Unemployment Extension Fight Heating Up -- Again (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | The unemployment extension reauthorization battle is heating up again. Again, Congress seems to be waiting until the last minute to pass much needed legislation that will ensure that benefits continue to be made available to millions of Americans currently jobless, victims of a sluggish economy and a stagnant jobs market. Again, Congress seems to be setting up battle lines with Democrats pressing for passage of the extensions and Republicans only willing to allow passage if they get some sort of concession for their cooperation. And again, according to OpenCongress.org, there are over two million of the long-term unemployed, those individuals that unemployment extensions are designed to assist, set to watch their benefits expire by mid-February if some form of reauthorization is not hammered out.

Feel like it's deju vu all over again? It is, just a year removed. Only the particulars have changed. The goals of both parties remain the same. Democrats want the unemployment extensions to advance their political agenda. Republicans want some kind of concession to advance their political agenda.

Last year, Republicans held out past the expiration date for extension benefits in early December. Wanting offsets to the extension proposal (not an unreasonable demand) in order for benefits to be paid for, Republicans were also adamant that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for America's wealthiest would not be the method of payment (which was unreasonable). In the end, as most knew would happen, the unemployment extension package passed with a 13-month extension (through to the end of 2011), while Democrats allowed the Bush tax cuts to extend for another two years.

Since most things that get done in Washington occur because of leverage, it would appear that Democrats had lost a crucial bargaining tool to offset the unemployment extension reauthorization. But the takeover of Congress by an intractable group of Tea Party Republicans after the 2010 midterm elections forced congressional gridlock in budgetary matters throughout the year and a debt ceiling deal at the end of July resulted in a radical spending cut plan to social programs and the defense budget to be triggered if a bipartisan "super committee" could not agree on $1.2 trillion in cuts.

They could not. They announced last week that they were unable to reach agreement.

So with the Democrats regaining some leverage (defense spending favored by Republicans), Congress is now setting up battle lines as the unemployment extension deadline nears. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has been attempting to put together a package, according to Politico, that allows for the reauthorization of benefits for a year while at the same time targeting and alleviating defense spending cuts, something the more hawkish Republicans can get behind.

Legislators will eventually pass something. Benefits will be reauthorized. The opposing sides just have to play a little partisan politics and blame each other for obstruction for a few weeks.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politicsopinion/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111205/cm_ac/10596741_unemployment_extension_fight_heating_up__again

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Afghanistan's allies pledge to stay for long haul (Reuters)

BONN (Reuters) ? Foreign governments pledged on Monday to support Afghanistan long after allied troops go home, with or without a political settlement with insurgents once seen as the best way to prevent a new civil war.

At a conference of more than 80 countries but boycotted by Pakistan, they said even after most foreign combat troops leave in 2014, the Afghan government will not be allowed to meet the fate of its Soviet-era predecessor, which collapsed in 1992.

"The United States intends to stay the course with our friends in Afghanistan," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. "We will be there with you as you make the hard decisions that are necessary for your future."

Hosts Germany sought to signal Western staying power in the country, where al Qaeda sheltered under Taliban protection before the September 11 attacks, at the gathering in Bonn.

"We send a clear message to the people of Afghanistan: We will not leave you on your own. We will not leave you in the lurch," said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.

Ten years after a similar conference held to rebuild Afghanistan, the Afghan war is becoming increasingly unpopular in Western public opinion -- especially since U.S. forces found and killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2 in a raid that removed a central pretext of the 2001 invasion.

Western countries are under pressure to spend money reviving flagging economies at home rather than propping up a government in Kabul widely criticized for being corrupt and ineffective.

And as expected, delegates at the Bonn conference steered clear of making specific pledges to make up a shortfall in funding for Afghanistan estimated by the World Bank at some $7 billion a year from the end of 2014.

For now, nobody wants to show their hand too clearly in the hope that someone else -- from the United States to Europe, the Gulf to Asia -- will come forward to foot a share of the bill.

Brewing confrontations pitting Washington against Pakistan and Iran, two of Afghanistan's most influential neighbors, have also added to despondency over the outlook for the war.

Pakistan boycotted the meeting after NATO aircraft killed 24 of its soldiers on the border with Afghanistan in a November 26 attack the alliance called a "tragic" accident.

But delegates from Russia to Iran to China, all uneasy about the U.S. military presence in their neighborhood, were nonetheless able to agree with Western powers "the main threat to Afghanistan's security and stability is terrorism."

"In this regard, we recognize the regional dimensions of terrorism and extremism, including terrorist safe havens, and emphasize the need for sincere and result-oriented regional cooperation..." a conference statement.

