Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/295283280?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, March 30, 2013
South Africa's Mandela "responding positively" to treatment
By Ed Stoddard
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Former South African President Nelson Mandela is "responding positively" to treatment for a recurring lung infection after being admitted to hospital overnight, the government said on Thursday.
"He remains under treatment and observation in hospital," it added in a statement, without giving further details about the health of the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader.
Mandela, who became South Africa's first black president in 1994, has been mostly absent from the political scene for the past decade, but remains an enduring and beloved symbol of the struggle against racism.
He is renowned at home and abroad for spending 27 years in prison fighting the last bastion of white rule in Africa and then promoting the cause of racial reconciliation.
"Black Americans look up to him because he fought oppression and his bravery is something that doesn't happen often," said Yau Williams, an American tourist, as he walked through Johannesburg's financial district of Sandton.
Mandela has been frail and in poor health for several years.
"He will come out fine, let's just have faith in God," said Samson Ndlovu, speaking in Zulu as he walked out of a Johannesburg taxi rank.
Mandela was in hospital briefly earlier this month for a check-up, and spent nearly three weeks in hospital in December with a lung infection and after surgery to remove gallstones.
That was his longest stay in hospital since his release from prison in 1990 after serving almost three decades for conspiring to overthrow the white-minority apartheid government.
Mandela has a history of lung problems dating back to when he contracted tuberculosis as a political prisoner.
As he has receded from public life, critics say his ruling African National Congress (ANC) has lost the moral compass he bequeathed it when he stepped down as president in 1999.
Under such leaders as Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, the ANC gained wide international respect as it battled white rule. Once the yoke of apartheid was thrown off, it began ruling South Africa in a blaze of goodwill from world leaders who viewed it as a beacon for a troubled continent and world.
Almost two decades later, this image has dimmed as ANC leaders have been accused of indulging in the spoils of office, squandering mineral resources and engaging in power struggles.
Mandela spent much of last year in Qunu, his ancestral village in the poor Eastern Cape province. But since his release from hospital in December he has been at his home in an affluent Johannesburg suburb, closer to sophisticated medical facilities.
(Additional reporting by Ed Cropley, Zandi Shabalala and Benon Oluka; Editing by Alistair Lyon)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-africas-mandela-back-hospital-070717156.html
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You want to see this flying armbar (Video)
The flying arm bar is one of those submissions that happens so quickly, that you need to look twice to realize what happened. Skip to the 1:10 mark in this video and you'll see Oliver Fontaine pull it off at the Lyon Fighting Championship in France. And you have to feel for his opponent, Sofian Benchohra, who never saw the arm bar coming. With a record of 4-7-1, he hasn't won a fight since October of 2010.
Thanks, MMA Fighting.
Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/want-see-flying-armbar-video-151956671--mma.html
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Thursday, March 28, 2013
Guess The Celebrity Abs! (Photos)
China's first lady serenaded Tiananmen troops
A computer screen shows websites displaying an undated photo of China?s new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger days singing to martial law troops following the 1989 bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, in Beijing, China, Thursday, March 28, 2013. The photo appeared online this week but was swiftly scrubbed from China?s Internet before it could generate discussion online. But the image - seen and shared by outside observers - revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
A computer screen shows websites displaying an undated photo of China?s new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger days singing to martial law troops following the 1989 bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, in Beijing, China, Thursday, March 28, 2013. The photo appeared online this week but was swiftly scrubbed from China?s Internet before it could generate discussion online. But the image - seen and shared by outside observers - revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
BEIJING (AP) ? A photo of China's new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger days, singing to martial-law troops following the 1989 bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, flickered across Chinese cyberspace this week.
It was swiftly scrubbed from China's Internet before it could generate discussion online. But the image ? seen and shared by outside observers ? revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China.
The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady, and also faces a tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party's top leaders.
The image of Peng in a green military uniform, her windswept hair tied back in a ponytail as she sings to helmeted and rifle-bearing troops seated in rows on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, contrasts with her appearances this week in trendy suits and coiffed hair while touring Russia and Africa with Xi, waving to her enthusiastic hosts.
"I think that we have a lot of people hoping that because Xi Jinping walks around without a tie on and his wife is a singer who travels with him on trips that maybe we're dealing with a new kind of leader, but I think these images remind people that this is the same party," said Kelley Currie, a China human rights expert for the pro-democracy Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
"It's using some new tools and new techniques, for the same purposes: to preserve its own power."
Peng, 50, a major general in the People's Liberation Army who is best known for soaring renditions of patriotic odes to the military and the party, kept a low profile in recent years as her husband prepared to take over as Communist Party chief. Her re-emergence has been accompanied by a blitz in domestic, state-run media hailing her beauty and charm, in a bid to harness the singer's popularity to build support for Xi at home and abroad.
"Peng Liyuan: Let the world appreciate the beauty of China," declared the headline of a China News Service commentary that said the first lady's elegant manners, conversation and clothing would highlight Chinese culture. Her presence on diplomatic trips would demystify the first family for the Chinese public, the commentary said.
However, the government is stepping into little-charted and possibly treacherous waters for China.
In 1963, the glamorous Wang Guangmei, wife of President Liu Shaoqi, wore a tightfitting qipao dress to a state banquet in Indonesia. When the political tides turned against Liu four years later, radical Red Guards forced Wang to don the same dress and paraded her through the streets as a shameful example of capitalist corruption.
Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, played a key role in the same radical campaign in which political opponents were mercilessly persecuted; after his death, she was put on trial and imprisoned, then moved to a hospital where she hanged herself.
The lifespan of Peng's Tiananmen image in the finicky world of the Chinese Internet has so far been short, and she remains a beloved household name with huge domestic popularity. The photo has circulated mainly on Twitter, which is blocked in China. The few posts on popular domestic microblogs did not evade censors for long.
Many young Chinese are unaware that on June 3 and 4, 1989, military troops crushed weekslong pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing with force, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Those who do know about the assault tend to be understanding of Peng's obligations as a member of a performance troupe in the all-powerful People's Liberation Army. At the time, her husband Xi was party chief of an eastern city.
"The photo probably has a negative impact more so internationally than domestically," said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at City University of Hong Kong. He said more scrutiny of Peng is likely and such images could raise questions about Xi's interest in reforms.
