US committed to strong relationship with Pakistan: Ambassador

LAHORE: 

American Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson reiterated on Tuesday the United States’ commitment to a strong bilateral relationship with Pakistan based on mutual respects and interests during his meeting on Tuesday with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Nawaz Sharif.

Olson met with Nawaz in Lahore and congratulated him on his victory in the general elections.

The ambassador also met with caretaker Punjab Chief Minister Najam Sethi during his visit to Lahore, according to the statement from the American Embassy.

On Monday, Nawaz promised Pakistan’s ‘full support’ as the US withdraws combat troops from Afghanistan.

“If there are concerns on either side I think we should address those concerns and strengthen this relationship,” Sharif said, referring to Pakistan’s alliance with the United States which can be notoriously difficult.

News Soruce: http://tribune.com.pk

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In scandal-plagued Washington, lawmaker struggles to keep track of issues

With the rumbling of so much scandal ripping through Washington this week—woeful stories aboutBenghazi, the DOJ subpoena of journalists' phone records and the IRS unfairly targeting conservative groups—it's hard to keep track of all the terrible.

Even lawmakers sometimes struggle

At Rep. Steny Hoyer's weekly meeting with reporters on Tuesday, the Maryland Democrat was asked if he was concerned about the DOJ seizing phone records from Associated Press journalists working in the House press gallery in the Capitol building.

Hoyer's answer was well-delivered: Articulate, clear, firm and precise.

One problem: He responded to the wrong scandal.

"The IRS activity was inappropriate, inconsistent with our policies and practices as a country, very concerning, needs to be reviewed carefully," Hoyer, one of the top-ranking House Democrats, said in response to a question from Fox News' Chad Pergram about the DOJ. "We need to ensure that this does not happen again, and we need to find out how long it continued, when it was stopped. It is my understanding—there was a front-page story on this at the [Washington] Post—it's my understanding that [IRS official] Lois Lerner, who was apparently overseeing this, at some point in time found out about this and said ..."

When Hoyer named Lerner, Pergram interrupted.

"We're talking about two things," Pergram, who apparently had not heard the first mention of the IRS, said from across the table, "You said Lois Lerner and the IRS."

Another reporter sitting closer to Hoyer, Public Radio International's Todd Zwillich, learned over and said softly, "He's talking about the AP story."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, excuse me," Hoyer said, pausing briefly. "Whatever happened, we need to find out why it happened. But clearly it should not have happened. I don't know enough about whether there was a warrant sought."

Boom. He nailed it!

But Hoyer wasn't finished.

"I don't know fully the rationalization or justification that was being used, but the president's statement that it was outrageous, that there was no place for it and that they have to be held fully accountable is a statement in which I agree," Hoyer went on to say.

The only problem is that President Barack Obama didn't comment about the DOJ story. And he certainly didn't call it "outrageous." In fact, the White House has declined to say much of anything about the DOJ investigation. Was he talking about the IRS story again? Yup.

Hoyer continued: "He then points out in another statement which with I agree: 'I can tell you that if you've got the IRS operating in anything less ...'" Hoyer's voice trailed off. "Oh I keep going IRS. I'm really fired up on the IRS."

Hoyer regrouped and returned to his answer about the DOJ.

"I don't have the president's statement on that, but I'm sure the president's statement on that was very much like that regarding the IRS," he said. (It wasn't.) "Neither of the activities is justifiable, outside the ambit in the case of the AP of having a legal mechanism where an interception of communications would have been warranted or justified by a court."

Now for the homestretch. Almost there!

"The House needs to look at this," Hoyer continued. "We need to find out exactly what happened and we need to make sure—that's why I'm confusing the two—that those folks who were involved in this are held accountable if in fact there was wrongdoing. Clearly we should not have either House lines, but particular the lines of the Fourth Estate—the press—subject to being intercepted without knowledge and without court oversight."

And with that, he moved on to other questions.

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Firefighters rescue cop rescuing a cat

Firefighters in New York City received an usual request: Rescue a cop stuck in a tree who'd been trying to rescue a cat.

According to a hilarious account in the New York Post, New York’s finest spent about 30 minutes to right a rescue gone embarrassingly wrong.

First, the New York Police Department responded to 911 phone calls from local residents in Queens who noticed a feline high up in a tree across from Public School 213, which was letting out.

Veteran Police Officer Dane Natto and his partner arrived on the scene, and Natto tackled the tree, climbing up to get the cat. But the cat saw the cop coming and climbed higher, as did Natto. Finally, the officer admitted defeat. He then realized that he, too, was stuck in the tree—some 30 feet off the ground.

