Italy president's office summons media, no word on statement

ROME (Reuters) - The Italian president's office said on Saturday it was opening its press room at 8.00 a.m. ET but gave no details of any statement that may come, following reports that the head of state is considering standing down to hasten early elections.

A source close to the situation told Reuters on Saturday that President Giorgio Napolitano was looking at the option of resigning early to get around get around constitutional provisions which prevent a president dissolving parliament in the final months of his mandate.

Similar reports were carried in all of Italy's main newspapers following failed attempts to form a government this week and break a month-long stalemate created by last month's inconclusive elections.

(Reporting By James Mackenzie; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/italy-presidents-office-summons-media-no-word-statement-112828809--business.html

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Porsha Williams Divorce Filing: Pay Me!

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Bolt to run 150-meter race at Copacabana beach

Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt runs with young athletes as he visits the Projeto Futuro Olimpico or Olympic Future Project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 28, 2013. The Olympic Future Project promotes the practice of sports and healthy living, targeting the low-income populations in the inner city(AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt runs with young athletes as he visits the Projeto Futuro Olimpico or Olympic Future Project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 28, 2013. The Olympic Future Project promotes the practice of sports and healthy living, targeting the low-income populations in the inner city(AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, center, and sprinter Daniel Bailey, from Antigua and Barbuda, center left, run with young athletes during their visit to the Projeto Futuro Olimpico or Olympic Future Project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 28, 2013. The Olympic Future Project promotes the practice of sports and healthy living, targeting the low-income populations of the inner city. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) ? Usain Bolt will have Copacabana beach in the background when he tries to break his world record in the 150-meter street race this weekend in Rio de Janeiro.

Bolt will compete at a track specially built at the famous beach on Sunday, challenging Antigua and Barbuda's Daniel Bailey, Ecuador's Alex Quinones, and a Brazilian athlete from a local qualifier.

Bolt set the 150 record of 14.35 seconds in the streets of Manchester in 2009.

The event is part of Bolt's four-day promotional tour to Rio and is supervised by the IAAF.

Bolt, who's also visiting social projects at the city hosting the 2016 Olympics, says it will be a "bit harder to break" world records in 2016 because he "will be kind of old" at 33.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-03-29-ATH-Bolt-150m-Race/id-e17e490929b7409b9350493c58739c2e

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Drones: Not just for war anymore?

Drone warfare isn't going anywhere, but drone utility could be growing. Marc Lallanilla, assistant editor at Live Science, proposes eight "totally cool" new uses for drones.

By Marc Lallanilla,?LiveScience / March 25, 2013

This 2004 photo shows the then-new drone flying near Fort Huachuca, Ariz. The unmanned drone, launched by the Border Patrol in June 2004, uses thermal and night-vision equipment to help agents spot illegal immigrants trying to cross the desert into the United States.

John Miller / AP

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Just a few years ago, drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), were virtually unknown.

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But the remote-controlled aircraft have stealthily slipped over the horizon and are now causing a buzz from Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to the rain forests of Sumatra.

"I am convinced that the domestic use of drones to conduct surveillance and collect other information will have a broad and significant impact on the everyday lives of millions of Americans," Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of a Senate Judiciary Committee looking into drone legislation, said on Thursday, March 21, CNN reports.

There's little doubt that UAV technology is here to stay, but their use isn't limited to cloak-and-dagger operations and military technology. Here are eight totally cool ways the drone can be your friend:

Real estate sales

Daniel G?rate had a lucrative career as a UAV videographer, using his $5,000 drone to capture stirring images of high-end properties for the Los Angeles real-estate market ? until the Los Angeles Police Department shut him down, declaring that commercial uses for drones were not allowed, the New York Times reports.

That's no longer the case, since a federal law signed in 2012 opened drone technology to commercial applications. G?rate, who also uses drones to take videos for commercials, has also been approached to take paparazzi-style photos of celebrities like Kim Kardashian, the Times reports.

Sports photography

Falkor Systems, a pioneer in the consumer use of UAV technology, has targeted extreme sports photography and video for drone use, focusing on skiing and base-jumping activities.

"The angles people get [while filming] are not quite as intimate as would be possible with an autonomous flying robot," said Sameer Parekh, Falkor CEO, who envisions a small UAV device that can accompany a downhill skier.

"You just take it out, let it take off and it follows you down the hill. You get back on the ski lift and put it back in your backpack," Parekh said.

Highway monitoring

There are roughly 4 million miles of highways crisscrossing the United States, but who's watching them all? Drones, someday.

A project to study the use of drones for inspecting roads and bridges, surveying land with laser mapping and alerting officials to traffic jams and accidents recently received a $75,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration and the Georgia Department of Transportation.

"Drones could keep workers safer because they won't be going into traffic or hanging off a bridge," said Javier Irizarry, director of the CONECTech Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as quoted by LiveScience's sister site TechNewsDaily. "It would help with physical limitations of the human when doing this kind of work."

Wildlife research

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been testing the Raven A, a small, camera-equipped drone that's about 3 feet (1 meter) long, to see if it can be used to conduct aerial counts of the endangered sandhill crane (Grus canadensis pulla).?

"We flew the [drone] over the cranes when they were roosting, feeding, and loafing to see how they reacted," said Leanne Hanson, a field biologist, in a USGS report. "They sat still for us when they were roosting and loafing, but birds flushed during feeding. We will plan missions during roosting and loafing times, when their behavior is not affected."

And critically endangered Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) nest in treetops, making them difficult to study. Drones, however, can easily navigate the primates' aeries, providing valuable information that will assist in conservation activities, reports PCMag.com.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/U1B4hUijrOU/Drones-Not-just-for-war-anymore

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Photo shows China's first lady singing to Tiananmen troops after crackdown

BEIJING (AP) ? A photo of China's new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger days, singing to martial-law troops following the 1989 bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, flickered across Chinese cyberspace this week.

It was swiftly scrubbed from China's Internet before it could generate discussion online. But the image ? seen and shared by outside observers ? revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China.

The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady, and also faces a tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party's top leaders.

The image of Peng in a green military uniform, her windswept hair tied back in a ponytail as she sings to helmeted and rifle-bearing troops seated in rows on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, contrasts with her appearances this week in trendy suits and coiffed hair while touring Russia and Africa with Xi, waving to her enthusiastic hosts.

"I think that we have a lot of people hoping that because Xi Jinping walks around without a tie on and his wife is a singer who travels with him on trips that maybe we're dealing with a new kind of leader, but I think these images remind people that this is the same party," said Kelley Currie, a China human rights expert for the pro-democracy Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

"It's using some new tools and new techniques, for the same purposes: to preserve its own power."

