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Monday, November 9, 2009

Somali pirates have carried out their longest-range attack to date today, firing on an oil tanker 1,850 kilometers off the coast of Somalia. NATO and European Union anti-piracy forces say pirates attacked the ship in the Indian Ocean, 740 kilometers northeast of the Seychelles islands.

The reports say pirates in at least two skiffs approached the tanker and attacked it with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The vessel took evasive maneuvers and escaped. No casualties were reported. The EU says a spotter plane has been sent to monitor the pirates.

Meanwhile, maritime officials say Somali pirates have seized a cargo ship full of weapons. Details are sketchy on the incident. It is not clear when or where pirates seized the ship, which the officials say is using a fake name, Al Mizan.

The Atalanta naval mission of the EU, which operates off the coast of Somalia, released a statement regarding the incident. “This was the longest range of a pirate attack off the Somali coast ever. Automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades were fired. With increasing speed and evasive maneuvers the master managed to evade the attack. No casualties were reported,” it read.

Somali pirates have gradually extended their reach using so-called mother ships that can journey far out to sea. From these, the pirates launch small skiffs to attack and board commercial vessels.

Last year, and for much of this year, most of the pirates’ attacks took place in the Gulf of Aden, north of Somalia. But in recent weeks, the pirates have concentrated their efforts in the western Indian Ocean, north of the Seychelles. The vast area is much harder for foreign naval patrols stationed off Somalia to cover, although the patrols have stopped some pirate attacks in progress.

Somali pirates are holding at least nine ships and well over 100 crew members in all. The pirates are also holding a British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, who they seized from a yacht last month.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

The Italian Cultural Institute in Barcelona was damaged today by an explosion. One Spanish policeman was injured and his bomb-sniffing dog killed. Staff at the Institute discovered a suspicious object and called police. Police then arrived with a bomb squad and bomb-sniffing dogs.

The explosion, described as small by Italian Embassy spokesman Filip La Rosa, occurred while police were investigating the object. Franco Giordano, Italian consul in Barcelona, described the home-made bomb as a coffee maker (a macchinetta di caffè) with cables.

The Italian Cultural Institute is located at the passatge Méndez Vigo, in the Eixample district of the Catalan capital. Italian language courses were suspended for the day.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Japan’s government has declared its first ever “nuclear emergency” after pressure rises in the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, combined with a minor radiation leak, caused a 10 km radius around the plant to be evacuated. An attempt to relieve the pressure inside the containment vessels of the plant has been delayed.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company’s 40-year old nuclear facility, 270 km NE of Tokyo, reported mechanical difficulties with its cooling system, although the automated shutdown systems worked correctly. With the core reaction shut down the plant is no longer actively generating heat, but the fuel rods continue to generate excess heat and radiation and need constant cooling.

The cooling system runs a constant flow of water to take the heat away from the submerged fuel rods, but the pumping system requires electricity to operate even after the plant is no longer producing electricity itself—generally from back-up diesel or natural gas generators.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

An American inventor has patented a pair of new time formats with a footprint less than 50% of that of conventional four-digit time. The more unusual of the two new formats, called “TWELV”, dispenses with numerals altogether. In place of clock hands or digits, the new clock uses color to convey the hour and a moon image to convey the minute, which moon slowly grows throughout the course of an hour from a narrow crescent to a full-fledged circle.

The second and more approachable of the new formats retains numerical digits to indicate the minute but uses colors to convey the hour.

Early critics question whether the aesthetic benefits of the moon-clock will be sufficient to encourage users to learn the color-based time-telling system. However, the size advantages of the new system may make it particularly suitable for mobile applications, particularly cell phones, wearable computers, and head-mounted displays.

Monday, January 11, 2010

United Airlines Flight 634 made an emergency landing yesterday morning when only two of the three landing wheels on the Airbus A319 deployed as the plane was making its final approach into Newark, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport. After multiple attempts to fix the problem failed, the pilot decided that an emergency landing was the only remaining choice.

Only the plane’s nose gear and left landing gear had descended. The right landing gear would not release. The airliner made a go-around as the crew attempted to fix the problem. Passenger Jim Falk knew something was wrong saying, “Normally a big plane like that doesn’t do a bypass, so we knew something was wrong.”

However, the pilot decided that nothing could be done to bring the gear down, and an emergency landing was declared. “We are going to have an unusual landing,” the pilot calmly announced to the 53 passengers seated on the plane, according to passenger Moritz Loew. Another passenger, Paul Lasiuk said he was more shocked than scared, telling himself, “You have no choice. You’re going to go through this.”

“Brace! Brace! Brace!”, the pilot announced over the plane’s public address system, calling for passengers to enter the brace position as the plane made a touchdown on the runway at Newark. The plane touched down on the nose wheel and left rear wheel before lurching to the right causing sparks to fly as the right engine skidded along the runway. Eventually, the plane came to stop at 9:27 A.M. EDT.

Afterward, passengers and crew evacuated the plane by sliding down the evacuation slides and moving quickly away from the plane. They were then taken by bus to the airline’s lounge where they told their stories to investigators and waited for their luggage. Three passengers reported minor injuries but refused treatment.

The emergency landing caused the airport to shut down for 20 minutes, but service quickly resumed on two of the airports three runways. The plane remained on the runway throughout the afternoon as investigators determined the cause of the landing gear failure.

