MOSCOW (Reuters) ? Russia's Foreign Ministry praised Arab League observers in Syria on Friday who were sent to check whether government forces have halted violence against protesters and said their comments were "reassuring."
"Judging by the public statements made by the chief of the mission M. al-Dabi, who in the first of his visits went to the city of Homs...the situation seems to be reassuring," the ministry said in a statement on its website.
In an initial tour of the protest hotbed city of Homs, Sudanese general Mustafa al-Dabi raised international concern over the mission's credibility with a comment that he had seen "nothing frightening." He said more time was needed to make a final judgment.
Moscow remains one of the last allies of Damascus following nine months of violence that the United Nations says has killed 5,000 people and isolated President Bashar al-Assad from most of the international community.
Russia, which has supported the Arab League monitoring mission from the start, called on the Syrian leadership to continue working constructively with the mission.
"We are counting on the professionalism and objectivity of the participants in the mission of Arab observers," said the Russian statement.
"We consider it very important to ensure consolidated support for the realization of the assignments that stand before the Arab League observers on international and regional levels."
Russia has submitted a revised United Nations draft resolution condemning the bloodshed but has stopped short of blaming the Syrian leadership, which accounted for seven percent of Russia's total of $10 billion in arms deliveries abroad in 2010, according to the Russian defense think tank CAST.
Human rights groups such as Amnesty International have raised questions about the choice of Dabi, a senior Sudanese general, to lead the observer mission.
Dabi was head of Sudan's military intelligence in the early 1990s, a time when rights groups say opposition figures were detained and tortured. He also held posts in Darfur at a time when International Criminal Court prosecutors say Sudanese authorities committed genocide.
(Reporting By Thomas Grove; Editing by Peter Graff)
A SPORTS coach from Billericay has been sentenced to seven years in jail for a string of online child sex offences.
Matthew Leonard, 21, from Upland Close, pleaded guilty to 15 offences, including inciting children to commit sexual acts online and possessing indecent images of children.
JAILED: Former sports coach Matthew Leonard has been sentenced to seven years, after pleading guilty tor a range of online child sex offences
Leonard confessed to a further ten offences following his arrest by police in April, but the court heard the actual number of his victims was as high as 80.
The former sports coach used the social networking site 'Habbo Hotel' to contact the majority of his victims, the youngest of whom was ten years old.
Users of the site, aimed at children aged between 8 and 12, attempt to create hotels by purchasing virtual furniture.
Basildon Crown Court heard how Leonard, posing under a false name and age, offered free furniture, or "furni" as he termed it, to young girls.
He would then move conversations on to the instant messenger MSN where he would incite girls to commit sexual acts to a web cam.
Leonard would record the images on to his computer and then threaten his victims with posting them on Facebook or sending them to friends if they refused to carry out further sexual acts, the court heard.
The offences took place from July 2010 up until his arrest in April with his victims coming from across the UK.
After executing a warrant on his house, police found 260 indecent images of children and 16 indecent videos.
Prosecuting, Carolyn Gardiner, told the court how Leonard had told police officers upon his arrest: "It's just pictures and videos, I work with kids, it's not like that."
In the dock, Leonard sat with his head in his hands throughout as he listened to the prosecution.
The court heard how he had told police officers during interview he did not think of his victims as "real kids", saying "you think it's just an image, just a video".
The impact of his crimes also had a bearing upon his family.
His mother, a child minder, was forced to give up her livelihood while Leonard's father tried to commit suicide after his arrest.
Leonard's brother was also known to police for viewing images of children over the internet, the court heard.
In defence, Mark Savage, said his client had become a "person he despises" having mixed with paedophiles while in custody, but said he had shown "genuine remorse" for his actions.
Mr Savage urged the judge to take into account Leonard's young age when imposing the sentence.
"His punishment will go on many, many years beyond what this court can impose," said Mr Savage.
His Honour Judge Jonathan Black took an hour to deliberate over the sentence.
Imposing the sentence of seven years, which included an extension of three years' supervision, Judge Black said Leonard had "ruined his own life" and that he presented a "serious risk to young girls".
Judge Black said he had "no doubt the offences would have continued for much longer had the police not intervened".
As well as his prison sentence, Leonard was also handed a lifetime Sexual Offence Prevention Order, placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life and banned from ever working with children in the future.
The stage is set for a labour conflict at Rio Tinto Alcan's Alma, Que., operations as workers there have rejected what the company describes as a final offer.
Workers from three negotiating units voted down the proposed deal by margins of 71 per cent, 88 per cent and 98 per cent.
They were following the advice of their union's executive committees, all of which recommended that members refuse the offer.
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The sides in the dispute haven't been able to agree on conditions related to subcontracted labour.
The Alma facility hosts one of Rio Tinto?s RIO-N largest Quebec aluminum smelters.
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Newt Gingrich may avoid going negative in Iowa (and elsewhere), but he sure is pandering to the biblical worldview crowd. Could he be trying to deflect their attention from his own family values?
Gingrich turned up on David Barton's radio show "Wallbuilders Live" the day after Christmas and described Barton as "extraordinarily knowledgeable about American history." Gingrich's own credentials as a historian aside, there is unanimity among historians on the problems in David Barton's "Christian American history" but little question as to his ideological use of history to support his view of the bible and its application to civil society in the form of biblical law. I've written about that here and here.
