AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
A Royal Australia Air Force AP-3C Orion takes off from RAAF Base Pearce in Perth, Australia, early Wednesday, March 26, 2014 to resume the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith) | ASSOCIATED PRESS
PERTH, Australia (AP) — Objects spotted floating in a new search area for debris from the missing Malaysian jetliner need to be recovered and inspected before they can be linked to the plane, Australian officials said Saturday.
Planes from China and Australia were combing the newly targeted area off the west coast of Australia after several objects were spotted Friday, including two rectangular items that were blue and gray, and ships on the scene will attempt to recover them, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
"The objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from MH370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships," the authority said in a statement. "It is not known how much flotsam, such as from fishing activities, is ordinarily there. At least one distinctive fishing object has been identified."
Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said a cold front would bring rain, low clouds and reduced visibility over the southern part of the search area, with moderate winds and swells of up to 2 meters (6 feet). Conditions will improve Sunday, although rain, drizzle and low clouds are still likely.
Newly analyzed satellite data shifted the search zone on Friday, raising hopes searchers may be closer to getting physical evidence that Flight 370 crashed in the Indian Ocean on March 8 with 239 people aboard.
The newly targeted zone is nearly 1,130 kilometers (700 miles) northeast of sites the searchers have crisscrossed for the past week. The redeployment came after analysts determined that the jet may have been traveling faster than earlier estimates and would therefore have run out of fuel sooner, officials said.
During the earlier search, hundreds of objects have been seen in the water by satellites, but so far not a single one has been confirmed as being from the missing Boeing 777.
Search planes are being sent out from Perth, Australia, in a staggered manner, so at least one plane will be over the area for most of the daylight hours. It is also closer than the previous search area, with a flying time of 2 ½ hours each way, allowing for five hours of search time, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
The Australian statement said five P-3 Orions — three from Australia and one each from Japan and New Zealand — plus a Japanese coast guard jet, a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, and one civilian jet acting as a communications relay were taking part in the air search Saturday.
But Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters in Sydney that the job of locating the debris was still difficult.
"We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work — it is an extraordinarily remote location. There are inhospitable seas, it's an inaccessible place, we are trying to find small bits of wreckage in a vast ocean," he said.
The new search area is about 80 percent smaller than the old one, but still spans about 123,000 square miles (319,000 square kilometers), roughly the size of Poland. In most places, depths range from about 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) to 13,120 feet (4,000 meters), although the much deeper Diamantina trench edges the search area.
Flight 370 disappeared March 8 while bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The hunt focused first on the Gulf of Thailand, along the plane's planned path. But when radar data showed it had veered sharply west, the search moved to the Andaman Sea, off the western coast of Malaysia, before pivoting to the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.
That change was based on analysis of satellite data. But officials said a reexamination and refinement of that analysis indicated the aircraft was traveling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel use and reducing the possible distance it could have flown before going down. Just as a car loses gas efficiency when driving at high speeds, a plane will get less out of a tank of fuel when it flies faster.
Malaysia's civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said personnel at Boeing Co. in Seattle had helped with the analysis.
"This is our best estimate of the area in which the aircraft is likely to have crashed into the ocean," Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said at a news conference in Canberra.
He said a wide range of scenarios went into the calculation.
"We're looking at the data from the so-called pinging of the satellite, the polling of the satellites, and that gives a distance from a satellite to the aircraft to within a reasonable approximation," he said. He said that information was coupled with various projections of aircraft performance and the plane's distance from the satellites at given times.
In Beijing, some relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers on the plane said the shift in the search area added to their confusion and frustration.
"What on earth is the Malaysian government doing?" said Wang Chunjiang, whose brother was a passenger. "Is there anything more that they are hiding from us?"
Investigators continued puzzling over what might have happened aboard the plane. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak amid an ongoing investigation, said the FBI's searches of computer hard drives belonging to pilot and co-pilot, including a flight simulator with deleted files, have yielded "no significant information" about what happened to the plane or what role, if any, the crew might have played in its disappearance.
