Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/295598220?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, March 31, 2013
Five Best Sleep Tracking Gadgets or Apps
We could all use a better night's sleep, and the key to getting there is a mix of good sleep habits and understanding the things that keep you from getting the best sleep you possibly can. That's where sleep tracking gadgets that you wear, and smartphone apps that monitor your sleep cycles all come into play. This week, we're looking at five of the best sleep tracking tools, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the week, we asked you to tell us which sleep tracking gadgets or apps you thought were the best. We tallied your nominations, and here's a look at the top five. We know it's a bit unfair to include gadgets alongside smartphone apps, but depending on what you're looking for when it comes to sleep tracking, it's good to have options, both robust and complete (but may cost money) and affordable for the gear you already own (and free).
FitBit One
Sleep tracking is just one of the features of the FitBit One. Clip it on your pocket or somewhere else on your person and it'll keep track of the steps you take over the course of the day and how active you are overall. It'll also generate great-looking reports and feedback on your activity levels. When it comes to sleep though, just slip your FitBit One into the included wristband and set it to sleep mode. It'll track your movements overnight, including the times you get up and move around, or when you're awake tossing and turning in bed. Turn it off in the morning, and after you sync it with the FitBit web site or app, you'll get a complete report of how well you slept, along with how many times you woke up and what times during the night you were active. It won't diagnose sleep issues, but if you're worried you're tossing and turning a lot, or if your partner is the root of your sleep ailments, this gadget will tell you. iOS and Android apps complete the picture and give you access to all the data the FitBit collects from your smartphone. The FitBit One is $100, and the apps are free.
Sleep As Android
Sleep As Android is (as the name implies) Android only, but it does a great job of watching your sleep cycles. Originally it was intended to just wake you gently at the best possible time of the morning when your sleep cycle was at the best time for you to rise, but the app has come a long way since then. The app still helps you track your sleep and shows you graphs of your sleep habits overnight, but the app will also warn you if you're running on a sleep deficit and you should get back into a regular sleeping pattern. The app even pays attention to the sound in the room while you're sleeping to catch you snoring, record you talking in your sleep if that's a problem you have, or help you diagnose sleep illnesses you might not otherwise know about, like sleep apnea. Sleep As Android will wake you up gently at the best time in the morning for you to wake without being late with nature sounds, soothing music, captcha or puzzle alarms, or whatever you choose from the music on your phone or a special playlist to get you started. You can snag a 2 week trial free, after which you'll have to drop $3 for an unlock code, and a few bucks more for other useful in-app purchases.
Jawbone Up
After a bit of a rocky start with the original Jawbone, the Jawbone Up has come a long way and addressed a number of the concerns that made the original a tenuous buy. Like most activity and fitness trackers, sleep is only one thing the Up pays attention to. It'll also track your steps and your activity level, and even makes it easy to log food and drink to keep track of your diet. It'll even remind you if you've been idle too long and tell you to get up and move around. When it comes to sleep, the Up can track how many hours you've slept, and pays attention to your activity overnight, including when you toss and turn and when you're sleeping deeply versus sleeping lightly. The Up will show you everything it's recorded in a report the next day on the web site, or through the Jawbone Up iOS or Android mobile apps, so you can start trying to figure out what the root cause of your sleep issues may be, and work your way to a better night's rest. A Jawbone Up will set you back $130, and the mobile apps are free.
Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle is an iOS app that also watches your sleep habits from your nightstand in order to help wake you up at the best possible time of the morning. We've mentioned it before, a long time ago, but the app has grown a good bit since then, and still has a loyal following. It's $1, and for the money you get motion monitoring (and even advises you on where you should place your iPhone while you sleep so it can make use of its accelerometer?right next to your pillow) so the app will know when you toss and turn and when you wake in the middle of the night. The app collects its data and then presents it to you in easy-to-understand graphs, and lets you even mark conditions for the night, including behaviors you may have changed, so you can see their effect on your night's rest. The app also functions as an alarm clock, and will wake you to your own music or any one of over a dozen soothing alarm melodies for a gentle start to the day. Plus, the app runs in the background so you can set your regular alarm and go about your business.
Sleepbot
SleepBot for Android is another great Android utility for tracking your sleep patterns and measuring how well you sleep over the course of several nights. We covered it a while ago, but the app has grown and added a wealth of new features since then. The app tracks you sleep, but it also tracks movement overnight, auto-recording so you can hear whether you snore or if you're having breathing problems overnight (or if you're talking in your sleep), and is even packed with tips to help improve your sleep hygiene and fall asleep faster (and stay deeply asleep). The app also has an easy-to-use widget that lets you "clock in" and "clock out" when you go to bed and when you wake up to start and stop the app from tracking your activity, and it supports a number of other Android alarm clocks, so you don't have to give up the app you love to use Sleepbot to track your sleep. Best of all, the app is completely free, and pairs with the Sleepbot webapp for even more detailed analysis.
Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all out vote.
Honorable mentions this week go to Sleep Time for Android and iOS, which does a lot of what many of the others app here in the round up also do: it keeps track of your movements and your sleep cycles, and wakes you up gradually at the right time during your sleep cycle so you're not late, but you're also not groggy and feel terrible when it's time to get up. For more information on Sleep Time, check out our article about it. It's free for Android users, and $2 for iOS users.
