NTSB to Challenge 787 Battery Tests

The National Transportation Safety Board will publicly question at a news conference planned for Thursday morning in Washington whether the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing adequately tested the lithium batteries that have caught fire on Dreamliners in the U.S. and Japan, ABC News has learned exclusively from a government source.

The NTSB will say its investigation into the fire on the 787 at Boston's Logan Field showed gaps between what happened with the battery in testing and what happened with the battery confiscated by the NTSB in Boston, a source told ABC News.

The NTSB investigation followed the mid-January announcement that the FAA ordered the grounding of all Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets until their U.S. operator proved that batteries on the planes are safe.

The pre-certification test results were found to be different than what happened during NTSB investigation, the source said. The agency, charged with investigating civil aviation accidents in the U.S., is expected to question whether the Boeing tests certified by the FAA were "robust enough."

The NTSB told ABC News that its investigation is looking at the battery failure and what caused it, as well as the certification processes, emphasizing that the FAA has been "very cooperative in allowing our investigators access to the certification review that they are undertaking on their own."

Akio Kon/Bloomberg/Getty Images

787 Dreamliner Grounded, Passengers Forced to Evacuate Watch Video

Boeing 787 Dreamliner Deemed Safe Despite Mishaps Watch Video

Both the airplane maker and the FAA are responsible for the testing, the government source said.

This morning, the chairwoman of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, told reporters at a breakfast briefing that the initial investigation into the batteries found "multiple cells where we saw uncontrolled chemical chain reaction," including short circuiting and thermal runaway, "and those features are not what we would have expected to see in a brand new battery, in a brand new airplane.

"We're evaluating assessments that were made, whether or not those assessments were accurate, whether they were complied with and whether more needs to be done," Hersman said. "We want to make sure the design is robust, that the oversight, the manufacturing process, that those are all adequate -- and so that will be a part of our continuing investigation to determine the failure modes, what may have caused it and what can mitigate against that in the future."

The lithium batteries, one power source for the 787, have never before been used in commercial airliners and were a source of concern from the beginning because of they operate at high temperature.

"I would not want to categorically say that these batteries are not safe," Hersman said. "Any new technology, any new design, there are going to be some inherent risks. ... I would say that, in the past, the NTSB have expressed concerns about the risks and recommended mitigation measures."

Hersman added that the fire seen on board the JAL Dreamliner in Boston in "shows us some risks that were not addressed."

In a statement to ABC News, Boeing said: "Lithium ion batteries were selected after a careful review of available alternatives because they best met the performance and design objectives of the 787. We've used them successfully in other applications, such as satellites, for nearly a decade, and they are used on other aircraft, spacecraft and naval vessels.

"With that said," Boeing added, "we constantly challenge our assumptions and decisions across all of our products when new information becomes available. Nothing we learned during the design of the 787 or since has led us to change our fundamental assessment of the technology. It merits emphasis that the 787 has extensive protections in place to ensure the ability for safe flight to continue even in the presence of a battery failure."

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Strengthening security at the nation’s airports

Most people think of airport security as their walk through the metal detector and the eyeballing by transportation security officers (TSOs). Dan Liddell, whose job it is to protect the flying public at seven airports in central New York, instead sees 17 zones of worker responsibility and hundreds of different tasks.

In pursuit of safeguarding the public, Liddell, a federal security director based in Syracuse, has written a book that is now used to train TSOs. It’s called the “National Standardization Guide to Improving Security Effectiveness.” Tasks at each duty area have been inventoried and cataloged, and the “knowledge, values and skills” associated with the airport security jobs have been identified under what Liddell describes as a systems approach to training.

As important as it is to use X-ray machines and explosive trace-detection equipment and to have the correct rules and procedures in place, Liddell said transportation security relies on the skills of the people responsible for it.

“People performance is the cornerstone,” he said. “When I set out to improve things, I look at the people. I look at their proficiency, their skill in doing something and how well they’re doing that job.”

Even when people have the skills to do their jobs, they don’t necessarily do them well each time, especially when conditions can vary with each day and every passenger. To keep performance high, TSOs are tested covertly at unexpected times. A banned item will be sent through a checkpoint and the reaction and activities that take place are monitored.

Whether or not TSOs spot contraband, everyone at that checkpoint during the test participates in an “after-action” review. “It’s the learning experience that’s relevant,” Liddell said. “We’re doing a review of actual performance and you can always improve.”

Liddell is sensitive to the pressure that airport security personnel face. TSOs have the tough of performing multiple tasks under constant camera surveillance and public scrutiny, often interacting with tired or irritated travelers. The testing and training helps them continually up their game.

