Protesters block roads in Lebanon after car bomb

BEIRUT (AP) ? Protesters burned tires and set up roadblocks around Lebanon on Saturday in a sign of boiling anger over a massive car bomb that killed a top security official and seven other people a day earlier ? a devastating attack that threatened to bring Syria's civil war to Lebanon.

The Lebanese Cabinet was scheduled to hold an emergency meeting Saturday as the country's opposition called for Prime Minister Najib Mikati to resign. The state-run National News Agency said security commanders would attend the meeting to discuss how to keep the peace.

The government declared a national day of mourning for the victims, who included Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, head of the intelligence division of Lebanon's domestic security forces. Dozens were wounded in Friday's blast in Beirut's mainly Christian Achrafieh neighborhood.

Many observers said the attack appeared to have links to the Syrian civil war, which has been raging for 19 months. Al-Hassan, 47, headed an investigation over the summer that led to the arrest of former Information Minister Michel Samaha, one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's most loyal allies in Lebanon.

Samaha, who is in custody, is accused of plotting a campaign of bombings and assassinations to spread sectarian violence in Lebanon at Syria's behest. Also indicted in the August sweep was Syrian Brig. Gen. Ali Mamlouk, one of Assad's highest aides.

Lebanon's fractious politics are closely entwined with Syria's. The countries share a web of political and sectarian ties and rivalries, often causing events on one side of the border to echo on the other. Lebanon's opposition is an anti-Syrian bloc, while the prime minister and much of the government are pro-Syrian.

The civil war in Syria has laid bare Lebanon's sectarian tensions as well.

Many of Lebanon's Sunnis have backed Syria's mainly Sunni rebels, while Shiites have tended to back Assad. Al-Hassan was a Sunni whose stances were widely seen to oppose Syria and the country's most powerful ally in Lebanon, the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

On Friday, protesters in mostly Sunni areas closed roads with burning tires and rocks in Beirut, the southern city of Sidon, the northern city of Tripoli and several towns in the eastern Bekaa Valley.

The highway linking central Beirut with the city's international airport was closed, as well as the highway that links the capital with Syria, the officials said on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Rafik Khoury, editor of the independent Al-Anwar daily, said the assassination was an attempt to draw Lebanon into the conflict in Syria, which has been the most serious threat to the Assad family's 40-year dynasty.

"The side that carried the assassination knows the reactions and dangerous repercussions and is betting that it will happen. Strife is wanted in Lebanon," Khoury wrote.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/protesters-block-roads-lebanon-car-bomb-080015903.html

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Physicists crack another piece of the glass puzzle

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

When it comes to physics, glass lacks transparency. No one has been able to see what's happening at the molecular level as a super-cooled liquid approaches the glass state ? until now. Emory University physicists have made a movie of particle motion during this mysterious transition.

Their findings, showing how the rotation of the particles becomes decoupled from their movement through space, are being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.

"Cooling a glass from a liquid into a highly viscous state fundamentally changes the nature of particle diffusion," says Emory physicist Eric Weeks, whose lab conducted the research. "We have provided the first direct observation of how the particles move and tumble through space during this transition, a key piece to a major puzzle in condensed matter physics."

Weeks specializes in "soft condensed materials," substances that cannot be pinned down on the molecular level as a solid or liquid, including everyday substances such as toothpaste, peanut butter, shaving cream, plastic and glass.

Scientists fully understand the process of water turning to ice. As the temperature cools, the movement of the water molecules slows. At 32 F, the molecules lock into crystal lattices, solidifying into ice.

In contrast, the molecules of glasses do not crystallize. The movement of the glass molecules slows as the temperature cools, but they never lock into crystal patterns. Instead, they jumble up and gradually become glassier, or more viscous. No one understands exactly why.

The phenomenon leaves physicists to ponder the molecular question of whether glass is a solid, or merely an extremely slow-moving liquid.

This purely technical physics question has stoked a popular misconception: That the glass in the windowpanes of some centuries-old buildings is thicker at the bottom because the glass flowed downward over time. "The real reason the bottom is thicker is because they hadn't yet learned how to make perfectly flat panes of glass," Weeks says. "For practical purposes, glass is a solid and it will not flow, even over centuries. But there is a kernel of truth in this urban legend: Glasses are different than other solid materials. "

To explore what makes glasses different, the Weeks lab uses mixtures of water and tiny plastic balls, each about the size of the nucleus of a cell. This model system acts like a glass when the particle concentration is increased.

A major drawback to this model system is that actual glass molecules are not spherical, but irregularly shaped.

"When the hot molten liquid that forms a glass cools down, it's not just that the viscosity becomes enormous, growing by a factor of a billion, there is something different about how the molecules are moving," Weeks says. "We wanted to set up an experiment that would allow us to see that movement, but spheres move differently than irregular shapes."

In 2011, however, the physics lab of David Pine, at New York University, developed a way to join clusters of these tiny plastic balls together to form tetrahedrons.

Kazem Edmond, while a graduate student at Emory, added these tetrahedral particles to the glass model system and led the experiments. Using a confocal microscope, he digitally scanned the samples as the viscosity increased, creating up to 100 images per second. The result was three-dimensional movies that showed the movement and the behavior of the tetrahedrons as the system reached a glassy state.

