Spec-Ops troops study to be part-spy, part-gumshoe (AP)

FORT BRAGG, N.C. ? The raid to grab Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan took just under 40 minutes ? roughly 10 to get to bin Laden.

Special operators spent much of the rest of the time gathering evidence: computer files, written notes and thumb drives that pointed to new al-Qaida plots and previously secret operatives around the globe.

That science is what special operators of all types are learning at Fort Bragg's Special Warfare Center, with real-life scenarios meant to shock ? and teach.

In one exercise, a Hollywood-style explosion leaves the remains of a fake suicide bomber scattered around a checkpoint.

The students must look past the grisly mess for the evidence that could lead to those who built the bomb.

Forging lessons painfully learned in the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the formal curriculum is intended to help elite military units track militants across international boundaries and work alongside sometimes competing U.S. agencies.

The coursework is similar to the CIA's legendary spycraft training center called The Farm, and is at the brainchild of Green Beret Maj. Gen. Bennet Sacolick, a veteran of elite special operations units and a long stint on loan to the CIA.

Among the students at the CIA-approved Fort Bragg course are Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Marine Corps special operators. As in the Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden, everything from computers to fingerprints can be retrieved from a raid site and quickly analyzed. In some cases the analysis is so fast it can lead to several new targets in a single night.

The school is also an illustration of how special operations and intelligence forces have reached a less-contentious coexistence after early clashes in which CIA officers accused the military operators of ineptly trying to run their own spy rings overseas without State Department or CIA knowledge.

"As my guys go to Afghanistan and interface with CIA base and station chiefs, they can do it with more credibility than in the past," Sacolick told The Associated Press in a rare interview.

While many in the public may not be aware that the military is allowed to gather information, and even run its own spy networks, special operations forces have been authorized to do just that since the disastrous Desert One raid meant to rescue the U.S. hostages held in Iran in 1979.

The raid went awry because of a helicopter crash, not an intelligence foul-up. But before the raid, military planners had been frustrated that CIA employees working inside the country were unable to provide the tactical intelligence needed to insert a covert force ? even basic information like which way the streets ran outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where the hostages were held.

That's why almost a third of every class at the CIA's Farm has been military, a former senior intelligence official said.

The Fort Bragg school means special operators now can get much of that CIA-style training at their home facility.

Sacolick said he was shocked at how piecemeal intelligence gathering and sharing was up until a couple of years ago. Special operations units would know their area but had no established way to pass it on, he said, or any means for reaching out to the CIA to fill in information gaps.

"The CIA will satisfy any information requirement we have," the agency veteran said.

"All we have to do is ask the right person. So that's what we are creating" among the special operations teams training at Fort Bragg, Sacolick said, pointing out troops who "have the vocabulary, have the contacts, know the questions to ask and who to ask."

The CIA also helped Sacolick design the course to teach special operators the spy-related tradecraft they need for the counterterror fight outside known war zones, such as in Somalia or Southeast Asia. They learn skills like how to evade surveillance by terrorists or a target country's intelligence service.

The elite teams' piecemeal training in those areas, often done previously by contractors rather than at the agency's Farm, was part of what caused the near-revolt of CIA station chiefs just after Sept. 11, when the Pentagon sent scores of such troops overseas. With their short haircuts, obvious military bearing and uneven training in tradecraft, they caused more than a few uncomfortable incidents for U.S. ambassadors and CIA chiefs, who sometimes were not even told they were there.

That led to congressional alarm and a clash between the Pentagon, the spies and the diplomats over who should be able to operate where.

The White House eventually created an information exchange to allow elite military troops to gather intelligence, while keeping State and the CIA in the loop.

To make sure spy did not stumble over spy, the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Stephen Cambone, and the CIA's then-top clandestine representative, Jose Rodriguez, created a mechanism that exists to this day to let each network know who was working for whom.

The next step was to find common ground among those competing tribes of intelligence and military operators ? a step embraced by now-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Then heading the military's Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal embraced the "hostage swap" of JSOC troops and CIA officers, deploying them to each other's command centers and forcing collaboration through proximity.

But he upgraded the practice, sending his best people, instead of following the unwritten custom of sending one's least-valuable employee to get them out of the home office.

McChrystal used to lecture his people, Sacolick among them, to forge their own networks of one-on-one relationships in other agencies to counter the enemy network.

That's how Sacolick ended up at the CIA, and why he patterned his school on lessons the agency helped teach him.

The idea is to pass on the skills learned in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, where special operators have had more intelligence backup and logistical support from the regular military than they will in the remote places where they usually operate, Sacolick said.

