LOS ANGELES - The first Singaporean to be nominated for a Grammy came up short on Sunday, with guitarist Arun Shenoy losing out to top veteran trumpeter Chris Botti for best pop instrumental album.
Shenoy, who was born in the southern Indian state of Karnataka before moving to Singapore, received a Grammy nomination for his debut album "Rumbadoodle," which he recorded during live performances around the world.
Shenoy has described his guitar work as a new perspective on gypsy rumba flamenco, merging the genre with other global influences.
The Grammy ultimately went to "Impressions" by Botti, whose pop-influenced jazz works had won him four previous nominations.
The other contenders in the category -- saxophonist Dave Koz, for a live album recorded in Tokyo, and guitarist Larry Carlton -- also had previous Grammy nominations.
HATTIESBURG, Miss. An apparent tornado tore through Hattiesburg on Sunday as part of a wave of severe storms that downed trees, damaged buildings and caused at least several injuries.
The twister traveled down one of Hattiesburg's main streets and caused what officials described as major damage, officials said, hitting several buildings on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi. Kyle Hopkins, emergency operations director for surrounding Forrest County, said officials hadn't confirmed injuries. There were reports of several people hurt elsewhere in the state.
"We had a tornado touch down. We have a lot of damage," Hopkins said.
The university released a statement saying that several buildings had been damaged but that no injuries were reported. Campus police have declared a state of emergency and asked anyone not on campus to stay away.
Video by CBS affiliate WHLT-TV shows the heavy damage to the university, including busted windows, wood panels strewn on the lawn and fallen fences.
The storm overturned and damaged vehicles and threw debris around parts of the campus.
To the west, Marion County emergency director Aaron Greer says three injuries have been reported in the community of Pickwick, about seven miles south of Columbia. He says two people were taken to hospitals, but the third didn't have the injury examined.
Greer says one mobile home was destroyed, three other structures have major damage and several have minor damage.
National Weather Service meteorologist Joanne Culin says there have also been reports of injuries in Marion County.
Nasty weather has settled in on much of Louisiana and Mississippi, including tornado or flash flood watches.
The National Weather Service says bad weather is likely to stretch into Fat Tuesday in southeast Louisiana. Jefferson Parish has canceled a Monday night parade.
A Northridge, Calif., home improvement store was evacuated tonight because of a possible sighting of suspected cop-killer Christopher Dorner, just hours after police announced a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest.
As helicopters hovered overhead and a command center was established, police searched the Lowe's store and eventually told shoppers they could leave, but could not take their cars out of the parking lot.
LAPD spokesman Gus Villanueva said the major response to the possible sighting was a precaution, but couldn't say whether Dorner was in the area.
The announcement of the $1 million reward today came as authorities in Big Bear, Calif., scaled back their search for Dorner, the disgruntled ex-cop who is suspected in three revenge killings.
"This is the largest local reward ever offered, to our knowledge," Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said at a news conference today. "This is an act of domestic terrorism. This is a man who has targeted those that we entrust to protect the public. His actions cannot go unanswered."
The money for the reward was pooled by businesses, government, local law enforcement leaders and individual donors, Beck said.
PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings
The reward comes on the fourth day of a manhunt for Dorner, who has left Southern California on edge after he allegedly went on a killing spree last week to avenge his firing from the police force. Dorner outlined his grievances in a 6,000 word so-called "manifesto" and said he will keep killing until the truth is known about his case.
Irvine Police Department/AP Photo
Manhunt for Alleged Cop Killer Heads to California Mountains Watch Video
Christopher Dorner Search: Officials Search for Ex-officer in the Mountains Watch Video
Dorner's threats have prompted the LAPD to provide more than 50 law enforcement families with security and surveillance detail, Beck said.
Authorities are chasing leads, however they declined to say where in order to not impede the investigation.
Dorner's burned-out truck was found Thursday near Big Bear Lake, a popular skiing destination located 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Investigators found two AR-15 assault rifles in the burned-out truck Dorner abandoned, sources told ABC News.
