Ala. Hostage Suspect Had Court Date Scheduled

The retired Alabama trucker who shot a school bus driver and is now holding a kindergarten student in an underground bunker was scheduled to be in court Wednesday to answer for allegedly shooting at his neighbors in a dispute over a damaged speed bump.

Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, has been holed up in a 6 by 8 foot bunker 4 feet underground with a 5-year-old autistic boy named Ethan since Tuesday, when he boarded a school bus and asked for two 6 to 8 year old boys. School bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr., 66, was shot several times by Dykes, and died trying to protect the children.

Police said that they do not think that Dykes had any connection to Ethan, and that SWAT teams and police are negotiating with Dykes.

"I could tell you that negotiators continue to communicate with the suspect and that there's no reason to believe the child has been harmed," Sheriff Wally Olson said late Thursday.

Dykes' neighbor Claudia Davis told The Associated Press that he had yelled at her and fired his gun at her, her son James Davis, Jr. and her baby grandson after he claimed their truck caused damage to a speed bump in the dirt road near his property. No one was hurt, but Davis, Jr. told the AP that he believes the shooting and kidnapping are connected to the scheduled court hearing.

"I believe he thought I was going to be in court and he was going to get more charges than the menacing, which he deserved, and he had a bunch of stuff to hide and that's why he did it," he said.

Alabama Hostage Standoff: Boy, 5, Held Captive in Bunker Watch Video

Alabama 5-year-old Hostage: Negotiations Continue Watch Video

Alabama Child Hostage Situation: School Bus Driver Killed Watch Video

This was not Dykes' only run-in with people in the neighborhood, where he had come to be known as a menacing figure. Neighbor Ronda Wilbur told the AP that Dykes beat her 120-pound dog with a lead pipe when it entered the side of the dirt rode his trailer sits on. Wilbur said her dog died a week later.

Early last year, two pit bulls belonging to neighbors Mike and Patricia Smith escaped and got into his yard. Patricia Smith said that Dykes threatened to shoot her children when they went to retrieve them.

Neighbor Ronda Wilbur said that Dykes would be seen on his property at all hours of the day.

"It could be 2 o'clock in the morning, it could be midnight. He was out there either digging or moving dirt," she said.

As the underground standoff moved into its fourth day, tensions grow in this small community near Midland City, Ala., which is now enveloped by SWAT teams and police.

"That's an innocent kid. Let him go back to his parents, he's crying for his parents and his grandparents and he does not know what's going on," Midland City Mayor Virgil Skipper told ABC News. "Let this kid go."

Neighbor Jimmy Davis said that he has seen the bunker where Dykes has been known to hunker down for up to eight days.

"He's got steps made out of cinder blocks going down to it, Davis said. "It's lined with those red bricks all in it."

Police say he may have enough supplies to last him weeks.

Former FBI profiler and ABC News consultant Brad Garrett said there's a distinct reason why authorities are keeping details about Dykes under wraps.

"One of reasons they are keeping negations closed and not releasing his picture, is to try to insulate the situation, so they don't have a situation where they don't have to deal with his anger and rage," he said.

Meanwhile, children are trying to understand why this happened to their friend

"He always comes up to my house to play," 10-year-old Trisha Beaty told ABC News. "I miss him. I miss him a lot."

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First time-travel movies reveal surreal universe

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

Time travel in the real world isn't yet possible. But thanks to new physics flicks, you can now experience an alternate universe to see what it might look like.

Developed by Wolfgang Schleich and colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany, these first time-travel videos mathematically recreate the weird world of Gödel's universe. In the first clip, a camera is placed at the centre of this cylindrical universe, simulating what an Earth-like object would look like. Because light behaves differently in this space, as the sphere moves away from you, you see an image of both the front and the back. If it moves above you, it appears as a collection of slices. During its orbit, you see many versions from different time periods all at once.

The video gets even more trippy as it simulates what you would see when looking up at a ball. Because the universe is rotating, light rays move in spirals, creating circular echoes around the object. If a single ball is replaced by a stack, you see all the balls at once.

Of course the visualisation isn't complete without a taste of time travel. The last clip follows a bizarre ball as it meets a younger version of itself, then ages.

For more about the simulation, check out our article "First real time-travel movies are loopers".

If you enjoyed this post, see how to build a time machine or check out how the universe emerged from nothing.

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Staff 'live-tweet' sackings at UK retailer HMV

LONDON: Staff at collapsed British music retailer HMV hijacked the company's official Twitter account on Thursday to warn they were being sacked en masse.

