North Korean rhetoric has left the South, with whom it remains at war, on alert
South Korea says North Korea cannot scrap the armistice that ended the Korean War and called on Pyongyang to tone down its rhetoric.
A unilateral move to end the pact was not legally possible, it said. As well as the armistice threat North Korea has in recent days also cut off a hotline and vowed to end non-aggressions pacts with Seoul. It says it is responding to US-South Korea military drills and new sanctions imposed after its third nuclear test. The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a treaty. North Korea has declared that armistice "invalid", but South Korea said a one-sided declaration was insufficient. "Unilateral abrogation or termination of the armistice agreement is not allowed under its regulations or according to international law," Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tai-Young said. Seoul would "absolutely keep the armistice agreement as well as strengthen consultation and cooperation with the United States and China, who are also concerned parties of the armistice", he said. "We demand North Korea withdraw remarks threatening stability and peace on the Korean peninsula and in the region," the spokesman added. This is not the first time North Korea has said it was withdrawing from the armistice. It also issued a similar threat after its nuclear test in 2009, for example. "Bellicose rhetoric" In recent weeks, however, there has been a marked escalation in rhetoric from Pyongyang, following international condemnation of its nuclear test. It opposes the fresh UN sanctions and has also voiced bitter opposition to two annual joint US-South Korea military exercises that are currently under way.
North Korea looks set to conduct military exercises in coming days, South Korea says
State-run television showed footage on Monday of mass rallies across the country to denounce the US and South Korea, while the state news agency also described leader Kim Jong-un briefing troops at a military unit near a border island. He told local commanders on Baengnyeong Island - close to the disputed inter-Korean maritime border and the site of the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan - to conduct "merciless firepower strikes" if provoked, KCNA said. Late last week he gave similar instructions to troops near Yeonpyeong Island, the scene of shelling in November 2011 that left four South Koreans dead, KCNA said. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US was "certainly concerned by North Korea's bellicose rhetoric". "The threats that they have been making follow a pattern designed to raise tension and intimidate others," he said. On Monday the US imposed additional sanctions on North Korea. The US Treasury added the Foreign Trade Bank (FTB) of North Korea and Paek Se-bong, the chairman of a committee which it said oversaw production of ballistic missiles, to the sanctions list. The US State Department also added three North Korean officials it said had links to the communist country's proliferation activities. The sanctions ban any US individual or entity from transactions with those named. In a speech, US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said North Korea should "change course" to obtain the aid and respect it sought. "North Korea's claims may be hyperbolic, but as to the policy of the United States, there should be no doubt: We will draw upon the full range of our capabilities to protect against, and to respond to, the threat posed to us and to our allies by North Korea." A spokesman for South Korean President Park Geun-hye, meanwhile, has said that her first overseas trip since taking office will be to the US in May, taking into account "the recent Korean Peninsula situation". North Korea's third nuclear test followed an apparently successful launch in December of a three-stage rocket, seen as a banned test of missile technology. Regional neighbours and the US fear Pyongyang is working to build a nuclear warhead small enough to put on a missile, but believe it does not yet have the capabilities to do so.
Gerrard sets sights on top five
By ESPN staff
Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard says the club must deliver "the perfect finish" to the season if they are to finish in the top five.
PA PhotosSteven Gerrard is looking for a strong finish to ensure the Reds play European football next season
The Reds have not finished higher than sixth since 2008-09, but the new owners have made clear that a return to the Champions League is a priority. With Liverpool currently sixth, seven points behind fourth-placed Chelsea and having played an extra game, it would appear that they may have to wait a little longer to achieve that aim. After a run of three successive wins, though, Gerrard is hoping the Reds can produce a strong finish to the campaign and, at the least, claim a place in the Europa League by securing fifth. "Liverpool don't belong in seventh, eighth or ninth in the table," he said. "We want to push for the European places year after year. Hopefully it's not too late but we will need to produce the perfect finish to sneak in the back door." Liverpool are currently two points behind Arsenal, who have a game in hand, and Gerrard added: "The top five places are the target. Let's see what happens in other big games that are not in our control. Hopefully the teams above us will slip up. All we can control is our performances and our consistency and hopefully we will finish strong." Liverpool had been struggling to secure positive results against teams in the top half this season, but they beat Swansea last month and then, most impressively, beat third-placed Tottenham 3-2 on Sunday. "I think this season has been slightly strange in the way that usually we do really well against the top sides and we slip up against the sides we should be beating, but we have been putting those sides away quite comfortably with three, four and five-nils and looking really good," Gerrard said. "We haven't got the points we've needed against the top sides. "This result and performance (against Spurs) will give us great confidence and belief. Hopefully it will be a springboard for us to go on and finish the season really strongly. "At times we haven't got what we've deserved against top sides but we can't look for excuses. We are where we are and we need to take responsibility for where we are in the league.'' Information from the Press Association was used in this report
The cardinals have been seeking divine guidance for the choice ahead
Cardinals gathered in Rome to elect the new Pope will begin voting later, with no clear frontrunner to take over as head of the Roman Catholic Church.
