PALM HARBOR, Fla. (AP) -- A Florida animal sanctuary says Cheetah the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan movies of the early 1930s has died at age 80.
The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor announced that Cheetah died Dec. 24 of kidney failure.
Sanctuary outreach director Debbie Cobb on Wednesday told The Tampa Tribune ( http://bit.ly/rRuTeJ ) that Cheetah was outgoing, loved finger painting and liked to see people laugh. She says he seemed to be tuned into human feelings.
Based on the works of author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Tarzan stories, which have spawned scores of books and films over the years, chronicle the adventures of a man who was raised by apes in Africa.
Cheetah was the comic relief in the Tarzan films that starred American Olympic gold medal swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Cobb says Cheetah came to the sanctuary from Weissmuller's estate sometime around 1960.
Cobb says Cheetah wasn't a troublemaker. Still, sanctuary volunteer Ron Priest says that when the chimp didn't like what was going on, he would throw feces.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Cheetah the chimp from 1930s Tarzan flicks dies. Wow! He was 80 years old!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
"Space ball" drops on Namibia
A photo provided by the National Forensic Science Institute shows a giant metallic ball …
A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.
The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.
Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.
With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together".
It was made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.
It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.
Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.
The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.
Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.
"It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first," he said.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Witches Of Pendle: Workers Find Cottage And Mummified Cat | Sky News
One expert described the find as 'spellbinding - it's like discovering your own little Pompeii'
2:39pm UK, Thursday December 08, 2011
A cottage believed to be linked to the Witches of Pendle and a mummified cat have been unearthed by workmen in Lancashire.
The site, described by one archaeologist as "Lancashire’s Pompeii", was discovered during a construction project.
Water engineers found the 17th-century cottage during excavations near the Lower Black Moss reservoir in Pendle and now experts think it could be connected to the famous Pendle Witches, especially as a mummified cat was found sealed into one of the walls.
It is thought the cat may have been entombed in the wall while still alive, possibly in the 19th century, as paranormal protection.
The site could be that of a notorious meeting between the witches on Good Friday in 1612
Simon Entwistle, an expert on the Pendle Witches, said: "Cats feature prominently in folklore about witches. Whoever consigned this cat to such a horrible fate was clearly seeking protection from evil spirits.
"We're just a few months away from the 400th anniversary of the Pendle Witch trials, and here we have an incredibly rare find, which could well be the famous Malkin Tower."
The tower was said to be the site of a notorious meeting between the witches on Good Friday in 1612.
Carl Sanders, United Utilities' project manager, said: "It's not often you come across a fairytale cottage complete with witch's cat.
"The building is in remarkable condition. You can walk through it and get a real sense that you're peering into the past.
"Pendle Hill has a real aura about it, and it's hard not to be affected by the place."
Frank Giecco, from NP Archaeology, led the team which unearthed the Pendle building.
He said: "It's like discovering your own little Pompeii. We rarely get the opportunity to work with something so well preserved. As soon as we started digging, we found the tops of doors, and knew we were onto something special.
"The building is a microcosm for the rise and fall of this area, from the time of the Pendle witches to the industrial age. There are layers of local history right before your eyes."
The building also contains many 19th-century artefacts such as crockery, a cooking range and a bedstead.
The United Utilities' engineering project has been put on hold while the archaeologists complete their investigation of the site.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Rumors Explode Over Higgs Boson Discovery
By Ian O'Neill
CERN
A proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN laboratory in Geneva that produced more than 100 charged particles.
This could be the announcement we've all been waiting for.
As soon as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) revved up its supercooled electromagnets in 2008 -- which promptly "quenched" (read: broke down in a very expensive way) and then restarted the following year -- it's been the one piece of news the world has been eagerly awaiting: confirmation of the discovery of one of the Universe's most secretive particles -- the Higgs boson.
After gazillions of particle collisions and countless rumors of Higgs discoveries, we have... yet another rumor of a Higgs discovery. But this time, the rumor seems to be meatier than ever.
ANALYSIS: What is the LHC Trying to Accomplish?
According to PhysicsWorld.com, CERN's Scientific Policy Committee will be meeting on Tuesday (Dec. 13) to discuss, amongst other things, an update on the search for the Higgs boson. Teams from the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments will be in attendance.
As noted by the Guardian.co.uk, the head scientists of the two groups will be there to give the Higgs update. "That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle," Sample pointed out in his Dec. 6 article.
Apart from the heads of ATLAS and CMS being there, why all the excitement?
According to comments left on a number of particle physics blogs, the word is that the LHC is closing in on the Higgs.
The Higgs boson is theorized to be the "force carrier" of the Higgs field -- a field thought to permeate the entire Universe, endowing matter with mass. Only by using powerful particle accelerators like the LHC do we stand a chance of seeing these mysterious particles.
ANALYSIS: What is the Higgs Boson?
Apparently, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments are independently seeing a Higgs signal, and the predicted mass of the particle agrees with the experimental results. In particle physics-speak, the Higgs appears to have a mass of 125 GeV (gigaelectronvolts).
