Sunday, June 30, 2013

Body spotted on Mt. Hood believed that of climber

(AP) ? Searchers are trying to reach a body on a Mount Hood glacier that was spotted by a helicopter crew looking for a missing climber.

The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office said officials believe the body is likely Kinley Adams, a 59-year-old Salem dentist who failed to return June 22 from a climb on the west side of Oregon's tallest mountain.

Oregon Army National Guard Blackhawk helicopter crews made the discovery Saturday at an altitude of about 8,400 feet, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

Because of extremely difficult terrain, a recovery effort was getting under way Sunday morning.

Avalanche risk from warming temperatures prevented rescue teams from climbing to the upper part of the 11,239-foot peak.

Adams is an experienced climber who had been making frequent trips to Mount Hood in preparation for a trip to Nepal. He is thought to have a cellphone, but searchers have been unable to pinpoint the signal. His mountain locator beacon was found at home, apparently with gear he was planning to take to Nepal.

He was reported missing June 22. His vehicle was found on the mountain at Timberline Lodge.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-06-30-Mount%20Hood%20Climber/id-d710e988ac5b48d6b68d8572e8d9e7d0

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Challenge to stop resumption of same-sex marriages in California

Gay marriages resume in California with a flurry

newsday.com (1 day ago)

Same-sex marriages resume in state

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More Home news ?

Source: http://home.topnewstoday.org/home/article/6643092/

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Apple reportedly clinches TSMC chip manufacturing deal

Apple reportedly clinches longsought TSMC manufacturing deal

Rumors of Apple switching its chip manufacturing from Samsung to TSMC have persisted for a long, long time. However, they may be more substantial this time around: the Wall Street Journal claims that Apple quietly signed a deal with TSMC earlier this month. The agreement reportedly has TSMC taking over some of Apple's chip production in 2014. Technical setbacks kept the agreement from happening any sooner, according to the sources. Neither company is commenting on the accuracy of the story, although few would doubt Apple's incentives to reduce its dependency on Samsung-made silicon -- it's not keen on funding a primary competitor.

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Source: Wall Street Journal

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/28/apple-reportedly-clinches-tsmc-chip-manufacturing-deal/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Wikileaks founder says Snowden info will keep getting published

By Deborah Charles

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Sunday that Edward Snowden made sure that the information he took about U.S. surveillance programs will continue to be published regardless of what happens to the former U.S. spy agency contractor.

Assange criticized the United States for revoking Snowden's passport and said it would not stop the classified information taken by the 30-year-old former contractor from getting out.

"Look, there is no stopping the publishing process at this stage," Assange said in an interview with ABC's "This Week" television show. "Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden can't be pressured by any state to stop the publication process."

He did not directly respond when asked if WikiLeaks was in possession of the files.

Last week, Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published the classified information released by Snowden, said Snowden had made encrypted copies of his files and distributed them in case anything happened to him.

Greenwald told The Daily Beast that the people in possession of these files "cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords." But Greenwald said "if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives."

Snowden left his job as an NSA contractor in Hawaii last month and went to Hong Kong before Britain's Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post published articles based on top-secret documents he took from the government that detailed U.S. surveillance programs.

After hiding in Hong Kong he fled Moscow, where he remains in hiding at the Sheremetyevo airport. The U.S. government has charged Snowden under the 1917 Espionage Act with theft and passing classified communications to an "unauthorized person."

Snowden is currently stuck in legal limbo in a transit area of the Moscow airport. Assange has said Snowden, who has sought legal advice from WikiLeaks, has requested asylum in Ecuador. But Snowden's passport was revoked by Washington and an Ecuadorean travel document he used to travel to Russia from Hong Kong has been declared invalid by Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.

Correa told Reuters in Ecuador on Sunday that Snowden's fate is in the hands of Russian authorities. He said Quito cannot begin considering asylum for Snowden until he reaches Ecuador or an Ecuadorean embassy.

Assange sought asylum from Ecuador last year and is living in Ecuador's London embassy to avoid being extradited to Sweden, which wants to question him about allegations of sexual assault and rape.

Assange said the United States had "marooned" Snowden in Russia by revoking his passport.

"Is that really a great outcome by the State Department?" Assange asked, saying that Washington had put Snowden through a "meat grinder" although "Mr. Snowden has not been convicted of anything."

In a separate interview, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, Tom Donilon, said since Snowden was not traveling on valid papers he should be returned to the United States "because he's wanted here for a crime."

Donilon said Washington had been in discussions with the Russian government through law enforcement channels on a regular basis about Snowden.

"And I have to agree with (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin, which - when he said the other day that it would be better for Mr. Snowden to decide where - when he's leaving ... sooner rather than later," Donilon said on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." "We agree with that - that the sooner that this can be resolved, the better."

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wikileaks-founder-says-snowden-keep-getting-published-173936850.html

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NASA turns off it?s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) Spacecraft

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NASA - National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationPasadena, CA ? NASA has decommissioned its Galaxy Evolution Explorer after a decade of operations in which the venerable space telescope used its ultraviolet vision to study hundreds of millions of galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic time.

?GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment,? said Jeff Hayes, NASA?s GALEX program executive in Washington. ?This small Explorer mission has mapped and studied galaxies in the ultraviolet, light we cannot see with our own eyes, across most of the sky.?

A speeding star can be seen leaving an enormous trail in this image from NASA?s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

A speeding star can be seen leaving an enormous trail in this image from NASA?s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Operators at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, VA, sent the signal to decommission GALEX at 12:09pm PDT (3:09pm EDT) Friday, June 28th.

The spacecraft will remain in orbit for at least 65 years, then fall to Earth and burn up upon re-entering the atmosphere. GALEX met its prime objectives and the mission was extended three times before being cancelled.

Highlights from the mission?s decade of sky scans include:

  • Discovering a gargantuan, comet-like tail behind a speeding star called Mira.
  • Catching a black hole ?red-handed? as it munched on a star.
  • Finding giant rings of new stars around old, dead galaxies.
  • Independently confirming the nature of dark energy.
  • Discovering a missing link in galaxy evolution ? the teenage galaxies transitioning from young to old.

The mission also captured a dazzling collection of snapshots, showing everything from ghostly nebulas to a spiral galaxy with huge, spidery arms.

This image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows NGC 4565, one of the nearest and brightest galaxies not included in the famous list by 18th-century comet hunter Charles Messier. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership. Since then, investigators from around the world have used GALEX to study everything from stars in our own Milky Way galaxy to hundreds of thousands of galaxies 5 billion light-years away.

