Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314927896?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Syrian rebels renew fight for Aleppo
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian rebels battled President Bashar al-Assad's forces in and around the northern city of Aleppo on Sunday, seeking to reverse gains made by loyalist forces in the commercial hub over the last two months, activists said.
The fighting, by a variety of insurgent groups, happened as France urged moderate rebels to wrest territory back from radical Islamists whose role in the fight to topple Assad poses a dilemma for Western countries concerned that arms shipments could fall into the hands of people it considers terrorists.
The 11 Western and Arab countries known as the "Friends of Syria" agreed on Saturday to give urgent military support to the rebels, channeled through the Western-backed Supreme Military Council in a bid to prevent arms getting to Islamist radicals.
But radical forces showed they remained formidable on Sunday when the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham brigade detonated a car bomb at a roadblock at an entrance to Aleppo killing at least 12 loyalist soldiers, according to the opposition Aleppo News Network and other activists in the city.
Aleppo, 35 km (20 miles) south of Turkey, has been contested since July last year, when rebel brigades entered the city and captured about half of it. In recent weeks, Assad has focused his military campaign on recapturing rebel-held areas.
He has also been expanding control of the central province of Homs after capturing a strategic town on the border with Lebanon, and has used heavy bombardment and siege warfare to contain rebels dug in around the capital, according to opposition sources and diplomats monitoring the conflict.
Firas Fuleifel, with the moderate Islamist al-Farouq Brigade, said six rebel fighters were killed in fighting in Aleppo in the last day.
WIN BACK CONTROL
French President Francois Hollande, whose country has been at the forefront of Western efforts to re-organize and back the opposition, said moderate rebels must take territory held by radical Islamists whose involvement in the conflict, he said, gives Bashar al-Assad a pretext for more violence.
"The opposition needs to win back control of these areas ... they have fallen into the hands of extremists," Hollande told a news conference in the Doha a day after the Friends of Syria met in the Qatari capital.
"If it seems that extremist groups are present and tomorrow they could be the beneficiaries of a chaotic situation, it will be Bashar al-Assad who will seize on this pretext to continue the massacre," Hollande said.
In Damascus, the Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamist Tawhid al-Asima brigades detonated a car bomb in an area known as Mezze 86, inhabited by members of Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam that has controlled Syria since the 1960s. Two people were killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
Rebels also attacked two security compounds in Damascus, killing at least five people, sources in the capital said.
In regional repercussions of the increasingly sectarian Syrian conflict, four Lebanese soldiers were killed in clashes with followers of a Sunni Islamist cleric who is a critic of the role of Hezbollah - the Shi'ite Lebanese group - in giving military support to Assad.
Sources in the city said the fighting broke out when a follower of Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir was arrested at an army roadblock in Sidon, 40 km (28 miles) south of Beirut.
The clashes were followed by fighting between Hezbollah members based in the mostly Sunni city and Assir's followers in which automatic weapons and shoulder fired rockets were used, the sources said.
(Additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut and Yara Bayoumy in Doha; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Kevin Liffey)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-rebels-renew-fight-aleppo-104545195.html
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Monday, June 17, 2013
Happy Father's Day: Dad's chores worth less than Mom's
Happy Father's Day vs. Happy's Mother's Day? The latter gets far more attention, but there may be a reason: Dad's work around the house isn't even worth half that of his spouse, according to a recent survey for Father's Day.?
A model grills a steak at his Fort Worth, Texas, home. A new Father's Day survey calculating the value of the typical household chores done by fathers, like grilling, found that Dad's chore value went up in 2013. But it's still far below the value of housework done by Mom.
Ralph Lauer/AP/File
EnlargeFather?s Day is the runt of the gift-giving holiday litter. Americans are expected to spend a combined $13.3 billion on Dad for Father?s Day in 2013, far less than they spent on the Christmas holidays ($580 billion), Valentine?s Day ($18 billion), and Mother?s Day ($20.7 billion), according to the National Retail Federation.
