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BBC
A workshop to make suicide bomber vests has been discovered in northern Mali, the French army has said.
About 5,000kg of fertiliser intended to be used as explosive was also uncovered in Bourem, a town on the Niger River between Gao and Timbuktu.
A sample suicide vest and 18 sewing machines were found and it appears local women were employed there, a French army spokesman told the BBC.
French forces have led an operation to oust Islamist militants from the north.
The al-Qaeda-linked groups had taken advantage of a coup in March 2012 to take control of the north of Mali, including major cities such as Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu where they imposed a strict form of Islamic law.
Since January, about 4,000 French troops with the help of Malian and West African soldiers have gained control of the vast desert region’s main towns and cities.
Slowing retreat
Lt Col Cyril Zimmer, French military spokesman in Mali’s capital, Bamako, told the BBC the suicide vest workshop was discovered earlier this week.
Lt Col Cyril Zimmer, French military spokesman in Mali’s capital, Bamako, told the BBC the suicide vest workshop was discovered earlier this week.
The fertiliser found on the site in a remote area of Bourem would be enough for plenty of belts and vests, he said.
Initially the soldiers thought they had found a factory to make copies of uniforms worn by Malian soldiers and those in the West African force, but they later found the sample vest.
The BBC’s Alex Duval Smith in Bamako says the discovery comes as France announced it was slowing the withdrawal of its soldiers from Mali.
It will still have between 3,000 and 3,500 troops on the ground when nationwide elections are held at the end of July.
France plans to gradually hand over to the Malian army and a 12,600-strong UN peacekeeping force, which is due to deploy next month and will incorporate the 6,000 West African soldiers already in the country.
The former colonial power intends to keep 1,000 troops in the country to work alongside the UN force to tackle further militant threats.
Earlier on Friday, the French army spokesman in Paris, Col Thierry Burkhard, said that “one third of terrorist groups had been neutralised, one third had decided to give up the game and one third has probably evaporated” to Mali’s neighbours.
France decided to intervene in Mali as the militants approached Bamako.
A suicide bomber goes into a pet shop and shouts “you’ve got 1 minute to get out,” Tortoise in the back shouts back,
Walking and texting is leading to a spate of collision-related injuries. Could a new app be the answer?
We’ve all done it. You’re walking down the street and the familiar beep of an incoming text becomes too tempting to resist. As you start to fire off a quick reply – bam! You clash shoulders with a fellow pedestrian doing exactly the same.
Alex Stoker is a Clinical Fellow in Emergency Medicine at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey. “If it’s a tall object like a wall or a lamp-post that someone walks into, then one might expect facial injuries such as a broken nose or fractured cheekbone,” he told the BBC.
“If on the other hand the collision results in falling over, then they’re much more liable to things like hand injuries and broken wrists. There’s a complete spectrum but it is possible to sustain a really serious injury.”
Man hole avoidance
A new app called CrashAlert aims to help save people from themselves. It involves using a distance-sensing camera to scan the path ahead and alert users to approaching obstacles.
The camera acts like a second pair of eyes – looking forward while the user is looking down.
CrashAlert is at prototype stage
Just as a Nintendo Wii or Xbox can detect where and how a player is moving, CrashAlert’s camera can interpret the location of objects on the street.
When it senses something approaching, it flashes up a red square in a bar on top of the phone or tablet. The position of the square shows the direction of the obstacle – giving the user a chance to dodge out of the way.
“What we observed in our experiments is that in 60% of cases, people avoided obstacles in a safer way. That’s up from 20% [without CrashAlert],” says CrashAlert’s inventor Dr Juan David Hincapié-Ramos from the University of Manitoba.
What’s more, the device doesn’t distract the user from what they’re doing. Hincapié-Ramos’s tests showed it can be used alongside gaming or texting without any cost to performance.
Despite designing CrashAlert, Hincapié-Ramos accepts that the best solution of all is for people to stop checking their phones in the first place.
“We should encourage people to text less while they’re walking because it isolates them from their environment. However people are doing it and there are situations where you have to do it. It’s for situations like this that CrashAlert can have a positive impact.”
But Dr Joe Marshall, a specialist in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Nottingham, says that it’s not necessarily people who are to blame – but the phones themselves.
“The problem with mobile technology is that it’s not designed to be used while you’re actually mobile. It involves you stopping, looking at a screen and tapping away.”
Dr Marshall believes that if we want to stop people being distracted by their phones, then designers need to completely rethink how we interact with them. But so far, there is no completely satisfactory alternative.
“Google glass solves the problem of looking down by allowing you to look ahead. But you still have to pay attention to a visual display,” he told the BBC.
So for now at least, it seems vigilance is the key to avoiding lamp-posts and unexpected manholes.
