Sweden suicide bomber: Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly was living in Britain - Telegraph.co.uk

The suicide bombing follows an attempt by Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, a former student at University College London, to blow himself up last Christmas on a flight to Detroit.

Abdulmutallab had trained in Yemen, but had become increasingly radical during his time in Britain. The security services and police are concerned that British university campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism. Neighbours told The Daily Telegraph last night that they had last seen Abdulwahab at the 1930s semi-detached house in Luton, Beds, two and a half weeks ago. The couple have two young girls and a baby son. His wife, Mona, a Swedish citizen, is said to run a home beauty company.

Tahir Hussain, 33, a taxi driver who lives nearby, said: “I used to see him around often. He didn’t say much but seemed nice. I used to see him walking with his kids.

“I was shocked when I heard what happened because I never thought he could do such a thing.”

Mr Hussain said that the couple had been living there for a year and that Abdulwahab used to go to Friday prayers at the Islamic Centre in Luton.

The bomber had recently advertised on a Muslim dating site for a second wife, saying he was looking for a “lady 25-30 who lives in UK for marriage”. The site, Muslima.com, said he was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and moved to Sweden in 1992 and then to Britain in 2001 to study for a degree in physical therapy, marrying in 2004.

On his Facebook page, he included a group called Yawm al-Qiyaamah, meaning Day of Judgment, that featured a montage of Tower Bridge in flames.

Reports from Sweden said Abdulwahab was shouting in Arabic and carrying six pipebombs, one of which exploded, along with a rucksack full of nails and explosives.

A paramedic said the bomber had no injuries to the face or body in general but looked as if he had been carrying something that exploded in his stomach. One witness said the bomber had worked as a sandwich board advertiser in the Drottninggatan shopping area.

Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, said it was “a most worrying attempt at a terrorist attack”, adding that it “failed – but could have been truly catastrophic”. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said: “The Swedish government have indicated they believe this was a terrorist attack. We will be talking to them about the details of that attack.”

Abdulwahab’s father, Thamer, 61, who lives in Tranås, south of Stockholm, said his son had been at the family home on Friday.

“After he woke up Saturday morning, he took his car and drove off,” he said. “He did not say if he was going to Stockholm or elsewhere.”

An Yemeni Islamist website, Shumukh al-Islam, published a photograph of Abdulwahab in dark glasses, saying: “It is our brother, mujahid Taymour Abdel Wahab, who carried out the martyrdom operation in Stockholm.”

Twelve minutes before the bombing on Saturday, a Swedish news agency received a message with two sound files, one in Swedish and one in Arabic, that was also sent to the Swedish Security Police. The message criticised Swedes’ silence over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and Swedish soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Abdulwahab said: “Now your children, your daughters and your sisters will die as our brothers, our sisters and our children are dying.”

He also asked his family for forgiveness for misleading them about a trip to the Middle East: “I never went to the Middle East to work or to make money, I went for jihad.” He asked his wife to kiss the children on his behalf. “Tell them Daddy loves them,” he added.

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Rare Honor for a Living Service Member - New York Times

The young staff sergeant, Salvatore A. Giunta, now 25, of Hiawatha, Iowa, was an Army specialist when he took part in the firefight in eastern Afghanistan three years ago. He is the first living service member to receive the Medal of Honor, the military’s most prestigious award, for action in any war since Vietnam.

Sergeant Giunta and the other soldiers of Company B, Second Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry Regiment, were part of a campaign to provide food, winter clothing and medical care to Afghans in remote villages. They were ambushed in the Korengal Valley in a coordinated attack from three sides.

In a packed ceremony in the East Room before Sergeant Giunta’s family, squad mates and the parents of two soldiers who were killed in the ambush, Mr. Obama recounted the events on the night of Oct. 25, 2007.

“The moon was full; the light it cast was enough to travel by without using their night-vision goggles,” Mr. Obama said, with Sergeant Giunta standing at his side, looking straight ahead. “They hadn’t traveled a quarter-mile before the silence was shattered. It was an ambush so close that the cracks of the guns and the whizzes of the bullets were simultaneous.”

The two lead squad men went down. So did a third who was struck in the helmet. Sergeant Giunta charged into the wall of bullets to pull him to safety, Mr. Obama said. Sergeant Giunta was hit twice, but was protected by his body armor.

The sergeant could see the other two wounded Americans, Mr. Obama recounted.