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There are plenty of reasons Father?s Day gets short shrift. Dads are difficult to shop for. They?re picky about gifts. The gifts they want are often prohibitively expensive. ?In the rare event you find an affordable, easy-to-find gift that Dad actually wants, he?ll usually buy it for himself before informing you.
But there might be another reason: According to a recent survey, Dad?s household chores are less valuable than Mom?s. By a lot.
Insure.com, a consumer insurance information site, puts out an annual Father?s Day Index that calculates the monetary value of the work the typical father does around the house, using Labor Department wage statistics for jobs that correlate to typical "dad" chores. Home repairs, for example, are calculated using wage data for maintenance and repair workers. Removing spiders from the house and squishing bugs correlates to pest control; driving kids to school and extra-curricular activities to chauffeurs, etc.
This year, the Father?s Day Index put Dad?s chore value at $23,344, an increase from last year?s $20,248. The 2013 value for moms, using the same methodology, is $59,862 ? over twice as much. Mom?s household value has been dropping for the past few years. So perhaps household labor is beginning to become more equally shared.
The survey should be taken lightly: Much of the value jump on the Dad end, after all, can be attributed to hourly wage increases for drivers, teachers, and plumbers in 2013. But it is yet another indication that the division of household labor and career obligations are shaking out more evenly between mothers and fathers. A Pew Research Center study released this past spring found that fathers are devoting more hours than ever to child care and housework: an average of 17 hours per week in 2011 compared with 6.5 hours in 1965.
Mothers, predictably, are spending more weekly hours on paid work than they were in 1965. And the mother is now the sole or primary breadwinner in 4 in 10 American families, according to Pew, quadrupling the 1960 rate.
All of this is great news, but it might not hurt to dote on the nation?s approximately 70 million dads a little extra this year as we inch toward gender equality. To do so, stop by and get a gift at one of the 7,368 men?s clothing stores, 15,542 hardware stores, or 21,418 sporting goods stores in the US, according to Census Bureau statistics.?
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Saturday, June 15, 2013
World Has 10 Years of Shale Oil: US Department of Energy
CNBC
By Gregory Meyer on June 11, 2013 at 12:44am
Global shale resources are vast enough to cover more than a decade of oil consumption, according to the first-ever U.S. assessment of reserves from Russia to Argentina.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimated ?technically recoverable? shale oil resources of 345 billion barrels in 42 countries it surveyed, or 10 percent of global crude supplies. The department had previously only provided an estimate for U.S. shale reserves, which it on Monday increased from 32 billion barrels to 58 billion.
The pace of oil and gas production gains has consistently surprised forecasters since horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, better known as ?fracking?, were pioneered in U.S. shale rock formations about ten years ago. Only the U.S. and Canada were producing oil and natural gas from shale in commercial quantities, the department said.
Read the full story here
.
Source: http://themarcellusshale.com/world-has-10-years-of-shale-oil-us-department-of-energy/
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Comet Lovejoy survives boiling brush with Sun, does victory dance
Comet Lovejoy's unlikely trip close to the sun's surface has given scientists a wealth of new information about our sun.
Comet Lovejoy sails out of the sun's corona in December 2011.
AP/NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory
EnlargeThis was not a tale that should have had a happy ending. When Comet Lovejoy sped into the Sun?s corona in 2011, scientists did not expect the daredevil to survive. Astronomers had already tracked 2,000 similar comets making the same inadvisable trip. None had made it, all melting into the sun?s super-hot glow.
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But Lovejoy did live ? and it is now telling scientists new tales about our sun.
"It's absolutely astounding," says Karl Battams, of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC, in a press release.?"I did not think the comet's icy core was big enough to survive plunging through the several million degree solar corona for close to an hour, but Comet Lovejoy is still with us."
Not only did Lovejoy survive its sunny jaunt ? it began to dance. Or rather, its tail started to wiggle.
Now, in a new paper published in Science, scientists detail what they learned about our sun as they watched the wily comet?s veritable suicide mission.
