Washington (CNN) ? It is the second big speech of his presidency's second act, but there is little or nothing to suggest President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address offers any hope of a new beginning or a new spirit in divided Washington.
Consider the vast partisan differences in expectations.
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Nour Botros is the host of 'Just For You -- Syria' on SAT-7 ARABIC. (Image courtesy SAT-7)
Syria (MNN) ? Pre-emptive or not, Israel has entered into the fray surrounding Syria.
It's believed that the Israeli strikes on January 30 targeted anti-aircraft missiles at a military base outside of Damascus. The missiles, according to Israeli intelligence sources, were headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
However, recent remarks by Syria's defense minister signaled that there won't be retaliation over the airstrike. In fact, it's quite the opposite. SAT-7 CEO Terry Ascott explains, "Syria could be galvanized toward unity were it attacked by Israel. In fact, President Assad's status has gone up several points in the wake of the Israeli attack because he was then seen as a victim of Israeli aggression, and this garnered the sympathy of neighboring Arab states as well."
So despite the appearance of escalation, Ascott thinks war is unlikely. The real threat for Israel comes from Hezbollah. There are many who believe war with Hezbollah is inevitable, which is what prompted the pre-emptive strikes to prevent a delivery of weapons. Ascott describes the situation in Syria. "It's a sort of ?jumping off' place for Iran, in terms of being able to influence certain areas such as Lebanon, Iraq, and certainly to be able to supply Hezbollah with arms in its struggle against Israel."
Ascott goes on to say, "What happens in Syria after the regime falls, or loses control of much of Syria as it already has, is going to impact many of the countries in the region, including Israel. Israel, of course, is concerned about what transpires in Syria." Meanwhile, Israel took preventative measures in the north of the country, and on February 05, they added a third Iron Dome anti-missile battery.
As to the discussion of no clear cut ?bad guy' in the Syrian uprising, Ascott says the complexity of the situation can't be seen in black and white. Regardless of who winds up running the country, "It is a no-win situation. We cannot see a happy ending, at least for the Christian community, whether the government survives or the government goes. It is of major concern that Christians are vulnerable to attacks from both sides at the present time."
If the rebels win, he says, "It would only progress then toward a civil war between the different factions involved in the fight against the present regime. In all cases, it's not going to be good news for most Syrians and certainly for minorities such as the Kurds, or the Alawites, or the Christians." These scenarios weigh heavily on the region and the hundreds of thousands of refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDP).
SAT-7, a Christian satellite television outreach to the Middle East and North Africa, is responding. Ascott explains, "These are concerns that we are addressing, for example, through our weekly live call-in show with a Syrian host that's looking at the situation there and also seeking to bring comfort, encouragement, and hope to the Christians in Syria."
Viewers are flocking to SAT-7 as a refuge from the violence tearing their country apart. "What we want to do is bring a perspective: ?How would Christ react if He were in that situation today?' And, ?What are the real needs--emotional, spiritual, psychological--of the people that are still watching us in Syria, those that haven't been displaced and have lost their TV sets and lost their satellite dishes?'"
While SAT-7 stays away from the politics of the country, they address the everyday impact of how those issues impact people. Their programming teams walk a fine line, says Ascott. "Pray for wisdom for the team. It really does need the wisdom of Solomon to kind of bring hope and perspective into a situation, so complex, so ugly, and so fast-changing as that in Syria."
Source: http://mnnonline.org/article/18204
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For years, the potential of 3D printing has made tech geeks drool, but now we're finally starting to see the technology graduate from a mere novelty into a highly useful tool. Take, for example, the story of the 5-year-old boy who was born without fingers on his right hand but recently received a 3D-printed prosthetic hand. Thanks to its quick turnaround speeds, the technology also enables scientists to test multiple designs at once. For example, in Australia researchers are using 3D printers to produce more effective tags that can be used to track large fish. At Cornell University, researchers are experimenting with using 3D printers to print food that could be eaten by astronauts in space, and scientists in Edinburgh successfully 3D-printed embryonic stem cells for the first time, demonstrating how 3D-printing technology could one day eliminate the need for organ donation. In related news, scientists were recently surprised to find children's cells living in mother's brains long after pregnancy.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/10/led-wine-sellar-breathing-bike-printed-stem-cells/
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LONDON (AP) ? Authorities in northern England have charged a 24 year-old man with threatening to kill 200 people in a Facebook posting that caused thousands of Tennessee children to stay home from school.
Northumbria police say Reece Elliott, 24, from South Shields, east of Newcastle, has been charged with making malicious comments which led to 2,900 children skipping class in Warren County, Tennessee.
Police were stationed this week at schools in McMinnville, the seat of Warren County, 70 miles (110 kilometers) northwest of Chattanooga.
The online posting threatening gun violence was made anonymously on a memorial page set up for a Tennessee student who died in October. Police did not address the motive behind the posting.
Northumbria police said in a statement Saturday that they were cooperating with authorities in Warren County.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-authorities-charge-man-schools-threat-111343437.html
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FILE - In this Feb. 7, 2013 file photo, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., right, welcomes CIA Director nominee John Brennan on Capitol Hill in Washington, prior to the start of Brennan's confirmation hearing before the committee. Lawmakers are considering whether Congress can set up a court to decide when drones can kill U.S. citizens overseas, much like the secret courts that now grant permission for surveillance. It's another sign of the U.S. philosophical struggle over remote warfare, raised after CIA head nominee John Brennan's vigorous defense of the drones. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 7, 2013 file photo, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., right, welcomes CIA Director nominee John Brennan on Capitol Hill in Washington, prior to the start of Brennan's confirmation hearing before the committee. Lawmakers are considering whether Congress can set up a court to decide when drones can kill U.S. citizens overseas, much like the secret courts that now grant permission for surveillance. It's another sign of the U.S. philosophical struggle over remote warfare, raised after CIA head nominee John Brennan's vigorous defense of the drones. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he finds merit in "some check" on a president's ability to order drone strikes against American al-Qaida suspects overseas, lending support to creating a special court that would review such requests.
