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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Russia condemns ally Syria over massacre of 108

In this image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network and accessed Monday, May 28, 2012, purports to show black smoke rising from buildings in Homs, Syria. U.N. envoy Kofi Annan called Monday on "every individual with a gun" in Syria to lay down arms, saying he was horrified by a weekend massacre that killed more than 100 people, including women and small children. (AP Photo/Shaam News Network via AP video) TV OUT, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CANNOT INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THE CONTENT, DATE, LOCATION OR AUTHENTICITY OF THIS MATERIAL

In this image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network and accessed Monday, May 28, 2012, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Damascus, Syria. U.N. envoy Kofi Annan called Monday on "every individual with a gun" in Syria to lay down arms, saying he was horrified by a weekend massacre that killed more than 100 people, including women and small children. (AP Photo/Shaam News Network via AP video) TV OUT, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CANNOT INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THE CONTENT, DATE, LOCATION OR AUTHENTICITY OF THIS MATERIAL

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, speaks to his British counterpart William Hague during their meeting in Moscow, Russia, Monday, May 28, 2012, which is expected to focus on the Syria crisis. (AP Photo/Pool)

UN-Arab League Joint Special Envoy for Syria (JSE) Kofi Annan, left, and, Norwegian Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, head of the U.N. observer team in Syria, right, attend a press conference in Damascus, Syria, Monday, May 28, 2012. Annan, arrived in Damascus on Monday for talks with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. (AP Photo/Bassem Tellawi)

BEIRUT (AP) ? A weekend massacre of more than 100 people emerged as a potential turning point in the Syrian crisis Monday, galvanizing even staunch ally Russia to take an unusually hard line against President Bashar Assad's government.

Analysts said Russia may be warning Assad that he needs to change course or lose Moscow's support, which has been a key layer of protection for the Syrian government during the uprising that began in March 2011.

Russia has grown increasingly critical of Damascus in recent months, but Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's latest comments were unusually strong. Although he said opposition forces have terrorists among them, he put the blame for 15 months of carnage primarily on Assad's government.

"The government bears the main responsibility for what is going on," Lavrov said in Moscow following a meeting with British Foreign Secretary William Hague. "Any government in any country bears responsibility for the security of its citizens."

Alexei Malashenko, a Middle East expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said Lavrov's comments suggest Russia may be backing away from its long-standing support for Damascus.

"Bashar Assad is driving himself and Russia into a corner," Malashenko said. "Bashar has definitely gotten the sense that he may lose Russia's sympathy, and he may step back a bit."

It is not clear whether Assad's forces were exclusively to blame for the slaughter of 108 people Friday in Houla, a collection of poor farming villages in Homs province. The United Nations said 49 children and 34 women were among the dead; some had bullet holes through their heads.

The U.N. Security Council blamed Syrian forces for artillery and tank shelling of residential areas, but it did not clearly state who was responsible for the close-range shooting deaths and "severe physical abuse" of civilians.

Activists from the area said the army pounded the villages with artillery and clashed with local rebels. They said pro-government gunmen later stormed the area, doing the bulk of the killing by gunning down men in the streets and stabbing women and children in their homes.

The Syrian government rejected that account entirely, saying soldiers were attacked in their bases and fought back in self-defense without leaving their bases.

Russia blamed both the government and the rebels for the Houla massacre.

"Both sides have obviously had a hand in the deaths of innocent people, including several dozen women and children," Lavrov said. "This area is controlled by the rebels, but it is also surrounded by the government troops."

He said Russia has no interest in propping up Assad but wants Syria to guide its own transition under a plan brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan.

"We don't support the Syrian government; we support Kofi Annan's plan," Lavrov said.

Moscow's pro-Syria stance has been motivated in part by its strategic and defense ties to Damascus, including weapons sales. Russia also rejects what it sees as a world order dominated by the U.S.

Losing Russian support could be disastrous for Assad because his crackdown has left him almost completely isolated internationally. Russia and China have stood by him so far, using their veto power to block U.N. resolutions against him.

