WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fearing they could miss important intelligence, U.S. spy agencies are planning to call back to work some of the thousands of civilian workers who have been temporarily laid off as a result of this week's federal government shutdown.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has already authorized chiefs of the 16 U.S. spy agencies he supervises to make revisions in their furlough arrangements, Clapper's spokesman Shawn Turner said.
"The impact of the shutdown on the Intelligence Community's mission is not static, it's cumulative. The employees who are on the job are stretched thin. They're focused on the most critical security needs," Turner said in an email on Wednesday.
"However, as this goes on and the security environment changes, we will need to make adjustments to the number of people we have working," Turner said. Precisely which agencies will call back workers and how many is unclear.
Turner and other officials familiar with the issue could not immediately explain how much legal leeway spy chiefs had to recall furloughed employees. One official said agencies were generally authorized to keep on board personnel needed to ensure the shutdown does not jeopardize lives or national security.
Another official said intelligence chiefs "should be freaking out" over the current level of furloughs because the public will turn on them "if anything happens."
On Tuesday, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said spy agencies were under instructions to place 72 percent of their civilian work forces on furlough during the shutdown, which has been caused by a legislative deadlock between the Democratic-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Feinstein said good intelligence required that CIA officers overseas meet with human sources and that "technical wizards ... collect signals and imagery information."
While she did not explicitly say that the shutdown had stopped CIA case officers meeting informants or caused the National Security Agency to curtail electronic eavesdropping, other officials said CIA processing of intelligence from human sources was likely to suffer as a result of the shutdown.
Officials said that as many as 12,500 of the CIA's civilian work force, which is believed to total around 20,000, were initially placed on furlough.
UNPRECEDENTED
At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Clapper and other spy chiefs warned that the longer the shutdown continued, the more national security could be placed in jeopardy.
"I've been in the intelligence business for about 50 years. I've never seen anything like this," he told the hearing on U.S. electronic eavesdropping programs at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"This (the shutdown) affects our global capability to support the military, to support diplomacy and foreign policy matters. The danger here is that this will accumulate over time. The damage will be insidious, so each day that goes by the jeopardy increases," he said.
Feinstein said Clapper had sent to Capitol Hill a detailed account of how the shutdown "will cripple" spy agencies, including the CIA and the NSA, as well as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency which process information from spy satellites.
Some spy agencies, such as NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, are staffed by large numbers of uniformed military personnel, who are not affected by the government shutdown. But Feinstein said every agency she mentioned "will lose the majority of its workforce." She did not give specific numbers.
At Wednesday's Senate committee hearing, the director of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, said his agency risked an exodus of highly skilled personnel the longer the shutdown continued. He said furloughs were hurting morale and the NSA risked losing thousands of PhDs, computer scientists and mathematicians forced off the job by the shutdown.
For the first time in its 125-year history, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), also known as the Vatican Bank, has published an annual earnings report, part of an ongoing push to rehabilitate the bank's shady reputation.
The 100-page report, published on the bank's website, "seeks to contribute to the transparency which the Catholic Church, our customers, our correspondent banks, our authorities, and the public rightfully expect," said IOR President Ernst Von Freyberg in a letter. "To serve the Catholic Church around the world, the Institute needs to be a well-respected member of the global financial community."
The report represents a turnaround for the bank, which just last year Forbes called "the most secret bank in the world." Over the years, the IOR has been accused of much illicit behavior, including money laundering, financing terrorism, and turning a blind eye to non-religious businessmen who opened accounts for purposes of tax evasion.
But in late 2010, Italian authorities seized $30 million from the Vatican Bank and placed the bank's president and chief executive under investigation for an alleged violation of anti-money-laundering rules, compelling the bank to open its books. Pope Benedict XVI soon established the Financial Intelligence Authority to help prevent future shenanigans, and appointed Rene Bruelhart to keep an eye on the bank. In May, Bruelhart made public six incidents of possible money laundering at the bank from the previous year.
In addition, Pope Francis in August set up a commission to investigate the bank once a year and "report back to him personally," says BBC.
So what can be garnered from the IOR's first earning's statement?
"It functions much like any other bank," says Roberto A. Ferdman at Quartz. It has more than 20,000 clients, from which it collected over 12 million euros in fees and commissions. The bank also earned nearly 26 million euros on loans.
The numbers of consequence: The bank holds 4.98 billion euros in assets, mostly money market accounts; 769 million euros in equity funds; 41.3 million euros in gold, coins, and other precious metals; and some prime Italian real estate, inherited in 2012.
Also, net profits for the year nearly quadrupled from the year before, to 86.6 million euros.