The tweets were swiftly deleted but within minutes, administrators Deloitte confirmed 190 redundancies had been made across HMV's head office and distribution network as a "necessary step in restructuring the business".

On the official @HMVtweets account, the outgoing staff in the human resources (HR) department began with a strangely upbeat message reading: "We're tweeting live from HR where we're all being fired! Exciting!!"

Further messages followed: "There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand.

"Sorry we've been quiet for so long. Under contract, we've been unable to say a word, or -- more importantly -- tell the truth."

HMV management began to take note as word spread across Twitter -- @HMVtweets had more than 60,000 followers before it was hijacked -- of what was happening.

"Just overheard our Marketing Director (he's staying, folks) ask "How do I shut down Twitter?" said the next message.

It went on to insist that "under usual circumstances, we'd never dare do such a thing as this. However, when the company you dearly love is being ruined... and those hard working individuals, who wanted to make hmv great again, have mostly been fired, there seemed no other choice."

HMV was Britain's last remaining high-street music and video retailer but it called in the administrators this month after finally succumbing to heavy debts and unrelenting pressure from online rivals such as Amazon and iTunes.

Last week, US-based restructuring firm Hilco announced it had agreed to buy the retailer's considerable debt, effectively taking control of the company and its 4,350 employees.

Confirming the 190 redundancies in a statement, Deloitte joint administrator Nick Edwards said: "Although such decisions are always difficult, it is a necessary step in restructuring the business to enhance the prospects of securing its future as a going concern."

- AFP/jc

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U.S. court denies Apple request to reconsider Samsung Galaxy Nexus ban -- Reuters

Score one win for Samsung.

The Federal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., has denied Apple's request to reconsider a prior ruling that refused to impose a sales ban on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone, Reuters reported.

The two companies have been embroiled in litigation for months, each accusing the other of patent infringement. Apple won a big victory last year, but it hasn't seen as much success in getting Samsung products banned in the U.S. In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned a sales ban on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone, saying the district court in California "abused its discretion" in imposing a preliminary injunction on
Galaxy Nexus sales.

We've contacted Apple and Samsung and will update the report when we hear back.

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New Theory on How Homing Pigeons Find Home

Jane J. Lee

Homing pigeons (Columba livia) have been prized for their navigational abilities for thousands of years. They've served as messengers during war, as a means of long-distance communication, and as prized athletes in international races.

But there are places around the world that seem to confuse these birds—areas where they repeatedly vanish in the wrong direction or scatter on random headings rather than fly straight home, said Jon Hagstrum, a geophysicist who authored a study that may help researchers understand how homing pigeons navigate.

Hagstrum's paper, published online Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, proposes an intriguing theory for homing pigeon disorientation—that the birds are following ultralow frequency sounds back towards their lofts and that disruptions in their ability to "hear" home is what screws them up.

Called infrasound, these sound waves propagate at frequencies well below the range audible to people, but pigeons can pick them up, said Hagstrum, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.

"They're using sound to image the terrain [surrounding] their loft," he said. "It's like us visually recognizing our house using our eyes."

Homeward Bound?

For years, scientists have struggled to explain carrier pigeons' directional challenges in certain areas, known as release-site biases.

This "map" issue, or a pigeon's ability to tell where it is in relation to where it wants to go, is different from the bird's compass system, which tells it which direction it's headed in. (Learn about how other animals navigate.)

"We know a lot about pigeon compass systems, but what has been controversial, even to this day, has been their map [system]," said Cordula Mora, an animal behavior researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who was not involved in the study.

Until now, the two main theories say that pigeons rely either on their sense of smell to find their way home or that they follow the Earth's magnetic field lines, she said.

If something screwed up their sense of smell or their ability to follow those fields, the thinking has been, that could explain why pigeons got lost in certain areas.

But neither explanation made sense to Hagstrum, a geologist who grew interested in pigeons after attending an undergraduate lecture by Cornell biologist William Keeton. Keeton, who studied homing pigeons' navigation abilities, described some release-site biases in his pigeons and Hagstrum was hooked.

"I was just stunned and amazed and fascinated," said Hagstrum. "I understand we don't get dark matter or quantum mechanics, but bird [navigation]?"

So Hagstrum decided to look at Keeton's pigeon release data from three sites in upstate New York. At Castor Hill and Jersey Hill, the birds would repeatedly fly in the wrong direction or head off randomly when trying to return to their loft at Cornell University, even though they had no problems at other locations. At a third site near the town of Weedsport, young pigeons would head off in a different direction from older birds.