By now, the East Room was so silent you could hear a rustle from across the room. One Army officer took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

Sergeant Giunta looked down as the president described how he and his squad mates threw grenades, which they used as cover to run toward the wounded soldiers. All this, they did under constant fire, Mr. Obama said. Finally, they reached one of the men. As other soldiers tended to him, Sergeant Giunta sprinted ahead.

“He crested a hill alone with no cover but the dust kicked up by the storm of bullets still biting into the ground,” Mr. Obama said.

And there Sergeant Giunta saw “a chilling sight” — the silhouettes of two insurgents carrying away the other wounded American — his friend, Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan. Sergeant Giunta leaped forward, and fatally shot one insurgent while wounding the other. Then he rushed to his friend. He dragged him to cover, and stayed with him, trying to stop the bleeding, for 30 minutes, until help arrived.

Sergeant Brennan died later of his wounds. So did Specialist Hugo V. Mendoza, the platoon medic. Five others were wounded.

Speaking to reporters after receiving the award, Sergeant Giunta said the honor was “bittersweet.”

“I lost two dear friends of mine,” he said. “I would give this back in a second to have my friends with me right now.”

The outposts in the Korengal Valley were disbanded this spring after months of patrols that cost the American military dearly. Forces were moved to provide security to larger population centers.

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Better living through palladium - msnbc.com

Alan Boyle writes:This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for decades-old breakthroughs in the use of palladium to help synthesize useful compounds — a process that took the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 13 pages to explain. The easy way to explain it is to say palladium is a rare metal that acts as a catalyst or "matchmaker," marrying ingredients to produce all sorts of useful things for flat-screen displays, cancer drugs, asthma medicines and more.

"Any undergraduate who's taken chemistry is starting to see this in textbooks as really important chemistry," Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society, told me today. Francisco is a chemistry professor at Purdue University and hence a colleague of one of the laureates named today, Purdue's Ei-Ichi Negishi.

Negishi, along with the University of Delaware's Richard Heck and Hokkaido University's Akira Suzuki, were honored for their work in the 1960s and '70s to develop a technique called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling in organic synthesis. That's quite a mouthful, but it simply means they found a way to use palladium atoms to build smaller molecules into larger ones, The atoms act as "marriage brokers," in the words of Inside Science News Service's Steve Miller. Here's what Francisco told Miller:

"Think of palladium as the mutual friend who brings two people together for a handshake," Francisco said. "Palladium brings the right carbon atoms from two molecules together, performs the introduction, and then moves on."

The palladium atoms themselves emerge unchanged by the process, ready to introduce more carbon atoms to each other.

"The beautiful thing about this chemistry is it's very fundamental ... it can create new carbon bonds and certain functional groups that normally would be very difficult to create, in a very easy, very facile, very efficient way," Francisco told me.

Francisco said most chemists knew it was just a matter of time before Heck, Suzuki and Negishi won a Nobel for their work. "At the time, I don't think the Nobel laureates really anticipated just how broadly that chemistry would be applied, but it was," he said.

So what kinds of products have been created through palladium-catalyzed cross coupling?

Pharmaceuticals: Painkillers ranging from synthetic morphine to naproxen (which is marketed under brand names such as Aleve or Midol Extended Relief). Asthma medicines such as montelukast (marketed as Singulair). Anti-cancer drugs such as synthetic Taxol as well as the candidate drug discodermolide (a synthetic version of a poison found in a Caribbean marine sponge) and diazonamide A (which appears to be effective in fighting colon cancer). Potential anti-viral drugs such as dragmacidin F (which affects the herpes virus and HIV). Antibiotics such as modified vancomycin (to fight MRSA infections).

Plastics: Heck developed the chemical reaction that now bears his name in order to create styrene, a major component in polystyrene plastic.

Electronics: Reactions involving palladium are used to optimize the blue light in organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which have found their way into ultra-thin flat-screen displays. The Heck reaction also comes into play for producing resins used in electronic fabrication (such as Dow Chemical's Cyclotene).

... And more: The Heck reaction is a key step in the production of the herbicide Prosulforon. The Suzuki reaction is used to manufacture a fungicide known as Boscalid. And strangely enough, researchers reported just this year that they put palladium together with graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon that earned two other researchers the Nobel Prize in physics this week. Palladium-graphene hybrids could be used as catalysts for the Suzuki reaction, to produce new strains of polymer circuitry and liquid crystals.

"What's exciting about this is it's a case where fundamental chemistry has led to innovations in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries that bring benefit to the general public," Francisco said. "What can be more exciting than using fundamental chemistry to improve the lives of people worldwide? That's cool stuff."

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