This is in contrast to last week, when the airport was shutdown for six hours after a young man named Haisong Jiang breached security by passing through an exit to kiss his girlfriend goodbye.

According to passengers, the crew remained calm during the ordeal. Jim Falk said, “They did a great job. There was no yelling, screaming, panicking or anything.” Falk said he wanted to buy a bottle of champagne for the currently unnamed pilot. Falk added, “The pilot did a beautiful job. He didn’t put it in the water like the other pilot did, but he should be commended.”

Martin Trebino, a spokesperson for United Airlines said they would not release the pilot’s name on Sunday, but did not indicate when his name would be made available either.

Paul Lasiuk said, “I’ve had a lot of worse landings at Newark before. It was unbelievably smooth.”

Moritz Loew joked with himself afterward saying, “What’s a great landing? One that you walk away from.”

The flight, which left Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport early Sunday morning around 6 A.M. reported no other problems during the flight up until the incident. According to United Airlines spokesperson Robin Urbanski, it remains unclear why the landing gear failed to deploy. Urbanski added that passengers’ tickets would be refunded and that they would receive vouchers and credit towards any future flight.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The International Monetary Fund and the European Union approved aid packages to help Georgia recover from its conflict with Russia, which occurred in early August. The IMF approved a US$750 million loan which will allow Georgia to rebuild its currency reserves. The European Union also approved an aid package of €500 million in aid by 2010, which is expected to help internally displaced people (IDPs) and economic recovery in the form of new infrastructure. Only €100 million of the EU aid will be given to Georgia this year.

These loans are aimed to restore confidence in Georgia’s economy and send a signal to international investors that Georgia’s economy is sound. According to the IMF, international investors have been “critical to Georgia’s economic growth in recent years.”

Takatoshi Kato, Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chairman of the IMF executive committee, said the loan will “make significant resources available to replenish international reserves and bolster investor confidence, with the aim of sustaining private capital inflows that have been critical to Georgia’s economic growth in recent years.”

Georgia has requested $2 billion in international aid to help it recover from the conflict. So far, the United States has pledged $1 billion in aid. Further assistance and loans to Georgia are expected from other organizations. Kato noted that “…Georgia is expected to receive financial assistance from multilateral and bilateral donors and creditors in support of the reconstruction effort.” It is expected that an international donors’ conference will take place next month to solicit more aid for the country.

Georgia’s government expects that economic growth will be more than cut in half as a result of the conflict. Last year, Georgia’s GDP increased 12.4% and it is predicted by the IMF that growth will be less than 4 percent in the coming year.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre.

PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington University, volunteered at a lab run by Edward Taub, who was testing neuroplasticity on live monkeys. Taub had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys’ fingers, hands, arms, legs; with some of the monkeys, he had severed the entire spinal column. He then tried to force the monkeys to use their limbs by exposing them to persistent electric shock, prolonged physical restraint of an intact arm or leg, and by withholding food. With footage obtained by Pacheco, Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty—largely as a result of the monkeys’ reported living conditions—making them “the most famous lab animals in history,” according to psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Taub’s conviction was later overturned on appeal and the monkeys were eventually euthanized.

PETA was born.

In the subsequent decades they ran the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty against Europe’s largest animal-testing facility (footage showed staff punching beagle puppies in the face, shouting at them, and simulating sex acts while taking blood samples); against Covance, the United State’s largest importer of primates for laboratory research (evidence was found that they were dissecting monkeys at its Vienna, Virginia laboratory while the animals were still alive); against General Motors for using live animals in crash tests; against L’Oreal for testing cosmetics on animals; against the use of fur for fashion and fur farms; against Smithfield Foods for torturing Butterball turkeys; and against fast food chains, most recently against KFC through the launch of their website kentuckyfriedcruelty.com.

They have launched campaigns and engaged in stunts that are designed for media attention. In 1996, PETA activists famously threw a dead raccoon onto the table of Anna Wintour, the fur supporting editor-in-chief of Vogue, while she was dining at the Four Seasons in New York, and left bloody paw prints and the words “Fur Hag” on the steps of her home. They ran a campaign entitled Holocaust on your Plate that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. In 2003 in Jerusalem, after a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up in a terrorist attack, Newkirk sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. As the film shows, they also took over Jean-Paul Gaultier‘s Paris boutique and smeared blood on the windows to protest his use of fur in his clothing.

The group’s tactics have been criticized. Co-founder Pacheco, who is no longer with PETA, called them “stupid human tricks.” Some feminists criticize their campaigns featuring the Lettuce Ladies and “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads as objectifying women. Of their Holocaust on a Plate campaign, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham Foxman said “The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.” (Newkirk later issued an apology for any hurt it caused). Perhaps most controversial amongst politicians, the public and even other animal rights organizations is PETA’s refusal to condemn the actions of the Animal Liberation Front, which in January 2005 was named as a terrorist threat by the United States Department of Homeland Security.

David Shankbone attended the pre-release screening of I Am An Animal at HBO’s offices in New York City on November 12, and the following day he sat down with Ingrid Newkirk to discuss her perspectives on PETA, animal rights, her responses to criticism lodged against her and to discuss her on-going life’s work to raise human awareness of animal suffering. Below is her interview.