Thirty airports around the country that helped test the training system and now use a version of it. Paul Armes, federal security director at Nashville International Airport, was interested in creating such a system with a colleague when they both worked in Arizona, but it “never got traction.”

When he learned about what Liddell was doing, he was eager to participate. “Typical of Dan, he built it himself and practiced it so he had hard metric results, and then he started reaching out to some of us, working with his counterparts around the country to get a good representative sample,” Armes said. “He sees things others don’t see sometimes and he has the capability to drill down into the details.”

Liddell began the “pretty long process” of analyzing how people were performing at checkpoints in 2009. He sat down with subject-matter experts to produce the task inventory he now uses. In 2010, he improved the review and reporting process that occurs after covert tests events and instituted the security practices he refined at the other New York airports he oversees, including Greater Binghamton, Ithaca and four others. “I love breaking it down,” he said. “I’ve got a quest for improvement.”

In a less sneaky version of the television show, “Undercover Boss,” Liddell went through the new-hire training program for his employees to understand as much as he could about the jobs and the training provided for them, he said.

If pursuing knowledge is in Liddell’s genes, it may be because his parents were both in education. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a fifth-grade teacher. His teaching manifested itself instead in the training realm, where he strives to educate security employees as effectively as possible, inside the classroom and out.

“It’s always a challenge to meet that right balance of really great effectiveness and really great efficiency,” he said. “There are always challenges. It’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to improve.”

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.

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Passion in US lower house immigration debate

WASHINGTON: US lawmakers debated plans on Tuesday to build a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants who remade their lives in America but found themselves at the heart of a fierce debate.

President Barack Obama and a group of Republican and Democratic senators have submitted plans for reform, but as the House of Representatives took up the issue, there were signs the bipartisan facade is coming under strain.

While from the Democratic side of the aisle, a rising Hispanic-American political star made an impassioned plea to fix a broken system, more senior Republicans warned against pushing too fast for change.

"Immigration is more than a political issue. It's who we are," said Julian Castro, the charismatic young mayor of San Antonio, Texas who had a star turn last year on the stage of the Democratic National Convention.

"Immigrants have made ours the greatest country in the world," he told a packed House Judiciary Committee hearing. "Doing nothing is not an option."

But Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the committee, warned against a "rush to judgment" -- despite concerns among his Republican colleagues that they have lost the support of a generation of Hispanic and Asian voters.

"I think we can all agree that our nation's immigration system is in desperate need of repair and it is not working as efficiently and fairly as it should be," he told the first of several hearings on the issue.

Goodlatte warned his panel "needs to take the time to learn from the past so our efforts to reform our immigration laws do not repeat the same mistakes."

The burst of activity on Capitol Hill marks the best chance in years to craft legislation to tighten border security, improve employment verification and bring some 11 million illegal immigrants out of limbo.

A 2007 effort spearheaded by then-president George W. Bush failed.

Obama and top Republicans are for once in agreement that political and demographic trends have suddenly shifted to offer the best chance for serious reform in a generation.

November's election saw Obama re-elected with 70 percent backing from Hispanic American voters -- many of whom have friends or relatives seeking papers.

It shook Republicans into realizing that their tough stance on immigration had driven Hispanics away from the party, and party luminaries like Senator Marco Rubio have come out strongly in favor of immigration reform.

But differences remain, particularly in the contentious issue of how to accommodate the millions who entered the country without permission, or who came in legally but overstayed their visas.

The issue bubbled over in the hearing room when about eight protesters stood up with fists raised, and chanted "undocumented and unafraid!" for about 30 seconds before walking out.

Castro said a pathway to citizenship, similar to the one proposed by the bipartisan group of senators last month, was crucial in order to bring 11 million undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows and into the full light of the American dream."

Republican Goodlatte pushed back, seeking to carve a possible compromise option short of full citizenship for those who entered illegally or stayed beyond their visa.

"Are there options that we should consider between the extremes of mass deportation and a pathway to citizenship for those not lawfully present in the United States?" Goodlatte asked.

Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer from California, conceded the system was dysfunctional, but that "partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path."

She argued that merely providing undocumented workers with legal status but no way to work towards full citizenship could create a "permanent underclass," while kicking the undocumented out en masse would trigger economic chaos.

With up to 90 percent of the estimated two million migrant farm workers in the country illegally, "you could do e-verify and find out they're not properly here and American agriculture would collapse."

