Various '7 billionth' babies celebrated worldwide

MANILA, Philippines Countries around the world marked the world’s population reaching 7 billion Monday with lavish ceremonies for newborn infants symbolizing the milestone and warnings that there may be too many humans for the planet’s resources.
While demographers are unsure exactly when the world’s population will reach the 7 billion mark, the U.N. is using Monday to symbolically mark the day. A string of festivities are being held worldwide, with a series of symbolic 7-billionth babies being born.
The celebrations began in the Philippines, where baby Danica May Camacho was greeted with cheers and an explosion of photographers’ flashbulbs at Manila’s Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital. She arrived two minutes before midnight Sunday, but doctors say that was close enough to count for a Monday birthday.
The baby received a shower of gifts, from a chocolate cake marked “7B Philippines” to a gift certificate for shoes.
source:taiwannews.com.tw

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Gaddafi buried in unknown location

The Libyan government buried Muammar Gaddafi in an unknown location at dawn on Tuesday, al-Jazeera television reported, citing a source in the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC).
Officials from the interim government had said earlier that the ousted Libyan leader would be buried in a secret desert grave, ending a wrangle over his rotting corpse that led many to fear for the country's governability.
Government forces had put the body on show in a cold store in Misrata while they argued over what to do with it, until its decay forced them to end the display on Monday.
The killing of the 69-year-old in his hometown of Sirte brought to a close eight months of war, finally ending a nervous two-month hiatus since anti-Gaddafi fighters overran the capital, Tripoli.
But it also threatened to lay bare the regional and tribal rivalries that present the NTC with its biggest challenge.
NTC officials had said negotiations were going on with Gaddafi's tribal kinsmen from Sirte and within the interim leadership over where and how to dispose of bodies – Gaddafi's son Mutassim was also on display in Misrata – and over what rebel leaders in possession of corpses might receive in return for co-operation.
"No agreement was reached for his tribe to take him," an NTC official told Reuters.
With the decay of the body forcing the NTC leadership's hand, it appeared to have decided that an anonymous grave would at least ensure the plot did not become a shrine.
An NTC official told Reuters several days ago that there would be only four witnesses to the burial, and all would swear on the Qur'an never to reveal the location.
NTC fears that Gaddafi's sons might mount an insurgency have largely been allayed by the death of two of those who wielded the most power, military commander Khamis and Mutassim, the former national security adviser.
Mutassim was captured along with his father in Sirte and killed in similarly unclear circumstances. The NTC official said he would be buried in the same ceremony on Tuesday. Khamis was killed in fighting earlier in the civil war.
But the official said Gaddafi's long-time heir apparent Saif al-Islam was in the remote southern desert and set to flee Libya, with the NTC powerless to stop him.
"He's on the triangle of Niger and Algeria. He's south of Ghat, the Ghat area. He was given a false Libyan passport from the area of Murzuq," the official added.
He said Muammar Gaddafi's former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi who, like Saif al-Islam, is wanted by the international criminal court, was involved.
"The region is very, very difficult to monitor and encircle," he said. "The region is a desert region and it has … many, many exit routes."
for more detail visit guardian.co.uk

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£101 million lottery prize won by Cambridgeshire couple

A couple from Cambridgeshire have won the UK's third biggest lottery prize of over £101 million and will go public this afternoon, Camelot said.

The win of £101,203,600.70 makes the couple better off than Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne (£95 million), and Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin (£48 million).

A National Lottery spokesman said they were looking forward to welcoming the winner to the millionaires' club.

The biggest-ever EuroMillions prize was a £161 million jackpot won by Colin and Chris Weir, from Largs, Scotland, earlier this year. In October 2010 an anonymous British winner scooped £113 million in the draw.

