'Emergency red list' targets Syria's looted treasures

Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

After months of protests and violent crackdowns, a look back at the violence that has overtaken the country.

By Ian Johnston, NBC News

An "emergency red list" detailing what kinds of archaeological artifacts are being looted in war-torn Syria is being drawn up to help prevent priceless treasures from being sold on the black market.

The International Council on Museums?told NBC News?it planned to produce the list, which will be circulated to customs and police officials worldwide, after becoming increasingly concerned about the extent of looting amid the uprising against President Bashar Assad?s regime and its bloody crackdown.

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Julien Anfruns, director general of ICOM, said that "right now we are pretty much in the worst-case scenario in Syria" for looting and the destruction of ancient sites as the bitter conflict between Assad and the Free Syrian Army continues.?Activists say between 23,000 and 26,000 have been killed since the fighting started last year.

The Arab Spring is dead -- and Syria is writing its obituary

The red list will contain pictures and details of the types of items that may have been looted, which Anfruns said would be a "powerful tool" for law enforcement authorities.

A bomb went off outside a mosque in Damascus on Friday, killing at least five policemen and wounding others, according to state-run Syrian television. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.

"When officials seize [an] object, they can then say 'we have to be very careful, this may be a Syrian object,'" he said, enabling further investigations to take place to see if the piece was of "dubious origin."

Illicit art trade valued at billions
Anfruns said it was possible the regime was selling artifacts to raise money, but stressed he did not have evidence that this was happening.

"It's a situation that we have seen in some other places. It's definitely a possibility that we do not exclude," he said.

"Illicit traffic of art is a significant trade in the world ? some of the valuations put that at between $6 billion and $7 billion every year," he said. "It's clear that Syrian antiquities are interesting for some parties. We really, really strongly advise any buyers to be extremely prudent ? it's a serious legal matter and due diligence is even more necessary in the current case."

Syrian baby found alive in rubble

Anfruns said there were laws in Syria designed to protect its cultural heritage and even buying artifacts sold by the Assad regime could fall foul of the law. It would also depend on the laws of the buyer's country.

"Honestly, in the current situation of conflict and looting and destruction of cultural heritage in Syria, everything that would be on the market will be of a suspicious origin," he said.

Machine guns operated by motorcycle brakes? Get a glimpse at the rebels fighting against Assad's forces in Syria's mountainous Jabal al-Zawiya area.

He said they were still at a preliminary stage with the first step to set up the group of experts who will draw up the red list over the next few months.

France sends cash to Syria rebels, source says

Anfruns said the conflict was too "hot" in Syria to enable investigators to work out what had actually been stolen. "What we do know is there has been looting, but what we don't know is what has been looted," he said.

ICOM produces a number of red lists for areas where art and archaeological artifacts is at risk from thieves. It produced an emergency red list for Egypt last year during the Arab Spring uprising and for Haiti in 2010 after it was hit by a devastating earthquake.

Clay tablets taken in the night
Mousab Azzawi, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, told NBC News that ancient clay tablets bearing inscriptions had been taken away in black bags during the night from an archaeological site at Tal Sheikh Hamad in May this year by people apparently working with the consent of Assad's forces.

Azzawi said he thought the value of the tablets and other artifacts such as jars, tools and jewelry taken away from the site would be in the millions of dollars, adding "I would expect they are over $100 million."

"Now the main question, the big question, is what happened with this, who is looking after them [the tablets]?" he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizes the U.S. over the situation in Syria. NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin reports.

"One guy ? this is not verified by us ? but he said ? the accents of the people who took the bags were Lebanese. He said they were with beards, which gives a hint it's Hezbollah. They are experts in this illegal trading," Azzawi said.

"If they are not sold now on the market to bring extra cash for the dying regime, they may be used later," he added.

Mission 'nearly impossible': Syria envoy downbeat on new job

But he said if ? as he assumed the regime would claim ? the artifacts were being taken away to preserve them, he said then this was being done in the "worst way for such a precious heritage."

"If they took them to a safe place, why didn't they take them in a reasonable way? These are very fragile."

Noah Charney, founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, told NBC News that stolen art had been used by dictatorial regimes to raise money for generations.

NBC News

People resisting the army of President Bashar al-Assad in northern Syria cope with loss and prepare for fighting.

Charney said the Taliban had a track-record of breaking into tombs in Afghanistan, "destroying a huge amount and taking the rest of it to sell."

And he pointed to a report in the Germany news magazine Der Spiegal that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had tried to sell numerous pieces of stolen art to an art professor in Germany in order to buy an airplane.?

