UK orders asset freeze over assassination plot (AP)

LONDON ? Britain's Treasury said Tuesday it had frozen the assets of five men in connection with the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States.

The finance ministry confirmed that it had acted under the Terrorist Asset Freezing Act, after ministers pledged action in response to the purported plan to kill Saudi envoy Adel Al-Jubeir in a bomb attack.

Two men have been charged by U.S. authorities, who accused them of attempting to hire an alleged Mexican drug cartel member to carry out the killing.

U.S. officials have described the plot as a clumsy but serious operation by Iran's elite foreign action unit, the Quds Force.

A spokesman for Britain's Treasury, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with policy, said the ministry had imposed asset freezes against five men.

They include both men charged in the case ? Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old U.S. citizen who also holds an Iranian passport, and Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of Iran's Quds Force, who is at large in Iran.

Britain also froze the assets of three other men ? Hamed Abdollahi, a senior Quds officer alleged to have helped coordinate the plot, Abdul Reza Shahlai and Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds force who allegedly oversaw the plot. The U.S. last week acted against the same five men.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons last week that the alleged plan "would appear to constitute a major escalation in Iran's sponsorship of terrorism outside its borders."

He said talks were ongoing between the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the European Union over whether to impose additional sanctions, which could include measures against Iran's regime, or specific entities.

"We are in close touch with the U.S. authorities and will work to agree an international response," Hague said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said last week that officials at the "highest levels" of the Iranian government must be held accountable.

Iran has strongly denied any involvement in the alleged plot.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111018/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_ambassador_plot

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Saudi takes Iran to U.N. over alleged plot (Reuters)

DUBAI/TEHRAN (Reuters) ? Saudi Arabia has taken a first step to have Iran reported to the United Nations Security Council, a move that could lead to new sanctions, but Tehran dismissed allegations it plotted to kill a top Saudi envoy as a ploy to isolate it.

"Saudi Arabia's permanent mission to the United Nations... formally requested the United Nations Secretary General notify the Security Council of the heinous conspiracy," the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper reported, citing a statement from the kingdom's U.N. mission.

The United States on Tuesday said it had uncovered a plot by two men with links to Iran's security forces to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, by planting a bomb in a Washington restaurant.

One of the men, who allegedly paid a U.S. undercover agent posing as a Mexican drug cartel hitman to carry out the assassination, has been arrested while. The United States says the other is in Iran.

Iran's leadership says the allegation has been cynically engineered to further isolate Tehran -- whose disputed nuclear program has triggered several rounds of international sanctions against it.

"All these pressures are aimed at stopping us from advancing," Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying on Sunday by the official IRNA news agency reported.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday said the alleged plot was a "meaningless and nonsensical accusation.

The Saudi step follows remarks by U.S. President Barack Obama that he would press for "the toughest possible sanctions" against Iran over the alleged plot, and vowed not to take any options off the table - a phrase commonly used to mean the possibility of using force.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said on Wednesday in Vienna that Iran "was responsible" for the alleged plot and said Riyadh would adopt a "measured response."

Iran's Foreign Minister spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast said such "unfriendly" comments were based on U.S. allegations for no which proof had been presented.

"The aim of this American-designed scenario is to hurt Iran's relations with its neighbors and it is wise not to make any hasty and unstudied comments," Mehmanparast was quoted as saying on Sunday by the labor news agency ILNA news agency.

Tensions between Shi'ite Muslim Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia have risen in recent months as Arab uprisings have altered the balance of power in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia earlier this month appeared to blame Iran, without naming it, for instigating clashes between members of the kingdom's Shi'ite minority and security forces on Oct 3 in which 14 people were injured.

(Reporting By Angus McDowall; editing by Sami Aboudi and Jon Boyle)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iran/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111016/wl_nm/us_saudi_iran_un

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[OOC] Gundam Oporation Apactypse

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Occupy Times Square: New York Marches For A Cause

'There's no dollar amount that can fix anything that I can ever hope to achieve in my life,' one protester tells MTV News.
By Natasha Chandel


Demonstrators rally at the Occupation Party
Photo: Natasha Chandel / MTV News

NEW YORK -- Occupy Wall Street might have started as a small demonstration September 17, finding a home in New York's Zuccotti Park, but since then, it has grown into a revolutionary movement, spanning 951 cities in 82 countries.

