An invisible heat-beam weapon developed by the military is set for use in a U.S. jail.
Law enforcement officials recently revealed plans to use the nonlethal device at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Pitchess Detention Center, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. The weapon, which shoots an invisible beam of energy, would be used in the prisoners' dormitory to stop an assault or break up a fight.
Called the Assault Intervention Device, it uses millimeter waves to heat the top layer of skin, causing an intense burning sensation that forces the person being targeted to move away immediately.
The weapon being installed in the jail is a smaller version of a technology originally developed by the military for use on the battlefield. The military's weapon, called the Active Denial System, can be put on a Humvee or truck, and researchers are also working on a aircraft-mounted version.
Raytheon, which makes the Assault Intervention Device, markets several versions of the weapon on its website.
The smaller version of the weapon being installed in the jail creates pain on a single part of the body, rather than all-over heat like the military version. A local news video showing the device being tested features a laughing test subject clutching a single part of the body where he has been hit, and then moving out of the way.
The device's use at the Pitchess Detention Center is part of a six-month evaluation being conducted by the National Institute of Justice to look at possible widespread use of the technology in jails. If that happens, then it will place law enforcement agencies well ahead of the military.
Despite spending years and tens of millions of dollars to develop the nonlethal technology, the military has not yet deployed the Active Denial System, in large part because of concerns of a public relations backlash against using a "microwave weapon." Ironically, a former Air Force secretary even suggested that the weapon should first be used in the United States before being deployed abroad. Evil has a new name.
Police have stormed a hijacked tourist bus and killed the gunman who took it over Monday in Philippine capital of Manila
"He is dead. He was forced to retreat to the front of the vehicle when the SWAT (special weapons and tactics police) team attacked from the back," said assault leader Superintendent Nelson Yabut, quoted by AFP.
It's not yet known how many hostages have survived the ordeal. Some captives were seen leaving the bus alive.
The hijacker, reportedly a sacked police inspector, had seized the tourist bus Monday morning in an apparent effort to be reinstated to his job.
The police moved in on a bus after multiple gunshots were heard in Manila's historic tourist district, where the hijacker is holding several tourists and a local driver hostage.
The developments came hours after the hijacker threatened to kill the hostages if police approached.
"I can see a lot of SWAT (special weapons and tactics police) coming in. I know they will kill me. They should all leave because anytime I will do the same here," the hijacker told the Radio Mindanao Network.
The hijacker, armed with a rifle, seized the bus with about 20 tourists from Hong Kong and three Filipinos onboard near a park in Manilas tourist district.
He released nine of the hostages before the bus was stormed by police.
A local radio station had reported earlier that the hijacker was negotiating with police, demanding to be reinstated and have his name cleared.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/24/2010 00:00 ||
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Even though some of the hostages were killed, this is still the best long-term approach to negotiating with hijackers (or pirates.)
#2
Err...no. There are all sorts of ways to talk disgruntled workers out of violence. It's called "hostage negotiation". The Philippine police did an amazingly poor job of this. A police assault is a last choice when all other options have been exhausted. Let's try this, Glenmore, why don't you get on that bus and then cheer on the security services to assault, when there are tons of options on the table for an outcome where nobody gets killed?
#4
Unfortunately for Manila + RP, local MAOISTS + BEIJING + CHIN NETTERS are dissatisfied at how the Manila PD handled the situation. STATE GOVTS-DIPLOMACY ASIDE, IIUC VARIOUS CHIN BLOGGERS ARE TAKING THE TRAGIC OUTCOME AS PROOF NOT ONLY OF GENERAL PHIL GOVT. INCOMPETENCE BUT MORE IMPOR AS EVIDENCIA OF DEEP OR UNDERLYING LOCAL HATRED OF ALL THINGS CHINESE.
Edward Kean, primary writer of the "Howdy Doody Show" and who is credited with creating the exclamation, "Kowabunga!," has died at the age of 85.