Portraits from the frontline: Syrian rebels pose in Aleppo

The Nazi regime had also stolen "lots of art ? not just from Jews" which was then sold to collectors often in the U.S. and U.K. before World War II.

"The idea of looting your own cultural heritage to fund a hostile or aggressive regime has a very rich history," he said.

More world stories from NBC News:

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on?Twitter?and?Facebook

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Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/10/13727086-emergency-red-list-targets-syrias-looted-treasures?lite

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?From the Bowl to the Mouth, the Soup Falls?

Illustration by Bianca Stone.

I met Sylviano at a Ciudad Ju?rez funeral in early 2011 when he told me to hop in the navy blue hearse he was driving to a cheap cemetery. Chubby and chatty, he carried the stains of a hearty meal on his shirt and the velour seats in his Cadillac were pocked with holes from dropped cigarettes. The air conditioning didn?t work either so dust?and the scent of the body in the back?kept rushing up at me.? ???

Then, and later on, Sylviano was my guide to the death business of Ju?rez?which is only now coming out of its boom years?but just as importantly, he was also the kind of guy only ?Murder City? could produce: dependent on bloodshed but inured to it, helpful, loud, not-so-clean, and honest only up to a point. Anywhere else, he would have been considered pure sleaze. Amid the dust and sorrow of Ju?rez, he fit right in.

These are the kinds of characters who dominate Sam Hawken?s strong but imperfect debut novel, The Dead Women of Ju?rez. Part crime thriller, part deep-dive into depravity, this is a book about men who fuck up a lot and may or may not be redeemed?primarily a Mexican cop who slugs from whisky bottles and an American boxer paid to have his face pummeled.

Sure there are women, too; the disappearance of one in particular brings the two men together. But mostly las mujeres quietly appear and disappear. They and the economics of Ju?rez, where poorly paid workers put together car parts, smartphones, and ovens, are mostly the backdrop for a story about men sloshing in the gutter and trying not to stink like sewage.

For the border, of course, this is a common theme. Oliver Stone?s latest film, Savages, picked up where Traffic left off, while Hawken?s book traces over themes of violence and corruption that also appear in Roberto Bola?o?s novel 2666, in Charles Bowden?s endless journalistic opus on the horrors of Ju?rez, and in newer books like Ioan Grillo?s El Narco.

But Hawken, who grew up in Texas, tries to be a little more down to earth. On his blog, he has rejected comparisons to Bola?o because, unlike the Chilean fabulist, he says he isn?t trying to write literature. Indeed, I felt like his goal was far simpler: By sharing his fascination with Ju?rez, he wants to make us like the unlikable and the ugly?while telling a good story. These are honorable goals. In the case of Ju?rez, many Americans who claim to care about the city are too quick to assign blame to capitalism or NAFTA or American drug demand without really listening to the individual stories of guilt, innocence, and unintentional error which also play an important role.

Hawken opens the book with a beating. Kelly Courter, the American, is in a back-alley boxing venue as the hired punching bag for a more promising young Mexican fighter egged on by a small crowd shouting ?Kick his ass to death!? ?The fact that Kelly survives seems heroic. He?s tough. He?s vulnerable. When he gets paid $200 in a bathroom ?that reeked of urine and shit? by a promoter named Ortiz, I thought that in a better world this is what Rocky VIII would look like. But Kelly is even more interesting and messed up than that.

Later on, we learn he also has, or used to have, a serious problem with heroin. His job, to the extent he has one, is slinging dope to tourists with his girlfriend?s brother, Esteban, who uses Kelly to deliver the drugs because he blends in better with the gringos looking for a high. Hawken makes a lot of the fact that Kelly is white?it calms the tourists? fears, plays a special role in his interaction with Mexican police, and seems to come up in every new conversation. Just like some of the overdone drug slang, this is one of the book?s flaws. It is neither necessary for the story (the dude?s name is Kelly, we don?t need to be reminded he?s American) nor does it make sense in the context of today?s border. In Ju?rez and elsewhere, there so many different skin tones and deportees speaking English that someone like Kelly, a bilingual 30-year-old, wouldn?t stand out for long, if he stood out at all. ??

Hawken gets a few other things wrong, too. With the American tourists hitting bars and brothels, for example, Hawken?s timing is simply off. In Ju?rez, Tijuana and elsewhere, the floods of Americans looking for fun disappeared when the bullets started flying. Whenever I visit the Ju?rez bridges at night, all I see are Mexicans coming home from shopping or work, walking slowly with empty eyes.? ?

