Santorum edges Romney in belated Iowa GOP count (AP)

DES MOINES, Iowa ? In a surprise flip, Rick Santorum edged front-runner Mitt Romney by 34 votes in the final tally of the Iowa caucuses, Republican officials said Thursday. But no winner was declared because some votes remain uncertified two weeks after the event's closest contest ever.

The state party initially had declared Romney the victor ? by just 8 votes ? in the first voting for the Republican presidential nomination, based on the count the morning after the Jan. 3 caucuses.

Iowa Republican Chairman Matt Strawn announced the new, certified totals Thursday, but said the party would not name an official winner because the results were so close and some votes can't be counted. Results from 8 of the state's 1,774 precincts were not certified to the state party by Wednesday's 5 p.m. deadline.

Of the votes certified, however, Strawn said Santorum was the winner.

Unofficial election night results from the 8 precincts gave Santorum 81 votes and Romney 46. If those results had been certified, Santorum's lead in the final tally would have been 69 votes.

Santorum was quick to claim the Iowa victory, saying in a fundraising email that "the incredible news" makes the score for Romney and himself 1-1. Romney followed Iowa with a strong win in New Hampshire. The third contest, South Carolina's primary, is Saturday.

Romney called the Iowa results a "virtual tie." In a written statement, the former Massachusetts governor praised Santorum's "strong performance" in the state.

The certified results: Santorum with 29,839 votes and Romney at 29,805, a difference of 34. Ron Paul finished third with 26,036. Newt Gingrich finished fourth with 16,163 votes. Turnout for the caucuses was 121,503.

Strawn blamed the lack of certification on various problems, including a county chairman who went on vacation without mailing in the final documentation.

"It isn't an election that is run by state officials and that's one of the strengths of the caucus process," he said.

Four Lee County precincts are among those listed by the party as not turning in certified vote totals. Lee County GOP Chairman Don Lucas said he believes supporters of a candidate ? he's not sure which ? took the certification document to report to the candidate how they did and never brought it back.

One Franklin County precinct also was among the eight that weren't certified.

Rick Grote, a member of the Franklin County GOP central committee, was the site chair for seven precincts that met at a high school in Hampton. He said the chair for the Geneva/Reeve precinct apparently failed to send the form certifying the vote count to the state party.

But Grote said both he and his brother took pictures of the form, but were never contacted by the state party.

"I don't know why somebody didn't call me or talk to me about, `Hey, we're missing this E-form. Got any clues on what's going on?' At that point, I could have said, I took separate photos of it. My brother took separate photos of it. We could sign an affidavit saying we took pictures, these were the numbers," Grote said.

Strawn said the party had no choice but to stick by its system.

"You have to have one form that all county chairs and all precinct chairs knew well in advance that that was the record," he said. "We just can't vouch for someone saying those are the numbers absent proof of that."

Former Iowa Republican Chairman Richard Schwarm said the vote problems won't ultimately make a difference. He noted that actual delegates will be selected later in the spring as Republicans continue their convention process.

"I think people realize it's a tie," Schwarm said. "It's a straw poll that has no impact on how we pick delegates."

The Associated Press projected based on election night results that Romney would end up with 13 delegates and Santorum 12. With the release of the certified tally, the AP is withdrawing one delegate from Romney's projected total and leaving it unallocated.

"Our goal throughout the certification process was to most accurately reflect and report how Iowans voted on the evening of Jan. 3," said Strawn.

The new numbers could give a boost to Santorum and other candidates trying to undermine Romney's dominance over the field as South Carolina voters go to the polls, with the Florida primary next up.

The field narrowed further Thursday when Texas Gov. Rick Perry abandoned his presidential bid and endorsed Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, and other Republican candidates are competing to attract voters seeking a more conservative alternative to Romney.

The Des Moines Register first reported the certified caucus totals on Thursday.

___

Associated Press writer Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_el_pr/us_iowa_caucuses

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No Wikipedia? What if the Internet went down? (AP)

WASHINGTON ? If a day without Wikipedia was a bother, think bigger. In this plugged-in world, we would barely be able to cope if the entire Internet went down in a city, state or country for a day or a week.

Sure, we'd survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet. But now we're so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.

No email, Twitter or Facebook. No buying online. No stock trades. No just-in-time industrial shipping. No real-time tracking of diseases. It's gotten so that not just the entire Internet but individual websites such as Google are considered critical infrastructure, experts said.

"Nobody would die, but there would be a major hassle," said computer security expert Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure in Helsinki, Finland.

