Oklahoma Insurance Department spokeswoman Calley Herth told the AP news agency that the early damage tally is based on visual assessments of the disaster zone that stretches more than 27 kilometres and that Monday’s tornado was on the ground for 40 minutes.

The financial cost of the tornado in Moore could be greater than the $2 bn in damage from a 2011 tornado that killed 158 people in Joplin, Missouri, Herth said, adding that the Joplin tornado left a smaller trail of destruction.

For the first time Wednesday, authorities provided a clearer accounting of the destruction in Moore, a town of about 56,000 in a central US region known as Tornado Alley. Moore was also hit by a massive tornado in 1999.
Up to 13,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and 33,000 people were affected in some way by the storm, Mick Cornett, Oklahoma City mayor, said at a news conference.

He also put the monetary damage estimate at between $1.5bn to $2bn.

Emergency officials were unable to put a figure on the number of people left homeless, because many people have been taken in by relatives and only a few dozen have stayed overnight at Red Cross shelters.

Six adults remain unaccounted for since the tornado, said Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management Director Albert Ashwood. It is possible those people had just “walked off” their properties or could still be found in the rubble, Ashwood said.

President Barack Obama will travel to Moore on Sunday to view the damage first-hand and meet with victims and emergency personnel. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano visited the area on Wednesday, pledging the government’s support.

The National Weather Service said the tornado was a top-of-the-scale EF5 twister with winds of at least 322 kph, the first EF5 tornado of 2013.

The Oklahoma medical examiner’s office announced that it has positively identified 23 of the 24 people who died in the tornado.

Nine children were among the 24 killed, including seven who died at Plaza Towers Elementary School, which took a direct hit by the deadliest tornado to strike the US in two years.

Mayor Glen Lewis said Wednesday he would propose an ordinance in the next couple of days to modify building codes to require that every new home in the town would have a reinforced tornado shelter.

Underground safe rooms are typically built below garages and can cost around $4,000.

Al Jazeera’s John Hendren, reporting from Moore Oklahoma, said even after the lethal 1999 tornado, commercial and home builders have opposed new requirements for shelters to be installed.

No landmarks

Emergency crews had trouble navigating devastated neighbourhoods because there were no street signs left. Some rescuers used smartphones or GPS devices to guide them through areas with no recognisable landmarks.

More than 1,000 people had already registered for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which sent hundreds of workers to Oklahoma to help with the recovery.

Emergency workers pulled more than 100 survivors from the debris of homes, schools and hospital.

Plaza Towers Elementary was one of five schools in the path of the tornado.

Oklahoma State Police Sergeant Jeremy Lewis said that rescuers “literally were lifting walls up and kids were coming out”.

“They pulled kids out from under cinder blocks without a scratch on them,” Lewis said.

The National Weather Service (NWS) predicted a 10 percent chance of more tornadoes in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.

It said parts of four other states – Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Iowa – had a five percent risk of tornadoes.

Lagarde has played down the investigation, but the stakes of the investigation are huge for both her and the IMF.

Criminal charges against Lagarde, 57, would mark the second scandal in a row for an IMF chief, after her predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also from France, resigned in disgrace over an alleged assault on a New York hotel maid.

Lagarde is appearng on Thursday before the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), which probes cases of ministerial misconduct, to explain her 2007 handling of a row that resulted in 400m euros ($515m) being paid to Tapie.

Tapie is a former politician and controversial business figure who went to prison for match-fixing during his time as president of French football club Olympique de Marseille.

Prosecutors working for the CJR suspect he received favourable treatment in return for supporting Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election.

They have suggested Lagarde, who at the time was finance minister, was partly responsible for “numerous anomalies and irregularities” which could lead to charges for complicity in fraud and misappropriation of public funds.

Tapie v Credit Lyonnais

The investigation centres on her 2007 decision to ask a panel of judges to arbitrate in a dispute between Tapie and Credit Lyonnais, the collapsed, partly state-owned bank, over his 1993 sale of sports group Adidas.

Tapie had accused Credit Lyonnais of defrauding him by consciously undervaluing Adidas at the time of the sale and argued that the state, as the former principal shareholder in the bank, should compensate him.

His arguments were upheld by the arbitration panel but critics claimed the state should not have taken the risk of being forced to pay compensation to a convicted criminal who, as he was bankrupt at the time, would not have been able to pursue the case through the courts.

The payment Tapie received enabled him to clear his huge debts and tax liabilities and, according to media reports, left him with 20-40m euros which he has used to relaunch his business career.

“Lagarde will for the first time have the opportunity to provide (the CJR) with explanations and clarifications that exempt her from any criminal responsibility,” Yves Repiquet, Lagarde’s lawyer, said of the court appearance.

“There’s nothing new under the sun,” Lagarde said last month in Washington.

“Ever since 2011 I had known very well that I will be heard by the investigative commission of the Cour de Justice.”

She has said the arbitration was necessary to put an end to a costly dispute, and has always denied having acted under orders from Sarkozy.

Lagarde would not automatically be forced to resign as IMF chief if she is charged, but such a ruling would certainly weaken her position.

Her contract requires that she maintain the integrity of the office and “strive to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in your conduct”.

Pierre Moscovici, finance minister, said on Wednesday that Lagarde “retains the full confidence of French authorities”, but suggested the government could seek to have the payout to Tapie nullified if it is found to have been fraudulent.

The bomb, containing about 100kg of explosives, targeted a lorry carrying members of a government paramilitary force on Thursday on the Northern Bypass road in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province.

Quetta is the capital of the province of Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

The province is considered one of the most deprived parts of Pakistan, which suffers from Taliban violence, a separatist insurgency and sectarian unrest.

Most of those wounded are said to be security personnel.

A bomb disposal officer said the nature of the device was not clear, and experts were trying to ascertain whether the explosion had been caused by an improvised explosive device (IED) or a suicide bomber.

Speaking at a news conference with his Jordanian counterpart, Nasser Judeh, Kerry said a US-Russian proposed conference in Geneva planned for next month seeks “to end the bloodshed that has cost tens of thousands of lives”.

“We would call on President Assad to make the same commitment to find peace in his country,” Kerry said.

The foreign ministers of Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States are attending the Amman gathering.

The meeting seeks to discuss a US-Russian proposal to hold a peace conference to bring together rebels and representatives of Assad’s regime.

As Kerry and his counterparts arrived at the meeting venue in Amman, about 250 pro-Assad demonstrators blocked the main entrance.

The protesters, a mix of Jordanians and Syrians, chanted “Death to America,” and, “Go home, Kerry we don’t want you here.”

Hezbollah involvement

Kerry said that if the Assad regime is unwilling to negotiate a political solution, the US and others will discuss growing support for the opposition “in order for it to continue to fight for the freedom of their country”.

He said several thousand Hezbollah fighters were taking part in the Syrian conflict with active Iranian support on the ground.

“Just last week, obviously, Hezbollah intervened very, very significantly,” the US Secretary of State said.

Also speaking in Amman, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah are “propping up” Assad and giving him increasing support.

“It is very clear that Syrian regime is receiving a great deal of support, increasing support in recent months from outside Syria from Hezbollah and Iran,” Hague said.

“The regime is being propped up by others outside, further undermining its legitimacy. It also shows that is a crisis that is increasing the threat to regional stability.”

Hague’s comments came as Syria’s main opposition bloc urged rebels to come from around the country to reinforce a town under attack by government troops and Hezbollah fighters.

Dozens of Hezbollah members have been killed fighting in the town of Qusayr and the surrounding areas in the past weeks.

The battle for Qusayr has now entered its fourth day and acting chief of the Syrian National Coalition, George Sabra, said that “forces from outside Syria” aim to destroy the town and rebels should join the fight to “rescue” it.

Sabra also urged Lebanese authorities to respect Syria’s sovereignty by preventing foreign gunmen from crossing the border to fight in the civil war.

Kerry also condemned Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, saying “several thousand” fighters from the group were taking part in the conflict.

Syria’s ambassador to Jordan, Bahjat Suleiman, denounced the Amman meeting, calling it part of a US-Israeli campaign to destroy his country.

He castigated Arab nations for attending, saying they are aiding Washington in its “aggressive, terrorist war, on behalf of Israel, to destroy Syria”.