Also, before you buy a sleep tracking gadget or try out an app to help improve your night's sleep, our own Adam Dachis did a lot of the work for you. Check out how he got a better night's sleep with the help of technology to learn what worked (and what didn't) for him.
Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is?and make your case for it?in the discussions below.
The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it?it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!
Title photo by groenmen.
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/LmaG0apxbYk/five-best-sleep-tracking-gadgets-or-apps
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3 of 4 reptiles stolen from Calif. museum found
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) ? Three of four reptiles that were swiped from a science museum and thrown together into a garbage bag during a heist were recovered Friday, though a 3-foot-long ball python remained at large, officials said.
The 3?-foot savannah monitor lizard, a 7-foot-long red-tailed boa constrictor and another 3-foot-long ball python were in good condition, said Mary Ellen Wright, the director of the Fresno Discovery Center. Authorities were searching for the missing python in an area frequented by a suspect, who has been arrested.
Wright had been worried about the reptiles' confinement together in the bag "because they are mortal enemies," she said.
"It would be like throwing two pit bulls in a locked room," she added, noting that the monitor lizard has sharp, 2-inch claws.
The reptiles were taken in a robbery that has perplexed museum officials and authorities, who have not released a motive.
Fresno Police Lt. Donald Gross said Friday Devin Michael Madej, 20, was arrested on suspicion of burglary and possession of stolen property.
The museum's education coordinator, Ian Goudelock, said the burglar didn't appear to be out to intentionally hurt the animals though the museum planned to have the reptiles checked by a veterinarian.
"It's just a strange theft. We're still trying to figure out why," he said. "It does kind of more or less have a happy ending."
Surveillance video showed the burglar broke into the Central California museum sometime late Wednesday or early Thursday, smashed the tanks that held the four reptiles ? worth hundreds of dollars ? and popped them into a garbage bag.
He also went into the center's gift shop and stole children's toys, the phone system and the security monitor, the Fresno Bee reported.
___
Information from: The Fresno Bee, http://www.fresnobee.com
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/3-4-reptiles-stolen-calif-museum-found-232302632.html
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Saturday, March 30, 2013
President Obama Sends Easter and Passover Message
President Obama dedicated his weekly address to the celebration of two religious holidays this week - Easter and Passover - and urged Americans to engage in prayer and reflection over the weekend.
"For millions of Americans, this is a special and sacred time of year," President Obama said. "This week, Jewish families gathered around the Seder table commemorating the Exodus from Egypt and the triumph of faith over oppression. And this weekend, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will join Christians around the world to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the hopeful promise of Easter.
"In the midst of all of our busy and noisy lives, these holy days afford us the precious opportunity to slow down and spend some q
obama uiet moments in prayer and reflection," he added.
PHOTOS: President Obama's First Term Captured In Photos
The president will be in Washington, D.C., over Easter weekend. And on Monday, the first family will welcome Americans to the White House for the annual Easter egg roll festivities.
"This weekend, I hope we're all able to take a moment to pause and reflect, to embrace our loved ones, to give thanks for our blessings, to rededicate ourselves to interests larger than our own," he said. "And to all the Christian families who are celebrating the Resurrection, Michelle and I wish you a blessed and joyful Easter."
The Republicans used their weekly address, delivered by Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., to not only spread well-wishes for Easter and Passover, but also to advocate for the building of the Keystone XL pipeline to lower energy prices.
"The Keystone XL pipeline is a no-brainer," Terry said in the GOP address. "The people and the Congress have spoken. The experts have weighed in. Now it's the time to build the Keystone pipeline. No more delays, no more politics. If the president continues to drag his feet, Congress is prepared to act.
"Doing all of this isn't just about the dollars and cents. It's about coming together to solve longstanding problems to ensure our children will have the same chances, the same hope and freedoms we've had," he said. "These are the blessings we celebrate during the rites of Easter and Passover. It's a time to unite in prayer and celebration - to renew traditions, lift up our spirits and tell old stories that remind us how trials and suffering can be overcome with courage and resolve. It's a time for perspective. If we look for opportunities to work together and seize on them - if we choose to build on and not squander past sacrifices - we come that much closer to realizing the promise of a more perfect union and peace for one and all."
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FEMA frustrated by drop in ND flood policies
FARGO, N.D. (AP) ? As North Dakota faces another possible major flood this spring, federal officials are frustrated by the number of people in the state who lack insurance for such a disaster.
Along the Red River and its tributaries, in flood-prone Fargo and Cass County, the number of insurance policies dropped by more than 40 percent from 2011 to 2012, FEMA officials said. Residents there have battled flooding in for five of the last seven years.
"It's an amazing phenomenon how people can go through these things, then drop their flood insurance and try to buy it back in time," FEMA spokesman Dave Kyner said. "I guess that's one of the most frustrating things for us here."
Flood policies in all of North Dakota declined 32 percent, which coincided with a dry year throughout the state.
Policies must be in effect for 30 days for flood damage to be covered. FEMA officials did not have figures for 2013 but said they have received calls recently from agents indicating a flurry of activity.
Richard Thomas, who lives in a subdivision south of Fargo that has lost nearly 20 homes to flooding or buyouts, said he considered dropping his insurance before deciding it was a bad idea.
"Our property is fairly high, so I thought about getting it when I thought I would need it," he said. "But the window (for getting insurance) is pretty small so I didn't want to try and time it."