Pakistan is accused by Washington and Kabul of providing "safe havens" to insurgents to use to counter the influence of rival India. Pakistan says it being used as a scapegoat for the U.S. failure to bring stability to Afghanistan.

SCALING BACK OBJECTIVES

The mood at the Bonn conference was a far cry from the early days of the Afghan war when, fresh from toppling the Taliban, Western powers hoped to bring permanent peace to a country which has now been at war for more than three decades.

But with problems of insecurity, governance, corruption and narcotics inside Afghanistan, compounded by insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan, objectives have been scaled back.

By the time of a conference in London on Afghanistan in January 2010, Western governments had agreed insurgents could be brought into peace talks if they were willing to cut ties with al Qaeda, give up violence and respect the Afghan constitution.

But even that goal has proved elusive. Embroynic contacts with the Taliban have yielded little, and foreign governments have been preparing increasingly for a scenario in which there is no peace settlement with the Taliban even before the before most foreign combat troops leave in 2014.

The aim now is to leave behind a government which is just about good enough to survive, even if fighting persists in parts of the country and the Taliban insurgency remains active.

Some are still hoping Pakistan will use its influence to deliver the Afghan Taliban into a political settlement.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai told reporters Pakistan had missed a good opportunity to discuss its own issues and the future of Afghanistan by not attending the Bonn conference. "But it will not stop us from cooperating together," he said.

Asked what he wanted Pakistan to do to help bring peace in Afghanistan, he said: "Close the sanctuaries, arrange a purposeful dialogue with those Taliban who are in Pakistan."

Clinton said she expected Pakistan to play a constructive role in Afghanistan, even as she voiced disappointment that Islamabad chose not to attend the conference.

But British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Afghanistan could still have a bright future even if the Taliban were not brought into a political settlement.

"It may take a longer time to bring about our objectives but we should not be deterred at all by Taliban reluctance to come to the table..." he told the BBC.

Foreign governments were also determined to try to dispel at least some of the pessimism seeping into the Afghan project.

Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna, whose country became the first to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan -- much to the irritation of Pakistan -- pledged India would keep up its heavy investment in a country whose mineral wealth and trade routes made it "a land of opportunity."

In a rare positive development, Clinton said the United States would resume paying into a World Bank-administered Reconstruction Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a decision that U.S. officials said would allow for the disbursement of roughly $650 million to $700 million in suspended U.S. aid.

The United States and other big donors stopped paying into the fund in June, when the International Monetary Fund suspended its program with Afghanistan because of concerns about Afghanistan's troubled Kabul Bank.

IRAN ROW OVERSHADOWS CONFERENCE

In a sign of quite how difficult it will be to bring peace to Afghanistan, the conference was nearly overshadowed before it started by a row with Iran -- increasingly at odds with the United States and European powers over its nuclear program.

Tehran said on Sunday it shot down a U.S. spy drone in its airspace and threatened to respond. [ID:nL5E7N40D9] International forces in Kabul said the drone may have been one lost last week while flying over western Afghanistan.

Iran has been accused in the past of providing low-level backing to the Taliban insurgency, and diplomats and analysts have suggested Tehran could ratchet up this support if it wanted to put serious pressure on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Monday also reiterated Iran's opposition to the United States keeping some forces in Afghanistan after 2014.

Simon Gass, NATO's senior civilian representative in Kabul and former British ambassador to Tehran, downplayed the prospect of Tehran acting as a spoiler in any Afghan settlement.

He recalled Iran was a historic foe of the Taliban, which has a record of hostility to Afghan Shi'ites, Iran's co-religionists.

Despite its dislike of the Taliban "Iran has a history in Afghanistan of supporting some Taliban groups in different ways. That could continue. We shall have to see," he said.

"But what I would say is that my quite long experience of Iran is that Iranians are realists, and once the international agreements are in place which define the security architecture for Afghanistan after 2014, my belief is that Iran will begin to adjust to those new realities," he told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom, Arshad Mohammed, Sabine Siebold, Missy Ryan and William Maclean; Writing by Myra MacDonald; Editing by William Maclean)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111206/wl_nm/us_afghanistan_conference

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Obama: U.S. needs payroll tax cut, recovery fragile (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? President Barack Obama said on Monday the United States needs to extend the payroll tax cut because the U.S. recovery is fragile and the situation in Europe is adding to the uncertainty.

"Although the unemployment rate went down last month, our recovery is still fragile," Obama said in a statement to reporters urging congressional Republicans to extend the payroll tax cut into 2012.