Comet Lovejoy, known to scientists as C/2011 W3, passed within just 87,000 miles of the sun?s surface for two days in December 2011. When it did, the comet began to evaporate in the sun?s scorch, leaving behind a tail-like trail of material that scientists could observe from multiple perspectives by using five different spacecraft. As the comet?s tail began to wiggle in a seeming victory dance, the scientists fed data from their multiple perspectives on the show into a computer that created a magnetohydrodynamic model of the sun's atmosphere.
Scientists also found the tail?s flits could suggest that the comet was surrounded by plasma waves running through the corona, or that the tail was bouncing on huge magnetic loops in the sun's atmosphere, raising new questions about sun?s atmosphere.
"This is all new," said Battams, in a press release. The new information ?is giving us our first look at comets traveling through the sun's atmosphere. How the two interact is cutting-edge research."
Comet Lovejoy was the discovery of amateur Australian astronomer Terry Lovejoy in December 2011. It belongs to what is known as the Kreutz family of sun-grazing comets, likely all pieces of a single giant comet that splintered apart in 1106 AD. It is thought to be at least 10 times larger than its other family members, and scientists are now pushing that estimate upwards, as only a comet with an unusually large ice core could have come as stunningly near to the sun and survive.
Scientists are unsure how long Lovejoy will exist after this stressful event, and SOHO and NASA's twin STEREO probes are continuing to monitor the comet as it swishes away from the sun
"There is still a possibility that Comet Lovejoy will start to fragment," said Battams, in a press release. "It's been through a tremendously traumatic event; structurally, it could be extremely weak. On the other hand, it could hold itself together and disappear back into the recesses of the solar system."
Thank you for your service, the not-so-little comet that could.
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Chopper video: Hollywood, CA pet store in strip mall burns ...
Jonathan Lloyd, KNBC-TV:
Firefighters carried animals from a strip mall pet store after they sawed through a metal gate to enter the unit and attack a fire that damaged the building?s roof Monday morning in Hollywood.
Aerial video showed firefighters carrying a cage of animals ? possibly puppies or small dogs ? from the building, identified by signage as Kim?s Pets and Fish. It was not immediately clear whether there are more animals in the building.
The fire, reported at about 6 a.m., damaged at least one unit of the strip mall at Lexington and Vermont avenues. Firefighters used a circular saw to cut through a metal gate and enter the building.
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iOS 7: Instead of Flatness, We Got Depth
Today, after plenty of self-deprecating jokes about virtual cows, Apple unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the mobile software by Jony Ive. After months of speculation and weeks of rumor-mongering, we finally have our answer: the future of iOS is, actually, is rife with dimensionality and texture. Which is a good thing.
The predicted rebirth Susan Kare?s original black-and-white OS design, it ain?t. Actually, let's just ban using the term "flat" altogether for this post. This iOS 7 we met today was full of what Jony Ive called ?new types of depth.? Alongside a poppy, neon-and-pastel color scheme, the icons, apps, and homescreen of iOS 7 are full of layering and dimensionality. There are also entirely new types of animation: from a screen that uses the accelerometer to adjust in parallax, to beautiful new animated weather icons.
Sure, Jony Ive has gotten rid of many of the richly detailed skeuomorphic elements that were originally designed to help first-time users get to know iOS. But he?s also introduced all sorts of interesting new complexities. For anyone expecting a Windows 8 look alike?you can rest easy. Let?s take a closer look.
An Ambient, Environment-Sensitive UI
The big focus on today?s unveiling was the apparent simplicity of the apps and icons. But for all the simplicity, the most telling element of the new UI is its complex adaptability to external environmental conditions.
The biggest?and perhaps most elegant?element of the new system is its responsivity. For example, iOS 7 uses the accelerometer to adapt the screen in parallax, achieving "new types of depth," in the words of Jony Ive. And using the phone?s light meter, it seems that the new icons and background adapt to the lighting to improve readability automatically?a bit like the previous iOS' ability to adapt screen brightness to environmental conditions.