On Saturday night (October 15), an Occupation Party was to start at 5 p.m. ET sharp in New York's Times Square. At around 4:45 p.m., a few hundred people had congregated. By 6:30 p.m., the number had easily reached the thousands.

An extension of Occupy Wall Street, the Occupation Party had gathered in the hub of New York consumerism, Times Square, to peacefully yet heartily protest corporate greed, nationwide unemployment and unethical governmental practices. They set out to march from their starting point back down to Wall Street.

Comprised of an eclectic mix of individuals, the rally saw folks playing music, dancing and chanting slogans such as "This is what Democracy looks like" and "We are the 99 percent."

Within the thousands were three young individuals who expressed the gamut of frustrations with "the system":

Janet Imobisa
Age: 25

Location: Virginia

Fighting for: Job creation

A senior in college, Janet recently lost her job as a call-center employee because the positions were outsourced to Singapore. "I was laid off, and I'm currently receiving unemployment, and it's so hard to find a job, and my unemployment is running out," Janet told MTV News. Janet is one of millions without a job and losing hope. According to the U.S. Board of Labor, the current unemployment rate in the U.S. is 9.1 percent, up more than 5 percent from the year 2000. "My future is in jeopardy," a cheerful but clearly anxious Janet said.

Jen Ventriglia
Age: 26

Location: New York

Fighting for: Hope

Standing atop a plant above the crowd was Jen, a young woman working two jobs at Edible Arrangements and UPS to pay her way through her full-time program in college. "It's all in preparation for a future that might not exist anymore because there are no more jobs. There's no dollar amount that can fix anything that I can ever hope to achieve in my life," Jen said. An aspiring entrepreneur, Jen cited the drop in value of the American dollar and taxes as the obstacles standing in the way of her dreams.

Peter Olsen
Age: 25

Location: New York

Fighting for: Equality

In the middle of the enormous crowd was a small hole. It seemed to be the epicenter, and everyone had formed around it. The attention seemed to be going to a young man in glasses and a red glass earring through his ear. Peter Olsen was one of the facilitators of the Occupation Party. The friendly young man was adopted from poverty-ridden Colombia by his parents, a couple from Westchester County in New York, but Peter found himself ostracized as a minority. "I was discriminated against. My parents adopted me because they thought I'd be in a better position here. Now I'm worse off than I would have been," said Peter, who told us he has four degrees and six certificates. Not only is he working in a Verizon store, but he still feels out of place.

With their futures hanging in the balance, Janet, Jen and Peter still smiled on, protesting to have their voices heard. These are just a handful of stories from within the Occupation Party, which has been compared to 1995's Million Man March. Whether it reaches such heights remains to be seen, but it was clear that the demonstrators came together for one common cause: change. And they won't take "no" for an answer.

Share your thoughts on the ongoing Wall Street protests in the comments below.

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1672584/occupy-times-square-occupation-party.jhtml

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Twenty die in Mexican prison fight near border

Fighting in a prison on Mexico's border with the United States has killed 20 people and wounded 12 others, authorities said on Saturday.

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The violence broke out this morning following an altercation between two inmates in the prison in Matamoros, a northeastern city right opposite Brownsville, Texas, the government of Tamaulipas state said in a statement.

Guards at the Centro de Ejecucion de Sanciones de Matamoros (CEDES) penitentiary later restored order with the aid of police, the statement added. The Tamaulipas government gave no details of weapons involved or how the victims died.

Many Mexican prisons are overcrowded and often plagued by violence linked to the country's powerful drug cartels. Turf wars between gangs fighting for control of smuggling routes in border regions have been particularly brutal.

The incident in Matamoros was one of the most violent to hit the country's prisons this year.