The upshot is that if this is proven, one of physics' bedrock theories -- the Standard Model -- is holding steady. If the Higgs does exist with this mass, then perhaps some more tricky Universal mysteries can be resolved.
If the insider-trading-like rumors are substantiated, the ATLAS detection has been measured to a 3.5-sigma certainty and the CMS result has been measured to a 2.5-sigma certainty. All these "sigmas" may not mean much, but they are a measure of the statistical certainty of a given result.
In an earlier Discovery News article Sean Carroll, senior research associate in the Department of Physics at Caltech, shed some light on what this means.
"Three-sigma events happen occasionally, especially when you look at a lot of data," he said. "But it could be real."
At 3.5-sigma, the ATLAS measurement has a 0.1 percent chance of being a "random fluke." The 2.5-sigma result has a 1 percent chance of being a fluke. With those odds, it's little wonder there's some excitement stirring. However, particle physicists are meticulous about their statistics before going public with any discovery.
"Three-sigma isn't seen as a 'discovery,' but it would be strong evidence for the existence of the Higgs," said Jon Butterworth, an LHC physicist working with the ATLAS detector. "Really, a 'five-sigma' is classed as a discovery. Five-sigma is the 'Gold Standard.'"
ANALYSIS: Higgs Boson Discovered? Not So Fast.
In an internal email, Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, attempted to manage the spiraling rumors:
"These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs."So, though exciting, the possible announcement on Tuesday will allude to the fact that CERN physicists are onto something, rather than any concrete evidence for the Higgs.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
New York City Filing: Heiress Signed Two Wills, One Leaves Nothing To Relatives
AP
Huguette Clark
A newly publicized will by an heiress to a Montana copper mining fortune leaves most of her $400 million estate to her family, while a will signed just weeks later left nothing to relatives.
The childless Huguette Clark died in May at age 104 -- a last breath of New York's Gilded Age that produced the Rockefellers, Astors and Vanderbilts.
Her relatives brought the new will to light on Monday: They filed court papers asking a Surrogate's Court judge to involve them in proceedings about how her money was spent -- and by whom -- while she was alive.
Clark's relatives accuse her co-executors, attorney Wallace Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler, of plundering her fortune. The two were among the few who for years had access to the reclusive Clark in her Manhattan hospital room. Clark had left her 42-room Manhattan home -- the largest residence on Fifth Avenue -- decades earlier, choosing to live undisturbed at the hospital.
A court-ordered accounting of the Paris-born heiress' finances as overseen by Bock and Kamsler in the last 15 years of her life is "a chilling report of the mishandling, misappropriation and mismanagement" of her assets, the relatives' lawyer, John R. Morken, wrote in papers filed Monday.
While Clark was confined to a hospital room, her spending amounted to about $1 million each month, Morken said, citing the figures.
Monday's filing included a will signed in March 2005, about six weeks before another will that Bock and Kamsler filed shortly after Clark's death.
The March 2005 will benefits 21 relatives on the side of Clark's father, U.S. Sen. William A. Clark, who represented Montana after building one of America's largest fortunes mining copper, building railroads and founding Las Vegas. Nevada's Clark County is named for him. His wealth vied with that of the Rockefellers.
A will signed in April 2005, by contrast, gives Clark's family nothing and leaves her money mainly to charity and her nurse.
Morken writes that beyond any financial interest, the relatives are concerned about their heritage -- and "that a very significant member of their family should have fallen victim, it appears, to the greed of persons who had put themselves in a position of trust with their great-aunt."
No criminal charges have been filed against Bock or Kamsler, and both have denied any wrongdoing in their dealings with Clark. Bock "always acted consistent with her wishes and carried them out to the letter," his lawyer, Robert J. Anello, said Monday.
Kamsler, his lawyer and an attorney for the Clark estate didn't immediately return phone calls Monday.
The Manhattan district attorney's office has been looking into how Clark's affairs were managed in the past two decades, people familiar with the probe have said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office did not immediately respond Monday to an inquiry about Clark.
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office also is keeping an eye on the Clark estate as part of its oversight role over estates and the execution of them.
It's not the first time the handling of Clark's finances -- and her life -- has come into question.
The April 2005 will showed she was leaving $34 million to her longtime private nurse and about $300 million to the arts. The fortune includes a prized Claude Monet water-lily painting not seen by the public since 1925; she gave it to Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art.
In that will, Clark left instructions for the creation of a foundation "for the primary purpose of fostering and promoting the arts" -- based at her 24-acre oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara, Calif., which would be converted into a museum. Bock and Kamsler would oversee the foundation; they also were left $500,000 apiece.
The Santa Barbara estate was where Clark spent her youth, but she had not been back since 1963, when her mother died.
Clark was married briefly in her 20s to a poor bank clerk studying law. They parted ways after only nine months.
After her mother's death, her once lively life amid New York's cultured world -- with forays to Europe -- became more solitary, and she rarely ventured from her Fifth Avenue home.
About six months before Clark's death, three of her relatives asked a Manhattan judge to appoint a guardian for her. Citing news reports and other information, they accused Bock and Kamsler of exercising "improper influence" over her and limiting family members' contact with her. But the state Supreme Court justice rebuffed the request, saying the relatives relied on hearsay and "speculative assertions" that she was incapacitated.
