Smoke Without Fire News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

A fortnightly column from The Wire's ombudsperson.

On August 4 Conor Oberst will release his new self-titled solo album, which was recorded in Tepoztlán, Mexico with a small group of musicians at the dawn of this year. In a relatively similar fashion to our reassessment of the Manic Street Preachers’ back catalogue earlier this year, DiS considers how a barely pubescent Oberst traversed from four-track recordings in the basement of his family home to standing at the cusp of unleashing one of 2008’s most anticipated records. Almost every song Oberst has recorded since he was but a wee one is out there somewhere if you look hard enough. T...

Chinese crew which used a hydrophone for what could be the black boxes. with this breakthrough coming on the very last day of battery life, is it too good to be true? >> what i find still odd is the fact that we don't have an associated debris field. you don't have smoke without fire. we've never had a crash investigation where black boxes were found without debris. >> there is fleeting signals that the chinese picked up. for instance, how could a relatively rudimentary detect for, this one costing no more than $16,000, pick up pulses miles deep? it's technically possible but not likely. >> re...

They were using a sophisticated detector, the towed pinger detector provided by the u.s. teams are also still investigating the pulses that the chinese detected. here's more on what that ship found. >> this is an important and encouraging lead, but one which i urge you to continue to treat carefully. >> reporter: words of warning over the weekend from angus houston, head of the international search team, about a possible breakthrough from this chinese crew. which used a hydrophone attached to a pole to detect two electronic signals from what could be the plane's black boxes. the sounds detecte...