Edward Snowden gets Nobel Peace Prize nomination from Norwegian MP

Oslo:  A Norwegian member of parliament nominated former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize on Wednesday, arguing that his release of classified documents made the world a safer place.

Baard Vegar Solhjell, a former education and environment minister for the Socialist Left party, said Snowden's revelations deepened the public's understanding of the extent to which states spy on their own citizens.

"There is no doubt that the actions of Edward Snowden may have damaged the security interests of several nations in the short term," Solhjell and fellow MP Snorre Valen said in a joint statement.

"We are, however, convinced that the public debate and changes in policy that have followed in the wake of Snowden's whistle blowing has contributed to a more peaceful, stable and peaceful world order," they said.

"His actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies."

Snowden, living in temporary asylum in Russia after disclosing U.S. government secrets on surveillance programmes and other activities, faces criminal charges in the United States after fleeing last year first to Hong Kong and then Russia.

Thousands of people around the world are eligible to nominate candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, including any member of any national assembly. There were 259 nominees for last year's prize, which was won by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for its efforts to eliminate Syria's chemical arsenal.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee will collect nominations for the 2014 prize up to February 1 and finalise its list on March 4, when the committee holds its first meeting of the year and members submit their own nominations. The winner will be announced on October 10.

'I'll break you in half,' politician threatens reporter

Photo credit: AP

Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y. speaking on Capitol Hill in Washington. (File pic)

Washington:  U.S. Representative Michael Grimm was caught on a television camera saying to a reporter, "I'll break you in half," after he was asked in an interview about a federal investigation into campaign finance violations.

The Staten Island, New York Republican had just walked away after the interview on Tuesday night in the Capitol building in Washington with cable channel NY1 News. He was asked about the arrest this month of one of his fundraisers.

With the camera still rolling, Grimm returned and confronted the reporter, Michael Scotto. He could be heard saying, "I'll break you in half," and NY1 said he threatened to throw Scotto over a balcony.

Grimm issued a statement late Tuesday, saying the reporter had taken a "cheap shot" by asking a question about a topic other than President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, which the president had just delivered.

A fundraiser for Grimm, Diana Durand, was arrested this month on charges she illegally funneled more than $10,000 to his campaign.

As Facebook turns 10, Mark Zuckerberg wants to change how tech industry works

AFP photo

Mark Zuckerberg at the 2014 Breakthrough Prizes Awarded in Fundamental Physics and Life Sciences Ceremony at NASA Ames Research Center on December 12, 2013 in Mountain View, California.

San Jose:  Mark Zuckerberg was in his element.

Zuckerberg, whose social network turns 10 years old next week, spoke on Tuesday at a meeting of the Open Compute Project.

Open Compute is an initiative that Facebook started three years ago to help big computing centers add the kind of cost cuts and efficiency gains from open-source software - where programmers share ideas and code across company, university and even national boundaries - to single computer servers and Web management.

If that sounds technical, you are right. Speaking to this engineering audience, Zuckerberg was much less guarded than usual about what he has done and where he is going.

His goals - some achieved and others still aspirational - paint a picture of someone who wants to do more than just be the king of social media. He wants to change the high-tech business, all the way to the guts of the data centre. And he thinks he is on his way to doing it.

To start, he believes he has eliminated the technical advantages enjoyed by Amazon, Google and Yahoo.

Facebook got big after those other companies had all built proprietary global computing systems. Unable to replicate quickly what they had learned, he introduced Open Compute, which effectively crowdsourced the problem of rethinking servers, server racks, cabling, networking and a hundred other engineering problems.

"When you're first to design something, there's advantage to keeping secrets," he said, adding that "from our perspective, it was much better" to take an open-source approach. Now, he said, "we're far ahead."

He did it while saving shareholders money and hugging the planet.

According to Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president for infrastructure, the company has saved $1.2 billion in energy and management costs by using open source products in the last three years.

"It's not just about saving money, we're saving a ton of money," he said. The server system that contains Facebook's core social graph, or all of the content that people interact with regularly, performs 4 billion operations a second, he said, at 24 percent less cost and 38 percent more efficient energy utilization than a conventional system.

Zuckerberg said Facebook's green energy approach, including windmill-based systems in Iowa and hydroelectric systems in Sweden, had saved the equivalent of power for 40,000 homes and emissions equal to 50,000 cars in the last year.

He has also done his bit to destabilize an industry worth more than $100 billion.

Big tech changes, an eminent Internet economist/investor has pointed out, require a committed buyer who will encourage young companies to endure several years of learning to perfect breakthrough products.

For most of Silicon Valley's history, this was done by the U.S. military. Facebook and the open computing project, which has drawn 150 companies, including Intel and Microsoft, looks like that firm buyer of transformational big-ticket computing technology.

As Zuckerberg put it Tuesday, "folks are heavily incentivized" to build new kinds of hardware when there is a prospect of big sales. "Facebook is a partnership company."

Innovations like servers made from cheap cellphone chips and now computer networking gear at perhaps half the operational cost of conventional products were features of the show floor at the open computing project.