If investigators can determine the plane went down in the newly targeted zone, recovery of its flight data and cockpit voice recorders could be complicated.
"There are a number of ridges, escarpments and fracture zones that run through this area, so it's a fairly complex area," said Rochelle Wigley, director of the Indian Ocean Mapping Project at the University of New Hampshire. Wigley said determining the ocean floor topography within the search zone depends on its exact coordinates. While investigators appear to be focusing on an area where much of the sea floor is about 6,600 feet (2,000 meters) below the surface, depths may reach a maximum of about 19,700 feet (6,000 meters) at its easternmost edge, she said.
The U.S. Navy is sending equipment that can detect pings from the recorders, or "black boxes," up to about 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) deep, and an unmanned underwater vehicle that operates at depths up to 14,800 feet (4,500 meters).
Joseph Kolly, director of research and engineering at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said the flight data recorders have to be able withstand depths of up to 6,100 meters (20,000 feet).
The new search zone's location 700 kilometers (435 miles) closer to the Australian mainland makes it easier to reach. Planes used so much fuel getting to and from the previous zone that they were limited to only about two hours of search time.
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Wong reported from Kuala Lumpur. Associated Press writers Scott McDonald and Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur; Kristen Gelineau in Sydney; Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia; Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand; and Eric Tucker and Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed.
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SWednesday's episode of the Colbert Report, a satirical television program in which Stephen Colbert satirically plays a conservative buffoon, featured a segment on actual buffoon Dan Snyder's Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, which was announced this week amid renewed protest against the team's nickname. The organization, according to the team's press release, will "offer genuine opportunities for Tribal communities." Of course, if Snyder had had the courage of his convictions, he would've called the group the Washington Redskins Foundation for Redskins. But in any case he came off as nothing so much as a man buying an indulgence for sexual deviancy with a check signed by his penis. It was pretty funny. Anyway, during the segment, Colbert made a callback to a 2005 episode of the show, in which Colbert, in character as a satirical conservative talk-show buffoon, was "caught" making racist jokes about Asians. After the callback, Colbert, in character, said he would atone for his racism by establishing the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever. The satirical buffoon would make like the actual buffoon. He would try to buy an indulgence, and in so doing he would sin anew. The joke worked because the comedian had chosen a slur of similar pitch and degree to "Redskins"—or "gooks," for that matter—whose absurdity would be plain to any viewer, racist and non-racist alike, one whose earnest usage nowadays elicits no more than sigh of pity. It was pretty funny.After the show, the official Colbert Report Twitter account—which is always in character and not controlled by Colbert himself—sent out a now-deleted tweet that read: "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever." That's when this happened:
SVocativ has published a lengthy profile of Marcus Ewert, who bedded not one Beat, but two: Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. This all started in 1988 — Ewert was 17, Ginsberg (who'd later come out as a member of NAMBLA) was 62, and Burroughs was 74. Ginsberg had his way with Ewert and then passed him onto his friend Burroughs, whom Ginsberg decided could use a good lay.If that all sounds like a great time, get a load of Ginsberg's blowjob technique, as revealed in this quote by Ewert:
SAntonin Scalia, the longest-serving active justice of the Supreme Court, has a great deal of charm at his disposal, in person. From a distance, it's easy to imagine Scalia as a sort of aloof, smoldering demon, throwing cruel barbs at popular notions about justice and progress. Yet he is dear friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nicholas Allard, the dean of the Brooklyn Law School, mentioned that friendship last Friday, on the stage of the opera house of Brooklyn Academy of Music, before bringing Scalia out to meet the crowd. The dean also mentioned that Scalia has written more concurring opinions than any other justice in the history of the court, along with his copious body of dissents. Grumpy and dismissive as his official