China mobilizes to fight new bird flu; Japan, HK on guard

By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - China said it was mobilizing resources nationwide to combat a new strain of deadly bird flu that has killed four people, as Japan and Hong Kong stepped up vigilance against the virus and Vietnam banned imports of Chinese poultry.

The H7N9 bird flu strain does not appear to be transmitted from human to human but authorities in Hong Kong raised a preliminary alert and said they were taking precautions at the airport.

In Japan, airports have put up posters at entry points warning all passengers from China to seek medical attention if they suspect they have bird flu.

A total of 11 people in China have been confirmed to have contracted H7N9, all in the east of the country.

Another person died on Thursday, in Shanghai, bringing the number of deaths to four, state media said. Xinhua news agency said the victim was a 48-year-old man who worked delivering poultry.

"(China) will strengthen its leadership in combating the virus ... and coordinate and deploy the entire nation's health system to combat the virus," the Health Ministry said in a statement late on Wednesday on its website (www.moh.gov.cn).

In Hong Kong, authorities activated the preliminary "Alert Response Level" under a preparedness plan for an influenza pandemic, which calls for close monitoring of chicken farms, vaccination, culling drills, and a suspension of imports of live birds from the mainland.

All passengers on flights in and out of Hong Kong were being asked to notify flight attendants or airport staff if they were feeling unwell.

Vietnam said it had banned poultry imports from China, citing the risk from H7N9.

In Beijing, the Health Ministry said the government would swiftly communicate details of the new strain to the outside world and its own people, following complaints it had been too slow to report on the outbreak and suspicion of a cover-up.

Chinese internet users and some newspapers have questioned why it took so long for the government to announce the new cases, especially as two of the victims fell ill in February. The government has said it needed time to correctly identify the virus.

In 2003, authorities initially tried to cover up an epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in China and killed about 10 percent of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

TRANSPARENT COMMUNICATION

China "will continue to openly and transparently maintain communication and information channels with the World Health Organisation and relevant countries and regions, strengthen monitoring and preventative measures", the ministry said in a statement.

Flu experts across the world are studying samples isolated from the patients to assess the human pandemic potential of the strain.

Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not generally from human to human.

So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain.

However, China has yet to find any animals infected with H7N9, meaning how humans got it remains a mystery.

"The gene sequences confirm that this is an avian virus, and that it is a low pathogenic form (meaning it is likely to cause mild disease in birds)," said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist at Britain's Imperial College London.

"But what the sequences also reveal is that there are some mammalian adapting mutations in some of the genes."

This, she said, meant the H7N9 virus has already acquired some of the genetic changes it would need to mutate into a form that could be transmitted from person to person.

While the official Xinhua news agency said it was unfair to compare SARS with H7N9, as the new bird flu virus had yet to show signs of human-to-human transmission, it did warn that the government's credibility was on the line.

"If there is anything that SARS has taught China and its government, it's that one cannot be too careful or too honest when it comes to deadly pandemics. The last 10 years have taught the government a lot, but it is far from enough," it said in a commentary.

(Additional reporting by Clare Baldwin in HONG KONG, Olivier Fabre in TOKYO, Hanoi newsroom and Kate Kelland in LONDON; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Robert Birsel)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-promises-swift-reporting-bird-flu-outbreak-031611766.html

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This $2B Cosmic Ray Detector Is Unravelling the Secrets of the Universe

Finding the Higgs Boson particle is a revolutionary scientific discovery, sure, but CERN isn't the only scientific body rewriting our understanding of elementary physics. An international team of researchers have just announced that the massive cosmic ray detector protruding from the ISS may have at long last detected dark matter. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/CphTZn345y4/this-2b-cosmic-ray-detector-is-unravelling-the-secrets-of-the-universe

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U.S.: N. Korea poses 'real and clear danger'

By Jack Kim and Phil Stewart

SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said it would soon send a missile defense system to Guam to defend it from North Korea, as the U.S. military adjusts to what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called a "real and clear danger" from Pyongyang.

Hours later, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said North Korea had moved what appeared to be a mid-range Musudan missile to its east coast. It was not clear if the North planned to fire the rocket or was just putting it on display as a show of force, one South Korean government source was quoted as saying.

