India says two soldiers killed in clash with Pakistan troops

SRINAGAR, India: Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers on Tuesday near the tense disputed border between the nuclear-armed neighbours in Kashmir and one of the bodies was badly mutilated, the Indian army said.

The firefight broke out at about noon on Tuesday (0630 GMT) after an Indian patrol discovered Pakistani troops about half a kilometre (1,600 feet) inside Indian territory, an army spokesman told AFP.

A ceasefire has been in place along the Line of Control that divides the countries since 2003, but it is periodically violated by both sides and Pakistan said Indian troops killed a Pakistani soldier on Sunday.

Relations had been slowly improving over the last few years following a rupture in their slow-moving peace process after the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, which were blamed by India on Pakistan-based militants.

"There was a firefight with Pakistani troops," army spokesman Rajesh Kalia told AFP from the mountainous Himalayan region.

"We lost two soldiers and one of them has been badly mutilated," he added, declining to give more details on the injuries.

"The intruders were regular (Pakistani) soldiers and they were 400-500 metres (1,300-1,600 feet) inside our territory," he said of the clash in Mendhar sector, 173 kilometres (107 miles) west by road from the city of Jammu.

In Islamabad, a Pakistan military spokesman denied what he called an "Indian allegation of unprovoked firing". He declined to elaborate.

On Sunday, Pakistan said Indian troops had crossed the Line of Control and stormed a military post. It said one Pakistani soldier was killed and another injured.

It lodged a formal protest with India on Monday over what it called an unprovoked attack.

India denied crossing the line, saying it had retaliated with small arms fire after Pakistani mortars hit a village home.

A foreign ministry spokesman said Indian troops had undertaken "controlled retaliation" on Sunday after "unprovoked firing" which damaged a civilian home.

The deaths are set to undermine recent efforts to improve relations, such as opening up trade and offering more lenient visa regimes which have been a feature of talks between senior political leaders from both sides.

Muslim-majority Kashmir is a Himalayan region which India and Pakistan both claim in full but rule in part. It was the cause of two of three wars between the neighbours since independence from Britain in 1947.

- AFP/fa

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Amazon Prime lands in Canada

Amazon Prime has expanded its coverage to Canada, but not all benefits will be part of the package.

Starting today, Prime will be offered to Canadian consumers for the usual yearly fee of $79.

The service's unlimited two-day shipping will be available in most of the country, according to Canada's Times Colonist. People in rural areas can grab the unlimited shipping but with no two-day guarantee. Those in certain locations will be able to upgrade to one-day shipping starting at $3.99 per item.

Steve Oliver, the country manager for Amazon.ca, told the Times Colonist that the shipping guarantee is good for millions of products sold by the store.

Amazon Prime also provides free Kindle e-book lending and the Instant Video streaming service to its U.S. members. But Canadian subscribers are out of luck here. Oliver told the Times Colonist that at this point the company has no plans to offer those options in Canada.

Amazon Prime is also available in the U.K, Japan, France, and Germany.

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Jodi Arias: Who Is the Admitted Killer?

Jodi Arias is a woman that many can't keep their eyes off of--a soft-spoken, small-framed 32-year-old who last year won a jailhouse Christmas caroling contest. But she is also an admitted killer who is now on trial in Arizona for the 2008 murder of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander.

Sitting in a Maricopa County court, Arias, whose trial resumes today, cries every time prosecutors describe what she admits she did -- stab her one-time boyfriend Travis Alexander 27 times, slit his throat and shoot him in the head.

Arias grew up in the small city of Yreka, Calif. She dropped out of high school, but received her GED while in jail a few years ago. She was an aspiring photographer; her MySpace page includes several albums of pictures, one of which was called "In loving memory of Travis Alexander."

FULL COVERAGE: Jodi Arias Murder Trial

Woman Facing Death Penalty Called Jealous by Prosecutors Watch Video

Ariz. Woman Faces Death Penalty in Boyfriend's Slaying Watch Video

"Jodi wanted nothing but to please Travis," defense attorney Jennifer Wilmot said in her opening statements, but added that there was another reality – that Arias was Alexander's "dirty little secret."

Arias' attorneys want the jury to believe she killed Alexander in June of 2008 in self defense, that he abused her, and she feared for her life when she attacked him in the shower of his Mesa, Ariz., home.

