Arabs may take Syria peace plan to United Nations (Reuters)

BEIRUT (Reuters) ? Arab states may take their proposals for ending Syria's crackdown on protests to the U.N. Security Council next week unless Damascus agrees to implement the initiative, Qatar's foreign minister said on Saturday.

Expressing frustration that Syria had not carried out the plan, six weeks after it was first agreed, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said the window for an Arab solution to the crisis was closing.

"If this matter is not solved in the weeks ahead, or couple of months, it will no longer be in Arab control," he told journalists after an Arab ministerial committee meeting in Qatar. "That is what we told the Syrians from the beginning."

Arab ministers would vote on Wednesday on whether to ask the Security Council to approve the initiative. "I believe that December 21 will be decisive, and we hope that the brothers in Syria will sign (the deal) before this date," Sheikh Hamad said.

Syria has conditionally approved a plan to send monitors to oversee implementation of the November 2 Arab League initiative, which calls on Assad to withdraw the army from urban areas, release political prisoners and hold talks with opponents.

But Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby said Damascus was objecting to the League's call for protection of Syrian civilians, saying members of the security forces were also being killed in the turmoil.

The United Nations says Assad's crackdown on the protests, inspired by uprisings across the Arab world this year, has killed more than 5,000 people. Authorities blame armed gangs for the violence and say 1,100 soldiers and police have been killed.

The Arab League suspended Syria and declared economic sanctions against Damascus over its failure to implement the initiative, joining the United States, European Union and neighbouring Turkey who have also imposed sanctions.

Long-time Syrian ally and arms supplier Russia took a step closer to the Western position on Thursday when it presented a surprise draft resolution at the United Nations which stepped up its criticism of the bloodshed in Syria.

Sheikh Hamad said that, in response to Moscow's move, the Arab League would meet on Wednesday to decide whether "to ask the Security Council to adopt the Arab initiative and Arab resolutions instead of resolutions from other states."

"We are not talking about military action but we will ask the Security Council to adopt the Arab initiative," Sheikh Hamad said, adding Syria should take heed of events in the Arab world where three leaders have been overthrown this year.

"Procrastination and banking on things quieting down or being controlled by security methods will not work," he said.

Any referral of the Arab plan to the United Nations would be likely to anger Damascus, which has accused unnamed Arab countries of trying to set the stage for foreign intervention.

GROWING INSURGENCY

The unrest is the most serious challenge to the 11-year rule of Assad, 46, whose family is from the minority Alawite sect - an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam - and has dominated majority Sunni Muslim Syria since 1970.

An armed insurgency has begun to eclipse civilian protests, raising fears Syria could descend into civil war.

Two days ago army deserters killed 27 soldiers and security personnel in the southern province of Deraa, an activist group said. On Saturday at least 24 people were killed, half of them in the province of Homs, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

It said another eight people were killed in the southern province of Deraa after army deserters clashed with Assad's forces carrying out raids in the region.

A delegation from Shi'ite-led Iraq, which opposed the Arab League sanctions and fears unrest in Syria will spill across the border and upset its own delicate sectarian balance, stopped in Damascus on Saturday before travelling on to Cairo.

Assad met the Iraqi delegation, which included National Security Adviser Faleh al-Fayad, and "affirmed that Syria dealt positively with all proposals submitted to it," the official news agency SANA reported.

"The delegation will present details of the Iraqi initiative to League officials on solving the Syrian crisis after positive discussions which we had with President Bashar al-Assad during our visit to Syria," a member of the team said on arrival in the Egyptian capital, the Arab League headquarters.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's media adviser, Ali al-Moussawi, earlier told Reuters in Baghdad that the meeting in Damascus was "very good."

The main exile opposition Syrian National Council was meeting in Tunisia on the first anniversary of the self-immolation of a jobless Tunisian graduate Mohamed Bouazizi, the incident that set off a wave of revolts around the Arab world.

Syrian protesters have expressed growing frustration that the Arab League, which surprised many when it suspended Syria and subsequently announced sanctions against Damascus, has since then extended the deadline for Syrian compliance several times.