North Korea also barred entry to a joint industrial complex it shares with the South for a second day on Thursday and said it would shut the zone if Seoul continued to insult it.

Events on the Korean peninsula have begun to unnerve global financial markets long used to the rhetoric North Korea routinely hurls at Seoul and Washington.

"The assumption remains that this is more bluster ...," said Rob Ryan, a strategist with RBS in Singapore. "But from here, we've reached a level of tensions that say things can't get too much worse without an actual exchange of fire."

The broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.6 percent, dragged down by a 2 percent slump in South Korean shares, while the South Korean won slid 0.7 percent against the U.S. dollar.

U.S. stocks sank on Wednesday after Hagel's comments and the Guam deployment news.

North Korea also repeated its threat to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. Pyongyang said it had ratified a potential strike because of U.S. military deployments around the Korean peninsula that it claimed were a prelude to a possible nuclear attack on the North.

Washington had been informed of the potential attack by North Korea, a spokesman for its army said in a statement carried by the English-language service of state news agency KCNA. It was unclear how such a warning was given since North Korea does not have diplomatic ties with Washington.

The report from KCNA appeared to re-state many of the month-long fusillade of threats emanating from Pyongyang.

Experts say North Korea is years away from being able to hit the continental United States with a nuclear weapon, despite having worked for decades to achieve nuclear-arms capability.

North Korea has previously threatened a nuclear strike on the United States and missile attacks on its Pacific bases, including in Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific.

Those threats followed new U.N. sanctions imposed on the North after it carried out its third nuclear test in February.

"Some of the actions they've taken over the last few weeks present a real and clear danger," Hagel told an audience at the National Defense University in Washington.

Despite the rhetoric, Pyongyang has not taken any military action and has shown no sign of preparing its 1.2 million-strong armed forces for war, the White House said on Monday.

That indicates its threats are partly intended for domestic consumption to bolster young leader Kim Jong-un ahead of celebrations marking the anniversary of the April 15 birthday of Kim Il-sung, the state's founder and the younger Kim's grandfather.

Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, criticized the latest North Korean statement.

"It is yet another offering in a long line of provocative statements that only serve to further isolate North Korea from the rest of the international community and undermine its goal of economic development," Hayden said.

HAGEL: TAKE THREATS SERIOUSLY

Hagel said he had to take the threats seriously, language he has used in recent weeks as the United States has revamped its missile defense plans and positioned two guided-missile destroyers in the western Pacific.

The United States has also flexed its muscles during annual military drills with South Korea, flying two radar-evading stealth bombers on a first-of-its-kind practice bombing run over South Korea.

In the latest move, the Pentagon said it was deploying a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to Guam in the coming weeks. The THAAD system includes a truck-mounted launcher, interceptor missiles and an AN/TPY-2 tracking radar.

Last month, Hagel said the Pentagon would add 14 new anti-missile interceptors in Alaska and move ahead with the deployment of a second missile-defense radar in Japan.

Yonhap quoted multiple government sources privy to intelligence from U.S. and South Korean authorities as saying North Korea had moved what appeared to be a Musudan missile to its east coast.

The missile is believed to have a range of 3,000 km (1,865 miles) or more, which would put all of South Korea and Japan in range and possibly also Guam. North Korea is not believed to have tested the Musudan mid-range missiles, according to most independent experts

South Korea's defense ministry declined to comment.

The missile was moved to the coast by train. The North has a missile launch site on its northeastern coast, which it has used to unsuccessfully test-fire long-range rockets in the past.

The Yonhap report did not say if the missile had been moved to the missile site.

The South Korean government said the North would allow 222 South Korean workers to leave the Kaesong industrial zone on Thursday. That would leave another 606 South Koreans in the complex. Seoul has urged its citizens to get out.

North Korea has threatened to shut the complex, one of the impoverished North's few sources of ready cash.

The industrial park, just inside the border with North Korea, has not formally stopped operations since it was inaugurated in 2000. It houses 123 companies and employs 50,000 North Koreans making cheap goods such as clothing.

(Additional reporting by Christine Kim in SEOUL, Ju-min Park in PAJU, David Alexander in WASHINGTON and Vidya Rangananthan in SINGAPORE; Writing by Dean Yates; Editing by Paul Tait)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-send-missile-defenses-guam-over-north-korea-011546394.html

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Video: Puzzle of how spiral galaxies set their arms comes into focus

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

As the shapes of galaxies go, the spiral disk ? with its characteristic pinwheel profile ? is by far the most pedestrian.