"It has been several months now that Xi Jinping has assumed the top leadership role and certainly, we have found no indicator that he is interested in this stage to push serious political reform."
The image is a snapshot of the back cover of a 1989 issue of a publicly available military magazine, the PLA Pictorial, according to Sun Li, a Chinese reporter who said he had taken a photo of it on his cell phone several years ago when it was inadvertently posted on his microblog. Sun said he quickly deleted it and had no idea how it resurfaced on the Internet years later.
Microblog users can easily save images and recirculate them even after the original posts have been deleted. The picture spread further after it was tweeted by the U.S.-based China Digital Times, which tracks Chinese online media.
Warren Sun, a Chinese military historian at Monash University in Australia, said he had little doubt about the authenticity of the image, citing a 1992 academic report as saying that after the crackdown, Peng performed a song titled "The Most Beloved People" in a salute to martial law troops.
While most of her army career has been in singing, the militaristic overtones of many of Peng's public appearances set her apart from Michelle Obama, former French first lady Carla Bruni and most of their counterparts in other countries. But for Peng, the Tiananmen photo was no one-off: She has been in the military since age 18 and has fronted TV music videos featuring dancing lines of men with combat fatigues and heavy weaponry.
She also starred in a song-and-dance number in 2007 that has perky women in Tibetan garb sashaying behind her while she sings an ode to the army that invaded Tibet in 1959. "Who is going to liberate us? It's the dear PLA!" go some of the lyrics. The video has provoked severe criticism from Tibetan rights groups.
In an indication of Peng's appeal in China despite her past, a man whose 19-year-old son was killed in the Tiananmen crackdown said he bears no grudges against her.
"If I had known about this back then, I would have been very disgusted by it. But now, looking at it objectively, it's all in the past," said Wang Fandi, whose son Wang Nan died from a bullet wound to his head. "She was in the establishment. If the military wanted her to perform, she had to go. What else could she do?"
Wang was a teacher at the China Conservatory of Music when Peng had been sent there by the military to study singing in her 20s. Though he never taught her directly, Wang had known who she was and describes her as being modest, a talented folk singer and an outstanding student.
"When I look back at history, I will look at it from other perspectives," Wang said. "Even if she had done something wrong, we shouldn't make a fuss about it. What's important is what happens in the future."
___
Follow Gillian Wong on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gillianwong
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UK scientists develop safer foot-and-mouth vaccine
By Ben Hirschler
LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have developed a new vaccine against foot-and-mouth disease that is safer and easier to manufacture, an advance they believe should greatly increase production capacity and reduce costs.
The technology behind the livestock product might also be applied to make improved human vaccines to protect against similar viruses, including polio.
The new vaccine does not require live virus in its production - an important consideration as foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is extremely infectious and vaccine facilities handling virus samples are difficult to secure.
"It spreads like wild fire," said David Stuart, a professor of biology at the University of Oxford, who led the research.
A 2007 outbreak of FMD in southeast England, for example, was traced to a nearby vaccine site. The same facility, ironically, is home to some of the researchers behind the new vaccine.
In contrast to standard FMD livestock vaccines, the new product is made from synthetic empty protein shells containing no infectious viral genome, scientists reported in the journal PLOS Pathogens on Wednesday.
This means the vaccine can be produced without expensive biosecurity and does not need to be kept refrigerated.
"One of the big advantages is that since it is not derived from live virus, the production facility requires no special containment," Stuart said.
"One could imagine local plants being set up in large parts of the world where foot and mouth is endemic and where it still remains a huge problem."
Worldwide, between 3 billion and 4 billion doses of FMD vaccine are administered every year but there are shortages in many parts of Asia and Africa were the disease is a serious problem.
Current standard vaccines are based on 50-year-old technology, although U.S. biotech company GenVec last year won U.S. approval for a new one.
The purely synthetic British vaccine has so far been tested in small-scale cattle trials and found to be effective.
Stuart said the research team from the universities of Oxford and Reading and two state-funded bodies - Diamond Light Source and the Pirbright Institute - would now conduct larger tests while discussing the vaccine's commercial development.
"We are talking to a potential commercial partner," Stuart told Reuters, adding that it would probably take around six years to bring the new vaccine to market. He said it was too early to give an indication of how much the vaccine would cost.
He declined to name the company involved but said it was not Merial, the animal health division of Sanofi that shares Pirbright's site in southeast England.
Stuart and his colleagues were able to produce empty protein shells to imitate the protein coat that surrounds the FMD virus using Diamond's X-ray system to visualise images a billion times smaller than a pinhead.
The same approach could in future be used to make empty shell vaccines against related viruses such as polio and hand-foot-and-mouth, a human disease that mainly affects infants and children, the researchers said.
(Editing by Keiron Henderson)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-scientists-develop-safer-foot-mouth-vaccine-220302071--finance.html
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Samsung Galaxy S4 up for pre-order in the UK
Official pre-orders start today ahead of April 26 launch
A little under a month away from launch day, Samsung's Galaxy S4 is now available to pre-order from leading UK retailers and carriers. You'll find a breakdown of what the major players are offering with Samsung's latest handset after the break.
We'll update this post with any more pre-order deals that come to light during the day. Check below for the full breakdown.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/cHtm32WsyZ4/story01.htm
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Coaches survive show-cause orders
FILE - In this Nov. 13, 2009, file photo, Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl yells to his team during the second half of Tennessee's basketball game against Austin Peay in Knoxville, Tenn. A three-year, show-cause order from the NCAA in August 2011 for lying to NCAA investigators about improperly hosting recruits at his home didn't keep Pearl from joining ESPN as a college basketball analyst little more than a year later. That was after a stint at Sirius Radio. (AP Photo/Wade Payne, File)
FILE - In this Nov. 13, 2009, file photo, Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl yells to his team during the second half of Tennessee's basketball game against Austin Peay in Knoxville, Tenn. A three-year, show-cause order from the NCAA in August 2011 for lying to NCAA investigators about improperly hosting recruits at his home didn't keep Pearl from joining ESPN as a college basketball analyst little more than a year later. That was after a stint at Sirius Radio. (AP Photo/Wade Payne, File)
In this Nov. 10, 2012, photo, Houston Rockets assistant coach Kelvin Sampson talks to players during their NBA basketball game against the Denver Nuggets in Houston. The NCAA hit Sampson with a five-year "show-cause" order after Sampson was a college coach at Oklahoma and Indiana, for improper calls to recruits. Sampson resigned at Indiana. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) ? Few words are less welcome to college basketball coaches than "show cause," shorthand for the NCAA penalty designed to keep those sanctioned for misconduct at one school from quickly jumping to another campus.