Kean also penned the theme song "It's Howdy Doody Time," to which millions of American children sang along each week during the show's run on NBC from 1947 to 1960.
Kean died Aug. 13 at a nursing care facility in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township from complications of emphysema.
During World War II, he served in the US Naval Reserve as a Lieutenant junior grade. In 1958, he became a stock broker.
Bad for warrantless searches, but good for War on Terror.
Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of EPIC: "It's no surprise that goverments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vehicles with mobile body-scanning technology], but from a privacy perspective, it's one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable." Pics, video, and article at link.
He believes the type of crime and the age at which the crime was committed are the best predictors:
"But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that's a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn't predict very much." Two-page story at link.
Looks like they've hashed everything out already.
Nathan Armstrong envisions a day when drivers will be rolling up to the curb in a car powered by an electric motor and covered with a body made from hemp. Henry Ford was going to do the same thing with soy. He was even going to make the bumpers out of soy, if I remember right. Obviously, he never got around to it.
What happens to the material if the paint is scratched? What effect will road salts have on this material? Can the material catch fire? I wonder if they've got plans on how to recycle these cars.
Check out the article for some of the engineering details.
The Minneapolis city attorney's office has decided to pay seven zombies and their attorney $165,000. This is what happens after somebody eats your brain...
The payout, approved by the City Council on Friday, settles a federal lawsuit the seven filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days for dressing up like zombies in downtown Minneapolis on July 22, 2006, to protest "mindless" consumerism.
When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion Well, duh! They're zombies!
and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated "weapons of mass destruction." Aw fercryinoutloud!
However, they were never charged with any crime.
Although U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen had dismissed the zombies' lawsuit, it was resurrected Well, duh! They're zombies!
in February by a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that police lacked probable cause to arrest the seven, a decision setting the stage for a federal trial this fall....
Posted by: Mike ||
08/24/2010 05:25 ||
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Jeez, when will this stupid zombie thing stop? I thought that nothing would be worse than the Ayn Rice vampire thing. What's next, wights?
(Xinhua) — Danger of a flooding Yalu River on the border of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) still looms large as a new round of rainstorm is forecast to pelt Sunday the river basin.
The flood-control headquarters in northeast Dandong City Sunday said although the river's flow was at 8,000 cubic meters per second Sunday morning, down from a daily high of 27,000 cubic meters per second recorded on Saturday, the river course is still holding water at dangerous levels.
More than 94,000 people in Dandong, Liaoning Province, by the Chinese side of the river have been evacuated by Sunday, according to the city's flood-control headquarters.
The local weather station forecast Sunday morning that rains measuring up to 250 millimeters would hit the city in the next 24 hours, posing a severe pressure on the flood control work.
Downpours since Thursday have left four people dead and 44 townships flooded, many of which are suffering from black out and communications disruptions.
The headquarters have monitored 158 embankment breaches along the swollen river.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/24/2010 00:00 ||
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The former president is planning to leave for North Korea on Tuesday in hopes of securing the release of an American man who was put behind bars for illegally entering the communist nation, according to U.S. officials.
The country agreed to free 31-year-old Aijalon Mahli Gomes if Carter came to retrieve him. The Boston resident was teaching English in South Korea, but was sent to eight years in a hard labor camp and fined $700,000 on Jan. 25 for allegedly crossing into North Korea and for an unspecified "hostile act." Well, he's not a chick, so you know Clinton wasn't gonna go pick him up...
(Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said on Monday that she and her deputy Wayne Swan will be meeting in coming days with the three re-elected independent and a newly-elected Green party Members of Parliament, who are likely to hold balance of power in forming a minority government.
Gillard told reporters that she and Swan will publicly report on how the negotiations were proceeding.
"I do want to sensibly manage the expectations of Australians as this process takes place, it will take a period of time," Gillard told reporters at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday.
Gillard said a stable government is the priority of Labor at the moment. She refused to answer questions if she or the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has better relationship with the independent and Green MPs, but said that Labor is able to provide a stable government for the Australian people.
