Apple overcomes last hurdle, iPhone 5 cleared for sale in China as Android continues to dominate
Label: TechnologyBen Affleck Grabs a Bite with His Girls
Label: Lifestyle
Caught in the Act
Ben Affleck and Seraphina
Bauer-Griffin
Leaving his little boy at home, doting dad Ben Affleck spent some time with two very special ladies on Wednesday.
The Argo star popped into Farmshop in Santa Monica, Calif., with his mother Chris and daughter Seraphina in tow. Affleck ordered a large iced coffee for himself, a latte for his mom and water without ice – and a Christmas cookie! – for his little girl. After grabbing their goods, the trio walked back out into the Brentwood Country Mart. – Jennifer Garcia
Kenya village of AIDS orphans hangs hopes on trees
Label: HealthNYUMBANI, Kenya (AP) — There are no middle-aged adults in the Kenyan village of Nyumbani. They all died years ago. Only the young and old live here.
The 938 children here all saw their parents die. The 97 grandparents saw their middle-aged children die. But put together, the bookend generations take care of one another.
UNAIDS says that as of 2011 an estimated 23.5 million people living with HIV resided in sub-Saharan Africa, representing 69 percent of the global HIV burden. Eastern and southern Africa are the hardest-hit regions.
Saturday is World AIDS Day.
Nyumbani is currently planting tens of thousands of trees for the fourth straight year in the hopes that the village will soon harvest the hardwood and become self-sustaining.
U.S. Is Weighing Stronger Action in Syrian Conflict
Label: World
Francisco Leong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Rebels in northern Syria celebrated on Wednesday next to what was reported to be a government fighter jet.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, hoping that the conflict in Syria has reached a turning point, is considering deeper intervention to help push President Bashar al-Assad from power, according to government officials involved in the discussions.
While no decisions have been made, the administration is considering several alternatives, including directly providing arms to some opposition fighters.
The most urgent decision, likely to come next week, is whether NATO should deploy surface-to-air missiles in Turkey, ostensibly to protect that country from Syrian missiles that could carry chemical weapons. The State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said Wednesday that the Patriot missile system would not be “for use beyond the Turkish border.”
But some strategists and administration officials believe that Syrian Air Force pilots might fear how else the missile batteries could be used. If so, they could be intimidated from bombing the northern Syrian border towns where the rebels control considerable territory. A NATO survey team is in Turkey, examining possible sites for the batteries.
Other, more distant options include directly providing arms to opposition fighters rather than only continuing to use other countries, especially Qatar, to do so. A riskier course would be to insert C.I.A. officers or allied intelligence services on the ground in Syria, to work more closely with opposition fighters in areas that they now largely control.
Administration officials discussed all of these steps before the presidential election. But the combination of President Obama’s re-election, which has made the White House more willing to take risks, and a series of recent tactical successes by rebel forces, one senior administration official said, “has given this debate a new urgency, and a new focus.”
The outcome of the broader debate about how heavily America should intervene in another Middle Eastern conflict remains uncertain. Mr. Obama’s record in intervening in the Arab Spring has been cautious: While he joined in what began as a humanitarian effort in Libya, he refused to put American military forces on the ground and, with the exception of a C.I.A. and diplomatic presence, ended the American role as soon as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was toppled.
In the case of Syria, a far more complex conflict than Libya’s, some officials continue to worry that the risks of intervention — both in American lives and in setting off a broader conflict, potentially involving Turkey — are too great to justify action. Others argue that more aggressive steps are justified in Syria by the loss in life there, the risks that its chemical weapons could get loose, and the opportunity to deal a blow to Iran’s only ally in the region. The debate now coursing through the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. resembles a similar one among America’s main allies.
“Look, let’s be frank, what we’ve done over the last 18 months hasn’t been enough,” Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, said three weeks ago after visiting a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. “The slaughter continues, the bloodshed is appalling, the bad effects it’s having on the region, the radicalization, but also the humanitarian crisis that is engulfing Syria. So let’s work together on really pushing what more we can do.” Mr. Cameron has discussed those options directly with Mr. Obama, White House officials say.
France and Britain have recognized a newly formed coalition of opposition groups, which the United States helped piece together. So far, Washington has not done so.