There were also certain days when the Cornell pigeons could find their way back home from these areas without any problems.

At the same time, homing pigeons from other lofts released at Castor Hill, Jersey Hill, and near Weedsport, would fly home just fine.

Sound Shadows

Hagstrum knew that homing pigeons could hear sounds as low as 0.05 hertz, low enough to pick up infrasounds that were down around 0.1 or 0.2 hertz. So he decided to map out what these low-frequency sound waves would have looked like on an average day, and on the days when the pigeons could home correctly from Jersey Hill.

He found that due to atmospheric conditions and local terrain, Jersey Hill normally sits in a sound shadow in relation to the Cornell loft. Little to none of the infrasounds from the area around the loft reached Jersey Hill except on one day when changing wind patterns and temperature inversions permitted.

That happened to match a day when the Cornell pigeons had no problem returning home.

"I could see how the topography was affecting the sound and how the weather was affecting the sound [transmission]," Hagstrum said. "It started to explain all these mysteries."

The terrain between the loft and Jersey Hill, combined with normal atmospheric conditions, bounced infrasounds up and over these areas.

Some infrasound would still reach Castor Hill, but due to nearby hills and valleys, the sound waves approached from the west and southwest, even though the Cornell loft is situated south-southwest of Castor Hill.

Records show that younger, inexperienced pigeons released at Castor Hill would sometimes fly west while older birds headed southwest, presumably following infrasounds from their loft.

Hagstrum's model found that infrasound normally arrived at the Weedsport site from the south. But one day of abnormal weather conditions, combined with a local river valley, resulted in infrasound that arrived at Weedsport from the Cornell loft from the southeast.

Multiple Maps

"What [Hagstrum] has found for those areas are a possible explanation for the [pigeon] behavior at these sites," said Bowling Green State's Mora. But she cautions against extrapolating these results to all homing pigeons.

Some of Mora's work supports the theory that homing pigeons use magnetic field lines to find their way home.

What homing pigeons are using as their map probably depends on where they're raised, she said. "In some places it may be infrasound, and in other places [a sense of smell] may be the way to go."

Hagstrum's next steps are to figure out how large an area the pigeons are listening to. He's also talking to the Navy and Air Force, who are interested in his work. "Right now we use GPS to navigate," he said. But if those satellites were compromised, "we'd be out of luck." Pigeons navigate from point to point without any problems, he said.

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Negotiations Drag Out for 5-Year-Old Hostage

An Alabama community is on edge today, praying for a 5-year-old boy being held hostage by a retired man who police say abducted him at gunpoint Tuesday afternoon.

Nearly 40 hours have slowly passed since school bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr., 66, heroically tried to prevent the kidnapping, but was shot to death by suspect Jimmy Lee Dykes, a former truck driver, police said.

Dykes boarded the bus Tuesday and said he wanted two boys, 6 to 8 years old. As the children piled to the back of the bus, Dykes, 65, allegedly shot Poland four times, then grabbed the child at random and fled, The Associated Press reported.

Worst Hostage Crises: Some of the World's Worst Situations

The primary concern in the community near Midland City, Ala., is now for the boy's safety. Dale County police have not identified the child.

Mickey Welsh/Montgomery Advertiser/AP

Alabama Child Hostage Situation: School Bus Driver Killed Watch Video

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Algeria Hostage Situation: Military Operation Mounted Watch Video

"I believe in prayer, so I just pray that we can resolve this peacefully," Dale County sheriff Wally Olson said.

The boy is being held in a bunker about 8 feet below ground, where police say Dykes likely has enough food and supplies to remain underground for weeks. Dykes has been communicating with police through a pipe extending from the bunker to the surface.

It is unclear whether he has made any demands from the bunker-style shelter on his property.

The young hostage is a child with autism. Dykes has allowed the boy to watch television, and have some medication, police said

Multiple agencies have responded to the hostage situation, Dale County Sheriff Wally Olson said. The FBI has assumed the lead in the investigation, and SWAT teams were surrounding the bunker.

"A lot of law enforcement agencies here doing everything they possibly can to get this job done," Olson said.

Former FBI lead hostage negotiator Chris Voss said that authorities must proceed with caution.

"You make contact as quickly as you can, but also as gently as you can," he said. "You don't try to be assertive; you don't try to be aggressive."

Voss said patience is important in delicate situations such as this.

"The more patient approach they take, the less likely they are to make mistakes," he said.

"They need to move slowly to get it right, to communicate properly and slowly and gently unravel this."

