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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Those Crazy Russians Use Retrorockets to Slow Down Tanks Dropped From Planes [Video]
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Texas mom shoots self, kids after welfare standoff
LAREDO, Texas (AP) ? A mother who had been denied welfare benefits killed herself and shot her two children after a seven-hour standoff at a government social services office, police said.
The children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, were in critical condition Tuesday, Laredo police investigator Joe Baeza said.
The standoff began around 5 p.m. Monday afternoon. Baeza said the woman was speaking with two employees when she pulled out a gun and said she wanted to speak to a supervisor. When the supervisor arrived, he convinced her to let the employees go in exchange for keeping him.
Meanwhile, about 25 other people were moved to safety, police said.
Police negotiators stayed on the phone with the woman throughout the evening, but she kept hanging up. She let the supervisor go unharmed around 7:45, but stayed inside the office with her children. After hanging up the phone around 11:45, police heard three shots, and a SWAT team entered the building. Inside, they found her body and her two wounded children.
The 38-year-old woman had recently moved to the area from Zanesville, Ohio, about 30 miles east of Columbus, Baeza said. She told negotiators about a litany of complaints against state and federal government agencies. It sounded like she had been denied services several months ago, Baeza said, but it wasn't clear what specifically triggered Monday's standoff.
"This wasn't like a knee-jerk reaction," Baeza said, adding that the woman felt she was owed restitution of some sort.
A spokeswoman for the state's welfare agency did not immediately return a call Tuesday seeking comment.
The children were "very critical" and unconscious when taken from the scene, he said. Their names, along with the name of the woman, were not released by police.
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Russia's ruling party wary as nation votes
Russian soldiers stand in line at a polling station in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011. Russians cast their ballots with muted enthusiasm in national parliamentary elections Sunday, a vote that opinion polls indicate could water down the strength of the party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, despite the government's relentless marginalization of opposition groups. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)
Russian soldiers stand in line at a polling station in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011. Russians cast their ballots with muted enthusiasm in national parliamentary elections Sunday, a vote that opinion polls indicate could water down the strength of the party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, despite the government's relentless marginalization of opposition groups. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, left, signs autographs while visiting a shipbuilding plant in St. Petersburg, Russia, Friday, Dec. 2, 2011. (AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Yana Lapikova, Pool)
An election commission official prepares a voting booth adorned with the coat of arms of the Russian state, left, and of the Smolensk region, right, at a polling station in the village of Kozlovka, 380 kilometers (236 miles) west of Moscow, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011. A parliamentary election will be held in Russia on Sunday. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
An election commission official prepares a voting booth adorned with the coat of arms of the Russian state, right, and of the Smolensk region, left, at a polling station in the village of Kozlovka, 380 kilometers (236 miles) west of Moscow, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011. A parliamentary election will be held in Russia on Sunday. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
An election commission official prepares a voting booth adorned with the coat of arms of the Russian state, right, and of the Smolensk region, left, at a polling station in the village of Kozlovka, 380 kilometers (236 miles) west of Moscow, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011. A parliamentary election will be held in Russia on Sunday. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
MOSCOW (AP) ? Russians cast their ballots with muted enthusiasm in national parliamentary elections Sunday, a vote that opinion polls indicate could water down the strength of the party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, despite the government's relentless marginalization of opposition groups.
Although Putin and his United Russia party have dominated Russian politics for more than a decade, popular discontent appears to be growing with Putin's strongman style, widespread corruption among officials and the gap between ordinary Russians and the country's floridly super-rich.
United Russia holds a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. But a survey last month by the independent Levada Center polling agency indicated the party could get only about 53 percent of the vote in this election, depriving it of the number of seats necessary to change the constitution unchallenged.
Putin wants United Russia to do well in the parliamentary election to help pave the way for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away.
He has warned that a parliament with a wide array of parties would lead to political instability and claiming that Western governments want to undermine the election. A Western-funded election-monitoring group has come under strong official pressure and its Web site was incapacitated by hackers on Sunday.