Since President Felipe Calderon's government sent in the army to crush the drug cartels at the end of 2006, more than 44,000 people have died in the ensuing violence.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43906326/ns/world_news-americas/

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Just so you know, iOS 5 can keep track of your location like never before (Appolicious)

Remember all that location-tracking controversy that surrounded the iPhone with the release of iOS 4? Researchers announced that location data gathered from iOS devices? GPS was being stored in an unprotected file rather than being deleted, and it touched off a whole bunch of discussion about privacy. It turned out that law enforcement officials had been using the data against suspects, and the story even spawned a few Senate inquiries into smartphone companies such as Apple and Google.

Well, according to a report from Gizmodo, the newly released iOS 5 has even more powerful tracking capabilities (although it?s important to note that you can opt out of them from the Settings menu, and you?re asked if you want them switched on when you first load iOS 5). It?s part of the software?s wealth of new, more powerful features, but it still might be considered a touch on the creepy side.

The improvements have been to Region Monitoring, a portion of the Core Location software used by apps to ping your location, allowing you to do things like check in to locations with Foursquare. Region Monitoring allows iOS 5 to give you location-specific reminders when you enter or leave an area, and while the feature was part of iOS 4, it wasn?t widely used. Apple has changed that by including APIs that make Region Monitoring more accessible to app developers, and it?s already leading to new kinds of improvements. Foursquare, for example, uses Region Monitoring to recommend nearby places to you, or even people, with its new Radar feature.

The new changes to Region Monitoring allow apps to access location data even when they?re not running, to create features like the ones at work in apps such as Find My Friends. That app lets you and your friends (who have to accept invites from each other) know where each other are more or less all the time. The app can be used to keep track of kids or to help coordinate meet-ups, but it keeps pinging your location without expressly letting you know.

Being a core feature of the phone, Region Monitoring is available passively to all the apps in your iPhone, should they need it, whenever you use an app that needs GPS capabilities. So connect to a Wi-Fi network or pull open the Maps app, and the GPS info you?re using to figure out where you are can be passed to other apps to help them work as well.

Core Location and Region Monitoring are pretty well tweaked to keep from draining your battery, Gizmodo says. As long as an app isn?t using it a lot, users likely won?t even notice the features are working. And of course, you can always switch them off. Region Monitoring will obviously lead to, and has already sparked, some cool new innovations in location-based apps.

But one wonders if all this heightened attention paid to where we are all the time is going to run afoul of the same politicians who were upset after the iOS 4 scandal. Likely it?ll be a lot less of a hullabaloo simply because users have the ability to opt-out. Even so, it?s worth paying attention to which apps are going to want to keep tabs on you, and why. Politicians might be satisfied now that Apple makes sure you know you?re turning location services on, but it?s still easy to forget that your smartphone pays attention to everywhere you go, now that location-based services are pushing for passive location tracking more than active check-ins.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/applecomputer/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/appolicious_rss/rss_appolicious_tc/http___www_appolicious_com_articles9886_just_so_you_know_ios_5_can_keep_track_of_your_location_like_never_before/43259861/SIG=13o1ar25q/*http%3A//www.appolicious.com/tech/articles/9886-just-so-you-know-ios-5-can-keep-track-of-your-location-like-never-before

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MobiUS smartphone ultrasound hits the market two years too late for relevancy

Mobisante MobiUS smartphone ultrasound
Mobisante's MobiUS smartphone ultrasound system scored FDA approval back in February, a big step towards getting the product out the door. Now the brainchild of former Microsoft bigwig Dr. Sailesh Chutani is finally available to order, the only problem is that it's based around two-year-old tech. At the heart of the MobiUS system is a Toshiba TG01 (it of Windows Mobile 6.5 stock) a now hopelessly outdated handset. Still, the probe and phone together cost $7,495, just a tiny fraction of what traditional ultrasound systems cost. We're sure there are small clinics, especially in poor and remote parts of the world, that are already eyeing Dr. Chutani's solution and, if his company scores enough orders, he hopes to cut the price in half. Maybe they can put some of that money towards developing a system that works with smartphone platforms people actually use -- like Android and iOS. Check out the demo video after the break.

Continue reading MobiUS smartphone ultrasound hits the market two years too late for relevancy

MobiUS smartphone ultrasound hits the market two years too late for relevancy originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/5xT0qkUACyY/

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Lawmakers to meet with NFL, union on hormone tests

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The NFL and the players union are set to meet with leaders of a House committee to discuss testing for human growth hormone, which has hit a snag despite an agreement in the latest collective bargaining agreement to begin testing players.

