LAS VEGAS (AP) ? Authorities say 200 people were treated for heat problems as temperatures soared at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas.
Clark County spokesman Erik Pappa says about 30 of them were hospitalized for heat-related injuries Friday afternoon at Van Warped Tour at Silverton Casino.
He says most of the others "were essentially provided shade and water and a place to sit down."
There were no reports of any life-threatening injuries.
As the numbers of people with problems grew, medical workers at the scene called for help from surrounding agencies.
The National Weather Service reported temps of 115 Friday, part of a heat wave affecting several Western states.
The Las Vegas Sun reports that responders aided an additional 35 people with heat problems around the city, including seven taken to hospitals.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/heat-wave-200-suffer-heat-problems-vegas-event-090102872.html
nba trade deadline diane lane drew peterson Argo bonnaroo robin roberts Ashley Morrison
PIFO, Ecuador (AP) ? Gino Descalzi used to fret about things like aphids, mildew and the high cost of shipping millions of roses a year from Ecuador to florists in the United States. These days he's worried about a 30-year-old former spy stuck in the transit area of the Moscow airport, and he can't believe it.
The Obama administration sent a thinly veiled economic threat to this South American country on Thursday when it indefinitely delayed a decision to eliminate tariffs on imports of roses worth about $250 million a year. The move created leverage over the leftist government seen as likeliest to grant National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden political asylum that would protect him from U.S. criminal charges.
About the same time, a small group of U.S. senators made explicit threats of trade retaliation if Ecuador harbors Snowden. And on Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden asked Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa to turn down any asylum request, although Correa described the conversation as cordial.
A week after Snowden began his stuttering, surreal flight across the globe, every passing day without him making progress toward Ecuadorean asylum makes the prospect look less likely. But the men who grow roses, asters and delphinia in the thin air of Ecuador's sun-soaked highlands are deeply concerned that, whatever happens to Snowden, they may turn out to be the most unlikely collateral damage from the geopolitical wrangle over his fate.
"This totally changes the financial panorama for our businesses and seriously affects the structure of our markets," said Descalzi, whose 280 employees produce some 22 million roses a year. "We're just shocked that an event so far from the political and economic life of Ecuador has caused so much commotion and worry."
The rose benefit for Ecuador had been widely expected to be approved. Any delay, they say, puts it into uncomfortably uncertain territory.
Even if Snowden never touches Ecuadorean soil and the U.S. cuts the 6.8 percent tariff on Ecuadorean roses, along with tariffs on frozen broccoli and canned artichokes, Ecuadorean flower growers are worried that the brouhaha has damaged Ecuador in the eyes of the United States, hurting its reputation for stability and reliability among the buyers who must decide between flowers from Ecuador and the already tariff-free blooms from its nearby market-dominant competitor, Colombia.
"This is not a mathematical equation," said Benito Jaramillo, the head of the Ecuadorean flower-growers' association. The graduate of Texas A&M and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign employs hundreds of people growing "summer flowers" ? a category of less-flashy blooms like hydrangeas and asters ? on his farm about a half-hour from the capital, Quito.
"The point is that there are a lot of other factors that damage our industry's image and competitiveness in the mid-term," Jaramillo said.
Flowers are serious business in Ecuador.
The industry says it employs about 50,000 people on about 550 farms across the country and is indirectly responsible for 110,000 jobs, putting it after only oil, seafood and bananas in the ranks of the country's biggest exporters. It boasts that the long days, rich sunlight and cool nights of the Andean highlands mean the heads of flowers, particularly roses, grow fuller and richer than those from Colombia, which they scoff at as more suitable for grocery stores than florists.
Industry representatives spent around a year campaigning hard in Washington for the inclusion of cut roses under the Generalized System of Preferences, or GSP, a mechanism meant to encourage development in lower-income countries. A broader trade pact that covers a wide range of Ecuadorean products, the Andean Trade Preference Act, had been widely expected to expire next month. That now seems certain, not least because Ecuador declared Thursday that it was preemptively rejecting it.