American officials and independent specialists on Syria said that the administration was reviewing its Syria policy in part to gain credibility and sway with opposition fighters, who have seized key Syrian military bases in recent weeks.
“The administration has figured out that if they don’t start doing something, the war will be over and they won’t have any influence over the combat forces on the ground,” said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer and specialist on the Syria military. “They may have some influence with various political groups and factions, but they won’t have influence with the fighters, and the fighters will control the territory.”
Tougher UAE Internet dissent law shuts door to free speech: HRW
Label: TechnologyDUBAI (Reuters) – The United Arab Emirates has “effectively closed the country’s remaining forum for free speech” with a decree issued earlier this month that tightened the law on online dissent, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday.
The U.S.-allied UAE, a Gulf trading and tourism hub and big oil producer, has not seen the serious unrest that has toppled four Arab heads of state since early last year. But it has shown little tolerance of open dissent, and more than 60 members of an Islamist group have been detained since the start of the year.
The decree by President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan imposes prison sentences for anyone who derides or caricatures the Gulf Arab country’s rulers or state institutions on the web, the state news agency WAM reported on November 12.
“The UAE’s cybercrimes decree reflects an attempt to ban even the most tempered criticism,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“The determination to police and punish online dissent, no matter how mild, is incompatible with the image UAE rulers are trying to promote of a progressive, tolerant nation.”
A source close to the UAE government said on Wednesday the decree aimed to address technological advances in communications that could affect the rights and beliefs of people.
“This decree does not restrict freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by the UAE constitution,” the source said. “The decree represents an extension of legislation to cover a wide variety of potential offences in many fields, including terrorism, human trafficking, money laundering and identity theft.”
POSSIBLE PRISON TERMS
WAM said the amendments “stipulate penalties of imprisonment on any person who creates or runs an electronic website or uses any information technology medium to deride or damage the reputation or stature of the state or any of its institutions”.
This included the president, the vice president, any of the rulers of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, crown princes, deputy rulers, the national flag, the national anthem, the emblem of the state or any of its symbols.
Social networking sites have enlivened public discourse in the UAE, a major oil exporter and business hub, where state media are tightly controlled and freedom of speech restricted.
People across UAE society, from ruling family members to ministers, government supporters and dissidents, make use of sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
The amendments announced on November 12 cover a wide range of offences, including outlawing the use of the Internet for human trafficking and prostitution.
But they include jail terms for “any person publishing any information, news, caricatures or any other kind of pictures that would pose threats to the security of the state and to its highest interests or violate its public order,” said WAM.
In addition, anyone who uses the Internet “to call for demonstrations, marches and similar activities without a license being obtained in advance from the competent authorities” could also face imprisonment.
Human Rights Watch said the decree’s vaguely worded provisions provide a legal basis to prosecute and jail people who use information technology to criticize senior officials, demand political reforms or organize unlicensed demonstrations.
“Although some provisions are aimed at preventing the proliferation of racist or sectarian views online, the principal effect of the law is severe restrictions on the rights to free expression and free association and assembly,” the New York-based watchdog said.
(Reporting by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Lindsay Lohan Arrested for Alleged Assault in Club
Label: LifestyleLindsay Lohan was arrested and charged with third-degree assault at 4 a.m. Thursday in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood after an alleged altercation with a woman in a nightclub, according to TV reports.
A NYPD spokesman said the Liz & Dick star, 26, allegedly exchanged words with a female patron at Club Avenue, on 10th Avenue between 17th and 18th Streets, reports Fox News. The confrontation then got physical, police say.
TMZ reports that Lohan, after telling the woman to give her some space, or words to the effect, reputedly punched the woman in the face.
The other woman was not arrested or injured, according to WNBC News, which also said Lohan was still in police custody at the 10th Precinct as of 6:30 a.m. A police source told the station that Lohan made no comment to authorities.
The actress's publicist could not be reached, said WNBC.
Lohan currently is on informal probation for removing a necklace from a California jewelry store last year, and could face potential jail time if she is re-arrested.
PASSINGS: Martin Richards, Bryce Bayer
Label: BusinessMartin Richards
Stage producer and philanthropist
Martin Richards, 80, a prominent stage producer who won an Oscar for producing the 2002 film "Chicago" decades after bringing it to Broadway, died Monday after a battle with cancer, said his publicist, Judy Jacksina.
