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ISIS Have Made Their Move Into Afghanistan Says Army General

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The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is now active in southern Afghanistan, according to Afghan officials, who say the extremist group are now fighting the Taliban and recruiting new members in the country.

A man known as Mullah Abdul Rauf has been identified as ISIS’ representative in the region.  General Mahmood Khan, a commander in the Afghan army’s 215 corps, told Associated Press: “A number of tribal leaders, jihadi commanders and some ulema (religious council members) and other people have contacted me to tell me that Rauf had contacted them and invited them to join him.”

It appears that Rauf was previously on the Taliban’s side. According to AP, Amir Mohammad Akundzada, who is a regional governor in Afghanistan, says Rauf is a former member of the Taliban: “People who want to fight in Afghanistan just create new names - one day they are wearing the white clothes [of the Taliban], and the next day they have black clothes and call themselves ISIS, but they are the same people.”

Last November, ISIS’ leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s ‘Volcanoes of Jihad’ speech appeared online. In it he said: “We give you [Muslims] good news by announcing the expansion of the Islamic state to new lands, to the lands of Al-Haramayn [Saudi Arabia] and Yemen...to Egypt, Libya, and Algeria”, clearly stating ISIS’ intentions to expand beyond Iraq and Syria where it primarily operates. Organizations in as many as 11 countries have already reportedly pledged fealty to ISIS, including jihadists in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and even as far as the Philippines.

In an article published last year on The Daily Beast, prompted by rumours that ISIS were moving into Afghanistan, a western intelligence source said: “There is good potential for ISIS to grow in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Even among the Taliban, there are some that might be willing to pledge to ISIS, or have done so already in secret and will reveal themselves in the near future.”

Ben Barry, a former brigadier, 35-year British army veteran and current senior fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies told Newsweek: “We have to treat these reports with some caution; I don’t believe they’ve been confirmed by anyone high up in the ISIS organization. A consistent feature of the Afghan Taliban’s argument is that they are the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Mullah Omar (the supreme commander of the Taliban) is the head of state in exile.”

He adds, “Of course the Islamic state does claim itself to be a state. So there is a potential clash of legitimacies there.” In terms of tactical implication Barry admits that “There will be those in the Afghan Taliban who will see what is achieved [by ISIS],” and some “may find that very attractive.”

Allegiances in terrorist factions are sometimes rather loose, with fighters moving between factions or even changing sides. News of ISIS activity in Afghanistan comes several months after a BBC report that disclosed that fighters from Hezb-I-Islami, a group allied with the Afghanistan Taliban, were considering defecting to ISIS. They interviewed one of the group’s commanders who said: “We are waiting to see if [ISIS] meet the requirement for an Islamic caliphate… if we find they do, we are sure that our leadership will announce their allegiance to them. They are great mujahedeen. We pray for them, and if we don’t see a problem in the way they operate, we will join them.”

According to the news website Vocativ, ISIS leader Baghdadi has previously appealed to the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, to abandon the Taliban in return for a major position within ISIS.

Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and the author of The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, is sceptical: “I doubt if the presence of ISIS will make a qualitative difference. ISIS does not possess a critical mass to dramatically change the dynamics of the conflict in Afghanistan at this moment”, despite the fact that certain elements of the Pakistani Taliban have defected to ISIS.

Gerges adds: “While the presence of ISIS in Afghanistan would pour gasoline on a raging fire there, the Arab-dominated organization cannot aspire to gain power in the war-torn country. The Taliban in Afghanistan are hard-core religious nationalists; they won't tolerate domination by non-Afghans, even if they are co-religionists from other Muslim countries.”

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France Votes to Keep Fighting Islamic State in Iraq

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PARIS (Reuters) - The French parliament voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to extend the country's military intervention against Islamic State militants in Iraq that started four months ago.

There were 488 votes in favor against one in the vote, which came after 17 people were killed in three days of violence that began on Jan. 7 when two Islamist gunmen burst into Charlie Hebdo's offices, opening fire in revenge for the paper's publication of satirical images of Mohammad in the past.

One of the killers cited France's military strikes as a motivation for his acts.

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Watch Out Jeb! Santorum Comes Out Swinging

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Rick Santorum finally inserted himself into the discussion of the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination. In an interview in The New York Times, the former Pennsylvania senator said his closest rivals for support among conservatives, freshman senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, had little to offer but bomb throwing. "Do we really want somebody who’s a bomb thrower, with no track record of any accomplishments?" he asked.

The Times reporter interpreted these remarks as illustrative of the stakes involved in securing the support of the GOP's conservative base. "Already," Jonathan Martin wrote, "there is notably less restraint in the language used by the more conservative aspirants than in the public statements from the establishment-backed potential candidates."

I don't doubt it. But there's another angle.

Unlike Paul, Cruz and other the middle-aged white men considering a run for the White House, Santorum is no longer in office (he lost his Senate seat in 2006). While his rivals erode their profiles with public exposure—especially New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the bridge scandal that still dogs him—Santorum has receded from the spotlight by working as head of a company that makes Christian-themed movies.

But the most important thing is this: Santorum came in second in 2012. That matters greatly in a top-down organization like the GOP, and party bosses have historically honored that.

For years now, the Republican who came in second the first time came in first the second time. That happened with Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, all loyal establishment men. But there's a crucial difference. Santorum is not only the heir apparent; he's also a hard-core conservative who won't have the obvious vulnerabilities that doomed Dole, McCain and Romney. The last runner-up to embody the imprimatur of the establishment as well as the conservative base was Ronald Reagan.

I don't mean to suggest that Santorum is the second-coming of Reagan. Far from it. 1980 is not 2016, and the conditions necessary for the rise of Barry Goldwater's ideological heir are no longer evident, no matter how much Republicans argue to the contrary. But I do mean to suggest that Santorum is likely aware of this symmetry, and that he's going to leverage it.

You could say Santorum came out swinging in the Times interview because there's no time to lose in wooing conservatives. You could also say he came out swinging because that's to be expected of the man forcefully reclaiming his place in the party order after a brief absence. To do otherwise is to risk conveying weakness.

There is an exception to heir apparency. Pat Buchanan, the conservative syndicated columnist who once advised Richard Nixon and Reagan, was the runner-up to Dole in 1996. He never had a chance in 2000 against George W. Bush, who had not run for president before, or against McCain, who quickly claimed the mantle of "outsider" candidate. There was no room left for Buchanan's implacable Know-Nothingism.

If history is any indication, Santorum's real rivals, even in these nascent stages, are not Paul or Cruz or Huckabee. It is probably Jeb Bush, who has the potential, like his brother, to circumvent the GOP's natural order.

And Santorum has a better chance than Buchanan of beating a Bush. George W. was never a runner-up, but he had that magical mix of establishment credibility and conservative bona fides, particularly in his espousing of evangelical Christianity. Santorum performed best in 2012 among Christian right voters. Even the mighty Jeb Bush can't say that.

John Stoehr is the managing editor of the Washington Spectator. Follow him on Twitter @johnastoehr.

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Whatsapp and Snapchat Could be Banned Under Cameron's New Surveillance Laws

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The British prime minister David Cameron has said that he wants to impose new surveillance legislation on the UK that would outlaw certain forms of encrypted digital communication, a move which has led civil liberties groups to voice concern that this could lead to serious abuse of  powers.

