Sunday, September 30, 2012

KENYA: Child killed in grenade attack on Kenyan church

A nine-year-old boy was killed and three other children wounded when a hand grenade was thrown into a Sunday school session in a church in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, police and medical staff said.

Kenya has suffered a series of grenade attacks since it sent troops across the border into Somalia last October in pursuit of Islamist al Shabaab militants who it blamed for kidnapping its security personnel and Western tourists.

The attack on the church came days after Kenyan troops launched a surprise offensive on the southern Somali port of Kismayu, the last stronghold of the al Shabaab, forcing the rebels to flee.

Police said attackers threw the grenade into the Sunday school service in St. Polycarp's church on Nairobi's Juja Road.

The grenade exploded, spraying the children with shrapnel and fatally injuring the boy.
"We suspect this blast might have been carried out by sympathisers of al Shabaab," said deputy police spokesman Charles Owino.

"These are the kicks of a dying horse since, of late, Kenyan police have arrested several suspects in connection with grenades," he added.

Masked assailants launched simultaneous gun and grenade raids on two churches in the northern town of Garissa in July, killing at least 17 people.

(REUTERS)

Source: http://www.france24.com/en/20120930-kenya-nairobi-grenade-blast-church-child-killed-wounded-retaliation-al-shabaab-unrest-somalia?ns_campaign=editorial&ns_source=RSS_public&ns_mchannel=RSS&ns_fee=0&ns_linkname=20120930_kenya_nairobi_grenade_blast_chu

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Trial of Pope Benedict's former butler to start on Saturday

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict's former butler, Paolo Gabriele, goes on trial on Saturday in one of the most embarrassing episodes in recent Vatican history.

The trial of the 46-year-old man who served the pope his meals and helped him dress is due to start at 9:30 a.m. (4.30 p.m. EDT) in the Vatican's little-used tribunal, a small room with rich paneled wood and a papal emblem on its ceiling.

His arrest on May 23 caused an international furor after police found confidential documents in his apartment inside the Vatican, a dramatic twist that threw the global media spotlight on an institution battling to defend its reputation from allegations of graft.

A three-judge panel will decide the fate of Gabriele, whom the pope used to call "Paoletto" (little Paul) and who is now described in Vatican documents as "the defendant".

Gabriele stands accused of stealing the pontiff's personal papers and leaking them to the media in what he says was an attempt to clean up corruption at the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.

According to an indictment last August, Gabriele told investigators he had acted because he saw "evil and corruption everywhere in the Church" and wanted to help root it out "because the pope was not sufficiently informed".

The documents pointed to a power struggle at the Church's highest levels.

Gabriele, who said he saw himself as a whistle-blowing "agent of the Holy Spirit", is widely expected to be convicted on charges of aggravated theft because he has confessed.

The trial procedures will be based on a 19th century Italian penal code and could result in a prison sentence of up to four years for Gabriele and one year for Claudio Sciarpelletti, a computer expert charged with aiding and abetting him.

CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS

It is not clear how long the trial might last.

Gabriele, a father of three who lived a simple but comfortable life in the city-state, told investigators after his arrest in May that he believed a shock "could be a healthy thing to bring the Church back on the right track".

His arrest capped nearly five months of intrigue and suspense after a string of documents and private letters found their way into the Italian media.

The most notorious of the letters were written to the pope by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, currently the Vatican's ambassador to Washington, who was deputy governor of Vatican City at the time.

In one, Vigano complains that when he took office in 2009, he discovered corruption, nepotism and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts to outside companies at inflated prices.

Vigano later wrote to the pope about a smear campaign against him by other Vatican officials who were upset that he had taken drastic steps to clean up the purchasing procedures.

Despite begging not to be moved away from the Vatican, Vigano was later transferred to Washington by Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

Since the papal state has no prison, Gabriele would serve time in an Italian jail, though the pope is widely expected to pardon him.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/trial-pope-benedicts-former-butler-start-saturday-230100646.html

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Friday, September 14, 2012

Hard coating extends the life of new ultrahigh-density storage device

ScienceDaily (Sep. 12, 2012) ? Probe storage devices read and write data by making nanoscale marks on a surface through physical contact. The technology may one day extend the data density limits of conventional magnetic and optical storage, but current probes have limited lifespans due to mechanical wear.

A research team, led by Intel Corp., has now developed a long-lasting ultrahigh-density probe storage device by coating the tips of the probes with a thin metal film.

The team's device features an array of 5,000 ultrasharp probes that is integrated with on-chip electronic circuits. The probes write tiny bits of memory as small as a few nanometers by sending short electrical pulses to a ferroelectric film, a material that can be given a permanent electric polarization by applying an electric field. High-speed data access requires that the probes slide quickly and frequently across the film. To prevent tip wear, which can seriously degrade the write-read resolution of the device, the researchers deposited a thin metal film of hafnium diboride (HfB2) on the probe tips.

As the researchers describe in the American Institute of Physics' journal Applied Physics Letters, the metal film reduces wear and enables the probe tips to retain their write-read resolution at high speeds for distances exceeding 8 kilometers -- greatly increasing the device's lifetime. The data densities of the device exceed 1 Terabit per square inch. The work is an important step toward the commercialization of a probe-based storage technology with capacities that exceed those of hard disk and solid-state drives.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Institute of Physics (AIP), via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Noureddine Tayebi, Angel Yanguas-Gil, Navneet Kumar, Yuegang Zhang, John R. Abelson, Yoshio Nishi, Qing Ma, Valluri R. Rao. Hard HfB2 tip-coatings for ultrahigh density probe-based storage. Applied Physics Letters, 2012; 101 (9): 091909 DOI: 10.1063/1.4748983

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/physics/~3/nXJVNBdChHY/120912093210.htm

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