Bomb shakes Damascus, opposition holds unity talks

AMMAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded near army and security compounds in Damascus, Syrian television reported, and fractured opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad began unity talks abroad to win international respect and arms supplies.

The 50-kilogram (110-pound) bomb, near a large hotel in a heavily guarded district, was described by state media as an attack by “terrorists” – the government’s term for insurgents in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad.

Opposition activists said Sunday’s blast appeared to be the work of the Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) Brigade, an Islamist militant unit that attacked military and intelligence targets several times in the last two months.

The mainly Sunni rebels have carried out a series of bombings targeting government and military buildings in Damascus this year, extending the war into the seat of Assad’s power.

The Syrian conflict has aggravated divisions in the Islamic world, with Shi’ite Iran supporting Assad — whose Alawite faith derives from Shi’ite Islam — and U.S.-allied Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar backing his foes.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group, said government forces had killed 179 people on Sunday. It said most of the dead were civilians killed in shelling of Damascus suburbs and included 14 women and 20 children. The rest were rebels killed in battles in the capital and the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.

Opposition campaigners said the Syrian army shelled rebel positions inside a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 20 people. They said the Yarmouk camp had become the latest battleground in the war.

In northern Idlib, opposition sources said rebels were forced to halt an offensive to take a big air base because of a shortage of ammunition, a problem that has dogged their campaign to cement a hold on the north by eliminating Assad’s devastating edge in firepower.

Islamist insurgents had launched the attack on the Taftanaz military airport at dawn on Saturday, using rocket launchers and at least three tanks captured from the military.

The Syrian government restricts journalists’ access in Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from the ground.

The Jaafar bin Tayyar Division, a rebel unit in Deir al-Zor, said its fighters had taken control of the al-Ward oilfield near the Iraqi border on Sunday, after overrunning a loyalist outpost that had 40 militiamen defending it.

Rebel commanders, former Syrian officials and the Syrian head of an oil services company familiar with oil production in the area said the fields, mostly not operational, had been under de facto rebel control for months.

FEARS OF WIDER CONFLAGRATION

The conflict began with peaceful protest rallies that morphed into armed revolt when Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, tried to stamp them out with military might. About 32,000 people have been killed, wide swathes of the major Arab state have been wrecked and the civil war threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.

The opposition talks that began in Qatar marked the first concerted attempt to meld feuding, disparate groups based abroad and coordinate strategy with rebels fighting in Syria.

Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have foiled prior attempts to forge a united opposition and deterred Western powers from intervening militarily.

Analysts were skeptical the planned four days of opposition talks in the Qatari capital Doha would bring immediate results.

They aim to broaden the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 300 members to 400, to pave the way for talks in Doha on Thursday including other anti-Assad factions to crystallise a coalition.

“The main aim is to expand the council to include more of the social and political components. There will be new forces in the SNC,” Abdulbaset Sieda, current leader of the Syrian National Council, told reporters in Doha ahead of the meeting.

The meetings would also elect a new executive committee and leader for the SNC, he said.

A Qatar-based security analyst, who asked not to be named, said the meetings would bring a small step forward, at most. “The Syrian National Council is just too divided,” he said.

In Cairo, the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, called on Sunday for world powers to issue a U.N. Security Council resolution based on a deal they reached in June to set up a transitional Syrian government.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the same news conference, dismissed the need for a resolution and said others were stoking violence by backing rebels. His comments highlighted the impasse over Syria’s civil war.

Russia and China, both permanent council members, have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad’s government for the violence. The other three permanent members are the United States, Britain and France.

(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal and Regan Doherty in Qatar, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Powell)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

EU boosts radio spectrum for superfast mobile services

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission is to release a swathe of radio spectrum to give mobile and internet companies more space for rolling out faster fourth-generation (4G) wireless services.

Monday’s announcement means an extra 120 MHz of spectrum will be available for 4G from 2014 at the latest to try to accommodate a sharp rise in the use of such services on mobile devices.

The radio spectrum, used by all wireless technologies for sending and receiving information, is becoming increasingly crowded as mobile demand adds to TV and radio broadcasting in using a resource also needed by emergency services and military telecommunications.

Industry estimates put growth in global mobile data traffic at 26 percent annually by 2015. According to networking firm Cisco Systems, mobile data traffic volumes in the European Union are expected to increase by more than 90 percent each year for the next 5 years.

Superfast 4G mobile communications allow the use of data-heavy services such as video conferencing.