In What to do about an out of Control Judiciary, Barton and Gingrich discussed what they consider an overreaching judiciary, and Gingrich's controversial strategies for reining it in. Since gaining ground in the Republican primary/caucus field, Gingrich has generated controversy and attention by suggesting that the judicial branch of government should be brought under the control of Congress, a move most scholars oppose as undermining the Constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government.
The Gingrich strategy is outlined in a position paper on Newt.org and includes impeaching and/or arresting judges and even abolishing courts. Since discussing the strategy in debates, Gingrich has gained support for the plan from conservative leaders like Rush Limbaugh but on Barton's radio show, Gingrich flattered Barton by saying that some of the views laid out in the position paper, "go back to (Barton's) own work" on the founding fathers. Toward the end of the interview, Gingrich was asked, "should you become President, is there a crop of judges and attorneys out there you could choose from" (i.e. folks of similar mind whom he could appoint to a reformed judiciary that "properly" understand the Christian character of the American Republic)?
Gingrich was ready with an enthusiastic endorsement of the law schools at Regent University and Liberty University, both of which have their roots Christian Reconstruction's long term strategy to establish a "biblical worldview" as the basis for civil law in America. Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches has written about both Regent University Law school and its Christian Reconstructionist founder Herb Titus and the effort to teach a "biblical worldview" based in David Barton's work at Liberty University's Law School.
Either Gingrich really would look to these two extreme institutions to fill court vacancies, or he just thinks saying he would will secure him support from a key part of the GOP base. In either case, it's another piece of evidence that this long-term effort to transform culture according to a specific understanding of a biblical worldview has had an impact. Funny -- there was no discussion of Gingrich's own "family values."
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Follow Julie Ingersoll on Twitter: www.twitter.com/julieingersoll
WELLINGTON, New Zealand ? Repairs were going well on a damaged Russian fishing ship listing in frigid waters off Antarctica for 11 days, New Zealand authorities said.
The Sparta hit underwater ice Dec. 16 that tore a 1-foot (30-centimeter) hole in its hull, and heavy ice in the Ross Sea prevented help from arriving until Monday.
Before the South Korean icebreaker Araon arrived, the Sparta's crew had been desperately pumping out near-frozen sea water and some had boarded life rafts.
New Zealand's Rescue Coordination Center said good progress was made on internal repairs but the external damage could not be repaired for safety reasons. The work still is expected to make the Sparta seaworthy, and both ships are expected to leave the area Wednesday.
The Araon, a polar research ship, then is expected to escort the Sparta to ice-free open ocean, the center said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
The Sparta's crew has 15 Russians, 16 Indonesians and one Ukrainian.
The survival drama on the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf is taking place about 2,200 miles (3,700 kilometers) southeast of New Zealand.
3.5 liter V6 DOHC engine with variable valve timing
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BEIJING (Reuters) ? Japan and China agreed to start formal talks early next year on a free trade pact that would also include South Korea, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said on Sunday after talks that showed the deepening bonds between Asia's two biggest economies.
Japan also said it was looking to buy Chinese treasury debt, and the two governments agreed to enhance financial cooperation.
"On a free trade agreement among Japan, China and South Korea, we've made a substantial progress for an early start of negotiations," Noda told reporters after his meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao.
China's central bank, the People's Bank of China, said on its website (www.pbc.gov.cn) that the two leaders agreed to strengthen bilateral financial market cooperation and "encourage the use of the renminbi and Japanese yen in international trade transactions between the two countries."
The renminbi is another name for China's yuan currency.
The trade talks announcement builds on an agreement between the three countries last month also to seek a trilateral investment treaty and finish studies on the proposed free trade agreement by the end of December so that they could start formal negotiations on the trade pact.
"China is willing to closely coordinate with Japan to promote our two countries' monetary and financial development, and to accelerate progress of the China-Japan-Republic of Korea free-trade zone and East Asian financial cooperation," Wen told Noda at the meeting, according to Chinese Foreign Ministry's official website (www.mfa.gov.cn).
But the regional trade negotiations could also compete for attention with Washington's push for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after Japan said last month it wants to join in the talks over the U.S. proposal.
CLOSER ECONOMIC TIES
Despite sometimes rancorous political ties between the two neighbors, Japan's economic fortunes are increasingly tied to China's economic growth and consumer demand.
China and Japan are also the world's first and second-biggest holders of foreign reserves. Wen told Noda that closer economic ties were in both countries' interests.
"The deep-seated consequences of the current international financial crisis continue to spread, and the complexity and severity of global and world developments have exceeded our expectations," Wen said.
"China and Japan both have the need and conditions to join hands more closely to respond to challenges and deepen mutually beneficial strategic relations."
China has been Japan's biggest trading partner since 2009.
In 2010, trade between the two nations grew by 22.3 percent compared to levels in 2009, reaching 26.5 trillion yen ($339.3 billion), according to the Japan External Trade Organization.
In a statement issued after the two leaders' meeting, the Japanese government said it would seek to buy Chinese government bonds -- a tentative step toward diversification of Tokyo's large foreign exchange reserves that are believed to be mostly held in dollars.
