Suicide bomber kills 14 at Afghan province council

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? A suicide bomber dressed in a police uniform killed 14 people including a prominent provincial council chief outside the council headquarters in northern Afghanistan on Monday, authorities said. The Taliban insurgency quickly claimed responsibility.

Seeking to weaken the Afghan government, Taliban insurgents have been carrying out attacks and assassinations intended to intimidate both officials and civilians ahead of next year's withdrawal of most international troops.

Baghlan provincial council leader Mohammad Rasoul Mohseni was entering the compound in the provincial capital of Pul-e-Khumri in the morning when the bomber approached on foot and detonated his explosives, said Baghlan chief of police Asadullah Sherzad.

The attacker was dressed in police uniform and blended with officers at a checkpoint near the council headquarters, then slipped into a group of people surrounding Mohseni and set off his bomb in the crowd, said Baghlan deputy police chief Mohammad Sadeq Muradi.

"He was basically waiting for his target, who was Rasoul Mohseni," Muradi said.

Two of Mohseni's police bodyguards, four checkpoint police and seven civilians were killed in the blast, he said. It was unclear whether the attacker was actually a member of Afghan security forces or an insurgent who bought or stole a uniform.

Mohammad Zahier Ghanizada, a member of parliament from Baghlan, said that Mohseni had previously received multiple death threats.

A well-known figure in Baghlan, Mohseni was previously a respected commander in the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban's hard-line regime before it was toppled in 2001. He comes from a prominent family in the province, and his brother Azim Mohseni is a member of parliament.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed in a text message to journalists that an insurgent operative carried out the targeted bombing.

"Today at 11 a.m. in front of the Baghlan provincial council office, we have carried out a suicide attack and killed the head of the council," it said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the bombing Monday.

"Such attacks are against all human rights and the principles of Islam," Karzai said in a statement. "Perpetrators of such attacks are enemies of the Afghan nation and the puppets of foreigners."

Karzai left later Monday for a two-day state visit to India, where he is expected to request military aid.

Both Karzai and the U.S. have sought peace talks with the Taliban and other insurgent factions in preparation for most foreign troops leaving next year after more than 12 years of war, but the efforts have borne little fruit. The Taliban seek to re-establish the strict interpretation of Islamic law they imposed for five years before being ousted in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion over its sheltering of al-Qaida's leadership.

The insurgents last month launched a fierce new spring offensive. On Monday, Taliban forces attacked several police checkpoints in the southern province of Helmand, and fighting raged on all day and into the night, both insurgents and police said.

Helmand's deputy police chief, Ghulam Rabbani, said the fighting was in heavily contested Sangin district and there were casualties on both sides. He expected the clashes to continue overnight.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said the insurgents had wrested control of six police checkpoints, but Helmand government officials denied that.

The insurgents also are pushing an assassination and bombing campaign that has in the past week alone seen the police chief of Farah province gunned down outside his home and twin blasts kill nine people in an elite gated community for government officials and business owners outside of the southern city of Kandahar. Two bombs also exploded outside the provincial governor's office in Nangarhar province last week, killing one police guard.

Insurgents have also targeted members of the international coalition. A roadside bomb killed four American soldiers last week in the country's south, while another insurgent faction, Hizb-e-Islami, targeted a coalition convoy in the capital of Kabul two days later, killing two U.S. soldiers and four American contractors who were training Afghan troops to take over security.

___

Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suicide-bomber-kills-14-afghan-province-council-075314027.html

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King hit on the way home - dad dies after family dinner - The Daily ...

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Source: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/king-hit-on-the-way-home-dad-dies-after-family-dinner/story-fni0cx12-1226647210021

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Easier travel ahead for Conn. commuters

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) ? Commuters facing long delays after a train collision disrupted their route along Connecticut's shoreline can look forward to easier traveling.

Normal commuter rail service from Connecticut to New York City, along with Amtrak service between Boston and New York, was scheduled to resume during Wednesday morning's rush hour on one of the nation's oldest and most heavily traveled railways.

On Tuesday, Metro-North was again using busses to shuttle passengers around the affected area.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Aaron Donovan said there were no major problems reported.

"Ridership is up slightly over Monday on the busses," he said. "Other than that it is running as expected."

Connecticut lawmakers plan hearings on the crash on the rail network they say is in need of extensive improvements.

Members of the General Assembly's Transportation Committee said they have been briefed by state transportation officials over the years about the hefty investment Connecticut needs to make to fully upgrade the commuter rail line, including a couple of 100-year-old bridges that need to be replaced.