“This extra spectrum for 4G in Europe means we can better meet the changing and growing demand for broadband,” said Neelie Kroes, European Union Commissioner for digital policy.

Freeing up additional spectrum would also help the EU address competition from countries such as the United States and Japan, where wireless services are among the world’s fastest.

“The EU will enjoy up to twice the amount of spectrum for high speed wireless broadband as in the United States,” the Commission said in a statement.

Companies that own parts of the radio wave spectrum bought after liberalization in the 1990s consider the resource among their most valuable assets and many are reluctant to share.

But in September the Commission pushed telecoms firms to share the radio frequencies they use for mobile and broadband services as space runs out.

(Reporting By Claire Davenport; Editing by Louise Heavens)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

MTV to air fundraiser for devastated Jersey shore

NEW YORK (AP) — MTV, home of the “Jersey Shore” reality show, plans to air a fundraising special to help rebuild New Jersey’s devastated shoreline.

The one-hour program will air Nov. 15 from MTV’s Times Square studio in New York City. It will feature the cast of “Jersey Shore” along with other guests.

The network said Monday the program will solicit contributions for the rebuilding of Seaside Heights, the heart of the Jersey shore and the principal setting for the “Jersey Shore” series.

For this effort, MTV will be partnering with Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization that provides design and construction services to communities in need.

Seaside Heights was among numerous coastal areas devastated by Sandy last week.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Sudan’s Bashir to get health check in Saudi Arabia: report

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan‘s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will visit Saudi Arabia where he will receive a medical checkup, state media said on Monday, after an official said the 68-year-old ruler had undergone throat surgery in August.

Bashir, who has ruled Sudan for 23 years, has held fewer public rallies in the past few months, prompting Sudanese newspapers and blogs to speculate about his health.

Last month, a government official said he had undergone surgery on his vocal cords in Qatar in August but was in good health.

State news agency SUNA said on Monday Bashir would meet the king and other officials on his trip to Saudi Arabia but did not say when the visit would take place.

“During the visit, the president will undergo a normal medical checkup related to the inflammation of his vocal cords,” SUNA said, quoting the presidency.

The president was in “good health” and was carrying out his activities normally, the report said.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes committed in the western Darfur region. He denies the charges.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

The Dark Art of Political Polling

How could a Gallup Organization survey published a week before the election show Mitt Romney up by 5 percentage points, while a CBS/New York Times poll from the same period put him 1 point behind President Obama? Even professional poll watchers don’t know.

New technologies such as e-mail blasts have made it possible to field polls cheaply—and to publicize them on the Internet, bypassing traditional gatekeepers in the mainstream media. With hundreds of polls to choose from, candidates draw attention to those that support their case. The public is growing suspicious of a snow job, if you believe an Oct. 2 poll about polls by Public Policy Polling. It found that 42 percent of respondents say pollsters are manipulating results to show Obama ahead. “The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense,” Nate Silver, who runs the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight poll blog, tweeted in September.

A well-done poll uses statistical science to produce something a little like magic. The key is giving every person in the target population an equal chance of being contacted. The classic method is known as “random digit dialing,” which sprays out calls to both listed and unlisted phone numbers. By interviewing a sample of just 1,000 or so people, a pollster can come very close to divining the opinions of hundreds of millions.

But there are far more ways to get it wrong than right. Take “tracking” polls. Unlike one-shot polls, they last for months. Each day new people are interviewed, and results are published for a rolling average of the previous three, five, or seven days. These polls get top billing from the media just before an election, but they have a little-noted flaw. Because each wave of polling takes only a day, there’s no opportunity to call back people who don’t answer the first time. That means raw results are skewed toward the kind of people who sit by the phone. “A one-day poll is going to get you a lot of old women,” says Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers University polling expert.

Pollsters correct for this by giving less weight to replies from quick-to-answer types and more to replies from people in hard-to-reach groups. But the reweighting itself is imprecise, so a tracking poll’s actual margin of error can be a percentage point or two higher than what’s reported as its “sampling error,” typically 3 to 4 percentage points. Paul Lavrakas, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, calls this “almost like a dirty little secret.”

