Chinese incursion leaves India on verge of crisis

NEW DELHI (AP) ? The platoon of Chinese soldiers slipped across the boundary into India in the middle of the night, according to Indian officials. They were ferried across the bitterly cold moonscape in Chinese army vehicles, then got out to traverse a dry creek bed with a helicopter hovering overhead for protection.

They finally reached their destination and pitched a tent in the barren Depsang Valley in the Ladakh region, a symbolic claim of sovereignty deep inside Indian-held territory. So stealthy was the operation that India did not discover the incursion until a day later, Indian officials said.

China denies any incursion, but Indian officials say that for two weeks, the soldiers have refused to move back over the so-called Line of Actual Control that divides Indian-ruled territory from Chinese-run land, leaving the government on the verge of a crisis with its powerful northeastern neighbor.

Indian officials fear that if they react with force, the face-off could escalate into a battle with the powerful People's Liberation Army. But doing nothing would leave a Chinese outpost deep in territory India has ruled since independence.

"If they have come 19 kilometers into India, it is not a minor LAC violation. It is a deliberate military operation. And even as India protests, more tents have come up," said Sujit Dutta, a China specialist at the Jamia Milia Islamia university in New Delhi.

"Clearly, the Chinese are testing India to see how far they can go," he said.

That is not China's stated view.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Thursday that Chinese troops had been carrying out normal patrols and had not crossed the boundary.

"China is firmly opposed to any acts that involve crossing the Line of Actual Control and sabotaging the status quo," she said at a daily briefing in Beijing as she was repeatedly questioned about the dispute.

Hua said talks to defuse the dispute were ongoing and that it should not affect relations. "As we pointed out many times, the China-India border issue is one which was left over from the past. The two sides reached important consensus that this issue should not affect the overall bilateral relations," Hua said.

Local army commanders from both sides have held three meetings over the crisis, according to Indian officials. India's foreign secretary called in the Chinese ambassador to register a strong protest. Yet the troops did not move, and even pitched a second tent, Indian officials said.

The timing of the crisis, weeks before Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is to visit India, has surprised many here. The Chinese leader's decision to make India his first trip abroad since taking office two months ago had been seen as an important gesture toward strengthening ties between rival powers that have longstanding border disputes but also growing trade relations.

Manoj Joshi, a defense analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, said the timing of the incursion raises questions about "whether there is infighting within the Chinese leadership, or whether someone is trying to upstage Li."

Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said Wednesday that while he had no plans to cancel a trip to Beijing next week to prepare for Li's visit, the government could reconsider in the coming week.

"A week is a long time in politics," he told reporters.

Indian politicians accused the scandal-plagued government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of floundering in fear before China.

"China realizes that India has a weak government, and a prime minister who is powerless," said Yashwant Sinha, a former foreign minister from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.

He demanded a stronger response. "A bully will back off the moment it realizes that it's dealing with a country which will not submit to its will," Sinha said.

Former Defense Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav called the government "cowardly and incompetent." He warned that China was trying to annex more territory to add to the spoils it took following its victory over India in a brief 1962 border war.

Defense Minister A.K. Antony countered that India is "united in its commitment to take every possible step to safeguard our interests."

Supporters of the right-wing Shiv Sena party burned effigies of Singh, Antony and other top officials Wednesday, demanding India retaliate by barring Chinese imports.

China is India's biggest trading partner, with bilateral trade heavily skewed in China's favor, crossing $75 billion in 2011.

Analysts feel linking a troop withdrawal to continued trade could work.

"The Chinese have to learn that such aggression cannot be delinked from trade," Dutta said.

Though the two countries have held 15 rounds of talks, their border disputes remain unresolved. India says China is occupying 38,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles) in the Aksai Chin plateau in the western Himalayas, while China claims around 90,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Analysts said they were baffled by Beijing's motives, since its actions could force India to move closer to Beijing's biggest rival, the United States.

"The Chinese for some reason don't seem able to see that," said Joshi.