Obama addressed the immigration issue Tuesday as well, hosting meetings with more than two dozen progressive leaders and business executives.

Steve Case, co-founder of America Online, said he was encouraged by the discussion at the White House.

"The president and his team listened to numerous proposals, outlined many of their own and expressed a desire to build a bipartisan consensus regarding comprehensive immigration reform," Case said.

-AFP/ac

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15 dip hands in hot oil to prove loyalty in Gujarat

SABARKANTHA (Gujarat): Fifteen persons received burn injuries after they dipped their hands in hot oil to convince a candidate, who lost in panchayat elections, that they had voted for him, police said.

The candidate, identified as Girish Parmar, has been detained, police said.

The incident took place at Derai village of Bayad taluka this evening after counting of votes for the district panchayat, gram panchayat and nagarpalika elections got over.

"Fifteen persons received injuries after they dipped their hands in hot oil to prove to the lost candidate of their community that they had voted for him. We have already nabbed the candidate," Sabarkantha superintendent of police Chirag Koradiya told PTI.

"We will lodge a complaint against the candidate though none of the persons, who received injuries, is coming forward to register the complaint as they all belong to one community," he said.

"This is a superstition followed in the village to convince a candidate of their community that they voted for him," he added.

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Life Found Deep Under Antarctic Ice For First Time?

For the first time, scientists believe they have collected life-forms from deep under the Antarctic ice.

Last week, a team found and collected microbes in a lake hidden under more than a half-mile of ice. (Related: "Race Is On to Find Life Under Antarctic Ice.")

Among other things, the discovery may shed light on what lies under the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

The newfound life-forms have little connection to life on the earth's surface and many apparently survive by "eating rocks," team member Brent Christner said in an interview from the U.S. McMurdo Station, after spending several weeks working at a remote field site at Lake Whillans.

That may explain how life on other celestial objects—such as on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn—survive in the absence of available carbon.

"The conditions faced by organisms in Lake Whillans are quite parallel to what we think it would be like on those icy moons," Christner said.

"What we found tells us a lot about extreme life on Earth," and how similar life beyond Earth might survive.

Making a Living in Ice

A 50-member U.S. team broke through to the 20-square-mile (50-square-kilometer) subglacial lake on January 28, and had two days of 24-hour sunlight to bring up samples before the borehole began to close. A day of reaming the hole was followed by two more days of sample collection.

The scientists are now returning with a four-day haul of lake water, lake bottom sediments, and hundreds of dishes of living organisms that are being cultured for intensive study in the United States.

An early task will be to make sure the newfound microbes were not introduced while drilling through the ice into the lake, which involved a hot-water drilling technique designed to greatly reduce or eliminate any contamination that might come from other kerosene-based drilling technology, Christner said.

Christner said that a commonly used dye was added to the water to illuminate the DNA of the microscopic organisms, and a substantial green glow told scientists that microbes were indeed present. Many of the organisms are likely chemolithotrophs, which rely on inorganic compounds of iron, sulfur, and other elements for nourishment.

Montana State's John Priscu, chief biologist of the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) program, said lab work at the drill site determined that microbial cells were present—and that they were alive. (Take an Antarctic quiz.)

"I believe it is safe to say that subglacial lake beneath the Whillans Ice Stream supports a microbial assemblage that is growing within this dark and cold habitat" of 31 degrees Fahrenheit (-0.5 Celsius), he wrote in an email.

DNA sequencing in the U.S. "will tell us who they are and, together with other experiments, tell us how they make a living."

Hidden Lakes

The U.S. team is one of three digging into what is now known to be a vast system of lakes and streams deep below the surface of Antarctica. (See "Chain of Cascading Lakes Discovered Under Antarctica.")

A British team attempting to drill into much deeper Lake Ellsworth had to return home in December because of equipment failure, but a Russian team is also at work now retrieving a core of water from Lake Vostok.

With much fanfare, the Lake Vostok core was pulled up last year from more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) below the frigid surface. Vostok is much deeper and larger than any other Antarctic lake, and both it and Ellsworth lie under much colder ice and are believed to have less deep subsurface water flowing in and out than does Whillans.

The existence of subglacial lakes and streams in Antarctica is a relatively new discovery, and the size of this wet world under the ice has only been grasped in recent years. (See Antarctic pictures by National Geographic readers.)

Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a principal investigator of the Whillans team, first described Lake Whillans in 2007.

Using satellite data, she and her colleagues discovered a periodic rising and falling of the ice surface above the Whillans Ice Stream between 2003 and 2006, and concluded that a lake was likely underneath.