He also said failure to extend unemployment insurance would do extraordinary harm to the U.S. economy.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/obama/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111205/pl_nm/us_obama_taxes

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Ryan Gosling too sexy for Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper admits Ryan Gosling is one of the reasons he doesn?t feel like People?s Sexiest Man Alive.

?There was such a backlash to when they announced it and Ryan Gosling, who I love and I just did a movie with him ? he?s the greatest ? but we were both in Paris this last week and a friend of mine showed me ? photographs from the paparazzi ? and when I say friend, I mean me, alone in my room, looking at the computer. And it?s like him walking around and he literally looks like he?s in a photoshoot, like he just came off the runway, like the pea coat is like this with the scarf,? Bradley recounted on ?The Graham Norton Show? in the UK over the weekend. ?There are ones of me, and I literally look like the neighbor who never really comes out of his house, and when he does, you?re like, ?Maybe you should just stay in.? We don?t know what he does in there. So it?s been interesting.?

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Big Screen Hunk Ryan Gosling

Bradley jokingly called being named the Sexiest Man, ?the worst,? adding, ?it?s just so awful.?

He also revealed the title has made him rethink every day activities.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Bradley Cooper: Hollywood?s ?Hangover? Heartthrob!

?I?m finally at an age ? I?m 36 years old ? where I really don?t care about anything like that anymore, which is a wonderful thing and then this happened and then I started to realize just how not sexy I am,? he said.

?I have a lot of moments where [I?m] walking out and I?ll open up the door [and think to myself], ?I could do that a lot sexier,?? he laughed.

In related news, Bradley, who was promoting the UK DVD release of ?The Hangover Part II,? said he expects to start shooting the third installment in the film franchise next fall.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Young Hollywood Heartthrobs!

?I personally want to do it. I hope we?re gonna start shooting in September. [Director, co-writer] Todd Phillips is working on the script,? Bradley said.

The actor also noted the film will likely diverge from the first two vacation-buddy comedies.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Big Screen Gentlemen: Hollywood?s Leading Men

?I think it?ll take place in Los Angeles and maybe not adhere to the structure. It might be different,? he explained.

Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45556816/ns/today-entertainment/

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Holiday calendar: The masses in Mecca

DigitalGlobe

Worshipers crowd around the Kaaba shrine in the Saudi city of Mecca, venerated as the most sacred site in Islam, in a satellite picture from DigitalGlobe. The image was captured from orbit on Nov. 2, just before the beginning of the annual Hajj pilgrimage. During the Hajj, millions of Muslims walk counterclockwise seven times around the Kaaba.

Alan Boyle writes

'Tis the season for religious holidays, including Hanukkah for Jews and Christmas for Christians. But the Muslim world has already marked its biggest religious observance of the year, with an orbiting satellite as a witness.

Today's offering for the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar adds an Islamic twist to the holiday countdown: Here's a picture from DigitalGlobe?showing thousands of people gathering around the Kaaba shrine in Mecca on Nov. 2, just before the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Participating in the Hajj is a duty able-bodied Muslims are required to perform at least?once in their lives. The capstone of the experience is the Eid al-Adha, a festival that commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to God.

The?scriptural story serves to illustrate the linkages between different religious traditions. Whether you observe Eid al-Adha or?Hanukkah, Advent or none of the above, here's wishing you wider perspectives on the world and its inhabitants during this holiday season.


Some of those wider?perspectives are on view in our Month in Space Pictures slideshow, which we've just published for November. Here's a lineup of links for the pictures included in the slideshow, plus pointers to some other space-themed Advent calendars:

Check back on Saturday for the next installment of our Advent calendar, which will be featuring new views of Earth from space every day until Christmas.


Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Source: http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/02/9174633-holiday-calendar-masses-in-mecca?chromedomain=cosmiclog

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Video: Gingrich shocks with child labor stance

Gorgeous concept car predicted future in 1969

The Holden Hurricane research vehicle, originally designed as an experiment "to study design trend, propulsion systems and other long-range developments," has been restored to its former glory 42 years after its car show debut.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/45529593#45529593

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Missing son of country singer Mindy McCready found in Arkansas (Reuters)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla (Reuters) ? The missing five-year-old son of country singer Mindy McCready was found hiding in a closet with his mother in Arkansas, Deputy U.S. Marshall David Rahbany said on Saturday.

Zander and his mother were found in a vacant home in Heber Springs, Arkansas on Friday night, Rahbany said. The Florida Department of Children and Families had reported Zander missing from his grandfather's house in Cape Coral, Florida on Tuesday, and a Florida judge issued an order Thursday for Zander to picked up by authorities.

Mindy McCready's mother has legal custody of Zander but the singer has visitation rights and was with him when he was reported missing.