Peng, 50, a major general in the People's Liberation Army who is best known for soaring renditions of patriotic odes to the military and the party, kept a low profile in recent years as her husband prepared to take over as Communist Party chief. Her re-emergence has been accompanied by a blitz in domestic, state-run media hailing her beauty and charm, in a bid to harness the singer's popularity to build support for Xi at home and abroad.

"Peng Liyuan: Let the world appreciate the beauty of China," declared the headline of a China News Service commentary that said the first lady's elegant manners, conversation and clothing would highlight Chinese culture. Her presence on diplomatic trips would demystify the first family for the Chinese public, the commentary said.

Chinese First Lady, Madame Peng Liyuan, left,, waves as she is accompanied by Tanzanian First Lady, Salma Kikwete, right, at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam, Sunday March 24, ... more? Chinese First Lady, Madame Peng Liyuan, left,, waves as she is accompanied by Tanzanian First Lady, Salma Kikwete, right, at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam, Sunday March 24, 2013. Liyuan is accompanying her husband, Chinese President in his first African tour since he became president of the second largest economy in the world. (AP Photo/ Khalfan Said) less? ?

However, the government is stepping into little-charted and possibly treacherous waters for China.

In 1963, the glamorous Wang Guangmei, wife of President Liu Shaoqi, wore a tightfitting qipao dress to a state banquet in Indonesia. When the political tides turned against Liu four years later, radical Red Guards forced Wang to don the same dress and paraded her through the streets as a shameful example of capitalist corruption.

Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, played a key role in the same radical campaign in which political opponents were mercilessly persecuted; after his death, she was put on trial and imprisoned, then moved to a hospital where she hanged herself.

The lifespan of Peng's Tiananmen image in the finicky world of the Chinese Internet has so far been short, and she remains a beloved household name with huge domestic popularity. The photo has circulated mainly on Twitter, which is blocked in China. The few posts on popular domestic microblogs did not evade censors for long.

Many young Chinese are unaware that on June 3 and 4, 1989, military troops crushed weekslong pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing with force, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Those who do know about the assault tend to be understanding of Peng's obligations as a member of a performance troupe in the all-powerful People's Liberation Army. At the time, her husband Xi was party chief of an eastern city.

"The photo probably has a negative impact more so internationally than domestically," said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at City University of Hong Kong. He said more scrutiny of Peng is likely and such images could raise questions about Xi's interest in reforms.

"It has been several months now that Xi Jinping has assumed the top leadership role and certainly, we have found no indicator that he is interested in this stage to push serious political reform."

The image is a snapshot of the back cover of a 1989 issue of a publicly available military magazine, the PLA Pictorial, according to Sun Li, a Chinese reporter who said he had taken a photo of it on his cell phone several years ago when it was inadvertently posted on his microblog. Sun said he quickly deleted it and had no idea how it resurfaced on the Internet years later.

Microblog users can easily save images and recirculate them even after the original posts have been deleted. The picture spread further after it was tweeted by the U.S.-based China Digital Times, which tracks Chinese online media.

Warren Sun, a Chinese military historian at Monash University in Australia, said he had little doubt about the authenticity of the image, citing a 1992 academic report as saying that after the crackdown, Peng performed a song titled "The Most Beloved People" in a salute to martial law troops.

While most of her army career has been in singing, the militaristic overtones of many of Peng's public appearances set her apart from Michelle Obama, former French first lady Carla Bruni and most of their counterparts in other countries. But for Peng, the Tiananmen photo was no one-off: She has been in the military since age 18 and has fronted TV music videos featuring dancing lines of men with combat fatigues and heavy weaponry.

She also starred in a song-and-dance number in 2007 that has perky women in Tibetan garb sashaying behind her while she sings an ode to the army that invaded Tibet in 1959. "Who is going to liberate us? It's the dear PLA!" go some of the lyrics. The video has provoked severe criticism from Tibetan rights groups.

In an indication of Peng's appeal in China despite her past, a man whose 19-year-old son was killed in the Tiananmen crackdown said he bears no grudges against her.

"If I had known about this back then, I would have been very disgusted by it. But now, looking at it objectively, it's all in the past," said Wang Fandi, whose son Wang Nan died from a bullet wound to his head. "She was in the establishment. If the military wanted her to perform, she had to go. What else could she do?"

Wang was a teacher at the China Conservatory of Music when Peng had been sent there by the military to study singing in her 20s. Though he never taught her directly, Wang had known who she was and describes her as being modest, a talented folk singer and an outstanding student.

"When I look back at history, I will look at it from other perspectives," Wang said. "Even if she had done something wrong, we shouldn't make a fuss about it. What's important is what happens in the future."

___

Follow Gillian Wong on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gillianwong

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-first-lady-serenaded-tiananmen-troops-103522468.html

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Putin: Raids on NGOs are to check foreign funding

MOSCOW (AP) ? Russian authorities are raiding non-governmental organizations to make sure they comply with a law intended to stem foreign meddling in Russian politics, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.

Activists have criticized the sweeping searches of as many as 2,000 NGOs across the country as an attempt by the Kremlin to intimidate its critics. France and Germany have summoned Russia's ambassadors to explain the searches, while the U.S., Britain and the EU have expressed concern.

Russia's rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, asked Putin about the raids, saying they have been conducted for no apparent reason.

Putin responded that the goal was to "check whether the groups' activities conform with their declared goals and whether they are abiding by the Russian law that bans foreign funding of political activities."

Hours before he spoke, the prosecutor general's office said the raids aimed to weed out underground groups and combat money laundering.

A recent law requires all NGOs with foreign funding that engage in vaguely defined political activities to register as "foreign agents." Leading Russian NGOs have denounced the law as impossibly vague.

Although rights activists such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have faced the most pressure, the Russian searches have also affected groups offering French-language courses in Siberia and those promoting bird-watching.

Pavel Chikov, a member of the presidential human rights council, said Russian agencies with no connection to the new law ? including the fire, labor and health departments ? had joined the checks.

"The prosecutor general's office has become a kind of repressive machine, instead of serving as institution that enforces the law," fellow council member Sergei Krivenko said Thursday.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland slammed what she called a Russian "witch hunt" against non-governmental organizations.

"These inspections appear to be aimed at undermining important civil society activities across the country," Nuland told reporters, adding that the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, has expressed his displeasure to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.

Nuland said the laws passed last year by Moscow impose "harsh restrictions on NGO activity in Russia."

"They are chilling the environment for civil society, which is taking Russian democracy in the wrong direction," she added.

Nuland said the U.S. was continuing its support for Russian advocacy groups, using platforms outside of Russia to direct funds to organizations.

Putin, who returned to the presidency in May, has repeatedly accused NGOs of being fronts allowing the U.S. government to interfere in Russia's affairs.

