Southwest planes flying after computer glitch

CHICAGO (AP) ? Southwest Airlines was operating normally Saturday afternoon after a system-wide computer failure caused it to ground 250 flights for nearly three hours late Friday night.

Full service was restored just after 2 a.m. EDT Saturday, but the Dallas-based airline experienced lingering delays in the morning as it worked to clear a backlog of flights and reposition planes and crew.

The airline ? the country's largest domestic carrier ? canceled 43 flights Friday night and another 14 Saturday morning.

Southwest is the latest airline to ground flights because of a large computer outage. But its problem was minor compared to those experienced by two competitors ? thanks in part to its late-day timing.

In April, American Airlines grounded all of its flights nationwide for several hours due to computer problems. The airline ultimately canceled 970 flights. And last year, United Airlines had two major outages: one in August delayed 580 flights; another in November delayed 636 flights.

The problem was detected around 11 p.m. EDT Friday, Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins said. It impaired the airline's ability to do such things as conduct check-ins, print boarding passes and monitor the weight of each aircraft. Some flights were on the taxiway and diverted back to the terminal, Hawkins said. Flights already in the air were unaffected.

Most of Southwest's cancelations Friday night were in the western half of the country, according to airline spokeswoman Michelle Agnew. Saturday's cancelations were scattered across the U.S. They included planes leavings from Minneapolis, Chicago, Phoenix, Denver and San Diego, according to flight tracking service FlightAware.

Southwest flies an average of 3,400 flights each day.

Agnew said in an email Saturday morning that the airline's technology team is "still working to confirm the source of the issue."

Shortly after 2 a.m., Southwest posted on its Twitter page that "systems are operating and we will begin work to get customers where they need to be. Thanks for your patience tonight."

Agnew said the computer system was "running at full capacity" by early Saturday. Before that, though, officials used a backup system that was much more sluggish.

______

AP Airlines Writer Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/southwest-planes-flying-computer-glitch-213430461.html

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Cambodian lost city not so lost after all

Cambodian lost city:?Researchers clarified that the Mahendraparvata was not lost, but that it was found to be unexpectedly large.

By Elizabeth Barber,?Contributor / June 19, 2013

In this photo taken in June 2012, Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat temples complex stands in Siem Reap province, some 230 kilometers (143 miles) northwest Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Airborne laser technology has uncovered a network of roadways and canals, illustrating a bustling ancient city linking Cambodia's Angkor Wat temples complex.

Heng Sinith/AP

Enlarge

Researchers have clarified that Cambodia?s ?lost city,? found in the swelter of the country?s northwestern jungles, was not so lost at all.?It is, however, bigger than once thought, prompting scientists to revise their previous beliefs about the?character ? and the eventual collapse ??of the Khmer Empire.

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Researchers from the University of Sydney's archaeological research center in Cambodia said that they had known about Mahendraparvata ? an ancient city from the Khmer Empire some 1,200 years old ? for decades, but that before the use of Lidar technology, which allowed them to probe the vast undergrowth with lasers that revealed the buried city?s shape, they had not understood just how extensive the abandoned one-time seat of the Khmer kingdom was. The city had previously been misreported as ?discovered" in a "world exclusive" from The Sydney Morning Herald.

?It is an exaggeration to say a lost city has been found because if you?re working in Cambodia you know it?s been there since the 1900s,"?Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology and Development Foundation and the project?s lead archaeologist, told The Cambodia Daily. "The main discovery is a whole network of roads and dykes that were linking monuments that were already known."

The city's unexpected size suggests that the Khmer?Empire, which ruled Southeast Asia from?about 800 A.D. to 1400 A.D.,?was more urban than previously imagined: Mahendraparvata was a planned, well-laid-out city that was formerly linked with a system of roads and canals to the Angkor Wat temples, built some 350 years later also in Siem Reap province. Scientists had previously thought that the kingdom was more a loosely organized collection of population centers. The findings are due to be published in the?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We identify?an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated," the researchers wrote in a statement?published by NBC.

The researchers also offered additional comment on why it was that the Khmer Empire, once decadent in its stone temples ascending toward the clouds, collapsed into ruin, not to be reincorporated into the country?s story again until the French reintroduced the memory to Cambodian national identity. Now, researchers have suggested that periods of megadrought, combined with practices that caused environmental degradation, were to blame for the fall of the empire ? a recipe?thought to have led to the decline of massive, ancient civilizations elsewhere in the world.

