MEXICO CITY (AP) ? Enrique Pena Nieto has taken the oath of office as Mexico's new president, bringing the old ruling party back to power after a 12-year hiatus.
His Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled for 71 years with a mix of populist handouts, graft and rigged elections before being voted out and replaced by the conservative National Action Party in 2000.
Pena Nieto has promised to govern democratically with transparency.
His swearing in was marred Saturday by protesters outside the Congress lobbing homemade bombs and firecrackers and shouting: "Mexico without the PRI!"
Before the swearing in, leftist congressmen inside the chambers demanded to know what was going on in the crowds and urged police to use restraint. Congressman Rafael Huerta of the Labor Party urged the new government to protect the people.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian air force jets bombarded rebel targets on Friday close to the Damascus airport road and a regional airline said foreign carriers had halted flights to the capital.
Activists said security forces clashed with rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad around Aqraba and Babilla districts on the southeastern outskirts of Damascus which lead to the international airport.
Internet connections and most telephone lines were down for a second day, the worst communications outage in a 20-month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands forced to flee the country.
The mostly Sunni Muslim rebels who are battling Assad, from Syria's Alawite minority linked to Shi'ite Islam, have been making gains around Syria by overrunning military bases and have been ramping up attacks on Damascus, his seat of power.
A spokesman for a rebel Military Council in Damascus, Musaab Abu Qitada, told Reuters on Thursday they were also trying to "liberate" the airport to stop planes they said were delivering arms to the government.
A resident of central Damascus said he saw black smoke rising from the east and the south of the city on Friday morning and could hear the constant boom of shelling. State television said Assad's forces were fighting rebels in those areas.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the conflict had reached "new and appalling heights of brutality and violence".
The government had intensified its campaigns to root out opposition strongholds and increased shelling and air strikes, Ban told the U.N. General Assembly. "Opposition elements also have stepped up their attacks. I am horrified and saddened and condemn the seemingly daily massacres of civilians," he added.
An aviation source in neighboring Jordan said two Syrian Air flights crossed Jordanian air space heading for the Syrian capital on Friday evening and that Damascus airport was open, although international airlines were staying away.
The head of the national airline Syria Air said its services were operating according to schedule, state television reported.
EgyptAir and Emirates have suspended flights to Damascus in response to the recent violence and there was no sign that Air Arabia and flydubai had flown scheduled trips on Friday.
"Airlines are not operating to Damascus today," said a Dubai-based airline official.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition monitoring group, said jets were bombarding targets in rural areas around Aqraba and Babilla.
The Observatory's director, Rami Abdelrahman, said the airport road was open, but there was minimal traffic.
"A DECISIVE PHASE"
U.S. and European officials said rebels were making gains in Syria, gradually eroding Assad's power, but said the fighting had not yet shifted completely in their favour.
A Damascus-based diplomat said he believed the escalation in fighting around the capital was part of a government offensive which aimed to seal off the state-controlled centre of the city from rebel-held rural areas to the south and east.
Activists say Assad's forces have also been shelling the Daraya district to the southwest of the city, trying to prevent rebels from cementing their hold of an area which could give them a presence in a continuous arc from the northeast to southwest of the capital's outer districts.
"I don't know whether the shelling has succeeded in pushing back the FSA (rebels) - experience shows that they return very quickly anyway," the diplomat said. "We seem to be entering a decisive phase of the Damascus offensive."
At least 12 Lebanese gunmen were killed in a Syrian army ambush in the central Syrian province of Homs, a security source said on Friday, highlighting how Lebanon's neighbours are being dragged into the war.
The sources said the Lebanese men were killed near the town of Tel Kalakh and were from majority Sunni northern areas of Lebanon.
WHO CUT THE INTERNET?
Syria's Internet shut down on Thursday, a move which activists blamed on authorities but which authorities variously attributed to a "terrorist" attack or a technical fault.
Global hacking network Anonymous accused Syria's government of blocking communications to silence critics and said it would respond by attacking Syrian government websites around the world.
"As we discovered in Egypt, where the dictator (Hosni) Mubarak did something similar - this is not damage that can be easily or quickly repaired," Anonymous said, referring to an Internet outage during the 2011 uprising in Egypt.
French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said the communications cut was of a matter of "extreme concern".
"It is another demonstration of what the Damascus regime is doing to hold its people hostage. We call on the Damascus regime to reestablish communications without delay," he said.
CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said on its blog saboteurs would have had to simultaneously cut three undersea cables into the Mediterranean city of Tartous and also an overland cable through Turkey in order to cut off the entire country's Internet access.
"That is unlikely to have happened," it said.
(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Mariam Karouny, Praveen Menon in Dubai and Jim Finkle in Boston)
Rockmelt's recently released?iPad app only offered signup through Facebook and Twitter, leading 50% of users not to sign in at all. So today it followed Pinterest and Spotify by?moving away from social-only signup and offering email as a login option."Users don't want to add?social?up front and give access to their information", Rockmelt's Eric Vishria tells me. "People want a little dating before marriage."