Our own Milky Way, astronomers believe, is a spiral. Our solar system and Earth reside somewhere near one of its filamentous, swept-back arms. And nearly 70 percent of the galaxies closest to the Milky Way are spirals, suggesting they have taken the most ordinary of galactic forms in a universe with billions of galaxies.

But despite their common morphology, how galaxies like ours get and maintain their characteristic arms has proved to be an enduring puzzle in astrophysics. How do the arms of spiral galaxies arise? Do they change or come and go over time?

The answers to these and other questions are now coming into focus as researchers capitalize on powerful new computer simulations to follow the motions of as many as 100 million "stellar particles" as gravity and other astrophysical forces sculpt them into familiar galactic shapes. Writing April 1 in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics report simulations that seem to resolve longstanding questions about the origin and life history of spiral arms in disk galaxies.

"We show for the first time that stellar spiral arms are not transient features, as claimed for several decades," says UW-Madison astrophysicist Elena D'Onghia, who led the new research along with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics colleagues Mark Vogelsberger and Lars Hernquist. "They are self-perpetuating, persistent and surprisingly long lived."

The origin and fate of the emblematic spiral arms in disk galaxies have been debated by astrophysicists for decades, with two theories predominating: One holds that the arms come and go over time. A second and widely held theory is that the material that makes up the arms ? stars, gas and dust ? is affected by differences in gravity and jams up, like cars at rush hour, sustaining the arms for long periods.

The new results fall somewhere in between the two theories and suggest that the arms arise in the first place as a result of the influence of giant molecular clouds, star forming regions or nurseries common in galaxies. Introduced into the simulation, the clouds, says D'Onghia, a UW-Madison professor of astronomy, act as "perturbers" and are enough to not only initiate the formation of spiral arms but to sustain them indefinitely.

"We find they are forming spiral arms," explains D'Onghia. "Past theory held the arms would go away with the perturbations removed, but we see that (once formed) the arms self-perpetuate, even when the perturbations are removed. It proves that once the arms are generated through these clouds, they can exist on their own through (the influence of) gravity, even in the extreme when the perturbations are no longer there."

The new study modeled stand-alone disk galaxies, those not influenced by another nearby galaxy or object. Some recent studies have explored the likelihood that spiral galaxies with a close neighbor ? a nearby dwarf galaxy, for example ? get their arms as gravity from the satellite galaxy pulls on the disk of its neighbor.

According to Vogelsberger and Hernquist, the new simulations can be used to reinterpret observational data, looking at both the high-density molecular clouds as well as gravitationally induced holes in space as the mechanisms that drive the formation of the characteristic arms of spiral galaxies.

###

University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.wisc.edu

Thanks to University of Wisconsin-Madison 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/127569/Video__Puzzle_of_how_spiral_galaxies_set_their_arms_comes_into_focus

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Report: Saudi court orders criminal to be surgically paralyzed

DUBAI (Reuters) - Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralyzed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which resulted in the victim being confined to a wheelchair.

The London-based human rights group said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be paralyzed surgically unless his family pays one million Saudi riyals ($270,000) to the victim.

The Saudi Gazette newspaper reported last week that Khawaher had stabbed a childhood friend in the spine during a dispute a decade ago, paralyzing him from the waist down.

Saudi Arabia applies Islamic sharia law, which allows eye-for-an-eye punishment for crimes but allows victims to pardon convicts in exchange for so-called blood money.

"Paralyzing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture," Ann Harrison, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director, said in a statement late on Tuesday.

"That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offences, as happens in Saudi Arabia," she added.

A government-approved Saudi human rights group did not respond to requests for comment.

The Arabic-language al-Hayat daily quoted Khawaher's 60-year-old mother as saying her son was a juvenile aged 14 at the time of the offence. She said the victim had demanded 2 million riyals to pardon her son and later reduced this to 1 million. "But we don't have even a tenth of this sum," she said.

Al-Hayat said an unnamed philanthropist was trying to raise funds to pay the blood money, but it was not clear how much time remained before Khawaher's sentence was to be carried out.

