Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/312968084?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Monday, June 17, 2013
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Nokia Lumia 925 review: lots of changes, but not much difference
It's been just half a year since Nokia revealed its first Windows Phone 8 device, and we've already got another flagship to review. The Lumia 925 marks a departure in design for Nokia -- it looks nothing like its predecessors, barring an expanse of screen and some capacitive Windows buttons. This time around, the phone is housed in an aluminum frame, making it Nokia's first metal smartphone since those heady Symbian days. This, alongside some hardware repositioning and (minor) specification changes has been enough for the Lumia 925 to weigh notably less than its 920 forebear -- and we think it's enough to feel in your hand. As we juggled the two Windows Phones ahead of this review, our first impressions were that the 925 was also much easier to hold, despite only a negligible difference in thickness.
This, alongside some hardware repositioning and (minor) specification changes has been enough for the Lumia 925 to weigh notably less than its 920 forebear
Arriving in three comparatively restrained monochrome hues (white, black and grey), Nokia's returned to OLED for its display tech, although it's the same 1,280 x 768 resolution as the rest of the 920 series and includes the company's anti-reflective screen technology for good measure. Its new Smart Camera app debuts on the Lumia 925, standing alongside the stock app and offering up some interesting new picture-taking options.
Otherwise, it's an awful lot like the Lumia 920, at least on paper: there's the same lauded 8.7-megapixel camera sensor, the same dual-core 1.5GHz processor and the same OS (albeit with some beta goodies). Nokia reckons that the phone is geared towards a different buyer than those who bought the Lumia 920, but alongside Verizon's recent US-only Lumia 928, is there enough to get fans that skipped on last year's model to buy this time around? And is there enough to persuade you not to hold out for what's on the horizon?
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia
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Parade marks Queen Elizabeth II's birthday
LONDON (AP) ? Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her birthday Saturday with traditional pomp and circumstance, followed by a visit to her husband in the hospital.
More than 1,000 soldiers, horses and musicians took part in the parade known as "Trooping the Color," an annual ceremony marking the queen's official birthday.
With Prince Philip unable to attend the celebration as he is recovering from abdominal surgery, the queen invited her cousin, the Duke of Kent, to accompany her in a vintage carriage.
The monarch's actual birthday was on April 21, when she turned 87.
The "Trooping the Color" ceremony originates from traditional battle preparations, when "colors," which refer to military flags, were carried down the rank to be seen by soldiers.
Other royals ? including Prince Harry, Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge ? also were on hand to celebrate on Saturday.
After the parade, the queen visited Philip at a private London hospital.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/parade-marks-queen-elizabeth-iis-birthday-101929879.html
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Ideas for keeping your data safe from spying
LONDON (AP) ? Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.
But given the revelations spilling out into the media recently, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying or surveillance by someone.
Experts say there are steps anyone can take to improve privacy, but they only go so far.
Using anonymity services and encryption "simply make it harder, but not impossible," said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher. "Someone can always find you __ just depends on how motivated they are."
With that caveat, here are some basic tips to enhance your privacy:
___
ENCRYPT YOUR EMAILS
Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe ? not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.
Experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.
Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.
___
USE TOR
Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.
Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider. And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.
Disadvantages: Browsing the web with TOR can be painfully slow. And some services ? like file swapping protocols used by many Internet users to share videos and music ? aren't compatible.
___
DITCH THE PHONE
Your everyday cellphone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cellphone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims' voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cellphone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.
An even bigger issue is that cellphones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give governments a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cellphones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home.
Disadvantages: Not having a cellphone handy when you really need it. Other alternatives, like using "burner" phones paid for anonymously and discarded after use, rapidly become expensive.
___
CUT UP YOUR CREDIT CARDS
The Wall Street Journal says the NSA is monitoring American credit card records in addition to phone calls. Some cybercriminals can use the same methods. So stick to cash, or, if you're more adventurous, use electronic currencies to move your money around if you want total privacy.