Hilal Khashan, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut, said the Houla massacre appears to be ushering in a change in Russia's position.

"There is a shift and the momentum against the regime is gathering," Khashan said. "The momentum is building and the Russians are not blocking the rising momentum."

The Syrian conflict is among the most explosive of the Arab Spring, in part because of Syria's allegiances to powerful forces, including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Shiite powerhouse Iran.

Activists say as many as 12,000 people have been killed since the uprising began. The U.N. put the toll as of March, a year into the uprising, at 9,000, but many hundreds more have died since.

Annan's peace plan, which calls for a cease-fire and dialogue, has been faltering for weeks. But Western leaders have pinned their hopes on his diplomatic pressure, since the U.S. and others are unwilling to get deeply involved in another Arab nation in turmoil.

Annan arrived in Damascus on Monday for talks with Assad and other officials and called on "every individual with a gun" in Syria to lay down arms, saying he was horrified by the Houla massacre.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Holland spoke on the phone and expressed their desire to work with Russia to resolve the crisis in Syria. A British spokeswoman said Cameron and Hollande agreed to act together to "bring an end to the bloody suppression of the Syrian people."

Activists reported fresh violence Monday, saying troops shelled several neighborhoods in Hama, killing at least 24 people.

___

Berry reported from Moscow. AP writers Bassem Mroue in Beirut and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Associated Press

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Bearish Market Predictions - Business Insider

It has been a rough month for markets. Waves of bad news from Europe and weak data from of China have helped keep stocks low.

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Monday, May 28, 2012

involuntary delay air canada international

Original routing Dub-LHR (1.5 hour transit)-YYZ-SFO. Business class. All seats, everything confirmed.

Checked in DUB issued boarding pass DUB-LHR, but nothing else would come out of machine, so I figured I would get it in LHR (although checkin for the entire trip).

When landed in LHR, went to the AC desk, they indicated they can't give me the other boarding passes as there wasn't enough time to get to gate (over 45 min!), and just wouldn't give it go me. They rerouted me after a 10 hour delay through LHR-YYC-SFO business class. Got a couple of meal coupons but it sucked with the 10 our delay in LHR lounge waiting for the next flight.

Am I entitled to any compensation here from AC?
Sounded very fishy since it wouldn't spit out my boarding cards as well as I had over 45 min to get to the gate in LHR.? Also the earlier flight LHR-YYZ had some problem so they couldn't put me on it.

Who do I contact and what is the best approach?

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Sunday, May 27, 2012

Your cotton T-shirt could soon charge your phone

17 hrs.

Alyssa Danigelis , Discovery Channel

One day, donning a T-shirt could mean you're also sporting a smart device charger. Engineers have successfully transformed cotton into a flexible, highly conductive component, which means it could charge devices.

"In the future, you can imagine our cell phones will be just like a piece of paper you can roll up. But we need to have a flexible energy device to integrate with flexible, stretchable motherboards," said Xiaodong Li, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of South Carolina who led the development with postdoc Lihong Bao. Their article was just published in the journal Advanced Materials ( abstract ).

NEWS: Electronic Tattoo Grafts Gadgets to Skin

Li knows how to be creative with cotton T-shirts. In 2010, he and his colleagues converted one into lightweight body armor by converting the fabric into boron carbide nanowires. So when he began looking for a backbone to make a flexible energy storage device, he turned to a $5 cotton tee from Wal-Mart.

The engineers had to make the cotton highly conductive so they tried several "recipes," Li said. He compared their experiments with trying to replicate a restaurant meal at home without having seen the chef's preparations. First they dipped the cotton in a sodium fluoride solution for an hour, took the wet material and dried it in a preheated oven for three hours. Then they heated it in a hotter furnace for an hour.

By the time it was done, the cotton had changed into activated carbon. Despite being baked, the charred-looking material could still be folded. From there, the engineers coated it with a nano-layer of the conductive metal manganese oxide for the last stage of building their energy storage device.

