Sunday, August 4, 2013
Weather News Headlines - Yahoo! News
U.S. issues global travel alert, cites al Qaeda threat
By Arshad Mohammed and Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States issued a worldwide travel alert on Friday warning Americans that al Qaeda may be planning attacks in August, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.
The State Department travel alert was based on the same intelligence that prompted it to close 21 U.S. embassies and consulates on Sunday, August 4, chiefly those in the Muslim world, a U.S. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
"The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens to the continued potential for terrorist attacks, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, and possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula," its statement said.
"Current information suggests that al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August," it added, saying the travel alert would expire on August 31.
Among the most prominent of al Qaeda's affiliates is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based group whose attempted attacks included the Christmas Day 2009 attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
U.S. security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the threat was related to AQAP but there was not a specific target. They also said that it was aimed at Western interests, an assessment later confirmed by the top U.S. military officer.
"The intent is to attack Western, not just U.S. interests," General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC News in an interview to be broadcast on its "This Week" program on Sunday.
"There is a significant threat stream and we're reacting to it," he said, adding that the kind of potential attack was "unspecified."
Britain said it would close its embassy in Yemen on Sunday and Monday. "We are particularly concerned about the security situation in the final days of Ramadan and into Eid," Britain's Foreign Office said in a statement, referring to the Muslim holy month which ends on Wednesday.
'SOME SPECIFICITY'
A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the threat was serious and that the U.S. government had reacted in such a dramatic manner "because we have some specificity but not enough."
On Thursday, the State Department said U.S. embassies that would normally be open on Sunday - chiefly those in the Muslim world - would be closed that day because of security concerns, adding that they might be shut for a longer period.
The embassies in the following countries will be closed: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
The consulates in Arbil, Iraq; Dhahran and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates will also be shut.
The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, which is normally closed to the public on Sunday, said all its facilities would be shut on Sunday and workers not essential for the building's security had been told not to come in.
It also said the American Center in Jerusalem and the Haifa Consular Agency would be closed on Sunday.
While the U.S. State Department routinely releases what it describes as a "Worldwide Caution" warning U.S. citizens of the general potential danger of attacks around the world, Friday's travel alert was based on more specific information, said one U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The previous "Worldwide Caution" was issued on February 19.
U.S. officials declined to provide additional details about the intelligence that led them to close the diplomatic missions and to issue the worldwide travel alert.
However, a second U.S. official said there was no information on a specific target, which was the reason for the broad alert.
The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, said on CNN's "New Day" that he and several other lawmakers met two days ago with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss the threat.
Later on MSNBC, Royce said: "I believe that it is probably now prudent, given the fact that, in this case, we do have this intelligence, to take this step to make certain that we have fully protected our embassy personnel."
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, David Lawder, Phil Stewart, Mark Hosenball, and Myra MacDonald in London; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Mohammad Zargham)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-issues-global-travel-alert-cites-al-qaeda-153618662.html
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Saturday, August 3, 2013
Anya Groner remembers T-Model Ford: "His songs revved up quickly, clattering alo...
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Source: http://www.facebook.com/oxfordamerican/posts/10151828457319187
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Nigeria: Doctors treating lead-poisoned children
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) ? Doctors Without Borders say they can start treating child victims in Nigeria of one of the world's worst recorded lead poisoning cases after a cleanup was held up for two years by a lack of funding.
Dr. Michelle Chouinard said Friday that more than 1,000 children need treatment that will take one or two years. She said it is too late to reverse serious neurological damage that has blinded some children and paralyzed others.
Her organization uncovered the scandal in 2010 when some 400 children convulsed and died in Nigeria's northwest Zamfara state. The poisoning was caused by crude mining in a gold rush. Villagers still say they would rather die of lead poisoning than poverty.
Environmental scientist Simba Tirima fears that without safe mining methods, the contamination could return.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-doctors-treating-lead-poisoned-children-094342477.html
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Evolution of mammalian monogamy remains mysterious
Two large studies reach opposing conclusions about why males stay with females
By Cristy Gelling
Web edition: August 2, 2013
Enlarge EVOLUTION OF MONOGAMY
Meerkats are unusual among mammals because they form monogamous pairs. Scientists disagree on what factors drove the evolution of monogamy in mammals.
Credit: Courtesy of D. Lukas
Why some mammalian species choose to spend their lives with the same mates has long baffled scientists ? and will probably continue to do so as two new massive studies present contradictory results.