The truck had a broken axle, which may be the reason he decided to set fire to it, the police sources said.
Full Coverage: Christopher Jordan Dorner
Officers have spent the past couple of days going door-to-door and searching vacant cabins. The manhunt was scaled back to 25 officers and one helicopter in the resort town today, according to the San Bernadino Sheriff's Office.
On Saturday, Beck announced he would reopen the investigation into Dorner's firing but said the decision was not made to "appease" the fugitive ex-cop.
"I feel we need to also publicly address Dorner's allegations regarding his termination of employment, and to do so I have directed our Professionals Standards Bureau and my Special Assistant for Constitutional Policing to completely review the Dorner complaint of 2007; To include a re-examination of all evidence and a re-interview of witnesses," Beck said. "We will also investigate any allegations made in his manifesto which were not included in his original complaint."
Quan's father, Randal Quan, was a retired captain with the LAPD and attorney who represented Dorner before a police review board that led to Dorner's dismissal from the force in 2008.
On Wednesday, after Dorner was identified as a suspect in the double murder, police believe he ambushed two Riverside police officers, killing one and wounding the other.
The next day, Randal Quan reported he received a taunting call from a man claiming to be Dorner who told him that he "should have done a better job of protecting his daughter," according to court documents documents.
Anyone with information leading to the arrest of Christopher Dorner is asked to call the LAPD task force at 213-486-6860.
ABC News' Dean Schabner, Jack Date, Pierre Thomas, Jason Ryan and Clayton Sandell and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed.
Fertilising the world's oceans with iron has been controversially proposed as a way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to curb global warming. Some geoengineers claim releasing iron into the sea will stimulate plankton blooms, which absorb carbon, but ocean processes are complex and difficult to monitor in tests.
"Experiments suggest you change the population of algae, causing a shift from fish-dominated to jellyfish-dominated ecosystems," says Alex Baker of the University of East Anglia, UK. Such concerns led the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to impose a moratorium on geoengineering experiments in 2010.
The annual ship deposition is much larger, if less concentrated, than the iron released in field tests carried out before the moratorium was in place. Yet because ship emissions are not intended to alter ocean chemistry, they do not violate the moratorium, says Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a think tank that consults for the CBD. "If you intentionally drove oil-burning ships back and forth as a geoengineering experiment, that would contravene it."
The new study, by Akinori Ito of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, is the first to quantify how shipping deposits iron in parts of the ocean normally deficient in it. Earlier models had assumed that only 1 to 2 per cent of the iron contained in aerosols, including shipping emissions, is soluble in seawater, so the remaining 98 to 99 percent would sink to the bottom without affecting ocean life. But Ito found that up to 80 per cent of the iron in shipping soot is soluble (Global Biogeochemical Cycles, doi.org/kdj). As this soot rapidly falls to the sea surface, it is likely to be fertilising the oceans.
In the high-latitude north Pacific - a region that is naturally iron-poor and therefore likely to be most affected by human deposits - ship emissions now account for 70 per cent of soluble iron from human activity, with the burning of biomass and coal accounting for the rest. Shipping's share will rise as traffic continues to grow and regulations restrict coal and biomass emissions.
Can we learn anything from this unintentional experiment? Baker thinks not. "The process isn't scientifically useful," he says, because the uncontrolled nature of the iron makes it difficult to draw meaningful comparisons.
The depositions are unlikely to be harmful at current levels, he says, but "given the uncertainties, I just don't know how much these iron emissions would have to increase before there was demonstrable harm to an ecosystem, or benefit in terms of carbon uptake, for that matter".
This article appeared in print under the headline "Ships inadvertently fertilise the oceans"
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BERLIN, Germany: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was left licking her wounds on Sunday after her education minister quit amid a plagiarism scandal, depriving her of a key ally as she gears up for September elections.
Merkel betrayed rare emotion as she accepted "with a very heavy heart" the resignation of Annette Schavan, a personal friend, who quit to fight charges from her former university that she plagiarised her thesis 33 years ago.
