Pakistani police make arrests in shooting of girl

MINGORA, Pakistan (AP) ? Pakistani police have arrested a number of suspects in the case of a 14-year-old girl shot and wounded by the Taliban for promoting education for girls and criticizing the fundamentalist Islamic movement, officials said Friday.

The shooting of Malala Yousufzai along with two classmates while they were on their way home from school Tuesday horrified people in Pakistan and internationally. It has been followed by an outpouring of support for a girl who earned the enmity of the Taliban for publicizing their acts and speaking about the importance of education for girls.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying that the girl was promoting "Western thinking." Late on Thursday, a spokesman for one of the group's branches in the country's north said the top leadership of the Taliban's Swat Valley chapter decided two months ago to kill Yousufzai in a carefully planned attack after her family ignored repeated warnings.

Police have been questioning people in the town of Mingora, in the Swat Valley, where the shooting took place.

Mingora police chief Afzal Khan Afridi said arrests had been made, but he declined to give any details about the number of people detained or what role they're suspected of having in the shooting. He said he did not want to endanger the ongoing investigation.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters Friday that the two gunmen who staged the attack were not among those arrested, but he said investigators had identified the masterminds of the shooting and efforts were under way to capture all those involved.

The Taliban spokesman, Sirajuddin Ahmad, said Yousufzai's family had been warned three times ? the most recent warning coming last week ? before the decision was made to kill her.

Ahmad said local Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah and his deputies selected three attackers, including two trained sharpshooters, who carefully studied the girl's route home from school.

Even before the Taliban took over the Swat Valley, Fazlullah's radio broadcasts spread fear among residents in the area. The group first started to exert its influence in 2007 and quickly extended its reach to much of the valley by the next year. They set about imposing their will on residents by forcing men to grow beards, preventing women from going to the market and blowing up many schools ? the majority for girls.

Malala wrote about these practices in a journal for the BBC under a pseudonym when she was just 11. After the Taliban were pushed out of the valley in 2009 by the Pakistani military, she became even more outspoken in advocating for girls' education. She appeared frequently in the media and was given one of the country's highest honors for civilians for her bravery.

Fazlullah, along with much of the Swat Taliban's top leadership, escaped the offensive and is believed to be operating from a base in eastern Afghanistan and sending fighters back across the border to attack northwest Pakistan.

But there are indications that he was trying once again to make inroads into the area.

Between April and June, Pakistani authorities arrested nearly 100 militants in the Swat Valley, said two security officials and a senior government official.

One of those arrested was a woman identified as Naheed Bibi, who was married to Fazlullah and had been sent by him to the valley to help reactivate militant sleeping cells there, the officials added.

Her interrogation led security officials to over 60 telephone numbers of SIM cards she and her aides had bought in various northwestern cities. By monitoring all the numbers, authorities rounded up the militants ? including several would-be suicide bombers ? and a large number of weapons and explosives was also seized, the officials said.

The officials did not want to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Pakistanis across the country held services to pray for Yousufzai's recovery Friday. Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf visited the hospital in Rawalpindi where she's being treated to pay his respects and check on her condition.

As the school Yousufzai attended reopened, children and teachers tried to come to terms with what happened to their star pupil, shot in a bus roughly 300 meters (yards) from her classrooms. Police were deployed around the school, but many students still stayed away.

"We have decided to open the school after two days to overcome the fear among our students that gripped them due to the attack," said one of the teachers, Zafar Ali Khan.

The school is owned and operated by the teenage activist's father, who takes great pride in his daughter's accomplishments and is a champion of education for girls.

The girl was initially airlifted from Mingora to a military hospital in the frontier city of Peshawar, where doctors removed a bullet from her neck. On Thursday, she was transferred to a hospital in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani army is headquartered near the capital, Islamabad.

Maj. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa said she is being kept on a ventilator and is in stable condition. Bajwa said the bullet entered her head and went into her neck toward her spine, but it was too soon to say whether she had any significant head injury.