persona may be, Scalia wants to be heard. And the crowd wanted to hear Scalia. The event, in which the Fox News host and former judge Andrew Napolitano would be asking the justice questions, had been relocated from the law school campus to the opera house to accommodate demand. Two wooden chairs with padded seats waited, on an Oriental rug. Scalia took the stage with an arm-swinging walk and took the chair at stage left. He wore a suit with narrow pinstripes; his necktie was yellow; the top of his dark hair has gone white. As he settled into his chair, he kicked out both feet, a childlike movement. He kicked them out again. Maybe his legs were stiff. Napolitano is a dear friend of Scalia's as well. He supplied an introduction after the introduction, in which he told a story about how the two of them had been dining together in a restaurant once and some of his own fans had come over to greet him, completely ignoring the famous and powerful justice at the table. TV professionals have a way of telling stories like these. Then they were off, with Napolitano gently goading Scalia about the idea that American law might recognize certain inherent transcendent rights, so that Scalia could cheerfully reject the concept, in favor of his own doctrine of originalism. "You're a big natural-law freak," Scalia said. That, the justice said, is the province of philosophers and theologians and other specialists, of which he is not one. "I'm a lawyer," Scalia said.The gist of Scalia's legal philosophy, as he wishes it to be understood, is that whatever abstract and universal ideas may have inspired the Founders were codified into the Constitution, at which point their abstract or universal nature ceased to apply. All that remained, going forward, was the specific text of the Constitution and subsequent legislation: "I enforce American law, and it's up to the American people to conform that to natural law."Scalia salted his remarks with similarly tidy constructions: "The rule of democracy is the majority rules." "The text is the text." "A liberty is a liberty." At the bottom of every hotly contested issue, he finds a self-evident principle, demonstrating that there is nothing even to be contested."Did the Eighth Amendment bar the death penalty?" he asked at one point. "Not a hard question." The people who wrote the Eighth Amendment practiced the death penalty, ergo its prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments" could not possibly exclude capital punishment. The only question, he said later on, is "Is the electric chair any more cruel than death by hanging?"—the presumption being that the answer was clearly that it was not. The rhetorical underpinning of all this was Scalia's notion of humility. Again and again, he returned to describing himself as a lawyer—that is, a mere technician, bound to work only with the textual tools he had been provided with. "What prepared me to decide these cosmic moral questions?" he asked. "Harvard Law School?"It was a good question, but not as expansive as it could have been. Theology and philosophy are not the only technical specialties in the academy; people also spend years training to become historians or linguists. One might deem those skills essential to understanding precisely why documents drafted by a committee of educated 18th-century men in the former British colonies used certain words and phrases and not others. Yet Harvard Law doesn't give out Ph.Ds in those disciplines, either.That lack of expertise didn't prevent Scalia from going on an extended disquisition on the significance of the word "the" in the Bill of Rights—a critically important word, in his reading. Americans do not enjoy "freedom of speech," but "the freedom of speech"; that is, the Founders, in the process of converting abstract law to a fixed code, guaranteed only "what was the right of Englishmen in 1791." Not that Scalia isn't willing to take a broader view. "No one should be a strict constructionist," he said. "That is stupid. Texts should not be interpreted strictly, they should be interpreted reasonably." So: "The reasonable meaning of the First Amendment is freedom to communicate, whether you do it by semaphore or by burning an American flag." The flag-burning subject gave Scalia a chance to demonstrate his personal modesty. "I would send that guy to jail so fast if I were king," he said. The flag-burner who came before the court in Texas v. Johnson, he said, was "a bearded weirdo, sandals, long hair and everything." But the sensibilities of Scalia the opinionated human had to yield to the textual restrictions on Scalia the lawyer. "I am not king," he said, cheerfully throwing up his hands.Scalia used his hands constantly as he spoke. He is a gifted extratextual communicator, his words constantly shaded by his tone, his gestures, and the comic application of his stern, heavy-lidded gaze. Frequently, he spoke ironically