"I need to prepare a 12-man team to go anywhere on this planet," he said. "They need to be every bit as good as they are in Afghanistan, in the middle of Africa somewhere" or wherever the next conflict takes them.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/education/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120104/ap_on_go_ot/us_special_operations_intelligence_school

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Huge Web Companies Are Willing To Go Dark In ... - Business Insider

The Stop Online Piracy Act is so polarizing in the tech world that huge web companies like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Google are considering going dark in order to spread awareness, reports ExtremeTech.

Imagine going to Google.com to do a search only to find some explanatory text on what SOPA is and how to call Congress to voice your opinion on it.

There's no plan on when the blackout would occur, but January 23 looks like the most likely date given that Congress is scheduled to debate SOPA on January 24.

ExtremeTech shares the full list of companies that may participate in the blackout. Again, consider what the Internet would be like without access to any of these companies' services:

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/sopa-protest-2012-1

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El Sony Tablet S baja de precio: empieza lo esperado

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U.S. steps up sanctions as Iran floats nuclear talks (Reuters)

HONOLULU/TEHRAN (Reuters) ? President Barack Obama signed new sanctions against Iran into law on Saturday, shortly after Iran signaled it was ready for fresh talks with the West on its nuclear programme and said it had delayed long-range missile tests in the Gulf.

Tensions between Iran and the West have grown since EU leaders said they wanted to set tougher sanctions against Tehran by the end of next month in a bid to force it to curb a research programme that they suspect is developing nuclear weapons.

In the absence of a fresh mandate from the U.N. Security Council, which has already imposed four rounds of global sanctions, Washington has also stepped up the pressure with sanctions on financial institutions that deal with Iran's central bank.

The defense funding bill, approved by Congress last week, aims to reduce the oil revenues that make up the bulk of Iran's export earnings. Obama signed it in Hawaii, where he was spending the Christmas holiday.

If enforced strictly, the sanctions could make it nearly impossible for most refiners to buy crude from Iran, the world's fourth biggest producer.

However, Obama asked for scope to apply the measures flexibly, and will have discretion to waive penalties. Senior U.S. officials said Washington was consulting foreign partners to ensure the new measures did not harm global energy markets.

Iran responded to the growing pressure by warning this week that it could shut the Strait of Hormuz if sanctions were imposed on its oil exports. It launched 10 days of naval wargames in the Gulf as a show of strength, further rattling oil markets and pushing up the price of crude.

In the past, Iran has threatened to close the waterway only if attacked by the United States and Israel.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, said it would not allow shipping to be disrupted in a waterway through which 40 percent of the world's oil passes.

Analysts say that Iran is playing for time and that its increasingly strident rhetoric shows its clerical leadership is concerned about even harsher penalties.

MISSILES

Against this backdrop, Iran's state media reported early on Saturday that long-range missiles had been launched during the naval exercises.

But Deputy Navy Commander Mahmoud Mousavi later went on the English language Press TV channel to deny they had in fact been fired: "The exercise of launching missiles will be carried out in the coming days."

Separately, Iranian media reported that nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili would write to the EU foreign policy chief to say Iran was ready for fresh talks on its nuclear programme, which it says is aimed exclusively at power generation.

"Jalili will soon send a letter to Catherine Ashton over the format of negotiations ... then fresh talks will take place with major powers," the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Iran's ambassador to Germany, Alireza Sheikh Attar, as saying.

Negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - plus Germany (P5+1) stalled in January.

Ashton, leading the European negotiators, wrote to Jalili in October and has not yet had a reply, her spokesman Michael Mann said. But the bloc was open to meaningful talks with Tehran:

"We continue to pursue our twin-track approach and are open for meaningful discussions on confidence-building measures, without preconditions from the Iranian side."

A U.S. administration official added: "We have indicated for years that we are willing to engage in talks with Iran, provided it is ready to engage in a meaningful and constructive fashion." Senior officials said the sanctions did not alter this policy.

Iranian analyst Hamid Farahvashian said Tehran was seeking to send a message to the West that it should think twice about the economic cost of putting pressure on Iran.

"The Iranians have always used this method of carrot and stick ... first they used the stick of closing Hormuz and now the carrot is their willingness for talks," said Farahvashian.

UNDER PRESSURE

Talks between Iran and the P5+1 have been stalled for a year and Malcolm Chalmers, Research Director at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, said Europe would be sceptical about the offer.

"EU countries will be wary of yet another attempt by Iran to play for time, seeking to postpone sanctions simply because talks have resumed," he said.

"So Iran will have to offer significant concessions even to get a conversation started on slowing the implementation of sanctions. And, all the time, the Europeans are aware of the growing war talk in Washington, where the pressure on (U.S. President Barack) Obama to launch an 'October surprise' to clinch the (U.S. presidential) election seems to be growing."

