Ecuador says Snowden seeking asylum there

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) ? Ecuador's foreign minister said Monday his country will act not on its interests but on its principles as it considers an asylum request from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, wanted for revealing classified U.S. secrets.

Speaking to reporters through a translator at a hotel in Hanoi, Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said the asylum request "has to do with freedom of expression and with the security of citizens around the world."

Patino spoke briefly to reporters on his way to a meeting with Vietnam's foreign minister. He did not say how long it would take Ecuador to decide.

Snowden was on a flight from Hong Kong that arrived in Moscow Sunday and was booked on a flight to Cuba Monday, the Russian news agencies ITAR-Tass and Interfax reported, citing unnamed airline officials.

"We know that he's currently in Moscow, and we are ... in touch with the highest authorities of Russia," Patino said.

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said Snowden was bound for Ecuador "via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks." The organization's founder Julian Assange, was granted asylum by Ecuador last year and has been staying at the country's embassy in the United Kingdom.

The Russian reports said a plane carrying Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday and he was booked on a flight to Cuba on Monday. The reports cited unnamed airline officials and said he intended to travel from Cuba to Caracas, Venezuela. There was also speculation that he might try to reach Ecuador.

Snowden had been in hiding in Hong Kong for several weeks after he revealed information on the highly classified spy programs.

Patino said Ecuador would not base its asylum decision on its potential to damage the country's relationship with the United States

"There are some governments that act more upon their own interests, but we do not," Patino said. "We act upon our principles."

He added, "We take care of the human rights of the people."

Patino was to hold a news conference Monday evening in Hanoi.

WikiLeaks said it was providing legal help to Snowden at his request and that he was being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from the group.

Assange has spent a year inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about sex crime allegations. He told the Sydney Morning Herald that his organization is in a position to help Snowden because it has expertise in international asylum and extradition law.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ecuador-says-snowden-seeking-asylum-170413690.html

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iOS 7 Preview: Control Center

Control Center provides one-swipe access to to all your settings and media controls from anywhere on your iPhone (or iPad).

Quick access to system-level toggles has been one of the most constant, consistent power-user feature requests -- nay, demands -- for years now. Everything from jailbreak apps like SBSettings to iOS 6's brief flirtation with URL Schemes for Settings made it a must-have on every geek list, come every Apple iOS keynote. And now, with iOS 7 and Control Center, it's finally a reality.

Here's how Apple describes Control Center:

Control Center gives you quick access to the controls and apps you always seem to need right this second. Just swipe up from any screen ? including the Lock screen ? to do things like switch to Airplane mode, turn Wi-Fi on or off, or adjust the brightness of your display. You can even shine a light on things with a new flashlight. Never has one swipe given you so much control.

And, based on what Apple's shown off to date, here's how it works:

• Like Notification Center, Control Center is a layer that you can slide out on top of the main iOS interface. It enjoys the same, bouncing, playful iOS 7 physics, and the same blur effect that mutes but doesn't entirely obliterate what's underneath. Unlike Notification Center, which comes from the top down, Control Center is activated by swiping up from beneath the screen, and rather than dark, smoked glass, it's given a light, frosted effect.

• You can access Control Center from anywhere on your iPhone (or iPad), including from the Lock screen.

• The top row Control Center provides handy on/off switches for commonly used settings like Airplane mode (which, when turned on, will turn off the cellular radio), the Wi-Fi radio, and the Bluetooth radio, as well as toggles for Do Not Disturb mode, and the portrait/landscape orientation lock. Black means off, white means on.
• Next is a slider for screen brightness, and a set of media controls that includes a positional scrubber, the title of the track/episode you're listening to or watching, the name of the album/series that track/episode is from, skip backwards or forwards buttons (or 15 seconds forward/back), pause/play, and a volume slider.
• If available, AirDrop and AirPlay occupy the next layer, and allow you to quickly access sheets with their individual options.
• The bottom row of icons consists of a Flashlight to toggle the LED flash on or off, and variants of Clock, Calculator, and Camera icons for quickly accessing those apps.

That Control Center functions so much like Notification Center, and even uses similar nomenclature makes it easy to understand, even for non-power-users who haven't been lamenting its absence on iOS for years. It'll give the obsessive compulsive among us nearly instant access to toggles we probably ought not be toggling all the time, but it'll also give plenty of regular people a fast, easy way to get at things as simple as media controls and even a flashlight when they need them.

