Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/279347467?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Friday, January 25, 2013
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Al-Qaida leader's brother condemns Mali operation
CAIRO (AP) ? The brother of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri on Wednesday sanctioned violence against the West in retaliation for the French-led campaign against militants in Mali, saying the U.S. and Europe are "making jihadists."
Mohammed al-Zawahri, one of Egypt's most influential jihadi leaders, made his comments in an interview with The Associated Press in Cairo, in the wake of the bloody four-day hostage crisis in Algeria, in which al-Qaida-linked militants seized a gas plant in retaliation for the campaign in Mali.
"All Muslims have the right to stop this aggression by any means," he said of the French-led military intervention. "This barbarism, aggression and brutality ... according to Shariah, we have to confront it."
"They (the West) are making jihadists," he added.
The four-day confrontation that began when al-Qaida-affiliated militants stormed the remote desert natural gas complex in Ain Amenas and took hostages early Wednesday. The militants threatened to blow up the entire complex, and Algerian troops finally ended the crisis with a ground assault. In all, 37 hostages, including an Algerian security guard, and 29 militants were killed, but five other foreign workers remain unaccounted for.
The Masked Brigade, the group that claims to have masterminded the takeover, has warned of more such attacks against any country backing France's involvement in Mali. French forces there are trying to help stop an advance by Islamic extremists.
Militants offered to free hostages in exchange for the release of two prominent terror suspects jailed in the United States: Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian sheik convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks and considered the spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist convicted of shooting at two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Al-Zawahri, who is the younger brother of the al-Qaida leader, was imprisoned for nearly 12 years under Egypt's former president, Hosni Mubarak, including four years in solitary confinement. He was tortured during his time in prison, before eventually being freed after Mubarak's ouster.
Since his release, he has been appearing in street protests in defense of Shariah, or Islamic law, and on Friday he was among some 200 ultraconservative Islamists and former jihadis who staged a protest in front of the French embassy in Cairo. The protesters raised a banner that read, "Mali is not alone," and called for a boycott of French products and the expulsion of the French ambassador.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/al-qaida-leaders-brother-condemns-mali-operation-210317279.html
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Lady Gaga Confirms Album With 'Darling' Jazz Legend Tony Bennett
The Mother Monster hit the stage with her 'darling' Bennett for President Obama at a Staff Ball on Tuesday.
By Jocelyn Vena
Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett
Photo: Getty Images
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1700716/lady-gaga-tony-bennett-album.jhtml
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ZTE Avid 4G (MetroPCS)
The ZTE Avid 4G gives you a lot of horsepower for $149, and it's an ideal smartphone for heavy Web browsing on MetroPCS's low-cost network. But almost every one of its other features is lackluster, so you should know what you're getting into here. With your eyes open, you'll probably appreciate the value.
I'm not recommending that anyone buy a high-end phone on MetroPCS right now. That's because in June, if the merger with T-Mobile?goes through, MetroPCS will stop selling its existing CDMA-based lineup and will switch over to a brand-new lineup of GSM phones. The CDMA phones will still work until 2015, but the older network will be neglected and, eventually, turned off. So anyone buying a Metro phone right now should expect to buy a new one in early 2014 to take advantage of the new post-merger network. (This has also rendered our Editors' Choice on MetroPCS moot, as we gave it to a more costly phone before we knew about the merger.)
Fortunately, Metro has a robust low-cost 4G LTE lineup. Along with the $149 Avid, there's the $99 Samsung Galaxy Admire 4G and the $49 LG Motion 4G, a crazy steal at that price. Now we've set the scene, so let's look at the Avid.
Physical Design and Phone Calling
The ZTE Avid 4G is a blandly designed, black slab phone that's 4.9 by 2.6 by .5 inches (HWD) and 5.25 ounces. It's a little chunky and a little cheap-feeling, but at least it's solidly built. The back is soft-touch black plastic, and there's a bit of chromed plastic around the edges. The physical power and volume buttons are easy to find.