China central bank said the two governments agreed to support Japanese businesses issuing yuan bonds in Tokyo and other markets outside of China, and Japan Bank for International Cooperation would begin a pilot scheme for issuing yuan-denominated bonds in mainland China.
The People's Bank of China also said it will support Japan in using the yuan for direct investment in China.
But Japanese officials have stressed that Japan's trust in dollar assets remains unshaken, and the scale of the planned purchase of Chinese government bonds will be small.
Wen and Noda also agreed to set up a framework to discuss maritime issues after diplomatic ties deteriorated sharply last year following Japan's arrest of a Chinese fishing boat captain near disputed isles in the East China Sea.
Bilateral meetings attended by vice ministers and senior officials from relevant ministries will be held periodically to exchange views, in an effort to prevent a similar row from happening.
"On maritime matters, we have successfully set up a channel to solve problems through multi-layered dialogue," Noda told reporters.
(Additional reporting by Koh Gui Qing; Writing by Chris Buckley; Editing by Yoko Nishikawa)
The American predisposition to rank pretty much everything seeps into nearly every facet of national discourse. Usually the domain of academia, the economy and sports, our tendency to create a hierarchy has crossed into more malleable arenas like the arts and politics -- the sort of hard-to-quantify categories that fuel heated debate and endless reconfigurations.
So naturally, after 44 presidents and well over two centuries, Americans have spent a great deal of time ranking their current and former leaders. Names like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln naturally rise to the top after benefitting from the kindness of history and a sense of mammoth achievement. But what of the last eight decades or so?
The Modern U.S Presidency: Unique Challenges
The era of the modern Presidency has been marked by tectonic shifts in society, technology and the unlocking of a once-hermetic outside world. Who, since the advent of television, airplanes, atomic bombs, and the Internet, ranks foremost in American minds? And, more importantly, why? The former question is easy to quantify among the living who remember. The latter question is a wholly different matter.
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A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center delineated Presidents along generational lines, asking Americans of various ages "Which President during your lifetime has done the best job?" The results were scattershot, depending on the age of the respondent.
Respondents were separated along four generational categories: Millennial; Gen X; Baby Boomers; and the Silent Generation (colloquially termed the "Greatest Generation.")
The two biggest winners across the board were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, with 34 percent and 49 percent of the vote respectively across all four generations. Third? The shocking (to some) pick of Barack Obama.
Along age lines, Millenials and Gen X-ers showed the strongest affinity for Clinton, while Boombers and the Silents prefer Reagan (though it should be noted a substantial number of Gen X-ers still have a place in their heart for Reagan).
The results present a quandary. Clinton and Reagan are miles apart by nearly every policy measure, as well as their approach to the job. So how, in our hyper-speed television, radio and internet era, did Clinton and Reagan manage to mingle in American minds? Achievements matter a great deal, but so does the ability to leave a substantive imprint on the collective social conscious and a legacy worth talking about. ?Academics have their own theories.
According to Dr. Meena Bose, Director of Hofstra University's Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, a mix of circumstances, happy memories and lasting impact dictate perceptions.
The modern Presidential era has been colored by campaigns to outline history's draft assessment with Presidential Libraries, memoirs, speaking engagements and the prolonged stints in the spotlight well after leaving office.
Clinton unabashedly falls into the category, with a memoir and more recently a policy tome "Back To Work." But according to Bose, his efforts in the long term may all be for naught.
"While President's have become much more attentive to their legacies, I think their legacy is largely dependent upon what the perception is of what they accomplished in office," she said.
Bose, who co-edited "Making the Grade: The Uses and Abuses of Presidential Ratings," said all the libraries and memoirs in the world can't change the substance of a President's stay in office.
Reagan's legacy remains intact largely due to the efforts of his party and former colleagues in holding him as an exemplar of Republican values.
"I think that illustrates his continuing dominance within the party, and that there hasn't been a Republican leader with that force since," Bose said. "It's what they did, how they shaped American politics through the force of their personality."
That "force of personality" is arguably one of the only connectors between Reagan and Clinton, according to Barbara Perry, Senior Fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, a nonpartisan institute that studies the presidency.
Charisma - Important Factor in Presdential Success
John F. Kennedy had a strong showing in Pew's poll, and Perry believes Clinton and Reagan can draw similarities to the 35th president -- namely their outsized charisma.
"What makes them different and sets them apart? It's charisma," Perry said. "They are larger than life. These three men all had that in spades."
Serving two terms doesn't hurt either, Perry and Meena said.
"Almost by definition two terms presidents have an advantage when it comes to ratings," Meena said. "But that indicates less of an interest in creating a legacy."
Which brings us to the bizarre case of Barack Obama, a man able to control a podium and speak with a commanding cadence. The tools, according to Perry, are there. But the execution falls short.
"Part of it is the way he chooses to present himself," she said, noting an admittedly scrawny physique that isn't complimented by the grandiosity of the White House's environs. "The stagecraft was very poor for him. I have made this case that he has not seized the symbolic presidency."
That failure to capture the "symbolic presidency" has Obama walking down a cavernous hallway to announce the successful killing of Osama bin Laden. It has him speaking at podiums, camera's trained so far back the presidential seal looks like a nickel. Such a faux pas may seem trivial, but in the modern era of continuous coverage, a President's image is definitive.
