China's Xi congratulates N. Korea's Kim
Seoul (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a message to North Korea's Kim Jong-Un, congratulating him on his election as ruling party chairman at a congress at which Beijing - Pyongyang's closest ally - was notably absent.
In his message, Xi described ties with North Korea as a "precious asset" that was personally "cultivated by the leaders of the elder generation" the North's official KCNA news ag ...
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MBDA's Brimstone missile completes RAF trials
Ridgecrest, Calif. (UPI) May 10, 2016 -
MBDA's enhanced Brimstone air-to-surface missile successfully completed U.K. Royal Air Force trials in February.
The trials, undertaken at China Lake in California, comprised 11 missile firings, including at the edge of the system's performance envelope, according to a company release.
Trials involved a variety of scenarios and resulted in precise hits on everything from very sma ...
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Jordan to buy US-made TOW missiles: company
Amman (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Jordan has signed a contract to buy TOW anti-tank missiles from US firm Raytheon, the company said in a statement issued Tuesday at the SOFEX arms fair for special forces.
Raytheon said the contract was signed between the Jordanian army and the US defence department, without specifying the contract's amount or the number of missiles involved.
It said Raytheon would begin deliveries "this ...
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'Executed' N. Korean general named to senior party posts
Seoul (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
North Korea's former military chief of staff who was reported executed earlier this year is apparently alive and well after being named Tuesday in a number of senior ruling party posts.
Intelligence reports in South Korea had suggested Ri Yong-Gil, former chief of the Korean People's Army (KPA) General Staff, was executed in February on accusations of corruption and forming a political facti ...
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Germany to increase troops for first time since Cold War ended
Berlin (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Germany is raising the number of its troops for the first time since 1990, ending a quarter of a century of successive cuts in the army since the end of the Cold War.
The Bundeswehr is expected to increase in the next seven years by 14,300 soldiers, while 4,400 civilian officers will also be added to the service, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said.
This boost in troop strength i ...
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Ex-NATO heads, US defence chiefs fire Brexit warning
London (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Britain leaving the EU would damage Western security and dangerously weaken Europe, five ex-NATO chiefs and a host of former US secretaries of state and defence warned on Tuesday.
The former NATO heads said a so-called Brexit would undermine the transatlantic military alliance and "give succour to the West's enemies", and would "undoubtably lead to a loss of British influence".
In a lett ...
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Philippines' Duterte open to territory-row talks with China
Davao, Philippines (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte is willing to talk with China over a highly sensitive territorial dispute in the South China Sea, his spokesman said Tuesday, in a significant reversal of the incumbent's stance.
Duterte, who won Monday's election in a landslide, is also willing to form partnerships with China to extract gas and oil deposits that are believed to be in the sea, as we ...
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US warship sails by South China Sea reef, irking Beijing
Beijing (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
The US on Tuesday sailed a warship close to a disputed South China Sea reef Beijing has built up into an artificial island, officials said, prompting China to express "dissatisfaction and opposition".
Guided-missile destroyer USS William P. Lawrence navigated within 12 nautical miles of the Fiery Cross Reef, occupied by China and also claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, the Penta ...
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Obama to make historic visit to Hiroshima
Washington (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Barack Obama will this month become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, but the White House is scotching talk of an apology for the devastating 1945 nuclear bombing of the city.
Obama, accompanied by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will make the deeply symbolic visit on May 27, after attending a G7 summit in south-central Japan, his spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
The Whit ...
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Iran equipped with Russian missile system: defence minister
Tehran (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Iran's army is now equipped with a Russian air defence system after a long and controversial delivery process, Defence Minister General Hossein Dehghan was quoted as saying Tuesday.
"I inform our people that... we are in possession of the strategic S-300 system" and that it "serves our air force's counterattack command," Dehghan said, according to ISNA news agency.
Parts of the system, i ...
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Missing Thai activist's wife urges police to step up probe
Bangkok (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
The wife of a Thai activist feared dead after he went missing last month said Tuesday police have failed to properly investigate his case, which threatens to to add to the country's dismal record of unsolved disappearances.
The United Nations has recorded at least 82 open cases of enforced disappearance in Thailand dating back to the 1980s.
The latest to vanish is Den Kamlae. The 65-year ...
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Philippines' Duterte ready to free communist rebels, resume talks
Manila (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte may release jailed communist rebels in an effort to restart peace talks aimed at ending a decades-old insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, an aide said Tuesday.
The aide said Duterte, set to be sworn into office on June 30 after a landslide election victory on Monday, signalled his readiness to discuss the release of a number of i ...
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Canada's fire-ravaged Fort McMurray works to restore utilities
Fort Mcmurray, Canada (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Crews worked Tuesday to start restoring water and electricity in this Canadian oil hub turned into a ghost town by a towering ring of fire that reduced its suburbs to ashes.
Government authorities, meanwhile, met with oil company executives in the oil sands region of unseasonably dry Alberta province to discuss how to get evacuated workers back on the job and production up and running again. ...
