Two More Pakistani Polio Workers Killed

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A roadside bomb killed two polio workers in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, in the third such attack this week on workers struggling to immunize children against the crippling disease.

The explosion struck as the two workers, with a United Nations-backed campaign, were traveling by motorcycle near Parachinar in the Kurram District, near the border with Afghanistan.

It was the first such attack on health workers in that area, said a senior local official speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity, offering further evidence that a Taliban-led campaign of violence and intimidation against polio workers is spreading across northwestern Pakistan.

Despite an internationally supported campaign to halt polio in Pakistan, infection rates have soared across the country in the past year, coinciding with a wave of militant attacks against the poorly protected workers at the heart of the effort. Some militants accuse polio workers of using vaccination as a cover to spy on behalf of the United States — a claim that has been fueled by the revelation that the C.I.A. used a vaccination drive as cover for the effort to find Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in early 2011.

The violence has badly affected vaccination efforts, which involve tens of thousands of health workers who repeatedly administer cheap oral vaccines to children under 5.

Nine polio workers were killed in a string of attacks across the country in December. On Tuesday, suspected militants fatally shot a police officer who had been escorting female polio workers in the Swabi District, 50 miles east of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province.

The shooting prompted officials to suspend the campaign in Swabi, but they pressed ahead in other parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the adjoining tribal belt. Another polio worker was wounded by a man with an ax in an unrelated episode on Tuesday.

It was unclear, however, whether the latest killings were directly related to the polio campaign. The Kurram District has a history of violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and the local official said it was unclear whether the explosion targeted the two workers for their links to the polio campaign or for their religious affiliation.

Violence against polio workers is not confined to the turbulent northwest. United Nations workers in Karachi, the port city on the Arabian Sea, have also suffered attacks that have set back efforts to wipe the disease from the city, Pakistan’s most populous.

Pakistan is one of three countries, along with Nigeria and Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic.

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Apple loses a U.S. appeals bid in Samsung patent fight

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Thursday rejected Apple Inc‘s request to revive its bid for a sales ban on Samsung‘s Galaxy Nexus smartphone, dashing the iPhone maker’s attempt to recover crucial leverage in the global patent wars.

Apple had asked the full Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to revisit a decision in October by a three-judge panel of the same court. The panel rejected Apple’s request to impose a sales ban on Samsung’s Nexus smartphone ahead of a trial set for March 2014.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. A Samsung representative could not immediately be reached.

The fight in appeals court comes after Apple won a $ 1.05 billion verdict last year against Samsung in a U.S. District Court in California. The same trial judge will preside over the legal battle surrounding the Nexus phone, which involves a patent not included in the earlier trial.

The fight has been widely viewed as a proxy war between Apple and Google Inc. Samsung’s hot-selling Galaxy smartphones and tablets run on Google’s Android operating system, which Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, once denounced as a “stolen product.”

In its October ruling against Apple, the appeals court raised the bar for potentially market-crippling injunctions on product sales based on narrow patents for phone features. The legal precedent puts Samsung in a much stronger position by allowing its products to remain on store shelves while it fights a global patent battle against Apple over smartphone technology.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, in San Jose, California, who has presided over much of the Apple/Samsung litigation in the United States, cited the appeals’ court decision in a December order rejecting Apple’s request for permanent sales bans on several Samsung phones. Apple has appealed Koh’s ruling.

Apple wanted the full Federal Circuit of Appeals, made up of nine active judges, to reverse the earlier ruling. But in a brief order on Thursday, the court rejected Apple’s request without detailed explanation or any published dissents.

Several experts had believed that Apple faced long odds, as the legal issues in play were not considered controversial enough to spur full court review.

Apple could still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the high court has made it more difficult for patent plaintiffs to secure sales injunctions in recent years.

The case in the Federal Circuit is Apple Inc. vs Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 12-1507.

(Reporting By Dan Levine; Editing by John Wallace, Grant McCool and Leslie Adler)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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One Direction Boys' Moms Are Thrilled, Though Not About Those Tattoos

By Tim Nudd

01/31/2013 at 02:30 PM EST

One Direction, (from left) Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Harry Styles

Jon Furniss/AP

If you think it's been an emotionally crazy few years for the members of One Direction, imagine how their mothers feel.

"My mum just cries the whole time. My mum literally has not stopped crying for the past two and a half years," Liam Payne said Thursday on ITV's Daybreak show in Britain.

The boys may be world famous, but they insist their families are still their biggest fans.

"It's really nice just to like look out [at a concert] and see your family, however embarrassing they're being," said Zayn Malik. "Even if they're on the chair dancing, like, it's just cool."