"It taps into their hearts and minds of the American people," Perry said. "It taps into ideas that may not be true but that people want to believe in as true."
Obama's performance at mastering the presidency in time for next year's election will likely open or close the door to a second term -- and keep alive some hope that he'll be counted among presidential greats.
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LOS ANGELES ? George Bailey can rest easy. He really did make a difference in the lives of people, including all 3.8 million in Los Angeles.
Bailey, for the one or two people who still haven't seen the classic Frank Capra film "It's A Wonderful Life," is a man driven to the brink of suicide when he comes to believe his life never really mattered.
It's up to his quirky guardian angel Clarence to set him straight by showing Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, what the world would have been like without him.
In honor of the film's 65th anniversary, the City Council declared Friday "It's A Wonderful Life Day" in Los Angeles.
To get people in the spirit, Councilman Tom LaBonge, several members of Capra's family and a few others gathered at the director's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on a sunny holiday morning.
The section of the walk, it turns out, is one filled with cheesy souvenir shops and sex toy emporiums. They give it more the look of Pottersville, the disreputable place in the film that the evil banker Mr. Potter turns bucolic Bedford Falls into when Bailey isn't there to stop him.
That didn't dampen Friday's celebration, however, which included Jimmy Hawkins, the actor who played Bailey's 5-year-old son, Tommy.
As one of the last surviving cast members, the 70-year-old actor-producer said he considers it an honor to introduce new audiences to the movie.
When it debuted in theaters in 1946, "It's A Wonderful Life" was actually a commercial and critical flop. But if that bothered Capra, he never let it show.
"My father always said that `It's A Wonderful Life' was the best movie that he ever made," Tom Capra said. "As a matter of fact, he said it was the best movie ever made."
The film, whose story takes place at Christmas, became a holiday classic with the dawn of television, when families began to gather each holiday season to watch it.
It airs again Saturday night on NBC.
"It carried with it the message that you can find in each of my dad's films. The message of hope," Capra said. "Maybe like George Bailey, we should pause for a brief moment and examine our lives and see if we can make a difference as long as we never give up."
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James Stewart, center, is reunited with his wife, Donna Reed, left, and children during the last scene of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life". (AP Photo)
James Stewart, center, is reunited with his wife, Donna Reed, left, and children during the last scene of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life". (AP Photo)
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James Stewart, center, is reunited with his wife, Donna Reed, left, and children during the last scene of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life". (AP Photo)
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GRAND GOAVE, Haiti ? Three hours before Britney Gengel died in the massive earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands in Haiti two years ago, she sent her family a text message expressing pure affection for the children she had met that morning while doing humanitarian work.
"They love us so much and everyone is so happy," she wrote. "They love what they have and they work so hard to get nowhere, yet they are all so appreciative. I want to move here and start an orphanage myself."
Later that January day, Gengel lay trapped under the wreckage of a hillside hotel that had collapsed. Rescuers pulled at least 68 bodies, including Gengel's, out of the ruins.
With her last text message in mind, Gengel's family is now making it their mission to carry out her dream and aid children in this devastated island nation.
Father Leonard Gengel and his 19-year-old son Bernie are following in Britney's footsteps and spending the Christmas holiday here to finish building an elaborate orphanage on the country's western coast. The trip is Leonard Gengel's 20th this year.
"My wife and I will wrap our arms around that text message for the rest of our lives," Gengel said from the passenger seat of a maroon Mitsubishi taking him to the construction site. "The text message still resonates with us."
The center they have in mind is a memorial of sorts, a brick-and-mortar homage to not just Britney but also the dozens who perished at the Hotel Montana, which was known for its sweeping vista of the capital of Port-au-Prince.
The Haitian government estimates more than 300,000 people died in the Western Hemisphere's worst modern natural disaster. Britney Gengel's death brought home the catastrophe to her family more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) away in Rutland, Massachusetts.
She was a 19-year-old sophomore at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, when she found her calling. The communications major had come to Haiti to hand out meals to children for Food for the Poor, a religious charity based in Coconut Creek, a Fort Lauderdale suburb.
"She fell in love with the children," said Leonard Gengel, a 51-year-old home builder. "She was consumed by what she saw and felt."
Just hours before the magnitude-7 earthquake hit, Britney sent the text message to her mother, Cherylann. The last photo of Britney, taken on the day she died, shows her surrounded by a group of pigtailed girls in crisp, blue uniforms.
At first, school officials told the family that Britney had gone missing. Later they said she was on a Florida-bound helicopter. Elated and relieved, the Gengels made their way to Fort Lauderdale to reunite with her. They learned there that she wouldn't be coming. School officials had received wrong information.
"It's unfathomable for a parent to lose a child twice in 36 hours," Gengel, his voice choked up, said as the car neared Grand Goave, the coastal town Britney had planned to visit before she died.
Gengel showed up in Haiti 10 days later to recover his daughter's remains, which wouldn't be found until Feb. 14, Valentine's Day. She would be the last of the six Lynn University students and professors who died to be located.
She was buried in Worcester, Massachusetts, outside the family home in Rutland.
On Wednesday, Gengel and his son landed in Haiti, clearly still grieving their loss. They spoke of Britney in quivering voices and wore matching white Polo-style shirts with the name of the orphanage stitched across their chests: Be Like Brit.
