses-given-big-boost/
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