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সোমবার, ১৪ নভেম্বর, ২০১১
Learn a Foreign Language on Your iPad ? with Help from Your Friends
Learning a foreign language on your own can be difficult because it’s almost impossible to tell if you’re pronouncing words correctly. ?The Hello-Hello World iPad app offers language courses for 11 different languages, and it has a social aspect that can help you learn better and faster. ?You can connect with friends who speak the [...]
Newlyweds among dead in Hawaii copter crash
HONOLULU?? At least one of the two couples killed in a tourist helicopter crash on Hawaii's Molokai island Thursday were newlyweds, according to reports Friday.
The aircraft was flying to see West Maui and Molokai when it went down near an elementary school, authorities said. The pilot and all four passengers were killed in the crash.
Rod Antone, a Maui official, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the two couples were from Pennsylvania and Ontario, Canada.
Maui county officials said at least two of the passengers were newlyweds, the paper reported.
Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration's Pacific Division, told the Star-Advertiser that after the crash the helicopter was "engulfed in flames."
Richard Stevens, principal of Kilohana Elementary School, said at the time of the crash "a lot of us heard what we thought was thunder," according to the paper. Ualapue resident Wren Wescoatt added there were heavy rain squalls at the time, saying he had heard a loud "whoop" sound then saw flames from the crash site.
'Extremely grieved'
The Maui News said officials identified the pilot as Nathan Cline, 30, of Kihei.
Blue Hawaiian Helicopters owner David Chevalier said the passengers were taking a 45-minute tour that departed from Kahului, on Maui. He declined to release the pilot's name.
"We're extremely grieved for our pilot as well as the passengers," Chevalier said. "Something like this can't be more devastating to us."
The EC-130 chopper that crashed was less than a year old and was being leased from Nevada Helicopter Leasing LLC, Chevalier said.
Maui mayor Alan Arakawa knew the pilot on a personally, according to a report on news website Hawaii News Now.
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"He's taken us around when we had the tsunami problems," the mayor said.
"We went around and we actually got to see all of the details, taking us real close. (He was) very experienced. We're just really sad that this has happened," he added.
"We truly want to express our sorrow to all of those whose families are involved," Arakawa told the website. Blue Hawaiian, this is only the second accident they've had in the history of the company, so generally a very, very safe company."
Deadly crashes
Molokai is a mostly rural island of about 7,000 people between Maui and Oahu, where world leaders have gathered this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Honolulu.
Helicopter tour companies advertise trips to Molokai to see the island's sea cliffs and Hawaii's tallest waterfall. The remote Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai is where Hawaii exiled leprosy patients between 1866 and 1969.
A Blue Hawaiian helicopter was involved in a July 2000 crash that killed seven people on Maui. A National Transportation Safety Board report said that the pilot was responsible, failing to maintain enough altitude over the terrain amid low-lying clouds.
Blue Hawaiian conducts 160,000 tours each year on all of the Hawaiian islands, Chevalier said.
Hawaii has seen several other helicopter crashes in the last decade.
In March 2007, four people died when a Heli-USA Airways helicopter crashed at Princeville Airport on Kauai.
Three passengers drowned in 2005 after a helicopter crashed into the ocean off the coast of Kauai. In 2004, five people were killed when a helicopter crashed into a mountain on Kauai.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45248790/ns/travel-news/
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রবিবার, ১৩ নভেম্বর, ২০১১
Supernova may have kicked off solar system
Force of explosion could explain chemical mysteries contained within asteroids
Web edition : Friday, November 11th, 2011
Scientists have found a recipe for cooking the solar system from scratch: take a cold cloud of gas, and set it 15 light-years from an exploding supernova. Stun the cloud with the supernova?s shockwave. Incubate, and watch as the solar system begins to take shape.
New computer simulations support this scenario, which is a plausible recounting of the solar system?s birth, reports a team of scientists in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. ?With the supernova, you have one triggering event, and you don?t have to invoke a complicated chain of events,? says study author Matthias Gritschneder, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Understanding how the local solar neighborhood grew up is crucial for learning how other planetary systems are born.
Scientists think the sun and surrounding planets were born from a churning disk of gas and dust, but what precisely caused the stuff to condense and form these bodies has been a mystery. Some clues appear in radioactive elements that were injected into and swam around the presolar cloud. Today, they are embedded in objects such as asteroids, and are thought to mark the first solid bodies that emerged after the cloud?s collapse.
One of these elements, aluminum-26, has helped scientists determine that the solar system was born a little more than 4.5 billion years ago. But the aluminum-26 also presents a puzzle: All of it appears to have enriched the cloud within roughly 20,000 years, much faster than most simulations can explain.