The first real downer about this phone, though, is the screen. Getting an 800-by-480 LCD into a $149 prepaid phone is a feat; the trick is to use the worst 800-by-480 screen in history. Unevenly lighted, the screen has an extremely poor viewing angle, which gets in the way of playing games with tilt controls. The panel also seems to be behind a sheet of plastic as thick as the Plexiglas divider in the Riker's Island visiting room.
Reception is strong here, but call quality is just acceptable. Earpiece volume is moderate-to-high; voices sound okay, but a little computery. Transmissions struggled with noise cancellation, becoming scratchy and thready in noisy areas. The speakerphone is too quiet to use outdoors, although it would be fine in a car. Bluetooth headsets worked fine, including triggering the standard Android voice dialing. Battery life was very good, at 10 hours, 8 minutes of continuous talk time.?
Android and Apps
The Avid starts looking up when you start running apps on it. With a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 processor, it benchmarked quite well, running full-screen games at smooth frame rates and delivering Web pages promptly. Web browsing plugged along nicley with the built-in Chrome browser and 4G LTE speeds ranging from 4-7Mbps in Manhattan. Maps loaded quickly and were accurate, and the Avid will work as both a tethered and a Wi-Fi hotspot with the right service plan. If you'll primarily be browsing the Web, the Avid 4G delivers very good value.?
The Avid 4G also runs a very close to stock version of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), including Google's attractive dialer and contact book. MetroPCS has added its usual bloatware, ranging from the useful Easy WiFi, which automatically connects to open Wi-Fi networks (although the phone supports 2.4Ghz only), to the infernal MetroXtras, which spams your phone with ads until you opt out. Unlimited Rhapsody music is available for just $5 added to most rate plans. There's no word on an Android 4.1 upgrade, and I wouldn't hold out hope.
Unfortunately, you can't run some more ambitious apps here because of a lack of internal storage. While the Avid supports memory cards up to 32GB in a slot under the back cover, it has only 2.3GB of internal memory, and I found I couldn't download games with large supplementary downloads like Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Asphalt 7: Heat because they needed to use internal memory as a staging area.
Multimedia and Conclusions
The Avid 4G comes with two awful cameras. Technically, there's a 5-megapixel camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front, but numbers never tell the whole story. The autofocus lag feels nearly endless at 1.5 seconds. While photos taken with the main camera are okay in controlled conditions, my outdoor shots looked oversharpened in the center and soft at the edges. Low-light shots had blown-out white areas and suffered from low shutter speeds, leading to blur if I couldn't hold my hand completely steady. The front camera is terrible; every shot I took was either so soft it looked smeared, or extremely noisy.
Video recording was a tad better. The main camera records videos up to 720p resolution at 30 frames per second indoors and out, and they're of decent quality, although they have a reddish cast to them. The front camera, on the other hand, only recorded 360-by-480 videos at 15 frames per second, and they were so soft they were practically impressionistic.
Audio and video playback is as good as could be expected, given the very dim screen. The phone had no problem playing a wide range of audio formats, whether through wired or Bluetooth headphones. Video played back at resolutions up to 1080p, although quality was hampered by the dim screen. There's no HDMI out.
The ZTE Avid 4G does one thing well: with its 800-by-480 screen, you get a lot more real estate for Web browsing, email, and gaming than you do with 480-by-320 phones like the competing LG Motion 4G and Samsung Galaxy Admire 4G. That said, I still think the Motion is a better value for money. It's less expensive than the Avid right now, but all of its components are of higher quality, providing a better overall experience.
More Cell Phone Reviews:
??? ZTE Avid 4G (MetroPCS)
??? Pantech Discover (AT&T)
??? Doro PhoneEasy 618 (Consumer Cellular)
??? Motorola Defy XT (Republic Wireless)
??? Nokia Lumia 820 (AT&T)
?? more
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/9XKj34DoF4U/0,2817,2414423,00.asp
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Helping healthy cells could be key to fighting leukemia, research suggests
Jan. 22, 2013 ? Instead of focusing on the elimination of cancer cells, maintaining a stable population of healthy blood cells in the bone marrow could be the most effective way to fight against leukemia.
Researchers at Imperial College London have shown that keeping healthy blood cells alive could be a more important tool in the fight against leukemia than keeping cancerous cells at bay.
