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Friday, 24 May 2013
Thursday, 23 May 2013
FBI ID's Benghazi suspects, but no arrests yet
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn't enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.
The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya's post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country's cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.
A senior administration official said the FBI has identified a number of individuals that it believes have information or may have been involved, and is considering options to bring those responsible to justice. But taking action in remote eastern Libya would be difficult. America's relationship with Libya would be weighed as part of those options, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.
The Libyan Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Waiting to prosecute suspects instead of grabbing them now could add to the political weight the Benghazi case already carries. The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans weeks before President Barack Obama's re-election. Since then, Republicans in Congress have condemned the administration's handling of the situation, criticizing the level of embassy security, questioning the talking points provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her public appearances to explain the attack and suggesting the White House tried to play down the incident to minimize its effect on the president's campaign.
The FBI released photos of three of the five suspects earlier this month, asking the public to provide more information on the men pictured. The images were captured by security cameras at the U.S. diplomatic post during the attack, but it took weeks for the FBI to see and study them. It took the agency three weeks to get to Libya because of security problems, so Libyan officials had to get the cameras and send them to U.S. officials in Tripoli, the capital.
The FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies identified the men through contacts in Libya and by monitoring their communications. They are thought to be members of Ansar al-Shariah, the Libyan militia group whose fighters were seen near the U.S. diplomatic facility prior to the violence.
Republican lawmakers continue to call for the Obama administration to provide more information about the attack. The White House released 99 pages of emails about the talking points drafted by the intelligence community that Rice used to describe the attack, initially suggesting they were part of a series of regional protests about an anti-Islamic film. In those emails, administration officials agreed to remove from the talking points all mentions of terror groups such as Ansar al-Shariah or al-Qaida, because the intelligence pointing to those groups' involvement was still unclear and because some officials didn't want to give Congress ammunition to criticize the administration.
U.S. officials say the FBI has proof that the five men were either at the scene of the first attack or somehow involved because of intercepts of at least one of them bragging about taking part. Some of the men have also been in contact with a network of well-known regional Jihadists, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
The U.S. has decided that the evidence it has now would be enough for a military operation to seize the men for questioning, but not enough for a civilian arrest or a drone strike against them, the officials said. The U.S. has kept them under surveillance, mostly by electronic means. There was a worry that the men could get spooked and hide, but so far, not even the FBI's release of surveillance video stills has done that.
FBI investigators are hoping for more evidence, such as other video of the attack that might show the suspects in the act of setting the fires that ultimately killed the ambassador and his communications specialist, or firing the mortars hours later at the CIA base where the surviving diplomats took shelter ? or a Libyan witness willing to testify against the suspects in a U.S. courtroom.
But Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he is concerned the Obama administration is treating terrorism as criminal actions instead of acts of war that would elicit a much harsher response from the United States.
"The war on terror, I think, is a war and at times I get the feeling that the administration wants to treat it as a crime," McKeon said Tuesday.
Administration officials have indicated recently that the FBI is zeroing in.
"Regardless of what happened previously, we have made very, very, very substantial progress in that investigation," Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers last week.
That echoed comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry to lawmakers last month.
"They do have people ID'd," Kerry said of the FBI-led investigation. "They have made some progress. They have a number of suspects who are persons of interest that they are pursuing in this and building cases on."
But options for dealing with the men are few and difficult, U.S. officials said, describing high level strategy debates among White House, FBI and other counterterror officials. Those confidential discussions were described on condition of anonymity by four senior U.S. officials briefed on the investigation into the attack.
The U.S. could ask Libya to arrest the suspects, hoping that Americans would be given access to question them and that the Libyans gather enough evidence to hold the men under their own justice system. Another option is to ask the Libyans to extradite the men to the U.S., but that would require the U.S. to gather enough solid evidence linking the suspects to the crime to ask for such an action.
Asking other countries to detain suspects hasn't produced much thus far. In this case, the Egyptian government detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad for possible links to the attack, but it remains unclear if U.S. intelligence officers were ever allowed to question him.
Tunisia allowed the U.S. to question Tunisian suspect Ali Harzi, 28, who was arrested in Turkey last October because of suspected links to the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack, but a judge released him in January for lack of evidence.
Finally, the U.S. could send a military team to grab the men, and take them to an offsite location such as a U.S. naval ship ? the same way al-Qaida suspect Ahmed Warsame was seized by special operations personnel in 2011 in Somalia. He was then held and questioned for two months on a U.S. ship before being read his Miranda rights, transferred to the custody of the FBI and taken for trial in a New York court. Warsame pleaded guilty earlier this year and agreed to tell the FBI what he knew about terror threats and, if necessary, testify for the government.
The U.S. has made preparations for raids to grab the Benghazi suspects for interrogation in case the administration decides that's the best option, officials said. Such raids could be legally justified under the U.S. law passed just after the 9/11 terror attacks that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida, officials said. The reach of the law has been expanded to include groups working with al-Qaida.
The option most likely off the table would be taking suspects seized by the military to Guantanamo Bay, the facility in Cuba that Obama has said he wants to close.
"Just as the administration is trying to find the exit ramp for Guantanamo is not the time to be adding to it," said Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guant?namo.
Beyond being politically uncomfortable, it's less effective, he said. "There've been a total of seven cases completed since 2001," with six of them landing in appeals court over issues with the legitimacy of the charges.
___
Associated Press writer Richard Lardner contributed to this report.
___
Follow Dozier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kimberlydozier or http://bigstory.ap.org/tags/kimberly-dozier
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fbi-ids-benghazi-suspects-no-arrests-yet-180357480.html
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Supreme Court to Reexamine Church-State Separation at Government Meetings
By David G. Savage
The Supreme Court has agreed to revisit the issue of church-state separation and decide whether a town council can begin most of its monthly meetings with a prayer from a Christian pastor.
Thirty years ago, the court upheld a state legislature's practice of beginning its session with a nondenominational prayer. The justices said that "to invoke divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making laws" did not violate the 1st Amendment's prohibition on an "establishment of religion."
But since then, several lower courts have said that a city council or county board may violate the 1st Amendment if its opening prayers favor one religion.
Want more public safety & justice news? Click here.
Last year, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the town of Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, had crossed the line by inviting Christian pastors to deliver nearly every opening prayer. Though the town's policy does not favor one religion, the appeals court said its practice had been to favor Christianity to the exclusion of other faiths.
"In practice, Christian clergy members have delivered nearly all of the prayers relevant to this litigation and have done so at the town's invitation," the appeals court said.
Lawyers for the town appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that opening prayers are a standard practice at town councils and county boards across the nation.
