It was only Sunday when the White Sox were in much a better place as they arrived at the .500-mark with a three-game sweep of the Miami Marlins.
But after their third straight loss to the Cubs in grand fashion, this one an 8-3 whipping on Thursday afternoon before 31,968 at Wrigley Field, White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko didn?t have much to say.
Having seen his team routed by the Cubs for the third time in four days thanks to pitcher Travis Wood?s fourth-inning grand slam off Jake Peavy, Konerko didn?t need to expand on his thoughts after the White Sox were outscored 24-6 in the series.
?We were just beaten soundly,? Konerko said. ?You tip your hat to them and there?s not much more to say than that. They were better in every area of the game.?
Every aspect seemed to jump up and bite the White Sox in a disastrous fourth inning.
[WATCH: Ventura thinks the White Sox can regroup after Crosstown Cup loss to the Cubs]?
They already trailed 2-1 when Wellington Castillo reached first base to start the inning after nobody could locate his infield pop up and it fell two feet behind third baseman Conor Gillaspie, who had charged toward the mound. Luis Valbuena followed with a single and Peavy hit Darwin Barney in the back to load the bases with no outs.
Wood, who also homered earlier this season, then ripped a 2-1 cutter from Peavy into the basket in left-center field for a grand slam and a 6-1 lead.
The first grand slam by a Cubs pitcher at Wrigley Field since Burt Hooton in 1972 perfectly summarized these three games for the White Sox: they never seemed to give themselves a chance.
?You gotta give them credit,? said Peavy, who allowed six earned runs and eight hits in four innings. ?At the same time, you got to look at yourself. We have to bring it. I think that we just have to step up with a little more intensity and it starts with me. I didn?t do a very good job of that today. Nor did much of anybody. We got to. We played well against Miami and then let our guard down here and didn?t play with intensity.?
[MORE: Peavy latest Sox pitcher to struggle against North Siders]
After two weeks of sound play on defense and the base paths, the White Sox showed they haven?t completely shed their error-prone ways against the Cubs. They misplayed balls in the outfield and on the infield. They ran themselves out of an inning or two. And they couldn?t hit a lick against Cubs pitching, either.
Cubs starters out-pitched the White Sox in the series by a significant margin as they allowed four earned runs in 21 innings. The White Sox, who entered with the best ERA among American League starting pitchers, yielded 14 runs in 14 innings.
Though his team essentially must start over again, White Sox manager Robin Ventura thinks it?s doable. The White Sox had won nine of 12 games before they faced the Cubs.
?Anytime you have three games like this at any point, it's discouraging,? Ventura said. ?But again, you've got to regroup and go. We've shown that we can play a lot better than this and you're going to have to prove it again.?
Peavy hasn?t had too many innings like he did on Thursday. He was one pitch away from escaping the second inning when Valbuena doubled with two outs, one of four straight two-out hits that gave the Cubs a 2-0 advantage.
Following the fourth inning, Ventura elected to remove Peavy, who had thrown only 69 pitches, in favor of a pinch hitter to try and spark the White Sox offense.
Aside from the work done by Konerko, however, the White Sox couldn?t do much against Wood, who allowed two earned runs and struck out six in six innings.
Konerko cut the lead to 2-1 in the third inning with a two-out RBI single off Wood.
He added an RBI double in the sixth to make it 7-2.
The White Sox appeared to start a one-out rally in the seventh inning against reliever James Russell but Alejandro De Aza, who reached base four times, was thrown out in an attempt to stretch a single into a double.
?There was a couple (mistakes) out there today that I don?t think any to do with the game and winning or losing,? Konerko said. ?But it?s something when it comes to the base running, the defensive stuff, that?s what you want to be good at because you feel like you have some sort of control of that...You just have got to get better at it.?
New cars are better than they've been in generations and many are being heavily discounted, which means it's a pretty great time to buy a new car. But which one? It's not an easy question, and, like all the hard questions in your life, Jalopnik's here to help with a giant chart that tells you exactly which car to buy.
The FBI has confirmed that a friend of slain Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unarmed and not waving a samurai sword when he was shot and killed last week by an FBI agent in Orlando, Fla., as earlier reports had indicated.
The FBI says Ibragim Todashev, 27, a Chechen immigrant and aspiring martial arts fighter, was about to sign a confession to a 2011 triple murder when he turned a table on an FBI agent, putting the agent in jeopardy. The agent then fired as many as 7 shots, hitting Mr. Todashev at least once in the head.
The agency is investigating the shooting, which has been listed by the Orange County medical examiner as a homicide. As county officials are not elaborating on that determination, the legal implications for the FBI are so far unclear.
RECOMMENDED: Quiz: How much do you know about terrorism?
But the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, has asked the Department of Justice for a separate investigation into whether the FBI violated Todashev's civil rights.
"We have confirmed through senior sources within the FBI that Ibragim was indeed unarmed when he was shot seven times in the head, what appears to be even in the back of the head," said Hassan Shibly, executive director of CAIR Florida. "That's very disturbing."
Mr. Shibly told reporters on Wednesday that the group wants "to make sure excessive force was not used against this unarmed individual."
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On Thursday, Todashev's father, Abdul-Baki Todashev, showed Russian journalists a series of photos of his son's body that he says suggests he was executed with a shot in the back of the head. Max Seddon of the Associated Press writes that "it was not immediately possible to authenticate the photographs."
