rustbelt bass

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Zimbabwe generals: We won't meet prime minister

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) ? Zimbabwe's generals and police commanders say they won't meet with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and other "malcontents" trying to undermine their powers, the country's official media reported Wednesday .

The state-owned Herald newspaper, controlled by President Robert Mugabe's party, said the country's powerful police chief warned critics of the army and police that they risked being arrested if they continued demanding reforms in the security forces and "peddling lies" on the allegedly tainted role of the armed services ahead of crucial elections later this year.

Security chiefs "will neither meet or engage" with Tsvangirai, the paper quoted police chief Augustine Chihuri as saying.

Chihuri said security chiefs "have no business talking to individuals of no substance," according to the paper, which said the police chief was addressing a police sports gala in Harare.

Tsvangirai's party has called for an overhaul of the police and military blamed for openly supporting Mugabe and failing to enforce the rule of law in the troubled southern African country.

Chihuri dismissed the calls for security reforms as attempts to create confusion within the ordinary ranks of the defense forces.

"I wish to warn liars and the peddlers of falsehoods who dream of talking to us, to this general or to that general ... the law will visit them harshly," Chihuri said, according to the paper.

Service commanders deny their units were among Mugabe loyalists blamed for state-orchestrated violence and human rights abuses surrounding past election campaigning and polling.

Chihuri said demands for "so-called security sector reforms" were a gimmick by political opponents who played no part in Zimbabwe's war of liberation that ended colonial-era rule and led to independence from Britain in 1980.

"We are too busy to engage with confused malcontents who do not know their identity and have a propensity to destroy what others, dead and alive fought for. They must stop abusing the freedom and democracy that so many Zimbabweans died for. I advise journalists to stop being used in this regard," Chihuri said.

It was the strongest criticism by a service commander of Tsvangirai and his party's leaders since several generals refused to salute the former opposition leader after he became prime minister in 2009 in a shaky coalition with Mugabe forged by regional mediators after the last violent and disputed elections the year before.

Chihuri's outspoken remarks were seen as another setback within the coalition as watershed elections loom.

Fresh elections to end the coalition are expected by September. Tsvangirai has asked his aides to open dialogue with the police and military to urge them to discharge their duties in an unbiased way and meet obligations in the constitution to be non-partisan.

Tsvangirai, 60, a former labor leader, did not join guerrilla forces fighting to end white ruled Rhodesia. His party says more democratic reforms, including a shuffle of some service units and commanders it accuses of being tainted by violence and alleged vote rigging, are a key demand to prepare the way for free and fair elections.

Chihuri, according to The Herald, rejected such reforms as "a non-issue."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/zimbabwe-generals-wont-meet-prime-minister-161000745.html

lorax fisker karma super tuesday states shepard fairey is snooki pregnant snooki pregnant gbc

Italian police arrest four suspected Islamist militants

BARI, Italy (Reuters) - Italian police on Tuesday arrested four of six men they suspect are members of an Islamist militant cell which was planning attacks in the United States, Israel and Italy, though no specific targets were named by police.

The men aimed to train militants and send them abroad, para-military police said, and are suspected of conspiracy to commit international terrorism and inciting racial hatred.

They were arrested in Andria in the southern Italian region of Puglia, where police say the group was based, and in Milan, Brussels and Catania, Sicily, and include a Tunisian who was the former imam at a mosque in Andria, police said.

Italian police are still looking for two other Tunisian men who they believe have returned to their home country. No international arrest warrant has been issued for them.

Investigators believe the six men tried to recruit among illegal immigrants in Italy, who then went on to training camps in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Yemen.

In some cases the new recruits carried out attacks in Iraq.

The cell was characterised by "fierce anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment" and aversion to states viewed as enemies in the context of religious war, a police statement said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/italian-police-arrest-four-suspected-islamist-militants-142026628.html

Lizzie Velasquez NFL Network att libya engadget twin towers gizmodo

What's a monster hurricane doing on top of Saturn? (+video)

A monster hurricane at Saturn's north pole, spotted by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, has an eye 1,250 miles wide and inner eye wall winds of 330 miles an hour. Its energy source is a mystery.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / April 30, 2013

In this undated false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows stunning views of a monster hurricane at Saturn's North Pole.

JPL-Caltech/SSI/NASA/AP

Enlarge

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of a monster hurricane at Saturn's north pole ? a storm so vast and powerful it makes tropical cyclones on Earth look tame by comparison.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

The storm's eye alone spans some 1,250 miles ? about the distance from North Carolina's Outer Banks to central Kansas. Wind speeds at the inner eye wall have been clocked at 330 miles an hour. The storm extends for another 600 to 700 miles beyond the eye.

Like a hurricane eye on Earth, the eye of Saturn is virtually cloudless, with tall clouds forming the eye wall and extending out from the eye.

"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," Andrew Ingersoll, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and a member of the Cassini science team, said in a prepared statement. "But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale."

Saturn's no-name storm sits nearly dead center inside another odd feature: a hexagonal ring of high-speed winds analogous to Earth's polar jet streams, high-altitude winds that circle the globe at high latitudes.

The hexagon is about the size of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a feature that would cover two to three Earths side by side, Dr. Ingersoll explained in an interview.

Saturn's polar storm is small compared with Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the current record-holder for largest storm on any planet in the solar system. That storm sits in Jupiter's southern hemisphere at a latitude comparable to the central coast of Queensland in Australia, where tropical cyclones frequently make landfall. Winds speeds for the Great Red Spot hover at around 400 miles an hour.

