Los Angeles arson ...[ 2610 ]

Official: Los Angeles arson suspect under investigation in Germany

By the CNN Wire Staff

January 4, 2012 -- Updated 1423 GMT (2223 HKT)
Video

Cars that were burned in a spree of arson fires lie in ruins on January 2, 2012 in Los Angeles, California.

Los Angeles (CNN) -- A German man due to appear in a Los Angeles court Wednesday in connection with one of the worst arson sprees in the city's history is also under investigation for arson and fraud in his home country, a prosecution official in Germany said.

Harry Burkhart, 24, was arrested in Los Angeles early Monday after a string of 52 fires -- mostly in parked cars -- since Friday. He faces an arraignment hearing Wednesday morning.

No one was hurt in the fires, but property damage costs are likely to reach $3 million, authorities said.

On Wednesday, a German official said Burkhart was also under investigation in relation to a fire in Neukirchen, near Frankfurt.

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A house owned by his family burned down in October 2011, said Annemarie Wied, the spokeswoman for the state prosecutor's office in Marburg.

"The evidence points to arson," Wied said, "because the complete inside of the house was devastated by the fire and two sources for the fire were discovered inside the building."

"No one was inside the house when the fire department was called and a claim was made with the insurance company only a day later," she added.

Wied said the investigation for arson and attempted insurance fraud was still in the early stages.

In Los Angeles, Burkhart faces one count of arson of an inhabited dwelling -- but is likely to face additional charges, said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Authorities believe Burkhart may have been motivated to set the fires because of his mother's arrest.

Police arrested his mother, 53-year-old Dorothee, during a traffic stop December 28. She is wanted in Germany on 19 counts of fraud, including an allegation that she defrauded the doctor who performed breast augmentation surgery on her in 2004.

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The other fraud charges center on rent and security deposits for apartments in Frankfurt.

The day after her arrest, the first of the fires began.

On Tuesday, Dorothee Burkhart appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge and did not appear to know that her son had been arrested.

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"What did you do to my son?" she yelled at the judge during the hearing. "My son is disappeared since yesterday. Perhaps the German Nazis know of our address."

The mother left Germany in October for California, where she lived with Burkhart in a Hollywood apartment, authorities said.

A Frankfurt court issued the international arrest warrant, said court spokesman Gunther Meilinger. The warrant is valid for the European Union and also in countries with bilateral agreements with Germany, including the United States, he said.

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Wied said authorities have not determined whether Dorothee Burkhart could be involved in the German fire.

Investigators seized press clippings about arson attacks in Germany from the Burkhart's apartment in California, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

CNN's Frederik Pleitgen, Chuck Conder, Alan Duke, Paul Vercammen, Mike Ahlers, Ashley Hayes, Lateef Mungin, and Irving Last contributed to this report.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez...[ 2609 ]

Argentine President Fernandez undergoes cancer surgery

 

Messages of support are on display outside the hospital in Pilar 

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BBC,..4 January 2012 Last updated at 13:07 GMT

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Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is undergoing an operation for thyroid cancer, with doctors saying she has a good chance of recovery.

Supporters are gathered outside the hospital where she is being treated, carrying signs wishing her well.

After the operation she will rest until 24 January, with Vice-President Amado Boudou in charge during her absence.

Ms Fernandez, 58, recently began her second term as president after a landslide election victory.

President Fernandez is being treated at the Austral University Hospital in Pilar, some 60km (40 miles) from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

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The operation was expected to last some three and a half hours.

People have been holding a vigil outside the building and other gatherings were planned, including in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and other public squares across the country.

Her office announced last week that cancer - a papillary thyroid carcinoma - was detected on 22 December during routine medical tests.

Sympathy

The cancer had not metastasised or affected her lymph nodes, official said.

Specialists say this type of thyroid cancer has a high survival rate if treated early. 

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Ms Fernandez was re-elected in October by a huge margin and remains extremely popular in Argentina.

During her first term she presided over strong economic growth and implemented a range of social policies to benefit the poor.

The sudden death of her husband Nestor Kirchner in October 2010 brought her a wave of public sympathy.

She began her second term energetically, pushing a number of controversial measures through Congress.

Ms Fernandez is the latest in a series of Latin American leaders to be diagnosed with cancer.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Paraguayan leader Fernando Lugo, and former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have all been operated on in the past year.

Lula was due to begin radiotherapy treatment on Wednesday.

Current Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was treated for early stage lymphatic cancer in 2009.

Quasicrystals...[ 2608 ]

Impossible crystals are 'from space'

 

The minerals were the first reported naturally-occurring quasicrystals
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BBC., 3 January 2012 Last updated at 14:09 GMT 

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Examples of a crystal previously thought to be impossible in nature may have come from space, a study shows.

Quasicrystals have an unusual structure - in between those of crystals and glasses.

