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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Energy costs raise concerns on growing economy: Fed

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Trayvon Martin Shooter George Zimmerman Charged With Murder

Zimmerman is now in custody after being charged with murder in the second degree in the Florida teen's shooting death.
By Rob Markman

Trayvon Martin
Photo: AP

After months of public outcry, there was a major break Wednesday (April 11) in the tragic shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin: Triggerman George Zimmerman was charged with murder in the second degree.

Special prosecutor Angela Corey announced the charges during a press conference in Jacksonville, Florida, just a half-hour after it was reported that Zimmerman turned himself in to authorities. Zimmerman was arrested and now is in an undisclosed location.

Martin's February 26 death sent shockwaves through the nation. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, saw 17-year-old Trayvon walking through his gated community in Sanford, Florida, and immediately grew suspicious of the teen, who was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. When Zimmerman called 911, police dispatchers advised him not to pursue Martin. By the time police arrived on the scene, Martin was shot dead and Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense, was not arrested or charged with a crime. Trayvon didn't have a weapon.

A week after the shooting, Sanford Police Chief Billy Lee said there was no evidence to dispute Zimmer's self-defense claim and they couldn't arrest Zimmerman because he was protected by the so-called "Stand Your Ground" law that allows Florida residents to shoot someone they reasonably believe is threatening them. According to reports, Zimmerman told police Martin punched him in the nose, knocked him down and repeatedly slammed his head into the ground.

Since the shooting death, there has been public outrage. Demonstrators took to the streets, and on March 23, President Obama called for an investigation into the incident, saying, "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon."

The hip-hop community has been particularly vocal, calling for justice for the teen. ?uestlove, Game, Young Jeezy, Nas, Killer Mike and Prodigy all spoke out in protest, while rappers like Plies and Bad Boy's Los made songs dedicated to Trayvon.

What do you think of the second-degree murder charges handed down to George Zimmerman? Let us know in the comments.

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90% In Darkness

Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 2012 Academy Awards, Agnieszka Holland's IN DARKNESS, is the poor man's SCHINDLER'S LIST, and I mean that as a high compliment. Now don't get me wrong. I think Spielberg made a masterpiece with his Shoah epic, but Holland earns astute emotions and mines similar themes yet in a more intimate setting. Based on the true story of a Polish sewer worker who charged a small group of Jewish refugees a daily fee to squat in the filthy sewers beneath the city. The title of the film is apt, as so much of it takes place in utter darkness. At almost two and a half hours in length, we feel every minute of their intensely long hiding. Like Schindler, our main character, Leopold Socha, played wonderfully by Robert Wieckiewicz, is an opportunist rather than a Jewish sympathizer. In fact, his anti-semitism is much more overt than Schindler's. On the other hand, his wife Wanda, an incredible Kinga Preis, is much more liberal at the outset, but wants to turn her back on the Jews when she fears for her life and that of her family. Their story is so searing, so vivid and unsentimental. It's no wonder I was more drawn to it than to the lives of the various Jews here. While all terrific actors who are given one horrifying scene after another to endure, their plight isn't as layered as that of Socha.There is one exception, and it's played by Benno Furmann, who is the love child of a Patrick Wilson/Josh Lucas bromance. Playing a man who leaves the sewers to escape INTO a concentration camp to save someone's life, he has leading man written all over her face. He easily commands the screen in all of his scenes. One of my all-time favorite critics, Roger Ebert, dismissed this film by saying that we've seen it all before. As much as I respect his opinion, I disagree. Usually films about this period in history tend to glorify the Jewish characters and they make every moment epic. IN DARKNESS does just the opposite. The Jews are just as flawed as any other characters here, as flawed as anybody would be when facing unreal, desperate circumstances. This is not a hyped up film. Something as simple as rainfall becomes an exciting action sequence, but it's played with an ingenious, dispassionate touch that Holland has always brought to her work.

March 4, 2012

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Astrophile: Ferocious superwind will seal sun's doom

Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse

Object: stellar superwinds
Location: red giant stars; our future
Characteristics: dusty, dense and doom-laden

The sun's dying breath will be no feeble wheeze. Instead, our star will go out in a blustering rage, launching a series of stellar sandstorms into the night. Due in 7 or 8 billion years, humans are unlikely to be around to witness this cosmic gale, but if we are it will be awe-inspiring: far faster than any Earthly hurricane, far denser than the solar wind blowing past Earth today and lasting more than 10,000 years.