Amnesty said the case demonstrated the need for Saudi Arabia to review its laws to "start respecting their international obligations and remove these terrible punishments from the law".

Saudi judges have in the past ordered sharia punishments that include tooth extraction, flogging, eye gouging and - in murder cases - death.

(Reporting by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-court-said-order-criminal-surgically-paralyzed-143547179.html

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Hostilities flare along Israeli-Gaza border

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel pressed Hamas on Wednesday to rein in rocket-firing militants in the Gaza Strip after the most serious outbreak of cross-border hostilities since the ceasefire that ended an eight-day war in November.

The flare-up, sparked by anger in Gaza over the death from cancer of a Palestinian held by Israel, included Israel's first air strike on the Hamas-run coastal enclave since the truce.

Confrontations spread to the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces clashed with dozens of Palestinian protesters in the city of Hebron, where Maysara Abu Hamdeya who died in jail on Tuesday aged 64, is due to be buried on Thursday.

Troops fired teargas and rubber bullets at youths throwing stones and petrol bombs; Reuters journalists saw several protesters escorted away with injuries. The Israeli military said a rock had also struck one of its officers in the face.

Some 4,600 Palestinian prisoners declared a hunger strike for three days in protest at Abu Hamdeya's death, accusing the authorities of poor medical treatment. Food trays were returned untouched on Wednesday, an Israeli prisons official said.

In West Bank towns, some shops were shuttered in solidarity.

The Gaza frontier fell quiet by evening and Israel and Hamas appeared to be weighing carefully their next moves; four months of relative calm has enabled Palestinians in Gaza to rebuild and Israelis near the border to live without sirens and rockets.

Two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip had struck southern Israel in a morning attack on Wednesday, causing no casualties, the Israeli military said. Hours earlier its planes had targeted "two extensive terror sites" in the north of the territory.

Israel launched the air strike after three rockets landed on Tuesday. An al Qaeda-linked group, Magles Shoura al-Mujahadeen, claimed responsibility for the attacks on both days, saying it was responding to the death of Abu Hamdeya, who was jailed for life in 2002 over a planned bomb attack on a Jerusalem cafe.

Tuesday was the third time since the November truce that rockets from Gaza had struck southern Israel. But with a new government and defense minister now in place after weeks of coalition-building since a January election, Israel seems keen to show resolve, putting the onus on Hamas to curb militants.

"(Israel's armed forces) decided to attack overnight in order to signal to Hamas that we will not suffer any strike on the south. And any shooting will meet a response, in order to restore quiet for the south soon," Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai, the chief military spokesman, said on Army Radio.

"I assess that Hamas has no interest in seeing the situation deteriorate," he said. "Our goal is to maintain the quiet."

SYRIA SPILLOVER

Spillover from the civil war in Syria - mortar and machinegun fire toward Israeli troops in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights - has also heightened Israeli unease.

"We will absolutely not allow any sporadic fire toward our citizens and our forces," Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said in a statement, referring to both Gaza and Syrian frontiers.

Israeli tanks fired at a Syrian post on Tuesday, though it was unclear whether rebel or government forces were manning it.

Hamas, an Islamist group close to the Muslim Brotherhood now ruling neighboring Egypt, has cracked down on hardline Salafist rivals it sees as jeopardizing its control of the Gaza Strip.

But the death of Abu Hamdeya has touched a nerve among the wider Palestinian populace, which regards those in Israeli jails as heroes in the fight for statehood.

Israel has denied negligence in his treatment.

Commenting on the violence in Gaza, Richard Serry, the U.N.'s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said it was of "paramount importance to refrain from violence".

He said in a statement that renewed violations of the ceasefire threatened to unravel Egyptian-brokered understandings that included an easing of Israel's blockade on the enclave.

Egypt mediated the November truce after fighting in which some 170 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed. Israel had launched that Gaza offensive, as it did a bigger campaign in 2008-09, with the declared aim of ending rocket fire.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement in 2007 after winning an election a year earlier. Palestinians want to establish a state in the enclave along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in a 1967 war.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Noah Browning in Ramallah and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem; Editing by Will Waterman and Alastair Macdonald)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hostilities-flare-along-israeli-gaza-border-080427719.html

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US sends F-22 fighter jets to South Korea as part of military exercise

As North Korean state TV shows constant images of the army bombarding South Korea, North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un is saying his missiles are at the ready and has cut off emergency communications. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

By Jim Miklaszewski, and Courtney Kube, NBC News

The U.S. Navy is shifting a guided-missile destroyer in the Pacific to waters off the Korean peninsula in the wake of ongoing rhetoric from North Korea, U.S. defense officials said.