Be Like Brit, they said, means lending a hand and looking out for the underdog.
With that in mind, the hilltop orphanage they are building, estimated to cost $1 million, will feature solar panels and earthquake-resistant walls, a medical clinic and an abundance of symbolic flourishes. It will be shaped like a 'B,' visible to Port-au-Prince-bound airplane passengers. Family members and sympathetic strangers have donated as much as $800,000, Gengel said.
The 19,000-square-foot (nearly 1,800-square-meter) facility will also house 33 boys and 33 girls, for the number of days Britney's body lay under rubble.
It's not clear yet where the children will come from, but Gengel said he wants the facility to house "true" orphans, that is, children without both parents. It's possible the children could be selected from the homeless settlements that sprung up in the aftermath of the earthquake, Gengel said.
On the Gengels' side has been an unlikely link to the National Palace. They call the first lady by her first name, Sophia.
As it happens, Bernie is roommates with the son of Haiti's pop star-turned-president, Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly, at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.
"Very normal," Bernie said about Sandro, a first-year student who also performs under the stage name of Ti-Micky. "You wouldn't know he's the president's son."
Still, there have been hurdles, and more are certain to follow.
It took six months for the Gengels to secure a clear land title and a deposit wasn't made until September of last year. They bought the land for $50,000, father Leonard Gengel said.
On Wednesday, several dozen Haitian workers hammered away amid the cinderblock base as others poured cement.
Kervince Parayson, the site coordinator, said it was inspiring "to see someone that comes from outside Haiti, as a (foreigner), and wants to do something big like that for the children."
The orphanage is due to open on the third anniversary of the quake, in 2013.
Standing above the construction site and looking out to the ocean, Bernie Gengel said he was pleased all the effort will help dozens of people in Haiti, but it will come too late for one.
"I'm happy we're doing this," he said. "But at the same time you wish you could go back and change things and you can't."
HONOLULU ? Xavier coach Chris Mack summed up the No. 14 Musketeers' latest post-brawl loss in a hurry.
"This was as disappointing a game for as long as I've been around," Mack said.
Hawaii relegated the reeling Musketeers to the seventh-place game in the Diamond Head Classic, rallying for an 84-82 overtime victory Friday night in the consolation semifinals.
Joston Thomas sent the Musketeers to their third straight loss since the bench-clearing brawl Dec. 10 against Cincinnati, making a layup from the baseline with 0.8 seconds left.
"I'm my mind, my heart I was thinking we're not losing," Thomas said. "No excuses. We have to pull through."
Down by 15 early in the second half of the consolation semifinal, Hawaii tied it at 77 on Hauns Brereton's 3-pointer from the top of the key with 2.0 seconds left in regulation.
Thomas finished with a career-high 24 points on 8-of-11 shooting and had nine rebounds. Vander Joaquim added 20 points for Hawaii (6-5), Zane Johnson had 14 and Brereton 13.
The victory was Hawaii's first over a ranked team since it beat then-No. 4 Michigan State in November 2005.
"We struggled defensively in the second half," Mack said. "We're struggling offensively. We got some open looks we didn't knock down."
On the winning play, Johnson penetrated the lane before passing to Thomas, whose right-handed shot circled the rim before falling through. It wasn't the way Hawaii coach Gib Arnold planned it.
"We drew up a play where Zane comes off a screen and knocks down a jumper for us like he's done all season," said Thomas, describing the winning play. Instead, Johnson penetrated the lane before passing to Thomas, whose right-handed shot circled the rim before falling through.
A desperation heave by Xavier from about 75 feet as time expired was well short.
Tu Holloway led Xavier (8-3) with 26 points, Mark Lyons had 18 and Kenny Frease 13. Xavier has lost three straight for the first time under coach Mack.
Lyons played for the first time since the victory over Cincinnati. He was one of three Musketeers suspended for their parts in the altercation.
Holloway, who returned from his one-game suspension Thursday in a first-round loss to Long Beach State, was 4 of 8 from 3-point range and 7 of 16 overall. He also had six assists.
Holloway left the game briefly with an apparent right (shooting) hand injury early in the game.
Xavier opened the game on a 12-0 run and stretched the lead to 15 with 17:17 remaining in regulation.
"They jumped on us pretty good and I think we were down 15 in the second half," Arnold said. "This team has some character and we're finding out who we are. We're still figuring things out."
Johnson's 3-pointer pulled Hawaii to 75-74 with 3:10 to play, but Holloway answered for the Musketeers with a 3-pinter with 24 seconds. Brereton then hit his tying 3-pointer off an assist from Jeremiah Ostrowski.
Hawaii took its first lead on the first possession of overtime on Joaquim's dunk.
The Rainbow Warriors, who rebounded from a quarterfinal loss to Auburn on Thursday, will face Clemson in the fifth-place game Sunday. The Musketeers will play Southern Illinois for seventh place.
Pions don't want to decay into faster-than-light neutrinos, study finds Public release date: 23-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Diana Lutz dlutz@wustl.edu 314-935-5272 Washington University in St. Louis
Major speed bump in the path of a startling result announced in September
When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment.
Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Online and in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put their finger on what appears to be an insurmountable problem with the experiment.