Another nice responsive detail? The text and line color of the control panel change according to the color of your home screen image. And, finally, the time and weather seem to appear accurately on the app icons. Goodbye to the endless sunny-and-72-degree days.
Layering and Depth
The details of the icons and apps are certainly simpler than they are today. But the visual ecology they exist within is far more complex. How? Well, first of all, icons and text aren?t siloed into individual icon buttons or bars. Very often, Ive?s Helvetica Neue Ultra Light type appears directly on the screen. That seems like it?d be simpler?but it?s actually a bigger graphical challenge to orient users to text that's floating in space, rather than text anchored by buttons.
The screen itself was presented as a dense layering of image effects, too. In an exploded axonometric view, we saw a crisp clear background serve as a foundation for a middle layer?the apps?topped off with an elegant blurred panel that serves as a background for the control center. We can glean something about the future of iOS in the use of layers. Rather than treating the homescreen and apps as unique, 3D spaces, iOS 7 uses layering to provide context, instead. It's a bit like Google Now, in a way. Rather than treating the UI as an architectural metaphor, it's treated as a series of layers, or cards.
The Typeface
Say hello the Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, a slimmer variant of iOS' standard Helvetica Neue. Neue was designed nearly three decades after the original Helvetica. It was redesigned because its early translation into pixels left much to be desired?for example, the italicized version was hastily slanted from the original, and the kerning and widths were irregular and disorganized.
So, in 1983, Linotype commissioned an update for the digital age. The width system was standardized, the curves were redrawn and cleaned up, and even things like punctuation were rejiggered for digital viewing. In a way, Helvetica Neue, and its variant Ultra Light, was one of the first classic typefaces of the computerized era. As a typeface for iOS, it couldn?t make more sense: seen on the sparse banner for today?s conference, the light iteration of Neue looks elegant and clean.
But the increased use of Ultra Light is something of a risk. In many contexts, Ultra Light becomes unreadable?and without the frame and background that all iOS text once lay against, it runs the risk of becoming meek and fragile. It?s certainly beautiful on blurred backgrounds?but if users decide to use a louder, crisper background, it could become problematic.
The Stock Apps
The new icons, just as we imagined, have lost much of of the reflectivity and depth of the old. The figures themselves have been given an update too: a rainbow-hued palette, and black-and-white backgrounds, make for a lovely little set of icons. There's also a set of wire-frame-esque icons that appear on the blurred, layered background of the lock screen.
Like the new typeface, the icons seem to borrow a bit from a golden age of signage and typography design: the 1930s (and later, the 1970s), when an Austrian designer named Otto Neurath developed a visual language of pictograms called Isotype. His language was intended to transcend traditional language barriers using typographic symbols.
What does this have to do with the iOS 7 icons? Well, the original iOS icons borrowed their rounded edges and simple icons from pictograms?a heritage that's been muddied by increasingly realistic details. By eschewing real-world visual cues for simpler icons, Apple is returning to its roots in pictograms and Isotype. In a way, we can understand this as Ive integrating a rich history of pictogram design into Apple?s design language.
If Cook and Ive had unveiled a super-simple, black-and-white iOS 7 today, this would be a simpler story. But rather than simplify, they've surgically removed outdated colors and details and replaced them with a series of new, complex UI cues. There are certainly some visual similarities with Android, and the solutions are similar to Windows Phone. But given the usage stats and customer loyalty that Tim Cook quoted in his introduction, the problems and solutions of iOS are unique. Rather than overhaul the system, they're attempting to carefully introduce what amounts to a new kind of visual slang?if the original iOS was built for a 45-year-old newbie, iOS 7 looks like it was designed for a tween. It's more grown-up in terms of functionality, but younger in terms of form.
Ive, in his introduction, hinted at the difference between simplicity and purity thusly: "Design isn't just the way something looks. It's the whole thing, the way something actually works, on so many different levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience. I think there's a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. It's about bringing order to complexity." Order isn't always simple?in fact, it usually tends to be pretty complicated.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/ios-7-instead-of-flatness-we-got-depth-512291484
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