Yet an Associated Press review of infractions cases since 2000 found that show-cause orders tend to have a sharply uneven impact.
Of the 44 former men's basketball coaches given show-cause orders since 2000, at least 25 found other basketball jobs, usually after the orders expired. Some remained involved with big-time programs, while others labored in obscurity at junior colleges, high schools or AAU programs. A few have found second acts in the NBA or as TV analysts.
Head coaches hit with show-cause orders tend to fare far better than the assistants deemed complicit in their misdeeds, the AP found.
Take former Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl. A three-year, show-cause order in August 2011 for lying to NCAA investigators about improperly hosting recruits at his home didn't keep him from joining ESPN as a college basketball analyst little more than a year later. That was after a stint at Sirius Radio.
Former Pearl assistant Steve Forbes, who was handed a one-year order, is head coach at Northwest Florida State College. His top assistant is Jason Shay, who also left Tennessee with a one-year show cause. Tony Jones, a third Pearl assistant who received a one-year order, is a preps coach in Alcoa, Tenn.
Washington State assistant Ray Lopes joined the Cougars in May 2012 after a pair of show-cause orders given to him for making hundreds of impermissible recruiting phone calls ? first at Oklahoma from 1995 to 2002 under Kelvin Sampson, and then again as Fresno State's head coach several years later.
"Many, many doors were shut on me out of fear, because of the show-cause tag on my resume," said Lopes, who started his climb back to the college ranks as an associate coach in the NBA D-League. "I was basically not worth taking a chance on, even though I had developed a pretty good reputation. None of that seemed to matter ... I almost gave up hope."
Under the penalty, schools that want to hire coaches with active show-cause orders essentially must prove to the NCAA that the rule-breaker has made amends. If not, any broader sanctions levied against the offender's former school can carry over to the new employer.
Former New Mexico State assistant Fletcher Cockrell left coaching for law school after receiving a 10-year order in 2001. The NCAA found that former Aggies coach Neil McCarthy agreed to hire Cockrell from Jones County Community College in Mississippi if he steered two of his JUCO players to Las Cruces. The NCAA also found Cockrell guilty of academic fraud by providing test answers to the two players.
"I'm doing quite well," said Cockrell, now a Houston attorney. "I'm OK, trust me."
So is Sampson, who is now an NBA assistant with the Houston Rockets following previous jobs with the Milwaukee Bucks and San Antonio Spurs. He declined to comment for this story.
The punishment has a long history. According to the NCAA, the University of Nebraska-Omaha received the first show-cause penalty in April 1963 ? an institutional penalty after the football team played in an unsanctioned postseason game. A decade later, the NCAA handed down what appears to be its first show-cause penalty against an individual, when the athletic director at what was then known as Bloomsburg State College in Pennsylvania was found to have improperly raised scholarship money from outside boosters.
Show-cause orders are more prevalent now, with the NCAA issuing more than 100 overall since 2000, covering sports from football and basketball to baseball, soccer, track, swimming, golf, rugby and rowing. Ten such orders were handed down in three of the past five years, with the penalties' duration ranging from two months to 10 years.
And coaches aren't the only ones hit. Recent show-cause orders have been issued against tutors, volunteer coaches, graduate assistants, secretaries, athletic directors, compliance officers, faculty athletic representatives and directors of operations.
The NCAA was unable to provide more detailed statistics that could further help assess the impact of show-cause orders, including the number of times its Committee on Infractions has heard requests from show-cause coaches to work elsewhere ? as well as the number of times such requests were allowed or denied.
Rod Uphoff, a member of the infractions committee since 2009, said NCAA punishments tend to mirror the criminal justice system, where judges consider a range of penalties depending on the severity of the violation and the history of the offender.
"Sometimes, with youthful assistant coaches who seem to be operating under the (influence) of a head coach, the committee may be more sympathetic than with an assistant coach who's been around for 20 years and ought to know the rules better," he said.
Uphoff, a University of Missouri law professor, said the committee employs show-cause orders not to run off unscrupulous coaches, but to put future employers on notice.
"They need to ensure that there are safeguards in place so that this person won't be tempted to violate the rules in the future," he said. Uphoff added that he couldn't recall a single case during his tenure of a show-cause employee or a prospective new boss petitioning the committee for another chance.
Of course, programs outside NCAA oversight don't need to seek such permission. Former Radford coach Brad Greenberg got a job in June 2012 leading Maccabi Haifa, a pro basketball team in Israel, mere months after receiving a five-year show cause order for misleading NCAA investigators looking into improper benefits for athletes.
Two Greenberg assistants coach high school teams in Virginia and Florida. His former director of basketball operations coaches at a Virginia military academy. Each received two-year orders.
Others, however, struggle to recover from show-cause orders, years after the penalties expire.
Twelve years after receiving a three-year order for reportedly watching recruits during a pickup game, former Buffalo coach Tim Cohane is suing the NCAA in federal court over what he calls a botched investigation in which his former players were threatened with losing their scholarships if they didn't incriminate their former coach.
Cohane is now associate head coach at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, a Division III school. He's also an adjunct law professor whose online faculty bio says he attended law school to "be able to represent student-athletes and coaches against the (NCAA)."
Kent State coach Rob Senderoff, a former Sampson assistant at Indiana, successfully petitioned the infractions committee in November 2008 to allow his hiring as an assistant at the school where he had previously spent four years despite a three-year show cause order for his role in the impermissible phone calls case.
Former Kent State athletic director Laing Kennedy, now retired, joined Senderoff at the committee hearing in a show of support. Kennedy's successor then hired Senderoff as head coach in 2011.
Like Lopes, Senderoff acknowledged his mistakes ? though both pointed out that the NCAA in January agreed to allow coaches to make unlimited calls and send as many text messages as they want to recruits who have completed their sophomore year of high school. The association now plans to reconsider those changes in response to a swift backlash from some football coaches and athletic directors, including those in the Big Ten.