___

AP writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/putin-raids-ngos-check-foreign-funding-182309572.html

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Snotty sea hares clog up nostrils of lobster predators

Genevieve Anderson

A sea hare releases ink in response to a threat.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

Spiny lobsters have hard shells and strong jaws easily capable of turning the soft-bodied, sluglike sea hare into an easy meal. But new research finds that sea hares have a snotty solution: Clog up potential lobster predators' nostrils.

When threatened, the sea hares excrete a white, sticky substance called opaline that stuffs up the lobsters' sensory organs. While the lobster struggles to deal with this sudden lack of smell, the sea hare can often escape its clutches.

Sea hares (Aplysia) are marine mollusks that get their name from two long, earlike projections on their heads. The largest species can grow up to 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms).?

Chemical protection
Size offers some protection from potential predators, but sea hares' main defenses are chemical. Like squid, they release purplish ink when threatened, but also excrete opaline. [See Video of Snotty Sea Hare in Action]

Georgia State University researchers knew that these chemicals could save sea hares from becoming a meal to spiny lobsters, but it wasn't clear whether the substances simply blocked the lobster sensory organs (which are on its antennae) or whether they actually induced chemical signals that prevented the crustaceans from smelling food.

To find out, the researchers used Caribbean spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) and sea hares (Aplysia californica). They extracted the water-soluble part of the sea hares' opaline, which left them with all of the stickiness but none of the amino acids and other chemicals that might have affected the lobsters' chemosensory receptors. They painted the opaline abstract on the lobsters' antennae and then exposed the crustaceans to "shrimp juice," which was made by soaking shredded shrimp in water for an hour.

The researchers repeated the same experiment with three other substances: carboxymethylcellulose, which is sticky but lacks opaline's amino acids; a mixture of only the amino acids found in opaline, without the stickiness; and a combination of carboxymethylcellulose and the opaline amino acids. A final group of lobsters got to smell the shrimp juice with nothing blocking their antennae.

As the lobsters responded to the shrimp juice in each condition, the researchers measured the activity of their chemosensory neurons.?

Sticky defense
The results revealed that even without neuron-affecting chemicals, opaline's stickiness alone is enough to save sea hares from spiny lobsters. The amino acid-free carboxymethylcellulose had the same effect as opaline, the researchers report March 27 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The opaline amino acids alone, however, did not stop the lobster neurons from responding to smells, perhaps in part because they were easily washed away by sea water.

Paul M. Johnson

A sea hare inks to escape the clutches of a spiny lobster.

Spiny lobsters have chemical sensory organs all over their head and legs, and the researchers suspect sea hares can clog them all.

"Typically, a sea hare is in the grasp of a spiny lobster before the sea hare inks," they wrote. "Our observations are that the ink sticks to all of the sensory appendages in the anterior end, including the antennules, mouthparts and anterior legs. We would expect an effect on these other chemoreceptors similar to that we have demonstrated for antennular chemoreceptors."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter?and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Animal rights groups sue FDA over egg labeling concerns

(Reuters) - Animal rights advocates on Thursday sued U.S. regulators to correct what they say is misleading labeling on cartons of eggs that come from caged hens.

The lawsuit comes more than seven years after animal rights groups started petitioning the federal government to take action, with no success. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges that claims made in unregulated egg labeling falsely portray a higher standard of animal treatment to consumers than actually exists, and that various government agencies, led by the Food and Drug Administration, have failed to address the plaintiffs' petitions on the matter, as required by law.

The lawsuit asks that egg producers nationwide be required to clearly label egg cartons with egg production methods, including the identification of "Eggs from Caged Hens," said Megan Backus, a spokeswoman for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit group that is one of the plaintiffs.

FDA officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Reporting By Carey Gillam; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/animal-rights-groups-sue-fda-over-egg-labeling-223257905.html

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Hot Gaming Startup Supercell Is Closing A Round Above $100M At Valuation Around $800M

Supercell is a very quiet, humble mobile gaming company out of the very quiet and humble city of Helsinki, Finland. Unlike their brasher, Angry Birds-making brethren a 15-minute drive away in Espoo, they don’t like to talk much about anything beyond making games and about the company culture they’re deliberately cultivating. All of this belies what has become a phenomenal business over the last nine months — one that makes around $1.3 million per day off two iOS games called Clash of Clans and Hay Day. After about three months of considering whether to do a huge secondary round with the help of boutique investment bank Code Advisors, we’ve heard they sold somewhere between 16 and 20 percent of the company’s common shares in a deal that would value the company at around $800 million. We’re still trying to figure out the exact amount. It’s somewhere between $100 and 150 million, but closer to the lower end of the range. We heard they got close, but didn’t quite get to a $1 billion valuation, not that this should be the goal anyways. Supercell declined to comment on the financing round. “We simply will not comment on market rumours,” said spokesperson Heini Vesander. “We’ve never really done that and will not do that now.” We’ve heard that Institutional Venture Partners, Atomico and Index Ventures are the new investors. Tencent and DST had done some due diligence on the company in February, but didn’t end up going in for whatever reason. Index declined to comment, and Atomico and IVP did not reply for comment. It’s a bold, ballsy bet for what is basically a two-product company in a notoriously hits-driven business. While the macro trends behind mobile gaming are hard to argue with, the business is unpredictable. Several of the companies that were leading the charts two years ago are now much farther down, even if their businesses are still profitable. Last year, the whisper numbers for top grossing titles ranged in the $40-80 million range annually.?At around $1 million a day, the industry is looking at mobile gaming franchises that could gross between $200 and 400 million in 2013.? A few days ago, Japanese carrier Softbank increased its stake in Gung Ho Entertainment, the maker of what is probably the most valuable iOS game in the world today — Japan’s Puzzles and Dragons. That deal valued that company at $4.1 billion,

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PIW4nOn9e44/

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Cyprus paying too high a price for Europe's help, says minister

PARIS (Reuters) - Cyprus is sacrificing too much for its European bailout, which is destroying the foundations of the island's economy, its foreign minister told a French newspaper.

"Europe is pretending to help us but the price to pay is too high: nothing less than the brutal destruction of our economic model," Ioannis Kasoulides told Thursday's edition of financial daily Les Echos.

The euro zone agreed the 10 billion euro rescue package on Monday following tough negotiations. It is the first to impose losses on bank depositors, and one that looks set to push the island deeper into an economic slump, shrink the banking sector and cost thousands of jobs.

The banks reopen on Thursday after being closed for almost two weeks, with tight controls imposed on transactions to prevent a run on deposits.

Under the terms of the rescue, the second-largest bank, Cyprus Popular, is being closed, and heavy losses being inflicted on big depositors, many of them Russian.

Asked about why it had been so difficult to reach a deal on the bailout, Kasoulides said: "We were not well enough prepared and there was no solidarity on the part of the Europeans."