Hundreds of thousands demonstrated on Friday, according to the British-based Observatory, under the slogan of "The Arab League is killing us."

(Additional reporting by Waleed Ibrahim in Baghdad and Sami Aboudi in Dubai; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111217/wl_nm/us_syria

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Immigration paranoia: Why are Americans being arrested? (The Week)

New York ? Activists say U.S. citizens are being detained under a federal program aimed at deporting illegal immigrants

An already controversial Obama administration push to find and arrest illegal immigrants is facing a new round of criticism from civil rights and immigrant groups, who say that documented U.S. citizens are being detained under the program. How often is this really happening? Here, a brief guide to the federal government's immigration crackdown, and some of its unforeseen consequences:

Are immigration agents really detaining U.S. citizens?
Yes, at least in a flurry of recent cases. These people are typically picked up by local police for other reasons ? U.S. citizen Antonio Montejano of Los Angeles, for example, was arrested for allegedly shoplifting a $10 bottle of perfume last month. But in custody, he was tagged as a suspected illegal immigrant by federal agents, acting on bad information in their database. As is typical in these cases, Montejano was supposed to be released quickly, but immigration agents told police to hold him in a local jail for possible deportation.

SEE MORE: Should 'citizen juries' decide illegal immigrant status?

?

Wait, they can do that?
In theory, it's OK to hold people who have been arrested if they're genuinely suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. Under the controversial Secure Communities program, federal agents can tell police to keep criminals locked up, pending an investigation into the detainees' legal right to be in the country. But mistakes happen: Montejano spent two extra days in jail after the judge in his shoplifting case ordered him released. "I was telling every officer I'm an American citizen," he tells the Los Angeles Times. "Nobody believed me."

Could Montejano take legal action?
Possibly. "Any case where an American is held, even briefly, for immigration investigation is a potential wrongful arrest," says Julia Preston in The New York Times. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which runs Secure Communities, takes the allegations "very seriously," spokesman John Morton tells the Times. "We don't have the power to detain citizens," he says.

SEE MORE: The 'dramatic' decline in illegal immigration: 3 theories

?

How often is this happening?
That depends on whom you ask. The American Civil Liberties Union points to the cases of Montejano and three others as irrefutable evidence that the problem is real, and widespread. The ACLU cites a study which found that 82 people were held ? for up to a year ? at Arizona immigration detention centers until a judge said they couldn't be deported because they were citizens. But the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank dedicated to reducing immigration, says the ICE database "contains no records of U.S. citizens who were detained by or for ICE."

Sources: Center for Immigration Studies, LA Times, NY Times

SEE MORE: Is Alabama's tough immigration law turning kids into bullies?

?

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oped/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/theweek/20111215/cm_theweek/222519

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Safety seemed to be an afterthought before the BP oil spill

Reporting from Washington?

?

The petroleum industry and federal regulators focused more on exploration and production than safety in the years leading up to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, helping to set the stage for the worst offshore environmental disaster in U.S. history, according to a new independent report by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council.

Conducted at the behest of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the report said the "multiple flawed decisions that led to a blowout" on the Deepwater Horizon rig resulted from "a deficient overall systems approach to safety" among the corporations that ran the drilling of the Macondo well, including BP, Transocean and Halliburton.

The report, titled "Macondo Well ? Deepwater Horizon Blowout, Lessons for Improving Offshore Drilling Safety," echoed many findings from previous studies of the disaster. But it added new levels of detail and put the nation's top engineering peer group behind a call for redesigning a massive set of valves, rams and hydraulic devices once thought to be fail-safe: the blowout preventer that failed to stem the flow of more than 200 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico.

"There were numerous warnings to both industry and regulators about potential failures of existing BOP [blowout preventer] systems" over the previous decade, according to the report, which demanded greater emphasis on safety than industry and regulators have shown, and questioned industry and regulatory norms that could erode safety.

The fragmented nature of offshore oil drilling, with different companies responsible for highly specialized tasks, means that few people on a rig may have a complete sense of the risks involved in the drilling operation, the report concluded.

The report committee's chairman, former Navy Secretary Donald C. Winter, said that improvements in regulatory oversight and in industry response to offshore disasters gave him confidence that offshore drilling should continue. But he stressed that more work needed to be done.