Meanwhile, Tony Abbott has returned to Canberra Monday morning, as he competes with Gillard to woo independents.
Saturday's general electon is set to create Australia's first hung parliament in 70 years as neither Labor nor the opposition coalition was likely to win the 76 seats needed for an outright majority in the 150-member lower house.
According to Australian Election Commission, after 78.27 percent of votes having been counted so far, Labor won 72 seats, while Liberal/National coalition had 69 seats.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/24/2010 00:00 ||
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They are now at 71/71 with the Liberals likely to win 73.
Labor has been edged out of a seat by Andrew Wilkie by the Iraq war 'whistleblower'.
I saw Wilkie on TV and he was going on about supporting whichever party was 'ethical'. When pressed on what he meant by ethical he said (and I paraphrase) anyone who agrees with me.
Fortunately, the Liberals don't need him to form a government.
Looks like the reputations of these two fine organizations are preceding them. I'm glad. Maybe rational folks on both sides of the fence are waking up.
A U.S. district judge granted a preliminary injunction Monday to stop federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that he said destroys embryos, ruling it went against the will of Congress. Red on red. I like it!
Wonder how the Bambi Admin will try to spin this to their benefit (and the Gulf states' detriment)?
The Gulf of Mexico's undersea oil plume is no more.
For nearly a month, scientists sampling the site of a deepwater plume stretching southwest from BP PLC's failed well in the Gulf have been foiled. Their sensors have gone silent. Where once a vibrant -- if diffuse -- cloud of oil stretched for miles, 3,600 feet below the surface, there is now only ocean, and what seems to be the debris of a bacterial feeding frenzy.
"For the last three weeks, we haven't been able to detect the deepwater plume at all," said Terry Hazen, a microbiologist and oil spill expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has had a clutch of researchers monitoring the Gulf since late May. So for all of August, it's been gone? Cue the conspiracy theorists....
The disappearance is backed up by government sampling data. The plume is simply gone. And Hazen knows why.
"This all fits with the fact that the bugs have degraded the oil," he said.
Despite press accounts to the contrary, Now there's a shocker! The MSM lied to us? Hooda thunk it?
the disappearance of this deepwater oil plume, whose midsummer existence was detailed last week by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is far from a shock, at least to scientists. Undersea bacteria -- the single-cell janitors of the marine world -- along with currents and diffusion likely combined to degrade or isolate the dispersed oil to undetectable levels, Hazen said.
The likely source . . . is a previously undiscovered, cold-loving microbe that surged in response to the plume, a development Hazen details in a new study to be published later this week in the journal Science. It is the first peer-reviewed report to provide direct evidence of how undersea microbes responded to hydrocarbons in the Gulf's deep waters.
"This enrichment of [cold-loving] petroleum degraders, with their rapid oil biodegradation rates, appears to be one of the major mechanisms behind the rapid disappearance of the deepwater dispersed oil plume," Hazen said.
The particular bacteria identified by Hazen are perfectly adapted for the Gulf's deep waters, which sit under high pressure and remain cold, hovering around 5 degrees Celsius, despite their near-tropical locale.
"They actually degrade oil faster at 5 degrees than they do at 20 degrees," Hazen said.
While it can be difficult to accept, if there is one disaster the Gulf is poised to handle, it is a leak of its own light crude, Hazen added. The bacteria have had millions of years to adapt to the oil, the petroleum itself is light and readily degraded and, in the plumes at least, the oil was already in low concentrations.
Hazen's study may finally raise public awareness that oil spills nearly always trigger substantial microbial hydrocarbon degradation, a fact that is too frequently ignored in initial responses, Timmis said. Future strategies to deal with oil spills must fully integrate measures to harness the microbial capacity to remove hydrocarbons, he said Pretty good article - scientific but accessible.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/24/2010 14:44 ||
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So does this imply that the environmentally safest place to drill is in very deep water? And wouldn't that be where the Obama folks have tried to outlaw future drilling? My guess is that we won't be hearing much about this from the mainstream media.
