Photograph by Jay Fleming
Without aggressive management, the population of Yellowstone cutthroats could be decimated. To suppress the population of lake trout, the National Park Service engaged a contract fishing company to net them. Cutthroats are removed carefully from the traps and thrown back. Lake trout are removed and killed. Last year about 300,000 of the non-native intruders were taken from the lake.
Published January 22, 2013
Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood her ground today, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she has overseen plans to secure diplomatic outposts around the world while cuts in State Department funding undermine those efforts.
Citing a report by the department's Accountability Review Board on the security failures that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, during an attack last year, Clinton said the board is pushing for an increase in funding to facilities of more than $2 billion per year.
"Consistent shortfalls have required the department to prioritize available funding out of security accounts," Clinton told the Senate this morning, while again taking responsibility for the Benghazi attack. "And I will be the first to say that the prioritization process was at times imperfect, but as the ARB said, the funds provided were inadequate. So we need to work together to overcome that."
Clinton choked up earlier in discussing the Benghazi attack.
"I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews," Clinton said this morning, her voice growing hoarse with emotion. "I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters."
Clinton is the only witness giving long-awaited testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee right now, and will appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee at 2 p.m.
Molly Riley/UPI via Newscom
The secretary, who postponed her testimony in December, started today by giving context to the terrorist attack.
"Any clear-eyed examination of this matter must begin with this sobering fact," Clinton began. "Since 1988, there have been 19 Accountability Review Boards investigating attacks on American diplomats and their facilities."
But the secretary did not deny her role in the failures, saying that as secretary of state, she has "no higher priority and no greater responsibility" than protecting American diplomats abroad like those killed in Benghazi.
"As I have said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more committed to getting this right," Clinton said. "I am determined to leave the State Department and our country safer, stronger and more secure."
Clinton testified that the United States needs to be able to "chew gum and walk at the same time," working to shore up its fiscal situation while also strengthening security, and she refuted the idea that across-the-board cuts slated to take place in March, commonly referred to as sequestration, were the way to do that."
"Now sequestration will be very damaging to the State Department and USAID if it does come to pass, because it throws the baby out with the bath," Clinton said.
While the State Department does need to make cuts in certain areas, "there are also a lot of very essential programs … that we can't afford to cut more of," she added.
More than four months have passed since the attack killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya. These meetings, during which Clinton discussed the report on State Department security failures by the Accountability Review Board, were postponed because of her recent illness.
Clinton told the Senate that the State Department is on track to have 85 percent of action items based on the recommendations in the Accountability Review Board report accomplished by March, with some already implemented.
President Barack Obama yesterday vowed to put the fight against global warming at the heart of his next four-year term in office.
Sweeping aside years of American prevarication on whether to act on emissions, Obama promised the US would lead the world in its efforts to curb global warming, and in the development of the technologies to achieve this goal.
"We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations," he said on Monday in his inaugural address to the nation.
With the horrors of superstorm Sandy
and the recent US droughts fresh reminders that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and frequent – a trend predicted by climate models – Obama sniped at Americans who still deny that human activity is to blame.
"Some may still deny the overwhelming judgement of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought, and more powerful storms," he said.
Obama flagged a transition to cleaner energy as an economic opportunity, one that would be lost to other nations unless the US stepped up. "The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult, but Americans cannot resist this transition, we must lead it.
"We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries," said the president. "We must claim its promise. That's how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow-capped peaks."
Environmental groups responded enthusiastically. "President Obama's clarion call to action on the threat of climate change leaves no doubt this will be a priority in his second term," Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists told New Scientist.
"The politics are shifting rapidly on climate change and clean energy issues, in the wake of the recent drought, wildfires, hurricane Sandy and other extreme weather events," said Meyer. "With presidential leadership, that shift will continue and deepen over the next four years, and meaningful progress on climate change will become an important part of Obama's legacy as president."
"This is a call to action against the climate chaos that is sweeping our nation and threatening our future," said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington DC. "Now it's time to act. Power plants are our single largest source of carbon pollution and we must cut that pollution. We must do it now, for the sake of our country, our children and the future we share."