The OPERA experiment, a collaboration between the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy, timed particles called neutrinos traveling through Earth from the physics laboratory CERN to a detector in an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, a distance of some 730 kilometers, or about 450 miles.
OPERA reported online and in Physics Letters B in September that the neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso some 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have arrived if they were traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum.
Neutrinos are thought to have a tiny, but nonzero, mass. According to the theory of special relativity, any particle that has mass may come close to but cannot quite reach the speed of light. So superluminal (faster than light) neutrinos should not exist.
The neutrinos in the experiment were created by slamming speeding protons into a stationary target, producing a pulse of pions unstable particles that were magnetically focused into a long tunnel where they decayed in flight into muons and neutrinos.
The muons were stopped at the end of the tunnel, but the neutrinos, which slip through matter like ghosts through walls, passed through the barrier and disappeared in the direction of Gran Sasso.
In their journal article, Cowsik and an international team of collaborators took a close look at the first step of this process. "We have investigated whether pion decays would produce superluminal neutrinos, assuming energy and momentum are conserved," he says.
The OPERA neutrinos had energies of about 17 gigaelectron volts. "They had a lot of energy but very little mass," Cowsik says, "so they should go very fast." The question is whether they went faster than the speed of light.
"We've shown in this paper that if the neutrino that comes out of a pion decay were going faster than the speed of light, the pion lifetime would get longer, and the neutrino would carry a smaller fraction of the energy shared by the neutrino and the muon," Cowsik says.
"What's more," he says, "these difficulties would only increase as the pion energy increases.
"So we are saying that in the present framework of physics, superluminal neutrinos would be difficult to produce," Cowsik explains.
In addition, he says, there's an experimental check on this theoretical conclusion. The creation of neutrinos at CERN is duplicated naturally when cosmic rays hit Earth's atmosphere.
A neutrino observatory called IceCube detects these neutrinos when they collide with other particles generating muons that leave trails of light flashes as they plow into the thick, clear ice of Antarctica.
"IceCube has seen neutrinos with energies 10,000 times higher than those the OPERA experiment is creating," Cowsik says.."Thus, the energies of their parent pions should be correspondingly high. Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos.
"But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.
Cowsik's objection to the OPERA results isn't the only one that has been raised.
Physicists Andrew G. Cohen and Sheldon L. Glashow published a paper in Physical Review Letters in October showing that superluminal neutrinos would rapidly radiate energy in the form of electron-positron pairs.
"We are saying that, given physics as we know it today, it should be hard to produce any neutrinos with superluminal velocities, and Cohen and Glashow are saying that even if you did, they'd quickly radiate away their energy and slow down," Cowsik says.
"I have very high regard for the OPERA experimenters," Cowsik adds. "They got faster-than-light speeds when they analyzed their data in March, but they struggled for months to eliminate possible errors in their experiment before publishing it.
"Not finding any mistakes," Cowsik says, "they had an ethical obligation to publish so that the community could help resolve the difficulty. That's the demanding code physicists live by," he says.
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Pions don't want to decay into faster-than-light neutrinos, study finds Public release date: 23-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Diana Lutz dlutz@wustl.edu 314-935-5272 Washington University in St. Louis
Major speed bump in the path of a startling result announced in September
When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment.
Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Online and in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put their finger on what appears to be an insurmountable problem with the experiment.
The OPERA experiment, a collaboration between the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy, timed particles called neutrinos traveling through Earth from the physics laboratory CERN to a detector in an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, a distance of some 730 kilometers, or about 450 miles.
OPERA reported online and in Physics Letters B in September that the neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso some 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have arrived if they were traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum.
Neutrinos are thought to have a tiny, but nonzero, mass. According to the theory of special relativity, any particle that has mass may come close to but cannot quite reach the speed of light. So superluminal (faster than light) neutrinos should not exist.
The neutrinos in the experiment were created by slamming speeding protons into a stationary target, producing a pulse of pions unstable particles that were magnetically focused into a long tunnel where they decayed in flight into muons and neutrinos.
The muons were stopped at the end of the tunnel, but the neutrinos, which slip through matter like ghosts through walls, passed through the barrier and disappeared in the direction of Gran Sasso.
In their journal article, Cowsik and an international team of collaborators took a close look at the first step of this process. "We have investigated whether pion decays would produce superluminal neutrinos, assuming energy and momentum are conserved," he says.
The OPERA neutrinos had energies of about 17 gigaelectron volts. "They had a lot of energy but very little mass," Cowsik says, "so they should go very fast." The question is whether they went faster than the speed of light.
"We've shown in this paper that if the neutrino that comes out of a pion decay were going faster than the speed of light, the pion lifetime would get longer, and the neutrino would carry a smaller fraction of the energy shared by the neutrino and the muon," Cowsik says.
"What's more," he says, "these difficulties would only increase as the pion energy increases.
"So we are saying that in the present framework of physics, superluminal neutrinos would be difficult to produce," Cowsik explains.
In addition, he says, there's an experimental check on this theoretical conclusion. The creation of neutrinos at CERN is duplicated naturally when cosmic rays hit Earth's atmosphere.
A neutrino observatory called IceCube detects these neutrinos when they collide with other particles generating muons that leave trails of light flashes as they plow into the thick, clear ice of Antarctica.