"I certainly am in the minority," Senderoff said. "I do think you can survive and bounce back from it. I don't know if I would have been able to go to another place. I'm more than grateful. I understand how fortunate I am."
___
Alan Scher Zagier can be reached at http://twitter.com/azagier
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Ungoogleable? Google tells Sweden 'ogooglebar' can't be a word.
Google asks Swedish Language Council to remove 'ogooglebar'?? or ungoogleable, in English ? from its list of new 2012 words.?
Is ungoogleable a word? Google isn't so sure. Here, a homepage doodle from 2010.
Screen grab
EnlargeLate last year, the Swedish Language Council published a report of words that had entered the Swedish lexicon in 2012. Among them was?ogooglebar ??ungoogleable, in English. This did not please Google. In fact,?according to the Council (you'll need to enable Google Translate, unless you speak Swedish), Google promptly wrote representatives for the organization, and asked them to remove the word.?
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The Council duly fired back ? "we decide together which words should be and how they are defined, used and spelled," reads a defiant post on the Council website ? and the ensuring furor has made Ungoogleable Gate front page news even in the US. So what's Google's problem? Well, to put it simply, Google is worried that if everyone starts using the word "google" as a lower-case verb or noun, it will dilute the name.?
As?John C. Dvorak of PC World suggests today, an analogue here is Kleenex, which is a brand name, but which is often used to describe all tissue. (Other examples: Band-Aid or Xerox.) In fact, a few years ago, Kleenex embarked on its own campaign to make sure Kleenex is referred to correctly in the media. In an advertisement that still appears ? in a slightly different form ? in the Columbia Journalism Review, Kleenex requested that the product always be identified as a trademarked entity.?
"You don?t need a Social Security number to get your identity stolen," the ad pleaded. "When you spend nearly a century building a name that people know and trust, the last thing you want is people calling any old tissue a Kleenex? Tissue. Simply put, ?Kleenex? is a brand name and should always be followed by an ? and the word ?Tissue.? Please help us keep our identity, ours."
It's worth noting that Google did in fact succeed in getting the Swedish Language Council to remove?ogooglebar from its list. And far be it from us to tell Google how to spend its energy. But surely this is a losing battle in the long term ? google (lower case, not upper case) and its various iterations are?already a popular slang term in dozens of languages, including English. It's going to be pretty difficult to reverse that trend.
But back to John C. Dvorak:?"When a new usage appears in the public domain, own it and make it brand associative," he?writes?in his PC World post.?"This could all be done through a small advertising campaign with a tagline like 'When I tell you to Google something, you use Google, of course!' After that, the word goes into the lexicon and only refers to using Google, not doing a generic search. Problem solved."?
For?more tech news, follow us on?Twitter @venturenaut.
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Justin Bieber Goes Shirtless Through Airport Security
'He's quite skinny, so I assume he was probably freezing,' an airport spokeswoman remarked of JB's Poland stop.
By Driadonna Roland
Justin Bieber
Photo: Forum/ X17online.com
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1704400/justin-bieber-shirtless-airport.jhtml
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis dies at 85
BOSTON (AP) ? Two-time Pulitzer winner Anthony Lewis, whose New York Times column championed liberal causes for three decades, died Monday. He was 85.
Lewis was married to Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She retired in 2010 to spend more time with her husband after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. A court spokeswoman confirmed his death.
Lewis worked for 32 years as a columnist for The New York Times, taking up causes such as free speech, human rights and constitutional law.
His Pulitzers came during his years as a reporter. He won his first in 1955 for defending a Navy civilian falsely accused of being a communist sympathizer, and he won again in 1963 for reporting on the Supreme Court.
His acclaimed 1964 book, "Gideon's Trumpet," told the story of a petty thief whose fight for legal representation led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.
Lewis saw himself as a defender of decency, respect for law and reason against a tide of religious fundamentalism and extreme nationalism. His columns railed against the Vietnam War, Watergate, apartheid in South Africa and Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
He wrote his final "Abroad at Home" column for The Times on Dec. 15, 2001, warning against the U.S. fearfully surrendering its civil liberties in the wake of the terrorist attacks three months earlier.
"The hard question is whether our commitment to law will survive the new sense of vulnerability that is with us all after Sept. 11," he wrote. "It is easy to tolerate dissent when we feel safe."
Gail Collins, then the editorial page editor of the Times, said when Lewis resigned that he had been an inspiration.
"His fearlessness, the clarity of his writing and his commitment to human rights and civil liberties are legendary," Collins said. "And he's also one of the kindest people I have ever known."
"Gideon's Trumpet" became a legal classic, telling the story of Clarence Earl Gideon, whose case resulted in the creation of the public defender systems across the nation. In Gideon v. Wainwright, the high court ruled that criminal defendants are entitled to a lawyer even if they cannot afford one.
Gideon's victory, Lewis wrote, "shows that even the poorest and least powerful of men ? a convict with not even a friend to visit him in prison ? can take his cause to the highest court in the land and bring about a fundamental change in the law."
The best-selling book was later made into a television movie starring Henry Fonda.
Fighting for the underdog was a theme for Lewis. He won his first Pulitzer Prize at the age of 28 for a series of articles in the Washington Daily News that were judged responsible for clearing a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy from McCarthy-era allegations that he was a security risk.
Lewis said Abraham Chasanow was a middle-class man, uninterested in politics, who was terrorized by the federal loyalty-security program of the 1950s when unnamed informants alleged Chasanow was a radical communist sympathizer.
Lewis, a Cambridge resident, was a 1948 graduate of Harvard College.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pulitzer-prize-winner-anthony-lewis-dies-85-152707734.html
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Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Quitting marshmallow test can be a rational decision
Mar. 26, 2013 ? A psychological experiment known as "the marshmallow test" has captured the public's imagination as a marker of self control and even as a predictor of future success. This test shows how well children can delay gratification, a trait that has been shown to be as important to scholastic performance as traditional IQ.
New research from University of Pennsylvania psychologists suggests, however, that changing one's mind about delaying gratification can be a rational decision in situations when the timing of the payoff is uncertain.
The research was conducted by assistant professor Joseph Kable and postdoctoral researcher Joseph McGuire, both of the Department of Psychology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Review.