Although Merkel enjoys a sizeable lead in the polls and a high level of personal popularity, this is the second body blow in recent weeks after what she termed a "painful" loss in a state election on January 20.
"The year could hardly have started worse for Mrs Merkel," gloated the chief whip of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), Thomas Oppermann.
Nevertheless, the level of alleged plagiarism in Schavan's thesis "Person and Conscience" was thought to be much less than in a similar case two years ago when popular defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg quit.
And even some opposition figures showed some sympathy for Schavan, who has vowed to fight Duesseldorf University's decision to strip her of her doctorate in the courts.
SPD head Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview in the Welt am Sonntag weekly that he valued Schavan as an "honest and competent" minister and he was "extremely sorry" to see her go but he believed it was the right decision.
The media was full of praise for the manner of Schavan's departure, perceived as dignified, and for the way she appeared to put her party and Merkel ahead of her personal ambition.
Addressing her leader and friend as "dear Angela", Schavan said the accusations that she cheated affected her "deeply" and said her priorities had always been "first my country, then my party and then me personally".
Merkel has already survived zu Guttenberg's more damaging resignation; the loss of another defence minister over controversial comments on Afghanistan; and the departure of party ally Christian Wulff as president over a home loan scandal.
Several media reports said the loss of Schavan would not inflict too much damage on Merkel, even in the run-up to elections on September 22.
"Merkel can distinguish between the demands of her office and of friendship. The office demanded a quick, concise decision. Friendship demanded glowing words. She offered... both," said the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel daily.
"That makes Merkel unassailable in this case because no-one could have done it better," added the paper.
The left-leaning Sueddeutsche Zeitung said the resignation "will not harm Merkel".
"Until now, no resignation has been seen by the people as due to her own political failings. There were always individual reasons. That is the art that Merkel has mastered. Everything bounces off her," noted the paper.
"In this case, that is completely right."
The chancellor moved quickly to mitigate the fallout, immediately appointing the 61-year-old Johanna Wanka, a mathematician with wide experience in education, as the new minister.
But the influential Die Zeit weekly noted that things were getting "lonely" around Merkel, as she loses yet another ally from her own conservative ranks amid a loveless relationship with her coalition partner, the Free Democrats.
"With Schavan's resignation, Merkel loses a further faithful ally. There aren't many people around her that can help her," said the paper.
"Like (former chancellor Helmut) Kohl at the end of his long chancellorship, she's standing almost completely on her own. There's hardly anyone left from her Praetorian guard."
FARMINGVILLE, N.Y. Stranded for hours on a snow-covered road, Priscilla Arena prayed, took out a sheet of loose-leaf paper and wrote what she thought might be her last words to her husband and children.
She told her 9 1/2-year-old daughter, Sophia, she was "picture-perfect beautiful." And she advised her 5 ?-year-old son, John: "Remember all the things that mommy taught you. Never say you hate someone you love. Take pride in the things you do, especially your family. ... Don't get angry at the small things; it's a waste of precious time and energy. Realize that all people are different, but most people are good. "
"My love will never die — remember, always," she added.
Arena, who was rescued in an Army canvas truck after about 12 hours, was one of hundreds of drivers who spent a fearful, chilly night stuck on highways in a blizzard that plastered New York's Long Island with more than 30 inches of snow, its ferocity taking many by surprise despite warnings to stay off the roads.
Even plows were mired in the snow or blocked by stuck cars, so emergency workers had to resort to snowmobiles to try to reach motorists. Four-wheel-drive vehicles, tractor-trailers and a couple of ambulances could be seen stranded along the roadway and ramps of the Long Island Expressway. Stuck drivers peeked out from time to time, running their cars intermittently to warm up as they waited for help.
With many still stranded hours after the snow stopped, Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged other communities to send plows to help dig out in eastern Long Island, which took the state's hardest hit by far in the massive Northeast storm.
In Connecticut, where the storm dumped more than 3 feet of snow in some places, the National Guard rescued about 90 stranded motorists, taking a few to hospitals with hypothermia.
