XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

Korean Stock Broker Leaps to Death Amid Market Plunge -

A South Korean stock broker jumped to his death from a high-rise office amid worldwide market turmoil.

The 48-year-old broker, identified only as "Seo," sent text messages to colleagues expressing regret over severe losses, just minutes before leaping to his death Wednesday in the city of Daegu, according to Chief investigator Lee Kang-ho.

Lee said Seo's text messages included an apology to his clients. The messages said prices of the stocks owned by his clients nosedived and he felt sorry, a Daegu police spokesman told AFP. No separate suicide note was found.

Police said CCTV footage showed the man coming out of an elevator alone on the 18th floor of the building before he was found dead on the ground.

South Korean stocks have been especially volatile amid global financial turmoil sparked by fears the U.S. and European economies could be headed for recession.

Officers in California scour online dating ads looking for possible human trafficking victims, and then arrange a date -

Londoners defend themselves from rioters - the police did not do anything so we chased them off ourselves -

The London lockdown seems to have worked. After three nights of escalating rioting across the city, last night was quiet. Instead, the looting and arson swept across England's provincial cities from Nottingham to Gloucester with Manchester seeing the worst of the violence.

It is unclear whether London was quiet because of the massive deployment of police — British Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday there would be 16,000 on the streets — or because across the city stores shut early, windows were boarded up, and staff were sent home.

Maybe the rumor that the biggest selling items at hardware stores and online mail-order shops were crow bars and other hand-held heavy metal objects deterred looters. Shopkeepers were clearly preparing to defend their property.

It appears that's what saved the shops in my neighborhood, Stoke Newington, on Monday night. After the rioting started in Hackney central, it moved half a mile west to the shopping district of Dalston. The mob then swung north along Kingsland Road toward Stoke Newington High Street. It's a neighborhood of Turkish Kurdish exiles and almost all the restaurants and shops — including several gold and jewelry stores — are owned by members of this community. More than a few of the Kurds have had to deal with the Turkish Army so a couple of hundred rioters weren't going to deter them. Crow bars and kebab skewers in hand they faced down the mob.

One Kurdish shopkeeper, Yilmaz Karagoz, told the Guardian newspaper, "We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves."

Police inaction, or ineffectual action, has been a big talking point in London the last 26 hours. Big questions hover over the Metropolitan Police's handling of these unprecedented events. People accept the logistics are hard enough. Police were faced with spontaneously combusting situations organized in the time it takes for kids with criminal mischief on their minds to text each other locations where the police seem not to be present.

“Naturist” challenges law banning public nudity - after he allegedly drove nude to an A&W fast-food outlet -

A breezy trip to the local drive-through has become a test of Canada’s 80-year-old law that makes it a crime to be naked in public.

Brian Coldin is charged in connection with a series of incidents dating back to 2008 and 2009, including one in which he allegedly drove nude to an A&W fast-food outlet near his rural Ontario hometown and reached into a non-existent back pocket for his wallet.

That incident and a similar encounter at a Tim Hortons coffee shop left staff “upset, embarrassed, shocked, shaken and uncomfortable," according to prosecutors.

Yes, but were they harmed? And was the impact of Coldin’s nakedness on members of the public more important than his freedom to express his “naturist” beliefs? Those are key among the questions raised by Coldin’s defense team, which includes Clayton Ruby, one of Canada’s foremost criminal and constitutional litigators.

Ruby and his team argue that section 174 of the Criminal Code banning public displays of nudity is an “historical oddity” that should be struck down in its entirety.

The law originates from a unique moment in Canadian history. It was adopted by Parliament in 1932, not as a response to the sexual mores of the time but as a direct attempt to control the strange and often violent antics of a religious sect known as the Sons of Freedom.

A radical offshoot of the Doukobours — Russian Christians who emigrated to western Canada to escape tsarist persecution — the Sons of Freedom objected to government regulation and, in particular, compulsory education for their children.