Ken Klukowski, a lawyer with the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group, predicted the court would "not only affirm prayer but significantly strengthen the religious liberty rights of Americans in public life and in the public square."
But the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, urged the high court to "affirm government neutrality on religion. A town council meeting isn't a church service, and it shouldn't seem like one," he said. His group represented Susan Galloway and Linda Stephen, two local residents who objected to the monthly prayers.
The court said it would hear the case in the fall. The justices took no action on another pending religion case, about whether a public high school could hold its graduation ceremony in a church.
The justices also agreed to hear a search case from Los Angeles and to decide whether disgruntled "frequent fliers" can sue an airline.
Walter Fernandez, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for robbery and gun crimes, objected to the search of his apartment. A girlfriend had consented to the search after police arrested him and took him away. The court will decide whether such a search is legal.
Rabbi Binyomin Ginsberg was a frequent flier on Northwest Airlines who sued the airline in San Diego after he was dropped from its "World Perks" program in 2008. Northwest has urged the Supreme Court to throw out the suit on the grounds that the federal Airline Deregulation Act bars claims in a state court over a "rate, route or service" of an air carrier.
(c)2013 Los Angeles Times
Source: http://www.governing.com/news/state/mct-supreme-court-to-reexamine-church-state-separation.html
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Rare View of Ancient Galaxy Crash Revealed
Astronomers caught a glimpse of two star-forming galaxies as they collided 11 billion light-years away. The smashup could eventually produce one giant elliptical galaxy, researchers say
A close-up view, with the merging galaxies circled. The red data show dust-enshrouded regions of star formation, while green and blue show carbon monoxide gas and starlight, respectively. The blue blobs outside of the circle are galaxies located much closer to us Image: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/STScI/Keck/NRAO/SAO
Astronomers have caught two big ancient galaxies in the act of colliding, shedding new light on the role such megamergers played in galactic evolution during the universe's youth.
The colossal smashup will eventually produce one giant elliptical galaxy, researchers said, suggesting that most such behemoths formed rapidly in this manner long ago, rather than growing slowly over time by gobbling up a series of relatively small galaxies.
"I think at least 90 percent of elliptical galaxies at this mass were formed through this channel," study lead author Hai Fu, of the University of California, Irvine, told SPACE.com. [Photos of Great Galactic Crashes]
Two galaxies becoming one
The merger is occurring 11 billion light-years away, meaning that astronomers are seeing the two colliding galaxies as they were about 3 billion years after the Big Bang that created the universe. During this epoch, "red and dead" elliptical galaxies full of old stars were common.
Fu and his colleagues initially thought the two merging galaxies were a singleton, dubbed HXMM01, when they saw it with the European Space Agency's infrared Herschel space telescope.
But follow-up observations with a variety of other instruments, both on the ground and in space, revealed that HXMM01 is actually two galaxies on a collision course, separated by about 62,000 light-years at the moment.
The gas-rich two-galaxy system contains the stellar equivalent of about 400 billion suns and is churning out new stars at a fantastic clip ? about 2,000 per year, researchers said. For comparison, just two to three new stars are born every year in our own Milky Way.
At this rate, the newly forming elliptical galaxy will exhaust its gas reservoirs and cease birthing stars in just 200 million years, going red and dead in what researchers describe as a surprisingly short period of time.
"The common thought was that massive galaxies form by accreting smaller galaxies and the growth, though rapid, would last more than 200 million years," co-author Asantha Cooray, also of UC-Irvine, told SPACE.com via email.
"And the formation was expected to not be as efficient as we have observed," Cooray added. "The 40 percent efficiency of star formation, the efficiency at which gas is converted to stars in one rotation of the system, was unexpected."
Fu and his colleagues report their results online today (May 22) in the journal Nature.
Star-formation mystery
The HXMM01 system's startling efficiency explains how elliptical galaxies can go red and dead so fast, Fu and Cooray said. Ellipticals' quick transformation had been a mystery, with some astronomers suggesting that their star-forming raw materials had been ejected by superpowerful phenomena such as quasars.
But this efficiency raises intriguing new questions, which Fu and his colleagues hope to tackle by further studying these ancient galaxies and their merging progenitors.
They want to "truly understand what is going on in those galaxies ? why the star-formation efficiency is 10 times higher than normal star-forming galaxies," Fu said. "That part is a total mystery right now."
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=2261b3d46f2992734d3173410af51e0e
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Wednesday, 22 May 2013
How Sunscreen Works (And Why You're Wrong About It)
Your skin shouldn't look like a package of pork cracklins after spending the day outdoors; that's why we invented sunscreen. However, there's a right way and a wrong way to slather on your protection?screw it up and you could get burned.
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Obama Has Raised the National Debt by Nearly $6.2 Trillion, the Equivalent of $78,385 Per Family of Four
By PHIL GRAMM
AND STEVE MCMILLIN
President Obama has raised the national debt by nearly $6.2 trillion, the equivalent of $78,385 per family of four. It is true that projected deficits recently have been reduced. April tax filings increased 28% from 2012, but much of this was thanks to a one-time rush at the end of 2012 to report income before rates rose in January. The second largest reduction in the deficit came from Fannie Mae taking a one-time accounting adjustment.
But unless the economy soars, or a significant budget agreement is reached, the most lasting legacy of the Obama presidency will be a $10 trillion increase in the national debt?a burden that bodes ill for the nation's future.
Once the Federal Reserve's easy-money policy comes to an end and interest rates return to their post-World War II norms, the cost of servicing this debt will explode. The cost will increase further as the Fed sells down its $1.85 trillion holding of government bonds, and the Social Security system runs deeper and deeper into the red. The Treasury will then have to pay interest on an ever-growing percentage of the debt.
Since the World War II era, the average maturity of outstanding federal debt has been about five years, and the average interest cost on a five-year Treasury note has been 5.9%. At this interest rate, the expected cost of the Obama debt burden will eventually approach some $590 billion per year in perpetuity, exceeding the current annual cost of any federal program except Social Security.
An America forever burdened by massive government debt would have been unthinkable for much of the nation's history. Beginning with the Revolutionary War, the pattern has been that federal debt increased to help finance the nation's armed conflicts. But government spending after the wars dropped and debt was paid down, or even paid off, as under President Andrew Jackson in 1835.
Federal borrowing during the Civil War reached nearly $2.8 billion, about 30% of GDP. Thereafter the government ran surpluses and redeemed U.S. bonds that served as the reserve base of national banks and literally burned U.S. paper currency?greenbacks?in the furnace of the Treasury building. The money supply fell and federal spending plummeted to $352 million in 1896 from $1.3 billion in 1865.