Although the president and his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, avoided discussing climate change in their televised debates prior to the election, Obama hinted of action to come in his post-election news conference, promising a "wide-ranging conversation" on climate change.
His new commitment also adds flesh to promises made four years ago in his first inaugural address to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet".
This time, he also has tactics in hand to outmanoeuvre the entrenched Republican opposition that foiled his attempts in 2010 to give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) power to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases.
According to The New York Times, new legislation is currently being drafted to enable the EPA to clamp down on dirtier, coal-fired power plants. Environmentalists are confident this can be achieved. The NRDC last year proposed a plan that would reduce carbon pollution from coal-burning power plants by a quarter, which would cut the total US carbon footprint by 10 per cent.
There are also increasing signs that as the Obama joins the battle against climate change, he has the American people on his side. A pre-election poll showed that most Americans now accept that global warming is caused by human activity.
But environmentalists warned of battles to come. "It will now take a sustained campaign by the president, his cabinet officials and the rest of his team to mobilise the American people in support of this effort, and to overcome the opposition of entrenched interests to the rapid transition away from fossil fuels that's needed to stabilise the climate," says Meyer.
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
SINGAPORE : Rising interest in derivatives trading helped lift earnings for the Singapore Exchange (SGX) last quarter.
Asia's second-largest bourse operator reported a 17 per cent on-year rise in second-quarter net profit to S$76 million.
It also attracted a large number of new bond listings in the same quarter.
Derivatives trading has been the star performer in SGX.
Over the October to December quarter, derivatives daily average volume on SGX hit a record of 358,532 contracts, up 30 per cent on-year.
This was supported by rising trading interests in China A50 futures and Japan Nikkei 225 options.
Not to be undone, the securities market performed well too.
Its daily average volume rose 8 per cent for the quarter to hit a trading value of S$1.2 billion.
This translates to a revenue of S$58 million for the securities business segment.
SGX said the better performance was due to improvements in investor sentiment following stability over the Europe debt situation and improved US economy.
Magnus Bocker, chief executive officer of Singapore Exchange, said: "We should remember the enormous amount of liquidity in the market. Not so much in the equity market, but actually more in the fixed income and currency markets, and with chasing yields and lot of very successful and growing companies, I think we can all expect this sentiment to continue. I think we can expect more flows into securities."
Some analysts are bullish on SGX's prospects going forward.
The said the improved investment climate globally may benefit the exchange operator.
Ken Ang, investment analyst at Phillip Securities Research, said: "SGX is very well placed to benefit from this increasing attractiveness of the equity market and therefore resulting in increase in trading value."
SGX attracted eight new listings in its second quarter - raising S$798.9 million.
While the number seems small, it came amid declines in the global initial public offering (IPO) market.
In 2012, global IPO volumes fell 27 per cent, with the lowest level of funds raised since 2009.
Kenneth Ng, head of Singapore research at CIMB Research, said: "I think while that (derivative) is great and that diversified the revenue of SGX, SGX still has a rather pertinent problem of trying to increase the security turnover velocity and value by retail initiatives, attracting listings and so forth."
Apart from seeking more IPOs, SGX also attracted some 90 new bond listings, raising S$39.7 billion for the quarter.
- CNA/ms
After a fractious false start last year, Web standards makers will reconvene in Orlando, Florida, this March to try to settle a debate about the best video technology for browser-based chatting.
The Web-based chat standard, which holds the potential to bring Skype-like audio and video communication services to the Web, is called WebRTC. The debate about it centers on how best to compress video: the widely used industry-standard H.264 codec, or Google's royalty-free, open-source VP8 codec?
The discussion took some surprising twists and turns late last year -- including Google's last-minute action to postpone discussion because of unspecified intellectual property issues and a vote by H.264 patent holders about whether to offer that codec for free.
If this debate sounds familiar, it's because Web standards setters already hashed it in recent years when dealing with Web video. There, fans of H.264's quality and widespread support pitted against those who gnash their teeth at patent-encumbered technology erecting toll booths on an an Internet otherwise built from free-to-implement standards.
HTML5 introduced built-in video, in principle letting Web developers use it as easily as they do images and no longer requiring them to rely on a plug-in like Adobe Systems' Flash Player.