Only seven parties have been allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups have been denied registration and barred from campaigning.
The Communist Party and the liberal Yabloko party complained Sunday of extensive election violations aimed at boosting United Russia's vote count, including party observers being hindered in their work.
In Vladivostok, voters complained to police that United Russia was offering free food in exchange for promises to vote for the party. In St. Petersburg, an Associated Press photographer saw a United Russia emblem affixed to the curtains on a voting booth.
Golos, the country's only independent election-monitoring group, said that in the Volga River city of Samara observers and election commission members from opposition parties had been barred from verifying that the ballot boxes were properly sealed at all polling stations.
Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister when Putin was president, said he and other opposition activists who voted Sunday are under no illusion that their votes will be counted fairly.
"It is absolutely clear there will be no real count," he said. "The authorities created an imitation of a very important institution whose name is free election, that is not free and is not elections."
United Russia's dominance of politics has induced a grudging sense of impotence among many in the country of 143 million. In Vladivostok, voter Artysh Munzuk noted the contrast between the desire to do one's civic duty and the feeling that it doesn't matter.
"It's very important to come to the polling stations and vote, but many say that it's useless," said the 20-year-old university student.
There are around 110 million eligible voters in Russia and turnout in many areas appeared low Sunday. In the Pacific Coast regions of Sakhalin and Kamchatka, turnout was just 45 to 48 percent with two hours to go until the polls closed.
Turnout in some regions appeared high, however. An AP reporter saw a polling station in Moscow's southwest filled with voters, including an unusually high number of young people compared to the previous election.
Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev made final appeals for their party Friday, the last day of campaigning, warning that a parliament made up of diverse political camps would be incapable of making decisions.
The view underlines Russian authorities' continuing discomfort with political pluralism and preference for top-down operation.
As president in 2000-2008, Putin's autocratic leadership style won wide support among Russians exhausted by a decade of post-Soviet uncertainty. But United Russia has become increasingly disliked, seen as stifling opposition, representing a corrupt bureaucracy and often called "the party of crooks and thieves."
A few dozen activists of the Left Front opposition group tried to stage an unsanctioned protest just outside the Red Square on Sunday, but were quickly dispersed by police, who detained about a dozen of them.
In the western city of Bryansk, an unidentified assailant threw a firebomb into the window of the local United Russia's office. No one was hurt and the fire was quickly extinguished, according to local police.
An interim report from an elections-monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted that "most parties have expressed a lack of trust in the fairness of the electoral process."
The websites of Golos and Ekho Moskvy, a prominent, independent-minded radio station were down on Sunday. Both claimed the failures were due to denial-of-service hacker attacks.
"The attack on the site on election day is obviously connected to attempts to interfere with publication of information about violations," Ekho Moskvy editor Alexey Venediktov said in a Twitter post.
Golos has come under strong pressure in the week leading up to the vote.
Its leader, Lilya Shibanova, was held at a Moscow airport for 12 hours upon her Friday return from Poland after refusing to give her laptop computer to security officers, said Golos' deputy director Grigory Melkonyants. On Friday, the group was fined the equivalent of $1,000 by a Moscow court for violating a law that prohibits publication of election opinion research for five days before a vote.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle said in his blog that he called the Golos head Saturday "to express my support for the work they have been doing, and convey the concern of the White House about the pressure they have been experiencing over the last week."
Putin last Sunday accused Western governments of trying to influence the election. Golos is funded by grants from the United States and Europe.
The group has compiled some 5,300 complaints of election-law violations ahead of the vote. Most are linked to United Russia. Roughly a third of the complainants ? mostly government employees and students ? say employers and professors are pressuring them to vote for the party.
____
Lynn Berry and Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed to this report.