In the classic marshmallow test, researchers give children a choice between one marshmallow and two. After the children enthusiastically choose two, the experimenter says that they need to leave for "a few minutes" or "a little while." The children are also told that, if they can hold off eating the one marshmallow until the researcher returns, they can have the two marshmallows they prefer. With the children left alone in the room, hidden cameras track how long they resist temptation. Most try to wait but end up caving within a few minutes.
"The kids' responses seem illogical -- if you decided to wait in the first place, why wouldn't you wait the whole way through?" Kable said.
This behavior was an intriguing puzzle for Kable; he studies how people make value-based decisions, especially when they require comparing the value of something in the present with something else in the future. But, in conducting his own variants of the marshmallow test, he found that a key fact had been glossed over in both popular and academic discussions: the children don't know how long they will have to wait.
"I didn't even know that there was uncertainty in the marshmallow test until we started trying to do that type of experiment ourselves on adults and weren't getting any interesting behavior," Kable said. "That the kids don't know how long it's going to be until the researcher returns changes the entire decision problem!"
This confusion may stem from the explanations provided for children's decisions in the marshmallow test. Some of the researchers who have employed the marshmallow test and its variants have hypothesized that participants' decision to eat the marshmallow could be attributed to a strong impulse overriding the original decision to wait, or that the ability to wait was drawing on a reserve of self control that is depleted over time. Since these hypotheses make the same predictions even when there is no uncertainty, the uncertainty was often downplayed.
Kable and McGuire's analysis of data from earlier marshmallow-test studies showed problems for these hypotheses, however. If reversing the decision to wait was a function of the wearing down of self control, the time at which children eat the first marshmallow should be clustered in the middle or towards the end of the waiting period. Instead, children who gave up waiting tended to do so within the first few minutes.
After this analysis, Kable and McGuire did their own survey-based research to see how people estimate the lengths of waiting times in different situations.
The researchers asked participants to imagine themselves in a variety of scenarios, such as watching a movie, practicing the piano or trying to lose weight. Participants were told the amount of time they had been at the activity and were asked to respond how long they thought it would be until they reached their goal or the end.
The results showed a marked difference between the scenario with a relatively well-defined length and those that were more ambiguous.
"Our intuition is that when we are waiting for something, the longer we wait the closer and closer we get to that thing, which is what we see when we ask people about familiar things, like how long a movie will last," Kable says. "But what we've found is that, if you don't know anything about when the outcome will occur, the longer you wait the more you think you're getting farther and farther away from that outcome."
While the marshmallow test remains a good predictor of who is better or worse at delaying gratification, Kable's research suggests the mechanism behind that ability needs to be reinterpreted. It may also suggest some tools and techniques people can use to improve self control, or at least become aware of situations where delaying gratification will be particularly challenging.
"This is exciting to us because it suggests a way to get people to persist to the end," Kable said. "Your previous experience and your expectations can change your behavior, so you need to give them experiences that provide them with the right kinds of expectations."
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/hABE1hnohKo/130326194138.htm
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Paul Graham Says Y Combinator Is Pickier Than Ever, With ?Hardly Any' Bad Startups In Current Batch
Before the pitches kicked off at today's Y Combinator Demo Day, partner Paul Graham said the incubator was stricter than ever when selecting the current batch ? there are 47 companies demonstrating today, compared to 75 in the last session. "There are hardly any startups in this batch that are bad," Graham said. For that reason, he claimed that it will be just as hard for investors at this demo day as in the past to select the best startups. That's a general complaint about demo days in general, especially YC's (where there are more presentations, and those presentations are only a few minutes long), but Graham said it's not about the format. When it comes to choosing winners, Graham said, "if it seems like it's hard, it actually is hard." He added that it's best to think about the presentations as a "live action" name tag, and that investors should make their real decisions after talking to the founders.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5N1_LdBU900/
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Hang Up and Listen: They Might Be Giant Killers Edition
Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
Hang Up and Listen is brought to you by?Stamps.com.?Click on the radio microphone and enter HANGUP to get our $110 bonus offer.
In this week?s episode of?Slate?s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca talk about Florida Gulf Coast?s unlikely journey to the Sweet 16 and the upset-filled opening rounds of the NCAA tournament. Next, they are joined by Thurl Bailey to discuss Survive and Advance, Jonathan Hock?s new ?30 for 30? documentary on Jim Valvano and North Carolina State?s 1983 championship team. Finally, they speak with Sports Illustrated?s Grant Wahl about the U.S. men?s soccer team?s snow game against Costa Rica and the quest to qualify for the 2014 World Cup.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned on the show:
Podcast production and edit by Mike Vuolo. Our intern is Eric Goldwein.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=b0f559c148f29f83019bee01fe4bc3e0
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Monday, March 25, 2013
March 23 marks 100-year anniversary of Devil Clouds tornado
Patti Jo Peterson
Managing editor
? It must have seemed like Hell broke loose when three tornados hit southeast Nebraska and traveled into Iowa March 23, 1913, leaving 168 dead, 350 injured and 2,500 people homeless.
? And to top it all, the storm chose Easter Sunday to destroy everything in its four-mile wide path.
? Dubbed the Omaha Tornado, the Yutan Tornado and the Berlin Tornado, this whirling triad that hit consecutively across Nebraska was the worst that ever hit the state.
? Even though nearly 100 years has passed since they left their mark, it still ranks the 13th most destructive tornado outbreak in the United States.
?? ?One-hundred and sixty-eight people were killed in one day alone. Nothing comes close to that in Nebraska,? said Brian Smith, National Weather Service meteorologist and warning coordinator. Smith said people remember the May 6, 1975, Omaha tornado outbreak that claimed three lives and the Grand Island outbreak June 3, 1980, that left five dead, but neither were as destructive to life as their 1913 predecessor.
? Covering the 1913 storm in detail was the now defunct newspaper, The Omaha Bee, a competitor of the Omaha World Herald. Following the storm, the Bee published a ?Nut-Shell Story of the Deadline Tornado.?
? ?To the eye it had the distinctive funnel-shaped twisting character of the typical tornado, sweeping along at a furious rate of speed,? the Bee reads. ?To the ear it conveyed the sound of a crashing din and a mighty rush of water.?
? The storm started brewing late afternoon and struck Cass and Saunders counties first. Rain started falling at 5 p.m., southwest of Omaha. Twenty minutes later the first tornado touched down in Craig. Another tornado formed at 5:30 p.m. hitting Ithaca before it made its 70-mile trip through the state.