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Fifth of world's plants under threat, warns Kew Gardens
London (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
A fifth of the world's plant species are at risk of extinction, British researchers warned Tuesday in an unprecedented global census of the plant kingdom.
The survey by Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, said 21 percent of species are under threat. The report, the first of its kind, is intended to become a global reference point for the study of plants.
The study, which esti ...
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Mexico eyes anti-pollution measures for smoggy capital
Mexico City (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Authorities announced on Tuesday new measures to combat a recent increase in air pollution in Mexico City, as officials reported an increase in related ailments such as asthma.
Environment Minister Rafael Pacchiano blamed the rise in ozone levels on the 5.5 million cars and trucks that zoom around the mega-city of 21 million people every day.
Pacchiano said that rules to verify vehicle e ...
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China court jails pro-democracy activists: lawyer
Beijing (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
A Chinese court has jailed two activists for taking part in small-scale pro-democracy protests after detaining them for nearly three years, their lawyer said Tuesday.
Yuan Bing and Yuan Xiaohua were jailed for four years and three-and-a-half years respectively, on charges including "picking quarrels and making trouble", their attorney Lu Jingmei told AFP.
A court in the central Chinese p ...
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Tensions simmer at Canada fire evacuee centers
Lac La Biche, Canada (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Frustration mounted Monday among the Fort McMurray evacuees, crammed into shelters after a traumatic flight from the Canadian oil city, as some turned to criticizing the official handling of the wildfires ravaging the region.
At the closest evacuation center to the fires, in Lac La Biche, about 300 kilometers (185 miles) south of Fort McMurray, security was doubled overnight and entry has be ...
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Canada natives mourn loss of hunting, fishing in Fort McMurray fires
Lac La Biche, Canada (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Chipewyan native Elmer McDonald putters around his trailer in a Lac La Biche parking lot and plays his fiddle since being evacuated as the Fort McMurray wildfires closed in on his tribal home late Sunday.
Several indigenous communities had taken in residents of the neighboring Canadian oil city forced to flee raging fires that have consumed more than 161,000 hectares of boreal forests.
B ...
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Over a dozen people killed in Uganda landslides
Kampala (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
About 15 people were killed and dozens injured on Tuesday in landslides triggered by torrential downpours in hilly western Uganda, local authorities said.
Bridges were washed away and some 200 homes destroyed in heavy rains that have cut off access to some areas.
"It is a major landslide, which has killed about 15 people as from the reports so far received and 50 others are undergoing tr ...
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Massive tornadoes rip across Oklahoma, at least two killed
Washington (AFP) May 10, 2016 -
Several massive tornadoes churned above Oklahoma on Monday, killing at least two people, with hail as big as grapefruit hitting the US state, the authorities and US media said.
The storms began forming in southern parts of the state in the afternoon, local media reported, with the first confirmed twister hitting near Elmore City, in rural Garvin County.
"Strong winds and hail as large a ...
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Pond scum and the gene pool
Manhattan KS (SPX) May 11, 2016 -
Kansas State University biologists are skimming pond scum for clues of multicellular evolution and possible origin of cancer. Brad Olson, assistant professor in the Division of Biology; Erik Hanschen, doctoral student at the University of Arizona; Hisayoshi Nozaki, University of Tokyo; and an international team of researchers found a single gene is responsible for the evolution of multicellular ...
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Stickleback fish adapt their vision in the blink of an eye
Vancouver, Canada (SPX) May 11, 2016 -
Stickleback fish are able to adapt their vision to new environments in less than 10,000 years, a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms, according to new research by University of British Columbia biodiversity experts.
"This is a very short time scale for large changes in colour vision to evolve," says Diana Rennison, lead researcher on the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal S ...
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Floods and coastal erosion may expose contents of UK landfills, study finds
London, UK (SPX) May 11, 2016 -
The contents of historic coastal landfill sites could pose a significant environmental threat if they erode, according to a new study from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). There are 1264 historic coastal landfill sites in England and Wales, all of which are sealed and no longer receive waste, but fall wholly or partially within the Environment Agency's Tidal Flood Zone 3.
In the fir ...
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Ancient species form 'snapshot' of primates stressed by climate change
Lawrence KS (SPX) May 11, 2016 -
In a study to be published this week in the journal Science, researchers describe unearthing a "mother lode" of a half-dozen fossil primate species in southern China. These primates eked out an existence just after the Eocene-Oligocene transition, some 34 million years ago. It was a time when drastic cooling made much of Asia inhospitable to primates, slashing their populations and rendering dis ...
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New insights into light color sensing and transfer of genetic traits
Bloomington IN (SPX) May 11, 2016 -
An international team led by Indiana University researchers has uncovered the regulation of a system that allows a globally abundant bacterium to efficiently capture sunlight and perform photosynthesis.
The study - led by IU biologist David M. Kehoe and conducted by Joseph E. Sanfilippo, IU Ph.D. student, and Animesh Shukla, former IU Ph.D. student, in collaboration with researchers in the ...
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