Now, the flower industry has turned its focus to its own government, which it desperately hopes won't offer asylum to Snowden.
"We can't put the interests of 14 million Ecuadoreans at risk because of a 29-year-old hacker whom we don't even know," Descalzi said. "This gentleman doesn't mean anything to us."
The business impacts of the Snowden affair have infuriated Ecuador's main business groups, who accuse the government of putting ideology before commerce.
The decision to renounce the Andean Trade deal was "permeated by political and ideological motives," said Roberto Aspiazu, chairman of a coalition of Ecuador's largest industries. The country's business sector is calling on the government to manage the relationship with the United States "with the utmost care," he said.
The government said it planned to compensate business damaged by the loss of U.S. tariff benefits and has painted its decision in terms of the nation's sovereignty versus U.S. threats.
"But in any case, now they're wanting to destroy Ecuador for receiving an asylum application from Mr. Snowden and they are pulling out the rubbish that we spy as well," President Correa said. "If you behave badly we will take (the trade deal) away from you. Well, here you have the sovereign response from Ecuador, my comrades."
But business groups warned that any government compensation could be interpreted as a subsidy subject to international litigation.
When asked how he feels about the whole situation, Jaramillo, the head of the flower association, thought before responding with a single word: "frustrated."
"One isolated issue shouldn't create so much damage," he said.
_____ Gonzalo Solano contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ecuador-flower-growers-snowden-shock-072605949.html
Jon Jones Broken Toe matt barkley russell westbrook NFL Draft Grades 2013 living social pnc Pain and Gain
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei (AP) ? The upcoming regional security summit in this tiny Southeast Asian sultanate is the sort of venue where North Korea has often managed to open up sideline discussions with Seoul and Washington. This time, while there will be plenty of talk about Pyongyang, there is little chance of substantive talk with it.
North Korea has sought negotiations with the U.S. and South Korea but has ignored their demands that it first honor prior commitments to move toward nuclear disarmament. At high-level diplomatic talks beginning this weekend, it can expect the cold shoulder from those countries and others frustrated by Pyongyang's insistence on developing nuclear weapons.
After a December long-range rocket launch, a February nuclear test and weeks of threats to launch nuclear strikes against South Korea and the United States, North Korea earlier this month made a surprise offer for separate talks with its rivals. Government delegates from the two Koreas met and agreed to hold senior-level talks on non-nuclear issues, but the agreement collapsed because of a protocol dispute. The United States responded coolly to Pyongyang's appeal for direct negotiations, which some analysts view as a familiar effort to win aid in return for ratcheting down tensions.
"While it is certainly preferable for North Korea to pursue diplomatic rather than missile or nuclear tests, all of North Korea's neighbors by now are well aware of North Korea's history of diplomatic initiatives as just another tool through which North Korea has sought to consolidate gains following periods in which North Korean brinkmanship has driven political tensions to high levels," Scott Snyder, a Korea specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, wrote in a blog post.
He added that agreeing to hold talks with the North "and come back to the table as though nothing has changed since the last six-party talks were held in 2008 would imply acceptance" of Pyongyang's rocket launches and nuclear tests.
Whether or not Washington and its allies ignore Pyongyang's diplomats, North Korea's atomic aspirations are on the agenda in talks surrounding the 27-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum, which takes place Tuesday in the Bruneian capital of Bandar Seri Begawan.
A draft of the forum chairman's statement provided to The Associated Press said that those meetings would reaffirm the importance of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, and that most participants urged North Korea "to abide by its obligations" under U.N. Security Council resolutions and commitments made in a joint statement following six-party talks in 2005.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from South Korea, China and Japan will attend the forum and could hold private meetings that touch on Pyongyang. North Korea is expected to send its longtime foreign minister, 80-year-old Pak Ui Chun, to the meeting, according to South Korea's Foreign Ministry.
Because the ASEAN forum gathers diplomats from all six countries involved in long-stalled nuclear disarmament negotiations ? the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas ? it has previously provided a chance to use informal, sideline talks to break stalemates over the nuclear issue.
