Monday, April 22, 2013

Five days of fear: What happened in Boston

FILE - This Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo provided by Bob Leonard shows second from right, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 1 and third from right, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings by law enforcement. This image was taken approximately 10-20 minutes before the blast. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Bob Leonard, File)

FILE - This Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo provided by Bob Leonard shows second from right, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 1 and third from right, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings by law enforcement. This image was taken approximately 10-20 minutes before the blast. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Bob Leonard, File)

FILE - In this Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo, an emergency responder and volunteers, including Carlos Arredondo, in the cowboy hat, push Jeff Bauman in a wheelchair after he was injured in one of two explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

FILE - In this Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo provided by Ben Thorndike, people react to an explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon in Boston. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Ben Thorndike, File)

FILE - In this Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo, Bill Iffrig, 78, lies on the ground as police officers react to a second explosion at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in Boston. Iffrig, of Lake Stevens, Wash., was running his third Boston Marathon and near the finish line when he was knocked down by one of the two bomb blasts. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/The Boston Globe, John Tlumacki, File) MANDATORY CREDIT: THE BOSTON GLOBE, JOHN TLUMACKI

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 16, 2013 file photo, Tammy Lynch, right, comforts her daughter Kaytlyn, 8, after leaving flowers and some balloons at the Richard home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Kaytlyn was paying her respects to her friend, 8-year old Martin Richard who was killed in Monday's bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

BOSTON (AP) ? In the tight rows of chairs stretched across the Commonwealth Ballroom, the nervousness ? already dialed high by two bombs, three deaths and more than 72 hours without answers ? ratcheted even higher.

The minutes ticked by as investigators stepped out to delay the news conference once, then again. Finally, at 5:10 p.m. Thursday, a pair of FBI agents carried two large easels to the front of the Boston hotel conference chamber and saddled them with display boards. They turned the boards backward so as not to divulge the results of their sleuthing until, it had been decided, they could not afford to wait any longer.

Now the time had come to take that critical, but perilous step: introducing Boston to the two men believed responsible for an entire city's terror.

"Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members of the suspects," said Richard DesLauriers, the FBI agent in charge in Boston. As he spoke, investigators flipped the boards around to reveal grainy surveillance-camera images of the men whose only identity was conferred by the black ball cap and sunglasses on one, the white ball cap worn backward on the other.

"Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us."

Photographers and TV cameras pushed forward, intent on capturing the images, even as people in the lobby stared into computers and smart phones, straining to recognize the faces. In living rooms and bars and offices across the city, and across the country, so many people looked up and logged on to examine the faces of the men deemed responsible for the bombing attack of the Boston Marathon, that the FBI servers were instantly overwhelmed.

At the least, Bostonians told each other, the photos proved that the monsters the city had imagined were responsible for maiming more than 170 were nothing more than ordinary men. But even as that relief sank in, the dread that had gripped the city since Monday at 2:50 p.m. was renewed.

If everyone had seen these photos, then that had to mean the suspects had seen them, too.

What desperation might they resort to, marathoner Meredith Saillant asked herself, once they were confronted with the certainty that their hours of anonymity were running out?

On the morning after the marathon, Saillant had fled the city for the mountains of Vermont with three friends and their children, trying to escape nightmares of the bombs that had detonated on the sidewalk just below the room where they'd been celebrating her 3:38 finish. Now, she put aside her glass of wine, reaching for the smart phone her friend offered and scrutinized the photos of the men who had defeated her city on what was supposed to be its day of camaraderie and strength.

"I expected that I would feel relief, 'OK, now I can put a face to it,' and start some closure," Saillant says. "But I think I felt more doom. I felt, I don't know, chilled. Knowing where we are and the era in which we live, I knew that as soon as those pictures went up that it was over, that something was going to happen ... like it was the beginning of the end."

There was no way she or the people of Boston could know, though, just when that end would come ? or how.

___

Marathon Monday dawned with the kind of April chill that makes spectators shiver and runners smile ? the ideal temperature for keeping a body cool during 26.2 miles of pounding over hills and around curves. By the four-hour mark, more than 2/3 of the field's 23,000 runners had crossed the finish line, and the crowds of onlookers were beginning to thin a little. But the growing warmth made it an afternoon to relish.

Passing the 25-mile mark, Diane Jones-Bolton, 51, of Nashville, Tenn., picked up the pace, relishing the effort and the sense of accomplishment of her 195th marathon.

Near the finish line, Brighid Wall of Duxbury, Mass., stood to watch the race with her husband and children, cheering on the competitors laboring through the race's final demanding steps.

In the post-race chute Tracy Eaves, a 43-year-old controller from Niles, Mich., proudly claimed her medal and a Mylar blanket, and took a big swig from a bottle of Gatorade.

And at the corner of Newbury Street and Gloucester, cab driver Lahcene Belhoucet pulled over, relishing the overabundance of paying passengers on an afternoon that traditionally gives almost as much of a boost to Boston's economy as it does to the city's spirits.

But the blast ? so loud it recalled the cannon fire heard on summer nights when the Boston Pops plays the 1812 Overture ? brought the celebration crashing down.

"Everyone sort of froze, the runners froze, and then they kept going because you weren't sure what it was," Wall said. "The first explosion was far enough away that we only saw smoke." Then the second bomb exploded, this time just 10 feet away.

"My husband threw our kids to the ground and lay on top of them," Wall said. "A man lay on top of us and said, 'Don't get up! Don't get up!' "

From her spot beyond the finish, a "huge shaking boom" washed over Eaves.

"I turned around and saw this monstrous smoke," she said. She thought it might be part of the festivities, until the second blast and volunteers began rushing the runners from the scene.

"Then you start to panic," she said.

Back in the field, Jones-Bolton noticed runners turning around and coming back at her. Then she realized most were wearing the blankets given to those who'd already completed the race. Suddenly the race came to halt, but nobody could say why. When word began to spread, Jones-Bolton panicked at the thought of her husband standing at the finish line, but was reassured by other runners.

At the finish, Wall, her husband and children raised their heads after a minute or two of silence. Beside them, a man was kneeling, looking dazed, blood dripping from his head. A body lay on the ground nearby, not moving at all. But in a landscape of blood and glass and twisted metal, they were far from alone.

"We grabbed each other and we ran but we didn't know where to run to because windows were blown out so another man helped me pick up my daughter," and they ran into a coffee shop, out the back door into an alley and kept going.

Meanwhile, the instincts of Dr. Martin Levine, a Bayonne, N.J., physician who has long volunteered to attend to elite runners at the finish line, told him to do just the opposite. Looking up at the plume of smoke, he estimated it was about two storefronts wide and quickly calculated how many spectators might be located in such an area.

"Make room for casualties ? about 40!," he yelled into the runners' relief tent. "Get the runners out if they can!" And he took off. Just then the second bomb went off. He reached the site to find a landscape resembling a battlefield, littered with severed limbs.

