North Korea sentences American to 15 years' labor

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? A Korean American detained for six months in North Korea has been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for "hostile acts" against the state, the North's media said Thursday ? a move that could trigger a visit by a high-profile American if history is any guide.

Kenneth Bae, a Washington state man described by friends as a devout Christian and a tour operator, is at least the sixth American detained in North Korea since 2009. The others eventually were deported or released without serving out their terms, some after trips to Pyongyang by prominent Americans, including former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

With already abysmal U.S.-North Korean ties worsening since a long-range rocket-launch more than a year ago, Pyongyang is fishing for another such meeting, said Ahn Chan-il, head of the World Institute for North Korea Studies think tank in South Korea.

"North Korea is using Bae as bait to make such a visit happen. An American bigwig visiting Pyongyang would also burnish Kim Jong Un's leadership profile," Ahn said. Kim took power after his father, Kim Jong Il, died in December 2011.

The authoritarian country has faced increasing criticism over its nuclear weapons ambitions. Disarmament talks including the Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia fell apart in 2009. Several rounds of U.N. sanctions have not encouraged the North to give up its small cache of nuclear devices, which Pyongyang says it must not only keep but expand to protect itself from a hostile Washington.

Pyongyang's tone has softened somewhat recently, following weeks of violent rhetoric, including threats of nuclear war and missile strikes. There have been tentative signs of interest in diplomacy, and a major source of North Korean outrage ? annual U.S.-South Korean military drills ? ended Tuesday.

In Washington, the U.S. State Department said it was working with the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang to confirm the report of Bae's sentencing. The United States lacks formal diplomatic ties with North Korea and relies on Sweden for diplomatic matters involving U.S. citizens there.

Bae's trial on charges of "committing hostile acts" against North Korea took place in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported. KCNA referred to Bae as Pae Jun Ho, the North Korean spelling for his Korean name.

Bae was arrested in early November in Rason, a special economic zone in North Korea's far northeastern region bordering China and Russia, state media said. The exact nature of Bae's alleged crimes has not been revealed.

Friends and colleagues say Bae was based in the Chinese border city of Dalian and traveled frequently to North Korea to feed orphans. Bae's mother in the United States did not answer calls seeking comment Thursday.

There are parallels to a case in 2009. After Pyongyang's launch of a long-range rocket and its second underground nuclear test that year, two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor after sneaking across the border from China.

They later were pardoned on humanitarian grounds and released to Clinton, who met with then-leader Kim Jong Il. U.S.-North Korea talks came later that year.

In 2011, Carter visited North Korea to win the release of imprisoned American Aijalon Gomes, who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing illegally into the North from China.

Korean American Eddie Jun was released in 2011 after Robert King, the U.S. envoy on North Korean human rights, travelled to Pyongyang. Jun had been detained for half a year over an unspecified crime.

Jun and Gomes are also devout Christians. While North Korea's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, in practice only sanctioned services are tolerated by the government.

U.N. and U.S. officials accuse North Korea of treating opponents brutally. Foreign nationals have told varying stories about their detentions in North Korea.

The two journalists sentenced to hard labor in 2009 stayed in a guest house instead of a labor camp due to medical concerns.

Ali Lameda, a member of Venezuela's Communist Party and a poet invited to the North in 1966 to work as a Spanish translator, said that he was detained in a damp, filthy cell without trial the following year after facing espionage allegations that he denied. He later spent six years in prison after a one-day trial, he said.

___

AP writer Lou Kesten contributed to this report from Washington.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/north-korea-sentences-american-15-years-labor-035931247.html

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The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: Zombie Survival 101

Your axe may be razor sharp, your slingshot aim might be undeadly accurate but if you forget your head the second zombies start rising from the grave, all your cardio training will be for naught. So, let's just take a moment and go over the basics one more time, just to be sure.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-thing-on-the-internet-tonight-zombie-surv-485902136

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Global networks must be redesigned, experts urge

May 1, 2013 ? Our global networks have generated many benefits and new opportunities. However, they have also established highways for failure propagation, which can ultimately result in human-made disasters. For example, today's quick spreading of emerging epidemics is largely a result of global air traffic, with serious impacts on global health, social welfare, and economic systems.

Helbing's publication illustrates how cascade effects and complex dynamics amplify the vulnerability of networked systems. For example, just a few long-distance connections can largely decrease our ability to mitigate the threats posed by global pandemics. Initially beneficial trends, such as globalization, increasing network densities, higher complexity, and an acceleration of institutional decision processes may ultimately push human-made or human-influenced systems towards systemic instability, Helbing finds. Systemic instability refers to a system, which will get out of control sooner or later, even if everybody involved is well skilled, highly motivated and behaving properly. Crowd disasters are shocking examples illustrating that many deaths may occur even when everybody tries hard not to hurt anyone.