Given the high profile and high-stakes nature of the Tsarnaev investigation, as well as international and national security implications, the bureau has a compelling reason to have a thorough and transparent investigation into Todashev's death, terror experts say.
"This is going to be a smorgasbord for every conspiracy [theorist] out there," says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. "This could be anything from a civil rights violation, to reasonable force, to suicide by cop.
"But," he continues, "it doesn't appear there's a motive for the bureau to have this guy dead. There's no institutional motive for that. That means that something happened with respect to two guys in that room at the time.
?Was this agent trigger happy? Was he in legitimate fear of his life with this martial arts guy in a room alone, flipping a table over, perhaps lunging for his gun? That's a split second amount of time to make a decision."
The shooting of Todashev became the latest twist in an investigation into the twin bombs set off at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 260. One of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was injured and then killed during a firefight with police, and his younger brother, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, was found hiding, wounded, in a boat, a day later after a massive manhunt that shut down much of the Boston metropolitan area.
In a missive scrawled on the walls of the boat before he was captured, Dzhokar Tsarnaev reportedly suggested the attacks were in retaliation to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since the bombings, the FBI has sought to connect Tamerlan with a triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., on Sept. 11, 2011, and that investigation brought them to Todashev, a fellow Chechen and martial arts fighter whom Tsarnaev had met in a Boston gym.
But among the questions raised by Todashev's death, constitutional law experts say, is the extent to which the questioning was voluntary, why it was conducted at his home, and whether Todashev could have ended the questioning at any point.
"Did he feel he was free to leave, was this something voluntary, given that courts have said that even the presence of a fair number of officers means that there can be a coerceive context?" Mr. Levin asks.
Reports from anonymous law enforcement sources suggest that other agents, including officers from the Massachusetts State Police, had left the room briefly when Todashev attacked the FBI agent.
The Orlando NBC affiliate station has reported that a samurai-style sword had been moved to a corner of the room before Todashev was questioned, citing sources who said the agent may have thought Todashev was going for the sword. The Washington Post, however, cited two anonymous law enforcement sources who said Todashev was not in possession of the weapon when he was killed.
Todashev has not been linked to the Boston bombings, though police say he was friendly with the Tsaernevs when he lived in Boston. He subsequently moved to Atlanta, then Orlando.
RECOMMENDED: Quiz: How much do you know about terrorism?
If the astronaut moved her/his leg the wrong way, it could be melted off by the jets. Then what will (s)he do?
Why, scream, of course. But as we all know, in space, no one....
The problem, in my limited understanding, is that any "suit" sturdy enough to support re-entry will in reality be a capsule. Even if it has dividers for arms and legs. With today's technology, it's going to be a far cry from "free flight", and more like going over the Niagara falls in a steel barrel. Some would want to, but I doubt it would be very enjoyable.
Tim Cook is jacketed and on stage at the D11 conference, and when asked about Android and its dominant market share, Apple's CEO responded in typical fashion: Apple isn't concerned about the most, only the best.
Cook gave some historical context for his comments. Apple believes they make the best PCs, but they never made the most. They made the best MP3 player, and did make the most, and the best tablet, and did make the most, but the phone, like the PC, while still the best in Cook's opinion, doesn't sell a majority of units in that space.
Usage metrics, where iOS has usually dominated Android, was also brought up by Cook. Like others before him, Cook floated that many Android phones aren't used as smartphones, but as feature phones.
There's been a lot of dodgy numbers thrown Apple's way, but the combination of their profit share (what matters to them) and their usage share (what matters to us) is hard to argue.
May 28, 2013 ? New research from the University of Southampton shows that copper and copper alloys will rapidly destroy norovirus -- the highly-infectious sickness bug. The virus can be contracted from contaminated food or water, person-to-person contact, and contact with contaminated surfaces, meaning surfaces made from copper could effectively shut down one avenue of infection.
Worldwide, norovirus is responsible for more than 267 million cases of acute gastroenteritis every year. There is no specific treatment or vaccine, and outbreaks regularly shut down hospital wards and care homes, requiring expensive deep-cleaning, incurring additional treatment costs and resulting in lost working days when staff are infected. Its impact is also felt beyond healthcare, with cruise ships and hotels suffering significant damage to their reputation when epidemics occur among guests.
Professor Bill Keevil, Chair in Environmental Healthcare at the University of Southampton and lead researcher, presented his work at the American Society for Microbiology's 2013 General Meeting last week. The presentation showed norovirus was rapidly destroyed on copper and its alloys, with those containing more than 60 per cent copper proving particularly effective. The contamination model used was designed to simulate fingertip-touch contamination of surfaces.
Professor Keevil from the University's Institute for Life Sciences says: "Copper alloy surfaces can be employed in high-risk areas such as cruise ships and care homes, where norovirus outbreaks are hard to control because infected people can't help but contaminate the environment with vomiting and diarrhea.
"The virus can remain infectious on solid surfaces and is also resistant to many cleaning solutions. That means it can spread to people who touch these surfaces, causing further infections and maintaining the cycle of infection. Copper surfaces, like door handles and taps, can disrupt the cycle and lower the risk of outbreaks."
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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? An official says two guests invited by an Afghan police commander to eat with him at his checkpoint picked up weapons after dinner and opened fire, killing him and six of his men.
Ahmad Jawed Faisal, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, did not say what the motive might have been for the late Monday attack in the remote district of Arghistan.
He says one officer survived and told authorities what happened.