?The lidar data reveal anthropogenic changes to the landscape on a vast scale, and lend further weight to an emerging consensus that infrastructural complexity, unsustainable modes of subsistence and climate variation were crucial factors in the decline of the classical Khmer civilization,??the researchers wrote.?

Once abandoned to time, the royal city was worked to rubble as a millennium of industrious vegetation and monsoon rains did their worst on its stone temples. The mountain, Phnom Kulen,?which once observed Cambodia at a cultural peak, would go on to witness one of the country's worst moments, becoming a Khmer Rouge stronghold in the 1970s, when the government murdered about a fifth of its population.

Throughout all that, the mountain has remained a spiritual place, host to tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/Se8DLCFCp5s/Cambodian-lost-city-not-so-lost-after-all

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Saudi Arabia offers Iran's Rohani qualified support

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia, a Gulf rival of Iran, wants Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani to seek stability in the Middle East and avoid interfering in other states' affairs, a Saudi official was quoted as saying on Thursday.

"If that is what Rohani aims for, then we support him and bless this position," Al Watan newspaper quoted Foreign Ministry undersecretary Prince Turki bin Mohammed as saying.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter and a leading Sunni Muslim power, has tense ties with Shi'ite Iran, notably over the war in Syria, where they back opposing sides, political unrest in Bahrain and the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

On Monday King Abdullah congratulated Rohani on his election victory and hailed what he described as the moderate cleric's wish to improve relations between the two nations.

Rohani has held out the prospect of forging better ties between Iran and the world, including the United States, and progress on resolving the nuclear dispute.

Prince Turki said Saudi Arabia favored "normal relations with Iran based on mutual respect and non-interference in the affairs of other states and the maintenance of security and stability of other states", Al Watan reported.

Western countries believe Iran is covertly seeking a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran denies this, saying its atomic program has only energy and medical purposes.

The United States and the European Union tightened financial and trade sanctions on Iran last year, forcing sharp cuts to its oil exports and badly damaging its economy.

The day before he was elected, Rohani told the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat daily that ending hostility between Iran and its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia, would be his top priority.

"Saudi Arabia and Iran can play an important positive role in major issues like security of the Gulf," he declared.

(Reporting by Mahmoud Habboush, Editing by William Maclean and Alistair Lyon)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-arabia-offers-irans-rohani-qualified-support-131726390.html

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Pope blames speculation, corruption for 'scandalous' food crisis

ROME (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Thursday that financial speculation and corruption were keeping millions of people in hunger and the financial crisis could not be used as an alibi for failing to help the poor.

The speech was the latest in a series of criticisms by the Argentinian pontiff, the first Latin American pope, of what he has called "the dictatorship of the economy" and the spread of consumerist values.

"It is a well-known fact that current levels of production are sufficient, yet millions of people are still suffering and dying of starvation. This is truly scandalous," he said in a speech to participants of a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Rome.

Francis has made repeated calls to tackle poverty and focus on the needs of the poor since he succeeded Pope Benedict in March. He has made it his mission to rejuvenate an institution reeling from scandals, including widespread sexual abuse by priests, and losing people to other faiths.

"A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table," he said.

"There is a need to oppose the shortsighted economic interests and the mentality of power of a relative few who exclude the majority of the world's peoples." he said.

Speaking earlier this month ahead of the G8 summit of world leaders, Francis denounced what he called a culture of waste in an increasingly consumerist world and said throwing away good food was like stealing from poor people.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-blames-speculation-corruption-scandalous-food-crisis-111649612.html

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Photoful for iPhone review: iOS 7 like photo galleries, meme creation, and editing tools all in one

Photoful for iPhone is a new photo gallery app that not only organizes your photos in a way that makes sense, but also lets you do almost all your editing and sharing in one place. The way Photoful organizes photos is also quite similar to the way iOS 7 will organize photos come fall. If you'd like to get a feel for what that'll be like, Photoful can give you a sneak preview right now.

Outside of the beautiful gallery views and easy album creation, Photoful is chock full of useful tools to let you edit and alter your photos to your liking. Photoful supports the ability to create memes in-app without the need of a secondary app, edit things like focus, crop, saturation, contrast, and more. Being able to do all of this in one app means you can eliminate some others, which is always welcome.