The law, which Cameron pledges to bring in if he wins the 2015 election, means that communication which the security services can’t read would be made illegal. Such a move could see a series of popular messaging platforms blocked, including WhatsApp, Snapchat, Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime.

Speaking at an event in the East Midlands on Monday, Cameron said he recognised such powers were "very intrusive" but that they were necessary to help counter the growing threat of terrorism in the UK. He said such a move would be “absolutely right”.

“In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people, which even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the home secretary personally, that we cannot read? Up until now, governments of this country have said no, we must not have such a means of communication,” he said.

Cameron continued: "That is why, in extremis, it has been possible to read someone's letter. That is why... it's been possible to listen in to someone's telephone call. That is why the same has been applied to mobile communications.

"But the question remains: are we going to allow a means of communication where it simply isn't possible to do that? My answer is no, we are not. The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe.”

Whilst it is already illegal to refuse to surrender your passwords or encryption keys if asked by the police, this law is not particularly useful if someone refuses to speak, or cannot be found in the first place.

Some products already contain certain kinds of encryption software which can bypass this problem, allowing law enforcement access when required. However many do not, including Whatsapp and iMessage, and so these kind of products could be banned if Cameron goes ahead with his plans.

PGP is another popular encryption tool – used frequently by journalists and whistleblowers - that enables secure communication between people by exchanging public encryption ‘keys’. There is no way to decrypt a user's communications, even with a warrant, unless you have their private key.

This is not the first speech Cameron has made in recent days in which he’s outlined his plans to change privacy laws in the UK. Speaking in Paris on Sunday, following the unity march to honour the 17 victims who died in the Paris attacks, Cameron said he wanted to “modernise” the law to help tackle the “poisonous death cult” of Islamic extremists.

The Draft Communications Data Bill, nicknamed the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’, was first proposed by home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and would require internet service providers and mobile phone companies to maintain records – but not content - of each user’s internet browsing history, emails, internet gaming, mobile messaging services for 12 months.

Previous plans for the data bill were blocked by the Liberal Democrats but Cameron has now stressed that he would ensure the legislation was passed if the Conservatives won the general election in May.

“That is my very clear view and if I am prime minister after the next election I will make sure we legislate accordingly. Obviously we are in a coalition. We have made progress on this issue by passing the new law which makes sure we protect some of the abilities we have to stop terrorists,” he said, speaking to media in Paris.

Cameron’s announcement has been met with hostility from many civil liberties campaigners. Director of Big Brother Watch Emma Carr said that it was “wholly unacceptable” for the tragedy in Paris to be used as an excuse to call for a return to the Snoopers’ Charter.

“It is the wrong solution and would divert resources from focused surveillance operations at a time when the agencies are already struggling to cope with the volume of information available,” she said.

“The government is introducing legislation to solve the important problem of who is using a specific Internet Protocol address, but the powers within the Snoopers’ Charter go too far, as recognised by a number of political figures and two parliamentary committees.”

Carr continued: “As we have seen with RIPA, legislation may be introduced with the most noble of intentions but if oversight and authorisation is poor, you easily end up in a situation where a vast number of public authorities are using the powers for investigations that were never originally intended when the legislation was passed.”

“An example being local authorities using it to watch dog fowlers, or the police using it to access journalists’ phone records,” she continued, referring to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, set up to regulate the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation, and covering the interception of communications.

“Rather than the powers being for targeted surveillance of suspected terrorists and criminals, it allows for the mass surveillance of an entire population,” she also said.

According to Carr, the most important way to avoid a Paris-style attack, is to ensure that there are adequate resources to monitor those identified as potential threats: “That is not currently the case, as identified in the example of the Woolwich murder. The powers should be there to gather information, legally and with oversight and accountability, to monitor those targeted as being a threat to society. This does not require powers that would put an entire populations communications under surveillance,” she said.

Speaking to the BBC on Monday, Labour leader Ed Miliband said that he would be more “cautious and considered” than Cameron is proposing to be. “I think it's right to take a step back and look at this,” he said.

“We've got to look at 'Do our intelligence services have the tools they need?' but equally 'Do we have the proper oversight to guarantee the liberties of free citizens?' because, after all, one of the things we want to protect most of all here is our freedoms. We should defend our freedoms and also make sure the security services have what's necessary to make sure that we counter that threat and defend that freedom.”

However, speaking just one day after the Charlie Hedbo attack, the head of MI5 Andrew Parker reiterated the importance of intercepting communications in order to avoid a terrorist attack.

According to Parker, changing technology is making it much harder for agencies to keep track of such communications: "Interception of communications, which includes listening to the calls made on a telephone, or opening and reading the contents of emails, form a critical part in the Security and Intelligence Agencies' tool kit," he said, in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute in London on 8th January.

"Changes in the technology that people are using to communicate are making it harder for the agencies to maintain the capability to intercept the communications of terrorists. Wherever we lose visibility of what they are saying to each other, so our ability to understand and mitigate the threat that they pose is reduced," Parker continued.

Responding to those who have voiced concerns about the legislation, Cameron said in his speech in the East Midlands: "Let me stress again, this cannot happen unless the home secretary personally signs a warrant. We have a better system for safeguarding this very intrusive power than probably any other country that I can think of.”

Labour's shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement on Monday that any new legislation would have to be accompanied with appropriate regulating mechanisms.

"The capabilities of the intelligence agencies and law enforcement must keep pace with changing and emerging technology. So too must the oversight arrangements," said Cooper.

"With proper warrants in place, the agencies need to be able to continue to be able to look at the content of communications of those feared to be plotting terrorist attacks. And there must continue to be safeguards to protect innocent people's privacy."

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Ultra-Rare Shark Birth Captured on Camera for First Time

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At first, photographer Attila Kaszo didn’t think much of a picture he took of one particular thresher shark in the Philippines.

One of the frames “ended up in my trash folder because it appeared to have a ‘blob’ on it which I thought was a jellyfish,” he told The Washington Post.

But upon closer examination, the blob was no jellyfish but the head of a young thresher shark being born. He shared it with shark research Simon Oliver, who “freaked out,” saying it has become the highlight of his career, according to the BBC.

That’s because it’s “the first record of any oceanic [shark] species giving birth,” said Oliver, who along with Kaszo authored a study about the finding, published in late December in Coral Reefs, the journal of the International Society for Reef Studies.

Simon Thorrold, a senior scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, told the BBC that he had “never seen a comparable image for any other pelagic shark,” a designation that includes any shark species that lives in the open ocean (as opposed to in reefs or near the seafloor). “It may well be [the first record of such a birth], or at least the first time that the event has been photographed, but this is always difficult to say definitively.”

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Change Gun Laws in Europe to Let Jews Carry Arms, Says Leading Rabbi

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A prominent Jewish leader has written to the governments of all the EU countries, calling on them to pass legislation giving special licence for Jewish people to carry guns.

In a letter sent to interior ministries around Europe and obtained by Newsweek, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director general of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) and the European Jewish Association (EJA) - the largest federation of Jewish organizations and communities in Europe - writes: “We hereby ask that gun licensing laws are reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities, as well as receiving the necessary training to protect their members from potential terror attacks.”

Speaking to Newsweek, Rabbi Margolin added that he believes that “as many people within the Jewish community as possible” should carry weapons.

The call comes in light of the recent attacks in Paris and increased anti-semitic attacks in Europe which Rabbi Margolin writes “have revealed the urgent need to stop talking and start acting”.