The price of oil fell Monday as traders concerned about global energy demand took profits ahead of economic data from China and the United States.
By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark oil for July delivery was down 50 cents to $93.65 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 10 cents to $94.15 a barrel Friday.
Analysts said traders took profits before May unemployment data is released today in Washington, which should help clarify the state of the recovery in the world?s biggest economy.
?We?re starting to build confidence in the economic data, but that?s not going to stop anyone from taking money off the table ahead of a long weekend,? Carl Larry of Oil Outlooks and Opinions said in a market commentary, referring to Monday?s Memorial Day holiday in the U.S.
Monday also was a public holiday in Britain.
Bridge fall affects major trade artery
SEATTLE
For farmers, business owners and government officials up and down the West Coast, Washington?s bridge collapse on Interstate 5 represents much more than a close brush with tragedy. As much as $20 billion in freight travels to and from Canada and along the busy north-south corridor each year.
People in Canada won?t go hungry if no Washington apples are trucked to them. But the American apple farmers may feel a pinch, said Don Alper, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham, about 20 miles north of the Skagit River.
?It?s a huge commercial artery,? Alper said. ?If things happen to it, it can have huge economic ramifications.?
Diamonds, nanotubes find common ground in graphenePublic release date: 28-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Hybrid created by Rice, Honda Research Institute shows nanotubes can grow on anything
What may be the ultimate heat sink is only possible because of yet another astounding capability of graphene. The one-atom-thick form of carbon can act as a go-between that allows vertically aligned carbon nanotubes to grow on nearly anything.
That includes diamonds. A diamond film/graphene/nanotube structure was one result of new research carried out by scientists at Rice University and the Honda Research Institute USA, reported today in Nature's online journal Scientific Reports.
The heart of the research is the revelation that when graphene is used as a middleman, surfaces considered unusable as substrates for carbon nanotube growth now have the potential to do so. Diamond happens to be a good example, according to Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and Honda chief scientist Avetik Harutyunyan.
Diamond conducts heat very well, five times better than copper. But its available surface area is very low. By its very nature, one-atom-thick graphene is all surface area. The same could be said of carbon nanotubes, which are basically rolled-up tubes of graphene. A vertically aligned forest of carbon nanotubes grown on diamond would disperse heat like a traditional heat sink, but with millions of fins. Such an ultrathin array could save space in small microprocessor-based devices.
"Further work along these lines could produce such structures as patterned nanotube arrays on diamond that could be utilized in electronic devices," Ajayan said. Graphene and metallic nanotubes are also highly conductive; in combination with metallic substrates, they may also have uses in advanced electronics, he said.
To test their ideas, the Honda team grew various types of graphene on copper foil by standard chemical vapor deposition. They then transferred the tiny graphene sheets to diamond, quartz and other metals for further study by the Rice team.
They found that only single-layer graphene worked well, and sheets with ripples or wrinkles worked best. The defects appeared to capture and hold the airborne iron-based catalyst particles from which the nanotubes grow. The researchers think graphene facilitates nanotube growth by keeping the catalyst particles from clumping.
Ajayan thinks the extreme thinness of graphene does the trick. In a previous study, the Rice lab found graphene shows materials coated with graphene can get wet, but the graphene provides protection against oxidation. "That might be one of the big things about graphene, that you can have a noninvasive coating that keeps the property of the substrate but adds value," he said. "Here it allows the catalytic activity but stops the catalyst from aggregating."
Testing found that the graphene layer remains intact between the nanotube forest and the diamond or other substrate. On a metallic substrate like copper, the entire hybrid is highly conductive.
Such seamless integration through the graphene interface would provide low-contact resistance between current collectors and the active materials of electrochemical cells, a remarkable step toward building high-power energy devices, said Rice research scientist and co-author Leela Mohana Reddy Arava.
###
Co-authors of the study are Honda senior scientists Rahul Rao and Gugang Chen; Rice graduate student Kaushik Kalaga; Masahiro Ishigami, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Central Florida; and Tony Heinz, the D.M. Rickey Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry at Rice.
The research was supported by the Honda Research Institute.
Read the open-access paper at http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130528/srep01891/full/srep01891.html
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Rice University and the Honda Research Institute use single-layer graphene to grow forests of nanotubes on virtually anything. The image shows freestanding carbon nanotubes on graphene that has been lifted off of a quartz substrate. One hybrid material created by the labs combines three allotropes of carbon graphene, nanotubes and diamond into a superior material for thermal management. (Credit: Honda Research Institute)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Diamonds, nanotubes find common ground in graphenePublic release date: 28-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Hybrid created by Rice, Honda Research Institute shows nanotubes can grow on anything
What may be the ultimate heat sink is only possible because of yet another astounding capability of graphene. The one-atom-thick form of carbon can act as a go-between that allows vertically aligned carbon nanotubes to grow on nearly anything.
That includes diamonds. A diamond film/graphene/nanotube structure was one result of new research carried out by scientists at Rice University and the Honda Research Institute USA, reported today in Nature's online journal Scientific Reports.
The heart of the research is the revelation that when graphene is used as a middleman, surfaces considered unusable as substrates for carbon nanotube growth now have the potential to do so. Diamond happens to be a good example, according to Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and Honda chief scientist Avetik Harutyunyan.
Diamond conducts heat very well, five times better than copper. But its available surface area is very low. By its very nature, one-atom-thick graphene is all surface area. The same could be said of carbon nanotubes, which are basically rolled-up tubes of graphene. A vertically aligned forest of carbon nanotubes grown on diamond would disperse heat like a traditional heat sink, but with millions of fins. Such an ultrathin array could save space in small microprocessor-based devices.
