Posts Tagged ‘Washington’
Written by admin on 23 January 2010
Washington, Jan 23 – Two men caught while trying to buy missiles and hundreds of AK-47 automatics rifles for the now routed Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were jailed for 14 to 26 years by a US court.
Sathajhan Sarachandran and Nadarasa Yogarasa were sentenced to 26 and 14 years in prison respectively for attempting to purchase $1 million worth of high-powered weaponry for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The sentences were imposed Friday by Chief US District Judge Raymond J. Dearie.
In January 2009, Sarachandran pleaded guilty to providing, conspiring to provide and attempting to provide material support to the LTTE and conspiring and attempting to acquire guided surface-to-air missiles and missile launchers for the group.
Yogarasa pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to the LTTE and conspiring to do so.
The US Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York said Aug 19, 2006 that Sarachandran, Yogarasa and two co-defendants were arrested on Long Island after engaging in negotiations with an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent.
The men wanted to purchase and export 20 SA-18 heat-seeking missiles, ten missile launchers, 500 AK-47s and other military equipment for the LTTE.
The defendants were acting at the direction of the LTTE leadership in Sri Lanka, including Pottu Amman, the LTTE’s chief of intelligence and procurement who was close to LTTE chief Velupillai Prabakharan.
Both Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman were killed in a Sri Lankan military offensive in May last year. Both were wanted in India for the 1991 killing of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The LTTE intended to use the SA-18 missiles to shoot down Kfir aircraft used by the Sri Lankan military, the statement said.
‘The defendants attempted to use this district as a terrorist arms depot,’ said US Attorney Campbell.
‘The sentences handed down send a clear message – we will use the full force of the law to stop terrorist organisations and their supporters in their tracks.’
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Written by admin on 23 January 2010
Washington, Jan 23 – Lemurs, flying foxes and narrow-striped mongooses reached the large isolated island of Madagascar 65 million years ago by hitching rides on natural rafts blown out to sea, new research confirms.
Matthew Huber and Jason Ali, professors at Purdue and the University Hong Kong respectively, say the flowing ocean currents between Africa and Madagascar millions of years ago would have made such a trip not only possible, but fast, too.
The idea that animals rafted to the island is not new. Since at least 1915, scientists have used it as an alternative theory to the notion that the animals arrived on Madagascar via a land bridge that was later obliterated by shifting continents.
Rafting would have involved animals being washed out to sea during storms, either on trees or large vegetation mats, and floating to the mini-continent, perhaps while in a state of seasonal torpor or hibernation.
Huber and Ali’s work, based on a three-year computer simulation of ancient ocean currents, supports a 1940 paper by George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential paleontologists and evolution theorists of the 20th century.
Once the migrants arrived on the world’s fourth largest island, their descendants evolved into the distinctive and sometimes bizarre forms seen today.
‘What we’ve really done is prove the physical plausibility of Simpson’s argument,’ Huber said. Anthropologists and paleontologists have good reason to be interested in Madagascar’s animals.
The island is located in the Indian Ocean roughly 300 miles east of Africa over the Mozambique Channel and is otherwise isolated from significant land masses.
Madagascar has more unique species of animals than any location except Australia, which is 13 times larger, says a Purdue release.
Its population includes 70 kinds of lemurs found nowhere else and about 90 percent of the other mammals, amphibians and reptiles are unique to its 226,656 square miles.
The findings are slated for publication in the February edition of Nature.
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Written by admin on 23 January 2010
Washington, Jan 23 – Woolly mammoths and prehistoric horses grazed on the North American plains several thousand years longer than hitherto presumed.
This is shown by samples of ancient DNA, analysed by an international team of research scientists under the leadership of Eske Willerslev, professor at Copenhagen University.
Analyses of ancient DNA once again upsets results of more common methods of dating, such as carbon 14 analysis of bone and tooth remains from extinct animals.
These methods had previously dated the extinction of mammoths and prehistoric horses in Central Asia to 13-15,000 years ago.
But with the DNA-test methods of Eske Willerslev and his colleagues, this boundary has now moved between 2,600 and 5,600 years closer to our time and has thus revised our previous opinion of when the last mammoths and prehistoric horses grazed on the North American plains.
The ancient DNA that formed the basis of this sensational result was discovered by scientists in samples of soil from the permafrost tundra surrounding the windswept town of Stevens Village on the bank of the Yukon River in Central Alaska.
‘With ancient DNA analysis, we are completely independent of skeletons, bones, teeth and other macro-fossil evidence from extinct animals,’ said Willerslev.
‘Whilst an animal leaves only a single corpse when it dies, it leaves quantities of DNA traces through urine and faeces whilst it is still alive. It is these DNA traces which we find in the soil,’ added Willerslev.
Surprisingly, scientists found that the later samples with mammoth DNA could be dated back to between 10,500 and 7,500 years ago, and are therefore between 2,600 and 5,600 years after the supposed extinction of the mammoths from mainland Alaska.
Thus, the scientists found proof that mammoths had walked the earth several thousand years longer than previously believed, says a Copenhagen University release.
The report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Written by admin on 23 January 2010
Washington, Jan 23 – Ancient Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, showed hardening of arteries, suggesting that heart attacks and stroke afflicted the ancients too.