In the space telescope?s last year, it scanned across large patches of sky, including the bustling, bright center of our Milky Way. The telescope spent time staring at certain areas of the sky, finding exploded stars, called supernovae, and monitoring how objects, such as the centers of active galaxies, change over time.

GALEX also scanned the sky for massive, feeding black holes and shock waves from early supernova explosions.

This image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows NGC 6744, one of the galaxies most similar to our Milky Way in the local universe. This ultraviolet view highlights the vast extent of the fluffy spiral arms, and demonstrates that star formation can occur in the outer regions of galaxies. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)?In the last few years, GALEX studied objects we never thought we?d be able to observe, from the Magellanic Clouds to bright nebulae and supernova remnants in the galactic plane,? said David Schiminovich of Columbia University, New York, NY, a longtime GALEX team member who led science operations over the past year. ?Some of its most beautiful and scientifically compelling images are part of this last observation cycle.?

Data from the last year of the mission will be made public in the coming year.

?GALEX, the mission, may be over, but its science discoveries will keep on going,? said Kerry Erickson, the mission?s project manager at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.

A slideshow showing some of the popular GALEX images is online at: http://go.nasa.gov/17xAVDd

JPL managed the GALEX mission and built the science instrument. The mission?s principal investigator, Chris Martin, is at Caltech. NASA?s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, developed the mission under the Explorers Program it manages.

Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d?Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on the mission. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are online at: http://www.nasa.gov/galex

Written By

Alan Buis
NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

J.D. Harrington
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.


Sections

Technology

Topics

Atmosphere, Black Hole, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Columbia University, Comet, Dulles VA, earth, Galaxies, GALEX, Large Magellanic Cloud, Milky Way Galaxy, Mira, NASA, NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Nebula, New York NY, Pasadena CA, Small Magellanic Cloud, South Korea, Stars, Supernova, Untraviolet, washington d.c.


Source: http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2013/06/30/nasa-turns-off-its-galaxy-evolution-explorer-galex-spacecraft/

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Phoenix, Las Vegas bake in scorching heat

PHOENIX (AP) ? A blazing heat wave expected to send the mercury soaring to nearly 120 degrees in Phoenix and Las Vegas over the weekend settled across the West on Friday, threatening to ground airliners and raising fears that pets will get burned on the scalding pavement.

The heat was so punishing that rangers took up positions at trailheads at Lake Mead in Nevada to persuade people not to hike. Zookeepers in Phoenix hosed down the elephants and fed tigers frozen fish snacks. And tourists at California's Death Valley took photos of the harsh landscape and a thermometer that read 121.

The mercury there was expected to reach nearly 130 through the weekend ? just short of the 134-degree reading from a century ago that stands as the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth.

"You have to take a picture of something like this. Otherwise no one will believe you," said Laura McAlpine, visiting Death Valley from Scotland on Friday.

The heat is not expected to break until Monday or Tuesday.

The scorching weather presented problems for airlines because high temperatures can make it more difficult for planes to take off. Hot air reduces lift and also can diminish engine performance. Planes taking off in the heat may need longer runways or may have to shed weight by carrying less fuel or cargo.

Smaller jets and propeller planes are more likely to be affected than bigger airliners that are better equipped for extreme temperatures.

However, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport officials reported no such heat-related problems with any flights by Friday evening.

The National Weather Service said Phoenix reached 116 on Friday, two degrees short of the expected high, in part because of a light layer of smoke from wildfires in neighboring New Mexico that shielded the blazing sun. Las Vegas still was expecting near record highs over the weekend approaching 116 degrees while Phoenix was forecast to hit nearly 120. The record in Phoenix is 122.

Temperatures are also expected to soar across Utah and into Wyoming and Idaho, with triple-digit heat forecast for the Boise area. Cities in Washington state that are better known for cool, rainy weather should break the 90s next week.

"This is the hottest time of the year, but the temperatures that we'll be looking at for Friday through Sunday, they'll be toward the top," said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark O'Malley. "It's going to be baking hot across much of the entire West."

The heat is the result of a high-pressure system brought on by a shift in the jet stream, the high-altitude air current that dictates weather patterns. The jet stream has been more erratic in the past few years.

Health officials warned people to be extremely careful when venturing outdoors. The risks include not only dehydration and heat stroke but burns from the concrete and asphalt. Dogs can suffer burns and blisters on their paws by walking on scorching pavement.

"You will see people who go out walking with their dog at noon or in the middle of the day and don't bring enough water and it gets tragic pretty quickly," said Bretta Nelson, spokeswoman for the Arizona Humane Society. "You just don't want to find out the hard way."

Cooling stations were set up to shelter the homeless as well as elderly people who can't afford to run their air conditioners. In Phoenix, Joe Arpaio, the famously hard-nosed sheriff who runs a tent jail, planned to distribute ice cream and cold towels to inmates this weekend.

Officials said personnel were added to the Border Patrol search-and-rescue unit because of the danger to people trying to slip across the Mexican border. At least seven people have been found dead in the last week in Arizona after falling victim to the brutal desert heat.

In June 1990, when Phoenix hit 122 degrees, airlines were forced to cease flights for several hours because of a lack of data from the manufacturers on how the aircraft would operate in such extreme heat.

US Airways spokesman Todd Lehmacher said the airline now knows that its Boeings can fly at up to 126 degrees, and its Airbus fleet can operate at up to 127.

While the heat in Las Vegas is expected to peak on Sunday, it's unlikely to sideline the first round of the four-week Bikini Invitational tournament.

"I feel sorry for those poor girls having to strut themselves in 115 degrees, but there's $100,000 up for grabs," said Hard Rock casino spokeswoman Abigail Miller. "I think the girls are willing to make the sacrifice."

___

Carlson contributed in Death Valley, Calif. Also contributing were Robert Jablon in Los Angeles, Julie Jacobson and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Michelle Price in Salt Lake City, Cristina Silva and Bob Christie in Phoenix and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, N.M.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/phoenix-las-vegas-bake-scorching-heat-202602575.html

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Students Drowning in Debt: An Opportunity for Education ...

money managementThis week, while the media has been schooling us on the student loan implosion and interest rates possibly doubling unless Congress takes action, Roger W. Ferguson Jr. and Debra W. Stewart ?published an opinion piece at Politico addressing an issue at the core of BetterInvesting?s curriculum ? financial education.

Ferguson is president and CEO of TIAA-CREF, a financial services organization, and a former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve; Stewart is president of the Council of Graduate Schools.

In Politico, they?re calling for a nationwide policy to teach students money management skills, beginning at the K-12 years.

