Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/323175233?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, August 1, 2013
Analysis: Manning damage has fallen well short of worst U.S. fears
By Warren Strobel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Accused of the nation's biggest-ever security leak, U.S. soldier Bradley Manning was vilified by the government for causing irreparable damage to American national interests. In retrospect, the harm he caused seems to have been overplayed.
A U.S. military judge cleared Manning on Tuesday of the most serious charge against him - aiding the enemy - in a verdict that indicated the soldier's secrecy violations, while criminal, were not as dire as prosecutors had alleged.
Manning's revelations to WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and raw intelligence reports from the Iraqi and Afghan battlefields, violated his military oath and "put real lives and real careers at risk," said former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.
But the strategic damage to the United States - to its reputation and its ability to work with allies and conduct diplomacy - "was transitory," said Crowley, who resigned in 2011 after publicly criticizing the Pentagon's treatment of Manning in a military prison.
As reams of classified State Department cables - some containing unflattering portraits of foreign leaders or detailing U.S. envoys' contacts with human rights groups - leaked to the public, some saw catastrophe for U.S. diplomacy.
Yet, despite what Crowley called a few "isolated cases" in which foreign counterparts were less candid than in the past, fearing their words might leak, the State Department was able to mitigate the damage.
In just one of dozens of examples, U.S. ties with Indonesia wobbled after the release of cables showing the U.S. Embassy suspected collusion between Jakarta's security forces and the extremist Islamic Defenders Front, accused of attacks on religious minorities.
The leaks "were quite unpleasant," said Teuku Faizasyah, Indonesia's presidential spokesman for foreign affairs. But he said, "Our relations with the U.S. have continued normally since. The lesson is that we have to be more careful with the flow of such intelligence."
The military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, found Manning guilty on 19 counts, including five espionage charges. Manning could face a sentence of 136 years in prison. Military prosecutors had pushed for a harsher judgment. They called him a "traitor" and said his actions had helped the al Qaeda network.
'SUBTLE RATHER THAN CATASTROPHIC'
"The official damage assessments concerning Manning/WikiLeaks have not been publicly released, but my sense is that the bulk of the damage is subtle rather than catastrophic," said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group.
"But it is nonetheless real," Aftergood said. "Because of the broad scope and overwhelming volume of the WikiLeaks cables, their disclosure cast doubt on the ability of the U.S. government to guarantee confidentiality of any kind - whether in diplomacy, military operations or intelligence. That's not a small thing."
In Australia, a crucial U.S. ally in the Asia-Pacific region, the revelations have affected the way Western diplomats operate and report on political developments, and have curtailed events such as social dinner party chats where diplomats often gain insights on what is happening in a country.
"The diplomats have told me this has affected their reporting of events in Australia, or events anywhere in the world," said government lawmaker Michael Danby, who until June was head of Australia's powerful joint intelligence committee which oversees intelligence matters.
"It has restricted political reporting and mingling for open Western societies (among diplomats and politicians)."
In late 2010, Wikileaks cables outed then Australian sports minister Mark Arbib as a regular source of information for U.S. diplomats. Danby's name was also mentioned. One cable also described current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, then the foreign minister, as a "mistake-prone control freak".
It remains to be seen whether the Manning verdict - rendered in a military rather than civilian court - will impact future prosecutions, most notably against former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents exposing previously secret U.S. telephone and internet surveillance programs. Snowden, who faces U.S. criminal charges, has taken refuge in a Moscow airport.
Aftergood, while cautioning that military courts are quite different from civilian leak trials, said, "Every Espionage Act case can alter the legal landscape for cases that come after it."
President Barack Obama has been more aggressive than any of his predecessors in searching out and punishing those responsible for national security leaks.
"There could also be some 'psychological' effect on how the government deals with leak cases as a result of the Manning trial, but this is harder to predict," Aftergood said.
"Prosecutors might say, 'Aha, we won - now let's go do it again.' Or they might say, 'OK, we made our point - now we can step back a little bit.'"