Plays and musicals he produced over several decades won 36 Tonys. They include the 1978 musical "On the Twentieth Century"; Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" in 1979 and the 2005 revival; Tommy Tune's "Grand Hotel" in 1989; the 1984 "La Cage Aux Folles" and 2004 revival; and "The Will Rogers Follies," which debuted in 1991.
The son of a stockbroker, he was born Morton Richard Klein on March 11, 1932, in New York City and sang on Broadway as a child in the mid-1940s musical "Mexican Hayride." When his voice changed, he continued singing in clubs in the 1950s and had small movie and TV roles before becoming a casting director in the 1960s.
He met Mary Lea Johnson — an heiress to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune — in the early 1970s and married her before the decade was out. Richards was openly gay, and for many years they lived in separate apartments in the same building. By all accounts, their personal and professional partnership was a happy one, according to Playbill.
The handful of films he co-produced included "The Boys From Brazil" (1978), "The Shining" (1980) and "Fort Apache, the Bronx" (1981).
When his wife died in 1990, Richards received a large inheritance. He was known to relish the good life but was also a generous philanthropist. He was a founding board member of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, established a liver and kidney transplant center at the New York University Langone Medical Center and created the New York Center for Children to care for abused children and their families.
Bryce Bayer
'Father of digital imaging'
Bryce Bayer, 83, an Eastman Kodak Co. researcher who has been called "the father of digital imaging" for the invention of a widely used color filter array that bears his name, died Nov. 13 in Bath, Maine. Direct Cremation of Maine announced his death but did not release a cause.
Since his Bayer filter was patented in 1976, it has been incorporated into nearly every digital camera and camera phone, according to Rochester, N.Y.-based Kodak.
"The elegant color technology invented by Bryce Bayer is behind nearly every digital image captured today," Terry Taber, Kodak's chief technology officer, said in a 2009 statement.
The filter allows devices to capture color images with a single sensor and paved the way for the development in the 1970s of the first working digital camera, Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer responsible for that step forward, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle last week.
"He was solving a fundamental problem before that problem was even upon us," Sasson said.
Bayer's invention is the key reason that digital cameras are compact yet provide sharp-looking pictures, another former colleague, Ken Parulski, told the newspaper.
Bayer, who was born in 1929, also developed processes for storing, improving and printing digital images before retiring from Kodak in the mid-1990s.
— Times staff and wire reports
News Analysis: Sunni Leaders Gaining Clout in Mideast
Label: World
Mohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency
A Palestinian woman in Gaza City on Tuesday walked amid the rubble left from eight days of fighting that ended in a cease-fire.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — For years, the United States and its Middle East allies were challenged by the rising might of the so-called Shiite crescent, a political and ideological alliance backed by Iran that linked regional actors deeply hostile to Israel and the West.
But uprising, wars and economics have altered the landscape of the region, paving the way for a new axis to emerge, one led by a Sunni Muslim alliance of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. That triumvirate played a leading role in helping end the eight-day conflict between Israel and Gaza, in large part by embracing Hamas and luring it further away from the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah fold, offering diplomatic clout and promises of hefty aid.
For the United States and Israel, the shifting dynamics offer a chance to isolate a resurgent Iran, limit its access to the Arab world and make it harder for Tehran to arm its agents on Israel’s border. But the gains are also tempered, because while these Sunni leaders are willing to work with Washington, unlike the mullahs in Tehran, they also promote a radical religious-based ideology that has fueled anti-Western sentiment around the region.
Hamas — which received missiles from Iran that reached Israel’s northern cities — broke with the Iranian axis last winter, openly backing the rebellion against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But its affinity with the Egypt-Qatar-Turkey axis came to fruition this fall.
“That camp has more assets that it can share than Iran — politically, diplomatically, materially,” said Robert Malley, the Middle East program director for the International Crisis Group. “The Muslim Brotherhood is their world much more so than Iran.”
The Gaza conflict helps illustrate how Middle Eastern alliances have evolved since the Islamist wave that toppled one government after another beginning in January 2011. Iran had no interest in a cease-fire, while Egypt, Qatar and Turkey did.