"Further work along these lines could produce such structures as patterned nanotube arrays on diamond that could be utilized in electronic devices," Ajayan said. Graphene and metallic nanotubes are also highly conductive; in combination with metallic substrates, they may also have uses in advanced electronics, he said.
To test their ideas, the Honda team grew various types of graphene on copper foil by standard chemical vapor deposition. They then transferred the tiny graphene sheets to diamond, quartz and other metals for further study by the Rice team.
They found that only single-layer graphene worked well, and sheets with ripples or wrinkles worked best. The defects appeared to capture and hold the airborne iron-based catalyst particles from which the nanotubes grow. The researchers think graphene facilitates nanotube growth by keeping the catalyst particles from clumping.
Ajayan thinks the extreme thinness of graphene does the trick. In a previous study, the Rice lab found graphene shows materials coated with graphene can get wet, but the graphene provides protection against oxidation. "That might be one of the big things about graphene, that you can have a noninvasive coating that keeps the property of the substrate but adds value," he said. "Here it allows the catalytic activity but stops the catalyst from aggregating."
Testing found that the graphene layer remains intact between the nanotube forest and the diamond or other substrate. On a metallic substrate like copper, the entire hybrid is highly conductive.
Such seamless integration through the graphene interface would provide low-contact resistance between current collectors and the active materials of electrochemical cells, a remarkable step toward building high-power energy devices, said Rice research scientist and co-author Leela Mohana Reddy Arava.
###
Co-authors of the study are Honda senior scientists Rahul Rao and Gugang Chen; Rice graduate student Kaushik Kalaga; Masahiro Ishigami, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Central Florida; and Tony Heinz, the D.M. Rickey Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry at Rice.
The research was supported by the Honda Research Institute.
Read the open-access paper at http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130528/srep01891/full/srep01891.html
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Rice University and the Honda Research Institute use single-layer graphene to grow forests of nanotubes on virtually anything. The image shows freestanding carbon nanotubes on graphene that has been lifted off of a quartz substrate. One hybrid material created by the labs combines three allotropes of carbon graphene, nanotubes and diamond into a superior material for thermal management. (Credit: Honda Research Institute)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
May 27, 2013 ? In a move that would make the Alchemists of King Arthur's time green with envy, scientists have unraveled the formula for turning liquid cement into liquid metal. This makes cement a semi-conductor and opens up its use in the profitable consumer electronics marketplace for thin films, protective coatings, and computer chips.
"This new material has lots of applications, including as thin-film resistors used in liquid-crystal displays, basically the flat panel computer monitor that you are probably reading this from at the moment," said Chris Benmore, a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory who worked with a team of scientists from Japan, Finland and Germany to take the "magic" out of the cement-to-metal transformation. Benmore and Shinji Kohara from Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute/SPring-8 led the research effort.
This change demonstrates a unique way to make metallic-glass material, which has positive attributes including better resistance to corrosion than traditional metal, less brittleness than traditional glass, conductivity, low energy loss in magnetic fields, and fluidity for ease of processing and molding. Previously, only metals have been able to transition to a metallic-glass form. Cement does this by a process called electron trapping, a phenomena only previously seen in ammonia solutions. Understanding how cement joined this exclusive club opens the possibility of turning other solid normally insulating materials into room-temperature semiconductors.
"This phenomenon of trapping electrons and turning liquid cement into liquid metal was found recently, but not explained in detail until now," Benmore said. "Now that we know the conditions needed to create trapped electrons in materials we can develop and test other materials to find out if we can make them conduct electricity in this way."
The results were reported May 27 in the journal the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences in the article "Network topology for the formation of solvated electrons in binary CaO-Al2O3 composition glasses."
The team of scientists studied mayenite, a component of alumina cement made of calcium and aluminum oxides. They melted it at temperatures of 2,000 degrees Celsius using an aerodynamic levitator with carbon dioxide laser beam heating. The material was processed in different atmospheres to control the way that oxygen bonds in the resulting glass. The levitator keeps the hot liquid from touching any container surfaces and forming crystals. This let the liquid cool into glassy state that can trap electrons in the way needed for electronic conduction. The levitation method was developed specifically for in-situ measurement at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source by a team led by Benmore.
The scientists discovered that the conductivity was created when the free electrons were "trapped" in the cage-like structures that form in the glass. The trapped of electrons provided a mechanism for conductivity similar to the mechanism that occurs in metals.
To uncover the details of this process, scientists combined several experimental techniques and analyzed them using a supercomputer. They confirmed the ideas in experiments using different X-ray techniques at Spring 8 in Japan combined with earlier measurements at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source and the Advanced Photon Source.
Research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, the Japan Science and Technology Agency, and the Academy of Finland.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors have indicted the operators of digital currency exchange Liberty Reserve, accusing the Costa Rica-based company of helping criminals around the world launder more than $6 billion in illicit funds linked to everything from child pornography to software for hacking into banks.
The indictment unsealed on Tuesday said Liberty Reserve had more than a million users worldwide, including at least 200,000 in the United States, and virtually all of its business was related to suspected criminal activity.
"Liberty Reserve has emerged as one of the principal means by which cyber-criminals around the world distribute, store and launder the proceeds of their illegal activity," according to the indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Officials said authorities in Spain, Costa Rica and New York arrested five people on Friday, including the company's founder, Arthur Budovsky, and seized bank accounts and Internet domains associated with Liberty Reserve.