In 2011, top nuclear envoys from the two Koreas met on the sidelines of the forum in Bali, Indonesia, and agreed to work toward a resumption of the dormant six-nation talks, though the negotiations remained stalled. The Koreas' foreign ministers held sideline talks in 2000, 2004, 2005 and 2007, and top diplomats from Pyongyang and Washington also met privately in 2004 and 2008.
North Korea will likely seek similar talks in Brunei, but South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tai-young told reporters Tuesday that officials from Seoul aren't considering meeting the North Korean foreign minister on the sidelines. In Washington, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said Monday that he knew of no discussions planned between Kerry and Pak in Brunei, and that such talks would be "fairly unusual."
Analysts said North Korea appeared to be repeating its pattern of following aggressive rhetoric with diplomatic efforts to get outside aid and concessions.
Chang Yong Seok, an analyst at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University, said Pyongyang must do something to show it's refraining from continuing nuclear activities, such as announcing some disarmament steps, if it wants to have talks.
Despite its recent bid for diplomacy, North Korea has raised renewed worries about a nuclear program that outsiders estimate to include a handful of crude nuclear bombs. Pyongyang followed up its February nuclear test, its third since 2006, with an announcement that it planned to restore all of its atomic bomb fuel producing facilities. The February test drew widespread international condemnation and tightened U.N. sanctions, which subsequently led the North to issue a torrent of warlike threats and sharply raise tensions on the divided peninsula.
Recent satellite photos show signs of new tunnel work at North Korea's underground nuclear test site, the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said in an analysis Tuesday. The analysis said it doesn't appear to indicate another atomic blast is imminent but suggests the country has continued to work on its nuclear weapons program even as tensions eased.
Other issues expected to draw keen media attention in Brunei include South China Sea territorial disputes and relations between the U.S. and China, the world's two biggest economies.
China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia over the South China Sea and its potentially oil- and gas-rich islands. Several claimants want group discussions in order to create a legally binding "code of conduct" to prevent clashes in the sea, but Beijing has not clearly stated when it will sit down with the 10-nation ASEAN bloc to discuss such a nonaggression pact.
China prefers one-on-one negotiations with each rival claimant to resolve the territorial dispute, something that would give it an advantage because of its sheer size and clout.
Southeast Asian countries believe that "having bilateral negotiations with a strong guy would be a losing game," said Bae Geung-chan, a professor at the state-run Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul.
The regional forum chairman's statement said ministers welcome efforts to work toward a code of conduct, and commended ASEAN nations and China for their work to maintain peace and stability.
Analysts say China and the U.S. probably won't have sensitive talks in Brunei that could change their relations. Their leaders recently held an unusually lengthy informal summit in California, during which both countries expressed optimism that the closer personal ties forged between the leaders could stem the mistrust between the world powers.
During the summit, President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, were in broad agreement over the need for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, according to U.S. officials.
___
Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nkorea-likely-cold-shoulder-asia-forum-095914963.html
Richard Ramirez pittsburgh penguins nba finals serena williams Tamar Braxton Prism Governors Ball
One of the redesigned apps Microsoft is introducing in the Windows 8.1 Preview is an update to its Xbox Music app that now puts the emphasis back on your own music – whether in the cloud or on your local machine – and less on music discovery, which the previous version focused on. When you first open the app, you’ll immediately notice that it’s now designed around your music collection, and while the ‘explore’ feature is still available, it has been somewhat de-emphasized in this update. As Microsoft notes, this new version now lets you play your music with just two clicks, while before, it often took six clicks or more to listen to your collection. The main new feature in this update, however, is the introduction of a Pandora-like radio feature that lets you pick any song in the Xbox Music collection and start a new station with related results. This feature, it’s worth noting, is even available when you don’t have an Xbox Music subscription. This means, of course, that you will have to watch an ad every now and then, similar to when you listen to other free radio-like services. One thing Xbox Music doesn’t seem to allow you to do, however, is to vote songs up or down to influence the song selection for a given station. In return, though, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many songs you can skip per hour per station. Turning Websites Into Playlists The coolest feature of Xbox Music, however, is sadly not in the Windows 8.1 Preview yet. At a press event before today’s official unveiling Microsoft showed a feature that allows you to take a website about music (think a top-10 list, review, set list or something similar) and automatically turn it into a playlist for Xbox Music. From Internet Explorer, you can simply invoke the regular Share charm, click on ‘Music’ and the service will scan the page for artists’ names, songs and other information to put together this playlist. Microsoft says this feature will launch “by the end of this year” but didn’t provide an exact date. It’s fair to assume that it’ll be available by the time the final version of Windows 8.1 launches.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ly_-IlSoI64/
after christmas sales case mccoy case mccoy UFC 155 Jack Klugman merry Christmas a christmas story
Dodgers center fielder Matt Kemp had just two hits and struck out six times during his three-game rehab stint with Triple-A Albuquerque. But that apparently doesn?t bother the Los Angeles decision-makers.