"IceCube has seen neutrinos with energies 10,000 times higher than those the OPERA experiment is creating," Cowsik says.."Thus, the energies of their parent pions should be correspondingly high. Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos.
"But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.
Cowsik's objection to the OPERA results isn't the only one that has been raised.
Physicists Andrew G. Cohen and Sheldon L. Glashow published a paper in Physical Review Letters in October showing that superluminal neutrinos would rapidly radiate energy in the form of electron-positron pairs.
"We are saying that, given physics as we know it today, it should be hard to produce any neutrinos with superluminal velocities, and Cohen and Glashow are saying that even if you did, they'd quickly radiate away their energy and slow down," Cowsik says.
"I have very high regard for the OPERA experimenters," Cowsik adds. "They got faster-than-light speeds when they analyzed their data in March, but they struggled for months to eliminate possible errors in their experiment before publishing it.
"Not finding any mistakes," Cowsik says, "they had an ethical obligation to publish so that the community could help resolve the difficulty. That's the demanding code physicists live by," he says.
###
[ | 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.
Handicapped Access: Accessible entrance and bathroom
Credit Cards: All major
Reservations: Recommended for large parties
Phone: (508) 990-1128
Food: 4 stars
Service: 4 stars
Atmosphere: 4 stars
Cleanliness: 4 stars
Price/Value: 5 stars
I've been to a lot of Chinese buffets over the years ? perhaps I shouldn't admit that ? but each one always seems to have its pluses and minuses. The only one that is a consistent satisfier is Peking Garden in Dartmouth, located in the same plaza as Best Buy and Stop and Shop. It's no surprise that it's one of the longest-standing of the genre.
Of all the Chinese buffets in the area, Peking Garden is the best overall experience. The food is always very good, the ambiance is better than most buffets and the place is always clean. From the decorations adorning the wall to the Chinese music piped in through the speakers, it feels more like the Chinese restaurants I grew up going to rather than just some carved-out corner of a shopping plaza.
I recently took my wife Jennifer and son Adam on a Wednesday evening while out doing some pre-holiday errands, and it was just as enjoyable as always.
When we arrived, there were about 20 parties scattered throughout the spacious dining area, and we were seated relatively close the buffet. Our server took our drink order and brought them back before we were even ready to make our first trip.
The dinner buffet price is $11.60 Mondays through Thursdays, and then Friday through Sunday it is $12.60. Lunch is also available until 3 p.m., for the price of $7.95 Monday through Friday and $8.95 on Saturday and Sunday. Just a bit of advice to those who try to go in early and pay the lunch price while dining on the dinner foods, such as the crab legs: the staff keeps an eye on that. I've heard of more than one occasion where they will charge you the dinner price if you take what they consider to be "dinner foods," and they're often noted on the buffet with a sign that says "dinner only."
From our bill, it appears as though my Coke and Jennifer's Diet Coke were included with the price of the meal, and we just had to pay $1.50 for Adam's milk. The placards on the tables also state that juice and bottles of soda are available for $1.50, and cans for $1. If you wish to partake in an alcoholic beverage, the domestic bottled beers are $3, while Heineken, Corona and Tsing Tao are $3.50. There is also wine available both by the glass and by the bottle.
I always make a recon mission around the buffets before I begin, to see what types of offerings are made that night. The first trip up, I immediately hit all my favorites, such as the black pepper chicken, General Tso's chicken, pepper steak and hot and sour soup. The best thing about Peking Garden is that the food always tastes fresh and has plenty of flavor; too many other Chinese buffets just let the food sit around, and the heat lamps zap out any hint of uniqueness until every piece of beef or chicken, no matter how it is prepared, all tends to taste the same.
On subsequent trips, I also had some octopus salad, steamed mussels, sushi with a tiny bit of wasabi, sweet and sour chicken fingers and the little fried dough bits dipped in sugar that are cleverly called "Chinese malasadas" to play up on the local cuisine. I tend to avoid things like roast beef, meatballs and mashed potatoes at a Chinese buffet. They're not really Chinese specialties, and as a result they're usually not very good.
While I generally enjoy almost all of the food at Peking Garden, on this particular night I had something that blew me away. It was so simple, yet so devine ? steamed shrimp wrapped in bacon. I can't believe it took me almost 34 years of life to have shrimp wrapped in bacon. In fact, I may have wrapped everything else on Earth in bacon at least once, except for shrimp. It was like the Coke can falling from the sky in "The Gods Must Be Crazy." Fear not, though, as I probably ate enough to more than make up for lost time.
By the time I remembered that I wanted to make a trip to the Mongolian Grill ? where you select from a wide variety of raw vegetables, meats, noodles and seasonings before a chef cooks it all for you on a round grill ? I was too full to make another trip.
Jennifer was a little disappointed that her favorite dish, the peanut butter chicken, was not on the buffet on that particular night. She still had plenty of her other favorites to choose from, including crab rangoons, Peking ravioli and beef teriyaki.
Adam, being a typical seven-year-old, is sometimes averse to trying new foods. I was able to talk him into giving a few things the old college try, including the steamed crab legs, an egg roll and the General Tso's chicken. His favorite, though, was the honey chicken, of which I am also a fan. Considering the chicken nuggets, pizza and French fries he also had, I'd say he definitely got a good value for the $7 we were charged for his meal.
