Israeli soldier, three gunmen killed near Egyptian border

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Three armed militants slipped into Israel from Egypt's Sinai peninsula on Friday, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding another before being shot dead, the army said.

It was at least the fourth cross-border attack in just over a year - violence that has persisted despite an Egyptian army and police crackdown on Sinai militants begun last month.

The latest incident underscored deep Israeli concern about faltering security in Sinai since the fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in a democratic uprising in 2011. Israel is now building a fence along the desert border to improve security.

"A big terror attack was thwarted," Israeli army spokeswoman Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich said of Friday's violence.

"Three terrorists infiltrated from Sinai into Israel and opened fire towards IDF soldiers guarding the border. The terrorists were well armed and carried explosive belts upon their bodies," she added.

General Tal Russo, commander of Israeli troops in the region, said the gunmen ambushed soldiers who had just intercepted some African migrants trying to cross into Israel and were providing water to the group.

"In the first round of fire, one of our fighters was killed," Russo told reporters near the scene. Another soldier was wounded by shrapnel when a gunman blew up due to an explosives vest he was wearing, the general said.

Russo said he had no information on the affiliation of the gunmen but promised an Israeli response for the attack once their identities were discovered. Previous attacks were blamed on Palestinian militants from Gaza and supporters believed to have established bases in the sparsely inhabited Sinai.

An Egyptian security source said one of the gunmen died when a bomb he was carrying detonated and the other two were killed in a gun battle with Israeli forces. He added that the nationalities of the gunmen were not immediately known.

Israel is putting up the border fence both to bolster security and curb an influx of African migrants, hoping to finish it by the end of the year. It will run along most of the 266 km (165 miles) from Eilat on the Red Sea to the Gaza Strip.

Leibovich said Friday's attack occurred about halfway down the border near an area known as Mount Harif, where the barrier is still under construction.

In June, militants fired on Israelis building a section of the barrier, killing a worker, before soldiers shot dead two of the attackers.

In August, Islamist gunmen killed 16 Egyptian border guards in north Sinai and hijacked an armored vehicle which they smashed across the border before being killed by Israeli forces.

Shortly afterward, Egypt sent hundreds of troops backed by tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters into the region in a joint operation with police to raid militant hideouts, arrest suspects and seize weapons.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Cairo and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem; Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/least-2-militants-killed-israel-egypt-border-israeli-112049668.html

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Survey: Small business owners losing confidence

NEW YORK (AP) ? Small business owners are losing confidence as they see the economy weaken, according to a survey released Wednesday that is at odds with another just-released look at owners' sentiments.

The survey taken in July by the National Small Business Association found that 60 percent of owners are feeling confident about the future, down from 75 percent in December. The survey also found that 34 percent of owners expect a recession in the next 12 months, up from 14 percent in December. And the number of owners who expect the economy to grow or remain unchanged fell to 66 percent from 86 percent.

The survey gave a more negative reading of business owners' feelings about the economy than one taken in August and released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business. That survey showed that small business owners are getting more optimistic about how their companies and overall business conditions will do after the election and the first of the year.

Similarly, it has been difficult to get a sense of small businesses hiring. The payroll company ADP reported last Thursday that small businesses picked up their pace of hiring last month. The Labor Department's monthly jobs report showed hiring by all businesses slowed.

How small businesses are faring has become a major issue in the presidential election campaign. Small business was a theme of the Republican National Convention, and President Barack Obama has been speaking more frequently about his policies to help small businesses.

The NSBA survey found that the number of owners expecting their sales to increase fell ? 56 percent expected higher sales in the December survey, but that number fell to 45 percent in the latest survey. The NFIB survey found owners slightly more optimistic about their sales in the coming months ? the number of those who expect higher sales rose 5 percentage points to 1 percent, wiping out a negative reading in July.

The surveyed mirrored others that found small businesses have been reducing their debt loads. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said they had debt, down from 78 percent two years ago and 80 percent five years ago. But the percentage of businesses able to obtain adequate financing fell to 66 percent in July from 70 percent six months earlier ? a similar finding to other studies and surveys about small business borrowing.

The NSBA questioned 350 of its members for the survey.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/survey-small-business-owners-losing-confidence-040509131--finance.html

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Was Kepler's supernova unusually powerful?

ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2012) ? In 1604, a new star appeared in the night sky that was much brighter than Jupiter and dimmed over several weeks. This event was witnessed by sky watchers including the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler. Centuries later, the debris from this exploded star is known as the Kepler supernova remnant.

Astronomers have long studied the Kepler supernova remnant and tried to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded to create it. New analysis of a long observation from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is providing more clues. This analysis suggests that the supernova explosion was not only more powerful, but might have also occurred at a greater distance, than previously thought.

This image shows the Chandra data derived from more than 8 days worth of observing time. The X-rays are shown in five colors from lower to higher energies: red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. These various X-ray slices were then combined with an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey, showing stars in the field.

Previous analysis of this Chandra image has determined that the stellar explosion that created Kepler was what astronomers call a "Type Ia" supernova. This class of supernovas occurs when a white dwarf gains mass, either by pulling gas off a companion star or merging with another white dwarf, until it becomes unstable and is destroyed by a thermonuclear explosion.

Unlike other well-known Type Ia supernovas and their remnants, Kepler's debris field is being strongly shaped by what it is running into. More specifically, most Type Ia supernova remnants are very symmetrical, but the Kepler remnant is asymmetrical with a bright arc of X-ray emission in its northern region. This indicates the expanding ball of debris from the supernova explosion is plowing into the gas and dust around the now-dead star.

The bright X-ray arc can be explained in two ways. In one model, the pre-supernova star and its companion were moving through the interstellar gas and losing mass at a significant rate via a wind, creating a bow shock wave similar to that of a boat moving through water. Another possibility is that the X-ray arc is caused by debris from the supernova expanding into an interstellar cloud of gradually increasing density.

The wind and bow shock model described above requires that the Kepler supernova remnant is located at a distance of more than 23,000 light years. In the latter alternative, the gas into which the remnant is expanding has higher density than average, and the distance of the remnant from Earth is between about 16,000 and 20,000 light years. Both alternatives give greater distances than the commonly used value of 13,000 light years.

In either model, the X-ray spectrum -- that is, the amount of X-rays produced at different energies -- reveals the presence of a large amount of iron, and indicates an explosion more energetic than the average Type Ia supernova. Additionally, to explain the observed X-ray spectrum in this model, a small cavity must have been cleared out around the star before it exploded. Such a cavity, which would have a diameter less than a tenth that of the remnant's current size, might have been produced by a fast, dense outflow from the surface of the white dwarf before it exploded, as predicted by some models of Type Ia supernovas.

Evidence for an unusually powerful Type Ia supernova has previously been observed in another remnant with Chandra and an optical telescope. These results were independently verified by subsequent observations of light from the original supernova explosion that bounced off gas clouds, a phenomenon called light echoes. This other remnant is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy about 160,000 light years from Earth, making it much farther away than Kepler and therefore more difficult to study.

These results were published in the September 1st, 2012 edition of The Astrophysical Journal. The authors of this study are Daniel Patnaude from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA; Carles Badenes from University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA; Sangwook Park from the University of Texas at Arlington, TX, and Martin Laming from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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Journal Reference:

1. Daniel J. Patnaude, Carles Badenes, Sangwook Park, J. Martin Laming. The Origin of Kepler's Supernova Remnant. The Astrophysical Journal, 2012; 756 (1): 6 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/756/1/6

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/jlcSkr65h6U/120911132654.htm

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