In the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosure, Obama ordered new steps to protect classified material stored on government computers and, in November 2012, issued a "National Insider Threat Policy" aimed at stopping future leaks like those by Manning.
Among the new steps were automated monitoring of classified government networks, aimed at detecting unusually large downloads of data. But that did not deter Snowden from allegedly making away with numerous highly classified NSA documents.
(Additional reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor in Jakarta and James Grubel in Canberra; Editing by Will Dunham, Stuart Grudgings and Neil Fullick)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-manning-damage-fallen-well-short-worst-u-001024179.html
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Escaped chimps cause zoo closure
1 August 2013
Last updated at 08:19 ET
Josie, Tojo and Jomar were three of the chimps which got into the secure area of their enclosure
A Leicestershire zoo had to close when eight chimpanzees found their way into service corridors in their enclosure.
At 09:35 BST, the chimps at Twycross Zoo escaped into an area they were not meant to be, leading to safety concerns.
A police spokesperson later said "everything was now in order".
Twycross Zoo, which reopened two hours later, said the animals were encouraged back into their enclosure with ice cream and fizzy drinks.
'Cupboard fun'A zoo spokeswoman said: "At no time were the public at risk, and no people or chimps were harmed during the incident, however it is part of our safety procedures that we close the zoo whilst such events are resolved.
Continue reading the main storyGreat apes
- Chimpanzees are found in the forests of central Africa
- The primates share 98% of human genes and are our closest living relative
- They demonstrate learned behaviours and use tools
"All of the chimps are fine, if not a little excited about having ice cream for breakfast. They are all on view to the public as normal."
Sharon Redrobe, the zoo's director, told BBC Radio Leicester: "Eight adventurous chimps got into the service corridors, but still within the main building, so it was still reasonably safe.
"They had a fun time running up and down, opening and closing cupboards. It took about an hour to get them into their day place.
"We apologise for closing but it was for a very good reason."
An internal investigation will now take place to discover how the animals escaped.
Leicestershire Police said the problem occurred during the moving of eight chimps and officers were called as a precaution.
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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23533133#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Video: Tonight: Manning cleared of aiding the enemy, Gulf of Mexico "dead zone," preserving TV history
Unusual fishing tournament lets sharks off the hook
Shark fishing tournaments have been popular off the coast of New York's Long Island for decades, and they've always ended with dead sharks on the dock. This year, 64 sharks were reeled in during a tournament off the coast of Montauk, and for the first time, they were all released back into the water. Chip Reid reports.
Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsVideo/~3/LBfT21Jup6A/
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Federal Court: Cell Phone Tracking Without a Warrant is A-OK
A Federal Appeals court has ruled that search warrants are not required by law enforcement agencies if they wish to seize cellphone records.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/federal-court-cell-phone-tracking-without-a-warrant-is-972962256
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Ultrasound patch heals venous ulcers in human trial
[unable to retrieve full-text content]In a small clinical study, researchers administered a new method for treating chronic wounds using a novel ultrasound applicator that can be worn like a band-aid. The applicator delivers low-frequency, low-intensity ultrasound directly to wounds, and was found to significantly accelerate healing in five patients with venous ulcers.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/Cxn5M4r_Tmk/130801095410.htm
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Angry Twitter spat leads'Fez' creator to leave game industry
fez 
20 hours ago
Polytron
"Fez" creator Phil Fish abruptly cancelled production of a sequel and retired from the game industry this weekend after a bucolic fight on Twitter.
When it comes to the caustic and chaotic world of online forums and social media, the video game industry often stands out from other areas of tech and entertainment for just how quickly a seemingly innocuous Twitter rant or indignant message can escalate into a real-world corporate dilemma. That's what forced game developer BioWare to buckle under the pressure of legions of angry "Mass Effect" fans demanding that it change the game's ending, after all. And it's the same pressure that vindicated many opponents of digital rights management who implored both Sony and Microsoft to revise their respective policies for the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
Most gamers would herald all these different cases as triumphs of social media or online discourse helping individual consumers advocate on behalf of themselves and their community. This past weekend, however, a similarly minded Twitter spat resulted in a highly anticipated sequel to a beloved independent video game being cancelled by its own creator.
