Thursday, February 21, 2013

To Russia (from space) with NO LOVE aka my favorite news item from last week

Russia’s Urals region has been rocked by a meteorite explosion in the stratosphere. The impact wave damaged several buildings, and blew out thousands of windows amid frigid winter weather. Hundreds have sought medical attention for minor injuries.

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Eyewitness accounts of the meteorite phenomenon, handpicked by RT.

Around 1,200 people have sought medical attention in Chelyabinsk alone because of the disaster, the official website of regional governor Mikhail Yurevich reported. Over 50 of those injured have been hospitalized, two of whom are in critical condition. The number of injured includes 289 children, the website said. A 52-year-old woman who suffered a spinal fracture will be transported to Moscow for treatment.

Army units found three meteorite debris impact sites, two of which are in an area near Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk. The third site was found some 80 kilometers further to the northwest, near the town of Zlatoust. One of the fragments that struck near Chebarkul left a crater six meters in diameter.

Servicemembers from the tank brigade that found the crater have confirmed that background radiation levels at the site are normal.

A hole in Chebarkul Lake made by meteorite debris. Photo by Chebarkul town head Andrey Orlov.

Police officers, environmentalists and EMERCOM experts at the site of a meteorite hit in the Chelyabinsk Region. Small 0.5-1 cm pieces of black matter resembling rock were found around the ice hole caused by the meteorite. Photo courtesy of the press service of the Interior Ministry′s Main Directorate for the Chelyabinsk Region.(RIA Novosti)

Experts working at the site of the impact told Lifenews tabloid that the fragment is most likely solid, and consists of rock and iron.

A local fisherman told police he found a large hole in the lake’s ice, which could be a result of a meteorite impact. The site was immediately sealed off by police, a search team is now waiting for divers to arrive and explore the bottom of the lake.

Samples of water taken from the lake have not revealed any excessive radioactivity or foreign material.

Weather sattelite Meteosat 10 has taken an image of the meteriote shortly after entering the atmosphere.(Copyright 2013 © EUMETSAT)

Russian space agency Roskosmos has confirmed the object that crashed in the Chelyabinsk region is a meteorite:

“According to preliminary estimates, this space object is of non-technogenic origin and qualifies as a meteorite. It was moving at a low trajectory with a speed of about 30 km/s.”

According to estimates by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the space object weighed about 10 tons before entering Earth’s atmosphere.

A meteorite is a solid piece of debris from space objects such as asteroids or comets, ranging in size from tiny to gigantic.

When a meteorite falls on Earth, passing through the atmosphere causes it to heat up and emit a trail of light, forming a fireball known as a meteor, or shooting or falling star.

A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.

The Russian army has joined the rescue operation. Radiation, chemical and biological protection units have been put on high alert. Since the explosion occurred several kilometers above the Earth, a large ground area must be thoroughly checked for radiation and other threats.

According to preliminary reports, the worst damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk was at a zinc factory, the walls and roof of which were partially destroyed by an impact wave. The city's Internet and mobile service were reportedly interrupted because of the damage inflicted near the factory.

Chelyabinsk administration’s website said nearly 3,000 buildings were damaged to varying extents by the meteor shower in the city, including 34 medical facilities and 361 schools and kindergartens. The total amount of window glass shattered amounts to 100,000 square meters, the site said, citing city administration head Sergey Davydov. The ministry also said that no local power stations or civil aircraft were damaged by the meteorite shower, and that “all flights proceed according to schedule.”

Buildings were left without gas because facilities in the city had also been damaged, an Emergency Ministry spokesperson said, according to Russia 24 news channel.

The Emergency Ministry reported that 20,000 rescue workers are operating in the region. Three aircraft were deployed to survey the area and locate other possible impact locations.

The trail of a falling object is seen above a residential apartment block in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, on February 15, 2013.(AFP Photo / Oleg Kargopolov)

The regional Emergency Ministry denied previous unconfirmed reports by local media that the meteorite was shot by the military air defenses.

The local newspaper Znak reported the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. Quoting a source in the military, it wrote a missile salvo blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.

Regnum news agency quoted a military source who claimed that the vapor condensation trail of the meteorite speaks to the fact that the meteorite was intercepted by air defenses.

Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.

A spokesperson for the Urals regional Emergency Ministry center claimed it sent out a mass SMS warning residents about a possible meteorite shower. However, eyewitnesses said they either never received it, or got the message after the explosion had occurred. The Emergency Ministry has since denied sending out the SMS warning, and said the spokesperson that spread the false information “will be fired.”

My favorite news item this week

The Bizarre Coincidences Surrounding the $50M Diamond Heist in Belgium

by Christopher Dickey, Nadette De Visser Feb 21, 2013 4:45 AM EST

There may be no connection between the $50 million jewel heist in Brussels on Monday and a $100 million robbery a decade before, but the timing has people wondering.