Around 100 people participated in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) Pride parade, the first such event in Moldova.

The march, which was organized by Gender-Doc Moldova, a national NGO working on LGBTI issues, was stopped early due to threats from counter-demonstrators.

“This is a red-letter day for LGBTI rights in Moldova; now the authorities must publicly support Pride marches and enable this event to be the first of many of its kind,” said Amnesty International’s David Diaz-Jogeix, Deputy Director of Europe and Central Asia Programme.

“The abrupt ending of the march shows more still needs to be done in the fight against discrimination in Moldova. If the LGBTI movement is allowed to blossom, a more tolerant society will follow.”

Sunday’s march passed off peacefully but was curtailed after counter demonstrators found out where the event was being held.

Before the parade, an Orthodox Bishop from the city of Bălţi called on priests, Afghanistan war veterans and Chisinau residents to resist the march.

Around a thousand counter-demonstrators gathered in the city centre on Sunday to protest against the march and the Law on Ensuring Equality

Zahra Shahid Hussain, central vice-president of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party and one of its founding members, was killed just hours before re-elections took place in the NA-250 constituency of Karachi on Sunday. The motives behind the attack remained unclear.

Hussain “was leaving her home for some work when three gunmen attacked her. She thought they wanted to snatch her purse and handed it over to them but they killed her”, Firdous Shamim, a local PTI leader, told the AFP news agency.

Police said all three assailants escaped after the attack late on Saturday.

“They shot her with one bullet near her chin and she could not survive,” Nasir Aftab, senior police official, told AFP.

Last week’s election, during which 150 people were killed nationwide, gave the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party, which controls Karachi, 18 of 19 National Assembly seats in the port city.

‘Charged political debate’

Al Jazeera’s Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from the capital Islamabad, said: “The very initial reports surrounding the killing of Zahra Shahid Hussain indicate that this could have been a robbery, for Karachi is prone to violence.”

On average 12 people are killed in Karachi every single day, he said.
Our correspondent said a message on Twitter sent out by Khan, accusing MQM of being behind the attack, had “charged the political debate in Pakistan”.

Khan and a party spokesperson condemned the killing and denounced it as a security failure on the part of the provincial government.

Altaf Hussain, the MQM leader, is wanted on murder charges in Pakistan and leads his party remotely from self-imposed exile in England.

The MQM is designated as a terrorist organisation by Canada, a charge it strongly denies. The party says the murder cases against Altaf Hussain are politically motivated.

Hussain gave a speech recently which many Pakistanis felt was an incitement to attack political rivals, but he insisted his words were taken out of context.

Re-polling in Karachi

Arif Alvi, the PTI’s candidate for the NA-250 constituency in Karachi, which saw re-polling in 43 polling stations on Sunday, condemned the killing but said he did not expect justice to be done.

“She was an asset of the party … and I believe the Sindh [provincial] government should investigate this murder, look for the killers and get them sentenced. But, unfortunately, over the last five years, nobody has ever been arrested for [political] killings or tried in a court of law,” Alvi said at the hospital where Hussain’s body was taken on Saturday night.
Thousands of security personnel had been deployed for the re-elections in Karachi.

The Election Commission of Pakistan ordered re-polling at the 43 polling stations in the Karachi constituency of NA-250 following allegations of vote-rigging in the May 11 polls, which marked the first democratic transition of power in Pakistan.

PTI and the Jamaat-e-Islami party have staged protests in several cities against the alleged rigging.

The Pakistan People’s Party and the MQM have announced a boycott, demanding that re-polling be held in all of the polling stations in NA-250, not just in the 43 that the ECP has designated.

Last weekend’s election saw about 50 million Pakistanis vote, with Nawaz Sharif, a centre-right former prime minister, emerging the winner nearly 14 years after he was deposed in a coup.

The Taliban, who denounce democracy as un-Islamic, killed more than 150 people during the election campaign, including 24 on polling day.

The attack on Sunday came a day after a rare interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was released, in which he said that his government was not using “fighters from outside of Syria, of other nationalities, and needs no support from any Arab or foreign state”.

There are now conflicting reports as to whether or not government forces have entered the town centre, with state TV reporting the army is inside the walls, but the opposition fighters telling Al Jazeera that this is not the case.

Reports coming out of Qusayr, which is in Homs province, said fighters of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement assisted the military.
Al Jazeera’s Nisreen el-Shamayleh, reporting from Amman, said that regaining control of the town was essential to pro-Assad forces.

“We’re hearing that the military is getting help from Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon, which is a staunch ally of Damascus,” she said.

“The rebels are calling for more help and weapons to try to face the Syrian government [forces]. It seems like a very heavy offensive, that could turn into a ground assault, according to activists.

If the military overpowers the rebels in Qusayr, “it’s a very strategic win, because the town connects Assad’s seat of power, Damascus, with the towns on the coast, many of which support him,” she said.

Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut said that Assad would want control of Qusayr before the conference being planned for June to discuss a resolution to the conflict.

“There are several different strategic, diplomatic, and political factors that makes Qusayr particularly important,” he said.

“It is the heartland of the Alawite community, it has been used as a conduit for supplies, men and guns going in to Syria, and it is close to Lebanon.

“Assad wants to make sure he is in the strongest position possible if this conference takes place.”

Assad interview

Our correspondent said that the death toll was likely to rise, as many people were critically injured in the onslaught, and that opposition fighters were reporting that most of the dead were civilians.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission, a network of activists on the ground, also reported an intense bombardment of Qusayr, which the Syrian regime has been trying to recapture.

“A rain of shells on the city, at the same time as artillery fire and mortar fire from dawn. Homes were destroyed and burnt down,” the group said.

The Qusayr district of Homs province has been the focus of fierce fighting between government forces and the rebels in recent weeks.

Assad spoke to the Argentine newspaper Clarin and the Argentine state news agency Telam in a frank and lengthy interview in Damascus, released on Saturday, in which he insisted that he will not resign before elections in 2014.
He also denied that his government has used chemical weapons against the civilian population, and blamed foreign intervention for the crisis.

His comments come amid a rare joint push by the US and Russia to convene the peace conference in Geneva, which he cautiously welcomed.

“We have received the Russian-US approach well and we hope that there will be an international conference to help Syrians overcome the crisis,” Clarin quoted Assad as saying.

“We must be clear … there is confusion in the world over a political solution and terrorism.

“They think that a political conference will stop terrorism on the ground. This is unrealistic.”

Understanding the atmospheric circulation is not simple for a planet without a solid surface, where Earth-style boundaries between solid, liquid and gas layers do not exist. Since the discovery of these strong atmospheric winds in the 1980s by the Voyager II spacecraft, the vertical extent of these winds has been a major puzzle — one that influences our understanding of the physics governing the atmospheric dynamics and internal structure of these planets. But a team led by Dr. Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute’s Environmental Sciences and Energy Research Department realized they had a way, based on a novel method for analyzing the gravitational field of the planets, to determine an upper limit for the thickness of the atmospheric layer.

Deviations in the distribution of mass in planets cause measurable fluctuations in the gravitational field. On Earth, for example, an airplane flying near a large mountain feels the slight extra gravitational pull of that mountain. Like Earth, the giant planets of the solar system are rapidly rotating bodies. In fact all of them rotate faster than Earth; the rotation periods of Uranus and Neptune are about 17 and 16 hours, respectively. Because of this rapid rotation, the winds swirl around regions of high and low pressure. (In a non-rotating body, flow would be from high to low pressure.) This enables researchers to deduce the relations between the distribution of pressure and density, and the planets’ wind field. These physical principles enabled Kaspi and his co-authors to calculate, for the first time, the gravity signature of the wind patterns and thus create a wind-induced gravity map of these planets.

By computing the gravitational fields of a large range of ideal planet models — ones with no wind, a task conducted by team member Dr. Ravit Helled of Tel Aviv University — and comparing them with the observed gravitational fields, upper limits to the meteorological contribution to the gravitational fields were obtained. This enabled Kaspi’s team, which included Profs. Adam Showman and Bill Hubbard of the University of Arizona, and Prof. Oded Aharonson of the Weizmann Institute, to show that the streams of gas observed in the atmosphere are limited to a “weather-layer” of no more than about 1000 km in depth, which makes up only a fraction of a percent of the mass of these planets.