That agreement was contingent on the union's agreeing to the testing methods, but the union has asked for more scientific data to prove the test is reliable.

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, and the top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, planned to attend Friday's meeting, along with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Baltimore Ravens cornerback and team representative Domonique Foxworth, and Travis Tygart, who heads the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Other representatives from the league, the union and the agency also were to participate.

"We look forward to cooperating with the committee and working with the NFLPA to start HGH testing in the NFL as soon as possible," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Thursday.

The union is seeking data from the athletes who were used to originally set thresholds as to what constitutes a positive test, so it can compare that data with a population study on football players. The union believes players could have naturally higher HGH levels than those of other athletes. The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sanctions the test, has declined to produce more information, saying plenty of information about the test is available publicly.

Union spokesman George Atallah said he hoped Tygart's agency would be more forthcoming at Friday's meeting than the World Anti-Doping Agency has been.

Issa and Cummings told the league and the union last month that the elimination of performance-enhancing drugs from the sport "protects the integrity of the league as well as player health and safety. Most importantly, such testing sends a message to young athletes that performance-enhancing drugs of all kinds are not tolerated at the sport's highest level."

The union has questioned the safety and reliability of the test. But nearly two dozen scientists and lab directors from around the world signed a letter sent to the union and NFL stating the current test is safe, scientifically reliable and appropriate for use in professional sports leagues.

A separate group of anti-doping scientists and lab directors also endorsed the test in another letter.

The majority of those who signed the letters have some connection to WADA or its accredited labs. Officials with labs linked to WADA are typically discouraged from making statements that question the agency's tests or procedures.

Athletes are believed to choose HGH for a variety of benefits, whether real or only perceived ? including increasing speed and improving vision.

___

Follow Fred Frommer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ffrommer

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2011-10-13-Hormone%20Testing-Congress/id-81c0e45e88634206be691c11f8eaa785

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Lawmakers to meet with NFL, union on hormone tests

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The NFL and the players union are set to meet with leaders of a House committee to discuss testing for human growth hormone, which has hit a snag despite an agreement in the latest collective bargaining agreement to begin testing players.

That agreement was contingent on the union's agreeing to the testing methods, but the union has asked for more scientific data to prove the test is reliable.

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, and the top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, planned to attend Friday's meeting, along with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Baltimore Ravens cornerback and team representative Domonique Foxworth, and Travis Tygart, who heads the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Other representatives from the league, the union and the agency also were to participate.

"We look forward to cooperating with the committee and working with the NFLPA to start HGH testing in the NFL as soon as possible," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Thursday.

The union is seeking data from the athletes who were used to originally set thresholds as to what constitutes a positive test, so it can compare that data with a population study on football players. The union believes players could have naturally higher HGH levels than those of other athletes. The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sanctions the test, has declined to produce more information, saying plenty of information about the test is available publicly.

Union spokesman George Atallah said he hoped Tygart's agency would be more forthcoming at Friday's meeting than the World Anti-Doping Agency has been.

Issa and Cummings told the league and the union last month that the elimination of performance-enhancing drugs from the sport "protects the integrity of the league as well as player health and safety. Most importantly, such testing sends a message to young athletes that performance-enhancing drugs of all kinds are not tolerated at the sport's highest level."

The union has questioned the safety and reliability of the test. But nearly two dozen scientists and lab directors from around the world signed a letter sent to the union and NFL stating the current test is safe, scientifically reliable and appropriate for use in professional sports leagues.

A separate group of anti-doping scientists and lab directors also endorsed the test in another letter.

The majority of those who signed the letters have some connection to WADA or its accredited labs. Officials with labs linked to WADA are typically discouraged from making statements that question the agency's tests or procedures.

Athletes are believed to choose HGH for a variety of benefits, whether real or only perceived ? including increasing speed and improving vision.

___

Follow Fred Frommer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ffrommer

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2011-10-13-Hormone%20Testing-Congress/id-81c0e45e88634206be691c11f8eaa785

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