Gay Rights Activists Fuming over IOC Sochi Decision

WASHINGTON, September 26 (RIA Novosti) – Scathing comments from gay and human rights activists began spewing out across the Internet and social media outlets Thursday, shortly after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Russia’s controversial law banning the promotion of “non-traditional relationships” to minors does not violate the anti-discrimination guarantees in the Olympic charter.

“If this law doesn’t violate the IOC’s charter, then the charter is completely meaningless,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization which advocates on behalf of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community, in a statement.

The Kremlin maintains the new law is aimed at protecting children and does not prevent adults from making their own choices, but critics claim the legislation is part of a much wider crackdown on homosexuality in Russia.

Many have expressed concern about what impact the law might have on LGBT athletes and spectators at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.

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http://en.rian.ru/world/20130926/183755148/Gay-Rights-Activists-Fuming-over-IOC-Sochi-Decision.html

Human Rights Watch Urges Israel To Stop Displacing Bedouins

By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, September 26, 2013 8:48 EDT

Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged Israel to stop trying to displace Bedouin families in the West Bank, where the army last week manhandled European diplomats on an aid mission.

“The Israeli military should end its unjustified attempts to forcibly remove a decades-old community,” the New York-based watchdog’s Middle East director Joe Stork said in a statement.

“Israeli forces didn’t just rough up diplomats, they demolished every single building in Makhul and ordered the residents to leave and never come back,” he said.

The army on September 16 demolished property built by the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley village after Israel’s Supreme Court ruled they had been erected without building permits and declared the area a “closed military zone”.

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/26/human-rights-watch-urges-israel-to-stop-displacing-bedouins/

Nope, nothing at all like 'apartheid'...indeed.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Water On Mars

By Alok Jha, The Guardian
Thursday, September 26, 2013 18:12 EDT

Dirt sample reveals two pints of liquid water per cubic feet, not freely accessible but bound to other minerals in the soil

Water has been discovered in the fine-grained soil on the surface of Mars, which could be a useful resource for future human missions to the red planet, according to measurements made by NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Each cubic foot of Martian soil contains around two pints of liquid water, though the molecules are not freely accessible, but rather bound to other minerals in the soil.


The Curiosity rover has been on Mars since August 2012, landing in an area near the equator of the planet known as Gale Crater. Its target is to circle and climb Mount Sharp, which lies at the centre of the crater, a five-kilometre-high mountain of layered rock that will help scientists unravel the history of the planet.

Last night NASA scientists published a series of five papers in the journal Science, which detail the experiments carried out by the various scientific instruments aboard Curiosity in its first four months on the martian surface. Though highlights from the year-long mission have been released at conferences and NASA press conferences, these are the first set of formal, peer-reviewed results from the Curiosity mission.

“We tend to think of Mars as this dry place – to find water fairly easy to get out of the soil at the surface was exciting to me,” said Laurie Leshin, dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lead author on the Science paper which confirmed the existence of water in the soil. “If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you’d get a couple of pints of water out of that – a couple of water bottles’ worth that you would take to the gym.”

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/26/nasas-curiosity-rover-finds-water-on-mars/

US, Others Pleased With New Iranian Attitude In Nuclear Talks, Set New Round Of Negotiations

Source: Associated Press

By MATTHEW LEE and LARA JAKES | ASSOCIATED PRESS | 6 minutes ago in Politics

The United States and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council said Thursday they were pleased by a new tone and attitude from Iran in talks aimed at resolving the impasse over its nuclear program and set a new round of negotiations for next month.

After a group meeting and then a one-on-one session between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Kerry called the talks "constructive" and said he was struck by a "very different tone" from Iran. But he stressed that words must be translated into action if Iran wants to prove it is not seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.

"We've agreed to try to continue a process that would try to make concrete and find a way to answer the questions that people have about Iran's nuclear program," Kerry told reporters. "Needless to say, one meeting and a change in tone, that was welcome, does not answer those questions."

"All of us were pleased that the foreign minister came today and that he did put some possibilities on the table."

Read more: http://www.newser.com/article/da92beb81/us-others-pleased-with-new-iranian-attitude-in-nuclear-talks-set-new-round-of-negotiations.html

Split Weakens U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebels as Islamists Gain

U.S. and Russian efforts to set the stage for Syrian peace talks suffered a blow as the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition was repudiated by more than a dozen rebel factions.

The break by the rebel groups shows the growing power of militant Islamic fighters and hampers the U.S. effort to position moderate Syrian opposition leaders to lead a transition from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. It also muddies the effort to arm and train moderate rebel groups while keeping advanced weapons out of the hands of extremists.

It’s now uncertain what role the opposition coalition will be able to play in peace talks that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seek to convene in Geneva as early next month.

The militants’ rejection of the main U.S.-backed opposition coalition “weakens it significantly,” Daniel Serwer, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, said yesterday.

