Monday, April 30, 2012

Third of asthmatics risk a fatal attack, study suggests

Boy using an inhaler

A third of people with asthma are at a high risk of having a potentially fatal asthma attack, research suggests.

The findings come from an online test launched a few months ago by Asthma UK to help those with asthma gauge how serious their condition is.

Nearly 25,000 people took the Triple A (Avoid Asthma Attacks) test, which asks simple questions about factors known to be linked to worsening disease.

Before taking the test, less than half recognised that they might be at risk.

The charity believes most asthma-related emergencies are avoidable.

It estimates that up to 75% of emergency hospital admissions would be preventable with better disease management.

But the latest findings suggest that people with asthma are considerably underestimating their risk of having an attack.

Over half of respondents (55%) did not think they were at increased risk. Yet the Triple A test results suggested 93% were at increased or highly increased risk.

Asthma kills three people every day, and every seven minutes someone in the UK is admitted to hospital with a potentially fatal asthma attack, according to Asthma UK.

Those taking the test will fall into one of three categories, colour-coded like traffic lights.

The red category means the person runs a highly increased risk of a serious attack, while green would mean no increased risk.

In between, there is an amber category which is accompanied by advice that the person being tested is at an increased risk of an attack - and advises him or her to have a review with a GP or asthma nurse.

Each category is linked to advice on how to control the symptoms and what to do if someone does have an attack.

And the test stresses that everyone's asthma is different and symptoms can come and go, which means there is no way to entirely rule out any risk of an attack.

People who have attended A&E or been admitted overnight to hospital for their asthma in the past six months tend to be at increased risk of a serious attack.

Similarly, those who rely on using their reliever (blue) inhaler five times a day or more or have needed a course of steroid tablets for their asthma in the past six months are also at increased risk.

Neil Churchill of Asthma UK said: "It's extremely worrying that many people with asthma do not realise their own risk of ending up in hospital.

"As up to 75% of emergency hospital admissions are preventable with better management and support it's vitally important people understand their asthma and crucial that they are supported by healthcare professionals who can help them to reduce their risk."



Source & Image : BBC

Thomas Kinkade's Death Sparks Feud Over Family, Art Secrets






The death of painter Thomas Kinkade earlier this month has pitted Kinkade's family members and close friends against Kinkade's live-in girlfriend in a fight over his company, legacy and public image.


Kinkade died April 6 at his Northern California home, which he shared with his girlfriend and personal assistant, Amy Pinto-Walsh. Kinkade was still married but separated from his wife of 30 years, Nanette Kinkade.


Following Kinkade's death, Pinto-Walsh, 48, made statements to local newspapers saying that Kinkade had died in his sleep and that she was the one who'd called 911 from the home they shared. Pinto-Walsh also identified herself as Kinkade's girlfriend of 18 months, and disclosed that Kinkade and his wife had separated.


When asked about the cause of death by Los Gatos Patch website, Pinto-Walsh said she was not supposed to divulge that information, and that the Santa Clara County Coroner's Office would have more details, but that Kinkade had had a heart condition and died in his sleep.


A recording of the 911 call received by Santa Clara County Emergency Services indicated that Kinkade had been drinking heavily the night before he died, provoking widespread media coverage of Kinkade's battle with alcoholism.


Now the painter's widow and his estate are battling Pinto-Walsh over her comments, claiming she broke a confidentiality agreement when she spoke publicly about Kinkade's health and threatened to disclose information about his family and businesses.


Nanette Kinkade, Kinkade's business holdings and the Kinkade Family Trust filed a request for a restraining order against Pinto-Walsh in Santa Clara Superior Court, prohibiting her from speaking about Kinkade publicly.


In the court documents, the group claims that on the morning of Kinkade's death, Pinto-Walsh began "threatening to publicize highly personal, private and confidential information about Mr. Kinkade and his family, as well as trade secrets."


When Linda Rasch, a family friend, went to Kinkade's home upon learning of his death, Pinto-Walsh told Rasch she "intended to release personal photographs, papers and memorabilia" belonging to the painter, some of which involved his family, Rasch said in a declaration included in the court record.


Kinkade's body-guard, Dean Baker, wrote in a declaration that he "would expect Ms. Pinto-Walsh to disclose confidential information that would harm Mr. Kinkade's family and businesses should she have the opportunity to do so.


"On repeated occasions, Ms. Pinto-Walsh stated that she was 'gathering evidence' to harm Mr. Kinkade and the business," Baker wrote. "On one occasion, Ms. Pinto-Walsh made a threat to Mr. Kinkade along the lines of 'I will tear you down.'"'


The restraining order request also alleged that Pinto-Walsh was privy to information about how Kinkade created his paintings, including the types of paint and brushes, as well as "the use of computer technology" in painting.


"If these trade secrets were disclosed, the Kinkade businesses would suffer irreparable harm," wrote Robert Murray, the attorney for Kinkade businesses.


Pinto-Walsh had signed a confidentiality agreement when she began working as Kinkade's personal assistant, which the family accused her of breaking when she spoke to the media, according to the restraining order filing.


The restraining order was granted by the court but never served on Pinto-Walsh because the family decided to work the matter out privately, a source close to the family told ABC News. The two parties are now discussing how to proceed, though the restraining order could be served in the future.


Marcia Horowitz, a New York publicist hired by the Kinkade family and Kinkade businesses, said today that her clients would not be willing to speak publicly about the court filings against Kinkade's girlfriend.


Amy Pinto-Walsh could not be reached for comment.


Calls to Zuber and Taillieu, the attorneys representing Nanette Kinkade and the Kinkade businesses, were not returned.



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Source & Image : Yahoo

US sees sharp rise in newborns with opiate withdrawal

Crying baby (file image)

The number of babies born in the US showing symptoms of opiate withdrawal increased threefold in the 10 years up to 2009, a medical study has found.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said one in every 1,000 newborns was affected in 2009.

The number of pregnant women testing positive for illegal or legal opiates increased fivefold in the same period.

The report says abuse of prescription painkillers is partly to blame.

The study, the first of its kind in the US, was based on records from more than 4,000 hospitals across the country.

It found that in 2009, about 13,500 babies were born with withdrawal symptoms - roughly one every hour.

Not all babies born to women who used opiates during pregnancy showed the symptoms, the report said.