Gritschneder and his colleagues think the nearby supernova solves the aluminum-26 puzzle. In their version of events, all the aluminum-26 would have been incorporated within 18,000 years of the shockwave?s collision, which quickly collapsed the cloud and infused it with the radioactive element. The team ruled out other potential solutions, such as solar wind from a nearby star or enrichment occurring from within the cold cloud itself, because the key elements would have been delivered too slowly or in the wrong quantities. ?You have to come up with something creative to make it happen fast enough,? Gritschneder says. ?We are confident that the clump can sit there, get hit by a supernova, and get enriched quickly.?
Alan Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., has had the same idea. Boss approached the problem differently, by calculating in three dimensions rather than two, but also concluded that shocking the embryonic solar system would simultaneously trigger the cloud?s collapse and quickly inject the required radioactive elements. ?The basic results are the same for both of us, which is a relief,? says Boss, who presented his work on November 8 at the Formation of the First Solids in the Solar System workshop in Kauai, Hawaii.
Getting the same results using different methods supports the supernova shockwave theory, says planetary scientist Fred Ciesla of the University of Chicago. He questions whether scientists have interpreted the 20,000-year time span correctly and points to unresolved issues raised by other radioactive elements, such as iron-60. But even so, Ciesla says, he favors the supernova shock theory over other hypotheses.
?Work like this says something about how stars and planets formed, and whether it?s consistent with the data we have,? Ciesla says. ?Once we?ve been able to accumulate enough information, we can start to speculate about how frequently this works in other places in the galaxy.?
Found in: Atom & Cosmos
Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336035/title/Supernova_may_have_kicked_off_solar_system
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Ex-Israeli president to serve 7 years for rape
JERUSALEM?? Israel's Supreme Court on Thursday ordered former President Moshe Katsav to spend seven years in prison after rejecting the disgraced politician's appeal of a rape conviction and other sex crimes.
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The unanimous decision of the three-judge panel capped a long and sordid chapter in Israeli politics that captured the country's attention for more than five years and ended with Katsav becoming the highest-ranking Israeli official ever sentenced to prison. He is to start serving his sentence on Dec. 7.
The ruling was seen as a major triumph for women's rights ? and specifically, rape victims' rights ? and for a legal system willing to take on some of the country's most influential figures.
Katsav, who has proclaimed his innocence throughout the affair, sat stone-faced throughout Thursday's ruling, briefly smiling wryly as it became clear his appeal was being rejected. He left the court grim-faced, surrounded by supporters, and made no comment to reporters.
Katsav, 65, was convicted last December of raping a former employee when he was a Cabinet minister and of sexually harassing two other women during his term as president from 2000 to 2007. He received a seven-year prison sentence in March, but was allowed to stay out of jail pending his appeal.
The court had not been expected to overturn the conviction, though experts had said there was a chance the sentence would be revised. Reading their opinions, the judges said Katsav's testimony had not been credible and accused him of exploiting his status as a high public official.
The former president "fell from the loftiest heights to the deepest depths," Judge Salim Joubran told the hushed court. "Such a senior official should be a role model to his subordinates. Every woman has a right to her own body. A right to dignity. A right to freedom. No one has the liberty to take any of those from her."
Katsav's attorney, Avigdor Feldman, said he "did not agree" with the outcome of the appeal and faulted the judges for believing the rape victim despite serious holes in her testimony.
"They would have believed her if she said the rape occurred on Venus," Feldman said.
But prosecutor Naomi Granot saw a triumph for the Israeli legal system. "This Supreme Court ruling confirms that in the state of Israel, all are equal before the law," she declared.
Katsav has maintained he was the victim of a political witch hunt.
Israel's presidency is a largely ceremonial office, typically filled by a respected elder statesman who is capable of rising above politics and serving as the country's moral compass.
The case against Katsav, which broke in 2006 after he told police one of his accusers was trying to extort money from him, shocked Israelis by portraying a man widely seen as a bland official as a predatory boss who repeatedly used his authority over female employees to force sexual favors.
Katsav reluctantly resigned two weeks before his seven-year term was to expire in 2007 under a plea bargain that would have allowed him to escape jail time.
He was replaced by Nobel peace laureate and former prime minister Shimon Peres, whom he had bested in the 2000 presidential race, decided in the Israeli parliament. Then, in a dramatic reversal, Katsav rejected the plea bargain, vowing to prove his innocence in court.
Judges, however, were not convinced, accused him of lying and sentenced him to jail in March. His long record of public service did not factor in his favor, they said, instead accusing him of exploiting his lofty positions to become a sexual offender.