These are policies that horrify modern Keynesian economists. Yet over that late 19th-century period real GDP and employment doubled, average annual real earnings rose by over 60%, and wholesale prices fell by 75%, thanks to marked improvements in productivity.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the national debt increased dramatically for the first time in the peacetime history of America, reaching 43% of GDP in 1938. World War II meant more borrowing. Since 1930, there has been no concerted effort to pay down the national debt. Any reductions in the national debt relative to the GDP have been almost solely the result of economic growth and inflation.
As the debt burden rises, so too does the cost of servicing the debt increase as a share of the growth the economy is capable of generating. When the debt on which interest is paid equals the GDP level of a nation, the economy must grow faster than the interest rate to avoid debt-servicing costs consuming all the benefit of economic growth. A nation then begins to lose its ability to grow its way out of a mounting debt crisis. Its options start to narrow down to forced austerity, inflation or default.
Today the total U.S. federal debt is 103% of GDP. Since interest paid to the Fed, the Social Security system and other government pension funds is effectively rebated to the Treasury, taxpayers currently bear only the burden of interest on 60% of this debt. But the size of the debt and the percentage of the debt on which interest will have to be paid are rising.
Some seek solace in the fact that at the end of World War II, the national debt exceeded GDP and still the economy prospered. But when the war ended, federal spending dropped to $29.8 billion in 1948 from $92.7 billion in 1945. Spending as a percentage of GDP fell to 12% from 44%. The U.S. emerged from the war as the world's dominant producer of goods and services. The demand for dollars around the world was insatiable, and a long period of record prosperity ensued. High GDP growth and inflation eventually brought down the debt-to-GDP ratio.
Americans today face a totally different situation. Spending and huge deficits continue unabated, and growth rates have declined since the recovery began four years ago. The reduction in government spending that occurred following World War II would be politically impossible today short of a cataclysmic crisis. Under Mr. Obama, the government has run trillion-dollar deficits for four consecutive years, and the top marginal tax rate today is already higher than it was when the budget was balanced in fiscal year 2001.
The president and many in Washington are complacent because, thanks to the Fed's unprecedented near-zero interest rate policy, the burden of servicing the debt today is just 0.9% of GDP, the lowest level in over five decades. But this cannot last, and the Fed is already looking for an exit plan.
Sadly, nations generally discover the truth of Albert Einstein's dictum that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe?not through the happy accumulation of wealth but through the agonizing enslavement of debt.
Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas, is senior partner of U.S. Policy Metrics, where Mr. McMillin, a former deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is a partner.
A version of this article appeared May 22, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Debt Problem Hasn't Vanished.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324787004578494864042754582.html
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Slickdeals' best in tech for May 21st: Brother all-in-one printer and JBL wireless subwoofer
Looking to save some coin on your tech purchases? Of course you are! In this roundup, we'll run down a list of the freshest frugal buys, hand-picked with the help of the folks at Slickdeals. You'll want to act fast, though, as many of these offerings won't stick around long.
Monday's list of links may have gotten bumped to Tuesday, but rest assured that we've got a handful of discounted tech ready for your perusal. A wireless Brother all-in-one inkjet printer and 300W JBL wireless subwoofer made the cut alongside three other tempting gadgets. Head down beyond the break for the full list and all of the requisite purchase info.
Filed under: Cameras, Home Entertainment, Peripherals, Portable Audio/Video, Storage
Source: Slickdeals
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Tuesday, 21 May 2013
Viruses and mucus team up to ward off bacteria
Phages may play unforeseen role in immune protection
By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition: May 20, 2013
The last thing most people would want in their bodies is mucus laden with viruses. But a new study suggests that viruses called bacteriophages, or phages, grab onto mucus and then infect and kill invasive bacteria. The finding, reported May 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Forest Rohwer of San Diego State University and colleagues, could mean that some viruses partner with animals and humans to stave off bacterial infections and control the composition of friendly microbes in the body.
Bacteriophages are viruses that break open bacteria, killing them. Researchers have studied bacteriophages for decades, and some disease therapies take advantage of the viruses? bacteria-slaying abilities, says microbiologist Frederic Bushman of the University of Pennsylvania medical school. But the study provides what Bushman says is a revelation that should have been obvious; phage may be a natural part of the immune system. ?It?s new in a way that is sort of common-sensey,? he says.
Previously, researchers thought of mucus mainly as a physical barrier to keep invading organisms from entering the body. The slimy substance made by our noses, intestines and other organs also fights invaders with antimicrobial molecules. ?Some researchers had found bacteriophages stuck in mucus, but they figured that the mucus had stopped or slowed the viruses. No one realized that the viruses are part of the body?s defense, says study coauthor Jeremy Barr, who works in Rohwer?s lab. ?This is a natural use of phage therapy that has probably been around since mucosal surfaces evolved,? Barr says.
Rohwer, who studies corals, had noticed that phages tend to concentrate in mucus. To find out why, the researchers collected mucus from human gums, sea anemones, fish, corals and mouse intestines. Mucus layers had more phages and fewer bacteria than the surrounding environment, suggesting that the viruses helped to limit the number of bacteria allowed into the mucus.
Phages are coated in proteins that latch onto sugars called glycans, anchoring the viruses in the mucus, the team discovered. From there the phages can ambush encroaching bacteria.
So far, the researchers have demonstrated that mucus and phages can work together to protect cells in a dish. The next step, Bushman says, would be determining what happens inside an organism, an experiment the researchers are already planning.
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Fighting to save an endangered bird -- with vomit
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
An adult marbled murrelet, a rare and endangered type of bird, floats atop the water.
By Becky Oskin
LiveScience
A psychological warfare program centered on vomit could help save the marbled murrelet, an endangered seabird that nests in California's old-growth redwood forests.
The robin-sized murrelet lives at sea but lays one pointy, blue-green egg each year on the flat, mossy branch of a redwood. While breeding, its back feathers morph from black to mottled brown to better match the forest. For two months, both parents race back and forth to the coast as far as 50 miles (80 kilometers) each day at speeds of up to 98 mph (158 km/h) while evading peregrine falcon and hawk attacks. After the chick hatches, it pecks off its redwood-colored down and, flying solo, launches straight for the ocean. Penguins have nothing on the murrelet.
"They're a seabird like a puffin, and they have this crazy lifestyle that's like a living link between the old-growth redwood?forests and the Pacific Ocean," said Keith Bensen, a biologist at Redwood National Park. "It's strange to have an animal with webbed feet in the forest," he said.
?Despite its amazing skills, the marbled-murrelet population is down by more than 90 percent from its 19th-century numbers in California, thanks to logging, fishing and pollution. Murrelets live as far north as Alaska, but the central California population is most at risk. Yet even though the state's remaining old-growth redwood trees are now protected, the murrelets continue to disappear.