If an Internet outage lasted more than a day or two, the financial hit would be huge, with mass unemployment, said Ken Mayland, a former chief bank economist and president of ClearView Economics. Eugene Spafford, director of Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, worries about bank runs and general panic.

Psychologically, too, it could be wrenching.

"I think it's easier to get off heroin," said Lisa Welter of New York City, who weaned herself for a month last year from just the social aspects of the Internet ? she still paid bills online ? and felt as if she was "living in a cave."

"There would be a sense of loss: What would I do with my time?" said Kimberly Young, a psychologist who directs the Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery.

On Wednesday, certain websites, most prominently Wikipedia, went dark to protest legislation in Congress that would crack down on pirated movies and TV shows. It was a one-day stunt. But it raises questions about our connectedness.

It is possible that hackers, terrorists, accidents or even sunspots could take down the Internet and cause areas to become cut off and unreachable, said Spafford, one of the foremost experts on computer security. The U.S. and other developed nations have multiple and robust routing systems that make it unlikely large areas would be affected, but smaller countries could be vulnerable to nationwide outages, Hypponen said.

The world only has to look back one year to Egypt to see what a sudden unplugging could spawn.

The government of Hosni Mubarak tried to stop protests in January 2011 by switching off the Internet. The shutdown halted businesses, banking operations and ? at the height of the demonstrations ? the ability of the protest leaders to organize and communicate with one another.

During the five days that the Internet was out, anti-Mubarak activists had to rely on help from abroad to spread their news and update Web pages. The outage harmed protesters' ability to organize or to counter government propaganda that portrayed them as agents of foreign powers, said Ahmed Saleh, who was in charge of managing the Facebook page that was credited with mobilizing thousands of Egyptians to take to the streets.

With the shutdown, the protests swelled as people unable to follow minute-by-minute what was going on took to the streets.

"No Internet meant that more people went down and realized that this was for real. The protests grew, and so did the anger against the government domestically and internationally," Saleh said.

He said the lack of Internet also allowed him to "live the moment" because he was not distracted with tweeting and posting on Facebook or analyzing the situation. This, he said, strengthened real face-to-face connections between people.

Nicholas Christin, associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, said that while a prolonged Internet outage would be uncomfortable, it might also bring out the best in people.

"I think you would find that people are very resilient," he said. "We would go back to the libraries."

Christin said he has gone a week without the Internet as part of a vacation. The first few days were rough, he said, but then "it was fantastic."

Christin did it by choice. Others had it imposed on them because of weather disasters or financial problems. They weren't nostalgic about it.

For three days, Jill Williams lost the Internet and power because of a California windstorm last month. Her small business requires her to use email to plan events.

"Those three days I felt deprived," she recalled in an email, responding to a Twitter request for anecdotes about going Internet-less. "The Internet has totally consumed my life, both business as well as pleasure."

Wyatt McMahon of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech University was having a hard time Wednesday just dealing with the shutdown at Wikipedia, which he leans on as a first step in his searches in his field, which combines statistics and biology.

If the entire Internet were lost, "that would be beyond catastrophic. Every single day, every single hour, if not every 30 minutes, I am using the Internet for work," McMahon said. "So if anything like that were to happen, it would bring everything to a screeching halt."

___

Sarah El Deeb in Cairo and Jocelyn Noveck in New York contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_hi_te/us_world_without_internet

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It?s a Girl - In India, China and many other parts of the...

It?s a Girl?-?In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called ?gendercide?.

This documentary film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters? lives, and of other mothers who would kill for a son. Global experts and grassroots activists put the stories in context and advocate different paths towards change, while collectively lamenting the lack of any truly effective action against this injustice.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youmightfindyourself/~3/syTa3ihQwP4/16068493310

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'Green' pesticide effective against citrus pests

ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2012) ? University of Florida researchers have discovered a key amino acid essential for human nutrition is also an effective insecticide against caterpillars that threaten the citrus industry.

The Lime Swallowtail, or Citrus Swallowtail, is a well-known agricultural pest from southern Asia discovered in the Caribbean in 2006, and researchers say its potential impact on the U.S. citrus industry is cause for serious concern.

"Everything that's in the Caribbean eventually gets to Florida -- Florida is an invasive magnet," said UF lepidopterist Delano Lewis, lead author of the study published in the current issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology. "That's why we're trying to make the first strike to see how to stop it."

Experiments conducted on the UF campus at the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and the College of Medicine show when methionine is sprayed on leaves it is 100 percent effective in killing larvae related to the Lime Swallowtail caterpillars within two to three days. If not controlled, the caterpillars can completely defoliate young wild lime plants.

