Key military players in Syria's civil war

Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

BEIRUT (AP) ? A list of key military players in the Syrian civil war:

?SYRIAN REGIME: Despite major defections and the loss of significant territory to rebels, the Syrian military remains a potent force against a poorly armed opposition. President Bashar Assad's inner circle has largely remained cohesive and united, avoiding high-level defections that sapped the strength of other regimes, such as Moammar Gadhafi's in Libya, during Arab Spring uprisings. Assad's closest advisers include his younger brother, Maher, who commands forces protecting the capital, as well as the heads of four intelligence agencies that are playing key roles in the government's crackdown.

?PRO-REGIME MILITIAMEN: Shadowy fighters, known as shabiha, recruited from the ruling elite's Alawite sect operate as hired muscle for the Syrian regime. They are believed to be carrying out some of the most brutal attacks of the conflict, allowing Assad's government to deny direct responsibility for them.

?SUPREME MILITARY COUNCIL: Syria's main rebel units, known together as the Free Syrian Army, regrouped in December under a unified rebel command called the Supreme Military Council, following promises of more military assistance once a central council was in place. The Western-backed council is headed by Gen. Salim Idriss, who defected from the Syrian army, and a 30-member group of senior officers. Idriss spent 35 years in the Syrian military and is seen as a secular-minded moderate. The non-lethal aid the U.S. pledged Thursday in Rome will be directed to the military council.

?LOCAL BRIGADES AND MILITARY COUNCILS: Local units made up of tens of thousands of autonomous rebel fighters have very little, if any, central organization or command structure. Many of the fighters defected from the military; others are Syrian citizens who took up arms against the regime.

?JABHAT AL-NUSRA: An Islamist extremist group that has been behind some of the rebels' most significant battlefield successes. The U.S. has designated al-Nusra a terrorist organization, saying it is affiliated with the al-Qaida network. Al-Nusra has claimed responsibility for most of the deadliest suicide bombings targeting regime and military facilities. The presence of Islamic extremists among the rebels is one reason the West has not equipped the Syrian opposition with sophisticated weapons, such as anti-aircraft missiles. Al-Nusra has gained popularity among some rebels for its effectiveness while alienating other, more secular-minded fighters.

?FOREIGN FIGHTERS: Syria has become a magnet for foreign fighters and jihadists who also flocked to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. No credible count of them exists, but anecdotal evidence suggests fighters from Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, the Netherlands and Britain are fighting against Assad's regime. Rebel commanders downplay the presence of foreign fighters, saying the conflict is purely a Syrian uprising.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-02-28-AP-ML-Syria-Military-Players-Glance/id-ed4068c09612400a8facfe3ec2ef0efa

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Scientists discover molecule that does double duty in stopping asthma attacks

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Scientists from Brigham and Women's Hospital are on the brink of the next treatment advancement that may spell relief for the nearly nineteen million adults and seven million children in the United States suffering from asthma. The scientists discovered two new drug targets in the inflammatory response pathway responsible for asthma attacks.

The study will be published on February 27, 2013 in Science Translational Medicine.

Researchers studied the lungs and blood of 22 people with mild and severe asthma. They saw that immune cells called natural killer cells and type 2 innate lymphoid cells played significant roles in airway inflammation in study participants with severe asthma.

Natural killer cells decreased airway inflammation by encouraging programmed cell death in immune cells called eosinophils, whereas type 2 innate lymphoid cells promoted airway inflammation by secreting cell-signaling molecules called interleukin-13.

Both mechanisms were controlled by a molecule called lipoxin A4 which is responsible for resolving inflammation. To achieve this, lipoxin A4 acted in both pro-resolving and anti-inflammatory ways. The researchers saw that lipoxin A4 encouraged natural killer cells to decrease inflammation by facilitating eosinophil cell death. Lipoxin A4 also discouraged type 2 innate lymphoid cells from promoting inflammation by blocking interleukin-13 secretion.

"Stopping airway inflammation is similar to putting out a forest fire," said Bruce Levy, MD, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Division, BWH Department of Internal Medicine, senior study author. "Firefighters tackle forest fires in two ways?dousing the fire with water and clearing away dry brush that could fuel the fire. Lipoxin A4 does just that to resolve inflammation. It is an airway inflammation fighter that performs the double duty of dampening pathways that ignite inflammation while at the same time clearing away cells that fuel inflammation."

In previous studies, Levy and his team discovered that lipoxin A4 production was defective in patients with severe asthma. Together with their new findings, this observation provides researchers and drug manufacturers with a new direction toward boosting lipoxin A4 in severe asthmatics when designing next-generation asthma therapies.

"Most patients with severe asthma have chronic airway inflammation that never fully resolves. This can lead to daily and often disabling symptoms despite available therapies. Our study provides new information on cellular targets that regulate inflammation and will enable the development of lipoxin-based therapeutics to decrease chronic inflammation in asthma and other diseases." said Levy.

