I know Neil Armstrong was an Apollo 11 guy, but Apollo 13 still gives you a lot of insight into the sort of danger astronauts willingly put themselves. Landing on the moon is an insane accomplishment, and there was so much that could have gone wrong. More »
SUGAR LAND, Texas — Roger Clemens was back on the mound at age 50, striking out hitters again.
Pitching for the first time in five years, Clemens tossed 3 1-3 scoreless innings Saturday night for the Sugar Land Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League.
* Reports of more than 200 dead in Daraya
* Town retaken from rebels by army on Friday
* Tanks on Damascus ring-road shell districts – activists
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN, Aug 26 (Reuters) – Syrian opposition activists accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on Sunday of committing a massacre of scores of people in a town close to the capital that the army had just retaken from rebels.
More than 200 bodies were found in houses and basements around Daraya, a working-class Sunni Muslim town to the southwest of Damascus, according to activists who said most had been killed “execution-style” by troops on house-to-house raids.
Due to restrictions on non-state media in Syria, it was impossible to independently verify the accounts.
“Assad’s army has committed a massacre in Daraya,” said Abu Kinan, an activist in Daraya, using an alias to protect himself from reprisals.
“In the last hour, 122 bodies were discovered and it appears that two dozen died from sniper fire and the rest were summarily executed by gunshots from close range,” Kinan told Reuters by telephone.
Video footage from activists showed numerous bodies of young men side-by-side at the Abu Suleiman al-Darani mosque in Daraya, many with what looked like gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
“A massacre,” said the voice of the man who appeared to be taking the footage. “You are seeing the revenge of Assad’s forces … more than 150 bodies on the floor of this mosque.”
The southern fringe of Damascus is a frontline in what has snowballed over the last 17 months from anti-Assad protests into a sectarian civil war.
Tanks deployed on the Damascus ring-road shelled the southern neighbourhoods of al-Lawwan and Nahr Aisheh late into Saturday night, local residents said.
BOMBARDMENT
The army overran Daraya, one of a series of large, mostly rundown Sunni Muslim towns that surround Damascus, on Saturday after three days of heavy bombardment that killed 70 people, according to opposition sources and residents. They said most of the dead were civilians.
The Daraya Coordination Committee activists’ group said in a statement that among those found with shots to the head were eight members of the al-Qassaa family: three children, their father and mother and three other relatives.
U.N. investigators said in a report this month that both sides in the conflict had performed summary executions – a war crime – but that Assad’s troops and militia loyal to the president had committed many more offences than the rebels.
The report said government forces and militiamen loyal to Assad committed a massacre of more than 100 civilians in the town of Houla in May that the government blamed on Islamist “terrorists”.
The United Nations estimates that more than 18,000 people have been killed in the conflict that pits a mainly Sunni opposition against a ruling system dominated by the Assad’s family for the last five decades.
Assad is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam and the sectarian nature of the conflict has already had an impact on neighbouring countries.
A Lebanese man who was abducted with a group of 10 other Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims in Syria in May, triggering tit-for-tat kidnappings of Syrian activists in Lebanon, arrived home on Saturday, hours after Syrian rebels released him as a “goodwill gesture”.
With Russia leading resistance to Western and Arab pressure for action against Assad, the United Nations Security Council remains deadlocked.
A new U.N. envoy, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, has said he is “humbled and scared” at the task of seeking a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis.
* President Correa says ‘unfortunate incident’ over
* WikiLeaks founder Assange still trapped in building
By Girish Gupta and Eduardo Garcia
QUITO, Aug 25 (Reuters) – Britain has withdrawn a threat to enter Ecuador’s embassy in London to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has taken refuge there, President Rafael Correa said on Saturday, taking the heat out of the diplomatic standoff.
“We consider this unfortunate incident over, after a grave diplomatic error by the British in which they said they would enter our embassy,” Correa said in a weekly media address.
In a statement, Ecuador’s government said it had received “a communication from the British Foreign Office which said that there was no threat to enter the embassy.”
Ecuador was furious after the British government warned it might try to seize Assange, who has been holed up in the building for more than two months trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations.
Ecuador, which has granted the former computer hacker asylum, demanded that Britain’s threat be retracted. The latest move should improve relations between Quito and London and allow more talks on Assange’s fate to take place.