"The people were still smoking, their skin and their clothes were burning," he said. "There were lower extremity body parts all over the place ... and all of the wounds were extreme gaping holes, with the flesh hanging from the bones ? if there was any bone left."

Back in his cab, Belhoucet said he mistook the first blast for an earthquake. Fearing that a building might collapse, he considered running. But then people came pouring down the street and he beckoned a family into the car. He grabbed the wheel, then turned momentarily to ask where they wanted to go.

Only then did he notice the man's face, dripping with blood.

___

Now, three days after the bombing, investigators had made significant headway in deciphering the method behind the terror.

Armies of white-suited agents had spent many hours sifting through the evidence littering Boylston Street, climbing to nearby rooftops to make sure no clue would go overlooked. Their efforts revealed that the bombers had constructed crudely assembled weapons, using plans easily found on the Internet, from pressure cookers, wires and batteries popular at hobby shops. But investigators still did not know why. And, more importantly, they had only the haziest idea of whom to hold responsible.

It all came down to the photos, culled after a painstaking search of hundreds of hours of videotape and photographs gathered from surveillance cameras and spectators. But if they were unable to identify the men, that left the investigators with a difficult choice: They could keep them to law enforcement officers who so far had had no luck, prolonging the search and risking letting the men slip away or attack again. Or they could ask the public for help. But then, the suspects would know the net was closing in.

When they decided to release them, it would only put Bostonians further on edge.

"There was this kind of strange tension," said Brian Walker of Boston. "You walk by people and you just kind of look at them out of the corner of your eye and check them out. I was conscious that I didn't feel comfortable walking around with a backpack. It was like I just want to be safe here and everybody is kind of jumpy."

But as investigators pored over tips in the hours before the photos were made public, the city, at least, was struggling to right itself.

On Monday, the bombs had exploded just a half-block before Brian Ladley crossed the Marathon finish line. But, feeling lucky to be alive, he was out at 7 a.m. Thursday to join the line at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, hoping to hear President Barack Obama speak at an interfaith service to honor the victims. The event was still hours away, but when tickets ran out, authorities spotted his marathon jacket and plucked him and some other runners out of line to watch the service in a nearby school auditorium.

"If they sought to intimidate us, to terrorize us ... it should be pretty clear right now that they picked the wrong city to do it," Obama told the crowd of more than 2,000 inside the church. "We may be momentarily knocked off our feet. But we'll pick ourselves up. We'll keep going. We will finish the race."

After it ended, Ladley found himself shaking hands with the president, too awestruck to remember their conversation. But what meant the most was the camaraderie of the crowd.

"It was wonderful to have a moment with other runners and be able to share our stories," he said.

Less than a mile away, 85-year-old Mary O'Kane strained at the bell ropes in the steeple of historic Arlington Street Church, imagining the sounds spreading a healing across her city ? and the land. Sprinkled amid hymns like "Amazing Grace" and "A Mighty Fortress," patriotic tunes like "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America" wafted down from the 199-foot steeple and over Boston Common across the street.

"I feel joyful. I feel worshipful. I feel glad to be alive," she said. The city's response to the bombing had revealed its strength and brotherhood, attributes she was certain would carry it through. But her belief in Boston was tinged with sadness. Now she understood a little bit about how New Yorkers who experienced 9/11 must feel.

"I mean, it happened ? it finally happened," O'Kane said. "We were feeling sort of immune. Now we're just a part of everybody...The same expectations and fears."

___

In the hours after investigators released the photos of the men known only as Suspect No. 1 and Suspect No. 2, the city went on about the business of a Thursday night, a semblance of normality restored except for the area immediately surrounding the blast site. Restaurants that had closed in the nights just after the bombing reopened for business. At Howl at the Moon, a bar on High Street downtown, the dueling pianists took the stage at 6 p.m., almost as if nothing had changed.

But across the Charles River in Cambridge, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, were arming up.

Later, friends and relatives would recall both as seemingly incapable of terrorism. The brothers were part of an ethnic Chechen family that came to the U.S, in 2002, after fleeing troubles in Kyrgyzstan and then Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia's North Caucasus. They settled in a working-class part of Cambridge, where the father, Anzor Tsarnaev, opened an auto shop.

Dzhokhar did well enough in his studies at prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin to merit a $2,500 city scholarship for college.

Tamerlan, though, could be argumentative and sullen. "I don't have a single American friend," he said in an interview for a photo essay on boxing. He was clearly the dominant of the two brothers, a former accounting student with a wife and daughter, who explained his decision to drop out of school by telling a relative, "I'm in God's business."

It's not that Tamerlan Tsarnaev didn't have options. For several years he'd impressed coaches and others as a particularly talented amateur boxer.

"He moved like a gazelle. He could punch like a mule," said Tom Lee, president of the South Boston Boxing Club, where Tsarnaev began training in 2010."I would describe him as a very ordinary person who didn't really stand out until you saw him fight."

But away from the gym, Tamerlan swaggered around his parents' home like he owned it, those who knew him said. And he began declaring an allegiance to Islam, joined with increasingly inflammatory views.

One of the brothers' neighbors, Albrecht Ammon, recalled an encounter in which the older brother argued with him about U.S. foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and religion. The Bible, Tamerlan told him, was a "cheap copy" of the Quran, used to justify wars with other countries. "He had nothing against the American people," Ammon said. "He had something against the American government."

Dzhokhar, on the other hand, was "real cool," Ammon said. "A chill guy."

Since the bombing, the younger brother had maintained much of that sense of cool, returning to classes at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and attending student parties.

On the day of the bombing, he wrote on Twitter: "There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don't hear them cuz they're the minority."

But by Tuesday, when he stopped by a Cambridge auto garage, the mechanic, accustomed to long talks with Dzhokhar about cars and soccer, noticed the normally relaxed 19-year-old was biting his nails and trembling.

The mechanic, Gilberto Junior, told Tsarnaev he hadn't had a chance to work on a car he'd dropped off for bumper work. "I don't care. I don't care. I need the car right now," Junior says Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told him.

Now, with the photos out, it was time to move. Already, one of Dzhokhar's college classmates had taken to studying the photo of Suspect No. 2 ? nearly certain it was his friend, although others were skeptical. It wouldn't take long for others to notice.

___

The call to the police dispatcher came in at 10:20 p.m. Thursday: shots fired on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge. Ten minutes later, when police arrived to investigate, they found one of their own, university officer Sean Collier, shot multiple times inside his cruiser. He had been monitoring traffic near a campus entrance, said Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas.

The baby-faced 26-year-old Collier, in just a year on patrol, had impressed both his supervisors and the students as particularly dedicated to his work. A few days earlier, he'd asked Chief John DiFava for approval to join the board at a homeless shelter, in a bid to steer people away from problems before they developed. Now he was being pronounced dead at the hospital.

