Insurgents attack US-run base in Afghanistan (AP)

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan ? Insurgents attacked a U.S.-run civilian and military base with rocket-propelled grenades and guns in a brazen early afternoon assault in the southern city of Kandahar, a traditional Taliban stronghold, Afghan officials said Thursday. Two attackers were killed.

Kandahar provincial police chief, Gen. Abdul Razzaq, who was at the base for a meeting when the attack began, said at least three insurgents took over an office in front of the base and started shooting. Fighting continues at the base, which is home to NATO troops, including Americans, and a provincial reconstruction team.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said in an email that the attack on the base began at roughly 2:45 p.m., with the attackers using rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. The Embassy said U.S. State Department personnel are "safe and accounted for, but there are unconfirmed reports of a number of other injuries."

NATO said no coalition troops were killed in the attack. Two coalition troops were wounded, according to an Afghan employee at the base, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution.

Medical officials at a hospital in Kandahar said that at least two civilians and a member of the Afghan security forces were wounded in the attack on the base. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

The provincial chief, Razzaq, said police had cleared one floor of the office, killing two attackers, and were moving to the second floor. Coalition forces also intentionally blew up three vehicles packed with explosives that had been parked near the base, he said.

The attack was the latest in a violence-filled day in the southern province of Kandahar that had long been viewed as a Taliban stronghold. Afghan and coalition forces have made gains in the south over the past two years, but insurgents have shifted their operations further east and to some northern provinces.

Earlier in the day, a 13-year-old girl died from injuries sustained after her family's home was struck by an insurgent's missile in Kandahar province's Zhari district, the provincial governor's office said in a statement. The missile appeared to be aimed at the district's center, but overshot its target.

In the province's Panjwai district, a suicide attacker in a car struck a NATO convoy early Thursday, said district chief Fazluddin Agha. It was unclear if there were any fatalities among NATO personnel, but one civilian was killed in the blast, according to officials at a hospital in Kandahar. The officials, speaking anonymously, had earlier said the civilian died during the attack on the base in Kandahar.

On Wednesday night, a 10-year-old boy lost both his legs in a roadside bombing in Kandahar's Khakrez district, the governor's office said.

The violence underscores the tenuous progress in the war-ravaged nation, a decade after the U.S.-led an invasion to oust the Taliban from power.

Tens of thousands of Afghan and coalition troops deployed in the south have succeeded in routing insurgents from their strongholds and are now trying to hold the areas to allow the Afghan government to gain a better foothold. Insurgents are ill-equipped to fight the Afghan and coalition forces directly, but launch strikes targeting institutions or individuals aligned with the government.

In tandem with the ongoing battle against militants, Afghan officials are also fighting corruption ? an issue that directly affects their ability to boost the local security forces who are tasked with stabilizing the country.

In neighboring Helmand province, the governor's office said an Afghan police officer has been accused of kidnapping Abdul Satar, a tribal elder and son of a former governor of Helmand. The officer is accused of trying to extort $200,000 from the victim's family.

A search operation located man who was abducted after he had been held for about 13 hours. The police officer was arrested, and authorities are trying to find two other policemen suspected of being involved in the kidnapping.

In another case, eight policemen and three suspected killers have been arrested in Herat province in the west in connection with the death of a civilian in Nahri Sarraj district of Helmand province, the governor's office said.

Also in the west, an Afghan policeman was killed when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb Thursday afternoon in Pusht Rod district of Farah province, provincial police chief Sayad Mohammad Roshandil said.

____

Associated Press writer Amir Shah in Kabul contributed.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111027/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan

ios 5 release date ios 5 release date ios 5 update joojoo joseph addai joseph addai michael jackson autopsy

Shakespearean Actors Recreate 'Anonymous' Director Roland Emmerich's Films

Anyone familiar with director Roland Emmerich's body of work should be able to pick up on a few common threads, namely explosions, disasters, big speeches and general epicness. After directing such large-scale thrillers like "The Day After Tomorrow," "Godzilla" and "2012," Emmerich's decision to direct a film about Shakespeare as he does in "Anonymous" is [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2011/10/28/anonymous-roland-emmerich-shakespeare/

2012 camry endometriosis 9 9 9 plan 9 9 9 plan hell on wheels hell on wheels last house on the left

Sponsored By: The Next Generation Virtual Workspace

[unable to retrieve full-text content]
  Cisco VXI delivers a complete virtualized collaborative workspace, unifying virtual desktop, voice, and video services, anywhere, on any device. It helps IT provide an exceptionally flexible and secure infrastructure for an uncompromised user experience.
cisco.com/go/vxi

Ads by Pheedo

Source: http://ads.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=c&i=a96ab3670145cea2dd7f0c6803715189&p=4

tonga irb super bowl 2011 super bowl 2011 blackout blackout iceland

Pink Floyd member's son loses jail term appeal

(AP) ? Appeal court judges on Friday upheld the 16-month jail sentence given to the son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour for a violent rampage during student protests last year.

