The Danish navy says it has captured a suspected pirate mothership off the Horn of Africa and rescued 14 people from Iran and Pakistan who were being held hostage on it.
While participating in NATO’s Ocean Shield anti-piracy force, the Danes encountered the ship Saturday and after boarding it they arrested 25 suspected pirates.
A dog, presumed dead after being buried by an avalanche that killed one of his owners, dug himself out and walked for four days to find the rest of his family and their hotel.
On Wednesday a Cooke City resident noticed a Corgi outside Room 17 of the Alpine Hotel, where the Gaillards had stayed the night before the Montana ski trip, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported.
Scientists said Thursday they have designed tiny wires, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair but with the same electrical capacity as copper, in a major step toward building smaller, more potent computers, ushering in the quantum computing age.
The advance, described in the US journal Science, shows for the first time that wires one atom tall and four atoms wide can carry a charge as well as conventional wires.
The long-running joke about interns is that they do little more than get coffee and collate papers.
While there’s usually no escaping menial labor as an intern, some programs provide worthwhile career experience. For those lucky enough to land a position at one of the following companies, a full-time job might even be waiting at the finish line.
Read about the internships at NBCUniversal, L’Oreal, Garmin (for engineering students), and MTV Networks.
A Navy destroyer in the Arabian Sea rescued 13 Iranian fishermen who had been held hostage by a band of pirates for weeks, the Pentagon announced late Friday.
Sailors from the USS Kidd, a guided-missile destroyer, boarded the Iranian ship and arrested 15 Somalis early Friday after one of the fishermen revealed over the radio that the vessel’s crew was being held captive.
The Iranian “pleaded with us to come over and board their vessel,” said Cmdr. Jennifer L. Ellinger, who added that the Navy ship had a linguist on board who could understand Urdu, a South Asian language.
The crew of the Kidd not only gave the “ecstatic” Iranians food, water and medical attention. They handed out souvenir Kidd baseball caps that the Iranians wore proudly, smiling and waving as they headed out to sea.
“Actor Charlie Sheen quietly donated $25,000 in December to help tornado relief in Alabama, making good on a pledge to help survivors of the deadly twisters even though some had doubted his promises,” reports CBS.
The head of Tuscaloosa’s tourism agency, Don Staley, said a representative of Sheen recently turned over money that came in through a fundraising website that the actor set up after tornadoes last spring killed about 250 people in Alabama, including 52 in the west Alabama city. Sheen wrote a check that covered about $15,000 of the total amount given.
(READ the story from CBS News)
RELATED Video/Story: Charlie Sheen Tours Alabama Tornado Wreckage, Plans Fundraiser
Tropical forests in Africa may be more resilient to future climate change than the Amazon and other regions, a gathering of scientists has said.
An international conference agreed that the region’s surviving tree species had endured a number of climatic catastrophes over the past 4,000 years.
As a result, they are better suited to cope with future shifts in the climate.
A businessman has come forward to write a $5,000 check to Armando Fontaine, a disabled Miami man whose car was stolen on Monday night.
After seeing a news report on NBC Miami, the Coral Springs businessman – who wishes to remain anonymous – made the donation to help replace the car with wheelchair lift which is still missing.
Steven Spielberg’s release of “War Horse” has provided us with an opportunity to re-examine the vital role played by animals in World War I.
Set on the battlefields of the Great War, the movie tells an inspiring tale of love and devotion between man and animal.
Besides the horse, dogs, pigeons, and even garden slugs played important roles in winning World War I.
The most famous animal to emerge from the war was Sgt. Stubby, a bulldog terrier with a short, stubby tail connected with the 102nd Regiment.
New Yorkers rang in the new year with continued generosity as donations kept pouring in for the scholarship fund for the children of slain NYPD cop Peter Figoski with totals nearing $1.9 million.
Figoski, was gunned down on Dec. 12 while backing up other officers at a home-invasion.
The Peter Figoski Scholarship Fund was launched by The New York Post and New York City Police Foundation.
(READ the update in the New York Post)
200,000 jobs were added in December, pushing the unemployment rate, down to 8.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
Job gains occurred in transportation and warehousing, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and mining.
The jobless rate continued its downward trend declining by 0.6 percent since August, as 100,000 jobs or more were added in each of the last six months. That hasn’t happened since April 2006, according to the Associated Press.
200,000 jobs were added in December, pushing the unemployment rate, down to 8.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
Job gains occurred in transportation and warehousing, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and mining.
The jobless rate continued its downward trend declining by 0.6 percent since August, as 100,000 jobs or more were added in each of the last six months. That hasn’t happened since April 2006, according to the Associated Press.
Schools are being encouraged by the UK’s top scientific body to bring cutting edge science into the classroom.
Projects, funded by the Royal Society, include a bioreactor being built by secondary pupils in Cornwall to test the viability of getting fuel from marine algae and a particle accelerator being built by a team of Nottingham teenagers.
The Royal Society offered £45,000 in grants to bring science alive.
Cancer death rates are continuing to fall, dropping by 1.8 percent per year in men and 1.6 percent per year in women, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report on cancer statistics released on Wednesday.
The drop is significant, even though it is small, because it has continued falling each year for the past 10 years.
Advances in cancer screening and treatment have prevented more than a million total deaths from cancer since the early 1990s.
The hunger-fighting game FreeRice.com announced yesterday that it has reached a milestone of one million registered players, who together are feeding the world’s hungry through donations of rice to the UN World Food Programme.
Since the game’s launch in 2007, Freerice players have already triggered the donation of nearly 100 billion grains of rice —enough to feed almost five million people for a day.
It wasn’t a veteran detective or even a full-time cop who finally caught the man suspected of lighting 52 fires in Los Angeles last week.
The hero is an Iranian-born real estate attorney by day, who patrols the LA streets by night as a “reserve deputy” working for the sheriff’s office on nearly a volunteer-basis.
The sheriff called Shervin Lalezary a “true hero,” saying his salary remains $1 a year.
The reserve deputy, who qualified in December to ride a car solo, was beyond his eight-hour shift when made the “arrest of his career.”
(READ the story in the LA Times)
The Duchess of Cambridge has chosen the good causes that will benefit from her publicity and volunteer work.
Kate Middleton did the research herself and chose to support youth hospices, a group working with addiction, a group that boosts kids through art, the National Portrait Gallery, which reflects her love of photography and painting, and the Scout Association’s outdoor programs.
The past 10 years have been the safest in history for the US aviation industry with a remarkable tenfold improvement in safety rates.
A more experienced workforce has helped the industry learn from past mistakes: New planes and engines are designed with prior mistakes in mind. Investigations of accidents have led to changes in procedures to ensure the same missteps don’t occur again.
Other improvements, like computer technology, has led to a greater assurance of safety.
US Passengers have more than a 99.99% chance that they will reach their destination safely.
The worldwide aviation industry is also improving.
Syrian authorities have released more than 500 prisoners accused of involvement in anti-regime activities, state TV reported Thursday, in what appeared to be another gesture to comply with the Arab League plan to end the regime’s 9-month-old crackdown on dissent.
If you’re the parent of a teenager, you likely find yourself routinely embroiled in disputes with your child. It’s a vital part of their growing up.
Now researchers suggest that those spats can be tamed and, in the process, provide a lifelong benefit to children.
Researchers from the University of Virginia want parents to think of those arguments not as a nuisance but as a critical training ground for learning how to resist negative peer pressure.