The team used computer modelling to show that maintaining a friendly environment for healthy cells was more effective than targeting the damaged cells directly. This result could change the way leukemia is treated, as cancer treatment has traditionally relied on fighting disease rather than maintaining health.
A better understanding of the processes taking place in the bone marrow could therefore allow doctors to take earlier and more targeted action in combating leukemia.
A cancer of the blood, leukemia is thought to survive and grow through the action of leukemia stem cells (LSCs), which multiply within the bone marrow. Here they face competition for resources with haematopoietic stem cells (or HSCs), which are responsible for producing and maintaining all the different varieties of healthy blood cell within the body.
The paper, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface on January 22, is the first attempt to model competition between these two types of cells using methods borrowed from the world of ecology.
Lead author Adam MacLean said: "The first researchers to model competing populations mathematically were looking at predators and prey -- famously lynx hunting wild hares. Whilst we don't have predator and prey cells, we have two cellular species who directly compete against each other for resources, and our models analyse how that competition plays out within the biological niche of the bone marrow."
The team carried out computer simulations to find conditions that would result in vanishing numbers of leukemia cells. They found that the greatest chance of beating leukemia came from maintaining a healthy population of HSCs, rather than trying to eradicate the LSCs directly.
According to Michael Stumpf, Professor of Theoretical Systems Biology and one of the paper's co-authors, "maintaining health is more likely to eradicate leukemia than fighting leukemia directly without taking care of the healthy stem cells. And that's a slightly surprising result which nobody had explicitly stated before. It allows us to understand these processes in a way that could be important for potential therapeutic responses."
Thanks to a recent funding grant from blood cancer charity leukemia & Lymphoma Research, Dr Lo Celso and her team hope to refine the models outlined in the paper to more accurately simulate conditions in the human body.
Professor Stumpf added: "We want to make the model more useful, and find cases where we can break the model if it's incorrect. Its simplicity means that it's fairly robust, but we hope to reproduce the real complexity of the competition between HSCs and LSCs."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Imperial College London.
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/3D00D_0_7Hk/130122231349.htm
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Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Apple pulls 500px photo app over nudity concerns
12 hrs.
Apple has pulled two popular photography apps from the iOS app store, reportedly because the company found it too easy to find nude images ? though, notably, not pornographic ones. 500px, whose apps were removed, is resubmitting them with adjustments, but Apple is already being criticized for this seemingly arbitrary policy.
The apps were taken down Tuesday morning, following discussions between 500px and Apple relating to a new version of the app. With nearly a million downloads at the time of the takedown, 500px's main app was a popular way to share photos online ? and not not a new one, either. The version Apple removed was functionally much the same as the one approved back?in October of 2011.
500px cofounder Evgeny Tchebotarev told TechCrunch that an Apple reviewer rejected their proposed update on the grounds that it let users search for nude photos. In fact, the app defaults to a safe search mode that can only be disabled via the main website.
Furthermore, the nude photos that one might search for are of the art variety, not porn. "We don?t allow pornographic images. If something is purely pornographic, it?s against our terms and it?s deleted," Tchebotarev?said.
On Twitter and at various blogs and news websites, Apple came under fire almost immediately. Among others, the company's?own Safari Web browser app can be used to find explicit images extremely easily.
It's not the first time Apple has been attacked for what people view as its Puritanical restrictions on apps. Web browsers in the app store are age-restricted because they could be used to find adult material, and the company has also removed what it feels are adult titles from its bookstore, prompting widespread criticism.
Tchebotarev took to Twitter to say that his company is hoping to get its?iOS app back online soon, presumably after some Apple-suggested adjustments have been made.
UPDATE 5:21PM: An Apple representative tells GigaOM that there were complaints of child pornography, although the CEO denies this was mentioned to them:
"The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography."
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBCNews Digital. His personal website is?coldewey.cc.
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Hunting High Sea Levels in South Africa
Two researchers from the Pliomax team ? Michael J. O?Leary, in rear, from Australia?s Curtin University, and Alessio Rovere, from Columbia University ? explore an ancient rock formation along the coast of South Africa. This particular formation dates to a period about 120,000 years ago when the earth was warmer and sea level was higher than today.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/01/22/science/earth/ancient-sealevel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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