The culprit: the egg-sucking, chick-eating Steller's jay.
USGS
A young marbled murrelet chick.
About 4,000 murrelets remain in California, with about 300 to 600 in central California's Santa Cruz Mountains. Squirrels, ravens and owls also swipe murrelet eggs, but jays are the biggest thieves in California, gobbling up 80 percent of each year's brood. Unless more eggs survive, the central California population will go extinct within a century, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Biological Conservation.
To boost California's murrelet numbers, biologists in California's Redwood National and State Parks are fighting back against Steller's jays and their human enablers.
The art of avian war
With cash earmarked for murrelets from offshore-oil-spill restoration funds, the parks have the rare ability to fund research studies and restore habitat. The two-pronged approach will teach the black-crested jays to avoid murrelet eggs on pain of puking. More importantly, it will shrink the jay population by thwarting access to their primary food source ? human trash and food. [Image Gallery: Saving the Rare Marbled Murrelet]
"Every time folks throw out crumbs to bring out jays and squirrels, it's having a real impact on a very rare bird nesting overhead in an old-growth redwood tree," Bensen told OurAmazingPlanet.
A Western bird, the blue and black Steller's jays like to frequent cleared forest edges ? which are filled with bugs and berry bushes ? and campgrounds littered with tasty trash and crumbs. As humans spend more time in the forest, the jay's numbers are booming. Their density in campgrounds is nine times higher than in other forest areas, said Portia Halbert, an environmental scientist with the California State Parks.
"We see this crazy overlap of jays in campgrounds because of the density of food," Halbert told OurAmazingPlanet. The overpopulation also menaces federally protected species, such as snowy plovers, desert tortoises and California least terns ? the jays eat their eggs too.
Richard Golightly
A Steller's jay inspects a fake egg meant to mimic the egg of a murrelet, another type of bird. The egg contains a vomit-inducing ingredient meant to discourage the jays from eating real murrelet eggs.
Steller's jays don't seek out murrelet eggs. But when the birds circle picnic areas near murrelet nests, some discover the chicken-size eggs make a fine treat. The smart, savvy birds?will return to the same spot over and over, searching for food. Murrelets, to their misfortune, nest in the same tree every year.
Masters of disguise, the first marbled murrelet nest wasn't discovered by scientists until 1974, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The seabird doesn't actually build a nest, instead choosing a flat branch covered in cozy moss and needles, with cover to hide from airborne predators. At dawn and dusk, parents switch roles, flying offshore to dive for fish and invertebrates. [Watch the mysterious marbled murrelet]
"For an animal that lives for some 20 years, losing an egg is a terrible, terrible loss," Bensen said. "They're investing an enormous amount of energy into that one baby."
Killing Steller's jays won't help the murrelets; even more of the marauding birds will invade campgrounds to compete for vacant territory, biologists have concluded. Plus, jays are part of the natural ecosystem, said Richard Golightly, a biologist at Humboldt State University in California. Instead, researchers think aversion training is the cheapest, most effective way to stop Steller's jays from snacking on murrelets.
"It freaks everybody out to train wild animals to do what you want, but it surprised the heck out of all of us how much more feasible it was than we thought," Bensen said.
World's worst Easter egg hunt
The plan, the brainchild of Humboldt State graduate student Pia Gabriel, centers on carbachol, an odorless, tasteless chemicalthat provokes vomiting with just a small swallow. Researchers fine-tuned the correct dose with lab tests at Humboldt State in 2009. Small chicken eggs, dyed blue-green and speckled with brown paint, were offered as meals to jays, with carbachol hidden inside. Wild Steller's jays in this first treatment group usually tried just one taste of the carbachol-filled fake eggs.
Portia Halbert
A graphic developed by the Redwood National and State Parks to encourage campers to clean up their food crumbs.
"All of a sudden, their wings will droop, and they throw up. That's exactly what you want ? a rapid response ? so within five minutes, they barf up whatever they ate," Bensen said. The quick action helps the jays link the eggs with the illness.
Some jays wouldn't even touch the eggs ? evidence that murrelet egg-nabbing is a learned behavior, Golightly said.
In spring 2010 and spring 2011, a team zip-tied hundreds of the copycat eggs to redwood-tree branches in several parks. Each chicken egg was painstakingly colored (Benjamin Moore Oceanfront 660) and speckled to resemble murrelet eggs. A control batch of red speckled eggs also decorated the forest.
"We've been accused of being the Easter bunny in the woods," Golightly told OurAmazingPlanet.
A second wave of eggs set out a few weeks later measured whether wild jays learned to avoid tossing their lunch. The mimic eggs reduced egg-snatching by anywhere from 37 percent to more than 70 percent, depending on where the eggs were deployed. For instance, one spot lost eggs to bears, so not as many jays got to sample the carbachol. (The bogus eggs were set low on branches, to avoid drawing jays toward real murrelet eggs.)
A retched success
The tests were so successful that Halbert applied for oil-spill restoration funds to start training Steller's jays in the state parks. In spring 2012, during murrelet nesting season, researchers spread hundreds of vomit-inducing eggs throughout Butano State Park and Portola Redwoods Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This year, the project included Memorial Park, a county park with old-growth redwoods. [Nature's Giants: Tallest Trees on Earth]
"It's worked amazingly well," Halbert said."We've found a significant decrease in predations by jays, the number of times eggs get broken," she said. The effects were monitored with camera traps and a second wave of mimic eggs.
Reducing predation on murrelet nests by 40 percent to 70 percent would stabilize the Santa Cruz Mountains murrelet population, according to the 2010 study published in the journal Biological Conservation. That 40 percent minimum would drop the extinction risk from about 96 percent to about 5 percent over 100 years, and result in stable population growth, reported lead study author Zach Peery of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In 2012, the smallest cutback in egg attacks by Steller's jays and other predators was 44 percent, and the biggest was as much as 80 percent in the two state parks, researchers reported. The project cost $80 per treated hectare (2.4 acres).
When the enemy is full, starve them
Here's why taste aversion?works so well for Steller's jays. Their fiercely territorial social structure keeps out untrained birds. Long-lived, with excellent memories, the jays will recognize and avoid those rare blue-green eggs that made them retch. Nothing else in the forest looks like a murrelet egg. If taste-aversion training were to spread through the murrelet's range, it would not be the first time a bird would require human babysitters to survive ? think of condors, who need devoted monitoring and care..
But Halbert said all the efforts to stop egg-stealing won't matter if the parks can't shrink the jay population by getting rid of their campground crumb food source. That's where the human psychology comes in. The parks hired an expert in public education and natural resources, Carolyn Ward, to help craft a message as finely tuned as any advertising company's.
"We're coming up with creative ways to change people's behavior," Halbert said.