Phil Fish, an indie developer who in 2012 achieved a rare kind of celebrity (for game developers, that is) after appearing as one of the main characters in the documentary "Indie Game: The Movie" in January and finally releasing his game "Fez" to widespread critical acclaim later that year, abruptly announced Saturday that he was canceling production of "Fez II" ? little more than a month after the game was first announced.
Details about what, exactly, provoked Fish's decision (or even if the famously quirky developer is actually sincere in his promise to axe "Fez II") are still murky. But many gaming outlets are pinning the sudden death of the game to a heated exchange between Fish and Marcus Beer, a gaming critic who goes by the moniker "Annoyed Gamer." The argument began last week when Beer criticized Fish and fellow indie game developer Jonathan Blow for not commenting on recent stories about Microsoft's prospective independent game development policies for the Xbox One during a rant on his GameTrailers video show. It escalated to Fish telling Beer on Twitter to "compare your life to mine and then kill yourself."
Fish's Twitter account has since been made private, but "Fez" developer Polytron issued a statement shortly after the initial Twitter showdown in which Fish reiterated that he had had enough of dealing with video games and all their assorted cultural baggage.
"i am done," he wrote. "i take the money and i run. this is as much as i can stomach. ... this is isn?t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. you win."
Many gaming journalists have since weighed in to share their own experiences dealing with the reprehensible side of gamer culture on the Internet. Cliff Bleszinski, the creator of the popular third-person shooter series "Gears of War," penned a lengthy, heartfelt letter on his personal Tumblr telling Fish "the industry needs people like you."
Thing is, Fish was already on something of a recent Twitter-rage tear by the time he erupted this past weekend. Just last week, he spent the good part of a day lambasting the video game website Polygon for quoting fellow game industry figure Kevin Dent in a story about the Xbox One's new indie publishing policies ? that coming the two traded blows on Twitter earlier this year over problems with the original "Fez's" performance. Fish may have reached the amount of Internet bile he was able to "stomach," but it was also a world that he willingly, even eagerly, participated in for part of his career.
Of course, there's also the possibility that by hanging "Fez II's" fate in the balance, Fish is deliberately courting this kind of controversy in the hopes of marshaling like-minded developers and fans (like Bleszinski) or simply to help sell more copies of the game if it ever does see the light of day.
Either way, many in the gaming press are doubtful that this is truly the last we've seen of Fish or "Fez." As Patrick Klepek put it in a recent piece on Giant Bomb: "I suspect we will, at some point, see (and play) the sequel to Fez, but this weekend?s events provide an opportunity for Fish to leave the spotlight and protect his sanity from the world and, well, himself."
"Fish speaks too passionately about games to leave them behind," he added.
Yannick LeJacq is a contributing writer for NBC News who has also covered technology and games for Kill Screen, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. You can follow him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq and reach him by email at: Yannick.LeJacq@nbcuni.com.
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Gold-diamond duo takes temperature of single cell
TALK about bling. Miniature diamonds more usually found in quantum computers, combined with fragments of gold, can be used to measure the temperature of individual cells. That could lead to a more accurate way to kill cancers while sparing healthy tissue ? and a new way to explore cell behaviour.
There are already ways to take a cell's temperature, using glowing proteins or carbon nanotubes. However, these lack sensitivity and accuracy because their components can react with substances inside the cell.
So Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University and colleagues turned to nanodiamonds, which have defects in their structure that mean they sometimes contain extra electrons. The tendency of these electrons to exist in many states at once, a superposition, makes nanodiamonds promising as the bits, or qubits, of a quantum computer, where superposition enables multiple calculations in parallel. However, these states vary with temperature, which is troublesome for computing.
Lukin's team wondered if this temperature dependence could instead be exploited to build a thermometer, particularly as diamonds are inert, so wouldn't interfere with a cell's chemistry.