51 Photos
Powerful blizzard descends on Northeast
The scenes came almost exactly two years after a blizzard marooned at least 1,500 cars and buses on Chicago's iconic Lake Shore Drive, leaving hundreds of people shivering in their vehicles for as long as 12 hours and questioning why the city didn't close the crucial thoroughfare earlier.
Cuomo and other officials were similarly asked why they didn't act to shut down major highways in Long Island in advance of the storm, especially given the sprawling area's reputation for gridlock. The expressway is often called "the world's longest parking lot."
"The snow just swallowed them up. It came down so hard and so fast," explained Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone.
"That's not an easy call," added Cuomo, who noted that people wanted to get home and that officials had warned them to take precautions because the worst of the snow could start by the evening rush hour. Flashing highway signs underscored the message ahead of time: "Heavy Snow Expected. Avoid PM Travel!"
"People need to act responsibly in these situations," Cuomo said.
But many workers didn't have the option of taking off early Friday, Arena noted. The 41-year-old sales account manager headed home from an optical supply business in Ronkonkoma around 4 p.m. She soon found her SUV stuck along a road in nearby Farmingville.
"Even though we would dig ourselves out and push forward, the snow kept piling, and therefore we all got stuck, all of us," she recalled later at Brookhaven Town Hall, where several dozen stranded motorists were taken after being rescued. Many others opted to stay with their cars.
Play Video
Getting travel back to normal after blizzard
Richard Ebbrecht left his Brooklyn chiropractic office around 3 p.m. for his home in Middle Island, about 60 miles away, calculating that he could make the drive home before the worst of the blizzard set in. He was wrong.
As the snow came rushing down faster than he'd foreseen, he got stuck six or seven times on the expressway and on other roads. Drivers began helping each other shovel and push, he said, but to no avail. He finally gave up and spent the night in his car on a local thoroughfare, only about two miles from his home.
"I could run my car and keep the heat on and listen to the radio a little bit," he said.
He walked home around at 8 a.m., leaving his car.
Late-shifters including Wayne Jingo had little choice but to risk it if they wanted to get home. By early afternoon, he'd been stuck in his pickup truck alongside the Long Island Expressway for nearly 12 hours.
He'd left his job around midnight as a postal worker at Kennedy Airport and headed home to Medford, about 50 miles east. He was at an exit in Ronkonkoma — almost home — around 1:45 a.m. when another driver came barreling at him westbound, the wrong way, he said. Jingo swerved to avoid the oncoming car, missed the exit and ended up stuck on the highway's grass shoulder.
He rocked the truck back and forth to try to free it, but it only sank down deeper into the snow and shredded one of his tires. He called 911. A police officer came by at 9:30 a.m. and said he would send a tow truck.
At 1 p.m. Saturday, Jingo was still waiting.
"I would have been fine if I didn't have to swerve," he said.
In Middle Island, a Wal-Mart remained unofficially open long past midnight to accommodate more than two dozen motorists who were stranded on nearby roads.
"We're here to mind the store, but we can't let people freeze out there," manager Jerry Greek told Newsday.
Officials weren't aware of any deaths among the stranded drivers, Cuomo said. Suffolk County police said no serious injuries had been reported among stuck motorists, but officers were still systematically checking stranded vehicles late Saturday afternoon.
While the expressway eventually opened Saturday, about 30 miles of the highway was to be closed again Sunday for snow removal.
Susan Cassara left her job at a Middle Island day care center around 6:30 p.m., after driving some of the children home because their parents couldn't get there to pick them up.
She got stuck on one road until about 2:30 a.m. Then a plow helped her get out — but she got stuck again, she said. Finally, an Army National Guardsman got to her on a snowmobile after 4 a.m.
"It was so cool. Strapped on, held on and came all the way here" to the makeshift shelter at the Brookhaven Town Hall, she said. "Something for my bucket list."
The Los Angeles Police Department announced today it will reopen the case of the firing of Christopher Dorner, but said the decision was not made to "appease" the fugitive former cop suspected of killing three people.