But the HTML5 video standards world couldn't agree on a codec -- the technology that defines how to encode and decode video so it can be sent over a network or stored on a disk in compressed form. Some prefer the H.264 codec, which is built into
Windows 7 and 8, OS X, iOS, and
Android, but which requires royalty payments to patent holders when shipped in products. Others prefer Google's VP8, a later arrival that Google is trying to promote as part of the WebM project.
Now we have the sequel to that debate, this time for real-time communications on the Web.
Separately from the codec issue is the RTC issue. The leading contender, backed notably by Google and Mozilla, is a standard in the making called WebRTC. Microsoft arrived later with a lower-level competing proposal called CU-RTC-Web. Burt regardless of which form of real-time video and audio chat arrives on the Web, a video codec will be necessary.
Standards makers had agreed to a show-of-hands vote on H.264 vs VP8 in November to see if they could pick a mandatory-to-implement (MTI) codec -- in other words, the one that would be required for software to say it supported the standard. That could have been a huge boost for encouraging VP8 adoption, which has been lackluster so far.
But at the last minute -- literally -- Google asked to postpone the issue because of unspecified intellectual property rights (IPR) issues at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), one standards group involved in the real-time communications standard.
In a mailing list message, Google's Serge Lachapelle said:
Google understands that concerns have been raised within the IETF RTCWEB WG [Real-Time Communication in Web browsers Working Group] regards to VP8 IPR...
Google likes VP8
Google believes strongly that the VP8 codec is the best technical option for a mandatory to implement codec.
We therefore kindly ask to postpone this decision and hope the workgroup will take this opportunity to make progress on other vital topics.
The postponement is for the IETF's upcoming meeting in Orlando from March 10 to 15. That postponement didn't sit well with some.
"This not a 'VP8 project', VP8 stands as a possible candidate, one of a set. It seems you are having trouble putting it formally on the table. Are you sure that those troubles can be resolved in a defined interval?" said Apple's David Singer." And, unsurprisingly given Apple's fondness for H.264, he also offered veiled support for that option: "The best *technical* option is almost certainly something widely deployed, implemented, and understood."
Added Nokia's Markus Isomaki, "I agreed to the proposal to drop the discussions since I was pretty sure we would not learn much new or reach any consensus over this. However, could you elaborate a bit what lead to your request just 5 minutes before the start of the session? I mean, concerns about VP IPR status have been raised all along the way and probably will continue to be."
Google didn't respond to that message or to a CNET request for comment on the issue.
VP8 has been dogged by intellectual property issues since it emerged two and a half years go, but so far there have been no legal challenges. MPEG LA, which licenses the large pool of H.264 patents, however, said VP8 violates 12 organizations' patents without disclosing which.
Royalty-free H.264?
MPEG LA got involved in the issue, too, at the behest of t The other standards group working on WebRTC, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), doesn't like the idea of patent payments in Web standards -- in fact, it's explicitly against its policy. Shortly before the November vote at the last IETF meeting, therefore, the W3C's highest authorities in effect weighed in against H.264.
"Whatever codec the [IETF's] rtcweb Working Group might choose, we encourage the working group to work toward technologies that implementers can be confident are available on a royalty-free basis, and W3C is willing to work with the IETF in achieving this," said none other than World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, along with W3C Chief Executive Jeff Jaffe, Philippe Le Hegaret, who leads the W3C's HTML work, and Thomas Roessler, a W3C technology leader.
The message dropped a juicy little nugget into the debate: the possibility of free H.264 use.
That might sound improbable, but MPEG LA granted free rights in perpetuity to use H.264 for Web sites that offer free streaming videos. But the W3C suggested that it might not be wise to get any hopes up for more free rights -- because it asked for those already in the earlier HTML5 video debate:
In 2011 W3C approached MPEG LA, the licensing authority for the generally-known patent pool for H.264, with a proposal for royalty-free licensing of the H.264 baseline codec, to be referenced for use by the HTML5 video tag. MPEG LA was receptive to this proposal; however, the proposal was turned down by a narrow margin within the MPEG LA membership.
Realistically, it's quite possible there will be no decision even March. And even if there is, the debate about the best codec doesn't look like it'll end anytime soon.