China's aggressive posture could also force India to accelerate its own military modernization program, analysts said.

The stand-off may eventually be resolved diplomatically, "but what it really shows is the PLA's contempt for our military capability," former Indian navy chief Sushil Kumar wrote in The Indian Express newspaper.

It could also push the government to agree to the army's longstanding demand to create its own strike corps on the border.

"By needling the Indians, they are helping us to accelerate our modernization," Joshi said.

___

Associated Press researcher Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-incursion-leaves-india-verge-crisis-044158564.html

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Police, media claim carrier, manufacturers aren't doing enough to prevent phone thefts, take all the wrong angles

Today the New York Times published a piece on the explosion of cellphone thefts, the rise of the black market systems that wipe the phones and resell them, and the efforts - or alleged lack thereof - of carriers and manufacturers in not doing enough to prevent the thefts in the first place. The piece approaches the problem from all the wrong angles, and here's why...

Things go south almost immediately with a quote from District of Columbia Chief of Police Cathy L. Lanier, who says "The carriers are not innocent in this whole game. They are making a profit off this." Technically, yes, if a customer has to walk into a carrier store and buy a new phone because their previous one was stolen, then the carrier can take a profit on it. But the same rule applies if somebody steals my laptop or my car or my coffee when I'm not looking. I'm going to have to go buy a new one, and the seller is going to take a profit. That's how business works. Of course, with all of those excepting my unattended cup of coffee I can purchase insurance to cover their replacement cost on the occasion of all sorts of events, event thefts. That includes that smartphone.

I don't want to go down the "blame the victim" route, but let's be honest here: protecting something you hold in your hand and making it less desirable to purloin is not the job of manufacturers or carriers. In fact, they're in the business of making devices more desirable, because they want you to buy them. That a product being more attractive to legitimate buyers also makes it more attractive to thieves is just the way things are.

Once you walk out of the store with that shiny new iPhone or Lumia or Galaxy or BlackBerry, it's no longer the carrier's or manufacturer's responsibility to maintain physical security of the device. It's yours. Chief Lanier's jurisdiction saw a record of 1829 cellphone thefts in 2012, an average of nearly seven per day.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg singled out the theft of Apple iPhones and iPads accounted for 14% of crimes, supposedly making them single-handedly responsible for an uptick in the overall crime level for the city. While there's little doubt that many New Yorkers were robbed specifically for their Apple-branded devices, that 14% involves all crimes where iPhones and iPads were stolen, not just people who were targeted for daring to brandish an iPhone in public.

Continuing to harp on the "iPhone thefts driving rising crime rates" theme, we have to consider that the iPhone and iPad are highly popular devices. They sell incredibly well and report after report have shown that owners use them more heavily than those who have purchased other devices. There are more people who are using iPhones and other smartphones on the streets, and thus more targets of opportunity.

As The New York Times points out, carriers and manufacturers are working to make stealing smartphones they sell more of a pain. The major US carriers have partnered with law enforcement across the country to launch a stolen phone database. It is essentially a list of the unique IMEI numbers (International Mobile station Equipment Identity) from phones that have been reported stolen. Once a phone's on the list, in theory an attempt to activate it on the network should throw up red flags.

Unfortunately for these efforts, if you know what you're doing it's relatively easy to modify a phone's IMEI and circumvent the database. There's no law against it, but that's something that New York Representative Eliot Engel (D) wants to change with the introduction of the Cell Phone Theft Protection Act to the United States Congress. The legislation is intended to discourage the theft of cell phones by "requiring wireless commercial services to cut off service to a stolen phone" by creating a national stole phone database (done - independently by carriers and law enforcement without prompting of the federal government), requiring all phones in the US to have unique ID numbers (done - the IMEI was created by the industry for exactly this reason), mandating that carriers make it possible for customers to remotely wipe their devices (manufacturers are on this), and making it illegal to alter a phone's IMEI.