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Minimum booze price will rein in alcohol abuse

Binge drinking and preloading – drinking cheap shop-bought alcohol before going to a bar – are two behaviours the UK government hopes to curb by imposing a minimum price for alcohol. A 10-week consultation period for the policy, which could see a ban on alcohol being sold at less than 45 pence per unit in England and Wales, ends on 6 February. Meanwhile, Scotland is considering a minimum of 50 pence. But will the policy succeed in tackling alcohol overconsumption and its consequences?

"There's a huge amount of evidence that pricing is linked to consumption," says John Holmes at the University of Sheffield, UK, whose research into the link between alcohol pricing and public health was used by the government in framing the proposed pricing policy.

The government hopes that the impact of a minimum price will be felt mainly by those who drink more than is recommended, since they tend to drink cheaper alcohol. In the UK, the recommended limits are 21 units for a man and 14 units for a woman, per week. A unit is equivalent to 10 millilitres of pure alcohol.

The government claims that the policy could lead to a 3.3 per cent fall in consumption across all alcoholic drinks. This will in turn lead to at least 5200 fewer crimes, 24,600 fewer alcohol-related hospital admissions and over 700 fewer alcohol-related deaths per year after 10 years, it says.

Holmes and his colleagues used spending data from 9000 UK households to model how different demographics respond to price changes. The model shows that a minimum price of 35 pence per unit would lead to a significant cut in the amount that people drink. For "hazardous drinkers" – men who drink over 50 units and women who drink over 35 units a week – a 40 pence minimum price would reduce consumption by 4 per cent; 60 pence would reduce it by 16 per cent.

The team also used epidemiological evidence to link consumption with risk of harm. "The specific numbers can be debated, but most would agree that lower consumption generally leads to lower rates of harm," says Holmes. He estimates that reductions in public health costs and crime resulting from the new policy could lead to savings of about £4 billion over 10 years. However, the policy will not help people with an alcohol dependency, he says, since they are likely to buy alcohol even at higher prices.

Canadian backing

Holmes's model is backed by evidence from Canada, which has set a minimum price for alcoholic drinks in British Columbia and Saskatchewan on several occasions – most recently in 2010. Tim Stockwell at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and colleagues looked at data from both provinces over a 20-year period. On average, there was a 3.4 per cent fall in total alcohol consumption across the population for every 10 per cent increase in minimum price.

In Canada, the immediate effects of a higher minimum price included fewer acute hospital admissions and fewer deaths caused solely by alcohol, such as alcoholic gastritis. After two to four years there were also fewer cases of alcohol-related diseases.

The pricing model in Canada is not the same as that proposed for the UK. Rather than setting a minimum price per unit of alcohol, the Canadian policy sets prices for each type of alcoholic drink.

Stockwell thinks the UK's approach is preferable, since it takes the strength of the drink into account. "In my opinion, the model being proposed in the UK is perfect from the public health and safety point of view."

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Thai tycoon takes majority control of Singapore's F&N

SINGAPORE: A Thai tycoon has clinched majority control of Singapore conglomerate Fraser and Neave (F&N), making his offer to fully takeover the company unconditional.

TCC Assets, owned by Thai billionaire Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, said in a statement late Wednesday that its stake in F&N stands at 50.92 per cent after further purchases in the stock market and more shareholders accepting its offer.

With majority control now in the hands of the Thai parties, "accordingly, the F&N offer has become unconditional in all respects," the statement added.

TCC Assets is offering to buy F&N shares it does not already own at S$9.55 apiece, valuing the drinks, property and publishing conglomerate at S$13.75 billion.

The deadline for the rest of the shareholders to accept the offer was extended from February 4 to February 18, according to the statement.

Indonesia-led property firm Overseas Union Enterprise (OUE) averted a bidding war earlier this month when it declined to match the offer by the Thais. OUE is linked to Indonesian tycoon Mochtar Riady.

The takeover is said to be the biggest in Singapore's corporate history if it pushes through.

F&N became a takeover target after it sold off its most prized asset, Tiger Beer maker Asia Pacific Breweries, to Dutch giant Heineken in September.

It still has lucrative beverages, property and publishing operations.

Analysts believe more shareholders are likely to accept the offer as it is the only bid on the table.

The market however is closely watching whether Japanese brewer Kirin, which holds a 15 per cent stake in F&N, will sell its interests or remain a minority shareholder.

Kirin had allied itself with OUE in the bidding war. Its 15 per cent stake is worth more than S$2.0 billion at the rate offered by TCC Assets.

