Breaking News Thread Version 2.0

[Krandall]

Iraqis rejoice as U.S. troops leave Baghdad
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090629/ts_nm/us_iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. troops pulled out of Baghdad on Monday, triggering jubilation among Iraqis hopeful that foreign military occupation is ending six years after the invasion to depose Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi soldiers paraded through the streets in their American-made vehicles draped with Iraqi flags and flowers, chanting, dancing and calling the pullout a "victory."

One drove a motorcycle with party streamers on it; another, a Humvee with a garland of plastic roses on the grill.

U.S. combat troops must pull out of Iraq's urban centers by midnight on Tuesday under a bilateral security pact that also requires all troops to leave the country by 2012.

All had left the capital by Monday afternoon, Major-General in Staff, Abboud Qanbar, head of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad, told Reuters.

Another Iraqi official who would not be named, said some units in cities outside Baghdad would leave at the last minute. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said 30 bases remained to be handed over. There are still some 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Addressing military leaders in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said: "Our sovereignty has started and ... we should move forward to build a modern state and enjoy security which has been achieved."

Many Iraqis were elated even though they feared militants might use the withdrawal as an opportunity to step up attacks.

"The American forces' withdrawal is something awaited by every Iraqi: male, female, young and old. I consider June 30 to be like a wedding," said Ahmed Hameed, 38, near an ice cream bar in Baghdad's upmarket Karrada district.

"This is proof Iraqis are capable of controlling security inside Iraq," added the recent returnee from exile in Egypt.

The government has declared June 30 a national holiday, "National Sovereignty Day."

"BIG JOY"

A spate of bombings in recent days, including two of the deadliest for more than a year that killed 150 people between them, have raised fears militants will try to step up the pace of attacks.

Yet few Iraqis see that as reason for the Americans to stay.

"It is a big joy to see them leaving," said Abu Hassan, 60, a shop owner. "There might be some more attacks because of struggles between the different parties, but Iraqis are controlling security now. It's up to our forces now."

At a ceremony outside central Baghdad's old defense ministry building, the last Baghdad location to be handed over by U.S. forces, a military band played while soldiers and army college students paraded through a square festooned with Iraqi flags.

"Baghdad is safe, Iraq is safe. We are moving to sovereignty in secure steps," Qanbar said at the ceremony, which unusually was not cordoned off, despite the presence of the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Major-General Daniel Bolger.

U.S. troops will remain at two giant bases near Baghdad airport that are defined as non-urban, in case the Iraqis need to draw on their firepower.

"They'll ask us for help whenever they need something but they've got a lot of capability. This is their country. It only makes sense they should secure their own cities," Bolger said.

More than six years of U.S. occupation and the orgy of sectarian violence it unleashed have left most Iraqis feeling ambivalent about U.S. forces.

Many complain their lives have improved little since then, with daily struggles caused by power cuts and water shortages.

"They did a good job getting rid of that tyrant, Saddam, and we thank them for that, but it's really time for them to leave," said Talib Rasheed, 70, sitting outside in one of Baghdad's leafier suburbs. "Maybe they could leave us some electricity?"

[Peelz]

I hope this is good news, not "yay the americans are gone, let's bomb shit" 

[Krandall]

seems it's a good time for us to get out of there. Those dang koreans/iranians are flexin their muscles, knowing they more than likely have a nuclear arsenal is even scarier than the "WMD" in iraq.

[disco]

Punk vs 72-year old man.   

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196479/Pictured-The-battered-bruised-face-burglar-got-wrong-72-year-old-boxer.html

[Krandall]

 

fricken awesome!

[Lady4Fiddy]

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.
In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. "The art of secret writing," or writing in cipher, has "engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages," Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall "far short of perfection."

To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote.

There is no evidence that Jefferson, or anyone else for that matter, ever solved the code. But Jefferson did believe the cipher was so inscrutable that he considered having the State Department use it, and passed it on to the ambassador to France, Robert Livingston.

The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Smithline's neighbor, who was working on a Jefferson project at Princeton University, told Dr. Smithline of Mr. Patterson's mysterious cipher.

Dr. Smithline, intrigued, decided to take a look. "A problem like this cipher can keep me up at night," he says. After unlocking its hidden message in 2007, Dr. Smithline articulated his puzzle-solving techniques in a recent paper in the magazine American Scientist and also in a profile in Harvard Magazine, his alma mater's alumni journal.

The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That's when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what's termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter "e" is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for "e."

Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter. Mr. Jefferson's correspondence shows that he used several code books of nomenclators. An issue with these tools, according to Mr. Patterson's criteria, is that a nomenclator is too tough to memorize.

Jefferson even wrote about his own ingenious code, a model of which is at his home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. Called the wheel cipher, the device consisted of cylindrical pieces, threaded onto an iron spindle, with letters inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Users could scramble and unscramble words simply by turning the wheels.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was "upwards of ninety millions of millions."

After explaining this in his letter, Mr. Patterson wrote, "I presume the utter impossibility of decyphering will be readily acknowledged."

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as "dx," don't exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as "u" after "q".

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson's State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of "aa," "ab," "ac," through "zz."

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what's called "dynamic programming," which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be "tedious in the 19th century, but doable."

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson's cipher emerged -- 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher's text:

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."