According to Ken Gurnick of MLB.com, Kemp has been activated from the disabled list and is in the Dodgers? starting lineup on Tuesday night against the rival Giants. He?ll bat fifth and start in center. Yasiel Puig is playing left field and Andre Ethier is in right.
Kemp wound up missing a little over three weeks because of a right hamstring strain. He has batted just .251/.305/.335 with two home runs and 17 RBI in 51 games this season for the Dodgers, who are in last place in the NL West with a 33-42 record.
Stand Up to Cancer Azarenka NFL fantasy football Chris Kluwe Jennifer Granholm Tulane player injured fox sports
BEIJING (AP) ? An American executive said Monday he has been held hostage for four days at his medical supply plant in Beijing by scores of workers demanding severance packages like those given to 30 co-workers in a phased-out department.
Chip Starnes, 42, a co-owner of Coral Springs, Florida-based Specialty Medical Supplies, said local officials had visited the 10-year-old plant on the capital's outskirts and coerced him into signing agreements Saturday to meet the workers' demands even though he sought to make clear that the remaining 100 workers weren't being laid off.
The workers were expecting wire transfers by Tuesday, he said, adding that about 80 of them had been blocking every exit around the clock and depriving him of sleep by shining bright lights and banging on windows of his office. He declined to clarify the amount, saying he wanted to keep it confidential.
"I feel like a trapped animal," Starnes told The Associated Press on Monday from his first-floor office window, while holding onto the window's bars. "I think it's inhumane what is going on right now. I have been in this area for 10 years and created a lot of jobs and I would never have thought in my wildest imagination something like this would happen."
Workers inside the compound, a pair of two-story buildings behind gates and hedges in the Huairou district of the northeastern Beijing suburbs, repeatedly declined requests for comment, saying they did not want to talk to foreign media.
It is not rare in China for managers to be held by workers demanding back pay or other benefits, often from their Chinese owners, though occasionally also involving foreign bosses.
The labor action reflects growing uneasiness among workers about their jobs amid China's slowing economic growth and the sense that growing labor costs make the country less attractive for some foreign-owned factories. The account about local officials coercing Starnes to meet workers' demands ? if true ? reflects how officials typically consider stifling unrest to be a priority.
Huairou district and Qiaozi township governments declined to comment.
A local police spokesman said police were at the scene to maintain order. Four uniformed police and about a dozen other men who declined to identify themselves were standing across the road from the plant.
"As far as I know, there was a labor dispute between the workers and the company management and the dispute is being solved," said spokesman Zhao Lu of the Huairou Public Security Bureau. " I am not sure about the details of the solution, but I can guarantee the personal safety of the manager."
Representatives from the U.S. Embassy stood outside the gate much of the day, and eventually were let in. U.S. Embassy spokesman Nolan Barkhouse said the two sides were on the verge of an agreement and that Starnes would have access to his attorneys. It was unclear what agreement might be reached, and subsequent attempts to contact Starnes were not immediately successful.