Disadvantages: Credit cards are a mainstay of the world payment system, so washing your hands of plastic money is among the most difficult moves you can make. In any case, some cybercurrency systems offer only limited protection from government snooping and many carry significant risks. The value of Bitcoin, one of the better-known forms of electronic cash, has oscillated wildly, while users of another popular online currency, Liberty Reserve, were left out of pocket after the company behind it was busted by international law enforcement.
___
DON'T KEEP YOUR DATA IN AMERICA OR WITH AMERICAN COMPANIES
U.S. companies are subject to U.S. law, including the Patriot Act, whose interpretations are classified. Although the exact parameters of the PRISM data mining program revealed by the Guardian and The Washington Post remain up for debate, what we do know is that a variety of law enforcement officials ? not just at the NSA ? can secretly demand your electronic records without a warrant through an instrument known as a National Security Letter. Such silent requests are made by the thousands every year.
If you don't like the sound of that, your best bet is to park your data in a European country, where privacy protections tend to be stronger.
Disadvantages: Silicon Valley's Internet service providers tend to be better and cheaper than their foreign counterparts. What's more, there's no guarantee that European spy agencies don't have NSA-like surveillance arrangements with their own companies. When hunting for a safe place to stash your data, look for smaller countries with robust human rights records. Iceland, long a hangout for WikiLeaks activists, might be a good bet.
___
STEER CLEAR OF MALICIOUS SOFTWARE
If they can't track it, record it, or intercept it, an increasing number of spies aren't shy about hacking their way in to steal your data outright. Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, warned the Guardian that his agency had been on a worldwide binge of cyberattacks.
"We hack everyone everywhere," he said.
Former officials don't appear to contradict him. Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden described it as "commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries' network." In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he boasted that "we are the best at doing it. Period."
Malicious software used by hackers can be extremely hard to spot. But installing an antivirus program, avoiding attachments, frequently changing passwords, dodging suspicious websites, creating a firewall, and always making sure your software is up to date is a good start.
Disadvantages: Keeping abreast of all the latest updates and warily scanning emails for viruses can be exhausting.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ideas-keeping-data-safe-spying-155424146.html
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013
US transplant network resists lung rule changes
PITTSBURGH (AP) ? The national organization that manages organ transplants on Monday resisted making emergency rule changes for children under 12 who are waiting on lungs but created a special appeal and review system to hear such cases.
The executive committee of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network held a teleconference to consider children who seek to qualify for adult lungs, and many members voiced serious ethical and medical concerns about a recent federal judge's ruling that questioned the existing system.
The meeting was prompted by the cases of two terminally ill children, 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, of Newtown Square, and 11-year-old Javier Acosta, of New York City, who are awaiting transplants at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Last week, federal Judge Michael Baylson ruled that they should be eligible for adult lungs after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to intervene in such cases. Both children have end-stage cystic fibrosis, and Javier's brother died two years ago while on the waiting list.
The families challenged transplant policy making children under 12 wait for pediatric lungs to become available or be offered lungs donated by adults after adolescents and adults on the waiting list had been considered. They said pediatric lungs are rarely donated.
One expert on transplant ethics said the network is trying to acknowledge the concerns the judge raised but also issue a warning.
"I think what they're trying to tell the judge is, 'We have a system. It's working. Let us decide, not you,'" said Dr. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center.
He said the judge's ruling "did hit a moral nerve" because the network recognizes the need to examine the claim that the 12-year-old distinction for lung transplants is arbitrary but the network also tried to "preserve the integrity of the system by not changing the rule" based on court intervention.
The Murnaghans' said in a statement that they consider the creation of the appeals process "a tremendous win for Sarah" and all other children waiting for lungs, but they added that the biggest issue is finding enough donors to help people who need transplants.
"We hope Sarah's story moves people to become organ donors," they said.
