Naruto Shippuuden Episode 299

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New US commander takes the helm in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford took over Sunday as the new and probably last commander of all U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan.

The American-led NATO coalition is entering the final stretch of its participation in a war that will have lasted more than 13 years when most foreign combat troops pull out at the end of 2014.

Dunford took over leadership of the International Security Assistance Force, and a smaller but separate detachment of American troops, from Marine Gen. John Allen, who had led them for the past 19 months.

"Today is not about change, it's about continuity," Dunford told a gathering of coalition military leaders and Afghan officials. "What's not changed is the growing capability of our Afghan partners, the Afghan national security forces. What's not changed is our commitment, more importantly, what's not changed is the inevitability of our success."

He takes charge at a critical time for President Barack Obama and the military. NATO decided at its 2010 summit in Lisbon to withdraw major combat units, but to continue training and funding Afghan troops and leave a residual force to hunt down al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "much work lies ahead" for Dunford as he tries to meet those objectives while at the same time withdrawing about 100,000 foreign troops, including 66,000 from the United States.

Dunford, from Boston, Massachusetts, will face serious challenges as he tries to accommodate an accelerated timetable for handing over the lead for security responsibility to Afghan forces this spring ? instead of late summer as originally planned.

"I told him our victory here will never be marked by a parade or a point in time on a calendar when victory is declared. This insurgency will be defeated over time by the legitimate and well-trained Afghan forces that are emerging today and who are taking the field in full force this spring," Allen said.

He added that success would be described as an "Afghan force defending Afghan people, and enabling an Afghan government to serve its citizens. This is victory; this is what winning looks like."

Although the Afghan security forces are almost at their full strength of 352,000, it is unclear if they are yet ready to take on the fight by themselves.

Before departing, Allen admitted that the Afghans still need much work to become an effective and self-sufficient fighting machine, but he said a vast improvement in their abilities was behind a decision to accelerate the timetable for putting them in the lead nationwide this spring when the traditional fighting season begins.

Obama said last month that the Afghans would take over this spring instead of late summer ? a decision that could allow the speedier withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan.

It is also unclear when the remaining 66,000 U.S. troops would return home, or how many American soldiers will remain after the end of 2014.

Obama may use his State of the Union address on Tuesday to announce the next steps for concluding the war and a timetable for withdrawal along with plans for a residual force post-2014.

Much of that depends on the U.S. negotiating a bilateral security agreement with the government that includes the contentious issue of immunity from Afghan prosecution for any U.S. forces that would remain here after 2014. President Hamid Karzai has said he will put any such decision in the hands of a council of Afghan elders, known as a Loya Jirga.

Although Dempsey said earlier in the week that the United States had plans to leave a residual force, a failure to strike a deal on immunity would torpedo any security agreement and lead to a complete pullout of U.S. forces after 2014 ? as it did in post-war Iraq. It is widely believed that no NATO-member nation would allow its troops to remain after 2014 to train, or engage in counterterrorism activities, without a similar deal.

The head of NATO joint command in Europe, German Gen. Hans-Lothar Domrose, said the alliance was already making plans for a post-2014 presence, plans he said that were "all well advanced."

Allen, 59, of Warrenton, Virginia, was the longest serving ISAF commander so far. Nearly two dozen generals have commanded troops from the United States and ISAF since the American invasion in late 2001 ? with six U.S. generals including Dunford running both commands in the past five years alone.

Also attending the ceremony were U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, Commander, U.S. Central Command, and Gen. James Amos, head of the Marine Corps. Karzai did not attend.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-commander-takes-helm-afghanistan-092414073.html

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Chilean film "Gloria" cheered at Berlin festival

BERLIN (Reuters) - There were cheers for Chilean drama "Gloria" at the Berlin film festival on Sunday, partly out of relief as the annual cinema showcase finally got its first hit after a series of critical misses.

The touching story of a middle aged woman's quest for love and adventure in modern-day Santiago drew comparisons to Woody Allen for the intimacy of the relationships and to Meryl Streep for the arresting performance of actress Paulina Garcia.