But those that did were often born earlier and smaller, suffered seizures, restlessness, breathing problems or difficulty feeding and often required treatment with the opiate-replacement drug methadone to help wean them off their dependency.

"They appear uncomfortable, sometimes they breathe a little faster. They're scratching their faces," said Dr Stephen Patrick of the University of Michigan, who worked on the study.

The babies were kept in hospital for an average of 16 days, compared to three for health babies.

As most were born to mothers who were entitled to financial help with their medical costs, the study said this was placing a serious burden on health budgets.

The researchers said many pregnant women were legitimately taking pain-relieving opiates on prescription, but warned that more must be done to find ways of protecting unborn babies from powerful drugs.

Dr Patrick said the findings were "part of a bigger call to the fact that opiates are becoming a big problem in this country".

An editorial in the journal accompanying the study said that while such opiate medications provide "superior pain control" they have been "overprescribed, diverted and sold illegally, creating a new opiate addiction pathway and a public health burden for maternal and child health".

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that painkiller abuse in the US had reached "epidemic proportions".

It said overdoses of pain relievers cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.



Source & Image : BBC

Dentist pulls out all of her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after split




In this unrelated photo, a patient receives dental treatment (AP/Esteban Felix)


If you're planning a trip to the dentist, it might not be the wisest decision to make your appointment with the person you just broke up with.


A Polish woman is facing three years in prison after she removed all of her ex-boyfriend's teeth during dental surgery just days after their breakup.


"I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions," Anna Mackowiak, 34, told the Austrian Times. "But when I saw him lying there I just thought, 'What a bastard' and decided to take all his teeth out."


Marek Olszewski, 45, reportedly showed up at Mackowiak's dental office complaining of toothache just days after he broke up with her. She then allegedly gave him a "heavy dose" of anesthetic, locked the door and began removing all of his teeth one at a time.


"I knew something was wrong because when I woke up I couldn't feel any teeth and my jaw was strapped up with bandages," Olszewski said.


"She told me my mouth was numb and I wouldn't be able to feel anything for a while and that the bandage was there to protect the gums, but that I would need to see a specialist," he said.


"I didn't have any reason to doubt her, I mean I thought she was a professional."


Adding to his trauma, Olszewski said his new girlfriend has already left him over his now toothless appearance.


"And I'm going to have to pay a fortune on getting indents or something," he said.



Mackowiak is currently being investigated for medical malpractice.


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Obi-Wan Kenobi arrested for hit and run


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$195 million Sea Shadow stealth sub for sale, only $10,000 deposit required




Source & Image : Yahoo

Obiwan Kenobi arrested on charge of hit-and-run




Obiwan Kenobi's mug shot (The Smoking Gun)Obi-Wan Kenobi was always a bit of a rogue Jedi, even lamenting his own former lack of patience during a dramatic exchange with Yoda in "The Empire Strikes Back."


But a California man who legally changed his name to match that of the fictional "Star Wars" hero may have given in to the temptations of the dark side of the Force, as he was charged with a hit-and-run.


According to the Auburn Press Tribune, Obiwan Kenobi was allegedly responsible for a five-car accident and is charged with leaving the scene after the wreck occurred.


And as Yoda warned the fictional Kenobi, "Told you I did. Reckless is he. Now, matters are worse."


In fact, things are far worse for the 37-year-old, who has been charged with a felony in the case by Roseville police. According to the paper, Kenobi was already wanted on an outstanding misdemeanor petty theft charge.


Born Benjamin Cale Feit, Kenobi changed his name to that of the "Star Wars" character as part of a 1999 radio station contest. At least up until the hit-and-run charge, formally associating himself with "The Phantom Menace" may have been the biggest accident in Kenobi's life.


After spending five days in jail, Kenobi was released from custody on Thursday without bail and is scheduled to appear in court on April 30.



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Source & Image : Yahoo

Greece's far right hopes for new dawn

Members of the Golden Dawn party campaigning

The boxes are packed with warm clothes, the plastic bags full of long-life food. There is even a teddy bear in tow. All sit piled in a rickety blue van, winding its way through Athens to be delivered to the Greek capital's needy.

Behind the aid is not a humanitarian organisation but Greece's ultranationalist party, Chrysi Avgi - or Golden Dawn. Their critics call them violent extremists. But they are keen to show off their soft side - and it wins votes.

One of the recipients is 76-year-old Katerina Karousi. She breaks down in tears as she talks of battling with cancer.

"Why not vote for Golden Dawn?" she asks. "They're helping us, so I should give them something in return."

But beyond the benevolent facade is a party that strikes fear into many here. With a virulent anti-immigrant line, Golden Dawn are often labelled neo-Nazis.

The leader was filmed making a Hitler salute in a town council meeting and the party logo has been likened to a swastika, though officials maintain it is the ancient Greek meander symbol.

Despite it all, Greeks are flocking to Golden Dawn, spurred by financial angst and deep disillusionment with mainstream politicians. The party scored just 0.29% of the vote in the last election in 2009.

Now polls give them over 5% - enough to enter parliament for the first time. A shock for a country that emerged from a right-wing military dictatorship less than four decades ago.

Back in the van, I quiz party volunteers Athina and Rosalie about their views and particularly the frequent allegations that Golden Dawn members assault immigrants on the streets; something the party officially denies.

"We believe in our race, we believe in our nation's power," Athina says. "These immigrants have not been checked for diseases. If a Greek person feels threatened by an immigrant, I justify someone trying to give them justice.

"I don't know why I should care about violence against immigrants."

"We are not racist," Rosalie assures me. "They [immigrants] are [racist] towards us, because we love our country. Is this wrong?

"We brought civilisation, we brought everything. They kill us and they rape us."

The next morning, the party campaigns in the affluent Athens suburb of Marousi. It is striking to see how many people take the fliers and newspapers as they are handed out, the party's growing popularity clearly visible.

But as we enter the local market, a passer-by throws an orange at them. Suddenly, Golden Dawn members turn on who they suspect is the assailant, screaming insults and threatening to attack him.

Further on, we reach the main square, where they spot a Socialist MP, Petros Efthymiou. They round on him, pelting him with jugs of water and cups of coffee.

It is behaviour giving fuel to those who call the party pure thugs.

"This is the face of fascism," Mr Efthymiou tells me. "Just brutal violence. And no respect for democratic values. But this is a problem not only for Greece but for all of Europe."

