Igihe

Tag: InternationalNews

  • Obama Not Involved in Benghazi Security Decisions–Clinton

    U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has told CNN that she assumes responsibility for last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

    “I take responsibility” for what happened on September 11, Clinton said in an interview during a visit to Lima, Peru.

    She added: “I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” citing the Nov. 6 presidential election. She insisted President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had not been involved in security decisions related to the consulate.

    The attacks on the Benghazi mission, and the Obama administration’s response to the violence, has become a contentious election issue and Clinton’s comments came a day before the second presidential debate between Obama and Republican opponent Mitt Romney.

    Romney has seized on the attack and said the death of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans killed at the consulate reveal weakness in Obama’s foreign policy.

    Romney has accused the administration of not providing adequate security to American diplomats and misrepresenting the nature of the attack.

    Foreign policy has been considered a strength for Obama, who has been praised for the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the withdrawal of troops from unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Congress has increased pressure on the State Department to release information about the attack. Obama and Clinton have both vowed a full investigation.

    “We can’t not engage,” Clinton told CNN. “We cannot retreat.”

    Clinton also sought to play down criticism that the administration initially linked the violence to deaths to a protest over an anti-Muslim film.

    There is always “confusion” after an attack, she said.

    Reuters

  • Obama Not Involved in Benghazi Security Decisions–Clinton

    U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has told CNN that she assumes responsibility for last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

    “I take responsibility” for what happened on September 11, Clinton said in an interview during a visit to Lima, Peru.

    She added: “I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” citing the Nov. 6 presidential election. She insisted President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had not been involved in security decisions related to the consulate.

    The attacks on the Benghazi mission, and the Obama administration’s response to the violence, has become a contentious election issue and Clinton’s comments came a day before the second presidential debate between Obama and Republican opponent Mitt Romney.

    Romney has seized on the attack and said the death of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans killed at the consulate reveal weakness in Obama’s foreign policy.

    Romney has accused the administration of not providing adequate security to American diplomats and misrepresenting the nature of the attack.

    Foreign policy has been considered a strength for Obama, who has been praised for the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the withdrawal of troops from unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Congress has increased pressure on the State Department to release information about the attack. Obama and Clinton have both vowed a full investigation.

    “We can’t not engage,” Clinton told CNN. “We cannot retreat.”

    Clinton also sought to play down criticism that the administration initially linked the violence to deaths to a protest over an anti-Muslim film.

    There is always “confusion” after an attack, she said.

    Reuters

  • Former Bosnian Serb Leader Wants Reward

    Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has said he should be rewarded for “reducing suffering”, not accused of carrying out war crimes.

    Beginning his defence at his trial in The Hague, he said he was a “tolerant man” who had sought peace in Bosnia.

    Mr Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 after almost 13 years on the run.

    He faces 10 charges of genocide and crimes against humanity during the war in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo.

    More than 7,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed at Srebrenica in the worst single atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II.

    During the 44-month siege of Sarajevo more than 12,000 civilians died.

    Mr Karadzic, 67, went on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in October 2009.

  • Former Bosnian Serb Leader Wants Reward

    Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has said he should be rewarded for “reducing suffering”, not accused of carrying out war crimes.

    Beginning his defence at his trial in The Hague, he said he was a “tolerant man” who had sought peace in Bosnia.

    Mr Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 after almost 13 years on the run.

    He faces 10 charges of genocide and crimes against humanity during the war in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo.

    More than 7,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed at Srebrenica in the worst single atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II.

    During the 44-month siege of Sarajevo more than 12,000 civilians died.

    Mr Karadzic, 67, went on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in October 2009.

  • Cubans to travel freely for First time in 51 years

    The Cuban government announced Tuesday that it will eliminate a half-century-old restriction that requires citizens to get an exit visa to leave the country.

    The decree that takes effect Jan. 14 will eliminate a much-loathed bureaucratic procedure that has kept many Cubans from traveling or moving abroad.

    “These measures are truly substantial and profound,” said Col. Lamberto Fraga, Cuba’s deputy chief of immigration, at a morning news conference. “What we are doing is not just cosmetic.”

    Under the new measure announced in the Communist Party daily Granma, islanders will only have to show their passport and a visa from the country they are traveling to.

    It is the most significant advance this year in President Raul Castro’s five-year plan of reforms that has already seen the legalization of home and car sales and a big increase in the number of Cubans owning private businesses.

    Migration is a highly politicized issue in Cuba and beyond its borders.

    Under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, the United States allows nearly all Cubans who reach its territory to remain. Granma published an editorial blaming the travel restrictions imposed in 1961 on U.S. attempts to topple the island’s government, plant spies and recruit its best-educated citizens.