The IOR's leap came mostly from "favorable trading results and higher bond values, resulting from the general decrease of interest rates in the financial markets throughout the years," according to the report. The bank invested heavily in Italian, German, and Euribor bonds, the values of which rose in 2012 as interest rates fell across the eurozone, thanks to the easy money policies of central banks.
So is the most secretive bank in the world basically identical to every other global bank, just a bit smaller?
Not quite. Reuters today also disclosed reports that the bank is likely on the verge of closing all embassy accounts, following some unusually large cash deposits and withdrawals in 2011 by the governments of Iran, Iraq, and Indonesia. The bank's watchdog earmarked the transactions after "the embassies' justifications for the transactions were too vague or disproportionate to the amounts," says Reuters.
Closing embassy accounts would represent yet another step for the IOR on its journey toward becoming the bank it describes in the report: "A small, conservatively managed financial institution of the Catholic Church that serves those spreading the Word of God around the world."
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Depression does not expose someone to a greater risk of cancerPublic release date: 1-Oct-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: C?dric Lemogne Cedric.lemogne@egp.aphp.fr INSERM (Institut national de la sant et de la recherche mdicale)
All of the absences from work for depression, certified by doctors, were recorded as well as many questionnaires measuring depressive moods. The results, which will be published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, do not indicate any significant association between a person experiencing the symptoms of depression during their lifetime and their subsequently contracting cancer.
The continuing increase in incidences of cancer in France is a subject that concerns healthcare professionals, patients and their families. Although research has not yet solved all of the enigmas of the way in which cancer works, some have occasionally attributed the advent of cancer to a painful personal history. "Received ideas often become ingrained", explains Cdric Lemogne, a psychiatrist at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital (AP-HP) who works in Professor Consoli's unit (Universit Paris Descartes). He is the principal author of a new study of the links between these two conditions. "Ever since Hippocrates and the beginnings of medicine, the presence of "black bile" which gave rise to the term melancholia or melancholy, has meant that people have associated the condition with the development of malign tumours. Today, there are certain claims in circulation that depression could be a risk factor in cancer". These have been supported by several scientific studies yet, in concrete terms, none of the existing meta-analyses has ever succeeded in confirming or rejecting these hypotheses.
The Inserm researchers explored the links by conducting the most robust epidemiological study. From this point of view, it was important to have data available, from quite a large cohort, that was validated for both the advent of cancer (validated cases of cancer, specific dates of the diagnosis, data for the incidence or otherwise of mortality) and with respect to depression-causing events.
The set of medical data from the 14,203 people who participated since 1989 in the GAZEL cohort of former employees of EDF-GDF [the gas and electricity companies] was collected between 1994 and 2009. The advent of depression-causing events was measured from the participants' responses to a specific questionnaire provided every three years over a period of fifteen years and through diagnoses of depression by doctors when the employee was absent from work between 1989 and 1993.
On the basis of all these factors no significant association was found between the advent of depression and the subsequent advent of the five types of cancer monitored in this study (prostate, breast, colon, cancer associated with smoking, and cancer of the lymph glands or hmatopoietic cancers (leukemias)). Consequently, being depressed does not expose a person to greater risk of cancer.
On the other hand, the fact of being diagnosed with cancer can cause symptoms of depression. Quite apart from the results of this study, researchers emphasize that patients need reassurance. "How many times does one hear their nearest and dearest saying 'you need to fight it, be strong to beat the cancer'. As it if were abnormal or even dangerous to feel despondent. I think that patients shouldn't worry if they feel depressed. What is important is to follow all the treatments. Against cancer on the one hand and against depression on the other hand".
Going further:
Even if mental illness is not responsible for causing cancer, it is nevertheless associated with a greater risk of mortality from cancer. People suffering from clinical depression might tend to neglect their health or have difficulty being taken seriously. If this results in delayed diagnosis, these people could be at risk, all things being equal, of being treated too late for cancer. In the future, it will be just as important to redefine medical support for people suffering from mental disorders.
###
This research benefitted from the support of the Public Health Research Institute and the Pasteur Mutualit Group's Company Foundation.
Depression and the risk of cancer: A 15-year follow-up study of the GAZEL cohort.
Cdric Lemogne 1,2,3,4,*, Silla M. Consoli 1,2, Maria Melchior 5,6, Hermann Nabi 5,6, Mireille, Coeuret-Pellicer 4,5, Frdric Limosin 1,2,3, Marcel Goldberg 4,5, Marie Zins 4,5
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Depression does not expose someone to a greater risk of cancerPublic release date: 1-Oct-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: C?dric Lemogne Cedric.lemogne@egp.aphp.fr INSERM (Institut national de la sant et de la recherche mdicale)
All of the absences from work for depression, certified by doctors, were recorded as well as many questionnaires measuring depressive moods. The results, which will be published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, do not indicate any significant association between a person experiencing the symptoms of depression during their lifetime and their subsequently contracting cancer.