Kasoulides also blamed the European Central Bank, saying that lending to Cyprus Popular, also known as Laiki, should have been stopped before if it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Without a bailout deal, Cyprus had faced certain banking collapse and risked becoming the first country to be pushed out of the European single currency.

Cyprus has about 68 billion euros in its banks - a vastly outsized financial system compared to its economy and population that attracted deposits from foreigners as an offshore haven.

Deposits above 100,000 euros in the two biggest banks, which are not guaranteed by the state under EU law, will be frozen and used to resolve Laiki's debts and recapitalize the Bank of Cyprus, the island's biggest.

(Reporting by Ingrid Melander; Editing by John Stonestreet)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cyprus-paying-too-high-price-europes-help-says-085718384--business.html

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Google Street View lets former Fukushima residents see the town they left

It's been more than two years since the tragic Eastern Japan tsunami and resulting Fukushima Prefecture nuclear plant crisis, but many of those who lived in affected areas still can't return: witness the 21,000 residents of Namie, who had to evacuate and haven't been back since. Thanks to a newly published Google Street View run, those former residents can once more see the town they had to leave. The 360-degree imagery shows Namie in the deserted state it faces today, with little recovery work done or possible. Google's photos can't accelerate the recovery process, but Mayor Tamotsu Baba views them as an incentive to eventually return -- and a better way for the rest of the world to understand the tsunami's long-term effects.

Filed under: Internet, Google

Comments

Via: Google Official Blog

Source: Memories for the Future

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/27/google-street-view-lets-displaced-japanese-glimpse-namie/

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HP introduces Unreal Engine 4-ready 'turnkey solution' workstations, collaborating with ALT Systems

Hewlett-Packard may not be well-known by consumers for creating the machines that power the industries that power the world we live in, but the company's workstation business does just that. From film to oil drilling to medicine, HP's workstations have their hands in a lot of pies -- and today, that expands more directly to yet another major industry: video games. With its Z1, Z820 and Z620 workstations, HP is collaborating with Epic Games, Autodesk, and ALT Systems to create what they're calling a "turnkey solution" to game development workstation woes. The three aforementioned units can be customized to arrive with a variety of variables, including Unreal Engine 4, Autodesk, and NVIDIA GTX-line GPUs.

In so many words, ALT Systems will take the disparate pieces of hardware and software from HP, NVIDIA, Autodesk and Epic Games to provide an all-in-one buying solution for game dev studios. As ALT Systems president Jon Guess laughingly explained, it provides clients "one neck to wring" should things go wrong, rather than dev studios having to suss out hardware issues on their own. The first fruits of the partnership arrive this year in game developer-centric versions of the aforementioned three workstation models. For a full rundown of the various workstation configurations that'll arrive this year, ALT Systems has a site set up just for you.

Gallery: HP Workstations (GDC 2013)

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, HP

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/1_uohci7j0M/

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Yelp Announces A New ?Revenue Estimator' For Small Businesses

Yelp is announcing a new feature intended to highlight and quantify the value that the listing and review site provides for small businesses. A company spokesperson told me the feature is important for two reasons. First, it helps business owners understand the impact that Yelp is already having on their revenue. Second, it gives them a baseline from which to judge the success of their advertising campaigns ? it's one thing to see an increase in page views after a campaign, and another to put an estimated dollar value on the new business generated by those ads.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/fd3BsYyjrqU/

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40th World Cross Country: Morocco Junior men's team wins bronze ...

By Larbi Arbaoui

Morocco World News

Taroudant, Morocco, March 25, 2013

The Moroccan team, which was composed of Mohamed Abid, Zouhair Talbi, Omar Ait Chitachen, Hassan Ghachoui, Jaouad Chemlal and Marouane Kahlaoui, made it to the podium at the 40th IAAF World Cross Country Championships ? Junior men?s team, with 65 points, behind Ethiopia (23 pts) and Kenya (26 pts), who won the World Cross Country Championships.

The 40th International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Cross Country Championships were held in Bydgoszcz, Poland on 24 March 2013.

The first Moroccan athlete to cross the finish line was Mohamed Abid, achieving the 12th position in 22min 31sec, while his fellows Zouhair Talbi, Omar Ait Chitachen, Hassan Jawad and Chemlal Ghachoui completed the race, as follow: 14th (22:34 ), 18th (22:38) 21th (22:53) and 23rd (23:03) respectively.

432 athletes from the 56 participating nations, including Morocco challenged the cold Polish weather that reached as low as 6 degrees to compete in four different categories.

It is worth mentioning that Morocco has not made it to the podium of the competition since the edition of Mombasa (Kenya) in 2007, where it won the silver medal in the men?s category and the bronze medal in the women?s competition.

? Morocco World News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten or redistributed

Source: http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2013/03/84028/40th-world-cross-country-morocco-junior-mens-team-wins-bronze-medal/

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Winning $338 million Powerball ticket was sold at N.J. liquor store

PASSAIC, N.J. (AP) ? One mystery was solved Monday in the $338.3 Powerball jackpot drawing ? the location in New Jersey where the winning ticket was sold. But a bigger mystery remained: Who bought it?

New Jersey lottery officials announced a liquor store in the city of Passaic, 15 miles northwest of New York City, had sold the ticket but said they hadn't heard from the winner ? who has a year to step forward and claim the prize.

Eagle Liquors owner Sunil Sethi said "a couple of people are telling us they got it, but nobody has confirmed it yet."

Liquor store employee Pravin Mankodia, 67, who has worked at Eagle for seven years, sold the ticket. "It feels awesome, we feel so lucky," he said.

The store will get $10,000. The owner said he'll probably use some of the money to fix up the store and also share some with employees.

As word spread that Eagle had sold the ticket, some patrons continued to dream about what could have been.

James Brown, 56, of Passaic, who described himself as a scrap man, as in scrap metal, said he would have returned to his home state if he had scored the big jackpot.

"I like it here, but I'd be back in South Carolina by now if I had won. I would like to go back home and retire," he said.

Brown buys lottery tickets twice a day and said he will keep doing so.

He then sought out Mankodia.

"Maybe he'll shake my hand and give me some luck, too," he said.

Other patrons were excited that someone from the area had apparently won the big jackpot.

"It's about time someone from Passaic wins something," said Gloria Brinson of Paterson, who buys lottery tickets at the store each week. "But now the question is what are they going to do with the money? Are they going to help the community? I hope so."

The winner will owe 25 percent of the jackpot in federal taxes and 3 percent in state taxes, which amounts to about $59 million, according to state lottery officials. The cash value of the jackpot after taxes is about $152 million, if the winner chooses a lump-sum payment of $221 million over an annuity.