Because the Lime Swallowtail, Princeps (Papilio) demoleus, is invasive and cannot be legally brought into the U.S., researchers experimented using a genetically related surrogate with a similar life history and appetite for citrus, the Giant Swallowtail, Heraclides (Papilio) cresphontes. Because these pest caterpillars have the same body structure and biology, researchers are confident methionine will also control the Lime Swallowtail, Lewis said.

"Its effectiveness is based on the biochemistry of the insect gut, so although this work was done on a surrogate, the methionine will block the ion channel in the same way," Lewis said.

Methionine is needed in the human diet for many reasons, including protein-building and metabolism. It is environmentally safe and harmless to citrus plants, mammals and birds.

"It's a very curious phenomenon to have this nutrient amino acid that humans can't live without, yet at the concentrations we put on the leaves, it is toxic to crop-destructive caterpillars," said study co-author Bruce Stevens, professor of physiology and functional genomics in the UF College of Medicine. "It's a completely different class of pesticides that has not been seen before -- most are toxic to not only the pest, but to people and animals, too."

Stevens first discovered the pesticide properties of methionine while cloning genes that regulate amino acid metabolism in 1998. Working with co-author James Cuda of UF's department of entomology and nematology, Stevens later found this amino acid to be effective against yellow fever mosquito larvae, tomato hornworm and Colorado potato beetle.

Methionine disrupts an ion channel that controls nutrient absorption in larvae with an alkaline intestine, such as in caterpillars of the Citrus Swallowtail. In 2004 and 2007, Stevens obtained two patents for the use of methionine as a pesticide, through the UF Office of Technology Licensing.

"The methionine is sprayed on the leaves, and when the caterpillars begin to eat the leaves, they ingest the compound -- it's not in the plant itself," Lewis said. "Once they take those first few bites, they don't feed again and remain stationary until they die."

Methionine is low-cost and serves as fertilizer if it reaches the ground because it's a biodegradable nitrogen source, Stevens said. The amino acid is mass produced and has been used as a nutritional supplement in outdoor livestock feed since the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently approved the use of methionine for organic poultry production.

"This is a neat idea and I'm hoping that more work will be done on this in the future because there's a lot of potential there," said John Ruberson, a professor in the entomology department at the University of Georgia, who was not involved in the study. "The one challenge I can see from a grower's perspective is that it tends to work kind of slowly. Typically, it takes two to three days to kill the insect, but they do show that [insect] feeding is reduced, which is a good thing."

Patent rights for the use of methionine to control turf and ornamental pests have been licensed to Phoenix Environmental Care LLC, which is developing a pest control product.

While researchers are unsure how the Lime Swallowtail reached the Caribbean, its proximity poses a potential threat to Central and South American citrus industries, as well.

"We suspect someone could have brought them to release the adult butterflies in weddings, or perhaps they arrived with imported citrus stock," Lewis said. "Regardless, it's in the Caribbean and it's a very strong flyer."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Florida. The original article was written by Danielle Torrent.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/cb3WPCwQIM4/120117145101.htm

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AfghanNewsNow: Troops kill 9 insurgents http://t.co/BzJiUlQf

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Iran says in touch with powers on new talks, EU denies it (Reuters)

TEHRAN (Reuters) ? Iran said on Wednesday it was in touch with big powers to hold fresh talks soon but the European Union denied it, with Britain saying Tehran had yet to show willingness for negotiations addressing suspicions that it trying to develop atom bombs.

A year after the last talks fell apart, confrontation is brewing as the EU prepare to dramatically intensify international sanctions against Iran with an embargo on its economically vital oil exports.

Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, used for a third of the world's seaborne oil exports, if it cannot sell its own crude, fanning fears of a descent into war in the Gulf that could inflame the Middle East.

Iranian politicians said U.S. President Barack Obama had expressed readiness to negotiate in a letter to Tehran, a step that might relieve tensions behind recent oil price spikes.

"Negotiations are going on about venue and date. We would like to have these negotiations," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told reporters during a visit to Turkey.

"Most probably, I am not sure yet, the venue will be Istanbul. The day is not yet settled, but it will be soon."

A spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, representing the six powers, denied there were any fresh discussions with the Islamic Republic to organize a meeting.

"There are no negotiations under way on new talks," he said in Brussels. "We are still waiting for Iran to respond to the substantive proposals the High Representative (Ashton) made in her letter from October." Iran has yet to formally respond.