Alexander's family and friends say Arias was a stalker who killed him in cold blood. They say the 30-year-old was a successful businessman who overcame all the odds. His parents were drug addicts, and he grew up occasionally homeless until he converted to Mormonism and turned his life around.

Jodi Arias Trial: A Timeline of Events in the Arizona Murder Case

"He actually had everything going for him," said Dave Hall, one of Alexander's friends. "A beautiful home, a beautiful car, a great income."

Alexander kept a blog, and in a haunting last entry, just two weeks before his murder, he wrote about trying to find a wife.

"This type of dating to me is like a very long job interview," he wrote. "Desperately trying to find out if my date has an axe murderer penned up inside of her."

Alexander did date a killer. It's now up to the jury to decide if she killed in self defense.

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Sea level rise could lead to a cooler, stormier world

A catastrophic rise in sea level before the end of the century could have a hitherto-unforeseen side effect. Melting icebergs might cool the seas around Greenland and Antarctica so much that the average surface temperature of the entire planet falls by a few degrees, according to unpublished work by climate scientist James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

While it might sound welcome, the temperature differences produced by the "iceberg cooling effect" could lead to even more climate chaos in a world already devastated by extreme weather. Winter storms, for instance, are powered by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator, so there might be storms of unprecedented ferocity.

And the temporary cooling would be deceptive. Due to the greenhouse effect, the planet as a whole would still be accumulating heat - it's just that vast amounts of heat would be going into melting ice and warming water. "It's a redistribution of heat energy," says Daniel Sigman of Princeton University, who studies the end of the last age and was not involved in Hansen's work.

Freezer door

To visualise the cooling effect, imagine being shut in a stiflingly hot kitchen. You could cool the air by flinging open the freezer and letting the food defrost. The kitchen as a whole will not lose heat as there is nowhere for it to escape to, but some of heat energy will go into defrosting the freezer rather than warming the air.

Most climate scientists think the "freezer door" will remain firmly shut this century, but not Hansen. He has longed warned that there could be a huge rise in sea level this century and, with colleagues Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, he recently simulated the possible effects. Hansen included a brief summary of some of the results in an analysis of Greenland ice loss released in December. He told New Scientist a full paper is being prepared for publication, but would not discuss the details.

Assuming a disastrous 0.6-metre sea level rise by 2065, Hansen's model suggests the average global surface temperature would be just 1.5 °C warmer than in preindustrial times, compared to 1.9 °C without the iceberg cooling effect. With a massive 1.4-metre rise by 2080, the surface temperature would fall by 0.9 °C, instead of rising by 2.2 °C. Although most of the world would remain much warmer than now, northern Europe might cool to preindustrial levels and the UK might actually be chillier.

Other climate scientists are reluctant to comment before seeing the full details, but Sigman points out that climate modellers have long done experiments looking at the complex effects of melting ice sheets. These experiments also typically show regional cooling, but in Hansen's simulation the effect is much greater. The likely reason for the difference is because his simulation assumes a much more rapid acceleration of ice loss, doubling every 10 years.

Most other climate scientists think the ice sheets will only melt slowly, largely because this is what happened at the end of past ice ages. Hansen, however, thinks this logic is flawed. The reason that sea level only rose slowly in the past, he writes, is because the planet only warmed slowly. After the last ice age, for instance, it took 10,000 years for the average global temperature to rise around 4 °C. Now the world is on course to warm this much in less than 200 years.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Indonesia police investigate baby-for-sale online ad

JAKARTA: Indonesian police on Monday said they are investigating an advertisement offering two babies for sale at US$1,000 each after it was spotted on the popular auction and shopping website Tokobagus.com.

"We are still investigating the existence of the online advertisement," Jakarta police spokesman Rikwanto told reporters.

"We have asked Tokobagus how the advertisement came to be posted, for how long, and whether any transaction was made," he added.

The National Commission for Child Protection lodged a police report last week after spotting the posting, its chairman Arist Merdeka Sirait told AFP.

"There was a photo of a baby and a telephone number. We called the advertiser and he said he wanted to sell two 18-month-olds, a boy and a girl, for Rp 10 million (US$1,000) each," Sirait said.

"We were negotiating, talking about birth certificates when he suddenly hung up. We tried contacting him again but failed," he added.