Ward's research revealed most park visitors only read the first sentence on signs, so starting with the marbled murrelet's history was wasted effort. Now, with everything from stickers on the back of bathroom stalls to new signs at campsites, Redwood Parks visitors are warned to "Keep it crumb clean." This summer marks the new program's first big push, with campfire talks, tchotchkes for kids, brochures and YouTube videos that highlight the murrelet's plight.
At Big Basin Redwood State Park, Halbert has also installed animal-proof food lockers and trash cans. At Redwood National Park, the staff reconfigured the outdoor sinks so jays and squirrels can't steal leftovers from dishes.
While Redwood National Park is going ?crumb clean,? the park will wait on the vomit eggs, Bensen said. "We're basically trying to prevent any food access to even the smallest crumb," he said. "With Steller's jays, just a couple Cheetos is enough. They'll keep coming and coming, and then eat the marbled murrelets. We want to cut that process off at the knees."
Future development
The "crumb clean" push comes as Big Basin gears up for a struggle over its first general plan, which will guide the park's future. The proposed plan, published in 2012, will expand areas of the park to new public use. But some groups, including the California Audubon Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, think the park should either close or restrict certain areas during murrelet breeding season, to help the endangered species recover.
A public hearing on the draft plan was?held Friday?in Santa Cruz, Calif., and a copy of the plan?is available online.
"If people are looking for someone to blame for the problem the murrelet is having, I think everybody has some of that blame," Golightly said. "Cutting of the old-growth forests in the past is the primary thing that put us to this point, but presently, if you visit the parks and feed the animals, you're contributing, too. It is coming at the expense of the murrelet."
Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us?@OAPlanet, Facebook?and Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
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Friday, 17 May 2013
Hot off the press: Seen and heard in Cannes
CANNES, France (AP) ? Associated Press journalists open their notebooks at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival:
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JOHANSSON MOVING BEHIND THE CAMERA
Scarlett Johansson will make her directorial debut with an adaptation of Truman Capote's first novel, "Summer Crossing."
A publicist for the "Avengers" actress confirmed Thursday that Johansson will direct the long-lost book. "Summer Crossing" wasn't published until 2005, after the manuscript was recovered.
Financing for the film was assembled in Cannes. Capote's novel is about a 17-year-old debutant who, during a summer alone in 1945 New York, strikes up a romance with a Jewish valet parking attendant.
Johansson next appears in the independent film, "Don Juan," in which she co-stars with writer-director Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
? Jake Coyle, Twitter: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle
BRAFF NOT JUST DEPENDING ON KICKSTARTER
Zach Braff isn't just counting on the $2.7 million he raised on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to make his follow-up movie to "Garden State." Worldwide Entertainment has stepped in at Cannes as a financier for that film, "Wish I Was Here."
It's not uncommon for a film to find additional foreign investors at Cannes, but Braff has come under considerable criticism for relying on fans to bankroll his second directorial effort.
In one of the most high-profile Kickstarter campaigns, the "Scrubs" actor lobbied his fans to contribute money. The film's 38,000-plus backers earn various levels of rewards, from a copy of the script to a part in the film.
On his Kickstarter page, Braff denied that he was doing anything to undermine the spirit of crowd-funding. He said the additional funds would allow him to make the film as designed, within a budget of $5-6 million.
"I'm sorry for the hoopla," he wrote. "I'm sorry if your friends think you've been duped. But you haven't been. This is real. Crowd-sourcing films is here to stay."
Braff follows Rob Thomas' popular Kickstarter campaign to bring the cult TV show "Veronica Mars" back as a film. That project, too, had outside investment from Warner Bros.
? Jake Coyle, Twitter: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle
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LUHRMANN: JAY-Z KEY TO 'GATSBY'
Not everyone is a fan of the hip-hop flavored soundtrack of "The Great Gatsby," but director Baz Luhrmann says using modern music was essential to capturing the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel.
"We wanted the film to feel like how it would have felt to read the novel in 1925," the director told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie provided opening-night screen fireworks and red-carpet glamor.
"Fitzgerald put music front and center in his novel. He took African-American street music called jazz and he put it right as a star in the book. People said, 'Why are you doing that? It's a fad, it'll be gone next week.' And he said, because I want this book to feel right here, right now."
Luckily for Luhrmann, "Gatsby" star Leonardo DiCaprio introduced him to Jay-Z, and the superstar agreed to help score the film. Two of Jay-Z's own tracks ? "$100 Bill" and the Grammy-winning jam "No Church in the Wild" ? feature on the soundtrack, and he elicited contributions from the wife Beyonce, Emeli Sande and Lana Del Rey.
Luhrmann also used the soundtrack to counter criticism of the absence of African-American speaking characters in the movie ? as in Fitzgerald's book.
"Jay said that music is a star in the film so I think there is a great African-American presence in this film and I am very, very grateful for it," he said.
?Jill Lawless, Twitter: http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
___
CANNES: WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
The French Riviera is a magnet for gamblers, so it's no surprise that odds makers are speculating furiously about who will win prizes from the Cannes Film Festival jury headed by Steven Spielberg.
Journalist and Cannes betting expert Neil Young ranks "Grisgris," by Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the early favorite for the Palme d'Or prize at 5-1. That is followed by "The Past," from Iran's Asghar Farhadi ? who won an Academy Award for "A Separation" ? at 11-2 and U.S. director James Gray's 1920s New York story "The Immigrant" at 13-2.
Other front runners are "Like Father, Like Son" from Korean director Kore-eda Hirokazu; Arnaud Desplechin's "Jimmy P," with Benicio del Toro as a traumatized Native American war veteran; and Alexander Payne's road movie "Nebraska."
But none of those films has even screened yet, and the odds are sure to change often before the prizes are handed out May 26.
?Jill Lawless, Twitter: http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
___
MOORE EXPRESSES ADMIRATION FOR JOLIE
Add Julianne Moore to those who are commending Angelina Jolie for her decision to reveal her choice to have a double mastectomy.
"I'm impressed with her and I'm impressed with her announcement, particularly because I feel there are so many women who are facing the same kind of choice, and it's a way to kind of validate and have solidarity with women who are having the same issue," Moore said in an interview from Cannes.
"It's obviously a really, really complicated (decision), and so I think her decision to go public about something like that can only help other women."
Jolie announced this week that she had both breasts removed recently because she had a very high chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Jolie has since had reconstructive surgery. Jolie's mother had breast cancer and died of ovarian cancer, while her grandmother suffered from ovarian cancer.
?Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Twitter: http://Twitter.com/nekesamumbi
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CUISINE GETS A STARRING ROLE AT CANNES:
The chefs who prepared the dinner for the Cannes Film Festival's opening gala were as starry as the guests.