The 115 cardinal-electors are attending a special Mass in St Peter's Basilica before processing into the Sistine Chapel to begin their secret deliberations this afternoon. They will vote four times daily until two-thirds can agree on a candidate. The election was prompted by the surprise abdication of Benedict XVI. The 85-year-old stepped down last month saying he was no longer strong enough to lead the church, which is beset by problems ranging from a worldwide scandal over sexual abuse to allegations of intrigue and corruption at the Vatican bank. Benedict's resignation and the recent damage to the Church's reputation make the choice of the cardinal-electors especially hard to predict, the BBC's James Robbins in Rome says. They will weigh pressure for a powerful manager to reform the Vatican against calls for a new Pope able to inspire the faithful, our correspondent adds.
At Tuesday morning's "Mass for the Election of the Supreme Pontiff" in St Peter's Basilica the cardinals are seeking divine guidance for the election ahead.
Conclave interactive video
Step inside our virtual Sistine Chapel as Philippa Thomas explains the process to elect a new Pope
In his homily, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano praised the "brilliant pontificate" of Pope Benedict and implored God to grant another "Good Shepherd" to lead the church.
He outlined the mission Catholics believe was given by Jesus Christ to St Peter - the first Pope - emphasising love and sacrifice, evangelization and the unity of the church. The BBC's Michael Hirst in Rome says the speech was more measured in tone than the address given in 2005 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict, which featured a fiery attack on the "dictatorship of relativism".
By ESPN Staff Liverpool midfielder Lucas Leiva says the recent Tottenham victory has allowed the Anfield club to start dreaming of a Champions League berth.
PA PhotosLucas Leiva is dreaming of the European Champions League
The 3-2 come-back victory moves the Merseysiders up into sixth position on the Premier League table, seven points adrift of the race for a spot in Europe's elite competition. "We are improving at the right time and, because of that, we can dream of a Champions League place," Lucas said. "Our greatest virtue in this match was that we never stopped fighting. We didn't get upset at losing and showed our strength to comeback. Liverpool are one of the form teams in the league right now, the Tottenham victory making it three wins in a row for the club. And despite admitting the club was proud of its recent record, Lucas said he and his team-mates are focused on stretching their winning form even further. "It was our third consecutive victory, something that is worth a lot given the difficulty of the Premier League," he said "We will continue to work hard, without fanfare, and things will come naturally."
SEATTLE -- Nigerian forward Obafemi Martins says on Twitter he is leaving Spanish club Levante to join the Seattle Sounders. Martins made his posts on Monday, which was followed by an announcement from Levante that he was leaving. Martins wrote that he wanted to give thanks to Levante for the chance to play in La Liga, but that signing with Seattle is, "a big step to take in my career." At training on Monday, Seattle general manager Adrian Hanauer told reporters there was nothing official to announce but did not deny "indicators" that pointed to Martins playing for Seattle in the near future. The Sounders have been seeking a replacement at forward to play alongside Eddie Johnson since Fredy Montero was loaned to Colombian club Millonarios. The 28-year-old Martins had nine goals in 22 matches in all competitions for Levante this season. His best seasons were with Inter Milan (2001-06) and Newcastle (2006-09).