The National Weather Service says there's a 50 percent chance this spring that Fargo will have one of the area's top five floods of all time, at around 38 feet. The first flood outlook in January called for a 6 percent chance that the river would reach 30 feet, but late winter snows bumped up the forecast.
Darren Dunlop, who lives in a north Fargo neighborhood protected by a permanent floodwall, said he started buying insurance a few years ago so he would be grandfathered in if there were policy changes.
"My insurance agent told me that when the new flood plain comes in, you will be required to have it," Dunlop said. "If you don't have it, you will have to buy it from the feds and it will be at an astronomically high rate."
The average flood policy in the U.S. is about $600 a year, according to the federal website http://www.Floodsmart.gov. Where a person lives and the age, elevation and structure of the home can affect the cost.
Policyholders can receive some money for flood-protection efforts, including sandbags. Thomas said he was paid $1,000 for a portable plastic tube called an AquaDam, which he calls his second insurance policy.
"Everyone out here is done with sandbags," Thomas said of the Forest River subdivision where he lives. "We're an AquaDam community."
Kyner said North Dakota had more disaster declarations than any other state in the six-state FEMA region between 1964 and 2010 and is among the top in the country for FEMA declarations in the last 15 years.
Kyner said when the historic Souris River flood wiped out 4,160 homes and businesses in Minot in 2011, the number of insurance policies in the city stood at 383. By the end of the year, that number had ballooned to 2,622. Last year it dropped 39 percent.
FEMA officials said people in Fargo and Cass County may have a false sense of security because of improvements made in flood protection since 2009, including the construction of new levees and the demolition of houses on the flood plain.
"People tend to think if they are close to the river, they have a high propensity for flooding, they need flood insurance, and if they're away from the river, they don't," said Norm Ashford, FEMA's insurance specialist. "But we actually pay 20 to 30 percent of our claims that are not close to the river."
Asked who needs flood insurance, Ashford said, "Everyone."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fema-frustrated-drop-nd-flood-policies-183758351.html
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Killer waves: Scientists study how tsunamis changed history
USGS
Beach damage between Banda Aceh and Krueng Sabe on Jan. 28, 2005, after a devastating tsunami.
By Becky Oskin
LiveScience
In a jumbled layer of pebbles and shells called the "Dog's Breakfast deposit" lies evidence of a massive tsunami, one of two that transformed New Zealand's Maori people in the 15th century.
After the killer wave destroyed food resources and coastal settlements, sweeping societal changes emerged, including the building of fortified hill forts and a shift toward a warrior culture.
"This is called patch protection, wanting to guard what little resources you've got left. Ultimately it led to a far more war-like society," said James Goff, a tsunami geologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
The Maori?were victims of a one-two punch. An earthquake on the nearby Tonga-Kermadec fault triggered the first tsunami in the mid-15th century. It was soon followed by an enormous wave triggered by an exploding volcano called Kuwae, near Vanuatu. The volcano's 1453 eruption was 10 times bigger than Krakatoa and triggered the last phase of worldwide cooling called the Little Ice Age.
The tsunamis mark the divide between the Archaic and Classic periods in Maori history, Goff said. "The driver is this catastrophic event," he told OurAmazingPlanet.
Goff is one of many scientists searching for ancient tsunamis in the Pacific and elsewhere. The devastating 2004 Indonesia tsunami and earthquake, which killed 280,000 people, brought renewed focus on the hazards of these giant waves. Understanding future risk requires knowing where tsunamis struck in the past, and how often. As researchers uncover signs of prehistoric tsunamis, the scientists are beginning to link these ocean-wide events with societal shifts.
Government of Australia
"Following 2004, there has been a lot of rethinking and a greater appreciation for how such events would have impacted coastal settlements," said Patrick Daly, an archaeologist with the Earth Observatory of Singapore.
Vulnerable islands
The West's written history and legends clearly illustrate the consequences of tremendous tsunamis in the Mediterranean. A great wave destroyed Minoan culture on the Greek island of Crete in 1600 B.C. The same tsunami may be responsible for the legend of Atlantis, the verdant land drowned in the ocean. More recently, in 1755, an enormous tsunami destroyed Lisbon, Portugal, Europe's third-largest city at the time. The destruction influenced philosophers and writers from Kant to Voltaire, who references the event in his novel "Candide." [10 Tsunamis That Changed History]
But islands face a much greater threat from tsunamis than coastal communities. After the Lisbon tsunami, the king of Portugal immediately set out to rebuild the city, which was only possible thanks to the presence of untouched inland areas.
"An island becomes totally cut off from the outside world," said Uri ten Brink, a marine geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Mass. "Islands are a lot more vulnerable to such disasters. It's the same kind of thing as during bad hurricanes. It takes a lot longer to recover."
Exposed on all sides, islands are simply more likely to be hit by tsunamis. People settle in shallow bays, which are protected from storms but actually magnify the height of incoming tsunami waves. Food in these societies comes from marine resources, which are destroyed by tsunamis, and croplands that become inundated with saltwater. Boats are smashed, halting trade and communication. Goff said women, children and the elderly are most likely to die, and in Polynesian culture, elders hold the knowledge needed to build boats, make tools and grow food.