"It's like anything else, you know," said Rep. Tony Guerrera, co-chairman of the committee. "You can have a brand-new car and it runs great, but if the roads are awful, with potholes going up and down, what good is it?"

The Metro-North crash at rush hour Friday evening injured 72 people, including one who remained in critical condition Monday. It snarled commutes for roughly 30,000 people who normally use the train, forcing travelers to navigate a patchwork of cars, trains and buses.

For Gary Maddin, the drive from his home in Milford, Conn., to the Bridgeport train station normally takes 20 minutes. On Monday, it took an hour. Then he had a shuttle bus and a train ride before he got to his destination, Grand Central Terminal in New York.

"It's a lot," he said. "It's a nightmare just to get into the city today."

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said resumption of rail service is "tremendously good news."

Some commuters used the jury-rigged alternative that continued Tuesday: A shuttle train ran between New Haven and Bridgeport, where a bus connection to Stamford circumvented the accident scene, and finally customers boarded a train for New York.

Others drove themselves, and state officials nervously watched heavy traffic on two major arteries in southwest Connecticut, Interstate 95 and the Merritt Parkway.

But transportation officials were pleased that area highways were not as choked as they feared, Malloy said. He said commuters heeded his warning over the weekend about the prospect of highways becoming parking lots if all 30,000 of the usual train riders drove instead.

"Today went exceedingly well," the governor said. "People listened to us. Many people stayed home or worked from home."

Backups on the Merritt Parkway, a secondary route through Connecticut, were less than on an average Monday, and I-95 was only slightly more jammed than usual because of fog, he said.

Some delays were reported Tuesday.

Crews have worked around the clock since Saturday, and track rebuilding has progressed quickly, officials with the Metro-North railroad said.

Federal investigators arrived Saturday and were expected to be on site for seven to 10 days. They are looking at a broken section of rail to see if it is connected to the derailment and collision. Officials said it wasn't clear whether the rail was broken in the crash or earlier.

The last major collision involving Metro-North occurred in 1988 when a train engineer was killed in Mount Vernon, N.Y., when one train empty of passengers rear-ended another, railroad officials said.

____

Associated Press writers Susan Haigh and Stephen Singer in Hartford contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/easier-travel-ahead-conn-commuters-062509060.html

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Split-second choice ended with NY student dead

NEW YORK (AP) ? The college student was being held in a headlock by a masked intruder with a loaded gun to her head, police said. Then the gunman took aim at an officer.

A moment later both Hofstra University junior Andrea Rebello and the intruder were dead ? killed after a split-second decision that is perhaps the most harrowing in law enforcement: when to pull the trigger.

"The big question is, how do you know, when someone's pointing a gun at you, whether you should keep talking to them, or shoot?" said Michele Galietta, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who helps train police officers. "That's what makes the job of an officer amazingly difficult."

She spoke Sunday as Hofstra University students honored Rebello, a popular 21-year-old public relations major, by wearing white ribbons at their graduation ceremony.

Rebello's funeral is scheduled for Wednesday in Sleepy Hollow, north of New York City.

The news that she died from a police bullet came as "a second shock" for the already devastated family, said Henry Santos, Rebello's godfather.

Her life ended in the seconds that forced the veteran police officer to make a fatal decision, but the questions surrounding the student's death are just beginning, along with an internal investigation by the Nassau County Police Department.

Rebello and the intruder, Dalton Smith, died early Friday when the officer fired eight shots, hitting him seven times and her once in the head, according to county homicide squad Lt. John Azzata.

With a gun pointed at her, Smith "kept saying, 'I'm going to kill her,' and then he pointed the gun at the police officer," according to Azzata.

The officer acted quickly, saying later that he believed his and Rebello's lives were in danger, according to authorities.

No doubt, he was acting to try to save lives ? his own and that of the young woman, Galietta said.

"What we're asking the cop to anticipate is, 'What is going on in the suspect's mind at the moment?'" she said. "We're always trying to de-escalate, to contain a situation, but the issue of safety comes in first, and that's the evaluation the officer has to make."

Eugene O'Donnell, a former New York City police officer and professor of law and police studies at John Jay College, said the crucial issue may be whether or not police had deemed it a hostage situation. If so, he said, there are protocols police follow to buy time, slow down, isolate and assess.

But O'Donnell said the officers may have had few options because of "an eyeball to eyeball confrontation between the officer and the offender."

"It may have been too fluid to deteriorate for the officers to do anything else," O'Donnell said. "It underscores that there's no two of these that are exactly alike."