Anne Sophie Pic, who is a three-star Michelin chef, and Bruno Oger, who has two, collaborated for the four-course meal after the festival's opening night film of "The Great Gatsby" on Wednesday night.
Guests were treated to a menu that included King crab with shrimp and sea bass with rhubarb and celery. Select media were given a preview Tuesday.
Pic and Oger will join other chefs during the festival at the Electrolux Agora Pavillion to ensure that VIPs get top cuisine.
?Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Twitter: http://Twitter.com/nekesamumbi
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hot-off-press-seen-heard-cannes-145337466.html
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Wednesday, 8 May 2013
'Young and Restless' star Jeanne Cooper dies at 84
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Jeanne Cooper, the enduring soap opera star who played grande dame Katherine Chancellor for nearly four decades on "The Young and the Restless," has died. She was 84.
Cooper died Wednesday morning in her sleep, her son the actor Corbin Bernsen wrote on Facebook. The family confirmed the death to CBS, according to a network spokeswoman.
Cooper will be remembered "as a daytime television legend and as a friend who will truly be missed by all of us here at the network," said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment, adding that the actress brought "indelible charm, class and talent to every episode."
Bernsen tweeted April 12 that his mother faced an "uphill battle" for an undisclosed illness. In subsequent days he wrote of her gradual improvement and said that she'd been taken off breathing equipment.
In a Facebook posting April 17, Bernsen said his mother cursed several times, "showing me that she's becoming her old self, not thrilled about the situation, and ready to get out of the hospital and shake up the world."
On Wednesday he wrote that she remained a fighter until the end: "She has been a blaze her entire life, that beacon, that boxer I spoke of earlier. She went the full twelve rounds and by unanimous decision... won!"
Cooper joined the daytime serial six months after its March 1973 debut, staking claim to the title of longest-tenured cast member. The role earned her 11 Daytime Emmy nominations and a trophy for best actress in a drama series in 2008.
"God knows it's claimed a big part of my life," she told The Associated Press in March as CBS' "Young and the Restless" celebrated its milestone 40th anniversary.
As the years passed, Cooper brushed aside thoughts of saying goodbye to the show and its fictional Wisconsin town of Genoa City.
"What would I do? I'm no good at crocheting. My fingers would bleed," she told the AP as she turned 83.
Cooper, born in the California town of Taft in 1928, attended the College of the Pacific and performed in local theater productions before her professional career began with the 1953 film "The Redhead from Wyoming" starring Maureen O'Hara. Other film credits include 1968's "The Boston Strangler" with Tony Curtis and 1967's "Tony Rome" with Frank Sinatra.
She had a parallel career in TV, with shows including "The Adventures of Kit Carson" in 1953 and "The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse" in 1954 and "Bracken's World" in 1969-70.
In a recurring role on "L.A. Law," she played the mother to Bersen's character, Arnie, and received a 1987 Emmy nomination for best guest actress in a drama. Bernsen later joined his mother on her series, making several appearances as a priest, Father Todd.
But it was her role on "The Young and the Restless" that made her a TV star intimately familiar to viewers.
In 1984, Coooper's real-life facelift was televised on the show as her character underwent the surgery at the same time, and had no regrets about it.
"It opened up reconstructive surgery for so many people, youngsters getting things done," she said. "To this day, people will come up to me and say, 'Thank you so much for doing that. My mom or I had something done, and not just cosmetic surgery.' That was an incredible experience in my life."
"The Young and the Restless" has topped the daytime serial ratings for more than 24 years, in part because of the continuity provided by Cooper and its other long-time stars including Eric Braeden. It held its ground as the genre diminished in popularity and the majority of soaps vanished.
Cooper's 30-year marriage to Harry Bernsen ended in divorce. The couple have three children, Corbin, Caren and Collin, and eight grandchildren.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/young-restless-star-jeanne-cooper-dies-84-184508186.html
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Monday, 6 May 2013
Microwave oven cooks up solar cell material
May 6, 2013 ? University of Utah metallurgists used an old microwave oven to produce a nanocrystal semiconductor rapidly using cheap, abundant and less toxic metals than other semiconductors. They hope it will be used for more efficient photovoltaic solar cells and LED lights, biological sensors and systems to convert waste heat to electricity.
Using microwaves "is a fast way to make these particles that have a broad range of applications," says Michael Free, a professor of metallurgical engineering. "We hope in the next five years there will be some commercial products from this, and we are continuing to pursue applications and improvements. It's a good market, but we don't know exactly where the market will go."
Free and the study's lead author, Prashant Sarswat, a research associate in metallurgical engineering, are publishing their study of the microwaved photovoltaic semiconductor -- known as CZTS for copper, zinc, tin and sulfur -- in the June 1 issue of the Journal of Crystal Growth.
In the study, they determined the optimum time required to produce the most uniform crystals of the CZTS semiconductor -- 18 minutes in the microwave oven -- and confirmed the material indeed was CZTS by using a variety of tests, such as X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and ultraviolet spectroscopy. They also built a small photovoltaic solar cell to confirm that the material works and demonstrate that smaller nanocrystals display "quantum confinement," a property that makes them versatile for different uses.
"It's not an easy material to make," Sarswat says. "There are a lot of unwanted compounds that can form if it is not made properly."
Sarswat says that compared with photovoltaic semiconductors that use highly toxic cadmium and arsenic, ingredients for CZTS photovoltaic material "are more environmentally friendly."
Free adds: "The materials used for this are much lower cost and much more available than alternatives," such as indium and gallium often used in semiconductors.
Making an Old Material More Quickly
Swiss researchers first invented CZTS in 1967 using another method. Other researchers discovered in 1998 that it could serve as a photovoltaic material. But until recently, "people haven't explored this material very much," Sarswat says. CZTS belongs to a family of materials named quaternary chalcogenides.
Without knowing it at first, Free and Sarswat have been in a race to develop the microwave method of making CZTS with a group of researchers at Oregon State University. Sarswat synthesized the material using microwaves in 2011. Free and Sarswat filed an invention disclosure on their method in January 2012, but the other group beat them into print with a study published in August 2012.
The method developed by Sarswat and Free has some unique features, including different "precursor" chemicals (acetate salts instead of chloride salts) used to start the process of making CZTS and a different solvent (oleylamine instead of ethylene glycol.)
Sarswat says many organic compounds are synthesized with microwaves, and Free notes microwaves sometimes are used in metallurgy to extract metal from ore for analysis. They say using microwaves to process materials is fast and often suppresses unwanted chemical "side reactions," resulting in higher yields of the desired materials.
CZTS previously was made using various methods, but many took multiple steps and four to five hours to make a thin film of the material, known technically as a "p-type photovoltaic absorber," which is the active layer in a solar cell to convert sunlight to electricity.