Our Intuition of Systemic Risks Is Misleading

Networking system components that are well-behaved in separation may create counter-intuitive emergent system behaviors, which are not well-behaved at all. For example, cooperative behavior might unexpectedly break down as the connectivity of interaction partners grows. "Applying this to the global network of banks, this might actually have caused the financial meltdown in 2008," believes Helbing.

Globally networked risks are difficult to identify, map and understand, since there are often no evident, unique cause-effect relationships. Failure rates may change depending on the random path taken by the system, with the consequence of increasing risks as cascade failures progress, thereby decreasing the capacity of the system to recover. "In certain cases, cascade effects might reach any size, and the damage might be practically unbounded," says Helbing. "This is quite disturbing and hard to imagine." All of these features make strongly coupled, complex systems difficult to predict and control, such that our attempts to manage them go astray.

"Take the financial system," says Helbing. "The financial crisis hit regulators by surprise." But back in 2003, the legendary investor Warren Buffet warned of mega-catastrophic risks created by large-scale investments into financial derivatives. It took 5 years until the "investment time bomb" exploded, causing losses of trillions of dollars to our economy. "The financial architecture is not properly designed," concludes Helbing. "The system lacks breaking points, as we have them in our electrical system." This allows local problems to spread globally, thereby reaching catastrophic dimensions.

A Global Ticking Time Bomb?

Have we unintentionally created a global time bomb? If so, what kinds of global catastrophic scenarios might humans face in complex societies? A collapse of the world economy or of our information and communication systems? Global pandemics? Unsustainable growth or environmental change? A global food or energy crisis? A cultural clash or global-scale conflict? Or will we face a combination of these contagious phenomena -- a scenario that the World Economic Forum calls the "perfect storm"?

"While analyzing such global risks," says Helbing, "one must bear in mind that the propagation speed of destructive cascade effects might be slow, but nevertheless hard to stop. It is time to recognize that crowd disasters, conflicts, revolutions, wars, and financial crises are the undesired result of operating socio-economic systems in the wrong parameter range, where systems are unstable." In the past, these social problems seemed to be puzzling, unrelated, and almost "God-given" phenomena one had to live with. Nowadays, thanks to new complexity science models and large-scale data sets ("Big Data"), one can analyze and understand the underlying mechanisms, which let complex systems get out of control.

Disasters should not be considered "bad luck." They are a result of inappropriate interactions and institutional settings, caused by humans. Even worse, they are often the consequence of a flawed understanding of counter-intuitive system behaviors. "For example, it is surprising that we didn't have sufficient precautions against a financial crisis and well-elaborated contingency plans," states Helbing. "Perhaps, this is because there should not be any bubbles and crashes according to the predominant theoretical paradigm of efficient markets." Conventional thinking can cause fateful decisions and the repetition of previous mistakes. "In other words: While we want to do the right thing, we often do wrong things," concludes Helbing. This obviously calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking. "For example, we may try to promote innovation, but suffer economic decline, because innovation requires diversity more than homogenization."

Global Networks Must Be Re-Designed

Helbing's publication explores why today's risk analysis falls short. "Predictability and controllability are design issues," stresses Helbing. "And uncertainty, which means the impossibility to determine the likelihood and expected size of damage, is often man-made." Many systems could be better managed with real-time data. These would allow one to avoid delayed response and to enhance the transparency, understanding, and adaptive control of systems. However, even all the data in the world cannot compensate for ill-designed systems such as the current financial system. Such systems will sooner or later get out of control, causing catastrophic human-made failure. Therefore, a re-design of such systems is urgently needed.

Helbing's Nature paper on "Globally Networked Risks" also calls attention to strategies that make systems more resilient, i.e. able to recover from shocks. For example, setting up backup systems (e.g. a parallel financial system), limiting the system size and connectivity, building in breaking points to stop cascade effects, or reducing complexity may be used to improve resilience. In the case of financial systems, there is still much work to be done to fully incorporate these principles.

Contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT) are also far from being failure-proof. They are based on principles that are 30 or more years old and not designed for today's use. The explosion of cyber risks is a logical consequence. This includes threats to individuals (such as privacy intrusion, identity theft, or manipulation through personalized information), to companies (such as cybercrime), and to societies (such as cyberwar or totalitarian control). To counter this, Helbing recommends an entirely new ICT architecture inspired by principles of decentralized self-organization as observed in immune systems, ecology, and social systems.

