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Okay, so it's a little later than expected, but we're happy to report that at least some Northeast Regional trains have now been augmented by AmtrakConnect. This (free) WiFi has been available on Acela trains for some time now, and in a few lucky Regional trains in the Northwest. Amtrak still hasn't confirmed the existence of this connectivity, so we can't say for sure just how many of its trains have been suitably augmented, but we know that at least number 69, the Adirondack, has it, because we're using it right now. Connectivity is a little rough and speeds are decidedly low -- problems that can certainly be applied to this particular railway relic as a whole.
President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, where he declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, where he declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, where he declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, where he declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama on Friday declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all American troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end.
Obama's statement put an end to months of wrangling over whether the U.S. would maintain a force in Iraq beyond 2011. He never mentioned the tense and ultimately fruitless negotiations with Iraq over whether to keep several thousand U.S. forces there as a training force and a hedge against meddling from Iran or other outside forces.
Instead, Obama spoke of a promise kept, a new day for a self-reliant Iraq and a focus on building up the economy at home.
"I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year," Obama said. "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over."
Obama spoke after a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and he offered assurances that the two leaders agreed on the decision.
The U.S. military presence in Iraq stands at just under 40,000. All U.S. troops are to exit the country in accordance with a deal struck between the countries in 2008 when George W. Bush was president.
Obama, an opponent of the war from the start, took office and accelerated the end of the conflict. In August 2010, he declared the U.S. combat mission over.
"Over the next two months our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home," Obama said. "The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops."
More than 4,400 American military members have been killed since the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The Associated Press first reported last week that the United States would not keep troops in Iraq past the year-end withdrawal deadline, except for some soldiers attached to the U.S. Embassy.
Denis McDonough, the White House's deputy national security adviser, said that in addition to the standard Marine security detail, the U.S. will also have 4,000 to 5,000 contractors to provide security for U.S. diplomats, including at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and U.S. consulates in Basra and Erbil.
In recent months, Washington had been discussing with Iraqi leaders the possibility of several thousand American troops remaining to continue training Iraqi security forces.
Throughout the discussions, Iraqi leaders refused to give U.S. troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, and the Americans refused to stay without that guarantee.
Moreover, Iraq's leadership has been split on whether it wanted American forces to stay.
When the 2008 agreement requiring all U.S. forces to leave Iraq was passed, many U.S. officials assumed it would inevitably be renegotiated so that Americans could stay longer.
The U.S. said repeatedly this year it would entertain an offer from the Iraqis to have a small force stay behind, and the Iraqis said they would like American military help. But as the year wore on and the number of American troops that Washington was suggesting could stay behind dropped, it became increasingly clear that a U.S. troop presence was not a sure thing.
The issue of legal protection for the Americans was the deal-breaker.
But administration officials said they feel confident that the Iraqi security forces are well prepared to take the lead in their country. McDonough said assessment after assessment of the preparedness of Iraqi forces concluded that "these guys are ready; these guys are capable; these guys are proven; importantly, they're proven because they've been tested in a lot of the kinds of threats that they're going to see going forward.
"So we feel very good about that."
Pulling troops out by the end of this year allows both al-Maliki and Obama to claim victory.
Obama kept a campaign promise to end the war, and al-Maliki will have ended the American presence and restored Iraqi sovereignty.
The president used the war statement to once again turn attention back to the economy, the domestic concern that is expected to determine whether he wins re-election next year.
"After a decade of war the nation that we need to build and the nation that we will build is our own, an America that sees its economic strength restored just as we've restored our leadership around the globe."
ATLANTA ? Wildlife biologists say black bears like the one that recently rambled through backyards in Atlanta's northern suburbs could soon be a permanent part of the community there, having cubs and multiplying.
State officials say bears could be reproducing well inside the Atlanta metro area within the next decade, which would mean a new way of life for suburbanites not accustomed to living in bear country.
Wildlife biologist Don McGowan of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources says trends suggest that bears will move well into metro Atlanta "and we may be seeing that already."
Researchers say bears are expanding nationwide, and are being seen in metro areas such as Birmingham, Ala., and Tulsa, Okla.
They say the U.S. bear population has boomed as hunting declined.
DENVER ? Authorities say it was only after a 14-year-old boy's mother took a trip from their northern Colorado home that they discovered he had allegedly been kept locked in a filthy room in a mice-infested trailer for most of three years.
Police acknowledged Friday that they previously had visited the home but saw no prior signs of abuse.
The boy, described by his mother as "developmentally delayed," was found hiding under a neighbor's porch Sept. 27 in Erie, Colo., after his mother and her boyfriend left for New York.
Authorities said that after she returned, she allegedly told officers that a lock found on the plywood door to the boy's room was installed because he had once run away. Police say she admitted to locking him up when she got upset with him or when he was in trouble.
According to an arrest affidavit, the boy told police that his mother, Amanda Joliff, her boyfriend, Richard Smith, and the boy's sister had kept him locked in the room under Joliff's orders since early 2008. He said he was allowed out to take care of the family's ducks, to clean and to eat, but said he usually only ate about four times a week.
