Helicopter

LONDON — A Russian ship said to be carrying refurbished attack helicopters to Syria turned back after its cargo became known and a British company stripped the vessel of its insurance, the British foreign secretary said Tuesday. The insurer Standard Club reportedly canceled its coverage upon learning that the cargo ship Alaed was apparently carrying munitions to Syria. British news reports indicated the ship was off the coast of Scotland at the time, believed to be en route to Syria, when it changed course.

Just one week after Orvillecopter took the Internet by storm, the APSCA has released Hovercat -- a new video that offers a less morbid take on the flying cat phenomenon. As you may recall, the Orvillecopter was a dead, stuffed cat that was turned into a remote-control helicopter by its owner -- Dutch artist Bret Jansen. The "Katkopter," as the Dutch press came to call it, debuted at an art festival in Amsterdam and created a stir around the world. For those who couldn't abide Orvillecopter (and we heard from plenty of people who could not)

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton charged Tuesday that Russia is sending helicopter gunships to prop up the Syrian government in an escalating conflict with rebels that a top U.N. official acknowledged had become a full-scale civil war. Russia has denied that it is supplying Syrian President Bashar Assad's security forces with weapons that can be used against armed rebels and civilians. Heavy fighting has claimed at least 10,000 lives over 15 months. "We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria," Clinton said at the Brookings Institution think tank.

As the atrocities mount in Syria, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has started increasing the pressure on Russia, which, as Syria's biggest weapons supplier, is propping up the regime of dictator Bashar Assad. In a speech in Oslo last week, she said that Russia's refusal to halt this arms trade flies in the face of international efforts to sanction Syria and raises serious concerns in Washington. It's a principled stance, but it presents a major consistency problem.

Dutch artist Bart Jansen is under attack after images of his flying helicopter cat went viral on the Internet this week. Jansen created the bizarre cat helicopter after his pet Orville was killed by a car. According to media reports, Jansen kept Orville's body in a freezer for about six months, before taking him to a taxidermist and attaching a plastic propeller to each of his four paws. Then he put a remote control engine inside the stomach of the cat, and after a few false starts, the "Orvillecopter" achieved lift-off.

We've seen a lot of strange things on the Internet, but this dead cat turned into a remote-control flying helicopter may be the strangest yet. The cat helicopter was conceived by Dutch artist Bart Jansen, and debuted for the public at the KunstRai ArtFair in Amsterdam that ended Sunday. Jansen calls his creation the Orvillecopter and describes it as "half-cat, half-machine. " The Orvillecopter is exactly what it looks like: A taxidermied cat with a plastic propeller attached to each paw. No animals were harmed for this project.

A former Glendale police officer will receive a $450,000 settlement from the city after alleging in a lawsuit that he faced retaliation for raising concerns over officials allegedly auctioning rides in the department's helicopter to charity groups. David Gillispie's lawsuit was dismissed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court after both parties agreed to the deal, which also requires the city to destroy and seal flight training logs, complaint information, internal memos, two performance evaluations and information regarding his transfer.

Up, up and not quite away. That's the frustrating story of human-powered helicopters and the prize coveted by virtually everyone who has designed the cumbersome beasts and tried to get them aloft. So far, nobody has come up with a muscle-driven machine capable of hovering for 1 minute and rising 3 meters - requirements for the Igor I. Sikorsky Prize, an honor the helicopter industry has dangled before aeronautics buffs for 32 years. The prize has been offered so long that the booty, initially $10,000, became embarrassingly small.

Emergency medical helicopters are certainly dramatic (especially on TV shows like “ER” and “Grey's Anatomy”), but are they really so much better than ambulances that they're worth the extra cost? A new study says the answer is yes. Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine culled data from the National Trauma Data Bank on 61,909 patients who were transported to a hospital via helicopter between 2007 and 2009 and compared them with 161,566 patients who were taken to the hospital in an ambulance.