Explosions rock Nigeria's Kano, at least six killed (Reuters)

KANO, Nigeria (Reuters) ? At least six people were killed in a string of bomb blasts on Friday in Nigeria's second city Kano and the authorities imposed a curfew across the city, which has been plagued by an insurgency led by the Islamist sect Boko Haram.

Smoke billowed from the police headquarters for the north in Kano after one blast blew out its windows, collapsed its roof and triggered a blaze that firefighters struggled to control.

A Reuters reporter counted three bodies at the scene and three more at the local passport office, which was surrounded by flaming debris.

Some residents ran around shouting and screaming following the attacks. There were at least four other explosions across the city in quick succession.

"I was on the roadside and I just heard a 'Boom!'. As I came back, I saw the building of the police zonal headquarters crashing down and I ran for my life," said local man Andrew Samuel.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the apparently coordinated attacks, which prompted the government to announce a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Kano, like other northern cities in Nigeria, has been plagued by an insurgency led by Islamist sect Boko Haram, blamed for scores of bombings and shootings against mostly government targets that are growing in scale and sophistication.

Boko Haram became active around 2003 and is concentrated in the northern states of Yobe, Kano, Bauchi, Borno and Kaduna.

Boko Haram, which in the Hausa language of northern Nigeria means "Western education is sinful," is loosely modeled on the Taliban movement in Afghanistan.

The group considers all who do not follow its strict ideology as infidels, whether they be Christian or Muslim. It demands the adoption of sharia, Islamic law, in all of Nigeria.

FLAMES AND SMOKE

Witnesses said the bomber of the police headquarters, which covers most of northern Nigeria, pulled up at the building on a motorbike then got off and ran at it holding a bag.

"We tried to stop him but he ran in forcefully with his bag. All of a sudden there was a blast. You can see for yourself the building is damaged," said a policeman at the scene.

Police said a second blast had hit Kano's passport office and another hit Zaria Road police station in the city.

"The ground was shaking with the explosion. We saw flames and smoke at the police station," said witness Umaru Ibrahim.

A source at the State Security Service said another bomber had tried to attack there but was gunned down before he could detonate his bomb.

Police and military roadblocks were erected in the city within minutes.

"We are trying to reach the scenes of these heavy blasts. Many of the roads are blocked now by security agents," said Abubaker Jibril, head of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) for Kano, told Reuters.

A bomb attack on a Catholic church just outside the capital Abuja on Christmas Day, claimed by Boko Haram, killed 37 people and wounded 57.

The main suspect in that attack escaped from police custody within 24 hours of his arrest, and police have offered a 50 million naira ($309,600) reward for information leading to his recapture.

Police arrested Kabiru Sokoto on Tuesday and while they were taking him from police headquarters to his house in Abaji, just outside Abuja, to conduct a search there, their vehicle came under fire.

Last August a suicide bomber blew up the U.N. Nigeria headquarters in Abuja, killing at least 24 people.

(Additional reporting by Tim Cocks in Lagos; writing by Tim Cocks and James Jukwey; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120120/wl_nm/us_nigeria_blast

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Teen ends globe-circling voyage in St. Maarten (AP)

PHILIPSBURG, St. Maarten ? Laura Dekker set a steady foot aboard a dock in St. Maarten on Saturday, ending a yearlong voyage aboard a sailboat named "Guppy" that apparently made her the youngest person ever to sail alone around the globe, though her trip was interrupted at several points.

Dozens of people jumped and cheered as Dekker waved, wept and then walked across the dock accompanied by her mother, father, sister and grandparents, who had greeted her at sea earlier.

Dekker arrived in St. Maarten after struggling against high seas and heavy winds on a final, 41-day leg from Cape Town, South Africa.

"There were moments where I was like, 'What the hell am I doing out here?,' but I never wanted to stop," she told reporters. "It's a dream, and I wanted to do it."