Just don't invite them on stage. "Our mums would absolutely poo themselves if we brought them on stage," Louis Tomlinson said. "My mum wouldn't know what to do."

One things the moms are a little less thrilled about? The tattoos their sons have been getting.

"My mum went crazy about the whole tattoo idea," Payne said. Malik added that their manager, Simon Cowell, hasn't said anything about the tattoos, "but our mums have been like, 'Maybe you're getting a bit too much.' "

The boys also denied rumors they were house hunting in Los Angeles. "No," said Tomlinson. "I think someone just sits down and says, 'What can I write about today?' "

In any case, they may have a grander destination in mind. Both Tomlinson and Harry Styles revealed in the interview that they'd love to go to space.

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APNewsBreak: EPA moves to ban some rodent poisons

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to ban the sale of a dozen rat and mouse poisons sold under the popular D-Con brand in an effort to protect children and pets.

The agency said Wednesday it hopes to reduce the thousands of accidental exposures that occur every year from rodent-control products. Children and pets are at risk for exposure because the products typically are placed on floors.

The agency had targeted a handful of companies two years ago, saying they needed to develop new products that are safer for children, pets and wildlife. All but Reckitt Benckiser Inc., manufacturer of D-Con, did so.

The company will have at least 30 days to request a hearing before an administrative law judge. If no hearing is requested, the ban will take effect.

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Wall Street edges lower as Fed keeps stimulus in place

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks edged lower on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve left in place its bond-buying stimulus plan, saying economic growth had stalled but indicating the pullback was likely temporary.

Describing the U.S. job market as continuing its modest pace of improvement, the Fed repeated a pledge to keep purchasing securities until employment improves substantially.

The statement from the Fed follows data that showed the economy, as measured by gross domestic product, unexpectedly contracted in the fourth quarter. Economists stressed that the 0.1 percent contraction, caused partly by a plunge in government spending and lower business inventories, is not an indicator of recession.

"It is interesting that the Fed decided to focus on the GDP report, pointing to how activity slowed because of transitory factors. That sums up the GDP report. I am a bit puzzled why the Fed focused solely on one report. I would argue that this was a slightly dovish report," said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 13.32 points, or 0.10 percent, at 13,941.10. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was down 1.90 points, or 0.13 percent, at 1,505.94. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 2.11 points, or 0.07 percent, at 3,151.55.

The S&P 500 held above 1,500, seen by technical analysts as an inflection point that will determine the overall direction in the near term. The index is on track to post its best month since October 2011 and its best January since 1997.

"This is a very modest pullback after a steep run," said Paul Zemsky, head of asset allocation at ING Investment Management in New York.

"It is too soon for the Fed to start talking about the end of (their bond buying program); the economy needs stimulus to sustain this recovery."

Both Boeing Co and Amazon.com shares gained after earnings beat expectations, continuing a trend this quarter of high-profile names advancing after results.

Amazon rose 5.1 percent to $273.51 and Boeing rose 1.1 percent to $74.43.

Thomson Reuters data showed that of the 192 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings this season 68.8 percent have been above analyst expectations, which is a higher proportion than over the past four quarters and above the average since 1994.

Chesapeake Energy rose 8 percent to $20.48 a day after it said Aubrey McClendon would step down as chief executive. The last year has been marked by civil and criminal probes into the second-largest U.S. natural gas producer.

Research In Motion shares fell 6.3 percent to $14.67 after the company, which is changing its name to BlackBerry, unveiled a long-delayed line of smartphones in hopes of a comeback into a market it once dominated.

Giving the market extra support, private sector employment topped forecasts with the ADP National Employment report showing 192,000 jobs added in January, higher than the 165,000 expectation.

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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Somalia Moves to Prosecute Woman Who Accused Soldiers of Rape

NAIROBI, Kenya — The Somali government, in a move that has outraged human rights groups, has charged a woman who said she was gang-raped by soldiers with making a false accusation and having “insulted and lowered the dignity of a National Institution,” crimes that could mean many years in prison.

The woman’s husband has also been jailed — essentially for backing up his wife’s allegations — and so has a Somali journalist who interviewed the woman, even though he never published any information.

The Somali government said that the woman was lying for financial gain and that she later admitted that her story was “bogus.”

But Somali advocacy groups criticized the government’s hard line on this case, which they said would prompt many rape victims to remain silent despite years of trying to empower them to come forward.

“Women are now asking me, ‘Who’s going to protect us?’ ” said Fartuun Adan, who runs a shelter for abused women in Somalia. “They’re saying, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ ”

There is no question that rape by armed men is a serious problem in Somalia. Though Somalia has become significantly more stable, there are still thousands of young women living in squalid displaced-persons camps and loose bands of soldiers and other gunmen roaming around with heavy weapons, essentially doing as they please.

