Rescuers search for Philly collapse victims

PHILADELPHIA (AP) ? A four-story building being demolished collapsed Wednesday on the edge of downtown, injuring 12 people and trapping two others, the fire commissioner said.

Rescue crews were trying to extricate the two people who were trapped, city Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers said. The dozen people who were injured were taken to hospitals with minor injuries, he said.

The collapse involved a building that once housed a first-floor sandwich shop. It collapsed, sending debris onto a Salvation Army corner thrift store next door. The two are adjacent to an adult bookstore and theater that had been taken down earlier.

Rescuers were using buckets and their bare hands to move bricks and rubble to search for survivors.

Witnesses said they heard a loud rumbling sound immediately before the collapse.

Veronica Haynes was on the fifth floor of an apartment building across the street.

"I was standing there looking out my window, watching the men at work on the building, and the next thing I know I heard something go kaboom," she said. "Then you saw the whole side of the wall fall down ... onto the other building."

Roofers Patrick Glynn and Anthony Soli were working atop a nearby building when they heard what sounded like two loud bangs or explosions. They immediately ran down the scaffolding to look for victims, and helped pull out two women and a man.

Glynn said he had been watching workers take down the building next to the Salvation Army building over the past few weeks, and said he suspected a collapse was inevitable because of the methods the workers were using to tear it down.

"For weeks they've been standing on the edge, knocking bricks off," he said. "You could just see it was ready to go at any time. I knew it was going to happen."

Carlton Williams of the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections said there were no existing violations on the building and the demolition company had proper permits for the work they were doing.

Bernie DiTomo was driving past Salvation Army building in his white pickup truck, on his way to an appointment, when the accident happened.

"The next thing you know, I heard a rumble, and a building and a sign fell on my truck," he said.

He said he lay down in the seat of his cab. It was probably over in about 30 seconds, he said. There was a lot of dirt and dust that he breathed in, but he was able to open the door and get out, unhurt. His truck remained nearby, partially covered in debris, as DiTomo watched recovery efforts from across the street.

High school student Jordan McLaughlan said he saw several people on the ground being given oxygen by rescuers after the collapse.

"It was hard to breathe, there was a lot of dust everywhere," McLaughlan said.

The accident happened at 10:45 a.m. Wednesday on the western edge of downtown, between the city's business district and its main train station.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pa-building-collapses-12-injured-2-trapped-164506731.html

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This Inflatable Aircraft Carrier Houses a Solar-Powered Wonder Plane

When you're flying around the world in a lightweight solar-powered plane with a wingspan larger than most commercial airliners, you need to guarantee you've always got a safe place to store it on the ground. So the support team behind the Solar Impulse, the world's first globe circumnavigating solar-powered aircraft, decided that the easiest way to guarantee they always had adequate shelter, was to simply bring one with them wherever they went.

First unveiled at St. Louis' Lambert Airport after storms destroyed the permanent hangar the Solar Impulse was scheduled to use, the giant inflatable cocoon measures 289 feet long, 105 feet wide, and has 36 feet-tall ceilings at its highest point. Weighing in at 7,716 pounds it's not the easiest thing to move, but it takes just twelve people a few hours to deploy.

To protect the Solar Impulse, which is very susceptible to damage from inclement weather, the portable hangar is waterproof, fireproof, and can withstand winds up to 62 miles per hour. But the material it's made from is still translucent enough to allow sunlight to shine through and charge the plane's batteries. It's not the first portable hangar?they've been used since World War I to allow advancing forces to quickly claim and setup makeshift airports for aerial attacks. But the technology and engineering behind this one is almost as impressive as the Solar Impulse itself.

[Solar Impulse via Gizmag]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-inflatable-aircraft-carrier-houses-a-solar-powered-511443405

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Senate sexual assault hearing ?forgets? to invite victims of sexual assault (Americablog)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/310446211?client_source=feed&format=rss

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French wine 'has Italian origins'

3 June 2013 Last updated at 15:11 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Evidence of the earliest winemaking in France has been described - and it indicates Italian origins.

Shaped vessels called amphoras, known to have been imported from the Etruscan people of Italy around 500 BC, have shown chemical evidence of wine.