Another secret: Americans routinely lie to pollsters when asked if they’ll vote—saying yes when the real answer is heck no. The trick is to ask a set of questions that ferrets out respondents’ true intentions. In an Oct. 18 blog post, FiveThirtyEight’s Silver contended that Gallup may have gotten its formula wrong, overestimating the likelihood of Romney’s supporters going to vote. Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor-in-chief, says that can’t be ruled out. “If our model is not as accurate as we’d like, we’ll definitely reevaluate it,” he says. RealClearPolitics’ average of eight national polls (including Gallup’s) showed Romney with just a 0.8 percentage-point lead through Oct. 28, compared with Gallup’s 5 percentage points.

Any poll that doesn’t include cell phones is highly suspect because cell-only households are more likely to vote Democratic than ones in landline-only households, says the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Robo-dialing polls, the cheapest kind of phone poll, are always landline-only, because federal law prohibits robo-dialing of mobile numbers. Correcting for that political bias by reweighting results is imperfect. Polls conducted online raise a red flag because of disparities in Web usage. YouGov, for one, works hard to get a clean random sample. But some Internet-based firms use e-mail lists that are unrepresentative, counting on weighting to fix errors. Pollsters generally disclose their methodologies, but journalists often fail to report them, treating all polls as if they’re equally valid.

The proliferation of polls has added to the public’s disillusionment, which only makes the pollsters’ job harder. People don’t answer calls from unfamiliar numbers or hang up when they hear a pollster on the line. So pollsters have to try about 10,000 households just to complete 1,000 interviews, more than three times as many as 15 years ago. “It’s harder every day,” says Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which polls for Bloomberg News.

A simple rule is to beware of polls whose results are far outside the mainstream. Journalists (though not all of us) play them up because they’re surprising, but outliers are the least likely to be accurate. Polls that crunch averages are a decent guide, because errors tend to cancel each other out. Ultimately, though, no poll is anything more than a snapshot of a single moment. The only real way to figure out who’ll win: wait till Election Day.

The bottom line: To get a reliable sample of 1,000 people, pollsters need to call 10,000, more than three times as many as 15 years ago.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Brazil’s ‘pop-star priest’ gets mammoth new stage

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil‘s “pop-star priest” is already packing in the crowds at the newly opened mammoth sanctuary that he built for his campaign to stem the exodus of faithful from the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America’s biggest nation.

Brazil still has more Catholics than any other country in the world, with about 65 percent of its 192 million people identifying themselves that way in the 2010 census. But that is down from 74 percent in 2000 and is the lowest since records began tracking religion 140 years ago.

That’s where Father Marcelo Rossi‘s Mother of God sanctuary comes in. The not-yet-finished structure will seat 6,000 people and have standing room for 14,000 more, church leaders say. In addition, the grounds outside can hold 80,000 people who could watch Mass on outdoor video screens.

After the inaugural Mass on Friday attracted upward of 50,000 people, a beaming Rossi told reporters: “They couldn’t all fit in. There was a crowd that had to stand outside! That’s a sign we’re on the right path, and it’s this sanctuary.”

Similar numbers jammed into the huge church Saturday.

It’s a fitting stage for Rossi, a Latin Grammy-nominated singer who is known for tossing buckets of holy water on worshippers and performing rollicking Christian songs backed by a blasting live band during Mass.

The church sits on 323,000 square feet (30,000 square meters) of land. Church officials declined to confirm how big the actual building is, though local reports put it at 91,500 square feet (8,500 square meters). That would make it one of the world’s 10 biggest churches. A cross soaring 138 feet (42 meters) into the air is the focal point.

The Mother of God sanctuary is anything but traditional. Designed by noted Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake, it has a wide-open layout giving it the feel of a warehouse. Concrete walls hold up a sloping blue roof that from the outside looks more like a basketball arena than a house of worship. With the church several years away from completion, white plastic chairs were in the place of pews for a lucky few thousand to grab a seat. The rest had to stand.

Rossi dismisses the idea his huge church is a response to the explosion of the evangelical Christian faith in Brazil. Rather, the priest seems to be battling what recent studies indicate is Catholicism’s biggest enemy: indifference.

While millions of Brazilian Catholics joined Pentecostal congregations in the 1990s, a study conducted last year by Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation based on census data found that the Catholics leaving the church these days are mostly becoming nonreligious. Experts have said the trend of Brazilians deciding organized religion isn’t for them poses a more potent threat to Catholic leaders than losses to the Pentecostals.

Rossi chose to open his new church on the Brazilian holiday of Finados, the nation’s version of the Day of the Dead. “A day, a day that was dead, was transformed!” the priest told worshippers during the service, using his gold-plated microphone.

