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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

US, Afghans confident troop agreement will pass

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, center, arrives for a meeting of the North Atlantic Council of defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013. NATO defense ministers open a two-day meeting beginning on Tuesday to discuss Syria, Afghanistan, cyber security and ballistic missile defense. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, left, speaks with Romanian Defense Minister Mircea Dusa during a meeting of the North Atlantic Council of defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013. NATO defense ministers open a two-day meeting beginning on Tuesday to discuss Syria, Afghanistan, cyber security and ballistic missile defense. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

BRUSSELS (AP) — U.S and Afghanistan officials said Tuesday that they are confident tribal elders and the Afghan population will agree to keep U.S. and coalition troops in the country after 2014, even as a senior U.S. military official warned of high profile attacks and assassinations leading up to Afghanistan's presidential elections next year.

The comments come amid persistent uncertainty about the security agreement, including provisions allowing the U.S. military to continue to conduct counterterrorism operations and insuring that U.S. military courts, not the Afghans, would maintain legal jurisdiction over American forces that stay in the country.

A senior U.S. official said that Afghan Defense Minister Bismillah Mohammadi told U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that he has strong confidence that the agreement would be endorsed soon and that the vast majority of Afghans support it. The two spoke during a NATO meeting where leaders were getting updates on the war and progress of the Afghan forces.

In a separate discussion, a senior U.S. military official said he is pretty confident that the agreement will be signed, adding that he has spoken to Afghans at every level and none have said the bilateral security agreement was a bad idea.

The military official also said that Afghans recognize that keeping U.S. and coalition troops in the country after 2014 to train and assist the Afghan forces is key to getting the more than $4 billion in financial support that allied nations have pledged to provide.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issues publicly due to NATO rules.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Hamid Karzai reached an agreement about a week ago on the key elements of a deal that would allow American troops to stay after 2014, when combat troops are scheduled to leave. One key unresolved issue — which is a deal breaker for the U.S. — is whether U.S. military courts maintain legal jurisdiction over the troops.

The U.S. official said Hagel made it clear to Mohammadi that jurisdiction is a must for the security agreement.

Karzai said that issue must be discussed by the consultative assembly of tribal elders, or Loya Jirga, before he makes a decision.

The national meeting is expected to start between Nov. 19 and 21 and could last as long as a week, with as many as 3,000 people attending. The Loya Jirga is not binding but Karzai is likely to follow it. The agreement would then have to be ratified by the Afghan Parliament.

There have been repeated worries that the complex agreement could fall apart in much the same way that U.S. negotiations with Iraqi leaders collapsed over the issue of troop immunity. The U.S. then pulled all of its troops out of Iraq.

Officials Tuesday sought to present a more optimistic view of the Afghan situation, while still acknowledging that there are still challenges ahead.

In particular, the military official warned that based on intelligence reports and discussions with Afghans, the U.S. is expecting the Taliban to try to disrupt April's elections with high-profile attacks and targeted killings aimed at candidates and high-level officials.

The military official said that although the peak fighting season is ending, the winter is likely to focus more on kinetic attacks than in the past. He said he expects a concerted effort by the enemy to try and prevent successful elections and the Afghan security forces are preparing for that fighting campaign now.

The official added that in the coming months the U.S. and coalition forces will focus less on building the proficiency of individual Afghan units, and more on improving broader capabilities such as logistics, intelligence gathering, budgeting and command and control.

U.S. officials have said that the U.S. and NATO would like to keep between 8,000-12,000 troops in Afghanistan to train and assist the Afghan force and conduct counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida. Both Hagel and the U.S. military official said they are still comfortable with that range of numbers.

They noted, however, that the number of troops is just one of the key components for success. The state of the Taliban, cooperation from Pakistan in battling the insurgency and the Afghan political process are also important.

Hagel told reporters traveling with him that the sooner an agreement is reached, the better. But he said there is still sufficient time.

"I don't think there's any deadline that we have to have it by Thanksgiving," said Hagel, as he was traveling to the NATO meeting. "If we stay on track — that gives us plenty of time."