??Lead researcher Xiaodong Li said his team knew that future body armor would need a flexible power source. And because the scientists work in South Carolina, which used to have a big cotton industry, they thought, 'Why not use a cotton T-shirt as the energy device?'?
??-- Li on his A-Ha! Moment? ? ?

Although others have used cotton in devices, Li said that to the best of his knowledge his research group is the first to activate a cotton T-shirt and build it into a super capacitor. Their device's performance is on par with other carbon-based super capacitors, according to their testing. After 1,000 cycles it had 97.3 percent retention.

"This is a very simple, low-cost process, and it's green," Li said. In addition to starting with a renewable plant-based material, he and his research group estimate that using cotton directly from textile mills could be as much as 10 times cheaper than chemically processing coal or petroleum into activated carbon.

To take his concept to market, the process needs to be scaled up. Li said that for this next phase, he's looking for a potential industry partner. He's also reaching out to state government leaders about using this process to help revive local textile production.

NEWS: Virus-Built Wearable Batteries Could Power Military

Reza Shahbazian-Yassar is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University who specializes in the application of nanomaterials for different forms of energy storage. He's familiar with the recent Advanced Materials journal article.

"The novelty of this work is that they have converted the fabric using simple heat treatment processes and a little bit of a chemical process," he said. Shahbazian-Yassar sees an advantage in clothing that contains convenient energy storage. Soldiers on the battlefield could use it in military applications, he added.

"The challenge of course is to improve the amount of energy that these fibers can store," he said. The material also has to be able to keep performing well after regular folding and stretching.

Li, who was recently in Beijing to give a presentation, said he envisions a time when academic conference attendees use roll-up electronic posters that include flexible power sources.

"I like to think about the big picture," he said. "Down the road, we will see such cotton-enabled energy devices in the market. We won't need to rely on oil any more."?

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Monday, May 21, 2012

U.N. nuclear chief hopeful on Iran deal before Baghdad meet

VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear supervisor flew to Tehran on Sunday voicing optimism he could reach a deal to investigate suspected atom bomb research - a possible breakthrough that Iran may hope could help ease Western sanctions pressure and deflect threats of war.

"I really think this is the right time to reach agreement. Nothing is certain but I stay positive," Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at Vienna airport, adding "good progress" had already been made.

But though Amano scheduled Monday's talks with Iran at such short notice that diplomats said agreement on new inspections seemed near, few see Tehran convincing Western governments to ease back swiftly on punitive measures when its negotiators meet big power officials in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Amano meets Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili on Monday, two days before Jalili sits across a table in the Iraqi capital from Catherine Ashton, the senior EU official heading a six-power coalition comprised of the five U.N. Security Council permanent members plus Germany.

By promising cooperation with U.N. inspectors, diplomats say Iran might aim for leverage ahead of the broader negotiations, where the United States and its allies want Iran to halt works they say are cover for developing nuclear weapons. Western sanctions on Iran's energy exports, and threats by Israel and Washington of military action, have pushed up world oil prices.

Western diplomats say Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat, would only make a rare visit to Tehran if he believed a framework agreement to give his inspectors freer hands in their investigation was close.

"We regard the visit ... as a gesture of goodwill," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying by the Iranian student news agency. He hoped for agreement on a "new modality" to work with the U.N. agency that would "help clear up the ambiguities".

The nuclear watchdog wants access to sites, officials and documents to shed light on activities in Iran that could be used to develop the capability to make nuclear weapons, especially the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran.

Two meetings between Iran and senior Amano aides in Tehran in January and February failed to make any notable progress. But both sides were more upbeat after a new round of talks in Vienna last week, raising hopes they were making headway.

"We need to keep up the momentum. There has been good progress during the recent round of discussions between Iran and the IAEA," Amano said, adding he did not expect to visit Parchin during his short, one-day stay in Tehran.

DOUBTS

Yet while an Iranian agreement on a so-called "structured approach" outlining the ground rules on how to address the IAEA's questions would be welcome, it remains to be seen how and when it will be implemented in practice.

