Thursday, September 10, 2009

“Dad Arrested for Kissing His Daughter - AOL” plus 4 more

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“Dad Arrested for Kissing His Daughter - AOL” plus 4 more

Dad Arrested for Kissing His Daughter - AOL

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:56 AM PDT

    Villagers help children floodwaters in Dhanarua, India, Sept. 10. Heavy rains caused flash floods that inundated about 100 villages.

    AP

    Smoke billows from a fire in a pine tree forest in Jamhur, Lebanon, Sept. 10.

    Joseph Barrak, AFP / Getty Images

    Canadian billionaire philanthropist Guy Laliberte smiles as he puts on a clown nose during a news conference at Russian Space Training Center in Moscow on Sept. 10. The founder of Cirque du Soleil says he'll take some reading matter to the International Space Station this month.

    Mikhail Metzel, AP

    French dairy farmers and supporters gather to protest milk prices in Paris on Sept. 10. Dairy prices have collapsed due to low demand caused by the financial and economic crisis.

    Martin Bureau, AFP / Getty Images

    Mika Yoshida, an employee of Ogawa Stadium, packages rubber face masks of Japan's Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama near Tokyo on Sept. 10.

    Junji Kurokawa, AP

    Police prepare to enter a hijacked Aeromexico plane sitting on the tarmac at Mexico City's international airport on Sept. 9. All passengers and the crew were released unharmed.

    Marco Ugarte, AP

    Brian Mills, an Elvis impersonator, marries Richard Johnson and Cheryl Bell, of Peoria, Ariz., at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel on Sept. 9.

    Isaac Brekken, AP

    This image taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope shows a celestial object that looks like a delicate butterfly. It was released by NASA on Sept. 9.

    NASA / AP

    President Barack Obama meets with New York City firefighters in Manhattan, Sept. 9, before speaking at a memorial service for the late CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite.

    Charles Dharapak, AP

    President Barack Obama delivers a speech on health care to a joint session of Congress, Sept., 9, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

    Charles Dharapak, AP



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US Senate Passes New International Visitor Fee - ABC News

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:49 AM PDT

Senators voted Wednesday to charge international travelers a $10 fee to help pay for a new nonprofit corporation to promote tourism in the United States.

The legislation, which passed 79-19, was backed by the travel industry. Lawmakers said many international governments aggressively help tourism in their countries by subsidizing promotional programs, but the United States leaves that work to the private sector and to state and local governments.

Much of the money for the promotional efforts will come from fees paid by the travel industry. The rest would come from the $10 fee on international visitors.

The United States began requiring people who do not need visas to enter the country to register online at least 72 hours before travel and renew their registration every two years. If the new proposal should become law, it would require people to pay the $10 fee when they register.

The European Union has said that some U.S. travelers to Europe could face retaliatory fees if the bill should pass. A similar bill has been proposed in the House of Representatives but has not been voted on. It would have to be passed and the two bills joined into a single piece of legislation to be signed into law.

Senators from states dependent on tourism, such as Florida and Nevada, led the effort to pass the bill, along with Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, from the agricultural state of North Dakota, the bill's chief sponsor.

"We desperately need jobs. We're very dependent on tourism. This bill will help create tourism-type jobs, but it won't just do it for Nevada," said that state's junior senator, Republican John Ensign. "When people come to our country to visit, they may come to one state primarily, but they usually stop in several other states along the way."

Senators, citing data from industry sources, said ramped-up marketing efforts would lead to an additional 1.6 million international travelers coming to the United States annually, and they said those travelers spend about $4,500 per visit.



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Despite opening, Cuba looks tough for U.S. telecoms - Reuters

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:27 AM PDT

By Jeff Franks - Analysis

HAVANA (Reuters) - Americans may soon be able to use their cell phones in Cuba, but U.S. telecommunications companies will find it tough to break into Cuba's largely untapped market under a new relaxation of the U.S. embargo against the island, industry experts say.

They will face a tangle of political, legal and technical issues that reflect 50 years of bitterness between two countries that were closely allied before the 1959 Cuban revolution put Fidel Castro in power.

Chief among the hurdles is likely to be a cool reception from the Cuban government, which views American cell phones, satellite dishes and Internet service as a threat to its control over the flow of information to the island just 90 miles from Florida.