The islands of the Pacific are particularly vulnerable. About 85 percent of the world's tsunamis strike in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to its perilous tectonics. Tsunamis are waves triggered when earthquakes, landslides or volcanic eruptions shove a section of water. Ringed by subduction zones, spots where one of Earth's plates slides beneath the other, the Pacific suffers the world's most powerful earthquakes, and it holds the highest concentration of active volcanoes.
USGS
A coal barge and tug carried onto land in Lho Nga, Sumatra in 2004. The tsunami runup reached 104 feet (32 m) here.
But the kind of tsunami that can change history, one that sweeps across the entire ocean, is rare.
"There are many tsunamis where there's been no cultural response or no obvious one," Goff said. "The smaller events aren't going to be the game changers."
Polynesia and tsunamis
But Goff thinks he's found a "black swan" that hit 2,800 years ago, the result of an enormous earthquake on the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone, where two of Earth's tectonic plates collide. The tsunami scoured beaches throughout the Southwest Pacific, leaving distinctive sediments for scientists to decode. Goff's findings are detailed in several studies, most recently in the February 2012 issue of the journal The Holocene.
The tsunami coincides with the mysterious long pause, when rapid Polynesian expansion inexplicably stopped for 2,000 years. Before the pause, settlers had swiftly crossed from New Guinea to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa over the course of about 500 years.
"It's one of those archaeological conundrums," Goff said. "Why? Well, if I just had my culture obliterated, it might take me a little time to recover. It's probably not the only explanation, but it very well could have been the root cause of why they stopped," he told OurAmazingPlanet.
Two tsunamis in the 15th century had a similarly chilling effect on Polynesian society. After leaving Samoa between AD 1025 and 1120, Polynesians spread across the Pacific Ocean, discovering nearly all of the 500 habitable islands there, according to a study published Feb. 1, 2011, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Polynesian network covered an area the size of North America, all traversed by wooden canoes. [7 Most Dangerous Places on Earth]
Following the tsunamis, the culture contracted, with the rise of chiefdoms, insularity and warfare, Goff said. "There was a major breakdown at exactly that time," Goff said. "You have to live on what you have on your island, and that causes warfare and a fundamental shift in how they go about living."
Indian Ocean tsunami history
Paleotsunamis also froze trade in the Indian Ocean, according to recent studies by geologists and archaeologists.
Along the Sunda fault off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, which spawned the deadly 2004 tsunami, growth patterns in coral reefs record past earthquakes. Combined with sediment layers that point to past tsunamis and historic records of cultural shifts, the clues suggest a 14th century tsunami with an impact as great as the modern cataclysm.
After the 14th-century tsunami, Indian Ocean traders shifted to the sheltered northern and eastern coasts in the Straits of Malacca, and activity ceased in coastal settlements in the same area hit by the 2004 wave, said Daly of Singapore's Earth Observatory.
"We think that the 14th-century tsunami disrupted one of the main trading routes connecting the Indian Ocean with China and Southeast Asia, a far more powerful impact on a global scale than what happened in 2004," Daly said.
After about a century, there was a gradual shift back, leading to the establishment of the flourishing Acehnese Sultanate from the 16th century, he said.
"It is interesting to think that later settlement only began after the memory of the previous event had faded," Daly told OurAmazingPlanet. "A huge, unexpected deluge of water that wiped out everything along the coast would have been really traumatic and incomprehensible to people in the past, and it is reasonable to suspect that the survivors would have been very apprehensive about moving back into such areas."
Repeating the past
Warnings would be passed down in oral or written stories and legends. The Maori offer detailed accounts of a series of great waves that hit the New Zealand coast. Along the Cascadia subduction zone, west of Washington state, tribal mythology documents a 1700 tsunami, with warnings to flee to high ground.
But because history-changing waves are rare, the warnings may be lost to time, or disregarded. In Japan, stone markers warned of the height of past tsunamis, and told residents to flee after an earthquake. Not all heeded the ancient admonitions when the 2011 Tohoku earthquake struck and sent a massive wave ashore.
By studying past tsunamis and their causes, researchers such as Goff and ten Brink of the USGS hope to reduce the destruction and loss of life from future waves. Right now, ten Brink is on Anegada Island in the Caribbean, investigating whether a tsunami there between 1450 and 1600?came from Lisbon or a local source. The project started as a hunt for evidence of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, one similar in size to those in Japan and Sumatra. Goff is assembling a database of Pacific paleotsunamis, including the 1450 wave, which ran 100 feet (30 meters) inland along the New Zealand coast.
"The reason we're interested in looking at old tsunamis is we're worried about how often these things happen," Goff said.
The question is whether increased knowledge about the scope and frequency of tsunamis will change current and future decision-making. [Read: Tsunami Warnings: How to Prepare]
"The early evidence from the last few destructive tsunamis suggests that we don't necessarily learn lessons that well, and people in general seem to be willing to remain in highly vulnerable areas," Daly said.
Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us?@OAPlanet, Facebook?or Google +. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Friday, March 29, 2013
Google adds Street View to ghost town inside Japan nuclear zone
AP / Google
This March 2013 image released by Google shows its camera-equipped Street View vehicle as it moves through Namie in Japan, a nuclear no-go zone where former residents have been unable to live since they fled from radioactive contamination from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant two years ago.
By Yuri Kageyama, Associated Press
TOKYO? ? Concrete rubble litters streets lined with shuttered shops and dark windows. A collapsed roof juts from the ground. A ship sits stranded on a stretch of dirt flattened when the tsunami roared across the coastline. There isn't a person in sight.