Clark died on May 24, more than a century after she was born in Paris to the 67-year-old U.S. senator and a 28-year-old Michigan woman.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
CherPumPle Lives!
Three layers of cake containing a cherry pie, a pumpkin pie and an apple pie. What more do you want from me? It’s a damn pastryception!
Greg Palast » Goldfinger eats Congo
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Goldfinger eats Congo
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!...
"Top funders of the Republican Party have demanded that two African nations pay them over half a billion dollars.... Is one of these vulture’s claims based on a stolen security, criminally transferred to an American financier called 'Goldfinger'?
Greg Palast, author of the new book, Vultures' Picnic, investigates for BBC Television and The Guardian."
Greg Palast reporting from Kinshasa, Congo; Sarajevo, Bosnia; and Brooklyn, New York
If God doesn't give a rat's ass about The Vulture, and what he does for a living, and what he's done for Africa, why should I?
The thought struck me while sitting here, coffee getting cold, in my old Toyota, trying to look invisible, staked out in front of 300 Dekalb Avenue. It's just after dawn here in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm hoping that Peter Grossman, a Wall Street star, will pop out of his posh brownstone for a jog or a cup of joe. Then I can jump him. He's on the look-out for me because I'd already jumped his crony, Goldfinger, the man who's making Grossman stunningly rich.
Grossman's riches, nearly $100 million for his firm, FG Management, come from the Congo. I was just there in Congo, two days before this stake-out, at a cholera quarantine center in the capital, Kinshasa.
Besides lots of cholera, Congo has lots of cobalt. Grossman has, through a crazy legal loophole in British law, waylaid a payment of $80 million to the African government for a shipment of cobalt from a government-owned mine.
Grossman is a "vulture," the name Wall Street gives, with an affectionate smile, to those who somehow can get their hands on old, forgotten debts of desperately poor nations––Congo, Zambia, Peru, and Liberia are cases I've investigated––which they pick up for pennies on the dollar of face value.
When ––usually after a Bono concert–– Western nations forgive debts owed by these poor countries, the nation receiving this aid is now ripe enough, and flush enough, for attack by the Vulture who demands many a pound of flesh for the debt he suddenly brandishes.
In Grossman's case, his company FG paid about $3 million for a debt Zaire (now Congo) owed Yugoslavia (now Bosnia). A court on the tiny island of Jersey, a tax haven in the English Channel, has ordered Congo to turn over the $80 million the African nation has in a bank account there, the payment for the cobalt. Furthermore, Congo must pay an additional $20 million to Grossman if the Africans can find it.
If that seems weird and nuts to you, it is. The United Kingdom and other nations bar collections by vultures against poor countries where Western government treasuries have agreed to give up their own claims. However, Vulture Grossman was free to pounce on Congo in Jersey, a pseudo-colony of Britain, because Britain's Parliament failed to include the magic words, "and Jersey" in its anti-Vulture law.
Question: How did Vulture Grossman get his hands on Congo's debt to Bosnia? That's what, while suppressing my need to urinate, I was waiting in the Brooklyn cold to ask him.
Here's what I can piece together: Only three days before I was in the Congo cholera clinic, I was in the office of the chief of financial police in Sarajevo, Bosnia. With master sleuth Drew Sullivan of the Sarajevo Center for Investigative Reporting, we tracked down the police report asserting that the nation's own prime minister had slipped control of the debt to one Michael Sheehan, a.k.a. Goldfinger who, for a fee, passed it from the Bosnia state power company to Grossman.
Goldfinger. We meet again. The Bond-movie Goldfinger is a Girl Scout compared to the real one. He's the man I discovered four years ago who paid off the President of Zambia to shaft his own nation out of its AIDS medicine money. The FBI and I have been discussing Goldfinger.
In Sarajevo, the Bosnian police chief told me the little hand-to-hand-to-hand business with the Congo debt was a crime, and the (now former) prime minister, a man named Nedzad Brankovic, should be in prison. The cops have written out the criminal complaint, but prosecutors have yet to touch the powerful politician.
I got to the man who blew the whistle on Brankovic, Brigadier-General Izet Spahic. He'd worked out a deal for the Bosnia power company (desperately broke) to make power pylons for the Congo (desperately broke). The project would generate electricity, clean water and profits for both countries.
It was quite a heart-warming story of two nations coming out of civil wars, with a combined total of four million dead, helping each other. But when it was discovered that the Vulture at 300 Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn had secretly seized control of the debt between the nations, the electricity deal was off.
I went by the Bosnia pylon-making factory. It was now shut and its several thousand workers gone. At least there's no cholera.
The Brigadier was furious. He asked me, how could these people think about making a profit off of civil war, poverty and unimaginable suffering?
Well, General, When do humans grow feathers and claws?
It's a question I'm going to ask Vulture Grossman when he comes out because the Guardian and BBC Newsnight want me to ask.
For myself, the Vulture's answer is inconsequential.
I assume that after we break our story, the British Parliament will move to close the loophole it so glaringly left open to the Vulture; and the US Congress will at least pretend to consider anti-vulture legislation now languishing in some committee.