A growing audience, including elementary schoolkids from PS 213, watched the fiasco unfold.

“We looked out the window, and we saw the cop inside the tree—sitting,” Luna Giuong told the Post. “[His] partner was laughing at him."

He stopped laughing long enough to call the New York Fire Department, which, writes the Post, “couldn’t believe what they were hearing.”

When the NYFD arrived, “they didn’t go straight to helping him,” Giuong recalled. “They all gathered around and laughed at him. They took their time."

Finally, using a ladder to climb the tree (the right way to rescue a cat, by the way), firefighters got the feline. Then Natto used the ladder to climb down. His descent was greeted with applause from the crowd.

The rescue took about 30 minutes, but, unfortunately for Natto, that cat tale will probably last a lifetime.

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Are you feeling lucky?

If you’ve ever fantasized about quitting Facebook once and for all, but can’t quite pull the trigger, Kyle McDonald has a solution for you — sort of. 

Social Roulette, which he created with a couple of collaborators, bills itself as a game: Sign in with your Facebook credentials, and it has a once in six chance of deleting your account. Clearly the idea has its appeal; in a matter of days Social Roulette has, amusingly, attracted 10,000 Facebook “likes,” and attention from various tech blogs and others. Here’s the back story.

The project was inspired in part by another Facebook underminer:FriendFracker, which was designed to allow users of the social network to delete random sets of friends. FriendFracker was created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Harper Reed as part of the digital-arts organization Rhizome’s annual Seven on Seven event;my Yahoo colleague Jason Gilbert covered it here. McDonald liked the element of chance, but “felt like it didn't go far enough,” he told me via email. “I wanted to create a game that made people nervous.” And if a player’s account wasn’t deleted, the fact that he or she had played and “survived” would be announced on the user’s timeline — a “badge of ‘honor,” as McDonald put it.

McDonald, an artist and educator whose work often tweaks at technology and how we use it, mentioned his idea to Jonas Lund last Friday and they brought in Jonas Jongejan and “hacked it together as a 4 hour speed project.” On Saturday, McDonald posted about it on the blog of F.A.T. Lab (a tech-creativity organization with a hackerish bent).

Among those who noticed right away: Facebook, which not surprisingly disabled the API key for Social Roulette (as it did for FriendFracker). It’s not clear how many people got a chance to play — let alone how many lost. But while McDonald says he and his collaborators are working on a fix, he also explains that this is actually beside the point. “Social Roulette is a provocation, not a tool,” he says. Indeed, the somewhat fishy endorsement blurbs on the site (from Gawker, Douglas Rushkoff, and Bruce Sterling, among others) are, he admits, fabrications.

The logo for Social Roulette, an Internet app that gives you a 1 in 6 chance of deleting your Facebook page.

Does that mean the whole thing is just a prank? McDonald frames it as something more ambiguous. “My favorite feedback came from a friend on Facebook who wrote that he played, and his account was not deleted, but he felt like after playing he now had the peace of mind to delete his account,” he says, and that’s the real goal: “Social Roulette is a gift to everyone who feels like they can't delete their Facebook account.”

Like Friendfracker, Social Roulette addresses mixed emotions about social networking that have been with us for a while. McDonald points to a couple of previous social media “suicide machine” projects, as well as Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice” promotion from a few years ago (which involved deleting 10 friends in exchange for a free burger). My colleague Gilbert also came across an earlier student project proposal for a “Russian Facebook Roulette,” which imagined putting one’s Facebook account at risk of deletion for a chance to win a trip to Russia.

Clearly, then, there’s some kind of strange mashup of anxiety, irritation and obligation in the way we think about the social media identities so many of us have built, and that’s what Social Roulette is provoking us to confront. Actually playing such a game matters less than thinking about exactly why you would or wouldn’t — whether the notion is too scary, or irresistibly tempting, or both.

Maybe that’s why McDonald doesn’t seem particularly concerned that Facebook has shut the game down: “Considering how many people don't know it's currently broken, but are still visiting and posting about it,” he told me, “I would say it's still working right now!”

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Skylab Legacy: Space Station Astronauts Reflect on 40 Years of Life Off Earth

Before the International Space Station existed, before U.S. astronauts shared space on Russia's space station Mir, America's first home in Earth orbit was Skylab. 

The converted upper stage of a massive Saturn V moon rocket, Skylab was launched 40 years agotoday (May 14). The orbital workshop gave NASA its first experience at establishing a long-duration human presence in space, laying the foundation for American astronauts to take up continuous residency almost three decades later on board the International Space Station (ISS). 