The United States and Israel have not ruled out a military option if diplomacy fails to resolve the nuclear dispute.

A senior Western diplomat in Tehran, who asked not to be named, said the fact that the Iranians were stepping up their threats "shows that they are worried about losing petrodollars, on which more than 60 percent of the economy depends."

The Iranian threat briefly pushed benchmark Brent crude up by more than a dollar to over $109 a barrel this week.

Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi told Saturday's weekly Aseman that further sanctions would push oil over $200 a barrel.

"IRANIANS WORRIED"

Chalmers said sanctions were most effective in influencing behaviour when they were imminent and credible but not yet in place as, once in place, they were hard to lift, short of a comprehensive conflict resolution.

"The Iranians know this, and are seriously worried by the prospect of an EU oil embargo, especially as it could be followed by action by the U.S.'s close Asian allies," he said.

"They could then be left at the mercy of China and India, who are likely to demand big price discounts in order to shift purchases from Arab countries, who will not be happy, to Iran."

The rising tensions are having an impact at home. Iran's currency has nosedived in recent weeks as ordinary Iranians have moved money from savings accounts into gold or foreign currency.

The price of staple foods has increased by up to 40 percent in recent months and many critics have put the blame on increasing isolation brought about by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic and foreign policies.

Iran's massive media coverage of the naval manoeuvres appeared an attempt by the authorities to strike a patriotic chord among ordinary Iranians worried about a military strike.

"I have already witnessed a war with Iraq in the 1980s ... I can hear the drumbeat of war," said merchant Mohsen Sanaie, 62, glancing over newspaper headlines at a central Tehran newsstand. "One stray bullet could spark a war."

(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb, Hashem Kalantari and Ramin Mostafavi; Writing by Parisa Hafezi, Jo Boyle and Kevin Liffey; Additional reporting by Vicky Buffery in Paris, Matthew Falloon in London and Alexandra Hudson in Berlin)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iran/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111231/wl_nm/us_iran_drill_missile

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'God Particle' Found? Search for the Higgs Boson Narrows (Time.com)

Physics has a well-deserved reputation for being horrendously complicated, but sometimes it's the simplest questions that lead to truly profound insights. When Einstein asked himself, "What would happen if you could ride on a beam of light?" for example, the answer led him to the Special Theory of Relativity.

For the past few decades, particle physicists have been wrestling with another deceptively simple question: Why does anything have mass? You might wonder "why not?" But according to modern physics, you can't get away that easily. The existence of mass ? the property of matter that gives gravity something to pull on ? needs explaining. (Photos: The Large Hadron Particle Collider)

Now, say two independent teams of scientists who revealed their results at a symposium in Switzerland Tuesday morning, there are experimental signs of an elusive particle formally known as the Higgs boson ? and informally known as the "God particle." If the Higgs is really there, the existence of mass has finally been explained, and a Scottish physicist named Peter Higgs is a lock for the Nobel prize.

It's a big "if," though, and nobody is making an actual claim. Indeed, said Fabiola Gianotti, a member of one of the teams said at the symposium. "We cannot conclude anything at this stage." (Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs)

But that hardly means there's nothing to say. The gathering took place in a packed auditorium at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva ? the home of the mammoth Large Hadron Collider. The LHC, which is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, works by taking subatomic protons, sending them racing in opposite directions through a 17-mile oval-shaped tunnel, then letting them smash together head-on at nearly the speed of light. The impact is powerful enough to vaporize the particles into tiny fireballs of pure energy, recreating conditions in the first moments after the Big Bang. Then, just as in the early universe, the energy re-condenses into particles. Among them may be the elusive Higgs.

That's what physicists have been hoping for, anyway, since long before the LHC was even built. It was way back in the 1960's that Peter Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, proposed what came to be known as the "Higgs mechanism" (others came up with similar ideas, but his is the name that stuck). The way it works is ... no, let's not go there. Suffice it to say that there's a sort of energy field that pervades the universe, and that when particles like protons, neutrons, quarks and the rest interact with the Higgs field, they're rewarded with mass. The Higgs boson helps broker the transaction. (Photos: Seeking Beauty in Scientific Research)

When the Higgs condenses out of particle collisions, it immediately decays into other particles, so physicists can't see it directly; they can only reconstruct its existence from the debris, like a CSI unit reconstructing what a bomb must have looked like from the fragments. And since each mini-Big Bang creates so many particles that decay into so many other particles, the reconstruction is incredibly difficult. The good news is that the new hints of a Higgs in all of that particle debris come from not one, but two entirely different detectors at the LHC ? the ATLAS (for "A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS") and the CMS (for Compact Muon Solenoid). The two operate in different ways, as a sort of mutual cross-check.