The “pop-star priest” is seen by Brazilian Catholicism as its biggest weapon against the lack of interest, and his new sanctuary adds to his tools of best-selling books and music recordings to keep worshippers interested in what many complain has become a staid institution.

There was nothing stale about his Mass on Friday.

Singing as loud as they could, waving white hankies and swaying with a rocking band, the 20,000 people who jammed into the Mother of God sanctuary hammed it up for TV cameras and shed tears down their cheeks as their superstar priest waved to them from the pulpit. An estimated 30,000 other people had gathered outside, where young boys climbed up into nearby trees trying to get a glimpse of the church grounds as they squinted over a sea of heads streaming out of the sanctuary.

“We have problems, everyone has problems,” worshipper Zuleima de Oliveira Sales said as she stood in the tightly packed sea of people under the soaring blue roof of the structure, her voice choking. “They don’t come to an end, but I have faith, I have faith in Our Lady.”

That’s the sort of belief the Catholic Church is counting on in Brazil and other developing nations. Leaders from the Vatican on down are looking to them as bulwarks against losses in Europe and the U.S., where sex abuse scandals have inspired many people to leave the church. About half of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.

Pentecostalism was once seen as a major threat to Brazil’s Catholic Church. Pentecostal churches, many of them founded by U.S. evangelicals, saw their membership double to more than 12 percent of the country’s population over the 1990s, with about half of the congregants estimated to be former Catholics.

During the 1990s, Brazil’s economy suffered from hyperinflation and other woes, and Pentecostal churches aggressively recruited in the slums and poor outskirts of Brazil’s cities by offering nuts-and-bolts self-improvement advice as well as Christian ministry.

Since 2003, however, Pentecostal churches have seen growth slow. The percentage of Brazilians calling themselves Pentecostals edged up from 12.5 percent of the population to 13.3 percent.

Yet the Catholic Church has continued to lose parishioners, and church leaders have had little success so far in halting that trend.

Brazil was the first nation outside Europe that Pope Benedict XVI visited, during a five-day tour in 2007 largely aimed at stopping losses in Latin America. During the trip, the pope canonized Brazil’s first native-born saint.

Then Benedict announced last August during the church’s World Youth Day, which drew 1.5 million people to Spain, that the next version of the gathering would be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. The pope is expected to attend.

For now, Rossi hopes his big church will bring together tens of thousands of faithful for every Mass, giving new energy to the Catholic faith.

“People want big spaces. They want grand places for prayer,” he told the Globo TV network. “One candle illuminates, 10 candles illuminate — and 100,000 candles light up so much more.”

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Bwin.party revenue hit by German tax rules, poor poker

LONDON (Reuters) – Bwin.party Digital Entertainment, the world’s largest listed online gaming group, said a new gaming tax in its core German market and a big drop in poker sales pushed net revenue down 10 percent in its third quarter.

The firm said on Friday net revenue in the three months to October 31 fell to 175.7 million euros compared to the same period a year ago, but added that it had seen a marked recovery in trading since the end of September.

“The introduction of a 5 percent turnover tax on sports betting in Germany, revenue decline in poker and continued pressure on consumer spending, particularly in parts of southern Europe, held back our performance in the third quarter,” the firm said in a statement.

In Germany, the tax rule which came into effect from July 1 contributed to an 8 percent decline in the amount wagered on sports betting as Bwin.party removed short-odds bets. Year-on-year sports betting revenues fell 2 percent to 828.3 million euros, with unfavourable European soccer results also a factor.

Poker net revenue fell 29 percent year-on-year to 37.0 million euros, continuing a recent decline, although the firm said the imminent integration of its dotcom poker networks would provide a major catalyst for growth.

The group said that a recent upturn in business had been driven by a strong recovery in sports betting, with average daily net revenue in October up 19 percent on the previous quarter. It said it was confident about its full-year result.

Shares in the group were down 1.65 percent at 119 pence by 0842 GMT.

(Reporting by Neil Maidment; Editing by Paul Sandle)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Anti-Obama “2016″ doc getting last-ditch digital release before election

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “2016: Obama‘s America,” the hit documentary critical of President Obama’s record, is getting a last-minute digital push in Spanish in a bid to boost Mitt Romney‘s chances ahead of the November 6 election, the producers of the movie told TheWrap on Friday.

