The team at Gogo is flying high lately both in the sky and on the ground thanks to its new hybrid GTO technology, which brings in-air download speeds up to 60 Mbps. To test the future of in-flight WiFi, Gogo uses the "Gogo One," a flying laboratory that comes outfitted with some pretty intense ...Over the weekend, people in Lewisburg, Pa., gathered for a weather forecast from caterpillars. Woolly bear caterpillars are black, with a brown stripe down the middle. Folklore says the larger the stripe, the milder the winter.
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Good morning. I'm David Greene. Sit down, Punxsutawney Phil. Over the weekend, people in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, gathered for a weather forecast from caterpillars. Woolly bear caterpillars are black, with a brown stripe down the middle and folklore says the larger the stripe, the milder the winter. At the 17th annual Woolly Worm Winter Weather Prognostication Festival - say that twice - several woolly bears predicted a wet, cold winter ahead. Of course, they were wrong last year. It's MORNING EDITION.
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Building an IT startup in the Gaza Strip isn't simple: Electricity is sporadic, there's no mobile 3G and even if you can sell your app outside Gaza's tightly controlled borders, it's difficult to get paid. Still, IT has some advantages in Gaza, and the possibilities have fostered a crop of devout entrepreneurs. At a first-of-its kind session to win seed money this week, Gazan entrepreneurs pitched, among other things, an app that uses music to help colorblind people dress well, a sports social network and 3-D printing for the masses.
By Toni Clarke
(Reuters) - Amarin Corporation Plc's triglyceride-lowering drug Vascepa should not be approved for use in a broader patient population until results from an additional study have been analyzed, an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday.
The panel voted 9-2 against approval of the drug for patients who also take a cholesterol-lowering statin such as Pfizer Inc's Lipitor and are at high risk of coronary heart disease.
While the drug reduced triglycerides, or blood fats, in a clinical trial, the panel was not convinced that lowering triglycerides would automatically lead to a reduced risk of coronary heart disease or death.
The FDA is not bound to follow the recommendations of its advisory panels but typically does so.
Vascepa is already approved to reduce triglycerides in patients who are not taking statins. Amarin had hoped to market the drug to a much broader patient population. But Dr. David Cooke, clinical director of pediatric endocrinology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a panelist, said it "has not yet been proven" that Vascepa, or any medication that lowers blood fats, except statins, decreases cardiovascular risk.
The FDA suggested that approval should be withheld pending the results of an 8,000-patient trial being conducted by Amarin that is expected to shed light on whether Vascepa actually cuts cardiovascular risk. Results of the trial are expected in late 2016.
Raghuram Selvaraju, an analyst at Aegis Capital Corp, said the company will "in all likelihood need to raise additional capital" in order to fund operations through to the release of those results. While those results "could still vindicate Amarin," he said, "we believe that moving to the sidelines is probably the most appropriate strategy at this juncture."
Selvaraju cut his recommendation on the stock to "hold" from "buy."
Amarin's shares were halted on Wednesday pending the FDA panel's discussion. They fell to a year-low of $4.50 on Monday following publication of the FDA's initial review of the company's application, which was more cautious than investors had expected.
Vascepa is a purified ethyl ester of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) derived from fish oil. EPA, along with a-linolenic acid and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are collectively referred to as omega-3 fatty acids.
EPA and DHA are also the major constituents of fish oils derived from cold water fish. The only other approved fish-oil treatment for severe hypertriglyceridemia is Lovaza, which is made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc. Lovaza has not been shown to cut the rate of heart attack or stroke.
(Reporting by Toni Clarke in Washington; Editing by Bernard Orr)
Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/BYmA1c1Vdhc/
After snagging CBS exec Nancy Tellem and launching a Halo-based TV series with Steven Spielberg, Microsoft's Xbox Entertainment Studios appears to be tackling a whole new genre. According to Deadline Hollywood, the fledgling TV division will launch its first reality-TV series for Xbox Live based on ...![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
ShareContact: Brian Bell
bpbell@caltech.edu
626-395-5832
California Institute of Technology
Developed to help scientists learn more about the complex nature of celestial objects in the universe, astronomical surveys have been cataloguing the night sky since the beginning of the 20th century. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)started searching the skies for certain types of stars and related phenomena in February. Since its inception, iPTF has been extremely successful in the early discovery and rapid follow-up studies of transientsastronomical objects whose brightness changes over timescales ranging from hours to daysand two recent papers by iPTF astronomers describe first-time detections: one, the progenitor of a rare type of supernova in a nearby galaxy; the other, the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst in July.
The iPTF builds on the legacy of the Caltech-led Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), designed in 2008 to systematically chart the transient sky by using a robotic observing system mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on Palomar Mountain near San Diego, California. This state-of-the-art, robotic telescope scans the sky rapidly over a thousand square degrees each night to search for transients.
Supernovaemassive exploding stars at the end of their life spanmake up one important type of transient. Since PTF's commissioning four years ago, its scorecard stands at over 2,000 spectroscopically classified supernovae. The unique feature of iPTF is brand-new technology that is geared toward fully automated, rapid response and follow-up within hours of discovery of a new supernova.
The first paper, "Discovery, Progenitor and Early Evolution of a Stripped Envelope Supernova iPTF13bvn," appears in the September 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters and describes the detection of a so-called Type Ib supernova. Type Ib supernovae are rare explosions where the progenitor star lacks an outer layer of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, hence the "stripped envelope" moniker. It has proven difficult to pin down which kinds of stars give rise to Type Ib supernovae. One of the most promising ideas, says graduate student and lead author Yi Cao, is that they originate from Wolf-Rayet stars. These objects are 10 times more massive and thousands of times brighter than the sun and have lost their hydrogen envelope by means of very strong stellar winds. Until recently, no solid evidence existed to support this theory. Cao and colleagues believe that a young supernova that they discovered, iPTF13bvn, occurred at a location formerly occupied by a likely Wolf-Rayet star.