But I think the focus on Grossman and his fellow carrion chewers is distracting. The destruction of Bosnia's power-pylon industry was the direct consequence of privatizing it, bringing the free market to socialist Yugoslavia and Brankovic to power, allowing him to buy and sell debt securities on the de-regulated world financial market.
It was the privatization of Congo's state cobalt mine and the looting of its riches, all at the behest of the World Bank, IMF and privateers, that drained Congo's treasury.
Grossman is just the re-po man, the latest of the financial carnivores who've bitten into Congo and Bosnia––and Greece and Detroit.
Grossman's vulture operation is just over the bridge from Occupied Wall Street, occupied at the bottom by protesters, "The 99%," and occupied at the top by The One Percent, those who kill economies for a profit.
It's easy to target Grossman. But Vultures can only feast when the system kills, when, for easy profits, economies are turned into rotting carcasses.
****
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released this week in the US and Canada by Penguin.
You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.
WBAI will launch Palast's new book in New York City on December 5. Get your tickets here.
Get info here on these tour cities:
Chicago - Nov 28 & 29
Madison - Nov 30
Albuquerque - Dec 1
Santa Fe - Dec 2
New York - Dec 5
Washington, DC - Dec 6
Houston - Dec 8
Baltimore - Dec 9
Burlington VT - Dec 12
Atlanta - Dec 15
***
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Woman ticketed in late-night vacuuming | NewsOK.com
Woman ticketed in late-night vacuuming
An Oklahoma City woman was cited on an excessive noise complaint after a neighbor called police and said she had been running her vacuum after midnight for more than an hour.
A late-night vacuuming session ended with a northwest Oklahoma City woman being cited for excessive noise, according to a police report.
Shelly Lea Armstrong, 42, was cited after her neighbor, Joe Wayne Green, 74, called police on Nov. 15 to report Armstrong had been running a vacuum cleaner in the apartment next door for about an hour after midnight.
According to the report, Armstrong was not using a vacuum when police arrived. Green signed a complaint against his neighbor and police presented Armstrong with a ticket. She was not arrested.
Neither Armstrong nor Green could be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Police said the fine for excessive noise typically is $167.
Massive Hydrovolcanic Explosion Inevitable at Fukushima - Infowars
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
November 22, 2011
On November 17, the architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, was interviewed in Japan. He warned that a “China Syndrome” situation is inevitable at the plant.
Haruo said that considering eight months have passed since the tsunami and the crippling of the nuclear plant without any improvement in the condition of the reactors, it is likely melted fuel has escaped the container vessel and is now burning through the earth.
On September 20, 2011, Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, estimated that material from the nuclear fuel rods may be twelve meters deep underground at reactors one and three.
Haruo said debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean. On November 15, tons of radioactive debris reached the Marshall Islands.
If the fuel reaches an underground water source, Haruo explained, it will result in the contamination of water, soil and the sea. More catastrophic, underground super-heated water will ultimately create a massive hydrovolcanic explosion.
Although media in Japan and the alternative media have covered this story over the last few days, it has been uniformly ignored by the corporate media.
Fukushima is no longer news worthy. Instead, the corporate media has turned its attention to Rob Kardashian and Dancing with the Stars and the other major distraction that is likely to persist through the holidays, the re-opened 30 year old murder investigation of actress Natalie Wood.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
25 Worst Internet Passwords
If “password” is your password, chances are you’ve been the victim of a hack attack.
“Password” is the least successful, according to SplashData’s annual list of worst Internet passwords.
The list, notes Mashable.com, is somewhat predictable. Sequences of adjacent numbers or letters on the keyboard, such as “qwerty” and “123456,” and popular names, such as “ashley” and “michael,” all are common choices. Other common choices, such as “monkey” and “shadow,” are harder to explain.
As some websites have begun to require passwords to include both numbers and letters, it makes sense varied choices, such as “abc123″ and “trustno1,” have become popular choices.
SplashData created the rankings based on millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers. Here is the complete list:
- 1. password
- 2. 123456
- 3.12345678
- 4. qwerty
- 5. abc123
- 6. monkey
- 7. 1234567
- 8. letmein
- 9. trustno1
- 10. dragon
- 11. baseball
- 12. 111111
- 13. iloveyou
- 14. master
- 15. sunshine
- 16. ashley
- 17. bailey
- 18. passw0rd
- 19. shadow
- 20. 123123
- 21. 654321
- 22. superman
- 23. qazwsx
- 24. michael
- 25. football
SplashData CEO Morgan Slain urges businesses and consumers using any password on the list to change them immediately.
“Hackers can easily break into many accounts just by repeatedly trying common passwords,” Slain says. “Even though people are encouraged to select secure, strong passwords, many people continue to choose weak, easy-to-guess ones, placing themselves at risk from fraud and identity theft.”
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Swearing Baby Doll? Listen and Decide for Yourself
Swearing Baby Doll? Listen and Decide for Yourself
Updated: Friday, 18 Nov 2011, 9:50 PM MST
Published : Friday, 18 Nov 2011, 9:49 PM MSTPHOENIX - It may be on the top of Christmas wishlists this year -- talking triplet dolls. But one of those triplets may need to get her mouth washed out with soap!