?A comprehensive national action plan is needed, and it must provide students with the knowledge and tools they need to fully understand their student loans and better manage their overall personal finances,? the column says. ?Helping students and families take advantage of available financial aid options and teaching money management skills will reduce the amount that students need to borrow and help them to manage any debt they may incur.?

The writers conclude: ?Working together, educational institutions, policymakers and businesses can help build a nation of financially literate Americans who are not only well-prepared for their chosen careers, but also secure in the skills they need to lead financially healthy lives. A dedication to financial education will help ensure that our nation has the highly educated professionals who can lead the way to future prosperity.?

As a nonprofit, BetterInvesting has been deeply involved in financial education programs for more than 60 years, with the help of our volunteers nationwide.

For example:

  • Charles K. Barker of Indianapolis, president of BetterInvesting?s Central Indiana Chapter, chairs a financial literacy program sponsored by the organization 100 Black Men of Indianapolis. Charles mentors high school students through the education program.
  • ?A member of The Standard and Rich Investment Club, a BetterInvesting affiliate located in the suburbs of Cleveland, developed a stock market curriculum that was approved by the National Endowment for Financial Education used in classrooms in a local school district.
  • ?Our longtime volunteer Bill Wilson, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, used BetterInvesting tools to teach his students how to analyze stocks.

BetterInvesting?s focus is teaching members how to succeed in the stock market, by analyzing how best to use their money and planning for the future. Members grow their wealth either individually or through clubs, and by doing so they reach for financial security.

BetterInvesting members tell us again and again that they use the skills they?ve learned to teach financial literacy to their children and grandchildren. And that?s as good as gold.

About BetterInvesting

BetterInvesting is a national nonprofit organization that has been empowering individual investors since 1951. Founded in Detroit, the association (formerly known as National Association of Investors Corporation) was born out of the conviction that anyone can become a successful long-term investor by following commonsense investing practices. BetterInvesting has helped more than 5 million people become better, more informed investors by providing webinars, in-person events, easy-to-use online tools for analyzing stocks and mutual funds, a monthly magazine and a community of volunteers and like-minded investors. For more information about BetterInvesting, visit its website at?http://www.betterinvesting.org/investing/landing/openhouse/blog/index.html or call toll free (877) 275-6242.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

?

Source: http://blog.betterinvesting.org/investing/students-drowning-in-debt-an-opportunity-for-education/

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Digg Reader web, iOS apps are open for the public

As we stand on the precipice of the shutdown of Google Reader the search for replacement RSS clients is more frantic than ever, and now Digg has opened access to its app for any users interested. Currently available on the web and as an iOS app (Android coming soon), importing ones Google account is just a few mouse clicks away. The experience as it exists now is pretty barebones, and Digg says it plans to add a "View unread items only" option, "Mark as unread" button and the always crucial "accurate" unread counts for feeds and folders in the near future. Hit the source link below to give it a shot, and then let us know if it's a contender for the throne.

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Source: Digg Blog

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/vOt_5hzfB40/

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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Real estate index shows May increase - Ramona Sentinel | Ramona ...

Thursday, June 27?The University of San Diego Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate?s Index of Leading Economic Indicators was released today, showing a 0.6 percent increase in May from the previous month.

The uptick was led by sharp gains in the number of residential building permits issued and local stock prices, USD professor Alan Gin said.

?With May?s advance, the outlook for the local economy remains unchanged from recent reports,? Gin said. ?Good growth is expected in the local economy through the end of 2013 and into at least the first part of 2014.?

The number of residential building permits issued in May topped 1,000 in a month for the second time this year. Not since 2007 had a single month had that many, he said.

Building permit totals so far in 2013 are up 50 percent over last year, according to Gin.

The professor said an improved overall economy has put more people to work and earned them greater incomes, which has increased demand for housing.

That, in turn, has created more jobs in real estate and construction businesses, he said.

Gin said local stock prices rose 1.88 percent in May, reflecting an increase in the broader market in May.

On the labor front, the number of filers for unemployment insurance rose last month, but the amount of help-wanted advertising also went higher, he said.

The index stood at 126.4 in May, its highest mark since December 2007.

Related posts:

  1. Report shows crime increase for Ramona
  2. New sentencing date set for real estate agent in conspiracy case
  3. Ramona real estate agent pleads guilty in kickback scheme
  4. Real Estate Association welcomes 2011-12 board
  5. Ramona Real Estate Association plans three events this month

Short URL: http://www.ramonasentinel.com/?p=24926

Source: http://www.ramonasentinel.com/2013/06/27/real-estate-index-shows-may-increase/

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Weekend heat wave to bake western US

PHOENIX (AP) ? Tigers at the Phoenix Zoo are getting frozen fish snacks. Temporary cooling stations are popping up to welcome the homeless and elderly. And airlines are monitoring the soaring temperatures to make sure it's safe to fly as the western U.S. falls into the grip of a dangerous heat wave.

A strong high-pressure system settling over the region Friday and through the weekend will bring extreme temperatures to the already blazing Southwest. Notoriously hot Death Valley in California is forecast to reach 129 degrees, not far off the world-record high of 134 logged there exactly one century ago.

The National Weather Service predicts Phoenix could reach a high of 118 on Friday, while Las Vegas could see the same temperature over the weekend.

Temperatures are expected to soar across Utah and into parts of Wyoming and Idaho, where forecasters are calling for triple-digit heat in the Boise area through the weekend.

Cities in Washington state better known for cool, rainy weather should break the 90s early next week, while northern Utah ? marketed as having "the greatest snow on Earth" ? is expected to hit triple digits. In Albuquerque, N.M., the mercury hit 105 on Thursday afternoon, the hottest it has been in the state's most populous city in 19 years.

"This is the hottest time of the year but the temperatures that we'll be looking at for Friday through Sunday, they'll be toward the top. We'll be at or above record levels in the Phoenix area and throughout a lot of the southwestern United States," said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark O'Malley. "It's going to be baking hot across much of the entire West."

Jennifer Smith, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center based in Idaho, said crews are especially worried about wildfires igniting in the Four Corners region where the borders of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona intersect.

Some of the strongest parts of the high pressure system are expected to be parked over the area through the weekend, where forecasters are calling for lightning but little to no precipitation, Smith said.

Scientists say that the jet stream, the river of air that dictates weather patterns, has been more erratic in the past few years. It's responsible for weather systems getting stuck, like the current heat wave. Scientists disagree on whether global warming is the cause of the jet stream's behavior.