? ?Thirty-eight people were killed in the towns of Yutan, Mead, Berlin (now Otoe), Rock Bluffs, DeSoto, Nehawka and Craig,? The Bee report states.
? In 35 minutes the storm system covered 40 miles just in Nebraska, the Omaha Bee reported.
? Former Journal-Star editor Bill Eddy wrote a column about the 1913 tornado in 2009. In it, he noted that Berlin had two churches full of worshippers on that fateful Easter morning.
? In the morning Berlin had a school, train depot, hotel, blacksmith shop, bank and several other stores and shops.
? The Berlin tornado formed four miles south of Douglas in southwest Otoe County, and leveled farm after farm passing Syracuse before it hit Berlin, and then killed 12 people and caused $250,000 worth of damage, according to the National Weather Service.
? ?The Berlin storm seems not to have left the ground, the path of destruction being continuous, as shown by its action on the ground even when buildings or trees were absent,? states Eddy in his column, quoting G.A. Loveland of the U.S. Weather Bureau.
? Sixty-nine-year-old Isabelle Shrader of Rock Bluff precinct in Cass County died as a result of the tornado. ?She, with her husband (George), son Homer and two granddaughters saw the tornado only a few moments before it struck their home, and all started to seek the shelter of a nearby thicket, but in making their flight Mrs. Shrader became separated from the others,? her obituary states.
? Just two years before, the Shraders celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with many friends and relatives at their home, which was leveled like a house of matchsticks when the storm hit it.
? Although he escaped death, A.B. Buckingham, a farmer living south of Greenwood, was injured when the tornado struck his home. He and his family lived through the event by going into their ?cyclone cellar.?
? Two days later, a local report states, he was brought into Greenwood with serious injuries.
? The third tornado, considered the worst, struck Omaha at about 5:45 Sunday evening. Varying between ? mile and ? mile wide and two to six blocks and four and one-half miles long, it cut from the southwest and crossed diagonally across the city.
? ?It killed 103 people,? Smith said.
? The Bee published photographs of the aftermath, including the devastation to the Plymouth Congregational Church, Trinity M.E. Church, parks and homes of the rich and poor alike.
? With Severe Weather Awareness Week starting Monday, March 25, Smith noted there is always the possibility that tornadoes will become a threat, especially in April and May.
? ?You could get into a similar pattern and have an outbreak of tornadoes, but nothing is ever exactly the same,? he said. ?Tornadoes come out of thunderstorms. It will feel muggy out. A storm system forms with a cold front and a warm front moves into the Plains States.?
? In such events, area residents would be notified much sooner of its approach than in 1913, Smith added.
? ?Back in 1913, there was no U.S. Weather Bureau. It was even discouraged to mention the world ?tornado,? for fear of causing a panic. There was no way to forecast one. There were no satellites, no observations and radar wasn?t even around,? Smith said.
? This year February and March have presented some large swings in temperatures. ?We?ve been basically on the cold side of things,? he said. ?We?re starting to get into the season of an active weather pattern.?
? In the event of a tornado watch or warning, Smith advises people listen to a weather radio, check out the National Weather Service website or watch television. ?We would have a warning ahead of time,? he said. ?Get a weather radio and listen to forecasts and conditions. It?s like having a smoke detector for severe weather.?
? Once a warning is issued, people should head to ?any place below ground,? such as a basement, cellar or lowest level of the house. ?You want to put as many walls between you and the tornado you can get,? Smith said.
? Smith was a consultant on the NET production of ?Devil Clouds: Tornadoes Strike Nebraska, the 1913 Easter Tornados,? to air March 22.
? *Editor?s note: A special thanks to Lyle Weatherby, who brought the 1913 tornado to The Journal?s attention by bringing newspaper clippings about the event bound in a former Osborn rushes and Brooms Catalog cover. The book was given to him by Martin Sporer of Murray and contains many of the Omaha Bee?s stories and photos.
Source: http://www.cass-news.com/articles/2013/03/25/news/local/doc514c8aac3c28b782287384.txt?orss=1
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Hawaii Wedding Photographers
Obviously not all couples are the same which works well for the Hawaii wedding packages market. Many services allow for customization based on the client's needs since all are different and people desire ceremonies that cater to their own ideals. The extravagance of a ceremony is really based on not only the customer's wants, but also their budget. For those interested in the idea yet not certain as to what might be affordable, the internet can be a useful tool. There are a plethora of Hawaii wedding packages websites which offer advice and prices on everything from flowers to location. Some packages even include suggestions on accommodations for the wedding party, families and guests, and in many cases the accommodations are included in the overall cost of the package.
Research is key for couples who want to find the package that is right for them. Hawaiian ceremonial services know that there are clients who want everything which is why there are packages that provide onsite coordinators, flowers, minister, solo musicians, a professional Hawaiian wedding photographer, limo, cake, chairs and an arbor for the beach, and more. For those willing to spend a little extra, the can receive a reception, complete photography session while touring an island, massage, hair and makeup for bride, a wedding certificate, the list goes on offering weddings as diverse as the couples.
The average price for all inclusive services can run upwards of four thousand dollars. There are companies that take into consideration that some clients will desire more finery, while others want more of the basics. For that reason many services usually include at least two different packages for clients to choose from. For example, one option allows for the clients to stay a resort style condominium, and another offer a resort grade hotel. Options such as these help the clients to feel more relaxed as the duration of the stay is similar to that of a Hawaiian vacation. Prices that include accommodations such as these often incorporate an entire package and can range anywhere from one hundred twenty a night to over four thousand.
The most popular locations for the exchanging of vows in the Hawaiian Islands are Maui, Oahu, and Kauai, with Maui being the most sought after. The Hawaiian Islands are so appealing because of the tropical setting and gorgeous landscapes. The Island's histories are steeped in myths and legends which provide an essence of mystery and romance. The Island's mysticism attracts many people, especially those who are seeking a beautiful location for starting their lives together. Included among the diverse Hawaii wedding packages some can be found that advertises by way of encouraging customers to incorporate the spirit of Hawaii into the ceremony, one that honors the island's heritage, traditions, and myths. Ceremonies such as these have taken into consideration that not everyone desires all the bells and whistles and would rather incorporate more if the Island's natural beauty. For couples who want an exotic setting yet not a lot of flare, packages can be found which provide low-key and informal ceremonies that include wedding services or simply just vow renewal. Companies such as these provide the necessities, such as the minister and a small set up on a beach. For a little extra cost clients can choose to have photos taken and leis for the bride and groom.