The Murnaghans' attorney, Steve Harvey, said the vote creates "a little appeals process" and Sarah's case may go back before the new network review board. But he added that they plan to ask Sebelius to keep Sarah eligible for adult lungs, as the judge instructed, until such a review is over.
The family has said that Sarah may have only a few weeks to live and that no suitable lungs have been found for her, even with the emergency exemption.
Committee member Alexandra Glazier, who's with the New England Organ Bank, said during the call that while she can't comment on specific transplant cases, judicial intervention is "not an appropriate approach" to managing organ donation. Glazier said that while an order by any judge might be well-intentioned, it would "inevitably fail" to take into account the many complex medical and ethical issues that go into crafting broad national rules.
"The message that lawsuits are a mechanism" to deal with complex medical or ethical issues is a dangerous one, Glazier said.
Dr. Steven A. Webber, of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said the network's pediatric committee voted 14-0 not to recommend emergency changes to existing rules.
"We did not feel that there was overwhelming compelling evidence" to make changes, Webber said.
While members of the network's executive committee voiced sympathy for anyone who is waiting for a transplant, they noted that making any sudden change to the system to help one group risks harming some other group. The existing system was created after years of reviews by numerous medical professionals and members of the public.
The network said in a statement after the teleconference that there are 1,659 candidates nationwide waiting for lung transplants, of whom 30 are age 10 or younger. The group said it was not immediately clear how many children may consider the option of a review under the new appeals process.
The network said that since 2007, only one lung transplant in the United States has occurred from a donor older than age 18 into a recipient younger than 12.
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Thursday, June 6, 2013
After sour years, is French influence on the rise in West Africa?
From the French intervention in Mali, to French special forces in Niger, to commercial interests and military bases in the region ??Paris is flexing its muscles. Ivory Coast is the top relationship.?
French President Francois Hollande (l.) receives the Felix Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize from Director-General Irina Bokova at UNESCO in Paris June 5, 2013. President Hollande receives the prize for his contribution to peace and stability in Africa.
Etienne Laurent/REUTERS
EnlargeWhen Jonathan Valette tells his French friends he?s from Ivory Coast, someone usually asks him if there are any elephants near his home. When he tells his fellow Ivorians about a shared French-Ivorian identity, they don?t quite know what to make of this white fellow.?
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But Mr. Valette is Ivorian, just like his father and before that his grandfather, a French immigrant who moved to the country for military service and ended up becoming a close associate of the country?s post-independence leader, F?lix Houphou?t-Boigny.
After over a decade abroad, Valette, who is also a French citizen, recently returned to the country?s main city Abidjan, which is still recovering from a brief war in 2011.
?I had many, many countries [to work in] but I chose Ivory Coast because I?m Ivorian,? Valette says.
Perhaps no former French colony has been so closely tied to its former colonial ruler as Ivory Coast. And that?s not something all Ivorians are comfortable with. The reign of Laurent Gbagbo, who was ousted in 2011 partly with French special forces help, saw a protracted and occasionally violent push against French influence in the country.
But after a decade of souring relations, Ivory Coast?s new President Alassane Ouattara is rekindling the country?s relationship with France, putting itself at the center of the European power?s African strategy once again.
Fran?afrique policy
For France, West Africa remains as vital as it has?always?been. Ivory Coast relies on the region's natural resources and fears the Islamist terrorists that lurk in the Sahel on the region's northern flank.?
French President Fran?ois Hollande has continued much of what is known as the "Fran?afrique" policy of his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. That means Paris has pushed its nexus of interests directly into the business of its former African colonies, despite their independence.
From the French intervention in Mali, to the special forces that respond to suicide bombings in Niger, to the military bases around west and central Africa ??the French are willing to openly flex their muscles in the former colonies.
At the center of this is Ivory Coast, its economy reinvigorated, its president friendly, and its streets mostly pacified.
Whether Ivorians cotton to France's newfound boldness is another question.