The hottest cities are taking precautions to protect vulnerable residents. Police are pleading with drivers not to leave children or pets in vehicles, and temporary cooling stations are being put up to shelter homeless people and the elderly on fixed incomes who hesitate to use air conditioning.

Officials said extra personnel have been added to the U.S. Border Patrol's Search, Trauma, and Rescue unit as people illegally crossing the border from Mexico into Arizona could succumb to exhaustion and dehydration. At least seven people have been found dead in the last week in Arizona after falling victim to the desert's brutal heat.

Even airlines are watching the mercury for any signs that temperatures could deter operations.

In June 1990, when Phoenix hit 122 degrees, several airlines, including America West, which later merged with US Airways, were forced to cease flights for several hours because the planes didn't have the data needed to know how they would fly in temperatures above 120 degrees.

US Airways spokesman Todd Lehmacher said the airline's fleet of Boeings can now fly up to 126 degrees, and up to 127 degrees for the Airbus fleet.

But the company's smaller express planes flying out of the Phoenix area may be delayed if the temperature tops 118 because as the air heats up, it becomes less dense and changes liftoff conditions.

"The hotter is it, your performance is degraded," Lehmacher said. "We're monitoring this very closely to see what the temperatures do."

Officials at Salt River Project, the Phoenix area's largest electricity provider, also are closely monitoring usage in order to redirect energy in case of a potential overload.

Company spokeswoman Scott Harelson said he doesn't expect usage to get anywhere near SRP's record 6,663 megawatts consumed in August 2011.

"While it's hot, people tend to leave town and some businesses aren't open, so that has a tendency to mitigate demand and is why we typically don't set records on weekends," Harelson said.

Meanwhile, over at the Phoenix Zoo, animals from elephants to warthogs will be doused with hoses and sprayed with sprinklers and misters throughout the weekend.

The tigers will get frozen fish snacks while the lions can lounge on concrete slabs cooled by internal water-filled pipes, said zoo spokeswoman Linda Hardwick.

"And they'll all have plenty of shade," she said. "The keepers will all just be very active looking for any behavior changes, anything that would tip them off that an animal is just getting too hot."

In Las Vegas, two Elvis impersonators and a performer costumed as the iconic "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign said they still planned to keep up their routine of working the tourist corridor in the broad daylight and turning in for the evenings, heat notwithstanding.

"We'd much rather fight with the sun than fight with the drunk people," Elvis impersonator Cristian Morales said.

___

Associated Press writers Robert Jablon in Los Angeles, Julie Jacobson and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Michelle Price in Salt Lake City, and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/weekend-heat-wave-bake-western-us-181304892.html

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Julianne Moore Under Consideration for Hunger Games Role

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/julianne-moore-under-consideration-for-hunger-games-role/

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China official in sex case gets prison for bribery

BEIJING (AP) ? A former Chinese official at the center of a sex tape scandal was convicted of taking more than 3.1 million yuan ($500,000) in bribes and sentenced to 13 years in prison Friday, at a time when China's new generation of leadership has vowed to crack down on widespread graft.

Lei Zhengfu, former party chief of a district in the south-central metropolis of Chongqing, did not say whether he would appeal the verdict by the city's No. 1 Intermediate Court, according to state media. The punishment meted out to him also includes confiscation of personal assets of 300,000 yuan ($48,000).

Lei's case has riveted the public since video clips went viral of the portly 55-year-old having sex with a woman hired by property developers, allegedly in an elaborate extortion scheme. The scandal has exposed in lurid detail the shady intertwining of sex, money and power in Chinese society.

Beijing Institute of Technology law professor Xu Xin said the sentence was more severe than those in earlier corruption cases involving similar amounts of bribes.

"Maybe because of the case's social impact, the court has chosen to be on the harsh end with its sentence," he said.

Lei asked another property developer who had benefited from his patronage to pay hush money of 3 million yuan to the blackmailers. Lei argued that the money was a loan, but prosecutors said the money ? which was not fully repaid ? amounted to a bribe.

Prosecutors also said Lei took two other bribes ? one of $10,000 and another of 100,000 yuan ($16,000) ? in return for favors granted through his government position, but it is Lei's sex scandal and the scheme behind it that have captivated member of the Chinese public, who are disgusted by what they see as the moral degradation of those in power.

Verdicts were expected to be announced later Friday in a separate case against the woman and the men behind the alleged extortion scheme.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-official-sex-case-gets-prison-bribery-040755134.html

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Auto loan rates in Birmingham, Alabama ? Bankrate, Inc.

You can currently pick up a 48-month new-car loan for an average of 4.03 percent. And that's great news if you're looking to finance a new vehicle. Our survey can help you find the lowest auto loan rates in Birmingham, AL, today.

One lender in our survey is currently offering 1.74 percent. In total, three lenders are offering rates below the national average. Just make sure to shop around thoroughly and compare fees and conditions before you decide on a lender. Our tools can help you compare auto loan rates in Birmingham, AL, and in other areas of Alabama, today.

Here are the auto loan rates in Birmingham, AL, as of 10:00 a.m. The 48-month new-car loan rates vary from 1.74 percent to 5.24 percent.

Use our auto loan calculator to check your monthly car payment.

Source: http://www.bankrate.com/financing/rates/auto-loan-rates-in-birmingham-alabama/

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Imgur launches meme generator, fuels your procrastination even more

DNP Imgur meme generator

Good Guy Greg or Scumbag Steve -- you decide which one Imgur is now that its new meme generator is ready to suck up more of your time. The tool comes with a bunch of popular templates, although you can upload a picture if you've always dreamt of following in Overly Attached Girlfriend's footsteps. It's similar to services like I Can Has Cheezburger and Quickmeme -- simply drop text boxes onto the images to showcase your own brand of humor and wit. Unsure how to create your own viral sensation? Browse the generator's gallery to check out past hits and maybe try remixing a few first. Between this and Imgur's new Android app, we wouldn't be surprised if some of you are kissing your afternoon productivity goodbye.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/27/imgur-meme-generator/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Breakthrough in Internet bandwidth: New fiber optic technology could ease Internet congestion, video streaming

June 27, 2013 ? As rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth strains the Internet's capacity, a team of engineers has devised a new fiber optic technology that promises to increase bandwidth dramatically. The new technology could enable Internet providers to offer much greater connectivity -- from decreased network congestion to on-demand video streaming.

Described in the June 28 issue of the journal Science, the technology centers on donut-shaped laser light beams called optical vortices, in which the light twists like a tornado as it moves along the beam path, rather than in a straight line.