Supernova iPTF13bvn was spotted on June 16, less than a day after the onset of its explosion. With the aid of the adaptive optics system used by the 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaiiwhich reduces the blurring effects of Earth's atmospherethe team obtained a high-resolution image of this supernova to determine its precise position. Then they compared the Keck image to a series of pictures of the same galaxy (NGC 5806) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, and found one starlike source spatially coincident to the supernova. Its intrinsic brightness, color, and sizeas well as its mass-loss history, inferred from supernova radio emissionswere characteristic of a Wolf-Rayet star.
"All evidence is consistent with the theoretical expectation that the progenitor of this Type Ib supernova is a Wolf-Rayet star," says Cao. "Our next step is to check for the disappearance of this progenitor star after the supernova fades away. We expect that it will have been destroyed in the supernova explosion."
Though Wolf-Rayet progenitors have long been predicted for Type Ib supernova, the new work represents the first time researchers have been able to fill the gap between theory and observation, according to study coauthor and Caltech alumna Mansi Kasliwal (PhD '11). "This is a big step in our understanding of the evolution of massive stars and their relation to supernovae," she says.
The second paper, "Discovery and Redshift of an Optical Afterglow in 71 degrees squared: iPTF13bxl and GRB 130702A," appears in the October 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Lead author Leo Singer, a Caltech grad student, describes finding and characterizing the afterglow of a long gamma-ray burst (GRB) as being similar to digging a needle out of a haystack.
Long GRBs, which are the brightest known electromagnetic events in the universe, are also connected with the deaths of rapidly spinning, massive stars. Although such GRBs initially are detected by their high-energy radiationGRB 130702A, for example, was first located by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescopean X-ray or visible-light afterglow must also be found to narrow down a GRB's position enough so that its location can be pinpointed to one particular galaxy and to determine if it is associated with a supernova.
After Fermi's initial detection of GRB 130702A, iPTF was able to narrow down the GRB's location by scanning an area of the sky over 360 times larger than the face of the moon and sifting through hundreds of images using sophisticated machine-learning software; it also revealed the visible-light counterpart of the burst, designated iPTF13bxl. This is the first time that a GRB's position has been determined precisely using optical telescopes alone.
After making the initial correlation between the GRB and the afterglow, Singer and colleagues corroborated their results and gained additional information using a host of other instruments, including optical, X-ray, and radio telescopes. In addition, ground-based telescopes around the world monitored the afterglow for days as it faded away, and recorded the emergence of a supernova five days later.
According to Singer, GRB130702A / iPTF13bxl turned out to be special in many ways.
"First, by measuring its redshift, we learned that it was pretty nearby as far as GRBs go," he says. "It was pretty wimpy compared to most GRBs, liberating only about a thousandth as much energy as the most energetic ones. But we did see it eventually turn into a supernova. Typically we only detect supernovae in connection with nearby, subluminous GRBs, so we can't be certain that cosmologically distant GRBs are caused by the same kinds of explosions."
"The first results from iPTF bode well for the discovery of many more supernovae in their infancy and many more afterglows from the Fermi satellite", says Shrinivas Kulkarni, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at Caltech and principal investigator for both the PTF and iPTF.
###
The iPTF project is a scientific collaboration between Caltech; Los Alamos National Laboratory; the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; the Oskar Klein Centre in Sweden; the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan; and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan.
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
ShareContact: Brian Bell
bpbell@caltech.edu
626-395-5832
California Institute of Technology
Developed to help scientists learn more about the complex nature of celestial objects in the universe, astronomical surveys have been cataloguing the night sky since the beginning of the 20th century. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)started searching the skies for certain types of stars and related phenomena in February. Since its inception, iPTF has been extremely successful in the early discovery and rapid follow-up studies of transientsastronomical objects whose brightness changes over timescales ranging from hours to daysand two recent papers by iPTF astronomers describe first-time detections: one, the progenitor of a rare type of supernova in a nearby galaxy; the other, the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst in July.
The iPTF builds on the legacy of the Caltech-led Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), designed in 2008 to systematically chart the transient sky by using a robotic observing system mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on Palomar Mountain near San Diego, California. This state-of-the-art, robotic telescope scans the sky rapidly over a thousand square degrees each night to search for transients.
Supernovaemassive exploding stars at the end of their life spanmake up one important type of transient. Since PTF's commissioning four years ago, its scorecard stands at over 2,000 spectroscopically classified supernovae. The unique feature of iPTF is brand-new technology that is geared toward fully automated, rapid response and follow-up within hours of discovery of a new supernova.
The first paper, "Discovery, Progenitor and Early Evolution of a Stripped Envelope Supernova iPTF13bvn," appears in the September 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters and describes the detection of a so-called Type Ib supernova. Type Ib supernovae are rare explosions where the progenitor star lacks an outer layer of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, hence the "stripped envelope" moniker. It has proven difficult to pin down which kinds of stars give rise to Type Ib supernovae. One of the most promising ideas, says graduate student and lead author Yi Cao, is that they originate from Wolf-Rayet stars. These objects are 10 times more massive and thousands of times brighter than the sun and have lost their hydrogen envelope by means of very strong stellar winds. Until recently, no solid evidence existed to support this theory. Cao and colleagues believe that a young supernova that they discovered, iPTF13bvn, occurred at a location formerly occupied by a likely Wolf-Rayet star.
Supernova iPTF13bvn was spotted on June 16, less than a day after the onset of its explosion. With the aid of the adaptive optics system used by the 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaiiwhich reduces the blurring effects of Earth's atmospherethe team obtained a high-resolution image of this supernova to determine its precise position. Then they compared the Keck image to a series of pictures of the same galaxy (NGC 5806) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, and found one starlike source spatially coincident to the supernova. Its intrinsic brightness, color, and sizeas well as its mass-loss history, inferred from supernova radio emissionswere characteristic of a Wolf-Rayet star.
"All evidence is consistent with the theoretical expectation that the progenitor of this Type Ib supernova is a Wolf-Rayet star," says Cao. "Our next step is to check for the disappearance of this progenitor star after the supernova fades away. We expect that it will have been destroyed in the supernova explosion."