State lottery director Carole Hedinger said it's not unusual for big winners to wait a few days or longer to claim the prize while they seek professional advice.

Lottery officials said it was the fourth-largest jackpot in Powerball history. The numbers drawn Saturday were 17, 29, 31, 52, 53 and Powerball 31.

No one had won the Powerball jackpot since early February, when Dave Honeywell in Virginia bought the winning ticket and elected a cash lump sum for his $217 million jackpot.

The largest Powerball jackpot ever came in at $587.5 million in November. The winning numbers were picked on two different tickets ? one by a couple in Missouri and the other by an Arizona man ? and the jackpot was split.

Nebraska still holds the record for the largest Powerball jackpot won on a single ticket ? $365 million ? by eight workers at a Lincoln meatpacking plant in February 2006.

Powerball is played in 42 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The chance of matching all five numbers and the Powerball number is about 1 in 175 million.

___

Associated Press writer Angela Delli Santi contributed to this report from Lawrenceville, N.J.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nj-liquor-store-sold-338m-powerball-ticket-154736229.html

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Lawmakers calls for more US involvement in Syria

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is calling for greater United States involvement in Syria through the creation of safe zone that would allow the U.S. military to train opposition forces attempting to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan said on CBS "Face the Nation" on Sunday that he doesn't want to lure the United States into a "big boots, on-the-ground conflict."

However, Rogers said he believes a greater U.S. presence is necessary to prevent chemical and conventional weapons from falling into the hands of anyone who would like to harm the United States if Assad is forced out.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lawmakers-calls-more-us-involvement-syria-160313971--politics.html

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Today, Senior Citizens get in free at the South Texas State Fair.

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/KFDMNews/posts/140793219432129

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Hair Today Gone Tomorrow ? Can Menopausal Hair Loss Be ...

Related eBooks

Studies show that up to 40% of women experience hair loss or hair thinning during menopause or in the four to five year period before menopause (perimenopause). Although there are no overnight solutions to menopausal hair loss, there are a number of steps you can take to remedy the situation.

Source:Hair Today Gone Tomorrow ? Can Menopausal Hair Loss Be Reversed?

Related Reading:

The Cleveland Clinic Guide to Menopause (Cleveland Clinic Guides)From the nation?s top-ranked clinic for gynecology and endocrinology, the most important health information and advice on what to do before and during menopause

Regain Control and Enjoy A Vibrant, Healthy Midlife!

If you are one of the millions of women who want answers about menopause, help has arrived: Discover leading-edge menopause treatments that offer effective relief from symptoms, and gain optimism and peace of mind about your health!

In The Cleveland Clinic Guide to Menopause, Dr. Holly Thacker, a trailblazer in women?s health, cuts through the myths and misinformation and provides solid information to help you handle menopause more effectively. She also offers advice that helps you improve your vitality, longevity, and quality of life. Inside you?ll find guidance to help you:

• Control menopause symptoms through safe, effective treatments that balance short-term results with your long-term health.
• Understand the myths and facts about hormone therapy and sort through the inaccurate, misleading and conflicting information that?s so prevalent today.
• Sleep better, boost your energy, and recharge your sex life?so you can regain short term results you want!
• Get the facts about vitamins, supplements, and antidepressants.
• Protect your long-term health by strengthening your bones, helping your heart, and taking smart steps to help prevent cancer and other diseases.

Cleveland Clinic is ranked consistently among the top hospitals in America by U.S. News & World Report. Its team of Women?s Health professionals offers coordinated, supportive care for the problems that affect women's lives, from breast cancer and infertility, to incontinence, pelvic floor disorders, and more.

No More HRT: Menopause - Treat the CauseContrary to popular opinion menopause is not a disease but a normal process in woman?s life - a time when the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual-self need nurturing. Hot flashes, night sweats, memory problems, fatigue, weight gain, loss of libido or headaches are blamed on the decreased production of hormones when the true cause is imbalanced adrenal glands, liver, thyroid and digestive function.

Along with equality, women have gained too much daily stress with increased work loads, lack of physical and spiritual exercise, insufficient rest, poor diet, environmental toxins including the exposure to toxic estrogens in the environment, all contributors to a difficult menopause.

No More HRT: Menopause Treat the Cause provides you with the key to a symptom-free menopause. Dr. Karen Jensen and Lorna Vanderhaeghe recommend treating the cause of women?s health problems by supporting the body with a healthy diet and lifestyle at an early age, to prevent PMS, fibroids, endometriosis, infertility, heavy periods, hot flashes, night sweats, breast and ovarian cysts, menopause and more. With love, they have put together a simple program to ensure vibrant health.

Life is a continuous adventure that requires mental, emotional, physical and spiritual stamina during the hormonal transitional years and always. This book offers many tips and insights that can help women accomplish this.

From this book you will learn:

• Why weak adrenals and low thyroid worsen menopausal symptoms
• New ways to improve energy
• How to enhance your flagging libido
• Calming remedies for peaceful sleep
• How to protect your bones, heart and memory
• Treatment strategies for uterine fibroids, ovarian cysts, heavy menstruation and more
• Discover nutrients to slow aging
• Why hormone imbalance makes you fat
• How to improve thyroid function

. . . and much, much more. The Truth About Hormone Replacement Therapy: How to Break Free from the Medical Myths of MenopauseJust Say No to America's Number-One Drug
Menopause is not a disease. So why are millions of American women taking a drug for this natural body process?
The widespread popularity of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a triumph of marketing and advertising over science. Although HRT and estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) can help some women with certain menopause-related problems, the benefits have been oversold to women and their health care providers. There is no scientifically valid evidence that estrogen prevents heart disease, colon cancer, or Alzheimer's. Nor is there any evidence that it keeps you looking younger, preserves your sex drive, or enhances your memory.
However, HRT does carry the risk of serious side effects, including certain cancers. Should you be taking such risky drugs to help you get through menopause? The Truth About Hormone Replacement Therapy, written by the National Women's Health Network, will help you decide. Inside, you'll discover:
?The risks of hormone replacement therapy
?How to talk to your doctor about HRT
?The truth about hormone therapy and osteoporosis
?Natural alternatives to relieve perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms
?And much more
This sensible health guide gives you the tools you need to make an informed decision that's best for you and your body.
"A balanced review of the hazards and potential benefits of hormone therapy after menopause."
?Graham A. Colditz, M.D., professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School The Natural Menopause Solution: Expert Advice for Melting Stubborn Midlife Pounds, Reducing Hot Flashes, and Getting Relief from Menopause Symptoms

For far too long, doctors thought hormone replacement therapy was the answer to menopausal symptoms from hot flashes to sleepless nights to stubborn belly fat. But while it does help, HRT can be risky?and may raise women?s chances for breast cancer, heart attack, and stroke. Luckily, there?s a growing stack of research that natural remedies can be just as effective.