"The way the market is addressed will change," said Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's vice president for hardware design and chairman of the project. "People are starting new businesses made for the way customers want to consume technology - more flexible, with more choice and control."

As tech history shows, it is tough for the incumbents to compete if that becomes the norm.

Zuckerberg really wants to connect a few billion more people. To put that another way, he is up for destroying several decades of international telecommunications practice.

That is probably a $1 trillion business. Besides Facebook and the project, Zuckerberg has started Internet.org. The headline job of the organization is to get pretty much the whole planet connected. It sounds like a noble thing to do, but it is clear he is getting ready to dive into the guts of what that will take, including remaking how the world uses wireless spectrum.

"Having a smartphone doesn't mean you're connected," he said. "An iPhone costs $2,000 for two years, and only $500 of that is the phone."

Facebook, he said, is working with carriers to deliver new services and will also seek new ways to make data hauling over wireless much more efficient.

Parikh said Internet.org was doing research, establishing partnerships with phone companies and looking at new ways to remake wireless systems, the same way it has been remaking servers and networking.

Then there is that matter of remaking how all businesses work. Oh, and much of the rest of the planet as well.

Facebook claims to have participation from 25 million small businesses, but for the most part these are little more than informational pages. That could change as Facebook finds its own ways to sell the kind of business services increasingly offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft, wrapped inside social media.

"The line between 'work' and 'not work' is blurring," he said, adding that in the future data gathering and analytics "will just be baked into how folks do business."

Additionally, Facebook would like to connect people to things like their cars and home appliances.

"We do identity, social and enable services to easily bring their friends and content," he said. "That should automatically extend to the Internet of Things."

In Zuckerberg's own low-pulse way, realizing the scale of his ambitions freaks him out sometimes. Because of Facebook's size and reach, "we have more responsibility," he said.

Ten years ago, "I remember we had first version of Facebook at Harvard," he said. "I said, 'OK, we've done this, someone will build this for the world.'"

He added, "I had no idea we'd be the ones."

Scientists create embryonic-type stem cells without embryos

Photo credit: Reuters

A fluorescent microscope image shows human embryonic stem cells in this photo taken at Stanford University and released by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

London:  In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a cheap and easy way to reprogramme mature cells from mice back into an embryonic-like state that allowed them to generate many types of tissue.

The research, described as game-changing by experts in the field, suggests human cells could in future be reprogrammed by the same technique, offering a simpler way to replace damaged cells or grow new organs for sick and injured people.

Chris Mason, chair of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London, who was not involved in the work, said its approach was "the most simple, lowest-cost and quickest method" to generate so-called pluripotent cells - able to develop into many different cell types - from mature cells.

"If it works in man, this could be the game changer that ultimately makes a wide range of cell therapies available using the patient's own cells as starting material - the age of personalised medicine would have finally arrived," he said.

The experiments, reported in two papers in the journal Nature on Wednesday, involved scientists from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan and Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the United States.

Beginning with mature, adult cells, researchers let them multiply and then subjected them to stress "almost to the point of death", they explained, by exposing them to various events including trauma, low oxygen levels and acidic environments.

Within days, the scientists found that the cells survived and recovered from the stressful stimulus by naturally reverting into a state similar to that of an embryonic stem cell.

These stem cells created by this exposure to stresses - dubbed STAP cells by the researchers - were then able to differentiate and mature into different types of cells and tissue, depending on the environments they were given.

"If we can work out the mechanisms by which differentiation states are maintained and lost, it could open up a wide range of possibilities for new research and applications using living cells," said Haruko Obokata, who lead the work at RIKEN.

Stem cells are the body's master cells and are able to differentiate into all other types of cells. Scientists say that, by helping to regenerate tissue, they could offer ways of tackling diseases for which there are currently only limited treatments - including heart disease, Parkinson's and stroke.

There are two main types of stem cells: embryonic ones, harvested from embryos, and adult or iPS cells, which are taken from skin or blood and reprogrammed back into stem cells.

Because the harvesting of embryonic stem cells requires the destruction of a human embryo, the technique has been the subject of ethical concerns and protests from pro-life campaigners.

Dusko Ilic, a reader in stem cell science at Kings College London, said the Nature studies described "a major scientific discovery" and predicted their findings would open "a new era in stem cell biology".

"Whether human cells would respond in a similar way to comparable environmental cues ... remains to be shown," he said in an emailed comment. "I am sure that the group is working on this and I would not be surprised if they succeed even within this calendar year."

Bomb attacks kill four in Pakistan's Karachi: officials

Karachi:  Three bomb blasts including a suicide attack on Pakistani security forces in the commercial hub of Karachi killed four people on Wednesday, officials said, with the Taliban claiming responsibility.

Three paramilitary Rangers and one civilian were killed, while four other people were wounded.

In the first incident, two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were placed close to a Rangers' checkpost in the busy North Nazimabad neighbourhood, killing one soldier and wounding three when they were detonated remotely.

The IEDs were installed in cement blocks, said senior police officer Amir Farooqi.

Later, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to the Rangers' headquarters in the same area of the city, killing two of the paramilitaries and a civilian security guard, and wounding another.