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Brigham and Women's Hospital: http://www.brighamandwomens.org

Thanks to Brigham and Women's Hospital for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127055/Scientists_discover_molecule_that_does_double_duty_in_stopping_asthma_attacks

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Vimeo Adds ?Looks? To Its Enhancer Toolbox, Powered By Visual FX Specialist Vivoom

Vimeo is helping its creators to improve their videos through a series of visual effects that it?s calling ?Looks.? The new feature will provide more than 500 different filters its creators can use to enhance their videos, all of which can be added, previewed, and selected through a cloud-based editor on Vimeo?s site. They?ll be able to see how effects look compared against their original videos.

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

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Wall Street advances, on track for third day of gains

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks edged higher on Thursday, pointing to a third straight day of gains in the wake of some strong economic data, though a further advance may be limited with major averages near multi-year highs.

While some data released Thursday were rosy, a read on economic growth was weaker than expected, and analysts said a pullback may be in store a day after major equity indexes posted their biggest daily advance since early January.

Over the past two sessions, the S&P 500 has gained 1.9 percent, rising back above the closely watched level of 1,500. The Dow Jones industrial average moved within striking distance of an all-time high.

"The market is looking choppy, and I think investors should use this as an opportunity to sell into strength," said Matt McCormick, a money manager at Cincinnati-based Bahl & Gaynor. "This seems like an environment where someone should be conservative instead of aggressive."

The U.S. economy grew 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, a weaker pace than expected, although a slightly better performance in exports and fewer imports led the government to scratch an earlier estimate of an economic contraction.

Separately, the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, while the February Chicago Purchasing Managers Index unexpectedly rose to an 11-month high.

While equity markets suffered steep losses earlier in the week on concerns over European debt, they have since recovered, with the gains fueled by strong data and recent comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that showed continued support for the Fed's economic stimulus policy.

"Growth is still anemic and there are still issues with Europe. People seem to be ignoring the signs that would otherwise give them cause for concern," said McCormick, who helps oversee $8.2 billion in assets.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 27.27 points, or 0.19 percent, at 14,102.64. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 5.13 points, or 0.34 percent, at 1,521.12. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 13.75 points, or 0.43 percent, at 3,176.01.

The benchmark S&P 500 has gained 1.4 percent in February, the Dow is up 1.7 percent and the Nasdaq has added 1 percent.

J.C. Penney Co Inc slumped 18 percent to $17.32 as the S&P's biggest decliner after the department store reported a steep drop in sales on Wednesday. Groupon Inc also slumped on weak revenue, with the stock off 25 percent at $4.50.

Mylan Inc jumped 6.5 percent to $30.45 on the Nasdaq after the generic drugmaker posted a 25 percent rise in fourth-quarter profit.

Investors were keeping an eye on the debate in Washington over sequestration - U.S. government budget cuts that will take effect starting on Friday if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement on spending and taxes. President Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders arranged to hold last-ditch talks to prevent the cuts, but expectations were low that any deal would be produced.

With 93 percent of the S&P 500 companies having reported results so far, 69.5 percent have beaten profit expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 6.2 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stock-index-futures-point-slightly-higher-open-090532234--finance.html

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How Bad Did Analytics Bugs Fool Facebook Pages? Reach Looked Down 14% When It Wasn?t

Months of mysterious Insights bugs duped Facebook Page owners. The median Page's analytics showed it reached 14.39 percent fewer people than it actually did, according to early data and graphs from EdgeRank Checker, a Facebook analytics startup that gave us the first look. The bugs may have caused people to mistakenly undervalue their Pages, change strategies or buy ads to make up for "lost" reach

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Olgc5UTBlXc/

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Lillehammer 2016 Youth Olympic Village targets lasting legacy ...

By Lauren Mattera at the World Sports Congress in London?

February 26 - Lillehammer 2016 promises its Winter Youth Olympic Village will act as a catalyst for future development in Norwegian sport and is set to leave a lasting legacy as one of the strongest development regions in Northern Europe.

The Norwegian city assures a strong legacy will result from its future Olympic Village - one of the few venues to be built from scratch ahead of the Games - which will provide the region with 360 student housing units for the Lillehammer University College and the Norwegian College of Elite Sport, claimed?Magnus Sverdrup, head of project management at Lillehammer 2016, here today.?

"The 2016 Youth Olympic Village will be part of a 10-year plan and will be the engine and tool to identify and develop talent in Norwegian sport," said Sverdrup.

"The Youth Olympic Village represents infrastructure that creates further development in terms of sport and education.

"It will help us find our future athletes, coaches and our future Olympians."