Last week, four Jewish men were killed when Amedy Coulibaly took hostages in a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, eastern Paris. During the resulting siege, Coulibaly told a French TV station via phone that he had targeted the shop ‘because it was Jewish’. Some 2,000 mourners attended the funeral of  Yoav Hattab, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham and Francois-Michel Saada at the Har Menuhot cemetery in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

Highlighting the threat of European-born jihadists returning from the Middle East, such as those who carried out last week’s attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, Rabbi Margolin added: “We need to recognise the warning signs of anti-Semitism, racism, and intolerance that once again threaten Europe and our European ideals.”

According to Rabbi Margolin, a license to carry a weapon would provide people in the Jewish community with a sense of security that is sorely lacking in Europe, particularly in light of recent events. “Right now Jews do not feel safe,” he said.

“We are threatened on a daily basis,” he said. “People are afraid to come to synagogue. People are afraid to go to Jewish schools.”

“[The police] are not doing enough, for sure. We just need more. The best solution is having at least two police officers at each Jewish institution, 24 hours a day. Until that happens we need to be able to feel secure in other ways.”

Rabbi Margolin said that being allowed to carry a weapon would “allow our people to feel protected” adding that the weapons would all be registered. “We will be under the supervision of authorities. It would be completely controlled in the most professional way.”

EU law does allow for the carrying of guns under a license, but leaves specific gun legislation down to individual member states. Neither the Department for Home Affairs and Migration in Brussels nor the UK Home Office were willing to comment on the letter at this stage.

On the type of weapon people would be equipped with, Rabbi Margolin said: “Even just a gun. I’m not referring to tanks, it’s not about heavy weapons. It’s just that everyone would have something in their pocket.”

The Brussels-based rabbi, who recently discussed Palestinian statehood and the removal of Hamas from the EU’s list of terrorist organisations with foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, said he is arranging meetings to discuss the campaign over the coming weeks.

Rabbi Margolin also criticised Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Paris attacks in which he called for French Jews to “come home” to Israel, saying that such campaigns make it harder for European Jews to live securely.

“The Israeli government should not make people panic. Immigration is not the solution to the terror,” he said.

“Each time something terrible happens more people think of immigration, but Jewish people have lived in Europe for over 2,000 years. For many, Europe is their homeland. To state there is no other solution except to leave Europe and move to Israel is just saying that the government has failed.”

The rabbi said that the campaign to license arms has received positive comments from the Jewish community, with most people saying being armed with a weapon would allow them to feel more secure. 

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Boom: Small Business Confidence at 8-Year High

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. small business optimism jumped in December to its highest level in more than eight years, the latest sign of strength in the economy even as dark clouds settle over global growth.

The outlook was further bolstered by other data on Tuesday showing job openings approached a 14-year high in November.

"There are concerns about global growth, but the fundamentals for the U.S. economy are very solid and what's going on overseas should only be a minor drag," said Gus Faucher, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh.

The National Federation of Independent Business said its Small Business Optimism Index increased 2.3 points to 100.4 last month, the highest reading since October 2006.

The index, which is back at its pre-recession average, was bolstered by a surge in sales expectations as well as hiring, capital outlays and business expansion plans.

The small business sector accounts for about half of the country's overall gross domestic product and makes up the largest share of hiring.

In a separate report, the Labor Department said job openings, a measure of labor demand, increased 2.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted 4.97 million in November, the highest level since January 2001.

"It doesn't get any better than this for the economy. This is another sign that the labor market is tightening up and we are already starting to see more help wanted signs out there in store windows," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York.

STRONG JOB GROWTH

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report is one of the indicators being closely watched by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and other policymakers at the U.S. central bank as they contemplate the future course of monetary policy.

It confirmed the recent strong trend in job growth and suggested an acceleration in 2015.

While hiring remained below pre-recession levels, there is little doubt the jobs market is tightening.

The JOLTS report showed there were 1.82 people for every open job in November. That was the smallest ratio since January 2008 and compared to 1.86 in October.

"We view this ratio's continued decline as indicative of a reduction in labor market slack," said Jesse Hurwitz, an economist at Barclays in New York.

With more slack being absorbed, wage growth should pick up. There are signs an acceleration is under way.

The NFIB survey showed more businesses are raising wages, with a quarter of respondents in December reporting higher compensation - the largest share since January 2008.

Coupled with the growing signs of a tightening jobs market, it suggests a surprise drop in average hourly earnings in December's employment report was a fluke.

"That leaves the slump in average hourly earnings in December looking even odder," said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics in Toronto.

The NFIB compensation measure correlates closely with the government's quarterly employment cost index, which is widely regarded as a better gauge of wage growth.

About 17 percent of businesses in the NFIB survey plan to raise compensation in the coming months.

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Nazi-Era German Word 'Luegenpresse' Makes a Comeback

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A German linguists' panel has chosen a Nazi-era term "Luegenpresse" (lying press), which anti-immigrant protesters have revived and shouted at the media, as the country's non-word of the year.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned the demands - an end to multiculturalism - of the grassroots "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West" (PEGIDA) at weekly rallies as "reprehensible" and said her conservative-led government would use all constitutional means to fight intolerance.

"Luegenpresse", first used in Germany by critics of the free press during World War One, earned the dubious "Unwort des Jahres" (Non-Word of the Year) honor in the eyes of a panel of experts out of 730 terms submitted by 1,250 contributors.

"'Luegenpresse' is a word contaminated by the Nazis," said Nina Janich, a professor at the Technical University Darmstadt and head of the six-member jury that selects such terms each year from the submissions.

"It's used deliberately in the PEGIDA movement to steer it against those (in the media) who criticize their movement."

The announcement of the "Unwort des Jahres" is a major news item in Germany and holds a special resonance in a country whose language is filled with words and concepts tarnished to the point of taboo status by their use under the Nazi regime.

A record 25,000 anti-Islam protesters marched through the east city of Dresden on Monday, some holding banners with anti-immigrant slogans, in the largest such rally to date. They chanted "Luegenpresse, halt die Fresse" (Shut up, lying press)

However, nearly 100,000 people joined counter-demonstrations against racism in other marches across Germany. And the Dresden-based PEGIDA has drawn far less supporters in other cities.

The jury picked two other terms as runners-up: "enhanced interrogation techniques" ("erweiterte Verhoermethoden") as a euphemism for "torture", and "Russia apologist" ("Russland-Versteher") that is often used as criticism of Germans who have defended Russia's point of view in the Ukraine crisis.

Previous non-words of the year have included "Doener-Morde" (doener killings) in 2011, referring to a string of neo-Nazi killings of people of Turkish origin; and "alternativlos" (no alternatives), which Merkel used to refer to Berlin's unpopular support for struggling euro zone states.

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Boehner's Plan to Block Obama's Immigration Moves

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives will vote to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security this week while blocking President Barack Obama's actions on immigration, House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday.

The $39.7 billion spending bill was expected to pass by Wednesday, when House Republicans leave Washington for a two-day policy retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

But its fate in the Senate was uncertain, and it may draw a White House veto.

Republican lawmakers leaving a closed-door strategy meeting on Tuesday said the House would seek to pass amendments to the core funding bill to deny money to implement Obama's November executive order lifting the threat of deportation to millions of undocumented immigrants. Republicans claim the order is illegal.

"Our goal here is to fund the Department of Homeland Security. And our second goal is to stop the president's executive overreach," Boehner told reporters.