Charlie Gilmour was one of thousands who demonstrated in December against rising university tuition fees and was among a group that broke away from the main demonstration and attacked a convoy carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla. At Gilmour's trial earlier this year, a judge said Gilmour had jumped on the hood of a Jaguar in the royal motorcade and thrown a garbage can at the car.

Gilmour also kicked a store window, stole the leg of a mannequin and was photographed hanging from a Union flag on the Cenotaph, a memorial to British war dead.

The 21-year-old Cambridge University student, who has been in jail since July, pleaded guilty to violent disorder but challenged the length of his sentence.

But three appeals judges said the sentence was neither "manifestly excessive (nor) wrong in principle."

"We do not believe that violence in this context and of the kind displayed by this defendant can normally be met by other than significant sentences of immediate custody even for those of otherwise good character," said one of the three, Anthony Hughes.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-10-28-Britain-Pink%20Floyd/id-8efb5b36824e4a19adacd4aca7b3d278

fred shuttlesworth rule 34 steve jobs bill gates frances bean cobain bill gates michael lewis palin

F-Secure Anti-Virus 2012

Specifications

Type
Business, Personal, Professional
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 7
Tech Support
Email, live chat, toll-free phone, knowledge base, and forum.
More

Does your ISP supply your antivirus software? If so, especially if you're in Europe, you may well be using F-Secure without knowing it. F-Secure is the power behind branded security protection for over 200 ISP partners, and these versions may not look anything like F-Secure Anti-Virus 2012 ($39.99 direct for three licenses). F-Secure Anti-Virus retains the previous edition's clean and simple interface and significantly enhances DeepGuard behavior-based detection. In testing, though, DeepGuard was almost as likely to block a valid program as a malicious one.

F-Secure's main window breaks down protection into three areas: status, tasks, and statistics. Status shows the current state of protection, lets you turn whole sections of the product on or off, and provides access to more detailed settings. Statistics offers a simple display of what the program has done for you in the areas of malware cleanup, email scanning, and blocking of suspicious programs. From the tasks pane you can launch a scan or update, restore files from quarantine, or release an application that's been blocked by DeepGuard.

For all its apparent simplicity, F-Secure is busy, busy, busy under the hood. A local database called the hive coordinates process information from all of the product's components, among them the cloud-based signature detection, local detection, and DeepGuard behavioral detection. This sharing of data lets the various components work efficiently and avoid redundancy.

Installation Tribulation
So how well does this highly-coordinated set of components clean up malware? I installed it on twelve infested test systems to find out. The actual installer is a tiny program that downloads the very latest components for installation. I was slightly surprised to find that after installation the program required another lengthy download to get the latest signature definitions. When fully ready, F-Secure runs a quick scan for active malware. This scan found quite a few threats and in several cases requested an updated to clean them up.

Getting F-Secure installed and running wasn't always easy. On one system the installation wouldn't finish. A second try required use of a special uninstall tool. When the installer failed again I tried the standalone F-Secure Easy Clean. Similar to Norton Power Eraser (Free, 4 stars), this tool is designed to clean up persistent malware that interferes with the full F-Secure product.

I also had to use Easy Clean on several systems that couldn't complete the initial update. In one case I had to resort to F-Secure's text-mode Rescue CD. When that didn't help, tech support advised running a command-line scanner in Safe Mode. I eventually got F-Secure properly installed on all twelve test systems, but it was a chore.

  • More...
  • -->

    Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/2E5-qdp_fc4/0,2817,2395216,00.asp

    yankees red sox yankees red sox buffalo bills molly sims tony stewart mixology sarah shourd

    Whirlpool to cut 5,000 jobs to reduce costs (AP)

    BENTON HARBOR, Mich. ? Appliance maker Whirlpool Corp. says it will cut 5,000 jobs in an effort as it faces soft demand and higher costs for materials.