Astronomers have observed Jupiter's ruddy blemish regularly since 1831, although some records hint at an initial observation in the 1600s. Indeed, it may be a permanent feature in the giant planet's atmosphere.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/4Jr9gPvd_ek/What-s-a-monster-hurricane-doing-on-top-of-Saturn-video

Lilly Pulitzer Ben And Jerrys Accidental Racist Lyrics Mad Men Jenna Jameson melissa mccarthy Andy Dick

Bird fossil sheds light on how swift and hummingbird flight came to be

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

A tiny bird fossil discovered in Wyoming offers clues to the precursors of swift and hummingbird wings. The fossil is unusual in having exceptionally well-preserved feathers, which allowed the researchers to reconstruct the size and shape of the bird's wings in ways not possible with bones alone.

Researchers spotted the specimen ? the nearly complete skeleton of a bird that would have fit in the palm of your hand and weighed less than an ounce ? while working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The newly discovered bird was named Eocypselus rowei, in honor of John W. Rowe, Chairman of the Field Museum's Board of Trustees.

First collected in southwestern Wyoming in a fossil site known as the Green River Formation, E. rowei lived roughly 50 million years ago, after the dinosaurs disappeared but before the earliest humans came to be.

E. rowei was a tiny bird ? only twelve centimeters from head to tail. Feathers account for more than half of the bird's total wing length.

To find out where the fossil fit in the bird family tree, the researchers compared the specimen to extinct and modern day species. Their analyses suggest that the bird was an evolutionary precursor to the group that includes today's swifts and hummingbirds.

Given the differences in wing shape between these two closely related groups of birds, scientists have puzzled over how swift and hummingbird flight came to be. Finding fossil relatives like this specimen is key to figuring that out, the researchers say.

"This fossil bird represents the closest we've gotten to the point where swifts and hummingbirds went their separate ways," said lead author Daniel Ksepka of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Hummingbirds have short wings relative to their bodies, which makes them good at hovering in mid-air. Swifts have super-long wings for gliding and high-speed flight. But the wings of E. rowei were somewhere in between.

"[Based on its wing shape] it probably wasn't a hoverer, like a hummingbird, and it probably wasn't as efficient at fast flight as a swift," Ksepka said.

The shape of the bird's wings, coupled with its tiny size, suggest that the ancestors of today's swifts and hummingbirds got small before each group's unique flight behavior came to be. "Hummingbirds came from small-bodied ancestors, but the ability to hover didn't come to be until later," Ksepka explained.

Closer study of the feathers under a scanning electron microscope revealed that carbon residues in the fossils ? once thought to be traces of bacteria that fed on feathers ? are fossilized melanosomes, tiny cell structures containing melanin pigments that give birds and other animals their color. The findings suggest that the ancient bird was probably black and may have had a glossy or iridescent sheen, like swifts living today. Based on its beak shape it probably ate insects, the researchers say.

The other authors of this study were Julia Clarke, Sterling Nesbitt and Felicia Kulp of the University of Texas at Austin, and Lance Grande of the Field Museum of Natural History.

The results will appear in the May 1 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

###

Ksepka, D., et al. (2013). "Fossil evidence of wing shape in a stem relative of swifts and hummingbirds (Aves, Pan-Apodiformes)." Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent): http://www.nescent.org

Thanks to National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 34 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128061/Bird_fossil_sheds_light_on_how_swift_and_hummingbird_flight_came_to_be

orcl the hartford illinois primary 2012 michael bay zsa zsa gabor illinois primary trayvon martin 911 call

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins told Bloomberg that "in five years I don't think there'll be a reason

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins told Bloomberg that "in five years I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore," and that tablets are "not a good business model." Which is maybe true if you sell PlayBooks and less so if you sell, say, 20 million iPads every three months.

National Secular Society - Protests as Luton council cuts free ...

Councillors walked out of a meeting at Luton Town Hall this week when observers in the public gallery began shouting and waving placards in protest at the Councils plans to end free transport for pupils attending religious schools.

Members of the executive refused to return until all members of the public had left the building. The council said the cut could save nearly ?300,000 in the first year. In total it needs to cut ?49m from its budget.

Luton currently provides discretionary free transport for children under eight who live between two and 15 miles from their school and between three and 15 miles for over eights. The authority said the cut would save about ?278k in 2013/14 and ?487k in 2014/15.

They are legally obliged to provide the transport for pupils aged 11 to 16 from low income families and this will continue.

About 600 pupils at Cardinal Newman Roman Catholic School will be affected. At present it takes eleven buses a day, including 10 double-deckers, to ferry 600 children to the Cardinal Newman Roman Catholic School inWarden Hill Road.

Parents said it would cost about ?600 per child, per year, to make alternative arrangements. They recently boycotted the transport for one day and drove their children to the school to demonstrate to the council what effect it would have on traffic in the area.

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, said: "In all the instances of councils cutting free transport to religious schools, the parents have claimed discrimination. But the real discrimination is against children going to community schools who have to find their own way at their own expense. The parents affected in Luton should be grateful that they've had so much extra money pumped into their children's education over such a long period. They are now going to have to give up this very generous perk ? provided solely on the grounds that they are Catholic ? and pay their way like everyone else has to."

Source: http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2013/04/protests-as-luton-council-cuts-free-transport-to-religious-schools

end of the world december 21 2012 norad 12/21/12 winter solstice Jabari Parker 2012

J.J. Abrams Eyeing John Williams For 'Star Wars' Reboot Score

'I believe that, going forward, John Williams will be doing that film,' Abrams says.
By Gil Kaufman

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1706602/star-wars--vii-composer-john-williams.jhtml

Outside Lands washington post Family Guy Boston Marathon revolution huffington post What is ricin Boston Marathon Explosion