Witnesses reported seeing two men. Fifteen minutes later, another call came in of an armed carjacking by two men. That was on Brighton Avenue, Haas said. For the next half-hour, the carjacking victim was kept in his car, had his bank card used to pocket $800 from an ATM and was told by his captors that they'd just killed a police officer and were responsible for the bombing, Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau said. Haas said the man escaped from the car when his captors went into a Cambridge gas station, and he called police.

Investigators had their break.

Although police had previously said the carjacking victim had left his cellphone in the Mercedes SUV, enabling police to track its location via GPS, Haas said Sunday the phone was found on Memorial Drive near the gas station. It was past 11 p.m. now, and as the Mercedes sped west into Watertown, one of Deveau's officers spotted it and gave chase, realizing too late he was alone against the brothers driving two separate cars. When both vehicles came to a halt, Deveau said, the men stepped out and opened fire. Three more officers arrived, then two who were off-duty, fending off a barrage. When a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer, Richard Donohue, pulled up behind them, a bullet to the groin severed an artery and he went down.

"We're in a gunfight, a serious gunfight," Deveau said. "Rounds are going and then all of the sudden they see something being thrown at them and there's a huge explosion. I'm told it's exactly the same type of explosive that we'd seen that happened at the Boston Marathon. The pressure cooker lid was found embedded in a car down the street."

In the normally quiet streets of Watertown, residents rushed to their windows.

"Now I know what it must be like to be in a war zone, like Iraq or Afghanistan," said Anna Lanzo, a 70-year-old retired medical secretary whose house was rocked by the explosion.

As the firefight continued, Tamerlan Tsarnaev moved closer and closer to the officers, until less than 10 feet separated them, continuing to shoot even as he was hit by police gunfire, until finally he ran out of ammunition and officers tackled him, Deveau said. But as they struggled to cuff the older brother, he said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev jumped back in the second vehicle.

"All of the sudden somebody yelled 'Get out of the way!' and they (the officers) look up and here comes the black SUV that's been hijacked right at them. They dove out of the way at the last second and he ran over his brother, dragged him down the street and then fled," he said.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A few blocks over, Samantha England, was heading to bed when she heard what sounded like fireworks. When she called 911, the dispatcher told her to stay inside, lock the doors and get down on the floor. She reached for the TV, trying to figure out what was going on.

"As soon as they said it on the news, that's when we started to freak out and realize they were here," England said.

But after all the gunfire, the younger Tsarnaev had vanished. Officers, their guns drawn, moved through the neighborhood of wood-frame homes and cordoned off the area as daylight approached.

At Kayla DiPaolo's house on Oak Street, she scrambled to find shelter in the door frame of her bedroom as a bullet came through the side paneling on her front door. At 8:30 a.m., Jonathan Peck heard helicopters circling above his house on Cypress Street and looked outside to see about 50 armed men.

"It seemed like Special Forces teams were searching every nook and cranny of my yard," he said.

Unable to find Tsarnaev, authorities announced they were shutting down not just Watertown, but all of Boston and many of its suburbs, affecting more than 1 million people. Train service was cancelled. Taxis were ordered off the streets. Filming of a Hollywood movie called "American Hustle" ? the tale of an FBI sting operation ? was called off. In central Boston, streets normally packed with office workers turned eerily silent.

"It feels like we're living in a movie. I feel like the whole city is in a standstill right now and everyone is just glued to the news," Rebecca Rowe of Boston said.

But as the hours went by, and the house-to-house search continued, investigators found no sign of their quarry. Finally, at about 6:30 p.m., they announced the shutdown had been lifted.

At the Islamic Society of Boston, Belhoucet, the cab driver who'd fled the bombing scene, arrived for evening prayer only to find it shuttered. But he told himself the city's paralysis could not continue much longer. "Because there is no place to hide," Belhoucet said. "His picture is all over the world now."

Across Watertown, people ventured out for the first time in hours to enjoy the day's unusually warm air. They included a man who took a few steps into his Franklin Street backyard, then noticed the tarp on his boat was askew. He lifted it, looked inside and saw a man covered in blood.

He rushed back in to call police. And again, the neighborhood was awash in officers in fatigues and armed with machine guns. The man hunkered down inside the boat, later identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, traded fire with police for more than an hour, until at last, they were able to subdue him.

Around 8:45 p.m., police scanners crackled:

"Suspect in custody."

On the Twitter account of the Boston police department, the news was trumpeted to a city that had been holding its collective breath over five days of fear: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won."

With that, Boston poured into the streets. In Watertown, officers lowered their guns and grasped hands in congratulation. Bostonians applauded police officers and cheered as the ambulance carrying Tsarnaev passed. Under the flashing lights from Kenmore Square's iconic Citgo sign, Boston University sophomore Will Livingston shouted up to people hanging out of open windows: "USA! USA! Get hyped, people!"

But on Boylston Street, where the bombing site remained cordoned off, there was silence even as the crowd swelled, and tears were shed.

"I think it's a mixture of happiness and relief," said Matt Taylor, 39, of Boston, a nurse who drove to Boylston Street as soon as he heard of the arrest.

Nearby, Aaron Wengertsman, 19, a Boston University student, who was on the marathon route a mile from the finish line when the bombs exploded, stood wrapped in an American flag. "I'm glad they caught him alive," Wengertsman said. "It's humbling to see all these people paying their respects."

They included 25-year-old attorney Beth Lloyd-Jones, who was 25 blocks from the bombings and considers them deeply personal, a violation of her city. She is planning her wedding inside the Boston Public Library, adjacent to where the bombs exploded.

"Now I feel a little safer," she said. But she couldn't help but think of the victims who suffered in the explosions that started it all: "That could have been any one of us."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE ? This reconstruction of events is based on reporting and interviews by Associated Press journalists across Boston and elsewhere from Monday through Saturday. AP writers Bridget Murphy, Michael Hill, Allen G. Breed, Denise Lavoie, Jeff Donn, Meghan Barr, Jay Lindsay, Katie Zezima, Pat Eaton-Robb, Rodrique Ngowi, Bob Salsberg, Marilynn Marchione and Geoff Mulvihill in Boston; Michelle Smith in Providence, R.I., Michael Rubinkam in Scranton, Pa.; and Trenton Daniel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, contributed to this report. Follow Adam Geller on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AdGeller

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-22-Boston%20Marathon-Five%20Days%20of%20Fear/id-fd044213e23149b1aad6d78252e9ae1a

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

US, China pledge efforts for nuclear-free NKorea

BEIJING (AP) ? The United States and China committed Saturday to a process aimed at ridding North Korea of its nuclear weapons, with the Obama administration gaining at least the rhetorical support of the only government that can exert significant influence over the reclusive North.

The question now is whether Beijing will make good on its pledge to uphold "peace and stability" and work with Washington on achieving the goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.