    “It is because of this that any analysis of Cuba’s problematic migration inevitably passes through the policy of hostility that the U.S. government has developed against the country for more than 50 years,” the editorial said.

    It assured Cubans that the government recognizes their right to travel abroad and said the new measure is part of “an irreversible process of normalization of relations between emigrants and their homeland.”

    The decree still imposes limits on travel by many Cubans. People cannot obtain a passport or travel abroad without permission if they face criminal charges, if the trip affects national security or if their departure would affect efforts to keep qualified labor in the country.

    Doctors, scientists, members of the military and others considered valuable parts of society currently face restrictions on travel to combat brain drain.

  • Cubans to travel freely for First time in 51 years

    The Cuban government announced Tuesday that it will eliminate a half-century-old restriction that requires citizens to get an exit visa to leave the country.

    The decree that takes effect Jan. 14 will eliminate a much-loathed bureaucratic procedure that has kept many Cubans from traveling or moving abroad.

    “These measures are truly substantial and profound,” said Col. Lamberto Fraga, Cuba’s deputy chief of immigration, at a morning news conference. “What we are doing is not just cosmetic.”

    Under the new measure announced in the Communist Party daily Granma, islanders will only have to show their passport and a visa from the country they are traveling to.

    It is the most significant advance this year in President Raul Castro’s five-year plan of reforms that has already seen the legalization of home and car sales and a big increase in the number of Cubans owning private businesses.

    Migration is a highly politicized issue in Cuba and beyond its borders.

    Under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, the United States allows nearly all Cubans who reach its territory to remain. Granma published an editorial blaming the travel restrictions imposed in 1961 on U.S. attempts to topple the island’s government, plant spies and recruit its best-educated citizens.

    “It is because of this that any analysis of Cuba’s problematic migration inevitably passes through the policy of hostility that the U.S. government has developed against the country for more than 50 years,” the editorial said.

    It assured Cubans that the government recognizes their right to travel abroad and said the new measure is part of “an irreversible process of normalization of relations between emigrants and their homeland.”

    The decree still imposes limits on travel by many Cubans. People cannot obtain a passport or travel abroad without permission if they face criminal charges, if the trip affects national security or if their departure would affect efforts to keep qualified labor in the country.

    Doctors, scientists, members of the military and others considered valuable parts of society currently face restrictions on travel to combat brain drain.

  • Amateur Astronomers Discover Planet with Four Suns

    This week, reality trumped (science) fiction with an image even more enthralling: two amateur astronomers poring through data from deep, distant skies and discovering a planet with four suns.

    NASA’s website calls the phenomenon a circumbinary planet, or a planet that orbits two suns.

    Rare enough on its own — only six other circumbinary planets are known to exist — this planet is orbited by two more distant stars, making it the first known quadruple sun system.

    Researchers presented the finding Monday night at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada.

    The discovery of the four-sun planet by amateur scientists takes crowd sourcing to new heights.

    The expression, coined by Wired magazine editor Jeff Howe, describes tasks that are outsourced to a disparate group of people to come up with a solution.

    In this case, the Planet Hunters group made data from NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope available to the public through its website and coordinates their findings with Yale astronomers.

    In combing through the data, “Citizen scientists” Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek spied anomalies that confirmed the existence of the special planet, now known as PH1 — short for Planet Hunters 1 — the first heavenly body found by the online citizen science project.

    The planet is a little bigger than Neptune, with a radius about six times greater than Earth.

    “I celebrate this discovery for the wow-factor of a planet in a four-star system,” said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

    “Most importantly, I celebrate this discovery as the fruit of exemplary human cooperation — cooperation between scientists and citizens who give of themselves for the love of stars, knowledge, and exploration.”

  • Amateur Astronomers Discover Planet with Four Suns

    This week, reality trumped (science) fiction with an image even more enthralling: two amateur astronomers poring through data from deep, distant skies and discovering a planet with four suns.

    NASA’s website calls the phenomenon a circumbinary planet, or a planet that orbits two suns.

    Rare enough on its own — only six other circumbinary planets are known to exist — this planet is orbited by two more distant stars, making it the first known quadruple sun system.

    Researchers presented the finding Monday night at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada.

    The discovery of the four-sun planet by amateur scientists takes crowd sourcing to new heights.

    The expression, coined by Wired magazine editor Jeff Howe, describes tasks that are outsourced to a disparate group of people to come up with a solution.

    In this case, the Planet Hunters group made data from NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope available to the public through its website and coordinates their findings with Yale astronomers.