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Monday, December 5, 2011
Instant nanodots grow on silicon to form sensing array
ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2011) ? Scientists have shown that it is now possible to simultaneously create highly reproductive three-dimensional silicon oxide nanodots on micrometric scale silicon films in only a few seconds. Xavier Landreau and his colleagues at the University of Limoges, France, demonstrated in their paper to be published in EPJD? that they were able to create a square array of such nanodots, using regularly spaced nanoindents on the deposition layer, that could ultimately find applications as biosensors for genomics or bio-diagnostics.
They used a process called atmospheric pressure plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition. This approach is a much faster alternative to methods such as nanoscale lithography, which only permits the deposition of one nanodot at a time. It also improves upon other silicon oxide growth processes that do not make it possible to precisely order the nanodots into an array. In addition, it can be carried out at atmospheric pressure, which decreases its costs compared to low-pressure deposition processes.One of the authors' goals was to understand the self-organization mechanisms leading to a preferential deposition of the nanodots in the indents.
By varying the indents' interspacing, they made it comparable to the average distance travelled by the silicon oxide particles of the deposited material. Thus, by adapting both the indents' spacing and the silicon substrate temperature, they observed optimum self-ordering inside the indents using atomic force microscopy.The next step in their research will be to investigate how such nanoarrays could be used as nanosensors. They plan to develop similar square arrays on metallic substrates in order to better control the driving forces that produce the highly ordered self-organisation of nanodots. Further research will be needed to give sensing ability to individual nanodots by associating them with probe molecules designed to recognise target molecules to be detected.
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Journal Reference:
- X. Landreau, B. Lanfant, T. Merle, E. Laborde, C. Dublanche-Tixier, P. Tristant. Ordering of SiOxHyCz islands deposited by atmospheric pressure microwave plasma torch on Si(100) substrates patterned by nanoindentation. The European Physical Journal D, 2011; DOI: 10.1140/epjd/e2011-20503-7
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/FsJe2ej4DbM/111202155523.htm
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
Stretchable Cables, Designed for Robots, Handy for Humans
If you ever yanked a power cable towards an outlet only to have it pull up a couple inches short, you’re going to love this stretchable cable from Asahi Kasei Fibers.
The wiring is called Roboden, and like the best of Japanese innovation it was designed for humanoid robots. According to the boffins behind the cable, [...]
The wiring is called Roboden, and like the best of Japanese innovation it was designed for humanoid robots. According to the boffins behind the cable, [...]
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/TqLZG9MA6CE/
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VW Chattanooga plant gets green award (Reuters)
(Reuters) ? Volkswagen AG's new assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is the first auto plant to receive the top environmental award from the U.S. Green Building Council, the company said on Thursday.
Frank Fischer, chief executive and chairman of Volkswagen Chattanooga, said that being green saves VW money on energy and water costs.
The plant's paint shop alone will save 50 million gallons of water over 10 years, VW said.
The plant makes the Passat sedan. VW reported November U.S. sales of about 6,000 of the cars, up from only about 300 a year earlier. The new Passat took the place of a sedan imported from Germany.
Volkswagen's November U.S. sales rose 41 percent to about 28,400 vehicles. VW was ninth among automakers in U.S. sales through October, up from 10th in 2010.
The Chattanooga plant uses power from a local hydroelectric dam, and insulation of its walls will save 720,000 kilowatts per year on power, VW said.
The U.S. Green Building Council awarded the plant its highest rating, a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building certification.
The German automaker's only U.S. auto plant opened a half year ago on reclaimed land that was once a U.S. Army munitions depot and factory. Much of the land on which the plant is located was maintained in its natural state, including creeks that run through it.
(Reporting by Bernie Woodall in Detroit; editing by John Wallace)
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Candy, cash ? al-Qaida implants itself in Africa (AP)
SOKOLO, Mali ? The first time the members of al-Qaida emerged from the forest, they politely said hello. Then the men carrying automatic weapons asked the frightened villagers if they could please take water from the well.
Before leaving, they rolled down the windows of their pickup truck and called over the children to give them chocolate.