The winning numbers were 18, 26, 34, 38 and 42. The Lucky Star numbers were 8 and 5.
source : telegraph.co.uk

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Thousands in Chicago protest financial industry

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Thousands of people including teachers, religious leaders and union workers marched in downtown Chicago on Monday to voice mounting anger over joblessness and income inequality in protests that snarled rush-hour traffic.
Chanting "We are the 99 percent" and "Tax, tax, tax the rich," some demonstrators marched on Michigan Avenue and gathered outside the Chicago Art Institute where a U.S. futures industry trade group was holding an evening cocktail reception.
Others marched outside a luxury hotel near to where the American Mortgage Bankers Association was holding a meeting downtown.
Five separate "feeder marches" -- which converged into one giant march up Michigan Ave -- were inspired by, but not formally affiliated with, the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York last month and sparked smaller protests nationwide.
Police estimated a crowd of around 3,000 protesters at the events, organized by the "Stand Up Chicago" coalition with the stated goal of reclaiming "our jobs, our homes and our schools," according to the group's website.
"We really want to highlight the role the financial industry has played," said Adam Kader of Arise Chicago, an interfaith workers' rights group and part of the coalition.
"They're here in our backyard, so this is the time to send a message about how we're really hurting," he added, saying the demonstration would focus on foreclosures, unemployment and lack of municipal funding for key services.
Police arrested 26 demonstrators, many wearing Chicago Teachers Union T-shirts, who linked arms and sat down in Monroe Street as they chanted "Save our schools, save our homes!" They were ticketed and released. Another demonstrator was arrested and faces a charge of battery on a police officer.
source: ca.reuters.com

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Space-obsessed teenagers sought by YouTube

YouTube is asking space-obsessed teenagers to come up with ideas for science experiments to be carried out in space. Two lucky winners will have their experiments carried out by astronauts on the International Space Station.

Space-obsessed teenagers will be interested in this one. YouTube is working with Chinese computer company Lenovo to give teenagers aged between 14 and 18 the opportunity to have their science experiments live streamed from the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth.
The competition, called YouTube Space Lab, has been launched by Google-owned YouTube and will be judged by NASA chiefs, astronauts and Professor Stephen Hawking.
Six regional finalists will be brought to Washington, DC in March next year where, in recognition of their efforts, they’ll get to experience a thrilling (and possibly stomach-churning) zero-G weightless flight. They’ll also receive a Lenovo IdeaPad.
At the special event in DC, the two best science experiment ideas will be chosen by the panel of judges. The two winners will have their experiments carried out by astronauts on the International Space Station.
And there are more goodies in store for the two global winners – they can either enjoy a trip to Tanegashima Island in Japan to watch their science experiment blast off in a rocket heading for the International Space Station, or travel to Star City in Russia to take part in an astronaut training session alongside Russian cosmonauts.
YouTube says it hopes the competition will “inspire a new generation of space enthusiasts by allowing them the extraordinary opportunity of becoming real scientists whose research is conducted in space.”
for more detail visit digitaltrends.com

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Former Washington Gov. Rosellini dies at age 101

Former Washington Gov. Albert Rosellini, a son of Italian immigrants who became the oldest living former governor in America, died Monday. He was 101.

A Democrat who always wore a rosebud on his lapel, Rosellini served as governor for eight years ending in 1965. His tenure in office was defined by efforts to reform state prisons and modernize mental health institutions while shepherding through the creation of the 520 floating bridge that now bears his name.

Rosellini's daughter, Lynn, recalled how he was able to connect with voters so quickly because of his ability to identify with average people and his interest in their concerns.

"He always said if he shook somebody's hand it was a vote," Lynn Rosellini said. "He would look at you like there was nobody else in the room."

The family said Rosellini's health had declined in recent weeks because of pneumonia. He died at a retirement community in Seattle.

Albert Dean Rosellini was born in Tacoma in 1910 and developed his characteristic work ethic as a child. He remembered selling newspapers at age 9 while also doing odd jobs for a woman for a penny a day.