Most packages include Hawaii wedding photographers for recording the entirety of the service, or simply for capturing those special moments. A fact couples should keep in mind when planning a tropical ceremony is that top wedding photographers can be booked up to a year in advance, so planning ahead is important. Wedding photography began as an art form in the 1820's. People did not commonly pose for pictures during the ceremony or for documenting the service at all until the late nineteenth century. This was mainly due to the photographer's large and rather cumbrous equipment. Traditionally, recording the entirety of the event did not come into vogue until the advent of more streamlined camera equipment in the 1970's. This paved the way for the wedding photographers in places such as Hawaii by allowing for more ease of transporting equipment on beaches.
Two different types of photography are popular for ceremonies which are traditional and photo journalistic. Traditional are more classic in nature and focus on capturing the overall scenes of the ceremony, while photo journalistic tend to focus more on capturing emotions and telling a story. Hawaii wedding photographers are very popular among people that flock to the islands. When choosing a photographer, potential clients can choose to look through portfolios to find a look that is right for them. Many can be found through the internet and allow clients to peruse portfolios with ease and get a taste for all the beautiful landscapes and settings of the islands for truly, "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork" (Psalm 19:1). While gaining a sense of the memories of the ceremony, Hawaii wedding photographers can help to preserve those special moments in breathtaking ways.
Source: http://www.christianet.com/hawaiicruises/hawaiiweddingphotographers.htm
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Florida Lotto jackpot rises to $13 million
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The jackpot in the Florida Lotto game has grown to $13 million after no one matched the six winning numbers in the latest drawing, lottery officials said Sunday.
A total of 32 tickets matched five numbers to win $6,089.00 each; 2,336 tickets matched four numbers for $66 each; and 48,005 tickets matched three numbers for $5 each.
The winning Florida Lotto numbers selected Saturday: 6-11-13-24-35-53.
Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/24/3304179/florida-lotto-jackpot-rises-to.html
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Sky's the limit? Southeast Asia budget airlines bet big on growth
By Anshuman Daga
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Lion Air's record aircraft orders underline the ambitious plans the privately held Indonesian group is hatching to emerge as a pan-Asian low cost carrier, throwing a serious challenge to AirAsia Bhd, the region's biggest budget airline.
The rivalry intensified on Friday when Lion Air launched its first service in Malaysia, barging onto AirAsia's home turf, but the pace of expansion has raised questions about whether airlines are overextending themselves.
Financiers and industry executives, however, say the party is just starting, with the region's budget carriers just beginning on the rapid growth path enjoyed by Ryanair Holdings Plc and Easyjet Plc in Europe and Southwest Airlines Co, the pioneer of the model, in the United States.
"I think it's been pretty rational in the sense that it is underpinned by economic prospects," Eric Eugene, BNP Paribas's global head of transportation banking, told Reuters in an interview in Singapore. "It's underpinned by the number of people capable of paying fares and flying."
The staggering bets being placed by both airlines rest on the dominant market shares they enjoy in their home countries and the hope that rising disposable incomes will drive Asia's growing middle class to keep flying to new destinations.
Lion Air's co-founder Rusdi Kirana placed a blockbuster order for 234 medium-haul jets with Airbus this week, just a year after ordering a record 230 Boeing planes.
Despite the projections of sharp growth, some bankers and lessors have expressed concerns that the series of record-breaking orders risks flooding Southeast Asia with too many narrowbody planes.
"The one thing that we have to consider is that the delivery span of those aircraft is over, probably, 10 years," said BNP Paribas's Eugene.
"So, if you put this number of aircraft in perspective of economic growth, and in perspective of aircraft retirement, actually our own results show that it's not irrational."
And, in a move that could reduce the risk of having too many unused planes if demand projections don't pan out, Lion Air has also set up Transportation Partners, an aircraft leasing company in Singapore, and hired senior financiers.
Establishing a base in Singapore, a growing aviation financing hub, might help Lion Air to diversify its portfolio outside Indonesia, where the country risk is much higher, and enable it to tap into a wider circle of banks for funding.
REGIONAL RIVALRY
The emergence of Lion Air presents Malaysia's AirAsia with the most serious challenge to its dominance of the region's budget flight business.
However Tony Fernandes, AirAsia Group's CEO, believes tight control on costs and ties with one planemaker will help his group retain its advantage.
"One aircraft the A320. Lowest cost airline in the world. That's the key. Lowest cost always wins," Fernandes tweeted on Friday.
AirAsia operates 120 aircraft and expects 360 more to be delivered up to 2026, excluding leased aircraft.
Lion Air controls a little less than half of the market in Indonesia's booming economy, home to 240 million people spread over 17,000 islands. AirAsia has recently started operations in the archipelago, but is a very small player in the market.
Lion Air has ambitious plans to start airlines across Asia-Pacific and is breaking into AirAsia's home market with its flights between Kuala Lumpur and the East Malaysian cities of Kuching and Kota Kinabalu through a partially owned venture, Malindo Air.
"What caught on in Europe with EasyJet and Ryanair 10 years ago is happening here now," Ranga Karumbunathan, managing director of origination at leasing company Avolon, said on the sidelines of an Asia aviation financing conference organized by industry consultancy CAPA. "So, I think the pie is big enough."
ASEAN HOPES
Investors have high hopes for plans by the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) for a single market for a combined economy of $2 trillion, with free movement of goods, services, investment and skilled labor among 600 million people.
Data from CAPA shows that 52 percent of seat capacity in Southeast Asia is operated by low cost carriers, or LCCs in the industry jargon.
"In less than a decade, LCCs went from virtually nothing to a majority share. So, clearly, a new market segment has been established," said Campbell Wilson, chief executive of Scoot, the medium-to-long-haul budget carrier owned by Singapore Airlines Ltd.