But as mobile technology continues to dominate everyday life, it might not be too ludicrous to expect to rely on smart cameras to steer us in the right direction.
What I don’t understand is what is the urgency to look at a text while walking? Just stop for 15 seconds.
Trouble is brewing for an American retailer after customers noted that one of its tea kettles bears a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler.
Bemused motorists took photographs of the huge JCPenney billboard advertising the kettle as they drove past it on the 405 Interstate highway near Culver City in California, one of America’s busiest stretches of roads.
“That Hitler looks like a kettle,” commented one user of Reddit, one of the several websites where the image was posted over the weekend.
“He even has his right arm extended,” wrote another, while a third added: “I’m a little Nazi, short and stout”.
Things that look Hitler have become a popular web meme – with the genre perhaps defined by the house in Swansea that bears an unsettling resemblance to the Nazi Fuhrer.
(CNN) — Charges against the Mississippi man accused of sending ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama and other officials were dropped Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Felicia Adams said, citing “new information” that has been uncovered.
Authorities now are investigating whether someone may have tried to falsely implicate Paul Kevin Curtis, according to a law enforcement source, speaking to CNN on condition of anonymity.
Curtis said he wants to “get back to being normal” after being falsely accused.
“This past week has been a nightmare for myself and my family,” he said. “My mother has suffered as well as my children.”
Curtis, an Elvis impersonator from Corinth, Mississippi, was arrested April 17 and charged with sending a threat to the president last week after letters containing the poison triggered security scares around Washington.
Curtis’ attorney, Christi McCoy, said her client has been framed by someone who used several phrases Curtis likes to use on social media.
The letters read, in part: “To see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance.”
They were signed “I am KC and I approve this message,” a source told CNN.
They each had a Memphis, Tennessee, postmark and no return address.
McCoy said she was sure someone else was to blame.
“I do believe that someone who was familiar and is familiar with Kevin just simply took his personal information and did this to him,” McCoy said. “It is absolutely horrific that someone would do this.”
Curtis had been accused of sending letters containing “a suspicious granular substance” to Obama; Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi; and Sadie Holland, a Justice Court judge in Lee County, Mississippi. The FBI said the substance tested positive for ricin, a toxin derived from castor beans that has no known antidote.
The FBI said no illnesses had been found as a result of exposure to the toxin.
Those Elvis Impersonators are a wild and crazy bunch.
One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says
Poll asking voters about conspiracy theories reveals alarming beliefs – including 37% believing global warming to be a hoax
If Obama is the anti-Christ, he sure is a pleasant Dark Angel.
About one in four Americans suspect that President Barack Obama might be the antichrist, more than a third believe that global warming is a hoax and more than half suspect that a secretive global elite is trying to set up a New World Order, according to a poll released on Tuesday.
The survey, which was conducted by Public Policy Polling, asked a sample of American voters about a number of conspiracy theories, phrasing the questions in eye-catching language that will have the country’s educators banging their heads on their desks. The study revealed that 13% of respondents thought Obama was “the antichrist”, while another 13% were “not sure” – and so were at least appeared to be open to the possibility that he might be. Some 73% of people were able to say outright that they did not think Obama was “the antichrist”.
The survey also showed that 37% of Americans thought that global warming was a hoax, while 12% were not sure and a slim majority – 51% – agreed with the overwhelming majority view of the scientific establishment and thought that it was not. The survey also revealed that 28% of people believed in a sinister global New World Order conspiracy, aimed at ruling the whole world through authoritarian government. Another 25% were “not sure” and only a minority of American voters – 46% – thought such a conspiracy theory was not true.
At least some of the insane theories suggested by the poll were dismissed by large majorities. For example, only 7% of Americans in the survey believed the moon landing was faked, 14% believed in Bigfoot and 4% accepted that “shape-shifting alien reptilian people control our world by taking on human form”. In other good news, Paul McCartney will be relieved that a mere 5% of respondents believed that he died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a double so the Beatles could continue their careers, and just 11% embraced the concept that the US government knowingly allowed the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 to take place.
The survey was carried out in order to explore how voters’ political beliefs impact on their willingness to embrace conspiracy theories – it did indeed find that the partisan divide that is blamed for many problems in Washington DC also extends to the world of paranoia, aliens and Sasquatch. For example, when it comes to thinking global warming is a hoax some 58% of Republicans agreed and 77% of Democrats disagreed. While 20% of Republicans believed Obama is the antichrist heralding the End Times, only 13% of independents did and just 6% of Democrats.
“Even crazy conspiracy theories are subject to partisan polarization, especially when there are political overtones involved. But most Americans reject the wackier ideas out there about fake moon landings and shape-shifting lizards,” said PPP president Dean Debnam.