The last point is really the only "new" item to US law in Engel's legislation. It's already against the law in countries like the UK and Latvia to alter a phone's IMEI, expressly with the goal of suppressing phone theft and resale. There's just one rub, though: the act of stealing is already illegal. Altering an IMEI is trivial compared to actually stealing the phone, making doing so illegal isn't going to cause any crook to second guess what they're doing.

Manufacturers too have been on the track of working to make their phones less desirable to be stolen, or at the very least protect the data of the owner once they are. Apple, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and others offer built-in services for their devices that enable you to remotely track, ring, lock, and wipe devices on your account (BlackBerry and Microsoft also allow you to display a message on the device). These sort of features aren't built into Android by Google, however, unless you're on a Google Apps account. Numerous third-party apps are available to add remote security features to Android devices.

The issue with those services is one of consumer awareness. Most simply aren't aware that they have the option to remotely wipe a device if it's been stolen. Many would probably be pleased by the ability to remotely command their phone make a sound so they can figure out where they left it last night.

Of course, all of these services do no good if the phone's radios are turned off - once it's off the internet, no amount of back-end services are going to enable you to remotely wipe the phone. Criminals have grown saavy enough to know that the first thing you do after stealing somebody's phone is turn it off, if not immediately wipe it yourself. To imply, as Chief Lanier, Mayor Bloomberg, Representative Engel, and others have, that iPhones and Galaxies and Lumias are driving crime rates and that it's the responsibility of carriers and manufacturers to do something about it is absurd.

Carriers and manufacturers have been for some time working to minimize the incentive to steal smartphones. They're operating on market forces; consumers don't like it when the smartphone they've come to rely upon is stolen, so the industry has an incentive of their own to make it less desirable to steal them in the first place. The manufacturers and carriers that build the best systems to protect the data on a smartphone (and that's usually the most distressing part to anybody who has lost possession of their device) and do the best job of marketing that to customers will reap the benefits from customers who opt to buy their product.

The same game played out nearly a century ago as the automobile. As automobiles began to grow in popularity, so did theft of the new horseless carriages. Manufacturers eventually began to include alarms and immobilizers to deter against vehicle theft. Today, cars can be equipped with two-way alarm systems that alert you of exactly what's happening to your in distress automobile. But that hasn't stopped grand theft auto in the slightest sense. There are more cars on the road today than at any time in history, and everything from expensive and security-laden new Cadillac Escalade SUVs to old Honda Accord and Toyota Camry sedans continue to be stolen every day. If something is desirable, thieves will find a way to get their hands on it.

As technology advances, so will the techniques of criminals. No amount of technology is going to make it any less desirable to steal the smartphone I hold in my hand. It's an expensive piece of technology, and while we can do much to safeguard the data it holds, that data isn't what thieves are usually after - it's the hardware itself. Protecting my phone once I've walked away from the sales desk in the carrier store is my responsibility and my responsibility only. I don't hold Starbucks as responsible for the physical security of my coffee nor would I consider Honda complicit if somebody stole by car.

Just because it's a popular target for thieves doesn't mean make my smartphone any different.

Source: The New York Times

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/JU021ctDwYQ/story01.htm

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News from the Front in War on Cancer--Mission Not Accomplished ...

Genetic sequencing has dumped a mountain of data into researchers' laps, but it hasn't yielded a silver bullet to cure cancer

By Marissa Fessenden

SEQUENCE: A DNA microarray Image: Public Domain image created by National Institutes of Health via Wikimedia Commons

Janet Rowley noticed something odd about the glowing chromosomes revealed by her microscope. It was the early 1970s, the first years of the so-called "war on cancer," and she was using a new staining technique to examine cells from patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a cancer of the blood that was almost always fatal. The technique highlighted bands within the chromosomes, and she could see an extra piece on the end of chromosome 9. That fragment was nearly the same size as a "missing" chunk of chromosome 22 that other researchers had detected a decade earlier. To Rowley, it looked as if the tips of these two chromosomes had swapped places, or translocated. During the next few years she found two other cases of chromosomal translocation in different forms of leukemia. The finds forever changed the way scientists thought about cancer.