Though Wolf-Rayet progenitors have long been predicted for Type Ib supernova, the new work represents the first time researchers have been able to fill the gap between theory and observation, according to study coauthor and Caltech alumna Mansi Kasliwal (PhD '11). "This is a big step in our understanding of the evolution of massive stars and their relation to supernovae," she says.
The second paper, "Discovery and Redshift of an Optical Afterglow in 71 degrees squared: iPTF13bxl and GRB 130702A," appears in the October 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Lead author Leo Singer, a Caltech grad student, describes finding and characterizing the afterglow of a long gamma-ray burst (GRB) as being similar to digging a needle out of a haystack.
Long GRBs, which are the brightest known electromagnetic events in the universe, are also connected with the deaths of rapidly spinning, massive stars. Although such GRBs initially are detected by their high-energy radiationGRB 130702A, for example, was first located by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescopean X-ray or visible-light afterglow must also be found to narrow down a GRB's position enough so that its location can be pinpointed to one particular galaxy and to determine if it is associated with a supernova.
After Fermi's initial detection of GRB 130702A, iPTF was able to narrow down the GRB's location by scanning an area of the sky over 360 times larger than the face of the moon and sifting through hundreds of images using sophisticated machine-learning software; it also revealed the visible-light counterpart of the burst, designated iPTF13bxl. This is the first time that a GRB's position has been determined precisely using optical telescopes alone.
After making the initial correlation between the GRB and the afterglow, Singer and colleagues corroborated their results and gained additional information using a host of other instruments, including optical, X-ray, and radio telescopes. In addition, ground-based telescopes around the world monitored the afterglow for days as it faded away, and recorded the emergence of a supernova five days later.
According to Singer, GRB130702A / iPTF13bxl turned out to be special in many ways.
"First, by measuring its redshift, we learned that it was pretty nearby as far as GRBs go," he says. "It was pretty wimpy compared to most GRBs, liberating only about a thousandth as much energy as the most energetic ones. But we did see it eventually turn into a supernova. Typically we only detect supernovae in connection with nearby, subluminous GRBs, so we can't be certain that cosmologically distant GRBs are caused by the same kinds of explosions."
"The first results from iPTF bode well for the discovery of many more supernovae in their infancy and many more afterglows from the Fermi satellite", says Shrinivas Kulkarni, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at Caltech and principal investigator for both the PTF and iPTF.
###
The iPTF project is a scientific collaboration between Caltech; Los Alamos National Laboratory; the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; the Oskar Klein Centre in Sweden; the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan; and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan.
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Intel has delayed production of its “Broadwell” processors due to a manufacturing glitch, something analysts say could postpone the launch of PCs and tablets based on the new chip.
Intel ran into some problems with the 14-nanometer process used to manufacture the chips and will have to fix them before it can resume production, CEO Brian Krzanich said during Intel’s earnings call on Tuesday.
“We’re planning to begin production in the first quarter of next year,” he said.
The Broadwell chips will succeed Intel’s “Haswell” line of Core processors, which are manufactured using a 22-nanometer process. The number refers to the dimensions of circuits etched on the chips.
Intel showed a laptop running on Broadwell at the Intel Developer Forum last month. Intel says the chips will be 30 percent more power-efficient and faster than their Haswell counterparts.
Intel normally releases new chips like clockwork on an annual basis, and the manufacturing problems are a rare misstep for the company. Krzanich said there were problems with the “yield”—or the number of good chips the company gets per silicon wafer.
Analysts said the manufacturing issue could delay the chip’s release to PC makers, affecting the release dates of their products.
“The way to look at it is the actual launch [of Broadwell] takes place on a different date,” said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
Intel hasn’t had to delay a major chip release since the Pentium 4 more than a decade ago, McCarron said.
Broadwell is based on the same architecture as Haswell but made with a more advanced process—something known as a “process shrink” in industry parlance. Broadwell’s delay won’t affect the release of its successor, Skylake, Krzanich said, as Skylake will be based on a brand-new architecture.
That will mean a shorter lifespan for the Broadwell chips, McCarron said.
The problems with Broadwell won’t affect the release of other chips for mobile devices made using the 14-nanometer process, according to Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.
“I don’t expect this to impact mobile processors that need 14-nanometer the most,” Moorhead said in an email.
Intel plans to release 14-nm Atom chips code-named Airmont for tablets and smartphones next year. It expects the chips to be faster and more power-efficient, which could mean longer battery life for products. Intel competes in mobile devices with ARM, whose processor designs are used in most phones and tablets today.
Tech-savvy users should be able to upgrade their chips from Haswell to Broadwell in some products.
“Broadwell and Haswell are pin compatible, so for the most part this will slide into existing systems,” Krzanich said.
Starlito (left) and Don Trip, whose mixtape Step Brothers 2 comes out Oct. 15.
Starlito (left) and Don Trip, whose mixtape Step Brothers 2 comes out Oct. 15.
Starlito and Don Trip hail from Tennessee, the former from Nashville and the latter from Memphis. Two years ago, they teamed up to make a mixtape called Step Brothers, named in honor of the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly movie. The acclaim for it, from critics and laypeople alike, opened a door wide enough for both rappers, who had been quietly respected as solo artists but languishing in record-label limbo — until 2010, Starlito had performed as All $tar, the name under which he made "Grey Goose," while Don Trip's "Letter to My Son" got him signed but not much else. Their song "Pray for Me," in particular, is warm and bone-chilling at the same time — thoughtful trap. Starlito has called the tape, which they made quickly with not many expectations, a "perfect accident."
On their followup — Step Brothers 2 (out Oct. 15), which they've made with more consideration — Starlito raps like his eyes are at half mast, or he's lying down, which makes his quick wit land even harder. Don Trip is sharper, but he reflexively wrings extra playing time out of his vowels and multiplies his syllables. His delivery is athletic, whichever of the several tones at his disposal he's decided to use. In "Ninja Focus," he says, "I go harder than a tortoise shell, my name ring like a doorbell, my wrist chilly like Hormel." While Starlito has a penchant for singing along with the vocal samples, Don Trip plays the straight man. But not that straight — he's the one who paraphrases Ghostface (though it's serious Ghostface) in "Where Do We Go."