Widely studied in molecular biology, atomic physics and quantum optics, optical vortices (also known as orbital angular momentum, or OAM, beams) were thought to be unstable in fiber, until BU Engineering Professor Siddharth Ramachandran recently designed an optical fiber that can propagate them. In the paper, he and Alan Willner of USC demonstrate not only the stability of the beams in optical fiber but also their potential to boost Internet bandwidth.

"For several decades since optical fibers were deployed, the conventional assumption has been that OAM-carrying beams are inherently unstable in fibers," said Ramachandran. "Our discovery, of design classes in which they are stable, has profound implications for a variety of scientific and technological fields that have exploited the unique properties of OAM-carrying light, including the use of such beams for enhancing data capacity in fibers."

The reported research represents a close collaboration between optical fiber experts at BU and optical communication systems experts at USC. "Siddharth's fiber represents a very unique and valuable innovation. It was great to work together to demonstrate a terabit-per-second capacity transmission link," said Willner, electrical engineering professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Ramachandran and Willner collaborated with OFS-Fitel, a fiber optics company in Denmark, and Tel Aviv University.

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the technology could not come at a better time, as one of the main strategies to boost Internet bandwidth is running into roadblocks just as mobile devices fuel rapidly growing demands on the Internet. Traditionally, bandwidth has been enhanced by increasing the number of colors, or wavelengths of data-carrying laser signals -- essentially streams of 1s and 0s -- sent down an optical fiber, where the signals are processed according to color. Increasing the number of colors has worked well since the 1990s when the method was introduced, but now that number is reaching physical limits.

An emerging strategy to boost bandwidth is to send the light through a fiber along distinctive paths, or modes, each carrying a cache of data from one end of the fiber to the other. Unlike the colors, however, data streams of 1s and 0s from different modes mix together; determining which data stream came from which source requires computationally intensive and energy-hungry digital signal processing algorithms.

Ramachandran's and Willner's approach combines both strategies, packing several colors into each mode, and using multiple modes. Unlike in conventional fibers, OAM modes in these specially designed fibers can carry data streams across an optical fiber while remaining separate at the receiving end. In experiments appearing in the Science paper, Ramachandran created an OAM fiber with four modes (an optical fiber typically has two), and he and Willner showed that for each OAM mode, they could send data through a one-kilometer fiber in 10 different colors, resulting in a transmission capacity of 1.6 terabits per second, the equivalent of transmitting eight Blu-RayTM DVDs every second.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/technology/~3/zoBY3cb6fMU/130627142406.htm

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Friday, June 28, 2013

beehive.govt.nz - Labour misleads on small business numbers

Labour MP David Clark?s claim that the number of new start-up businesses has fallen fails to understand the reality of the Global Financial Crisis, Minister for Small Business John Banks said today.

?While the total number of start-ups has fallen since 2007, 92 per cent of those closures were zero-employee firms ? in other words the self-employed,? Mr Banks said.

?This indicates that people are choosing the security of being an employee rather than taking the risk of being self-employed. It is completely understandable in the current economic climate that people become more cautious about leaving their jobs to start a small business.

?The good news is businesses that have been starting are doing well. ?

?The Statistics New Zealand Business Operations Survey 2012 shows the proportion of small businesses exporting and conducting R&D and innovation activities are both increasing.

?Export businesses with 6-19 employees have increased from 15 per cent to 23 per cent in the past year. Businesses which employ between 1-19 employees have actually increased every year since 2008.

?To really support small business we need to get the fundamentals right.? That?s why the National-led Government is focused on sound economic management which includes getting back to surplus by 2014.

?Part of this plan is the Business Growth Agenda which includes a huge range of support for business, such as the Regional Business Partners Network, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise programs, and work is being undertaken on the introduction of a single business number.

?In contrast, a Labour Government would increase the costs to small business by introducing a capital gains tax, introducing compulsory redundancy payments of up to six months? worth of employee?s wages, increasing public debt to fund new spending, nationalising the electricity sector, having different rates of GST or income tax based on activity type, and removing the 90 day probation period for new employees.

?On top of this, Labour want to ramp up the Emissions Trading Scheme which would increase the cost of power, petrol and other goods, and resist reform of the Resource Management Act which currently creates costly delays for businesses trying to develop their resources.

?None of these policies will help small business,? Mr Banks said.

ENDS
?

Source: http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/labour-misleads-small-business-numbers

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This Climate Fix Might Be Decades Ahead Of Its Time

Global Thermostat's pilot plant in Menlo Park, Calif., pulls carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. The next challenge is to find uses for the captured gas.

Courtesy of Global Thermostat

Global Thermostat's pilot plant in Menlo Park, Calif., pulls carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. The next challenge is to find uses for the captured gas.

Courtesy of Global Thermostat

Every year, people add 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, mostly by burning fossil fuels. That's contributing to climate change. A few scientists have been dreaming about ways to pull some of that CO2 out of the air, but face stiff skepticism and major hurdles. This is the story of one scientist who's pressing ahead.

Peter Eisenberger is a distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Earlier in his career, he ran the university's famed Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and founded Columbia's Earth Institute. He was never one of those scientists who tinkered into the night on inventions. But he realized he didn't need to be.

"If you looked at knowledge as a commodity, we had generated this enormous amount of knowledge and we hadn't even begun to think of the many ways we could apply it," Eisenberger says. He decided he'd settle on a problem he wanted to solve and then dive into the pool of knowledge for existing technologies that could help him.

He started looking for a way to pull carbon dioxide right out of the air. "And it turned out the best device already exists," he says. "It's called a monolith. That is the same type of instrument that's in the catalytic converter in your car. It cleans up your exhaust."

Eisenberger's monoliths grab carbon dioxide from the air and release it again when you heat them up.

He teamed up with a colleague at Columbia, Graciela Chichilnisky, and formed a company to develop the idea. Global Thermostat got seed money from Edgar Bronfman, Jr. ? CEO of Warner Music Group and the former CEO of Seagram's, his family's business.

The company has built two pilot plants at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif. But of course there are big issues to solve: What do you do with the carbon dioxide once you've captured it, and how do you make money?

"If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile," says Peter Eisenberger, co-founder of Global Thermostat, a firm that's building a device to pull carbon dioxide from the air.

Chris Schmauch/Global Thermostat

"So we then we looked for ways to monetize CO2 and found that lots of people wanted to use CO2 as a feedstock to make a valuable product," Eisenberger says.

Growers pipe carbon dioxide into greenhouses. Oil companies pump it underground to help them squeeze out more oil. Soda companies use it to put bubbles in their drinks. These are mostly small-scale applications.