What Hawken gets right, though, are the Mexican cops and prosecutors. The second half of the book focuses on the investigation of yet another Ju?rez woman who has disappeared. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of these since the early ?90s, and Hawken and his characters are among the many to be haunted by the posters of missing young girls that hang from telephone poles all over the city. Kelly?s girlfriend, Paloma, is one of the activists who puts up those posters. She works with a groups searching for the missing?until she disappears. At the time, Kelly is in drug-induced stupor, so he and Esteban get fingered as the main suspects.

Their case is an example of crime and punishment, Ju?rez-style. Needless to say it?s not pretty:

Kelly only heard the thud of his skull against the lower doorframe and then the asphalt outside. He caught a boot to the ribs that he couldn?t block or twist away from. He sensed a descending fist before it crashed it into his face.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=cc135ccfb22c6a59df95f986b19fc202

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romanythresher: Twitter Meme: How The Rumor Started That Bill Clinton Is Announcing The iPhone 5 http://t.co/ZP89atXK

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Source: http://twitter.com/romanythresher/statuses/243595220242034688

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Ft. Carson troops head home, reflect on 'insider' threat

On Wednesday, Staff Sgt. Richard Yniguez and 101 other members of Fort Carson?s 110th Military Police Company stepped onto friendlier soil after six months training Afghan soldiers and Afghan police.

2012-09-05 17:59:21

Charmaine Yniguez knew the drill.

As soon as her husband, Staff Sgt. Richard Yniguez, stepped on the plane for Afghanistan, Charmaine said she stopped watching national news channels. She had learned during Richard?s previous two deployments to keep a careful eye on the television channels their children flipped to every day.

?They were in the danger zone,? Charmaine Yniguez said.

On Wednesday, Richard Yniguez and 101 other members of Fort Carson?s 110th Military Police Company stepped onto friendlier soil after six months training Afghan soldiers and Afghan police.

In a ceremony at the post?s Special Events Center, hundreds of family members and friends gathered to welcome the company ? a homecoming that came three months earlier than expected after the company?s soldiers trained 1,500 Afghan soldiers and police, said Capt. Terence Staples, company commander.

See a photo gallery of the homecoming here.

?I was crying yesterday already and he wasn?t even back yet,? said Charmaine Yniguez, smiling before the ceremony.

Thirty-eight of the company?s soldiers stayed behind, in part to help provide security for Gen. John Allen, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Staples said.

The soldiers? mission had carried unexpected risks, as the news out of Afghanistan grew increasingly grim as the months ticked by.

On Thursday, Fort Carson officials plan to host a memorial for two Fort Carson soldiers killed when an Afghan policeman turned his gun on the forces training him.

The soldiers, Sgt. Christopher J. Birdwell, 25, of Windsor, Colo., and Spc. Mabry J. Anders, 21, of Baker City, Ore., were assigned to a unit that replaced the 110th Military Police Company as it prepared to return stateside.

Such ?green on blue? attacks spiked last month. At least 12 attacks left 15 coalition troops dead in August, pushing the number of coalition deaths from ?insider? attacks to 45 this year.

The attacks spurred U.S. officials to halt the training of about 1,000 of Afghanistan?s security forces, a move announced Sunday in the wake of the attack. The country boasts 350,000 soldiers and police officers.

Later this week, an Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman said hundreds of Afghan soldiers were forced from the military?s ranks due to incomplete or forged documents.

About a quarter of ?green on blue? attacks since 2007 involved the Taliban, coalition authorities said. The spokesman didn?t say whether the fired soldiers had ties to the Taliban.

The 110th Military Police Company was not targeted during its deployment, Staples said, but he added that soldiers always remained aware of the threat.

?You?re always thinking about it,? said 1st Lt. Michael McCanney, leader of 3rd Platoon. ?But my guys, I never felt unsafe with them. They always had my back.

?I was always able to talk to the Afghan leadership. And we were the most vulnerable ones there and my guys kept us safe ? my platoon and the guys we were training.?

To help build trust between his soldiers and their Afghan counterparts, Staples met once a week for hours-long talks with the commander of the Afghan forces his soldiers trained. The company handed off control of a joint operation outpost and two district centers to Afghan soldiers and police during its deployment, Staples said.

?We want to protect ourselves but we can?t be overly aggressive because that will counteract what we?re doing over there,? Staples said.

Now back home, the soldiers changed their focus to plans put on hold by the deployment.

McCanney ? who proposed to his fiancee, Emily Clark shortly before he left ? planned to start helping prepare for their June wedding near Buffalo, N.Y.