If the security agreement is not signed, all troops would leave at the end of next year. President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press he would be comfortable with a full pullout of U.S. troops.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-22-EU-NATO-Afghanistan/id-655783beea4242b887b359a791366aa8
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Air Force Officers Keep Leaving the Doors to Our Nuclear Missiles Open

Not to scare you or anything, but Air Force officers have left the blast doors to nuclear-tipped missiles open at least twice in the past year. These are the guys who help guard the launch codes who are also tasked with watching over the arsenal. Leaving the missiles available and unattended is a very, very big no-no.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Obama taps former budget aide Zients to help health law rollout

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration has asked former budget official and management expert Jeffrey Zients to help the administration manage the rocky roll-out of the Affordable Care Act known as "Obamacare," the White House said on Tuesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which is managing the healthcare program's launch, has brought Zients in to provide "management advice and counsel" to the project, White House spokesman Jay Carney said at a briefing on Tuesday.

(Reporting By Mark Felsenthal and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-taps-former-budget-aide-zients-help-health-173900419.html
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Cardinals, Red Sox set to renew October rivalry

BOSTON (AP) — Lance Lynn squeezed through a door leading into the Green Monster, shimmied along a cramped space behind the famed left-field wall and peered out a tiny metal slot in the Fenway Park scoreboard.

"A little snug for me," the burly St. Louis pitcher said.

Plenty of Cardinals got their first look at the century-old ballpark during a workout Tuesday, a day before they opened the World Series against the Boston Red Sox.

The Red Sox saw a neat sight, too. As they took batting practice at dusk, a giant, vibrant rainbow formed high in the sky beyond center field. Slugger David Ortiz noticed.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "It's a Dominican thing."

Whatever, Big Papi. Something special always seems to happen when the Redbirds and Red Sox meet, from Stan the Man vs. the Splendid Splinter, to Gibby vs. Yaz, to Pedro vs. Pujols.

Now, they're set to meet for the fourth time in "that Octobery kind of air," as Cardinals Game 1 starter Adam Wainwright described it.

Jon Lester will oppose him Wednesday night, facing a lineup that got a late boost. Allen Craig, who hit a major league-leading .454 with runners in scoring position but hasn't played since Sept. 4 because of sprained left foot, is set to return.

"I feel like I'm in a good spot," said the cleanup man, who will be the Cardinals' designated hitter.

Weather could be a factor. Temperatures are supposed to dip into the low 40s and rain is in the forecast.

Boston was listed as a slim favorite in the matchup between teams that tied for the big league lead in wins. The clubs haven't met in the regular season since 2008, and Red Sox speedster Jacoby Ellsbury was looking forward to this pairing that some are billing as the Beards vs. the Birds.

"It will be exciting to see some unfamiliar faces," he said.

Dustin Pedroia, Mike Napoli and many of their scraggly Boston teammates figure to get a good look at the Cardinals' crop of young arms, led by postseason ace Michael Wacha and relievers Trevor Rosenthal, Carlos Martinez and Kevin Siegrist.

Ortiz is the link to the Red Sox team that swept St. Louis in the 2004 Series — Boston never trailed at any point — and ended an 86-year championship drought.

"Obviously I'm aware of the history of the two teams," Ellsbury said. "Once the first pitch happens, all that goes out the window."

The Red Sox are trying to win their third crown in 10 years. St. Louis is aiming to take its second title in three years and third in eight seasons.

"Some of us have some pretty bad memories of being here in 2004, and we're looking to kind of right that ship," St. Louis manager Mike Matheny said.

Matheny was the Cardinals' catcher that year, backed up by rookie Yadier Molina. Now Molina is considered the best defensive catcher in baseball, charged with trying to stop Ellsbury and a Red Sox team that's run a lot in the postseason.

"It's fun to be part of this history, to be here in Fenway Park, to be part of this Series against Boston," Molina said.

"It's different to play here overall. Playing defense, offense, pitching. It's different, but at the same time it's fun," he said.