Boehner, however, declined to say whether he would bring a "clean" DHS funding bill to the floor if the newly Republican-controlled Senate fails to pass the House measure or if Obama vetoes it over immigration-related provisions.

Current funding for the sprawling agency that spearheads domestic counterterrorism efforts and secures U.S. borders, airports and coastal waters expires on Feb. 27.

Republicans also plan an amendment aimed at reversing Obama's 2012 initiative deferring action against immigrants brought into the United States illegally as children. If passed, it could put hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation.

Some Republican lawmakers said this amendment may have more difficulty passing, so the party was working to drum up support.

"I would expect some bipartisan opposition on that," said Representative Tom Cole, a close ally of Boehner. "Some people will vote no on the amendment but might still be comfortable on the final vote, after they’ve had a chance to register their concern."

Meanwhile, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi accused Republicans of putting DHS funding in jeopardy at a time of high alert following the last week's deadly attacks in Paris.

"In January, a horrible, horrible terrorist attack took place in Paris," Pelosi told reporters on the Capitol steps. "You'd think it would have heightened the urgency to pass a homeland security bill, but the Republicans still say no to passing a clean bill unless they can be a menace to immigration."

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Hearing Voices? You're Not Alone

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One night, during her first year at the University of Sheffield, Rachel Waddingham struggled to fall asleep. She could hear three middle-aged men she didn’t know talking about her in another room. “They were saying, ‘She’s stupid, she’s ugly, I wish she would kill herself,’” she says. “I was angry and went downstairs to challenge them, but no one was there. They kept laughing and saying, ‘She’ll never find us.’”

The voices became a recurring presence, providing an aggressive, unsettling commentary on her life. Waddingham came to believe they were filming her around the clock, and she became paranoid. When she had a neck ache, she assumed a tracking device had been planted under her skin. At the supermarket, the voices would ask each other questions like “Does she know what she’s buying?”—leading Waddingham to reach sinister conclusions. “I worried they might have poisoned the food,” she says. “I’d come back with orange juice, milk, bread and cheese, because it’s all I could work out was safe.”

Waddingham turned to alcohol to cope, and avoided friends because she feared “The Three” would secretly film them as well. Months later, she dropped out of the university and moved into a bedsit (similar to a single-resident-occupancy building in the U.S.), too afraid to eat or bathe. A doctor eventually admitted her into a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on a cocktail of drugs. During her eight months in the hospital, the voices faded, but the side effects of the medication made life intolerable. Waddingham gained more than 65 pounds and developed diabetes. Her eyes would roll involuntarily, and she struggled with akathisia, an overwhelming sense of restlessness that caused her to shuffle from foot to foot. Suicide attempts followed, and she felt “like a walking zombie.” But because she was no longer hearing the voices, she was released from the hospital.

Waddingham is still on meds today, but has been slowly weaning herself off of them for years. Her long-term goal is to end her reliance on medication entirely.

Life With the Not-Yets

Research suggests that up to 1 in 25 people hears voices regularly and that up to 40 percent of the population will hear voices at some point in their lives. But many live healthy and fulfilling lives despite those aural specters.

In October, Waddingham and more than 200 other voice-hearers from around the world gathered in Thessaloniki, Greece, for the sixth annual World Hearing Voices Congress, organized by Intervoice, an international network of people who hear voices and their supporters. They reject the traditional idea that the voices are a symptom of mental illness. They recast voices as meaningful, albeit unusual, experiences, and believe potential problems lie not in the voices themselves but in a person’s relationship with them.

“If people believe their voices are omnipotent and can harm and control them, then they are less likely to cope and more likely to end up as a psychiatric patient,” says Eugenie Georgaca, a senior lecturer at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the organizer of this year’s conference. “If they have explanations of voices that allow them to deal with them better, that is a first step toward learning to live with them.”

The road to this form of recovery often begins in small support groups run by the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). The first group formed in the Netherlands in 1987, and, since then, others have cropped up in 30 countries, including Bosnia, Canada, Japan, Tanzania and the U.S. Members share their stories and coping mechanisms—for example, setting appointments to talk with the voices, so the voice-hearer can function without distraction the rest of the day. Above all, these groups give voice-hearers a sense of community where they can be seen as people rather than patients.

A central premise of HVN is that these voices frequently emerge following extreme stress or trauma. Research bears that out: At least 70 percent of voice-hearers are thought to have experienced some form of trauma. The characteristics of voices vary widely from person to person, but the voices often mimic the sound and language of abusers. In other instances, they may personify characteristics of the victim at the time of his or her abuse. The voices can be demonic and frightening, angelic and friendly, and take every form in between.

Waddingham, for instance, now hears 13 voices. Among them are Blue, a frightened but cheeky 3-year-old; Elfie, an angry teenager; Tommy, a teenage boy who criticizes her speech; the Scream, a female voice filled with pain and suffering (“When I first heard her, I felt so overwhelmed I was unable to leave the house”); and the Not Yets, a group of voices Waddingham is not yet ready to engage with fully. “They say very nasty things about me—abusive, sexual, violent things, which echo what was said around me when I was little,” she says. “I try to think of them as frightened children that don’t yet know that it’s not OK to say those things.”

When the younger voices can’t fall asleep, Waddingham reads them bedtime stories. When voices suggest she’s going to be harmed by a stranger, she thanks them for their concern but lets them know she is being vigilant about her safety.

The Phantom Choir

After leaving a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia at 18, Eleanor Longden was assigned to work with a psychiatrist familiar with the hearing voices movement. He encouraged her to overcome her fear of her voices, which included both human and demonic-sounding ones.

Traditional psychiatry discourages patients from engaging with voices, and prefers to silence them through medication. But HVN members, like Longden, say that listening to voices is vital to calming them down. And by communicating back, Longden was able to test the boundaries of what these voices could actually do. One time, a voice threatened to kill her family if Longden didn’t cut off her toe, and Longden could hear a “phantom choir” laughing along with him. She refused to obey. Her family didn’t die, but the choir did go silent.

As she grew less afraid, Longden sought to unpack the messages they carried. “I started to see my experiences as a sane reaction to insane circumstances,” she says. Longden had suffered years of sexual and physical abuse as a child. Her memory is hazy, but she knows her abusers were men outside her family. When she heard voices calling her weak for pathetically accepting the years of abuse, she began to read them as encouraging her to be strong and assertive. She later bought a book on assertiveness. “I would say, ‘You can help me practice’ and the voice was like, ‘All right.’”

Some voice-hearers speak to their voices, while others use internal dialogue. Still others communicate by writing things down. Since the voices can manifest any time of day, voice-hearers must think of practical solutions to deal with them without alarming colleagues and passersby. Some choose to wear Bluetooth headsets so they can speak aloud in public without causing alarm, while others simply talk into their mobile phones.

Sandra  Marius 07Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, the founders of the hearing voices movement, are pictured at the 2014 conference in Greece.

Patient X

Standing by the pool at the Hotel Philippion in Thessaloniki, the venue for this year’s symposium, a photographer asks Marius Romme to lean in closer to his wife, Sandra Escher. The two have spent a lifetime listening to the unspeakable trauma suffered by so many voice-hearers. Yet Romme, now 80, and Escher, 69, remain warm, optimistic and almost evangelical in their beliefs, which gave rise to the hearing voices movement three decades ago. “Voices have significance in the lives of voice-hearers and can be used to their benefit,” Romme says. “It’s not a handicap, it’s an extra capacity.”

