Endeavour's Final Flight Ends...[ 2935 ]

Image of the Endeavour's Final Flight Ends

The space shuttle Endeavour, atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA, lands at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2012 in Los Angeles where it will be placed on public display at the California Science Center. Today's flight marks the final scheduled ferry flight of the Space Shuttle Program.
Photo Credit: (NASA/Matt Hedges)
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UPDATE 4-Space shuttle Endeavour home in Los Angeles after final flight

By Dana Feldman and Eric Kelsey
LOS ANGELES, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The space shuttle Endeavour touched down in Los Angeles on Friday on the back of a jumbo jet, greeted by cheering crowds as it ended a celebratory final flight en route to its retirement home at a Southern California science museum.
The 75-ton winged spaceship, ferried by a modified Boeing 747, landed at Los Angeles International Airport shortly before 1:00 p.m. after hop-scotching across the country from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and flying a victory lap over California.
Hundreds of office workers stood atop downtown skyscrapers, cheering as the shuttle banked low around the city as it arrived from its last stopover at Edwards Air Force Base, about 100 miles (160 km) north of the city in the Mojave desert.
"Let me be the first to say, welcome to Los Angeles, Endeavour," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said during a ceremony on the tarmac.
The shuttle's arrival brought two major freeways leading to the Los Angeles airport to a standstill as drivers got out of their cars to watch the spacecraft make its final approach.
Tens of thousands more spectators, armed with photo and video cameras, had jammed into Griffith Park and Observatory and the surrounding area to catch a glimpse of Endeavour as it soared over the landmark Hollywood sign.
"It's the end of an era," said John Norman, 45, a technical manager from Los Angeles, who visited Kennedy Space Center in Florida to see Endeavour's final launch. "It's just one of those boyhood dreams."
Applause and cheers rolled through the hills when the orbiter and its escort roared past three times, each pass closer than the one before.
In San Francisco, people crowded the city's waterfront to catch a glimpse of the shuttle as it flew over the bay.
"There's a lot of nostalgia," said Anthony Falzone, a 40-year-old lawyer. "When I was a kid, Apollo was long gone, and this was the space program, this was my experience with manned spaceflight."
LAST FERRY FLIGHT
Endeavour's flight from Edwards to Los Angeles marked the shuttle's last ferry flight and the final airborne journey for any of NASA's three surviving shuttles.
NASA retired Endeavour and the rest of its shuttle fleet last year after completing the U.S. portion of the $100 billion International Space Station, a permanently staffed research complex orbiting 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
The arrival at Edwards was a homecoming of sorts for the California-made shuttle, built as a replacement for Challenger, which was lost in a 1986 accident that killed seven astronauts.
Endeavour went on to fly 25 missions, including 12 to help build and outfit the space station, and logged nearly 123 million miles (198 million km) in flight during 4,671 orbits.
"(Endeavour) was my first ride to space and it was in 2008. It was very special being a rookie with her and I look forward to seeing her when she's finally settled into her new home," former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman said.
"Though I do have a bone to pick with her. She had a few malfunctions and the alarms went off twice. But at the end of the day I'm here, she kept me safe. I forgive her," he said.
Endeavour is the second of NASA's three surviving shuttles to be sent to a museum. The oldest one surviving, Discovery, is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center outside Washington.
Endeavour will next undergo preparations to be moved through city streets to the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles, where it will be put on display starting Oct. 30.
To make way for the mammoth orbiter along its 12-mile (19-km) route, crews are cutting down nearly 400 trees, raising overhead utility wires and temporarily removing hundreds of utility poles, street lights and traffic signals. The center has agreed to plant 1,000 new trees to replace those scheduled for removal.

Cooking his dead wife...[ 2934 ]

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'I ended up cooking her,' chef said of his dead wife

By Larry Altman

Los Angeles News Group

Posted:   09/19/2012 08:36:20 AM PDT

Updated:   09/19/2012 11:21:50 AM PDT

A Southern California chef accused of killing his wife, whose body has never been found, told detectives that he slowly cooked his her for four days in a 55-gallon drum, boiling her body in water and discarding her remains in his restaurant's grease pit, according to a taped confession played Tuesday in court.

David Viens, 49, said he hid the skull and jawbone in his mother's attic, but a detective said he could not find it.
Viens revealed the grisly details of how he disposed of his Dawn Viens' body when he summoned detectives to his hospital room at County-USC Medical Center on March 15, 2011, three weeks after he jumped from a Rancho Palos Verdes cliff in a suicide attempt as detectives closed in.
Jurors read a transcript as Viens' recorded statement was played at his murder trial in Superior Court in downtown Los Angeles. Viens, sitting in his wheelchair, appeared to stare straight ahead.
"I manipulated her so the face was - the face is down, and I took some - some things - like weights that we use, and I put them on the top of her body, and I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days," Viens said.
"You cooked Dawn's body for four days?" sheriff's homicide Sgt. Richard Garcia asked.
"I cooked her four days," he said. "I let her cool. I strained it out."
Viens is charged with killing his wife, who was last seen Oct. 18, 2009.