The far right is indeed on the rise beyond Greece's borders.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front in France, achieved her party's highest ever share of the vote in the first round of the French presidential election in April.

Other countries, including the Netherlands and Denmark, have seen an increase in far right support; political extremes benefiting from the financial hardship.

"Greece is dying from immigrants, politicians like the guy you just saw and bankers," says Ilias Panagiotaros, Golden Dawn's spokesman.

"We're going to put mines on our borders and we're going to have electric fences."

So immigrants should be killed by landmines, I ask?

"I don't care, they shouldn't jump into the country - that's their problem," he replies.

I ask about the neo-Nazi label.

"They can say what they like, it's not true," he says. We're Greek nationalists and we're proud of it."

That rhetoric has struck a chord here, feeding into a wider anti-immigrant narrative before the election. With more than 80% of migrants to the EU now passing through Greece, they are an easy target for a nation sinking deeper into recession.

The current government has announced the creation of up to 30 detention centres for illegal immigrants, the first of which has now opened.

And the leader of the centre-right New Democracy Party, Antonis Samaras - who heads the polls - has made clamping down on illegal immigration one of his key electoral themes.

Meanwhile, anti-immigrant violence has risen steadily. In an Athens hospital I meet Altaf - not his real name - a Pakistani immigrant badly beaten in the past few days. He does not know who his attackers were.

His arm and nose are broken, he has a thick gash on his skull and a cut above his eyebrow.

"I don't understand why this is happening," he says.

"We're all human. I'm scared to go out now. It never used to be this way."

The other side shouts loudly too - anti-racism rallies have been held by those determined to stop Golden Dawn at any cost. But their efforts may well be futile.

A divided and deeply angry nation is going to the polls, desperate for an alternative - a nation fearing the future and looking for someone to blame.



Source & Image : BBC

Ron Conway: Tech is nowhere near a bubble

Tech investor Ron Conway says there is more room to grow before the tech bubble even comes close to bursting.

Tech investor Ron Conway says there is more room to grow before the tech bubble even comes close to bursting.

LOS ANGELES (CNNMoney) -- One of the earliest investors in tech darlings Google, Facebook and Twitter says any talk of a tech bubble is overblown.

"We are nowhere near a bubble," says Ron Conway. He most recently invested in Instagram, which Facebook just snapped up for $1 billion.

"The companies getting funded have sales and profits," Conway said Monday, during a panel on Silicon Valley investing at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.

Conway argues that simply looking at e-commerce shows just how much more money can be created through the web.

Currently, fewer than 6% of people buy online. By his estimates, that figure will jump to 25% over the next 10 years. "Investors are understanding what I've been saying since 1994, that we are in the infancy of the Internet," he said.

Still, he acknowledges that valuations have been "sloppy," meaning investors were throwing money at startups without doing enough due diligence.

One of the hottest new areas is collaborative consumption, which includes companies that create a marketplace for people to buy, sell or rent their cars, houses and other possessions.

Conway recently participated in a $111 million funding round for AirBnB, which lets owners rent out their houses. "The Facebook generation doesn't care about owning things," he said. "They don't have a problem with sharing cars and renting rooms in other houses."

And that should be a boon for start-ups.

He estimates that if 1 in 200 companies gets funded now, that could turn into 5 of 200 soon.

While Facebook's upcoming IPO is drawing much attention, Conway sees more room for mergers and acquisitions in the tech field. "IPO is the exception to the rule," he said.

Companies that draw a lot of attention, such as Facebook, will continue scooping up niche firms that vie for consumers' online attention.

For example, Conway touted Pinterest as "the fastest growing company on the web." Pinterest lets consumers collect images from around the web and "pin" them on a personalized board. Coincidentally, Conway is also an investor.

Overall, he says innovation is accelerating so the four horsemen of tech -- Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500), and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) -- have even more to worry about.

Facebook will have the best chance of staying at the forefront because of its business model of what he calls standardized disruption. "For this reason, it will take a longer time before they get disrupted," said Conway.

Still, he said not to count Google out, and while touting Larry Page as a visionary, he added a not-so-veiled swipe at Microsoft. "People who put Google and Microsoft in the same sentence are very very foolish."  



Source & Image : CNN Money

Turkey to write first fully civilian constitution

Turkish tanks during a military parade in Ankara. File photo

A parliamentary committee in Turkey is due to start work on the country's first fully civilian constitution.

The aim is to draft a simpler and more democratic charter to replace the existing constitution, which was drawn up under military rule 30 years ago.

It gave great powers to the military, curbed individual rights and largely ignored the country's minorities, including the Kurds.

The new draft is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

The multi-party committee has up to now operated with a rare degree of consensus, promising a charter that represents the will of the people and creates a truly representatives democracy, the BBC's Jonathan Head in Istanbul reports.

To that end there have been meetings across Turkey, encouraging civil society groups to contribute their views, our correspondent says.

But contentious issues lie ahead, he adds, in particular, how much cultural autonomy to allow the Kurds and what powers the presidency should have.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has dominated politics for a decade, has made no secret of his ambition to move into the president's office when his final term, is finished.

If consensus on the constitution breaks down in parliament, Mr Erdogan has threatened to push the issue through by means of a referendum.



Source & Image : BBC

Insights From the Youngest Minds







CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seated in a cheerfully cramped monitoring room at the Harvard University Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology and a pre-eminent researcher of the basic ingredient list from which all human knowledge is constructed, looked on expectantly as her students prepared a boisterous 8-month-old girl with dark curly hair for the onerous task of watching cartoons.


The video clips featured simple Keith Haring-type characters jumping, sliding and dancing from one group to another. The researchers’ objective, as with half a dozen similar projects under way in the lab, was to explore what infants understand about social groups and social expectations.


Yet even before the recording began, the 15-pound research subject made plain the scope of her social brain. She tracked conversations, stared at newcomers and burned off adult corneas with the brilliance of her smile. Dr. Spelke, who first came to prominence by delineating how infants learn about objects, numbers, the lay of the land, shook her head in self-mocking astonishment.


“Why did it take me 30 years to start studying this?” she said. “All this time I’ve been giving infants objects to hold, or spinning them around in a room to see how they navigate, when what they really wanted to do was engage with other people!”