"Our concern is whether this is a good first step in the right direction," Winter said in a conference call, "or whether these changes represent a transient response in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon."

The Interior Department said in a statement that it welcomed the report's findings, which it said backed the regulatory policies it has pursued since the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010.

The department introduced more stringent environmental and safety regulations, and the industry responded by developing new oil spill response and containment systems, incorporating lessons from the gulf disaster.

But the report expressed concerns about how serious and sustained industry efforts might be, given that its research and development efforts over the last 20 years have been shrunk and outsourced. And most of those efforts have "been focused disproportionately on exploration, drilling, and production technologies as opposed to safety."

Erik Milito of the American Petroleum Institute trade group defended the industry's research focus. "The industry is leading the way in applying the best elements of the most successful existing safety programs, including the use of independent auditing and certification by third parties," Milito said.

Complacency about safety, particularly in the case of blowout preventers, became apparent in testimony before the committee that showed "a misplaced confidence that blowout preventers could provide a guarantee, an insurance policy to the blowout," Winter said.

The industry seems to have tempered its confidence in the reliability of blowout preventers, said Roger L. McCarthy, a private engineering consultant from Palo Alto and a member of the report committee. Still, there is no uniform standard for blowout preventers and no independent certification of their efficacy, McCarthy said.

"You can't buy a circuit breaker for your home that hasn't been independently certified by Underwriters Laboratories," McCarthy said, "while a BOP is kind of a circuit breaker for an incredible amount of power that comes up the drill string, and it's not certified to any standard."

Deep offshore oil drilling is becoming more common, as evidenced by the $337 million in bids offered Wednesday in the Interior Department's first auction of federal leases in the western Gulf of Mexico since the BP spill.

In such an environment, the industry needs to approach safety through a "proactive" system that articulates all the risks inherent to each particular process and puts in place steps to prevent them, the report recommended. Although that approach was adopted in the North Sea in the wake of disasters there a generation ago, not all companies use the approach beyond their North Sea operations.

neela.banerjee@latimes.com

Source: http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/latimes/news/science/~3/LHAVta1iv7Q/la-na-bp-spill-report-20111215,0,6496189.story

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Harrison having appeal hearing with Cottrell (AP)

PITTSBURGH ? Steelers linebacker James Harrison is having his appeal hearing on his one-game suspension.

The hearing, via video conference call Wednesday, is being conducted by Ted Cottrell, who was hired by the league and the NFL Players Association to oversee such appeals. No decision is expected until Thursday at the earliest.

Harrison was suspended Tuesday for Pittsburgh's game next Monday night at San Francisco because of his helmet-to-helmet hit on Cleveland quarterback Colt McCoy, who suffered a concussion. That hit came in Pittsburgh's 14-3 win on Dec. 8.

The NFL cited Harrison's history of flagrant hits ? this was his fifth on a quarterback ? in making him the first player suspended under stricter guidelines for player safety that were invoked midway through last season.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/sports/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111214/ap_on_sp_fo_ne/fbn_harrison_appeal

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Find Out How to Open That File Type with Wolfram Alpha [Wolfram Alpha]

If you come upon a file extension you don't know, the endlessly useful Wolfram Alpha has a tool built-in that will tell you what it is and what programs you'll need to open it.

While you could use something like previously mentioned Fileext.com, Wolfram Alpha is dead simple and probably something you already have in your custom search engines (and if you don't have it there, you should). Just head to Wolfram Alpha, type in the file extension you're looking for with a dot preceding it (e.g. .jpg), and search. It'll tell you what type of file it corresponds to, as well as give you some sample applications that you can use to open it. Hit the link to read more, including a trick on finding out how to open files that don't have an extension.

How to Open Files that have Unknown Extensions | Digital Inspiration

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/U3ST32GEEls/find-out-how-to-open-that-file-type-with-wolfram-alpha

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Japan's Olympus hid up to $1.7 billion (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) ? An investigative panel has found Japan's disgraced Olympus Corp hid up to $1.67 billion in losses from its investors, but is likely to say there is no evidence of involvement by organized crime in the cover-up, a source said Monday.