Google Street View is giving the world a rare glimpse into one of Japan's eerie ghost towns, created when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami sparked a nuclear disaster that has left the area uninhabitable.
The technology pieces together digital images captured by Google's fleet of camera-equipped vehicles and allows viewers to take virtual tours of locations around the world, including faraway spots like the South Pole and fantastic landscapes like the Grand Canyon.
AP / Google
This screenshot, made from the Google Maps site provided March 27, 2013 by Google, shows stranded ships left as a testament to the power of the tsunami which hit the area two years ago.
Now it is taking people inside Japan's nuclear no-go zone, to the city of Namie, whose 21,000 residents have been unable to return to live since they fled the radiation spewing from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant two years ago.
Koto Naganuma, 32, who lost her home in the tsunami, said some people find it too painful to see the places that were so familiar yet are now so out of reach.
She has only gone back once, a year ago, and for a few minutes.
"I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited I can take a look at those places that are so dear to me," said Naganuma. "It would be hard, too. No one is going to be there."
Namie Mayor Tamotsu Baba said memories came flooding back as he looked at the images shot by Google earlier this month.
He spotted an area where an autumn festival used to be held and another of an elementary school that was once packed with schoolchildren.
"Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children," he said in a post on his blog.
"We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster."
Street View was started in 2007, and now provides images from more than 3,000 cities across 48 countries, as well as parts of the Arctic and Antarctica.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Poll: People want to prepare for worsening climate
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A new national survey says 82 percent of Americans want to prepare now for rising seas and stronger storms from climate change. But most are unwilling to spend the money to keep the beach where it is.
The poll by Stanford University found that only 1 in 3 people favored the government spending millions to construct big sea walls, replenish beaches or pay people to leave the coast.
The options the majority preferred were making sure new buildings were stronger and reducing future coastal development.
Three in 5 people want those who are directly affected by rising seas to pay for protection, not the entire American public.
Survey director Jon Krosnick said Americans seem fatalistic about global warming.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/poll-people-want-prepare-worsening-climate-205901705.html
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6 Amazing Adventure Tours for Women like Us
A sense of adventure does not diminish with age. As older women, we have a greater sense of self, are more confident and appreciate those things that are most important in life. We are inspired by natural and authentic beauty, have a dedication to lifelong learning and a curiosity to explore new experiences. Above all, we appreciate and stand in awe of the wonders our world holds. The following 6 must-see tours are suggestions for women just like us. If you have an adventure travel experience you?d like to share, please comment below.
Failte, Ireland ? the Most Beautiful Place on Earth!
National Geographic Photographers dubbed Southern Ireland?s Dingle Peninsula The Most Beautiful Place on Earth thanks to breathtaking views and pristine archeological sites. This unique area of Ireland has supported life for over 6,000 years, and the landscape is dotted with over 2,000 castles, strongholds and archaeological monuments.
Begin your morning with a horseback ride along pristine beaches, four wheeling through the hills or hiking ancient walking trails that lead you through greenest hills you?ve ever seen. Take a mid-morning tour of haunted sites with a special interest tour leader who will fill you in on local legends and lore while giving you a truly unique tour. Try your hand at archery or skeet shooting on castle grounds before ending your tour mid-afternoon.
Take a surfing or try kayaking lesson in the afternoon, charter a vessel for deep sea fishing fun or try dropping a line into one of the many rivers along the coast. Complete your day with Ireland?s finest cuisine accompanied by Irish brewed stouts or ales at a local pub, where you?re sure to have an unbelievable evening full of laughter, storytelling and music.
Anchorage (Alaska),?U.S.A.?- Flightseeing Tours
Alaska is the final frontier, and there is no better place to experience such a ruggedly beautiful terrain while still being within reach of the conveniences of the city. Anchorage is snuggled into the Chugach Mountain Range and receives 600 inches of snow every winter. One of the best ways to view majestic Chugach State Park without undertaking a mountain climbing adventure is to hop aboard a flightseeing tour.
During your tour of the Alaskan skies, you will travel over the Knik Glacier rim where you will view amazing hanging glaciers. Zip over the Colony Glacier at Lake George to view where it spills into the winding Knik Glacier Gorge. See moose, Dall sheep, and more while you fly over pristine lakes and surrounded by breath-taking snowcapped mountains before heading back to your hotel or private cabin.
South Africa ? Elephant Back Safaris
Follow the footsteps of the Ancients to a land of magnificent beauty and exotic wildlife.
Jeep safaris rarely stray from the road, but an elephant back safari takes you off the beaten track. Your tour begins in the saddle of Africa?s most beloved transportation: the elephant. Because their scent masks yours, other creatures feel safe. You?ll remain safe and protected while viewing Africa through the elephant?s eyes ? complete with lions, tigers, hippos, rhinos and more.
Be inspired when you meet preserve guardsmen with passion, sacrifice and dedication to animal welfare. Guards are community heroes: military tough, attuned to the environment, and uniquely qualified by skills learned only by native tribesmen as a rite of passage.
Return to civilization, where you are welcome to tour local markets brimming with handmade textiles, jewelry, art, instruments and traditional dress while you watch the natives sporadically break out in song and dance. This trip is hard to top!