Although no spacecraft missions to Uranus and Neptune are planned for the near future, Kaspi anticipates that the team’s findings will be useful in the analysis of another set of atmospheric circulation patterns that will be closely observed soon: those of Jupiter. Kaspi, Helled and Hubbard are part of the science team of NASA’s Juno spacecraft to Jupiter. Juno was launched in 2011; upon reaching Jupiter in 2016 it will provide very accurate measurements of the gravity field of this giant gaseous planet. Using the same methods as the present study, Kaspi anticipates that they will be able to obtain the same type of information they acquired for Uranus and Neptune: namely, placing constraints on the depth of the atmospheric dynamics of this planet.

Uranus and Neptune are the farthest planets in the solar system, and there are still many open questions regarding their formation and composition. This study has implications for revealing the mysteries of their deep, dark interiors, and may even provide information about how these planets were formed. Moreover, many of the extrasolar planets detected around other stars have been found to have similar masses to those of Uranus and Neptune, so this research will be important for understanding like-sized extrasolar planets, as well.

Understanding the atmospheric circulation is not simple for a planet without a solid surface, where Earth-style boundaries between solid, liquid and gas layers do not exist. Since the discovery of these strong atmospheric winds in the 1980s by the Voyager II spacecraft, the vertical extent of these winds has been a major puzzle — one that influences our understanding of the physics governing the atmospheric dynamics and internal structure of these planets. But a team led by Dr. Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute’s Environmental Sciences and Energy Research Department realized they had a way, based on a novel method for analyzing the gravitational field of the planets, to determine an upper limit for the thickness of the atmospheric layer.

Deviations in the distribution of mass in planets cause measurable fluctuations in the gravitational field. On Earth, for example, an airplane flying near a large mountain feels the slight extra gravitational pull of that mountain. Like Earth, the giant planets of the solar system are rapidly rotating bodies. In fact all of them rotate faster than Earth; the rotation periods of Uranus and Neptune are about 17 and 16 hours, respectively. Because of this rapid rotation, the winds swirl around regions of high and low pressure. (In a non-rotating body, flow would be from high to low pressure.) This enables researchers to deduce the relations between the distribution of pressure and density, and the planets’ wind field. These physical principles enabled Kaspi and his co-authors to calculate, for the first time, the gravity signature of the wind patterns and thus create a wind-induced gravity map of these planets.

By computing the gravitational fields of a large range of ideal planet models — ones with no wind, a task conducted by team member Dr. Ravit Helled of Tel Aviv University — and comparing them with the observed gravitational fields, upper limits to the meteorological contribution to the gravitational fields were obtained. This enabled Kaspi’s team, which included Profs. Adam Showman and Bill Hubbard of the University of Arizona, and Prof. Oded Aharonson of the Weizmann Institute, to show that the streams of gas observed in the atmosphere are limited to a “weather-layer” of no more than about 1000 km in depth, which makes up only a fraction of a percent of the mass of these planets.

Although no spacecraft missions to Uranus and Neptune are planned for the near future, Kaspi anticipates that the team’s findings will be useful in the analysis of another set of atmospheric circulation patterns that will be closely observed soon: those of Jupiter. Kaspi, Helled and Hubbard are part of the science team of NASA’s Juno spacecraft to Jupiter. Juno was launched in 2011; upon reaching Jupiter in 2016 it will provide very accurate measurements of the gravity field of this giant gaseous planet. Using the same methods as the present study, Kaspi anticipates that they will be able to obtain the same type of information they acquired for Uranus and Neptune: namely, placing constraints on the depth of the atmospheric dynamics of this planet.

Uranus and Neptune are the farthest planets in the solar system, and there are still many open questions regarding their formation and composition. This study has implications for revealing the mysteries of their deep, dark interiors, and may even provide information about how these planets were formed. Moreover, many of the extrasolar planets detected around other stars have been found to have similar masses to those of Uranus and Neptune, so this research will be important for understanding like-sized extrasolar planets, as well.

These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that’s what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and lead author of a paper appearing on the cover of the May 17 issue of Science, has found that he can control the growth behavior of these crystals to create precisely tailored structures.

“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature. This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes,” says Noorduin.

The precipitation of the crystals depends on a reaction of compounds that are diffusing through a liquid solution. The crystals grow toward or away from certain chemical gradients as the pH of the reaction shifts back and forth. The conditions of the reaction dictate whether the structure resembles broad, radiating leaves, a thin stem, or a rosette of petals.

It is not unusual for chemical gradients to influence growth in nature; for example, delicately curved marine shells form from calcium carbonate under water, and gradients of signaling molecules in a human embryo help set up the plan for the body. Similarly, Harvard biologist Howard Berg has shown that bacteria living in colonies can sense and react to plumes of chemicals from one another, which causes them to grow, as a colony, into intricate geometric patterns.

Replicating this type of effect in the laboratory was a matter of identifying a suitable chemical reaction and testing, again and again, how variables like the pH, temperature, and exposure to air might affect the nanoscale structures.

The project fits right in with the work of Joanna Aizenberg, an expert in biologically inspired materials science, biomineralization, and self-assembly, and principal investigator for this research.

Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard SEAS, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Harvard Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Her recent work has included the invention of an extremely slippery material, inspired by the pitcher plant, and the discovery of how bacteria use their flagella to cling to the surfaces of medical implants.

“Our approach is to study biological systems, to think what they can do that we can’t, and then to use these approaches to optimize existing technologies or create new ones,” says Aizenberg. “Our vision really is to build as organisms do.”

To create the flower structures, Noorduin and his colleagues dissolve barium chloride (a salt) and sodium silicate (also known as waterglass) into a beaker of water. Carbon dioxide from air naturally dissolves in the water, setting off a reaction which precipitates barium carbonate crystals. As a byproduct, it also lowers the pH of the solution immediately surrounding the crystals, which then triggers a reaction with the dissolved waterglass. This second reaction adds a layer of silica to the growing structures, uses up the acid from the solution, and allows the formation of barium carbonate crystals to continue.

“You can really collaborate with the self-assembly process,” says Noorduin. “The precipitation happens spontaneously, but if you want to change something then you can just manipulate the conditions of the reaction and sculpt the forms while they’re growing.”

Increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide, for instance, helps to create ‘broad-leafed’ structures. Reversing the pH gradient at the right moment can create curved, ruffled structures.

Noorduin and his colleagues have grown the crystals on glass slides and metal blades; they’ve even grown a field of flowers in front of President Lincoln’s seat on a one-cent coin.

“When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges,” describes Noorduin. “Sometimes I forget to take images because it’s so nice to explore.”

In addition to her roles at Harvard SEAS, the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and the Wyss Institute, Joanna Aizenberg is Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard and Director of the Science Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Coauthors included Alison Grinthal, a research scientist at Harvard SEAS, and L. Mahadevan, who is the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at SEAS, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Physics, and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute.

The project was supported by National Science Foundation grants to the Harvard Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (DMR-0820484) and the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (ECS-0335765); and by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

The study compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, missions to estimate ice loss for glaciers in all regions of the planet.

“For the first time, we’ve been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise,” said geography Assistant Professor Alex Gardner of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., lead study author. “These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets.”

A paper on the subject is being published in the May 17 issue of the journal Science.

“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise,” said Pfeffer, a glaciologist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research

ICESat, which ceased operations in 2009, measured glacier changes using laser altimetry, which bounces laser pulses off the ice surface to determine changes in the height of ice cover. The GRACE satellite system, still operational, detects variations in Earth’s gravity field resulting from changes in the planet’s mass distribution, including ice displacements.

GRACE does not have a fine enough resolution and ICESat does not have sufficient sampling density to study small glaciers, but mass change estimates by the two satellite systems for large glaciated regions agree well, the scientists concluded.

“Because the two satellite techniques, ICESat and GRACE, are subject to completely different types of errors, the fact that their results are in such good agreement gives us increased confidence in those results,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, a study co-author and fellow at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Ground-based estimates of glacier mass changes include measurements along a line from a glacier’s summit to its edge, which are extrapolated over a glacier’s entire area. Such measurements, while fairly accurate for individual glaciers, tend to cause scientists to overestimate ice loss when extrapolated over larger regions, including individual mountain ranges, according to the team.