In protest, entire communities would parade in the nude, events often accompanied by acts of arson and violent confrontations with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Surprise! Underwater volcano has erupted - off the coast of Oregon spewing forth layer of lava more than 12 feet thick -

An undersea volcano has erupted off the coast of Oregon, spewing forth a layer of lava more than 12 feet thick in some places, and opening up deep vents that belch forth a cloudy stew of hot water and microbes from deep inside the Earth.
Scientists uncovered evidence of the early April eruption on a routine expedition in late July to the Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano that stands 250 miles off the coast of Oregon.
The discovery came as a surprise, as researchers attempted to recover instruments they'd left behind to monitor the peak a year earlier. When the researchers hefted a seafaring robotic vehicle overboard to fetch the instruments, the feed from the onboard camera sent back images of an alien seafloor landscape.
"At first we were really confused, and thought we were in the wrong place," said Bill Chadwick, a geologist with Oregon State University. "Finally we figured out we were in the right place but the whole seafloor had changed, and that's why we couldn't recognize anything. All of a sudden it hit us that, wow, there had been an eruption. So it was very exciting."

In addition to producing hardened lakes of blobby lava, in places more than a mile across, the eruption changed the architecture of the region's seafloor hot springs.
"There are more vents, they're higher temperature, and there are microbes living in them that are usually deep in the crust that come up to the surface in these events," Chadwick told OurAmazingPlanet.

Read more -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44080264/ns/technology_and_science-science/

New York City Will Mandate Sex Education - will be required to take lessons on topics like how to use a condom -

For the first time in nearly two decades, students in New York City’s public middle and high schools will be required to take sex-education classes beginning this school year, using a curriculum that includes lessons on how to use a condom and the appropriate age for sexual activity.

The new mandate is part of a broader strategy the Bloomberg administration announced last week to improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers. According to city statistics, those teenagers are far more likely than their white counterparts to have unplanned pregnancies and contract sexually transmitted diseases.

“It’s obviously something that applies to all boys and all girls,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “But when we look at the biggest disadvantages that kids in our city face, it is blacks and Latinos that are most affected by the consequences of early sexual behavior and unprotected sex.”

The change will bring a measure of cohesion to a patchwork system of programs largely chosen by school principals.

It will also bring to New York the roiling national debate about what, exactly, schools should teach students about sex.

Nationwide, one in four teenagers between 2006 and 2008 learned about abstinence without receiving any instruction in schools about contraceptive methods, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health. As of January, 20 states and the District of Columbia mandated sex and H.I.V. education in schools. An additional 12 states, New York included, required H.I.V. education only, according to a policy paper published by the institute.

Tuesday, 9 August 2011

China's first aircraft carrier starts sea trial - sought to downplay saying would be used for training and "research" -

China's first aircraft carrier on Wednesday left its shipyard in the country's northeast to start its first sea trial, the state news agency Xinhua said.
The revamped old Soviet ship's sea trial was in line with the schedule of its refitting project and would not take long, the news agency said, quoting military sources.
After returning from the trial, the carrier will continue its refit and test work, the report said, adding that the vessel had set sail from its shipyard in the city ofDalian.
Beijing last month sought to downplay the capability of its first aircraft carrier,saying the vessel would be used for training and "research", amid concerns over the country's military build-up.
The project has added to regional worries over the country's fast military expansion and growing assertiveness on territorial issues.
It also comes amid heightened tensions over a number of maritime territorial disputes involving China, notably in the South China Sea, which is believed to be rich in oil and gas and is claimed by several countries.
The issue has heated up recently with run-ins between China and fellow claimants Vietnam and the Philippines, sparking concern among its neighbouring countries and the United States.
In September, a erupted between Japan and China over the disputed Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, located in the East China Sea.
Chen Bingde, the nation's top military official, only provided the first official acknowledgement of the aircraft carrier in a Hong Kong newspaper interview in early June.
But media reports and military analysts have for years said the 300-metre (990-foot) ship was in development.

Read more -
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.9e214cd05d006bc55e2b5fc33bdea0f3.f81&show_article=1

Entire U.S. Stealth Fighter Fleet Grounded - Air Force currently has zero flyable stealth fighters. None. -

In past few decades, the U.S. Air Force has spent untold billions researching and developing a family of stealth fighter jets that are supposed to be generations ahead of any dogfighters in the sky.

But after building more than 170 F-22 Raptors and a handful of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, not a single one is available for service. The Air Force currently has zero flyable stealth fighters. None.

The vaunted F-22 has been grounded with a possible faulty oxygen system since May. Production of the last few Raptors is even on hold, because the jets can’t fly from the factory.