A more recent method known as "colloidal synthesis" -- preparing the crystals as a suspension or "colloid" in a liquid by heating the ingredients in a large flask -- reduced preparation time to 45 to 90 minutes.
Sarswat decided to try microwave production of CZTS when the University of Utah's Department of Metallurgical Engineering decided to get a new microwave oven for the kitchen where students heat up their lunches and make coffee.
"Our department secretary had a microwave to throw away," so Sarswat says he took it to replace one that had recently burned up during other lab experiments.
"The bottom line is you can use just a simple microwave oven to make the CZTS semiconductor," Free says, adding: "Don't do it at home. You have to be cautious when using these kinds of materials in a microwave."
By controlling how long they microwave the ingredients, the metallurgists could control the size of the resulting nanocrystals and thus their possible uses. Formation of CZTS began after 8 minutes in the microwave, but the researchers found they came out most uniform in size after 18 minutes.
Uses for a Microwaved Semiconductor
To make CZTS, salts of the metals are dissolved in a solvent and then heated in a microwave, forming an "ink" containing suspended CZTS nanocrystals. The "ink" then can be painted onto a surface and combined with other coatings to form a solar cell.
"This [CZTS] is the filling that is the heart of solar cells," says Free. "It is the absorber layer -- the active layer -- of the solar cell."
He says the easy-to-make CZTS photovoltaic semiconductor can be used in more efficient, multilayer solar cell designs. In addition, CZTS has other potential uses, according to Sarswat and Free:
-- Theromoelectric conversion of heat to electricity, including waste heat from automobiles and industry, or perhaps heat from the ground to power a military camp.
-- Biosensors, made by painting the nanocrystal "ink" onto a surface and sensitizing the crystals with an organic molecule that allows them to detect small electrical currents that are created when an enzyme in the body becomes active. These biosensors may play a role in future tests to help diagnose cardiovascular disease, diabetes and kidney disease, Sarswat says.
-- As circuit components in a wide variety of electronics, include devices to convert heat to electricity.
-- To use solar energy to break down water to produce hydrogen for fuel cells.
The microwave method produced crystals ranging from 3 nanometers to 20 nanometers in size, and the optimum sought by researchers was between 7 nanometers and 12 nanometers, depending on the intended use for the crystals. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or roughly one 25-millionth of an inch.
Larger crystals of CZTS make a good photovoltaic material. Sarswat says the study also demonstrated that smaller crystals of CZTS -- those smaller than 5 nanometers -- have what is called "quantum confinement," a change in a material's optical and electronic properties when the crystals becomes sufficiently small.
Quantum confinement means the nanocrystals can be "tuned" to emit light of specific, making such material potentially useful for a wide variety of uses, including more efficient LEDs or light-emitting diodes for lighting. Materials with quantum confinement are versatile because they have a "tunable bandgap," an adjustable amount of energy required to activate a material to emit light or electricity.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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Sunday, 5 May 2013
Cooking Class - Classic Modern French Dinner with a Twist! | Gig ...
Bella Kitchen & Home, 4793 Point Fosdick Dr NW, Gig Harbor, WA | Get?Directions??
$65.00
A Classic Modern French Dinner with a Twist! ...of SPICE!?
Windy Payne, owner of For the Love Spice spice company in Gig Harbor will instruct you in simple and creative ways to make your dinner fabulous with the use of spices...??? The ones you already have in your cupbord!
??????????????????????? ~ MENU ~
- Roasted Pork Shoulder - using French 4 spice
- Spiced Orange Sauce with Mustard
- Pickled Fennel Bulb
- Baked Onion Rings? ...with just? a hint of heat!
- Roasted Garlic & Cheese Mashed Potatoes with Green Peppercorns
- Wedge Salad with Buttermilk Blue Cheese Dressing, Bacon and Chives
- Lemon Shortcakes with Lavender Vanilla Sugar Soaked Strawberries and Fresh Whipped Cream
In this class, Windy will train you in the creative use of herbs and spices in your everyday cooking. In addition, Windy will discuss the joy of rustic French cuisine and how you can incorporate these concepts into your weekly meal plans.
Windy Payne loves making spice combinations so much that she has made a business of it, right here in Gig Harbor. ?For the Love of Spice specializes in custom designed and hand packed herb and spice seasoning blends.? The journey began with a love for cooking and the sharing of good food with others. ?She began selling herb and spice seasoning blends at the local Farmer?s Market and soon the many requests for purchases over the winter led to the opening of an online store www.fortheloveofspice.com.
47.301706
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primary
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1849144
/locations/9348831
Source: http://gigharbor.patch.com/events/cooking-class-classic-modern-french-dinner-with-a-twist
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Nokia Lumia 928 billboard can't wait for official announcement to trumpet low-light camera performance
It's not uncommon for an as yet announced phone to pop up on Twitter, or via an insider leak. But a physical billboard? That takes some doing. If this image -- spotted out in the wild -- is to be believed, Nokia's Lumia 928 is as real as the day is long. The Verizon handset shown certainly fits the images we've already seen, and the low-light boast will stoke the coals of any Xenon or PureView rumors for sure. However, this spot is hardly Times Square, so until we see something a little more concrete, Lumia fans on Big Red will have to keep the faith with that 822.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia
Source: My Nokia Blog
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/kmJD91ZgBr4/
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Biden, Kerry honor fallen diplomats
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the courage and dedication of U.S. diplomats slain in the line of duty as they led a memorial service on Friday to honor those killed in last year's terrorist attack on the American diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya and an April roadside bombing in Afghanistan.
Amid persistent Republican allegations that the Obama administration is trying to cover up the facts around the Benghazi incident, Biden and Kerry told the families of the fallen that they should be proud. They paid tribute to Benghazi victims Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Ty Woods, as well as Anne Smedinghoff, the young foreign service officer killed last month in Afghanistan.
Also honored was foreign service officer Ragaei Abdelfattah, who was killed in Afghanistan last year while working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The names of those six, along with diplomats Joseph Fandino and Francis Savage who were killed during the Vietnam war, were added to memorial plaques at the State Department as its employees celebrated Foreign Affairs Day.
These are "eight people who dedicated their lives to service and, to a person, each one sought out the most difficult assignments," Kerry said at the ceremony. "They understood the risks and yet they still raised their hands and said: 'Choose me.'"
Biden echoed the sentiment and noted that most Americans do not understand the conditions that diplomats work under in dangerous parts of the world.
"What they don't know, and you can't blame them for not knowing, is that in many places in the world, they are as much a soldier as anyone in uniform," he said. "What they don't know, and you can't expect them to know, is that they take risks that sometimes exceed those of the women and men in uniform."