The movie and data from the experiment provide the first clear picture of the particle dynamics for glass formation. As the liquid grows slightly more viscous, both rotational and directional particle motion slows. The amount of rotation and the directional movements of the particles remain correlated.

"Normally, these two types of motion are highly coupled," Weeks says. "This remains true until the system reaches a viscosity on the verge of being glass. Then the rotation and directional movements become decoupled: The rotation starts slowing down more."

He uses a gridlocked parking lot as an analogy for how the particles are behaving. "You can't turn your car around, because it's not a sphere shape and you would bump into your neighbors. You have to wait until a car in front of you moves, and then you can drive a bit in that direction. This is directional movement, and if you can make a bunch of these, you may eventually be able to turn your car. But turning in a crowded parking lot is still much harder than moving in a straight line."

Previous research has inferred this decoupling of movement by experimenting with actual molecular glasses. The Weeks lab used a simple model system to scale up glassy material so that you can actually watch the decoupling process happening.

"Glass is important in everyday life," Weeks says. "The more we understand its fundamental nature, the more we may be able to improve it and use it in different ways. One reason that smart phones are getting smaller and better, for example, is that stronger and thinner glass is being developed."

###

Emory University: http://www.emory.edu

Thanks to Emory University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124514/Physicists_crack_another_piece_of_the_glass_puzzle

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Senegal v Ivory Coast Africa Cup of Nations match abandoned after violent riot

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a new opinion in Video Games about Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade

Newest Review:?... where you get about 5 games on one disk the only game i remember on it was boom boom rocket which is like guitar hero with fireworks, all... more

Well this bundle seems nice it comes with lots of items like LIPS singing game and the offcial xbox arcade game pack where you get about 5 games on one disk the only game i remember on it was boom boom rocket which is like guitar hero with fireworks, all the items come in a nice green plastic wrapping so its well protected unless you buy used of course and you also get a wireless controller and VGA cable and a memory card.
I find that the VGA cable and the memory card are becoming useless as most new televisions have HDMI sockets which is just a single cable and provides better sound and picture quality and the xbox memory cards have so little size on them they are not even worth using you might as well buy a 60 or 120 GB hard drive as they are cheap to get now.

Summary: great for xbox newbies but you will replace the memory card fast

More reviews in the field of Games Console

Source: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/video-game-console/microsoft-xbox-360-arcade/1665856/

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Terms of service too long? This site reads them for you

18 hrs.

Devin Coldewey

Users don't often have the time or attention span to read through the whole terms of service that appear whenever they install new software or try a new website. Yet hidden in there may be information that's good to know. A new site,?ToS;DR, does the hard work so you don't have to.

While most terms of service are equally tedious and difficult to read, they do actually differ in significant ways when it comes to issues like?data ownership, privacy issues and?political positions. ToS;DR's name is?a riff on the acronym TL;DR, or "too long; didn't read," and it does for walls of policy text what Spark Notes does for literature.

Casting aside all the the nonsense and?legal boilerplate, ToS;DR finds the key parts of a site's policy and grades them. Do they claim copyright over any images you upload? Thumbs down. Do they defend your privacy in court? Thumbs up. Do they follow the law as interpreted by New York or California? Informative either way.

RIght now,?there are 32 services listed, from Twitter to Skype to Verizon. Not all have been subjected to equal scrutiny, and few have actual "grades" yet. And there are difficulties related to how certain sites must comply with regulations in different countries. But their capsule summaries are easier to read than the real terms of service and get across some important points.

ToS;DR just started in June, so many more sites and services will be added as they receive and parse more information via their discussion groups.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is?coldewey.cc.

Source: http://www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/terms-service-too-long-site-reads-them-you-931724

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Rainstorm adds to misery in east Congo rebellion

CORRECTS NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED TO TWO - Charlotte Ntibatekereza, who lost her son and grandson in the fighting in Kiwanja July 25 2012, stands in her house Sunday Aug. 5, 2012. Ntibatekereza's son, his wife and her 4-year-old grandson were sleeping on the floor when a heavy-calibre bullet smashed through three walls of their home. Her son and grandson died instantly. Her daughter-in-law is in the hospital recuperating from a bullet wound to the arm in fighting last week that pitted M23 rebels against the army. The rebels have the upper hand, holding a string of eastern town as regional leaders gather Monday in Kinshasa to try to resolve a rebellion that has forced more than a quarter million people from their homes. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

CORRECTS NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED TO TWO - Charlotte Ntibatekereza, who lost her son and grandson in the fighting in Kiwanja July 25 2012, stands in her house Sunday Aug. 5, 2012. Ntibatekereza's son, his wife and her 4-year-old grandson were sleeping on the floor when a heavy-calibre bullet smashed through three walls of their home. Her son and grandson died instantly. Her daughter-in-law is in the hospital recuperating from a bullet wound to the arm in fighting last week that pitted M23 rebels against the army. The rebels have the upper hand, holding a string of eastern town as regional leaders gather Monday in Kinshasa to try to resolve a rebellion that has forced more than a quarter million people from their homes. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