Well a cute little doll is making some noise -- the kind that's raising more than a few eyebrows.
The You and Me Play and Giggle Triplets are a hot toy item of the 2011 holiday season but most of the attention they’re getting has to do with their best feature -- their ability to talk.
We heard that one of the triplets has a potty mouth, so we bought one and took it to other shoppers to see what they thought.
“It just said how you doing witch!”
“It sounded like witch with a b to me!”
“Don’t know if that’s what I was supposed to hear but that’s what I heard.”
“Yeah something that rhymes with witch.”Swearing Baby Doll? Listen and Decide for Yourself: MyFoxPHOENIX.com
In a statement, Toys R Us claims what you're hearing is not swearing, it's baby babble.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Bullet strikes White House window - CNN.com
updated 11:49 AM EST, Wed November 16, 2011Bullets are believed to have hit the exterior window on the south side of the White House on Friday.
Washington (CNN) -- The Secret Service is looking into whether a bullet fired into a window at the White House is connected to a shooting nearby last Friday.STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- No specific concern for the president's safety, a Secret Service official says
- The man being sought had a "direction of interest" toward the president, a law enforcement official says
- The bullets were found on the south side of the White House
- A bullet pierced the historic glass and was stopped by ballistic glass
The bullet was stopped by a bullet-proof window and did not enter the White House, the Secret Service said Wednesday. Authorities also found another round in the exterior of the White House. The bullets were found Tuesday, the Secret Service said.
"A round was stopped by ballistic glass behind the historic exterior glass. One additional round has been found on the exterior of the White House. This damage has not been conclusively connected to Friday's incident, and an assessment of the exterior of the White House is ongoing," a Secret Service statement said.
There is no specific concern for President Barack Obama's safety, a Secret Service official not authorized to speak on the record told CNN.
The bullets were found on the south side of the White House, the official told CNN.
Last Friday night at about 9 p.m., U.S. Park Police and the Secret Service investigated after hearing shots fired about 700 to 800 yards from the White House, the Secret Service statement said.
Within five minutes, officers located a vehicle in the 2300 block of Constitution Avenue. Evidence in the vehicle led to U.S. Park Police obtaining an arrest warrant for Oscar Ortega-Hernandez," described as a 21-year-old Hispanic male, 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds.
A weapon registered to Ortega-Hernandez was found in the car, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.
The Secret Service interviewed people who know Ortega-Hernandez, and determined he had a "direction of interest toward the president and the White House" -- a term that does not suggest a direct specific threat.
Authorities are searching for Ortega-Hernandez, with the FBI, ATF and Metropolitan Police Department all taking part, officials said.
"There's always an outer perimeter and this was on the very outer perimeter of our security," the Secret Service official said. "The gun and car were found within several minutes. We have a lot of security -- a lot of layered security down there and the security worked."
The law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said when shots were heard Friday night, there were reports of tires screeching and cars racing.
CNN's Carol Cratty, Athena Jones and John King contributed to this report.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Why the Milky Way May Be Facing a Midlife Crisis - Yahoo! News
Our Milky Way galaxy and its neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, seem to be going through a midlife crisis.
New research reveals that both galaxies are in the middle of transitioning from young, star-forming regions into older, stagnant ones, a transition that is revealed by the galaxies' color. Generally, such a change comes after two galaxies collide, astronomers said, but this pair seems to be making the shift on its own.
In galaxies, star formation rates and color are closely related. But, analyses of the shade of the Milky Way are surprisingly rare.
A team of Australian astronomers, led by Simon Mutch, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, sought to determine the color the Milky Way and the nearby spiral Andromeda galaxy. [Stunning Photos of Galaxy Collisions]
Too young to feel this old
Instead of the young, active signs they expected, the astronomers determined that both galaxies are not the typical blue or red color, but instead, fall in an in-between state of green.
Scientists have long regarded the Milky Way as a "typical" spiral galaxy, but in regards to color, the galaxy doesn't quite follow the standard model.
"Green galaxies are commonly thought to represent galaxies which are undergoing the transition from being young, dynamic, energetic, star-forming blue galaxies to being old, lethargic red galaxies," Mutch told SPACE.com in an email interview.
"In terms of a human being, this transitional phase could be thought of being akin to a midlife crisis."
Astronomers can't figure out the color of the Milky Way easily by examining it from the inside, because the position of the sun within the galaxy makes it a challenge.
"Determining the state of our own galaxy, while we're stuck inside it, is very difficult to do," Mutch said. "The phrase 'hard to see the forest for the trees' rings true here. When we look at the galaxy, much of it is obscured from our view by intervening gas and dust."
Viewing the Milky Way from the outside
To peek inside, Mutch and his team studied the mass of stars, the rate of star formation and the brightness and color of the stars within the two galaxies. These measurements provide a snapshot of the galactic pair.
The astronomers then modeled how galaxies grow, selecting an evolutionary track that fulfilled several of the properties of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies today.
Now, instead of looking at the galaxy from the inside, the team was able to get a glimpse from the outside instead, which gave them a clear view of the color.