Garcia plays Gloria, a bespectacled 58-year-old divorcee whose children have left home and who goes out to singles night discos, where she dances and flirts and refuses to retreat quietly into the old age.

There she meets Rodolfo, a charming but complex former naval officer in his 60s, who sweeps her off her feet in a whirlwind romance that Gloria believes may turn into something permanent.

As they try to forge a lasting bond, their past lives constantly intrude, in what critics saw as a metaphor for Chile as it emerges from the dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

Director Sebastian Lelio's inspiration was his mother and her generation, which is rarely tackled in an industry obsessed with youth.

"I would say that we are all facing what Gloria is facing, but it just happens to some people sooner than others," he told reporters in Berlin, where Gloria is one of 19 movies in the main competition lineup and the most popular so far.

"We all face crossroads in our lives where we can retreat into ourselves or we can hit the dancefloor."

GLORIA AS ROCKY

He likened Gloria to the movie character Rocky Balboa.

"The world strikes at her and beats her down, but she manages to get up once more and carry on forward, holding her head up high."

Lelio is unflinching in his portrayal of the romance between Gloria and Rodolfo, which includes passionate sex scenes normally reserved for younger actors.

Actor Sergio Hernandez said he expected people in Chile would be shocked by the graphic nature of some scenes.

"We live in a hypocritical society, but I don't think people should be shocked," he said. "It's always been there ... adults making love as they never have before, perhaps better than they ever have before."

Lelio believed his movie had universal appeal as well as portraying Chilean society today.

"We have increased life expectancy," he said.

"Hitting your 60s doesn't mean the same thing that it used to in the old days. A new chapter of your life can begin and that's what I wanted to look at in this film. That's not Chile, it's happening in lots of countries around the world."

It was welcome in Berlin, where it was the seventh competition film to screen at the February 7-17 event. The first six, including U.S. entries "Promised Land" and "The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman", failed to impress critics.

Though not a comedy, Gloria's zest for life ensures plenty of laughs. Her revenge at being jilted comes in the form of a paintball attack on her target in a spoof of mob movies where enemies are gunned down in the street in broad daylight.

For Garcia it also has an upbeat message for Latin American audiences, because her character would have lived through the military coup of 1973 which placed Pinochet in power and the human rights abuses that followed.

"I think we are seeing a new society emerging in Chile and I think this is linked to what happens in Gloria," she said.

"Sometimes people are gloomy and cynical and I think it's important to say there is another way of looking at life - seeing the light and not just the dark."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chilean-film-gloria-cheered-berlin-festival-124936419.html

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French retailers pull back products in horsemeat scandal

PARIS (Reuters) - Six big French retailers said on Sunday they were recalling lasagne meals and other products suspected of being mis-labeled after the discovery of horsemeat in beef products.

The British unit of frozen foods group Findus began recalling its beef lasagne last week on advice from its French supplier, Comigel, and the French and British governments have since vowed to punish those found responsible for allowing horsemeat originating from Romania to be sold as beef.

French retailers' federation FCD said on Sunday that French supermarkets were also pulling several products supplied by Findus and Comigel on concerns that they were mislabeled. The supermarkets are Auchan, Casino, Carrefour, Cora, Monoprix and Picard

An initial French investigation has revealed that the horsemeat ended up in a Luxembourg factory supplied by a French firm and that a Dutch and Cypriot trader had also been involved although the meat originally came from a Romanian abattoir.

French Consumer Affairs Minister Benoit Hamon said in Le Parisien newspaper that the apparent fraud had generated profits of 300,000 euros and may have been going on since August.

He also said he expected further investigation to reveal whether French meat processing firm Spanghero at the heart of the supply chain was aware it had bought horsemeat or had been deceived.

Eating horsemeat is a taboo in Britain and although once common fare in France it has been out of fashion for decades.

(Reporting by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Greg Mahlich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/french-retailers-pull-back-products-horsemeat-scandal-162814854--finance.html

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Using Twitter to predict the influence of lifestyle on health

Feb. 8, 2013 ? Researchers at the University of Rochester showed last year how Twitter can be used to predict how likely it is for a Twitter user to become sick. They have now used Twitter to model how other factors -- social status, exposure to pollution, interpersonal interaction and others -- influence health.