Dr. Spelke, 62, is tall and slim, and parts her long hair down the middle, like a college student. She dresses casually, in a corduroy jumper or a cardigan and slacks, and when she talks, she pitches forward and plants forearms on thighs, hands clasped, seeming both deeply engaged and ready to bolt. The lab she founded with her colleague Susan Carey is strewed with toys and festooned with children’s T-shirts, but the Elmo atmospherics belie both the lab’s seriousness of purpose and Dr. Spelke’s towering reputation among her peers in cognitive psychology.


“When people ask Liz, ‘What do you do?’ she tells them, ‘I study babies,’ ” said Steven Pinker, a fellow Harvard professor and the author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” among other books. “That’s endearingly self-deprecating, but she sells herself short.”


What Dr. Spelke is really doing, he said, is what Descartes, Kant and Locke tried to do. “She is trying to identify the bedrock categories of human knowledge. She is asking, ‘What is number, space, agency, and how does knowledge in each category develop from its minimal state?’ ”


Dr. Spelke studies babies not because they’re cute but because they’re root. “I’ve always been fascinated by questions about human cognition and the organization of the human mind,” she said, “and why we’re good at some tasks and bad at others.”


But the adult mind is far too complicated, Dr. Spelke said, “too stuffed full of facts” to make sense of it. In her view, the best way to determine what, if anything, humans are born knowing, is to go straight to the source, and consult the recently born.


Decoding Infants’ Gaze


Dr. Spelke is a pioneer in the use of the infant gaze as a key to the infant mind — that is, identifying the inherent expectations of babies as young as a week or two by measuring how long they stare at a scene in which those presumptions are upended or unmet. “More than any scientist I know, Liz combines theoretical acumen with experimental genius,” Dr. Carey said. Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at M.I.T., put it this way: “Liz developed the infant gaze idea into a powerful experimental paradigm that radically changed our view of infant cognition.”


Here, according to the Spelke lab, are some of the things that babies know, generally before the age of 1:


They know what an object is: a discrete physical unit in which all sides move roughly as one, and with some independence from other objects.


“If I reach for a corner of a book and grasp it, I expect the rest of the book to come with me, but not a chunk of the table,” said Phil Kellman, Dr. Spelke’s first graduate student, now at the University of California, Los Angeles.


A baby has the same expectation. If you show the baby a trick sequence in which a rod that appears to be solid moves back and forth behind another object, the baby will gape in astonishment when that object is removed and the rod turns out to be two fragments.


“The visual system comes equipped to partition a scene into functional units we need to know about for survival,” Dr. Kellman said. Wondering whether your bag of four oranges puts you over the limit for the supermarket express lane? A baby would say, “You pick up the bag, the parts hang together, that makes it one item, so please get in line.”


Babies know, too, that objects can’t go through solid boundaries or occupy the same position as other objects, and that objects generally travel through space in a continuous trajectory. If you claimed to have invented a transporter device like the one in “Star Trek,” a baby would scoff.


Babies are born accountants. They can estimate quantities and distinguish between more and less. Show infants arrays of, say, 4 or 12 dots and they will match each number to an accompanying sound, looking longer at the 4 dots when they hear 4 sounds than when they hear 12 sounds, even if each of the 4 sounds is played comparatively longer. Babies also can perform a kind of addition and subtraction, anticipating the relative abundance of groups of dots that are being pushed together or pulled apart, and looking longer when the wrong number of dots appears.



Source & Image : New York Times

Should Obama politicise Bin Laden's death?

President Bush in a flight suit

President Barack Obama is being accused by opponents of making political capital out of the killing of Osama Bin Laden a year ago.

That's not surprising - he is indeed making a big deal out of it.

The question is whether doing so is distasteful and whether his campaign is politicising something that should be above politics.

Vice-President Joe Biden says a bumper sticker slogan to sum up the four years could read: "Bin Laden is dead. General Motors is alive."

There is no doubt the death of America's Most Wanted is being used as an essential backdrop to Mr Obama's re-election campaign.

His team won't allow anyone to run away with the idea that the Navy Seals raid was the inevitable result of obvious decisions taken by shadowy figures within the administration.

Instead, they hammer home the view that the president made a courageous and difficult call, going against the advice of many of those around him.

This is pushed explicitly in a new campaign video narrated by Bill Clinton.

There have been several detailed insider accounts which support the idea of a tough and risky decision-maker at the top.

It is certainly true that had the raid gone wrong the political fall-out would have been huge.

Think Black Hawk Down. Think Jimmy Carter's failed attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran. Then multiply by a factor of 10.

The video is also explicit in suggesting that Mitt Romney would not have made the same call as Mr Obama, quoting him as saying: "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

Fox News suggest that this is unfair and taken out of context because Romney went on to add: “He is going to pay. He will die."

It is hardly surprising that Mr Obama wants to use Bin Laden's death as a symbol. It may not be the only success of his administration. But it is the only one unadulterated by party politics.

The only one that was celebrated by just about every American, of every political persuasion. It was greeted with glee by some of those who might usually see Mr Obama as weak on national security.

When some worry that he is a consensus seeker, a ditherer, this version of the president is a gutsy risk taker.

The fact that Mr Obama got Osama is a backdrop, a context, to every other, more contentious foreign policy decision.

It was inevitable that it would be used in the campaign, but his team have pushed it in a particularly bullish, even boastful way.

It is just as inevitable that opponents will portray that as unseemly immodesty.

The crudeness of the presidential pitch may put some off, but any row that is created only serves to highlight that Bin Laden was indeed killed on Mr Obama's watch, on his orders.



Source & Image : BBC

Venezuela's Chavez to head back to Cuba for more cancer treatment







Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he is in the

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he is in the "home stretch" of his cancer treatment in Cuba.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS



  • NEW: Hugo Chavez says Venezuela should quit an OAS commission on human rights

  • NEW: He asks that a newly created council take up the matter

  • Chavez has not specified the type of cancer he has; he has spent 50 days in Cuba this year

  • "We're in the home stretch," the president says about his radiation treatment





(CNN) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Monday he will return to Havana to undergo more cancer treatment.

The 57-year-old president has been back and forth several times this year between Venezuela and Cuba, where he is being treated for an unspecified type of cancer. He returned home from his latest trip Thursday.

"We're in the home stretch," the president said about his radiation treatment. He spoke during a ceremony to sign a new labor law, during which he also called for Venezuela to withdraw from the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

"Enough already!" he said of the Washington-based body, accusing the United States of using it as a way to harm Venezuela.