In this photograph taken Thursday Aug. 2, 2012, A Congolese man in Goma, eastern Congo, transports a diesel generator using a chikudu, which is a cross between a bike and a scooter and made of wood. U.N. humanitarian chief Baroness Valerie Amos arrived in Goma on Tuesday and is to visit some of the 280,000 people who have fled their homes since mutinying soldiers launched the M23 rebellion in April. But security is so poor that Amos was forced to cancel planned trips to the mining town of Walikale and the seat of the rebellion at Rutshuru town, 75 kilometers (50 miles) north of Goma. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

GOMA, Congo (AP) ? Drenching rain punctuated by frightening bursts of thunder and forked lightning add to the misery of some of the 280,000 refugees from Congo's eastern rebellion, whose plight is highlighted by a visit from the U.N. humanitarian chief.

A planned U.N. food distribution could be delayed by Wednesday's tropical thunderstorm.

The U.N.'s Baroness Valerie Amos, on the third day of a Congo trip, says relief efforts are hampered by a lack of funding. She appeals for contributions. The U.N. says aid organizations need $791 million and so far have received only $341 million.

In the storm, makeshift huts of twigs and leaves became swamps at an impromptu camp outside Goma, the provincial capital. Mutinous soldiers started the rebellion in April and have taken control of large swathes of eastern Congo.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-08-08-Congo-Rebellion/id-b827faf48c884f3db0cdf34880a5cc67

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Takeover target Rona's earnings rise with sales

(Reuters) - Canada's Rona Inc , which has rejected a C$1.8 billion takeover proposal from U.S. home-improvement retailer Lowe's Cos Inc , said on Wednesday its quarterly adjusted earnings rose along with higher sales volumes.

The results come as investors try to gauge the chances of Rona - which says it is No. 1 in Canada's hardware and home improvement market - succumbing to a Lowe's takeover.

Rona has said repeatedly that it is not for sale, and the government of the province of Quebec, where it is based, wasted no time criticizing Lowe's proposed offer when it was announced last week.

Rona's stock touched C$14.49 shortly after the news of the C$14.50-a-share offer broke, but since then the stock has consistently traded below that level. Shares rose 1.0 percent to C$13.88 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Wednesday morning.

On Wednesday's quarterly results conference call with analysts and investors, Rona said it would not discuss the Lowe's proposal.

SALES RISE

In the second quarter, Rona's distribution sales rose 8.7 percent and retail and commercial sales were 1.8 percent higher.

"We view the results as mixed," said National Bank Financial analyst Vishal Shreedhar in a note to clients. "Q2 financial results were slightly below expectation; however, management is making progress towards its financial priorities."

Beginning with the quarter, Rona changed the way it measures same-store sales, a yardstick generally designed to strip out gains from opening new outlets.

Rona had reported seven consecutive quarters of same-store sales declines before the revision.

For the first time the company is including distribution sales to affiliate dealers, and on that basis same-store sales rose 1 percent in the quarter.

In Rona's retail and commercial business alone, same-store sales fell 0.9 percent. The company attributed the decline to cautious consumers and the mix of products sold.

When it last reported earnings in May, Rona said same-store sales - which at that point did not include sales to dealers - had been positive late in the first quarter, and through April. But the trend did not continue.

"Starting at the end of May, we saw a slowdown," Chief Financial Officer Dominique Boies said on the conference call. "We saw, I would say, somewhat of a rapid slowdown in same-store sales, where consumers became, again, very unstable."

ADJUSTED EARNINGS RISE

The company said its earnings benefited from lower financial costs, amortization and depreciation, and efficiency measures put in place during the quarter.

Net earnings attributable to participating shares after a dividend on preferred shares fell to C$34.1 million ($34.2 million), or 28 Canadian cents a share, compared with C$37.0 million, or 28 Canadian cents, a year earlier.

Excluding unusual items, earnings rose to C$43.6 million, or 36 Canadian cents a share, from C$37.0 million, or 28 Canadian cents. Revenue rose 3.4 percent to C$1.42 billion.

Analysts, on average, had expected earnings of 37 Canadian cents a share on revenue of C$1.41 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Quebec's government has sharply criticized the Lowe's proposal, saying it is not in the interests of Quebec or Canada. Rona's figures put its national market share ahead of that of U.S. industry giant Home Depot Inc .

The company, founded in Quebec in 1939 by independent hardware stores keen to ditch their powerful wholesalers, has deep roots in the French-speaking province, still home to about half of its 30,000 employees.

TURNAROUND PLAN

Rona argues that its own turnaround plan is a better deal for shareholders than Lowe's proposal.

The company is refocusing on smaller stores that it says customers prefer, closing 10 of its biggest outlets and splitting up 13 others by the end of 2013. In their place, it is opening smaller "proximity" and "satellite" stores.

On Wednesday, Rona said it still expects the new strategy, announced early this year, to boost earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by C$10 million in 2012.

The first of the new proximity stores opens in Edmonton, Alberta, on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Allison Martell; Editing by Peter Galloway)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/rona-adjusted-earnings-revenue-rise-130511030--sector.html

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