"If you want to know, down to the individual level, how many people are sick in a population, you would have to survey the population, which is costly and time-consuming," said Adam Sadilek, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester. "Twitter and the technology we have developed allow us to do this passively, quickly and inexpensively; we can listen in to what people are saying and mine this data to make predictions."

Sadilek also explained that many tweets are geo-tagged, which means they carry GPS information that shows exactly where the user was when he or she tweeted.

Collating all this information allows the researchers to map out, in space and in time, what people said in their tweets, but also where they were and when they were there. By following thousands of users as they tweet and go about their lives, researchers also could estimate interactions between two users and between users and their environment.

In a paper to be presented on Feb. 8 at the International Conference on Web Searching and Data Mining in Rome, Italy, Sadilek will show how their new model accounts for many of the factors that affect health and how it can complement traditional studies in life sciences. Using tweets collected in New York City over a period of a month, they looked at factors like how often a person takes the subway, goes to the gym or a particular restaurant, proximity to a pollution source and their online social status. They looked at 70 factors in total. They then looked at whether these had a positive, negative or neutral impact on the users' health.

Some of their results are perhaps not surprising; for example, pollution sources seem to have a negative effect on health. However, this is the first time this impact has been extracted from the online behavior of a large online population. The paper also reveals a broader pattern, where virtually any activity that involves human contact leads to significantly increased health risks. For example, even people who regularly go to the gym get sick marginally more often than less active individuals. However, people who merely talk about going to the gym, but actually never go (verified based on their GPS), get sick significantly more often. This shows that there are interesting confounding factors that can now be studied at scale.

The technology that Sadilek and his colleague Professor Henry Kautz have developed has led to a web application called GermTracker. The application color-codes users (from red to green) according to their health by mining information from their tweets for 10 cities worldwide. Using the GPS data encoded in the tweets the app can then place people on a map, which allows anyone using the application to see their distribution.

"This app can be used by people to make personal decisions about their health. For example, they might want to avoid a subway station if it's full of sick people," Sadilek suggested. "It could also be used in conjunction with other methods by governments or local authorities to try to understand outbursts of the flu."

It is now flu season and as the number of people with the flu across the U.S. increases, so do the number of people monitoring GermTracker. On some days in January 10,000 people visited the http://fount.in website where the app is hosted.

The model that Sadilek and his colleagues developed is based on machine-learning. At the heart of their work is how they are training an algorithm to distinguish between tweets that suggest the person tweeting is sick and those that don't.

"It's like teaching a baby a new language," Sadilek said. He explained that they first generated a training set of data, 5,000 tweets that had been manually categorized and from which the algorithm can start to distinguish what words and phrases are associated with someone being sick. He added, "We need the algorithm to understand that someone who tweets 'I'm sick and have been in bed all day' should be characterized as sick, but 'I'm sick of driving around in this traffic' shouldn't be."

The application is also improving the algorithm. Every time someone goes onto the application and clicks on one of the colored dots that represent the tweeting users, they can see the specific tweet that led someone to be classified in a specific way. The application asks you to assess the tweet yourself and say whether you agree with the classification or not. This gets fed back into the algorithm, which continues to learn from its mistakes.

The authors have recently started two collaborations with researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "In one effort, we are planning to link Twitter predictions to clinical influenza studies," said co-author Kautz, chair of the University's computer science department. "In another effort, we are working with faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and the School of Nursing on extending these techniques to monitor and measure factors impacting depression and other psychological disorders."

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/Q1cjfcPzOIo/130208110041.htm

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Ohio Amish beard-cutting ringleader gets 15 years

In this photo made on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013, a pair of young Amish boys play in a sandbox in front of the home of Sam Mullet Sr., in Bergholz, Ohio. Mullet is one of sixteen men and women facing sentencing Friday, Feb. 8, 2013 in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio. The defendants want leniency so they can return to their homes and farms, to teach their sons a trade and their daughters how to sew, cook and keep house. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