The continuing increase in incidences of cancer in France is a subject that concerns healthcare professionals, patients and their families. Although research has not yet solved all of the enigmas of the way in which cancer works, some have occasionally attributed the advent of cancer to a painful personal history. "Received ideas often become ingrained", explains Cdric Lemogne, a psychiatrist at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital (AP-HP) who works in Professor Consoli's unit (Universit Paris Descartes). He is the principal author of a new study of the links between these two conditions. "Ever since Hippocrates and the beginnings of medicine, the presence of "black bile" which gave rise to the term melancholia or melancholy, has meant that people have associated the condition with the development of malign tumours. Today, there are certain claims in circulation that depression could be a risk factor in cancer". These have been supported by several scientific studies yet, in concrete terms, none of the existing meta-analyses has ever succeeded in confirming or rejecting these hypotheses.
The Inserm researchers explored the links by conducting the most robust epidemiological study. From this point of view, it was important to have data available, from quite a large cohort, that was validated for both the advent of cancer (validated cases of cancer, specific dates of the diagnosis, data for the incidence or otherwise of mortality) and with respect to depression-causing events.
The set of medical data from the 14,203 people who participated since 1989 in the GAZEL cohort of former employees of EDF-GDF [the gas and electricity companies] was collected between 1994 and 2009. The advent of depression-causing events was measured from the participants' responses to a specific questionnaire provided every three years over a period of fifteen years and through diagnoses of depression by doctors when the employee was absent from work between 1989 and 1993.
On the basis of all these factors no significant association was found between the advent of depression and the subsequent advent of the five types of cancer monitored in this study (prostate, breast, colon, cancer associated with smoking, and cancer of the lymph glands or hmatopoietic cancers (leukemias)). Consequently, being depressed does not expose a person to greater risk of cancer.
On the other hand, the fact of being diagnosed with cancer can cause symptoms of depression. Quite apart from the results of this study, researchers emphasize that patients need reassurance. "How many times does one hear their nearest and dearest saying 'you need to fight it, be strong to beat the cancer'. As it if were abnormal or even dangerous to feel despondent. I think that patients shouldn't worry if they feel depressed. What is important is to follow all the treatments. Against cancer on the one hand and against depression on the other hand".
Going further:
Even if mental illness is not responsible for causing cancer, it is nevertheless associated with a greater risk of mortality from cancer. People suffering from clinical depression might tend to neglect their health or have difficulty being taken seriously. If this results in delayed diagnosis, these people could be at risk, all things being equal, of being treated too late for cancer. In the future, it will be just as important to redefine medical support for people suffering from mental disorders.
###
This research benefitted from the support of the Public Health Research Institute and the Pasteur Mutualit Group's Company Foundation.
Depression and the risk of cancer: A 15-year follow-up study of the GAZEL cohort.
Cdric Lemogne 1,2,3,4,*, Silla M. Consoli 1,2, Maria Melchior 5,6, Hermann Nabi 5,6, Mireille, Coeuret-Pellicer 4,5, Frdric Limosin 1,2,3, Marcel Goldberg 4,5, Marie Zins 4,5
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
TORONTO (AP) ? The 2016 NBA All-Star game is coming to Toronto, and the Raptors are looking to one of the music industry's biggest stars to help revamp the franchise in time for the festivities.
NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver made the announcement Monday, marking the first time Toronto will hold the league's annual showcase.
Canadian rap star Drake and Mayor Rob Ford were among those at the news conference. The Raptors also announced that Drake will be their "global ambassador" and have a voice in the team's rebranding.
Tim Lieweke, president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, said the team is in the process of planning a major face-lift that will include a new look and new colors. Drake will be heavily involved in the effort, which is expected to take the next two seasons.
"I'm really out here with the people. I'm in touch with what they want to see," Drake said. "I really just want excitement for this team. I want us to be one of the biggest teams in the league."
Lieweke called this the beginning of a "new age" for the Raptors.
"This is a team and this is a sport that is going to rock this city going forward," he said. "Good days are coming and we couldn't be more excited."
But the Raptors have a long way to go on the court. They haven't made the playoffs since 2008.
"We have now a responsibility to grow our basketball team so that it meets the momentum of the All-Star game," new general manager Masai Ujiri said. "We promise you in Toronto that we're going to bring the best basketball."
Silver is optimistic the Raptors will turn things around.
"By the time we come here for the All-Star game there will be a winning tradition in Toronto," he promised.