He was a boxer in college and took three jobs to put himself through school, working as a butcher in Pike Place Market, working on an Alaska steamer and law clerking.

source: blueridgenow.com

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Rescuers find 18 bodies in Indonesia plane crash

The bodies of all 18 people who were on board a plane that crashed into the jungle-covered mountains of western Indonesia were recovered from the wreckage Saturday, rescuers said.

The Spanish-designed CASA C-212 lost contact with air traffic control early Thursday while flying from North Sumatra to Aceh province. Minutes later, it sent out a distress signal, then dropped off the radar.

Rugged, forested terrain and bad weather had prevented rescuers from reaching the crash site by foot, and the wreckage was spotted from a helicopter Friday in the Leuser mountains at an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,524 meters).

Early Saturday, 13 rescuers were lowered from a helicopter by rope to the crash site, following two others who had reached the site just before darkness fell Friday.

"They found the bodies still tied with the seat belt on their seats," Sunarbowo Sandi, head of the local search-and-rescue team, told The Associated Press from his monitoring post in a village near the crash site in the Bahorok region, about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) northwest of the capital, Jakarta.

The bodies included all 14 passengers and four crew members. Four of the dead were children.

Hopes had been raised that there may be survivors after the aircraft was spotted intact with one of its doors open, and rescuers dropped food and medicine down to the crash site.

The victims' relatives, who had been waiting for information, broke down in tears when they learned that their loved ones were found dead.

Read More: chron.com

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Using Twitter to track people's moods

There's a lot you can read about on Twitter — including, it now appears, the patterns of human moods.
After analyzing two years' worth of tweets by 2.4 million people around the world, researchers at Cornell University have concluded that individuals wake up happy but that their mood deteriorates as the day progresses.
That discovery, among others reported Thursday in the journal Science, will interest researchers who are trying to understand how circadian rhythms and other natural influences shape our states of mind. But the study's primary significance may have more to do with its methods than its results.
"We now have the ability to view societies at a massive scale using the Internet," said study leader Scott Golder, a graduate student in sociology at Cornell. "This will open up opportunities for social scientists."
Golder said he intended to use Twitter to study behavior, not emotion. He and a fellow graduate student wrote a computer program that sampled all Twitter user accounts created between February 2008 and April 2009, collecting up to 400 messages from each account.
The program compiled more than half a billion Twitter messages, none longer than 140 characters. Most were written by English speakers and deemed good candidates for analysis with other software. The researchers looked at keywords in the tweets to figure out what people were doing and used timestamps embedded in the tweets to peg those activities to particular times of day and locations around the world.
They surmised that bacon is more popular than sausage (but eaten at the same time of day) and that a television show about someone named "Oprah" aired at 4 p.m. on weekdays. They estimated that it takes seven hours to become inebriated, based on the lag between tweets about "beer" and tweets about being "drunk."
They also figured out that they could search for mood-oriented keywords just as easily as they searched for behavior-oriented ones, Golder said.
The team employed a well-known text analysis program that is often used by researchers to sort words based on their emotional content; it seeks out words such as "happy," "awesome" and "fantastic" that have positive overtones as well as words like "afraid," "remorse" and "fury" that have negative ones. Sure enough, patterns emerged.
More Read: articles.latimes.com

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California man is found alive by his children after wreck