Richard Yniguez thought first of devouring pot roast, Spanish rice and cherry cream cheese treats with his family.

?I got to do a lot of family catch-up,? Richard Yniguez said.

Source: http://thankyouforyourservice.us/issue/september-2012/article/ft-carson-troops-head-home-reflect-on-insider-threat

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It's Possible to Be Obese and Heart-Healthy: Studies | Neuro Vasx

Posted by neurovasx on Sep 5, 2012 in Content | 0 comments

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 5 (HealthDay News) ? Some obese people have no greater risk of cardiovascular disease or cancer than normal-weight people, a new study suggests.

Moreover, for patients with heart disease, being obese may actually reduce the risk of death, a phenomenon called the ?obesity paradox,? another study finds.

?It is possible to be fat and fit ? but relatively few people are,? said Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine. He took no part in either study.

?For the most part, the behaviors that promote fitness most effectively defend against fatness into the bargain. It is certainly possible to be thin and unhealthy, which is why health, not a particular weight, is what we should be aiming for as both individuals and a society,? he said.

Both reports were published online Sept. 5 in the European Heart Journal.

For the first study, a team led by Francisco Ortega, of the department of biosciences and nutrition at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, collected data on more than 43,000 people who were part of the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study.

Study participants were mostly white (98 percent), and were well-educated and worked in executive or professional positions.

Each participant answered questions about medical history and lifestyle, and took a treadmill test to evaluate their cardiovascular fitness. In addition, their height, weight, percent of body fat and waist size were measured, as well as blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.

Study participants were recruited between 1979 and 2003, and followed until the end of 2003 or until they died.

The researchers found that among obese individuals, 46 percent were heart healthy and had a 38 percent lower risk of dying than those obese people who were not heart healthy.

Moreover, those healthy obese had the same reduced risk of heart disease and cancer as healthy normal-weight people, they added. Both groups had a 30 percent to 50 percent reduction in their risk for cardiovascular disease or cancer compared to obese people who were not heart healthy, the researchers found.

?Not every obese person is equally healthy/unhealthy,? Ortega said. ?There is a relatively large subset of obese people that are metabolically healthy, and if obesity is defined using body-fat percent (instead of body-mass index) and cardiac-respiratory fitness is taken into account, the future prognosis of metabolically healthy but obese people is similar to that of normal-weight people,? he said.

Doctors should take into consideration that not all obese people have the same prognosis, Ortega said.

?Physicians could assess fitness, fatness and metabolic markers to do a better estimation of the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer of obese patients,? Ortega explained. ?Our data support the idea that interventions might be more urgently needed in metabolically unhealthy and unfit obese people, since they are at a higher risk,? he said.

Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a spokesman for the American Heart Association and professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the study follow-up period was too short to really determine if obese people in the study were heart healthy.

?This study followed individuals for 15 years ? further studies are needed to determine the long-term health consequences of obesity in these individuals,? he said.

In the second study, Dr. Oskar Angeras, a consultant cardiologist at the Sahlgrenska Academy of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and colleagues collected data on more than 64,000 people in the Swedish Coronary Angiography and Angioplasty Registry, who had heart disease or had a heart attack between May 2005 and December 2008.

Angeras? team found those with the lowest risk of dying after acute coronary syndrome were overweight and moderately obese, while the highest risk was among the underweight and the morbidly obese.

Conventional wisdom says losing weight improves health, but that may not be the case for obese people who have already developed heart disease, the researchers say.

?In acute coronary syndrome, the obesity paradox suggests that there could be protective mechanisms in either fat tissue or in obese patients? [individual makeup] that reduce the risk of mortality. This is of course speculative and needs further investigations,? Angeras said.

?We believe that it is important to focus on secondary prevention like treating [high blood pressure] and [high fat levels in the blood], stop smoking, exercise and eat a healthy diet, which has solid evidence in literature,? he added. ?Weight reduction is, however, perhaps not that important in itself, more a cause of anxiety among patients.?

Angeras added that the obesity paradox exists and should be recognized in health care guidelines for acute coronary syndrome.

Fonarow pointed out that multiple explanations and potential mechanisms have been advanced to explain the obesity paradox, but the exact mechanisms are not known and further studies are needed.

?Yet, patients who are obese present with acute coronary events at an age 8 to 10 years younger, compared with healthy and underweight individuals, [which] demonstrates the adverse consequences of obesity in developing cardiovascular events in the first place,? Fonarow said.

And Katz added that there has long been evidence that the overall relationship between body weight and all-cause mortality, when plotted as a graph, takes the shape of a J or U, with lower mortality near the middle, and higher mortality at both the lowest and highest weights.