Starnes said the company had gradually been winding down its plastics division, planning to move it to Mumbai, India. He arrived in Beijing last Tuesday to lay off the last 30 people. Some had been working there for up to nine years, so their compensation packages were "pretty nice," he said.
Some of the workers in the other divisions got wind of this, and, coupled with rumors that the whole plant was moving to India, started demanding similar severance packages on Friday.
Christian Murck, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said he wasn't familiar with Starnes' case, but that such hostage-taking was "not a major problem" for the foreign business community.
"It happened more often say 15 years ago than today, but it still happens from time to time," he said. "It rarely leads to personal harm to the managers involved, but there are cases when it has in years past."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-factory-boss-held-hostage-workers-beijing-074855847.html
Dexter Season 7 Ryder Cup 2012 Johnny Lewis yom kippur yom kippur avengers soa
Bing's making a play for schools with a new ad-free version of search. And in addition to wiping the ads, Bing for Schools will also boast enhanced privacy protection, explicit content filtering by default, and other features to "promote digital literacy." Not a bad idea!
     |
Spike Albrecht NCAA Championship Game michigan basketball ncaa final four Evil Dead halle berry kurt cobain
Rusty the missing red panda (National Zoo's Twitter feed)
A red panda named Rusty has pulled an Edward Snowden and gone missing. No word on whether he's bound for Ecuador.
Rusty was last seen in his exhibit at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. And then?abracadabra!?Rusty vanished.
The zoo posted this alert to its Twitter feed on Monday morning:
In a series of Twitter updates, the zoo wrote that zookeepers have scoured trees but have not been able to find him. "Red pandas are wild animals, & will bite if cornered or scared," the zoo warned. "If you do see Rusty, don?t try to approach him. Stay where you can safely keep an eye on him & alert the Zoo (202.633.4888) immediately."
The World Wildlife Fund lists the population of the red panda as fewer than 10,000.
The parallels between Rusty and NSA whistle-blower Snowden are too obvious to ignore. Both are being sought by authorities, and both are memes just waiting to happen. Snowden's disappearing act already has led to a slew of online memes. Should Rusty draw the attention of Secretary of State John Kerry, we're sure the memes will lead to, well, pandemonium.
Several months ago, a different red panda showed off what the species is capable of when it practiced its pullups in front of a crowd in Fuzhou, China.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/rusty-red-panda-goes-missing-national-zoo-165736563.html
Golden Globes 2013 Sandy Hook conspiracy Stuart Scott Holly Rowe Chief Keef FRANK ZAMBONI Tiffany Six
A politician apologized this week for saying no one had died because of the meltdown, as Japan continues to assess the impact of the nuclear disaster.
The steel structure for the use of the spent fuel removal from the cooling pool is seen at the Unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant at Okuma in Fukushima prefecture, Japan, June 12.
Noboru Hashimto/AP
EnlargeMore than two years after the triple meltdown at Japan?s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant all but brought the country to a halt following a massive earthquake and tsunami, the disaster's long-term effects on health are still unknown.
Skip to next paragraph' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
Sanae Takaichi, the policy chief of the Liberal Democratic Party, let loose a media firestorm during a speech calling for the restart of nuclear reactors after saying that no one had died as a direct result of the Fukushima accident.
Highlighting the sensitive nature of the issue, that claim was challenged by politicians, including those from the affected area. They noted local government records showing that at least 1,000 people have died from other causes related to the accident, including suicides and health problems triggered by the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents.
Ms. Takaichi later apologized, and said she had meant that no one had died from radiation spewed from the plant in the days after it was crippled by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But her remarks came as residents, experts, and campaigners continue to assess the impact the nuclear disaster has had and will have on health.
In a recent draft report, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) said it expected to see no noticeable rise in cancer rates, adding that the swift evacuation of people living in a 20-kilometer (12-mile) radius of the plant had sharply reduced radiation exposure.
The dose levels were "so low that we don't expect to see any increase in cancer in the future in the population," Wolfgang Weiss, a senior member of UNSCEAR, told reporters.