Ashton wrote to Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili to stress that the West still wanted to resume talks but Iran must be ready to engage "seriously in meaningful discussions" about ways to ensure its nuclear work would be wholly peaceful in nature.

The Islamic Republic has in sporadic meetings over the past five years insisted that talks focus on broader international security issues, not its nuclear energy program.

Britain also dismissed Salehi's remarks. "There are no dates or concrete plans because Iran has yet to demonstrate clearly it is willing to respond to Baroness Ashton's letter and negotiate without preconditions," a Foreign Office spokesman said.

"Until it does so, the international community will only increase pressure on it through further peaceful and legitimate sanctions," he said.

Iran denies wanting nuclear bombs, saying its enrichment work is for power generation and medical applications.

PROTRACTED IMPASSE

The last talks between Iran and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- along with Germany stalled in Istanbul a year ago, with the parties unable to agree even on an agenda.

Since then, a U.N. nuclear watchdog report has lent weight to concern that Iran has worked on designing a nuclear weapon and Washington and the EU have turned to extending hitherto modest sanctions in place since 2006 to target Iranian oil.

EU foreign ministers are expected to approve a phased ban on imports of Iranian oil at a meeting on January 23 - three weeks after the United States passed a law that would freeze out any institution dealing with Iran's central bank, effectively making it impossible for most countries to buy Iranian oil.

"Ahead of (that meeting) Iran is chasing headlines and pretending that it is ready to engage," a Western diplomat said in reference to Salehi's remarks. "If it really is ready to sit down without preconditions the (six powers) would do so. Sadly, at the moment, it seems more interested in propaganda."

Iran has said it is ready to talk but has also started shifting uranium enrichment to a deep bunker where it would be less vulnerable to the air strikes Israel says it could launch if diplomacy fails to curb Tehran's nuclear drive.

Western diplomats say Tehran must show willingness to change its course in any new talks. Crucially, Tehran says other countries must respect its right to enrich uranium, the nuclear fuel which, if enriched to much higher levels than that suitable for power plants, can provide material for atomic bombs.

Russia, a member of the six power group that has criticized the new EU and U.S. sanctions, said the last-ditch military option mooted by the United States and Israel would ignite a disastrous, widespread Middle East war.

"On the chances of whether this catastrophe will happen or not you should ask those who repeatedly talk about this," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference in Moscow.

"I have no doubt that it would pour fuel on a fire which is already smoldering, the hidden smoldering fire of Sunni-Shi'ite (Muslim) confrontation, and beyond that (it would cause) a chain reaction. I don't know where it would stop."

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Wednesday any decision about an Israeli attack on Iran was "very far off."

THREATS, FRIENDSHIP

China, which shares Russia's dislike of the new Western moves to stop Iran exporting oil, said U.S. sanctions that Obama signed into law on December 31 had no basis in international law.

"As for some countries imposing unilateral sanctions on Iran, that is not international law and other countries are under no obligation to participate," Li Song, a deputy director-general of the Foreign Ministry's Department of Arms Control and Disarmament, told an online question-and-answer session.

Iranian politicians said that in reply to Tehran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, if sanctions prevent it selling oil, Obama has written to the senior cleric who sits atop the Islamic Republic's power structure.

While Washington has yet to comment on the reported letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, several members of Iran's parliament who discussed the matter on Wednesday said it included the offer of talks.

"In this letter it was said that closing the Strait of Hormuz is our (U.S.) 'red line' and also asked for direct negotiations," the semi-official Fars news agency quoted lawmaker Ali Mottahari as saying.

"The first part of letter has a threatening stance and the second part has a stance of negotiation and friendship."

Washington has often said it has a dual-track approach to Iran, leaving open the offer of talks while seeking ever tighter sanctions as long as Tehran does not rein in its nuclear work.

But any fresh opening to Tehran might be a risky strategy for Obama in an election year as aspiring Republican presidential challengers compete over who is toughest on a country Washington has long considered a pariah state.

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a Washington Post column that there were doubts about Tehran's sincerity in wishing to return to negotiations.

"By threatening the disruption of global oil supplies, yet dangling the prospect of entering talks, Iran can press actors such as Russia and China to be more accommodating in an effort to avoid a crisis that they fear," Takeyh wrote.

"Any concessions that Iran may make at the negotiating table are bound to be symbolic and reversible."

(Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara, Chris Buckley in Beijing, Alexei Anishchuk in Moscow, Justyna Pawlak in Brussels, Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem, Fredrik Dahl in Vienna and Estelle Shirbon in London; Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120118/wl_nm/us_iran

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