It is the curse of the modern age. After a day spent text messaging, emailing and browsing the web, your smartphone is dead. So now, after brushing your teeth and letting the dog out, there is another task: plugging in your phone. But it never used to be like this. Simple handsets used to keep on going for days on end. So what changed? And more importantly, what is the mobile industry doing about it? The big difference is of course the technology -we used to talk on 2G phones that ran on the old GSM networks. They could last for almost a week, partly because we asked so little of them. As detailed in the previous article in this series, smartphones became powerful computers because they needed to be to make strong, wireless connections to the network. And when they make those connections we ask them to do data-intensive tasks like stream video. Every single step along the way involves information processing. That takes currents flowing around silicon chips; and currents running round silicon chips generate heat, wasting energy. PC and laptop users are constantly reminded about this by the whirr of the fans that keep their processors cool. We don't notice it on phones, because everything they do seems to happen so silently, so effortlessly. But when you look at the detail, energy drips way like water from a leaky tap. And it all adds up. Take the work of Dr Angela Nicoara, senior research scientist at the Deutsche Telekom Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. She has become something of a digital dietician, counting the joules that go into feeding our smartphones' appetites. She recently laid out her findings in a report she enticingly called Who Killed My Battery? In a collaboration with the group of Professor Dan Boneh at Stanford University, she connected a state of the art electronic meter to the battery of a smartphone, which typically store around 15-20,000 joules of energy, and then tracked the power for every millisecond it performed one of the most common applications for our handhelds: browsing the web. What emerged when she broke down the actions millisecond by millisecond came as a surprise. The first was that just hitting the “go” button and getting the phone to contact the network used 12 joules, as the phone exchanged details with the local base station, agreed transmission settings and so on. That’s before a single byte was downloaded. When that process begins, the real surprises come thick and fast. It turns out that the design of the web page has a massive impact on the energy it takes to put it on your mobile screen. For example, the BBC News website, specifically designed for mobile users, took another 3 joules to download and process all the bits for a news story. For the worst performer of the websites she explored, Apple.com, it took another 34 joules – 11 times more than the BBC. Wikipedia came just behind. Careless websites, she found, are at least contributors to killing her battery. For our PCs and laptops connected to the mains, these numbers don’t matter. With the constraints of a mobile battery they are critical. The difference between these websites was in the way that they were built. For example, interactive elements that are used to customise a site experience and often run in the background of a site were a big drain. A half of those 34 joules needed to see the Apple page were down to these functions, without them even being touched; on Wikipedia, they alone cost 10 joules.
Another drain are the so-called CSS files that tell a browser how to layout the page. Again, on the Apple site, these required 12 joules to download and render onto the screen. Simple improvements reduce this by 5 joules. Each joule might seem a trivial amount, but like a slimmer on a diet lots of small savings soon add up – especially when some websites take eleven times as much energy to visit as others. Electronic warfare But website design is not the only drain on a phone’s batteries. The way we access these websites – and in particular the settings our service providers use - also has a huge effect, according to Hari Balakrishnan, Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Surprisingly, it is the network that decides what power setting our handsets use. When we need to transmit, the network tells our handsets to power up to maximum. But the network’s interests are different from ours. We would like to power down again as soon possible to save our battery. But only a slender portion of an already crowded radio spectrum is assigned for these so-called control messages, says Dr Balakrishnan. Because of that, the network tries to minimise the number of control signals it sends, even if that leaves our handset powering away while doing nothing. “A classic example,” says Dr Balakrishnan, “is when you’re running an application that wakes up every 20 or 30 seconds and sends one byte of information. That would, in many cases, keep your radio in the high-power, active mode all the time. But it doesn’t have to. That kind of trivial workload should consume next to no energy, but ends up using huge amounts of energy because of the sub-optimal controls implemented by the networks.” Like Dr Nicoara, Dr Balakrishnan decided to test his suspicion by wiring his battery to a meter and watching the battery drain. The results showed that by letting the phone control its own settings, he could halve the power consumed by the wireless transmissions with minimal effect on the network performance (although he stresses the details change from device to device, and from network to network). Again, these might seem small improvements overall – but a network that can give our phones a few more hours of working battery life is highly likely to attract more customers these days. Of course, it wouldn't matter how long your phone was fired up to exchange bits with the base station, if it could do so with minimal energy. But it turns out the mobile industry has been fighting a war with its electronics for years because they are so inefficient. Specifically, it is the purity of the radio wave that they use to connect to the base station that requires so much power. With radio spectrum restricted (see the two previousarticles in this series) transmission frequencies are squeezed in close together, and any