"I think that the rules and the practices that the Obama administration has followed are quite stringent and are not being abused. But who is to say about a future president?" said Gates, Pentagon chief for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
The potential model that some lawmakers are considering for overseeing such drone attacks is a secret court of federal judges who now review requests for government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases.
"Something that would give the American people confidence that there was, in fact, a compelling case ... to launch an attack against an American citizen, I think just as an independent confirmation or affirmation, if you will, is something worth giving serious consideration to," Gates told CNN's "State of the Union" in an interview broadcast Sunday.
The issue gained momentum in the run-up to the confirmation hearing last week for John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser who helped managed the drone program, to be CIA director. Before the hearing, Obama directed the Justice Department to give the congressional intelligence committees access to classified legal advice providing the government's rationale for drone strikes against American citizens working with al-Qaida abroad.
Demands for such information grew after the leak early last week of an unclassified memo on how decisions are made to target U.S. citizens abroad. The memo says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior al-Qaida leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans, even if there is no evidence of a specific imminent attack.
The leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said she intended to review proposals for "legislation to ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values" and she suggested something similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That special court reviews requests on government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases.
Gates said that "this idea of being able to execute, in effect, an American citizen, no matter how awful, having some third party having a say in it or perhaps ... informing the Congress or the intelligence committees or something like that, I just think some check on the ability of the president to do this has merit, as we look to the longer term future."
A September 2011 drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both U.S. citizens. A drone strike two weeks later killed al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, a Denver native.
The strikes came after U.S. intelligence concluded that the elder al-Awlaki was senior operational leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula plotting attacks on the U.S., including the abortive Christmas Day bombing of an airplane landing in Detroit in 2009.
In Thursday's hearing, Brennan defended drone strikes as necessary, saying they are taken only as a "last resort," but he said he had no qualms about going after Anwar al-Awlaki.
He said the White House had considered the concept of the special courts, and he said he would be open to discussing it because "American citizens by definition are due much greater due process than anybody else by dint of their citizenship."
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In this excerpt from a new book, two canine intelligence researchers explain how dogs use barks to communicate
Image: Dutton, a Member of Penguin Group
Excerpt from The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think, by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Published by Dutton, a Member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. ? 2013 Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. All Rights Reserved.
Mystique is a dog who lives at Lola ya Bonobo, [the wildlife sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] where Vanessa and I study bonobos. During the day, she is sweet and demure, but at night she becomes a different animal. She guards our house, barking ferociously every time someone comes within earshot. Usually in Congo, a little extra security is appreciated. The only problem is that our house is on the main trail where the night staff walk back and forth after dark. Mystique dutifully barks at all passersby whether she has known them for a day or all her life. Eventually, we just learned to sleep through it. But if there was really a cause for concern, like a strange man with a gun, I wonder if Mystique would bark in a way that would alert me that there was something dangerous and different about the person approaching the house.
Dog vocalizations may not sound very sophisticated. Raymond Coppinger pointed out that most dog vocalizations consist of barking, and that barking seems to occur indiscriminately. Coppinger reported on a dog whose duty was to guard free- ranging livestock. The dog barked continuously for seven hours, even though no other dogs were within miles. If barking is communicative, dogs would not bark when no one could hear them. It seemed to Coppinger that the dog was simply relieving some inner state of arousal. The arousal model is that dogs do not have much control over their barking. They are not taking into account their audience, and their barks carry little information other than the emotional state of the barking dog.
Perhaps barking is another by-product of domestication. Unlike dogs, wolves rarely bark. Barks make up as little as 3 percent of wolf vocalizations. Meanwhile, the experimental foxes in Russia [that have been bred to be docile] bark when they see people, while the control foxes do not. Frequent barking when aroused is probably another consequence of selecting against aggression.
However, more recent research indicates that there might be more to barking than we first thought. Dogs have fairly plastic vocal cords, or a ?modifiable vocal tract.? Dogs might be able to subtly alter their voices to produce a wide variety of different sounds that could have different meanings. Dogs might even be altering their voices in ways that are clear to other dogs but not to humans. When scientists have taken spectrograms, or pictures, of dog barks, it turns out that not all barks are the same?even from the same dog. Depending on the context, a dog?s barks can vary in timing, pitch, and amplitude. Perhaps they have different meanings.
I know two Australian dogs, Chocolate and Cina, who love to play fetch on the beach. Each throw sends them plunging through the waves, racing for that magic orb of rubber. When Chocolate retrieves the ball, inevitably Cina wrestles the ball from Chocolate?s mouth, even while Chocolate growls loudly. The girls also eat together, but when Cina tries the same trick with Chocolate?s food, the result is very different. A quiet growl from Chocolate warns Cina away.
It is difficult to see how Cina knows when it is okay to take something from Chocolate?s mouth, since both growls are made when Chocolate is aggravated and unwilling to share. If anything, Chocolate?s growl seems louder and scarier when she is playing than when she is eating.
Experiments have now shown that dogs use different barks and growls to communicate different things. In one experiment, researchers recorded a ?food growl? where a dog was growling over food, and a ?stranger growl? where a dog was growling at the approach of a stranger. The researchers played these different growls to a dog who was approaching a juicy bone. The dogs were more hesitant to approach if they heard the food growl rather than the stranger growl.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=d9c4988bddad22095e54f8764bf129bd
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