This week, a United Nations official reported more than 1,100 cases of sexual violence last year in Somalia, a figure that the United Nations considers alarming but an underestimation.

When Somalia’s new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, took office last year, he announced that his government was committed to cracking down on rapists and protecting vulnerable women.

But in the past few weeks, Somali government officials have aggressively pursued the woman who made the recent rape allegation, saying that her story was “simply baseless” and that a medical examiner confirmed she had not been raped.

Several people in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, who have met the woman said she was forced by the police to recant. The woman, whose identity has been released by the Somali government but is being withheld by The New York Times, is 27 years old and has been living in a displaced-persons camp in Mogadishu with several young children. She said she was raped last August by five members of the government’s security services who forced her at gunpoint into an abandoned high school and then took turns assaulting her. She was on her way to get food for the children at the time, she said.

Her prosecution appears to be linked to an article by Al Jazeera published on Jan. 6 that detailed rape allegations against government soldiers and apparently embarrassed the new government, which recently has been making the rounds with donor nations, asking for millions to help rebuild Somalia.

But Al Jazeera did not base its article on the woman’s allegations. After the article appeared, police officials found out that the woman had accused government soldiers of rape and then they arrested Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, a freelance journalist who had interviewed her, even though he did not work with Al Jazeera or publish any of his information.

Mr. Ibrahim, 25, has been in jail for more than two weeks, along with the woman’s husband. The three appeared in court on Tuesday, along with two others connected to the case, and more hearings are expected next week.

In the recent past, the worst culprit for rape in Somalia was the Shabab militant group, which presented itself as a morally righteous rebel force and the defender of Islam, even though it had been seizing women and girls as spoils of war, gang-raping and abusing them as part of its reign of terror. Many victims and witnesses said that Shabab militants forced families to hand over girls for arranged marriages that often lasted no more than a few weeks and were essentially sexual slavery, a cheap way to bolster their ranks’ flagging morale. One teenage girl who refused to be locked into such a marriage was buried up to her neck in sand and then had her head bashed in, rock by rock.

But as the Shabab have been pushed out by African Union peacekeepers from most of the areas they used to control, government troops are now a bigger problem in terms of preying upon defenseless civilians, human rights advocates say.

Lisa Shannon, an American who co-founded Sister Somalia, an organization that helps rape victims in Somalia, recently visited Mogadishu, where she heard many allegations of government soldiers’ gang-raping women.

She said the attacks were “happening in camps, happening around town, it has not slowed down at all.”

She called the case against the woman who made the recent rape allegation a “huge red flag.”

“It’s taken a long time to get women in Somalia to speak openly about this,” Ms. Shannon said on Wednesday. “Now they are all terrified.”

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The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem

BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]

BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]

This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.

Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.

And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Lindsay Lohan's Day in Court: We Put Her Style on Trial

Stylewatch
Style News Now

01/30/2013 at 02:00 PM ET

Splash News Online (2)

By now, we’re sort of used to Lindsay Lohan‘s antics, but it seems that we’ll never get accustomed to her unusual outfit choices. Case in point: the two very different (but equally eyebrow-raising) styles she sported within 12 hours this week.

First up, Lohan traveled from N.Y.C. to L.A.Tuesday night in an ensemble that has never been worn before on a plane — and with good reason. From her billowy leather trousers to her fur-trimmed leather jacket, we can’t imagine a stiffer, sweatier travel ensemble. Add a floppy brown hat and you’ve got a look that’s very Indiana-Jones-meets-Kim-Kardashian.

Then she showed up (on time!) to her probation violation pretrial hearing in L.A. on Wednesday morning in an outfit that mixed a courtroom-ready dress with a nightclub-ready heel. A marked improvement from her leather look, but still completely inappropriate for the situation.

The star has six weeks to come up with a better outfit (her trial date is March 18), and we’d be happy to assist in any way we can. Lindsay: call us! Tell us: What would you do to fix Lohan’s style?

PHOTOS: TELL US WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT MORE QUESTIONABLE STAR STYLE!

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Soldier looks forward to driving with new arms

BALTIMORE (AP) — A soldier who lost all four limbs in a roadside bombing in Iraq says he's looking forward to driving and swimming with new arms after undergoing a double-arm transplant.

"I just want to get the most out of these arms, and just as goals come up, knock them down and take it absolutely as far as I can," Brendan Marrocco said Tuesday.

The 26-year-old New Yorker spoke at a news conference at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was joined by surgeons who performed the operation.

