Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/296200325?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Swimming-Youngest world record-holder Muir dies aged 60
CAPE TOWN, April 2 (Reuters) - Former South African swimming great Karen Muir, the youngest-ever world record holder in any sport, has died of breast cancer aged 60, South African media reported on Tuesday.
Muir was elected to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1980 having set 15 world records in the backstroke at 100 metres, 200 metres, 110 yards and 220 yards.
Her first was in the 110-yards event at the 1965 ASA National Junior Championships in Blackpool, England aged 12 years, 10 months and 25 days, making her the youngest world record holder in any sport.
Muir also won 22 South African Championships and three U.S. National Championships, but never competed at the Olympic Games because of the sports boycott imposed on her country.
Muir went on to qualify as a doctor and emigrated to Canada where she practised until her death. (Reporting by Nick Said in Cape Town; editing by Ed Osmond; nick.said@thomsonreuters.com +27832722948 Messaging nick.said.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/swimming-youngest-world-record-holder-muir-dies-aged-114513981--spt.html
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Tuesday, April 2, 2013
FCC seeks public comment in review of TV, radio decency policy
(Reuters) - Regulators on Monday launched a review of policy governing the way it enforces broadcasts of nudity and profanity on radio and television and asked for public comment on whether its current approach should be amended.
The Federal Communications Commission issued a public notice inviting comment on whether it should focus its efforts on pursuing only the "most egregious" cases in which rules are broken, or focus on isolated cases of nudity and expletives uttered on radio and TV shows.
The public notice follows a Supreme Court ruling in June 2012 against a government crackdown some 10 years ago on nudity and profanity.
"We now seek comment on whether the full Commission should make changes to its current (egregious cases) broadcast indecency policies or maintain them as they are," the FCC said on Monday.
It asked for public input over the next 30 days on whether, for example, it should treat cases of nudity in the same way as profanity, and whether "deliberate and repetitive" use of expletives is necessary to prove indecency.
Since the Supreme Court ruling, the FCC said it had focused its enforcement on "egregious cases" and had handled a backlog of more than 1 million complaints since June 2012.
The Supreme Court said that the FCC rules were vague and that it had not given fair notice of a tougher stance that resulted in three-high profile incidents that resulted in complaints and fines against U.S. networks.
These included the broadcast of a glimpse of singer Janet Jackson's breast at a 2004 Super Bowl half time show.
Under a 2001 FCC policy that was amended in 2004, network and local radio and television channels can be fined up to $325,000 for a single fleeting expletive blurted out on a live show or for brief glimpses of nudity. Cable and satellite operators are not subject to such rules.
The FCC said that it would continue to enforce its current polices as usual during the comment period and that Monday's public notice did not alter any of its policies.
The TV industry has argued that policies have been inconsistent over the years, allowing the television broadcast of movie "Schindler's List" that includes nudity, but leading to fines against News Corp's Fox television for expletives uttered by singer Cher and reality TV star Nicole Richie on awards shows in 2002 and 2003.
The most publicized case in recent years was the so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that allowed part of Jackson's breast to be briefly exposed during a half-time show for the 2004 Super Bowl football championship that drew half a million complaints.
CBS was fined $550,000 but the fine was thrown out by the Supreme Court in a separate judgment in late June 2012.
(Reporting By Jill Serjeant in Los Angeles; Editing by Eric Walsh)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fcc-seeks-public-review-tv-radio-decency-policy-225421851.html
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U.S. deploys stealth fighters to South Korea
By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea will strike back quickly if the North stages any attack on its territory, the new president in Seoul warned on Monday, as tensions ratcheted higher on the Korean peninsula amid shrill rhetoric from Pyongyang and the U.S. deployment of radar-evading fighter planes.
North Korea says the region is on the brink of a nuclear war in the wake of United Nations sanctions imposed for its February nuclear test and a series of joint U.S. and South Korean military drills that have included a rare U.S. show of aerial power.
North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a "state of war" with South Korea in response to what it termed the "hostile" military drills being staged in the South. But there have been no signs of unusual activity in the North's military to suggest an imminent aggression, a South Korean defense ministry official said last week.
"If there is any provocation against South Korea and its people, there should be a strong response in initial combat without any political considerations," President Park Geun-hye told the defense minister and senior officials at a meeting on Monday.