Katsav's conviction was a stunning fall from grace for a man who rose from humble beginnings to become a symbol of success for Mizrahi Jews, those of Middle Eastern descent who for decades were an underclass in Israel. The country's elite has long been dominated by Jews of European origin.
In one of the more bizarre moments in the case, Katsav accused prosecutors and the media of plotting his demise and accused them of being out to destroy him because he didn't belong to the European-descended elite.
After his sentencing in March, one of Katsav's lawyers said the former president was so distraught over his impending prison sentence that he was at risk of committing suicide.
The verdict against Katsav was seen as a victory for women's rights in a decades-long struggle to chip away at the nation's macho culture, which once permitted political and military leaders great liberties.
Miriam Schler, director of the Tel Aviv Rape Crisis Center, told Israeli Channel 10 news that Katsav's sentence was "very meaningful."
"This is a day with a very important message to rape victims in the state of Israel, that the justice system can be trusted," Schler said.
It also highlighted the justice system's increased willingness to prosecute powerful figures who see themselves as above the law.
In recent years, Israel has seen a former finance minister sent to prison for embezzling funds and a justice minister convicted of forcibly kissing a female soldier. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was forced to resign to face corruption charges. His trial is still in court.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45234913/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/
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শনিবার, ১২ নভেম্বর, ২০১১
Mexico says copter crash likely due to thick fog (Reuters)
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) ? Thick fog likely caused the helicopter crash on Friday that killed Mexican Interior Minister Francisco Blake and all seven others on board, the country's transportation minister said on Saturday.
An exhaustive investigation is under way, but the initial results indicate the crash was an accident, Communications and Transport Minister Dionisio Perez-Jacome told a news conference.
"At this time we have no indications, no evidence ... that would make one suspect that this is anything other than an accident," he said.
That contradicted an earlier report in a Mexican newspaper, citing a preliminary investigation, that pilot error could have caused the crash.
As interior minister, Blake was responsible for helping Mexican President Felipe Calderon in the country's fight against powerful drug cartels.
Blake, 45, was the second interior minister under Calderon to be killed in an air crash, which fueled some Mexicans to speculate on Twitter about the causes of his death.
Investigators confirmed the pilot was flying manually, using his own vision rather than instruments to guide the craft, but they said that was standard given the good weather conditions when the helicopter left Mexico City.
The helicopter, which was transporting Blake to an event in Cuernavaca about 60 miles south of Mexico City, is believed to have encountered low-lying clouds outside the capital, Perez-Jacome said.
At that point, to seek better visibility the pilot diverted from the planned route, but floundered in dense fog southeast of the capital and crashed on a remote hillside.
Initial checks of the damaged helicopter showed no damage from an explosion or fire, Perez-Jacome said.
Further investigations will seek to confirm the presence of fog in the area where the helicopter crashed, investigators said.
Mexico has requested help from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board as well as the French office in charge of investigating civil aviation accidents, Perez-Jacome told reporters late on Friday.
"This investigation will be exhaustive and will consider all the available evidence," Calderon said at a memorial service for the crash victims on Saturday.
Calderon called Blake an admirable public servant and a very close friend.
The president called off his planned trip to Hawaii for a summit of Asia-Pacific nations after the crash.
(Reporting by Elinor Comlay and Luis Rojas Mena; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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শুক্রবার, ১১ নভেম্বর, ২০১১
Haiti pro-army group frustrated with president (AP)
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ? A group of aspiring soldiers and former troops criticized President Michel Martelly on Wednesday, saying he is breaking his campaign promise to restore Haiti's army.
At a news conference in the Delmas section of the capital, the leaders of a group calling itself the Organization of Demobilized Soldiers for the Reconstruction of Haiti accused Martelly of not sticking to his word.
"As president you must have one word ? either yes or no," ex-soldier David Esperance said as two dozen men in camouflage pants stood behind him. "You can't change your word all the time as president."
The charge came five days after the Martelly administration said the president would announce details about a new "public security force" on Nov. 18 instead of a plan to revive the national army.
The army was disbanded in 1995 by then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide because of its long history of abuse and coups.
Martelly said as a candidate that he wanted to restore the armed force. In September, The Associated Press obtained a government plan to bring back the military with 3,500 soldiers at the cost if $95 million.
The new military would be responsible for border patrol, disaster response and nationwide surveillance, according to the plan. It would later replace a United Nations peacekeeping mission that has been in Haiti since 2004.
It's unclear who would foot the bill.
The U.S. State Department has said that it would help strengthen the national police force, which has 8,500 officers in a country of 10 million, instead of helping rebuild the army.
Members of the pro-army group and similar organizations in the countryside have been training in recent months with the hopes of securing a job in the planned force.
Martelly spokesman Lucien Jura couldn't be reached for comment Wednesday.
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