The songs on Step Brothers 2 are littered with regret — in "28th Song," Starlito's sleeping with his girlfriend's sister and he's not proud of it. They both say they've sold drugs before, but that that doesn't mean you should. This isn't a new emotion for either writer. Five years ago, Starlito told The New York Times that his first single wasn't the launching pad he'd hoped it would be, for a couple of reasons: "I was having a hard time, for a second, being so closely associated with alcohol." Now, in "Bunk Beds," he says, "I've got more fake friends than songs with radio spins, and I'm not concerned with either until they try to play me again." And then there's the ladies. In "Open Your Eyes," laced with smooth saxophone, Starlito bemoans the state of his love life. "My girlfriend my Glock 9," he says. "Looking for a pretty woman with the wisdom of my grandmother."
The production is purple, almost lurid, with swelling synths, morbidly obese bass lines, scarily impersonal 808s. It's not exactly pretty — though "Leash on Life" cleans up nice — but its drama is Godfather levels of riveting. If you're not listening with every ounce of woofer available to you, then you're listening wrong. Step Brothers 2 is a Southern Gothic novel with many authors: Starlito and Don Trip certainly, but also Kevin Gates and Drumma Boy, also from Memphis; Burn One, from Atlanta; and Young Chop, from Chicago. "4x4 Relay," produced by Chizzy and Sarah J, doesn't sound like the rest of them, though — it's triumphant, the kind of song you make so you can become part of people's celebrations, and not just their ruminative commutes and daily grind. It's the kind of song you make once you've arrived.
FILE - In this Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, file photo provided by the Newtown Bee, a police officer leads two women and a child from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman opened fire, killing 26 people, including 20 children. The Associated Press is challenging the refusal by investigators to release the 911 tapes from the Dec. 14 shooting. A hearing officer for Connecticut's Freedom of Information Commission has recommended the tapes be released, and the full commission is meeting Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013, to consider the case. (AP Photo/Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks, File) MANDATORY CREDIT: NEWTOWN BEE, SHANNON HICKS
FILE - In this Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, file photo provided by the Newtown Bee, a police officer leads two women and a child from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman opened fire, killing 26 people, including 20 children. The Associated Press is challenging the refusal by investigators to release the 911 tapes from the Dec. 14 shooting. A hearing officer for Connecticut's Freedom of Information Commission has recommended the tapes be released, and the full commission is meeting Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013, to consider the case. (AP Photo/Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks, File) MANDATORY CREDIT: NEWTOWN BEE, SHANNON HICKS
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — When the old Sandy Hook Elementary School is demolished, building materials will be pulverized on site and metal will be taken away and melted down in an effort to eliminate nearly every trace of the building where a gunman killed 26 people last December.
Contractors also will be required to sign confidentiality agreements and workers will guard the property's perimeter to prevent onlookers from taking photographs or videos.
The goal is to prevent exploitation of any remnants of the building, Newtown First Selectman E. Patricia Llodra said Tuesday.
"We want to be absolutely certain to do everything we can to protect the privacy of the families and the Sandy Hook community," she said. "We're going to every possible length to eliminate any possibility that any artifacts from the building would be taken from the campus and ... end up on eBay."
Demolition is set to begin next week and be finished before the Dec. 14 anniversary of the shootings. Town voters last month accepted a state grant of $49.3 million to raze the building and build a new school, which is expected to open by December 2016.
The contractors' confidentiality agreements, which were first reported Monday by The News-Times of Danbury, forbid public discussion of the site as well as photographs or disclosure of any information about the building.
Llodra, the superintendent of schools and other town officials have been discussing how to handle the demolition for weeks. Llodra said they want to shield the victims' families and the community from more trauma, and don't want any part of the school used for personal gain.
Most of the building will be completely crushed and hauled away to an undisclosed location. Some of the demolition dust may be used in the foundation and driveway of the new school, Llodra said. The town also is requiring documentation that metal and other materials that can't be crushed and are hauled off-site are destroyed, she said.
In addition to the demolition crew confidentiality agreements, the project management company, Consigli Construction, also may do background checks on the workers.
"It's a very sensitive topic," Selectman Will Rodgers told The News-Times. "We want it to be handled in a respectful way."
Adam Lanza, 20, killed 20 first-grade children and six women inside the school before committing suicide. Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive for the massacre.
Sandy Hook students have been attending classes at a former school in neighboring Monroe that was renovated specially for them.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-10-15-School%20Shooting-Demolition/id-ace3352433fe4849bc17c5dcf29daebbGENEVA (AP) — Declaring that Iran no longer wants to "walk in the dark" of international isolation, Iranian negotiators put forward what they called a potential breakthrough plan Tuesday at the long-stalled talks on easing fears that Tehran wants atomic arms.
Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the Iranian plan's formal name was "An End to the Unnecessary Crisis and a Beginning for Fresh Horizons." He described it as having many new ideas but added negotiators had agreed to keep the details confidential during the morning bargaining session.
"We think that the proposal we have made has the capacity to make a breakthrough," he told reporters.
Alluding to the international pressure over Iran's nuclear program that has driven the country into near-pariah status, he said: "We no longer want to walk in the dark and uncertainty and have doubts about the future."
Iran's version of a grand bargain is for painful international sanctions to be lifted in exchange for possible concessions it had been previously unwilling to consider, such as increased monitoring and scaling back on uranium enrichment — a potential path to nuclear arms and the centerpiece of the impasse with the West.
A member of one of the delegations meeting with Iran told The Associated Press the plan offered reductions in both the levels of uranium enrichment being conducted by Iran and the number of centrifuges doing the enrichment — both key demands from the six nations with Iran at the negotiating table. He demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to divulge details.
European Union official Michael Mann said Iran's PowerPoint presentation, presented by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, lasted about one hour.