In The Natural Menopause Solution, the editors of Prevention and integrative medicine specialist Melinda Ring, MD, distill that research into the easy-to-follow 30-Day Slim-Down, Cool-Down Diet, which can help women lose 21 percent more body weight. Plus it?s proven to help reduce the number and intensity of hot flashes by 50 percent. In addition to this easy eating and exercise program, there are hundreds of drug-free solutions for sleep problems, memory lapses, mood swings, lack of energy, low libido, and more?and strategies to protect against heart disease, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and cancer.

Source: http://www.jackiesbazaar.com/womensinterests/menopause-hrt/hair-today-gone-tomorrow-can-menopausal-hair-loss-be-reversed

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Pakistan appoints caretaker prime minister

ISLAMABAD (AP) ? Pakistan's election commission has chosen a former high court chief justice nominated by the country's outgoing ruling party to serve as caretaker prime minister in the run up to a historic national election this spring.

The head of the election commission, Fakhruddin Ebrahim, announced the decision to appoint Mir Hazar Khan Khoso on Sunday.

Khoso served as the chief justice to the high court in southwest Baluchistan province and also briefly served as the acting governor of the province.

The election commission chose Khoso out of four nominees, two submitted by the recently ruling Pakistan People's Party and two by the main opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N.

Pakistan is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections on May 11 ? the first transition between democratically elected governments in the country's history.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pakistan-appoints-caretaker-prime-minister-074415612.html

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How Silly Can Fox News Get? Bill O'Reilly's "War on Easter" (Little green footballs)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/293946852?client_source=feed&format=rss

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The People of the Cookbook: Jews, Food and Engagement

by Rabbi Cara Weinstein Rosenthal

What is it about Jews and food? Why are we always eating? As I write this, I am aware that Jews worldwide currently inhabit that strange calendrical trough between two peak food-consumption holidays, Purim and Pesach. For many of us, the last crumbs from the leftover hamantaschen were wiped away not long ago, and now the free corners of the kitchen and pantry are steadily being colonized by shopping bags of Pesach food.

Ask Jews to encapsulate the back story of nearly all of our holidays, and those well-versed in Jewish jokes will roll their eyes and intone, ?They tried to kill us; we won; let?s eat!? Having a preschooler has brought home to me how much our experience of Judaism truly revolves around food. My daughter and her classmates taste apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, they fry latkes for Chanukah, they bake hamantaschen for Purim, and they roll out matzah dough and chop nut-free charoset for Pesach.

We Jews are certainly not the only people to have distinctive food-based folkways that tie into our religious and cultural traditions, but we do have a curiously strong relationship with food. Food communicates our spiritual and emotional states, it mediates our experiences of family and tradition, it becomes a vehicle for the creation of memory and meaning. It?s significant that our religious calendar includes six yearly fast days through which we express our desire for repentance and cleansing and/or our grief over historical tragedies like the destruction of the ancient Temple. Even when we?re not eating, we?re using food (in this case, the deliberate absence of food) to express ourselves.

All of which provides an interesting backdrop for the recent release of a community study by the Jewish Education Project?s Early Childhood and Family Engagement Department (Engaging Today?s Families: Parent Research Findings, January 2013) focusing on first-time mothers of young children. For the study, researchers conducted focus groups with mothers in the New York metro area who had children under the age of two and who did not have formal connections to organized Judaism. Not surprisingly, the study found that most of the mothers interviewed were ambivalent about participating in Jewish life. They yearned for connection and community, but were wary of settings in which their lack of Jewish knowledge might become apparent.

What was significant for me was the researchers? finding that these women?s ?interest in a new Jewish opportunity mainly revolves around connection, community and cooking.? Some of the mothers interviewed longed for communities in which young mothers would pool cooking resources in order to help each other at busy or stressful times, like at the birth of a child. In her eJewish Philanthropy article on the research findings (?Let?s get Serious about Relationship Weaving and Increase the Potential for Communal Change in Family Engagement,? January 28, 2013), the Jewish Education Project?s Shellie Dickstein quoted one Upper West Side mom who quipped, ?I have friends that live in Englewood, NJ. When they had their babies, they had a calendar of who is going to cook for [the mom] who just gave birth and all their meals are taken care of for a while. In the city I asked my friends, where is my dinner??

It doesn?t take much analysis to figure out that what Jews like this young mother are looking for goes much deeper than the stress of figuring out what they are going to serve their families for dinner on a particular Tuesday night. These kinds of statements reveal a longing for connection and community, a desire to have someone help you and take care of you when you?re feeling vulnerable. I think it?s telling, though, that this desire is expressed through the lens of food. It?s not a support group or a carpool that these young mothers want, it?s the kind of nurturing that?s served with a ladle and shared around a table.

Of course, Passover is the quintessential holiday for making connections through food. The theme of hachnassat orchim ? welcoming guests ? underpins the Pesach seder, as we recite, ?Kol dichfin yetei veyeichul? ? ?Let all who are hungry come and eat.? But Pesach magnifies and complicates the Jewish relationship with food, especially for those who are not sure whether or not they really have a seat at the Jewish table ? those who are unaffiliated or loosely affiliated, those who are members of interfaith families, those whose lack of Jewish background or education leaves them feeling lost at seders or services.

On Pesach, food has an amplified ability to invite and to terrify. Many Jews, even those who have little other connection with the Jewish community, look forward to enjoying family favorites on Pesach, the smells and tastes of brisket and matzah ball soup (or baghali polo) evoking feelings of connection and tradition. At the same time, many view Pesach preparations with fear and trembling, trying to keep track of the multitudinous rules and regulations: What foods are okay to eat? What dishes and utensils am I supposed to use? Can I eat rice? What if I can?t have gluten, or eggs, or nuts? Kashrut is complicated enough during the rest of the year, then Pesach comes along and cranks the difficulty dial up to 11.

For all of these reasons, Pesach presents a unique opportunity for Jewish organizations to reach out to Jews at all levels of affiliation (and to use food as a valuable means of connection). Many synagogues and schools host communal seders or invite families to matzah-factory events, but how many organizations truly put into practice the Haggadah?s inclusive call and reach out beyond their mailing lists to involve those Jews in the wider community who are hungry for friendship and for a sense of belonging? How many synagogues really strive to guide the perplexed in making sense of Pesach?s tricky kashrut rules, and how many just announce that the rabbi is willing to sell your chametz for you? How many organizations confuse being ?welcoming? with having an overly child-centered educational approach, losing the opportunity to introduce loosely engaged Jews to the richness and depth of Jewish tradition? Inviting families to bake matzah or make charoset is a great place to start, but Jewish organizations shouldn?t lose sight of the fact that adults can go beyond the basic mechanics and facts to engage with the deeper meanings of Pesach food traditions, the ways in which the foods we eat on Pesach challenge us to grapple with the themes of slavery and redemption that run throughout Jewish history and reverberate within our own lives.