or from an assumed persona, so that the audience understood that he meant something opposite to or aslant from his literal words. He cited the teaching powers of "Harvard Law School, or even Yale Law School," in a way that clearly treated the high end of legal academia as ridiculous, even as he seemed to endorse the hierarchy among elite schools.But he did all this in a venue where video and audio recording were forbidden. So you'll have to take my word for it. He was funny, even if the evidence is not necessarily there in the text.Ultimately, Scalia's legal humility is meant for other people. It's his fellow justices who keep overreaching, failing to recognize the commonsense limits on their power. He clings to his integrity, in a neatly closed intellectual loop. Originalism, he said, "is really the only possible criterion for how a judge should apply the Constitution....What other possible criterion is there?" Obviously his colleagues must believe that there are other criteria, but Scalia excludes those possibilities. He may delight in Ginsburg's company, but he does not even try to reach her on legal matters."I have never discussed legal philosophy in depth with any of my colleagues," he said. He theatrically imagined the result, if he did: "'My God, Nino, you're right!'" His meaning was that he did not expect the other justices ever to say any such thing."No, it's too late," he said. "It's too late for them and their generation." So he makes his arguments after the fact, for posterity. "I write my dissents for the students at law schools," he said. It was sometimes peculiar which matters struck Scalia as airtight, and which did not. In another aside on language, he meditated on the absurdity of "substantive due process": "The world is divided into substance and procedure," he said. (Recall, Scalia is not a trained philosopher.) Substantive process was inherently nonsensical. "It's the opposite of procedural substance," he said. The little word "due," floating in the middle in a cloud of unexamined assumptions, went unexamined.Nor did he convincingly articulate why it was reasonable to interpret the First Amendment's protection of "speech" broadly, but the Fourth Amendment's protection of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" narrowly. He ticked of those those four items multiple times, even using his fingers, to express the formal limits on privacy. One of those recitations came up when Napolitano raised the question of the secret court proceedings that govern the NSA's surveillance. "I don't want to get myself recused," Scalia said. He went on to argue, though, that the court had brought disaster on itself long before when it decided that wiretaps fell under the Fourth Amendment. Now, he said, decisions about the surveillance state must be made by the branch of government "least competent" to make them."My court doesn't know diddly about the degree of the threat," he said.Originalist modesty, then, would apparently demand that the NSA's high-tech Panopticon be allowed to gaze without limit. But in the question-and-answer period, a different possibility came up. Why, a student from NYU asked, wouldn't data on a computer count among a person's "effects"?"Ooh!" Scalia said. "Ooh! I'd better not answer... It's a really good question. That's fun."Here, for a moment, was the Scalia of the 21st century, the author of the majority opinion that said that looking at the outside of a house with thermal imaging, for the purpose of picking out what was inside, constituted a search. "It may be effects," he said. "Don't you think that may be effects?"It was little bit nice and a much bigger bit dismaying. The Supreme Court, on both wings and its center, is populated by people with limited experience of modernity. Search-and-seizure cases are often where this shows up (four justices, including the liberal John Paul Stevens, had disagreed with Scalia's view that thermal imaging would require a warrant). Even so, till this moment, had the possibility really never crossed Scalia's mind that in a world where everything is done by computer, someone's "effects"—let alone "papers"—might be virtual? This is how a mind, even a clever one, ends up working when it's stuck in a cloister. The final question of the night came from a student who asked Scalia about whether his history of opinions resisting gay rights contributed to the "demeaning and persecution" of sexual minorities. He spoke in a nervous rush, with a trembling voice and none of the justice's ease of manner.The question—"Is that a question?"—was "ridiculous," Scalia told him. Scalia did not agree with the conclusion that his legal opinions, his reading of the limits of the text, could have "promoted hate in America or abroad." "If that provokes hate—I can't imagine how it would," Scalia said. "But hate whom you like." [Photo by Damion Edwards Photography for Brooklyn Law School]