Rahbany, the chief deputy U.S. marshal for eastern Arkansas, said officials believed that McCready, 36, and Zander might be at the home of her boyfriend David Wilson in Heber Springs. A neighbor reported there were lights on at a nearby vacant house and marshals and members of the Cleburne County Sheriff's Department entered that home and found Wilson, McCready and Zander.

"She didn't resist," Rahbany said of McCready.

He said Zander was in the custody of the Arkansas Division of Child and Family Services. No charges were filed against McCready or Wilson.

"We're working with Arkansas officials to bring him (Zander) back as soon as possible," Terri Durdaller of the Florida Department of Children and Families said on Saturday.

(Editing by Greg McCune and Eric Walsh)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111203/us_nm/us_mccready

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Like humans, the paper wasp has a special talent for learning faces

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) ? Though paper wasps have brains less than a millionth the size of humans', they have evolved specialized face-learning abilities analogous to the system used by humans, according to a University of Michigan evolutionary biologist and one of her graduate students.

"Wasps and humans have independently evolved similar and very specialized face-learning mechanisms, despite the fact that everything about the way we see and the way our brains are structured is different," said graduate student Michael Sheehan, who worked with evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts on the face-recognition study. "That's surprising and sort of bizarre."

The study marks the first time that any insect has demonstrated such a high level of specialized visual learning, said Sheehan, lead author of a paper on the topic scheduled for online publication in the journal Science on Thursday, Dec. 1.

In earlier research, Tibbetts showed that paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) recognize individuals of their species by variations in their facial markings and that they behave more aggressively toward wasps with unfamiliar faces.

In 2008, Sheehan and Tibbetts published a paper in Current Biology demonstrating that these wasps have surprisingly long memories and base their behavior on what they remember of previous social interactions with other wasps.

In their latest study, Sheehan and Tibbetts tested learning by training wasps to discriminate between two different images mounted inside a T-maze, with one image displayed at each end of the top arm of the T.

Twelve wasps were trained for 40 consecutive trials on each image type. The paired images included photos of normal paper wasp faces, photos of caterpillars, simple geometric patterns, and computer-altered wasp faces. A reward was consistently associated with one image in a pair.

The researchers found that the paper wasps, which are generalist visual predators of caterpillars, were able to differentiate between two unaltered P. fuscatus faces faster and more accurately than a pair of caterpillar photos, two different geometric patterns, or a pair of computer-altered wasp faces. They learned to pick the correct unaltered wasp face about three-quarters of the time.

Two simple black-and-white geometric patterns should have been easy for the wasps to distinguish, because the insects' compound eyes are good at detecting contrast and outlines, Sheehan said. Yet the wasps learned complicated face images more rapidly than the geometric patterns.

At the same time, introducing seemingly minor changes to a P. fuscatus facial image -- by using a photo-editing program to remove a wasp's antennae, for example -- caused test subjects to perform much worse on the facial recognition test.

"This shows that the way they learn faces is different than the way they seem to be learning other patterns. They treat faces as a different kind of thing," Sheehan said.

"Humans have a specialized face-learning ability, and it turns out that this wasp that lives on the side of your house evolved an analogous system on its own," he said. "But it's important to note that we're not claiming the exact process by which wasps learn faces is the same as humans."

The ability to recognize individuals is important to a species like P. fuscatus, in which multiple queens establish communal nests and raise offspring cooperatively, but also compete to form a linear dominance hierarchy. Remembering who they've already bested-and been bested by-keeps individuals from wasting energy on repeated aggressive encounters and presumably promotes colony stability by reducing friction.

Sheehan also tested a closely related species of wasp, P. metricus, which lacks the varied facial markings of the paper wasp and lives in colonies controlled by a single queen. In the T-maze test, P. metricus scored no better than chance when asked to distinguish between individuals of its own species.

"Differences in face learning between the two species cannot be attributed to general differences in visual learning, as both species learned to discriminate between pairs of artificial patterns and caterpillars at the same rate and with the same accuracy," Sheehan and Tibbetts wrote. "P. fuscatus and P. metricus differed only in their ability to learn normal face stimuli."

"The evolutionary flexibility of specialized face learning is striking and suggests that specialized cognition may be a widespread adaptation to facilitate complex behavioral tasks such as individual recognition," they wrote.

Funding for the project was provided by the University of Michigan and an E.S. George Reserve Scholarship to Sheehan.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan. The original article was written by Jim Erickson.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. M. J. Sheehan, E. A. Tibbetts. Specialized Face Learning Is Associated with Individual Recognition in Paper Wasps. Science, 2011; 334 (6060): 1272 DOI: 10.1126/science.1211334

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111201142756.htm

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