Shuffled chromosomes in leukemia established that broken, scrambled and messed-up genes cause cancer. The genetic code details when cells should grow, divide and eventually die. Cancer is a disease of misinformation?cells ignore the rules, growing despite multiple molecular signals telling them to stop and invading other tissues because they no longer respond to biological messages to stay put or even destroy themselves. In the past four decades scientists have identified thousands of genetic mistakes that either cause cancer or boost the risk of developing it. The effects of these typos are sometimes dramatic?the gene variants BRCA1 and BRCA2 can boost women's lifetime risk of developing breast cancer from 12 percent to 60 percent. Some errors are found only in cancer cells themselves; other changes can be passed from generation to generation. The latter are the mistakes that may be passed down and boost the risk of developing cancer?this is the inherited genetic risk, or the reason that people with a familial history of a disease may want to get tested earlier or more often.

As researchers uncover more genetic mistakes and delve deeper into the human genome, it may be possible to pin down the exact probabilities conferred by inherited genetic risk. If clinicians could scan a healthy person's genes for variations that explain their probability of developing cancer, perhaps they could prevent or catch the disease before it became a problem: Spit into this vial and the doctor will tell you what will ail you in 20 years.

Despite the plummeting cost of DNA sequencing technology, much of the information is a jumble of alphabet soup. Science can figure out what gene variants and markers a person has, but they can't tell exactly what it means for his or her health. It will take researchers years to untangle the genetics of cancer. Even large steps, heralded as a major advances, answer few questions and pose many more.

This spring, a massive international collaboration doubled the number of known genetic regions associated with the risk of breast, prostate or ovarian cancers. The genetic markers are signpost that researchers can follow to better understand the biology of these cancers. Only a few of the 74 newly identified markers are shared by more than one type of cancer, underscoring cancer's complexity. Yet exactly how the findings can inform public health recommendations remains to be discovered. Each marker is associated with small modifications of risk, but the effects add up. The findings could lead to more accurate cancer screening and hint at ways cancers could be caught before the disease becomes aggressive. Only further study, however, will show where to draw the lines between risk percentages that tell patients "not to worry" or "get tested now."

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=news-from-cancer-war

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Reese Witherspoon Shouldn't Be Laughing About Her Arrest

Reese Witherspoon knows she's not above the law, so why is she laughing off her arrest? In a Thursday appearance on Good Morning America, the Mud actress spoke about her husband's DUI, and her accompanying disorderly conduct charge, for the first time. (Watch below.) While she did acknowledge their "poor judgement," she also joked about how it was just "one of those nights." Really, Reese?

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/reese-witherspoon-shouldnt-be-laughing-about-her-arrest/1-a-534995?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Areese-witherspoon-shouldnt-be-laughing-about-her-arrest-534995

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Obama to tap Pritzker, Froman for economic jobs

A White House official says President Barack Obama will name a longtime fundraiser to run the Commerce Department and a top economic adviser as the next U.S. Trade Representative. The Commerce nominee is expected to be Penny Pritzker, left, shown in a Oct. 4, 2010 file photo and The U.S. Trade Representative is expected to be Mike Froman seen in an Oct. 8, 2010 file photo. Obama will announce both nominations from the White House Thursday morning May 2, 2013 before departing for Mexico. (AP Photo/File)

A White House official says President Barack Obama will name a longtime fundraiser to run the Commerce Department and a top economic adviser as the next U.S. Trade Representative. The Commerce nominee is expected to be Penny Pritzker, left, shown in a Oct. 4, 2010 file photo and The U.S. Trade Representative is expected to be Mike Froman seen in an Oct. 8, 2010 file photo. Obama will announce both nominations from the White House Thursday morning May 2, 2013 before departing for Mexico. (AP Photo/File)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama on Thursday will nominate a longtime fundraiser to run the Commerce Department and a top economic adviser as the next U.S. Trade Representative, a White House official said.