Current estimates predict if all the glaciers in the world were to melt, they would raise sea level by about two feet. In contrast, an entire Greenland ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, while if Antarctica lost its ice cover, sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet.

Yang, who also holds appointments with the University of California Berkeley’s Chemistry Department and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research in the journal NANO Letters. The paper is titled “A Fully Integrated Nanosystem of Semiconductor Nanowires for Direct Solar Water Splitting.” Co-authors are Chong Liu, Jinyao Tang, Hao Ming Chen and Bin Liu.

Solar technologies are the ideal solutions for carbon-neutral renewable energy — there’s enough energy in one hour’s worth of global sunlight to meet all human needs for a year. Artificial photosynthesis, in which solar energy is directly converted into chemical fuels, is regarded as one of the most promising of solar technologies. A major challenge for artificial photosynthesis is to produce hydrogen cheaply enough to compete with fossil fuels. Meeting this challenge requires an integrated system that can efficiently absorb sunlight and produce charge-carriers to drive separate water reduction and oxidation half-reactions.

“In natural photosynthesis the energy of absorbed sunlight produces energized charge-carriers that execute chemical reactions in separate regions of the chloroplast,” Yang says. “We’ve integrated our nanowire nanoscale heterostructure into a functional system that mimics the integration in chloroplasts and provides a conceptual blueprint for better solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies in the future.”

When sunlight is absorbed by pigment molecules in a chloroplast, an energized electron is generated that moves from molecule to molecule through a transport chain until ultimately it drives the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbohydrate sugars. This electron transport chain is called a “Z-scheme” because the pattern of movement resembles the letter Z on its side. Yang and his colleagues also use a Z-scheme in their system only they deploy two Earth abundant and stable semiconductors — silicon and titanium oxide — loaded with co-catalysts and with an ohmic contact inserted between them. Silicon was used for the hydrogen-generating photocathode and titanium oxide for the oxygen-generating photoanode. The tree-like architecture was used to maximize the system’s performance. Like trees in a real forest, the dense arrays of artificial nanowire trees suppress sunlight reflection and provide more surface area for fuel producing reactions.

“Upon illumination photo-excited electron−hole pairs are generated in silicon and titanium oxide, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum,” Yang says. “The photo-generated electrons in the silicon nanowires migrate to the surface and reduce protons to generate hydrogen while the photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide nanowires oxidize water to evolve oxygen molecules. The majority charge carriers from both semiconductors recombine at the ohmic contact, completing the relay of the Z-scheme, similar to that of natural photosynthesis.”

Under simulated sunlight, this integrated nanowire-based artificial photosynthesis system achieved a 0.12-percent solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency. Although comparable to some natural photosynthetic conversion efficiencies, this rate will have to be substantially improved for commercial use. However, the modular design of this system allows for newly discovered individual components to be readily incorporated to improve its performance. For example, Yang notes that the photocurrent output from the system’s silicon cathodes and titanium oxide anodes do not match, and that the lower photocurrent output from the anodes is limiting the system’s overall performance.

“We have some good ideas to develop stable photoanodes with better performance than titanium oxide,” Yang says. “We’re confident that we will be able to replace titanium oxide anodes in the near future and push the energy conversion efficiency up into single digit percentages.”

This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

“The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors,” said UC Berkeley vision scientist Stephen Palmer, lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a 37-color palette, the UC Berkeley study found that people tend to pair faster-paced music in a major key with lighter, more vivid, yellow colors, whereas slower-paced music in a minor key is more likely to be teamed up with darker, grayer, bluer colors.

“Surprisingly, we can predict with 95 percent accuracy how happy or sad the colors people pick will be based on how happy or sad the music is that they are listening to,” said Palmer, who will present these and related findings at the International Association of Colour conference at the University of Newcastle in the U.K. on July 8. At the conference, a color light show will accompany a performance by the Northern Sinfonia orchestra to demonstrate “the patterns aroused by music and color converging on the neural circuits that register emotion,” he said.

The findings may have implications for creative therapies, advertising and even music player gadgetry. For example, they could be used to create more emotionally engaging electronic music visualizers, computer software that generates animated imagery synchronized to the music being played. Right now, the colors and patterns appear to be randomly generated and do not take emotion into account, researchers said.

They may also provide insight into synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one perceptual pathway, such as hearing music, leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a different perceptual pathway, such as seeing colors. An example of sound-to-color synesthesia was portrayed in the 2009 movie The Soloist when cellist Nathaniel Ayers experiences a mesmerizing interplay of swirling colors while listening to the Los Angeles symphony. Artists such as Wassily Kandinksky and Paul Klee may have used music-to-color synesthesia in their creative endeavors.

In the first experiment, participants were asked to pick five of the 37 colors that best matched the music to which they were listening. The palette consisted of vivid, light, medium, and dark shades of red, orange, yellow, green, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, and purple.

Participants consistently picked bright, vivid, warm colors to go with upbeat music and dark, dull, cool colors to match the more tearful or somber pieces. Separately, they rated each piece of music on a scale of happy to sad, strong to weak, lively to dreary and angry to calm.

Two subsequent experiments studying music-to-face and face-to-color associations supported the researchers’ hypothesis that “common emotions are responsible for music-to-color associations,” said Karen Schloss, a postdoctoral researchers at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper.

For example, the same pattern occurred when participants chose the facial expressions that “went best” with the music selections, Schloss said. Upbeat music in major keys was consistently paired with happy-looking faces while subdued music in minor keys was paired with sad-looking faces. Similarly, happy faces were paired with yellow and other bright colors and angry faces with dark red hues.

Next, Palmer and his research team plan to study participants in Turkey where traditional music employs a wider range of scales than just major and minor. “We know that in Mexico and the U.S. the responses are very similar,” he said. “But we don’t yet know about China or Turkey.”

Other co-authors of the study are Zoe Xu of UC Berkeley and Lilia Prado-Leon of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico.

According to the scientists’ calculations, these short-lived droplets are the size of three to five protons. To provide a sense of scale, that is about one-100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a virus.

“With this discovery, we seem to be seeing the very origin of collective behavior,” said Velkovska, professor of physics at Vanderbilt who serves as a co-convener of the heavy ion program of the CMS detector, the LHC instrument that made the unexpected discovery. “Regardless of the material that we are using, collisions have to be violent enough to produce about 50 sub-atomic particles before we begin to see collective, flow-like behavior.”

These tiny droplets “flow” in a manner similar to the behavior of the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that is a mixture of the sub-atomic particles that makes up protons and neutrons and only exists at extreme temperatures and densities. Cosmologists propose that the entire universe once consisted of this strongly interacting elixir for fractions of a second after the Big Bang when conditions were dramatically hotter and denser than they are today. Now that the universe has spent billions of years expanding and cooling, the only way scientists can reproduce this primordial plasma is to bang atomic nuclei together with tremendous energy.

The new observations are contained in a paper submitted by the CMS collaboration to the journal Physical Review D and posted on the arXiv preprint server. In addition, Vanderbilt doctoral student Shengquan Tuo recently presented the new results at a workshop held in the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas in Trento, Italy.

Scientists have been trying to recreate the quark-gluon plasma since the early 2000s by colliding gold nuclei using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This exotic state of matter is created when nuclei collide and dump a fraction of their energy into the space between them. When enough energy is released, it causes some of the quarks and gluons in the colliding particles to melt together to form the plasma. The RHIC scientists had expected the plasma to behave like a gas, but were surprised to discover that it acts like a liquid instead.

When the LHC started up, the scientists moved to the more powerful machine where they basically duplicated the results they got at RHIC by colliding lead nuclei.

In what was supposed to be a control run to check the validity of their lead-lead results, the scientists scheduled the collider to smash protons and lead nuclei together. They didn’t expect to see any evidence of the plasma. Because the protons are so much lighter than lead nuclei (they have only one-208th the mass), it was generally agreed that proton-lead collisions couldn’t release enough energy to produce the rare state of matter.

“The proton-lead collisions are something like shooting a bullet through an apple while lead-lead collisions are more like smashing two apples together: A lot more energy is released in the latter,” said Velkovska.