Star formation dominates in blue galaxies, where the glow of young stars gives a galaxy its shine. As the stars die, they explode in supernova blasts that distribute gas throughout the galaxy, which is then recycled into newborn stars.
But galaxies aren't sitting quietly; they are constantly moving in the expanding universe. When galaxies collide, gas flows into the black hole at the newly merged center.
The resulting active galactic nucleus, or AGN, is among the brightest radio signals in the universe, and can be seen across great distances. Because it consumes the gas that baby stars need, the AGN slows star formation, and the galaxy loses its blue hue and gradually shifts to red, the astronomers said.
What caused the midlife crisis?
But the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are shifting from blue to red without a collision, which was a surprising discovery, the researchers explained.
Since they are already slowing down, when they crash into each other in the future, the collision most likely won't generate a new powerhouse.
"Our finding that both the Milky Way and Andromeda are green suggests that there will be little cold gas left in both these galaxies when they merge sometime in the next 5 billion years or so," Mutch said. "They will likely be unable to produce an AGN."
So, why is the Milky Way running out of dust? Mutch isn't sure.
Sometimes black holes will inject large amounts of energy into the surrounding region, Mutch explained. This keeps new gas from being accreted.
"However, we know from observations that the central black hole of our galaxy is not particularly active," Mutch said.
The new color "provides us with an interesting open question as to what exactly is causing the Milky Way and Andromeda to be running out of fuel for producing new stars."
Details of the study were published in the July edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Scientists find two 'sunken islands' off WA - part of Gondwana land link | Perth Now
Narelle Towie Science Reporter
MYSTERIOUS: An image of one of the sunken islands. Source: PerthNowSCIENTISTS have discovered two huge sunken islands in the Indian Ocean west of Perth.The islands, about the size of Tasmania, were once part of the supercontinent Gondwana and are more than 1.5km underwater.
Researchers from the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Tasmania say the islands were once above water and formed part of the last link between India and Australia.
They made the discovery while mapping the seafloor of the Perth Abyssal Plain.
“The data collected on the voyage could significantly change our understanding of the way in which India, Australia and Antarctica broke off from Gondwana,” University of Sydney geologist Dr Joanne Whittaker said.
The scientists returned to Perth last week after carrying out the complicated task of dredging up hundreds of kilograms of rock samples from the steep slopes of the two islands during a three-week expedition aboard CSIRO vessel Southern Surveyor.
We expected to see common oceanic rocks such as basalt in the dredge, but were surprised to see continental rocks such as granite, gneiss and sandstone containing fossils,” University of Sydney’s chief expedition scientist Dr Simon Williams said.
“A detailed analysis of the rocks dredged up during the voyage will tell us about their age and how they fit into the Gondwana jigsaw.”
The islands, called ‘micro-continents’, were formed when India began to move away from Australia, about 130 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
They became stranded thousands of kilometres from either coast as the land masses separated, the scientists say.
“The sunken islands charted during the expedition have flat tops, which indicates they were once at sea level before being gradually submerged,” Dr Whittaker said.
“Our preliminary analysis of the magnetic data that we collected could cause us to rethink the plate tectonic story for the whole of the Eastern Indian Ocean,” she said.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Canada eyes Asia after U.S. delays Keystone project | Reuters
Demonstrators carry a giant mock pipeline while calling for the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline during a rally in front of the White House in Washington November 6, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts
HONOLULU |
HONOLULU (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Sunday his country will make a bigger push to sell its energy products to Asia after Washington delayed a decision to approve the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline project.
"This does underscore the necessity of Canada making sure that we are able to access Asia markets for our energy products," Harper told reporters on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
"That will be an important priority of our government going forward and I indicated that yesterday to the president of China."
The Obama administration recently announced it would study a possible new route for TransCanada Corp's proposed $7 billion pipeline, which could end up killing the project.
Harper reiterated the Canadian government's disappointment and said he remained optimistic the United States would eventually give it the green light.
"It's important to note there has been extremely negative reaction to this decision in the United States," Harper said ahead of a one-on-one meeting with President Barack Obama.
(Reporting by Rachelle Younglai; Editing by John O'Callaghan)
Radiation in Europe: UN nuclear agency mystified by soaring levels | Mail Online
Very low levels of radioactive iodine-131 have been detected throughout Europe, but the particles are not believed to pose a public health risk, the U.N.nuclear agency said on Friday.
NASA have released images of 2,400 stars, known as the Tarantula Nebula, that are producing intense radiation and powerful winds, believed to be the cause for the detection in the atmosphere
Closer look: Known as the Tarantula Nebula, these stars have produced intense radiation say NASA
Outbreak: Unusual levels of iodine-131 have been detected in the Czech Republic and northern Germany
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Vienna-based U.N. watchdog, said it did not believe the radioactive particles were from Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant after its emergency in March.
Professor Malcolm Sperrin, director of medical physics at Britain's Royal Berkshire Hospital, said any link with Fukushima was extremely unlikely.
'It is far more likely that the iodine may be as a result of excretion by patients undergoing medical treatment.