David Freese grew up in St. Louis and became MVP of the 2011 Series. He heard about Stan Musial vs. Ted Williams in 1946, knew about Bob Gibson facing Carl Yastrzemski in '67 and recalled watching on TV when Red Sox reliever Keith Foulke fielded Edgar Renteria's tapper to finish off 2004.

"I remember the comebacker that ended it. The sweep. You don't expect a World Series to end in four games," the 30-year-old third baseman said.

Freese said he'd always hoped to get a chance to play at Fenway, and he got his first look Tuesday.

After Matheny stood near the mound and pointed out the particulars of the dirt triangle in center field, Freese stepped in for batting practice. He launched a long drive that hit high off the Green Monster in left-center, the loud thwack echoing all around the ballpark.

"That's my Wall ball," he hooted to teammate Matt Holliday.

Good for a hitter, maybe not so great for a pitcher.

"A ballgame can change with one swing of the bat in this ballpark," said Wacha, who also climbed into the wall. "It's pretty crazy. Crazy dimensions, that's for sure."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cardinals-red-sox-set-renew-october-rivalry-200225881--spt.html
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Chocolate Fashions Make For A Truly Sweet Little Black Dress

"Eternal Diamond," an A-line dress hand-painted with 40 pounds of Lindt chocolate. It's adorned simply along the hem with chili and orange segments, flavors used in speciality Lindt chocolate bars. The fan and hat are also crafted from chocolate, of course.

Photo: Paul Winch-Furness/Courtesy Salon du Chocolat

If you find yourself sauntering down the runway wearing 40 pounds of chocolate, don't sweat it. Seriously – you might find yourself dripping on the audience.

So warns Fiona Bitmead, one of ten models who showed off edible chocolate creations Friday night at the Salon du Chocolat in London. Five handlers helping her get dressed.

"[I] had to worry about a dress melting on me!" she says. "I can't say I've ever wanted to eat the dresses I've worn down the catwalk before."

But as Tim Gunn might say, make it work!

Salon du Chocolat, not surprisingly, is a French creation. It's the world's largest chocolate fair open to the public, and it has been running for 19 years. This year, it will travel to 23 cities around the world, providing patrons a chance to taste and buy artisan and specialty chocolate. The salon hits New York in November 2014.

Clad in little — and not so little — chocolate dresses, the models at the London event wore gowns, headpieces, bags and even a swimsuit all made of, or adorned with white, milk and the dark stuff.

Cute, but probably not the best choice for fun in the sun: This bikini was a collaboration between chocolatier Fruitful Blooms and swimwear purveyor Bikini Fling. It features Fruitful Blooms' signature chocolate leaves and flowers.

Photo: Paul Winch-Furness/Courtesy Salon du Chocolat

Chocolatiers and designers worked together to create a chocoholic's dream dresses. Lauren Smith, a 23-year-old art school graduate, was hired by Swiss chocolatier Lindt to design its "Eternal Diamond" dress, the creation Bitmead modeled. The A-line dress gets its rich brown color from the 40 pounds of chocolate that cover it; it's adorned simply along the hem with chili and orange segments, flavors used in specialty Lindt chocolate bars. Smith says she had two major worries about the dress.

"One of the main challenges was trying to pick a fabric that could sustain the weight of the chocolate and the embellishments," Smith says. "Luckily, I picked a good, sturdy stiff canvas which worked well."

Fabric samples were tested at Lindt headquarters in advance to ensure the dress could withstand the heavy chocolate coating. Smith and the Lindt team constructed the piece de resistance by hand in just two weeks.

London patisserie On Cafe's entry featured a gown covered in macarons, of course.

Photo: Paul Winch-Furness/Courtesy Salon du Chocolat

London patisserie On Cafe's entry featured a gown covered in macarons, of course.

Photo: Paul Winch-Furness/Courtesy Salon du Chocolat

"The thing that I was really worried about was sewing through chocolate and fabric and that actually came out really well. It was a bit hard, but I was able to stitch it," Smith tells The Salt.