One group of researchers says monogamy evolved in primates to counter the threat of males killing babies to boost their siring success. The other team concludes that mammals, including primates, become monogamous when females live far away from one another.
The differences in the studies have raised eyebrows. ?They do seem to be saying the opposite thing,? says Anthony DiFiore, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin. ?It?s interesting because they use very, very similar methods,? DiFiore says.
The two groups also disagree on whether the research has implications for why humans evolved fidelity to mates.
Both teams investigated the evolution of social monogamy, which researchers define as males and females living in breeding pairs. It does not necessarily mean that each animal is always faithful and never mates outside the pair.
Social monogamy is normal for birds but rare in mammals. That?s because birds of both sexes can participate in parenting duties such as incubating eggs and feeding chicks, but male mammals can?t help gestate or breastfeed a baby. During the long period when a mother mammal is occupied with parenting, an opportunistic father can take off to sire more offspring with other females.
But around 9 percent of mammal species, such as wolves and beavers, live in pairs in which the male sticks by his mate. This living arrangement is more common among primate species, about a quarter of which live in pairs.
To determine what factors drove the evolution of monogamy, Dieter Lukas and Tim Clutton-Brock from the University of Cambridge in England collected information about more than 2,500 species of mammals ? nearly half of all mammalian species. The researchers used published reports to classify each species as monogamous or not, and then noted whether that species practices infanticide and whether the females live in discrete territories. Using this dataset, the researchers reconstructed the likely evolutionary history of mammalian monogamy. The team concludes in the Aug. 2 Science that monogamy evolved independently 61 times, almost always when females lived far from one another.
In those situations, Lukas says, males have difficulty mating with multiple females. By sticking with one female and guarding her from amorous advances from other males, he might produce more offspring than if he attempted to spread himself around.
The other group, led by Kit Opie of University College London, performed a similar evolutionary reconstruction but focused on 230 primates. These researchers conclude July 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the trigger for the evolution of monogamy was high rates of infanticide by males.
In nonmonogamous species such as gorillas, males may benefit from killing other males? babies because losing a baby forces the mother to enter her fertile period sooner. But males that hang around their mate and offspring can defend them from roving killers, so monogamy could have evolved as a counter-strategy, Opie and colleagues suggest. Today, monogamous primates have very low rates of infanticide, and in some cases, such as in titi monkeys native to South America, infanticide has never been observed at all.
Opie is confident that infanticide drove many primates to live in pairs. ?It solves the puzzle. It finishes the debate,? Opie says. ?Or we certainly hoped, before we heard about the other paper, that it would finish the debate.?
The debate is, of course, far from over. ?We don?t find any support that infanticide has been important for the evolution of monogamy across mammals,? Lukas says. In his team?s dataset, monogamy is as likely to have evolved from an ancestor that did not practice infanticide as from one that did. This was also true when they examined only primates.
But Opie says that widely spaced female territories can?t be the cause of the switch to monogamy in primates, because in his team?s analysis, females shifted into discrete territories after the evolution of monogamy.
The groups also disagree about implications for human evolution. Opie says that humans evolved to live in monogamous pairs to minimize the threat of infanticide. Humans were part of his team?s analysis. ?We treated them just the same as all the other primates, because that?s what they are,? Opie says.
But Lukas and his team say their own results have little bearing on humans. Humans evolved from an ancestor that lived in social groups, so their theory about monogamy evolving when females live far apart doesn?t apply. Besides, he says, humans may not actually have evolved monogamy at all. In many traditional societies, one man may take several wives.
The dispute might stem from the way the groups classify the key behaviors: monogamy, infanticide and female territories, says Charles Nunn, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University.
Opie?s methods were also slightly better at handling the blurry lines between types of mating systems, Nunn says, whereas Lukas? team ?really wants to pin each species into one cubby hole.? For example, Opie?s team classified the gray bamboo lemur, which has some variation in its mating habits, as both monogamous and polygynous, while Lukas? team classified this species as not monogamous. ?The devil is going to be in the details,? Nunn says.
Both teams emphasize that they do not yet know why their conclusions on primates differed, but they have exchanged data and agree they need to work together to iron out the details.
Ultimately, the factors that led to monogamy might differ among species. ?Many times we forget that this is not math,? says evolutionary anthropologist Eduardo Fernandez-Duque of the University of Pennsylvania. ?It?s unlikely that one size will fit all.?