Romme hasn’t always thought that. Starting in 1974, he ran the social psychiatry department at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and saw patients at a community mental health clinic one day a week. “All my career, I worked with people who hear voices, and I regularly prescribed medicine,” he says. “As all psychiatrists, I thought the voices were meaningless.” He dismissed them as symptoms of mental illness.

A patient named Patsy Hage changed his thinking. Hage started hearing voices as an 8-year-old, after being severely burned. By the time she came to see Romme, she was 30 and her voices had forbidden her from seeing friends or attending choir practice, leaving her isolated and severely depressed. Tranquilizers relieved some of her anxiety, but they did not silence the voices. They did, however, leave her less alert and unable to feel her emotions.

“She was exceptional because she did not agree with me,” Romme says. “She was more critical of my approach, saying, ‘You don’t help me with my problems. The voices are more powerful than I am.’” She questioned why he considered her mentally ill but saw nothing strange about the religiously faithful. “You believe in a God we never see or hear,” she told him, “so why shouldn’t you believe in the voices I really do hear?”

Eventually, she gave Romme a copy of The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by the Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes. In it, Jaynes argued that hearing voices was common until the development of written language. He believed the voices heard by the heroes of Homer’s Iliad were not metaphors but real experiences. “They were voices whose speech and direction could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes,” he wrote, “as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.”

Attributing meaning to the voices gave Hage comfort, and Romme encouraged her to speak with other voice-hearers. They weren’t always easy to find, so he enlisted the help of Escher, a science journalist he had met years earlier. Together, he and Escher placed a national advertisement asking voice-hearers to send in a postcard with their story. Around 700 arrived, including more than 500 from people who experienced auditory hallucinations—and got on with life just fine. “We thought that all people who heard voices would become psychiatric patients,” Escher says. “That simply wasn’t true.”

They invited everyone who sent them a postcard to attend the first hearing voices conference in the Netherlands, to share stories and coping mechanisms. Romme and Escher, who eventually married, began inviting voice-hearers to come stay in their house, so they could talk more openly about their experiences.

Their research struck a chord with the public and stoked interest from the media, though not always for the reasons they had hoped. “Sometimes the journalists were terrible,” Escher remembers. “They would phone and ask, ‘Do you have seven schizos and seven dissociatives?’ I started asking for the questions in advance. Some saw the interviews like looking at monkeys on show.”

On the Margins

Romme and Escher’s belief that voices are not a symptom of disease but rather a response to troubling life experiences—and their treatment method of listening and responding to the voices—remains far outside the mainstream. Russell Margolis, a professor of neurology and director of Johns Hopkins University’s Schizophrenia Program, accepts that voices can result from trauma, but he is quick to point out that they can also be part of a broader syndrome such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which demand specific treatment.

“I’m sure [Roman and Escher’s] approach can be helpful for some, but I can see some instances where it could be destructive,” he says. “One of my great concerns...is that people can get so wrapped up in their symptom that they don’t move forward.”

Yet for many, the hearing voices approach remains an important alternative to the dominant psychiatric model. Waddingham’s voices forced her to confront her past and have helped her push past her pain. She now takes care of the voices that once tormented her. “I can feel a lot of what that voice is feeling,” she says. “If I can chill them out and they can feel safe, then I feel safe. Years ago I would have interpreted these feelings as evidence of me being watched. Now I have a way of making sense of them that gives me some autonomy and control.”

Waddingham, now 36, is helping others do the same. She runs the Voice Collective, a London-wide project that provides services to young voice-hearers and their parents. In 2010, she began establishing hearing voices groups inside English prisons, where, according to the Ministry of Justice, 15 percent of women and 10 percent of men demonstrate psychotic symptoms but are left to cope on their own.

The challenges they face—alone in a prison cell—make Waddingham even more thankful for how far she has come. “I feel so privileged,” she says. “I’ve traveled. I’m married. I’ve got cats. And I’ve started my own business. People always say I work too much, and I say, ‘I spent a good decade drugged up with no life. I’m recapturing some of what I lost.’” 

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Russian Troops Stationed Near Finnish Border as Putin Begins Move on Arctic

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A detachment of about 800 servicemen from Russia’s Northern Fleet have been stationed in the Russian town of Alakurtti, Murmansk region, just 50km from the Finnish border, part of a large-scale expansion of Russian military facilities in the country’s northwest according to a press statement issued by the unit’s commanding admiral Vladimir Korolev on Tuesday.

The rest of the fleet are expected to be stationed there “soon” according to Korolev. The base will be one of the key strongholds in Russia’s northernmost territories, designed to strengthen the country’s defence capabilities from the west, and improve their territorial claims over areas in the Arctic.

At full force, Russia’s Northern Fleet consists of about 3,000 ground troops trained for combat in Arctic conditions, along with 39 ships and 45 submarines. Its arrival in Murmansk follows Russia’s decision last year to create a united command for all of its units designated with protecting Russia’s interests in the country’s northern regions.

According to Korolev, only one of the two commissioned barracks in the town are operational at the moment, with the other still under construction. Once the facilities are complete, Northern Fleet troops will begin combat training in Alakurtti.

14 airfields are also expected to be built in the new base, according to Korolev, with 10 of them due to be opened “in a matter of months”.

The servicemen taking up the stations in the military town on Tuesday constitute the motor rifle brigade - a coastal defense unit from the Northern Fleet’s ranks.

Hours later at a press conference in Moscow on, Russia’s deputy defense minister general Dmitry Bulgakov confirmed his colleague’s account and added that all of Russia’s Northern Fleet troops stationed on the Finnish border will be kitted out with frost resistant uniforms, which are designed to resist temperatures of -60 degrees celsius.

NATO spokespeople were not immediately available to comment. Although Finland is not part of the alliance, Norway is a founding member.

According to Russia’s state news agency Itar-Tass, the Northern Fleet underwent training in simulated Arctic conditions last week, while a recent Newsweek investigation found that in the coming years Russia’s military activity will focus on operations in the Arctic.

Finnish news network YLE said that preparations were being made so that as soon as this spring Alakurtti could accommodate almost 3,000 Russian soldiers in the small town.

The current strategic advance of Russian troops towards the Murmansk region follows the Russian Navy’s head of command Admiral Viktor Chirkov’s announcement last month that the regions of the highest importance to the forces under his command are the Black Sea and the Arctic.

The Arctic circle is thought to have a wealth of natural resources with five countries making a territorial claim over it. Russia, Canada, USA, Norway and Denmark, which has sovereign control over Greenland, have all made claims over the North Pole.

In the last few months Russia has heavily stepped up its military projects in its northwestern regions and the overhaul of its facilities in Murmansk is part of that effort.

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Cuban Dissidents Out of Prison, But Still Not Free

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HAVANA (Reuters) - Most of the 53 Cuban prisoners released from jail under a historic U.S.-Cuba accord remain bound to the justice system under conditions that could easily return them to prison, dissident leaders say.

While they doubt Cuba's communist government would risk its rapprochement with the United States by putting former prisoners back behind bars, they say the 53 released are not entirely free.

"It was done with the sword of Damocles hanging over them," said Rafael Molina, a leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), the country's largest dissident organization.

About one-third of the 38 people released last week are subject to "conditional release," meaning they must periodically report to the courts supervising their cases, said the dissident Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

Another third were released on parole, requiring them to serve out their terms outside prison but unable to leave the country, it said.

