In the Loop: Interior pick could watch, but not deliver, a State of the Union address

The nomination announcement Wednesday afternoon of Sally Jewell, chief executive of outdoor company REI, to be secretary of the interior would put her eighth in the line of presidential succession should anything happen to President Obama, Vice President Biden, House and Senate leaders and the top four Cabinet officials at State, Treasury, Defense and Justice.

Except for one problem: She was born in England — came here when she was 3 — and thus doesn’t qualify. She would hardly be the first Cabinet member in this situation.

Others affected by this in recent years include Bush II Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, born in Taiwan, and Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, born in Prague. Ditto Nixon’s German-born secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.

What this means is that, if confirmed, Jewell will be forced to attend every State of the Union address, because she’ll never be the “designated successor.”

On another note, if she gets the job, she’ll be overseeing some places with a history of sweatshops that could compete with REI. REI says that it manufactures gear and apparel around the world, including China, Taiwan and El Salvador, but that it prides itself as being quite scrupulous in monitoring working conditions at its suppliers.

But as head of the Interior Department, Jewell would have jurisdiction over a few U.S. territories — especially the Northern Marianas — that were criticized for years as havens for immigrant smuggling, prostitution and sweatshops. (Because they’re U.S. territories, the clothing made there can be labeled “Made in U.S.A.” and come in duty-free.)

An Interior official assured us, however, that congressionally mandated minimum-wage increases and “new global trade rules embraced by the U.S.” have taken care of the problem.

So, no sweat.

Straying pols, beware

Philandering politicos around town, start quaking in your wingtips. And maybe call your lawyer.

Fair warning:L.A.-based
Gloria Allred
, attorney to many a woman involved in a high-profile controversy, was sworn in this week as a member of the D.C. bar. Which means . . . well, not much, for the moment.

Allred tells us that she’s not working on any particular case that would bring her to our fair city. But she frequently does business here, she says, and rather than operate on a “pro hac vice” basis (meaning each time she comes before a D.C. judge, she gets a one-time waiver), she decided to go all in.

She didn’t have to take the D.C. bar exam but instead used a waiver process designed for lawyers already practicing in other states.

Allred cheered the fact that there were three women on the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where she was sworn in during a Monday ceremony, along with plenty of fellow female lawyers. “That’s something you wouldn’t have seen when I was sworn in to the California bar 38 years ago,” she said.

Allred’s storied career has included going up against powerful men on behalf of the women who say they’ve been wronged. Clients have included
Sharon Bialek
, who accused former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual harassment, and
Natalie Khawam
, the sister of the woman who blew the whistle on CIA Director David Petraeus’s affair.

Should ne’er-do-well men around town worry now that Allred is poised to take on a local case at a moment’s notice? The typically bombastic lawyer’s unusually coy reply: “I’ll leave that to them to decide.”

Friendly fire

Seems no one is playing their position these days. On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden
hinted that he might, maybe, possibly filibuster the nomination of White House counterterrorism adviser
John Brennan
to be CIA director for Wyden’s pal President Obama.

Apparently the Oregon Democrat is mighty upset about a new white paper from the Justice Department and wants more information about the legal justification for drone strikes against U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism. He’s promised to “pull out all the stops” to get what he’s looking for, Roll Call reports.

And for days there’s been will-they-or-won’t-they speculation that Republicans could potentially, perhaps filibuster the nomination of one of their own, former senator Chuck Hagel (Neb.) to be secretary of defense.

Which puts us in the topsy-turvy position of having a Democrat threaten a Democratic president’s nominee with filibuster, while Republicans warn they could do the same to a fellow Republican.

Never mind that it’s all posturing — filibusters of Cabinet nominees on either side are unlikely, or at least they’re unprecedented.

Which is good to remember before you pop something to relieve the vertigo.

With Emily Heil

The blog: washingtonpost.com/
intheloop. Twitter: @InTheLoopWP.

Read More..