?The way that France sees Ivory Coast is as a country where it is losing influence and where it wants to keep influence,? says Douglas Yates, a professor at the American University of Paris. ?When Gbagbo took over, he harnessed an anti-French sentiment to build popularity.?
Le petit Paris
The echoes of ?le petit Paris,? Abidjan?s moniker during the city?s salad days in the 1970s, can still be seen. There?s the baguette-toting commuters, the ubiquitous espresso machines in restaurants and cafes, the billboards for French businesses that greet commuters passing over the Charles de Gaulle Bridge, not to mention a shared language, and the influence of 14,000 French expatriates now residing in the country.
But most Ivorians are young, Mr. Yates says. They didn?t experience the booming economy and rapid development of Mr. Houphou?t-Boigny?s time. In those days, some 60,000 French expatriates lived in the former colony. To the younger generation, France is something between a job-creating patron and a neocolonial bogeyman intent on keeping Ivory Coast in its pocket.
?It?s all about their way of integrating. If the French come to do business, there won?t be any problem,? says Dimitri Bakou, a bar owner in the posh Riviera district of Abidjan. ?The thing is, when they try to interfere in the politics of the country, there?s a problem.?
The events of 2004 galvanized opinion against the French, particularly in the country?s south, home to Gbagbo?s core supporters. When an Ivorian airstrike killed eight French troops during the country?s civil war, France retaliated by destroying the country?s entire air force.
What happened next is seared into the minds of French expatriates in the country: Mobs descending on French homes and businesses, forcing families to flee to their rooftops as French helicopters ferried them to a military base on the edge of town.
Meanwhile, shootouts between the French military and rioting Ivorians killed scores, deepening the disgust many Ivorians felt of the Europeans.
?From the Ivorian perspective it probably was a turning point because that?s when French military presence and intervention became more present,? says Penelope Chester, an analyst who studies Ivory Coast.
Ivorians tried to diversify
It was the start of a downward spiral for France and Gbagbo, and so the former president went looking for other investors ??and mostly came up short, Yates said.
?It?s not really a country that is like Angola, which China is going to give priority to,? he adds. ?They?ll [the Chinese will] come in, there?ll be commercial interests, but everyone recognizes that this is France?s Africa.?
And even Gbagbo wasn?t that successful in divesting the French from Ivory Coast. French logistics company Bollor? picked up a contract to manage Abidjan?s port during Gbagbo?s rule.
Bouygues, a prominent French firm, got a deal to manage the country?s electricity supply in 2005. And in 2010 ??when Gbagbo was still in power ??31 percent of its imports were still coming from France, according to data compiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
And now Gbagbo is gone, the result of a disputed presidential election in 2010, a rebel offensive the next year, and finally French firepower to hasten the rebels? capture of Abidjan. With Ouattara safely in power, there?s a feeling among many expatriates that Ivory Coast is open for business again.
Himself a former International Monetary Fund official, President Ouattara has made overtures to European investors since taking power in 2011. France?s Hollande has been receptive. Ivory Coast received more than $400 million in aid from France in 2013, a rarity these days for France?s government.
Also, when French troops deployed to Mali early this year to stem an offensive by Islamists, French troops drove overland from Ivory Coast to reach the neighboring country.
?The French bet heavily on the side [of Ouattara] and they won,? Yates says.
How much they won remains to be seen: Ouattara is up for reelection in the 2015 presidential election, and the country is still wracked by insecurity in the country?s west. And many Ivorians remain suspicious of Ouattara?s ascension, seeing him as a French-backed usurper, and Gbagbo as the rightful president.
For Mr. Valette, coming back to the city of his birth was a choice: He wanted to work in insurance, just like his father did. But for other Franco-Ivorians, the choice isn?t so easy.
?Some people have nowhere else to go,? Mr. Valette said. ?Their home is Africa."
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'Lizard King' fossil shows giant reptiles coexisted with mammals during globally warm past
June 5, 2013 ? Some 40 million years before rock singer Jim Morrison's lyrics earned him the moniker "the Lizard King," an actual king lizard roamed the hot tropical forests of Southeast Asia, competing with mammals for food and other resources.