A wine press identified in the same region shows that the beverage quickly gained favour and launched a local industry that would conquer the world.

The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There is also evidence that the wines contained herbal and pine resins, which may have helped preserve them for shipping.

The history of wine development is a patchy one, principally because wine leaves behind few chemical markers that archaeologists today can ascribe definitively to wine, rather than other agricultural products.

The earliest known examples of wine-making as we know it are in the regions of modern-day Iran, Georgia, and Armenia - and researchers believe that modern winemaking slowly spread westward from there to Europe.

In 2004, Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum led a team whose findings suggested that wine based on rice may have been developed in China at the same time or even before efforts in the Middle East.

But details for many parts of the spread from the Middle East, including into France, remained unclear.

Dr McGovern and colleagues have now pinned down another part of the story in the new study.

"You could argue that it comes [into France from] farther north on the continent," he told BBC News.

"You could have it spreading across Germany, say, from Romania - but this really provides a definite set of evidence that it came from Italy."

Molecular historians

The team was examining what are called amphoras, vessels designed for carrying both liquids and solids and for neat packing into a boat's hull.

The Etruscans, a pre-Roman civilisation in Italy, are thought to have gained wine culture from the Phoenicians - who spread throughout the Mediterranean from the early Iron Age onward - because they used similarly shaped amphoras.

Further, it is known that the Etruscans shipped goods to southern France in these amphoras - but until now it remained unclear if they held wine or other goods.

Dr McGovern's team focused on the coastal site of Lattara, near the town of Lattes south of Montpellier, where the importation of amphoras continued up until the period 525-475 BC.

They used a high-precision analytical tool called gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, which provides a list of the molecules absorbed into the pottery of the amphoras. The results showed that they did once contain wine - as well as pine resin and herbal components.

But more surprising was the find of a wine-pressing platform, where grapes were ground and liquid drained off.

"In a walled town like this, it is unusual to find a wine press from an early period," Dr McGovern said. "Finding the chemical evidence for the press, that was a surprise."

The find is consistent with a pattern seen elsewhere - that wine is introduced from abroad, but a local culture eventually seeks to transplant the grapes and grow their own, local wine industry.

"From there, [winemaking] spread up the Rhone River, the domesticated vine gets transplanted, it crosses with the wild grapes and all sorts of interesting cultivars develop - those are the ones that spread around the world.

"Most of the wine we have today is from French cultivars, which ultimately derive from the Near-East cultivar via the Etruscans," he explained.

"There's still a lot of blanks to fill in, but I find it very exciting."

The methods used in the study have pushed the boundaries of what can be gathered chemically from archaeological remains such as those in Lattara.

Regis Gougeon of the University Institute of Vine and Wine at the University of Bourgogne said the work was "undoubtedly a good example of technology and methodology leading the science".

"It was already acknowledged - in particular thanks to Patrick McGovern's work - that viniculture might have travelled from the Near East to the Mediterranean Sea area about 3000 BC," Dr Gougeon told BBC News.

"However, this Etruscan hypothesis is indeed rather new and sheds an interesting light on the possible input of this educated and art-oriented civilisation."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22758119#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Keen On? Stephen Wolfram: Confessions Of The Most Quantified Person On The Planet

Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, may well be the smartest and most interesting guy in tech. A PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of twenty, the youngest ever recipient of the MacArthur "genius" fellowship, the inventor of both Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram's life has been dedicated to the capture and organization of all the knowledge in the world.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/W_ROSuPv7hI/

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Police Dog Put to Rest, Saluted in Massachusetts

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/police-dog-put-to-rest-saluted-in-massachusetts/

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Erdogan rejects 'dictator' claims

A protester stands atop of a destroyed car during a rally at the Taskim square in Istanbul early Sunday, June 2, 2013. Public anger has flared among urban and secular Turks after police violently broke up an anti-development sit-in in the landmark Taksim Square, with protests spreading to dozens of other cities as demonstrators denounced what they see as Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

A protester stands atop of a destroyed car during a rally at the Taskim square in Istanbul early Sunday, June 2, 2013. Public anger has flared among urban and secular Turks after police violently broke up an anti-development sit-in in the landmark Taksim Square, with protests spreading to dozens of other cities as demonstrators denounced what they see as Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