Joliff, 36, and Smith, 31, have been jailed on charges of false imprisonment, child abuse and neglect. A public defender assigned to represent Joliff declined to comment because he hadn't reviewed the case yet. It wasn't clear yet who was representing Smith.
The allegations were first reported by the Greeley Tribune.
Police had previously been called to the home in February 2007 after the family's dog bit a boy.
Lt. Lee Mathis said an officer responded and shot the dog after it cornered the officer in an alley. The boy who was bit was under 10 at the time, but Mathis said he couldn't discuss whether it was the same boy who was allegedly locked in his room because of the pending abuse case.
Mathis also said a boy who lived at the home showed up at a bar to listen to country western music in August 2010 and officers took him home. A year later, police were called to the home because neighbors had complained about unlicensed dogs.
Mathis said police never entered the home during those interactions and didn't notice anything suspicious.
"If we had any indication of what was going on, we would have taken action," he said.
A police officer who did enter the home after the boy showed up at the neighbor's said the boy's room was filled with junk and had a soiled mattress with no sheets. The only window was boarded up and there appeared to be a leak in the ceiling.
The officer also noticed droppings from mice that had eaten through boxes of pasta, which the boy said was his main source of sustenance. The officer said there were two dogs, six birds including two ducks, and four toads living inside. The home reeked of animal urine and feces, and another dog lived outside.
While Joliff and Smith were in New York, the neighbor who discovered the boy told police that the boy and his sister remained at their home with the boy's father ? whom authorities noted wasn't the boy's biological father.
The boy told police that his father and sister decided to move out of the trailer Sept. 27 but told him he would have to wait another day to leave.
The boy said they gave him $5 to find a place to stay and he crawled underneath a neighbor's porch to sleep, too afraid to ask for help.
ATHENS, Greece ? Greek unions on Friday threatened further strikes next week, a day after parliament approved new harsh cutbacks to secure international loans despite protests and riots that left one man dead and nearly 200 injured.
The new austerity measures include further pension and state salary cuts, civil service staff cuts, a reduction in the tax-free threshold and a watering-down of workers' collective bargaining rights. Their approval by the governing Socialist majority was expected to pave the way for a vital euro8 billion ($11 billion) payout from international creditors within weeks so Greece can stay solvent.
Ilias Iliopoulos, secretary-general of the Adedy civil servant union, insisted the new law "will not be implemented," and accused the Socialists of turning a blind eye to the toll these measures will take on workers.
"This government has ignored the popular uprising by approving this terrible law," Iliopoulos told The Associated Press. "Our answer is: get out as fast as you can, there is no place for you in Greece any longer."
"We are planning new strikes next week," he added.
Greece's main private sector union, GSEE, was also planning new strikes.
"We plan long-running opposition to ensure that the crippling cutbacks imposed by our loan-shark creditors are not enforced," said GSEE board member Stathis Anestis.
More than 150,000 people took to the streets of Athens on Wednesday and Thursday during a two-day strike against the cutbacks, which follow 20 months of deeply resented austerity measures. Police arrested about 20 people following extensive rioting on both days.
But Thursday's vote further weakened Prime Minister George Papandreou's government, after a former labor minister who objected to reducing the bargaining rights was expelled from the party. The Socialists now control 153 of parliament's 300 seats, down from 160 after their landslide election victory two years ago.
Greece now heads into a series of tough negotiations in Brussels involving the 17 finance ministers of the eurozone and European leaders. The meetings kick off later Friday, when the eurozone finance ministers gather, with the finance ministers of the full 27-nation European Union in talks on Saturday, and the EU heads of state and government on Sunday.
Greece has avoid bankruptcy only with an euro110 billion ($152 billion) bailout loan from its eurozone partners and the International Monetary Fund since May of last year. Creditors worried about the country missing budget targets had demanded that Athens pass extra austerity measures before its gets the next payout ? without which Greece says it will run out of money in mid-November.
But the new cutbacks have caused deep anger in a country struggling in a third year of recession and record unemployment, which reached 16.5 percent in July.
"These last few years, lawmakers have been voting against the will of the people," said a civil engineer who only gave his first name, Yorgos. "(Democracy) has been annulled."
European officials have already admitted that a second bailout for Greece, agreed to in July, is not enough to prevent the country from bankruptcy, and this discussions this weekend will focus on ways to increase support for Greece.
Ferries were confined to port for a fifth straight day Friday in a strike that is already causing shortages in the country's islands. Municipal employees, state nurses and prison guards also walked off the job and mounds of rotting rubbish ? uncollected for nearly three weeks ? piled up in Athens.
Greek unions held a small march Friday in central Athens to protest the death of a 53-year-old construction worker who suffered a heart attack after attending Thursday's rally, which saw savage clashes between union protesters and anarchists armed with firebombs and stones.
The fighting raised the possibility of a vendetta between the two groups. Early Friday, three Communist party offices were firebombed in the northern city of Thessaloniki.