The session resumed in mid-afternoon and a U.S. State Department official said the six powers were looking at further details of the Iranian presentation. The official demanded anonymity because she was not authorized to divulge details of the closed meeting.
Iran's uranium enrichment program is at the core of the six world powers' concerns. Iran now has more than 10,000 centrifuges churning out enriched uranium, which can be used either to power reactors or as the fissile core of a nuclear bomb. Iran has long insisted it does not want nuclear arms — a claim the U.S. and its allies have been skeptical about — but has resisted international attempts to verify its aims.
Tehran is now under international sanctions that are biting deeply into its troubled economy. Since the election of reformist Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in June, Iranian officials have said they are ready to compromise.
The U.S, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany are eager to test whether those words will translate into real progress such as increased international monitoring and scaling back uranium enrichment.
"We have seen some positive mood music coming out of Tehran," Mann said. "But of course the most important thing is that they actually follow it up with concrete proposals that address our concerns."
The first session of the two-day talks — the first since Rouhani's election — lasted about 2 ½ hours, ending shortly after noon. Back pains suffered by Zarif, Iran's chief negotiator, threatened to complicate the process.
Mann said the pains did not stop Zarif from having a "cordial" dinner Monday evening with Catherine Ashton, the top EU diplomat convening the talks. But Araghchi said Zarif was "suffering a lot," although he intended to stay in Geneva until the talks ended.
Iran's state TV, which closely reflects government views, said Tehran offered to discuss uranium enrichment levels. The report also said Iran proposed adopting the additional protocols of the U.N.'s nuclear treaty — effectively opening its nuclear facilities to wider inspection and monitoring — if the West recognizes Iran's right to enrich uranium.
Of the tons of enriched uranium in Iran's stockpile, most is enriched to under 5 percent — a level that need weeks of further enrichment to turn into weapons-level uranium. But it also has nearly 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of 20 percent-enriched uranium, a form that can be quickly upgraded for weapons use, according to the U.N's atomic agency, which keeps tabs on Iran's nuclear activities. That is close to — but still below — what is needed for one nuclear weapon.
No final deal is expected at the two-day session, but it potentially could be the launching pad for a deal that has proven elusive since negotiations began in 2003.
One immediate change from previous talks was the choice of language. Mann told reporters they were being held in English, unlike previous rounds under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rouhani's hard-line predecessor, where Farsi translation was provided.
A former senior U.N. official who has acted as an intermediary between U.S. and Iranian officials said the six powers want significant cuts in the number of Iranian centrifuges now enriching uranium.
They also demand that Iran ship out to another country not only the 20 percent uranium it now has but also most of the tons of low-enriched uranium it has produced. And they want caps on the amount of enriched uranium that Iran could keep at any time. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the talks.
Iran says it needs this material to power a future reactor network. Iranian state television has quoted Araghchi as saying that Tehran was ready to discuss its enrichment program but would never ship enriched materials abroad.
While seeking to reduce enrichment at Iran's sprawling underground facility at Natanz, the six powers also want Iran to completely close the heavily fortified enrichment plant at Fordo, south of Tehran.
Demands to reduce enrichment instead of stopping it implicitly recognize Iran's right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. That already is a victory for Tehran, considering talks began 10 years ago with the international community calling on the Islamic Republic to mothball its enrichment program.
A somewhat diverting genre exercise that loses it in the final reels.
Wednesday, Oct. 9 (in France)
Jean-Baptiste Andrea
Jeremie Renier, Audrey Fleurot, Melusine Mayance, Bouli Lanners
PARIS – “Whatever you do, don’t open the briefcase” are the ominously cliched instructions guiding the protagonist -- and much of the plot -- of the high-concept French thriller Brotherhood of Tears (La Confrerie des larmes). Yet while filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Andrea is hardly treading new ground in this classic good guy-wrong place scenario, he manages to keep things relatively engaging, tossing out lots of twists and red herrings until things fly off the rails during an inevitably silly third-act reveal. Francophone slots and VOD action await this mid-sized European co-production, with possible overseas interest among genre specialists.
Despite what many will consider a bogus and only-in-France kind of conclusion, the director and co-writer Gael Malry smartly keep their MacGuffin under wraps until way late in the game, focusing mostly on the tribulations of former Paris detective Chevalier (Jeremie Renier), whose mounting gambling debts and failure to hold down a job send him on nightly fits of binge drinking. He’s also got a pesky tweenage daughter (Melusine Mayance) who gives him hell for being such a deadbeat dad, even if his mess of a life is shown to be less the result of choice than of circumstance.
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Just when it looks like Chevalier is headed straight for the gutter, an opportunity pops up in the form of an anonymous, extremely well-paid job which, at least at first, consists of merely sitting for 8 hours a day in an empty office. Thrilled to be cashing in on such an easy gig, the ex-cop goes on shopping sprees, buys a Porsche and gets a makeover -- behavior that seems all-too naive for someone who’s clearly been through the ringer many times.
Finally the real work begins when Chevalier is asked to deliver a set of mysterious briefcases to various clients across the globe. The only rule: never, ever open them. Yet anyone who’s seen films like Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly or even Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction knows that the temptation is always too strong, and as Chevalier grows increasingly nosy about his employment, the bodies start piling up around him until things eventually come to a head in ways that are both surprising and downright ridiculous.
For at least the first hour, Andrea -- who directed the 2006 David Schwimmer-Simon Pegg starrer Big Nothing -- reveals a certain knack for building suspense out of a few basic elements, as cheesy as some of them may be. And as long as the guessing game is on, Brotherhood of Tears provides some light thrills despite much heavy-handedness, especially in scenes involving Chevalier and his daughter, not to mention the budding romance he has with a cop (Audrey Fleurot) who happens to be his biggest fan.
It’s like an Alfred Hitchcock movie with neither the penetrating humor nor the formidable craft, which basically leaves a plot that works up to a certain point and a main character who tends to feel more like a cog in the machine than a real person -- even if Dardennes brothers regular Renier (The Kid with a Bike) deserves points for a cagey performance that never discredits the material.