"Stars like the sun die in a phase of catastrophic mass loss called a superwind," explains Albert Zijlstra at the University of Manchester, UK. Zijlstra and his colleagues have now caught a glimpse of our sun's doom in the dust around other stars, which seems to reveal what drives these sandstorms.

Superwinds were already known to exist, but it was not clear how they could be powered. One idea was that iron-tainted dust might absorb starlight to be pushed outwards. The problem with that model is that the dust would heat up and vaporise before it could really get moving and drive the wind.

Zijlstra's team used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to look at three red giant stars that are in this late stage of life. By using polarisers and masking off parts of the telescope, they could pick out the polarised light coming from shells of dust around each star.

Ferocious Neptune

The dust was so close to these stars that it would certainly be vaporised if it were absorbing light strongly. So it must be made of transparent crystals. The team suspect it is made of clear silicate minerals, similar to ordinary terrestrial sand grains.

In that case, what pushes it outwards? A clue comes from the size of the grains. At around 300 micrometres across, they are much larger than expected, and these large grains should be good at reflecting starlight. By reflecting instead of absorbing, they can be pushed out without getting overheated.

Then the superwind is a kind of inverted sandstorm. "Instead of the wind picking up the sand, here it is the sand driving the wind," says Zijlstra.

Blowing at 10 kilometres per second, the wind is far faster than any Earthly hurricane or even the ferocious winds of Neptune. In astronomical terms that is no great pace - slower than the solar wind blowing past Earth today - but a superwind is many million times denser than the tenuous solar wind, making it vastly more powerful.

White sapphire

A superwind is not a steady breeze but a series of gusts. These aged stars pulsate roughly once per year. When the sun's time comes, such an intermittent superwind will carry away perhaps a third of its mass over a period of 10,000 years or so.

The wind will form a beautiful planetary nebula, and leave behind a bare stellar core to begin its long afterlife as a white dwarf. If Earth has managed to survive that long, then its bare surface may get sandblasted.

In some cases, the authors suggest, the dust grains may not be silicates but crystals of corundum, the mineral that forms some precious gemstones. That means those stars end their lives in storms of white sapphire.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10935

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Law would lure data processing centers to Ala.

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Supreme Court makes ruling on genetic patents | Rockville Civil ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., was recently ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider a decision it made in July 2011. According to the appeals court, biotechnology company Myriad Genetics was allowed to hold patents on two human genes used to test individuals for breast and ovarian cancer.

The two genes at the center of the controversy are BRCA 1 and BRCA 2. In order to test individuals for both types of cancer, Myriad Genetics uses a test that examines extracted DNA for mutated genes. This allows the company to determine if individuals are at a heightened risk for either of the cancers.

A decision made by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in March 2010 disallowed the company from patenting the genes because they were considered, legally, laws of nature. The appeals court's ruling overturned this, based on the concept that the company tests for specific chemical forms of the two genes, not the genes as they appear naturally.

This argument was shot down by the Supreme Court. According to reports, patents have been limited by the Supreme Court in recent years. Patents covering abstract ideas, natural phenomena and laws of nature have been invalidated by the Supreme Court several times. In a similar case, the Supreme Court recently ruled that another company using gene-related patents to perform medical tests could not hold those patents.

Opponents of the patents are excited by ruling. A staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union said that companies should not be allowed to patent something as natural as DNA. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against Myriad in 2009, seeking to have the patents invalidated.

Source: Chemical and Engineering News, "Supreme Court Orders Review Of Gene Patents," Glenn Hess, Mar. 27, 2012

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Gary Ross Won't Direct 'Hunger Games' Sequel! Who Should?

Well, it's official: The Hunger Games director Gary Ross won't be Catching Fire. Following reports that he might not helm the upcoming Hunger Games sequel, Ross and Lionsgate have issued statements confirming the filmmaker's exit from the franchise. But both sides insist that it wasn't salary negotiations that put the nail in the coffin; instead, they're blaming a disagreement over the film's production schedule.

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