For a city which still benefits from the legacy created in the 1994 Winter Olympic Games, with the majority of venues having originally been built for thoseGames, a sustainable legacy has no doubt been at the heart of the design and construction of the infrastructure.

The Olympic Village, which will be located in the centre of the Olympic Park, has been specifically designed to reduce carbon footprint and is suitable for recreation facilities,?Sverdrup claimed.

It will act primarily as athlete accommodation with each housing unit holding up to four of the athletes competing in the Games, and will convert back into student accommodation for both the Lillehammer University College and the Norwegian College of Elite Sport post Games.

Lillehammer 2016 will host the Second Youth Winter Olympic Games after Innsbruck 2012

Lillehammer, which now has a population of around 26,000, has had to accommodate for its ever growing population through major infrastructure developments.

Lillehammer University College has witnessed an impressive rise in the number of its top sports students, from 13 in 1999 to 155 in 2010 - with a quarter of the country's top sport students living or training in the Lillehammer region.

"As the region is a centre for major national and international Winter Sports events in Norway," said?Sverdrup.

"We believe it [the Youth Olympic Village] will further boost this development.

"This is important for both the Norwegian National Olympic Committee and Lillehammer as a whole.

Construction on the facility is planned to get underway in August this year and will finish in March 2015 - allowing the city a whole year to test the facilities.

Meanwhile, out of the academic calendar the Youth Olympic Village will be used to welcome young athletes and coaches to come and train at the facilities.

Lillehammer, the only candidate city at the time, won the right to host the second Youth Winter Olympic Games in December 2011 after losing out to Innsbruck to hold the first in 2012.

Preparations for the Games were given a boost after their plans were highly praised following their first inspection from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Coordination Commission late last year.

Contact the writer of this story at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Related stories
October 2012:?Lillehammer 2016 Winter Youth Olympics gets early boost from IOC Coordination Commission
February 2012:?Exclusive - Lillehammer 2016 promise to bring own identity to Winter Youth Olympics

Source: http://www.insidethegames.biz/olympics/youth-olympics/2016/1013083-lillehammer-2016-youth-olympic-village-targets-lasting-legacy

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Historical Echoes: Cash or Credit? Payments and Finance in ...

Historical Echoes: Cash or Credit? Payments and Finance in Ancient Rome
Marco Del Negro and Mary Tao

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Imagine yourself a Roman citizen in the 1st Century B.C. You?ve gone shopping with your partner, who?s trying to convince you to buy a particular item. The thing?s pretty expensive, and you demur because you?re short of cash. You may think that back then such an excuse would get you off scot-free. What else can you possibly do: Write a check? Well, yes, writes the poet Ovid in his ?Ars Amatoria, Book I.? And since your partner knows it, you have no way out (the example below shows some gender bias on Ovid?s part. Fortunately, a few things have changed over the past 2,000 years):

But when she has her purchase in her eye,
She hugs thee close, and kisses thee to buy;
?Tis what I want, and ?tis a pen?orth too;
In many years I will not trouble you.?
If you complain you have no ready coin,
No matter, ?tis but writing of a line;
A little bill, not to be paid at sight:
(Now curse the time when thou wert taught to write.)

In a previous Historical Echoes post, we describe some of the characters in early Roman high and low finance. Here, we look at their modus operandi.

Large sums of money changed hands in Roman times. People bought real estate, financed trade, and invested in the provinces occupied by the Roman legions. How did that happen? Cicero writes, in Epistulae ad Familiares 5.6 and Epistulae ad Atticum 13.31, respectively: ?I have bought that very house for 3.5 million sesterces? and ?Gaius Albanius is the nearest neighbor: he bought 1,000 iugera [625 acres] of M. Pilius, as far as I can remember, for 11.5 million sesterces.? How? asks historian H. W. Harris (in ?The Nature of Roman Money?)??mechanically speaking, did Cicero pay three and half million sesterces he laid out for his famous house in the Palatine . . . . That would have meant packing and carrying some three and half tons of coins through the streets of Rome. When C. Albanius bought an estate from C. Pilius for eleven and half million sesterces, did he physically send the sum in silver coins?? Harris? answer is: ?Without much doubt, these were at least for the most part documentary [i.e., paper] transactions. The commonest procedure for large property purchases in this period was the one casually alluded to by Cicero [De?Officiis 3.59] . . . ?nomina facit, negotium conficit? . . . provides the credit [or ?bonds??nomina], completes the purchase.?

