U.S. aiming to hit 6,000 km/h in test flight of supersonic ‘waverider’
The U.S. military conducted an unmanned test flight on Tuesday of its hypersonic Waverider aircraft, designed to move at six times the speed of sound using technology that bridges the gap between planes and rocketships, a military official said.
A B-52 bomber launched the remotely monitored, nearly wingless experimental aircraft, officially known as the X-51A, between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., John Haire, a spokesman for the 412th test wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, said in a statement. Results of the brief test flight will be released on Wednesday, he said. (US Air Force / AFP/Getty Images)
That looks sort of fast.
State officials have confirmed that the Megabus, which crashed into a concrete pillar off of I-55, lost control as the result of a flat tire. Firefighters have been forced to use four ladders to try and free passengers trapped in the top of the bus, and more than 30 ambulances have reportedly arrived on-scene. 15 patients have been sent to surrounding hospitals, but no word yet on the severity of their injuries. A live, but audio-free, stream of the continuing events is available here. (Photo via Jennifer Feldman) More on the story here
He looked so calm when he did it. It was like scary. He waited for both the bombs to explode before he did anything. Then, after both of them exploded, he began to shoot.
Eyewitness from Aurora, Colo., theater shooting during showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” last night.
More:
9News in Denver live-streaming video.
Video of police response calls, including calls for gas masks.
Developing story and related On Deadline blog posts.
(via usatoday)
» The money will finance drastically increased salaries for Corps-selected teachers — with each set to receive a $20,000 pay raise — and would require participating teachers to commit to program participation for a multi-year period. Over $100 million in funding will be set aside for the new project, effective immediately, and the President will include another $1 billion in his budget proposition for fiscal 2013. ”I’m running to make sure that America has the best education system on earth, from pre-K all the way to post-graduate,” Obama told a crowd in San Antonio, continuing, “And that means hiring new teachers, especially in math and science.”
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Capturing Libya: Through a Hipstamatic Lens
To photojournalism purists, it was pure blasphemy: a prestigious prize, third place for photo of the year, granted to a New York Times photographer who’d used not a 35mm to document U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but simply, his iPhone — and an app called Hipstamatic. Immediately, traditionalists went berserk: “What we knew as photojournalism at its purest form is over,” one photojournalist lamented. Using Hipstamatic in a news report, another commentator proclaimed, was “cheating us all.”
And yet, to Ben Lowy, a conflict photographer who has made a career out of a certain brand of iPhonography — and will debut the first ever photojournalism-inspired Hipstamatic lens with his namesake later this year — the award was a well-needed wake-up call for photojournalism fundamentalists. Last February, Lowy set out to capture the uprising in Libya from his iPhone (alongside millions of protesters who’d document the Arab Spring on their mobile devices) in photos that would fuel reporting from the region in outlets around the globe. In October, Lowy’s Hipstamatic images of everyday life in wartime Kabul were published in the New York Times Magazine, prompting the magazine’s photo editor, Kathy Ryan, to defend their use on the paper’s 6th Floor blog. And since then, Lowy has published an iPhone photo a day — from dramatic images of war to mundane life in Brooklyn — on his Tumblr, captured under the title, iSee.
That he’s found a home on Tumblr suggests that Tumblr is a place for new approaches.
The Free Syrian Army carried out this attack in retaliation for the massacres committed by the regime and because of the international silence. We promised that we are going to hit the regime in its most sensitive axis. This was necessary for us.COL. MALIK KURDI, deputy commander of the Free Syrian Army, which claimed responsibility for an attack in Damascus that killed Syria’s defense and deputy defense ministers. (via the Washington Post)
The Internet Defense League, a group of “people and sites who use their massive combined reach to defend the open internet and make it better”, has introduced a rallying cry of sorts should anything similar to SOPA, PIPA or CISPA rear its head once more. Borrowing an idea from the Caped Crusader, the IDL will publicly debut on July 19, 2012 — the same night as The Dark Knight Rises — and plans to use a portion of its seed money to let the Cat Signal shine in major cities around the country. source
Make the SFB writers work for you! It’s Week 3 in our Facebook project, The Pitch! So far we’ve tackled the Supreme Court and Seventeen Magazine. Now we need your votes to determine what story we need to delve deeper into. You have until Friday evening to like the photo of the story you want to win. source
A security team aboard a US Navy vessel has fired on a small boat near the United Arab Emirates after it disregarded warnings, a U.S. Defense official said Monday.
The motor boat had been rapidly approaching the USNS Rappahannock and failed to respond to warnings, the official said. Watch Reuters.com for more.
The official said the boat departed after being fired upon, adding that it’s unclear if there are any injuries or deaths.
‘Slam Drunk’
In which Jason Kidd is reminded of why being a sports star in NYC isn’t the easiest job title — and why the NY Post and Daily News should call each other before using the same headline.