On Monday (May 13), NASA commemorated four decades of "life off Earth" and the 40th anniversary of Skylab's launch during a roundtable discussion held at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The event featured Skylab and ISS astronauts, as well as agency managers who are helping to plan the United States' future outposts in space. [Skylab: The First U.S. Space Station (Photos)] 

"When these guys went to the final frontier to stay for a long time, they did it as the first ones, the ones who were entering the unknown and to see what it was going to be like and set the stage for us," said astronaut Kevin Ford, who returned from space in March after commanding the International Space Station's Expedition 34. "It is a pleasure for me to be here on the 40th anniversary." 

America's first space station 

Three crews of three astronauts each launched to the Skylab space station between May and November 1973. Each mission set a record for the amount of time that crewmembers spent in space — Skylab 1 for 28 days, Skylab 2 for 59 days and Skylab 3 for 84 days. 

"It verified the fact that people could live, work [and] do productive things for long duration, and also took the first steps toward doing the science that we wanted to have aboard," said Owen Garriott, who served as the science pilot for Skylab's second crew. 

That astronauts were even able to spend one day aboard Skylab was a testament to the value of having humans in space. 

Excessive vibrations during the station's Saturn V liftoff resulted in a critical meteoroid shield being ripped off in flight, which in turn took out one of the orbital workshop's two power-providing solar arrays. Flight controllers moved Skylab's secondary solar panels to face the sun to provide as much electricity as possible, but because of the loss of the debris shield this caused the station's interior to heat up to over 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius). 

The effort to "save Skylab" fell to its first crew, who had to quickly prepare for a series of unexpected spacewalks in the short time they had between the station's launch and their own. Despite the very tight schedule, the astronauts successfully deployed a parasol (later augmented by a solar shield) to lower the temperature inside the station and freed a snagged second solar array. 

Once the workshop was a stable living platform, the three Skylab crews logged about 2,000 hours in total performing scientific and medical experiments. They also took more than 46,000 photos of the Earth and 127,000 photos of the sun, capturing eight solar flares on film. 

The astronauts also devised methods for maximizing their productivity, a lesson with far-reaching applications. 

"We dealt with problems having to do with scheduling and productivity," said Gerald "Jerry" Carr, who commanded the final Skylab crew. "We came to some solutions that worked very well. It took a while to get there ... but those solutions that we came across were used on subsequent missions to some degree." 

"We tried to make sure that got into the planning for the operations aboard the International Space Station and on the [space] shuttle," Carr added.

 "I think we're still working that issue," replied Ford. "We've gotten a much better feeling, I think, now that we are up there to do work that the ground can't necessarily figure out how long it is going to take you to do everything." 

The end of Skylab

Upon the end of its crewed missions, Skylab was moved into a stable attitude where it was expected to remain for eight to 10 years. It was hoped that one of the early space shuttle missions could be used to re-boost Skylab's orbit to save the station for future use. 

In late 1977, however, four years before the shuttle would first fly, it was discovered that greater-than-predicted solar activity had heated the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere, increasing the drag on Skylab. On July 11, 1979, Skylab re-entered the atmosphere and broke apart over the Indian Ocean. Much of the station burned up or dropped into sea, but its debris field stretched over Australia, where many pieces were later found. [See photos of Skylab's remains in Australia]

Despite its relatively short life span, the use of Skylab's unique environment and vantage point represented a major step in the United States' spaceflight efforts, serving as a bridge between the Apollo missions to the moon and the long-duration expeditions on board the International Space Station, the roundtable said.

"The [International] Space Station was built around what we learned on Skylab," Ford said. "What they put up there for us, the way the modules were sized and the way they were constructed in space... that all came out of what we learned from Skylab."

"We may have done it first, but these guys are doing it better," added Carr, referencing Ford and the current ISS crews. "People need to continue to do it better and better because we learn more and more as we do this. We just took the first step, and the rest of the steps are having had been taken and are being taken right now." 

News Soruce: http://weather.yahoo.com

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Stocks rise further as optimism prevails

LONDON (AP) — Stocks pushed higher Tuesday as investors remained optimistic that economic growth is picking up, but not so much that the U.S. Federal Reserve will start to wind down its stimulus program imminently.

Over the past few weeks, investors have been picked up by a wave of optimism over a range of issues — including the prospects for the U.S. economy — following a run of forecast-busting jobs figures.

That has pushed several indexes to record highs. The Dow Jones industrial average and the broader S&P 500 index both hit new highs on Tuesday.