The declarations from both nations' foreign policy chiefs came as North Korea appears to be readying a missile test that has caused grave concern for the U.S. and its two close Asian allies, South Korea and Japan.

"We are able ? the United States and China ? to underscore our joint commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Beijing before having dinner with State Councilor Yang Jiechi.

Kerry and Yang said they'd seek a peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear standoff, which has only grown worse in recent months under its young leader Kim Jong Un.

Since testing an atomic device in February, the North has threatened new tests of its missile capacity and even talked about launching nuclear strikes against the United States, while expanding its U.N.-outlawed uranium and plutonium enrichment program.

"We agreed that this is of critical importance for the stability of the region and indeed for the world and indeed for all of our nonproliferation efforts," Kerry said. "This is the goal of the United States, of China" and of other countries that hope to resume nuclear talks one day with North Korea.

"From this moment forward we are committed to taking actions in order to make good on that goal," he added. "And we are determined to make that goal a reality. China and the United States must together take steps in order to achieve the goal of a denuclearized Korean peninsula. And today we agreed that further discussions to bear down very quickly with great specificity on exactly how we will accomplish this goal."

Kerry said U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and representatives from U.S. intelligence agencies would travel to Beijing later this month. Kerry also is sending his deputy at the State Department, William Burns, as part of the effort to "make sure that this is not rhetoric but that it is real policy that is being implemented."

Yang said his government's position was clear.

"China is firmly committed to upholding peace and stability and advancing the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula," he said through an interpreter.

"We maintain that the issue should be handled and resolved peacefully through dialogue," Yang said, adding that China would work with the United States and other nations to resume six-party talks with North Korea that fell apart for good four years ago.

Amid almost daily North Korean threats, the U.S. has been counting on China to force its unruly neighbor to stand down. It's a strategy that has produced uneven results over decades of American diplomacy, during which the North has developed and tested nuclear weapons and repeatedly imperiled peace on the Korean peninsula.

But with only the counter-threat of overwhelming force to offer the North Koreans, the U.S. has little other option.

In their statements delivered side by side, neither Kerry nor Yang specifically addressed the immediate crisis: a North Korean test of a missile with a range of up to 2,500 miles that the U.S. believes could happen any day. Later, Kerry said at a news conference that Washington and Beijing "both call on North Korea to refrain from any provocative steps and that obviously refers to any future missile shoot."

Kerry and Yang focused primarily on the long-term problem, which is a nuclear program that may soon, if not already, include the capability to deliver a warhead on a missile.

The question of North Korea's capacity has been subject to great debate in Washington this past week after a U.S. intelligence assessment suggested North Korea had the capacity to put a nuclear warhead on a missile, even if any such weapon would have low reliability.

China has the greatest leverage over North Korea, a country that like few in the world actually cherishes its isolation.

The Chinese dramatically have boosted trade ties with their neighbors and maintain close military relations some six decades after they fought side by side in the Korean War. They provide North Korea with most of its fuel and much of its food aid.

And China has a history of quickly reversing course after talking tougher with North Korea. In late 2010, as American officials were praising Beijing for constructive efforts after the North shelled a South Korean island, a Chinese company agreed to invest $2 billion in a North Korean industrial zone.

"There is no question in my mind that China is very serious ? very serious ? about denuclearizing," Kerry told reporters after his day of talks with top Chinese officials including new President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. He said no options were taken off the table in their discussions, without going into specifics.

Beijing, which values stability in its region above all else, clearly has different priorities than Washington.

China's greatest fear is the implosion of North Korea's impoverished state and the resulting chaos that could cause, including possibly millions of refugees fleeing across the border into China.

For that reason, China has in many ways looked past North Korea's bellicose rhetoric and activity, prioritizing the security of Kim's government, like his father's and grandfather's, over nuclear proliferation concerns.

China also remains deeply wary of any American military buildup in its backyard. Chinese officials are suspicious that the containment effort toward North Korea may be part of the long-term U.S. strategy to expand its influence in the region and even ring in fast-growing China with countries closer to Washington.

U.S. officials say they've gone to great lengths to explain to China that the American objective in North Korea, at least in the short term, is not to change governments.

The U.S. abhors the North's human rights record, its regular provocations and military links with other international pariahs such as Iran. But the U.S. has stressed over years of conversations with Beijing that pushing for North Korean denuclearization could reinforce stability.

In Seoul on Friday, Kerry said President Barack Obama had canceled a number of military exercises planned with South Korea. The message that the U.S. wasn't seeking a military confrontation was directed as much to the North as to Beijing.

The Obama administration believes it may now have greater scope for diplomatic progress.

It has pointed to Xi's recent criticism of the North as illustrative of a subtle shift in China's outlook. Beijing also has backed U.N. penalties in response to North Korea's tests of a nuclear device and intercontinental ballistic missile technology over the past four months.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-china-pledge-efforts-nuclear-free-nkorea-134527072--politics.html

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Ed Sheeran Wins MTV's Musical March Madness Tournament!

The Sheerios carry Ed to victory over Thirty Seconds To Mars in the MMM championship.
By James Montgomery


Ed Sheeran
Photo: Getty Images

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1705517/ed-sheeran-musical-march-madness-2013-winner.jhtml

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Thousands of Bahrainis mount protest before Formula One

By Yara Bayoumy

MANAMA (Reuters) - Thousands of Bahrainis staged a peaceful march on Friday in the first of a series of protests the Shi'ite-led opposition is planning to hold before next week's Formula One Grand Prix race.

Police stayed away from Friday's demonstration as protesters denounced king Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa and Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, his uncle.

"You have no legitimacy," they chanted.

The Gulf Arab state, where the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet is based, has been hit by unrest since pro-democracy protests broke out in early 2011, putting it in the frontline of the region-wide power struggle between Shi'ite Muslim Iran and Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia.

Waving the red-and-white Bahraini flag, the demonstrators marched from one main roundabout to another in the village of al-Aali, some 15 km (nine miles) outside the capital Manama.

"The Formula One is used by the regime to advertise that there is nothing wrong in Bahrain," said Abdelwahid al-Nadhkhadha, a 53-year-old company employee. "We are showing the world that we are people with demands."

Watched by millions around the world, the Grand Prix is the biggest sporting event hosted by the U.S.-allied country whose government is hoping for a big turnout despite continuing violent unrest.

The race at the Sakhir desert circuit was canceled in 2011 when protests were crushed and at least 35 people died.

Demonstrations have taken place almost daily in the island kingdom since the end of martial law in June 2011, often resulting in confrontations as youths throw stones or petrol bombs and police fire birdshot pellets and teargas.

The opposition and the government resumed reconciliation talks in February for the first time since July 2011 but little progress has been reported.

COMPLAINTS

The Shi'ite majority complains of discrimination while their loyalty in turn has been questioned by members of Bahrain's Sunni ruling family, bound by historical and marriage ties to that of Riyadh.