"Her blood pressure is normal. Heartbeat is normal, and thanks to God, her condition is satisfactory," Bajwa said.

___

Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed and Zarar Khan in Rawalpindi, Adil Jawad in Karachi, Rebecca Santana and Asif Shahzad in Islamabad and Anwarullah Khan in Khar contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pakistani-police-arrests-shooting-girl-120245719.html

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Guillermo del Toro Plans Pacific Rim Graphic Novel

It looks like director Guillermo del Toro?s much-anticipated Monsters vs Mecha movie, Pacific Rim, is about to get a graphic novel companion. ?Penned by Travis Beacham (Clash of the Titans), the same screenwriter behind the feature, the graphic novel will be put out through Legendary Comics and will be available before the film?s July 12th, 2013 release date, as its story is a prequel of sorts. ?Del Toro talks about the decision to release the comic as a prequel rather than adapt the movie after?it debuts. ?See what the director had to say, along with a brand new poster for Pacific Rim?after the jump.

In an interview with The LA Times? Hero Complex at the ongoing New York Comic-Con, del Toro talked about his plans to expand the universe of?Pacific Rim?beyond just the feature film. ?When asked why he decided to go prequel instead of post-release adaptation, del Toro explained as follows:

I think those experiments ? well, in my experience as a collector, it?s rare that you find a movie adaptation in which anyone really succeeded. They end up being really badly done commercial ventures where you have a not-so-great artist and a not-so-great writer and a not-so-great adaptation at the end of the day.

The idea was to set up the creation of the world that is in ?Pacific Rim,? sort of give the stories and the drama and the science that occurs after the first?kaijumakes land in 2013, and what happens when that occurrence is repeated over and over again until we realize that it?s not a single occurrence or a series of occurrences, but a full-on invasion. And that we are going to need to [create] a weapon to deal with a creature that is that big and is not going in a straight line or a diagonal ? hitting a target that is a living organism of a scale that has never been seen on Earth. We need to create an equally inventive way to grapple with the creature before it gets more inland. The ingenuity of the creation of Jaegers ? the gigantic machines ? that are pilot-controlled; the reaction of the?kaiju?attack; the creation of the academy; the first generation of Jaeger pilots that come out ? all of that is set up in the movie, but is not expanded upon. The graphic novel will do that and more.

Del Toro, notoriously over-committed, also comments on how involved he?ll be with the production of the graphic novel:

I try to get involved as much as possible. The first decision that is needed from me is to hire the right artist, the right colorist, the right writer for the books. That?s the part that I think is most important. It?s like directing in the comics?. In ?Pacific Rim,? I expect to approve the layout, the pencils, the inking, the coloring, the cover, the script ? everything.

So is there hope for the comic after the movie comes out, depending on if both are successful?

I think so 100%. It?s worth it from the creative point of view.? We are not doing just a spinoff, it?s not an ancillary market decision to go to the comic. I created one that allows us to set up and expand and explore things that are spoken of in the movies, but this is another kind of creative important endeavor. One of the things that we did in the movie that I intend to continue/create in the comic book was to convey that this is a real world with real mechanics and real people fixing valves and machines. It?s a livelihood. And hopefully in the comic we can give the fans that set world that?s not changing from panel to panel or from page to page or from issue to issue that you really feel the day-to-day minutiae of what it means to be a mechanic or a pilot or a commanding officer in this world. That would be my most cherished hope.

Be sure to check out the full interview at Hero Complex. ?As a treat for all that reading you just did, here?s the new poster for?Pacific Rim:

Pacific Rim?stars Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kinkuchi, Charlie Day and Ron Perlman. ?Here?s the official synopsis for?Pacific Rim:

When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume humanity?s resources for years on end.? To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge.? But even the Jaegers are proving nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju.? On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes ? a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi) ? who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past.? Together, they stand as mankind?s last hope against the mounting apocalypse.