Potentially big obstacles loom on the U.S. side as well, despite enactment last week of regulations by President Barack Obama effectively granting U.S. telecoms companies a loophole in the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against communist-ruled Cuba.

Lawsuit judgments against Cuba have been stacking up for years in U.S. courts, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in financial liability for the cash-strapped island in the midst of its worst economic crisis since the 1990s.

U.S. companies also could face stiff competition from Latin American and European rivals said to be eyeing the Cuban market. All potential entrants will have to market to a Cuban population that makes on average $20 a month and so for whom modern communications are often a luxury.

On the plus side, Cuba is a close and potentially lucrative market where there are only 12.6 phones per 100 people, the lowest ratio in the region, and only 13 percent of the population has access to the Internet, or in most cases a local intranet restricted to Cuban sites.

Cuba has been mostly silent so far on the telecoms changes, which Obama originally announced in April along with the lifting of restrictions on family travel and remittances of money to Cuba by Cuban Americans.

But a high-ranking Cuban official, well placed to know the government's telecoms policy, told Reuters last week Cuba was willing to meet with all U.S. companies.

HAPPY TO TALK

"We'd be happy to talk with them," he said when asked if Cuba would consider doing business with U.S. telecommunications companies. "We're prepared to talk about everything."

John Kavulich, senior policy adviser at the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York, said Cuba's assurances should be taken with a grain of salt.

"The government of Cuba generally responds to overtures from the United States with a 'willingness to discuss anything.' When the 'anything' is defined as accountability and lessening of control, the willingness is likely to be minimal," he said.

Most experts think Cuba will seriously consider any telecom proposal that holds the promise of rich revenues.

But security concerns will take precedence, and so they doubt the Cuban government will want anything to do with U.S. satellite television or Internet services. Continued...



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BYU's Hall feels a measure of redemption - ESPN.com

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:27 AM PDT


Posted by ESPN.com's Graham Watson

Max Hall acknowledged that he needed to start the 2009 season off with a bang.

The embattled BYU quarterback had taken the brunt of the criticism for a poor 2008 season. He'd been blamed for ruining what looked to be the team's first trip to the BCS and spent the time between the Las Vegas Bowl and spring football trying to get his mind right for his senior season.

So coming in to last week's game against Oklahoma, Hall knew that one way or another, his performance would define his legacy as a BYU quarterback.

"I think that's why I was so emotional after the game," Hall said. "All the criticism and the scrutiny that I got after last year from our fans and from other fans and from everybody around the nation was tough. But it was motivation. I worked really hard in the offseason to improve my game.

"And to come out and have a signature win like that. It's a win people will always remember and will go down as one of the best wins in BYU history. To have a chance to be the quarterback in that game, to have the game-winning drive, that's something I've been dreaming about since I was a little kid."

Hall completed 26 of 38 passes for 329 yards and two touchdowns. And even though he looked shaky at times and threw two interceptions, he still had the composure to lead his team on the game-winning drive in the fourth quarter of a 14-13 win over the No. 3 Sooners.

"What we've talked a lot about, Max and I, is simply doing your best and knowing who you are and not letting anyone else define you from the outside," BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall said. "When you're in as visible a position as he is, he's going to be a target. Yet, he's done everything he can so far this season to answer that. But I don't think he's doing it to answer anybody else, I think he's doing it to help our team."

Hall and BYU have earned numerous accolades this week. The Cougars jumped 11 spots in the AP poll to start the second week No. 9 and lead the chase for a BCS bowl berth.

Now, Hall's task is to make sure his team doesn't succumb to the same pressures it did a year ago. The Cougars travel to Tulane this week to play in what should be an easily winnable game. However, looking ahead, there's a tough game against Florida State looming.

"I think we're motivated enough and we realize that we have a very good football team, and the possibilities could be endless," Hall said. "We can do whatever we set out to do this year if we keep working hard and we take it one practice and one game at a time."



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New Robot Travels Across The Seafloor To Monitor The Impact Of Climate ... - Science Daily

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:56 AM PDT

ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2009) — Like the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which wheeled tirelessly across the dusty surface of Mars, a new robot spent most of July traveling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the California coast. This robot, the Benthic Rover, has been providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep seafloor. It will also give scientists a way to document the effects of climate change on the deep sea. The Rover is the result of four years of hard work by a team of engineers and scientists led by MBARI project engineer Alana Sherman and marine biologist Ken Smith.