Waning fears over Europe's debt crisis and the bold attempt by Japan's monetary authorities to shake off a two-decade economic stagnation have also helped.

In Europe, Germany's DAX rose 0.7 percent to close at 8,339.11 while the CAC-40 in France rose 0.5 percent to 3,966.06. The FTSE 100 index of leading British shares gained 0.8 percent to 6,686.06.

Figures showing industrial production among the 17 countries that use the euro rose a better-than-expected 1 percent in March helped shore up the mood. The figures raised some expectations that the recession in the eurozone may have ended. The first estimate of the region's gross domestic product in the first three months is due for release Wednesday.

In the U.S., the Dow was up 0.5 percent to hit a new high at 15,170.75 while the S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent to 1,647.45.

Earlier in Asia, Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 0.2 percent to close at 14,758.42 — a modest retreat following two spectacular sessions that have seen the index rise to five-year highs.

The index has soared more than 42 percent since the beginning of the year as the yen dropped sharply in response to the Bank of Japan's aggressive monetary stimulus program.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, elected late last year on promises to revive the world's third-largest economy, has implemented a policy mix of increased public spending and aggressive monetary easing to end the country's two decades of economic stagnation.

On Tuesday, the dollar was up 0.4 percent against the Japanese yen, at 102.28 yen, and largely unchanged against the euro, which was trading 0.1 percent lower at $1.2961.

Elsewhere in Asia, South Korea's Kospi added 1 percent to 1,968.83 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng shed 0.3 percent at 22,930.28. In mainland China, the Shanghai Composite Index fell 1.1 percent to 2,217.01. The Shenzhen Composite Index fell 1.4 percent 960.81.

Oil prices were little changed, with the benchmark New York rate 19 cents lower at $94.98 a barrel after the International Energy Agency raised its U.S. oil production forecasts and cut its prediction for global crude demand.

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Bangladesh honors the dead from building collapse

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Thousands of mourners gathered Tuesday at the wreckage of a Bangladeshi garment factory buildingto offer prayers for the souls of the 1,127 people who died in the structure's collapse last month, the worst tragedy in the history of the global garment industry.

The Islamic prayer service was held a day after the army ended a nearly three-week, painstaking search for bodies among the rubble and turned control of the site over to the civilian government for cleanup.

Recovery workers got a shocking boost Friday when they pulled a 19-year-old seamstress alive from the wreckage. But most of their work entailed removing corpses that were so badly decomposed from the heat they could only be identified if their cellphones or work IDs were found with them. The last body was found Sunday night.

Soldiers in camouflage, police and firefighters in uniform stood solemnly in neat rows near relatives of the dead. Many of the rescue workers had pained expressions on their faces. Tears rolled down the cheeks of one soldier.

The mourners raised their cupped hands in prayer and asked for the salvation of those who lost their lives when the Rana Plaza building came crashing down on April 24. They also appealed for divine blessings for the injured still in the hospital.

Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hasan Suhrawardy, the military commander who had been supervising the site, thanked all those involved in the work. He said the army has prepared a list of 1,000 survivors that it would give to the government with the recommendation they be provided jobs on a priority basis.

The tragedy came months after a fire at another Bangladesh garment factory killed 112 workers.

With global pressure mounting on Bangladesh and the brands it manufactures for, some of the biggest Western retailers have embraced a plan that would require them to pay for factory improvements here.

Italian fashion brand Benetton, British retailer Marks & Spencer and Spanish retailer Mango became the latest companies Tuesday to agree to sign a contract requiring them to conduct independent safety inspections of factories and cover the costs of repairs. The pact also calls for retailers to pay up to $500,000 a year toward the effort and to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make safety improvements.

Swedish retailing giant H&M, the biggest purchaser of garments from Bangladesh; British companies Primark and Tesco; C&A of the Netherlands; and Spain's Inditex, owner of the Zara chain, announced on Monday they would sign the pact.

Two other companies agreed to sign last year: PVH, which makes clothes under the Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Izod labels, and German retailer Tchibo. Among the big holdouts are Wal-Mart Stores, which is the second-largest producer of clothing in Bangladesh, and Gap.

Gap, which had been close to signing the agreement last year, said Monday that the pact is "within reach," but the company is concerned about the possible legal liability involved.

Worker rights groups have set a Wednesday deadline for companies to accept the agreement, saying they will increase pressure on brands that do not.

"This agreement is exactly what is needed to finally bring an end to the epidemic of fire and building disasters that have taken so many lives in the garment industry in Bangladesh," said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, one of the organizations pushing for the agreement.