'Whilst such patients are carefully controlled, some release of iodine into the environment may be inevitable but would certainly be well below any limits where health detriment would even begin to be an issue for concern," he said.
Blameless: The Fukushima explosion is not believed to be the root cause for the increase in iodine-131 levels
The Czech Republic's nuclear security watchdog said it had tipped off the IAEA after detecting the radiation it thought was coming from abroad but not from a nuclear power plant. It suggested it may come from production of radiopharmaceuticals.
Germany's Environment Ministry said slightly higher levels of radioactive iodine had been measured in the north of the country, ruling out that it came from a nuclear power plant.
Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Sweden also reported traces at very low levels that did not pose a health risk.
Experts said the origin of the radiation - which has been spreading for about two weeks - remained a mystery but could come from many possible sources ranging from medical laboratories or hospitals to nuclear submarines.
Iodine-131, linked to cancer if found in high doses, can contaminate products such as milk and vegetables.
Paddy Regan, a professor of nuclear physics at Britain's University of Surrey, said the suggestion that it may have leaked from a radiopharmaceuticals maker 'sounds very sensible and totally reasonable.'
He said since iodine was used in the treatment of thyroid conditions it was also likely that hospitals in many European countries would have it in their stores.
'It would be very unlikely for it to have come from Fukushima since the accident was so many months ago and iodine-131 has a brief half-life,' he said.
Iodine-131 is a short-lived radioisotope that has a radioactive decay half-life of about eight days, the IAEA said.
Massimo Sepielli, head of the nuclear fission unit of Italy's national alternative energy body ENEA said any number of sources could be to blame for the readings.
'It could be coming from the transporting of (nuclear) material, it could come from a hospital ... it could even come from a nuclear submarine, even if it's a more complicated possibility ... but you can't rule that out.'
Officials in Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Finland, France, Britain, Switzerland, Poland and Norway said they had not detected any abnormal radiation levels. Romania's watchdog said there had been no incident at the country's sole nuclear plant.
Austria's Environment Ministry said small levels were measured in the east and north of the Alpine country, saying the estimated dose level for the population was one 40,000th of the dose of radiation received in a transatlantic flight.
In the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986, an earthquake followed by a massive tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima plant in Japan, causing a reactor meltdown and leakage of radiation, including of iodine.
In the days and weeks after the accident, tiny amounts of iodine-131 believed to have come from Fukushima were detected as far away as Iceland and other parts of Europe, as well as in the United States.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Duqu Trojan revealed to be shape-shifting killer - Technology & science - Security
Embedded in the code are humorous references to the Showtime show 'Dexter'
By Paul Wagenseil
Security analysts have found more mysterious but fascinating details in the Duqu Trojan, the so-called "son of Stuxnet" discovered just two months ago.
Moscow's Kaspersky Lab got hold of a different variant of Duqu than the original, and found that the Trojan's creators not only may have been working on Duqu since 2007, but seem to have a sense of humor as well.
According to Kaspersky's Alexander Gostev, the Duqu infection vector is customized for each target, and its code contains a joking reference to "Dexter," the long-running Showtime TV series about a morally ambiguous serial killer.
Kaspersky analyzed a spear-phishing email directed at an undisclosed company, which was attacked by Duqu twice in mid-April of this year but did not realize what hit it until recently.
As with the earlier version of Duqu found in September by Hungary's CrySyS lab, the Kaspersky variant used a "dropper" — a separate piece of malware — to burrow into PCs via a font embedded in a Word document. (The Windows vulnerability, which had not previously been known of, has not yet been patched, but there is a workaround.)
The fictitious font is named "Dexter Regular." Buried in the dropper code is the text string, "Copyright 2003 Showtime Inc. All rights reserved. Dexter Regular version 1.00. Dexter is a registered trademark of Showtime Inc." ("Dexter" actually was first broadcast in 2006. None of this implies that Showtime is behind the Duqu Trojan.)
The next step in the Duqu infection pattern is to load a driver into the Windows kernel. Kaspersky found that its driver was compiled in August 2007, while the one found by Crysys was dated March 2008.
"If this information is correct, then the authors of Duqu must have been working on this project for over four years!" Gostev wrote.
If that's true, then Duqu, dubbed the "son of Stuxnet" because of its startling similarity to the military-grade worm that infected and disrupted Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010, may actually be the father of the more famous bug.
There's another Iranian connection as well, according to Gostev. The April attacks on the unnamed company took place just before Iran announced that it had been attacked by a second piece of malware, which Iranian researchers called the "Stars" worm.
Unfortunately, Iran never shared samples of the Stars worm, which led some in the West to suspect it was mere propaganda from the Islamic Republic. (Samples of Stuxnet were distributed worldwide because an Iranian security researcher emailed a copy to a former colleague in the Ukraine.)
But Gostev thinks the Iranians might have found Duqu without realizing it.
"Most probably, the Iranians found a keylogger module that had been loaded onto a system," he wrote. "It's possible that the Iranian specialists found just the keylogger, while the main Duqu module and the dropper (including the documents that contained the then-unknown vulnerability) may have gone undetected."