Last week, test flights for the newer F-35 were suspended, too, because of a valve problem in the plane’s integrated power package. It’s the third time this year that JSFs have been grounded. Tests may resume as early as next week. Then again, they may not.

Yesterday, the U.S. military committed to spending another $535 million to buy 38 more Joint Strike Fighters — a family of stealth jets that are supposed to become the multipurpose, affordable workhorses of tomorrow’s fleet. Ninety percent of America’s combat aviation power is eventually supposed to come from the jets’ three variants.

But the jets have been anything but cheap. The current cost for the JSF program is $382 billion and rising for more than 2,400 aircraft. No wonder just about every major deficit reduction plan scales back the JSF effort in some way.

And, at the moment, they’re not producing any combat power, either.

Back in 2002, the plan was to have more than 90 JSFs flying by next year. As things currently stand, the Air Force and Navy might not get their variants until 2016. The Marines — who knows?

For now, every available penny in the JSF program is tied up in getting the jets back into the air and their programs on track.

Pentagon’s Mach 20 Missile Ready for Ultimate Test - the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 - Wed. 7AM PDT -

The Pentagon has been working for nearly a decade on an audacious plan to strike anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. Wednesday could prove to be the do-or-die moment for that plan.

At approximately 7 a.m. PDT, a three-stage Minotaur IV Lite rocket is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will puncture the atmosphere, and then release an experimental aircraft. That aircraft, known as the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, will then come hurtling back to Earth at nearly 20 times the speed of sound, splashing down near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 4,100 miles away. Total flight time: about 30 minutes.

That is, if the flight goes as planned. The first HTV-2, launched by Pentagon bleeding-edge research arm Darpa in April of 2010, disappeared over the Pacific after just nine minutes of flight. The vehicle was never recovered.

It was a loss not just for this single effort, but for the entire concept of “Prompt Global Strike,” the Pentagon plan to eliminate its enemies anywhere around the world.

The Defense Department is pursuing three different families of technologies to accomplish the task. One is to rearm nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. But that runs the risk ofaccidentally triggering a response from another atomic power, who might mistake it for a nuke. Oops.

A second effort is to build shorter-range cruise missiles that can fly at five or six times the speed of sound. But that X-51 Waverider project is running into complications: A June flight test ended prematurely, for reasons that are still unclear.

Some variation of the HTV-2 is the third choice; to some in the defense community, it’s the most appealing. The HTV-2 spends most of its time flying through the atmosphere, before it dives down to hits its target. That means it’s unlikely to be mistaken for a nuclear missile, which spends most of its time above the atmosphere. World War III averted.

CHICAGOLAND: Clerk Complains About 'Jurassic Park-Size' Cockroaches in City Hall... -

Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza wants her staff removed from the basement of City Hall, due to a persistent problem with cockroaches.

Mendoza tweeted Monday that it was “time to clean up, move out of the city Clerk’s City Hall basement, and ask the Orkin Man for help.”

A photo she shared on Facebook showed two large cockroaches lying on their backs of the floor of the office. A broader shot showed at least seven cockroaches scattered on the floor, around the cables for the computer system in the office.

Mendoza and about 30 others work on the first floor, but most of her staff is in a basement that, to compound problems, is already poorly ventilated.

Mendoza didn’t mince words during in an interview with CBS 2’s Roseanne Tellez later Monday.

She said the insects her staff members have encountered are “Jurassic Park-size roaches.” She has called on Mayor Emmanuel for help moving all of her employees upstairs.

“I wouldn’t want to work like that. I’m sure none of your viewers would want to work like that,” Mendoza said. “(The mayor) has given me his commitment that he will work with me to make sure we can get our employees out of there as soon as possible.”

The roaches are not a new problem in Mendoza’s office. The Chicago Tribune reported back on May 16 – the day she was inaugurated along with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other elected city officials – that the office had a roach problem and that she wanted to get her employees out of the basement.

“We have live roaches and usually in the morning there are a lot of dead roaches laying on the floor,” says city clerk employee Monica Carranza, who has worked in the basement for four years. “It’s disgusting.”

She is thrilled at the prospect of moving.

“Everybody really appreciates the fact that we might have some sunshine and less roaches,” she said.