Because VP8 vs H.264 is only part of the codec debate. As new technologies appear, the video world is starting to move onto the next phase: H.265 vs. VP9.
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... a manatee? The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) believes that a gas cloud in the constellation Aquila bears an uncanny resemblance to the endangered aquatic mammal.
Heidi Winter, executive assistant to NRAO's director, first noticed the similarity. And Tania Burchell, an NRAO media producer who used to work in manatee conservation, quickly saw it as "a wonderful opportunity to bridge two worlds—biology and astronomy."
The cloud, or nebula, which is named W50, has more in common with manatees than just its shape. It is the remnant of a star explosion from 20,000 years ago. Particle beams that shoot from the explosion's center, where a star and a black hole orbit each other, form a spiral pattern resembling scars.
Manatees also bear scars. "Around 80 percent of manatees in Florida have visible scarring," said Michael Lusk, manager of Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge. Because manatees prefer shallow water, collisions with boat propellers are frequent.
The resemblance continues. Like the "sea cow," which can blend into murky water, the nebula is hard to spot. It's approximately 18,000 light-years away, so only one bright arc can be seen by the human eye. Astronomers first saw the ghostly nebula with a telescope that collects a kind of light that radiates at longer wavelengths called radio waves.
W50's new nickname, the Manatee Nebula, and its first photos were unveiled January 19 at the Florida Manatee Festival. "People have an underlying love for the natural world—sky or sea," said Burchell. "We're human beings on this planet, looking up or looking down."
The event marks the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, which aims to protect critical habitats. Florida's manatee population has risen from around 700 in the 1970s to 5,000 today, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering reclassifying the species from endangered to threatened.
It's what we expect as shoppers—what's in the food will be displayed on the label.
But a new scientific examination by the non-profit food fraud detectives the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), discovered rising numbers of fake ingredients in products from olive oil to spices to fruit juice.
"Food products are not always what they purport to be," Markus Lipp, senior director for Food Standards for the independent lab in Maryland, told ABC News.
In a new database to be released Wednesday, and obtained exclusively by ABC News today, USP warns consumers, the FDA and manufacturers that the amount of food fraud they found is up by 60 percent this year.
USP, a scientific nonprofit that according to their website "sets standards for the identity, strength, quality, and purity of medicines, food ingredients, and dietary supplements manufactured, distributed and consumed worldwide" first released the Food Fraud Database in April 2012.
The organization examined more than 1,300 published studies and media reports from 1980-2010. The update to the database includes nearly 800 new records, nearly all published in 2011 and 2012.
Among the most popular targets for unscrupulous food suppliers? Pomegranate juice, which is often diluted with grape or pear juice.
"Pomegranate juice is a high-value ingredient and a high-priced ingredient, and adulteration appears to be widespread," Lipp said. "It can be adulterated with other food juices…additional sugar, or just water and sugar."
Lipp added that there have also been reports of completely "synthetic pomegranate juice" that didn't contain any traces of the real juice.
USP tells ABC News that liquids and ground foods in general are the easiest to tamper with:
Milk, honey, coffee and syrup are also listed by the USP as being highly adulterated products.
Also high on the list: seafood. The number one fake being escolar, an oily fish that can cause stomach problems, being mislabeled as white tuna or albacore, frequently found on sushi menus.
National Consumers League did its own testing on lemon juice just this past year and found four different products labeled 100 percent lemon juice were far from pure.
"One had 10 percent lemon juice, it said it had 100 percent, another had 15 percent lemon juice, another...had 25 percent, and the last one had 35 percent lemon juice," Sally Greenberg, Executive Director for the National Consumers League said. "And they were all labeled 100 percent lemon juice."
Greenberg explains there are indications to help consumers pick the faux from the food.
"In a bottle of olive oil if there's a dark bottle, does it have the date that it was harvested?" she said. While other products, such as honey or lemon juice, are more difficult to discern, if the price is "too good to be true" it probably is.
"$5.50, that's pretty cheap for extra virgin olive oil," Greenberg said. "And something that should raise some eyebrows for consumers."
Many of the products USP found to be adulterated are those that would be more expensive or research intensive in its production.
"Pomegranate juice is expensive because there is little juice in a pomegranate," Lipp said.
Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent
(Image: B. S. P. I./Corbis)
Think of it as satnav for your waist. The "vibrobelt", a vibrating belt to help guide cyclists, has proven successful in early tests. It uses vibrating actuators that indicate left, right, backward and forward turn directions, and even tickles the user with coded buzzes that tell them how far they have to go to their destination.
Developed in a masters project by Haska Steltenpohl of the Intelligent Systems Lab at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, alongside supervisor Anders Bouwer, the system aims to give cyclists a "heads-up" navigator, allowing them to keep their eyes on the road after they have chosen their destination on a GPS smartphone. They simply set off and get directional nudges from the vibrators just before each turn.
To see if the vibrotactile navigation compared well with using a standard GPS map on a handlebar-mounted smartphone, 20 volunteers tried both methods on a variety of unfamiliar routes. While all the cyclists reached their destinations successfully, the researchers noted an important difference: when questioned about landmarks they had passed, the vibrobelt users proved much more aware of their surroundings en route than those who were constantly glancing at a GPS screen.
That's a key observation as concerns mount over the appalling death toll among cyclists. The researchers plan to reveal their system and research results at the annual Intelligent User Interfaces conference in Santa Monica, California, in March.
It's not the first time "vibro" navigation has been tried, however. The US military is trialling a system that guides ground troops to targets in a similar fashion.
ALGIERS: Thirty-seven foreigners of eight different nationalities were killed during the hostage crisis at an Algerian gas plant that was overrun by Islamist gunmen, Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said on Monday.
"Thirty-seven foreigners of eight different nationalities," were killed during the four-day siege, Sellal told a news conference in Algiers, without specifying their nationalities.
One Algerian also lost his life, bringing the giving an overall toll of 38, while five foreigners were still missing, he added.
Among those that other official sources have already confirmed to have died in the siege were one Frenchman, one American, two Romanians, three Britons, six Filipinos and seven Japanese.
During the army's final assault on the plant, Sellal said the remaining gunmen executed several hostages by shooting them in the head.
The interior ministry had on Saturday given a preliminary toll of 23 foreign and Algerian hostages killed during the siege, which ended on Saturday with Algerian forces storming the remaining part of the complex still in militant hands.
The ministry said 685 Algerian and 107 foreign hostages were freed.
Sellal also said that the 32 militants who overran the In Amenas gas facility, taking hundreds of workers hostage, came from northern Mali. Twenty-nine of them were killed and three arrested.
He said the group's leader was Mohamed el-Amine Bencheneb, an Algerian militant known to the country's security services, and that he was killed during the army's assault.
As well as the three Algerians among them, the kidnappers had six foreign nationalities, namely Canadian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Malian, Nigerian and Mauritanian.
- AFP/xq
Now that this year's Super Bowl teams have been decided (and who doesn't love a battle of brothers?), perhaps you're ready for a big new TV on which to enjoy the game.
For a limited time, and while supplies last, TigerDirect has the Sceptre X508BV-FHD 50-inch LCD HDTV for $399.99, plus around $30 for shipping. That's your after-rebate price, but, hey, some deals require a little delayed gratification.
As you might expect from the price, this is an entry-level TV. It's not especially thin, and it lacks apps and Wi-Fi and all that (though that's easily remedied with an inexpensive Roku box). It has a 60Hz refresh rate, which I'll take any day over 120-240Hz and the "soap opera effect" that lends.
Other key specs include three HDMI inputs, an 8ms response time, and, of course, 1080p resolution. Sceptre backs the unit with a one-year warranty.
As for the rebate, it's good as long as you make your purchase before Jan. 26, and it comes in the form of a prepaid Amex card. Here's the PDF.
With a TV like this, I think it's wise to look closely at user reviews. There are nearly two dozen of them at TigerDirect, with an average rating of 4.3 stars out of 5. That would be good enough for me to pull the trigger, were I in the market for a TV.
If you are, let me know if you think this is the deal to beat, or whether it's worth spending more to get a thinner design and more frills.
Deals found on The Cheapskate are subject to availability, expiration, and other terms determined by sellers.
Curious about what exactly The Cheapskate does and how it works? Read our FAQ.
Copyright © News discolorate. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