Last September, the LHC did a brief test run to make sure it was adjusted properly to handle proton-lead collisions. When the results of the run were analyzed, team members were surprised to see evidence of collective behavior in five percent of the collisions — those that were the most violent. In these cases, it appeared that when the “bullet” passed through “apple” it released enough energy to melt some of the particles surrounding the bullet hole. They appeared to be forming liquid droplets about one tenth the size of those produced by the lead-lead or gold-gold collisions.

However, the initial analysis was limited to tracking the motion of pairs of particles. The researchers knew that this analysis could be influenced by another well-known phenomenon, the production of particle jets. So, when the scheduled proton-lead run took place in January and February, they searched the data for evidence of groups of four particles that exhibit collective motion. After analyzing several billion events, they found hundreds of cases where the collisions produced more than 300 particles flowing together.

According to Tuo, only two models were advanced to explain their observations at the workshop. Of the two, the plasma droplet model seems to fit the observations best. In fact, he reported that the new data is forcing the authors of the competing model — color glass condensate, which attributes the particle correlations to the internal gluon structure of the protons themselves — to incorporate hydrodynamic effects, meaning that it is also describing the phenomenon as liquid droplets.

U.S. members of the CMS collaboration are supported primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.

Now, thanks to a new method of analysis on ancient grinding stones, the archaeologists have uncovered evidence that agriculture could predate the advent of rice in the region.

The research was the result of a two-year collaboration between Dr Huw Barton, from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, and Dr Xiaoyan Yang, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing.

Funded by a Royal Society UK-China NSFC International Joint Project, and other grants held by Yang in China, the research is published in PLOS ONE.

Dr Barton, Senior Lecturer in Bioarchaeology at the University of Leicester, described the find as ‘hitting the jackpot’: “Our discovery is totally unexpected and very exciting.

“We have used a relatively new method known as ancient starch analysis to analyse ancient human diet. This technique can tell us things about human diet in the past that no other method can.

“From a sample of grinding stones we extracted very small quantities of adhering sediment trapped in pits and cracks on the tool surface. From this material, preserved starch granules were extracted with our Chinese colleagues in the starch laboratory in Beijing. These samples were analysed in China and also here at Leicester in the Starch and Residue Laboratory, School of Archaeology and Ancient History.

“Our research shows us that there was something much more interesting going on in the subtropical south of China 5,000 years ago than we had first thought. The survival of organic material is really dependent on the particular chemical properties of the soil, so you never know what you will get until you sample. At Xincun we really hit the jackpot. Starch was well-preserved and there was plenty of it. While some of the starch granules we found were species we might expect to find on grinding and pounding stones, ie. some seeds and tuberous plants such as freshwater chestnuts, lotus root and the fern root, the addition of starch from palms was totally unexpected and very exciting.”

Several types of tropical palms store prodigious quantities of starch. This starch can be literally bashed and washed out of the trunk pith, dried as flour, and of course eaten. It is non-toxic, not particularly tasty, but it is reliable and can be processed all year round. Many communities in the tropics today, particularly in Borneo and Indonesia, but also in eastern India, still rely on flour derived from palms.

Dr Barton said: “The presence of at least two, possibly three species of starch producing palms, bananas, and various roots, raises the intriguing possibility that these plants may have been planted nearby the settlement.

“Today groups that rely on palms growing in the wild are highly mobile, moving from one palm stand to another as they exhaust the clump. Sedentary groups that utilise palms for their starch today, plant suckers nearby the village, thus maintaining continuous supply. If they were planted at Xincun, this implies that ‘agriculture’ did not arrive here with the arrival of domesticated rice, as archaeologists currently think, but that an indigenous system of plant cultivation may have been in place by the mid Holocene.

“The adoption of domesticated rice was slow and gradual in this region; it was not a rapid transformation as in other places. Our findings may indicate why this was the case. People may have been busy with other types of cultivation, ignoring rice, which may have been in the landscape, but as a minor plant for a long time before it too became a food staple.

“Future work will focus on grinding stones from nearby sites to see if this pattern is repeated along the coast.”

Using the seven-dish KAT-7 telescope and the 26 m radio telescope at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO), astronomers have observed a neutron star system known as Circinus X-1 as it fires energetic matter from its core into the surrounding system in extensive, compact `jets’ that flare brightly, details of which are visible only in radio waves.

Circinus X-1 is an X-ray binary (or two-star system) where one of the companion stars is a high-density, compact neutron star (a neutron star is an extremely dense and compact remnant of an exploded star and only 20km in diameter.) The two stars orbit each other every 16.5 days in an elliptical orbit. When the two stars are at their closest the gravity of the dense neutron star pulls material from the companion star. A powerful jet of material then blasts out from the system.

During the time astronomers, including a team from the University of Southampton, observed Circinus X-1 (13 December 2011 to 16 January 2012) the system flared twice at levels among the highest observed in recent years. KAT-7 was able to catch both of these flares and follow them as they progressed. This is the first time that the system has been observed in such detail during the full flare cycle.

“One way of explaining what is happening is that the compact neutron star gobbles up parts of its companion star and then fires much of this matter back out again,” explains Dr Richard Armstrong, an SKA SA Fellow at the University of Cape Town and lead author of the paper. “The dramatic radio flares happen when the matter Circinus X-1 has violently ejected slows down as it smashes into the surrounding medium.”

Professor Rob Fender, Head of the Astronomy Research Group at the University of Southampton, says: “Circinus X-1 continues to reveal new aspects of its behaviour, and is arguably the best laboratory for relativistic jet astrophysics in the southern hemisphere. It is furthermore an excellent control to the large population of jets associated with accreting black holes.”

Dr Armstrong adds: “These types of observations are crucial for understanding the processes of both accretion of matter onto extremely dense systems, such as neutron stars and black holes of both about the sun’s mass, and also the so-called supermassive variety we now know to be at the centre of most galaxies.”

KAT-7 is the world’s first radio telescope array consisting of composite antenna structures. It is the test array for MeerKAT, a much larger radio array, which is itself in turn a precursor for the dish-based component of the SKA.

The MNRAS study was carried out as part of the development for the ThunderKAT project on MeerKAT, which will find many more of these types of systems in the galaxy and search for new types of radio systems that change rapidly with time.

Professor Fender, who is co-leader of the MeerKAT project, adds: “This project will test the extremes of physics, density, temperature, pressure, velocity, gravitational and magnetic fields, and are beyond anything achievable in any laboratory on Earth. It provides a unique glimpse of the laws of physics operating in extraordinary regimes. Nearly all such events are associated with transient radio emission. By studying radio bursts from these phenomena, we can pinpoint the sources of explosive events, probe relativistic accretion and understand the budget of kinetic feedback by such events in the ambient medium.”

The devices could one day be used to continuously track heart health and provide doctors a safer method of measuring a key vital sign for newborn and other high-risk surgery patients.

“The pulse is related to the condition of the artery and the condition of the heart,” said Bao, whose lab develops artificial skin-like materials. “The better the sensor, the better doctors can catch problems before they develop.”

Your pulse

To find your pulse, press your index and middle finger into the underside of your opposite wrist. You should feel the steady rhythm of your heart as it pumps blood through your veins.

Each beat you feel is actually made up of two distinct peaks, even though you can’t tell them apart with just your fingers. The first, larger peak is from your heart pumping out blood. Shortly after a heartbeat, your lower body sends a reflecting wave back to your artery system, creating a smaller second peak.

The relative sizes of these two peaks can be used by medical experts to measure your heart’s health.

“You can use the ratio of the two peaks to determine the stiffness of the artery, for example,” said Gregor Schwartz, a post-doctoral fellow and a physicist for the project. “If there is a change in the heart’s condition, the wave pattern will change. Fortunately, when I tested this on myself, my heart looked fine.”

To make the heart monitor both sensitive and small, Bao’s team uses a thin middle layer of rubber covered with tiny pyramid bumps. Each mold-made pyramid is only a few microns across — smaller than a human red blood cell.

When pressure is put on the device, the pyramids deform slightly, changing the size of the gap between the two halves of the device. This change in separation causes a measurable change in the electromagnetic field and the current flow in the device.