___
APTV producer Nebi Qena in Athens and Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki contributed to this story
No simultaneous warming of Northern and Southern hemispheres as a result of climate change for 20,000 yearsPublic release date: 21-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Svante Bjorck Svante.Bjorck@geol.lu.se 46-703-352-494 Lund University
However, Svante Bjrck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments.
Svante Bjrck's study thus goes 14 000 years further back in time than previous studies have done.
"What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective", he says.
Svante Bjrck has gone through the global climate archives, which are presented in a large number of research publications, and looked for evidence that any of the climate events that have occurred since the end of the last Ice Age 20 000 years ago could have generated similar effects on both the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.
It has not, however, been possible to verify this. Instead, he has found that when, for example, the temperature rises in one hemisphere, it falls or remains unchanged in the other.
"My study shows that, apart from the larger-scale developments, such as the general change into warm periods and ice ages, climate change has previously only produced similar effects on local or regional level", says Svante Bjrck.
As an example, let us take the last clear climate change, which took place between the years 1600 and 1900 and which many know as the Little Ice Age. Europe experienced some of its coldest centuries. While the extreme cold had serious consequences for agriculture, state economies and transport in the north, there is no evidence of corresponding simultaneous temperature changes and effects in the southern hemisphere.
The climate archives, in the form of core samples taken from marine and lake sediments and glacier ice, serve as a record of how temperature, precipitation and concentration of atmospheric gases and particles have varied over the course of history, and are full of similar examples.
Instead it is during 'calmer' climatic periods, when the climate system is influenced by external processes, that the researchers can see that the climate signals in the archives show similar trends in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
"This could be, for example, at the time of a meteorite crash, when an asteroid hits the earth or after a violent volcanic eruption when ash is spread across the globe. In these cases we can see similar effects around the world simultaneously", says Svante Bjrck.
Professor Bjrck draws parallels to today's situation. The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are currently changing very rapidly. At the same time, global warming is occurring.
"As long as we don't find any evidence for earlier climate changes leading to similar simultaneous effects on a global scale, we must see today's global warming as an exception caused by human influence on the earth's carbon cycle", says Svante Bjrck, continuing:
"this is a good example of how geological knowledge can be used to understand our world. It offers perspectives on how the earth functions without our direct influence and thus how and to what extent human activity affects the system."
Svante Bjrck's results were published this summer in the scientific journal Climate Research.
###
For more information, please contact Professor Svante Bjrck, Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, Lund University, tel.: +46 46 222 7882, mobile: +46 703 352494, email: Svante.Bjorck@geol.lu.se
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
No simultaneous warming of Northern and Southern hemispheres as a result of climate change for 20,000 yearsPublic release date: 21-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Svante Bjorck Svante.Bjorck@geol.lu.se 46-703-352-494 Lund University
However, Svante Bjrck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments.
Svante Bjrck's study thus goes 14 000 years further back in time than previous studies have done.
"What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective", he says.
Svante Bjrck has gone through the global climate archives, which are presented in a large number of research publications, and looked for evidence that any of the climate events that have occurred since the end of the last Ice Age 20 000 years ago could have generated similar effects on both the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.
It has not, however, been possible to verify this. Instead, he has found that when, for example, the temperature rises in one hemisphere, it falls or remains unchanged in the other.
"My study shows that, apart from the larger-scale developments, such as the general change into warm periods and ice ages, climate change has previously only produced similar effects on local or regional level", says Svante Bjrck.
As an example, let us take the last clear climate change, which took place between the years 1600 and 1900 and which many know as the Little Ice Age. Europe experienced some of its coldest centuries. While the extreme cold had serious consequences for agriculture, state economies and transport in the north, there is no evidence of corresponding simultaneous temperature changes and effects in the southern hemisphere.
The climate archives, in the form of core samples taken from marine and lake sediments and glacier ice, serve as a record of how temperature, precipitation and concentration of atmospheric gases and particles have varied over the course of history, and are full of similar examples.
Instead it is during 'calmer' climatic periods, when the climate system is influenced by external processes, that the researchers can see that the climate signals in the archives show similar trends in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
"This could be, for example, at the time of a meteorite crash, when an asteroid hits the earth or after a violent volcanic eruption when ash is spread across the globe. In these cases we can see similar effects around the world simultaneously", says Svante Bjrck.
Professor Bjrck draws parallels to today's situation. The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are currently changing very rapidly. At the same time, global warming is occurring.
"As long as we don't find any evidence for earlier climate changes leading to similar simultaneous effects on a global scale, we must see today's global warming as an exception caused by human influence on the earth's carbon cycle", says Svante Bjrck, continuing:
"this is a good example of how geological knowledge can be used to understand our world. It offers perspectives on how the earth functions without our direct influence and thus how and to what extent human activity affects the system."
Svante Bjrck's results were published this summer in the scientific journal Climate Research.
###
For more information, please contact Professor Svante Bjrck, Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, Lund University, tel.: +46 46 222 7882, mobile: +46 703 352494, email: Svante.Bjorck@geol.lu.se
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 21-Oct-2011
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