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Teenage girl sailor 'in trouble' in Indian Ocean

Vendredi 2 juillet 2010 à 10:21

 
A US teenage girl sailing solo around the world is thought to be in distress in a remote area of the Indian Ocean.
Californian sailor Abby Sunderland, 16, was last heard at about 1300 GMT on Thursday before emergency beacons were activated, her brother said.
She is believed to be more than 3,220km (2,000 miles) from the cheap puma shoes coasts of both Africa and Australia.
Search vessels are now heading towards her, but officials say they will not arrive for another two days.
An aircraft was scheduled to depart from Perth, on Australia's western coast, on a four-hour flight to Ms Sunderland's location, Australian Maritime Safety Authority spokeswoman Carly Lusk said.
Huge waves
Ms Sunderland's brother - who also circumnavigated the globe solo, aged 17 - paid tribute to her skills but voiced concern at her lack of radio contact.
"The distress beacons mean she's in some kind of trouble. She's a very accomplished sailor but she's in the Indian Ocean right now and it's a really dangerous place," Zac Sunderland said.
But he added: "She's got all the skills she needs to take care of what she has to take care of, she has all the equipment as well."
In a post on the teenager's blog, her family wrote that she had battled 60-knot winds and 20-to-25ft (6-7.6m) seas before going missing.
Zac Sunderland completed his own solo voyage around the
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globe in 2009 at the age of 17.
His sister set sail from California in January, attempting to beat her brother's record and become the youngest person to complete the journey.
She had to give up the goal of setting the record after stopping in April at Cape Town, South Africa, for repairs to her boat, named Wild Eyes.
But she later decided to continue the voyage.

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Four severed heads found in Guatemala City

Vendredi 2 juillet 2010 à 10:18

 
Four severed heads and two beheaded bodies have been found in the capital of Guatemala.
The bodies were left in the open around Guatemala City, including in front of Congress and at a shopping centre.
Messages to the interior minister and the director of prisons were pinned to them, leading police to blame drug gangs for the killings.
So far only two bodies have been found and none of the victims have been identified.
Interior Minister Carlos Menocal said the first head was found in cheap puma shoes front of Congress, the second at a shopping centre, another in front of a fire station and the fourth in a residential neighbourhood.
Police spokesman Donald Gonzalez said the killings were linked to drugs, and came after a string of arrests of alleged high-profile drug traffickers.
"They [the killers] left them in strategic places where there's a lot of foot traffic so everyone could see them," Mr Gonzalez said.
He said he believed the killings were in revenge for new restrictions imposed in the country's prison system.
One of the messages read "no more impunity".
Earlier this year Guatemala introduced stricter prison rules, including more frequent transfers to different jails, to prevent convicts from continuing to run criminal enterprises from behind bars.
Revenge killings?
Interior Minister Carlos Menocal read out one of the messages, which had been written on cardboard and propped up against the remains.
"This is happening because of the mistreatment and the injustices in the puma shoes country's jails," the message read.
"If you don't do anything about these mistreatments, what happens from now on will be the fault of the government and the prison system, who are the ones abusing their authority."
The remains were left in public places leaving passers-by shocked
The killings come three days after the resignation of the director of a United Nations-backed commission to combat links between organised crime and the Guatemalan state.
Carlos Castresana stepped down saying that the Guatemalan government had not kept its promise to reform the justice system.
He also urged President Alvaro Colom to sack the recently-appointed prosecutor general, who he accused of having links with criminal gangs.
Mr Gonzalez, the police spokesman, said criminal gangs were taking advantage of a vacuum left by Mr Castresana's resignation "to wreak havoc".
Decapitation is used by Mexican drug gangs to spread fear among their rivals and the security forces but has not yet widely spread from Mexico.
But one of Mexico's most powerful and violent
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drug cartels, Los Zetas, is believed to be active in Guatemala, and a number of violent shoot-outs in 2008 were attributed to them.
Guatemala is seen as an ideal transit point for cocaine smuggled from Colombia through Guatemala to Mexico and on to the US.

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Physicists burst bubble mystery

Vendredi 2 juillet 2010 à 10:12

 
Page last updated at 08:01 GMT, Thursday, 10 June 2010 09:01 UK
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News
The high-speed footage shows that a bursting bubble will create a perfect ring of "daughter bubbles"
With the help of high speed video, scientists have discovered that there is far more to bursting bubbles than meets the eye.
Under the right conditions, a bursting bubble on a liquid surface does not simply vanish, but creates a perfect ring of tiny "daughter bubbles".
This occurs as the ruptured bubble retracts into the cheap puma shoes liquid, forming a doughnut shape of trapped air.
washing up
The scientists reported their discovery in the journal Nature.
In the paper, the team described a "bubble-bursting cascade".
"When one of these daughter bubbles ruptures, a ring of even smaller bubbles forms," the researchers wrote.
Eventually, the daughter bubbles are sufficiently tiny that they rupture to form sharp "jets" that propel small aerosol droplets into the atmosphere.
James Bird from Harvard University, who led the research, explained that his main interest was in the fundamental physics of how bubbles behave. But his discovery could eventually help to fine-tune many manufacturing processes.
"Where small bubbles are detrimental, such as in glass manufacturing, our results provide insight into how the parameters might be tuned to reduce the daughter bubbles," Dr Bird explained.
'Pop science'
He said that he happened upon the popping phenomenon accidentally while "playing around in the lab late one night".
"My colleague Laurent and I were trying to see if bubbles behaved like drops when puma shoes they contacted a surface," he told BBC News.
"Our intended goal failed completely, but instead we were staring at popping hemispherical soap bubbles [and] we noticed this ring of daughter bubbles that neither of us could explain."
High speed footage captured the bursting "cascade"
The scientists pointed that the finding could even have implications for health research - aerosol droplets from bursting bubbles have been implicated in the transmission of diseases in swimming pools and hot tubs.
They are also thought to be involved in the exchange of material and heat between the ocean and the atmosphere, so these results could help shed light on those processes.

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