Budgeted at €7M ($9.5M), the film makes fine use of its multiple locations, hopping around between Turkey, Belgium and France, with DP Jean-Pierre Sauvaire (Taxi) giving the action a gritty and handheld sheen. A busy score by Laurent Perez del Mar (Zarafa) takes its cues from John Powell’s theme for The Bourne Identity, although Brotherhood is far from that kind of franchise and more like a mildly entertaining one-off whose staying power lasts as long as the end credits.
Opens: Wednesday, Oct. 9 (in France)
Production companies: Full House, Red Lion, Saga City, D8 Films, uFilm
Cast: Jeremie Renier, Audrey Fleurot, Melusine Mayance, Bouli Lanners
Director: Jean-Baptiste Andrea
Screenwriters: Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Gael Malry
Producers: Laurent Baudens, Didar Domehri, Gael Nouaille
Director of photography: Jean-Pierre Sauvaire
Production designer: Christina Schaffer
Costume designer: Nathalie Leborgne
Music: Laurent Perez del Mar
Editor: Antoine Vareille
Sales agent: Films Distribution
No rating, 99 minutes
Baghdad (AFP) - Bombings in Iraq killed 20 people Sunday and brought the year's toll to more than 5,000 dead in a surge in violence that authorities have failed to curb, officials said.
Violence in Iraq has reached a level not seen since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a brutal sectarian conflict.
The spike in violence, which has included a number of sectarian attacks, has raised fears of a relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shiite bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people.
On Sunday, 21 explosions -- 10 car bombs, nine roadside bombs and two suicide bombings -- hit central and south Iraq, also wounding 130 people.
In one of the deadliest attacks, a car bomb exploded near a bus station in the city of Kut, killing four people and wounding 15, police and medical personnel said.
Other targets in the wave of bombings included a football field and a funeral.
The funeral was for one of the victims of a car bomb targeting shoppers that killed 15 people in Samarra the day before.
Militants seeking to cause maximum casualties frequently bomb places where crowds gather, including shopping districts, markets, football fields, cafes, mosques and funerals.
Also on Sunday, Iraq launched a project to issue national IDs that are supposed to be more difficult to forge than current identification documents.
"Terrorist groups have always benefited from forged IDs, so we were sometimes forced to deploy experts... at security checkpoints to check the IDs," interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan said.
The ID project is just the latest in a string of security measures announced in recent months, but so far, none has curbed the violence.
Diplomats and analysts say the Shiite-led government's failure to address the grievances of the Sunni Arab minority -- which complains of political exclusion and abuses by security forces -- has driven the rise in unrest this year.
Violence worsened sharply after security forces stormed a Sunni Arab anti-government protest camp in northern Iraq on April 23, sparking clashes in which dozens died.
The authorities have made some concessions aimed at placating anti-government protesters and Sunnis in general, such as freeing prisoners and raising the salaries of Sunni anti-Al-Qaeda fighters, but underlying issues remain unaddressed.
With the latest unrest, more than 290 people have been killed this month, and over 5,000 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.
100 Gbps over fiber is old news, but those same speeds achieved wirelessly? That's a first. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology have managed to use sub-terahertz waves (237.5 GHz, in this case) to transmit data over 20 meters at 100 gigabits per second. Since the experiment used ...Damascus (AFP) - At least 27 people died in a car bombing in rebel-held northwestern Syria as the United States stepped up its calls for a peace conference between the rebels and the Assad regime.
Also Monday, suspected jihadists freed four out of seven aid workers kidnapped in the increasingly volatile region.
The ICRC has not commented on the nationality of those abducted, though it has said most of the group were Syrian. There has been no claim of responsibility.
The United Nations said, meanwhile, that "the race is on" to make sure Syria keeps to deadlines to destroy its chemical weapons arsenal under the terms of a UN Security Council resolution.
The blast in the town of Darkush killed at least 27 people, including three children and a woman, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding the death toll could rise because many of the wounded were in serious condition.
Activists said the blast targeted the market area of the town, which is a few kilometres (miles) from the border with Turkey, on the Orontes River.
Four of the kidnapped aid workers were meanwhile freed, International Committee of the Red Cross spokesman Ewan Watson said, adding the organisation was awaiting further information about the others.
The Observatory said an Al-Qaeda-linked rebel group -- the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) -- kidnapped the six Red Cross staff and a volunteer from the Syrian Red Crescent.
The Red Cross, one of the few organisations able to deliver aid nationwide, said the team had travelled to Idlib on October 10 to assess the situation at health facilities and deliver aid.
"We don't have any intention of stopping our activities in Syria, but of course this situation makes us reflect and take a close look at our operations," Watson had earlier told Swiss radio.
Rebels control large swathes of Idlib, and kidnappings have become increasingly common in rebel-held parts of Syria, targeting both journalists and aid workers.
'Urgent' need for peace talks
The bombing and abductions came as the United States stepped up its calls for a peace conference between President Bashar al-Assad's regime and its Western-backed opponents, who are divided over the initiative.
The United States said there was an "urgent" need to set a date for so-called Geneva 2 peace talks, despite a leading opposition group's rejection of the process.
"We believe that it is urgent to set a date to convene the conference and work toward a new Syria," US Secretary of State John Kerry said after meeting UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in London.
"There has to be a transition government," he said. "This will require all the parties to come together in good faith."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged Washington to bring the opposition to the talks proposed for mid-November.
His call came a day after the Syrian National Council -- a key component of the National Coalition recognised by most Arab and Western governments -- ruled out attending any Geneva peace talks, and said it would quit the umbrella group if it participated.
The United States threatened strikes in response to August 21 sarin attacks that killed hundreds of people on the outskirts of Damascus, but the military action was averted by a US-Russian deal under which Syria is turning over its chemical arsenal for destruction.
SNC chief George Sabra said his group would boycott the Geneva talks because the international community had failed to punish the gas attacks or address the plight of civilians in besieged areas.