"This seems to be a new modus operandi by baby-selling syndicates. We are very concerned and must stop this crime against humanity," Sirait said, adding that human-traffickers could be jailed from 15 to 20 years.

Tokobagus posted an apology on Twitter, saying the advertisement was a result of "pure human error and was unintentional" and had been removed.

Indonesians have been using local auction and shopping sites to sell anything from cars and jewellery to body organs such as kidneys, exploiting a loophole in local laws.

Hundreds of advertisements have appeared on Indonesian personal advertising websites offering kidneys for as little as 50 million rupiah each.

- AFP/xq

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Cisco adds three more routers to its 802.11ac portfolio

The new Linksys EA6700 Smart Wi-Fi router from Cisco.

(Credit:
Cisco)

LAS VEGAS--If you're not so happy with Cisco's first 802.11ac router, the Linksys EA6500, there are now more options.

The networking vendors announced today at
CES 2013 three more routers that all support 802.11ac. All of them belong to the same Linksys Smart Wi-Fi router series and share similar features as well as physical design as the Linksys EA6500. These new routers include:

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1750 HD Video Pro, EA6700: This is now the new top-notch Smart Wi-Fi Router in the Linksys portfolio. The AC1750 is designed for homes with 10 or more connected devices with HD content streaming needs. The true dual-band AC1750 delivers Wi-Fi speeds up to 1,300Mbps on the 5GHz band and up to 450Mbps on the 2.4GHz band.

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1600 Video Enthusiast, EA6400: Very similar to the EA6700 but the EA6400 belongs to the lower tier and is designed for home with five or seven connected devices for HD streaming. This router offer Wi-Fi speeds up to 1,300Mbps on the 5GHz band and up to 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz band.

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1200 Advanced Multimedia, EA6300: This is the lowest-tier router among the three. Support on the the dual-stream setup of the Wi-Fi standards, the EA6300 offers up to 867Mbps on the 5GHz band and up to 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. Cisco says it makes a good fit for homes with five or fewer HD streaming Wi-Fi connected devices.

All three of the new routers support Gigabit Ethernet and one USB 3.0 port -- the EA6700 also has another USB 2.0 port -- that can be used to host an external storage device to create a network attached storage (NAS) solution.

The EA6700 comes with two USB ports, one of which is USB 3.0.

(Credit:
Cisco)

Cisco says the new Smart Wi-Fi Routers provide great Wi-Fi coverage thanks to the support for Beamforming technology, which is designed to precisely adjust, steer, and monitor the direction and shape of the Wi-Fi signals to send data back and forth over the optimal path.

Similar to the rest in the EA family, they are easy to set up and offer new tools for home network management, both locally and on the go via a mobile app. They can also run third-party apps developed for the Cisco Connect Cloud platform. And finally these routers also support SimpleTab, a near-field communication (NFC) technology that allows for supported clients to connect to the routers' Wi-Fi network via a quick tab.

In addition to these routers, Cisco also announced its first USB 802.11ac adapter, the Linksys AC 580 USB Wi-Fi, that allows consumers to easily upgrade any existing computer to support the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.

Cisco's new Smart Wi-Fi Routers and the Linksys AC 580 USB Wi-Fi are set to be available during the first quarter of the year with pricing being available then.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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Hagel Nomination Stirs Bipartisan Opposition

Two weeks before his inauguration, and with more "fiscal cliffs" on the horizon, President Obama is embracing a showdown with Congress over his pick to lead the Pentagon in his second term.

Obama will nominate former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense at a formal White House announcement later today, administration officials said.

The president will name counterterrorism advisor John Brennan as the new CIA director to replace David Petraeus, rounding out an overhaul of his national security team.

Obama tapped Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts last month to become the next Secretary of State.

Hagel is in many ways an ideal pick for Obama, giving nod to bipartisanship while appointing someone with a demonstrated commitment to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and to retooling and economizing the Pentagon bureaucracy for the future.

But the nomination of Hagel to replace outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is also politically charged, expected to trigger a brutal confirmation fight in the Senate, where a bipartisan group of critics has already lined up against the pick.

"This is an in your face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CNN on Sunday. "I don't know what his management experience is regarding the Pentagon -- little, if any, so I think it's an incredibly controversial choice."