Dekker claims she is the youngest sailor to complete a round-the-world voyage, but Guinness World Records and the World Sailing Speed Record Council did not verify the claim, saying they no longer recognize records for youngest sailors to discourage dangerous attempts.

Dutch authorities tried to block Dekker's trip, arguing she was too young to risk her life, while school officials complained she should be in a classroom.

Dekker said she was born to parents living on a boat near the coast of New Zealand and said she first sailed solo at 6 years old. At 10, she said, she began dreaming about crossing the globe. She celebrated her 16th birthday during the trip, eating doughnuts for breakfast after spending time at port with her father and friends the night before in Darwin, Australia.

The teenager covered more than 27,000 nautical miles on a trip with stops that sound like a skim through a travel magazine: the Canary Islands, Panama, the Galapagos Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Bora Bora, Australia, South Africa and now, St. Maarten, from which she set out on Jan. 20, 2011.

"Her story is just amazing," said one of Dekker's fans, 10-year-old Jody Bell of Connecticut. "I can't imagine someone her age going out on sea all by herself."

Bell was in St. Maarten on a work trip with her mother, Deena Merlen, an attorney in Manhattan, who wanted to see Dekker complete her journey. The two wore T-shirts that read: "Guppy rocks my world."

"My daughter and I have been following Laura's story, and we think it's amazing and inspiring," Merlen said.

Unlike other young sailors who recently crossed the globe, Dekker repeatedly anchored at ports along the way to sleep, study and repair her 38-foot (11.5-meter) sailboat.

During her trip, she went surfing, scuba diving, cliff diving and discovered a new hobby: playing the flute, which she said in her weblog was easier to play than a guitar in bad weather.

Dekker also complained about custom clearings, boat inspections, ripped sails, heavy squalls, a wet and salty bed, a near-collision with two cargo ships and the presence of some persistent stowaways: cockroaches.

"I became good friends with my boat," she said. "I learned a lot about myself."

Highlights of her trip include 47 days of sailing the Indian Ocean, which left her with unsteady legs when she docked in Durban, South Africa, where she walked up and down the pier several times for practice.

While in South Africa, she also saw her first whale.

"It dove right in front of my boat and got all this water on my boat, and that wasn't really nice," she said.

Dekker launched her trip two months after Abby Sunderland, a 16-year-old U.S. sailor, was rescued in the middle of the Indian Ocean during a similar attempt. Jessica Watson of Australia completed a 210-day solo voyage at age 16, a few months older than Dekker.

Dekker had said she planned to move to New Zealand after her voyage, but she said Saturday that she wants to finish school first. If she goes to New Zealand, she said, she'd like to sail there.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120121/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_st_maarten_young_sailor

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Microsoft and IBM push Dow up, Google falls

In this Jan. 18, 2012 photo, traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Financial markets were cautious Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, ahead of another round of debt-reduction talks between Greece and its private creditors that could determine whether Europe's debt crisis flares up again. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In this Jan. 18, 2012 photo, traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Financial markets were cautious Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, ahead of another round of debt-reduction talks between Greece and its private creditors that could determine whether Europe's debt crisis flares up again. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

NEW YORK (AP) ? IBM and Microsoft drove the Dow Jones industrial average higher Friday after the tech giants reported stronger earnings than analysts expected.

Microsoft said sales of Xbox games and Office software helped push revenue up in the last quarter of 2011. IBM credited better sales of software and services and raised its earnings outlook for the year. Microsoft rose 6 percent and IBM rose 4 percent.

The Dow rose 96.50 points to close at 12,720.48. That's a gain of 0.8 percent. Without the huge gains in IBM and Microsoft, the Dow would have risen just 24 points.

The S&P 500 index inched up 0.88 to 1,315.38. Both the Dow and S&P ended the week with gains of more than 2 percent.

Plenty of things are going right, said Frank Fantozzi, CEO of Planned Financial Services, an independent wealth manager in Cleveland. Applications for unemployment benefits dropped last week to the lowest level in nearly four years. Housing sales are steadily rising. And most companies are reporting better profits.

