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Bombs kill 27 as Iraqi
Shiites mark Ashura
Cold kills 128 Afghan children
Pak PM calls for steps to
resolve Kashmir dispute
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100 Oppn workers held in Nepal
And now, brain signals to move robotic arm
Monster explosion in Milky Way spotted
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Bombs kill 27 as Iraqi Shiites mark
Ashura
Baghdad, February 19 Iraq’s security forces had been braced for attacks in the southern holy city of Kerbala, where more than 170 pilgrims were killed during the Shiite ritual of Ashura last year. But guerrillas targeted the capital, which has borne the brunt of violence since last month’s elections. In the worst attack, a man wearing a vest laden with explosives boarded a bus in the Shiite Khadamiya district and blew himself up, according to witnesses and the US military. The police said 17 persons were killed and 41 wounded in the blast, close to a barrier protecting a Shiite mosque. A Reuters photographer at the scene said bodies were lying in the road, blown apart and burned. The orange bus was torn almost in half and reduced to a burnt wreck. In a separate attack in the same area, a suicide bomber blew himself up after an exchange of fire with security forces. One US soldier was killed. Earlier, a suicide bomber on a motorbike attacked a group of people attending the funeral of a woman killed in one of yesterday’s bombings. Four mourners were killed and 39 wounded, hospital officials said. While Baghdad was rocked by the blasts, Shiites in Kerbala were able to observe Ashura in relative peace. Officials said several hundred thousand pilgrims marched through the city’s streets, chanting, beating their breasts and crying ‘’Hussein’’ in honour of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who died in a battle in 680 A.D. Some cut themselves with knives in a symbolic act of atonement for Hussein’s death. Traffic was banned around the city to limit the threat of car bombs, and local residents helped set up checkpoints.
— Reuters |
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Cold kills 128 Afghan children
Kabul, February 19 “One hundred and twentyeight children have died in
the last month and a half. That’s the confirmed figure,” Health Minister Amin Fatimie told AFP. “Some parents do not go to the doctors and they administer opium to the kids to stop the cough, and that stops the cough but can also kill them,” he said. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium, and many parents mired in desperate poverty have few or no other pain killers available. The minister rejected estimates by the aid agency Catholic Relief Services that up to 1,000 children could have been killed by the freezing weather in the western province of Ghor alone. Members of the aid organisation drove and hiked through the snow to 16 villages in the district of the remote western province, and found 80 children had died in those villages alone in the last month, most in the last two weeks.
— AFP |
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Pak PM calls for steps to
resolve Kashmir dispute
Islamabad, February 19 Talking to newsmen at the Chaklala airport, the Prime Minister said back-channel efforts which had been continuing for quite some time had led to the fulfilment of a long-standing demand of Kashmiris living on both sides of the Line of Control. Mr Aziz said he had told Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh that though the bus service was a substantive CBM, the real aim of the ongoing talks should be the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. He said he had also made it clear to the Indian minister that Pakistan desired a solution which was in line with the wishes of Kashmir people. About the Baglihar dam project, Mr Aziz said the matter had been taken up with the World Bank for appointment of neutral arbitrators. He said Pakistan also had reservations over the Kishanganga dam on Neelam River and he had raised the issue with Mr Singh. He said reopening of the Khokhrapar-Monabao train link was also under consideration and for the purpose the rail track was being repaired as it was in a dilapidated condition. Similarly, talks were continuing to finalise the opening of the Pakistan consulate in Mumbai and the Indian consulate in Karachi, he added. Mr Aziz said during his meeting with Mr Singh, he had emphasised the need for taking immediate steps for normalisation of relations between the two countries. Pakistan wanted to expand its trade and economic relations with India. Responding to a question, he said that Pakistan was making efforts for the transformation of the OIC into a vibrant representative body having the ability to project Islam in its true spirit and image. |
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100 Oppn workers held in Nepal
Kathmandu, February 19 Those arrested include activists of the Nepali Congress, Nepal Sadbhavna
Party-UML and Janmorcha Nepal. The activists demanding restoration of multi-party rule on the 55th Democracy Day were arrested yesterday from Kathmandu,
Pukhara, Dhangadhi, Dhanushaand and nine from Dipayal. Former Parliament members Mina Pandey, Haribhakta Adhikari and Mukti Prasad Sharma belonging to the Nepali Congress were some of the prominent leaders to be taken into custody.
— PTI |
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And now, brain signals to move robotic arm
Washington, February 19 A monkey outfitted with a child-sized robotic arm controlled directly by its own brain signals is able to feed itself chunks of fruits and vegetables. The researchers trained the monkey to feed itself by using signals from its brain that are passed through tiny electrodes, thinner than a human hair, and fed into a specially designed algorithm that tells the arm how to move. “The beneficiaries of such technology will be patients with spinal cord injuries or nervous system disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS,” lead researcher Andrew Schwartz, said. The neural prosthesis moves much like a natural arm, with a fully mobile shoulder and elbow and a simple gripper that allows the monkey to grasp and hold food while its own arms are restrained. Computer software interprets signals picked up by tiny probes inserted into neuronal pathways in the motor cortex, a brain region where voluntary movement originates as electrical impulses. The neurons’ collective activity is then fed through the algorithm and sent to the arm, which carries out the actions the monkey intended to perform with its own limb. The primary motor cortex, a part of the brain that controls movement, has thousands of nerve cells, called neurons, that fire like Geiger counters. These neurons are sensitive to movement in different directions. They developed a special algorithm that uses the limited information from relatively few neurons to fill in the missing signals. The algorithm decodes the cortical signals like a voting machine by using each cell’s preferred direction as a label and taking a continuous tally of the population throughout the intended movement. Monkeys were trained to reach for targets. Then, with electrodes placed in the brain, the algorithm was adjusted to assume the animal was intending to reach for those targets. “When the monkey wants to move its arm, cells are activated in the motor cortex. Each of those cells activates at a different intensity depending on the direction the monkey intends to move its arm. The direction that produces the greatest intensity is that cell’s preferred direction. The average of the preferred directions of all of the activated cells is called the population vector. We can use the population vector to accurately predict the velocity and direction of normal arm movement, and in the case of this prosthetic, it serves as the control signal to convey the monkey’s intention to the prosthetic arm,” Schwartz said.
— ANI |
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Monster explosion in Milky Way spotted
Washington, February 19 The blast observed on December 27 came from a neutron star — a collapsed dead star with a sun-like mass squeezed into a sphere just 24 km across — in the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer). Even at a distance of 50,000 light years, the explosion was powerful enough to bounce off the moon and disturb Earth’s upper atmosphere, researchers yesterday said at a briefing at NASA headquarters. A light year is about 10 trillion km, the distance light travels in a year. It interfered with many satellites and overloaded receptors on some spacecraft, but was blocked by the atmosphere and had little practical effect on Earth except to disrupt some very low-frequency radio transmissions, the scientists said. Neutron stars are rare enough, but this one was an exotic type known as a magnetar with an ultra-strong magnetic field capable of stripping information from a credit card at a distance halfway to the moon. If such a blast occurred within 10 light-years of Earth, it could destroy much of the ozone layer and cause mass extinction.
— Reuters |
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