For now, however, Assange remains trapped in the embassy with British police waiting outside. Britain has said it is determined to fulfill a legal obligation to send him to Sweden.
The Washington-based Organization of American States had condemned Britain’s threat, and South American foreign ministers strongly backed Correa’s position that Britain’s warning was unacceptable and could set a dangerous precedent.
Correa says he shares Assange’s fears that if handed over to Sweden, he could then be extradited to the United States to face charges over WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of secret U.S. cables.
U.S. and European government sources say the United States has issued no criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder and has launched no attempt to extradite him.
Ecuador’s government says it never intended to prevent Assange from facing justice in Sweden. It has said that if he received written guarantees from Britain and Sweden that he would not be extradited to any third country then Assange would hand himself over to the Swedish authorities.
Assange, whose platinum hair and friendships with the rich and famous have helped make him a global celebrity, spoke from the embassy’s balcony last weekend, denouncing what he called a “witch hunt” by the United States against him and WikiLeaks.
Read More…
More on Julian Assange
So I finished Infinite Jest a few months ago, and as soon as I did, I came across the lovely video for The Decemberists’ Calamity Song. Admittedly, I was a bit more drawn to the whole Eshaton thing than the song at first, but it’s really started to grow on me, and I’ve been mumbling through the lyrics I can’t remember for the better part of a week now. More »
There’s a lot of talk of a new iPhone coming soon, and the Chinese know it. IDC researchers estimate that Apple’s share of smartphones in the country was sliced almost in half during the second quarter, to 10 percent, as expectations and rumors led the local population to wait for the big update. Better competition also played a part in denting iPhone shipments, although it’s not Apple’s chief rival Samsung who’s responsible. Rather, it’s China’s own Lenovo that had the most impact. It broke into the double digits with a second-place 11 percent share thanks to recently started indirect sales of its Android-dominated lineup, while Samsung saw its own share dip slightly to 19 percent. Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei bracketed Apple at third and fifth. We wouldn’t be surprised if the balance of power shifts in about a month, but the impacts to Apple and Samsung alike show just how tough it can be to stay on top in one of the fastest-growing markets on Earth — especially one with so many local brands.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
IDC: iPhone wait cuts Apple’s China phone share by nearly half, Lenovo seizes the opportunity originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 19:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Get ready for gym, tan, LABOR! Sources close to Snooki tell TMZ the reality star has gone into labor.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A hiker in Alaska’s Denali National Park photographed a grizzly bear for at least eight minutes before the bear mauled and killed him in the first fatal attack in the park’s history, officials said Saturday.
Investigators have recovered the camera and looked at the photographs, which show the bear grazing and not acting aggressively before the attack, Denali Park Superintendent Paul Anderson said.
We’re just two short months away from the launch of Windows 8, and unsurprisingly, we’re beginning to see Microsoft‘s manufacturing partners tease upcoming products. The latest is Samsung, which earlier this week released a video teasing its new Windows 8 notebook. When it comes to actually seeing the notebook, the video leaves something to be desired, but then again that’s the entire point of a teaser isn’t it?
However, there are a few brief glimpses of the new notebook to be found in the video, but most of it centers around making reference to Leonardo da Vinci. It’s difficult to say with any certainty what this new device is, but it’s entirely possible that it’s a tablet/notebook hybrid instead of just a straight-up notebook. The few shots we see give us the feeling that it’s the Samsung Series 7 Hybrid that we saw back at Computex in June, but hard to confirm considering that each shot is up-close and never long enough.
For what it’s worth, the teaser is titled “Something Smart is Coming,” which also suggests that this could be a tablet/notebook hybrid. Whatever it is, it’s clear that Samsung thinks this is going to be big, as the video shows that Samsung considers this to be the next step in “the evolution of technology.” The description of the video on YouTube says that a reveal is coming soon, which almost definitely means that Samsung will be showing this off at IFA 2012.
If that’s the case, it would make sense that it is indeed the Series 7 Hybrid we’re seeing in the video. When we saw it at Computex, the company didn’t part with any pricing or release information, and there’s a pretty good chance that information is coming at IFA 2012. Of course, given the nature of “the tease,” we could be completely off. One thing is for sure, though: we don’t have much longer to wait before we find out what Samsung is plotting, so keep an ear to SlashGear for more information!
Samsung’s incoming Windows 8 notebook teased in brief video is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
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