Airlines and leasing companies are expected to take delivery of about 175 aircraft in Southeast Asia over the next two years, accounting for one-third of all deliveries in the Asia-Pacific region, according to aviation data provider Ascend Online Fleets. The bulk of the deliveries will be in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
"It has got all the ingredients - large population in sub-three-hour flights along with a growing middle class, very rapidly growing economies and developing infrastructure, the ability to find people who haven't flown before and get them flying," said Paul Sheridan, head of consultancy, Asia, at Ascend.
"And then airports that are very happy to see low cost airlines flying in and out."
Singapore's Changi Airport, one of the main Asian gateways for international travelers, closed its no-frills terminal this year as it could not cope with the rapid expansion of the LCC segment. The sparse budget terminal, housed in a separate facility, was a big put-off for travelers looking to catch connecting flights.
Singapore is building a fourth, larger terminal estimated to cost $1 billion and be completed by 2017.
Around one-third of travelers going through Singapore are budget travelers, up from a negligible share a decade ago.
"I think if we go back and look at Ryanair, even Southwest, there were times in their evolution when they made some brave decisions about ordering planes which people thought were nuts," John Duffy, Chief Operating Officer of Transportation Partners, Lion Air Group's leasing company, told the Singapore conference.
"And probably Emirates as well, actually. But they have continued to generate traffic, sustain load factors, sustain yield."
(Editing by Alex Richardson)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/skys-limit-southeast-asia-budget-airlines-bet-big-023024996--finance.html
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Experts: N. Korea trains 'cyber warrior' teams - Army News | News ...
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2013/03/ap-experts-say-north-korea-trains-cyber-warrior-teams-032413/
By Youkyung Lee - The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Mar 24, 2013 14:23:25 EDT
SEOUL, South Korea ? Investigators have yet to pinpoint the culprit behind a synchronized cyberattack in South Korea last week. But in Seoul, the focus remains fixed on North Korea, where South Korean security experts say Pyongyang has been training a team of computer-savvy ?cyber warriors? as cyberspace becomes a fertile battleground in the standoff between the two Koreas.
Malware shut down 32,000 computers and servers at three major South Korean TV networks and three banks last Wednesday, disrupting communications and banking businesses, officials said. The investigation into who planted the malware could take weeks or even months.
South Korean investigators have produced no proof yet that North Korea was behind the cyberattack, and on Friday said the malware was traced to a Seoul computer. But South Korea has pointed the finger at Pyongyang in six cyberattacks since 2009, even creating a cyber security command center in Seoul to protect the Internet-dependent country from hackers from the North.
It may seem unlikely that impoverished North Korea, with one of the most restrictive Internet policies in the world, would have the ability to threaten affluent South Korea, a country considered a global leader in telecommunications. The average yearly income in North Korea was just $1,190 per person in 2011 ? just a fraction of the average yearly income of $22,200 for South Koreans that same year, according to the Bank of Korea in Seoul.
But over the past several years, North Korea has poured money and resources into science and technology. In December, scientists succeeded in launching a satellite into space aboard a long-range rocket from its own soil. And in February, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, its third.
?IT? has become a buzzword in North Korea, which has developed its own operating system called Red Star. The regime also encouraged a passion for gadgets among its elite, introducing a Chinese-made tablet computer for the North Korean market. Teams of developers came up with software for everything from composing music to learning how to cook.
But South Korea and the U.S. believe North Korea also has thousands of hackers trained by the state to carry its warfare into cyberspace, and that their cyber offensive skills are as good as or better than their counterparts in China and South Korea.
?The newest addition to the North Korean asymmetric arsenal is a growing cyber warfare capability,? James Thurman, commander of the U.S. forces in South Korea, told U.S. legislators in March 2012. ?North Korea employs sophisticated computer hackers trained to launch cyber-infiltration and cyber-attacks? against South Korea and the U.S.
In 2010, Won Sei-hoon, then chief of South Korea?s National Intelligence Service, put the number of professional hackers in North Korea?s cyber warfare unit at 1,000.
North Korean students are recruited to the nation?s top science schools to become ?cyber warriors,? said Kim Heung-kwang, who said he trained future hackers at a university in the industrial North Korean city of Hamhung for two decades before defecting in 2003. He said future hackers also are sent to study abroad in China and Russia.
In 2009, then-leader Kim Jong Il ordered Pyongyang?s ?cyber command? expanded to 3,000 hackers, he said, citing a North Korean government document that he said he obtained that year. The veracity of the document could not be independently confirmed.
Kim Heung-kwang, who has lived in Seoul since 2004, speculated that more have been recruited since then, and said some are based in China to infiltrate networks abroad.
What is clear is that ?North Korea has a capacity to send malware to personal computers, servers or networks and to launch DDOS-type attacks,? he said. ?Their targets are the United States and South Korea.?
Expanding its warfare into cyberspace by developing malicious computer codes is cheaper and faster for North Korean than building nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destructions. The online world allows for anonymity because it is easy to fabricate IP addresses and destroy the evidence leading back to the hackers, according to C. Matthew Curtin, founder of Interhack Corp.
Thurman said cyberattacks are ?ideal? for North Korea because they can take place relatively anonymously. He said cyberattacks have been waged against military, governmental, educational and commercial institutions.
North Korean officials have not acknowledged allegations that computer experts are trained as hackers, and have refuted many of the cyberattack accusations. Pyongyang has not commented on the most recent widespread attack in South Korea.
In June 2012, a seven-month investigation into a hacking incident that disabled news production system at the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo led to North Korea?s government telecommunications center, South Korean officials said.
In South Korea, the economy, commerce and every aspect of daily life is deeply dependent on the Internet, making it ripe grounds for a disruptive cyberattack.
In North Korea, in contrast, is just now getting online. Businesses are starting to use online banking services and debit cards have grown in popularity. But only a sliver of the population has access to the global Internet, meaning an Internet outage last week ? which Pyongyang blamed on hackers from Seoul and Washington ? had little bearing on most North Koreans.
?North Korea has nothing to lose in a cyber battle,? said Kim Seeongjoo, a professor at Seoul-based Korea University?s Department of Cyber Defense. ?Even if North Korea turns out to be the attacker behind the broadcasters? hacking, there is no target for South Korean retaliation.?
Associated Press writer Jean H. Lee contributed to this story with reporting from Pyongyang, North Korea; Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul also contributed to this report.
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Source: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2013/03/ap-experts-say-north-korea-trains-cyber-warrior-teams-032413/
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