The government denies discrimination and says it has implemented reforms recommended by an international inquiry that investigated police handling of the 2011 protests.

"We are asking for our human rights," one protester shouted over a loudspeaker on the main road as the demonstrators marched forward. Some wore banners that said "Ready to die for Bahrain".

A woman draped in a black cloak, typical of garb worn by Shi'ite women, said she felt it was her duty to march.

"As long as there are oppression, arrests and killings, there should not be a Formula One," the woman, who wished to be identified only as Um Hussein, said.

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch said police had detained 20 opposition activists in towns near the Formula One circuit. Bahrain denied the report and said four people had been detained on suspicion being linked to a recent firebomb attack on the Foreign Ministry building.

Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone said last week he had no concerns about the race becoming a target for anti-government protesters.

An international inquiry commission, invited by Bahrain's government, said in a report in November 2011 that 35 people had died during the uprising. The dead were mainly protesters but included five security personnel and seven foreigners. The report said five people had died from torture.

The opposition puts the death toll at more than 80.

(Writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-bahrainis-mount-protest-formula-one-160601292.html

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Are human genes patentable?

Apr. 12, 2013 ? On April 15, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral argument in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, a case that could answer the question, "Under what conditions, if any, are isolated human genes patentable?" Kevin Emerson Collins, JD, patent law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, believes that layered uncertainties make this case an unusually difficult case in which to predict the outcome.

During the early 1990s, Myriad Genetics made important scientific discoveries related to mutations in the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes, which are biomarkers for increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Based on this work, Myriad sought, and obtained, patent protection for "isolated" DNA molecules that embody these sequences.

The Supreme Court's opinion in Myriad will determine whether Myriad's gene patents are valid or, alternatively, whether they were improperly issued from the beginning.

"The legal controversy centers on patent law's 'products of nature' doctrine -- a doctrine that prevents the patenting of newly made products that do not display a 'marked difference' from naturally occurring products," Collins says.

"A perfectly circular section cut out of a leaf of a newly discovered plant may be technically new at the time that it is first made -- and it may be socially useful if the leaf contains chemicals that are natural wound healers, but it's likely an unpatentable product of nature because there is no marked difference between the newly created product and the naturally occurring product.

"Importantly, the Myriad gene patents only encompass DNA molecules in an 'isolated' state, separate from the remainder of the chromosome in which they exist in a human body, and they thus describe molecules that were technically new when Myriad first made them."

The question before the Court is whether the structural and functional differences between naturally occurring DNA molecules and DNA molecules in an isolated state is sufficiently significant to constitute a "marked difference" and to sanction the patenting of the isolated DNAs.

Behind the legal controversy is an economic controversy that may (or may not) influence the Supreme Court's pronouncement on the products of nature doctrine. "The social costs of the exclusive rights to inventions granted by patents are normally justified by the incentives that patents provide for self-interested entities to invest in research and development and generate the socially valuable inventions," Collins says.

However, under some circumstances, there are legitimate concerns that the incentive-based benefits of patents may not outweigh these costs.

"One function of the products of nature doctrine is to ensure that the basic tools of scientific and technological work are not constrained by claims of patent rights and remain free for all to use as inputs into future research," says Collins.

"To the extent that isolated genes are essential technological and scientific building blocks, the costs of Myriad's gene patents in the form of slower innovation in the future may be so great that they will outweigh the benefits of the patent-induced incentives that speed up the creation of the isolated genes themselves."

The verdict

Collins says it is difficult to predict how the Supreme Court will decide this case because of three compounded uncertainties.

First, the Supreme Court has to date not offered a clear legal framework for identifying products of nature, so it is unclear how high a hurdle the markedly different standard will prove to be.

Second, it is unclear how strongly the Court's legal determination will be influenced by the underlying economic concerns about the privatization of the building blocks of technological progress.

Third, the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals -- the court that authored the opinion below in Myriad -- is not likely to lead to much of any deference.

"Recent Federal Circuit patent decisions have been poorly received by the Supreme Court," Collins says. "The Federal Circuit upheld the patentablity of these genes, but, given recent history, this is not much of an indicator as to Supreme Court will handle this case."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Washington University in St. Louis. The original article was written by Jessica Martin.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

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/most_popular/~3/u6tBHbmvrbM/130412084225.htm

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Friday, April 12, 2013

Healing by the clock: In fruit flies, intestinal stem-cell regeneration fluctuates with the time of day

Apr. 11, 2013 ? Circadian rhythms keep time for all living things, from regulating when plants open their flowers to foiling people when they try to beat jet lag. Day-night cycles are controlled through ancient biological mechanisms, evolutionarily speaking, so in essence, a human has the same internal clock as a fly does.

These circadian clocks govern daily rhythms through genes that synchronize molecular pathways that promote or repress protein production, influencing a multitude of body functions. Even before waking, for example, our clock-driven metabolism turns on enzymes and transporters that prepare our bodies to eat and digest food.

One of the circadian clock's transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene activity, is called period. Stem cell biologist Phillip Karpowicz, HMS research fellow in genetics, did not expect to find period in the gut of a fly. Working in the lab of Norbert Perrimon, the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics, Karpowicz studies flies to see how the intestine regenerates cells when they are injured.

Screening for transcription factors active in damage repair revealed that the gene period was needed. Further experiments showed that this component of the circadian clock is critical to intestinal regeneration, meaning that in flies, gut healing fluctuates according to the time of day. Karpowicz, Perrimon and their colleagues published their results April 11 in Cell Reports.

"We thought this was really weird. I would not have thought that regeneration would tend to work better at one part of the day versus another part of the day," Karpowicz said. "But now we've shown that there's a rhythm in stem cells that's really important for the regeneration process."

"This is a beautiful example of why we do genetic screens in the first place. By taking an unbiased approach, the fly tells us what is important to study," Perrimon said.

Intestines are hotbeds of regeneration because they are constantly vulnerable to damage. Harmful bacteria or harsh chemicals that animals ingest can injure cells lining their intestines, which are essential for absorbing nutrients or blocking infectious agents from crossing through thin intestinal walls.

To understand how a circadian clock might operate in intestinal stem cells, the scientists bred mutant flies to lack the period gene. The flies were normal except for their arrhythmic bursts of activity throughout the 24-hour day. Their intestines also appeared normal, until they ingested a chemical that caused inflammation.

Compared to other flies, the mutants mounted a weaker response to repair their damaged cells. Their stem cells divided poorly and in a more haphazard manner, impairing the healing process.

In further experiments, the scientists tested whether period was active in cells called enterocytes that surround the intestinal stem cells and absorb nutrients. Disrupting period in enterocytes also weakened the cells' response to damage. The scientists showed that this rhythm originates in the intestine, rather than in the brain, which typically controls circadian rhythms.