Digital currency is made up of transferable units that can be exchanged for cash. Over the past decade, its use has expanded, attracting attention from the media and Wall Street. The most widely known digital currency is called Bitcoin. Liberty Reserve's currency was not connected to Bitcoin.
The indictment detailed a system of payments that allowed users to open accounts with little information and move money around with anonymity.
The U.S. Treasury named Liberty Reserve under the USA Patriot Act as a company "specifically designed and frequently used to facilitate money laundering in cyber space."
That designation, the first against a virtual currency exchange, prohibits banks or other payment processors from doing any business with Liberty Reserve, even if it should reopen under a new name.
In addition to pornography and drug trafficking funds, Liberty Reserve's virtual currency was also used to anonymously buy and sell software designed to steal personal information, according to a statement from the U.S. Treasury.
Users could also buy malware programs designed to assault financial institutions, as well as lists of information from thousands of compromised personal accounts, the Treasury said.
In addition to Budovsky, his deputy, Azzedine El Amine was arrested, as was co-founder Vladimir Kats, and two technology designers, Maxim Chukarev and Mark Marmilev.
Two more company employees were still at large in Costa Rica according to officials: Ahmed Yassine Abdelghani and Allan Esteban Hidalgo Jimenez. According to the indictment, almost all of the men used the alias, Eric Paltz.
None of the men could be reached for comment.
According to the indictment, Liberty Reserve's currency unit was called the "LR." Users opened accounts at Liberty Reserve giving only a name, address and date of birth that the company made no attempt to verify.
Once a user had a Liberty Reserve account, he or she could use cash to purchase LRs from third-party exchange merchants, which traded LRs with each other in bulk and charged fees to make the exchanges between LRs and hard cash.
Liberty Reserve users could transfer the digital currency units called LRs to each other, to be redeemed in different parts of the world for cash using the third-party exchange companies.
The third party exchange companies provided the gateway to more conventional payment systems. According to information Liberty Reserve's archived web pages, the company had relationships at one time with at least 35 different exchange companies, some of which transferred cash back and forth to customers using PayPal, Western Union, MoneyGram, credit cards including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and CitiBank Global Money Transfer.
The indictment said Liberty Reserve did not collect any banking or transaction information from the third-party exchange companies. It also let its users hide their Liberty Exchange account numbers when making transactions, which offered another opportunity for the users to mask their true identities.
The company processed around 12 million financial transactions per year. Since it began operating in 2006, the indictment said, Liberty Reserve laundered over $6 billion in criminal proceeds.
On Tuesday, the company's website, www.libertyreserve.com, displayed the message: "This domain name has been seized by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team."
It was not clear whether the people arrested in Spain and Costa Rica would be extradited to the United States or when the two people arrested in Brooklyn, New York, would appear in court.
Regulatory obligations to combat money laundering have emerged as a major challenge to digital currency firms. The U.S. Treasury Department's anti-money laundering unit, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), issued guidance in March that labeled digital currency firms as money transmitters, thereby obliging them to enact anti-money laundering programs and register with FinCEN.
A top Bitcoin exchange, Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, failed to register with FinCEN earlier this month and had its U.S. dollar accounts seized by authorities.
Over the past week, a Bitcoin unit has traded at around $130, according to the website Bitcoincharts.com.
(Reporting by Emily Flitter in New York; Additional reporting by Brett Wolf in St. Louis and Isabella Cota Schwarz in San Jose, Costa Rica and Matthew Goldstein in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Tim Dobbyn and Jan Paschal)
Pavlof Volcano has been erupting for over a week, releasing a humongous plume of ash, steam, and smoke visible from the International Space Station. The eruption has quieted down, but seismic data suggests that it's not over.
By Liz Fuller-Wright,?Correspondent / May 24, 2013
Space station astronauts captured this picture of Pavlof Volcano on Saturday.
Courtesy of the ISS Expedition 36 crew / NASA
Enlarge
Astronauts on the International Space Station?captured jaw-dropping pictures of a volcanic eruption last Saturday. Since then, the volcano has been hidden from sight, shrouded in thick clouds.
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Pavlof Volcano has been belching ash and spewing lava since May 13, when tremors and rising surface temperatures gave way to fountains of molten rock bursting from the volcano's north flank.
When that lava hit ice and snow, it created explosive steam clouds that could be seen for dozens of miles ? and photographed from space. The steam, ash, and gas plumes have climbed over 20,000 feet into the sky, and left a grey streak stretching for a hundred miles.
Prior to last week, Pavlof hadn't erupted since 2007.
Is it over?
Pavlof has been playing it cool for the past few days, reports the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which celebrated its 25th?anniversary last month.
Though the ash eruptions have disrupted local air travel, the violence seems to have subsided for now, with a more relaxed release of ash and lava continuing steadily. Even through the clouds hiding Pavlof from sight, satellites can measure high surface temperatures indicating that the lava is still flowing.
After about a week of steady seismic rumbles,?the shaking calmed down on Tuesday morning and hasn't restarted, though a huge seismic blast this morning suggests that Pavlof had another volcanic explosion ? but through the clouds, it's hard to know just what or where.
The scientists at Alaska Volcano Observatory have the volcano threat level set at "Watch," which is one step down from the highest level, "Warning." But they caution that massive explosions ? like the one that created that giant, 20,000-foot plume ? can occur without warning.