Both detectors have seen evidence of the Higgs ? which is big news and the reason for both the symposium and all of the speculation that attended its announcement. But the less good news is that in statistical terms, that evidence weighs in at what is known as the three-sigma confidence level. No need to go here in too much detail either, except to say you'd need to get to the five-sigma stage to claim an actual discovery. "It's too early to draw a definite conclusion," said Gianotti. "We need four times as much data." (See "Higgs Boson May Have Been Found! (But Probably Not.)")

Getting that data requires many thousands of fireballs, and the LHC accelerator will need another year or more to crank all of them out and allow Gianotti and her colleagues to announce that they've indeed discovered the Higgs boson. Or not. "The number of sub-three-sigma discoveries that have turned out to be wrong," says Princeton astrophysicist Michael Strauss, "is reasonably large."

You'd think that if the hunt for the Higgs comes to nothing it would be a big disappointment for physicists. But it's not necessarily so. Finding the Higgs would add a key missing brick to the edifice of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, which would be important ? but also just a bit dull. (See "Why the Large Hadron Collider Matters: The Search for the 'God Particle'")

"The great irony," Harvard theorist Lisa Randall told the New York Times a day or two ago, "is that not finding a Higgs boson would be spectacular from the point of view of particle physics, pointing to something more interesting than the simple Higgs model." For physicists, it turns out, "be careful what you wish," especially if you're wishing for a Higgs, may truer than it seems.

(See "Higgs Boson: The Ghost in the Machine")

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/time_rss/rss_time_us/httpwwwtimecomtimehealtharticle08599210219000htmlxidrssnationyahoo/43902382/SIG=12l0dp1dq/*http%3A//www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2102190,00.html?xid=rss-nation-yahoo

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Holiday Essential Tip: Create a Chic Seasonal Tablescape (omg!)

When it comes to having the family over for holiday dinner, sometimes planning the menu is the easy part.

Whether you're hosting four or 14 people for a seasonal meal, Us Weekly has you covered, thanks to entertaining guru Mark Addison. Here, Addison shares three fun ideas for unique holiday tablescapes.

MIX AND MATCH HOLIDAY TABLE
"Think of your table top as an extension of your closet and personal style," says our expert. "Mix traditional with modern and even eclectic pieces, top basics with flea market finds or borrow complementary patterns from friends and family. Mix colors and patterns to make each person's place setting unique."

PHOTOS: LOL! Celebs horrible holiday sweaters

LIVING HOLIDAY TABLE
Tired of boring Poinsettia displays? Try Addison's chic and easy idea for a Living Wreath Centerpiece: Start with a floral foam wreath form and securely pin some topical moss to the wreath form. Then add color, texture and visual interest by layering miniature orchids, berries, and other festive florals into the wreath, making sure to cover the root balls with moss to keep them from drying out. To finish off your new accessory, place a clear cylinder vase into the center of the wreath and fill it with colored water and floating candles.

VIDEO: Nutrition tips and tricks to use to navigate the holiday buffet

CANDYLAND TABLE
To make sure the kids behave during dinner, try Addison's sweet -- and chic -- idea for a Candyland-inspired table. First, lay out a red tablecloth, green napkins and plain white dinner plates. To spruce up the plates, bejewel them with jelly beans, attached to the plate with royal icing used as glue. For an extra yummy effect, Addison suggests adding an edible centerpiece using lollipops and candy canes arranged in brightly colored flower pots lined with chocolate rice cereal as "dirt." The best part? This centerpiece also doubles as dessert, since guests can graze right from the pots.

For more of Mark Addison's tips, visit his web site at MarkAddison.com.

WIN IT! To freshen up your holiday table for those family dinners, Us is gifting one lucky reader with a 1800Flowers.com Peace on Earth Holiday Bouquet. To enter, email your name, address, daytime phone number and age (must be over 21) to Giveaways@usmagazine.com. You must put 'Holiday Table Essentials' in the subject line of your email in order to be eligible. All entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. (EST) on Monday, December 5. Click here for official rules.

Get more Us! Follow us on Twitter, Friend us on Facebook, Subscribe to Us Weekly

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/omg_rss/rss_omg_en/news_holiday_essential_tip_create_chic_seasonal_tablescape144000780/43808858/*http%3A//omg.yahoo.com/news/holiday-essential-tip-create-chic-seasonal-tablescape-144000780.html

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Feels weird

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Coming back to RPG Gateway and RPGing in general after a long absence. It all feels kind of weird getting back into this. I use to always rp with friends that I had class with in high school, now I've graduated and so much else has happened, my life has changed so much and I feel like something is missing. I am hoping getting back into this will help me out with everything. If you want to know what?s happened I can go into it.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/IaDxADUuZ4E/viewtopic.php

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