Love Pesach food or loathe it, matzah will soon be here to stay for eight long, tiring, glorious days. Let?s make sure that our institutions reach out on this holiday ? and on all days ? to help Jews nourish each other, body and soul.

Rabbi Cara Weinstein Rosenthal is an educator, congregational consultant, and writer focusing on outreach and engagement. As PJ Library Coordinator for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, she works with synagogues to help them increase their potential to include young families in Jewish life and community.

Source: http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-people-of-the-cookbook-jews-food-and-engagement/

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Society silent over increasing teenage pregnancy rate in Central ...

The Medical Director in charge of the Central regional hospital, Dr. Daniel Asare is alarmed at the rate at which teenagers are getting pregnant in that region.

According to him, the number of teenagers - between the ages of 12-14 - who frequent the health facility for antenatal care, has increased to disturbing proportions.

Statistics indicate that in 2012 alone, close to 14,000 teenagers in the Central region got pregnant.

Joy News' Central regional correspondent Richard Kojo Nyarko reported Dr Asare as saying the above figure indicate a 62 per cent increase in teenage pregnancy rates in the region over previous years.

Dr Asare therefore wondered why child rights advocates and other related state institutions seem to be quite over the matter even after widespread reports about the issue in the media.

?Naturally speaking,? he noted, ?these teenagers were defiled so why are the advocates?and the whole society quite??? he quizzed, fearing the situation could degenerate if measures are not taken to control it.

The medical director called on the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU), the Children and Gender Ministry as well as civil society organizations to treat the issue with all the urgency required in order to ?save the girl child?.

?

Source: http://news1.ghananation.com/latest-news/301728-why-is-society-silent-over-increasing-teenage-pregnancy-rate-in-c-r-doctor-asks.html

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Quantum computers coming soon? Metamaterials used to observe giant photonic spin Hall effect

Mar. 21, 2013 ? Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have once again demonstrated the incredible capabilities of metamaterials -- artificial nanoconstructs whose optical properties arise from their physical structure rather than their chemical composition. Engineering a unique two-dimensional sheet of gold nanoantennas, the researchers were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

"With metamaterial, we were able to greatly enhance a naturally weak effect to the point where it was directly observable with simple detection techniques," said Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division who led this research. "We also demonstrated that metamaterials not only allow us to control the propagation of light but also allows control of circular polarization. This could have profound consequences for information encoding and processing."

The spin Hall effect, named in honor of physicist Edwin Hall, describes the curved path that spinning electrons follow as they move through a semiconductor. The curved movement arises from the interaction between the physical motion of the electron and its spin -- a quantized angular momentum that gives rise to magnetic moment. Think of a baseball pitcher putting spin on a ball to make it curve to the left or right.

"Light moving through a metal also displays the spin Hall effect but the photonic spin Hall effect is very weak because the spin angular momentum of photons and spin-orbit interactions are very small," says Xiaobo Yin, a member of Zhang's research group and the lead author of the Science paper. "In the past, people have managed to observe the photonic spin Hall effect by generating the process over and over again to obtain an accumulative signal, or by using highly sophisticated quantum measurements. Our metamaterial makes the photonic spin Hall effect observable even with a simple camera."

Metamaterials have garnered a lot of attention in recent years because their unique structure affords electromagnetic properties unattainable in nature. For example, a metamaterial can have a negative index of refraction, the ability to bend light backwards, unlike all materials found in nature, which bend light forward. Zhang, who holds the Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, where he also directs the National Science Foundation's Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has been at the forefront of metamaterials research. For this study, he and his group fashioned metamaterial surfaces about 30 nanometers thick (a human hair by comparison is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick). These metasurfaces were constructed from V-shaped gold nanoantennas whose geometry could be configured by adjusting the length and orientation of the arms of the Vs.

"We chose eight different antenna configurations with optimized geometry parameters to generate a linear phase gradient along the x direction," says Yin. "This enabled us to control the propagation of the light and introduce strong photon spin-orbit interactions through rapid changes in direction. The photonic spin Hall effect depends on the curvature of the light's trajectory, so the sharper the change in propagation direction, the stronger the effect."

Since the entire metasurface sample measured only 0.3 millimeters, a 50-millimeter lens was used to project the transmission of the light through the metamaterial onto a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera for imaging. From the CCD images, the researchers determined that both the control of light propagation and the giant photonic spin Hall effect were the direct results of the designed meta-material. This finding opens up a wealth of possibilities for new technologies.

"The controllable spin-orbit interaction and momentum transfer between spin and orbital angular momentum allows us to manipulate the information encoded on the polarization of light, much like the 0 and 1 of today's electronic devices," Yin says. "But photonic devices could encode more information and provide greater information security than conventional electronic devices."

Yin says the ability to control left and right circular polarization of light in metamaterial surfaces should allow for the formation of optical elements, like highly coveted "flat lenses," or the management of light polarization without using wave plates.

"Metamaterials provide us with tremendous design freedom that will allow us to modulate the strength of the photonic spin Hall effect at different spatial locations," Yin says. "We knew the photonic spin Hall effect existed in nature but it was so hard to detect. Now, with the right metamaterials we can not only enhance this effect we can harness it for our own purposes."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. X. Yin, Z. Ye, J. Rho, Y. Wang, X. Zhang. Photonic Spin Hall Effect at Metasurfaces. Science, 2013; 339 (6126): 1405 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231758

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/physics/~3/5swIk_-rtcw/130321151921.htm

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Israel becomes a fortress nation as it walls itself off from the Arab Spring

The renewed war in Iraq combined with Hamas' rise in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood running Egypt and the conflict in Syria, the region surrounding Israel is in turmoil. In response, Israel is erecting a 150-mile fence along the border with Egypt and another one along the Syrian border. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

By Richard Engel, Correspondent, NBC News

TEL AVIV ? On a wide beach in Tel Aviv, I recently watched two Israeli men ? wearing tight neon bathing suits that would make many Americans blush ? play a game of paddle ball.?They impressively smashed their serves and volleys with decisive forehands and backhands and dove in the sand to make saves.

A few feet away, a couple of young women in skimpy bikinis with tattoos on their ankles and shoulders stretched into yoga positions in the shade of a wooden gazebo.

You can buy ice cream and cold beer on the beach and nobody seems to litter.

---

If Tel Aviv?s beachfront sounds like a island of paradise in the midst of the turbulent Middle East ? that?s because it is. And Israeli officials intend to keep it that way.