The USS Fitzgerald is capable of intercepting and destroying a missile, should North Korea decide to fire one off, the officials said.

Still, U.S. defense officials insist that there is nothing to indicate that North Korea is on the verge of another launch.?

The White House on Monday said the United States hasn?t seen large-scale movements from North Korean military forces in the aftermath of harsh rhetoric from the reclusive government.

"I would note that despite the harsh rhetoric we are hearing from Pyongyang, we are not seeing changes to the North Korean military posture, such as large-scale mobilizations and positioning of forces," Carney said

The Fitzgerald was also moved back in December 2012 to be in position to defend against the impending North Korean rocket launch.

On Sunday, The United States sent F-22 stealth fighter jets to South Korea as part of military exercises in a move aimed at further deterring threats from North Korea against its neighbor.

It was unclear if the Fitzgerald was also part of the ongoing military drills.

Also Monday, South Korean President?Park Geun-hye appeared to give her country's military permission to strike back at any attack from the North without further word from Seoul, saying she took the North's escalating threats "very seriously," South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.

"As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, I will trust the military's judgment on abrupt and surprise provocations by North Korea," she said, according to Yonhap.

Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald / U.S. Air Force via Reuters, file

Two U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters fly near Andersen Air Force Base in Guam in this handout photo dated August 4, 2010.

The deployments and Park's remarks came as tensions approached an all-time high between Pyongyang and Washington. ?

Kim Jong Un has?ratcheted?up the rhetoric?against?both South Korea and the United States in recent months, and in February violated U.N. sanctions by ordering a nuclear weapons test.?

On Saturday, North Korea said it had entered a "state of war"?against South Korea, according to a statement reported by the North's official news agency, KCNA.?

The?U.S. military command in South Korea?announced the deployment of the fighter jets in a statement.

"[North Korea] will achieve nothing by threats or provocations, which will only further isolate North Korea and undermine international efforts to ensure peace and stability in Northeast Asia," it said.

The exercise, called Foal Eagle, is meant to reinforce "the U.S. commitment of its most advanced capabilities to the security of the Republic of Korea," according to the statement.

The stealth aircraft ? two F-22 Raptors -- were deployed from Japan to the Osan Air Base in South Korea from Japan where they will remain on ?static display? as part of the military drills, Pentagon spokesman George Little said. The F-22s are not expected to actively participate in any exercises, however.

This is the fifth time F-22s have deployed to South Korea. Exercise Foal Eagle began on March 1 and will continue until the end of April.

Kim has also recently threatened to "settle accounts" with the U.S. and posed near a chart that appeared to detail bombings of American cities.

The F-22 jets' arrival follows other recent displays of air power by the U.S. in South Korea. Last week B-52 bombers and B-2 stealth bombers were sent to the country for the annual?exercise.?

In North Korea, meanwhile, KCNA reported on an Easter service at which it said "the participants renewed the firm resolution to put the warmongers [the US and South Korea] into the red hot iron-pot of hell as early as possible."

North Korea's stance, however, can be notoriously difficult to interpret.

In a later release Monday on KCNA, Pyongyang announced the adoption of a law "consolidating" its position as a nuclear power that would use its weapons only ?to repel invasion or attack from a hostile nuclear weapons state and make retaliatory strikes.?

Among the law's pledges were that North Korea would store its weapons responsibly, that it would not use them against non-nuclear nations, and that it would participate in nonproliferation talks -- though the last clause came with the condition that there was ?improvement of relations with hostile nuclear weapons states.?

NBC News? Andrew Rafferty, John Newland and Jeff Black contributed to this report.

Related:

North Korea: Nukes are our country's 'life'

US official warns North Korea is no 'paper tiger'

Analyst: Threats are predictable, Kim Jong Un is not

This story was originally published on Sun Mar 31, 2013 10:45 PM EDT

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