SLast year, IBT Media acquired Newsweek from IAC, hoping to use the magazine’s name to redeem the company’s reputation as a soulless content farm controlled, in part, by right-wing Moonie leader David Jang. In a lengthy profile of IBT founder Johnathan Davis, Guardian reporter Jon Swaine reveals that the 31-year-old entrepreneur believes in redeeming gay people, too:
SNow that Airbnb is a $10 billion soon-to-be-public corporation, the outlaw of the sharing economy is trying to go legit at the expense of its hosts. Literally.The company, which lets users rent space in apartments, homes, yurts, etc. sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio this week suggesting that hosts pay the 15 percent lodging tax that typically applies to hotels, which amounts to at least $21 million a year.CEO Brian Chesky has told regulators that he would be willing to let hosts pay the occupancy tax before. But this is the first time that the company has ever revealed "estimates on how much tax revenue its New York hosts might generate," reports The Wall Street Journal. Six years later, New York has lost millions in potential tax dollars while Airbnb gained hundreds of millions in venture capital, with hundreds of millions more to come. But with a possibility of an IPO looming, Airbnb is getting proactive about what would end up in the "Risk Factors" section. A copy of the letter, obtained by Valleywag, woos de Blasio by suggesting the taxes could go toward his efforts to combat homelessness:
SThe rainbow flag flies over a building next to Nelson's Column monument in Trafalgar Square in central London on Friday. It marks the start of same-sex weddings in the UK, which will begin at midnight on Saturday. Image via Lefteris Pitarakis/AP.
SThe market has soured on cheap citrus: In the past year, the price of limes—or, as experts are calling them now, "green gold"— has skyrocketed, reaching heights never before seen.Some places, like Texas, have seen prices quadruple in just the last few weeks alone; nationwide, the prices have more than doubled in the past year."We're at an unprecedented price point," Ronnie Cohen, the vice president of sales for Vision Import Group, a produce importer based in New Jersey, told USA TODAY. Forty pound boxes cost about $40 last year; now, they're more than $100, Cohen said."This is something we've never seen for any fruit or vegetable," a buyer for Hardie's Fruit and Vegetable Co. in Dallas said, adding that now he pays more than $100 per box, compared to just $20 last month."The prices are insane," Dave Samuels, of Ingardia Bros. Produce in Santa Ana, Ca., told the Press-Enterprise.Bad weather combined with supplies hoarding has caused a crop shortage in Mexico, raising prices and, according to Cohen, causing some in the "lime community" to describe the fruit as "oro verde," or "green gold."Experts are divided on how long the crisis will last. Cohen said the harvest in May will bring some "price relief," though the wholesalers who spoke with Reuters said the high prices will continue indefinitely. Those hardest hit by the shortage are the Mexican restaurant owners in Texas, many of whom were eager to share their sense of lime dread with reporters. "I'm still gonna buy limes," Joe Lancarte, a Dallas restaurant owner, told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. "I'm just not gonna put them on every single glass, probably, if it gets to that point."[Image via Shutterstock]
Vin Scully kept his cool as an earthquake shook Dodger Stadium. 
The governments of Nigeria and Ivory Coast are currently looking into building a railroad connecting Lagos and Abidjan. The project is expected to boost trade relations between the two countries and in the West African region in general. The construction of this rail line will also boost the West African transportation sector, and allow for the consideration of other forms of transportation within Lagos, thus providing solutions for the traffic-laden city. It will open Nigeria to other West African states through more affordable and safer rail routes. 
Bogota's historic center has suffered from gradual but steady decay during the last few decades. Bogotá is not alone in this process: many other Latin American cities have faced similar issues with their historic districts. The government has therefore been able to explore other successful solutions adopted in neighboring countries -- experts from Lima, Guatemala and BahÃa dos Santos (Brazil) have already been consulted. And conversely, Bogotá was recently invited to Lima to participate in the 4th Cultural Landscape conference, organized by the Peruvian cultural ministry. Latin America offers excellent examples of historical urban centers' rehabilitation, such as Lima and Quito, so Bogotá is showing foresight in seeking cooperation with its neighboring cities as it prepares its own conservation and rehabilitation plan.