By Army News Service on Friday, November 30th, 2012
Scientists at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory are pioneering data teleportation ? for the real world.
When the USS Enterprise, from the hit television and movie series ?Star Trek,? beamed individuals to and from the ship, the ship?s transporters were moving matter.
While fictional technology may stir the imagination, science fiction is more of an inspiration than reality. It often provides a spark of scientific inspiration that can lead to discoveries once considered unimaginable.
Today, Army scientists hope to send information from one location to another without the data being transmitted through the intervening space.
To reach this goal, Ronald E. Meyers leads a project that includes fellow physicist Patricia J. Lee and their teams that are collaborating with the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland at College Park. The groups have a 27-kilometer fiber optic connection between their laboratories.
?We use photons that go through the fiber in order to entangle the atoms at two different locations,? Meyers said.
A photon is an elementary particle and a basic building block of the universe. The team sends photons from one end of the fiber to the other. Once photons are entangled, they mysteriously respond to each other.
?The idea of entanglement is that when one photon is manipulated, the other photon will respond at a distance through a process that Einstein highlighted,? Meyers said. ?What we?re going to do is to entangle the distant atoms using these photons. Once they?re entangled, then you do not need the fiber in between. You manipulate atoms here and atoms at another location will respond instantly with nothing in between.?
This effect is known as quantum teleportation using atoms and photons.
?You can communicate between these locations without information appearing to go through the intervening space,? Meyers said. ?It?s mind-boggling.?
For the U.S. Army, a secure quantum communications network is a technology investment worth making. Meyers said physicists around the world are pursuing quantum teleportation research.
?One day we will have communication over worldwide distances with quantum repeaters as mediators at nodes in between,? Meyers said. ?We?ll be able to teleport information globally. What we?ll have is tamper-resistant security.?
Cyber-security is a major concern for military and civilian sectors.
?This is important,? he said. ?The greatest potential that a quantum communications network holds for the Army is secure communications.?
As quantum computing takes hold in the coming decades, the potential for hacking exponentially increases.
?Quantum computers will be able to easily decrypt communications that are currently secure,? Meyers said. ?We?re talking decryption in seconds instead of years. That?s one reason why it?s vital for us to explore quantum encryption.?
Quantum research is building momentum, according to Lee.
?There are a lot of people worldwide who work on this type of research, and we are just a part of the community trying to make the next step a reality,? Lee said. ?Our contribution is trying to set this up in a real-life. It?s very exciting.?
News reports of quantum research advances are growing.
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics went to physicist David Wineland for his quantum research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
?We would hope to have the quantum atomic memory fully going within the next year,? Meyers said. ?There?s a lot of progress on it.?
The team is also striving to develop quantum repeaters.
?We can perform photon teleportation sooner, but having teleportation with quantum memory adding the atoms is really the key to massive changes in the U.S. communications system,? Meyers said. ?We think that teleportation with atoms and photons is an important goal for the United States and we want to get it out of the laboratory and show that it?s possible over long distances.?
Consider a future battlefield with a Soldier, an unmanned aerial vehicle, a command and control element and access to a satellite.
?If you put entangled atoms at each of these locations and they?re moving around, then you can teleport data between the Soldier and the satellite ? you can teleport to UAVs ? you can teleport to command and control headquarters,? Meyers said. ?We think it?s going to be the future for military communications. Now the strategic impact ? it?s possible to get information out of your location without others getting it. This is a whole new technology will one day be common.?
Meyers and Lee agree that quantum data teleportation will become a dominant technology.
?There are several important applications for quantum information,? Lee said. ?For our project here, one of our goals is to build a quantum sensor. Cold atoms can be used to sense acceleration and rotation and they can make very sensitive inertial navigation systems to guide the Soldier or vehicles. That?s a really important application if we can actually develop that technology.
?It?s also going to be very important for Soldiers on the battlefield to have secure communication and computational power that will offer capabilities exceeding anything that we have access to right now,? Lee said.
Like a perpetual jigsaw puzzle, Lee said their research continues to evolve.
?There will be many ways to use this tool. A lot of them we don?t even know about ? they haven?t been thought of,? she said. ?New things will come up and that?s how research, technology and science evolve.?
Meyers said the Army continues to fund quantum research in academia and other research institutions.
?The fundamental physics is there,? Meyers said. ?We have to learn enough of the physics and some of the engineering to implement it and to demonstrate that it can be done. I think this is an evolutionary process that will cause a huge shift in communications.
?Remember, we put a man on the moon with very primitive computers and we developed an atomic bomb without a computer,? Meyers said. ?The fact is we?re going to have these very powerful quantum computers with a lot of intelligence. They?ll be able to work over long distances without being intercepted. It?s going to change the world.?