The dynamics of Antarctic ice has taken on a much greater significance in the era of global warming, since some 90 percent of Earth's fresh water sits on the continent.

Although the lakes themselves are not affected by warming, how they interact with the region's ice is important to predicting the future behavior of the ice sheets.

For instance, understanding whether the ice is moving more quickly toward the surrounding ocean is a key goal of the WISSARD project, which is part of a larger U.S. National Science Foundation project to understand the ice movements, glaciers, and biology of the ice sheet of West Antarctica.

More Work to Be Done

For Christner, a specialist in Antarctic biology at Louisiana State University, the work has only just begun. (Also see "Pictures: 'Extreme' Antarctic Science Revealed.")

Two labs were brought to the Whillans site by a caravan of trucks from McMurdo: One to perform a quick analysis of the lake water, and the other to examine sediment.

Christner's team is charged with culturing samples in dishes so they can be studied more extensively later. He said some of the microbe species, including bacteria and archaea, may be unique, but many may well be found elsewhere—at great ocean depths and deep underground.

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White House: Drone Strikes on Americans 'Legal'

Feb 5, 2013 3:54pm

U.S. Air Force

The White House today defended the use of targeted drone strikes against U.S. citizens abroad suspected of high-level terrorist activity, but declined to detail the criteria for ordering such an attack.

“Sometimes we use remotely piloted aircraft to conduct targeted strikes against specific al Qaeda terrorists in order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters.

“We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, to prevent future attacks and, again, save American lives. These strikes are legal, they are ethical, and they are wise,” he said.

Administration lawyers found it is lawful to kill an American citizen if a “high-level” government official believes the target is an operational leader of al Qaeda who poses “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and if capture is infeasible, according to a newly disclosed Justice Department document.

The 16-page white paper, first obtained by NBC News, finds there “exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations” and that the administration does not need to present evidence to a court before or after ordering such an attack.

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the document reads.

Carney repeatedly declined to discuss the details of the white paper.

“I would point you to the ample judicial precedent for the idea that someone who takes up arms against the United States in a war against the United States is an enemy and therefore could be targeted accordingly,” he told ABC News’ Jon Karl.

“[The president] takes his responsibility as commander in chief to protect the United States and its citizens very seriously. He takes the absolute necessity to conduct our war against al Qaeda and its affiliates in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution and our laws very seriously,” he said.

The white paper is believed to be a summary of the reported classified memo that outlined the legal justification for the drone attack that killed American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011.

The American Civil Liberties Union has called the newly discovered document “profoundly disturbing.”

“It’s hard to believe that it was produced in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances. It summarizes in cold legal terms a stunning overreach of executive authority — the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement before or after the fact,” ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said in a written statement.

The Obama administration has carried out more than 300 CIA drown strikes in Pakistan, far more than his predecessor, President George W. Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Pressure is building from Capitol Hill for the White House to outline its legal authority to kill American citizens in counterterrorism operations.

“It is vitally important… for Congress and the American public to have a full understanding of how the executive branch interprets the limits and boundaries of this authority,” a group of eleven bipartisan Senators wrote in a letter to the president Monday, “so that Congress and the public can decide whether this authority has been properly defined, and whether the President’s power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards.”

SHOWS: World News

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Football: Messi agility is all in the mind - scientists

LONDON: Barcelona superstar Lionel Messi may owe his trademark feints and body swerves to the fact his brain is busier than that of a less gifted player, according to a study into footballers' minds.

Researchers at Britain's Brunel University found that highly skilled footballers are able to activate more areas of their brain than novices when an opposing player approaches, enabling them to react to their moves more successfully.

Published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, the research found that experienced players are able to suppress the urge to react instinctively, making them less likely to fall for opponents' attempts to trick them.

As part of the study, 39 players ranging from beginners to semi-professionals lay in an MRI brain scanner and watched clips of a junior international-level player running towards them with the ball.

Occasionally, the oncoming player would produce a deceptive manoeuvre and participants had to decide in which direction they need to move in order to counter.

They were then grouped according to how well they performed in the task, revealing that strong performers were more attuned to the actions and movements of opponents than their less-skilled counterparts.

"Our neuroimaging data clearly shows greater activation of motor and related structures in the brains of expert footballers, compared to novices, when taking part in a football-related anticipation task," said Daniel Bishop from Brunel University.

"We believe that this greater level of neural activity is something that can be developed through high quality training, so the next step will be to look at how the brain can be trained over time to anticipate the moves of opponents."