    In combing through the data, “Citizen scientists” Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek spied anomalies that confirmed the existence of the special planet, now known as PH1 — short for Planet Hunters 1 — the first heavenly body found by the online citizen science project.

    The planet is a little bigger than Neptune, with a radius about six times greater than Earth.

    “I celebrate this discovery for the wow-factor of a planet in a four-star system,” said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

    “Most importantly, I celebrate this discovery as the fruit of exemplary human cooperation — cooperation between scientists and citizens who give of themselves for the love of stars, knowledge, and exploration.”

  • Roth & Shapley Win Nobel Economics Award

    Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics.

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the US academics for their work on the “theory of stable allocations and practice of market design”.

    The work is concerned with the best possible way to allocate resources, such as in school admissions.

    Mr Roth is a professor at Harvard and Mr Shapley teaches at the University of California in Los Angeles.

    The committee said their work was a form of economic engineering, designing markets for situations where traditional market mechanisms based on price are not applicable or do not work well.

    “Even though these two researchers worked independently of one another, the combination of Shapley’s basic theory and Roth’s empirical investigations, experiments and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets,” the Academy said.

    Appearing at a news conference by phone from the US, Mr Roth said: “It sheds a very bright spotlight on the work we do, so that’s a good thing.

    “My colleagues and I work in an area that we’re calling market design, which is sort of a newish area of economics and I’m sure that when I go to class this morning my students will pay more attention.”

    In 1962, Mr Shapley and his colleague David Gale laid down a theory for how best to match demand and supply in markets with ethical and legal complications, such as admitting students to public schools in the US.

    If these particular markets were just left according to price, then you would get what economists refer to as market failure.

    This original work developed into the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which aims to ensure “stable matching” or the best possible outcome for both sides. “An allocation where no individuals perceive any gains from further trade is called stable,” the Academy explained.

    This is a key pillar in co-operative game theory, an area of mathematical economics that seeks to determine how rational individuals choose to co-operate.

    In the early 1980s, Alvin Roth set out to study the market for newly qualified doctors.

    This was a problem as a scarcity of medical students – such as that which existed in the US in the 1940s – forced hospitals to offer internships earlier and earlier, sometimes several years before graduation, meaning that a match was made before they could produce evidence of their skills and qualifications.

    A clearing system was set up to try to better match medical students and hospitals. In a paper from 1984, Mr Roth studied the algorithm used by this clearing house and discovered that it was very close to the Gale-Shapley algorithm, showing that it applied in real-life situations.

    The awards continue a strong US run of victories in the category of economic sciences.

    Forty-three prizes in economics have been awarded since 1969.

    BBC

  • Roth & Shapley Win Nobel Economics Award

    Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics.

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the US academics for their work on the “theory of stable allocations and practice of market design”.

    The work is concerned with the best possible way to allocate resources, such as in school admissions.

    Mr Roth is a professor at Harvard and Mr Shapley teaches at the University of California in Los Angeles.

    The committee said their work was a form of economic engineering, designing markets for situations where traditional market mechanisms based on price are not applicable or do not work well.

    “Even though these two researchers worked independently of one another, the combination of Shapley’s basic theory and Roth’s empirical investigations, experiments and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets,” the Academy said.

    Appearing at a news conference by phone from the US, Mr Roth said: “It sheds a very bright spotlight on the work we do, so that’s a good thing.

    “My colleagues and I work in an area that we’re calling market design, which is sort of a newish area of economics and I’m sure that when I go to class this morning my students will pay more attention.”

    In 1962, Mr Shapley and his colleague David Gale laid down a theory for how best to match demand and supply in markets with ethical and legal complications, such as admitting students to public schools in the US.

    If these particular markets were just left according to price, then you would get what economists refer to as market failure.

    This original work developed into the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which aims to ensure “stable matching” or the best possible outcome for both sides. “An allocation where no individuals perceive any gains from further trade is called stable,” the Academy explained.

    This is a key pillar in co-operative game theory, an area of mathematical economics that seeks to determine how rational individuals choose to co-operate.

    In the early 1980s, Alvin Roth set out to study the market for newly qualified doctors.

    This was a problem as a scarcity of medical students – such as that which existed in the US in the 1940s – forced hospitals to offer internships earlier and earlier, sometimes several years before graduation, meaning that a match was made before they could produce evidence of their skills and qualifications.

    A clearing system was set up to try to better match medical students and hospitals. In a paper from 1984, Mr Roth studied the algorithm used by this clearing house and discovered that it was very close to the Gale-Shapley algorithm, showing that it applied in real-life situations.

    The awards continue a strong US run of victories in the category of economic sciences.

    Forty-three prizes in economics have been awarded since 1969.

    BBC