The panel will also stop short of recommending criminal charges against executives involved in the accounting scandal, presenting only the facts and leaving Olympus to pursue this aspect, said the source familiar with the panel investigation.

"That is up to the company," he said.

The panel's report is due to be released as soon as Tuesday, almost two months after Olympus's sacked chief executive, Englishman Michael Woodford, went public with his concerns over its dubious accounting for a series of murky acquisitions.

The maker of cameras and medical equipment has since lost more than half its market value and risks being delisted from the Tokyo stock exchange, a sanction that would cut it off from equity markets and put it under pressure to sell core assets.

But it may be able to avoid that humiliation if there is no proof of the much-rumored link between the cover-up and Japan's "yakuza" gangsters -- and if Olympus can meet a December 14 deadline to iron out its books and report its second-quarter results.

Olympus shares firmed 3 percent on the news, though investors remain on tenterhooks for not only the panel's official findings but also the outcome of a separate, joint investigation by police, prosecutors and the market regulator.

The source said the panel found that former executive vice president Hisashi Mori and ex-internal auditor Hideo Yamada had led the cover-up of losses, which amounted to 130 billion yen ($1.67 billion) at its peak.

The panel has found Mori and Yamada then informed former president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, the source added. Kikukawa at first publicly rejected the accusations of a cover-up when the scandal broke in October, but he later quit and the company conceded it had hid investment losses stretching back as far as two decades.

CRIMINAL COMPLAINTS

Current President Shuichi Takayama has said the firm is prepared to take legal steps, including filing criminal complaints, against those responsible for the cover-up.

Olympus has so far said that it used some of $1.3 billion in acquisition payments and advisory fees to aid in the cover-up of the losses on its securities investments. It has declined to give details until the panel hands down its report.

The panel was appointed by Olympus and includes a former supreme court judge.

Olympus remains under joint investigation by Tokyo police, prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission. The official investigations include a police unit dedicated to fighting organized crime.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange has placed Olympus on a watch-list as a possible prelude to delisting. Even if the firm meets the December 14 reporting deadline, the exchange can still delist the stock depending on the scale of its past misreporting or if it is found to have knowingly done business with organized crime.

Woodford, who blew the whistle on accounting tricks at the company after his sacking from the top job in October, has launched a campaign to oust the current board and replace it with his own team of candidates led by him as nominated CEO.

That has set up a battle between Woodford, who was a rare foreign CEO in Japan, and Takayama, who plans to stay on, at least in the short term, to try to get the firm back on track.

The Olympus affair has fanned doubts about corporate governance generally in Japan as well as revived concerns about ties between yakuza and companies. Yakuza have a long history of trying to extort money from companies, sometimes threatening to release information that firms would like to keep secret.

Attention will also focus on the panel's findings over the role of auditors who signed off on Olympus' books, as well as outsiders such as Akio Nakagawa, a banker with lengthy ties to Olympus and whose firm Axes received a huge advisory fee related to the 2008 takeover of UK medical equipment maker Gyrus.

(Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Mark Bendeich)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/japan/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111205/ts_nm/us_olympus

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Protesters accuse Putin's party of rigging vote (AP)

MOSCOW ? Several thousand protesters took to the streets Monday night and accused Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party of rigging this weekend's parliamentary election in which it won the largest share of the seats.

It was perhaps the biggest opposition rally in years and ended with police detaining about 300 activists. A group of several hundred marched toward the Central Elections Commission near the Kremlin, but were stopped by riot police and taken away in buses.

Estimates of the number of protesters ranged from 5,000 to 10,000. They chanted "Russia without Putin" and accused his United Russia party of stealing votes.

In St. Petersburg, police detained about 120 protesters.

United Russia won about 50 percent of Sunday's vote, a result that opposition politicians and election monitors said was inflated because of ballot-box stuffing and other vote fraud. It was a significant drop from the last election, when the party took 64 percent.

Pragmatically, the loss of seats in the State Duma appears to mean little because two of the three other parties winning seats have been reliable supporters of government legislation.