Google boosts mobile ad campaigns

SAN FRANCISCO: Google began letting businesses target mobile ads based on how close smartphone users might be to shops or what they might be craving at certain times of day.

Google began upgrading its AdWords service with "enhanced campaigns" for advertisers trying to better connect with people accessing the Internet on the move with smartphones or tablet computers.

"People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained," Google senior vice president of engineering Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a blog post.

"Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type."

For example, a breakfast cafe interested in reaching people searching for "coffee" on smartphones could arrange to bid higher for people within close distance and less for queries made after noon.

AdWords uses a bidding process to determine which advertisements are posted along with results for specified query terms. Modern smartphones and tablets are built with location-sensing technology that users can activate.

Ads shown to smartphone users could be customized with one-touch calling options or map directions, while the same merchant would provide a shopping website link to people browsing online from a desktop computer.

AdWords also lets merchants track how often ads lead to telephone calls.

The upgrade comes as modern lifestyles increasingly revolve around staying connected to the Internet with smartphones or tablet computers.

- AFP/al

Read More..

Suryanelli gang-rape case rocks Kerala assembly again, House adjourned

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The CPM-led LDF opposition forced the adjournment of the Kerala assembly on Thursday over alleged police excess against women MLAs demanding re-investigation of charges against Rajya Sabha deputy chairman PJ Kurien in the Suryanelli gang-rape case.

Though chief minister Oommen Chandy announced that the government was prepared for a judicial inquiry into the police action on CPI MLAs ES Bijimol and Geetha Gopi on Wednesday, opposition leader VS Achuthanandan insisted on immediate suspension of the "erring" police personnel.

Chandy, quoting ADGP's report and video visuals on the incident, said though nothing could be found in them to take instant action against police officials, considering the seriousness of the incident government was ready for a judicial probe.

After heated exchanges during the zero hour, rejecting the government's stand slogan-shouting opposition members, including women MLAs, rushed to the well of the House. Four of the women MLAs even scaled the speaker's podium and kept on chanting "we want justice and protection."

Speaker G Karthikeyan then rushed through the rest of the business and adjourned the House hours ahead of the day's schedule.

This was the third day that the LDF was disrupting proceedings in connection with the alleged involvement of Kurien in the Suryanelli case.The opposition has been pressing for a further investigation in the case in the wake of the victim sticking to her charge against Kurien.

Kurien has all along rejected the charge and the demand for his resignation, saying it was a matter which had already been cleared by the Supreme Court.

The Leftist women outfits on Wednesday held a protest over the issue in front of the assembly and some agitators, including Bijimol and Geetha Gopi, were allegedly roughed up by police. The two MLAs have been hospitalised.

Read More..

Humans Swap DNA More Readily Than They Swap Stories

Jane J. Lee

Once upon a time, someone in 14th-century Europe told a tale of two girls—a kind one who was rewarded for her manners and willingness to work hard, and an unkind girl who was punished for her greed and selfishness.

This version was part of a long line of variations that eventually spread throughout Europe, finding their way into the Brothers Grimm fairytales as Frau Holle, and even into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (Watch a video of the Frau Holle fairytale.)

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it's much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

The study, published February 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that about 9 percent of the variation in the tale of the two girls occurred between ethnolinguistic groups. Previous studies looking at the genetic diversity across groups in Europe found levels of variation less than one percent.

For example, there's a part of the story in which the girls meet a witch who asks them to perform some chores. In different renditions of the tale, the meeting took place by a river, at the bottom of a well, or in a cave. Other versions had the girls meeting with three old men or the Virgin Mary, said Atkinson.

Conformity

Researchers have viewed human culture through the lens of genetics for decades, said Atkinson. "It's a fair comparison in the sense that it's just variation across human groups."

But unlike genes, which move into a population relatively easily and can propagate randomly, it's harder for new ideas to take hold in a group, he said. Even if a tale can bridge the "ethnolinguistic boundary," there are still forces that might work against a new cultural variation that wouldn't necessarily affect genes.