That was 18 months ago, and since then, the bearded men in tunics like those worn by Osama bin Laden have returned for water every week. Each time they go to lengths to exchange greetings, ask for permission and act neighborly, according to locals, in the first intimate look at how al-Qaida tries to win over a village.
Besides candy, the men hand out cash. If a child is born, they bring baby clothes. If someone is ill, they prescribe medicine. When a boy was hospitalized, they dropped off plates of food and picked up the tab.
With almost no resistance, al-Qaida has implanted itself in Africa's soft tissue, choosing as its host one of the poorest nations on earth. The terrorist group has create a refuge in this remote land through a strategy of winning hearts and minds, described in rare detail by seven locals in regular contact with the cell. The villagers agreed to speak for the first time to an Associated Press team in the "red zone," deemed by most embassies to be too dangerous for foreigners to visit.
While al-Qaida's central command is in disarray and its leaders on the run following bin Laden's death six months ago, security experts say, the group's 5-year-old branch in Africa is flourishing. From bases like the one in the forest just north of here, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is infiltrating local communities, recruiting fighters, running training camps and planning suicide attacks, according to diplomats and government officials.
Even as the mother franchise struggles financially, its African offshoot has raised an estimated $130 million in under a decade by kidnapping at least 50 Westerners in neighboring countries and holding them in camps in Mali for ransom. It has tripled in size from 100 combatants in 2006 to at least 300 today, say security experts. And its growing footprint, once limited to Algeria, now stretches from one end of the Sahara desert to the other, from Mauritania in the west to Mali in the east.
The group's stated aim is to become a player in global jihad, and suspected collaborators have been arrested throughout Europe, including in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, England and France. In September, the general responsible for U.S. military operations in Africa, Army Gen. Carter Ham, said AQIM now also poses a "significant threat" to the United States.
The answer to why the group has thrived can be found in this speck of a town, where homes are made of mud mixed with straw and families eke out a living either in the fields of rice to the south or in the immense forest of short, stout trees to its north.
It's here, under a canopy stretching over an area three times larger than the city of New York, that Sokolo's herders take their cattle. They avoid overgrazing by organizing themselves into eight units linked to each of the eight wells, labeled N1 through N8, along the 50-mile-long perimeter of the Wagadou forest. They pay $5 per year per head of cattle, and $3 per head of sheep, for the right to water their animals.
When the al-Qaida fighters showed up about 1 1/2 years ago with four to five jerrycans and asked for water, they signaled that they did not intend to plunder resources. They stood out in their tunics stopping a little below the knees, small turbans and beards, a foreign style of dress associated with the Gulf states and bin Laden.
"From the moment you lay eyes on them, you know that they're not Malian," said 45-year-old herder Amadou Maiga.
They started to come every four or five days in Land Cruisers, with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. At first they stayed for no more than 15 to 20 minutes, said the villagers, including herders, a hunter and employees of the Malian Ministry of Husbandry who travel to the area to vaccinate animals and repair broken pumps. If on Monday they took water from one well, on Wednesday they would go to another, always varying their path.
Fousseyni Diakite, 51, a pump technician who travels twice a month to the forest to check the generators used to run the wells, first ran into the cell in May 2010, when he saw four men in Arab dress inside a Toyota Hilux truck, all with AK-47s at their feet.
He said the men come with medical supplies and try to find out if anyone is sick.
"There is one who is tall with a big chest ? he's Arab, possibly Algerian. He's known for having an ambulatory pharmacy. He goes from place to place giving treatment for free," Diakite said.
They venture into the camps where the herders sleep at dusk and hand out cash to villagers who join them for prayers, he said ? bills of 10,000 West African francs (about $20), equal to nearly half the average monthly salary in Mali.
Most of the herders sleep in lean-to's in camps at the forest's edge. Because these are temporary settlements, they do not have mosques, unlike most villages in this nation twice the size of France that is 90 percent Muslim.
In Boulker, a hamlet near the forest, the fighters left 100,000 francs (around $200), instructing locals to buy supplies and build an adobe mosque, Diakite said.