    The jobs to be cut are mostly in North America and Europe. They include 1,200 salaried positions and the closing of the company's Fort Smith, Ark., plant.

    The company expects the moves will save $400 million by the end of 2013.

    Whirlpool also says its third-quarter net income more than doubled to $177 million, or $2.27 per share, from $79 million, or $1.02 per share. Adjusted earnings of $2.35 per share fell short of analyst expectations for $2.75 per share.

    The company, whose brands include Maytag and KitchenAid, has been squeezed by higher costs for materials such as steel and copper.

    Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/earnings/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111028/ap_on_bi_ge/us_earns_whirlpool

    man up wayne newton naomi wolf ron paul 2012 mitt romney newt gingrich columbus dispatch

    Denver gets season's first snow as Obama visits (AP)

    DENVER ? A fall storm is bringing the season's first snow to Denver and more powder to Colorado's mountains.

    Up to 4 inches fell in Denver by Wednesday morning, with more falling in areas to the north. Downed power lines due to snow caused power outages, including one that shut down the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

    Wall Street protesters continued to camp out under tarps, but two people had to be treated for hypothermia.

    The taste of winter came as President Barack Obama makes his second visit to Denver in less than a month. The last time he visited some people passed out from the heat.

    The same storm was also bringing snow to Utah and Wyoming, where it shut down a portion of Interstate 80 between Laramie and Cheyenne.

    Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/obama/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111026/ap_on_re_us/us_western_snow

    no child left behind vince young vince young byu skylab skylab all my children

    Keenum tosses 9 TDs as No. 18 Houston beats Rice (AP)

    HOUSTON ? For a quarter and a half, Rice took advantage of rain and sloppy play by No. 18 Houston to lead the Cougars.

    Then, the rain stopped and Houston's Case Keenum had one of the best games of his career.

    Keenum threw a career-high nine touchdown passes to set the Football Bowl Subdivision record for career TD tosses as the Cougars overcame a slow start in a 73-34 win over Rice Thursday night.

    Bryce Callahan intercepted Keenum, and Cameron Nwosu recovered a Keenum fumble and returned it 12 yards for a touchdown in the first quarter in heavy rain as Rice built a 17-7 lead.

    The rain subsided and Keenum and the Cougars got going after that. They outscored Rice 45-3 to take a 52-20 lead by early in the third quarter and cruised to the easy victory to remain undefeated.

    "The rain slowed down a little bit," Rice linebacker Justin Allen said. "I think the rain affected him. We got into his face a little in the first half. I wished it would have rained all game. It stopped, and they got things cranked up. There was no looking back for them."

    Keenum, who became the FBS career leader in total offense last week, has 139 career touchdown passes.

    On Thursday he abused Rice's 115th ranked defense by throwing TD passes of 57, 21, 64, 18, 41, 20, 37, 22 and 47 yards to break former Texas Tech quarterback Graham Harrell's record of 134.

    He was 24 of 37 for 534 yards before he was replaced by backup Cotton Turner with eight minutes remaining.

    "He knows the offense by now and runs it great and the stats prove it," Allen said of Keenum. "Those are video game numbers, something we couldn't get stopped."

    Tyler Smith had 170 yards rushing and two rushing and one receiving touchdown for Rice (2-6, 1-4). That included a 97-yard scoring run which was the longest TD run in school history.

    "I know I had a pretty breakout game today, but it's pretty tough because we lost," Smith said. "We had things going our way. It was trying to stay consistent and have that fast start. That is what we have been working on is trying to get out of the gate, so we don't have to come from behind early on."

    Tyron Carrier tied the NCAA record for career kickoff returns for touchdowns with seven by returning the opening kickoff 100 yards for a score.

    Rice made it 7-3 with a 51-yard field goal by Chris Boswell early in the first quarter.

    The Owls used a squib kick on the ensuing kickoff to keep the ball away from Carrier and defensive lineman Austin Lunsford fielded it and fumbled and Rice recovered.

    Rice took advantage of the miscue on a 1-yard touchdown run by Smith that made it 10-7.

    Rice finished with 359 yards rushing as a team, with Turner Petersen rushing for 140 yards working out of the wildcat formation.