The committee's prognosis was slightly more upbeat than that offered in February by the World Health Organization, which said residents in the worst affected areas faced a slightly higher risk of developing certain cancers.
The WHO added that girls exposed as infants in the most contaminated areas faced a 70 percent higher risk of developing thyroid cancer over their lifetime. This could mean, it said, that about 1.25 out of every 100 girls could develop thyroid cancer, as opposed to the natural rate of about 0.75 percent.
"Due to the low baseline rates of thyroid cancer, even a large relative increase represents a small absolute increase in risks," the WHO said.
Dr. Weiss suggested the UNSCEAR recent report was more accurate because it took into account a full year's worth of data, rather than the WHO study's three months' worth. "[The WHO] didn't have the full picture. We didn't have the full picture either but we have more than one year in addition," he said. "The results are very straightforward ... the evacuation of many, many thousands of people resulted in a reduction of the dose that they would have received if they had stayed in the evacuation zone by a factor of 10."
Weiss said parallels between Fukushima and Chernobyl, where, according to UNSCEAR, more than 6,000 children and adolescents developed thyroid cancer, many after drinking milk contaminated with radioactive iodine, were misguided. "The doses through the thyroid in Japan are much, much lower," he said.
While international studies bear out official Japanese reassurances about the health impact of Fukushima, some scientists accuse the UN of using faulty methodology.
Alexey Yablokov, author of ?Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,? says UNSCEAR's claim that there would be no observable increase in cancer rates was "absolutely unacceptable."
The UN bodies' calculations, he says, had been made using flawed estimates of average radiation doses among Fukushima residents. "The average dose estimates don't reflect the real dose of radiation [received by Fukushima residents]," he said during a recent visit to Tokyo.
"How did they estimate the average? It's impossible, because on the first day of the accident the level of radiation was thousands of times higher,? says Dr. Yablokov. ?How do you calculate how many minutes people spent inside and outside their houses at that time, or how much air they breathed? It's absolutely ridiculous."
Earlier this month, a study of more than 170,000 Fukushima Prefecture residents aged 18 or under revealed 12 confirmed cases of thyroid cancer, up from three in February. Medical officials in the prefecture said, however, there was no evidence the new cases were linked to the Fukushima meltdown.
Cham E. Dallas, clinical professor of emergency medicine at Georgia Regents University, agrees. "There is no evidence whatsoever that would support that these cases of thyroid cancer, appearing within only a year of two of the accident, are related to radiation exposure from the Fukushima accident," he says.
"The radioiodine exposure levels at Fukushima were only a tiny, tiny fraction of those at Chernobyl, which were very significant. Therefore, there just wasn't enough exposure at Fukushima to get thyroid cancers, and no other cancers can be expected, based on the Chernobyl experience."
Other leading radiation experts have similarly dismissed any link between thyroid cancer cases and Fukushima.
"[They are] very unlikely to be related to radiation from Fukushima. Most likely it is a case of ascertainment bias ... look for something and you will find it," says Robert Peter Gale, executive director of clinical research at Celgene Corp.
odd lamar d antoni fashion star andrew bird lizzie borden lizzie borden
British National Archives
A "discoid shape" is circled in a picture taken at Stonehenge and submitted to the British Ministry of Defense in 2009. The ministry said trying to identify the speck would be an "inappropriate use of defence resources."
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Britain's Ministry of Defense finished up its release of almost 60 years' worth of UFO sighting reports on Friday with a bang: a 4,300-page cache of documents that describe strange sights over Stonehenge and Parliament, and lay out the reason why the ministry shut down its UFO desk three and a half years ago.
Thanks in part to the proliferation of camera phones, the number of UFO reports in the U.K. doubled in 2008, to 208 reports for the year, said David Clarke, a UFO historian who reviewed the latest files in a YouTube video. Then, in 2009, the pace of sightings tripled, to a running total of 643 reports by November of that year.