Food artist Paul Wayne Gregory was involved with the construction of the dress, which took 24 hours to hand-paint with chocolate. Gregory says the process wasn't without its meltdowns, as it were.

"Tempering helps," he says, "but there was a lot of melting, breaking and re-building."

And how on earth did they transport it? Gregory says, "We had two women holding it in the back of a van."

Mark Tilling, master chocolatier at Squires Kitchen, a British pastry shop and baking school, used 10 pounds of chocolate squares to create an Audrey Hepburn-inspired dress and matching round handbag. Tilling says the hardest part was finding something suitable to serve as the template.

Breakfast of chocolate at Tiffany's? Ten pounds of the dark, sweet stuff were used to craft this Audrey Hepburn-inspired dress and matching handbag, created by master chocolatier Mark Tilling of Squire Kitchen.

Photo: Paul Winch-Furness/Courtesy Salon du Chocolat

"It took all day just to find the right dress," Tilling says. " It's got to be easy to get into, so we needed a long zip in the back."

Tilling started with the dress: Using it as a base, he warmed chocolate to act as glue for the squared panels that adorn the frock.

Thankfully, designers won't have to re-create their perishable dresses. Each fashion show will feature the work of local designers and chocolatiers.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/10/21/239291104/chocolate-fashions-make-for-a-truly-sweet-little-black-dress?ft=1&f=1004
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The ocean is broken

The following article was reprinted with permission from The Newcastle Herald.

IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

Read what's happened since this article went global

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.

"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."

But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.

"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.

Not this time.

"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.

"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.

"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.

"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.

"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.

"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."

Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.

And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.

"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.

He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.

More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.

Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.

"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.

"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."

This article ran in the Newcastle Herald, which published a follow up after it gained traction worldwide.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/the-ocean-is-broken-133327474.html
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Colorado theater gunman coerced into incriminating statements, defense says

By Keith Coffman

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (Reuters) - Police coerced movie theater gunman James Holmes into talking about explosives found in his apartment after he shot 12 people to death, and those statements should be barred from his murder trial, defense lawyers argued in a Colorado courtroom on Monday.

Prosecutors stood by the admissibility of the statements, countering that police were merely trying to obtain information on how to safely defuse the bombs to protect law enforcement officers and the public from a potential detonation of the booby traps.

The latest legal back-and-forth in the high-profile case came in a hearing over what evidence should be allowed in the capital murder trial of the onetime neuroscience graduate student, due to start in early February.

Holmes, 25, is charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder for opening fire in a suburban Denver cinema during a midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" in July 2012.

The shooting rampage left 12 moviegoers dead and 70 others injured or wounded, some with permanent paralysis.

Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his lawyers have said their client was undergoing a psychotic episode when he sprayed the movie auditorium with gunfire before surrendering to police.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the California native if he is convicted.

Public defender Kristen Nelson said police denied Holmes' repeated requests to speak to a lawyer before he was questioned by investigators, and deceived him into thinking that the information he provided would not be used against him.

Had police allowed him to seek legal counsel immediately after his arrest, as required under the U.S. Constitution, a lawyer would have helped "protect this mentally ill man from being the instrument to his own conviction and execution," Nelson said.

Holmes, who has tended to stare straight ahead during courtroom testimony, bowed his head throughout Nelson's impassioned argument.

Prosecutor Rich Orman countered that police were unsure at the time if there was a second gunman at large and were dealing with a fluid situation.

"They could not know if setting foot in the apartment would trigger a massive conflagration," he said.

Defense lawyers also said the seizure of Holmes' bank accounts, which traced his firearms purchases, should be suppressed because there was not initially a valid, signed court order allowing the records to be released to prosecutors.

But prosecutors said they noticed what they called an oversight and informed the public defenders and the court of the error that was later rectified with a proper court order.

Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos Samour Jr. has not ruled on the suppression motions.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman; Editing by Steve Gorman and Eric Beech)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/colorado-theater-gunman-coerced-incriminating-statements-defense-says-044658839.html
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