The NBA All-Star game will be held in New Orleans in 2014 and in New York in 2015. The NHL played its All-Star game in Toronto in 2000. The Toronto Blue Jays hosted baseball's showcase in 1991.
Lieweke estimated that an NBA All-Star game usually generates about $100 million for the host city. But he predicted Toronto will eclipse that, saying he and Drake have been discussing making the festivities about more than basketball and music.
"We're already talking about fashion, we're talking about films, we're talking about food, we're talking about all the things ... that are the trademark of this great city," Lieweke said. "We certainly see it as an opportunity to let everyone see all the phenomenal parts of Toronto."
Galaxy Tab 2 can only log on if laptop is logged on
I use a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, and use my Comcast wireless Wi-Fi. Starting three weeks ago, I have been unable to log onto my network with the Tab. IF I log on with my laptop first, I can ALWAYS then log onto my Tab. It will not accept my password which I reset about a year ago. It now displays "Authorization Error Occurred." Does anyone know why this has started? Will a factory reset solve this? Thanks!!
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) ? A shootout between Islamic extremists and Nigerian security forces rocked the nation's capital early Friday, according to a Nigerian security official.
It is the first violence from the Islamic radicals of Boko Haram in Abuja this year and highlights Nigeria's continuing security problems from the extremists.
The gunfight in the capital occurred as Nigerian officials were recovering bodies in Benisheik, in northern Nigeria, where 143 civilians were killed by suspected Boko Haram fighters. The killings in Benisheik took place on Tuesday and represent one of the highest death tolls in the Islamic uprising in northeast Nigeria.
Together the gunfight in the capital and the mass killings in the northeast challenge the Nigerian military's insistence that it is winning the war against the extremists since a state of emergency was declared May 14.
The Islamic radicals of Boko Haram want to enforce strict Shariah law throughout Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation of more than 160 million people almost equally divided between Muslims and Christians. Boko Haram is blamed for violent attacks that have killed nearly 2,000 in Nigeria since 2011.
The shooting in the capital broke out early Friday when a security team was searching for hidden weapons and it was fired upon by members of Boko Haram, said a statement issued Friday by Marilyn Ogar, Deputy Director of the Department of State Services.
Two arrested members of Boko Haram had led a security team in Abuja to a site near the residential compound for legislators where they said arms were buried, said Ogar.
"No sooner had the team commenced digging for the arms than they came under heavy gunfire attack by other Boko Haram elections," said Ogar's statement.
Some people were injured but did not say there had been any deaths, she said. She said 12 people were arrested.
Boko Haram's violence occurs mostly in Nigeria's northern areas although there have been some serious incidents in the capital.
In August 2011 a Boko Haram suicide car bomb exploded at the United Nations offices in Abuja, killing 24 people. In April 2012 the Abuja office of the newspaper, This Day, was hit by a car bomb and two people were killed.
In northeastern Nigeria, officials on Thursday recovered 143 bodies in the town of Benisheik after an attack on Tuesday by a large, heavily armed group suspected to be Boko Haram.
Two soldiers and three police officers also were killed, according to a soldier who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The private said extremists disguised in military fatigues attacked in about 20 pickup trucks and two light tanks firing anti-aircraft guns that overwhelmed soldiers armed only with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
"We had to retreat to our base to reinforce after running out of ammunition. We had to run for our lives," said the private, who said he hid in a millet plantation. "But they followed us down and surrounded our base and began to shell our building. We couldn't stand the heat of their superior firepower. We had to retreat into the village after they killed two of our soldiers and three policemen."
He said the attackers finally retreated in triumph, taking off with an additional four military patrol trucks and two light armored tanks.
An AP reporter watched as Environmental Department workers piled corpses swollen by the tropical heat into trucks at the near-deserted village where hundreds of homes had been torched.
"We have been picking corpses off the roadsides all day, there are more in the bush ... We have so far picked up 143 corpses," said Abdulazeez Kolomi, an assistant at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Villager Abacha Wakil said the gunmen invaded the town at about 7.45 p.m. Tuesday and did not leave until about 3.30 a.m. Wednesday. When residents ventured back to the village from the bushes where they spent the night they discovered the beheaded bodies of 14 young men, most belonging to a vigilante group set up to fight the extremists, he said.
Army Brig. Gen. Muhammed Idris Yusuf pleaded with the villagers to not lose confidence in the military. "We share your pain and we promise to beef up the presence of soldiers around Benisheik," he said. "We have not abandoned you as you think: Our troops ran out of ammunition and that was why they withdrew to reinforce. They are now back and more are coming."
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Galaxy Tab 2 can only log on if laptop is logged on
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