distortion in the signal would lead to catastrophic interference. And it turns out that the basic physics of the amplifiers that drive the antennae can only generate those pure waves when drawing a lot of electrical current. When the 3G standards were introduced, manufacturers turned to a special design of amplifier first concocted back in the 1930s, because of the stringent demands of the networks. But even then, for every watt of transmitted radio power, there's more than another watt simply warming your handset to create this pure wave. Basically, simple physics is doubling the drain rate on your battery. “The industry is racing furiously to mitigate this problem,” says Joel Dawson, Professor of Power Engineering at MIT, who has himself come forward with a smart fix that involves electronically compensating for this distortion, something that could apparently halve the losses. But how soon any of those fixes will make it to the market remains to be seen. Energy harvest Of course these aren’t the only drains on a battery. Modern smartphones pack everything from small accelerometers to energy hungry global positioning systems. And then there is the display - the whole selling point of the smart phone is the interface that lets you access the world wherever you are. Until researchers can develop electronic-inks similar to these used in the Kindle e-book or other pixelated passive systems that refresh as fast as lit screens, simply viewing the phone comes at a substantial cost. The obvious solution would be to pack in a bigger battery, but of all the components in your handset, the battery is the one that represents seriously mature technology. Most of the electrochemistry was laid down a hundred years ago and, as one battery manufacturer confessed to me, there's little they can do about. The introduction of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the 1990s was something of a step change. But since then … well, while virtually every other phone parameter doubles in a year or two, it takes a decade to double battery performance. There are ongoing efforts to improve battery technology (See: Charging Tomorrow’s smartphones) but there may also be another route: harvesting energy from the environment. Solar power is long-established, and has been tried many times with mobile phones, but has failed largely because of inconvenience. As the front of phones is crowded out with buttons, photovoltaic cells have largely been put on the back – but that has required turning a phone upside down to keep the battery charged. But the form of the modern smart phone, freeing up the top face, has changed all that. And one potential solution is on display at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this. WYSIPS (“What You See is the Photovoltaic Surface”), as it is known, is a joke, according to Francis Robcis, sales director for the new product. “Because you can’t see it,” he explains. And it needs to be like that, because WYSIPS has silicon solar cells embedded within the large smartphone display. “Go into the office, and most people will leave their phones lying around with the face up,” says Robcis. So that when the set is idle, the tiny silicon strips (too small to see) are busy recharging the battery. The challenge has been to integrate the photovoltaics into the display without dimming the image by more than 10 per cent – a reduction users should find acceptable. And to allow it to sit alongside the touchscreen function. If the system takes off, the future mobile screen could become a busy place. The company hopes to have a pilot line producing screens by the end of the year, to prove the technology is viable. Powering by sunlight, of course, is conventional, even if unfamiliar in mobile phones. At the University of Washington Seattle, ex-Intel researcher Joshua Smith is planning something much more radical: powering mobile phones - with gratifying circularity - by radio waves. His lab, funded by tech giants Intel and Google, has already made great strides. “The largest TV towers in the US put out around a megawatt of energy,” Smith explains. “We’re able to operate our energy harvester as much as 30 km from one and get small but usable amounts of energy.” In essence, harvesting radio energy requires rewiring the phone antenna to extract not the signal but the power of the carrier wave. And it’s not only powerful TV transmissions that you can tap into. Recently, Smith’s lab has been able to harvest energy from mobile phone masts. The quantities available are down in the microwatt range, so not enough to power voice transmissions. But enough energy can be accumulated, Smith says, to send short texts, or just to stretch the battery life. “It would be enough to have perpetual standby. My favourite example is driving along in my car. My son is playing Angry Birds on the cell phone, and completely drains the battery. And then I get a flat tyre. It would be nice if I could send an emergency SMS using this ambient energy. And of course, compared to solar power, you could even do it at night.” All of which means that the daily ritual of recharging your phone could soon be a thing of the past.
Mr Chavez's mother and brothers were among those who paid their respects
The body of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is lying in state at the military academy in Caracas.
His family and close advisers, as well as the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, paid their respects next to his open coffin on Wednesday. Mr Chavez died aged 58 after suffering from cancer for nearly two years. Hundreds of thousands of people earlier took to the streets of the capital to pay tribute as a hearse carrying his coffin took hours to reach the academy. The state funeral for Mr Chavez is due to take place on Friday. The head of the presidential guard was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying that he had been with Mr Chavez when he died. General Jose Ornella said Mr Chavez had died of a massive heart attack, and in his final moments had said he wanted to carry on living. "He couldn't speak but he said it with his lips: 'I don't want to die. Please don't let me die,'" said Gen Ornella, according to AP.
North Korea looks set to conduct military exercises in coming days, South Korea says 