While the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring continues to reverberate across the region, Israel, a small country the size of New Jersey, has been busily building about 500 miles of fence, walls and barricades to keep the surrounding Arab world out.

Keeping a lid on Gaza
Just 45 miles south of the paddle ball players in neon, Hamas runs the Gaza Strip, the narrow Palestinian territory squeezed between Egypt and Israel.?

Senior U.S. officials say President Barack Obama is trying to stay out of the Sunni-Shiite conflicts gripping the region, and shore up America's increasingly nervous friends there. NBC News' Richard Engel reports.

Hamas is a Palestinian political party with an aggressive militant wing.?At its rallies, Hamas supporters routinely chant that one day they will destroy Israel and that Palestinians will return to their homes where Jews now live.?Hamas has long been Israel's enemy, but in the wake of the Arab Spring, the group is empowered like never before.

Just last November, Hamas and Israel fought a brief war. Hamas launched rockets at southern Israel, and for the first time in the group?s history, at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.?Many of the rockets were shot down by Israel?s U.S.-funded Iron Dome missile defense system.

Behind the headlines, away from the conflict with the Palestinians, life in Israel is a vibrant mix of cosmopolitan and coast, Jews and Arabs. NBC's Martin Fletcher looks at life from inside Israel.? ?

More than 150 Palestinians and at least six Israelis were killed in the fighting.?But Hamas walked away with significant political recognition.?

Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi sent his prime minister to Gaza during the fighting to show solidarity with Hamas.?That would never have happened under former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.?

Mubarak didn?t trust Hamas and kept them weak.?In fact, during the previous, and far more severe, Gaza-Israel war in early 2009, Mubarak effectively helped Israel target Hamas by cutting off its border, denying escape and resupply routes.?

Nir Elias / Reuters, file

Israeli soldiers watch as an Iron Dome launcher fires an interceptor rocket near the southern city of Beersheba on November 17, 2012 .

But ever since the Arab Spring reset the Middle East and unleashed anti-Israel passions that Arab strongmen ? like Mubarak ? once kept at bay, Israel feels threatened. And they are fortifying their defenses.

Gaza tunnel
Now getting in and out of the Gaza Strip is increasingly difficult and bizarre. ??

When you exit Israel, you must first pass through a?series of metal detectors and X-ray machines, before entering a long Israeli-controlled tunnel.

The tunnel is above ground, fenced in on both sides, and with a wire roof.?It runs along the ground like a metal snake. It's about 20 feet wide and stretches for about a mile with a dog-leg turn in the middle. There are cement blocks in the tunnel so you can?t drive a car through it.?You have to walk, dragging your bags.?It feels like you?re passing through a wormhole from a beach community into a prison.?

Making the tunnel stranger still is its quiet loneliness. There aren?t any Israeli guards or officers in the tunnel.?As you walk with your bags, every few hundred yards you come to a closed gate.?A camera and microphone over the gate turn on as you approach.?You call out to an unseen guard that you?d like to advance and, if he approves, the gate clicks open and you move to the next barrier.

Egypt fence
Beyond Gaza, about 100 miles to the southeast of the gazebos shading women on Tel Aviv?s beach,?is Israel?s border with Egypt.?For decades, the border was protected naturally by the bare and?jagged Sinai Mountains and the open desert.??

Moshe Milner / Israeli government via EPA, file

A photograph supplied by the Israeli Government Press Office in January 2013 shows a panoramic view of some of the border fence Israel has completed separating Israel from Egypt.

But now with Mubarak gone, a metal snake is going up along the Egyptian border, too. ?

Israel is building a 150 mile fence along the Egyptian border. It?s nearly finished ? with only 6.2 miles left to go.

The fence has two layers, is 20 feet high and is topped with razor wire.?It also plunges several feet under the sand, so you can?t dig underneath it.?Israel clearly doesn?t feel the mountains and desert offer enough protection anymore.

The Wall
Back on the beach in Tel Aviv, few people talk about their increasingly hostile neighbors in Gaza and Egypt, or the fences that keep them out.?But other barriers are even closer.

Marko Djurica / Reuters, file

A Palestinian rides a bicycle past a mural on the controversial Israeli barrier depicting the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, at Qalandiya checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah on November 26, 2012.

Just 40 miles east of Tel Aviv, a giant wall cuts off the West Bank ? the landlocked Palestinian territory surrounded on three sides by Israel, and one side by Jordan. Palestinians call it the "apartheid wall" because it keeps them penned in.?Israel built the wall during a spate of Hamas suicide attacks and since its construction the number of bombings in Israel has plummeted.

Keeping Syria out, too
About 100 miles north of the Tel Aviv, a new fence is going up along the border with Syria.?Only about 10 miles of that barrier, which looks just like the one with Egypt, is finished.?The rest is going up fast.

As I walked along the new fence with Syria with our cameraman and producer a few days ago, we were stopped by a group of Israeli border guards who politely told us to leave.?

Atef Safadi / EPA

Israeli employees work on the new border fence at the Israeli-Syrian border, south of the Golan Heights, in Israel, on March 8, 2013.

The border guards, based on a hill overlooking the fence, told me they had seen fighting between Syrian government troops and rebels just a few hundred yards away from their base.?The chief of staff of the Israeli military said at a conference this month that he believes it?s only a matter of time before armed factions in Syria turn their attention to Israel.

"We see terror organizations that are increasingly gaining footholds in the territory and they are fighting against Assad.?Guess what? We?ll be next in line," said Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz.

'Fear index' down
As Israel waits for the political storm in the Arab world to pass, it has become a fortress nation, what some experts call a "garrison state."?

Perhaps it?s human nature, but living in a bubble has some advantages.?Fences and walls can be effective and even soothing, at least for those who build them.

Oliver Weiken / EPA

Israel's military said it had accomplished its objectives while Hamas claimed victory after the two sides exchanged deadly airstrikes and rocket attacks for over a week.

A study by Haifa University?s National Security Center published this month in the Israel newspaper Haaretz said Israelis have never felt more secure in their borders.?The so-called annual "fear index? is at an all-time low.?

"People in Israel are simply optimistic. As a result of a hundred years of Zionism that met with difficult challenges, the public's conceptions are that we have overcome that, and that we will overcome it in the future," Prof. Gabriel Ben-Dor, the director of the study, told Haaretz.

But there?s twist. Israel?s Arab citizens, who may be more in touch with the profound changes in the region that they watch unfolding on Arabic-language television, were far less convinced about Israel?s security than Jewish respondents to the survey.

"It is possible the Arab population is seriously and intensively following what is happening across the border, and they judge the situation differently," said Ben-Dor.

The Israeli military is certainly aware that things have changed for Israel.

But that apparently hasn?t sunk in for most Israelis, or, just like people on the beaches of Tel Aviv, perhaps they don?t want to think about it.

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