The team used nanowires to insert diamonds about 100 nanometres across, along with gold nanoparticles, into a human cell in a dish. Shining a laser onto the cell heats it and the gold particles. The diamond, in turn, changes shape, squeezing the defect electrons and rearranging their energy levels.
Shining a different type of laser on the cell causes the electrons to absorb and then emit light with a brightness that depends on the new energy-level arrangement. The team used this light to deduce the cell's temperature.
They found they could detect temperature differences of just o.oo18 ?C inside the cell, a sensitivity record. And when they placed two diamonds in the cell, they could detect temperature variations between them, caused by their varying closeness to the gold. This should be possible even when the diamonds are just 200 nanometres apart.
The team also used the set-up to heat a cell enough to kill it, and recorded a temperature upon death. Lukin presented the work on 22 July at the Second International Conference on Quantum Technologies in Moscow, Russia, and this week in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature12373).
If such thermometers can be used in the body, they might improve cancer therapy, says Lukin's colleague Norman Yao. The temperatures of cancerous cells and their healthy neighbours could be monitored, and just enough heat applied to kill the cancer but not the healthy cells.
"In certain cases, particularly near critical structures such as great vessels, arteries or nerve bundles, an accurate read-out of local cellular temperature would be advantageous in the sparing of those structures," says Glenn Goodrich of Nanospectra Biosciences in Houston, Texas, a company carrying out human trials of cancer therapy based on gold nanoparticles.
Diamond thermometers could also explore cellular mysteries. "If a cell is unhappy, if it's in contact with a virus, a chemical reaction starts and it locally starts producing heat," says Lukin. "How this occurs no one understands in detail. Perhaps we can answer this question."
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CBS 2Q beats Street as dispute goes on
FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2007 file photo, a CBS Corp. logo is silhouetted in Las Vegas. CBS reports its quarterly earnings on Wednesday, July 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2007 file photo, a CBS Corp. logo is silhouetted in Las Vegas. CBS reports its quarterly earnings on Wednesday, July 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? CBS Corp. said Wednesday that net income rose 11 percent in the latest quarter, beating the expectations of analysts as the company continues to benefit from the types of fees that are at the center of a dispute with one of its key cable TV distributors.
Second-quarter net income grew to $472 million, or 76 cents per share. That's up from $427 million, or 65 cents per share, a year ago.
Revenue rose 11 percent to $3.7 billion.
Analysts polled by FactSet had expected 72 cents per share of earnings on revenue of $3.51 billion.
Shares increased 66 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $53.50 in after-hours trading.
The broadcaster benefited from licensing its shows to online streaming providers such as Netflix Inc. and from increasing the money it receives from cable and satellite TV distributors to retransmit CBS programming on customers' lineups. Analysts see such retransmission fees as key to CBS posting revenue and profit growth in the future. But such fees come at the expense of distributors, which are increasingly resisting.
A fight between CBS and one such distributor, Time Warner Cable Inc., continued Wednesday after a brief blackout of CBS stations to some cable customers after midnight on Monday. The companies have set a Friday deadline to reach a deal after a previous deal expired as the second quarter ended on June 30.
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves told investors on a conference call that the company remained resolute in its negotiations with Time Warner Cable. Time Warner Cable has resisted, saying CBS's demands would push up customer's monthly bills. But Moonves said he was confident a new deal would result in more money than it was receiving previously.
"Every deal we've made in the last two years has been an improvement from the one before," he said. "Our job is to continue to produce the content we're doing and getting paid for it."
Revenue from licensing deals is key to ensuring stability for CBS because advertising revenue ebbs and flows with the economy. The company said revenue from non-advertising sources grew to 43 percent of the total compared to less than 30 percent a few years ago.
Advertising revenue grew 5 percent in the quarter.
The company also highlighted the success of the TV show "Under the Dome," an unusual summer release that was made possible because it sold exclusive online rights to Amazon.com Inc.'s streaming video service. Episodes are available on Amazon four days after they broadcast on CBS.