Until two years ago, quasicrystals had only been created in the lab - then geologists found them in rocks from Russia's Koryak mountains.

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In PNAS journal, a team says the chemistry of the Russian crystals suggests they arrived in meteorites.

Quasicrystals were first described in the 1980s by Israeli researcher Daniel Schechtman, who was awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.

Schechtman's ideas were initially treated with doubt or scorn by some of his peers, who thought the structures were "impossible".

Rule breaker

Quasicrystals break some of the rules of symmetry that apply to conventional crystalline structures. They also exhibit different physical and electrical properties.

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In 2009, Luca Bindi, from the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues reported finding quasicrystals in mineral samples from the Koryak mountains in Russia's far east.

 

The "forbidden symmetry" of the quasicrystal was first spied in 1982

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The mineral - an alloy of aluminium, copper, and iron - showed that quasicrystals could form and remain stable under natural conditions. But the natural process that created the structures remained an open question.

Now, Dr Bindi, Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and others claim that tests point to an extra-terrestrial origin for the Russian minerals.

They used the technique of mass spectrometry to measure different forms - or isotopes - of the element oxygen contained in parts of the rock sample.

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The pattern of oxygen isotopes was unlike any known minerals that originated on Earth. It was instead closer to that sometimes found in a type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite.

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The samples also contained a type of silica which only forms at very high pressures. This suggests it either formed in the Earth's mantle, or was formed in a high-velocity impact, such as that which occurs when a meteorite hits the Earth's surface.

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"Our evidence indicates that quasicrystals can form naturally under astrophysical conditions and remain stable over cosmic timescales," the team writes in PNAS.

Loch Ness tilts back and forth ...[ 2607 ],

Loch Ness is giant 'spirit level'

BBC.,3 January 2012 Last updated at 17:22 GMT

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News 
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Scotland rocks: Urquhart Castle which sits on the banks of Loch Ness
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Scientists have measured the way Loch Ness tilts back and forth as the whole of Scotland bends with the passing of the tides.

It is a tiny signal seen in the way the waters at the ends of the 35km-long lake rise and fall.

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dWhen combined with the direct tug from the gravity of the Moon and Sun, the loch surface goes up and own by just 1.5mm.

The study is reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

"If you were on a boat in the middle of the loch, you certainly wouldn't notice it," said Philip Woodworth from the UK National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Liverpool, "but a tide like this has never been observed in a western European lake before."

Prof Woodworth, David Pugh and Machiel Bos say their precision measurement technique could be used in other lakes around the world to understand better how the Earth's crust deforms as a result of ocean movements - rather like a carpenter will use a spirit level to gauge how a length of wood deviates from the horizontal.

"I have described Loch Ness as the largest spirit level in the world," David Pugh, who is a visiting professor at NOC, told BBC News.

None of us can feel it, but Britain rises and falls by centimetres every 12 hours and 25 minutes as a great bulge of ocean water washes around the country.

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The pencil-shaped Loch Ness is the largest UK lake by volume, and although inland, is close enough to the North Sea to be influenced by this loading effect. 

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The team placed their sensors a few metres under the lake surface at six locations, from Fort Augustus in the far southwest to Aldourie in the far northeast. They then monitored the change in the height of the overlying water during the course of 201 days.

What the scientists saw was a clear spike in the data twice a day - the result of the gravitational pull of the Moon and Sun. But they could also tease out a second signal stemming from the way water rises and falls as a result of the tilting of the land. And, in fact, the latter effect sits on top of the first and is responsible for most of the amplitude change.

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The team says the measurement was made to an accuracy of just 0.1 mm over the loch's 35 km length.

"We had to extract the tidal signal and get rid of all the noise. This involved very high precision," explained David Pugh.

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"For example, the loch itself goes up and down every day by four centimetres just due to the pump storage scheme for hydroelectric generation, and we have to pull out a very small signal within that.

"The holy grail would be to learn from the effects of the tides something about the Earth's crust. So the more precise we can get, the more we may learn about the crust."

Iran warns U.S. over aircraft carrier ...[ 2606 ]

Iran warns U.S. over aircraft carrier

By the CNN Wire Staff

January 3, 2012 -- Updated 1750 GMT (0150 HKT)

The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis is in the Persian Gulf region.

(CNN) -- Iran warned the United States Tuesday not to return a U.S. aircraft carrier "to the Persian Gulf region."
"The Islamic Republic of Iran will not repeat its warning," said Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, commander of Iran's Army, according to the state-run news agency IRNA.
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Salehi "said the country will not adopt any irrational move but it is ready to severely react against any threat," the report added.
The commander spoke at the Port of Chabahar in southern Iran, as forces held a military parade the day after Iran ended naval drills in the region, IRNA reported.
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• Iran warns U.S. over aircraft carrier 

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