Obama's Defense Nominee Chuck Hagel Stirs Washington Lawmakers Watch Video

The criticism stems from Hagel's controversial past statements on foreign policy, including a 2008 reference to Israel's U.S. supporters as "the Jewish lobby" and public encouragement of negotiations between the United States, Israel and Hamas, a Palestinian group the State Department classifies as terrorists.

"Hagel has consistently been against economic sanctions to try to change the behavior of the Islamist regime, the radical regime in Tehran, which is the only way to do it, short of war," Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said last month.

The Nebraska Republican has also drawn fire for his outspoken opposition to the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq and the subsequent troop "surge" ordered by then-President George W. Bush in 2007, which has been credited with helping bring the war to a close.

On the left, gay rights groups have protested Hagel for comments he made in 1998 disparaging then-President Bill Clinton's nominee for U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg James Hormel as "openly, aggressively gay." Hagel has since apologized for the remark as "insensitive."

Top Senate Democrats tell ABC News there is no guarantee Hagel will win confirmation and that, as of right now, there are enough Democratic Senators with serious concerns about Hagel to put him below 50 votes.

But that could change, with many top lawmakers publicly vowing to withhold final judgment until Hagel has an opportunity to answer his critics during confirmation hearings. No senator has yet publicly vowed to filibuster the Hagel nomination.

Hagel is a decorated Vietnam veteran and businessman who served in the senate from 1997 to 2009. After having sat on that chamber's Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, he has in recent years gathered praise from current and former diplomats for his work on Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board as well as the policy board of current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

"Chuck Hagel is a tremendous patriot and statesman, served incredibly in Vietnam, served this country as a United States senator. He hasn't had a chance to speak for himself. And so why all the prejudging?" said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., on "This Week."

"In America, you give everybody a chance to speak for themselves and then we'll decide," she said.

The top Senate Republican echoed that sentiment. "I'm going to wait and see how the hearings go and see whether Chuck's views square with the job he would be nominated to do," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said.

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Silent Skype calls can hide secret messages

Got a secret message to send? Say it with silence. A new technique can embed secret data during a phone call on Skype. "There are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed," says Wojciech Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland. So his team's SkypeHide system lets users hide extra, non-chat messages during a call.

Mazurczyk and his colleagues Maciej Karaś and Krysztof Szczypiorski analysed Skype data traffic during calls and discovered an opportunity in the way Skype "transmits" silence. Rather than send no data between spoken words, Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that carry speech.

The team hijacks these silence packets, injecting encrypted message data into some of them. The Skype receiver simply ignores the secret-message data, but it can nevertheless be decoded at the other end, the team has found. "The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult," says Mazurczyk. They found they could transmit secret text, audio or video during Skype calls at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls.

The team aims to present SkypeHide at a steganography conference in Montpellier, France, in June.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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US drones kill 12 Taliban in Pakistan: officials

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan: US drones fired a volley of missiles at militant hideouts in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 12 Taliban fighters near the Afghan border, security officials said.

The missile attack took place in Babar Ghar village in South Waziristan, a tribal district bordering Afghanistan which is a stronghold of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

"US drones fired several missiles at two militant compounds. At least 12 militants have been killed and several others were wounded," a security official in Miranshah told AFP under condition of anonymity.

The official earlier said eight militants were killed.

"There are members of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) among those who have been killed," he said, adding that a close relative of TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud was among the dead.

"Most of the militants were from Punjabi Taliban group and a close relative of Hakimullah Mehsud," the official said.

Another security official in the northwestern city of Peshawar confirmed the drone attacks and casualties.

Intelligence officials in Miranshah said that militants had died after US drones fired up to 10 missiles on three militant compounds in the Babar Ghar attack, but the security officials could not verify that account.

Residents said that militants had cordoned off the area and were looking for more dead or wounded in the debris.

US drone strikes last week killed a prominent warlord who sent insurgents to fight NATO troops in Afghanistan along with nine other militants in Pakistan's tribal belt.

Mullah Nazir was the main militant commander in South Waziristan, part of the tribal zone where militants linked to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have bases on the Afghan border. He is one of the highest-profile drone victims in recent years.

The covert US drone strikes are publicly criticised by the Pakistani government as a violation of sovereignty, but American officials believe they are a vital weapon in the war against Islamist militants.

A report commissioned by legal lobby group Reprieve in September estimated that between 474 and 881 civilians were among 2,562 to 3,325 people killed by drones in Pakistan between June 2004 and September 2012.

- AFP/xq

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