Seattle (WA), U.S.A.?- Blake Island Boat Tour
The appreciation of stunning outdoor beauty combined with a peek into the world of ancient civilizations equates to an adventure tour you don?t want to miss. Seattle?s Puget Sound is home to Blake Island, a private island accessible only by private charter or boat. Hop on your cruise boat from downtown Seattle?s Pier 55, where you will cruise to Tillicum Village.
Tourists learn about the ways of ancient inhabitants while being greeted with a traditional meal of steamed clams in nectar and salmon prepared in Native style. Take in a show of the Coast Salish tribe?s storytelling and symbolism before wrapping up with a quick tour of the islands. Explore the island?s walking and hiking trails and 5 miles of pristine beaches before wrapping up your tour at the gift shop.
Cambodia ? Jungle Safari and Boat Tour
Many of Cambodia?s most precious sites were abandoned for unknown reasons. In time, they were forgotten, eventually lost to the jungle, where they lay untouched, slowly disintegrating. Political unrest discouraged archaeological work. Today, the political climate is comfortable, rediscovery efforts are supported, and there is much to see. While you?re sure to visit Cambodia?s temples and sites, there are adventures to be had in the jungle and sea!
Your adventure begins with breakfast aboard a converted Khmer tour boat. While traveling to Koh Ta Kiev, you?ll enjoy views of lush jungles and white sand beaches complemented by brilliantly blue water. Snorkel stunningly colorful coral reef and try your hand at fishing for squid and reef fish. You will dock on a secluded island before lunching on traditionally cooked fresh seafood at a Khmer floating fishing village. Be sure to explore the local markets for one-of-a-kind souvenirs.
Cruise north to a private cove, drop anchor and take a 30 minute guided jungle trek, where you will likely see jungle cats, exotic birds, monkeys, snakes and other native wildlife. Take a quick dip before leaving campers around 4pm, or speak with your tour guide about renting tent space for an overnight stay in the jungle. Your tour comes to a close with your boat ride back to the mainland whistle you enjoy a sunset drink.
Austin (TX), U.S.A. ? Lake Travis Zip Line Adventures
Austin is a great place to vacation when cold weather keeps beating you back indoors. Temperatures are warm year round, and the city offers constant musical entertainment, numerous fishing lakes, natural hot springs and more to enjoy at your leisure.
While leisure is great, if you?re looking for something a little more heart-poundingly adventurous, you?ve got to try the safe but thrilling 2 ? hour zip line tour of the famous canyons and inlets gracing Lake Travis. Fly down 5 different zip lines ranging in length from 250 feet to over 2800 feet. You?ll never experience views like these any other way! Professional tour guides teach you about the local area while assisting you through challenging hikes and nature walks.
Have you ever participated in an adventurous tour? Did it change your life? What was your experience and what tips would you give to your fellow travelers? Please add your comments below?
Source: http://sixtyandme.com/6-amazing-adventure-tours-for-women-like-us/
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Experimental Drug May Work Against Hepatitis C - Health News and ...
By Maureen Salamon
HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) ? An experimental therapy for hepatitis C ? a ?silent killer? linked to liver cancer and cirrhosis ? has shown promise in tamping down virus levels in early trials.
Experts caution, however, that it?s too soon to know if the injectable drug will someday gain a standing among emerging oral medications against the disease.
New research suggests that the drug, miravirsen, could potentially be part of a drug ?cocktail? that manages the hepatitis C virus in much the same way as similar combinations have transformed HIV/AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable condition.
Miravirsen suppresses molecules the hepatitis C virus needs to reproduce. The drug decreased viral loads by about 500-fold at the highest doses used in a small, phase 2 study by an international group of researchers. Drug resistance, a common problem with other hepatitis C medications, did not develop among patients taking miravirsen.
A phase 2 trial evaluates a drug?s effectiveness while continuing to assess its safety.
?This is the first real clinical study of this approach and the results are encouraging,? said Dr. Judy Lieberman, chairwoman of cellular and molecular medicine at Boston Children?s Hospital. ?What?s exciting to me is that there doesn?t seem to be any drug resistance developing. If there?s a way to develop a drug cocktail that doesn?t require a half a year of treatment ? that would be really exciting, but it?s too early to tell.?
Lieberman was not involved in the research but co-wrote an editorial accompanying the new study in the March 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Hepatitis C is one form of liver disease and affects about 170 million people worldwide, according to study background information. It?s transmitted by shared needles or, less frequently, through sex. Often symptomless, the infection is a major cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver.
Led by Dr. Harry Janssen, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, researchers split 36 patients with hepatitis C into four groups. Nine patients in each of the first three groups received a dose of either 3 milligrams (mg), 5 mg or 7 mg of miravirsen per kilogram of body weight for 29 days, while the last nine patients received a placebo. All were followed for 18 weeks.
The so-called viral load of patients receiving the highest dose decreased by about 500-fold, Lieberman said, and the hepatitis C virus was below detectable levels in four of nine patients. Meanwhile, the treatment caused no significant toxic effects in any patients, aside from mild injection-site reactions and a brief increase in liver enzyme levels.
Calling the study ?interesting,? Dr. David Bernstein, chief of the division of hepatology at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., said that as an injectable drug, miravirsen would be less desirable among patients than other new drugs for hepatitis C that can be taken orally.
?It?s a novel concept, but it?s only 36 patients and a phase 2 study,? Bernstein said. ?It?s impressive that their viral loads came down, but most suffered a recurrence of the virus.?