Bangladesh has about 5,000 garment factories and 3.6 million garment workers. It is the third-biggest exporter of clothes in the world, after China and Italy.

Working conditions in the $20 billion industry are grim, a result of government corruption, desperation for jobs, and industry indifference. Minimum wages for garment workers are among the lowest in the world at 3,000 takas ($38) a month.

On Monday, Bangladesh's Cabinet approved an amendment lifting restrictions on forming unions in most industries, government spokesman Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan said. The old 2006 law required workers to obtain permission before they could unionize. The day before, the government set up a new minimum wage board that will issue recommendations to the Cabinet for pay raises for garment workers.

Government officials also have promised improvements in safety in an industry where at least 1,800 people have been killed in factory fires or building collapses since 2005.

Bangladesh's government has in recent years cracked down on unions attempting to organize garment workers. In 2010 the government launched an Industrial Police force to crush street protests by thousands of workers demanding better pay and working conditions.

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Hoarding disorder gets spotlight in DSM-5

Regular viewers of hoarding reality shows are used to being stunned by someone's clutter. But behind the sensationalistic stories of rooms buried in trash, kitchens filled with rotting food, and yards overrun by goats are people suffering from a serious mental illness –hoarding–that for many years was misdiagnosed.

The upcoming fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-5) aims to change that. The highly influential DSM-5 will classify hoarding as a distinct disorder within the chapter about obsessive-compulsive and related disorders. Before the DSM-5, hoarding could be misdiagnosed as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The classification change isn’t just symbolic. The American Psychiatric Association believes it will have a real effect in terms of the diagnosis and treatment of people who have a persistent difficulty ridding themselves of possessions, regardless of their value.

The history

"The history of [misdiagnosing]," said Dr. Jeff Szymanski of the International OCD Foundation in a phone interview with Yahoo News, "is that hoarding possessions, keeping lots of possessions was considered a compulsive behavior early on, so it was put under the rubric of obsessive compulsive disorder. So if you were asking questions about OCD, you would say, 'Do you compulsively hoard lots of objects?' But that was really the only question you ended up asking. It's a key question, but it's really the only question you're asking.

"As people were being treated for OCD and they were working with this subgroup that had hoarding as their OCD symptom, they [mental health providers] started to recognize that, 'Wait a minute, these actually don't seem like they're the same group.'"

Over the past 20 years, researchers working on this have found that OCD and hoarding are quite different. “There are brain imaging scans that compare people with OCD to people that have hoarding disorder,” said Dr. Szymanski. "And even in brain scans, they're showing some differences."

Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, Director of the University of California San Diego's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders Program and unofficial advisor in the creation of the DSM-5, said in a phone interview with Yahoo News, "Until recently, the general public and certainly the medical community and maybe even the majority of the mental health community did not understand that this was a neuropsychiatric disorder that was treatable, that was describable, that was consistent. And it wasn't a part of something else, and it was a condition that needed clinical attention."

The change

What will a change in DSM-5 mean for people who suffer from hoarding? Does a reclassification mean that much? Dr. Saxena believes it does. Hoarding, he said, "will be listed, clinicians will have some awareness of it, and people will start screening for it. And patients will realize it’s a problem that they can get treated."

Dr. Saxena also hopes that authorities will start to recognize compulsive hoarding as a psychiatric disorder with the new DSM-5. "The reality shows have raised awareness, but they tend to sensationalize the patients, and they rarely talk about treatment.”

The DSM-5’s reclassification reflects a shift in how mental health professionals think about hoarding. For many years, people who suffered from hoarding were believed to have a social problem or were simply lazy, according to Dr. Saxena. People would be evicted from their homes but were rarely referred for treatment, because nobody recognized hoarding as a disorder.

"The big change," Dr. Saxena said, "will be an official recognition of hoarding as an important neuropsychic disorder that will increase screening, increase detection and diagnosis, and refer patients in for treatment."

In other words, hoarding's new classification in DSM-5 means doctors and mental health professionals are going to be asking different questions. "It can become kind of a big deal," Dr. Szymanski said. "The questions we ask determine the diagnosis. The diagnosis determines the treatment."

The implications

There are other implications in hoarding's reclassification, too. Dr. Saxena hopes it results in more people seeking treatment and receiving a proper diagnosis. "It will also drive the [mental health] field to educate itself and train all the incoming trainees and practicing clinicians of all ages," Dr. Saxena said. "It's already inspiring pharmaceutical companies to think about doing trials specifically for hoarding disorder. They never have before."