Viens' confession revealed details about the
final hours of Dawn Viens' life. 

Viens said he had just worked 100 hours in his first week at his new restaurant, the Thyme Contemporary Cafe in Lomita, between Torrance and San Pedro in Los Angeles County. He went to bed tired on Oct. 17, 2009.
His wife, he said, had been using cocaine and drinking and he did not want anything to do with it. He went to bed.
When he awakened Oct. 18, 2009, he found her watching football, eating pizza and drinking beer.
Viens said he checked the restaurant's cash receipts and found "a lot of money" was missing. He double-checked his math at his mother's house and returned home. That night, he and Dawn ate at California Pizza Kitchen, and he went out drinking with a friend. Dawn called him, upset.
When he got home, he took an Ambien and moved a bureau in front of a door so his wife could not enter the room. But she was able to get in anyway, he said.
"So, I'm laying there and the next thing I know, she's all over me and she's got the light in my face, calling me all kinds of mean names and stuff," he said. "And I keep telling her the same thing, `Just leave me alone. I just need to sleep. I just need to sleep. Just let me sleep."'
Viens told detectives he got up, grabbed his wife by both hands and forced her onto the living room floor.
"I wrap her hands up real quick," Viens said. "I wrap her feet up real quick, and I take a piece of clear duct tape, wrapping tape, and I put that over her mouth. And that was it. I said, 'Good night."'
Viens said he awakened four hours later. Dawn was dead. "I just freaked," he said. "I go, 'Oh my God.' And I go rushing out there and she's gone."
"I obviously can't bring her back to life," Viens told detectives. "And ... but what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? And that's when I came up with the idea of cleaning the grease traps and commingling in the excess protein in those units. If you ever really looked at that, you would see where we mix up real good."
Viens was not asked where the boiling took place, but it was implied it was at the restaurant where the grease pit was located. Restaurants use the pit to collect cooking grease and oil, which is later sucked away by a disposal company.
Viens said he poured seven or eight pounds of grease from the drum into his grease trap using a trash bag.
Viens told detectives he took his wife's skull and jaw in one piece and hid it in the attic of his mother's Torrance home.
"The whole skull and jaw came out in perfectly one piece," he said. "That's the only thing I didn't want to get rid of in case I wanted to leave it somewhere."
The rest of the remains were placed in trash bags and buried in debris in the trash bin behind his restaurant, Viens said.
"That's the God's honest truth," he said.
In the earlier confession played for jurors, a seriously injured Viens told detectives on March 1, 2011, that he killed his wife by duct taping her mouth, hands and feet, and awakened to find her dead. In that statement, he said he put her body in a trash bag and threw her in a trash container behind his restaurant.
Sheriff's Sgt. Richard Garcia interviewed Viens while coroner's officials and detectives were digging at the restaurant.
In that confession, Viens said Dawn Viens wanted cocaine that day, and the experience of "doing coke together" wasn't enjoyable.
"For some reason I just got violent," Viens said. "Seemed like it had to deal with her stealing money."
Garcia told Viens that investigators suspected Dawn Viens was buried in the recently renovated restaurant, but Viens told him that wasn't true.
During cross-examination Viens' attorney, Fred McCurry, Garcia admitted that without the confessions, investigators had recovered no evidence to find Dawn Viens or actually know how she died.
"Outside of Mr. Viens' statements, you have no idea how Mrs. Viens died?" McCurry asked.
"He was the only one there," Garcia responded.
Added Garcia: "David Viens disposed of the remains in such a way that we can't recover anything."
The defense is expected to begin its case on Wednesday. It's unclear if David Viens will testify.

France would close its embassies ..[ 2933 ]

France to Shut Embassies, Schools Amid Cartoon Row

• EUROPE NEWS
• September 19, 2012, 9:06 a.m. ET

By INTI LANDAURO

PARIS—France's Foreign Ministry said it would close its embassies as well as French schools in 20 countries on Friday, amid fears of backlash after a French weekly magazine published a series of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
French authorities said they feared the cartoons published in satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday could cause more outrage in the Muslim world, days after a low-budget film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad sparked violent protests at U.S. and other Western embassies in several Muslim countries.
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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

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French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo's publisher, known only as Charb, speaks to journalists, on Wednesday in Paris.