Commerce nominee Penny Pritzker, a businesswoman, philanthropist and Hyatt hotel heiress, is Obama's final pick to fill vacancies among Cabinet secretaries in his second term. The Commerce post has been vacant since last summer, when former Secretary John Bryson resigned after he said he suffered a seizure that led to a series of traffic collisions.

USTR nominee Michael Froman is one of Obama's senior economic advisers and a former Citigroup executive. The Cabinet-level post performs as the administration's top adviser and negotiator on international trade. If confirmed by the Senate, Froman would replace Ron Kirk, a former Dallas mayor who stepped down as trade representative in February after serving in the post for all of Obama's first term.

Obama will announce both nominations from the White House Thursday morning before departing for Mexico. The White House official insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the nominations ahead of Obama.

If confirmed, Pritzker would become the fourth woman serving as secretary in Obama's current Cabinet. She also would be the wealthiest in the Cabinet by far, with Forbes estimating her net worth at $1.85 billion and ranking her as the 277th richest American.

Pritzker is a lifelong Chicagoan who has known Obama since the 1990s and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for both his presidential campaigns. She was his finance chairwoman in 2008, served as co-chair of Obama for America 2012 and gave $250,000 to help put on his inaugural festivities in January.

Obama has called her a fearless leader for his candidacy "who never wavered, never waffled and cracked the whip with grace and good cheer."

Obama selected her for his 16-member Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board in 2009. When that board expired, Obama included her in his 26-member Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Pritzker has led several companies and currently serves as chair of investment firms Pritzker Realty Group and Artemis Real Estate Partners. She's also on the board of the Hyatt Hotels Corp., the chain co-founded by her father.

She's donated generously to education and the arts and resigned from the Chicago Board of Education in March as she was being vetted for the Commerce nomination.

Froman, Obama's deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, is steeped in the issues confronting the trade representative.

He has been Obama's main representative at international economic summits such as the meetings of the Group of Eight and Group of 20. He is responsible for coordinating White House policy on international trade, investments, energy, climate and development.

Froman served during President Bill Clinton's administration as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin. He also worked as deputy assistant secretary for Eurasia and the Middle East and did a White House stint similar to his current job under Obama.

Before joining the Obama economic and national security teams he worked in various capacities at Citigroup, including managing partner of the Wall Street bank. He also has been a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and a resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

Among the top ongoing trade issues are negotiations over the Trans-Pacific partnership, an Asia-Pacific trading bloc that is key to Obama's efforts to boost exports to Asia. Members include the U.S., Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Vietnam, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei, Singapore and Peru. Last month, the U.S. approved Japan's entry into negotiations on the trading bloc.

___

Associated Press writer Nedra Pickler contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-05-02-Obama-Nominations/id-6d2cf27037eb4913bc18f13a67c669f1

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Reddit's reworked privacy policy clarifies data handling, comes into effect May 15th

The online Aladdin's cave and AMA forum Reddit has revealed a revamped privacy policy intended to make clear exactly how it deals with users' data. Legalese is notably absent, with credit for that going to Lauren Gelman, a legal consultant who's previously worked with the likes of the EFF -- a member, like Reddit, of the Internet Defense League. Essentially, the new policy is geared towards allowing "your participation to remain as anonymous as you choose," with the website stating that any of your data won't be shared without consent, unless the law requires it. Even then, you will be notified, with the only exception being a court order that prevents it. Reddit also notes that deleting your account will remove your username from posts and comments, but they will remain on the site. As only the last edit performed stays on the servers, however, you could trek back through your history and strip everything out to finalize your departure. There's much more in the announcement post and full policy document over at the source links, in case you wanna have a read before it all kicks in on May 15th.

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The Slash-and-Burn House Republican Yahoo Caucus Rampages On (Atlantic Politics Channel)

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