#2
Nothing to see here (as predicted). The evil BP company has it all well under control and Obama is leveraging fear to punish 25,000 conservative, Gulf Coast oil workers and countless related businesses.
#4
Yokay, I'll bite, didn't Perts on the MSM-Net repor that up to 22 miles of slowly dissipating oil plumes may be lurking near the sea floor, + that the same is still OIL-THATS-THERE-BUT-JUST-DOESN'T-LOOK-OR-FEEL-ETC.-LIKE-OIL???
#5
I'm just curious what the metabolites are from the microbes that biodegraded the oil. I betcha my gulf coast is someday gonna have one big fart that will send a plume of methane over the coastal states. One tiny spark and New Orleans goes up in flames.
#6
I predict the toxic release will occur in the winter months Tex, and that tens of thousands of migratory Snowbirds will be slain. I recommend we begin blaming Bush immediately.
Hmmmmmm...wonder how many Benjamins workin for the five-o bring?
The U.S. Department of Justice is looking for fluent Ebonics speakers to fill nine drug enforcement jobs, giving merit to a dialect that experts say is often mimicked and little understood.
John Braugh, a leading expert on African-American English, and chairman of the Linguistic Society of America's public relations committee, said having trained translators on staff with the DEA could provide an invaluable service.
Such experts, he said, would likely be used -- as with many federal linguists -- to assist with wiretaps and linguistic profiling, when a person's accent or dialect can help lead investigators to the criminal.
Though Braugh applauded the Justice Department for recognizing the relevance of Ebonics in society, he questioned whether it may be unwittingly throwing itself back into a political debate by using the term "Ebonics." Is Mrs. Cleaver is still alive?
The position to which you have applied within the US Department of Justice is open to career employees only. Your application cannot be rated at this time.
Did our "traveling press" ever report this? H/T to Lucianne.com
While President Barack Obama was "forcefully" endorsing the Ground Zero Mosque, Michelle Obama was paying homage with her presence to the Great Mosque at Granada, which overlooks what was once Islams most important outpost in Europe, the Alhambra palace in Granada.
There is no doubt about the influence of the Great Mosque of Granada overlooking Alhambra. One Spanish guidebook states that the Alhambra is to Granada what St. Peters is to Rome or St. Marks Square to Venice.
Built in 2003, the Great Mosque in Granada, like the mosque planned in the shadow of Ground Zero, was born in controversy.
Michelle Obama and her nine-year-old daughter, Sasha, visited the Alhambra Mosque at dusk on the second day of her visit to Spain, one day after Barack had celebrated his 49th birthday without his family with Chicago friends.
On inauguration day [of the mosque], a muezzin called Spanish Muslims to prayer at the first mosque to be opened in Granada since the 1492 reconquista, the culmination of a 22-year project.
"That's why no respected journalist or publication would ever dare to write such a headline about blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, and any other minority group for that matter. But Muslims, apparently, are fair game. They can be written off as the alien 'other,' and no one seems to care."
Ah, nice touch there at the end, Guardiano, mentioning "the other," and thus aligning yourself with the basic liberal smear that conservatives are just a bunch of narrow-minded paranoids who fear anybody and everybody who is "different."
But that's a topic for another day. For now, here's why Guardiano's sophistic analogy is, to use a technical term for "illogical and utterly fallacious," a crock: Blacks, Jews, Hispanics and Asians don't characteristically choose to live in countries where people who convert from the official established religion face death, often by the most brutal of methods.
Thus, substituting "Black" for "Muslim" as you did makes no sense; it's literally a non sequitur because only Muslims typically choose to live in such countries, and last time I checked, killing somebody because they refuse to follow your preferred religion is the bloody essence of religious bigotry.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/24/2010 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The Minneapolis city attorney's office has decided to pay seven zombies and their attorney $165,000. 