Dr. Szymanski said the new questions that determine diagnosis will help mental health professionals develop a better treatment plan. "There are many people with hoarding disorder that if we asked just very straightforward OCD questions, we might not even pick up on hoarding. They might have OCD and we might be treating the OCD but we never really ask the right questions about the hoarding disorder so it never gets treated."

The new classification will also mean a big change in the way hoarding is studied. "Researchers had been studying hoarding disorder for 20 years, but it was a little all over the place. This clarifies the questions and allows us to look more directly at developing better treatments for this population because we're deciding they're a different group," said Dr. Szymanski.

Other benefits

A new classification also brings with it new recognition for those who suffer from hoarding problems. "They aren't pack rats. This is a debilitating disorder," said Dr. Szymanzki, "that is inhibiting people from living anywhere close to a full life. So this brings a certain kind of weight to it in a way that I think was not there before."

Everyone's insurance differs, of course, but hoarding's reclassification could mean those with mental health insurance who seek treatment may be better reimbursed.

"If the therapist did not ask the right questions and you don't end up with the diagnosis, then your insurance doesn't pay for it. And now, if you are diagnosed with hoarding disorder, your insurance will cover it if your insurance does cover mental health treatment," said Dr. Syzmanski. “With more detailed questions you can follow up [on], people are more likely to get more accurate diagnosis and treatment. Not only will insurance cover, but you're also more likely to get insurance for treatment that helps.”

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Britain's PM Cameron visits Boston bombing site, pays tribute

BOSTON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron paid tribute to the victims of the Boston marathon bombing on Tuesday in a visit to the site of the attack, saying Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States against terrorism.

On the second day of a three-day trip to the United States, Cameronvisited the memorials to the victims at Copley Square, accompanied by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

Three people were killed and more than 260 injured in the April 15 bombings.

Cameron made a special trip to Boston after meeting President Barack Obama in the White House on Monday to discuss the Syrian conflict and next month's G8 summit in Northern Ireland.

"Everyone in the UK stands with your great city and your great people," Cameron told reporters in the square.

It was crucial to challenge the "narrative of violent extremism," he added, which meant "standing for the values that we believe in" such as freedom, democracy and diversity.

"We know how important it is to stand up and say the terrorists will not win," the prime minister added. "We will never give in to terrorists."

Ethnic Chechen brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a shoot-out with police, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were suspected of setting off bombs at the marathon's finish line. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in a prison west of Boston, charged with crimes that could carry the death penalty if he is convicted.

Cameron also met members of Boston's emergency services to hear how they coped with the bombing.

The London marathon took place six days after the attack and began with a 30-second silence for the victims. Many of the London runners wore black ribbons in memory of the dead.

"I'm here to tell Bostonians that Londoners, like all Britons, stand shoulder to shoulder with them," Cameron told the London Evening Standard newspaper separately.

"For those who seek to try and disrupt our way of life, our message is clear: be it Boston or London, we will be strong."

After meeting Cameron on Monday, Obama thanked the London marathon runners for dedicating the race to the Boston victims.

On Monday, Cameron became the first British serving prime minister to visit the FBI operations center in Washington, from where the hunt for the Boston bombers was conducted.

Cameron, who was accompanied by the new chief of Britain's MI5 security service, has said he wants to see whether Britain can learn from Boston's experience.

Cameron also visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday, where he dropped into a robotics laboratory to hear about how such technology is being used for medical purposes.

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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RNC chief: Obama must fire Attorney General Holder

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus pressed President Barack Obama on Tuesday to fire Attorney General Eric Holder. Priebus argued that the Justice Department had violated the First Amendment by scooping up phone records of Associate Press reporters and editors.

“Attorney General Eric Holder, in permitting the Justice Department to issue secret subpoenas to spy on Associated Press reporters, has trampled on the First Amendment and failed in his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution,” Priebus said in a statement emailed to reporters.

“Because Attorney General Holder has so egregiously violated the public trust, the president should ask for his immediate resignation,” Priebus said.

“If President Obama does not, the message will be unmistakable: The president of the United States believes his administration is above the Constitution and does not respect the role of a free press,” the RNC chief said.

Holder is due to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday at a previously scheduled hearing.

It's not clear that the Justice Department broke any laws or violated the Constitution—though The Associated Press denounced the collection of phone records of its reporters without prior notice an unacceptable and unprecedented violation of freedom of the press as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU have denounced the Justice Department's actions. The White House has referred questions about the burgeoning scandal to the Justice Department.

News Soruce: http://news.yahoo.com

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Analysis: Controversies give Obama new governing headaches

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama learned on Monday what can happen to presidents caught up in allegations of scandal: they have to address them instead of anything else.