- AFP/jc

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I&B ministry's channel on YouTube catching people

CHANDIGARH: The Union I&B ministry's free-to-air channel on YouTube, which gives people access to historical recordings, research findings, movie trailers, IEC campaigns, photographs, live telecasts among other priceless data, is slowly catching on.

For those who love history, the channel is a veritable treasure trove, with nuggets like recordings of pre-Independence speeches by Maulana Azad and Mahatma Gandhi to Sardar Patel's February 12, 1949 address to the nation on communal harmony. A quirky video of a pigeon being caressed by Jawaharlal Nehru was the top trending video on the channel on Monday. The channel already has over 1000 subscribers and has registered over 93000 video views since its launch just over three months ago. The I&B ministry, which is in the midst of a major makeover, entered into a non-monetised content-sharing agreement with YouTube in September last year.

"There's a need to cater to the growing tech-savvy population of the country," said Union I&B minister Manish Tewari.

There are also links to obscure researches on chickpea (white chana) from Hyderabad institutes to a new prehistoric rock art site found in Wayanad (Kerala) in January earlier this year. The government is using the platform to give publicise its campaigns, too, such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Bharat Nirman.

The ministry is now in the process of upgrading it to a premium channel which will lead to better live streaming and seamless integration across all social media platforms.

Not just that, the channel has been bundled into an attractive customised app, called MIB, for Android smartphones and will have the same for Apple iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows-enabled smart-phones too.

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Space Pictures This Week: A Space Monkey, Printing a Moon Base

Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced January 31 that it is looking into building a moon base (pictured in an artist's conception) using a technique called 3-D printing.

It probably won't be as easy as whipping out a printer, hooking it to a computer, and pressing "print," but using lunar soils as the basis for actual building blocks could be a possibility.

"Terrestrial 3-D printing technology has produced entire structures," said Laurent Pambaguian, head of the project for ESA, in a statement.

On Earth, 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, produces a three-dimensional object from a digital file. The computer takes cross-sectional slices of the structure to be printed and sends it to the 3-D printer. The printer bonds liquid or powder materials in the shape of each slice, gradually building up the structure. (Watch how future astronauts could print tools in space.)

The ESA and its industrial partners have already manufactured a 1.7 ton (1.5 tonne) honeycombed building block to demonstrate what future construction materials would look like.

—Jane J. Lee

Published February 4, 2013

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Boy Safe, Kidnapper Dead After Hidden Camera Tip

A week-long standoff in Alabama, where a retired trucker held a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker, has ended with the kidnapper dead and the child safe, according to law enforcement.

Officials had been able to insert a high-tech camera into the bunker to monitor the movements of the suspect, Richard Lee Dykes, and they had become increasingly concerned that he might act out, according to a law enforcement source with direct knowledge.

"FBI agents safely recovered the child who's been held hostage for nearly a week," FBI Special Agent Steve Richardson said at a news conference.

The agent said negotiations with Dykes "deteriorated" in the past 24 hours.

"Mr. Dykes was observed holding a gun," Richardson said. "At this point, the FBI agents, fearing the child was in imminent danger, entered the bunker and rescued the child."

The boy, identified only as Ethan, "appears physically unharmed" and is being treated at a hospital, authorities said.

Joe Songer/AL.com/AP Photo

Alabama Hostage Crisis: Boy Held Captive for 7 Days Watch Video

Hostage Standoff: Drones Fly Over Alabama Bunker Watch Video

Dykes, 65, is dead, but officials have not yet provided details on how he died.

"Right now, FBI special agent bomb technicians are in the process of clearing the property for improvised explosive devices," the FBI said in a written statement. "When it is safe to do so, our evidence response teams, paired with state and local crime scene technicians, will process the scene."

PHOTOS: Worst Hostage Situations

Dykes allegedly shot and killed a school bus driver last week and threatened to kill all the children on the bus before taking the boy, one of the students on the bus said.

"He said he was going to kill us, going to kill us all," Tarrica Singletary, 14, told ABC News.

Dykes had been holed up in his underground bunker near Midland City, Ala., with the abducted boy for a week as police tried to negotiate with him through a PVC pipe. Police had used the talks to send the child comfort items, including a red Hot Wheels car, coloring books, cheese crackers, potato chips and medicine.

Dykes was a decorated Vietnam vet who grew up in the area. He lived in Florida until two years ago, the AP reported, and has an adult daughter, but the two lost touch years ago, neighbor Michael Creel said. When he returned to Alabama, neighbors say he once beat a dog with a lead pipe and had threatened to shoot children who set foot on his property.

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