Charoen's TCC Group has a real estate unit, and the tycoon also owns Thai Beverage, which sells Chang beer.

- AFP/jc

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Samsung to be fined $900 over plant gas leak -- report

Samsung will be fined for belatedly reporting a fatal hydrofluoric gas leak to authorities, according to a new report.

The gas leak reportedly occurred sometime on Sunday (the exact timeline is not easily determined, due to conflicting reports out of Korea) at a Samsung semiconductor facility south of Seoul. Several hours later, Samsung contacted crew members from a maintenance company to clean up the leak. Five crew members arrived on the scene and started to clean up the spill. However, one of the individuals, who was reportedly not wearing a full hazmat suit, died due to exposure. Four other individuals who were wearing their full protective gear were sent to a hospital, but fully recovered, according to reports.

Korea-based Yonhap News, citing sources within the police office assessing the fine, reported today that investigators have determined that Samsung took too long to alert law enforcement to the spill, and the company has been assessed a fine of up to 1 million Korean won (about $900).

For its part, Samsung has remained tight-lipped on the leak, but reportedly told Yonhap in a statement on Monday that it believed the leak was "minimal."

Samsung is one of the leading semiconductor makers in the world, and produces chips for a wide range of companies including Apple. It's not clear what processors were in production at the time of the accident.

CNET has contacted Samsung for comment on the news. We will update this story when we have more information.

(Via Engadget)

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Hello Kitty! Please Don’t Kill Me!

Maybe the butler didn't do it. But the cat probably did.

A new study, published January 29 in Nature Communications, estimates that cats are responsible for killing billions of birds and mammals in the continental U.S. every year. The estimate: 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion bird victims and 6.9 billion to 20.7 billion mammals. Peter Marra, the senior author of the study, called the results "stunning." (Watch: A house cat's point of view.)

"For the last 20, 30, 40 years," he said, "the number that has been batted around as a max was about 500 million."

And there are a lot of potential feline killers. Over 80 million pet cats reside in American homes and as many as 80 million more stray and feral cats survive outside.

The authors found that the stray and feral cats are responsible for most of the kills. But pets aren't exactly innocent: They are blamed for about a third of the bird action. The study also discovered that the cats mainly kill native species like chipmunks and house wrens, not invasive pests like the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus). (Video: Secret lives of cats.)

The study is part of a larger effort to quantify the threats to birds, said Marra, an ecologist with the Migratory Bird Center at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C. Cats happened to be the first threat they considered. Plans are to look at other threats related to human activity: wind turbines, buildings, automobiles, and pesticides. The research is important, Marra said, because "a lot of these causes of mortality may be reversible." He hopes the study will aid policymakers and help cat owners realize "cats are having a larger impact than we thought."

So what can be done about all these wild killer cats?

Current efforts to rein in America's feral cats are insufficient. While a feral cat management technique called Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) stops some cats from reproducing, it doesn't stop those cats from preying on wildlife. The Humane Society of the United States supports TNR as part of the solution, but acknowledges that it will not noticeably reduce the cat population. John Hadidian, a senior scientist with the society, notes that TNR only reaches about two million cats, and it can be "cumbersome and expensive." He hopes that the attention from papers like this will encourage novel approaches like oral contraceptives for cats.

To some cat observers, the study news was no surprise. Economist Gareth Morgan made headlines around the world last week when he launched a proposal to rid New Zealand of cats. Morgan, whose website features a cartoon kitten announcing "I love to kill," believes that pet cats are endangering New Zealand's birds. While his website advocates a New Zealand without cats, and he would like people to make their current cat their last, he says he really wants cats to be regulated the way dogs are. He points to laws enacted in Western Australia as an example: Cats must be registered, neutered, and microchipped. The microchip, a small identifying device embedded under the skin, can be detected by vets or authorities so they can reunite lost pets with their owners and differentiate between pets and strays. "I'm not saying they should kill their cats," Morgan said. "If they are really into cats, that's fine, but you must control them."

Morgan admits this is "an emotional issue" in a country where nearly half of the households have at least one feline. "It's not that cat owners don't care," Morgan said, "it's that they haven't thought about it."

Meanwhile, people in the U.S. aren't likely to turn on cats either. Cat ownership has increased from about 56 million pet cats in the mid-1990s to the current count of 80 million. Though cats are viewed as both a conservation threat and a human companion, the Humane Society's Hadidian thinks common ground can be reached. "Both the bird people and the cat people want the same thing," he said, "fewer cats outdoors."

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