Coming Era of Social Innovation

A better understanding of the success principles of societies is urgently needed. "For example, when systems become too complex, they cannot be effectively managed top-down" explains Helbing. "Guided self-organization is a promising alternative to manage complex dynamical systems bottom-up, in a decentralized way." The underlying idea is to exploit, rather than fight, the inherent tendency of complex systems to self-organize and thereby create a robust, ordered state. For this, it is important to have the right kinds of interactions, adaptive feedback mechanisms, and institutional settings, i.e. to establish proper "rules of the game." The paper offers the example of an intriguing "self-control" principle, where traffic lights are controlled bottom-up by the vehicle flows rather than top-down by a traffic center.

Creating and Protecting Social Capital

"One man's disaster is another man's opportunity. Therefore, many problems can only be successfully addressed with transparency, accountability, awareness, and collective responsibility," underlines Helbing. Moreover, social capital such as cooperativeness or trust is important for economic value generation, social well-being and societal resilience, but it may be damaged or exploited. "Humans must learn how to quantify and protect social capital. A warning example is the loss of trillions of dollars in the stock markets during the financial crisis." This crisis was largely caused by a loss of trust. "It is important to stress that risk insurances today do not consider damage to social capital," Helbing continues. However, it is known that large-scale disasters have a disproportionate public impact, in part because they destroy social capital. As we neglect social capital in risk assessments, we are taking excessive risks.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by ETH Zurich, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Dirk Helbing. Globally networked risks and how to respond. Nature, 2013; 497 (7447): 51 DOI: 10.1038/nature12047

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/-7LSOislMLI/130501131943.htm

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Exclusive: Goldman's special situations group names new global head

By Lauren Tara LaCapra

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc has named Julian Salisbury to become head of its Global Special Situations Group, as current head Jason Brown retires, according to memos sent on Wednesday that were obtained by Reuters.

Salisbury, a partner and managing director who now heads the group's European operation, will move from London to New York for the role.

The Global Special Situations Group is known on Wall Street as one of Goldman's most profitable operations. It invests the bank's own money and sometimes client money in stocks, bonds and loans to distressed companies in hopes of earning profits through a restructuring or turn-around plan.

Although the group is managed by Goldman's securities unit, profits from the business flow into the bank's Investing and Lending earnings segment, which reflects money the bank earns from investing and lending its own capital.

The Global Special Situations Group - often referred to by the acronym SSG - has received more attention in recent years because of the Volcker rule, which prevents banks from trading for their own account and limits banks' investments in hedge funds and private-equity funds.

Although a final Volcker rule has not been released by regulators, Goldman has made some changes to the business to comply with what it expects the rule to say. For instance, it has scaled back short-term bets to make its investments longer-term in nature.

The Global Special Situations Group has been run by a succession of prominent bankers, including co-founder Mark McGoldrick, who left Goldman in 2007 to found Mount Kellett Capital Management with another former executive from the business. McGoldrick left Goldman after receiving a $70 million bonus that he thought was too small, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Brown, who is also a partner and managing director based in Asia, took over leadership of the operation in 2011 when its previous head, Richard Ruzika, retired. Ruzika had been global head of commodities trading and a close friend of Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein. He died from a stroke a few months after leaving the bank in May 2012.

In one memo, Isabelle Ealet and Pablo Salame, who are co-heads of Goldman's broader securities business, said Brown had been instrumental in realigning the Global Special Situations Group's investment approach.

Salisbury has been head of the European Special Situations Group and a member of the SSG Global Investment Committee since 2009. Before that he worked in Moscow, expanding business in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He was a founding member of the European division of SSG in 2003 and before that was a distressed debt trader and an accountant at KPMG.

He was named managing director in 2005 and partner in 2008.

A Goldman spokesman confirmed the content of the memos but declined further comment.

(Reporting By Lauren Tara LaCapra; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and John Wallace)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-goldmans-special-situations-group-names-global-head-191104696.html

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Teachers head: Don't link tests to evaluations yet

NEW YORK (AP) ? The head of the country's second-largest teachers union said Tuesday governments should hold off on linking standardized test results with evaluations of schools, students and teachers until everyone is on the same page.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called for a moratorium on penalties associated with tests aligned to the national standards called Common Core benchmarks until the standards have been fully implemented.

"The fact that the changes are being made nationwide without anything close to adequate preparation is a failure of leadership, a sign of a broken accountability system and, worse, and an abdication of our responsibility to kids, particularly poor kids," Weingarten told the Association for a Better New York, a business group.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards.