Chavez asked a newly created council to take up the matter.

Venezuelan official says Chavez is in full control

The president pulled a cross from his breast pocket, kissed it and clasped it in his fist.

"I am confident Christ will repeat, or continue, the miracle," he said, his voice cracking with emotion as he wrapped up his address.

Chavez said he would return to Venezuela within "a few days." Since the beginning of the year, he has spent 50 days in Cuba.

The Venezuelan government has released few specifics on the president's illness, fueling widespread speculation about his health and political future. Chavez has led Venezuela since 1999 and has pledged to run for re-election in October.


Source & Image : CNN World

Is there a worldwide parking problem?

Car park

A revolution is required in our attitude to car parking, according to the author of a new book. He claims we are adrift in a "sea of asphalt" and calls on architects to design car parks which are more aesthetically pleasing and have less environmental impact.

There are an estimated 600 million cars in the world, a figure that's rapidly growing, especially in China and other "emerging markets".

They all need to park somewhere.

In the US, surface car parks take up land roughly about the size of Puerto Rico (which is 8,959 sq km or 3,459 sq miles), according to a new book by Eran Ben-Joseph, professor of landscape architecture and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Land is plentiful in the US - except for some cities - and consequently parking lots take up huge amounts of space.

Shopping malls, cinemas, stadiums, factories and office complexes are surrounded by prairies of bitumen.

Many of them are deliberately designed for the busiest shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving, which means they are often half-empty.

Prof Ben-Joseph says: "These places are just surrounded by a sea of asphalt."

In Europe, Japan and in US cities like New York and Boston, where land is at a premium, multi-storey car parks - or "parking garages" - are the preferred option.

In his book, ReThinking a Lot, Prof Ben-Joseph argues car parks should be more "environmentally responsible" and "aesthetically pleasing".

So what could be done to improve them?

Few multi-storey car parks are cultural assets, but these 10 examples of modernist architecture show there are occasions when architects excel themselves and create landmarks a city can be proud of.

Eric Kuhne, who designed the award-winning car park at Bluewater shopping centre, just outside London, said there was no excuse for drab parking lots, which he described as "insidious".

"At Bluewater there are two trees for every three cars and we chose trees which give a blindingly white blossom in the spring and iridescent leaves in the fall. The car parks become a sea of colour," said Mr Kuhne, who was born in the US but is now based in London.

Mr Kuhne says: "Too often parking lot design is perfunctory and ignominious when it could restore pageantry to our great cities."

He says they should be designed in such a way that they "honour the heroic routine" of driving, working and shopping.

In his book Prof Ben-Joseph says when the automobile was first invented they were usually parked by the kerb like the horses and wagons they would eventually replace.

The world's first parking lot is believed to have been built in 1917 in Los Angeles by a young Italian immigrant, Andrew Pansini.

The following year the La Salle Hotel in Chicago built the first parking garage on multiple levels.

Over the years there have been a number of developments - underground car parks, pay and display machines and most recently the advent of paying by mobile phone.

The first automated car park were developed in the US in the 1920s.

But robotic car parks really took off in Japan in the 1970s, especially in Tokyo which suffers from an acute shortage of land and needed to maximise the number of cars which could be stored at any one time.

The Cube, an office and apartment development in Birmingham, opened in 2010 and has installed an automated parking system which allows cars to "park themselves".

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The robotics system is expensive - around £2m - but it allows for more cars to be crammed in.

New technology is also being used to try to solve the problem of driving around looking for a parking space.

A British company, Deteq, has invented a system of smart sensors which can be installed in car parks to enable the operators to know how many spaces they had and which times of day were most popular.

The managing director of Brighton-based Deteq, Adrian Bone, said: "We've also developed an app which would allow the motorist to find out where the nearest parking spaces were."

It has been known for years that asphalt soaking up the sun's rays contributes to the "urban heat island" phenomena which makes cities warmer than surrounding rural areas.

Now efforts are under way to harness that energy.

One such project is in Tempe, Arizona.

Parking lots can occasionally be places of culture. In New York the Shakespeare in the Lot project puts on the bard's plays for free in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The project's artistic director, Hamilton Delancey, who has been involved for 11 years, said: "We set out about 50 plastic seats and people bring their own chairs and blankets and we usually get up to 250 for a performance. Parking lots can occasionally be places of culture.

"In New York the Shakespeare in the Parking Lot project puts on the bard's plays for free in a car park in Mae."

Mr Delancey, who is putting on The Merry Wives Of Windsor and Coriolanus this summer, said: "Sometimes it can quite get quite surreal. You could be staging Othello and a driver will come back to pick up their car and there's an audience surrounding it.

"But the actors will stop, step aside, everybody will move their chairs, the cars backs out, then the audience sits back down, the actor - still in character - carries on without missing a beat."

The so-called Lot 59 project has seen a five-acre parking lot at the Arizona State University's Sun Devils gridiron stadium covered with giant solar panels, which can produce 2.2 megawatts of electricity annually - enough to power 550 homes.

Bob Boscamp, one of the founders of the company behind the Power Parasol, said the design allows 23% of the light to get through, creating a "dappled" effect for motorists.

The Power Parasol will be formally unveiled this week.

Another Arizona company is pioneering the use of "nano-engineered colour coatings" on asphalt parking lots.

Sheri Roese, founder and CEO of Emerald Cities Cool Pavement, says: "Who decided that all roads and parking lots should be black?"

"It was the unintended consequence of advancement in the transportation industry since the 1800s, minus an understanding of how colour impacts the environment.

"Now we know hot black asphalt is contributing to urban heat."

The new coating was applied to a school parking lot in Phoenix.

Meanwhile scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California are working on developing reflective asphalt, which if used on parking lots could significantly reduce the amount of heat which is absorbed.

Another project which is in its early days, as reported recently in the Boston Business Journal, is a plan to create energy by heating water running in pipes beneath asphalt parking lots.

Mike Hulen, the founder of Novotech, the Massachusetts company behind it, has tried it out at a test site in Arizona and told the BBC: "Asphalt is a perfect black body and the idea is to trap the heat in it and remove it."

He has a number of patents pending in the field and is on the look-out for funding for the project.

The fate of one of Britain's most iconic car parks is symptomatic of a new architectural trend.

The Trinity Square car park in Gateshead, Tyneside, made an infamous cameo appearance in the cult film Get Carter, starring Michael Caine.