The South has changed its rules of engagement to allow local units to respond immediately to attacks, rather than waiting for permission from Seoul.
Stung by criticism that its response to the shelling of a South Korean island in 2010 was tardy and weak, Seoul has also threatened to target North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and to destroy statues of the ruling Kim dynasty in the event of any new attack, a plan that has outraged Pyongyang.
Seoul and its ally the United States played down Saturday's statement from the official KCNA news agency as the latest in a stream of tough talk from Pyongyang.
North Korea stepped up its rhetoric in early March, when U.S. and South Korean forces began annual military drills that involved the flights of U.S. B-2 stealth bombers in a practice run, prompting the North to puts its missile units on standby to fire at U.S. military bases in the South and in the Pacific.
The United States also deployed F-22 stealth fighter jets on Sunday to take part in the drills. The F-22s were deployed in South Korea before, in 2010.
On its part, North Korea has cancelled an armistice agreement with the United States that ended the Korean War and cut all hotlines with U.S. forces, the United Nations and South Korea.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS "NOT A BARGAINING CHIP"
Park's intervention came on the heels of a meeting of the North's ruling Workers Party Central Committee where leader Kim Jong-un rejected the notion that Pyongyang was going to use its nuclear arms development as a bargaining chip.
"The nuclear weapons of Songun Korea are not goods for getting U.S. dollars and they are ... (not) to be put on the table of negotiations aimed at forcing the (North) to disarm itself," KCNA news agency quoted him as saying.
At the meeting, Kim appointed a handful of personal confidants to the party's politburo, further consolidating his grip on power in the second full year of his reign.
Pyongyang took part in nuclear disarmament talks for five years aimed at paying it off in return for abandoning its atomic weapons program. Those talks fell apart in 2008. Some experts say the talks gave the North grounds to pursue a highly enriched uranium program that took it closer to owning a working arsenal.
Songun is the Korean word for the "Military First" policy preached by Kim's father who used it to justify the use of the impoverished state's scare resources to build a 1.2-million strong army and a weapons of mass destruction program.
CALLS FOR RESTRAINT
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said North Korea's announcement that it was in a state of war followed a "familiar pattern" of rhetoric.
China has repeatedly called for restraint on the peninsula.
However, many in South Korea have regarded the North's willingness to keep open the Kaesong industrial zone, located just a few miles (km) north of the heavily-militarized border and operated jointly by both sides, as a sign that Pyongyang will not risk losing a lucrative source of foreign currency by mounting a real act of aggression.
The Kaesong zone is a vital source of hard currency for the North and hundreds of South Korean workers and vehicles enter daily after crossing the armed border. It was still open on Monday despite threats by Pyongyang to shut it down. Closure could also trap hundreds of South Korean workers and managers of the more than 100 firms that have factories there.
The North has previously suspended operations at the factory zone at the height of political tensions with the South, only to let it resume operations later.
(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert in WASHINGTON; Editing by David Chance, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Ian Geoghegan)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-korea-vows-fast-response-north-u-deploys-043826040.html
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After Newtown: A new use for a weapons-detecting radar?
Apr. 1, 2013 ? In the weeks after the Connecticut school shooting, as the nation puzzled over how it happened and what might prevent it from happening again, Kamal Sarabandi was listening to the news. Talk turned to giving teachers guns, and he paused.
"I said, there must be a better way," Sarabandi recalled.
Then he had an epiphany. Sarabandi is an electrical engineering professor at the University of Michigan. His specialty is remote sensing -- detecting objects and gathering information from a distance. And for several years ending in mid-2012, he was funded by the Department of Defense to tweak a type of radar not too different from the kind police use to nab speeders and use it to find weapons and bombs concealed on a person's body.
The funders envisioned it for military uses. But after Newtown, Sarabandi wondered if his research had homefront applications. Maybe his millimeter-wave radar system could flag weapons on their way in to busy places where they're not allowed.
"Schools, airports, stadiums or shopping malls -- wherever there is a large number of people that you want to protect," Sarabandi said.
It could work from a football field away, Sarabandi says, and take less than one second per person. That's a lot quicker and more convenient than a metal detector, he adds.
The new technology isn't in the radar system itself, which, like all radar, senses objects by sending out radio waves and listening for the signals that bounce back. Sarabandi's particular millimeter wavelength is used today in collision avoidance systems in cars, in satellite communications and in military targeting and tracking, for example.