"It takes a whole hell of a lot of courage and dedication to do the job your family members do," Biden said. "They do it willingly with a passion that astounds me."
Neither Biden nor Kerry made mention at the ceremony of the ongoing dispute between the administration and congressional Republicans over the administration's handling and response to the Benghazi attack. Stevens and the others were killed in an assault on a diplomatic mission there on Sept. 11, 2012. No one has been identified as responsible for the incident.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/biden-kerry-honor-fallen-diplomats-145646646.html
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Lawyer for Jodi Arias makes closing arguments
Defendant Jodi Arias listens to prosecutor Juan Martinez makes his closing arguments during her trial at Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix on Thursday, May 2, 2013. Arias is charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing and shooting death of Travis Alexander, 30, in his suburban Phoenix home in June 2008. (The Arizona Republic, Rob Schumacher, Pool)
Defendant Jodi Arias listens to prosecutor Juan Martinez makes his closing arguments during her trial at Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix on Thursday, May 2, 2013. Arias is charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing and shooting death of Travis Alexander, 30, in his suburban Phoenix home in June 2008. (The Arizona Republic, Rob Schumacher, Pool)
Judge Sherry Stephens reads the jury instructions before prosecutor Juan Martinez makes his closing arguments in Jodi Arias' muder trial at Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix on Thursday, May 2, 2013. Jurors deciding the fate of Jodi Arias will be allowed to consider the lesser charge of manslaughter. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, Rob Schumacher, Pool)
Prosecutor Juan Martinez makes his closing arguments in Jodi Arias' muder trial at Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix on Thursday, May 2, 2013. Arias is charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing and shooting death of Travis Alexander, 30, in his suburban Phoenix home in June 2008. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, Rob Schumacher, Pool)
Defense attorney Kirk Nurmi listens to prosecutor Juan Martinez makes his closing arguments during the Jodi Arias trial at Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix on Thursday, May 2, 2013. Arias is charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing and shooting death of Travis Alexander, 30, in his suburban Phoenix home in June 2008. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, Rob Schumacher, Pool)
PHOENIX (AP) ? A lawyer for Jodi Arias began his closing argument Friday by imploring jurors to take an impartial view of the case and his client ? even if they don't like her.
Arias smiled broadly when defense lawyer Kirk Nurmi told the jury: "It's not about whether or not you like Jodi Arias. Nine days out of 10, I don't like Jodi Arias. ... But that doesn't matter."
Arias said she killed Travis Alexander in self-defense, but prosecutors say it was an act of first-degree murder that could bring the death penalty. Arias hopes the jury, at the most, convicts her of second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 25 years in prison. The jury also has the option of manslaughter, which carries a sentence of seven to 21 years.
Nurmi said the case can be summed up with the words "fear, sex, lies and dirty little secrets."
The trial has become a tabloid and cable TV sensation with its graphic tales of sex and lies and has attracted spectators from around the country who line up as early as 2 a.m. for a chance to score a few open seats in the courtroom.
Arias, 32, is charged with first-degree murder in the June 2008 death of her one-time boyfriend at his suburban Phoenix home. Authorities say she planned the attack on Travis Alexander after he wanted to end their relationship and prepared for a trip to Mexico with another woman.
Arias initially denied any involvement then later blamed it on masked intruders. Two years after her arrest, she said she killed him in self-defense when he attacked her after a day of sex.
Arias wept and looked away from jurors Thursday as prosecutor Juan Martinez concluded his closing arguments by displaying a gruesome photo of Alexander's back, covered in stab wounds, while describing her as a manipulative liar who meticulously planned the savage attack.
He pounded his hand on a table, raising his voice occasionally but largely speaking in an almost whisper-like tone. Martinez said Arias lied from the start and is still lying, and hoped to fool the jury into believing she is the victim.
"That's what she wants you to believe," Martinez said, the photo of Alexander's dead body displayed on a large screen behind him. "But actually, in reality, it's this," he said, motioning toward the autopsy picture.
The images displayed Thursday, one after another, of Alexander's decomposed body covered in stab wounds, of his bruised face with a gunshot wound above the forehead, of the bloody scene of the killing, were too much for Alexander's friends and family members. They sobbed and buried their faces in their hands.
"This is an individual who will stop at nothing, and who will continue to be manipulative and will lie at every turn," Martinez told jurors.
Alexander suffered nearly 30 knife wounds, was shot in the head, and had his throat slit. Arias' palm print was found in blood at the scene, along with nude photos of her and the victim from the day of the killing.
Arias said Alexander grew physically abusive in the months before she killed him, but there was no evidence or testimony during the trial to corroborate her allegations.
The defense has portrayed Alexander as a cheating womanizer who used Arias for sex and abused her physically and emotionally. Prosecutors depicted Arias as an obsessed ex-girlfriend who couldn't come to grips with the ending relationship.
Martinez told jurors that Arias had been stalking Alexander and arrived unannounced on the day she killed him, sneaking into his home at about 4 a.m. The two went to sleep together, then awoke and had sex.
At some point, Martinez said, Arias decided it was time to carry out her murderous plan.
Martinez displayed text messages that Alexander and Arias exchanged about a week before the killing.
"I want you to understand how evil I think you are," Alexander wrote to her.
The key to a first-degree murder conviction lies with intent, and Martinez said repeatedly that Arias planned the killing well in advance.
Arias' grandparents had reported a .25 caliber handgun stolen from their Northern California home about a week before Alexander's death ? the same caliber used to shoot him. Arias was staying with them at the time, and the burglary occurred two days after the text messages that indicated Alexander no longer wanted anything to do with her.
Arias said she recalls Alexander attacking her in a fury on the day he died. She said she ran into his closet to retrieve a gun he kept on a shelf and fired in self-defense but has no memory of stabbing him. There has been no evidence presented that Alexander owned a gun, and the weapons used in the killing have never been found. Arias said she disposed of the gun in the desert.
"This is a meticulous approach to premeditation," Martinez told jurors. "This is a meticulous approach to killing."
Nurmi disputed that contention. He asked the jury why she would steal the gun and stage a robbery when she could have just taken a weapon.
Arias' demeanor changed as the day went on. She began unemotionally scribbling notes with a pencil, even flashing a smirk as the prosecutor described her apparently faking an orgasm on a phone sex chat with Alexander that was played for jurors. She gently shook her head on another occasion. But once Martinez got to the photos, Arias was in tears.
"It's like a field of lies that has sprouted up around her as she sat on the witness stand," Martinez said of Arias' 18 days testifying. "Every time she spat something out, another lie."
___
Brian Skoloff can be followed at https://twitter.com/bskoloff
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