Swiping up to reveal Control Center will be confusing for people who've spent any time on webOS, BlackBerry 10, some versions of Android, or even the iPad's gesture navigation system, and personally I do find the swiping up as a way to show the fast app switcher/multitasking cards much more intuitive than the double-button click. However, Android's current two-finger swipe down to switch from their version of notification center to their version of control center isn't as easy to use, and ultimately, as goes Apple and iOS 7 will go hundreds of millions of users.

As to the design itself, while I have concerns about the low contrast and thinness of the icons and typography used, overall the usefulness exceeds the usability, and hopefully the latter can at some point be brought up to match the former.

I once wrote that iOS wasn't meant for geeks, and while I still think that's generally true, with iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Apple is starting to show they now have more than enough love to go around.

Control Center will ship as part of iOS 7 this fall. Check out the resources below for more, and let me know -- how do you like what you've seen of Control Center so far?

• iOS 7: Everything you need to know
• iOS 7: Discussion forum

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/lTuKW9fZnw0/story01.htm

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Sexually Active in High School? Predictors of Hookup Behavior For ...

By Janice Wood Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on June 22, 2013

Researchers have identified several factors associated with an increase in hookups ? casual, no-strings-attached sex ? among women in their first year of college.

?Our findings suggest hooking up during the first year of college is influenced by pre-college hookups, personality, behavioral intentions, the social and situational context, family background and substance use patterns ? particularly marijuana use,? said Robyn L. Fielder, M.S., a research intern at The Miriam Hospital?s Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine in Providence, R.I.

Fielder and her team surveyed 483 incoming first-year female college students about their risk behaviors, personality traits and social environment.

Specific questions covered the students? sexual behavior, hookup attitudes and intentions, self-esteem, religious beliefs, parents? relationship status, alcohol and marijuana use, smoking, impulsivity, and sensation-seeking behavior. Researchers followed up with the women monthly for eight months.

What the researchers found is that pre-college hookups emerged as the strongest predictor of hooking up during freshmen year, suggesting early experiences may provide a model for future behavior.

?These findings suggest that women?s hookup behavior during the first year of college may influence their hookup behavior later in college,? said Fielder.

?That?s why the transition to college is an important time for health care professionals to provide sexual health information and resources to help women make informed choices.?

It?s also important to consider the array of individual, social and contextual factors when studying hookup behavior, she noted.

?Focusing on any one area of influence fails to capture the complicated matrix of forces that influence young adults? relationship decisions,? Fielder added.

The study was published online in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Source: Lifespan

College woman looking into the camera photo by shutterstock.

APA Reference
Wood, J. (2013). Sexually Active in High School? Predictors of Hookup Behavior For College Women. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 23, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/06/22/sexually-active-in-high-school-predictors-of-hookup-behavior-for-college-women/56324.html

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Source: http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/06/22/sexually-active-in-high-school-predictors-of-hookup-behavior-for-college-women/56324.html

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NKorea demands dissolution of UN command in SKorea

UNITED NATIONS (AP) ? North Korea's U.N. envoy demanded the dissolution of the United Nations Command in South Korea on Friday, accusing the United States of using the force to prepare for war against the North and build an Asian version of NATO to realize President Barack Obama's pivot to Asia.

Ambassador Sin Son Ho told reporters at a rare news conference that the most pressing issue in northeast Asia today is the hostile relations between North Korea and the United States "which can lead to a new war at any moment."

He reiterated North Korea's surprise offer last Saturday of wide-ranging senior-level talks with the United States "to defuse tension on the Korean peninsula and ensure peace and security in the region."

The proposed talks followed months of rising tensions and anti-American rhetoric by North Korea and the collapse earlier this month of proposed high-level talks between North and South Korea, amid bickering over who would lead the two delegations.

Sin stressed that the deteriorating situation on the Korean peninsula "is not caused by the DPRK," the initials of the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"All deteriorations and intensified situations (are) entirely caused by the United States of America," he insisted on several occasions.

Sin said U.S.-North Korea talks should include replacing the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-53 Korean War ? and he stressed that one of the "prerequisite requirements" for establishing "a peace mechanism" to replace the armistice is the dissolution of the U.S.-led U.N. Command.