?But there is no paradox in this,? Katz said. ?Sick people lose weight, and the sickest people lose the most weight of all. Sometimes, this is the disease. Sometimes, it?s the therapy ? such as cancer chemotherapy. And sometimes, it?s an array of factors such as isolation, loneliness and despair. In contrast, people with a reserve of vitality, and hope, keep eating.?

More information

For more on obesity, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

SOURCES: Francisco Ortega, Ph.D., unit for preventive nutrition, department of biosciences and nutrition, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm; Oskar Angeras, M.D., consultant cardiologist, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Gregg Fonarow, M.D., spokesman, American Heart Association, and professor, cardiology, University of California, Los Angeles; David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Prevention Research Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.; Sept. 5, 2012, European Heart Journal, online

Last Updated: Sept. 05, 2012

Copyright ? 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Click here to view the original post.

Source: http://1minutegetaway.com/neurovasx/its-possible-to-be-obese-and-heart-healthy-studies/

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Slices (for Android)

I am always looking for a better Twitter client on Android than the official one. Finding one is harder than you'd think. I've tried Plume, Tweetdeck, Tweetverse, Twitterbot, but I always return to the official app, simply because it's the most stable and updates the fastest. That said, it's boring and really lacking in features and configuration options. A new Twitter client, Slices (free), from the makers of Tweetcaster and BaconReader (a Reddit client), presents your Twitter timeline in a refreshing, data-driven way, but it is ultimately too unstable to use and lacks some basic features. I'm not deleting my current Twitter app just yet.?

Intelligent Feeds
The killer feature in Slices is the ability to "slice" your Twitter timeline into categories. A slice is very similar to a list on Twitter, except the app automatically creates categories for you, if you like. To start, sign in with your Twitter credentials and allow Slices to extract all the data from your Twitter account. Slices automatically groups all the people you follow into categories, which are presented in a tree diagram from a pull-out menu on the side. I was impressed at how the app instantly grouped the 600-odd people I follow into "Tech & Science" "Business & Money" and "TV & Movies." You can create your own slice too. Unfortunately you can't slice these slices any further.

From the menu, you can tap into an extensive section devoted to discovery. Scroll through topics like humor, celebs, and sports to see top lists to follow, and Twitter accounts related to that category. My favorite category is Live Events, which shows you a live stream of tweets during a trending event, such as tonight's U.S. Open tennis match. This will be a fun feature to use as the U.S. Presidential election heats up as well. Unfortunately, Slices only displays a few trending events and doesn't let you search for one.?

Some Interesting Features, But Misses Basic Ones
Apart from organizing all your followers into categories, Slices offers a few neat features I haven't seen elsewhere. You can bookmark Twitter accounts to your side menu, temporarily "zip" or hide annoying users from your timeline, and even tweak the look and sound of an interaction or direct message alert.

However, Slices misses some very basic features, namely support for multiple Twitter accounts, a character counter, and real-time updating. I ran both Slices and the normal Twitter app for a few days and the formerly consistently pushed notifications anywhere from five to 30 minutes after Twitter.

But my biggest problem with Slices is that it crashed constantly on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.1.1. I finally uninstalled the app after about a week. ?

Not For Me
Slices presents an interesting way to explore the Twitterverse through a unique set of discovery tools. Hyper-engaged Twitters users or those who can spend hours exploring new content through Twitter? ?will probably appreciate most what Slices has to offer. However if you're looking for performance, stick with the official Twitter app for Android for now. The quest continues...

For more Android Software, see:
??? Slices (for Android)
??? Pageonce (for Android)
??? RPG DarkGate (for Android)
??? Google Translate 2.5 (for Android)
??? Onavo Extend 1.2.6 (for Android)
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/EKMpdt0LdRc/0,2817,2409212,00.asp

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Democrats open 2012 convention

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) ? Democrats have called their national convention to order and delegates will soon move to adopt a party platform that calls for higher taxes on wealthier Americans while backing same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

An estimated 35,000 attendees will be at the convention in Charlotte, N.C.

First lady Michelle Obama is the last speaker scheduled Tuesday night. San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro will deliver Tuesday's keynote address.

Republicans held their convention last week in Tampa, Fla., and nominated Mitt Romney to oppose President Barack Obama.

The platform that Democrats will adopt is a sharp contrast from the blueprint that the GOP adopted at its convention. The Republican plan would ban abortion and gay marriage, repeal Obama's health care overhaul and shift Medicare into a voucher-style program.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-open-2012-convention-210851962--election.html

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