‘Atherosclerosis, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socio-economic status living,’ says Gregory Thomas, clinical professor of cardiology at the University of California-Irvine (UCI).
‘The findings suggest that we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand the disease,’ said Thomas, principal study co-investigator.
The nameplate of the Pharaoh Merenptah (1213-1203 BC) in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities reads that, when he died at 60 years, he was afflicted with atherosclerosis, arthritis, and dental decay.
Intrigued, Thomas and a team of US and Egyptian cardiologists, joined by experts in Egyptology and preservation, selected 20 mummies at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities for scanning on a Siemens 6 slice CT scanner during February.
The mummies underwent whole body scanning with special attention to the cardiovascular system, said an UCI release.
The researchers found that nine of the 16 mummies who had identifiable arteries or hearts left in their bodies after the mummification process had calcification either clearly seen in the wall of the artery or in the path were the artery should have been. Some mummies had calcification in up to 6 different arteries.
Using skeletal analysis, the Egyptology and preservationist team was able to estimate the age at death for all the mummies and the names and occupations in the majority.
Of the mummies who had died when they were older than 45, seven of eight had calcification and thus atherosclerosis while only two of eight dying at an earlier age had calcification.
Atherosclerosis did not spare women; vascular calcifications were observed in both male and female mummies, said an UCI release.
The most ancient Egyptian afflicted with atherosclerosis was Lady Rai, who lived to an estimated age of 30 to 40 years around 1530 BC and had been the nursemaid to Queen Ahmose Nefertiti.
To put this in context, Lady Rai lived about 300 years prior to the time of Moses and 200 prior to King Tutankhamun (Tut).
These findings appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
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Written by admin on 23 January 2010
Washington, Jan 23 – Hollywood’s famous film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) has received buyout bids from several potential suitors, including India’s Reliance ADA Group (ADAG), according to the Wall Street Journal.
Bids ranged between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, but the offers aren’t close to covering the $3.7 billion that is owed to lenders, the leading US financial daily said Friday citing people with knowledge of the situation.
MGM has now begun to explore how it could stage a streamlined ‘prepackaged’ bankruptcy as part of the auction, it said.
In all, MGM received interest from more than 10 suitors. Besides Reliance-ADAG, they included Time Warner Inc., Lions Gate Entertainment, Summit Entertainment, Liberty Media Corp and News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal.
Also interested were private investment firms Elliott Management and Access Industries, the investment arm of Russian-born industrialist Len Blavatnik.
The studio is owned by a group, including private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and TPG Inc. and media companies Sony Corp. and Comcast Corp, which acquired the studio in a $5 billion deal that closed in 2005.
Under almost any sale scenario, MGM will need approval from all its lenders, a threshold that could prove difficult to achieve, the Journal said. The studio’s lending group, led by J.P. Morgan Chase and Co, includes some 140 investors, many of them hedge funds.
The Journal cited a person close to the negotiations as saying the studio remains operational with several films in the pipeline, including ‘Hot Tub Time Machine,’ which hits theatres in March and ‘Zookeeper,’ currently in post-production.
MGM, which owns a 4,000-title movie library including the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises, has begun evaluating the bids and could start providing more information to serious contenders in the near future, it said citing people familiar with the matter.
The studio is struggling after taking on debt to pay for its 2005 leveraged buyout and a sharp slowdown in the market for DVDs with little hope of a rebound.
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Written by admin on 23 January 2010
Washington, Jan 23 – Concerned about the emergence of terrorists in new areas as they come under pressure in the Afghan-Pakistan border region that is ‘potentially their headquarters’, the US is seeking international cooperation.
‘These terrorist elements are always looking to adapt, given that they’re under pressure in the area that is theirs potentially – you would refer to as their headquarters in the Afghan-Pakistan border region,’ National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer told reporters Friday.
‘I think that the more pressure we put on them there, the more they will look elsewhere to try and establish themselves,’ he said when asked about the Obama administration’s agenda to combat al Qaeda.
‘That is why we believe it is very important that we cooperate with countries all around the globe … to prevent their ability to establish themselves in those countries.’
‘There is no doubt, as you have seen in this first year in office, that President (Barack) Obama understands fully his solemn responsibility to the American people to defend the homeland, to defend American interests,’ Hammer said.
‘As part of that effort, he believes that international cooperation is critical as we move forward in eliminating the threats of al Qaeda, of al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula, wherever it might surface,’ he said.
Hammer pointed to a stepping up in an effort in Afghanistan with the deployment of additional troops and working with the Afghan government to confront al Qaeda and it’s extremist allies in that region.
‘I think what you have seen in Pakistan as well in the past year is a deepening of that partnership,’ he said noting Defence Secretary Robert Gates was in Pakistan this week.
Gates had talked ‘to the Pakistani government about those issues, in terms of how to go after extremists that threaten Pakistan as well as the United States,’ Hammer said. ‘You’ve (also) seen actions taken in conjunction with the government of Yemen.’
‘Of course, you see that it is important for the United States, working with all these other countries, to go aggressively after those that want to do us harm… Do not only the United States harm, but of course the countries where these entities, these terrorists operate,’ the spokesman said.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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