Great heists depend on exquisite timing, which is precisely the way an armed gang carried out the stunning diamond robbery at the Brussels airport on Monday. Just as some $50 million worth of precious stones were being transferred from an armored car to the hold of a commercial flight bound for Switzerland, what looked like a couple of black police cars with flashing blue lights drove onto the tarmac and eight men got out brandishing assault rifles. They seized 120 parcels of diamonds, got back in their cars, and were gone in less than five minutes, apparently operating out of sight of the passengers—and of the airport police.

Belgium Diamond Heist — Approximately $50 million worth of diamonds were stolen from a Helvetic Airways aircraft seen on the tarmac of Brussels international airport on February 19, 2013. (Yves Logghe/AP)

Sounds like a scene in a movie. But there’s more. With a little imagination, there’s a whole screenplay. And like any good script, this story already has a lot of twists and turns—some of them probably blind alleys—including a few that even lead back to … Hollywood.

Questions about the timing of the Brussels Airport job did not end with the action on the runway. Belgian crime reporters immediately thought back to 10 years ago—exactly 10 years ago to the week—when an Italian gang managed to break into what the world had thought was an impregnable vault in the diamond district of Antwerp and make off with more than $100 million worth of stones.

Those middle-aged burglars were some of the best old pros in the business: planners, locksmiths, electricians, and muscle known as the School of Turin. Their leader, Leonardo Notarbartolo, was a ruggedly handsome grandfather who’d been a thief all his life and was proud of it. As robberies go, the 2003 heist in Antwerp was a work of genius, with just one stupid mistake. The gang was done in when a farmer found some suspect garbage and called the police. Among the incriminating bits of evidence: receipts for some of the gear used in the heist and a half-eaten sandwich with the ringleader’s DNA on it.

There are only so many master jewel thieves in this world, and only a handful able to carry out such rigorous preparation and execution.

Notarbartolo was convicted of the 2003 Antwerp job in 2005, but neither he nor any of his partners ever revealed where the loot was hidden. And, proud as he was of his larcenous vocation, for much of the time he was behind bars he was trying to figure out how he could get a movie made about his life. According to Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell in Flawless, their exhaustive investigation of the Antwerp job, Notarbartolo was hoping the whole deal would be lucrative, or that it least it would help him explain where he got his money if he started to look rich.

In 2009, Joshua Davis interviewed Notarbartolo in a Belgian prison and wrote a profile for Wired magazine. “I may be a thief and a liar,” the thief and liar told him, “but I am going to tell you a true story.” Davis, on his website, notes that he is executive producer of “the diamond project,” a movie adapted from his article in Wired.

In an email, we asked Davis if he had paid Notarbartolo for the Wired story, and he was categorical: “I never paid Notarbartolo anything, nor did Wired,” he said. We followed up with a question about Paramount paying for “life rights” to make a film, but Davis hasn’t gotten back to us on that yet.

All this would be so much minor gossip in the movie and publishing biz if not, once again, for the strange question of timing. Notarbartolo got out of prison on parole in 2009. According to the Belgian press, he recently went to the United States to talk to people about a movie. There have been some rumors around Rodeo Drive that “the diamond project” was in trouble, which, if true, would typically mean a lot of money promised wouldn’t get paid out, since it’s usually tied to stages of script acceptance and production.

In any case, Notarbartolo flew back to Europe on January 29. He promptly found himself under arrest at the Paris airport, where he was about to connect to Turin. He was then extradited to Belgium on Monday, as it happens—the day of the heist at the Brussels airport—a coincidence that Flawless coauthor Selby calls “amazing.”

It appears that Notarbartolo had had an arrest warrant issued for him in November 2011 on the grounds he’d broken the conditions of his parole. And one of the infractions, according to Belgian prosecutors quoted in the local press, is that while failing to pay back “one penny” to the victims of his crime, Notarbartolo made money off the story he gave to Wired. His Belgian lawyer, Walter Damen, was not available for comment. (Damen’s assistant told us he was visiting Notarbartolo in jail.) But press reports of the bail hearing say Damen claimed in his client’s defense that there was no proof he had any of the loot in his possession, and he wasn’t really profiting from his crime through the Wired story because it was really fiction.

Now, it may be that none of this really has anything to do with the heist on the tarmac at Brussels airport. “It’s a pretty different M.O.,” says Selby, an authority on the diamond business as well as diamond thefts. The 2003 job run by Notarbartolo was very quiet—almost invisible—and not discovered until the end of the Valentine’s Day weekend that year. The Brussels job was, as the military likes to say, “kinetic”—all action, with guns waving and orders shouted and people fearing for their lives, although in the end nobody got hurt. Selby says he doubts there was any direct link with Notarbartolo, but he was disturbed by so many odd coincidences of timing. “It’s weird,” he said. “I don’t know what to say about that.”