Our bill came to $33.10 before tip, a bargain for the meals we enjoyed and for the new foods we got Adam to sample. As I was wrapping up my experience with a chocolate-vanilla twist ice cream cone (I avoid the slightly stale cakes and cream puffs on the buffet and go right for the ice cream machine) and Adam and Jennifer enjoyed some fortune cookies, our server came by and handed us a box containing a Chinese-style 2012 calendar as a gift. Each table got one, and I thought it was a nice touch.
So if you're looking for close-to-authentic Chinese food, and plenty of it, Peking Garden is the place to go. There's a reason why it's been around so long, and doesn't appear to be going anywhere.
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NEW YORK ? If you're one of the holdouts still paying bills with checks, tracking your accounts with pen and paper or clipping coupons from the newspaper, 2012 could be the year you take the digital plunge.
A host of budding personal finance services and applications are poised to go mainstream in the new year, and together, they will likely have a big impact on the way Americans bank, shop, and track their finances. Some of the services are web-based, but many take advantage of the proliferation of smartphones, which are now carried by one-third of U.S. adults ? with more likely to join that crowd in the next few days after receiving the gadgets as holiday gifts.
Whether online or mobile, here are some personal finance technologies to watch in 2012:
? Mobile money
The September launch of Google Wallet was just one high-profile move toward the use of smartphones for payments, replacing credit or debit cards. The technology allows users to wave their phones in front of payment terminals and have transactions deducted from linked bank accounts or credit cards. Expect more options for electronic payments from mobile service providers and card networks next year, and wider adoption of the terminals by retailers, mass transit systems and more.
Another innovation that is already being heavily promoted is person-to-person payments. American Express Co., MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc. and PayPal all offer ways for their customers to send and receive money using links to various accounts and cards. As the TV commercials depict, if this technology takes off there will be no more fumbling for cash when it's time to split the check at a restaurant, and sending money across town or across borders will be easier, faster and less expensive.
? Non-bank money management
Mint.com, the popular personal finance site, was only the beginning. A raft of new money management tools are now available that can help users keep track of bills, investments and other aspects of their financial lives.
Among the standouts is Manilla.com, which not only pulls together household bills and financial accounts, but also helps users keep track of details like travel rewards points and magazine subscriptions. The service provides reminders for when bills are due and has features that make it easy to pay bills or set up auto payments. Since the company's goal is to help its customers eliminate paper clutter, there's even a way to store electronic account statements. And it has a smartphone app for accessing all these functions on the go.
Other non-bank options include Pageonce, an app that automatically tracks bills and enables users to make payments on their phone; savvymoney.com, a site that offers debt-management help; and Betterment.com, a site designed to simplify investing.
? Targeted deals
The combination of geo-location technology that can track your movements when you're carrying your smartphone, and QR codes, those weird squares appearing more and more often in advertising, is enabling companies to offer personalized discounts and on-the-spot deals to customers willing to opt into their programs.
Mall shoppers have already started getting texts and emails designed to lure them into certain stores, and the technology can also be used to encourage customers to enter contests, demonstrate new apps or products and even contact customer service.
? Social commerce
Javelin Strategy & Research, a financial services research firm, is using this term to identify the trend toward the combination of commerce and social networking on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
While these sites are moving toward making it easier to shop without navigating toward a link, that's just one step toward social commerce.
The concept of financial social networking is also being expanded by companies like Weemba.com, whose site allows individuals to search for a loan by posting nontraditional details like a description of the need for the money ? debt consolidation, a mortgage refinance, or a kitchen makeover complete with the designer's plans, for instance. The details posted add depth to the usual credit score and financial information that banks and other funders may review, and the site opens the lending request to a wider audience.
Other examples of the use or concept of social networking include Kickstarter.com, where creative types can seek funding for their artistic endeavors and those willing to provide seed money can choose to provide all or part of the needed funds to get the project off the ground.
Saveup.com is a game aimed at helping individuals pay down debt and build savings, and Bundle.com uses data tracking and spending information to produce lists of popular restaurants and stores in selected cities, helping users find the right spot at the right price.
Banks are also experimenting with ways to make use of social networking to interact with customers, with some success. Even Bank of America Corp., a recurring target for gripes large and small about the financial system this year, has nearly 365,000 "likes" on its official Facebook page, which it uses for efforts like supporting community causes and advertising opportunities like its Student Leader program, which offers paid internships to high schoolers who work at charitable organizations.
Customers can expect more on these fronts from startups and big financial institutions in the next 12 months.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) ? The Vatican said on Wednesday an unknown buyer had snapped up the internet address vatican.xxx, a domain combining its name with an extension reserved for pornographic content.
"This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said on Vatican radio.
It was not clear from his statement if the Vatican had tried to acquire the domain in order to prevent future misuse and had been beaten to the punch by the unknown buyer.
Lombardi denied Italian media reports that the Vatican had, like many other organizations including companies, universities and museums, registered the xxx domain to prevent its misuse.
The xxx domains are being launched this month for pornographic content and many organizations have preemptively acquired them so others cannot.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Barry Moody)
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Public release date: 23-Dec-2011
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