In this photo taken late Saturday, June 1, 2013, a demonstrator waves a national flag as Turkish protesters clash with riot police near the former Ottoman palace, Dolmabahce, where Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan maintains an office in Istanbul, Turkey. Protests in Istanbul, Ankara and several other Turkish cities appear to have subsided Sunday, after days of fierce clashes following a police crackdown on a peaceful gathering as protesters denounced what they see as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style. (AP Photo)

In this photo taken late Saturday, June 1, 2013, a masked couple walk as Turkish protesters clash with riot police near the former Ottoman palace, Dolmabahce, where Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan maintains an office in Istanbul, Turkey. Protests in Istanbul, Ankara and several other Turkish cities appear to have subsided Sunday, after days of fierce clashes following a police crackdown on a peaceful gathering as protesters denounced what they see as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style. (AP Photo)

Turkish protesters clash with riot police near the former Ottoman palace, Dolmabahce, where Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan maintains an office in Istanbul, Turkey, late Saturday, June 1, 2013. Turkish police retreated from a main Istanbul square Saturday, removing barricades and allowing in thousands of protesters in a move to calm tensions after furious anti-government protests turned the city center into a battlefield. A second day of national protests over a violent police raid of an anti-development sit-in in Taksim square has revealed the depths of anger against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who many Turks view as increasingly authoritarian and dismissive of opposing views.(AP Photo)

Protesters gather around a fire set by them during a rally at the Taskim square in Istanbul early Sunday, June 2, 2013. Public anger has flared among urban and secular Turks after police violently broke up an anti-development sit-in in the landmark Taksim Square, with protests spreading to dozens of other cities as demonstrators denounced what they see as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

ISTANBUL (AP) ? Turkey's prime minister on Sunday rejected claims that he is an authoritarian leader, dismissing protesters as an extremist fringe even as hundreds moved back into the landmark square that was the site of the fiercest anti-government outburst in years.

Over the past three days, protesters around the country have unleashed pent-up resentment against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who after 10 years in office many secular Turks see as an uncompromising figure with undue influence in every part of life.

A huge, exuberant protest in Taksim Square subsided overnight, but hundreds of people were streaming into the area again on Sunday and some 1,500 people were assembling in a square in Ankara, the capital.

Many waved flags, sang and called on Erdogan to resign. Some protesters have compared him to a sultan and denounced him as a dictator.

"If they call someone who has served the people a 'dictator,' I have nothing to say," Erdogan said in an address to a group representing migrants from the Balkans. "My only concern has been to serve my country."

In another speech delivered an hour later, Erdogan said: "I am not the master of the people. Dictatorship does not run in my blood or in my character. I am the servant of the people."

The demonstrations were ignited by a violent police crackdown on a peaceful sit-in to prevent the uprooting of trees at Istanbul's Taksim Square.

Police and protesters clashed violently on Friday and Saturday, with clouds of tear gas overwhelming the normally touristy city center and hundreds injured.

Thousands flooded into the square on Saturday after police lifted barricades to try to reduce tensions. The government said some 1,000 people were detained during the protests.

There were violent clashes between police and demonstrators trying to approach Erdogan's offices both in Ankara and Istanbul late on Saturday, but there were no immediate reports of any skirmishes on Sunday.

Erdogan continued to maintain a defiant tone, calling the protests "ideological" and manipulated by an opposition "unable to beat (the government) at the ballot box."

He also reiterated that his government would not back away from plans to uproot trees at Taksim as part of his urban renovation plans for the area. In a statement that could cause more controversy, he also declared that a mosque would be built at Taksim.

The mosque plans have long been contentious because it would further shrink the green spaces in Istanbul's city center. Some argue that there are already plenty of mosques around Taksim.

"I am not going to seek the permission of the (the opposition) or a handful of plunderers," Erdogan said.

Erdogan also defended his government's environmental record, saying it had planted two billion trees since coming to office in 2002.

_____

Fraser reported from Ankara.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-06-02-Turkey-Protest/id-2520562b02644f3793378fdf58c08da0

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