Another feature of Photoful is the ability to tag photos however you'd like. Tapping the tag icon in the upper right will give you a list of tags that are pre-generated for you. You can always add your own as well. Tagging photos with these will let you sort photos based on your tags. Basically you'll be able to have two levels of organization. Albums based on places and tags. It's somewhat simliar to how iPhoto on the Mac allows you to have albums and events. In my opinion, the organization that Photoful uses is even smarter yet.

When it comes to sharing, Photoful supports native sharing directly via email, SMS message, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can choose to upload multiple photos to certain services by just tapping on them in the edit view and choosing share. The one thing that has continuously bothered me about certain Twitter apps is that I can only include one photo. There are some exceptions to this, but for the most part, it's one photo unless you want to use another image sharing service.

The good

• Great interface that gives users a similar taste to what iOS 7 has in store
• One flick deletion of photos, just flick the photo to the side to delete it
• Synchronizes with your native Photos app so your photos are up to date in both places
• Lots of editing option, some necessary and some just for fun

The bad

• No complaints

The bottom line

Photoful does an amazing job of displaying photos in a way that makes sense. Bundle that with some basic editing tools, filters, and great organization options, and you've got a winner. Due to the way Photoful organizes photos much better than any default solution, I can see myself using it in conjunction with the native Photos app for a long time to come.

• Free - Download Now

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/FGCJrGaRkMI/story01.htm

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'Enormous' repercussions as court weighs DNA sampling during arrests

Jewel Samad / AFP - Getty Images file

The Supreme Court is weighing whether police have the right to take a DNA sample immediately after an arrest.

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

The Supreme Court is about to decide what one justice says may be its most important criminal procedure case in decades ? whether the police have the right to take a DNA sample after they make an arrest.

The question before the justices is whether taking DNA, often with the quick swab of a cheek, is the latter-day equivalent of fingerprinting or violates the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

?This is what?s at stake,? Justice Samuel Alito said during an oral argument Feb. 26. ?Lots of murders, lots of rapes that can be ? that can be solved using this new technology that involves a very minimal intrusion on personal privacy.?

The case arises from the arrest of a 26-year-old Maryland man, Alonzo King, in 2009 on a charge of second-degree assault. The police took a swab of DNA from his cheek, ran it through a database and matched it to an unsolved rape from six years earlier.

King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for the 2009 assault. The Maryland Court of Appeals later reversed the rape conviction on the grounds that the DNA sample was an unreasonable search.

The question before the court has vast implications: 28 states and the federal government take DNA swabs from people under arrest before they can be judged innocent or guilty. In Maryland alone, DNA samples during arrests have led to 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions since 2009, Katherine Winfree, the state?s chief deputy attorney general, told the justices.

Maryland law restricts DNA swabbing to people arrested for certain violent crimes. But Chief Justice John Roberts, worried about the reach of similar laws, wondered during the oral argument why they couldn?t be applied to simple traffic stops.

Tim Sloan / AFP - Getty Images

Chief Justice John Roberts indicated concern about the reach of state laws that allow DNA sampling during arrests.

?There?s no reason you couldn?t, right?? he asked Winfree. ?I gather it?s not that hard. Police officers who give Breathalyzer tests, they can also take a Q-tip or whatever and get a DNA sample, right??

Michael Dreeben, a lawyer for the federal government, which supports the Maryland law, told the justices that people under arrest ?are no longer like free citizens who are wandering around on the streets? with full Fourth Amendment rights.

They can be subjected to a strip search, for example, or given a medical screening when they are thrown in jail, he said. While he conceded that law enforcement officers must get a warrant before searching a home, he said DNA was ?not of that character.?

?It is far more like taking a fingerprint,? he said.

Kannon Shanmugam, a lawyer for King, argued that the two were different, partly because fingerprinting is mostly used for identification, not to solve cold cases, and is much more invasive.

?An individual?s DNA contains far more information and far more personal information than an individual?s fingerprints,? he said.

Prosecutors around the country will be watching the court?s ruling closely. If the justices decide that DNA swabbing during arrest is unconstitutional, untold numbers of cold-case convictions could be appealed.