"Humans don't copy the ideas they hear randomly," Atkinson said. "We don't just choose ... the first story we hear and pass it on.

"We show what's called a conformist bias—we'll tend to aggregate across what we think everyone else in the population is doing," he explained. If someone comes along and tells a story a little differently, most likely, people will ignore those differences and tell the story like everyone else is telling it.

"That makes it more difficult for new ideas to come in," Atkinson said.

Cultural Boundaries

Atkinson and his colleagues found that if two versions of the folktale were found only six miles (ten kilometers) away from each other but came from different ethnolinguistic groups, such as the French and the Germans, then those versions were as different from each other as two versions taken from within the same group—say just the Germans—located 62 miles (100 kilometers) away from each other.

"To me, the take-home message is that cultural groups strongly constrain the flow of information, and this enables them to develop highly local cultural traditions and norms," said Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in the U.K., who wasn't involved in the new study.

Pagel, who studies the evolution of human behavior, said by email that he views cultural groups almost like biological species. But these groups, which he calls "cultural survival vehicles," are more powerful in some ways than our genes.

That's because when immigrants from a particular cultural group move into a new one, they bring genetic diversity that, if the immigrants have children, get mixed around, changing the new population's gene pool. But the new population's culture doesn't necessarily change.

Atkinson plans to keep using the tools of the population-genetics trade to see if the patterns he found in the variations of the kind and unkind girls hold true for other folktale variants in Europe and around the world.

Humans do a lot of interesting things, Atkinson said. "[And] the most interesting things aren't coded in our DNA."

Read More..

Armstrong May Testify Under Oath on Doping

Facing a federal criminal investigation and a deadline that originally was tonight to tell all under oath to anti-doping authorities or lose his last chance at reducing his lifetime sporting ban, Lance Armstrong now may cooperate.

His apparent 11th-hour about-face, according to the U.S. Anti Doping Agency (USADA), suggests he might testify under oath and give full details to USADA of how he cheated for so long.

"We have been in communication with Mr. Armstrong and his representatives and we understand that he does want to be part of the solution and assist in the effort to clean up the sport of cycling," USADA CEO Travis T. Tygart said in a written statement this evening. "We have agreed to his request for an additional two weeks to work on details to hopefully allow for this to happen."

Neither Armstrong nor his attorney responded to emails seeking comment on the USADA announcement.

The news of Armstrong's possible and unexpected cooperation came a day after ABC News reported he was in the crosshairs of federal criminal investigators. According to a high-level source, "agents are actively investigating Armstrong for obstruction, witness tampering and intimidation" for allegedly threatening people who dared tell the truth about his cheating.

Lance Armstrong Under Criminal Investigation Watch Video

Lance Armstrong Breaks Down: Question Pushes Cyclist to Brink Watch Video

Lance Armstrong Shows His Emotional Side With Oprah Winfrey Watch Video

The case was re-ignited by Armstrong's confession last month to Oprah Winfrey that he doped his way to all seven of his Tour de France titles, telling Winfrey he used performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career and then lied about it. He made the confession after years of vehement denials that he cheated.

READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping

READ MORE: Lance Armstrong May Have Lied to Winfrey: Investigators

WATCH: Armstrong's Many Denials Caught on Tape

If charges are ultimately filed, the consequences of "serious potential crimes" could be severe, ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams said -- including "possible sentences up to five, 10 years."

Investigators are not concerned with the drug use, but Armstrong's behavior in trying to maintain his secret by allegedly threatening and interfering with potential witnesses.

Armstrong was previously under a separate federal investigation that reportedly looked at drug distribution, conspiracy and fraud allegations -- but that case was dropped without explanation a year ago. Sources at the time said that agents had recommended an indictment and could not understand why the case was suddenly dropped.

"There were plenty of people, even within federal law enforcement, who felt like he was getting preferential treatment," said T.J. Quinn, an investigative reporter with ESPN.