The more pressure placed on the monitor, the more the pyramids deform and the larger the change in the electromagnetic field. Using many of these sensors on a prosthetic limb could act like an electronic skin, creating an artificial sense of touch.

When the sensor is placed on someone’s wrist using an adhesive bandage, the sensor can measure that person’s pulse wave as it reverberates through the body.

The device is so sensitive that it can detect more than just the two peaks of a pulse wave. When engineers looked at the wave drawn by their device, they noticed small bumps in the tail of the pulse wave invisible to conventional sensors. Bao said she believes these fluctuations could potentially be used for more detailed diagnostics in the future.

Blood pressure and babies

Doctors already use similar, albeit much bulkier, sensors to keep track of a patient’s heart health during surgery or when taking a new medication. But in the future Bao’s device could help keep track of another vital sign.

“In theory, this kind of sensor can be used to measure blood pressure,” said Schwartz. “Once you have it calibrated, you can use the signal of your pulse to calculate your blood pressure.”

This non-invasive method of monitoring heart health could replace devices inserted directly into an artery, called intravascular catheters. These catheters create a high risk of infection, making them impractical for newborns and high-risk patients. Thus, an external monitor like Bao’s could provide doctors a safer way to gather information about the heart, especially during infant surgeries.

Bao’s team is working with other Stanford researchers to make the device completely wireless. Using wireless communication, doctors could receive a patient’s minute-by-minute heart status via cell phone, all thanks to a device as thick as a human hair.

“For some patients with a potential heart disease, wearing a bandage would allow them to constantly measure their heart’s condition,” Bao said. “This could be done without interfering with their daily life at all, since it really just requires wearing a small bandage.”

The team published its work in the May 12 edition of Nature Communications. The team’s research is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

An American female employee of Swiss jewellers Chopard told police on Friday that thieves had plundered her hotel room and ripped out the strongbox in the wardrobe.

Police said the safe and the jewels inside it had been stolen in the raid, which has been compared to the scenario of a movie worthy of screening at the Cannes Film Festival, where actors were due to wear the stolen jewels.

Commander Bernard Mascarelli, a judicial police spokesman in the nearby city of Nice, said the robbery took place about 2am (00:00 GMT) on Friday at the Novotel hotel near the festival venue.

Mascarelli said police were trying to verify the exact value and type of the jewels stolen, but sources said it was a “matched set”.

However, Jean-Michel Caillau, the prosecutor in nearby Grasse who is leading an investigation, said that early estimates were that the jewels could have been worth as much as $1.4m.

Authorities were going over hotel surveillance cameras and questioning potential witnesses who might have seen any culprits, who struck hours after the festival’s world premiere of The Bling Ring, a true tale of wealthy teenagers who burgle the homes of Hollywood celebrities.

‘Inside complicity’

“It seems pretty unlikely to us that it was just one person,” Mascarelli said.

“Apparently this [hotel guest] was someone who was targeted because it wasn’t someone who had been seeking attention.

“There must have been either an inside complicity, or people who were in contact with this person and knew that the person had jewels.”

Officers said they were examining footage from the southern French city’s security cameras in the hope of finding clues.

Chopard is one of the official sponsors of the festival, and one of its stores, complete with its own red carpet, lies on the palm-fringed beachfront, just opposite the venue.

The jeweller redesigned the coveted Palme d’Or trophy and each year lends out jewellery to stars for their walk up the red-carpeted steps at the Palais des Festivals.

The Palme d’Or features 118g of yellow gold, with a value of more than 20,000 euros ($26,000), and is set in a base of rock crystal.

The Cannes Film Festival is ranked as the world’s most prestigious movie showcase and is held amid tight security, as it lures thousands of wealthy actors, directors, producers and movie buyers.

Festival organisers would not disclose the Palme’s whereabouts on Friday, but said it was kept in a safe place.

The festival had no comment on the robbery.

Spokeswomen for Chopard and Novotel owner Accor also declined comment.

Daniel Stani-Reginald, 21, had plotted to rape and murder a woman for years before choosing Tosha Thakkar, a 24-year-old accounting student who lived in an adjoining room at his Sydney boarding house, the Supreme Court heard.

He read thousands of internet articles on serial killers and sex attackers before assaulting Thakkar in March 2011 and throttling her with a cable in a crime described by judge Derek Price as “extraordinarily cruel”.

“The last minutes of her life must have been horrifying. This was a terrible way for the deceased to die,” Price told the court on Friday.

After he killed Thakkar, Stani-Reginald, who pleaded guilty, stuffed her body in a black cloth suitcase, took a taxi to a nearby canal and tossed it into the water in broad daylight, Price said.

He had shown no remorse and had poor prospects of rehabilitation, the judge said, ruling he was likely to offend again and was a danger to the community.

Though his father had murdered his mother in his presence when he was 10 years old, leaving him a state ward, psychiatrists who examined Stani-Reginald found no evidence of mental illness.

Price jailed Stani-Reginald, of Sri Lankan descent, for a maximum 45 years, 30 years of which must be served without possibility of parole, stopping short of the life sentence sought by prosecutors.

Thakkar’s family were disappointed with the term.

“We have lost Tosha forever. We’re not going to get her back, so we were expecting a life sentence,” said cousin Pratik Thakkar.

A spate of violent crimes against Indian students in Australia in recent years strained diplomatic ties between the two countries and prompted street protests, damaging Australia’s reputation and seeing foreign enrolments dive.

An investigation traced the “coordinated and simultaneous attacks” to hundreds of Internet protocol addresses in a number of countries, an unnamed source at the Saudi Interior Ministry told SPA, the country’s state news agency.

The interior ministry website crashed on Wednesday after it received a “huge amount” of service requests, but was back online less than two hours later after the “necessary technical drills” were performed to counter the attack, the source said.

The report made no mention of a possible motive.

Businesses, government agencies and critical infrastructure operators face unprecedented challenges from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks launched by criminals, hacker activists and foreign governments.

An attack last year on national oil company Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, damaged almost 30,000 computers and was one of the most destructive cyber strikes conducted against a single business.

That attack used a computer virus known as Shamoon. A group that claimed responsibility said Saudi Aramco was the main source of income for the Saudi government, which it blamed for “crimes and atrocities” in several countries including Syria and Bahrain.

On Friday, the website and Twitter feed of the Financial Times newspaper were hacked, apparently by the “Syrian Electronic Army”, a group of online activists who claim that they support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Sources tell Al Jazeera that 50 have been wounded and many are in critical condition.

Both of the Sunni Muslim mosques were badly damaged, and the roof of one of them collapsed, said tribal police officer Badshah Rehman. The mosques were located in Baz Darrah village in the Malakand district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Al Jazeera’s Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from Islamabad, said the blasts happened shortly after Friday prayers.

He said the area has had a very heavy military presence since the Pakistan Swat Valley offensive in 2009.

Rescue workers were trying to retrieve the dead and wounded from the debris, Rehman said.

Our correspondent said that some people may be trapped under the rubble of the mosques but the remote area is making it difficult for rescue efforts.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blasts, but suspicion will likely fall on the Pakistani Taliban.

Taliban attacks

The Taliban have been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for years that has killed thousands of civilians and security personnel. The fighters have attacked Sunni mosques in the past.

The Pakistani army has mounted multiple operations against the fighters in the northwest, but they have proven resilient and continue to carry out near-daily attacks.

The Taliban recently launched a series of attacks in the run-up to national elections on May 11 in an attempt to derail the vote. Pakistanis defied the group by coming out in large numbers to cast their ballots.

The attack underlines the challenge of Taliban violence facing a new government led by Nawaz Sharif set to take power.

Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N Party was the big winner in the election and appears set to form the next government.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party, led by former cricket star Imran Khan, is expected to form the provincial government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Both politicians have called for negotiations with the Taliban, and Khan has even said that Pakistani troops should stop battling the fighters and pull out of areas of the northwest.

Now he will face the challenge of applying his election platform to the challenges of governing one of Pakistan’s most violent areas.

The official said on Friday that the fighting happened on Thursday in the Sambisa Forest Reserve, just south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.

The official said that soldiers would remain in the area to secure it.

The official also said that Nigeria’s government shut off mobile phone service to parts of northeast Nigeria as soldiers moved in to enforce an emergency declaration by President Goodluck Jonathan over three states there.