After he was wounded, Marrocco said, he felt fine using prosthetic legs, but he hated not having arms.

"You talk with your hands, you do everything with your hands, basically, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," he said.

Marrocco said his chief desire is to drive the black Dodge Charger that's been sitting in his garage for three years.

"I used to love to drive," he said. "I'm really looking forward to just getting back to that, and just becoming an athlete again."

Although he doesn't expect to excel at soccer, his favorite sport, Marrocco said he'd like to swim and compete in a marathon using a handcycle.

Marrocco joked that military service members sometimes regard themselves as poorly paid professional athletes. His good humor and optimism are among the qualities doctors cited as signs he will recover much of his arm and hand use in two to three years.

"He's a young man with a tremendous amount of hope, and he's stubborn — stubborn in a good way," said Dr. Jaimie Shores, the hospital's clinical director of hand transplantation. "I think the sky's the limit."

Shores said Marrocco has already been trying to use his hands, although he lacks feeling in the fingers, and he's eager to do more as the slow-growing nerves and muscles mend.

"I suspect that he will be using his hands for just about everything as we let him start trying to do more and more. Right now, we're the ones really kind of holding him back at this point," Shores said.

The procedure was only the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant ever done in the United States.

The infantryman was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He is the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War.

Marrocco also received bone marrow from the same donor to minimize the medicine needed to prevent rejection. He said he didn't know much about the donor but "I'm humbled by their gift."

The 13-hour operation on Dec. 18 was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Hopkins.

Marrocco was being released from the hospital Tuesday but will receive intensive therapy for two years at Hopkins and then at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.

After a major surgery, human nerves regenerate at a rate of an inch per month, Lee said.

"The progress will be slow, but the outcome will be rewarding," he added.

___

Associated Press Writer David Dishneau contributed to this story from Hagerstown, Md.

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Defensive stocks extend rally as caution sets in

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Tuesday, led by defensive sectors, in a sign the cash piles recently moving into the market are being put to use by cautious investors to pick up more gains.

The S&P 500 is on track to post its best monthly performance since October 2011 and its best January since 1997 as investors poured $55 billion in new cash into stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds in January, the biggest monthly inflow on record.

Among rising defensive shares, which are companies relatively immune to economic swings, were drugmaker Pfizer, up 1.2 percent to $27.16 after posting earnings and AT&T , 1.5 percent higher at $34.64.

"Cyclicals were moving very nicely, now you see balance with some of the defensives. Many managers use that as an internal hedge in equity portfolios," said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey.

She said the market is cautious ahead of Wednesday's statement following the Federal Reserve's two-day meeting. In addition, defensive stocks would hold up better if Friday's payrolls report surprises on the downside.

The S&P hovered near 1,500, and market technicians say the benchmark is at an inflection point which will determine the overall direction in the near term.

"The public is pouring in now," said Carter Worth, chief market technician at Oppenheimer & Co in New York. "It reflects complacency and that typically leads to hubris, and hubris leads to trouble. Everyone's buying."

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 70.27 points or 0.51 percent, to 13,952.2, the S&P 500 <.spx> gained 6.62 points or 0.44 percent, to 1,506.8 and the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> dropped 3.52 points or 0.11 percent, to 3,150.77.

The top performing sectors on the S&P 500 were healthcare <.spxhc> and telecom services <.splrcl>, so-called defensives, both up more than 1 percent.

The energy sector also advanced, on the back of strong earnings from Valero Energy Corp and a hedge fund move to break up Hess Corp to boost investor returns.

Valero shares jumped 10.3 percent to $42.82 and Hess gained 8.5 percent to $67.80.

The equity gains have largely come on a strong start to earnings season, though results were mixed on Tuesday with Pfizer rising but Ford Motor Co down after its report.

Both companies reported profits that topped expectations, but Ford also forecast a wider loss in its European segment. Ford dropped 5.6 percent to $13.01 as one of the biggest percentage losers on the S&P 500.

Thomson Reuters data showed that of the 174 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings this season, 68.4 percent have been above analyst expectations, which is a higher proportion than over the past four quarters and above the average since 1994.

Disappointing outlooks from Seagate Technology and BMC Software pressured their shares. Seagate lost 9.6 percent to $33.82 and BMC fell 8.5 percent to $40.70.

Software maker VMware Inc lost 21 percent to $77.71 also after a cautious 2013 outlook.

Amazon was the biggest drag on the Nasdaq with a 2.1 percent drop to $270.17 before its results, expected after the closing bell.

U.S. home prices rose in November to rack up their best yearly gain since the housing crisis began, a further sign that the sector is on the mend, but consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in more than a year in the wake of higher taxes for many Americans.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

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