Built in the 1960s, it hulked over the centre of the town for years, but was eventually demolished in 2010 and is being replaced by a massive new development.

The £150m redevelopment, which will include a supermarket and accommodation for the nearby Northumbria University, is designed with a 700-space underground car park.

Underground car parks or car parks with buildings on top of them gobble up less land and can be designed to reduce environmental impact.



Do you have a favourite car park? Or one you loathe? Have you got suggestions for alternative activities for your local parking lot? Send us your comments on this story.



Source & Image : BBC

Mexico passes law to compensate victims of crime

Javier Sicilia and Teresa Carmona attend a meeting with senators in Mexico City on 23 April 2012

Members of Parliament in Mexico have unanimously approved a bill which will provide compensation to the victims of organised crime.

The law will create a national body to record such crimes as kidnapping and forced disappearances.

It will also oversee legal, medical and financial support to crime victims.

About 50,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon began deploying soldiers to fight organised crime in 2006.

Under the law, relatives of people who have been killed or forcibly disappeared can claim for compensation, as well as those who have been kidnapped or wounded as a result of organised crime.

The law will also apply to victims of human rights abuses carried out by the security forces.

Long campaign

A national registry will be created to record crimes and set aside funds for the compensation of victims, with the maximum pay-out set at $70,000 (£43,000).

The bill was passed unanimously in the House of Representatives, with activists in the gallery applauding and shouting "Not one more death!".

As it has already been passed by the Senate, the law will now go to President Calderon, who has already expressed his support for the initiative.

Campaigners such as the poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was killed along with six friends last year, have welcomed the vote.

The BBC's Will Grant in Mexico City says the problem will be for victims to provide evidence of the crime committed against them.

Our correspondent says that only a very small proportion of drug-related murders are ever brought to trial and many crimes go unreported for fear of reprisals.



Source & Image : BBC

For Some Parents, Leaving a Private School Is Harder Than Getting In





In February 2011, Nicole Smolowitz’s son was admitted to the Mandell School on the Upper West Side. She signed a contract and paid the $7,500 deposit.


By late April, the family’s financial situation had changed, and private school was no longer an option. Ms. Smolowitz called the school to say her son would not be able to attend. She did not expect to get her deposit back — but she was told she had to pay the remaining $26,250, as well.


“It’s April,” she said she told them. “I will find someone for you to take my child’s spot.” The school told her that was not how things were done. Then, in September, Mandell sued.


For most parents, getting their child into a private school is a moment of joy, or at least relief. But uncomfortable conversations take place at this time of year, as some parents reconsider.


Sometimes these conversations lead to an amicable parting. Other times, they lead to a bare-knuckled fight in court.


Since 2009, at least five private schools in New York City — Mandell, York Preparatory School, Friends Seminary, Léman Manhattan Preparatory School and the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School — have sued parents for tuition.


The schools’ argument is simple: Parents sign a contract when they accept placement, saying they will send their child to the school the next year and pay the agreed-upon price.


Parent-oriented Web sites like UrbanBaby.com are now filled with anxious questions about how far schools will go to enforce those contracts.


The contractual deadline at which a family is on the hook for a year’s tuition varies: at Mandell, it is in March; at Riverdale Country School, it is May 31; and at the Trinity School, it is in July. If parents withdraw their children before the deadline, they lose only their deposit, usually several thousand dollars. Typically, parents must sign a new contract each school year.


While financial strain is an oft-cited reason for parents withdrawing their children from private schools, another factor is the availability of public gifted-and-talented programs. Often, the deadline for parents to commit to a private school comes before the city’s Education Department sends acceptance letters for the gifted programs, which it is expected to do this year in late May.


Lawsuits are not the only tool available to schools: some parents have reported being threatened with debt collectors, leading many to cave and pay for an education their child will not receive. And defending a lawsuit is often not financially worthwhile, as the cost of a lawyer can approach the amount the school is demanding.


Frances Langbecker said she was shocked when Friends Seminary sued her after her daughter had been there for six years, especially because she had been a class parent and an active fund-raiser for most of that time.


In 2008, Ms. Langbecker was working in real estate, and her husband was starting a company. Because of the financial crisis, she had her daughter, Isabella, apply to New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math, or NEST+m, a selective public school on the Lower East Side. When Isabella was accepted days after Friends’s back-out deadline, she said, she called Friends to say that while she did not think Isabella would attend NEST+m, they planned to go to the orientation to check it out.


According to Ms. Langbecker, while she and her husband were still deciding where to send Isabella, the principal of Friends sent Isabella a letter saying he was sorry to see her go.


Then Friends sued for $28,700. According to the school’s court filings, the Langbeckers had withdrawn Isabella after the back-out date. “It was ugly, bad, devastating,” Ms. Langbecker said. “The Friends community was my community.”


In their own court papers, the Langbeckers said Friends had let other parents back out and questioned whether the lawsuit fit with the school’s Quaker principles. They also said the school had not kept up its end of the contract because it had failed to deliver a quality education at times, like when certain math and English teachers were out. Ultimately, Ms. Langbecker said, both sides dropped the case. David Black, the lawyer for Friends, did not return calls for comment.


While doing research for the suit, Ms. Langbecker came upon another case that gave her hope: the Gunderson case, as families who have been sued call it.



Source & Image : New York Times

President Obama Suggests the Public Look at Romney's Previous Statements on Going After OBL







Without mentioning his opponent by name, President Obama took clear political aim at Mitt Romney on Monday, continuing a line of attack from his campaign that Romney would not have given the go-ahead to the mission that ended in the death of Osama bin Laden .



Asked about Romney's comments from earlier this morning belittling how difficult the decision to go after bin Laden may have been, the president said "As far as my personal role and what other folks would do, I'd just recommend that everybody take a look at people's previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden. I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. That's been at least my practice."



The president was alluding to Romney's 2007 comments about bin Laden that "it's not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person." The Obama campaign last Friday released a web ad suggestion that this sentence suggests he would not have been willing to take the risk and order Navy SEALs to cross into Pakistan and infiltrate bin Laden's Abbotabad compound.



Continued the president, "I said that I'd go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they'd do something else, then I'd go ahead and let them explain it."