"Overall, we're moving in the right direction and it's bolstered the market," Fantozzi said. "The S&P getting over 1,300 this week is a nice sign."

Google lost 8.4 percent after its earnings per share fell a dollar short of analysts' estimates. The misfire stemmed from an 8 percent drop in prices that the Internet search giant charges advertisers for each click.

Google's drop tugged the Nasdaq composite index lower. It fell 1.63 points to 2,786.70.

Even though high-profile companies such as Google and JPMorgan Chase have posted disappointing earnings results in the past week, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. Of the 60 companies in the S&P index that have reported earnings so far, 62 percent have beaten estimates, according to John Butters, senior earnings analyst at FactSet Research.

In another sign that traders were becoming more willing to take on risk, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note crossed above 2 percent for the first time in two weeks. The yield, a widely used benchmark for corporate and consumer borrowing, had inched lower since early December as traders parked money in the safest of assets.

The National Association of Realtors said that home sales rose 5 percent in December, the third straight monthly increase.

Among other companies in the news:

? Capital One Financial lost 5.6 percent. The bank and credit-card company's earnings sank 41 percent as expenses for marketing, salaries and legal fees jumped compared with the year before.

? Schlumberger rose 1.3 percent. The oil-field services company's quarterly profit surged 36 percent, helped by exploration work in the Middle East and Africa. The company also raised its quarterly dividend to 27.5 cents.

- Intel rose 2.9 percent. The world's largest chip maker reported stronger profits after the market closed Thursday. Intel's results got a boost from sales to China and other developing countries, where many people are buying PCs for the first time.

Stocks have been on a slow and steady climb to start 2012. The S&P 500 has closed higher on 11 of 13 days and is now up 4.6 percent for the year.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-01-20-Wall%20Street/id-83e32dff2f2b40f29ec31b3e5d91a6fd

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2nd officer recommends Manning be court-martialed

WASHINGTON ?? A second Army officer is recommending a general court-martial for a low-ranking intelligence analyst charged in the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history.

The Army says Col. Carl Coffman sent his recommendation Wednesday to Maj. Gen. Michael Linnington, commander of the Military District of Washington. Linnington will decide whether to order a trial for Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Coffman concurred with the presiding officer at Manning's preliminary hearing last month. The 24-year-old Crescent, Okla., native faces 22 counts, including aiding the enemy.

Manning allegedly gave more than 700,000 secret U.S. documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks for publication.

Defense lawyers say the emotionally troubled soldier should never have been deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while stationed there from late 2009 to mid-2010.

Check back for more details on this developing story.

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46059396/ns/us_news/

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A Minute With: Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper (Reuters)

PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) ? The Sundance Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, starting ten days of movie screenings and providing the launching pad for some of the world's top low-budget features and documentaries at the largest U.S. gathering for independent filmmakers.

The 117 movies to be screened at the festival held in the ski resort of Park City, Utah were selected from 4,042 features submitted, including 24 in competition.

Festival director John Cooper, Sundance's chief programmer, spoke to Reuters about the tone of the films selected and how first time filmmakers can be hopeful with new technology making films easier to turn around and offering a variety of platforms for films to reach audiences.

Q. What are you seeing that's different in the overall tone of the films selected this year?

A. "What I am seeing in general is that the independent film movement or community is maturing a little bit. The bar gets set higher each year. It doesn't seem to be leveling off. Each year the films are coming in with more depth of quality and over arching completeness and vision. This bar is set and other filmmakers coming up through the ranks know that is there."

Q. Some thought that with technology improving cameras and editing and sometimes making it cheaper to make indie films it might go the other way -- that quality might diminish with a more crowded field, why do you think quality is improving?

A. "There are a lot of factors. There is more of a community base now as to how they work. I am noticing much more a sharing of cinematographers, of actors and ideas.