The United Nations said Monday the Syrian regime was providing "good cooperation" in the bid to destroy the country's chemical weapons by mid-2014.
However Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) called Tuesday on Syria's warring groups and the international community to make aiding needy civilians as urgent a priority as dealing with chemical weapons.
"Influential countries gathered around a table, thrashed out an agreement on chemical weapons and put it into practice. They have shown it can be done, so where are the efforts to repeat this success with the burning question of access for humanitarian aid?" said MSF General Director Christopher Stokes in a statement.
The comments came as the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force for Syria.
The United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have been working in Syria since October 1 to eradicate the country's banned arms.
The OPCW says Syria's war is already holding up the work and has appealed for local truces to get access to weapons sites.
The appeal from MSF came four days after the OPCW won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work to rid the world of the devastating weapons.
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You know the saying about drinking early in the day: "It's 5 o'clock somewhere in the world."
Well, it turns out that the "somewhere" actually can make a difference when it comes to drinking.
Scientists at Oxford University have found that whisky has a different taste depending on where it's sipped.
The idea came from the experience of many travelers. Go someplace warm and sunny, and the food and drink are breathtaking, explains Charles Spence, lead author of the study. Bring some home, though, and it never tastes as good, he says.
"All those cues about the warmth of the sun on your back, that's all actually transferring some kind of meaning and some value to that which we are eating and drinking," Spence tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin. "That's what's lost when you bring it home on a cold winter's night, and it was that that we wanted to try and capture with this experiment."
The researchers set up three rooms, each bathed in a different light and infused with different aromas. The first smelled of fresh-cut grass, had turf on the floor, a croquet set and the sounds of gamboling sheep.
A red light washed the second room, accompanied by high-pitched tinkling sounds, "because we know those convey the notion of sweetness," Spence says. A sweet smell permeated the room as well.
The final setting was lined with wood and smelled of cedar, with the sounds of someone walking through dried leaves in a forest.
Scientists guided people from room to room; participants sipped from the same glass of whisky in each environment.
"We asked them, after they'd spent a few moments in each room, to think about how intense was the grassiness on the nose, how sweet the taste of the whisky in the mouth, and how rich was the textured woody aftertaste of the drink," Spence says.
The result: People rated the same drink differently depending on which room they were in, even though they knew they were carrying just one glass. Spence says he was surprised the participants noted a difference, despite knowing they had the same whisky.
"But in fact, that was kind of the genius of the thing, that they carried just one glass," Spence says. "And that's what kind of struck people ... that they could look back at their scorecard and see that they'd given the very same drink in their other hand a very different rating — and they knew that all that had changed was that they had walked from one room to another."
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Bob Iger, Walt Disney Company Chairman and Vice-Chair of the U.S.-China Business Council
Corporate America views the current business environment in China with "tempered optimism," according to the annual survey conducted by the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC), a nonprofit trade group vice-chaired by Walt Disney Company Chairman Bob Iger.
Slowing economic growth, rising costs, and persistent, unaddressed operating challenges in China continue to weigh on sentiment in what is now the world's second-biggest film market.
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On the positive side, more than 90 percent of survey respondents reported that their China operations are profitable, the highest percentage reported since the USCBC began surveying its membership of 219 firms.
The survey comes as Hollywood studios are sending senior execs to China on a regular basis to try and take advantage of the booming market.
Iger was named vice chair of the council earlier this year, a reflection of the growing importance of China to the entertainment industry, and Disney is involved in numerous projects in China. Other blue-chip corporations that are members of the USCBC include Apple Inc, Gap, Coca-Cola and Caterpillar, and of the 110 respondents in the survey, 60 percent were manufacturers and 40 percent were services companies.
Of major concern to U.S. corporations, and a factor with serious implications for the entertainment business, is intellectual property rights enforcement. With illegal downloads and pirate DVDs continuing to dominate the non-theatrical market, the issue remains a major source of ire for the industry.
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Some 98 percent of respondents still say IPR enforcement is a concern for them.
A shifting IPR landscape and continued issues with enforcement have led a majority of respondents to state that IPR protection has gone "unchanged" from a year ago, the report said.
Protecting trade secrets remains the top priority for companies, with a record high number of respondents -- 40 percent -- citing trade secrets as the IP of greatest concern. "However, ensuring appropriate enforcement of trade secret rights is highly complex, and requires numerous protections and enforcement mechanisms that China’s legal system may still be in the process of fully developing" the report said.
Over a quarter of respondents said that the legal framework remained insufficient to fully prosecute a trade secrets case.
The report called for a tougher deterrent to piracy.
"China should continue its work in this area by improving the protection of trade secrets, restricting the use of compulsory licenses, and removing market access barriers to products, such as imported films, so that the absence of legitimate products does not incentivize the production and sale of counterfeits," it said.
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Of the respondents, 96 percent said that China is still among their top five global investment priorities, although the number that said it was their top priority declined from 22 percent a year earlier to 15 percent now.
The survey reveals how corporations feel they need to be in China, and could still make money here, despite an increasingly difficult operating environment.
Just over half of the survey respondents plan to commit more resources to China in the next year, down from 67 percent in the 2012 survey.
The number one challenge facing the industry is the rising costs, and especially the cost of labor, which has risen from last year when it was just fourth in the list of concerns.
Problems with licensing occur at the central, provincial and local levels and affect almost every aspect of doing business in China. Licensing issues often overlap with other issues in the top 10, including uneven regulatory implementation.
Also problematic is the lack of national treatment and insufficient transparency in government rule drafting and decision making.
Respondents expressed concern about the advantages given to Chinese firms -- both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private companies -- which are denied to most foreign companies.
Competition is also intensifying. Most multinational companies in China contend with other foreign competitors as well as both state-owned and private Chinese companies.
Also, this year’s survey mentioned emerging challenges, such as cybersecurity, that affect a wide variety of companies. Progress on this issue will require government-to-government discussions and action, the survey said.