About the size and weight of a small compact car, the Benthic Rover moves very slowly across the seafloor, taking photographs of the animals and sediment in its path. Every three to five meters (10 to 16 feet) the Rover stops and makes a series of measurements on the community of organisms living in the seafloor sediment. These measurements will help scientists understand one of the ongoing mysteries of the ocean—how animals on the deep seafloor find enough food to survive.

Most life in the deep sea feeds on particles of organic debris, known as marine snow, which drift slowly down from the sunlit surface layers of the ocean. But even after decades of research, marine biologists have not been able to figure out how the small amount of nutrition in marine snow can support the large numbers of organisms that live on and in seafloor sediment.

The Benthic Rover carries two experimental chambers called "benthic respirometers" that are inserted a few centimeters into the seafloor to measure how much oxygen is being consumed by the community of organisms within the sediment. This, in turn, allows scientists to calculate how much food the organisms are consuming. At the same time, optical sensors on the Rover scan the seafloor to measure how much food has arrived recently from the surface waters.

MBARI researchers have been working on the Benthic Rover since 2005, overcoming many challenges along the way. The most obvious challenge was designing the Rover to survive at depths where the pressure of seawater is about 420 kilograms per square meter (6,000 pounds per square inch). To withstand this pressure, the engineers had to shield the Rover's electronics and batteries inside custom-made titanium pressure spheres.

To keep the Rover from sinking into the soft seafloor mud, the engineers outfitted the vehicle with large yellow blocks of buoyant foam that will not collapse under extreme pressure. This foam gives the Rover, which weighs about 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds) in air, a weight of only about 45 kilograms (100 pounds) in seawater.

Other engineering challenges required less high-tech solutions. In constructing the Rover's tractor-like treads, the design team used a decidedly low-tech material—commercial conveyor belts. After watching the Benthic Rover on the seafloor using MBARI's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), however, the researchers discovered that the belts were picking up mud and depositing it in front of the vehicle, where it was contaminating the scientific measurements. In response, the team came up with a low-tech but effective solution: they removed the heads from two push brooms and bolted them onto the vehicle so that the stiff bristles would clean off the treads as they rotated.

The team also discovered that whenever the Rover moved, it stirred up a cloud of sediment like the cloud of dust that follows the character "Pig-Pen" in the Charlie Brown comic strip. This mud could have affected the Rover's measurements. To reduce this risk, the engineers programmed the Rover to move very, very slowly—about one meter (3 feet) a minute. The Rover is also programmed to sense the direction of the prevailing current, and only move in an up-current direction, so that any stirred-up mud will be carried away from the front of the vehicle.

In its basic configuration, the Benthic Rover is designed to operate on batteries, without any human input. However, during its month-long journey this summer, the Rover was connected by a long extension cord to a newly-completed underwater observatory. This observatory, known as the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), provided power for the robot, as well as a high-speed data link back to shore.

According to Sherman, "Hooking up the Rover to the observatory opened up a whole new world of interactivity. Usually when we deploy the Rover, we have little or no communication with the vehicle. We drop it overboard, cross our fingers, and hope that it works." In this case, however, the observatory connection allowed MBARI researchers to fine tune the Rover's performance and view its data, videos, and still images in real time. Sherman recalls, "One weekend I was at home, with my laptop on the kitchen table, controlling the vehicle and watching the live video from 900 meters below the surface of Monterey Bay. It was amazing!"

Later this fall, the Rover will be sent back down to the undersea observatory site in Monterey Bay for a two-month deployment. Next year the team hopes to take the Rover out to a site about 220 km (140 miles) offshore of Central California. They will let the Rover sink 4,000 meters down to the seafloor, where it will make measurements on its own for six months. The team would also like to take the Rover to Antarctica, to study the unique seafloor ecosystems there. The Rover may also be hooked up to a proposed deep-water observatory several hundred miles off the coast of Washington state.

In addition to answering some key questions of oceanography, the Benthic Rover will help researchers study the effects of climate change in the ocean. As the Earth's atmosphere and oceans become warmer, even life in the deep sea will be affected. The Benthic Rover, and its possible successors, will help researchers understand how deep-sea communities are changing over time.

Just as the rovers Spirit and Opportunity gave us dramatic new perspectives on the planet Mars, so the Benthic Rover is giving researchers new perspectives of a dark world that is in some ways more mysterious than the surface of the distant red planet.



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