The president was also referring to Romney's reaction in 2007 after then-Senator Obama said "if we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." Romney at the time called those comments "ill-timed" and "ill-considered" and said "there is a war being waged by terrorists of different types and nature across the world. We want, as a civilized world, to participate with other nations in this civilized effort to help those nations reject the extreme with them."



The Romney campaign argues that his 2007 comments about "not moving heaven and earth" to get bin Laden are being unfairly twisted by the president, that the full context indicates that he was saying the war against the extremist Islamist movement was bigger than just one man - not that he wouldn't go after that one man. According to the Associated Press's Liz Sidoti, Romney said capturing bin Laden would made the U.S. safer by only "a small percentage" resulting in "a very insignificant increase in safety" since someone else would take bin Laden's place. Romney supported a broader strategy against



At the time, however, Romney's then-primary rival Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in response to Romney's comment that "it takes a degree of naiveté to think he's [bin Laden] not an element in the struggle against radical Islam."



After McCain hit him for the remark, Romney backtracked from it at a debate, saying "We'll move everything to get him. But I don't want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there's going to be another and another….This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate."



In recent months, Romney has been trying to belittle what was by all accounts a difficult decision for President Obama to order the Navy SEAL operation during which bin Laden was killed one year ago tomorrow. Many members of the president's senior national security apparatus, including Vice President Biden, then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, and director of the National Counter Terrorism Center Michael Leiter all questioned whether the intelligence was good enough to merit the order. General James "Hoss" Cartwright favored a bomb strike.



Romney today said that " even Jimmy Carter would have given that order " and said "of course" he would have done so. The order Carter gave to carry out the doomed attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages, in 1980, was one of the reasons Gates - who was working at the CIA at the time - was reluctant to support the mission.



The president made his remarks in the East Room of the White House at a joint appearance with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.



-Jake Tapper and Mary Bruce


Also Read


Source & Image : Yahoo

Bin Laden: Seized documents show delusional leader and micromanager







A trove of documents found at Osama bin Laden's compound reveal his methods and thoughts, Peter Bergen writes.

A trove of documents found at Osama bin Laden's compound reveal his methods and thoughts, Peter Bergen writes.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS



  • Peter Bergen: 6,000 documents seized from bin Laden compound are revealing

  • He says they paint a portrait of a man convinced he could reverse U.S. policy

  • Bin Laden's private musings show he was focused on tiny details

  • Bergen: bin Laden worried that too much damage had been done to al Qaeda's brand name





Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad," from which this essay is adapted.

(CNN) -- There is no better way for historians to assess Osama bin Laden's thinking and the real state of al Qaeda as it was understood by its leaders in the years after 9/11 than the "treasure trove" of more than 6,000 documents that were recovered by the U.S. Navy SEALs who raided bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a year ago.

In those documents we hear bin Laden speak in his own voice, unaware, of course, that one day his most private musings would end up in the hands of the CIA.

The documents paint a portrait of a man who was simultaneously an inveterate micromanager but was also someone almost delusional in his belief that his organization could still force a change in American foreign policies in the Muslim world if only he could get another big attack organized inside the United States -- something some of his subordinates were quite skeptical about given al Qaeda's diminished capabilities.



Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen


In the course of reporting a new book about the 10-year search for bin Laden after 9/11, senior U.S. administration officials allowed me to review hundreds of pages of declassified -- but as yet unpublished -- memos from the Abbottabad "treasure trove." I examined a variety of memos that were written by bin Laden himself and also memos that his subordinates had written to him, or to others.

The memos paint a picture of an organization that understood it was in deep danger from the American drone shrikes in Pakistan's tribal regions that had been decimating its leadership since summer 2008.

They show bin Laden hatching improbable schemes to attack the United States, while he was deeply involved in the minutia of the internal affairs of both al Qaeda's core group in Pakistan and its regional affiliates in the Middle East and Africa. And they also show that bin Laden well understood that al Qaeda's brand name was in deep trouble, in particular, because the group and its affiliates had killed so many civilians.

On August 7, 2010, bin Laden wrote to Mukhtar Abu al-Zubair, the leader of the brutal Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia, telling him that Al-Shabaab ("the Youth") would be better off if it did not declare itself publicly to be part of al Qaeda. Bin Laden advised, "If asked, it would be better to say there is a relationship with al Qaeda, which is simply a brotherly Islamic connection, and nothing more."

Bin Laden explained to the Shabaab leader that al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq had attracted many enemies by adopting the al Qaeda name. He also pointed out that it would be better for fundraising purposes if Shabaab didn't identify itself as being part of al Qaeda, because businessmen in the Arab world "who are willing to help the brothers in Somalia" would be more likely to do so if they thought they were not supporting al Qaeda directly.

Al Qaeda, "the base" in Arabic, was the name that the group had given itself when it was founded in Pakistan by bin Laden in 1988. Now the leader of al Qaeda was advising his followers to steer away from using the term.

Bin Laden also advised members of Shabaab to try to avoid killing civilians, as they were then doing in battles in and around Mogadishu's key Bakara market, and rather to focus their attacks on African Union troops as they arrived or departed at the Mogadishu airport. Given bin Laden's own record when it came to ordering the deaths of civilians, this solicitude for the citizens of Mogadishu is somewhat ironic.

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So badly tarnished had the al Qaeda brand become that bin Laden noodled with changing the name of his group. In an internal memo, bin Laden pointed out that "[President] Obama [says] that our war is not on Islam or the Muslim people, but rather our war is on the al Qaeda organization. So if the word al Qaeda was derived from or had strong ties to the word 'Islam' or 'Muslims,' or if it had the name 'Islamic party' it would be difficult for Obama to say that."

Bin Laden went on to nominate some possible new names for al Qaeda. "These are some suggestions: Monotheism and Jihad group, Monotheism and Defending Islam Group, Restoration of the Caliphate Group ... Muslim Unity group." None of these suggestions were exactly catchy and the group did not rename itself.

Bin Laden's principal conduit to his organization was Atiyah Abdul Rahman, a Libyan militant of about 40. Viewed by officials in the West as no more than a mid-tier terrorist, Rahman was actually bin Laden's chief of staff. In a 48-page memo to Rahman written in October 2010, bin Laden told him that al Qaeda's longtime sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal areas was now too dangerous because of the campaign of American drone strikes there. The CIA had launched a record number of strikes into the tribal regions during 2010. Bin Laden wrote, "I am leaning toward getting most of our brothers out of the area."