Nevertheless, it was a substantial symbolic blow to a party that had become virtually indistinguishable from the state itself.

The result has also energized the opposition and poses a humbling challenge to Putin, the country's dominant figure, in his drive to return to the presidency.

Putin, who became prime minister in 2008 because of presidential term limits, will run for a third term in March, and some opposition leaders saw the parliamentary election as a game-changer for what had been presumed to be his easy stroll back to the Kremlin.

More than 400 Communist Party supporters also gathered Monday to express their indignation over the election, which some called the dirtiest in modern Russian history. The Communists finished second with about 20 percent of the vote.

"Even compared to the 2007 elections, violations by the authorities and the government bodies that actually control the work of all election organizations at all levels, from local to central, were so obvious and so brazen," said Yevgeny Dorovin, a member of the party's central committee.

Putin appeared subdued and glum even as he insisted at a Cabinet meeting Monday that the result "gives United Russia the possibility to work calmly and smoothly."

Although the sharp decline for United Russia could lead Putin and the party to try to portray the election as genuinely democratic, the wide reports of violations have undermined that attempt at spin.

Boris Nemtsov, a prominent figure among Russia's beleaguered liberal opposition, declared that the vote spelled the end of Putin's "honeymoon" with the nation and predicted that his rule will soon "collapse like a house of cards."

"He needs to hold an honest presidential election and allow opposition candidates to register for the race, if he doesn't want to be booed from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad," Nemtsov said on Ekho Moskvy radio.

Many Russians have come to despise United Russia, seeing it as the engine of endemic corruption. The balloting showed voters that they have power despite what election monitors called a dishonest count.

"Yesterday, it was proven by these voters that not everything was fixed, that the result really matters," said Tiny Kox of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, part of an international election observer mission.

Other analysts suggested the vote was a wake-up call to Putin that he had lost touch with the country. In the early period of his presidency, Putin's appeal came largely from his man-of-the-people image: candid, decisive and without ostentatious tastes.

He seemed to lose some of the common touch, appearing in well-staged but increasingly preposterous heroic photo opportunities ? hunting a whale with a crossbow, fishing while bare-chested, and purportedly discovering ancient Greek artifacts while scuba diving. And Russians grew angry at his apparent disregard ? and even encouragement ? of the country's corruption and massive income gap.

"People want Putin to go back to what he was in his first term ? decisive, dynamic, tough on oligarchs and sensitive to the agenda formed by society," said Sergei Markov, a prominent United Russia Duma member.

The vote "was a normal reaction of the population to the worsening social situation," former Kremlin-connected political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Only seven parties were allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups were barred from the race. International monitors said the election administration lacked independence, most media were biased and state authorities interfered unduly at different levels.

"To me, this election was like a game in which only some players are allowed to compete," said Heidi Tagliavini, the head of the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Of the 150 polling stations where the counting was observed, "34 were assessed to be very bad," Tagliavini said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington has "serious concerns" about the elections.

"Russian voters deserve a full investigation of all credible reports of electoral fraud and manipulation, and we hope in particular that the Russian authorities will take action" on reports that come forward, Clinton said.

Other than the Communist Party, the socialist Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party led by mercurial nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky are also expected to increase their representation in the Duma; both have generally voted with United Russia, and the Communists pose only token opposition.

Two liberal parties were in the running, but neither got the 7 percent of the national vote needed to win seats. Nemtsov's People's Freedom Party, one of the most prominent liberal parties, was denied participation for alleged violations in the required 45,000 signatures the party had submitted with its registration application.

About 60 percent of Russia's 110 million registered voters cast ballots, down from 64 percent four years ago.

Social media were flooded with messages reporting violations. Many people reported seeing buses deliver groups of people to polling stations, with some of the buses carrying young men who looked like football fans, who often are associated with violent nationalism.

Russia's only independent election monitoring group, Golos, which is funded by U.S. and European grants, has come under heavy official pressure in the past week. Golos' website was incapacitated Sunday by hackers, and its director Lilya Shibanova and her deputy had their cellphone numbers, email and social media accounts hacked.

___

Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Lynn Berry in Moscow contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/russia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111205/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_election

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