That, of course, is the beginning -- with a few liberties taken -- to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. "Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson," says Dr. Smithline. "And nobody knew until now."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html?mod=yhoofront#project%3DCIPHER0907%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive

Very Cool!!

[Krandall]

I just read that on Yahoo a few hours ago!!! way sweet!

[Diggs59]

Arturo Gatti dead!


Here's the link: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2009/07/11/2009-07-11_arturo_gatti_former_boxer_found_dead_on_honeymoon_in_brazil.html

Sad......

[Krandall]

Dang, he wasn't that old iether. what. 30somethin!

[Krandall]

This is insane in my eyes..
so what if he was a guard. He was doing his civil duty as a german citizen.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090713/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_demjanjuk

MUNICH – Retired auto worker John Demjanjuk was formally charged Monday with 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder — one for every person who died at Sobibor during the time he is accused of serving as a guard at the Nazi death camp.

The charges by prosecutors a Munich state court are one of the final steps before an expected autumn trial for the 89-year-old, who has been fighting a variety of Nazi-era charges since 1977.

Demjanjuk and his family have argued that he is in poor health. Photos taken in April showed him wincing in pain as immigration agents removed him from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio, where he had been living since 1993.

German doctors cleared the way for formal charges this month when they declared that Demjanjuk (dem-YAHN'-yuk) was fit to stand trial so long as court hearings do not exceed two 90-minute sessions per day.

The state court must now decide whether to accept the charges — usually a formality — and set a date for the trial. Court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel it was unlikely to start until the autumn.

The defendant's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., described the charges as "a farce" in an e-mail to The Associated Press, writing that, "as long as my father remains alive, we will defend his innocence as he has never hurt anyone anywhere." Demjanjuk's lawyer, Guenther Maull, said he had no immediate comment because had not yet seen the charges.

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, says he was a Red Army soldier who spent the war as a prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.

But prosecutors accuse him of serving as a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. Nazi-era documents obtained by given to German prosecutors by U.S. authorities include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at Sobibor and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki, Poland. U.S. and German experts have declared the ID genuine.

"This is obviously an important step forward," Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said by telephone from Jerusalem. "The effort to bring Demjanjuk to justice sends a very powerful message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrator."

Demjanjuk gained U.S. citizenship in 1958. The U.S. Justice Department moved to revoke the citizenship in 1977, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard, and it was revoked in 1981.

Demjanjuk was deported to Israel and tried on accusations that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said "Ivan" was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.

Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998. A U.S. judge revoked it again in 2002 based on fresh Justice Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps from immigration officials.

A U.S. immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

They accused him in that warrant of being an accessory to murder in 29,000 cases, representing the number of people who arrived there while he was alleged to be a camp guard based on his photo ID. However, that number was reduced in the charges because, of the people transported to Sobibor, "many did not survive the journey," said Anton Winkler, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors.

Approximately 250,000 Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners died at Sobibor, which opened in 1942 and was razed a year and a half later.

Charges of accessory to murder carry a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison in Germany.

[Krandall]

German plane drops out of sky

vid here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8150639.stm

A sports biplane has crashed into a car after plunging from the air. The pilot was performing aerobatics and struck a car, which was parked on a road near the airfield.

The impact of the collision tore the undercarriage off the aeroplane and left it, and the car in a nearby field.

A couple who were in the car at the moment of impact, suffered scratches while their daughter suffered some injuries, but no-one had to be taken to the hospital. The pilot also suffered minor injuries but did not need to go to hospital.

"Clearly guardian angels had a hand in the outcome," Grossostheim police said in a statement about the incident.

[Colorado700R]

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Not every classically trained musician has the gumption to interpret Michael Jackson on the violin. But German-born virtuoso David Garrett re-imagines "Smooth Criminal" with such fervor that you'd think Jackson had intended the song to be played by the instrument all along.
"I always loved his performances because as a lot of classical musicians are perfectionists, he was," said Garrett of the late singer. "He was really one of those people who was really old school, always looking for better performances. [He was] definitely a big influence [on me]."

Recorded before Jackson's death, Garrett's "Smooth Criminal" cover appears on his self-titled debut album, which has enjoyed three weeks atop the classical crossover charts since its release last month on Decca Records.

As comfortable playing Bach's "Air on the G String" as he is Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" (both of which appear on the album), Garrett makes no bones about the fact he's trying to attract a younger audience to classical music by injecting shots of rock and pop.

Already a celebrated artist in Europe and Asia, the 28-year-old worked his way into the spotlight in the United States with help from his PBS special "Live in Berlin."

And his chiseled jawline and playful blond ponytail seem to help sway the female contingent. After spotting him recently on NBC's "Today Show," actress Kirstie Alley declared on Twitter that Garrett was her new crush.

But she'd better get moving if she wants to keep up with him. Garrett, who studied with renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman at New York's Juilliard School, recently set a record as the world's fastest violinist, a feat to be documented in 2010's Guinness Book of World Records. He played "Flight of the Bumblebee" in a dizzying 66 seconds. Put another way, that's 13 notes per second. Really.

[Peelz]

13 notes per second? Nice, on a violin? cripes!

[disco]

News icon Walter Cronkite dies at 92

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/6535009.html

[Krandall]

sad