"The suicide attacker walked in and tried to enter into the gate when he was intercepted by the security officials and he blew himself up," Farooqi told AFP.

A spokesman for the Rangers confirmed the toll. "The Rangers personnel who spotted and intercepted the suicide bomber will be awarded the highest Rangers gallantry award," he added.

The injured were rushed to the nearby Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for treatment.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Shahidullah Shahid claimed responsibility for the attacks.

"We carried out the attacks to take revenge for killing of our mujahideen in jails," he told AFP.

The Taliban regularly complain that their members, once incarcerated, are victims of extra-judicial killings by security forces.

Earlier this month a Taliban suicide attacker killed one of Pakistan's best-known police commanders, famed for his fearless work tackling militants in the city.

Karachi, a city of 18 million people which contributes 42 percent of Pakistan's GDP, has been plagued by sectarian, ethnic and political violence for years.

Pakistan has endured a bloody start to the year with 114 people killed in attacks in January, according to an AFP tally.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government has been under fire for failing to make a strong response to the upsurge in violence. For NDTV Updates,

Egypt to put Al Jazeera journalists on trial: prosecutor

Cairo:  Egypt will put an Australian, two Britons and a Dutchwoman on trial for aiding 16 Egyptian members of a "terrorist organisation", the public prosecutor said on Wednesday, describing the four as Al Jazeera correspondents.

According to the website of the Qatar-based television channel, three of its journalists, Peter Greste, an Australian, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, were detained in Cairo on December 29. They have not been released.

The identities of the two Britons and the Dutchwoman mentioned by the prosecutor were not immediately clear. The Dutch embassy declined to comment. The British embassy said it was aware of the report and was seeking more information.

In a statement, the prosecutor said the four had published "lies" that harmed the national interest and had supplied money, equipment and information to the 16 Egyptians. The foreigners were also accused of using unlicenced broadcasting equipment.

The 16 Egyptians are to face trial for belonging to a "terrorist organisation", an apparent reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been protesting against the government since the army toppled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July.

The government has declared the Brotherhood a terrorist group. The Brotherhood says it is a peaceful organisation.

Al Jazeera's Cairo offices have been closed since July 3 when they were raided by security forces hours after the army ousted Morsi following mass protests against him.

Qatar was a strong financial backer of Egypt during Morsi's year in power and the Gulf Arab state has vehemently criticised his overthrow and the ensuing crackdown on the Brotherhood.

The charges against the journalists are likely to further strain ties between Doha and Cairo.

Human rights groups have condemned the arrests of journalists and a general suppression of dissent in Egypt.

In December a prosecutor ordered the arrest of an Egyptian man whose 15-year-old son was detained for owning a ruler bearing a symbol associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

'Not right for United States to spy on us,' German Chancellor Angela Merkel says

Photo credit: AFP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks during a session at the Bundestag (lower house of parliament) on January 29, 2014 in Berlin.

Berlin:  Berlin and Washington are still "far apart" in their views on the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.

In the first major policy speech of her third term, the conservative leader said nobody doubted that domestic and allied foreign intelligence agencies helped to protect the German people from terrorism and crime.

"But does that make it right for our closest allies, like the United States or Britain, to access all imaginable data - arguing that it helps their own security and that of their partners?" she said towards the end of a one-hour speech to the Bundestag.

"Can it be right that it's not just about defending against terrorist threats but also to gain advantage over their allies, for example, in negotiations at G20 summits or U.N. sessions?"

"Our answer can only be: 'No, that cannot be right'."

Merkel warned that ceding to the temptation to "do everything that is technically do-able" led to mistrust between allies which would eventually undermine their mutual security.

"Our views are today far apart," said Merkel, who has spoken with U.S. President Barack Obama about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations of American and British surveillance of allies.

Obama told German TV earlier this month the two countries' close friendship must not be damaged "through surveillance measures that obstruct our trusting communication".

"As long as I am the President of the United States, the German Chancellor need not worry about that," Obama said one day after announcing U.S. security reforms that banned eavesdropping on allied political leaders like the chancellor.

The NSA is likely to be on the agenda of Merkel's meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Berlin on Friday.

"NO BETTER PARTNER"

Snowden's first revelations last June caused indignation in Germany, which is especially sensitive about surveillance after its experience of abuse by the Gestapo under the Nazis and by the Stasi in Communist East Germany during the Cold War.

Reports that the NSA even monitored Merkel's mobile phone added to the anger in Germany, which has pushed - in vain so far - for a 'no-spy' agreement with the United States.

Snowden told German TV on Sunday that the NSA also spied on German industry, such as engineering firm Siemens . He has claimed asylum in Russia but has offered to go to Berlin to help a Bundestag probe into NSA activities.

Merkel said it was not helpful to link the NSA row to talks between Washington and the European Union about a transatlantic free trade area, adding that there was no other "leverage" the EU could use against the Americans regarding espionage other than "the strength of our arguments".

"Millions of people who live in undemocratic countries are today looking closely at how the democratic world reacts to security threats," Merkel said, adding that, for all their differences, "Germany can wish for no better partner than the United States".