"Also what is a happening is that independent filmmakers are looking at a different artistic life for themselves. They are not quite as fast or may never really want to jump to the big Hollywood film or situation for themselves. What a lot of people have learned and what is coming back in the younger filmmakers especially is they want to work in a way that makes them excited and fulfilled."

Q. What about documentaries that premiered last year such as "Senna" which went on to be popular with critics and audiences? What about this year's batch, what themes are you seeing?

A. "They came in a little different this year. They came in a little more overarching and more comprehensive of the issues that are facing the world. Last year they seemed very character-driven with more of a personal perspective. And this year we shift back and forth a little bit, but there are more about issues like hunger, the war on drugs, about global warming and the healthcare crisis. They are very topical issues on a much bigger more comprehensive scale."

Q. Is Sundance still the place for first-time and second-time directors? How has that changed?

A. "It has ramped up I think. It is not just an event for the filmmakers, it is talent too. There are actors that are going to pop out of this festival. For example, the woman from 'Filly Brown,' - it is multi-level discovery."

Q. Investors began to flee the market beginning around five years ago, but last year Sundance saw a more optimistic mood and numerous business deals. Any predictions for this year?

A. "We had a very successful year last year so people are coming to the festival with expectations, which is scary to me sometimes, because it doesn't really mean that much to me. There seems to have been a bit of a market correction both on the filmmakers side with the cost to make a film and what they sell for. It is a little more realistic. But it's very hard to tell.

"What I do know is when I watch the audiences respond in the theater, there is a market for them. Not even a market - there is an audience for them. Now how we connect the right audience to the films -- and I know that these films aren't for everyone but they are for a lot of people - that is where we are still in a big flux."

Q. Are older distribution methods -- theatrical and DVD -- still the key to making money? What stage are we at with web streaming?

A. "I still think theatrical is very real. But it's trickier. Now the talk is not so much about delivery systems but marketing systems. That is the first big shift. And then it's going to be about how you get the films themselves."

Q. Sundance recently announced a new deal for films selected

to be streamed online on sites including iTunes and YouTube should the filmmaker wish. How should filmmakers feel about this going into the festival?

A. "I hope they will step into the festival and breathe easier knowing that there is this great opportunity for them."

Q. Is the divide between Hollywood and indie film growing or getting less?

A. "I think the divide is growing. As Hollywood has its problems with financial things and needs to make films of a certain size, you are splitting, where maybe 10 years ago there was a blending a little bit."

(Reporting By Christine Kearney; editing by Patricia Reaney)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120118/people_nm/us_sundance_preview

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Solar Swan Song: NASA Satellite Witnesses a Comet's Plunge into the Sun

News | Space

A sun-watching spacecraft has for the first time tracked a comet's path all the way into the solar atmosphere

By John Matson ?| January 19, 2012

COMETARY CATACLYSM: Imagery from the Solar Dynamics Observatory documents the demise of a comet plunging toward the sun. The comet streaked in from the right of the image. Image: ? Science/AAAS

As dramatic exits go, it's on par with Major T. J. "King" Kong riding a falling nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull at the end of Dr. Strangelove. A NASA spacecraft has documented a comet's demise as it plunged toward the sun at 600 kilometers per second, broke apart and vaporized inside the solar atmosphere.

The comet, known as C/2011 N3 (SOHO), met its fiery fate on July 6. The object's official name designates that it was discovered in early July 2011 by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. Many comets meet a similar end, but astronomers and solar physicists have never been able to track a comet's trajectory all the way into the depths of the solar corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere.

With the help of another spacecraft?NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in 2010?a group of scientists were able to witness the final minutes of the comet's existence. The observations of C/2011 N3 as it broke apart allowed the researchers to estimate the comet's mass and the size of its nucleus; similar events in the future may provide clues about the origins of comets as well as probe conditions near the sun that are otherwise difficult to explore. The team of researchers published their findings in the January 20 issue of Science.