Phone service was restored on Friday, but the official said the phones likely would be shut off again.

Earlier, Nigerian forces began deploying fighter jets and helicopter gunships to target Boko Haram strongholds, security sources told Reuters news agency.

The military said that it was ready to launch air strikes against the Boko Haram as several thousand troops moved to the remote northeast region to retake territory seized by the group.

A force of “several thousand” soldiers along with fighter jets and helicopter gunships were deployed for the offensives in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa state, Brigadier-General Chris Olukolade, a defence spokesman, said.

Curfew imposed

Telephone connections to Borno and Yobe remained completely cut on Thursday, and a 12-hour overnight curfew was imposed in Adamawa, following the other two states which are already under curfew.

In some parts of Maiduguri, and in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, traffic returned to roads and shops re-opened on Friday, as most military operations took place in remote rural areas. Roads out of the city to such areas were sealed off by soldiers.

The operation comes after President Goodluck Jonathan imposed a state of emergency in all three areas as he admitted that Boko Haram had “taken over” territory in the northeast and declared war against the government.

The increased military presence follows a surge in violence against government and Christian targets in the northeast by Boko Haram, a group fighting against Western education that wants to impose Islamic law in areas controlled by them.

The offensive has been cautiously welcomed by some in Nigeria, but the army’s reputation for excessive force is causing concern around the world.

Rights groups said they feared for the safety of civilians from combatants on both sides, but Jonathan’s move enjoys widespread public support after more than three years of trying to contain the insurgency without notable success.

The US expressed fears over a worsening “cycle of violence” on Wednesday, and warned that any “heavy-handed” tactics or disregard for human rights during the emergency operations could damage bilateral relations.

On Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strongly worded statement saying: “We are [...] deeply concerned by credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism”.

The US “condemns Boko Haram’s campaign of terror in the strongest terms”, Kerry said, but urged Nigeria’s armed forces to show restraint and discipline.

Rights groups have documented cases of abuses by Nigerian forces, including summary executions and random shootings.

“If the military continues its practice of targeting civilians, there is a risk of massive abuses during this offensive,” Eric Guttschuss, from Human Rights Watch, said.

Lawmakers repeatedly confronted Steven Miller — the acting commissioner ousted from him job earlier this week — about his and other officials’ failure to disclose the program last year despite being aware of it.

“In fact, we were repeatedly told no such targeting was happening. That isn’t being misled, that’s lying,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Yet Miller seemed to frustrate lawmakers’ attempts to dig deeper. He claimed, a week after the scandal broke and a year after he first learned of the practice, that he still did not know who was responsible.

“I don’t have that name,” he testified, after Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., asked who was behind the program. Reichert accused Miller of being “uncooperative during this hearing.”

Miller also claimed — over and over — he was being honest with Congress during a hearing last year.

“You did not share the information you knew,” Reichert charged.

“I answered all questions truthfully,” Miller replied.

This claim was met with deep skepticism Friday. Miller acknowledged he learned of the practice during a May 3, 2012, briefing. Yet when he was asked about it at a July 25 hearing that year, he said only that some applications fell into a particular category – and that those organizations were grouped for “consistency” and “quality.”

A letter he wrote to a Republican lawmaker the month before also gave a general description of the process without acknowledging that some groups were being singled out based on words like “Tea Party” and “Patriot.”

“How can we not conclude that you misled this committee?” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., former GOP vice presidential nominee, asked Miller.

Miller said he “did not mislead the committee” and stands by his answer.

Asked whether his answer was “incomplete,” he said again he answered “truthfully.”

Miller objected to the term “targeting,” and claimed political motivations were not at play in the program, which began in 2010. But he apologized for the program and said “foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient.”

“As acting commissioner, I want to apologize on the behalf of the Internal Revenue Service for the mistakes that we made and the poor service provided,” Miller said. “The affected organizations and the American public deserve better.”

The hearing is the first to examine the scandal, and will likely kick off a string of subsequent hearings and investigations. Republicans made clear that the two retirements or resignations to date would not satisfy their concerns. Democrats were also critical of the agency, but voiced concern that it would be used by Republicans to score “political points.”

Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, ripped the tax-collecting agency over the practice at the start of the hearing. “Now we know the truth — or at least some of it,” he said. “We also know that these revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. It would be a mistake to treat this as just one scandal.”

He questioned how high the scandal went, and also suggested there was other targeting of conservatives that has not yet been acknowledged by the agency. He called it part of a “culture of cover-ups.”

“This systemic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” he said. He said the problem is not just personnel, but the size and scope of the IRS.

The inspector general who released a scathing report on the agency also testified Friday. J. Russell George — the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration — said his findings raised “troubling questions” about the agency, while claiming some of the wrongdoing was apparently done with no-to-little supervision.

But he said all three allegations against the agency turned out to be true — that it was using “inappropriate criteria” to screen conservative groups, it was delaying applications and it was asking unnecessary questions.

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., the top Democrat on the committee, said the agency’s management “completely failed the American people.” At the same time, he urged Republicans not to use the hearing to “score political points.”

Republicans, though, expressed more concern after they learned Thursday that the IRS official who led the tax-exempt organizations unit when the targeting took place — Sarah Hall Ingram — has since moved over to the IRS office responsible for ObamaCare.

“Stunning. Just stunning,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said after learning of the move.

Miller said Friday he was the one who promoted her and called her a “superb civil servant.”

The acknowledgement comes after the administration announced that Ingram’s successor Joseph Grant — who had only been on the job a few days — would be retiring.

President Obama, meanwhile, maintained Thursday that he didn’t know about the investigation into the IRS program until it was made public. Obama also appointed a new acting commissioner — White House budget officer Daniel Werfel — after the prior IRS chief announced his resignation.

The revelations at the Friday hearing could add more headaches for the Obama administration, as it tries to juggle its response to several scandals at once.

It’s unclear whether more officials will resign at the IRS in the days to come. This week’s clean-up at the agency is part of the Obama administration’s mad dash to save face and regain footing after being hammered by a series of scandals this week, including new questions over the Benghazi terror attack and the Justice Department’s seizing of journalists’ phone records.

Josephine Guerrero, spokeswoman for the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), said on Tuesday the four were “detained today by an unidentified armed group while they were patrolling” near Al Jamlah in the so-called Area of Limitation.

“The four are from the Philippine battalion. Efforts are under way to secure their release,” she said.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, strongly condemned the abductions and called for the peacekeepers’ immediate release.

“The secretary-general calls on all parties to respect UNDOF’s freedom of movement and safety and security,” Martin Nesirky, Ban’s spokesman, said.

Reuters reported that a Syrian rebel group had claimed responsibility for the abductions. The news agency quoted the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigades as saying that it was holding four Filipino peacekeepers following clashes in the area that had put them in danger.

Al Jazeera’s Rula Amin, reporting from Beirut in neighbouring Israel, said rebel brigades based in the area where the abductions occurred maintain that “[the peacekeepers] are not hostages”.

“They [rebels] did not kidnap the UN peacekeepers. They simply took [the peacekeepers] because they want to save their lives,” she said.

“Because there is a lot of heavy clashes in the area between government forces and the rebels, they say they are trying to protect the UN observers.”

She said “promises” have been made “that the men will be released very soon”.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said the soldiers were a part of UNDOF, which has been in the Golan Heights since the end of the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.

Tuesday’s incident follows a similar situation in March involving peacekeepers from the Philippines, and UN diplomats are worried about the continuation of the peacekeeping operation at a time of extreme tension in the region, he said.

UN-Arab League envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi on Wednesday “warmly welcomed” the agreement, a statement from his office said.

“This is the first hopeful news concerning that unhappy country in a very long time,” it said. “The statements made in Moscow constitute a very significant first step forward. It is nevertheless only a first step.”

“There is every reason to expect” backing for the accord from the remaining UN Security Council permanent members, the statement said.

“It is equally important that the entire region mobilises in the support of the process,” it added.

In talks which stretched late into the night, US Secretary of State John Kerry met first for more than two hours with President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and then for a further three with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“We agreed that Russia and the United States will encourage both the Syria government and opposition groups to find a political solution,” Lavrov told reporters at a concluding news conference that ended after midnight.