G8 leaders from left, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama attend a working session during the G-8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland on Tuesday, June 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Yves Herman, Pool)
G8 leaders from left, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama attend a working session during the G-8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland on Tuesday, June 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Yves Herman, Pool)
G-8 leaders from left, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron, US President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy pose during a group photo opportunity during the G-8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday, June 18, 2013. The final day of the G-8 summit of wealthy nations is ending with discussions on globe-trotting corporate tax dodgers, a lunch with leaders from Africa, and suspense over whether Russia and Western leaders can avoid diplomatic fireworks over their deadlock on Syria?s civil war. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
President Barack Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, Monday, June 17, 2013. Obama and Putin discussed the ongoing conflict in Syria during their bilateral meeting. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
US President Barack Obama, right, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper walk together to a group photo opportunity during the G-8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday, June 18, 2013. The final day of the G-8 summit of wealthy nations is ending with discussions on globe-trotting corporate tax dodgers, a lunch with leaders from Africa, and suspense over whether Russia and Western leaders can avoid diplomatic fireworks over their deadlock on Syria?s civil war. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
G8 leaders from left, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, US President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy attend a working session during the G-8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland on Tuesday, June 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Jewel Samad, Pool)
ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) ? Hunting for a glimmer of common ground, the leaders of major economic powers are declaring themselves dedicated to a political solution to Syria's bloody civil war, even as President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin stake out diametrically opposite stands on which side deserves military support.
Ahead of a Group of Eight joint statement on Syria to be issued Tuesday, the U.S. remained committed to Obama's recent decision to arm the rebels and Russia did not budge from its weapons sales to President Bashar Assad's regime.
Yet even as Obama found common ground among European allies against Putin at a G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, the U.S. president also struggled to convince some of those same allies to join him in sending armaments to the Syrian opposition.
Syria, where at least 93,000 people have been killed in the conflict, has emerged as one of the intractable issues at the G-8 in Northern Ireland, where leaders of eight of the wealthiest economies gathered at a gleaming lakeside golf resort to hash over trade, tax and foreign policy challenges.
"Of course, our opinions do not coincide, but all of us have the intention to stop the violence in Syria, to stop the growth of victims, and to solve the situation peacefully," Putin said after meeting for two hours with Obama. "We agreed to push the parties to the negotiations table."
"We do have differing perspectives on the problem," Obama concurred. "But we share an interest in reducing the violence; securing chemical weapons and ensuring that they're neither used nor are they subject to proliferation; and that we want to try to resolve the issue through political means, if possible."
In an interview on PBS that was taped Sunday and aired late Monday, Obama was much blunter, and pessimistic.
"What's been clear is that Assad, at this point ? in part, because of his support from Iran and from Russia ? believes that he does not have to engage in a political transition, believes that he can continue to simply violently suppress over half of the population," Obama told interviewer Charlie Rose. "And as long as he's got that mindset, it's going to be very difficult to resolve the situation there."
Even so, Obama in the interview portrayed himself as a reluctant participant in the civil war.
"We know what it's like to rush into a war in the Middle East without having thought it through," he said in obvious reference to the war in Iraq.
British officials said Cameron was looking for consensus among the G-8 members on five areas of potential agreement that could win Russian support, including securing chemical weapons, pursuing extremists and creating an executive authority for Syria after it undergoes a political transition.
But despite their shared belief that Assad must leave power, the U.S., Britain and France were also showing cracks in their unity. Britain and France appear unwilling ? at least for now ? to join President Barack Obama in arming the Syrian rebels, a step the U.S. president reluctantly finalized last week.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, downplayed those differences, saying the Syrian opposition could be strengthened either politically, through humanitarian aid or as a military force.
"Different nations are going to feed into that process in different ways," he said.
The G-8 leaders were all smiles Tuesday morning as they walked in unison under cloud-covered skies at the lodge, where they posed for a "family photo" in front of a lake before Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper set off for a walk. Talks on how to combat corporate tax-dodging balanced out the effort to find some modicum of consensus on Syria in the waning hours of the summit as the leaders huddled in meetings and at a working lunch.
The sensitive Syria discussions unfolded in the midst of awkward revelations that the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ tapped into the communications of foreign diplomats during the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London, including those of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev. That report, in the newspaper The Guardian, came on the heels of reports about the high-tech surveillance methods and record-gathering employed by the National Security Agency in the United States.
While the disclosures added a layer of controversy to the summit, U.S. officials said heads of state at a summit like the G-8 are perfectly aware that such spying goes on. As for the issue coming up in talks with Putin, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters, "It was a non-event at this meeting."
Indeed, in his interview with PBS, Obama made it clear such eavesdropping is commonplace, and tried to distinguish it from the cyber-hacking his administration has accused China of carrying out.
"There is a big difference between China wanting to figure out how can they find out what my talking points are when I'm meeting with the Japanese, which is standard fare, and we try to prevent them from penetrating that, and they try to get that information," he said. "There's a big difference between that and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple's software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product. That's theft."
It was a remarkably direct accusation coming just a week after Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a desert resort in California.
"We had a very blunt conversation about cybersecurity," Obama said of his talks with Xi.
With Putin, Obama also tried to emphasize their areas of cooperation, including an extension of a 1992 agreement designed to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons. The agreement resolved Russian concerns that the original post-Soviet pact, named after Senate sponsors Democrat Sam Nunn and Republican Richard Lugar, was too intrusive in securing material from Russia. Rhodes said the deal allows both countries to cooperate on nuclear security in the U.S. and Russia, but also in other countries. Obama is likely to draw attention to the deal in a speech Wednesday in Berlin.
Still, relations between Obama and Putin have never been warm. Rhodes called the encounter between the two "businesslike," one made even more stilted through translation.
Obama tried to leaven their joint appearance before reporters at the end of their talks by observing that "we compared notes on President Putin's expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball. And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover."
Putin, through an interpreter, replied, "The president wants to relax me with his statement of age."
___
Associated Press writers Cassandra Vinograd and Julie Pace in Northern Ireland contributed to this report.
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