Bin Laden advised his followers not to move around the tribal regions except on overcast days when America's all-seeing satellites and drones would not have as good visibility of the area. He complained that, "the Americans have great accumulated expertise of photography of the region due to the fact they have been doing it for so many years. They can even distinguish between houses that are frequented by male visitors at a higher rate than is normal."

Bin Laden urged his followers to depart for the remote Afghan province of Kunar where he himself had hid after escaping from U.S. forces at the Battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001, explaining that "due to its rough terrain and many mountains, rivers, trees, it can accommodate hundreds of the brothers without them being spotted by the enemy."

He was constantly urging holy war to his followers, but when it came to his own family bin Laden was privately advocating something quite different. He advised that his 20-year-old son Hamza should leave the drone-infested Pakistani tribal regions to further his religious training in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar, which happens to be, per capita, the richest country in the world. Bin Laden added that if two of his other sons, Othman and Mohamed, should ever leave Iran, where they were living in exile, he would also advise them to steer clear of Pakistan's tribal areas. (Bin Laden noted that one of his sons, Ladin, had already been allowed to exit Iran to travel to Syria).

According to the documents recovered in the Abbottabad compound, the spectacular set of self-inflicted mistakes by al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq played heavily on the minds of bin Laden and his top advisers. They complained internally that al Qaeda's campaign of attacks against Iraqi Christians had not been sanctioned by bin Laden.

To the leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula based in Yemen, bin Laden urged that they not kill members of the local tribes, a tactic that al Qaeda had frequently employed in western Iraq, which had provoked a tribal uprising against al Qaeda that began in 2006 and had dealt a large blow to the group's fortunes in Iraq. "Learn from their mistakes," bin Laden admonished.

Al Qaeda's leaders wrote to Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistan Taliban on December 3, 2010, to warn him to suspend his campaign of attacks against Pakistani mosques and markets, which had killed hundreds of Pakistani civilians.

Although the Pakistani Taliban is an independent conglomeration of Taliban groups, al Qaeda was seeking to control their tactics and stop their counterproductive killing of Pakistani civilians. That isn't to say that al Qaeda's leaders had suddenly morphed into humanitarians. At one point in the letter to Mehsud, they wrote, "We're sending the attached short list on what is acceptable and unacceptable on the subject of kidnapping and receiving money. We hope that you and the Mujahedeen in Pakistan will approve it."

In his isolated final years, bin Laden became a micromanager, admonishing his Yemeni group that its members should always gas up and eat heartily before they embarked on road trips so that they wouldn't have to stop at gas stations and restaurants monitored by government spies. And he advised al Qaeda's North African wing to plant trees so they could later use them as cover for their operations:

"Trees would give shade and freedom to move around especially if the enemy spies from the air." It's safe to assume that this arboreal advice was simply ignored. At one point bin Laden even told his chief of staff that he preferred that any money sent to him be in Euros.

Bin Laden had long been disciplined, secretive and paranoid and he warned his lieutenants to be careful with any contacts with journalists. "Keep in mind that journalists may be involuntarily monitored in a way that they do not know about either on ground or by satellite. Especially Ahmad Zaidan of Al-Jazeera [the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan]. It's possible that a tracking device could be put in one of their personal effects before coming to a meeting."

Bin Laden sometimes gave guidance to his deputies so bizarre that they must have read it while scratching their turbans in bemusement. He complained that Faizal Shahzad, the American citizen of Pakistani heritage who had tried to blow up an SUV in Times Square on May 1, 2010, had broken the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the United States, and tut-tutted that "We do not want the Mujahedeen to be accused of breaking an oath." Bin Laden kept pressing his lieutenants for more attacks on America, but now they couldn't recruit naturalized U.S. citizens to carry out those missions. Huh?

Until the end, Bin Laden remained fixated on attacking the United States, writing to the leader of his affiliate in Yemen, "We need to extend and develop our operations in America and not keep it limited to only blowing up airplanes."

He urged that Yemenis who had visas for the United States be recruited for operations there. And he reminded his Yemeni followers that killing Americans was the priority rather than killing Yemeni soldiers or policeman, so the United States would be forced "finally to withdraw from our countries and stop supporting the Jews." He also warned his group not to get overly ambitious. "The people of Yemen are not really ready for a government formed by al Qaeda."

Bin Laden told his deputies that killing President Obama was a high priority as well as then-commandier in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus, but not to bother with plots against Vice President Joe Biden, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, or then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen.

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approached, bin Laden, always very conscious of his own media image, got down in the weeds with his media team about how best to exploit the impending coverage of the anniversary. He suggested reaching out to Abdel Barri Atwan, a leading Palestinian journalist based in London, as well as the veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk of the British Independent newspaper, both of whom had done interviews with bin Laden in the past. He also mused about doing a TV interview with CBS, which he regarded as the "least biased" of the American TV channels.

In response, an al Qaeda member, likely the American recruit Adam Gadahn, wrote bin Laden a critique of the various American news channels that is worth quoting at some length: "As for the neutrality of CNN in English it seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others, except Fox News of course ... I used to think that MSNBC channel might be good and neutral, but it has lately fired two of the most famous journalists, Keith Olbermann and Octavia Nasr, [who, in fact, left CNN] ... ABC Channel is all right, actually it could be one of the best channels as far as we're concerned. It's interested in al Qaeda issues, particularly the journalist Brian Ross, who specializes in terrorism. The channel is still proud of its interview with the Sheikh [bin Laden in 1998]."

A June 2009 letter sheds light on the murky question of what kind of relationship al Qaeda has enjoyed with the Iranian government since the fall of the Taliban. For many years one of bin Laden's wives and a number of his children lived in Iran under some form of house arrest as well as some leaders of al Qaeda, such as the military commander Saif al-Adel.

A bin Laden lieutenant wrote to bin Laden "With regards to the Iranian relationship and the problem with our detained brothers, we bring good news. They released a new group of brothers in the last month."

The writer goes on to name several men the Iranian government had recently released.

The writer alludes to al Qaeda having abducted Heshmatollah Attarzadeh-Niyaki, an Iranian diplomat, in late 2008 near his home in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar. After holding the diplomat for more than a year, the militants quietly released him back to Iran in the spring of 2010.

Pakistani intelligence officials believe this was part of a deal that finally allowed some of bin Laden's family to end their years of house arrest in Iran.

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Source & Image : CNN Opinion