"They said that for every population center with at least 10 people, there should be a mosque," he said.
Along with its poverty, Mali has an enormous geography and a weak central government ? not unlike Afghanistan, where bin Laden first used the charm offensive to secure the loyalty of the local people, said Noman Benotman, a former jihadist with links to al-Qaida, now an analyst at the London-based Quilliam Foundation.
"We used to teach our people about this. It's part of the military plan ? how to treat locals. This is the environment that keeps them alive," said Benotman, who first met bin Laden in Sudan and who spent years fighting alongside al-Qaida in Afghanistan. He said bin Laden gave his fighters specific instructions on how to conduct themselves: Don't argue about the price, just make the locals happy. Become "like oxygen" to them.
AQIM is taking the lesson to heart. Soon after they began taking water, one of the bearded fighters approached a shepherd at the pump to buy a ram. The fighters were looking to slaughter it to feed themselves. The shepherd offered it to him for free ? too afraid to ask for money, said Maiga, the man's friend.
But the stranger refused to take the ram without payment, and immediately handed over a generous sum.
"They seem to know all the prices ahead of time. They point to a ram and say, `I'll buy that one for 30,000 cfa ($60),'" said Maiga, quoting the highest sum a herder could expect to get for a ram in these parts. "They never bargain."
AQIM grew out of the groups fighting the Algerian government in the 1990s, after the military canceled elections to stave off victory for an Islamist party. Over the next decade, they left a trail of destruction in Algeria. Around 2003, they sent an emissary to Iraq to meet an al-Qaida intermediary, according to Benotman. Three years later, the insurgents joined the terror family, in what second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri called "a blessed union."
Since then, their attacks have taken on the hallmarks of al-Qaida. A pair of explosions this August killed 18 people as they tore through the mess hall of Algeria's military academy, with the second bomb timed to hit emergency responders.
Al-Qaida in turn appears to be learning from its affiliates, which have used kidnappings for ransom in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. After bin Laden's death in May, investigators found files on his hard drive showing plans to turn to kidnapping to compensate for a decline in donations.
AQIM in particular has perfected what analysts call a "kidnap economy," drawing on its refuge in Mali, according to diplomats, hostage negotiators and government officials. In 2003, the group kidnapped and transported 32 mostly German tourists from southern Algeria to Mali, where, according to a member of Mali's parliament, they struck a deal with local authorities that is still in effect today.
"The agreement was, `You don't hurt us, we won't hurt you,'" said the parliament member, formerly involved in hostage negotiations, who asked not to be identified because of the danger involved.
The government of Mali denies these accusations, but officials cited in diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks make the same assertion. The president of neighboring Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, told his American counterparts in 2009 that Mali is "at peace with AQIM to avoid attacks on its territory." Whereas the al-Qaida cell has captured more than 50 foreigners in Algeria, Niger and Mauritania, hardly any of the violence has touched Mali.
The cell has also managed to recruit local fighters, including 60 to 80 Tuaregs, the olive-skinned nomads who live in the Sahara desert, according to a security expert. And villagers say they have seen black-skinned sub-Saharan Africans in the pickups speaking the languages of Mali, Guinea and Nigeria.
"The situation in Mali is they have become locals ? they are not foreigners," said Benotman. "This is really, really very, very difficult to do, and it makes it very hard to get rid of them."
One thing still stands in al-Qaida's way: Its hardcore ideology does not gel with the moderate Islam practiced by Mali's nomads. Most of them said they were afraid, caught between need for the money al-Qaida offers and wariness of its extremist beliefs.
When bin Laden died, the members of the local cell went from well to well to ask people to pray for his soul, according to Amaye ag Ali Cisse, an employee of the Ministry of Husbandry who travels twice a month to the wells to oversee the vaccination of animals.
"Everyone is uncomfortable," he said. "This is a religion that doesn't belong to us."
The herders say the fighters have not tried to impose their ideology by force. Instead, they say that the AQIM members wait until they have seen a herder at least a few times before broaching the subject.