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1926070/news/1926070/

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Romney, White House spar over Libya attacks

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) ? Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Friday accused the vice president of "doubling down on denial" over the deadly invasion at the U.S. Consulate in Libya, leaving the White House to defend its handling of the attack that killed its ambassador and three other Americans.

Biden said in a debate Thursday night that "we weren't told" there had been requests for more security at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi ahead of the terrorist attack one month ago.

A State Department official testified before Congress on Wednesday that she had, in fact, refused requests for more security in Benghazi because the department wanted to train Libyans for the task. Another U.S. official testified he had argued unsuccessfully for more security for weeks.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that when Biden said "we weren't told," Biden meant President Barack Obama and himself. Carney said such security matters are handled by the State Department.

Asked what the president's reaction was when he heard testimony of State Department officials who had pleaded for more security, Carney said Obama "wants to get the bottom of what happened." He said the president is committed "to make sure that what happened in Benghazi never happens again."

Romney told supporters in swing state Virginia that the White House has more questions to answer about the tragedy.

"The vice president directly contradicted the sworn testimony of State Department officials," Romney said. "He's doubling down on denial. And we need to understand exactly what happened as opposed to just have people brush this aside. When the vice president of the United States directly contradicts the testimony, sworn testimony of State Department officials, American citizens have a right to know just what's going on. And we're going to find out."

Romney said his running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, gave Americans answers in the 90-minute debate against Biden, not political attacks. And Romney seemed to suggest he didn't think much of Biden's reaction to many of Ryan's answers, with the vice president responding on television's split screens with dismissive chuckles and eye rolls when his rival was speaking.

"There was one person on stage last night who was thoughtful and respectful and steady and poised, the kind of person you'd want to turn to in a crisis," Romney said to cheers. "And that was the next vice president of the United States, Paul Ryan."

Biden, eager to make up for the president's lackluster performance in his first debate with Romney, played the aggressor throughout the debate that came with less than four weeks to go before Election Day. The president gave his running mate a quick thumbs up for delivering with the energy and feeling that he did not.

"His passion for making sure that the economy grows for the middle class came through so I'm really proud of him," Obama said after watching the debate aboard Air Force One on the way home after a day of campaigning in battleground Florida.

Ryan came back at the vice president with harsh talking points, a flurry of statistics and a sharp economic warning: In another Obama term, he said, "Watch out, middle class, the tax bill's coming to you."

Romney, who watched the debate at the end of a campaign day in North Carolina, got on the phone to Ryan immediately afterward to congratulate him. Ann Romney told a rally in the western Michigan town of Hudsonville on Friday that the debate showed why her husband chose Ryan as his running mate.

"What he saw in Paul was a level head, very smart. You can tell, it came through, the kind of character that this man has," Mrs. Romney said.

Ryan declined to engage in any morning-after analysis while stopping for breakfast with his family Friday at Josie's diner in Lexington on his way out of Kentucky. All he would allow is that he felt great about how the debate turned out.

Attention now shifts to the two remaining debates between Obama and Romney: Tuesday's "town hall" style faceoff in Hempstead, N.Y., and a final showdown, over foreign policy, on Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla.

And the campaigns get right back into the thick of it on Friday, looking for ways large and small to shift more voters in their direction in the small number of states whose electoral votes are still up for grabs: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.

After his Virginia rally, Romney was linking up with Ryan in Ohio. Biden and wife, Jill, will woo young voters at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Obama will spend a rare day in Washington, preparing for the next two debates and taking campaign contest winners out to eat.

The president has set aside a serious chunk of time for preparation after being faulted for underestimating the importance of his first debate with Romney. He'll be hunkered down in Williamsburg, Va., from Saturday until Tuesday rehearsing with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, acting as a proxy for Romney.

The Democrats' monthlong "gotta vote" bus tour will be in Milwaukee on Friday, just in time to rev up supporters for the opening of Wisconsin's early voting season on Monday.