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about hepatitis C.
Source: http://news.health.com/2013/03/27/experimental-drug-may-work-against-hepatitis-c/
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Relevant Blog Commenting | Article Rewriting | Articles | Blog ...
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SPAM comments unrelated to the post will not be tolerated.
GOAL OF COMMENT: To genuinely comment on the post and add value. The comments are not valuable unless they are approved by the blogger, so making a real comment is critical. Again, SPAM comments unrelated to the post will not be tolerated.
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4. Your comment must use excellent native-English grammar.
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Article Rewriting, Articles, Blog, Copywriting, Technical Writing Qualifications required:
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Even graphene has weak spots
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Public release date: 28-Mar-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: David Ruth
david@rice.edu
713-348-6327
Rice University
Rice, Tsinghua theorists find junctions in polycrystalline graphene sap strength of super material
HOUSTON (March 28, 2013) Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost never perfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
###
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
David Ruth
Mike Williams
713-348-6728
mikewilliams@rice.edu
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400542n.
This news release can be found online at: http://news.rice.edu/2013/03/28/even-graphene-has-weak-spots/.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Related Materials:
Yakobson Group: http://biygroup.blogs.rice.edu
Zhiping Xu Group: http://www.cel-tsinghua.org/xuzp/people.html
Graphic for download: http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0328_GRAPHENE-web.jpg
New work by theorists at Rice and Tsinghua universities shows defects in polycrystalline forms of graphene will sap its strength. The illustration from a simulation at left shows a junction of grain boundaries where three domains of graphene meet with a strained bond in the center. At right, the calculated stress buildup at the tip of a finite-length grain boundary. (Credit: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University)
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 28-Mar-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: David Ruth
david@rice.edu
713-348-6327
Rice University
Rice, Tsinghua theorists find junctions in polycrystalline graphene sap strength of super material
HOUSTON (March 28, 2013) Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost never perfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
###
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
David Ruth
Mike Williams
713-348-6728
mikewilliams@rice.edu
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400542n.
This news release can be found online at: http://news.rice.edu/2013/03/28/even-graphene-has-weak-spots/.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Related Materials:
Yakobson Group: http://biygroup.blogs.rice.edu
Zhiping Xu Group: http://www.cel-tsinghua.org/xuzp/people.html
Graphic for download: http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0328_GRAPHENE-web.jpg
New work by theorists at Rice and Tsinghua universities shows defects in polycrystalline forms of graphene will sap its strength. The illustration from a simulation at left shows a junction of grain boundaries where three domains of graphene meet with a strained bond in the center. At right, the calculated stress buildup at the tip of a finite-length grain boundary. (Credit: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University)
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/ru-egh032813.php
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Thursday, March 28, 2013
Multiple moves found harmful to poor young children
Public release date: 28-Mar-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Sarah Mancoll
smancoll@srcd.org
202-289-7905
Society for Research in Child Development
Poor children who move three or more times before they turn 5 have more behavior problems than their peers, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and the National Employment Law Project. The study is published in the journal Child Development.
Moving is a fairly common experience for American families; in 2002, 6.5 percent of all children had been living in their current home for less than six months. Among low-income children, that number rose to 10 percent. In addition, in 2002, 13 percent of families above poverty moved once, but 24 percent of families below poverty moved. Research has shown that frequent moves are related to a range of behavioral, emotional, and school problems for adolescents.
Using national data on 2,810 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, representative study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, researchers sought to determine how frequent moves relate to children's readiness for school. Parents were interviewed shortly after the birth of their children, then again by phone when the children were 1, 3, and 5; in-home assessments were done when the children were 3 and 5. The study also looked at the children's language and literacy outcomes, as well as behavior problems reported by mothers.
The study found that 23 percent of the children had never moved, 48 percent had moved once or twice, and 29 percent had moved three or more times. Among children who moved three or more times before age 5, nearly half (44 percent) were poor; poverty was defined based on the official federal threshold. Moving three or more times was not related to the children's language and literacy outcomes.
But children who moved three or more times had more attention problems, anxiousness or depression, and aggressiveness or hyperactivity at age 5 than those who had never moved or those who had moved once or twice. These increases in behavior problems occurred only among poor children, the study found, suggesting that frequent moves early in life are most disruptive for the most disadvantaged children.
"The United States is still recovering from the great recession, which has taken a major toll on the housing market," notes Kathleen Ziol-Guest, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, who led the study. "As housing markets have collapsed across communities, highly mobile low-income families have moved in search of work and less expensive housing.
"The findings in this study suggest that the housing crisis and its accompanying increase in mobility likely will have negative effects on young children, especially poor children."
###
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 28-Mar-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Sarah Mancoll
smancoll@srcd.org
202-289-7905
Society for Research in Child Development
Poor children who move three or more times before they turn 5 have more behavior problems than their peers, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and the National Employment Law Project. The study is published in the journal Child Development.
Moving is a fairly common experience for American families; in 2002, 6.5 percent of all children had been living in their current home for less than six months. Among low-income children, that number rose to 10 percent. In addition, in 2002, 13 percent of families above poverty moved once, but 24 percent of families below poverty moved. Research has shown that frequent moves are related to a range of behavioral, emotional, and school problems for adolescents.