"That really did put a strain on the resources that the MoD had committed to this subject, and really led up to their decision to finally pull the plug on Britain's X-Files, simply because they just didn't have the resources to investigate these sightings, or to look at them in any detail," Clarke said. "So they just tended to be filed away."
That was basically what happened to the Stonehenge sighting: In January 2009, the ministry received several photographs that showed a speck in the sky over the millennia-old monument in Wiltshire. "I didn't see anything in the sky at the time, because I was focusing upon the stones," the witness wrote in an archived email. "Upon uploading them to my computer, though, I spotted the discoid shapes in the background. ... I'm sure you get this kind of thing every day! However, I'm very fond of my UFOs so needed to share them!"
The ministry wrote back, saying that it doesn't try to identify the source of UFO sightings "unless there is evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom." Trying to explain every sighting would be an "inappropriate" use of defense resources, the ministry said. A similar reply was sent to a witness who reported seeing "a craft that had green, red and white lights" hovering over the Houses of Parliament in February 2008.
UFO historian David Clarke discusses highlights from Britain's final batch of X-Files.
Clarke said many of the mobile-phone snapshots sent in between late 2007 and late 2009, the period covered by Friday's document release, were of such poor quality that it was hard to tell what was going on. The "vast majority" of cases turned out to have down-to-earth explanations, he said. Here's a sampling of the highlights:
British National Archives
A schoolgirl's letter includes a drawing of an alien in a flying saucer.
"We have now come to the end of this program of release for the UFO files, and it is often said about UFOs that 'the truth is out there,'" Clarke said in the video, which was recorded amid the ministry's filing cabinets. "In my opinion, the truth is actually in here, in these files."
The latest batch of files, as well as previously released X-Files, can be downloaded via the British National Archives website.
More of Britain's X-Files:
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Medal Count Sam Mikulak London 2012 diving Tim Berners-Lee Olympics 2012 Schedule Kenneth Branagh Lupe Ontiveros
By Barbara Liston
ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - The judge in the George Zimmerman trial has ruled that two voice identification experts who suggested that unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin screamed for help before he was shot and killed by Zimmerman will not be allowed to testify at the trial.
The ruling by Judge Debra Nelson was released on Saturday. It was the last major hurdle before opening statements in the high-profile trial begin on Monday in Seminole County courthouse in Sanford, Florida.
Prosecutors had sought to call audio experts to testify about a 911 emergency call in which screams for help can be heard in the background during an altercation between Zimmerman and Martin before the shooting.
In her 12-page order, Nelson said the decision does not prevent either side from playing the 911 tape and presenting witnesses familiar with Zimmerman's and Martin's voices from stating their opinions.
Prosecutors say Zimmerman followed and confronted Martin despite a police dispatcher telling him not to pursue the 17-year-old. Zimmerman, 29, has said the two fought and that he shot Martin because he feared for his life.
An all-female jury will decide whether Zimmerman is guilty of second-degree murder, a charge that carries a potential life sentence. Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty.
Two state experts, in what they qualify as tentative or probable findings because of the poor quality of the recording, have said that the chilling screams heard in the background came from Martin.
The screams could be pivotal evidence and help identify who was the aggressor on the night of the February 2012 killing. Zimmerman's family and supporters claim the voice was his, while Martin's parents insist the voice belonged to their son.
Last year, an FBI expert said a voice analysis of the call was inconclusive.
Lawyers for Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer, sought to block the testimony on grounds that the methods used by the state's voice recognition experts were based on questionable science.
Audio experts who testified for the defense in a lengthy pre-trial hearing argued that voice recognition techniques cannot identify an individual from screams made under extreme duress.
On Friday, the judge also dismissed a defense motion to bar certain words and phrases from the prosecution's opening statement.
She ruled prosecutors could allege that Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, "profiled" Martin but ordered them not to use the term "racial profiling."
(Reporting by Barbara Liston; Writing by Kevin Gray; Editing by Eric Beech)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/judge-blocks-audio-expert-testimony-trayvon-martin-case-153333340.html
Robbie Rogers nascar indy 500 adam levine Blue Is the Warmest Color johnny cash smash