The issue in New York, among the first states to test students based on the standards, has been contentious. New York students in grades 3 through 8 took Common Core-aligned math and English tests during the last two weeks although most schools in the state have not fully implemented the standards.

Some New York students complained that the Common Core-aligned English tests were too difficult to complete in the allotted time, and there were reports of students crying from stress.

Weingarten said she supports the Common Core standards, which are intended to increase rigor and prepare students better for college and careers, but she urged New York not to evaluate teachers or students based on this year's tests.

"Across the state, scores from this spring's assessments may be used to determine whether students advance or are held back, to designate a school's performance, and even to determine whether schools stay open or shut down. And they will be used as 20 percent of teacher evaluations," she said.

Merryl Tisch, the head of New York's Board of Regents, said the same percentage of teachers will be rated "effective" based on this year's tests as in the past. But she noted the state Education Department has said it will not designate any schools as failing based on the tests.

She added: "We believe strongly that this is the right thing for students and teachers right now."

Andrew Kirtzman, a spokesman for the city Department of Education, said, "This is about a special interest that doesn't want this to happen because of fear for their jobs."

The AFT says it has 1.5 million members. The National Education Association claims to be the largest teachers union with 3 million members.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/teachers-head-dont-tests-evaluations-yet-123637946.html

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Rally against looting ancient Egyptian necropolis

DAHSHOUR, Egypt (AP) ? Egyptian youths protested Monday at a key historic site, demanding that authorities put a stop to looting and construction that threatens one of the nation's oldest pyramids and burial grounds.

Illegal construction of a new cemetery has been going on for months in part of a 4,500-year-old pharaonic necropolis. The expansion has encroached on the largely unexplored complex of Dahshour, where Pharaoh Sneferu experimented with the first smooth-sided pyramids that his son Khufu, also known as Cheops, employed at the more famous Giza Plateau nearby, when he built the Great Pyramid.

Authorities issued an order in January to remove the construction equipment, instructing the Interior Ministry's police to implement it, but no action has been taken.

Also, a security vacuum that followed Egypt's 2011 popular uprising has encouraged looters to step up their illegal digs, clashing with guards at the site.

On Monday, dozens of young protesters at the site about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Cairo held up a sign that read: "God does not bless a nation that gives up its heritage."

Ramadan Mohammed, a 20-year old student from the nearby village of Mansheyet Dahshour, said he witnessed looting himself. He said he wanted to show that Dahshour residents were not responsible and should not to be blamed.

"I'm here to see the government's response," Mohammed said, with the shadow of Pharaoh Sneferu's Bent Pyramid looming in the background. "The military was in control of the country all this past period, they should have protected the site and caught the looters. Instead, they stood there doing nothing," he complained.

Antiquities experts warn that construction of the new cemetery also endangers the ancient complex.

Villagers say their cemeteries are full, but authorities do not give permits or land for new ones, so they grabbed what they insist is empty desert land to erect family tombs.

The area, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, also includes the adjacent Valley Temple and the 3,800-year-old Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III.

Nearby is Sneferu's Bent Pyramid, some 700 years older, with its distinctive bent sides believed to have been caused when the builders had to correct the angle halfway through construction. Farther away is the Red Pyramid, where Sneferu's builders got the angles right, producing the first smooth-sided pyramid, evolving from the stepped structures built by earlier dynasties.

Antiquity restoration specialist Marwa el-Zeini, who was at the protest, blamed authorities for failing to stop the cemetery construction.

Mohamed Youssef, head of antiquities for Dahshour, dismissed the protest as a media stunt.

Monica Hanna, an independent archaeologist who has worked at Dahshour, praised the local initiative.

"It's the first time the local community is taking a step forward, rather than the academics," Hanna said. "Previously, it would always appear that the academics were against the residents."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/rally-against-looting-ancient-egyptian-necropolis-204747299.html

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State Department hits Raytheon with $8M penalty

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The American defense company Raytheon has agreed to an $8 million settlement for violating U.S. arms control regulations.

The State Department says it reached the agreement with Raytheon after uncovering numerous violations.

The violations included inaccurate tracking and documentation of exports and imports of controlled hardware, as well as improper manufacture of certain equipment by the company's foreign partners.

Raytheon will pay a $4 million fine. An additional $4 million penalty will be suspended on condition that Raytheon uses that money to improve compliance procedures.

Raytheon Co., based in Waltham, Mass., reported $24 billion in sales last year.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/state-department-hits-raytheon-8m-penalty-235124558.html

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