Maybe someday Eisenberger could get paid to clean up the atmosphere by sucking out the CO2 and burying it underground, though there's no market for that now.

But using carbon dioxide to make fuel could someday be big. So Eisenberger's first project involves using CO2 to feed algae that churn out biofuel.

"Our first demonstration plant is being erected right now down in Daphne, Alabama, with an algae company called Algae Systems, which sits on Mobile Bay," Eisenberger says. "They'll be floating their algae in plastic bags on the top of the water. We'll be piping in CO2 that we pull out of the air, and the sun will do the rest."

Of course, this one project will have zero effect on how much carbon dioxide is in the earth's atmosphere. But Eisenberger has much grander ambitions.

"I believe we have something that's economically viable, so our company will be successful," he says. "But I'm really in this because I want to contribute to a long term solution that the world needs."

Eisenberger says if he can open the door to capturing carbon dioxide from the air ? and make the process cheap enough ? someday we could actually slow down, or possibly even reverse, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Robert Socolow at Princeton University started hearing a buzz about this technology a few years back.

"It's catchy," Socolow admits. "It's attractive conceptually that one could basically pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the next several decades and pull it out later and everything would be fine." But the appeal of the idea also worried him ? people might use the mere prospect of this technology as an excuse not to act.

So Socolow spearheaded a critique of the technique, on behalf of the American Physical Society.

Socolow's panel concluded that the technology would be hopelessly expensive, costing $600 for every ton of carbon dioxide it drew out of the air. And the scale would also be huge. In order to capture the emissions would waft into the air from a single coal-fired power plant, you'd need to build a structure 20 miles long and 30 feet high. "It's like the Great Wall of China," Socolow says.

The committee concluded that it would make a lot more sense to cut down on emissions first ? make our cars, homes and factories more efficient. Panel members also said it makes much more sense to capture carbon dioxide directly from smokestacks, where it's concentrated, instead of from the air.

Socolow says, maybe someday we'll have our emissions under control, and then we might need to remove some of the carbon dioxide that's already in the air with a capture technology. But, in his view, that's a long way away. "I locate it in the 22nd century," he says. In other words, this might be a good project for Eisenberger's great-great-great grandchildren.

Researchers currently working on carbon dioxide capture technologies say the American Physical Society critique has made it much harder for them to raise money. Klaus Lackner at Columbia University says he was turned down for a government grant. David Keith at Harvard and the University of Calgary says he struggled to get funding for his small company.

"It's a very powerful report from a very credible group of people, and it may well help to kill us and other efforts," Keith says.

Proponents of air-capture technologies say some of the panel's conclusions are just plain wrong ? especially the estimated cost of $600 per ton.

"We have had third party reports, independent people, evaluating our technology, and it's under $50 a ton," Eisenberger says. He hasn't actually demonstrated that cost yet, and he agrees that nobody should take his word for it. But he's stopped arguing with his critics.

"I'm just going to go do it," he says. "And doing it or not ? that's the answer."

Pursuing a big idea takes some hard-headedness and thick skin.

"If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile," Eisenberger says. "Because what you do when you innovate is you disturb the existing order."

Fortunately, this won't be an academic argument forever. "That's the beauty of science. The people that take the time to come into the lab and see it working and do their own evaluation of the cost and the performance, they know it's not crazy."

If the researchers pursuing this technology can really make it inexpensive to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Eisenberger says it could be a game-changer.

We could start producing fuels with the carbon dioxide that's already in the air, instead of unearthing more fossil fuels. This won't happen quickly, though.

"The energy infrastructure of the world is $55 trillion," Eisenberger says. So a technology to replace that is "not like a new Google app."

Still, human societies have made such transitions before. "They just don't happen in a day," Eisenberger says. "But they happen."

There's certainly no guarantee that capturing carbon dioxide from the air would ever become a big enough enterprise to make a difference to Earth's climate. But it won't even be put to the test unless people like Eisenberger give it a try.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/27/189522647/this-climate-fix-might-be-decades-ahead-of-its-time?ft=1&f=1007

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Fallon 'fully behind' National Grid

Michael Fallon: "I can assure you, the lights are not going to go out"

The government says energy minister Michael Fallon is "fully behind" a National Grid consultation that could see big businesses paid to cut their energy usage in times of shortage.

Last night Mr Fallon appeared to dismiss the proposal in an interview on the BBC's Newsnight programme.

It followed a warning from energy regulator Ofgem that the risk of power cuts has increased in the UK.

Despite that the government has emphasised "the lights won't go out".

Electricity network owner National Grid has suggested large consumers, such as big shops and factories, could be asked to lower use between 16:00 and 20:00 on weekdays in the winter.

Ofgem also suggested keeping some mothballed power plants in reserve in case of emergencies.

"This does not mean that disruption is imminent or likely, but Ofgem, [the Department of Energy and Climate Change] and ourselves believe it appropriate to consider what measures could be taken in case margins deteriorate further," National Grid said.

In a statement, DECC said Mr Fallon "is fully behind Ofgem and National Grid's consultations which are about whether they should take the prudent step of extending their existing services in the context of possible tightening in the supply margin in the middle of the decade".

Continue reading the main story

Analysis


Can it be right to ask businesses to close to keep the lights on for the rest of us? That's what is being proposed by National Grid.

There is no compulsion. No rationing. Instead medium and large firms will be paid to reduce their electricity demand.

The National Grid says this would be a last resort to be used on winter evenings when temperatures plunge and demand soars.

It is also proposing to pay some electricity generators to keep mothballed plants ready to provide power. The Grid accepts that these new provisions sit outside its "usual system operator role" and are likely to modestly increase household bills.

But some industrial users may reflect that if the only way to keep the lights on is to shut down factories and businesses then government energy policy can't be working.

'Lights stay on'

"One option, if the need arose, would be for companies to voluntarily enter into agreements to fire up currently mothballed power stations or for large users to reduce their demand, in return for which they would receive payment," it said.

"This is an extension of what already happens in the power market. There is no compulsion and it is not rationing.

"We are confident that, with Ofgem and Grid having all the tools at their disposal, the lights will stay on."

In an interview on Newsnight, Mr Fallon appeared to dismiss the idea of paying big users to cut back.

When asked if there was any truth to reports that big factories and businesses would be asked to cut their energy use in 2015, Mr Fallon replied: "No".

"The latest [Ofgem] assessment has shown that the position is slightly worse than the previous assessment last year.

"The regulator Ofgem has got to make sure, with all the tools at its disposal - bringing some mothball plant back in action and back on line - that the lights stay on and they will."