Others were simply freed pending trial, with charges still intact, or had their sentences altered.

Virtually all can be returned to jail for minor offenses and some say they were told to stay away from opposition politics.

"None of them have unconditional freedom. None of them," said Elizardo Sanchez, leader of the commission, although he added he did not believe the government would harass them.

Haydee Gallardo, 51, and her husband were among those released last week and she took part in a protest march organized by the Ladies in White group over the weekend.

Though she believes she is one of the few to have no conditions set on her release, she says she worries her husband Angel Figueredo, 53, could be returned to jail.

"I don't think the repression will stop considering that they continue to keep watch over us," Gallardo told Reuters. "I'm afraid the repression will result in him getting locked up again."

Figueredo said he was never told what he could or could not do outside of prison, but that he has received more subtle messages. After leaving the Ladies in White march, he said he saw a state security officer whom he recognized, watching from his car.

"He gave me a threatening nod of the head, but he didn't stop me or talk to us," he said.

STIGMA, SUSPICION

Released dissidents often return to their homes stigmatized, enduring suspicions from Cubans who show little or no sympathy for those who openly challenge the one-party system.

They often encounter difficulty finding jobs, and relatives may be declined promotions or coveted spots in universities.

Interior Ministry officials historically have told those on parole not to engage in politics, but many have defied the order without consequence, presuming they are protected by their high profiles.

As part of the deal to restore diplomatic relations after five decades of hostility, the U.S. government negotiated the release of 53 people it considered political prisoners.

Cuba had already released 17 of them by the time the deal was announced on Dec. 17 and has since set free the other 36, plus at least two more who were not on the U.S. list.

Senior U.S. officials have welcomed the mass release.

Cuban officials have said little but they deny the dissidents qualify as political prisoners, instead dismissing them as a tiny minority of mercenaries working for the United States.

While most Cubans support the revolution or are apolitical, there are pockets of dissent, as in David Bustamante's neighborhood in the central city of Santa Clara.

Bustamante, 23, was arrested in May after climbing onto his roof and shouting slogans, demanding that Cuba feed its people.

He was arrested and held for six months before being convicted of public disorder and disrespecting Cuban authorities. One of the 53 on the U.S. list, he was freed on Dec. 9 on conditional release.

Now, he says, he is subject to a curfew and has been warned not to resume political activism.

"I don't feel free," Bustamante told Reuters by telephone. "This is a mockery and it shows they are mocking us. They are snatching our freedom every day because we don't have freedom of expression."

Martha Beatriz Roque, 69, has lived under what Cuba calls "extrapenal license," or parole, for 10 years. She is out of prison but unable to leave Cuba and presumes she is closely watched by state security.

"There are a lot of things you can't do and other things you don't know whether you can do or not," Roque told Reuters. "Those under extrapenal license depend on a judge, to whom you have to report regularly. Those on conditional release are constantly responding to the justice system, any time the system decides."

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Photos: German Anti-Islamisation Rally Draws Thousands

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An anti-Islamisation rally in Germany drew a record 25,000 people to the streets of Dresden on Monday night, five days after deadly terrorist attacks in Paris resulted in 20 people dead, including three gunmen.

The rally in Dresden was organized by anti-immigration group Patriotische Europaer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, or PEGIDA).

A week ago, 18,000 people attended a similar march in the east German city, the BBC reports. Since October, PEGIDA has held weekly protests that have gradually grown in size; the first one, held on October 20, drew 350 people, CNN reports.

Marchers held signs declaring “Je Suis Charlie,” a slogan that became a rallying cry for peaceful demonstrators showing their solidarity with the victims of last week’s attack in Paris.

Gunmen claiming to be affiliated with terrorist group Al-Qaeda killed 10 staff members and two police officers at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, in Paris Wednesday. After an extensive manhunt by police, the suspected gunmen, who were brothers, were killed by police in a standoff Friday. On Thursday, one gunman killed a policewoman and a day later joined a second gunmen in a holdup at a kosher supermarket, where they killed four hostages. French police stormed the building, killing one of the attackers. The other, a woman, is still at-large.

The PEGIDA marchers were described by Reuters as “mostly men over 50.” Marches were also held Monday night in Dusseldorf and Berlin by local factions of PEGIDA.

Despite being told by police to stay away from the rallies, anti-PEGIDA protesters came out in force across Germany, holding signs reading “Never Again” and “Refugees Welcome.” Around 30,000 people marched against PEGIDA in Leipzig, 20,000 in Munich, 19,000 in Hanover and 7,000 in Dresden, the BBC estimated.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would join a march in Berlin on Tuesday organized by Muslim groups to remember the victims of the Paris attacks. “Islam belongs in Germany,” Merkel said on Monday after meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday. “I am the chancellor of all Germans, this includes those who live here permanently, regardless of their origin or where they were born.” She has said the PEGIDA marchers have “hatred in their hearts.”

PEGIDA was founded in October 2014 by activist Lutz Bachmann, a former cook who has owned a small advertising agency since the early 1990s. His demands for the German government include barring reentry for Islamists who leave Germany to fight in the Middle East and forced integration of immigrants into German society. The group’s co-founder, Kathrin Oertel, told Reuters that PEGIDA is getting “more support each week.”

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Accurate Size of Largest Sea Creatures Revealed

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We humans like to tell tall tales. Literally. When people—even scientists—record and communicate the size of various animals, they tend to exaggerate the beasts’ size.

Looking to set the record straight, scientists have put together a comprehensive survey of past studies and verifiable documentation to determine the accurate size of a range of marine animals, from crabs to whales. They found that in many cases that the alleged record size for a species was significantly larger than anything that could be scientifically validated.

“It's sort of human nature to make everything bigger, and we are poor observers of size in general,” says study lead author Craig McClain, a marine biologist at Duke University. “I don't think there were any examples of animals being larger in reality than what people had thought—in almost every case they were smaller, or the same, as reported previously.”

For example, giant squid are often referred to in the popular media and old studies as growing up to 49 feet or even 59 feet, says McClain, who is also the assistant director of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. This is almost certainly a significant overestimate, and may result from previous measurements being made on dead animals that washed ashore; tentacles can loosen and stretch out as they begin to decay, he says.

Instead the authors wrote in the study, “we feel that the longest scientifically verified giant squid is 12 [meters],” or 39 feet. Of course, that’s still impressive, he adds. They found similar overestimates for other oceanic beasts.

marine-animal-sizesAccurate record sizes of marine animals

(Click for a larger version of the graphic.)

They came up with the new, more accurate records by consulting recent peer-reviewed studies, polling scientists around the world, and even looking at measurements of specimens sold on eBay.

Some of these latter numbers tend to be quite accurate—people who collect giant mollusks, for example, are very precise about measuring length as this directly impacts price, McClain says. And dealers who fudge size statistics don’t tend to survive, he adds.

So check out the above image in case you want to know the accurate record size for the ocean’s behemoths—whether it be the 120-foot lion’s mane jellyfish or the 4.5-foot-wide giant clam. The scientists’ results are also published online in the journal PeerJ.

octopus-useA large octopus

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Does Facebook Know You Better Than Your Mother? Or Roommate?

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In the 2013 sci-fi romance Her, a writer falls in love with his computer’s operating system. Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, begins to feel as if his Samantha—the female identity of his OS, voiced by Scarlett Johansson—knows him better than his closest friends do.

After Wu Youyou and Michal Kosinski saw Her, they started discussing whether it was possible for a computer in the real world to judge someone’s personality better than other humans.

