A Russian helicopter crashed into the Sea of Okhotsk during joint rescue exercises with Japan, killing one of the 13 people aboard.

The Mi-14 helicopter went down off the Russian island of Sakhalin, north of Japan’s Hokkaido, when one of its rotor blades hit the water during exercises simulating an emergency response to an oil spill and aid to stricken ships.

All 13 people aboard were rescued from the aircraft, but 3 were injured and one of them, a pilot, died on the way to a hospital on shore.

5 crew members and 8 rescuers from Russia’s civil aviation agency had been aboard the helicopter when it went down.

Some of those rescued were taken aboard a Japanese vessel participating in the exercises, and Japanese divers were involved in the rescue operation.

Japanese divers pulled at least one person from the stricken ship.

The exercises involved 7 ships and 4 helicopters from the Russian side and 3 ships and 1 helicopter from the Japanese side.

Say you watch a YouTube video and you love the audio for so much that you absolutely have to have it. It could be a spoken-word bit that you really want to take with you on your music player, or an artist posts music to YouTube for free with a static image over top of their songs; either way, it’s difficult to find an app that can download just the audio from a YouTube video in high quality. Enter Dirpy, a free Web app that can transcode a YouTube video into high-quality MP3 in real time.

Dirpy was designed to give you more control over the end product when you transcode a YouTube video. The service is simple to use: Just paste in the URL of the YouTube video you’d like to download the audio from, and the service will show you the video so you know it’s the right one. It allows you to choose the beginning and end of the transcoding session, too. For example, if you’re watching a 20-minute comedy routine but only the middle 3 minutes made you laugh, you can tell Dirpy to capture only that audio.

In addition to being able to specify start and end times for the recording, you can also choose the bit rate at which Dirpy encodes the resulting mp3. The service defaults to the highest available bit rate, but allows you to downgrade if you want a smaller file. Dirpy is capable of encoding at up to 256 kbps, although most YouTube videos default to 128 kpbs. Dirpy also allows you to add ID3 tags to and MP3, instead of just spitting out a file that you aren’t able to edit.

Dirpy also displays related videos, so you can easily move between similar songs or videos without having to go back to YouTube. You can also add Dirpy to your bookmarks toolbar to transcode any YouTUbe video with a single click, and the site’s FAQ has detailed instructions on how to do this in just about every browser.

Dirpy is in beta, requires Javascript to run, and works in every operating system. The developers say the Web app works best in Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera. It’s completely free, and doesn’t even have ads.

[Visit Dirpy]

What if you want to rip audio from YouTube videos? Or want to covert any FLV file to AVI,MOV,MP4 or MP3 format?

With the Online FLV Converter at Vixy, you can convert YouTube videos in other formats like AVI, MOV and MP4 or convert the video as an audio only file in the MP3 format. Vixy also lets you covert any FLV file to AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3 format online.

When you submit an URL, this service will download and convert the video to your desired format and lets you download the converted file. Vixy allows you to download online videos direct to PC, iPod and PSP for free.

The above trick can also be applied to other video sharing web sites like Google Video and MetaCafe.

If the YouTube Video is on your hard disk as an FLV file, you can use the free FLV Extract utility to extract audio and video from FLV files. The video is saved as AVI and the audio is saved as MP3.

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An Ilyushin IL-18 Coot operated by DHL aborts takeoff from the 8202 ft long airstrip at Cabinda, West Africa.

The pilot has done an excellent job. There’s a busy public road beyond the boundary fence, less than 50 meters from the end of the runway.