The ambassador said the talks can include "a world without nuclear weapons," which the United States has already proposed.

But he warned that North Korea will not give up its nuclear "self-defense deterrent" unless the United States "fundamentally and irreversibly abandons its hostile policy and nuclear threat" toward the North and dissolves the U.N. Command, which oversees the armistice, and as long as there are nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. State Department said: "The United States remains committed to authentic and credible talks on denuclearization" in order to implement a Sept. 19, 2005 joint statement in which the DPRK made a commitment to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs, and to bring North Korea into compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions "through irreversible steps leading to denuclearization."

The Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, and left the Korean peninsula divided by a heavily fortified border monitored by the U.N. Command. Washington also stations 28,500 American troops in South Korea to protect its ally against North Korean aggression.

A U.N. Security Council resolution adopted two days after North Korean troops invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, recommended that U.N. member states provide military forces and other assistance "to a unified command under the United States of America" to assist the South.

At peak strength, when the armistice was signed in July 1953, the command had over 930,000 troops from 17 countries, including more than 590,000 South Koreans and 302,000 Americans. Since then, the command has overseen the armistice.

In 1994, then U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali distanced the United Nations from the U.N. Command saying in a letter to North Korea's foreign minister that the Security Council didn't establish it "but merely recommended the creation of such a command, specifying that it be under the authority of the United States."

"Therefore the dissolution of the unified command does not fall within the responsibility of any United Nations organ but is a matter within the competence of the Government of the United States," Boutros-Ghali was quoted as saying.

In a lengthy statement, Sin claimed the U.N. Command "was a tool of war for aggression which was organized by the U.S." and "has nothing to do with the U.N."

"The U.N. Command is the U.S. command in essence," he said, and if necessary the DPRK will submit the issue to the U.N. General Assembly to dissolve it.

Sin said all the facts show that the U.S. is gradually transforming the U.N. Command into a multinational military alliance "which would serve as a matrix of the Asian version of NATO" and "a stepping stone for the U.S. armed forces for aggression toward the DPRK and the realization of ... America's pivot to Asia strategy."

The U.S. aim, he said, is to make South Korea "a forward base for domination of (the) Asia Pacific region and hold fast to it as a cannon fodder for an aggressive war."

As a result, he said, "the situation on the Korean peninsula this year has reached to the full-scale nuclear showdown and to the brink of war between the DPRK and the U.S."

Sin's appearance before U.N. journalists was his first since June 15, 2010 when he vehemently denied any North Korean involvement in the sinking of a South Korean navy ship in March 2010 and demanded that military investigators from the North be allowed to go to the site to verify the results of a South Korean probe. It concluded the ship was sunk by a torpedo launched by a North Korean midget submarine.

The ambassador also answered questions on a number of other issues Friday, saying "we don't have any human rights problems in our country," that recent North Korean talks with China were "very friendly," and that the U.S. should "stop economic sanctions against us."

___

Associated Press Writer Maria Sanminiatelli contributed to this report from the United Nations

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nkorea-demands-dissolution-un-command-skorea-160628448.html

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Southwest cancels 57 flights after computer glitch

In this Feb. 9, 2012 file photo, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 waits to take off at Chicago's Midway Airport as another lands. A spokesman for Southwest Airlines says all departing flights have been grounded due to a system-wide computer problem, Saturday, June 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

In this Feb. 9, 2012 file photo, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 waits to take off at Chicago's Midway Airport as another lands. A spokesman for Southwest Airlines says all departing flights have been grounded due to a system-wide computer problem, Saturday, June 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

CHICAGO (AP) ? Southwest Airlines expects some lingering delays Saturday morning after a system-wide computer failure caused it to ground 250 flights for nearly three hours late Friday night.

Full service was restored just after 2 a.m. EDT Saturday, but the Dallas-based airline is still working to clear a backlog of flights and reposition planes and crew.

The airline ? the country's largest domestic carrier ? canceled 43 flights Friday night and another 14 Saturday morning.

Southwest is the latest airline to ground flights because of a large computer outage. But its problem was minor compared to those experienced by two competitors ? thanks in part to its late-day timing.

In April, American Airlines grounded all of its flights nationwide for several hours due to computer problems. The airline ultimately canceled 970 flights. And last year, United Airlines had two major outages: one in August delayed 580 flights; another in November delayed 636 flights.