The scientists widened their lens to look at all the genes that were turned on or off during the day. Performing genome-wide expression studies, they discovered 430 genes -- about 3 percent of the fly genome -- that are rhythmically expressed in fly intestines.

"We think these cells may be more acutely sensitive to damage at a certain time of day," Karpowicz said.

The next step will be to confirm these fly findings in mice. The scientists have already contemplated the potential applications to human health, including the timing of chemotherapy so a patient might best tolerate the treatment's side effects.

"This could be quite relevant in terms of when you should time the absorption of those drugs to work in sync with the intestinal regeneration process," Karpowicz said.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Harvard Medical School. The original article was written by Elizabeth Cooney.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Phillip Karpowicz, Yong Zhang, John B. Hogenesch, Patrick Emery, Norbert Perrimon. The Circadian Clock Gates the Intestinal Stem Cell Regenerative State. Cell Reports, 11 April 2013 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2013.03.016

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

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_environment/~3/bI4CST9TbaA/130411123959.htm

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Information technology amplifies irrational group behavior

Apr. 11, 2013 ? Web tools and social media are our key sources of information when we make decisions as citizens and consumers. But these information technologies can mislead us by magnifying social processes that distort facts and make us act contrary to our own interests -- such as buying property at wildly inflated prices because we are led to believe that everybody else is. New research from the University of Copenhagen, which has just been published in the journal Metaphilosophy, combines formal philosophy, social psychology, and decision theory to understand and tackle these phenomena.

"Group behaviour that encourages us to make decisions based on false beliefs has always existed. However, with the advent of the internet and social media, this kind of behaviour is more likely to occur than ever, and on a much larger scale, with possibly severe consequences for the democratic institutions underpinning the information societies we live in," says professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen Vincent F. Hendricks.

In the article Infostorms just published in the journal Metaphilosophy, he and fellow researchers Pelle G. Hansen and Rasmus Rendsvig analyse a number of social information processes which are enhanced by modern information technology.

Informational cascades and Sex and the City

Curiously, an old book entitled Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the 18th Century to the Present Day, which in 2007 suddenly climbed the Amazon.com bestseller list, provides a good example of group behaviour set in an online context:

"What generated the huge interest in this long forgotten book was a scene in the movie Sex and the City in which the main character Carrie Bradshaw reads a book entitled Love Letters of Great Men -- which does not exist. So, when fans of the movie searched for this book, Amazon's search engine suggested Love Letters of Great Men and Women instead, which made a lot of people buy a book they did not want. Then Amazon's computers started pairing the book with Sex and the City merchandise, and the old book sold in great numbers," Vincent F. Hendricks points out.

"This is known as an 'informational cascade' in which otherwise rational individuals base their decisions not only on their own private information, but also on the actions of those who act before them. The point is that, in an online context, this can take on massive proportions and result in actions that miss their intended purpose."

Online discussions take place in echo chambers

While buying the wrong book does not have serious consequences for our democratic institutions, it exemplifies, according to professor Vincent F. Hendricks, what may happen when we give our decision-making power to information technologies and processes. And he points to other social phenomena such as 'group polarization' and 'information selection' which do pose threats to democratic discusson when amplified by online media.

"In group polarization, which is well-documented by social psychologists, an entire group may shift to a more radical viewpoint after a discussion even though the individual group members did not subscribe to this view prior to the discussion. This happens for a number of reasons -- one is that group members want to represent themselves in a favourable light in the group by adopting a viewpoint slightly more extreme than the perceived mean. In online forums, this well-known phenomenon is made even more problematic by the fact that discussions take place in settings where group members are fed only the information that fits their worldview, making the discussion forum an echo chamber where group members only hear their own voices," Vincent F. Hendricks suggests.

Companies such as Google and Facebook have designed algorithms that are intended to filter away irrelevant information -- known as information selection -- so that we are only served content that fits our clicking history. According to Professor Hendricks this is, from a democratic perspective, a problem as you may never in your online life encounter views or arguments that contradict your worldview.

"If we value democratic discussion and deliberation, we should apply rigorous analysis, from a variety of disciplines, to the workings of these online social information processes as they become increasingly influential in our information societies."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Copenhagen.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Pelle G. Hansen, Vincent F. Hendricks, Rasmus K. Rendsvig. Infostorms. Metaphilosophy, 2013; 44 (3): 301 DOI: 10.1111/meta.12028

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

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/living_well/~3/zKK-3R288Fw/130411124005.htm

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Fires in Southeast Asia

Fires in Southeast Asia [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 11-Apr-2013
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Contact: Rob Gutro
robert.j.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Fires purposely set to burn crop residues and get the land ready for the growing season are continuing as evidenced in this image from the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite. A longer, more detailed account of these types of fires can be found at this URL: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/world/20130326-indochina.html.

This natural-color satellite image was collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on April 07, 2013. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red.

###

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC. Caption by Lynn Jenner.


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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/2013-04/nsfc-fis041113.php

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Thursday, April 11, 2013

S_47P::::10 Things to Know for Today

Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! homepage or look through a list of Yahoo!'s online services.

Please try Yahoo Help Central if you need more assistance.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/10-things-know-today-101340019.html

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ConocoPhillips delays 2014 Arctic marine drilling

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- ConocoPhillips Alaska announced Wednesday it will not drill in Arctic waters off Alaska's northwest shore in 2014.

Environmental groups hailed the decision and said the experience of Royal Dutch Shell PLC in 2012 demonstrated that oil companies are not prepared to drill in the fragile Arctic environment.

ConocoPhillips said uncertainties of evolving federal regulatory requirements are the reason for backing off.

"While we are confident in our own expertise and ability to safely conduct offshore Arctic operations, we believe that more time is needed to ensure that all regulatory stakeholders are aligned," said ConocoPhillips Alaska President Trond-Erik Johansen in the prepared statement.

It would not be prudent to commit financial resources to preserving the option to drill in 2014 at this time, the company said.

The company cited an Interior Department report released last week that said industry and government should work together to create an Arctic-specific model for petroleum exploration. The model would focus on standards for drilling and emergency response.

"We welcome the opportunity to work with the federal government and other leaseholders to further define and clarify the requirements for drilling offshore Alaska," Johansen said. "Once those requirements are understood, we will re-evaluate our Chukchi Sea drilling plans. We believe this is a reasonable and responsible approach given the huge investments required to operate offshore in the Arctic."

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, called the decision disappointing but not unexpected.

"Companies can't be expected to invest billions of dollars without some assurance that federal regulators are not going to change the rules on them almost continuously," she said in a prepared statement. "The administration has created an unacceptable level of uncertainty when it comes to the rules for offshore exploration that must be fixed if we're going to end our dependence on oil from the Middle East."

Interior Department spokeswoman Jessica Kershaw said in an email request for comment that the Obama administration remains fully committed to supporting safe and responsible exploration of potential energy resources in the Arctic. They present unique technical challenges and environmental and cultural considerations, she said.