"It was the third time that I saw them that they started preaching to me," said Maiga. "They said that everything they do is in order to seek out God."
Herder Baba Ould Momo, 29, said he tries to come up with an excuse to leave when the pickup trucks arrive at the well, because he's afraid the terror cell will pull him in. He said they backed off when they noticed he wasn't interested.
"The first thing they try to do is invite people to join them in the forest. If they see that the person is wavering, it's then that they start preaching ? saying everything is transitory," said Momo, who like most of the herders wears plastic flip-flops, with a robe of wrinkled cloth. "But if the person is categorical in saying `No,' they leave them alone."
In June, Mauritania and Mali led a rare joint attack on the al-Qaida cell in the Wagadou Forest. However, herders say that a week earlier, the al-Qaida fighters told them that an attack was imminent and that they had laid down land mines in the forest. Mauritania blames Malian officials for tipping off AQIM.
The herders said that for around two weeks, they didn't see the bearded fighters. Then they returned with a new fleet of Hilux pickup trucks, and with more men. Since then, the fighters' tracks have been all over the forest floor, in a map of constant movement, said 60-year-old hunter Cheickana Cisse. They no longer sleep in the same place.
Just as Cisse was taking a drink of water at the N7 pump on a recent evening, two pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft cannons and loaded with combatants drove up. The men had chains of ammunition strapped across their chests, and belts loaded with cartridges.
They laid their AK-47s in a circle on the ground to create a space to pray, like a symbolic mosque. One of them asked Cisse if he had heard of bin Laden.
"He said, `We're like this with bin Laden,'" Cisse explained, intertwining his right and left index fingers like a link in a chain. "He said, `We're al-Qaida.'"
The elderly hunter tried to slip away just as one of the fighters made the call to prayer.
"And they said, `You? Aren't you going to pray?' They told me to come into the circle. I could feel them watching me," he said.
The men kneeled inside the circle of weapons. Four others guarded them, including one who climbed on the roof of the truck. Cisse tiptoed inside and began going through the prayer. "I kept stealing glances to see if they were doing the same moves as me," he said. "I know the words, but I was scared."
When the group had finished, the four who had kept vigil took their turn inside the circle. Cisse quietly walked away.
They didn't try to stop him.
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S.Africa: Funds raised to fight rhino poaching (AP)
JOHANNESBURG ? A fundraising campaign aimed at putting rhino poachers in jail was welcomed Friday by a South African conservationist.
Michael Knight, head of park planning and development for South Africa's national parks department, said money raised by the Florida-based International Rhino Federation would be used to support such efforts as teaching park employees how to safeguard evidence at crime scenes.
More South African rhinos were poached ? 341 ? in the first 10 months of 2011 than in all of 2010, which was a record poaching year with 333 animals lost. The International Rhino Federation project is for parks in South Africa and neighboring Zimbabwe, which also has seen increased poaching.
An Asian economic boom in recent years is believed to be behind the spike in poaching, with a growing middle class in countries like China and Vietnam able to afford exotic purported remedies like powdered rhino horn.
"We're losing animals like crazy," Knight, who also chairs the rhino specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said in an interview. "But the prosecutions are falling way behind."
Knight said police in isolated areas of South Africa are not always experienced in investigating environmental crime. He said rangers and others would be trained to support police and prosecutors.
In court, he said, "You need to have the most up-to-date information, you need to have the most convincing arguments."
The federation launched its fundraising this week. Donations will fund training in collecting evidence and information. The federation also plans to distribute basic crime scene kits containing cameras, fingerprinting materials and evidence bags.
In an interview, federation director Susie Ellis said that an anonymous donor kicked off the fund with $25,000. She said she spoke with South African security officials in March about how best to use the money.
"It's a small project that we hope will have a big impact," she said, adding tthat he first training session is set for early February in South Africa.
____
Online:
http://www.rhinos-irf.org
____
Donna Bryson can be reached on http://twitter.com/dbrysonAP
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