Sarabandi paired it with Doppler radar signal processing to pick out the signature of a person walking in the noisy radar scene. Then he uses a technique called radar polarimetry to essentially squint at the signal coming from the pedestrian's torso and identify the telltale glare that a metal object hidden there would cause.
He hasn't tested the technology on people, or people with real guns. But he has done computer simulations. He has also conducted experiments in an echo-reducing chamber with a mannequin hiding a nail-studded block of wax under a leather jacket. The nail block stands in for a makeshift explosive.
Here's how the concept works: Doppler radar, famous for its weather and speed trap applications, uses the Doppler effect to measure an object's speed. It can tell a meteorologist how fast a storm is approaching, for example. Sarabandi used it to identify what parts of the reflected signal were coming from, say, the limbs and what part was coming from the torso of a human walking.
To do this, he first attached motion-capture electrodes on the limbs and torsos of several human subjects and had them walk around in the U-M 3-D lab. He used the recordings of their motions to make true-to-life animations. Then by simulating their Doppler radar reflection over time, he identified a general pattern that he could program a computer to recognize. It's a spiky graph to the untrained eye, but to Sarabandi, it represents "the DNA of walking." To confirm that it was specific to humans, he compared it with the signal from a walking dog -- a short-haired Labrador.
Once he knew he could pick out the people, he zoomed in on their torsos -- fortuitously a sweet spot for two reasons: People often hide weapons there, and it's a relatively smooth backdrop against which to see something out of the ordinary.
When it came time to push the technology to identify a hidden weapon, Sarabandi and his research colleagues went shopping for a mannequin. They found one in a store that was going out of business in downtown Ann Arbor. They painted it with a coat that reflects radar-like human skin. And they set it up on a turntable in their anechoic chamber, an eerie, dim room with foam spikes jutting from its walls, floor and ceiling. The spikes catch the echoes and the chamber gives the researchers a controlled place to test.
Polarimetric radar is what the researchers used to look for the weapons. This technique sends a signal at a certain polarization and analyzes the polarization of the signal that bounces back. Polarization refers to the orientation of the electric field of a beam of light or any electromagnetic radiation. Sunlight isn't polarized, but it can get that way when it reflects off smooth surfaces that don't conduct electricity. In a similar vein, an irregular metal object can change the polarization of one of Sarabandi's radar beams, and his system can observe that change.
"So if we see enough signal with a polarization different from what was sent, we know that person is carrying something," Sarabandi said.
Sarabandi's idea would be to scan a large group of people from a distance. Then security guards could watch flagged individuals more closely or pull them aside for scans with more sensitive devices.
Today Sarabandi and colleagues are working on a smaller system for a robot, and they're funded by the Army. Developing and deploying a system for the homefront would take a lot more research, and, likely, public discussion. But it's one idea as the nation searches for solutions.
Sarabandi is the Rufus S. Teesdale Professor of Engineering.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/11yCnK07uck/130401112040.htm
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Lawyer: India's Supreme Court rejects Novartis AG's right to patent new version of cancer drug
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lawyer-indias-supreme-court-rejects-052234007.html
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Defense firm pays $100,000 to settle race bias claim ? Business ...
Aerospace and defense contractor ATK has agreed to pay a job applicant $100,000 after she complained about discriminatory hiring practices at the company?s Eden Prairie plant.
The woman, who is black, applied for an IT support position that would have had her working directly with ATK executives. Company officials initially told her she had the job, but then retracted the offer and hired a white man instead.
She filed a complaint with the EEOC, which investigated and concluded that ATK probably rejected the woman because of her skin color. When ATK denied the charges, the EEOC sued on the woman?s behalf. That?s when ATK elected to settle instead of going to trial.
In addition to the monetary set?tlement, the company agreed to a three-year consent decree under which it will review its workplace policies to ensure compliance with Title VII and related record-keeping rules, including a requirement to maintain notes taken during the job interview process.
ATK also agreed to provide anti-discrimination training to staff in Min??ne??sota and at the company?s headquarters in Virginia.
Advice: Thorough documentation makes employer practices transparent. In this case, the company apparently failed to keep notes when it was interviewing candidates. Thoroughly document each hiring decision?and each no-hire decision?to show that your process was designed to find the best candidate, not weed out members of protected classes.
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