Dorner, a fired and disgruntled former Los Angeles police officer, said in the so-called "manifesto" he released that he was targeting LAPD officials and their families and will keep killing until the truth is known about his case.
"I have no doubt that the law enforcement community will bring to an end the reign of terror perpetrated on our region by Christopher Jordan Dorner and he will be held accountable for his evil actions," LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said in a statement released tonight.
He spoke of the "tremendous strides" the LAPD has made in regaining public trust after numerous scandals, but added: "I am aware of the ghosts of the LAPD's past and one of my biggest concerns is that they will be resurrected by Dorner's allegations of racism within the Department."
To do that, he said, full re-investigation of the case that led to Dorner's firing is necessary.
"I feel we need to also publicly address Dorner's allegations regarding his termination of employment, and to do so I have directed our Professionals Standards Bureau and my Special Assistant for Constitutional Policing to completely review the Dorner complaint of 2007; To include a re-examination of all evidence and a re-interview of witnesses," he said. "We will also investigate any allegations made in his manifesto which were not included in his original complaint.
Irvine Police Department/AP Photo
Christopher Dorner Search: Officials Search for Ex-officer in the Mountains Watch Video
Hundreds of Officers on Hunt for Alleged Cop Killer Watch Video
"I do this not to appease a murderer. I do it to reassure the public that their police department is transparent and fair in all the things we do."
PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings
As police searched for Dorner today in the San Bernardino Mountains, sources told ABC News that investigators found two AR-15 assault rifles in the burned-out truck Dorner abandoned.
The truck had a broken axle, which may be the reason he decided to set fire to it, the police sources said.
A man identifying himself as Dorner taunted the father of Monica Quan four days after the former LAPD officer allegedly killed her and just 11 hours after he allegedly killed a police officer in Riverside, Calif., according to court documents obtained by ABC News
A man claiming to be Dorner called Randall Quan and told him that that he "should have done a better job of protecting his daughter," according to the documents.
In his 6,000-word "manifesto," Dorner named Randal Quan, a retired LAPD captain and attorney who represented him before a police review board that led to Dorner's dismissal from the force.
"I never had an opportunity to have a family of my own, I'm terminating yours," Dorner wrote, and directed Quan and other officials to "[l]ook your wives/husbands and surviving children directly in the face and tell them the truth as to why your children are dead."
The call, according to court records, was traced to Vancouver, Wash., but law enforcement officials do not believe Dorner was there at the time at the call.
Dorner is believed to have made the call early Thursday afternoon, less than half a day after he is suspected of killing a police officer and wounding two others early that morning, sparking an unprecedented man hunt involving more than a thousand police officers and federal agents spanning hundreds of miles.
Mailing your cellphone to a recycling company might make you a few pounds, but it can leave you at risk of identity theft. The deletion techniques recycling companies use are meant for hard discs, and so don't work on the solid-state flash memory used in mobile phones. That means personal data like banking info, texts, contacts and pictures can end up in the hands of, well, anyone the phone ends up with.
To remedy the problem, British company BlackBelt Smartphone Defence of Skelmersdale, Lancashire claims to have developed a software algorithm that can securely delete data on cellphone memory chips. The trouble with data in a flash memory chip is that it is protected by an on-chip protection algorithm called the wear leveller. This hard-coded routine does its best to ensure the chip's lifetime is maximised so that each memory cell's ability to store charge is not worn out.
"The problem is that the wear-levelling algorithm ends up working against the data wiping technique used for hard drives, which tries to overwrite all the data," says the company's Ken Garner.
What the firm has done is write their own algorithm, called BlackBelt DataWipe, that works with, rather than against, the leveller routine to render data irrecoverable. "It is like having a shredder for personally identifiable data," says Garner.
However, they don't yet know if their method is proof against sophisticated, nation-state level attacks - which might use electron microscopes to read the last vestiges of the zeros and ones on a memory chip. "I imagine if you're GCHQ you'll probably have technology that could get around this and recover it in some way," says Garner.