A team of U.S. paleontologists, led by Jason Head of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, describes fossils of the giant lizard from Myanmar this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Their analysis shows that it is one of the biggest known lizards ever to have lived on land.
The creature's scientific name is Barbaturex morrisoni -- which means "Lizard King," in honor of the aforementioned Doors singer.
At almost six feet long and weighing upwards of 60 pounds, the lizard provides new and important clues on the evolution of plant-eating reptiles and their relationship to global climate and competition with mammals.
In today's world, plant-eating lizards like iguanas and agamids are much smaller than large mammal herbivores. The largest lizards, like the giant, carnivorous Komodo dragon, are limited to islands that are light on mammal predators. It is not known, however, if lizards are limited in size by competition with mammals, or by temperatures of modern climates, Head said.
But B. morrisoni lived in an ecosystem with a diversity of both herbivorous and carnivorous mammals during a warm age in Earth's history -- 36 to 40 million years ago -- when there was no ice at the poles and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were very high. The creature was larger than most of the mammals with which it lived, suggesting that competition or predation by mammals did not restrict its evolution into a giant.
"We think the warm climate during that period of time allowed the evolution of a large body size and the ability of plant-eating lizards to successfully compete in mammal faunas," Head said.
"You can't fully understand the evolution of ecosystems in the modern world without looking at the ones that preceded them. We would've never known this by looking at lizards today. By going back in time using the fossil record, we can find unique information on the origin of modern ecosystems."
Head worked with Patricia Holroyd of University of California, Berkeley, Gregg Gunnell of Duke University, and Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa on identifying and analyzing B. morrisoni.
It was a discovery millions of years and then a few extra decades in the making. Fossils of the giant lizard were discovered by Ciochon and colleagues in the 1970s in Myanmar, but were unstudied in the University of California Museum of Paleontology until a few years ago, when Head and Holroyd began looking into them.
When Head first examined the fossils, he noticed the creature's bones were characteristic of a group of modern lizards that includes bearded dragons, chameleons and plant eaters like spiny-tailed lizards.
"I thought, 'That's neat. Based on its teeth, it's a plant-eating lizard from a time period and a place from which we don't have a lot of information.' But when I started studying its modern relatives, I realized just how big this lizard was. It struck me that we had something here that was quite large -- and unique," said Head, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at UNL and a curator in the University of Nebraska State Museum of Natural History's Division of Vertebrate Paleontology.
He noticed another telltale sign -- ridges on the underside of the jaw that strongly suggested it supported soft tissues, much like the multicolored chin flaps and dewlaps that give some modern lizards a bearded appearance. The giant lizard's genus name, Barbaturex, means "bearded king."
"I was listening to The Doors quite a bit during the research," Head said. "Some of their musical imagery includes reptiles and ancient places, and Jim Morrison was of course 'The Lizard King,' so it all kind of came together."
Head said the discovery of B. morrisoni now leads to other big questions: For how long do these giant lizards persist in the fossil record? How far and wide did they disperse across the planet? What are the relationships of the evolution of reptile body sizes to changes in global temperature throughout history? And the obvious question -- does a warming climate mean giant reptiles will someday return?
He said if we were to raise global temperatures at a natural pace and preserve natural, healthy habitats, we could end up with the evolution of giant lizards, turtles, snakes and crocodiles.
"But we're changing the atmosphere so fast that the rate of climate change is probably faster than most biological systems can adapt to. So instead of seeing the growth and spread of giant reptiles, what you might see is extinction," he said.
Meanwhile, the researchers will consider how the clues provided by B. morrisoni can be used to reconstruct global temperature over geologic time periods.
"That becomes very important in modeling what temperature change will be like across the surface of the planet in the future," Head said. "And that, obviously, bears directly on our own health."
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/jaWyenBKGhU/130605090421.htm
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