As many as 13 rebel groups issued a statement saying the Turkey-based Syrian National Coalition “does not represent us” and that they plan to unite under Islam’s sharia law, according to a video on Google Inc.’s YouTube showing a leader of one brigade, Abdulaziz Salameh, reading the document aloud.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-26/split-weakens-u-s-backed-syrian-rebels-as-islamists-grow.html

Jobless Claims Fall To 305,000, Near 6-Year Low

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell 5,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 305,000, the second-lowest level in six years. Steady declines in applications show that very few companies are laying off workers.

The Labor Department said Thursday that the less volatile four-week average declined 7,000 to 308,000, the lowest since June 2007.

All states reported their first-time applications on time, a department spokesman said. Applications plummeted three weeks ago because computer upgrades in California and Nevada prevented them from fully reporting their data. Those states have cleared their backlogs, the spokesman said.

"Based on these figures, the labor market is getting better, albeit at a modest pace," Joseph LaVorgna, chief US economist at Deutsche Bank.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/26/jobless-claims-employment/2867339/

Edward Snowden Reveals New Information About NSA Spying On India

By Jason Burke, The Guardian
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 14:17 EDT

The US National Security Agency may have accessed computers within the Indian embassy in Washington and mission at the United Nations in New York as part of a huge clandestine effort to mine electronic data held by its south Asian ally.

Documents released by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden also reveal the extent and aggressive nature of other NSA datamining exercises targeting India as recently as March of this year.

The latest revelations – published in the Hindu newspaper – came as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, flew to Europe on his way to the US, where he will meet President Barack Obama.

The NSA operation targeting India used two datamining tools, Boundless Informant and Prism, a system allowing the agency easy access to the personal information of non-US nationals from the databases of some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/25/edward-snowden-reveals-new-information-about-nsa-spying-on-india/

IDF Soldier Passes IDs Of Jewish Girls Who Socialize With Arabs To Anti-Assimilation NGO

A female IDF soldier who is often stationed at checkpoints is apparently very disturbed by the fact that some Jews and Palestinians actually hang out. The soldier turned anonymously (on Facebook) to Yad La’achim a religious organization whose mandate is to “save Jews from assimilation,” in the hopes they can help her prevent this from happening in the future by talking some sense into these young women. As she wrote to them:

Hi, I speak with true pain, as a soldier working at checkpoints and every Friday night Jewish girls pass through in minority cars [common euphemism for Arabs]. I would be glad if you could come and stand with me at the checkpoint for at least an hour and try to appeal to the hearts of these poor Jewish girls… Every time I see such Jewish girls, I try to hold up the vehicle and check the background of these Arabs [euphemism gone], and in between I take the Jewish girls aside for a short talk (which doesn’t always help). So perhaps you will succeed, because it’s really painful to see the daughters of Israel going with these Arabs.

God willing, we have contacted the charming soldier and from now on she will report to us on every such girl, after she checks her ID.

Israel On Sidelines As World Rushes To Embrace Iran's Rouhani

A day after newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani gave a speech at the United Nations acknowledging the Holocaust and declaring Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb, an Israeli cartoon featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trudging to the United Nations asking himself, “Where is Mahmoud [Ahmadinejad] when I need him?”

After all, it wasn’t too hard to convince other world powers – particularly the US – that the guy who denied the Holocaust and talked about Israel being wiped off the map might not be someone whose finger you’d want on the trigger of a nuclear-armed country.

But Mr. Rouhani is much more measured and sophisticated, and his arrival on the world stage has been greeted with optimism, so Mr. Netanyahu’s usual rhetoric isn’t selling as well in the West this time.

But he has still resisted falling in line with world powers.

“Iran thinks that soothing words and token actions will enable it to continue on its path to the bomb,” Netanyahu said in a statement after Rouhani’s speech Tuesday, declaring that Israel would welcome a “genuine” diplomatic solution. “But we will not be fooled by half-measures that merely provide a smokescreen for Iran's continual pursuit of nuclear weapons. And the world should not be fooled either."

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http://news.yahoo.com/israel-sidelines-world-rushes-embrace-irans-rouhani-203000323.html

Wal-Mart Cutting Orders as Unsold Merchandise Piles Up

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is cutting orders it places with suppliers this quarter and next to address rising inventory the company flagged in last month’s earnings report.

Last week, an ordering manager at the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters described the pullback in an e-mail to a supplier, who said others got similar messages. “We are looking at reducing inventory for Q3 and Q4,” said the Sept. 17 e-mail, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News.

U.S. inventory growth at Wal-Mart outstripped sales gains in the second quarter at a faster rate than at the retailer’s biggest rivals. Merchandise has been piling up because consumers have been spending less freely than Wal-Mart projected, and the company has forfeited some sales because it doesn’t have enough workers in stores to keep shelves adequately stocked.

“We are managing our inventory appropriately,” David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said today in a telephone interview. “We feel good about our inventory position.”

The order pullback isn’t “across the board” and is happening “category by category,” he said in a previous interview.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-25/wal-mart-cutting-orders-as-unsold-merchandise-piles-up.html