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Whether you have recently been hurt in a car or truck accident, burned or injured by chemical exposure, hurt on a construction site, or simply frustrated by an insurance company that has refused to pay benefits that are owed to you, a personal injury lawyer can help! The aim of this article is to help you understand how to select the best one.
The personal injury lawyer you choose should be more than just ?competent.? Your legal team should be ?remarkable?. Your personal injury lawyer should provide you with resources to deal with all aspects of your case, answer questions, prepare intensely for trial, try your case (if need be) and always be prepared to fight on your behalf.
A truly remarkable firm will work hard to exceed your expectations. They will pull out all stops to get you compensation to cover damages you have suffered, which may include but are not limited to, medical and surgical costs, lost work time and wages, anxiety, pain and suffering, car mileage and many out of pocket costs that you may face. A respected firm will follow up with clients promptly. Look for a lawyer who has a reputation for being tough but fair, smart and compassionate. A great law firm will make sure the client feels comfortable, and at the same time, they need to send a message, loud and clear, to insurance companies and liable parties that they mean business. The right firm will not be scared to throw their credentials around for the benefit of the client.
Accident and injury victims often find themselves in a state of a shock after a traumatic event and do not act swiftly enough. When a terrible event disrupts everything in your world, it?s only human nature to ?wait a bit? to get your head together before moving forward, but this approach may not be the best idea. Here?s why: Evidence from the accident or injury may get lost or even be deliberately destroyed in the hours and days after the accident. Witness recollections may grow foggier and more inaccurate as time passes after the incident. Even your own recollection of the event will give way to hazier, less accurate memories. And if you wait too long after the accident or injury, you may lose your ability to make a claim altogether, even if you have compelling evidence on your side, due to the ?statute of limitations?.
Each personal injury case is unique and needs to be looked at by an experienced injury lawyer. Choose a car accident lawyer that will give you the time and attention you deserve and need to win your case. Be sure they listen astutely to what you want and need and help you feel calm, comfortable, and taken care of throughout your case. Most injury law firms takes cases on a contingency basis. This means that until they win a trial verdict or reach a settlement, you do not owe anything.
FILE - In this Aug. 2, 2011 photo, a life-sized replica of Yoda, George Lucas? master of the Force, is shown at Lucasfilm Ltd. production studios in San Francisco. Lucas is moving forward with plans to build a park complete with a statue of Yoda and Indiana Jones in his Marin County hometown of San Anselmo, Calif. Lucas has applied for a permit to demolish the existing buildings at the site. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
FILE - In this Aug. 2, 2011 photo, a life-sized replica of Yoda, George Lucas? master of the Force, is shown at Lucasfilm Ltd. production studios in San Francisco. Lucas is moving forward with plans to build a park complete with a statue of Yoda and Indiana Jones in his Marin County hometown of San Anselmo, Calif. Lucas has applied for a permit to demolish the existing buildings at the site. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
SAN ANSELMO, Calif. (AP) ? Star Wars fans might soon have another Yoda statue in the San Francisco Bay area to visit.
Filmmaker George Lucas plans to help build a small park in Marin County that would feature a bronze sculpture of the popular Star Wars character, along with one of Indiana Jones.
Lucas' estate manager, Sarita Patel, said the Yoda statue would be similar to one in San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood. That one ? a full-sized replica of the Jedi sage ? lies atop a fountain outside an arts center where Lucas moved most of his operations in 2005. It has become a big draw for fans.
Lucas applied for a permit Wednesday to demolish a building on the site of the planned park in San Anselmo, the town where he lives, the Marin Independent Journal reported (http://bit.ly/YsKH3u)
He announced over the summer that he planned to donate the land where the building sits to the San Anselmo Chamber of Commerce, and donate the statues for the proposed park. Lucas has since also agreed to pay for the building's demolition.
The chamber hopes to raise $150,000 to $200,000 to create the park.
San Anselmo Town Manager Debra Stutsman said the demolition application, which includes a historical analysis of the building, will be reviewed by the town's Planning Commission and Historical Commission.
The building, as well as a fresco inside, date back to 1945.
Patel said Lucas plans to donate the fresco to the Spanish consulate in San Francisco.
Lucas built his film operation in Marin County and had planned to put up a palatial new digital media production studio there. But he abandoned those plans earlier this year in the face of opposition from neighbors and what he said were delays in the approval process.
Luxury fashion house Prada has released a set of stunning Saffiano leather board games.
Family or friend game nights can now be chic with Prada?s new collection of fun and classic games. Prada made its own version of chess, backgammon and nine men?s morris. These gorgeously designed miniature game sets are made of Saffiano leather and come with matching leather cases and metal playing pieces. The cases are branded with a signature silver Prada symbol on the front and closing band. These luxury board games are made of the best materials and, with a name like Prada on them, do not come cheap. Each set comes in around $3,000.
When Christmas rolls around, if you are in the mood to splurge and can?t resist, you can pick up any of the Prada Saffiano leather board games online or at select stores.