In this photo made on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013, a pair of young Amish boys play in a sandbox in front of the home of Sam Mullet Sr., in Bergholz, Ohio. Mullet is one of sixteen men and women facing sentencing Friday, Feb. 8, 2013 in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio. The defendants want leniency so they can return to their homes and farms, to teach their sons a trade and their daughters how to sew, cook and keep house. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

In this photo made on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013, an Amish woman walks down the dirt road past the home of Sam Mullet Sr., and one of the the farms in Bergholz, Ohio that are worked by the families of sixteen men and women facing sentencing Friday, Feb. 8, 2013 in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio. The defendants want leniency so they can return to their homes and farms, to teach their sons a trade and their daughters how to sew, cook and keep house. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

In this photo made on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013, a young Amish woman walks down the dirt road between the farms in Bergholz, Ohio that are worked by the families of sixteen men and women facing sentencing Friday, Feb. 8, 2013 in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio. The defendants want leniency so they can return to their homes and farms, to teach their sons a trade and their daughters how to sew, cook and keep house. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

In this photo made on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013, an Amish buggy is driven down the road between the farms in Bergholz, Ohio that are worked by the families of sixteen men and women facing sentencing Friday, Feb. 8, 2013 in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio. The defendants want leniency so they can return to their homes and farms, to teach their sons a trade and their daughters how to sew, cook and keep house. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

CLEVELAND (AP) ? The ringleader in hair- and beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio was sentenced Friday to 15 years in prison.

Before his sentencing, Samuel Mullet Sr. told Judge Dan Aaron Polster in Cleveland that he had been blamed for running a cult and was ready to take the punishment. Polster also sentenced 15 other Amish to prison terms ranging from one to seven years.

Mullet, his ankles in chains and a white beard down to mid-chest, said if his community is seen as a cult, "Then I'm going to take the punishment for everybody."

With relatives of victims and his family sitting on opposite sides of the public gallery, Mullet said he has lived his life trying to help others.

"That's been my goal all my life," Mullet, 67, said to a hushed courtroom, with his fellow defendants and their attorneys sitting at four defense tables and filling the jury box.

"I'm not going to be here much longer," said Mullet, who didn't elaborate on any health issues.

Mullet and his family deny his community is a cult. The government asked for a life sentence for Mullet. The defense asked for two years or less.

The 10 men and six women were convicted last year in five attacks in Amish communities in 2011. The government said the attacks were retaliation against Amish who had defied or denounced Mullet's authoritarian style

Amish believe the Bible instructs women to let their hair grow long and men to grow beards once they marry. Cutting it would be offensive to Amish.

The defendants were charged with a hate crime because prosecutors believe religious differences brought about the attacks.

Nine of 10 men who were convicted have been locked up awaiting sentencing. The six women, who all have children, have been free on bond.

In a rare interview last week in Bergholz at the sprawling Mullet farm amid rolling hills in eastern Ohio, Mullet's unmarried 19-year-old grandson, Edward Mast, discussed the family's attitude. He said they are steadfast in the belief that the attacks didn't rise to the level of a hate crime.

"The beard, what it stands for me, what I know about it, once you're married, you just grow a beard. That's just the way the Amish is," Mast said.

As for the victims, he added, "They got their beard back again, so what's the big deal about it?"

Arlene Miller, 48, of Carrollton, whose husband, an Amish bishop, was among the victims, thinks Mullet deserves a tough sentence and the others should get less time if they get cult deprogramming counseling.

"It's a cult," she said. "Their minds were programmed in the wrong way by Sam Mullet, so we feel like these people are very deceived and they are actually victims of Sam Mullet."

She said there were no winners in the ordeal.

"There's no happy ending to this," she said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-02-08-Amish%20Attacks/id-b590d755c7b149c4ae9d271718c3357d

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Women for Women : A great fashion quote which is so correct ...

Similar to traditional radio and television, mobile video?broadcasting delivers branded content in either a paid/free environment, on someone?s mobile MP3 player. The period for which an advertisement can be sustained on a visual medium like television is greatly restricted because of the expenses. ?

Podcasting for online business is a blessing for advertisers, internet marketers and web masters.

Source: http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2013/02/women-for-women-a-great-fashion-quote-which-is-so-right/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=women-for-women-a-great-fashion-quote-which-is-so-right

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