Hopefully by the end of May the two ministers working together could convene an international conference to build on the Geneva accord agreed by world powers last June for a peaceful solution in Syria, they said.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said that the meeting between Kerry and Lavrov was significant because for the first time both countries were on the same page with regards to the political solution for Syria.

But he said they have not yet resolved the fate of President Bashar al-Assad.

Geneva agreement

One such solution is the Geneva communique. The agreement, which was reached by world powers on June 30, set out a path towards a transitional government.

The accord was never implemented because the temporary ceasefire for which it also called was never put in place.

“We believe that the Geneva communique is the important track to end the bloodshed in Syria,” Kerry said, describing the agreement as a roadmap to a “new Syria”.

During his meeting with Putin, Kerry said: “The United States believes that we share some very significant common interests with respect to Syria – stability in the region, not having extremists creating problems throughout the region and elsewhere.”

In response, Putin said his government has agreed “to cooperate in maintaining the stability” in Syria and make sure the country does not descend into further violence, Al Jazeera’s David Chater, reporting from Moscow, said.

He also reported that Putin announced that he will hold separate one-on-one talks with President Barack Obama at the G-8 Summit in Northern Island on June 16 and 17.

Both the US and Russia endorsed a plan for a political solution for Syria last June but have differed over how to implement it.

Kerry said President Obama also believes Russia and the US could cooperate “significantly” on issues including North Korea, Iran and economic ties, which both sides said have not lived up to their potential.

Kerry’s visit is part of an effort to improve relations between Russia and the US, which have been strained by disagreements over issues including human rights and Syria since Putin’s return to the Kremlin a year ago.

His nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which has long lacked a permanent director, awaits a Senate hearing. A $10 million budget allocation to research the causes and prevention of gun violence needs congressional approval. This comes on top of the biggest setback for the administration, the Senate’s rejection this month of a proposed expansion of background checks for gun buyers.

The administration says many of Mr. Obama’s 23 executive actions will have an effect, even as officials acknowledge that they can’t accomplish all that legislation could.

Few of the measures were intended to bring wholesale changes, both gun-rights and gun-control advocates say, with many seeking to improve the effectiveness of existing laws and regulations.

The database is used to screen gun buyers for criminal and mental-health histories or other factors that would make buyers ineligible to own guns. Grant applications are due next month.

The Justice Department also has required federal agencies to file reports aimed at improving their procedures for submitting records to the background-check database.

And the Department of Health and Human Services said it would write new rules to ensure that federal health-privacy law doesn’t prevent states from providing records to the background-check system.

Some of Mr. Obama’s executive actions have been slowed. In January, he nominated acting ATF Director B. Todd Jones as permanent head of the bureau, following through on one of his post-Newtown goals. The Senate hasn’t confirmed a permanent ATF director since 2006.

But Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, hasn’t scheduled a hearing to consider Mr. Jones’s nomination.

This month, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel informed the judiciary committee that it is investigating a complaint that Mr. Jones, in his post as the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, retaliated against a person described as a whistleblower, according to a letter from the agency reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A committee aide said Mr. Leahy was reviewing the merits of the complaint. An ATF representative didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Perhaps most notable among the president’s actions was a memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the causes and prevention of gun violence. The National Rifle Association has stymied such research in the past, arguing that it was a step toward gun control.

The president included $10 million for this research in his budget. But it is up to lawmakers to allocate the money.

John Frazer, the director of research and information for the NRA, said the organization hadn’t yet taken a position on the president’s directive. The relevant question, he said, is what research will be conducted and what data collected. Mr. Frazer has urged the CDC to study the benefits of guns.

While gun-rights organizations have fought a wide set of proposed firearms restrictions, they so far have expressed few concerns about the president’s executive actions. Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, said the majority of the items appear inconsequential.

“Some of them basically don’t do anything.

Sohel Rana, who had been in hiding since his Rana Plaza building collapsed on Wednesday, was about to flee the country through the Benapole border crossing to India about 250 miles, or 400 kilometers. southwest of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, a spokesman for the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion said. The battalion draws on both soldiers and policemen and is known for commando-style raids.
Also Sunday, a fire broke out during the rescue effort at the collapsed building, killing the last known trapped survivor, a woman who had said her name was Shahana Begum.

Also Sunday, a fire broke out during the rescue effort at the collapsed building, killing the last known trapped survivor, a woman who had said her name was Shahana Begum.

“We were talking to her, giving her oxygen while we cut through the concrete,” Shams Uddin, a firefighter, said in a telephone interview. “But after hanging on for four days, she died in the fire. Three of my men were also injured
and are now in hospital.”

Maj. Gen. Hasan Suhrawardy, an official coordinating the rescue effort, said he believes there aren’t any survivors left. Rescuers in the aftermath of an earthquake typically hunt for survivors for up to one week. Monday will mark five days since the building collapse. Several hundred people still are deemed to be missing.

Four people were rescued from the wreckage Sunday afternoon, amid cheers from crowds.

Col. Ziaul Ahsan, an RAB spokesman, told reporters that Mr. Rana, a politician in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, where the building was located, was apprehended in a raid at the border. The crossing at Benapole is known as a channel for smugglers ferrying cargo and people into India.

The government also used fighter jets to bombard the rebel-held towns of Yabroud, Douma and Harasta, east of Damascus, as well as Sbeineh, southwest of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Monday.

“At least one civilian was killed in an air strike on Qaboon” in northeast Damascus, SOHR said, “while regime troops pounded the district of Jobar” in the east.

Meanwhile, “fierce clashes raged on the edges of Jobar [in eastern Damascus], near Abbasiyeen Square”, according to SOHR, which relies on a broad network of activists, doctors and lawyers for its reports.
Rebels view the square as a strategic target because it lies well within the confines of Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad government’s main bastion of power.

SOHR also reported the army’s use of heavy artillery fire on Yarmuk in southern Damascus, with tanks also striking other rebel enclaves nearby.

Elsewhere in Syria, jet fighters hit targets in the northeastern city of Raqqa as well as an area near the government-held Base 17 in the eponymous province.

Raqqa’s provincial capital fell into rebel hands in early March, and fighters have since been fighting to gain control of Base 17, one of the army’s few remaining bastions in the province.

In coastal Syria, “the army launched a massive operation … in the north of Latakia province”, near the Turkish border, attacking rebel-held villages, the pro-government Al-Watan newspaper said.

According to a preliminary toll for Monday, at least 22 people were killed in violence across Syria, SOHR said.

Muslim Brotherhood denial

In a separate development, the exiled leader of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood denied on Monday widespread accusations by other pro-rebel political factions that the group was seeking to impose its will on other members of the country’s opposition.

The rare news conference by Mohammad Raid al-Shaqfa highlights the suspicions that his movement has raised in an already fractured opposition.

The Islamist group has a powerful donor network among members in exile and supporters in oil-rich Gulf countries. Many in the opposition say the Brotherhood uses its support and money as key levers for influence.

“Our aim is not to tear apart but to unite the [Syrian] opposition,” Shaqfa said in the Turkish city of Istanbul, where he is based.

He blamed accusations against his group on “lies and fabrications” that he said were spread by the Assad regime.

Secret prisons

In yet another development on Monday, a Syria-based human rights group said in a report that Assad’s military unit in charge of protecting Damascus was running secret prisons holding hundreds of suspected regime opponents.

The Violations Documentation Centre said the regime army’s Fourth Division was running detention centres in its bases in and around Damascus.

The division is commanded by Maher Assad, the president’s younger brother. It is considered a pillar of military forces and is charged with defending the capital, the seat of Assad’s power.

The centre, which has tracked the dead, wounded and missing since the start of the uprising in March 2011, said it interviewed former detainees, who had been held in small crowded cells and beaten by guards.

Bashar El-Ahmed, a 31-year-old schoolteacher, said he was taken blindfolded to the detention centre and realised after arrival that he was underground.

He said guards beat him with batons, electric prods and cables. The report said El Ahmed was accused of human right activism.

The claims could not be independently verified, but other rights groups, including the US-based Human Rights Watch, have said thousands of opposition members, protesters and their families have been detained since the revolt against Assad’s rule started in March 2011.