Police tactical manuals are meant to assist officers in making the best decision possible, but in the end, "they're not 100 percent foolproof," Galietta said. "In a situation like that, you can follow procedure, and it doesn't mean it comes out perfectly."

Hofstra student John Kourtessis told the New York Post that he'd gone to a bar with Rebello and a few other friends to celebrate the end of school. When they got back to Rebello's house, she asked him to move his car and he went upstairs to get his keys.

When he came back down, he said, Smith was there. He said Smith kept talking about "the Russian guy," insisting the house's residents owed a Russian man money and that he was outside waiting.

"He was saying ... that he just needed us to cooperate. I said, 'Listen, we have all this money here.'"

Kourtessis said the students offered Smith computers, jewelry and other items from the house but that Smith kept demanding more money.

The officer who fired the shots is an eight-year NYPD veteran and has been with Nassau County police for 12 years.

He is now out on sick leave, Azzata said.

Procedurally, the Nassau County district attorney would determine whether an officer's use of deadly force was justified, O'Donnell said. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office did not respond to a request for comment left Saturday night.

___

Associated Press writers Frank Eltman in Mineola, N.Y., and Jake Pearson in New York City contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/split-second-choice-ended-ny-student-dead-062837730.html

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Porsha Williams: Locked Out by Kordell Stewart!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/05/porsha-williams-locked-out-of-by-kordell-stewart/

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RNA capable of catalyzing electron transfer on early earth with iron's help, study says

RNA capable of catalyzing electron transfer on early earth with iron's help, study says

Monday, May 20, 2013

A new study shows how complex biochemical transformations may have been possible under conditions that existed when life began on the early Earth.

The study shows that RNA is capable of catalyzing electron transfer under conditions similar to those of the early Earth. Because electron transfer, the moving of an electron from one chemical species to another, is involved in many biological processes ? including photosynthesis, respiration and the reduction of RNA to DNA ? the study's findings suggest that complex biochemical transformations may have been possible when life began.

There is considerable evidence that the evolution of life passed through an early stage when RNA played a more central role, before DNA and coded proteins appeared. During that time, more than 3 billion years ago, the environment lacked oxygen but had an abundance of soluble iron.

"Our study shows that when RNA teams up with iron in an oxygen-free environment, RNA displays the powerful ability to catalyze single electron transfer, a process involved in the most sophisticated biochemistry, yet previously uncharacterized for RNA," said Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The results of the study were scheduled to be published online on May 19, 2013, in the journal Nature Chemistry. The study was sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which established the Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution (Ribo Evo) at Georgia Tech.

Free oxygen gas was almost nonexistent in the Earth's atmosphere more than 3 billion years ago. When free oxygen began entering the environment as a product of photosynthesis, it turned the earth's iron to rust, forming massive banded iron formations that are still mined today. The free oxygen produced by advanced organisms caused iron to be toxic, even though it was ? and still is ? a requirement for life. Williams believes the environmental transition caused a slow shift from the use of iron to magnesium for RNA binding, folding and catalysis.

Williams and Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry postdoctoral fellow Chiaolong Hsiao used a standard peroxidase assay to detect electron transfer in solutions of RNA and either the iron ion, Fe2+, or magnesium ion, Mg2+. For 10 different types of RNA, the researchers observed catalysis of single electron transfer in the presence of iron and absence of oxygen. They found that two of the most abundant and ancient types of RNA, the 23S ribosomal RNA and transfer RNA, catalyzed electron transfer more efficiently than other types of RNA. However, none of the RNA and magnesium solutions catalyzed single electron transfer in the oxygen-free environment.

"Our findings suggest that the catalytic competence of RNA may have been greater in early Earth conditions than in present conditions, and our experiments may have revived a latent function of RNA," added Williams, who is also director of the RiboEvo Center.

This new study expands on research published in May 2012 in the journal PLoS ONE. In the previous work, Williams led a team that used experiments and numerical calculations to show that iron, in the absence of oxygen, could substitute for magnesium in RNA binding, folding and catalysis. The researchers found that RNA's shape and folding structure remained the same and its functional activity increased when magnesium was replaced by iron in an oxygen-free environment.

In future studies, the researchers plan to investigate whether other unique functions may have been conferred on RNA through interaction with a variety of metals available on the early Earth.

In addition to Williams and Hsiao, Georgia Tech School of Biology professors Roger Wartell and Stephen Harvey, and Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry professor Nicholas Hud, also contributed to this work as co-principal investigators in the Ribo Evo Center at Georgia Tech.