The pressures against Armstrong today are immense and include civil claims that could cost him tens of millions of dollars.

Armstrong is currently serving a lifetime ban in sport handed down by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, and today was the deadline he was given to cooperate under oath if he ever wanted the ban lifted.

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

PHOTOS: Olympic Doping Scandals: Past and Present

PHOTOS: Tour de France 2012

ABC News' Michael S. James contributed to this report.

Read More..

Strengthening security at the nation’s airports

Most people think of airport security as their walk through the metal detector and the eyeballing by transportation security officers (TSOs). Dan Liddell, whose job it is to protect the flying public at seven airports in central New York, instead sees 17 zones of worker responsibility and hundreds of different tasks.

In pursuit of safeguarding the public, Liddell, a federal security director based in Syracuse, has written a book that is now used to train TSOs. It’s called the “National Standardization Guide to Improving Security Effectiveness.” Tasks at each duty area have been inventoried and cataloged, and the “knowledge, values and skills” associated with the airport security jobs have been identified under what Liddell describes as a systems approach to training.

As important as it is to use X-ray machines and explosive trace-detection equipment and to have the correct rules and procedures in place, Liddell said transportation security relies on the skills of the people responsible for it.

“People performance is the cornerstone,” he said. “When I set out to improve things, I look at the people. I look at their proficiency, their skill in doing something and how well they’re doing that job.”

Even when people have the skills to do their jobs, they don’t necessarily do them well each time, especially when conditions can vary with each day and every passenger. To keep performance high, TSOs are tested covertly at unexpected times. A banned item will be sent through a checkpoint and the reaction and activities that take place are monitored.

Whether or not TSOs spot contraband, everyone at that checkpoint during the test participates in an “after-action” review. “It’s the learning experience that’s relevant,” Liddell said. “We’re doing a review of actual performance and you can always improve.”

Liddell is sensitive to the pressure that airport security personnel face. TSOs have the tough of performing multiple tasks under constant camera surveillance and public scrutiny, often interacting with tired or irritated travelers. The testing and training helps them continually up their game.

Thirty airports around the country that helped test the training system and now use a version of it. Paul Armes, federal security director at Nashville International Airport, was interested in creating such a system with a colleague when they both worked in Arizona, but it “never got traction.”

When he learned about what Liddell was doing, he was eager to participate. “Typical of Dan, he built it himself and practiced it so he had hard metric results, and then he started reaching out to some of us, working with his counterparts around the country to get a good representative sample,” Armes said. “He sees things others don’t see sometimes and he has the capability to drill down into the details.”

Liddell began the “pretty long process” of analyzing how people were performing at checkpoints in 2009. He sat down with subject-matter experts to produce the task inventory he now uses. In 2010, he improved the review and reporting process that occurs after covert tests events and instituted the security practices he refined at the other New York airports he oversees, including Greater Binghamton, Ithaca and four others. “I love breaking it down,” he said. “I’ve got a quest for improvement.”

In a less sneaky version of the television show, “Undercover Boss,” Liddell went through the new-hire training program for his employees to understand as much as he could about the jobs and the training provided for them, he said.

If pursuing knowledge is in Liddell’s genes, it may be because his parents were both in education. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a fifth-grade teacher. His teaching manifested itself instead in the training realm, where he strives to educate security employees as effectively as possible, inside the classroom and out.

“It’s always a challenge to meet that right balance of really great effectiveness and really great efficiency,” he said. “There are always challenges. It’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to improve.”

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.

Read More..

Five dead, three injured in Solomon Islands 8.0 quake

 

HONIARA: At least five people were killed, including a child, and three more were injured when a 8.0 magnitude earthquake jolted the Solomon Islands Wednesday, hospital officials said.

"We can report five dead and three injured. One of the dead was a male child, three were elderly women and one an elderly man," Chris Rogers, a registered nurse at Lata Hospital in the Santa Cruz Islands, told AFP.