The producers, who already have digital distribution in English with Lionsgate, have struck a new deal with digital company Yekra to release it in Spanish on Friday, according to Mark Joseph, a representative for the film.

“We’re just finalizing the link – it’s ready to go,” said another individual working on the film. The streamed version in Spanish will cost $ 2.99 and will be aimed at independent voters in Spanish-speaking communities.

Lionsgate released the movie on DVD, video-on-demand and streaming platforms like iTunes and Amazon in mid-October.

The producers hope to swing any remaining independent voters in a race that is neck-and-neck for the two candidates.

A Lionsgate spokesman told TheWrap: “This is commerce for us, not taking sides politically. We’re proud to have released the two highest-grossing political docs of all time, ‘Fahrenheit 911′ and ‘Obama 2016.’”

“2016: Obama’s America,” based on Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” challenges the president’s record and foretells what the nation will be like if he is reelected. Both the Associated Press and the president’s website questioned its many assertions, prompting D’Souza to fire back in an op-ed with TheWrap.

The film has been an unexpected success story, grossing more than $ 33 million at the domestic box office with a reported budget of $ 2.1 million. With its catchphrase, “Love Him. Hate Him. You Don’t Know Him,” it long ago surpassed “Bully” as the year’s top-earning documentary.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Anorexic Bakes to Gain Control Over Food

Camilla Kuhns of Kirkland, Wash., makes the best cookies in the world. Ask anyone but her.

Kuhns is a 29-year-old anorexic with a penchant for baking. She has never tasted one of her own confections. Her younger brother, Seth, samples dough and final products to let her know if anything is off, and her mother, Ilene, tastes the frosting.

“Yeah, my mom’s my angel when it comes to the frosting,” Kuhns told ABC News Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV right before she entered an inpatient treatment program for her eating disorder two weeks ago. “I don’t know what it is, but it makes me very anxious.”

On her blog, Kuhns said she is 5’8″ and weighs 104 pounds with her shoes and clothes on and while holding her purse. She baked challah breads, cakes and pastries for others to enjoy while her own daily intake amounted to a head of cauliflower with hot sauce and a tablespoon of nuts. To ensure she burned off every single calorie consumed, she exercised for three to four hours a day.

Her best friend, Amber “Nic” Poppe, said that Kuhns has suffered from various eating disorders since she was 11. Both her anorexia and the baking escalated recently after a tough year that included the death of a friend and a messy divorce.

“Baking became therapeutic for her. I know it sounds strange but it seems like her way of overcoming her issues with food,” Poppe said.

Actually, it isn’t so strange. Experts have long noted the connection between eating disorders and baking, as well as cooking, watching cooking shows and collecting recipes.

In a famous 1943 study known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, men put on a semi-starvation diet for six months developed such an intense obsession with food, they daydreamed, read and talked about it constantly. The fixation was so persistent that more than 40 percent of them mentioned cooking as part of their post-experiment plans. After they left the study and regained their weight, three of the men changed their occupations to become chefs.

“I see it a lot this in my practice,” said Jennifer Thomas, an assistant psychologist at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center at McLean Hospital in Boston. “Patients will prepare elaborate meals for friends and family while they themselves go hungry. They get a vicarious joy and a sense of superiority from watching others indulge while they don’t allow themselves to eat.”

As someone who was anorexic for five years, Victoria Casciaro said she can relate. The 20-year-old college student admitted she was also a starving baker who constantly made treats she never considered eating herself.

“I would look at what I put in the mixing bowl and it would scare me because I didn’t have the nutrition facts, so I couldn’t calculate whether or not it was a safe or dangerous food,” she recalled.

Not only would Casciaro resist her sumptuous creations, she would wash her hands frequently during the baking process to prevent herself from accidentally tasting the ingredients. She’d carefully avoid taking even the tiniest nibble for fear that she’d gain weight or set off a binge.

Haley Anderson, a 20-year-old recovering anorexic, said she’d often whip up copious amounts of baked treats for everyone else, then talk herself out of trying them.

“I’d tell myself that taste buds have memory,” she said, “and if you can avoid a certain food long enough then you could forget what it tastes like and no longer be tempted by it.”

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

A Rising Tide of Natural Disasters

The number of natural disasters since 1996 costing $ 1 billion or more doubled compared with the previous 15-year period.

Note: Damage numbers represent the 2012 Consumer Price Index cost adjusted value except in the case of 2012 estimates; Data: NOAA, IHS Global Insight; Bloomberg

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..