###

Georgia Institute of Technology: http://www.gatech.edu

Thanks to Georgia Institute of Technology for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128307/RNA_capable_of_catalyzing_electron_transfer_on_early_earth_with_iron_s_help__study_says

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Greening's goal in 2nd OT lifts Sens over Pens

Ottawa Senators Daniel Alfredsson (11) celebrates with teammates Milan Michalek (9), Sergei Gonchar (55) and Mika Zibanejad (93) in the third period of game four of the Eastern Conference Stanley Cup semi-final NHL hockey action on Sunday May 19, 2013 in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

Ottawa Senators Daniel Alfredsson (11) celebrates with teammates Milan Michalek (9), Sergei Gonchar (55) and Mika Zibanejad (93) in the third period of game four of the Eastern Conference Stanley Cup semi-final NHL hockey action on Sunday May 19, 2013 in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

Ottawa Senators goaltender Craig Anderson, left, makes a save while Pittsburgh Penguins Brandon Sutter and Senators Daniel Alfredsson jostle in front of the net during the first overtime period of game four of their Stanley Cup Eastern Conference semi-final NHL hockey game at Scotiabank Place in Ottawa on Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Patrick Doyle)

Ottawa Senators' Daniel Alfredsson (11) celebrates as he scores on Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Tomas Vokoun (92) during the third period of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Stanley Cup semifinal NHL hockey series on Sunday, May 19, 2013, in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

Ottawa Senators' Zack Smith, left, trips over Pittsburgh Penguins' Matt Niskanen during the first period of Game 4 of their NHL Stanley Cup Eastern Conference semifinal NHL hockey series in Ottawa on Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Patrick Doyle)

OTTAWA (AP) ? Colin Greening scored 7:39 into double overtime, and the Ottawa Senators rallied for a 2-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins that cut their series deficit to 2-1 on Sunday night.

Daniel Alfredsson got Ottawa even 1-1 by scoring a short-handed goal with 29 seconds left in regulation just after the Senators pulled goalie Craig Anderson for an extra skater.

"We were just calm," Anderson said of the Senators' mood heading into overtime. "We had tied it up. We had momentum. We felt like the fans really rallied behind us.

"Going into overtime, we knew we just had to build off the momentum and keep the pressure on."

Anderson made 49 saves, including 18 after regulation. Tomas Vokoun stopped 46 shots for Pittsburgh and took his first loss (4-1) since taking over for No. 1 Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury.

Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series will be in Ottawa on Wednesday.

Tyler Kennedy scored with just over a minute to play in the second period to give the Penguins a 1-0 lead. That stood up until Alfredsson tied it in the closing seconds of the third.

"Just praying that we get something to the net," Anderson said of the tying goal. "We practice that drill all the time in practice. Guy drops it off and goes to the net.

"It was just the way we practiced. Alfie is one of the best guys in the game. We want the puck on his stick at all times."

Ottawa forward Jason Spezza, who hadn't played since Jan. 27 ? after undergoing back surgery to repair a herniated disc ? lined up alongside Milan Michalek and Cory Conacher.

The sellout crowd chanted the 29-year-old Spezza's name during his first shift.

Spezza faced a familiar opponent. His last game before surgery was at home against the Penguins, when he earned one assist and logged 21 minutes of ice time.

In his first game back, Spezza was slow to backcheck but he managed to generate a few scoring chances and made nice passes.

His back was put to the test in overtime when Penguins forward Craig Adams delivered a bone-crunching hit along the boards. Spezza shook off the check.

Both teams had good scoring chances in the extra periods. Pittsburgh's best scoring opportunity came when Pascal Dupuis hit the post with a drive during the first overtime.

Anderson was on his game after being pulled in Game 2. He robbed Penguins captain Sidney Crosby early in the second period, and moments later stopped a hard shot by Evgeni Malkin, who smashed his stick against the ice in frustration.

He again stymied Malkin with a sprawling save in the first overtime. Anderson's effort brought the crowd of 20,500 to its feet with chants of "Andy! Andy!"

"You just want to give your team a chance to win," Anderson said. "Sometimes stats are misleading. You just kind of build off the good stuff."

The Senators took seven penalties against the Penguins, who own the top power-play unit in the playoffs, but didn't allow a goal.

Senators defenseman Erik Karlsson took a slashing penalty with less than two minutes left in the game, but Ottawa killed it.

Ottawa improved to 3-0 at home in this postseason (3-0).

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-05-20-HKN-Penguins-Senators/id-50d3c1406b3c4b599fa7e7a0d81f4f9c

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