David Lavau’s children drove slowly along the mountain road, stopping to peer over the dropoffs and call out for their missing father.
Then finally a faint cry: “Help! Help!” The voice not only let Lavau’s children find him, it may have resolved another missing-person case.
Six days after his car plunged 200 feet into a ravine, Lavau, 68, was rescued Thursday by his three adult children, who took matters into their own hands after a detective told them his last cellphone signal came from a section of the Angeles National Forest.
And near him they found a body in another car that belonged to a man reported missing 10 days earlier.
As Lavau lay injured in the woods next to his wrecked car, he survived by eating bugs and leaves and drinking creek water, a doctor said.
Lavau was in serious but stable condition Friday at a hospital with three rib fractures, a dislocated shoulder, a broken arm and fractures in his back.
Ranbir Singh, the hospital’s trauma director, said Lavau told him he was driving home on the evening of Sept. 23 when he was temporarily blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car. He braked but failed to gain traction. The car flipped and plunged down the embankment.
It landed near a car belonging to Melvin Gelfand, 88, whose family had reported him missing on Sept. 14. The body found inside could not be visually identified due to decomposition. Gelfand’s son-in-law Will Matlack said the family had been contacted by the coroner’s office, which was trying to match fingerprints or dental records to make a positive identification.
Lavau spent the night in his wrecked car and crawled out in daylight. He found a stream nearby and ate ants, the doctor said. He also found a flare in the other car and tried to light it, but it was expired. He also couldn’t find his cellphone.

Read more: kansascity.com

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Pakistan’s Spy Agency Is Tied to Attack on U.S. Embassy

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military official said Thursday that Pakistan’s spy agency played a direct role in supporting the insurgents who carried out the deadly attack on the American Embassy in Kabul last week. It was the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan
In comments that were the first to directly link the spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence with an assault on the United States, Adm. Mike Mullen the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went further than any other American official in blaming the ISI for undermining the American effort in Afghanistan. His remarks were certain to further fray America’s shaky relationship with Pakistan, a nominal ally.
The United States has long said that Pakistan’s intelligence agency supports the Haqqani network, based in Pakistan’s tribal areas, as a way to extend Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. But Admiral Mullen made clear that he believed that the support extended to increasingly high-profile attacks in Afghanistan aimed directly at the United States.
These included a truck bombing at a NATO outpost south of Kabul on Sept. 10, which killed at least five people and wounded 77 coalition soldiers — one of the worst tolls for foreign troops in a single attack in the war — as well as the embassy assault that killed 16 Afghan police officers and civilians.
“With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” Admiral Mullen said in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.” In short, he said, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” His remarks were part of a deliberate effort by American officials to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan and perhaps pave the way for more American drone strikes or even cross-border raids into Pakistan to root out insurgents from their havens. American military officials refused to discuss what steps they were prepared to take, although Admiral Mullen’s statement made clear that taking on the Haqqanis had become an urgent priority.
for more detail visit nytimes.com

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Central Texas fires cause a handful of high school sporting delays

As the raging wildfires neared, Bastrop High football coach Gerald Perry rushed from his home Sunday with his wife, Michelle, and their three children. On Tuesday, he and his family had settled into an uneasy existence at a shelter for evacuees at Bastrop Middle School.
Perry, who left home with "a pair of shorts and two T-shirts," said he had no idea whether his house was among the roughly 577 homes destroyed by two fires in Bastrop County that had burned 34,800 acres by Tuesday night. He did know that two of his assistant coaches and at least two of his players had lost their homes to the wind-driven flames .
"It looks like a war zone out there," Perry said. "We've got friends who have lost their homes. This is a daunting task. Football is about the furthest thing from my mind."
On Friday night, Perry's team shut out Seguin to even its record after two games. By Tuesday, the Bears' football season had been pushed into the background, as a handful of high schools in Central Texas postponed or cancelled sporting events and other extracurricular activities in the wake of the devastating fires.
Tuesday's varsity volleyball matches involving teams from Bastrop, Cedar Creek, Vandegrift, Rouse and Smithville high schools were called off.
Bastrop and Cedar Creek also won't play Friday after the Bastrop Independent School District cancelled classes for the rest of this week.
The decision also meant Bastrop's football team won't play its scheduled game against Akins on Friday night.
Cedar Creek, which won't field a varsity football team until next year, will not play its scheduled junior varsity game on Thursday. Coach Dan Hernandez said he had contacted most of the 85 to 90 juniors, sophomores and freshmen who play football for Cedar Creek, which opened in 2010.
for more detail visit  statesman.com

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