The Aleutian Islands are sparsely enough settled that the primary hazard from volcanoes like Pavlof is that airborne ash could endanger planes flying between North America and Asia. In fact, in 1989, a wide-body passenger jet encountered an ash plume from Redoubt, another Alaska volcano, and lost power in all four engines.?Fortunately for the passengers, after the plane plummeted two miles in five minutes, the crew restarted the engines and landed safely in Anchorage, about a hundred miles away.
Why did Pavlof erupt?
Like the rest of the Aleutian Islands (and, for that matter, the Cascades), Pavlof sits on the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American plate. When the dense ocean floor runs into the less-dense continental crust, its weight pulls it down into the mantle, where the heat and pressures make it start to melt.
When rock melts, magma forms ? and when magma reaches the earth's surface, it erupts as lava. The more water or gases were trapped in the magma, the more explosive the eruption will be.
Though scientists know exactly how volcanoes form, volcanologists can't yet predict eruptions. But they've made huge strides, thanks to regular monitoring of hundreds of active volcanoes around the world.
Volcano monitoring became a political punching bag in 2009, after Louisiana's Gov. Bobby Jindal highlighted it as "wasteful spending" in the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address. "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in?Washington, D.C.," said Mr. Jindal. The eruption of Redoubt Volcano a month later ? the same volcano that had nearly crashed a passenger jet in 1989 ? was seen by some as a definitive response, but video monitoring shrunk in recent years due to budget pressures and the sequester.
Alaska's 52 active volcanoes once had 200 working seismic instruments. Now 80 of those instruments have fallen into disrepair and can?t be fixed because of the USGS budget cuts, the Associated Press reported last week. That means that five of Alaska's 52 active volcanoes aren?t monitored electronically at all, and the number could rise if more instruments go without maintenance.
ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - A court hearing begins Tuesday to determine how Trayvon Martin should be portrayed to a jury when a neighborhood watch captain goes on trial for killing the unarmed black teenager last year.
George Zimmerman, whose highly anticipated second-degree murder is scheduled to start June 10, has said he shot Martin in self-defense during a fight in February 2012.
At issue in Tuesday's hearing are pieces of evidence that suggest 17-year-old Martin used marijuana at an undetermined time and had been suspended from school shortly prior to his death. The defense also wants to use text messages and social media posts that Zimmerman's lawyer said would show that Martin presented himself as "street wise" and interested in guns.
Prosecutors will argue that the Facebook postings by Martin, who had no criminal record and the way he portrayed himself to his friends is irrelevant to what happened on the night of the killing.
In a motion to ban evidence of marijuana use, prosecutors said there is no evidence that Martin was under the influence or that marijuana contributed to his death. O'Mara claims, however, that the evidence supports the defense theory that Martin was the aggressor.
The hearing before Judge Debra Nelson begins at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) in the Seminole County Criminal Justice Center in Sanford, where national news media are gearing up for extensive live coverage of the trial.
Zimmerman followed Martin after he spotted him walking in the rain in a gated community in the town of Sanford near Orlando where Martin was spending the weekend in one of the town homes with his father. Zimmerman called police to report a suspicious person and pursued Martin despite the dispatcher telling him not to. Soon after, Zimmerman shot Martin during a struggle before police arrived.
In court filings Zimmerman's lawyers say they want the judge to decide about the use during the trial of voice analysis of 911 tapes of calls to the police before and during the struggle.
Lawyers are seeking clarification from the judge about whether the science behind the various types of voice analysis used by experts for the state and defense is solid enough to be considered by the jury.
Experts have reached different conclusions about whether it was Zimmerman or Martin screaming in the background of a 911 call taped just before Martin was shot, or whether it is possible to be certain at all.
Some experts could isolate only seconds of usable audio on the tape while one prosecution expert claims to have deciphered several phrases uttered by Zimmerman and Martin.
The defense also wants the judge to allow the identities of the jurors to remain secret and to let the jury visit the crime scene.
Martin's death set off debate about Florida's "stand your ground" law, which allows deadly force if a person fears serious bodily harm. Police initially declined to arrest Zimmerman, who is white and Hispanic, which led to racial protests.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee says that military commanders who allow sexual assault to flourish should be fired.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham says that women who serve in the military are needed and, quote: "putting up with way too much crap."
Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said victims need to know they're protected and have their day in a court they can trust.
A Pentagon study found that 26,000 members of the armed forces faced sexual assault last year, but only a few thousand cases were reported.
President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel addressed the issue separately in graduation speeches at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) ? A Kenyan police official says the country's anti-terrorism police have killed a wanted terrorist and recovered a cache of weapons in the port city of Mombasa.
Police official Boniface Mwaniki said Sunday that Khalid Ahmed was trailed by police from the capital Nairobi to Mombasa where he was killed in a dawn exchange of fire at his mother's house. Mwaniki says the Somali national sneaked into Kenya from Somalia where he had undergone paramilitary training.
Mwaniki said police recovered a hand grenade, a pistol and ammunition inside the house. He said some police officers were wounded in the shootout with Ahmed.
Kenya has had a growing terror problem since 2011 when it sent its troops to fight Islamic militants inside Somalia. Al-Shabab has since then staged retaliatory attacks inside Kenya.