SOHO has discovered more than 2,000 comets near the sun, most of them thanks to the help of unpaid amateur astronomers who comb through imagery from the spacecraft. Most of the sun-grazing comets, like C/2011 N3, belong to the Kreutz family, which is thought to have originated from a single progenitor that broke apart within the past few thousand years. The smallest of these comets are destroyed by the sun before they draw too close, so C/2011 N3 was rather sizable for a Kreutz-family comet, with a nucleus 10 to 50 meters across.

"It must have been on the large side," says lead study author Carolus Schrijver, a solar physicist at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif. The comet's size contributed not only to its survival deep into the solar atmosphere but also to its receiving close scrutiny during the sunward plunge. "This was noted as a particularly bright one," Schrijver says. "That morning as it was approaching the sun I said, 'Well, let's see if we can see it.'"

An atmospheric imaging camera on SDO was indeed able to track the inbound comet, watching it bear down on the sun in an ultraviolet streak that lasted about 20 minutes before it disappeared. By that time the comet was only about 100,000 kilometers above the solar surface and had broken into a number of fragments, further hastening its vaporization.

"The temperatures [at that point] are so high that things are evaporating," says astronomer Matthew Knight of Lowell Observatory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who did not contribute to the new study. "Not just gases and ices, but heavy elements."

The comet's total obliteration in the solar atmosphere let Schrijver and his colleagues estimate how much material was lost in the process. "Because it vanished, we could actually measure its mass," Schrijver says. The researchers estimate that the comet may have shed as much as 60 million kilograms of material in its plunge?about the mass of the Titanic. But the comet's composition is less clear. "We're still trying to understand what was glowing," he says. The imager used to track C/2011 N3 is most sensitive to iron, but Schrijver notes that the glow could also have been produced by carbon or oxygen.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=fcb17ee905ce5cab249f2b259206e097

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Feds challenge credibility of former BP executive (AP)

U.S. officials say a former BP executive was paid $107,000 a month to do consulting for a company lawyer, but allege the money may have been designed to influence her testimony during a deposition in litigation over the Gulf oil spill.

The allegations were made in a court filing Tuesday by government lawyers who want to challenge her credibility at trial with the compensation details. The filing says she was "responsible in great part for actively preventing" implementation of essential safety programs on such rigs as the Deepwater Horizon that exploded, killing 11 workers and prompting the spill.

Her name was redacted from the document, and a related exhibit was filed under seal.

The government says before she was deposed, she was hired as a consultant to a BP attorney, but she did little to earn her fee.

BP spokeswoman Ellen Moskowitz said in an email to The Associated Press that the London-based company had no comment. It previously argued the disaster resulted from a cascade of failures by multiple companies, not the actions of one or two officials who worked for BP.

The Deepwater Horizon was owned by Transocean and was being leased by BP while the oil giant prepared to abandon a well it had drilled a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico. The rig exploded off Louisiana on April 20, 2010, leading to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed over the spill, and a civil trial designed to assign shares of fault to the companies involved in the disaster is scheduled for Feb. 27 in federal court in New Orleans. The trial also is meant to determine whether rig owner Transocean can limit what it pays those making claims under maritime law.

Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange said Tuesday that a possible settlement could be reached before the start of the trial.

For right now, however, lawyers are preparing as if the trial will go forward and are filing motions related to evidence, witnesses and testimony.

The U.S. government, which has accused BP previously of being evasive, has a big stake in the outcome of the litigation.

In their filing Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers say they should be able to use compensation details to show bias on the part of the former BP executive and other witnesses who may testify. They want a judge to allow such details to be weighed on a case by case basis, rather than be excluded across the board as BP has requested.

"There are instances where employee compensation is relevant to bias, credibility, or other issues, such as active efforts by BP ? or certainly the appearance of such efforts ? to hide evidence under the guise of faux privilege," the lawyers wrote.

A Justice spokesman declined to comment on the filing beyond what was included in it.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_re_us/us_gulf_oil_spill

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