"The expectations have been crystal clear from the very beginning that any approved activities will be held to the highest safety and environmental standards," Kershaw said.

Environmental groups said oil companies simply are not ready to drill ? or to clean up a major spill if it occurs in waters with ice that can vary from slush to many feet thick.

"The Arctic is dangerous and a tough place to work," said Chris Krenz of Oceana by phone from Juneau. "Shell certainly demonstrated that in spades. It's a tough place to work."

Shell estimates that it has spent upward of $5 billion on Arctic offshore drilling but its drilling was bedeviled by problems last year.

Shell performed preliminary work on exploratory wells in both the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea but was restricted from drilling into oil-bearing rock because it had not finished work on a spill response barge promised in its spill response plan. A containment dome, a key piece of equipment, was damaged in testing off the Washington coast.

Seasonal ice in the Chukchi Sea delayed Shell vessels from moving north. When Chukchi drilling began in September, a major ice floe forced Shell's drill ship off a prospect less than 24 hours later.

When the drilling season ended, the Coast Guard announced that it had found safety violations on the Noble Discoverer, which drilled in the Chukchi. The Coast Guard has turned over its investigation of the vessel to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Problems peaked in late December when the drill vessel Kulluk, a circular barge that operated in the Beaufort, broke away from its towing vessel on its way to a shipyard in Washington state and ran aground on an Alaska island.

Both vessels will be repaired in Asia shipyards. Shell previously announced it would not resume drilling in 2013

Krenz said existing technology is not sufficient to protect Arctic ecosystems and opportunities for subsistence from drilling and a possible oil spill. He agreed that specific standards must be developed for the Arctic.

"The oil is not going anywhere but the technology to protect the Arctic can improve," Krenz said.

Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts' U.S. Arctic program, said in a statement that challenges in the Arctic are considerable.

"Clearly, more time is needed to develop world-class safety and oil spill prevention and response standards," she said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/conocophillips-delays-2014-arctic-marine-165828482.html

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Obama: I've met GOP more than halfway (CNN)

Share With Friends: Share on FacebookTweet ThisPost to Google-BuzzSend on GmailPost to Linked-InSubscribe to This Feed | Rss To Twitter | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/298069470?client_source=feed&format=rss

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B?nh Meatloaf: A Vietnamese sandwich gets an American makeover

Pork and beef meatloaf is flavored with basil, scallions, garlic, and Chinese five-spice powder. Top it with pickled carrots and daikon and then serve with baguette slices for this American take on Vietnamese b?nh m? sandwiches.

By Terry Boyd,?Blue Kitchen / April 9, 2013

Give meatloaf a twist with this Vietnamese-American fusion recipe. Top the meat with pickled carrots and daikon, or white radishes.

Blue Kitchen

Enlarge

We love border-crossing cooking.?When ingredients and techniques travel across boundaries and cultures, food gets interesting. Vietnamese cuisine is a perfect example. Not only does it share herbs and spices with its Asian neighbors, but it borrows from its culinary past as a French colony.

Skip to next paragraph Terry Boyd

Blue Kitchen

Terry Boyd is the author of Blue Kitchen, a Chicago-based food blog for home cooks. His simple, eclectic cooking focuses on fresh ingredients, big flavors and a cheerful willingness to borrow ideas and techniques from all over the world. A frequent contributor to the Chicago Sun-Times, his recipes have also appeared on the Bon App?tit and Saveur websites.

Recent posts

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A family favorite here at Blue Kitchen is Marion?s?Vietnamese Beef Stew. The slow cooked, meaty, multi-spiced dish is served with a French baguette instead of rice and eaten with forks and spoons, not chopsticks. Similarly, b?nh m? ? in the West, delicious, usually meaty Vietnamese sandwiches ? are served on baguettes. In Vietnam, the term b?nh m? actually means bread or, more specifically, French bread.

B?nh m? ? the sandwich ? comes in many forms. The most popular is made with roast pork, but beef, chicken, tofu, and other varieties are generally available in the sandwich shops that have sprung up in cities across the United States. It is virtually always served with pickled carrots and daikon, a mild white radish popular in the cuisines of Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam and India. It?s often served with sliced peppers too, jalape?o being a readily available choice, and topped with cilantro sprigs.

We first sampled b?nh m? meatloaf served as the classic sandwich at?The Butcher & Larder, our favorite Chicago butcher shop. Made with their own ground pork (and perhaps beef?I don?t remember), it was delicious. About halfway through, though, we stopped eating it as a sandwich, opening it up and concentrating on the meat and toppings with the occasional bite of bread. And that gave me the idea to dispense with the sandwich altogether and create a mash-up of the Vietnamese favorite and the ultimate American comfort food: b?nh meatloaf.

B?nh Meatloaf
Serves 4 to 6

For the pickled carrots and daikon?makes about 2 cups:
Make this at least three hours ahead of making the meatloaf to let the vegetables marinate. Will keep for up to three weeks in the fridge. See Kitchen Notes for a couple of thoughts on ways to use the jalape?o pepper.

1/2 cup warm water

4 teaspoons sugar

2 teaspoons salt

1/2 cup rice vinegar (or distilled vinegar)

1 cup carrot matchsticks (or julienned or coarsely grated?see Kitchen Notes)

1 cup daikon matchsticks (see Kitchen Notes)

scant 1/2 cup thin slices of jalape?o pepper (optional?see Kitchen Notes)

Add sugar and salt to warm water and stir to dissolve. Stir in vinegar. Set aside and let cool while you prepare carrots, daikon and jalape?o pepper. Combine in bowl with vinegar mix. Set aside to let vegetables marinate at room temperature, stirring occasionally, for at least 3 hours. For longer than 3 hours, refrigerate.

For the meatloaf:

1 pound ground pork

1 pound ground beef (see Kitchen Notes)

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh basil

3 scallions, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon fish sauce (see Kitchen Notes)

1 tablespoon hot sauce (such as Sriracha)

1 egg, beaten

1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder

6 tablespoons bread crumbs (I used panko)

cilantro sprigs

baguette slices

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/zisBQGuz9rY/Banh-Meatloaf-A-Vietnamese-sandwich-gets-an-American-makeover

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Energy Secretary Nominee Dodges Question On Gas Exports

A U.S. Senate committee held a confirmation hearing for Ernest Moniz on Tuesday, who has been nominated to be the U.S. Energy Secretary. Moniz says he will retire from MIT, where he's a professor of physics and energy systems. He would advocate for the Obama administration's "all of the above" energy strategy, which calls for continued fossil fuels development and supports nuclear energy, wind and solar.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/09/176713154/energy-secretary-nominee-dodges-question-on-gas-exports?ft=1&f=1007

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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Ex-Ill. lawmaker elected to succeed Jackson Jr.

FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, Robin Kelly celebrates her special primary election win in Matteson, Ill., for Illinois' 2nd Congressional District seat, once held by Jesse Jackson Jr. She faces Republican challenger Paul McKinley in the April 9, 2013 special election. Kelly, will have quite a challenge ahead after Tuesday's election in the overwhelmingly Democratic district, if she wins as expected: She'll have to fill the shoes of Jackson, whose name and seniority allowed him to bring home lots of bacon, and she'll have to withstand the spotlight of having won with the help of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun money. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, Robin Kelly celebrates her special primary election win in Matteson, Ill., for Illinois' 2nd Congressional District seat, once held by Jesse Jackson Jr. She faces Republican challenger Paul McKinley in the April 9, 2013 special election. Kelly, will have quite a challenge ahead after Tuesday's election in the overwhelmingly Democratic district, if she wins as expected: She'll have to fill the shoes of Jackson, whose name and seniority allowed him to bring home lots of bacon, and she'll have to withstand the spotlight of having won with the help of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun money. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)

This undated photo provided by the McKinley for Congress campaign shows Republican Paul McKinley. McKinley will face Democratic former state Rep. Robin Kelly in the April 9, 2013, special election to fill Illinois' 2nd Congressional District seat vacated by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (AP Photo/Courtesy the McKinley for Congress Campaign)

CHICAGO (AP) ? Former state Rep. Robin Kelly has won the special election for Jesse Jackson Jr.'s vacated Illinois congressional seat.

The Matteson Democrat was widely expected to win Tuesday's contest over Republican community activist Paul McKinley. The strongly Democratic Chicago-area district includes suburbs and rural areas.

Kelly easily won the special primary in February from a crowded field of candidates including former Congressman Debbie Halvorson. The main issue in that race quickly became gun control and Kelly's campaign received a $2 million boost in ads including ones on television targeting Halvorson. Kelly is in favor of an assault weapons ban and has vowed to be a leader in the federal fight for gun control.

Jackson resigned in November. In February, he pleaded guilty to charges accusing him of misspending campaign funds.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-09-Congress-Jackson%20Seat/id-52ee2c46b8d44ea9a3df422989ea1f2d

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Good Reads: dogs with PTSD, children in the news, unwed mothers, waking up the Ice Age

This week's round-up of Good Reads includes helping dogs who come home from war zones, the dilemma behind telling Malala Yousafzai's story, why more mothers aren't choosing marriage, and a quest to bring back the wooly mammoth.

By Jenna Fisher,?Staff writer / March 29, 2013

Gina, a US military bomb-sniffing dog, suffered from stress after serving in Iraq.

Ed Andrieski/AP/File

Enlarge

It has been said that war has no winners. That statement could easily include not just soldiers and civilians, but also the hundreds of stray animals that are caught in the crossfire.

Skip to next paragraph Jenna Fisher

Asia editor

Jenna Fisher is the Monitor's Asia editor, overseeing regional coverage for CSMonitor.com and the weekly magazine.

Recent posts

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As the 2014 withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan draws closer, a lot of attention has been paid to how to care for the soldiers coming home, many of whom have done multiple tours. Attention is also being paid, as Jessie Knadler points out in The Daily Beast, to the animals they bring home with them.

Some dogs rescued from war zones appear to be coming home with their new masters exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress disorder ? even when their owners aren?t ?? as they adjust to not having to navigate land mines or sudden fights.

What?s the method to ease such a transition?

?All we could give her was time, love, freedom, and lots of exercise and discipline,? writes Ms. Knadler of Solha, the dog her Army Reservist husband brought home with him from Kandahar. ?Is that how to treat canine PTSD? I don?t know. But Solha is a different, calmer dog today than she was a year ago. And she?ll never have to fight another dog again.?

Children on camera

By the time a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Malala Yousafzai was shot point-blank by the Taliban six months ago in Pakistan, her activism and story had captured interest around the world. She exemplified a rare courage, spunk, and determination that made her a powerful symbol of the fight for female education amid extremism.

It was the media that handed this young girl the soapbox ? and possibly made her a target, worries Syed Irfan Ashraf, who first put Malala on camera when she was just 11 years old.

Disclosing the guilt he felt for doing so, he told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, ?No one was paying attention to what was happening in Mingora. We took a very brave 11-year-old and created her to get the attention of the world. We made her a commodity.?

The economy of unwed mothers

Good news: Over the past two decades, teen birthrates have fallen. The other news? By the time American women turn 30, about two-thirds have had their first child ? usually outside of marriage, according to a recent report highlighted in The Atlantic Monthly.

Take note of ?usually outside of marriage,? writes Derek Thompson, asking, ?Why so few marriages?? The answer, he writes, is best seen through the lens of three factors:

?(1) The changing meaning of marriage in America; (2) declining wages for low-skill men; and (3) the declining costs of being a single person.?

It used to be that the marriage contract was entered into in the US with specific roles in mind. The wife would stay home and take care of the kids, and the husband would go to work and put food on the table. That model has been upended.

?Think of marriage like any other contract or investment. It?s most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them.?

Back to life, back to reality

Right now scientists in South Korea are combing the frozen remains of woolly mammoths looking for the scientific version of a needle in a haystack: a live cell. Any live cell. If they find one, they?ll try to use it to bring the mammoth back from centuries of extinction. (Don?t worry, they?ve got a Plan B.)

Roll your eyes if you must, but, writes Carl Zimmer in National Geographic, the idea of bringing vanished species back to life has percolated in popular culture and in science labs at least since ?Jurassic Park,? and that technology is close ? really close.

Indeed, advances in manipulating stem cells, in recovering ancient DNA, and in reconstructing lost genomes has pushed science closer to reviving that which was once thought to be lost for good. Remember Dolly, the first sheep to be cloned in 1996? Amateur. Scientists now offer up the hopeful example of Celia the bucardo (an extinct type of mountain goat).

?Celia?s clone is the closest that anyone has gotten to true de-
extinction. Since witnessing those fleeting minutes of the clone?s life, [Alberto] Fern?ndez-Arias, now the head of the government of Aragon?s Hunting, Fishing and Wetlands department, has been waiting for the moment when science would finally catch up, and humans might gain the ability to bring back an animal they had driven extinct.?

The question now is, Should it be done?

? ?The history of putting species back after they?ve gone extinct in the wild is fraught with difficulty,? says conservation biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. A huge effort went into restoring the Arabian oryx to the wild, for example. But after the animals were returned to a refuge in central Oman in 1982, almost all were wiped out by poachers. ?We had the animals, and we put them back, and the world wasn?t ready,? says Pimm. ?Having the species solves only a tiny, tiny part of the problem.? ?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/4ar0XcjYUSA/Good-Reads-dogs-with-PTSD-children-in-the-news-unwed-mothers-waking-up-the-Ice-Age

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