It happened when the president had to interrupt his news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain to answer questions about the widening investigation into the Benghazi attacks in Libya and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.

By the end of the day he was facing a third major problem when the Associated Press said the Department of Justice had secretly seized some of its reporters' phone records last year.

It is all leading to comparisons with the second term of President Bill Clinton, in which his agenda was severely disrupted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Obama, unlike Clinton, has not been accused of personal misconduct. But his ability to steer the Washington "conversation" could be compromised.

"I think the IRS scandal comes at a very inopportune time for the president and the Democratic agenda," said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University scholar of Congress.

"The challenge for Obama and the Democrats in the coming weeks and months will be to keep the public's attention focused on Obama's policy goals when Republicans and the media will be focused on scandal."

The problems for Obama and Democrats may be worsened as well by the nature of the IRS behavior: targeting groups for extra scrutiny based on their political leanings reinforces the notion of big government pursuing citizens exercising constitutional rights.

It could feed into gun rights activists' worries about slippery slopes that lead to gun confiscation or gun-owner registries, said one Republican Senate aide, or fears of government "takeovers" of healthcare.

Ron Bonjean, a veteran Republican aide on Capitol Hill who is now a consultant, said even though the IRS is an independent agency, the White House can expect to be blamed by the public for any wrongdoing by it.

"The public sees the IRS as part of the federal government, which the White House controls," Bonjean said.

The same might be said of the news that broke Monday that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press.

'WAY OFF MESSAGE'

The potential risk is high for Obama and the Democrats.

The Democratic-controlled Senate is considering a comprehensive bipartisan immigration bill that already faces a rough road in the Republican-controlled House, where suspicion of the Obama administration runs highest.

"The political fallout will be very damaging for the administration," said Bonjean.

"This will be another issue that takes the administration way off message," he said. "There's no way they can punch through with a positive agenda while investigations of the IRS are going on."

The IRS scandal could easily spill over into the 2014 mid-term election year.

A week ago, Obama was confronting a single investigative proceeding on Capitol Hill on the subject of the deadly attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last September.

It was attracting relatively little public attention outside conservative circles, and he could dismiss as partisan because only Republicans were pushing it.

On Monday he confronted the prospect of multiple probes, with those into the IRS backed by Obama's Democratic allies in Congress as Democrats moved quickly to show they were as concerned as Republicans about alleged IRS abuses.

On top of that, the AP is assessing options for legal action in response to the government's actions, said David Schulz, an attorney representing the AP.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the White House was not involved in the decision to seize the AP records.

The administration's chief opponent in Congress of late -Representative Darrell Issa of California - threatened to add the AP issue to the list of things he is already probing, which include Benghazi and the IRS scandal.

Even without charges of personal misconduct, "staying coherent" in pursuit of an agenda is much more challenging for a president than it was in the Clinton years, said one of his former press secretaries, Mike McCurry.

"The environment for communications is so much more complicated now because you have this voracious social media environment in which everything is magnified," he said.

"We didn't have that. You could have congressional inquiries and scandals but you could calibrate a little bit and keep an agenda in play."

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Analysis: Syria's savagery will thwart reconciliation

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian soldiers slowly stab a man to death, puncturing his back dozens of times. A rebel commander bites an organ ripped out of an enemy combatant. A young boy hacks the head off a prisoner. A soldier mutilates the genitals of a corpse.

These are the images of Syrian conflict, the first war in which the prevalence of camera phones and Internet access has allowed hundreds of gruesome war crimes to be broadcast, spreading hatred and fear. They are defining the war that is spilling across Syria's borders and making reconciliation an ever more distant prospect.

Brutality has been used as a tool since the revolt began two years ago, when videos emerged of government soldiers torturing pro-democracy protesters. In response to the crackdown, the opposition took up arms and now fighters from both sides are filming themselves committing atrocities.

Ghoulish footage of violence is not filmed surreptitiously, but with pride by the assailants who often speak to camera.

Rebel commander Abu Sakkar, known to journalists and revered by many rebels, was shown in a video on Sunday cutting organs out of a dead soldier, addressing the camera as he ripped the flesh: "I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers," he warned President Bashar al-Assad's forces as his men cheered.

Sakkar was a founding member of the Farouq Brigade, one of the main rebel units in Syria, but has since formed his own battalion as the opposition fragments. In the mosaic of hundreds of opposition groups, Sakkar's men are seen as neither secular nor hardline Islamists, but as some of the hardiest fighters.