In an assessment released on Thursday, Ofgem said spare electricity production capacity in the UK could fall to 2% by 2015, increasing the risk of blackouts.

The watchdog said more investment in power generation was needed to protect consumers.

It said: "Ofgem's analysis indicates a faster than anticipated tightening of electricity margins toward the middle of this decade."

The global financial crisis, tough emissions targets, the UK's increasing dependency on gas imports and the closure of ageing power stations were all contributing to the heightened risk of shortages, Ofgem said.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23093581#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Getting cat management wrong: 'Who's for cats?' - Saving Pets

June 28, 2013No Commentscats

More than 53% of us (that?s over 12 million) share our homes, lives and often our beds, with a dog or cat, or both. We consider them members of our families and spend more than $4.62 billion every year caring for them.

Given this groundswell of love for animals, there is enormous potential to tap into this compassion to promote effective and humane management of homeless cats and dogs in our communities.

This begs the question, why did the Victorian Government choose to spend over $220,000 on a two-year cat management campaign that succeeded only in driving up kill rates while demonising free-roaming cats and all those who choose to care for them? The ?Who?s for cats?? campaign was hailed a success in changing behaviour by all bodies involved, but the bigger picture reveals some damaging and costly end results.

Getting cat management wrong: ?Who?s for cats??

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Source: http://www.savingpets.com.au/2013/06/getting-cat-management-wrong-whos-for-cats/

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Snowden mystery deepens: All eyes on airport

MOSCOW (AP) ? Moscow's main airport swarmed with journalists from around the globe Wednesday, but the man they were looking for, National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, was nowhere to be seen.

The mystery of his whereabouts only deepened a day after President Vladimir Putin said that Snowden was in the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport.

There were ordinary scenes of duty free shopping, snoozing travelers and tourists sipping coffee but no trace of America's most famous fugitive. If Putin's statement is true, it means that Snowden has effectively lived a life of airport limbo since his weekend flight from Hong Kong, especially with his American passport now revoked by U.S. authorities.

Adding to the uncertainty, Ecuador's foreign minister said it could take months to decide whether to grant asylum to Snowden and the Latin American nation would take into consideration its relations with the U.S. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino compared Snowden's case to that of Julian Assange, the founder of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, who has been given asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

"It took us two months to make a decision in the case of Assange, so do not expect us to make a decision sooner this time," Patino told reporters during a visit to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Snowden, who is charged with violating American espionage laws, fled Hong Kong over the weekend and flew to Russia. He booked a seat on a Havana-bound flight Monday en route to Venezuela, but didn't board the plane. His ultimate destination was believed to be Ecuador.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa shot back at critics on Wednesday, taking special aim at a Washington Post editorial that described him as "the autocratic leader of tiny, impoverished Ecuador" and accused him of a double standard for considering asylum for Snowden while stifling critics at home.

"The shamelessness of the century: Washington Post accuses Ecuador of double standard," Correa said on his Twitter page.

As a contractor for the NSA, Snowden gained access to documents that he gave to the Post and the Guardian to expose what he contends are privacy violations by an authoritarian government.

Correa complained that the international press "has managed to focus attention on Snowden and on those 'wicked' countries that 'aid' him, making us forget the terrible things against the U.S. people and the whole world that he denounced."

An Associated Press reporter entered the transit area where Snowden is purportedly staying by flying from Kiev, Ukraine. It serves both connecting passengers traveling via Moscow to onward destinations and passengers departing from Moscow who have passed border and security checks.

The transit zone unites three terminals: the modern, recently built D and E, and the older, less comfortable F, which dates to the Soviet era. Boarding gates line one side of the transit and departure area, and gleaming duty free shops, luxury clothing boutiques and souvenir stores selling Russian Matryoshka dolls are on the other. About a dozen restaurants owned by local and foreign chains serve various tastes.

Hundreds of Russian and foreign tourists awaited flights on Wednesday, some stretched out on rows of gray chairs, others sipping hot drinks at coffee shops or watching through giant windows as silver-blue Aeroflot planes landed and took off.

An Asian girl, about 10 years old, slept peacefully on her father's lap. A middle-aged mother and her teenage daughter tried out perfume samples at a duty free store, while a woman in a green dress picked out a pair of designer sunglasses. A pilot was buying lunch at Burger King.

Putin insisted Tuesday that Snowden has stayed in the transit zone without passing through Russian immigration and is free to travel wherever he likes. But the U.S. move to annul Snowden's passport may have severely complicated his travel plans. Exiting the transit area would require either boarding a plane or passing through border control, both of which require a valid passport or other documentation.

Hordes of journalists armed with laptops and photo and video cameras have camped in and around the airport, looking for Snowden or anyone who may have seen or talked to him. But after talking to passengers, airport personnel, waiters and shop clerks, the press corps has discovered no sign of the leaker.

Russian news agencies, citing unidentified sources, reported that Snowden was staying at a hotel in the transit terminal, but there was no sign of him at the zone's only hotel, Air Express. It offers several dozen capsule-style spaces that passengers can rent for a few hours to catch some sleep. Hotel staff refused to say whether Snowden was staying there or had stayed there in the past.

"We only saw lots of journalists, that's for sure," said Maxim, a waiter at the Shokoladnitsa diner not far from Air Express, who declined to give his last name because he wasn't allowed to talk to reporters.

The departure and transit area is huge and has dozens of small rooms, some labeled "authorized personnel only," where someone could potentially seek refuge with support from airport staff or security personnel. And security forces or police patrolling the area can easily whisk a person out of this area through back doors or corridors.

There are also a few VIP lounge areas, accessible to business-class passengers or people willing to pay $20 per hour. Snowden was not seen in those areas.

Sheremetyevo's press service declined to comment on Snowden's whereabouts.

Hong Kong officials said they allowed Snowden to leave for Moscow because the U.S. government got his middle name wrong in documents it submitted seeking his arrest. Hong Kong immigration records listed Snowden's middle name as Joseph, but the U.S. government used the name James in some documents and referred to him only as Edward J. Snowden in others, Justice Secretary Rimsky Yuen said. The U.S. also did not provide his passport number and did not respond to requests for clarification, Yuen said.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks gave a terse update on Snowden, saying he was "well" in a post on Twitter.

WikiLeaks says one of its staffers, Sarah Harrison, is traveling with Snowden, but the statement gave no indication if the update came from her, from Snowden, or from some other source.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson did not immediately return a call and a text seeking further comment.

In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Assange said that he was limited in what he could say about Snowden due to security concerns. He denied reports that Snowden was spending his time at the airport being debriefed by Russian intelligence officers.