Paris's decision to pre-emptively close its embassies highlights how Western governments are grappling to respond to a wave of protests fueled by events—the film in the U.S., or potentially the caricatures in France—largely out of their control.
The French government said that although freedom of speech rules applied in France, the magazine's decision to publish the cartoons was ill-timed.
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"It is dangerous, even irresponsible, when we know the general climate, to pour oil on fire," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said at a news conference in Paris on Wednesday.
French authorities didn't disclose the list of countries where they would close embassies. But government officials said they had decided to close buildings on Friday because it is the main day of prayer for Muslims, suggesting the order would apply mainly to Muslim countries. A spokesman at the Foreign Ministry said ambassadors would have the option to keep their embassies closed beyond Friday for security reasons.
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French interests overseas have so far been spared by the recent spate of protests in Muslim countries. The protests began last week, when a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked, resulting in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Demonstrations have since erupted elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia, including Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan. 
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In Paris, about 150 protesters were arrested on Saturday during what police described as an unauthorized rally near the U.S. embassy.
Charlie Hebdo defended its decision to publish the prophet cartoons.
"If we start to wonder whether we have the right to draw Muhammad or not, or if it is dangerous to do it, we will have to start to wonder whether we can draw Muslims or human beings in the paper," the magazine's editor in chief, known only as Charb, told French radio RTL. "Eventually, we won't be drawing anything and a bunch of extremists in the world and in France will have won."
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The magazine headquarters in Paris were put under heightened police protection, police said.
Charlie Hebdo's offices were struck by arson last year after the paper published a special issue with Muslim cartoons called "Sharia Hebdo."

The surface of Mercury..[ 2932 ]

Mercury probe points to different origin for 1st planet

By Matt Smith, CNN

September 18, 2012 -- Updated 2250 GMT (0650 HKT)

High levels of magnesium and sulfur on the surface of Mercury, suggest its makeup is far different from other planets.

(CNN) -- X-ray data from NASA's MESSENGER probe points to high levels of magnesium and sulfur on the surface of the planet Mercury, suggesting its makeup is far different from that of other planets, scientists say.
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The unmanned orbiter has been beaming back data from the first planet for a year and a half. Readings from its X-ray spectrometer point to a planet whose northern volcanic plains formed through upwellings of rocks more exotic than those often found on the Earth, the Moon or Mars, said Shoshana Weider, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

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"Before this MESSENGER mission, a lot of people assumed it was very like the Moon -- it's dark, it's grey," Weider said. But while the Moon's surface formed when light materials floated to the top of an ocean of molten rock, the low level of calcium on Mercury indicates that didn't happen there.

"This gives us clues to the kind of precursor materials that accreted to form Mercury, in an extremely oxygen-poor environment," Weider said.

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A short history of the Space Shuttle Endeavor

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The concentration of sulfur on the surface is about 10 times that seen on Earth, she said. And while Mercury's iron core "makes up a huge amount of the planet," very little is found at the surface.

The northern region of volcanic plains differs significantly from the surrounding portion of Mercury, where the surface -- as dated by the number of craters -- is about a billion years older, Weider said.

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The results were published in the latest issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Geophysical Union. Weider and her co-authors studied 205 different readings from the spectrometer to produce their results.

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MESSENGER -- an acronym for the Mercury Surface Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging mission -- has been orbiting Mercury since March 2011. It's only the second spacecraft to reach the planet and the first to circle it.

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It's about 5% the size of Earth and revolves around the sun every 88 days. It rotates very slowly -- once every 58 Earth days -- and the surface temperature on the day side can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit (425 C), according to NASA.

Obama: 'no excuse' for attacks..[ 2931 ]

Obama: Islam stands against violence, so 'no excuse' for attacks

US leader: "for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom, and dignity, and hope that our flag represents."

Kristin DeasySeptember 15, 2012 10:00

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US President Barack Obama and State Secretary Hillary Clinton return to their seats after speaking during the transfer of remains ceremony marking the return to the US of the remains of the four Americans killed in an attack this week in Benghazi, Libya, at the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on September 14, 2012. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

US President Barack Obama used his weekly White House address today in continued efforts to distance the Washington from the anti-Islam film that has sparked mounting anti-American sentiment around the globe. 
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The US leader condemned the Tuesday attack against the US embassy in Libya that killed the US ambassador and three others, vowing that "those who attack our people will find no escape from justice."
"We will not waver in their pursuit. And we will never allow anyone to shake the resolve of the United States of America," he said.

More from GlobalPost: Anti-American unrest creates a '1979 moment' for Obama

Describing religious freedom as a fundamental American value, Obama said "all faiths" condemn the taking of innocent life and while the US is quick to "reject the denigration of any religion, including Islam," he said "there is never any justification for violence."
The remarks echoed those of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who on Friday referred to the California-made footage that first prompted protests in Libya on Tuesday as an the "awful internet video that we [in the US governmet] had nothing to do with," according to CNN. 
“Let us never forget that for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom, and dignity, and hope that our flag represents,” Obama said in his address today, comments that came a day after angry protesters burned US flags in anti-American demonstrations around the globe. Follow GlobalPost's live coverage of the unrest here.
The unrest has emerged as a unexpected challenge for Obama as he campaigns for reelection, with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney earlier accusing Obama of having "sympathize[d] with those who waged the attacks." 
-The president responded by saying Romney "seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later," reported CNN.
Watch Obama's full remarks on the Libya attacks and anti-American unrest here: 
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120915/obama-islam-stands-against-violence-s