It wasn't too long ago that we saw the Evernote app get a pretty major refresh on Windows Phone, but today the note-taking service is back with some underlying improvements and a couple of new features. The main highlight in version 3.1 is that the WP application now allows various tools to be pinned to your handset's Live Tiles -- you know, things like notes, recordings and snapshots. To close things out, Evernote added the option for users to be able to display Snippet View notes in a horizontal list, a minor tweak that's bound to be appreciated by those who have a thing for landscape mode. All in all, we'd say this isn't too bad for being in the category of a "dot-one" update.
It may seem like everyone out there wants the latest and greatest in feature-packed, giant-screen smartphones, but there's still a bunch of people that just need to make a call from time to time. And for that reason, companies like LG keep making flip phones like the Envoy II?not that there's anything wrong with that. We like a good simple cell phone ourselves, like our Editors' Choice, the Samsung Jitterbug Plus. Unfortunately, while the $69.99 LG Envoy II for U.S. Cellular may be simple, it isn't very good. It's less of a classic flip phone than it is simply stuck in the past.
Design and Call Quality Design-wise, the Envoy II is your standard flip phone. It measures 3.9 by 2.0 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.7 ounces. The whole thing is made of matte black plastic with a lightly textured strip that runs across the middle. All external controls are on the left, including a covered, non-standard headphone jack, a volume rocker, and the power port.
There's a 1-inch monochrome LCD on the outside of the phone. It shows you the time, date, network, reception, ringer, and battery life. The phone opens smoothly, though the hinge feels flimsy, like you can break it off if you push too hard. Inside is a 2.2-inch display with just 176-by-144-pixel resolution. It looks terrible. Everything is blurry, like you're wearing someone else's glasses, and viewing angles are poor. You can control the size and style of the text, but it still looks small even on the largest setting. Thankfully, the phone has text-to-speech conversion, so you can have it read incoming messages aloud.
The lower half of the phone is home to your number keys, as well as a rather busy control pad. There's a standard five-button navigation pad, which is flanked by an additional seven function keys. That's a lot of buttons, but none of them are the keys to send or end a call?those are a little further down with the number keys. So what controls do you get? There are two function keys in either corner that correspond to commands on screen. There's also a button for the camera, speakerphone, alarm, text-to-speech, and voice commands. That's about three buttons too many. Some of those controls would've been better off left to the Settings menu.
The keys themselves are decent. They're dimly backlit, with decent separation and good travel. Of course, even the best number pad isn't ideal for texting, so if that's what you're after, you're better off with a keyboarded phone like the Samsung Freeform 4.
In New York City where I did my testing, U.S. Cellular phones use Sprint's network.?The Envoy II is a 2G device with no Wi-Fi. Reception was decent and voice quality is solid. Voices sound very good in the phone's earpiece; there's some light fuzz, but you need to turn the volume all the way up to hear it. Calls made with the phone are also solid, though voices were a little muted from aggressive noise cancellation. There's some side tone in the earpiece, which helps prevent you from talking too loudly. The speakerphone sounds okay, but is not loud enough to hear outside. And calls sounded good over a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset, though the voice command system was rather fussy; it worked properly less than half the times I tried. Battery life was average at 6 hours and 14 minutes of talk time.
Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions You don't get much in the way of apps. The main menu has 12 icons you can choose from, which range from the phone book and text messages to the Settings menu and Uno. Most of the apps can be found under the Tools menu. You get a calculator, calendar, stopwatch, tip calculator, unit converter, and world clock. There's also a programmable menu called My Menu, but since it's buried under Tools, it isn't terribly convenient to use.
There's an app store from U.S. Cellular, as well as a place to buy new ring tones. You can also browse the Web, via the Myriad 6.2-powered Web browser, which reads WAP sites. But between the WAP browser, the slow data speeds, and the poor display, this isn't a good phone for getting online.
Multimedia support is pretty much out. There is no music or video playback. Even if there were, the phone has a skimpy 121.5MB of free storage, no microSD card slot, and a non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack. So you probably don't have compatible headphones, and there's little room to store anything except photos.
Speaking of photos, the LG Envoy II has a 1.3-megapixel camera. Pictures taken with the phone aren't terrible for what they are?the camera actually does a decent job with color?but there is virtually no detail. There's also no good way to transfer photos off the phone. You have to send them as a picture message or use Bluetooth.
The LG Envoy II uses the classic flip phone design, but it's far from a classic. On U.S. Cellular, you're better off with the Samsung Chrono 2. It has a similar design, but it costs less and you can use it as a music player. There's also the Kyocera DuraPro, which is also a flip phone, but with a much bigger, rugged design. It has a better camera than the Envoy II, as well as a much sharper screen. If you prefer to text, you should check out Samsung Freeform 4, which has a BlackBerry-style keyboard and better multimedia support than the Envoy II. There's also the LG Freedom. We haven't reviewed it yet, but it combines a touch-screen display with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Our Editors' Choice for simple phones remains with the Samsung Jitterbug Plus. It's extremely easy to use, and has free 24-hour operator assistance, though you'll need service through GreatCall to get it.?
Considering Fallon Fox won her first two fights in the first round, it was expected for the first openly trans fighter to walk through her next opponent, Allanna Jones at Championship Fighting Alliance on Friday. In her first nationally televised bout, Fox won with a submission in the third round, but it was not the overwhelming win that oddsmakers were expecting.
You can watch the full fight in the video above. Fox and Jones both made mistakes like keeping their hands too low and holding their chin out too far throughout the bout. They looked like two inexperienced fighters because that's what they are.