_____

Yoong reported from Kuala Lumpur. Lynn Berry in Moscow and Raphael Satter in London contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/snowden-mystery-deepens-eyes-airport-170621319.html

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Obama sees a hopeful democratic example in Senegal

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) ? The hopeful story President Barack Obama wants to tell about Africa is represented in the first stop of his weeklong trip to re-engage the continent, in a country where democracy recently overcame an impending electoral crisis.

During his visit to Senegal on Thursday, Obama also will reflect on the ties many African-Americans share with the continent as he takes a tour of Goree Island, Africa's westernmost point. By some accounts, millions of Africans were shipped off into slavery across the Atlantic Ocean through the island's "Door of No Return."

Crowds welcomed Obama's motorcade Thursday morning in Dakar, cheering and waving homemade signs as he made his way to the presidential palace for his meeting with Senegalese President Macky Sall. Some in the crowd drummed and sang outside the palace gates. Sall and his wife, Marieme Faye Sall, greeted Obama and first lady Michelle Obama before entering the palace.

Obama was scheduled to hold a press conference before ferrying to Goree Island for his tour.

It's the first of two island visits where Obama planned to highlight racial atrocities of the past. The second was scheduled for Sunday at South Africa's Robben Island, where anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years.

But Mandela's condition could affect Obama's plans. The former South African president is gravely ill, and Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes said it would be left to the Mandela family to decide whether he is up for a visit from Obama this weekend.

Mandela's legacy hangs over the entire trip, with Senegal among many African countries that have benefited from his example of a peaceful transition to power. "So much of the democratic progress that we see across the continent I think can be tied in some way to the inspiration that Nelson Mandela set," Rhodes said.

Obama's focus in Senegal will be on the modern-day achievements of the former French colony after half a century of independence. Sall ousted an incumbent president who attempted to change the constitution to make it easier for him to be re-elected and pave the way for his son to succeed him. The power grab sparked protests, fueled by hip-hop music and social media, that led to Sall's election.

But such people-powered democratic transitions are not always the story of the African experience. Fighting and human rights abuses limited Obama's options for stops in his first major tour of sub-Saharan Africa since he took office more than four years ago. Obama is avoiding his father's homeland, Kenya, whose president has been charged with war crimes, and Nigeria, the country with the continent's most dominant economy. Nigeria is enveloped in an Islamist insurgency and military crackdown.

Obama's itinerary in Senegal was designed to send a message, purposefully delivered in a French-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, to other Africans in countries that have not made the strides toward democracy that Senegal has. Obama plans to meet with civil society leaders at the Goree Institute and visit the Supreme Court to speak about the importance of an independent judiciary and the rule of law in Africa's development.

"It's not enough to have elections, it's not enough to have democratically elected leaders," Rhodes said. "You need to have independent judiciaries. You need to have confidence in the rule of law. You need to have efforts to combat corruption. Because, frankly, not only is that good for democracy and respect for human rights, but it's critical to Africa's economic growth, because where you have clear rules of the road and efforts to combat corruption, businesses will invest, and jobs will be created and growth will take off. And that's what we want to see."

___

Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-sees-hopeful-democratic-example-senegal-044328472.html

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Microsoft demos Lego Mindstorms EV3 platform using Surface-controlled robot

Microsoft demos Lego Mindstorm EV3 platform using Surfacecontrolled robot

Robot toys aren't what you'd normally expect from Microsoft's developer-focused Build conference, but that's just what the company served up today. In a chat about developer tools, Microsoft's VP of Web Services Antoine Leblond demoed a version of Lego Education's unreleased Mindstorms EV3 platform using -- what else? -- a brick-built robot and a Surface tablet. Citing the Win RT APIs that let users interact with device-specific protocols (i.e., USB, Bluetooth, etc.) Leblond was able to stream live video of his face, using a separate Windows tablet, to the tank-like franken-toy. All whimsy aside, this MS / Lego collaboration's less about giving kids a neat, remote spying tool and more about making programming fun and approachable. You know, STEM stuff. And we're all for it.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/o9jUKd62AA0/

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Astronomers spy on galaxies in the raw

June 26, 2013 ? A CSIRO radio telescope has detected the raw material for making the first stars in galaxies that formed when the Universe was just three billion years old -- less than a quarter of its current age. This opens the way to studying how these early galaxies make their first stars.

The telescope is CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array telescope near Narrabri, NSW. "It one of very few telescopes in the world that can do such difficult work, because it is both extremely sensitive and can receive radio waves of the right wavelengths," says CSIRO astronomer Professor Ron Ekers.

The raw material for making stars is cold molecular hydrogen gas, H2. It can't be detected directly but its presence is revealed by a 'tracer' gas, carbon monoxide (CO), which emits radio waves.

In one project, astronomer Dr Bjorn Emonts (CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) and his colleagues used the Compact Array to study a massive, distant conglomerate of star-forming 'clumps' or 'proto-galaxies' that are in the process of coming together as a single massive galaxy. This structure, called the Spiderweb, lies more than ten thousand million light-years away [at a redshift of 2.16].

CSIRO's Compact Array radio telescope can detect star formation, helping to answer fundamental questions about how early galaxies started forming stars.

Dr Emonts' team found that the Spiderweb contains at least sixty thousand million [6 x 1010] times the mass of the Sun in molecular hydrogen gas, spread over a distance of almost a quarter of a million light-years. This must be the fuel for the star-formation that has been seen across the Spiderweb. "Indeed, it is enough to keep stars forming for at least another 40 million years," says Emonts.

In a second set of studies, Dr Manuel Aravena (European Southern Observatory) and colleagues measured CO, and therefore H2, in two very distant galaxies [at a redshift of 2.7].

The faint radio waves from these galaxies were amplified by the gravitational fields of other galaxies -- ones that lie between us and the distant galaxies. This process, called gravitational lensing, "acts like a magnifying lens and allows us to see even more distant objects than the Spiderweb," says Dr Aravena.

Dr Aravena's team was able to measure the amount of H2 in both galaxies they studied. For one (called SPT-S 053816-5030.8), they could also use the radio emission to make an estimate of how rapidly the galaxy is forming stars -- an estimate independent of the other ways astronomers measure this rate.

The Compact Array's ability to detect CO is due to an upgrade that has boosted its bandwidth -- the amount of radio spectrum it can see at any one time -- sixteen-fold [from 256 MHz to 4 GHz], and made it far more sensitive.

"The Compact Array complements the new ALMA telescope in Chile, which looks for the higher-frequency transitions of CO," says Ron Ekers.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/U3tDbFmAtfs/130626113656.htm

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