"We'll see if the Iranians agree to let the agency visit Parchin. I have my doubts, no matter what any agreement says on paper," said one Western envoy ahead of Amano's visit to Iran and the meeting with world powers, the P5+1, in Baghdad.

Such a deal would also not be enough in itself to allay international concerns. World powers want Iran to curb uranium enrichment, which can have both civilian and military purposes.

Iran, to general incredulity from its Israeli and Western adversaries, insists its nuclear program is intended only to generate electricity and other civilian uses. Unlike Israel, assumed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, Iran is a signatory to treaties that oblige it to work with the IAEA.

"We are not going to do anything concrete in exchange for nice words," another diplomat said of the Baghdad meeting, the arrangement of which stemmed from a P5+1 meeting with Iran in Istanbul last month that ended over a year of not talking.

"Presumably, we will get a flavor of what the Iranians are prepared to do," the diplomat said. "It sounds like they are interested in making progress."

Another Western diplomat said: "What we need now, with the situation in the region, are urgently concrete steps. So our talks will focus on something that can be implemented very quickly."

ISRAEL SCEPTICAL

Leaders of the Group of Eight, worried about the effect of high oil prices on their faltering economies, raised the pressure on Iran on Saturday, signaling their readiness to tap into emergency oil stockpiles quickly this summer if tougher new sanctions on Tehran threaten to strain supplies.

"All of us are firmly committed to continuing with the approach of sanctions and pressure in combination with diplomatic discussions," U.S. President Barack Obama said.

Israel, convinced a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a mortal threat, has - like the United States - not ruled out air strikes to stop Iran's atomic progress if it deems diplomacy has failed.

Russia's deputy foreign minister said on Sunday that military action against Iran over its nuclear program was being considered in some Western countries.

"It is one of many various signals coming from various sources that the military option is considered as realistic and possible," Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on his way back from the G8 summit.

Israel has made clear its skepticism about the prospects for diplomacy, saying Iran is just trying to buy time.

"We don't see any readiness from the Iranian side to give up their nuclear ambitions and for them all the engagement, from our point of view, it's clear deception," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday.

BAGHDAD GOALS

In Baghdad, the powers' main goal is to get Iran to stop the higher-grade uranium enrichment it started two years ago and has since expanded, shortening the time needed for any weapons bid.

Iran says it needs the uranium enriched to a fissile concentration of 20 percent for its medical research reactor.

An adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said there were hopes the Baghdad meeting would be successful.

But Iran will not "tolerate any pressure and it decides about its destiny in the nuclear issue with full authority," Mehr News Agency quoted Ali Akbar Velayati as saying.

The IAEA wants Iran to address issues raised by an agency report last year that revealed intelligence pointing to past and possibly ongoing activity to help develop atomic arms.

Iran says the intelligence is fabricated, and has so far resisted requests for inspectors to visit Parchin.

Western diplomats say they suspect Iran is cleaning the site to remove incriminating evidence, a charge Tehran dismisses.

"I hope Amano asks for his people to see Parchin," one Western diplomat said. "But it seems a wild guess to me."

Diplomats say the six powers will probably aim to extract an offer from Tehran to implement some limited curbs and begin a long-term process of gradual concessions from all sides.

Their hope is that economic sanctions imposed by Western nations in the last year, targeting Iran's vital oil revenues and ability to trade with international partners, would be enough to force Iran to take that first step, one diplomat said.

Immediate confidence-building measures that Iran could offer are "not all that complicated," said former senior U.S. State Department official, James Dobbins, now with the Rand Corporation's International Security and Defense Policy Center.

"It is essentially, 'Stop enriching to 20 percent, ship out what you've already done ... and then let's last start talking about more comprehensive measures'."

But European diplomats say any corresponding changes to their further oil embargo plans are out of the question for now: "The EU oil sanctions are a very big card and a very big step," one said. "Just because they have been applied last doesn't mean they will be the first to be taken off."

(Additional reporting by Justyna Pawlak in Brussels, William Maclean in London, Marcus George in Dubai, Patrick Markey in Baghdad and Ori Lewis and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Philippa Fletcher)

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