What exactly are these nomina??from which, by the way, comes the term ?nominal,? so commonly used in economics. In his Ph.D. dissertation ?Bankers, Moneylenders, and Interest Rates in the Roman Republic,? C. T. Barlow writes (pp. 156-7): ?An entry in an account book was called a nomen. Originally the word meant just that?a name with some numbers attached. By Cicero?s day . . . [n]omen could also mean ?debt,? referring to the entries in the creditor?s and the debtor?s account books.? And this ?debt was in fact the lifeblood of the Roman economy, at all levels . . . nomina were a completely standard part of the lives of people of property, as well as being an everyday fact of life for a great number of others? (Harris, p. 184). Pliny the Younger writes, for example, (in Epistulae 3.19): ?Perhaps you will ask whether I can raise these three millions without difficulty. Well, nearly all my capital is invested in land, but I have some money out at interest and I can borrow without any trouble.?

For concreteness, say that some fellow, Sempronius, owes you one million sesterces. You?or in case you?re a wealthy senator, or eques, your financial advisor (procurator?Titus Pomponius Atticus was Cicero?s)?would record the debt in the ledger. What if you suddenly needed the money to buy some property? Do you have to wait for Sempronius to bring you a bag with 1 million sesterces? No! As long as Sempronius is a worthy creditor (a bonum nomen [see Barlow, p. 156]; in the modern parlance of credit rating agencies, a triple-A creditor), you?d do what Cicero says: transfer the nomina, strike the deal. For example, Cicero writes to his financial advisor Atticus (Ad Atticum 12.31): ?If I were to sell my claim on Faberius, I don?t doubt my being able to settle for the grounds of Silius even by a ready money payment.? As Harris (p. 192) observes: ?Nomina were transferable, and by the second century B.C., if not earlier, were routinely used as a means of payment for other assets . . . . The Latin term for the procedure by which the payer transferred a nomen that was owed to him to the seller was delegatio.?

So, we?ve seen that Romans could settle payments by transferring nomina. But was there a market for nomina, just like there?s one today in, say, mortgage-backed securities? According to both Barlow and Harris, the answer is yes. They claim that the Romans took the transferability one step further and essentially turned ?mere entries in account books? into ?negotiable notes? (see Barlow, p. 159, and Harris, p. 192). Not everyone agrees. The economic historian P. Temin (?Financial Intermediation in the Early Roman Empire?) also reports evidence of assignability of loans, opening the possibility of ?wider negotiability, but,? he adds, ?we do not have any evidence that it happened? (p. 721). Yet some indirect evidence is there. For instance, the idea of negotiable notes appears to be well understood by Roman jurists, such as Ulpian (The Digest of Justinian XXX.I.44): ?A party who bequeaths a note bequeaths the claim and not merely the material on which the writing appears. This is proved by a sale, for when a note is sold, the debt by which it is evidenced is also considered to be sold.?

What if you had to transfer money to somebody in a different part of the globe? As the Roman dominions expanded into Greece, Spain, North Africa, and Asia, Roman finance actually faced this logistical problem. If you?re in Rome and want to, say, finance Caius? mines in Thapsus, North Africa, how do you get him the money? He needs the silver to buy material, slaves, and other things, but you?re naturally very reluctant to see your money sail away for Africa, as the chances of it getting there aren?t that high (see pirates, shipwrecks, etc.). ?Permutatio, the transfer of funds from place to place through paper transactions, was Rome?s great contribution to ancient banking? (Barlow, p. 168). It worked as follows: The publicani were private companies in charge of tax collection in the provinces (as well as many other tasks; see ?Publicani,? by U. Malmendier). They had a branch in Rome and one in Thapsus. So, you?d give them the silver in Rome (or transfer them some nomina) and they?d divert some of their tax collection in North Africa to Caius. This is also how the Republic would finance its public spending overseas. Since taxes were collected throughout the provinces, by trading claims on taxes Romans could transfer funds across the globe?or at least to the part of the globe they had conquered.

Interestingly, some historians measure the sophistication of Roman finance ?by the extent banks were present? (Temin, p. 719). While it is true that we have no evidence of a 1st Century B.C. Wells Fargo, this may not necessarily imply lack of sophistication. Prior to the Great Recession in the United States, a large chunk of financial intermediation didn?t involve banks?it went through the ?shadow banking system.? Roman high finance ?functioned primarily on the basis of brokerage? (K. Verboven, ?Faeneratores, Negotiatores and Financial Intermediation in the Roman World,? p. 12), and hence was a bit like a proto-shadow banking system, as we suggest in our prior post. Like the shadow-banking system in the United States, it was fragile. Going back to our earlier example, we note that if whomever you want to buy property from starts wondering about the creditworthiness of Sempronius, she will not accept his nomina in payment and will want cash. That?ll force you to call in the loan to Sempronius, who in order to pay you will call in his loan to Titus, and so on. But financial crises in ancient Rome are the subject of a future post.

We are grateful to Cameron Hawkins of the University of Chicago for help navigating the literature.

Source: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/02/historical-echoes-cash-or-credit-payments-and-finance-in-ancient-rome/

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