Another picture posted online shows a rebel holding the severed head of a man, supposedly an Assad loyalist, over a barbecue as if to cook it. The fighter smiles and poses confidently, gripping a tuft of hair.

ZERO SUM GAME

Reinoud Leenders, an associate professor in the war studies department of King's College London, says that these brutal displays are used as a tool of war by both sides.

"It's the ultimate expression of disrespect and dehumanizing your opponent," he said.

In the face of an insurgency, he says, Assad's forces have used mass killings and torture to root out rebel fighters hiding among civilians.

"The regime has difficulty in pinning down opposition members, so they scare civilians from the area to get the rebels exposed. It looks irrational and emotional but there are rational reasons," he said.

Nadim Houry, a Syria and Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch, has documented abuses since the start of the revolt and says that he is seeing more and more brutal acts.

"Both parties are acting like they are facing an existential threat," he said. The opposition and the government see the war as a zero sum game, both fighting for survival, he says.

This fear of defeat silences condemnation from supporters of both sides, he says. The main Syrian opposition group condemned the video of a rebel commander taking a bite from the dead soldier but many opposition supporters dismissed the brutality.

On some opposition Facebook pages people celebrated the act. Others berated the media for highlighting one particular event, saying they should focus on indiscriminate killing of men, women and children by Assad's war planes and militia.

The Syrian government has never acknowledged brutality in army ranks, instead referring to people killed by soldiers as "terrorists" and areas captured by its forces as "cleansed".

Syria's war started as a popular uprising against the Assad dynasty, which has ruled for over four decades using secret police, intimidation and brute force.

But majority Sunni Muslims lead the revolt, while Assad gets his core support from his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, leading to sectarian fighting and hatred.

International powers have taken sides, with the West and Gulf countries supporting the opposition, while Iran and Russia back Assad. While war crimes are condemned in words, there has been no real deterrent for the perpetrators, which Houry said has allowed atrocities to continue.

"What is particularly troubling is the silence of the international powers," Houry said. He referred to a recent army and loyalist militia attack in the coastal town of Banias in which at least 62 people, including babies, were killed.

"We have been seeing (these massacres) for over a year. What is shocking is the level of indifference. People shrug their shoulders and look away," said Houry.

Since Syria never signed up to the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, the court could only investigate allegations of brutality there with a referral from the United Nations Security Council - something permanent members Russia and China have so far blocked.

RECONCILIATION

The United States and Russia have proposed a peace conference to try to end the war, but savagery from both sides means that the unlikely event of a peace agreement might not stop atrocities and fighting between increasingly disparate militias.

"The ideas of reconciliation are now unrealistic. The conflict is as much about the conflict itself than pro- or anti-regime," Leenders said. "I see a total mismatch between the US and Russian narrative and what is going on in Syria."

In its sectarian nature and big power inertia, the Syrian conflict has drawn comparisons with Bosnia, which was torn apart by Serbs, Croats and Muslims in a 1992-95 war that gave the world the term ‘ethnic cleansing' and was marked by some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War Two.

Almost 17 years since that war ended, the wounds are still raw. Bodies are still being dug up and a cycle of blame and denial weighs on efforts to reconcile communities. Bitterness runs deep and spills into politics, stifling development.

Details of the worst atrocities are coming to light even now. Each side clings to its own narrative of the war.

In March, an ethnic Montenegrin man was jailed for 45 years for killing 31 people and raping at least 13, including a pregnant woman in front of her young child.

The judge in the case said the defendant, Veselin Vlahovic, nicknamed Batko, sometimes forced his victims to kiss his hand as he beat them, and once ordered a man to have sex with the corpse of a woman whose throat had been cut.

In Srebrenica, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were gunned down in five summer days in 1995, their bodies bulldozed into pits, buried and reburied in a bid to conceal the crime. Many Serbs still dispute the figures, despite mountains of testimony at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The strength of feeling on all sides has made political compromise in the name of peace difficult, at times impossible, and acts as a brake on development.

In Lebanon, which lies next to Syria and fought its own 15-year civil war which ended in 1990, fault lines between religions remain strong and armed militias still come to blows as a weak government looks on helplessly.

Many Lebanese fighters accused of war crimes are now politicians as people support powerful members of their sect to safeguard against the influence of their foes.

"We don't have real reconciliation in Lebanon right now. Reconciliation requires justice," said rights researcher Houry, who lives in Beirut. "There is a tear at the fabric of Syria, similar to what we saw in Lebanon."

(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny in Beirut, Matt Robinson in Belgrade and Thomas Escritt in The Hague; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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