Using national data on 2,810 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, representative study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, researchers sought to determine how frequent moves relate to children's readiness for school. Parents were interviewed shortly after the birth of their children, then again by phone when the children were 1, 3, and 5; in-home assessments were done when the children were 3 and 5. The study also looked at the children's language and literacy outcomes, as well as behavior problems reported by mothers.
The study found that 23 percent of the children had never moved, 48 percent had moved once or twice, and 29 percent had moved three or more times. Among children who moved three or more times before age 5, nearly half (44 percent) were poor; poverty was defined based on the official federal threshold. Moving three or more times was not related to the children's language and literacy outcomes.
But children who moved three or more times had more attention problems, anxiousness or depression, and aggressiveness or hyperactivity at age 5 than those who had never moved or those who had moved once or twice. These increases in behavior problems occurred only among poor children, the study found, suggesting that frequent moves early in life are most disruptive for the most disadvantaged children.
"The United States is still recovering from the great recession, which has taken a major toll on the housing market," notes Kathleen Ziol-Guest, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, who led the study. "As housing markets have collapsed across communities, highly mobile low-income families have moved in search of work and less expensive housing.
"The findings in this study suggest that the housing crisis and its accompanying increase in mobility likely will have negative effects on young children, especially poor children."
###
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/sfri-mmf032113.php
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Russia backs Syria, firmly, as UN prepares chemical weapons probe
Russia is laying to rest any thoughts that its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might be wavering: It is championing the Assad regime?s position in a United Nations probe of alleged chemical weapons use in the Syria conflict, and blasting as ?illegal? the official recognition of the Syrian opposition by some countries.
At the same time, Britain and France are advocating providing Western military assistance to the rebels, and urging the United States to drop its opposition to joining such a plan.
Secretary of State John Kerry, in Paris Wednesday, got a bit of direct pressure from the French, who want the US to at least provide nonlethal logistical assistance if the Britain and France provide the heavy weapons the rebels want.
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The result of this standoff between camps of world powers is that the Syrian conflict, which the UN says has already claimed more than 70,000 lives and driven hundreds of thousands of Syrians into neighboring countries, seems likely to drag on for some time.
?It?s hard to see the conditions or sequence of events that lead to a quick end to this war, which is one reason there is so much emphasis on maintaining the delivery of humanitarian assistance,? says one UN official.
At the UN, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is assembling the team and finalizing other details of the investigation he ordered last week into allegations from both camps in the Syria war that chemical weapons were used in Aleppo in northern Syria.
Want your top political issues explained? Get customized DC Decoder updates.
But Russia is complicating Secretary General Ban?s already politically sensitive task, demanding that the team of investigators include representatives from the five permanent members of the Security Council ? in other words that Russia and China, which have repeatedly blocked UN action against Mr. Assad, be guaranteed a hand in the investigation.
At one point, Russia even briefly insisted that the investigation be called off. That came after Britain and France urged Ban to extend the investigation to all claims of chemical weapons use in Syria and not limit it to the Aleppo incident earlier this month.
Ban?s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told reporters earlier this week that the investigation team would be made up of experts from two international organizations ? the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World Health Organization. On Tuesday, Mr. Nesirky announced that Ban had named Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish scientist who was part of the team that investigated allegations that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, as head of the Syria investigation.
Nesirky also said that the investigation will focus on technical issues and on determining whether or not chemical weapons were used ? and not on determining who used them.
President Obama has said the use of chemical weapons in the Syria conflict would be a ?red line? for the US. Some regional analysts speculate that a determination that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons would trigger deeper US involvement in the conflict, perhaps a US decision to arm the rebels.
The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, hinted as much in a statement last week supporting Ban?s decision to launch an investigation. ?If Bashar al-Assad and those under his command make the mistake of using chemical weapons, or fail to meet their obligation to secure them, then there will be consequences,? Ambassador Rice said
It was the Syrian regime that originally requested that Ban launch an investigation of the Aleppo incident. But according to some analysts, Russia now wants to make sure that the investigation doesn?t end up a pretext for Western intervention in the conflict ? in the way the US used allegations of Iraq?s (as it turned out, nonexistent) WMDs to launch the Iraq invasion.
But Russia is not limiting its unflagging support for Assad to the chemical weapons investigation.
Moscow reacted swiftly this week when the Arab League turned Syria's seat in the organization over to the opposition, and as Qatar ? which was hosting an Arab League summit ? gave the Syrian opposition the keys to Syria?s embassy in Doha, the Qatari capital. Russia said it was "illegal" and "anti-Syrian" for Qatar to hand over the embassy.
The Assad regime said Qatar had illegally given the embassy to a band of ?bandits and thugs,? and the official Syrian news agency SANA reacted by calling Qatar ?the biggest bank for supporting terrorism in the region.? Assad regularly dismisses the opposition battling him as ?terrorists.?
Some UN diplomats say Russia ? which at one point last year seemed to be softening its support for Assad ? has recently ?tacked harder? toward the regime?s defense, as one diplomat says.
That hardening has convinced the UN?s special representative for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, that his goal of getting even some minimal form of Security Council action on Syria remains unrealistic.
And that sidelining of the special representative?s role in trying to reach some political settlement of the Syrian war has only added to a resignation that the diplomatic stalemate ? and the violence ? are not about to end.
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/russia-backs-syria-firmly-un-prepares-chemical-weapons-201729775.html
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