Wu, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of Cambridge, and Kosinski, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Stanford, are co-lead authors of a study, published online Monday in the journal PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), that asks how well someone’s digital footprint can predict his or her personality—and how that compares with the judgment of friends, family, roommates or a spouse.

In his previous research, Kosinski found that Facebook likes can be used to accurately predict a range of attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender.

He says that one common comment he and his colleagues received about that paper, published in PNAS in March 2013, was “OK, this is really cool that [Facebook likes] can predict all of those things, but how does it compare with how humans can predict?” In other words, he says, how impressive is it that the computer can make such accurate predictions?

Wu and Kosinski, along with David Stillwell, a researcher at Cambridge, found that the computer’s average accuracy predicting personality was higher than the average accuracy of all human judges, except for a spouse. But a spouse’s judgment, too, could be beat with a larger quantity of data.

1-13-15 FB study graphThis is a graph showing accuracy of computer model's personality judgement compared with humans.

The researchers used a sample of more than 80,000 volunteers, who answered 100 questions on an app called myPersonality. The questionnaire, based on the commonly used OCEAN model, evaluates respondents for five major personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The participants also gave researchers access to their Facebook likes, which served as the digital footprint used to compare computer judgment with human judgment of personality in the study.

The researchers had the computer try to find patterns that linked the personality traits uncovered in the OCEAN survey with Facebook likes by building linear regressions models on a portion of the sample data they had collected and generating a formula for each trait based on likes.

For example, in evaluating openness, likes such as Buddhism, The Daily Show, Salvador Dali and William Shakespeare were linked with a liberal and artistic personality on the survey, whereas How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and rap and hip-hop were linked with a conservative and conventional personality. On the extraversion scale, Snookie, partying, Gucci and beer pong indicated an outgoing and active personality, while The Matrix, programming, Doctor Who and thinking indicated a shy and reserved personality.

The researchers then fed in the remaining sample data so the computer could predict a user’s traits based on the patterns it had previously established. They repeated the process to generate predictions for each participant. The more Facebook likes a study participant had, the more accurate the computer’s prediction (at least up to a few hundred likes—Kosinski expects there would be diminishing returns at a certain point).

They then had friends and family members of participants fill out a short survey about the latter group’s personalities, and compared the results with the computer’s judgments.

With just 10 likes, the computer did a better job predicting someone’s personality than a co-worker did; with 70 likes, it beat friends’ and roommates’ judgments; with 150 likes, it superseded that of family members; and with 300 likes, it was even better than a spouse.

1-13-15 FB study Fig 2Computer-based personality judgment accuracy (y axis), plotted against the number of Likes available for prediction (x axis). The red line represents the average accuracy (correlation) of computers’ judgment across the five personality traits. The five-trait average accuracy of human judgments is positioned onto the computer accuracy curve.

It’s important to keep in mind that the study focused on one type of personality assessment related to five specific traits. There are other observations and judgments a computer might not handle as well, says Wu, such as emotional intelligence.

“Humans do have an advantage given their ability to capture cues that…might not be as visible in a digital environment,” she says. “Maybe likes are not indicative of how socially skilled someone is,” whereas humans can determine whether someone is socially awkward or doesn’t have empathy from observations of things like facial expression and body language.

The researchers chose to use likes as their digital footprint “because this is a very generic type of digital signal,” says Kosinski, “curated by people and maintained in a public environment.” He and his colleagues predict that the “results should generalize to other environments like Spotify playlists, web browsing logs, Amazon Kindle logs.”

However, Kosinski says that in previous tests, he has found that other footprints, like Web browsing logs, are even more accurate than Facebook likes. People are less aware of their browsing history, he says, and don’t censor it in the same way they do with public Facebook likes. In the future, Facebook likes could be mixed in with other information, such as status updates, songs listened to, browsing logs and data that can be collected by a mobile phone (tone of voice, how often you talk, heartbeat) to predict personality traits more accurately, as well as to track (and even predict) current and changing states of mind.

This, Wu says, has lots of practical applications. “Recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality; products and services could adjust their behavior to best match their users’ characters and changing moods,” she says. “People may choose to augment their own intuitions and judgments with this kind of data analysis when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths or even romantic partners.”

But there are also dangers to having machines that can judge people’s personalities and emotional states, says Kosinski. “Like any other technology, this technology is morally neutral, but it can be used for a bad purpose,” he says. “For example, knowledge of psychological traits can help me exert influence over you.” The risk, he says, is that people will lose trust in cellphones and online environments, which is why he believes people should be given control over their own data and the authority to decide whether it will be shared with certain companies.

Nevertheless, says Kosinski, there is a type of “magic” in the paper: “a very vanilla, very standard, very generic statistical model can predict something that was so far considered to be kind of a deeply human skill.”

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Boko Haram Steps Up Attacks in Nigeria Ahead of Election

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ABUJA/BAUCHI (Reuters) - A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a mosque in the northeastern Nigerian city of Gombe on Tuesday, killing at least two other people and wounding 14 during prayers, a Red Cross official and witnesses said.

Gombe is just outside the main area of operations of Boko Haram, a violent jihadist group trying to carve out an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, and has been attacked several times in the last few months.

"We were holding prayers when we heard a loud explosion," witness Musa Usman told Reuters by phone.

"We rushed out of the mosque. There were so many people injured on the ground."

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.Growing insecurity linked to Islamist militants is a major problem for President Goodluck Jonathan a month before polls in which he faces a rival, Muhammadu Buhari, seen as tough on security when he was a military ruler in the 1980s.

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it believes the Feb. 14 election in Nigeria is a factor behind the sharp increase in attacks by Boko Haram, a group which has killed thousands since launching an uprising five years ago.

Red Cross official Umar Ahmed, who was on the scene of the blast, said the bomber and two other people were killed. An official at the hospital to where the casualties were brought, Ibrahim Garba, said the emergency ward was treating 14 people for blast wounds. Some were in critical condition, he said.

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U.S. To Target North Korea's Finances

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States aims to use new sanctions imposed on North Korea over the cyber attack on Sony Pictures to cut off the country's remaining links to the international financial system, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.

Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department, said past sanctions had already discouraged "hundreds" of overseas banks, including China's major commercial banks, from doing business with North Korea.

New sanctions announced by President Barack Obama on Jan 2. provided "a tremendous amount of flexibility" and the goal was to identify remaining financial institutions that allowed North Korea access to the global system, which could face sanction themselves, Glaser told a House of Representatives briefing.

"We could target any North Korean government agency; we could target any North Korean government official ... we could apply sanctions with respect to any individual or entity who is providing them, in turn, material support," he said.

Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for use of the full scope of the new sanctions announced after U.S. authorities said North Korea was behind the Sony attack.

"The significance of this new Executive Order may come from the broad power it gives the president to target anyone who is a part of the North Korean government, or is assisting them in any way … that is if the administration chooses to use it to its full advantage," he told the briefing.

"We need to step up and target those financial institutions in Asia and beyond that are supporting the brutal and dangerous North Korean regime."

When challenged by Royce about "a number of small banks" still doing business with North Korea and the need to choke off the country's access to hard currency, Glaser replied: "That's exactly what we are trying to do."

Royce said he hoped a bipartisan bill he sponsored that would label North Korea "a primary money laundering concern" would be passed by the Senate this year.