Much of the controversy that surrounded Fox was the perception that since she was born a man, she would have clear advantage over her opponents. As Sherdog's Jordan Breen pointed out, "So, did anyone watch that and think, 'Wow, what an insurmountable advantage Fallon Fox has, no one could ever beat her!'?" She beat a 2-1 fighter, but not soundly. When she goes up in level of competition, as she will do in the next round of the CFA tournament, she will have a hard time.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has agreed to a settlement in a disability discrimination case filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. An applicant for a school crossing guard position had filed the complaint and later sued, alleging that the NYPD required a physical examination im??mediately upon completion of a job application.
The ADA requires employers to make a conditional offer of employment before requiring any medical examinations.
Under the settlement, the NYPD will pay the applicant $65,000 and make her a conditional offer of em?ployment. The department also agreed to provide ADA training to its hiring personnel.
Note: Sometimes it?s the simplest tasks that trip employers up. That?s why training on the basics is essential to keep liability costs down.
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Scientists have uncovered a survival mechanism that occurs in breast cells that have just turned premalignant-cells on the cusp between normalcy and cancers-which may lead to new methods of stopping tumors.
In their Molecular Cell study, the Salk Institute researchers report that a protein known as transforming growth factor beta (TGF-?), considered a tumor suppressor in early cancer development, can actually promote cancer once a cell drifts into a pre-cancerous state.
The discovery-a surprise to the investigators-raises the tantalizing possibility that, with novel treatment, some cancers might be prevented before they even develop.
"Our work suggests it might be possible to halt cancer development in premalignant cells-those that are just a few divisions away from being normal," says the study's lead author, Fernando Lopez-Diaz, a researcher in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory at Salk.
Agents designed to inhibit TGF-? are already being tested against cancers that have already spread, says Beverly M. Emerson, a Salk professor, head of the lab and the study's senior author. "This study offers both significant insights into early cancer development and a new direction to explore in cancer treatment," she says. "It would be fantastic if a single agent could shut down both advanced cancer and cancer that is primed to develop."
Oncologists might also be able to use their discovery to predict whether premalignant cells in a patient are destined to become full-fledged cancer, Emerson adds. "Not all premalignant cells morph into cancer," she says. "Many self-destruct due to cellular protective mechanisms. But some will become tumors and, at this point, there is no way to predict which of these cells are a risk."
The two faces of TGF-?
TGF-? molecules are secreted proteins found in most human tissues. They play a number of different biological roles, including controlling cell proliferation and inflammation and assisting in wound healing.
The prevailing dogma in cancer research is that TGF-? signaling keep cells from morphing into cancer, says Lopez-Diaz. Scientists also recognized that cancer cells that "want" to spread learn how to use TGF-? wound-healing function to break from a tumor, he says.
Another protein, P53 is a known tumor suppressor. During the stress response that occurs as a cell becomes cancerous, and in response to chemotherapy, p53 attempts to repair DNA damage that has occurred, and, if not successful, p53 orders the cell to die. "The p53 pathway must be sabotaged for cells to become cancerous," Lopez-Diaz says. "This happens when its gene becomes mutated, if the p53 protein is exaggeratedly degraded or, less appreciated, if p53 biosynthesis is impeded."
The researchers conducted this study to learn exactly how p53 and TGF-? interact in cancer development. "For the past decade, everyone has believed that these two pathways work together in normal and premalignant cells to stop cancer, even though there was not much data to support this assumption," he says.
The team examined premalignant as well as cancer cells from breast and lung tumors and matched normal and premalignant breast cells from healthy women provided by scientists at the University of California San Francisco.
But no matter how many different ways they did their experiments, the Salk researchers found that TGF-? can interfere with cells' damage responses in premalignant or cancer cells.
In fact, they found that TGF-? halts both the transcription of the p53 gene-the process by which cellular machinery reads the DNA code for a gene-and the subsequent process by which the corresponding p53 protein is produced, known as translation.
This could explain why, in about half of the breast tumors, including premalignant lesions, that the team studied at both UC San Francisco and at Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute, when TGF-?1 signaling was highly activated, the levels of p53 were reduced, and vice versa-if the TGF-?1 pathway was reduced, there were high levels of p53. " A similar trend was seen with PUMA, a protein which induces cell death," Fernando Lopez-Diaz adds. "There was rather abundant PUMA protein when little TGF-?1 activation existed and vice versa."
"The bad face of TGF-? emerged within just a few cell divisions away from normality, allowing cells to avoid death," he says.
Filling in the cancer puzzle
This newfound immortality explains many oncologic mysteries, Lopez-Diaz says. "One is that it sheds light on how premalignant and early cancer cells are able to withstand the assault of chemotherapy and other treatments," he says.
It may explain why 77 percent of breast cancers have a normal p53 gene, and it further suggests a way that cancer cells can use both to metastasize and survive the journey to organs where they set up a new home.
"Because it helps cells avoid death, TGF-? can reduce the negative impact that the metastatic process has in the cancer cells," Lopez-Diaz says.
He adds that there is much work yet to do. "We want to understand the signals that turn TGF-? into a bad guy," he says. "If we know that, we might be able to inhibit those signals, and force damaged cells to die, as they should. That may offer us another treatment possibility, along with TGF-? inhibitors now being tested."
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Salk Institute: http://www.salk.edu
Thanks to Salk Institute for this article.
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Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live today at 9am Pacific time.
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Public release date: 28-May-2013
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