Perhaps most ominously, there are enough differences among the known variants of Duqu to lead Gostev to suspect that the Trojan's creators are carefully tailoring the malware package for each specific target as needed, if the compilation dates on the main Trojan component are accurate.
"This fact shows that the authors build a separate set of files for each specific victim, and do so right before the attack," Gostev wrote.
Such fine-tuning would make Duqu and its creators more sophisticated and persistent that the so-called "advanced persistent threat" attacks — widely assumed to be coming from China — that have penetrated Western companies over the past few years.
In those cases, spear-phishing emails also provide the infection vector, but the installed malware does not vary from one target to the next.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Kidnapped ballplayer Ramos found alive in Venezuela | Reuters
People stand outside the family house of kidnapped baseball player Wilson Ramos in Valencia November 10, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Eduardo Hernandez
CARACAS |
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan security forces found kidnapped Major League baseball player Wilson Ramos alive on Friday in mountains near where he was seized, Information Minister Andres Izarra said.
"Baseball player Ramos was found alive by security forces in mountainous area of Montalban, Carabobo state," Izarra said on Twitter.
There were few other details immediately available.
The 24-year-old Washington Nationals catcher was abducted by armed men on Wednesday night while he chatted with friends and relatives at his mother's home in the city of Valencia.
He had been due to play for the local Aragua Tigers during the U.S. off-season.
Kidnappings, armed robberies and murders are common in Venezuela, where worries about personal security routinely top surveys of voters' concerns before a presidential election next October.
Ramos' case particularly shocked this baseball-mad nation, putting huge pressure on the authorities to find him. He is one of the many players from Venezuela who have found stardom and wealth playing baseball in the United States.
Ramos is considered one of the more highly regarded catching prospects in baseball. He had a .267 batting average with 15 home runs and 52 runs batted in for the Nationals during the 2011 season, his first in the major leagues.
(Additional reporting by Mario Naranjo; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Motorcycle Powered by Sewage, Has Toilet for Seat | NBC Los Angeles
Seat is a toilet. Seriously.
By Greg Wilson
| Friday, Nov 11, 2011 | Updated 10:21 AM PST
A new motorcycle that has a toilet for a seat and runs on sewage just completed a 600-mile trek across Japan.The three-wheeled vehicle, developed by Japanese toilet maker Toto, features a toilet for a seat and has a giant roll of toilet paper mounted on the back that flutters in the breeze as the bike cruises along.
The eco-friendly, three-wheel Neo runs on biogas produced from sewage and was built by Japanese toilet maker Toto. It has a (non-working) toilet for a seat and a giant roll of toilet paper mounted on the back.
While the bike is not for sale and not designed for mass production, Toto hopes it will promote um, renewable energy. The bike's fuel is produced from a combination of household and livestock waste, broken down and fermented, company spokesman Kenji Fujita said. "Although the seat of the bike is indeed a toilet, it is not for actual use," Fujita told Reuters. "The fuel is eco-friendly biogas, stored in the tanks on the back."
"It's a surprisingly nice way to travel."
The motorcycle can reach 45 miles per hour.
Ichie Tanaka, one of six people who rode the Neo across Japan during the three-week tour, said she was relieved the journey was over. "At first when I saw the bike, I was taken aback. But after riding it, I found it quite interesting," she said. "It doesn't hurt at all and is actually quite comfortable to sit on."
PBS story on Safecast
Earlier this year Miles O’Brien and Xeni Jardin joined us in Japan to learn a bit about Safecast and joined us on a trip through Fukushima – I blogged about the day when it happened. They were working on a piece for PBS which aired in the US tonight. The full segment is viewable above, and the transcript is available here. There is also a accessory story about some of the abandoned pets we saw on the trip. These are fantastic pieces that really capture what we’re trying to do with Safecast.
Also, here’s a related piece where Miles tells Hari Sreenivasan a bit about Safecast’s hacker roots.
Super Strong 'Mighty Mouse' Created By Swiss Scientists | Wild Nature - Scitech
LAUSANNE, Switzerland – Swiss scientists created super-strong mice, with muscles twice as strong as those of normal mice, by tweaking a gene.
The "Mighty Mouse" is stronger, faster and can run twice the distance of ordinary mice before showing signs of fatigue, according to a team of scientists from the Laboratory of Integrative Systems Physiology, in Lausanne.
The team, working in collaboration with scientists from the University of Lausanne and California's Salk Institute, created the super mice by reducing the function of a natural inhibitor -- called NCoR1 -- which they believe may be responsible for how strong and powerful muscles can be.
Without the inhibitor, the muscle tissue developed much more effectively, according to the study, published in the journal Cell. Similar results also were observed in worms.
If scientists can replicate the effect in humans, they may be able to use the technique to successfully treat age-related or genetically-caused muscle degeneration.
"This could be used to combat muscle weakness in the elderly, which leads to falls and contributes to hospitalizations," researcher Johan Auwerx said. "In addition, we think that this could be used as a basis for developing a treatment for genetic muscular dystrophy."
However, if the results are confirmed in humans, the scientists warned that it may also attract interest from athletes.
"It will be important for anti-doping authorities to monitor that these treatments are not used in an unauthorized manner," Auwerx added.