The problem was detected around 11 p.m. EDT Friday, Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins said. It impaired the airline's ability to do such things as conduct check-ins, print boarding passes and monitor the weight of each aircraft. Some flights were on the taxiway and diverted back to the terminal, Hawkins said. Flights already in the air were unaffected.

Most of Southwest's cancelations Friday night were in the western half of the country, according to airline spokeswoman Michelle Agnew. Saturday's cancelations were scattered across the U.S. They included planes leavings from Minneapolis, Chicago, Phoenix, Denver and San Diego, according to flight tracking service FlightAware.

Southwest flies an average of 3,400 flights each day.

Agnew said in an email Saturday morning that the airline's technology team is "still working to confirm the source of the issue."

Shortly after 2 a.m., Southwest posted on its Twitter page that "systems are operating and we will begin work to get customers where they need to be. Thanks for your patience tonight."

Agnew said the computer system was "running at full capacity" by early Saturday. Before that, though, officials used a backup system that was much more sluggish.

______

AP Airlines Writer Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-06-22-Southwest%20Flights%20Grounded/id-d9700ff4174f4422b2571bfb03362f35

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Mass. Senate race: This time, outside money is funding negative ad blitz

In 2012, Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown swore off negative ads paid for by groups outside Massachusetts. But in the Gomez-Markey Senate battle, the money is pouring in.

By Ryan Lenora Brown,?Correspondent / June 21, 2013

This photo provided by WGBH shows U.S. Senate candidates, Republican Gabriel Gomez, left, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, right before a debate moderated by R.D. Sahl, center, Tuesday, June 18, 2013, at WGBH studios in Boston. (AP Photo/WGBH, )

Meredith Nierman/WGBH/AP

Enlarge

During the fiercely competitive 2012 Senate race in Massachusetts, the two candidates made an unusual promise: neither would allow outside groups to fund attack ads on their behalf. If either Democrat Elizabeth Warren or Republican Scott Brown broke this so-called ?People?s Pledge,? they agreed they would pay half the cost of the ad in question to a charity of their opponent?s choice.

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?We?re saying that we want to be able to run our own campaigns,? Ms. Warren, now senator, told Boston radio station WBUR at the time.?

Neither side backed down. When two outside groups ran ads on Mr. Brown's behalf several months before the election, he dutifully cut checks to Warren's charities. After that, the outside ad spending dried up.

But in this year's special election to fill the state's other Senate seat ? vacated by John Kerry ? things have been markedly different. When Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat, asked Republican Gabriel Gomez to take the same pledge in early May, Mr. Gomez refused, saying his opponent could afford to make that promise only because he already had a sizable campaign war chest built up over his nearly four decades in Congress.?

?It?s an open seat but [Gomez] knew he was essentially running against an incumbent,? says Shannon Jenkins, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. ?Markey has a huge network of donors, so Gomez needed all the help he could get.?

But now it seems that strategy may have backfired. Since the general election campaign began, outside groups have spent far more on Markey?s campaign than Gomez?s. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending, ?super political-action committees? and other groups have paid out about $2 million in support of Markey?s campaign?and another $2.5 million-plus against Gomez since the start of the election cycle.

For Gomez, on the other hand, outside groups have funneled about $700,000 into efforts on his behalf and spent another $700,000 against Markey.

And as the two candidates and their supporters race to reach lethargic voters more focused on summer beach trips and the Stanley Cup finals than politics, this outside money has fueled a blitz of TV and radio ads to hammer home the campaigns? messages.

Over the past month, the Senate Majority super PAC, for instance, has spent more than $1 million on Markey ads, with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dropping another $700,000, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which also collects campaign finance data. A second super PAC, the NextGen Committee, which opposes the Keystone XL Pipeline, spent $153,000 of its own to run a string of anti-Gomez ads on the streaming radio service Pandora.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/fwq03_beBWs/Mass.-Senate-race-This-time-outside-money-is-funding-negative-ad-blitz

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Live From Facebook's ?New Product' Mystery Announcement

Just last week, a small chunk of the tech press was surprised to find invitations for a Facebook announcement waiting in their mailbox. "A small team has been working on a big idea," it read. The only other thing Facebook would say is that they'd be showing "a new product". No comment on what it might be, or which team it would come from. We're live at Facebook HQ to find out what it is.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/QnnxkwWGOW0/

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