Mindful of the implications, the court could narrowly tailor its ruling, said Jeffrey Urdangen, director of the Center for Criminal Defense at the Northwestern University School of Law.

?The repercussions of this are enormous,? he said.

For victims of violent crime, as for the justices themselves, the question presents a difficult balancing act ? how to weigh the crime-solving power of forensic advances against the rights of the accused.

Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, acknowledged that the issue is tough, but she said the center supports DNA sampling at the time of arrest, partly because it could prevent future crime.

She likened it to vaccination: Patients have to grapple with side effects, she said, but that pales next to the potential for good.

Of the DNA sampling, she said: ?It?s a tool that can save many, many, many lives, and we should take hold of it. It doesn?t mean that we don?t remain a good country. It?s not the end of democracy. It?s just a new tool that we need to learn how to handle.?

Justice Antonin Scalia was less welcoming. At the oral argument, he cut off Winfree, the Maryland state lawyer, immediately after she mentioned the 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions.

?Well, that?s really good,? he said. ?I?ll bet you if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you?d get more convictions, too.?

Alito, the justice who called the sampling issue ?perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this court has heard in decades,? appeared to lean toward classifying it with fingerprinting.

He and Scalia, two of the court?s conservatives, generally come down on the same side of rulings. But they appeared to differ on DNA sampling, an indication of the trickiness of the issue.

Matching the DNA against databases now takes two to three weeks. Two years from now, it could be almost instant, the Maryland lawyer said, meaning the judges could use it to make determinations about bail.

Scalia was unmoved.

?You just can?t demonstrate that now,? he said. ?Maybe you can in two years. The purpose now is ? is the purpose you began your presentation with, to catch the bad guys, which is a good thing.?

?But you know,? he continued, ?the Fourth Amendment sometimes stands in the way.?

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was originally published on Sat Jun 1, 2013 5:31 PM EDT

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653381/s/2cb78375/l/0Lusnews0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A60C0A10C1863180A80Eenormous0Erepercussions0Eas0Ecourt0Eweighs0Edna0Esampling0Eduring0Earrests0Dlite/story01.htm

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Bangladesh official: Disaster not 'really serious'

A woman covers her nose to block out the smell of decomposing bodies as people in the background identify bodies at a makeshift morgue where victims of the collapse of a garment factory buildings are brought Friday, May 3, 2013 in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh. Authorities suspended the mayor of the suburb of Savar, where the building was located, and arrested an engineer who called for the building?s evacuation last week but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

A woman covers her nose to block out the smell of decomposing bodies as people in the background identify bodies at a makeshift morgue where victims of the collapse of a garment factory buildings are brought Friday, May 3, 2013 in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh. Authorities suspended the mayor of the suburb of Savar, where the building was located, and arrested an engineer who called for the building?s evacuation last week but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

Women cover their noses as they look through body bags in hopes of identifying a family member, a victim of the garment factory building collapse, in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, Friday, May 3, 2013. More than 500 victims bodies have been recovered from the Bangladesh garment-factory building that collapsed last week, authorities said Friday. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

A Bangladeshi woman, holding a photo of her missing son, cries at a graveyard after a garments factory building collapse in Savar near Dhaka, Bangladesh, Friday May 3, 2013. Authorities suspended the mayor of the suburb of Savar, where the building was located, and arrested an engineer who called for the building?s evacuation last week but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. (AP Photo/Palash Khan)

A woman holds a photo of her missing sister after a garment factory building collapsed last week in Savar near Dhaka, Bangladesh, Friday May 3, 2013. Authorities suspended the mayor of the suburb of Savar, where the building was located, and arrested an engineer who called for the building?s evacuation last week but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. (AP Photo/Ismail Ferdous)

A woman is comforted by family members and others after she identified the body of her relative recovered from the rubble of the garment factory building which collapsed last week, in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, Friday, May 3, 2013. Authorities suspended the mayor of the suburb of Savar, where the building was located, and arrested an engineer who called for the building?s evacuation last week but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) ? Bangladesh's finance minister downplayed the impact of last week's factory-building collapse on his country's garment industry, saying Friday he didn't think it was "really serious" hours after the 500th body was pulled from the debris.

Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith spoke as the government cracked down on those it blamed for the disaster in the Dhaka suburb of Savar. It suspended Savar's mayor and arrested an engineer who had called for the building's evacuation last week, but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. The building owner was arrested earlier.

The government appears to be attempting to fend off accusations that it is in part to blame for the tragedy because of weak oversight of the building's construction.

During a visit to the Indian capital, New Delhi, Muhith said the disaster would not harm Bangladesh's garment industry, which is by far the country's biggest source of export income.

"The present difficulties ... well, I don't think it is really serious ? it's an accident," he said. "And the steps that we have taken in order to make sure that it doesn't happen, they are quite elaborate and I believe that it will be appreciated by all."

The government made similar promises after a garment factory fire five months ago that killed 112, saying it would inspect factories for safety and pull the licenses of those that failed. However, that plan has yet to be implemented.

Asked if he was worried that foreign retailers might pull orders from his country, Muhith said he wasn't: "These are individual cases of ... accidents. It happens everywhere."

Muhith, a long-time government official from a prominent family, has been criticized for insensitive comments in the past ? even by his own party. Last year when thousands of small investors lost their savings and poured into the streets seeking government intervention, Muhith said it wasn't responsible and the investors were at fault.

The official death toll from the April 24 collapse reached 512 Friday and was expected to climb, making it likely the deadliest garment-factory accident in world history. It surpassed long-ago disasters such as New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which killed 146 workers in 1911, and more recent tragedies such as a 2012 fire that killed about 260 people in Pakistan and one in Bangladesh that same year that killed 112.

At the site of the collapse, workers carefully used cranes to remove the concrete rubble and continue the slow task of recovering bodies. The official number of missing has been 149 since Wednesday, though unofficial estimates are higher.

"We are still proceeding cautiously so that we get the bodies intact," said Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hassan Suhwardy, the commander of the area's army garrison supervising the rescue operation.

A government investigator said Friday that substandard building materials, combined with the vibration of the heavy machines used by the five garment factories inside the Rana Plaza building, led to the horrific collapse.

Mainuddin Khandkar, the head of a government committee investigating the disaster, said substandard rods, cement, bricks and other weak materials were used in the building's construction.

About 15 minutes before the collapse, the building was hit by a power blackout, so its heavy generators were turned on, shaking the weakened structure, Khandkar said.

"The vibration created by machines and generators operating in the five garment factories contributed first to the cracks and then the collapse," he said, adding that a final report would be soon submitted to the government.

Police official Ohiduzzaman said Friday that engineer Abdur Razzak Khan was arrested a day earlier on a charge of negligence. He said Khan worked as a consultant to Rana Plaza owner Mohammed Sohel Rana when the illegal three-floor addition was made to the building.

Rana called Khan to inspect the building after it developed cracks on April 23, local media reported. That night Khan appeared on a private television station saying that after his inspection he told Rana to evacuate the building because it was not safe.

Khan, a former engineer at Jahangirnagar University near Savar, said he told government engineers the building needed to be examined further.

Police ordered the building evacuated, but witnesses say Rana told people gathered outside the next morning that the building was safe and that garment factory managers told their workers to go inside. It collapsed hours later.

Authorities also suspended the mayor of Savar, Mohammad Refatullah, for alleged negligence, said Abu Alam, a top official of the local government ministry.

Alam said an official investigation had found that the mayor ignored rules in approving the design and layout of the doomed building. The mayor is from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which has criticized his suspension as politically motivated.

The government also effectively suspended Kabir Hossain Sardar, the top government administrator at Savar, following reports that he declared the building safe after inspecting the cracks a day before the collapse. Sardar had close links with Rana. Alam said the government was taking action against everyone involved with Rana and his building.

Rana was arrested earlier and is expected to be charged with negligence, illegal construction and forcing workers to join work, crimes punishable by a maximum of seven years in jail. Authorities have not said if more serious crimes will be added.

The Bangladesh High Court has ordered the government to confiscate Rana's property and freeze the assets of the owners of the factories in Rana Plaza so the money can be used to pay the salaries of their workers.

Among the garment makers in the building were Phantom Apparels, Phantom Tac, Ether Tex, New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms.

___

AP Videojournalist Archana Thiyagarajan in New Delhi contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-05-03-Bangladesh-Building%20Collapse/id-22cf182d6600491da2433ed520fe34d6

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