- AFP/ck

Read More..

Bikaner baby bitten, maimed by father turns critical

JAIPUR: A five-month-old baby girl from Bikaner, whose father had bitten off parts of her lips, nose and cheek last month, was put on ventilator support on Wednesday after her condition deteriorated, doctors said here.

"The baby was operated upon on February 1 at the Sawai Man Singh government hospital and she was stable but her condition turned critical following which she was put on ventilator today," the hospital spokesperson said.

The baby's 36-year-old father Bahadur Singh had bit off her nose, lip and cheek in a fit of rage leaving her face damaged in Bikaner last month.

The accused was drunk when he had reached his house in Siyana village and had a verbal spat with his wife Santosh over some domestic issue.

During the quarrel, he had allegedly bit his daughter's upper lip, nose and cheek, according to the police.

Read More..

The Real Richard III

It's a question that actors from Laurence Olivier to Kevin Spacey have grappled with: What did Richard III, the villainous protagonist of Shakespeare's famous historical drama, really look and sound like?

In the wake of this week's announcement by the University of Leicester that archaeologists have discovered the 15th-century British king's lost skeleton beneath a parking lot, news continues to unfold that helps flesh out the real Richard III.

The Richard III Society unveiled a 3D reconstruction today of the late king's head and shoulders, based on computer analysis of his skull combined with an artist's interpretation of details from historical portraits. (Related: "Shakespeare's Coined Words Now Common Currency.")

"We received the skull data before DNA analysis confirmed that the remains were Richard III, and we treated it like a forensic case," said Caroline Wilkinson, the University of Dundee facial anthropologist who led the reconstruction project. "We were very pleasantly surprised by the results."

Though Shakespeare describes the king as an "elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog," the reconstructed Richard has a pleasant, almost feminine face, with youthful skin and thoughtful eyes. His right shoulder is slightly higher than the left, a consequence of scoliosis, but the difference is barely visible, said Wilkinson.

"I think the whole Shakespearean view of him as being sort of monster-like was based more on his personality than his physical features," she reflected.

Look back at 125 years of National Geographic history

People are naturally fascinated by faces, especially of historical figures, said Wilkinson, who has also worked on reconstructions of J.S. Bach, the real Saint Nicholas, the poet Robert Burns, and Cleopatra's sister.

"We make judgments about people all the time from looking at their appearance," she said. "In Richard's case, up to now his image has been quite negative. This offers a new context for considering him from the point of view of his anatomical structure rather than his actions. He had quite an interesting face."

A Voice From the Past

Most people's impression of Richard's personality comes from Shakespeare's play, in which the maligned ruler utters such memorable lines as "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York," and "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

But how would the real Richard III have expressed himself? Did he have an accent? Was there any sense of personality or passion in his choice of words?

To find out more about the mysterious monarch, Philip Shaw, a historical linguist at University of Leicester's School of English, analyzed the only two known examples of Richard III's own writing. Both are postscripts on letters otherwise composed by secretaries—one in 1469, before Richard became king, and one from 1483, the first year of his brief reign.

Shaw identified a quirk of spelling that suggests that Richard may have spent time in the West Midlands, or perhaps had a tutor who hailed from there.

"I was looking to compare the way he spells things with the way his secretaries spell things, working on the assumption that he would have been schooled to a fairly high level," Shaw explained.

Read about National Geographic explorers on our Explorers Journal blog

In the 1469 letter, Richard spells the word "will" as "wule," a variation associated with the West Midlands. But Shaw also notes that by 1483, when Richard wrote the second letter's postscript, he had changed his spelling to the more standard "wyll" (the letters 'i' and 'y' were largely interchangeable during that period of Middle English).

"That could suggest something about him brushing up over the years, or moving toward what would have been the educated standard," Shaw said, noting that the handwriting in the second example also appears a bit more polished. "One wonders what sort of practice and teaching he'd had in the interim."