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Playboy, Penthouse get the ax at military stores
NEW YORK -- Playboy, Penthouse and other sex-themed magazines will no longer be sold at Army and Air Force exchanges ? a move described by the stores' operators as a business decision based on falling sales, and not a result of recent pressure from anti-pornography activists.
The 48 "adult sophisticate" magazines being dropped are among a total of 891 periodicals that will no longer be offered by the Army and Air Force Exchange Service at its stores on U.S. military bases worldwide. Other titles getting the ax include English Garden, SpongeBob Comics, the New York Review of Books and the Saturday Evening Post.
Morality in Media, a Washington-based anti-pornography group, called the decision "a great victory" in its campaign against sexual exploitation in the military, and said it would continue to urge operators of Navy and Marine Corps exchanges to follow suit.
Chris Ward, a spokesman for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, said the cutbacks ? which took effect Wednesday ?would reduce the space allotted to magazines by 33 percent and free up room at the exchanges for more popular products.
He noted that newsstand sales of most consumer magazines were falling steadily as online alternatives proliferated. Sales of the "adult sophisticate" category of magazines at the exchanges had declined 86 percent since 1998, he said.
Hundreds of magazines will continue to be sold at the exchanges. The current top-sellers are People, Men's Health and Cosmopolitan.
Though many types of magazines are among the 891 being dropped, the adult magazines posed particular difficulties, Ward said. Under federal regulations, they required special handling and placement in order to ensure they were properly displayed out of reach of children.
In some respects, the exchange service's decision will have limited impact. Military personnel will still be able to bring explicit magazines onto their bases that they purchased elsewhere, and will have access to online pornography.
However, Morality in Media spokesman Iris Somberg said it nonetheless was a significant move.
"We had military families calling us after seeing porn on the shelves," Somberg said Thursday. "The exchanges are supposed to be a safe place for families to go do their shopping."
Somberg said the presence of sex magazines on military bases was a "contributing factor" to the broader problem of sexual exploitation and sexual assault that has become a high-profile challenge for the military leadership.
"The joint chiefs of staff said we need to change the culture," she said. "One way to do that is to not have this material sold on base."
Coincidentally, the exchange service announcement that it would drop the adult magazines came shortly after the release of a Department of Defense letter stating that Penthouse, Playboy and certain other sex-themed magazines were allowed to be sold on bases because they were not considered "sexually explicit."
There is a federal law ? the 1996 Military Honor and Decency Act ? which prohibits the on-base display or sale of hard-core pornographic magazines. A military review determined that the "adult sophisticate" magazines sold at the exchanges did not meet this threshold.
The Army and Air Force Exchange Service has annual revenue of $9.2 billion and a workforce of about 40,000 civilian and military personnel. It operates 1,155 retail stores worldwide, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with hundreds of fast-food outlets.
Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/01/3536385/playboy-penthouse-get-the-ax-at.html
Friday, August 2, 2013
Google bets on custom colors with first flagship Moto X phone
By Sinead Carew and Alexei Oreskovic
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Motorola on Thursday unveiled its highly anticipated Moto X smartphone, which will be customizable with different colors for AT&T customers and marks the cellphone maker's first flagship device since Google Inc bought the company in 2012.
The Moto X will go on sale in the United States at the end of August or the beginning of September for a suggested retail price of $199.99 to customers who sign a two-year contract at five of the biggest U.S. mobile network operators.
Google, which spent $12.5 billion to acquire money-losing Motorola, faces a steep climb in its effort to revive the mobile phone pioneer in a smartphone market now dominated by Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics.
Once the global No. 2 phone maker, Motorola's market share was down to 2 percent in the second quarter, ranking it 12th among smartphone makers, according to Research firm Strategy Analytics.
Motorola is betting that it can win over consumers by offering a huge palette of colors to personalize their phones as well as unusual phone materials such as wood.
In order to promise delivery of customized phones within four days, Motorola had contract manufacturing partner Flextronics International Ltd build a factory in the United States.
AT&T Inc, the No. 2 U.S. mobile service provider, will have exclusive rights to let its customers customize the phone from a selection of 18 colors for the back, two colors for the front and seven accent colors for an undisclosed time period.
Rivals Verizon Wireless , Sprint Corp, T-Mobile US and U.S. Cellular will only be able to offer black-and-white versions of the device.
(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-bets-custom-colors-first-flagship-moto-x-191121064.html
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