Moonves said the show, based on the novel by Stephen King, cost more than $3 million per episode, but it was profitable even before it aired because of Amazon's participation and international sales.
Advertising sales based on the more than 10 million viewers each week are "gravy" that will bring in profits in the third quarter, Moonves said.
Moonves said other networks would likely try to copy the model. He said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos "actually spoke to me personally about how pleased they were that they experimented with this."
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The ghosts of ovarian cancer
Writer Donna Trussell and Dr. Steve Buie at her 10-year checkup in 2011, a decade after her ovarian cancer diagnosis.
A lot has happened in the 12 years since my diagnosis. Now I know more about ovarian cancer, and the information is not exactly comforting.
In these dozen years I?ve buried new friends, which wasn?t surprising, since they had cancer too. I?ve also buried old friends, which was shocking. ?You beat me to hospice,? I said to one. ?How?d that happen??
I have not forgotten those left behind. I once heard Tim O?Brien read a short story about a dead sister. Her ?ghost? was sad and lonely. She said she felt like a book on a library shelf that no one ever checks out. But I always remember my friends who died. I don?t know when I?ll be joining them.
Before leaving for my most recent annual check-up, I stacked books to read ? essays on outcasts and writers, a children?s story, a book on grizzly bear attacks. But when it was time to leave for the clinic, I settled on ?Doo Wop Motels: Architectural Treasures of the Wildwoods.? That ought to distract me.
I couldn?t help but notice that my doctor looked older. But then, that was the plan ? for us to grow old together. He?s been my doctor for 25 years. He found my cancer. He saved my life.
My exam started with good news, which continued the next day, when blood test results rolled in. Even the dreaded CA-125 blood test (a marker for ovarian cancer) came back normal. I was in the clear.
But a day later, another test came back. There was blood, a red flag for cancer.
I?ve had a good, long remission, which should make me more secure, but it doesn?t. There?s nothing magic about five years of survival, or even 10. I knew my ovarian cancer could still recur. I knew the toxic treatments I got could cause a brand new cancer. So could the genetic predisposition that led to my first cancer.
An acquaintance once asked me how I felt about cancer, now that it?s ?all over,? now that I know I was destined to survive. Aren?t I glad it happened? Didn?t I learn something? Didn?t good things come out of cancer?
Let?s see?scars, missing body parts, permanent damage to nerves, lowered cognitive ability, fear that never really goes away. So, no.
How did a debilitating, life-threatening disease become a journey, an adventure, a mystical calling? I suggest we demote cancer to what it really is: proof of our human frailty. Survivors go on with their lives despite cancer, not because of it.
My followup test to my followup test is scheduled now. My doctor specified it should happen ?as soon as possible.? Naturally, after cancer every phrase and gesture gets parsed for secret meaning.
Twelve years ago I was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer. My chance of surviving five years was 30 percent, or even less due to my unusually aggressive cell type. Unlike cervical and breast cancer, ovarian cancer has no screening test. My only symptoms were gas, bloating and a low-grade fever.
Amid all the public hoopla about other cancers, this year ovarian cancer will quietly kill about 14,000 American women and 22,000 will be diagnosed. Do the math.
I tell myself that just because I beat the formidable odds against me 12 years ago does not mean that the odds are now in cancer?s favor. Many benign conditions can cause bleeding.
?Let?s think positive,? the nurse said. ?Oh yes,? I said, ?because that works so well.? My sarcasm made us both laugh.
When I go in for more tests on Wednesday, I will take with me the spirits of both the living and the dead.
I feel like a fighter pilot who?s ordered back to the sky. Like I?ve survived many missions, somehow returning to base, and remembering the pilots who did not. My luck can?t hold forever. If a fighter pilot survived, the war ended and the pilot went home. But with cancer, you never really go home.
Donna Trussell is a Texas-born writer living in Kansas City.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/07/30/the-ghosts-of-ovarian-cancer/
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