But it is the fight for Syria that is the defining struggle in this revived Sunni-Shiite duel. The winner gains a prized strategic crossroads.
For now, it appears that that tide is shifting against Iran, there too, and that it might well lose its main Arab partner, Syria. The Sunni-led opposition appears in recent days to have made significant inroads against the government, threatening the Assad family’s dynastic rule of 40 years and its long alliance with Iran. If Mr. Assad falls, that would render Iran and Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, isolated as a Shiite Muslim alliance in an ever more sectarian Middle East, no longer enjoying a special street credibility as what Damascus always tried to sell as “the beating heart of Arab resistance.”
If the shifts seem to leave the United States somewhat dazed, it is because what will emerge from all the ferment remains obscure.
Clearly the old leaders Washington relied on to enforce its will, like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, are gone or at least eclipsed. But otherwise confusion reigns in terms of knowing how to deal with this new paradigm, one that could well create societies infused with religious ideology that Americans find difficult to accept. The new reality could be a weaker Iran, but a far more religiously conservative Middle East that is less beholden to the United States.
Already, Islamists have been empowered in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, while Syria’s opposition is being led by Sunni insurgents, including a growing number identified as jihadists, some identified as sympathizing with Al Qaeda. Qatar, which hosts a major United States military base, also helps finance Islamists all around the region.
In Egypt, President Mohamed Morsi resigned as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood only when he became head of state, but he still remains closely linked with the movement. Turkey, the model for many of them, has kept strong relations with Washington while diminishing the authority of generals who were longstanding American allies.
“The United States is part of a landscape that has shifted so dramatically,” said Mr. Malley of the International Crisis Group. “It is caught between the displacement of the old moderate-radical divide by one that is defined by confessional and sectarian loyalty.”
The emerging Sunni axis has put not only Shiites at a disadvantage, but also the old school leaders who once allied themselves with Washington.
The old guard members in the Palestinian Authority are struggling to remain relevant at a time when their failed 20-year quest to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands makes them seem both anachronistic and obsolete.
Brad Pitt: Fatherhood Has Made Me a Better Man
Label: Lifestyle
People Exclusive
Thinking back over 2012, Brad Pitt acknowledges it's been a big year for his "familia" since proposing to Angelina Jolie – whom he affectionately calls "Mama" – last April.
"It's been a family type of year, a down-home type of year," he tells PEOPLE in this week's cover story. "Mama's worked more. And quite frankly I've really enjoyed it."
The actor, whose Mob drama, Killing Them Softly, hits theaters Friday, chatted with PEOPLE between bites of his dinner with 4-year-old twins, Knox and Vivienne, at their rental home outside of London. While he stopped short of confirming a wedding date, he did reveal what the couple have in mind for their big day: "Just family," Pitt says. "Keep it simple. Keep it simple – really."
For now, the actor is looking forward to being reunited with the rest of his brood – Maddox, 11, Pax, 9, Zahara, 7, and Shiloh, 6 – who were in Cambodia working on the family's foundation with Jolie.
Has fatherhood made him a better man? "Absolutely," Pitt says. Being a dad "takes you right off yourself."
As for turning 50 next year, the actor insists he's taking it all in stride. "This is what I think about: 'Okay, you're way over the mid-point [of your life]. You don't know how much time you have left,' " Pitt says. "I want to enjoy this year more than ever."
• Reporting by K.C. BAKER
For more of our interview with Pitt, including wedding plans and his "intense" life with Jolie and their kids, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday
CDC: HIV spread high in young gay males
Label: HealthNEW YORK (AP) — Health officials say 1 in 5 new HIV infections occur in a tiny segment of the population — young men who are gay or bisexual.
The government on Tuesday released new numbers that spotlight how the spread of the AIDS virus is heavily concentrated in young males who have sex with other males. Only about a quarter of new infections in the 13-to-24 age group are from injecting drugs or heterosexual sex.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said blacks represented more than half of new infections in youths. The estimates are based on 2010 figures.
Overall, new U.S. HIV infections have held steady at around 50,000 annually. About 12,000 are in teens and young adults, and most youth with HIV haven't been tested.
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CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns
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