Although it's hard to infer tone of voice from written letters, there is certainly emotion in the words penned by Richard III.

In the 1469 letter, the 17-year-old seeks a loan of 100 pounds from the king's undertreasurer. Although the request is clearly stated in the body of the letter, Richard adds an urgent P.S.: "I pray you that you fail me not now at this time in my great need, as you will that I show you my good lordship in that matter that you labour to me for."

That could either be a veiled threat (If you don't lend me the money, I won't do that thing you asked me to do) or friendly cajoling (Come on, I'm helping you out with something, so help me out with this loan).

"His decision to take the pen himself shows you how important that personal touch must have been in getting people to do something," Shaw said.

The second letter, written to King Richard's chancellor in 1483, also conveys a sense of urgency. He had just learned that the Duke of Buckingham—once a close ally—was leading a rebellion against him.

"He's asking for his Great Seal to be sent to him so that he can use it to give out orders to suppress the rebellion," Shaw said. "He calls the Duke 'the most untrue creature living. You get a sense of how personally let down and betrayed he feels."

Shaw said he hopes his analysis—in combination with the new facial reconstruction—will help humanize Richard III.

"He probably wasn't quite the villain that Shakespeare portrays, though I suspect he was quite ruthless," he said. "But you probably couldn't afford to be a very nice man if you wanted to survive as a king in those days."

Read More..

Lance Armstrong Under Criminal Investigation

Federal investigators are in the midst of an active criminal investigation of disgraced former Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, ABC News has learned.

The revelation comes in stark contrast to statements made by the U.S. Attorney for Southern California, Andre Birotte, who addressed his own criminal inquiry of Armstrong for the first time publicly on Tuesday. Birotte's office spent nearly two years investigating Armstrong for crimes reportedly including drug distribution, fraud and conspiracy -- only to suddenly drop the case on the Friday before the Super Bowl last year.

Sources at the time said that agents had recommended an indictment and could not understand why the case was suddenly dropped.

Today, a high level source told ABC News, "Birotte does not speak for the federal government as a whole."

According to the source, who agreed to speak on the condition that his name and position were not used because of the sensitivity of the matter, "Agents are actively investigating Armstrong for obstruction, witness tampering and intimidation."

An email to an attorney for Armstrong was not immediately returned.

READ MORE: Lance Armstrong May Have Lied to Winfrey: Investigators

AP Photo/Bas Czerwinski, File

Lance Armstrong Shows His Emotional Side With Oprah Winfrey Watch Video

Cyclist Lance Armstrong: Bombshell Confession Watch Video

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: Doping Confession Watch Video

Earlier Tuesday, during a Department of Justice news conference on another matter, Birotte was confronted with the Armstrong question unexpectedly. The following is a transcript of that exchange:

Q: Mr. Birotte, given the confession of Lance Armstrong to all the things --

Birotte: (Off mic.)

Q: -- to all thethings that you, in the end, decided you couldn't bring a case about, can you give us your thoughts on that case now and whether you might take another look at it?

Birotte: We made a decision on that case, I believe, a little over a year ago. Obviously we've been well-aware of the statements that have been made by Mr. Armstrong and other media reports. That has not changed my view at this time. Obviously, we'll consider, we'll continue to look at the situation, but that hasn't changed our view as I stand here today.

The source said that Birotte is not in the loop on the current criminal inquiry, which is being run out of another office.

Armstrong confessed to lying and using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career in an interview with Oprah Winfrey.

READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping

WATCH: Armstrong's Many Denials Caught on Tape

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

Investigators are not concerned with the drug use, but Armstrong's behavior in trying to maintain his secret by allegedly threatening and interfering with potential witnesses.

Armstrong is currently serving a lifetime ban in sport handed down by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. He has been given a Feb. 6 deadline to tell all under oath to investigators or lose his last chance at a possible break on the lifetime ban.

PHOTOS: Olympic Doping Scandals: Past and Present

PHOTOS: Tour de France 2012

Read More..