cryptogon.com

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At least 13 Palestinians were killed, and dozens were also wounded, as they marked the Nakba, or catastrophe — the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the war in which hundreds of thousands lost their homes through expulsion and flight.

It’s been marked every year but this was the first time that Palestinian refugees and their supporters, inspired by the recent protests around the Arab world, tried to physically breach Israel’s military border from all sides.

“These protests aim to undermine the very existence of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “It is important that we see the reality and know who and what we are dealing with.”

In a move Israeli officials fear could be a new strategy of opposing the Israeli occupation, thousands of Palestinians marched from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Surprised Israeli soldiers scrambled to push them back, in several cases opening fire with live ammunition.

Arab affairs analyst Ehud Ya’ari said he believed there would be more demonstrations on Israel’s borders and they would become a growing challenge to the Israeli army.

“This is something that has been talked about for a long time,” he told Israel Television. “The fact that several dozen Palestinians managed to cross the border from Syria into Israel means that they succeeded. They will keep trying with larger numbers.”

The move came after high levels of radioactive cesium were detected in sludge and other waste material at sewage plants in Fukushima Prefecture — home to the disaster-crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

On May 12, the government announced that highly radioactive sludge will be tentatively kept at sewage plants in the prefecture, while sludge with relatively low-level radiation could be recycled into cement and other material.

While highly-radioactive sludge will be treated in the same way as radioactive waste for the time being, no plans for the final disposal of such sludge were presented. It will also be difficult to promote the recycling of sludge with high-level radiation contamination. Since relevant laws and regulations do not cover highly-radioactive sludge at sewage plants, the government faces serious challenges in handling the issue.

According to the announcement, sludge with radioactivity levels of over 100,000 becquerels per kilogram should preferably be incinerated and melted in Fukushima Prefecture before being kept at sewage plants. Ash generated through sludge incineration should be contained in metal barrels to prevent it from scattering. Sludge with radioactivity levels of under 100,000 becquerels per kilogram can be temporarily kept at sewage plants and controlled disposal sites, with radioactivity monitoring required.

Until recently Andritsaina was not much of a prospect for urban Greeks. “But that,” said Yiannis Dikiakos, “was before Athens turned into the explosive cauldron that it has become. We woke up one day and thought we’ve had enough. We want to live the real Greece and we want to live it somewhere else.”

Piling his possessions into a Land Rover and trailer, the businessman made the 170-mile journey to Andritsaina last month. As he drove past villages full of derelict buildings and empty homes, along roads that wound their way around rivers and ravines, he did not look back.

“Athens has failed its young people. It has nothing to offer them any more. Our politicians are idiots … they have disappointed us greatly,” said Dikiakos, who will soon be joined by 10 friends who have also decided to escape the capital.

Take one part Blackwater, and another part Able Danger, the military data-mining op that claimed to have identified members of al-Qaida living in the United States before 9/11. Put ‘em together, and you’ve got a new company called Jellyfish.

Jellyfish is about corporate-information dominance. It swears it’s leaving all the spy-world baggage behind. No guns, no governments digging through private records of its citizens.

“Our organization is not going to be controversial,” pledges Keith Mahoney, the Jellyfish CEO, a former Navy officer and senior executive with Blackwater’s intelligence arm, Total Intelligence Solutions. Try not to make a joke about corporate mercenaries.

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Adriana Paracchino and Elijah Thimsen, published May 8, 2011 in the journal Nature Materials, demonstrates that this problem can be overcome by covering the semiconductor with a thin film of atoms using the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique.

Under the supervision of Professor Michael Grätzel in EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces, the two scientists achieved this remarkable feat by combining techniques used at the industrial scale, and then applying them to the problem of producing hydrogen. With their process, cuprous oxide can be simply and effectively protected from contact with water, making it possible to use it as a semiconductor. The advantages are numerous: cuprous oxide is abundantly available and inexpensive; the protective layer is completely impermeable, regardless of the roughness of the surface; and the process can easily be scaled up for industrial fabrication.

A promising technique

Jindal said Friday that the Army Corps of Engineers had received permission to open the Morganza spillway for the first time in 38 years to relieve pressure on river levees. The corps says it will open the spillway when the river flow reaches a certain point, but an exact timing wasn’t known. However, that flow rate is expected to happen Saturday.

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If Morganza is opened, water would flow 20 miles south into the Atchafalaya River. From there it would roll on to the Gulf of Mexico, flooding swamps and croplands.

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The river’s rise may also force the closing of the river to shipping, from Baton Rouge to the mouth of the Mississippi, as early as next week. That would cause grain barges from the heartland to stack up along with other commodities.

If the portion is closed, the U.S. economy could lose hundreds of millions of dollars a day. In 2008, a 100-mile stretch of the river was closed for six days after a tugboat collided with a tanker, spilling about 500,000 gallons of fuel. The Port of New Orleans estimated the shutdown cost the economy up to $275 million a day.

With crop prices soaring, farmers along the lower Mississippi River had been expecting a big year, maybe even a huge one. Now, many are facing ruin, with floodwaters swallowing up corn, cotton, rice and soybean fields.

And even more farmland will be drowned when the spillway is opened. Unlocking the spillway would inundate Louisiana Cajun country with as much as 25 feet of water but would ease the pressure on levees downstream, averting a potentially bigger disaster in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Trouble has already found the fields in far northeastern Louisiana, where Tap Parker and about 50 other farmers filled and stacked massive sandbags along an old levee to no avail. The Mississippi flowed over the top Thursday, and nearly 19 square miles of soybeans and corn, known in the industry as “green gold,” was lost.

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While the Mississippi River flooding has not had any immediate impact on prices in the supermarket, the long-term effects are still unknown. A full damage assessment can’t be made until the water has receded in many places.

Some of the estimates have been dire, though.

He was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and turned over to Manhattan police, according to a spokesman from the agency. Plainclothes officers boarded the flight at 4.45pm, moments before take-off, and took the 62-year-old out of the first-class cabin and into custody. He had been due to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday.

“It was 10 minutes before its scheduled departure,” said John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman.

Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal alleged attack on a woman employee at the Sofitel New York on West 44th Street in the heart of the city’s theatre district.

The 32-year-old woman told police that she entered Strauss-Kahn’s room at about 1pm on Saturday and he emerged from the bedroom naked, threw her down and tried to sexually assault her, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She broke free and escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened who called the police.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.