At a news conference at the United Nations in New York, North Korea's Deputy U.N. Ambassador An Myong Hun reiterated his country's position that it had nothing to do with the Sony hacking and said the United States should provide evidence.

Long-standing international sanctions have sought to push North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program, but while they have slowed the program, they have not stopped it.

The country's main economic ties are with China and, according U.S. government reports, its tiny economy has supported itself with money-making scams ranging from counterfeiting $100 bills to illicit arms and drug sales.

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Fighting Escalates in Ukraine With Attacks on Bus, Donetsk Airport

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KIEV (Reuters) - A passenger bus came under heavy fire in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, killing at least 11 people, Ukrainian authorities said, and fighting intensified around the international airport in the city of Donetsk as separatists tried to oust government forces.

The latest violence flared after Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany scrapped plans for a summit in Kazakhstan this week because of the failure to implement a four-month-old ceasefire agreement.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko condemned the bus attack as an act that "chilled the heart" and said the forces of the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics were to blame.

"These deaths are on the conscience of the DNR and LNR gangs and on those who stand behind them," he said in a statement in which he promised to sign a decree on Wednesday to more troops for the front.

A senior official from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) called for maximum restraint from all sides in the Ukraine conflict, which has killed more than 4,700 people since last April.

"Over the past 24 hours the situation has significantly deteriorated, especially near the Donetsk airport," said Ertugrul Apakan, head of the OSCE special monitoring mission in Ukraine.

The war between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels broke out soon after Russia annexed Crimea last year, creating the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War. Western governments accuse Russia of backing the separatists, including by sending in troops, which it denies.

Photographs showed the bus peppered by holes, as were seats inside it. A long trail of blood marked the road beside it near the town of Volnovakha.

A regional Ukrainian administration spokesman said the bus was attacked by rebels using Grad rocket launchers while it was carrying civilians through a government checkpoint.

Separatists denied responsibility and said the bus had been attacked by small arms fire rather than a missile or shell.

AIRPORT BATTLE

Reports from Donetsk said a significant part of the airport's control tower - already a wrecked hulk with cabling and concrete dangling from it after months of shelling - had been destroyed.

The Sergei Prokofiev airport complex, opened to great fanfare by the now ousted president Viktor Yanukovich to mark the Euro 2012 soccer championship, has disintegrated under months of fire.

After a night of attacks from separatists using Grad missile launchers, the rebels began firing from tanks on the airport's new terminal, which was still being held by Ukrainian government forces, the Kiev military said in a statement.

"The Russian military and the terrorists have deliberately chosen the tactic of escalation of tension," military spokesman Andriy Lysenko told journalists. One Ukrainian soldier was killed and 10 wounded in overnight fighting.

Although it has not functioned since the onset of hostilities last April, with its runways cratered by shell holes, the airport has symbolic value for both sides. Government forces have repelled repeated rebel attempts to dislodge them.

In the capital Kiev, a parliamentary deputy said government forces had been given an ultimatum by the rebels to pull out of the airport by 5 p.m. (10.00 a.m. EST) "or face destruction".

This could not be confirmed from the separatist side.

The Russian, German and French government leaders had been invited to talks on Thursday in the Kazakh capital Astana by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

But the four countries' foreign ministers said after meeting in Berlin on Monday that the failure to implement the ceasefire deal and the need to agree on how to deliver aid and release prisoners meant "further work needs to be done" before a summit is held. There was no indication when it might now take place.

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2 Chainz, Nancy Grace Debate Marijuana Legalization

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Rapper 2 Chainz joined television host/justice enthusiast Nancy Grace to discuss the pros and cons of legal marijuana on HLN Tuesday night, and the result was great television.

Using the hashtag #Pot2Blame?, Grace tackled marijuana policy at length with a panel of guests that also included addiction specialist Brad Lamm and National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Chair Norman Kent. But most of the 50-minute segment was devoted to 2 Chainz (real name Tauheed Epps), whom Grace questioned on everything from his parenting to his lyrics while a stream of marijuana b-roll and 2 Chainz music videos played silently in the background. (Grace's perfect icebreaker? "While I have you—why the two chains?") 

The two mostly argued over a series of criminal cases raised by Grace as emblematic of a future in which pot is widely legal. In one recent case, the 3-year-old daughter of a Colorado couple died in a mobile home fire while her parents were drinking and smoking pot on the porch. Grace also referenced a Georgia teacher accused of letting minors smoke pot at her house, and a 2014 viral video of a toddler smoking a blunt while adult voices can be heard in the background. 

“You can’t use these particular stories to define everyone who uses [marijuana],” 2 Chainz said on Tuesday's show. “You don’t have to be a genius; you don’t have to graduate from school. You don’t have to a successful artist or entertainer to know that giving any child drugs is wrong.”

The rapper went on to tout the benefits of marijuana, both medical—he said he uses it to cope with anxiety—and financial. He repeatedly referenced the hundreds of millions of dollars generated in Colorado by legal marijuana sales, and told Grace that taxpayer money currently used on minor drug arrests (including a bust on his tour bus that netted less than a gram of pot) would be better spent elsewhere.  

“He’s articulating what millions and millions of Americans feel, which is that pot is perfectly normal,” NORML’s Kent said on the show. “2 Chainz’s children are going to grow up in a world where people use marijuana responsibly, where they don't go to jail unjustly, where cannabis consumers are going to be lawfully protected, where government revenues are going to be enhanced and we’re all going to be better off.”

On Monday's program, Grace called marijuana legalization a "horrible" idea. "The ones that are disagreeing are lethargic, sitting on the sofa eating chips," she said. "Pot, it makes you fat and lazy." 

 

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Most British Jews Feel They Have No Future in Europe: Poll

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A quarter of Jews in Britain have considered leaving the country in the last two years and well over half feel they have no long term future in Europe, according to a survey published on Wednesday.

Additionally, anti-Semitic beliefs are widely prevalent among the wider public with 45 percent of Britons agreeing with at least one anti-Semitic sentiment, the YouGov poll for the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) group found.

The survey comes a week after four French Jews were killed in an attack on a Kosher supermarket in Pariswhich led to police stepping up security at synagogues and other Jewish venues across Britain.

"Whilst anti-Semitism in Britain is not yet at the levels seen in most of Europe, the results of our survey should be a wakeup call," said Gideon Falter, chairman of the CAA in a foreword to its report.

"Britain is at a tipping point: unless anti-Semitism is met with zero tolerance, it will continue to grow and British Jews may increasingly question their place in their own country."

Last July, the Community Security Trust, which provides security advice to Britain's estimated 260,000 Jews, said anti-Semitic incidents in Britain had risen to a near record level amid fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Gaza.

According to the CAA's poll of 2,230 British Jews, 58 percent felt Jews might have no long-term future inEurope, 45 percent felt their family was threatened by Islamist extremism and more than half had witnessed more anti-Semitism in the last two years than ever before.

The survey of the wider public found a quarter of Britons believed "Jews chase money more than other British people", and one in six agreed that "Jews think they are better than other people" and "Jews have too much power in the media".

In all, 45 percent of the 3,411 questioned believed at least one anti-Semitic statement shown to them to be true.

France has posted almost 5,000 extra police officers to protect Jewish sites after last week's killings, and on Tuesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron met Jewish leaders to reassure them and see if there was more that could be done to ensure their safety.

"I think we have to recognize that in a modern democracy you can never protect every threat but we should do everything we can and be as vigilant as we can to help reassure," he told them.

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