___

Associated Press writers Nancy Benac and Ben Feller in Washington, Phil Elliott in Louisville, Ky., and John Flesher in Hudsonville, Mich., contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/romney-white-house-spar-over-libya-attacks-170723214--election.html

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Classic Board Games For Family Fun - NAS Meridian Homes

Games nights at home at NAS Meridian Family Housing are a great way for the whole family to spend time together. These classic board games are perfect for holidays, rainy days, or any time you want to get the family together for some fun. They?re simple enough for the kids, but they?re sure to bring out the kid in you, too. You just might get hooked!

Battleship
This thrilling cat-and-mouse game of naval strategy is especially great for boys. Use deduction and a bit of luck to sink your opponent's ships!

Clue
There?s a different guilty party each time you play this addictive classic. Collect clues to try to figure out "whodunit."

Scrabble
Big words win the day in this crossword-style game. It's a great way to work on spelling and vocabulary with your kids? without them realizing how much they're learning!

Pictionary
Kids and adults alike love this energetic and hilarious game. The objective is to draw?your selected word in hopes of getting your teammates to guess it.?

Connect Four
Inspired by tic-tac-toe, Connect Four's object is to drop four checkers into a row while simultaneously preventing your opponent from "connecting four." It?s simple, fast, and fun.

Source: http://blog.nasmeridianhomes.com/2012/10/11/classic-board-games-for-family-fun/

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Like songbirds and people, mice can learn new tunes

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Scientists have found the first evidence that the ability to learn vocalizations, a capacity so far believed to be restricted to a handful of bird and mammal species like humans and dolphins, is shared by another species: mice. The new research, published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Erich Jarvis and Gustavo Arriaga at Duke University and colleagues, shows for the first time that mice share certain behavioral and brain mechanisms involved in vocal learning with songbirds and humans and can learn new vocal patterns.

Most animals make sounds of some sort, but only a few have the capacity to modify the sequence and pitch of sounds to create songs and speech, collectively referred to as vocal learning. So far, only three groups of birds - parrots, hummingbirds and songbirds - and some mammalian species - humans, whales, dolphins, sea lions, bats and elephants - have shown the behaviors and brain circuits that are considered essential to the process of learned vocalization. Despite decades of research, scientists have yet to find evidence of these behavioral and neurological hallmarks in other species, including those closely related to vocal learners such as non-human primates.

Though the series of ultrasonic vocalizations referred to as mouse 'song' was previously known, this study provides the first evidence that mice can change at least one acoustic feature of these vocalizations based on their social exposure. When two male mice of different strains were housed together, the animals gradually learned to match the pitch of their songs to one another, suggesting a capacity for learning not previously known. The researchers state that this is a limited form of vocal learning, but do not know whether other more complex features, such as syntax and frequency modulation, could be learned.

The researchers found that mice can form some of the necessary connections between different brain regions and the vocal motor neurons to control the sounds they make, a feature so far found in song learning birds and humans. Though the connections are more limited in mice compared to humans or songbirds, Jarvis states, "This is an exciting find, as the presence of direct forebrain control over the vocal neurons may be one of the most critical aspects in the human evolution of speech."

According to the researchers, their discovery was made possible by using modern techniques not previously available. They also clarify that the connections in mice are much more primitive than in songbirds or humans, but they may reveal some of the intermediate steps in the process by which vocalization evolved in advanced vocal learners like songbirds and humans.

###

Arriaga G, Zhou EP, Jarvis ED (2012) Of Mice, Birds, and Men: The Mouse Ultrasonic Song System Has Some Features Similar to Humans and Song-Learning Birds. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46610. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046610

Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org

Thanks to Public Library of Science for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124410/Like_songbirds_and_people__mice_can_learn_new_tunes

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The Deadly Disgrace of Obama?s Pro-Terrorist Lawyers (Michellemalkin)

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Negative Credit Financial Consolidation Loans: A Trusty Debt ...

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Source: http://blogbellezza.com/negative_credit_financial_consolidation_loans_trusty_debt_treatment_solution

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