    "That is what we wanted to do was to start him and run the football and hopefully, move it down every time and get points," Rice coach David Bailiff said. "We ran the ball effectively. We didn't throw it very good tonight. I thought our offensive game plan was good. We have to continue to work on our execution."

    After Callahan's interception, the Owls came up empty on the ensuing drive when Boswell slipped on the rain-slicked grass and missed a 38-yard field goal attempt.

    The rain had let up when Houston (8-0, 4-0 Conference USA) got the ball back and Keenum found Edwards for his first touchdown pass. The teams exchanged field goals at the beginning of the second quarter to leave Rice up 20-17 with 10 minutes remaining in the half.

    Keenum then threw three touchdown passes in a six minute span at the end of the first half to put Houston on top 38-20 and tie the touchdown passes record.

    He set the record on a 41-yard pass to Charles Sims early in the third quarter to push the lead to 45-20.

    Patrick Edwards had seven receptions for 318 yards receiving and five touchdowns for Houston.

    "We had some opportunities but didn't get it done," Bailiff said. "Offensively, we had a big night running the football but had a lot of missed opportunities out there where we made some mistakes that we didn't need to make to stay in it."

    Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/sports/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111028/ap_on_sp_co_ga_su/fbc_t25_rice

    50 50 gene simmons family jewels dream house dream house the patriot taylor martinez taylor martinez

    A Quiet Revolution in Clean Energy Finance - Ramana Nanda and ...

    Ramana Nanda and Juliet Rothenberg

    Ramana Nanda and Juliet Rothenberg

    Ramana Nanda is a professor at the Harvard Business School. His research is focused on entrepreneurial finance, including the challenges of funding clean energy startups. Juliet Rothenberg is a student at Harvard Law School and has worked in operations, governmental affairs, and business development with a number of clean energy startups.

    Between 2006 and 2008, more than $1 billion venture-capital dollars were channeled into startups focused on solar, wind and biofuel technologies. In the last year, however, early-stage investments in clean energy production technologies have fallen substantially (see the table at the end of this piece for more detail). Many venture capitalists are limiting their investments to the "demand-side" ? aimed at reducing energy use ? rather than investing in startups trying to change the way we produce energy.

    It's easy to see why VCs have soured on the sector: the traditional VC model is based on high-risk, capital-efficient business models with the potential for huge exit valuations. Even if most of their investments fail, a few spectacular successes can "make the fund" for a VC. A star example is Google, which raised a mere $40 million in private funding before its IPO at a $23 billion valuation. Most clean energy startups, on the other hand, need huge amounts of capital to get off the ground, and so far big payoffs have been scarce. Many VCs tell us that the lack of big exits makes it harder to sell capital-intensive clean energy investments to their partners, particularly at a time when the "lean startup" model is in vogue. Solyndra's example has been particularly stark: it raised over $1 billion in equity finance in addition to receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, all prior to a cancelled IPO and the recent FBI investigation upon its bankruptcy. The net result is that many VCs now turn down promising companies that might contribute to transforming the way we produce energy.

    Despite these gloomy headlines, three developments in the sector give us hope that the revolution in clean energy production is far from dead:

    1. Although generalist VC investors have shied away from the sector, a number of specialist clean-technology investors have emerged in the last decade. These investors have been willing to dedicate the time and effort required to build an energy company, and are actively experimenting with new models for investing in this capital intensive sector. Between 2008 and 2010, over 25 US-based, cleantech-focused venture capital and private equity funds raised over $300 million in committed capital each, amounting to over $35 billion of capital committed for clean energy startups (here's an example). It is also significant that energy production technologies are still attracting investment from VCs. Of the more than 200 early-stage investments made in clean technology companies in the U.S. between January and July of this year, 40% were in startups related to solar, wind, and biofuels.

    2. While there has not been a defining exit in clean energy akin to the "Netscape moment" for the internet, there have been numerous recent IPOs in the biofuels sector. Examples like Amyris, Solazyme, Gevo, and KiOR have opened the door for other companies to file. We are also beginning to see an IPO window open up for solar startups, led by solar thermal company BrightSource Energy and microinverter company Enphase, which filed for their IPOs earlier this year. If the IPO window remains open in spite of Solyndra's public failings, we anticipate that a broader set of clean energy startups will achieve successful exits.

    3. Our biggest optimism, however, comes from the evolutions we are seeing in the sector as a whole, which includes both startups and incumbents. Large corporate players are beginning to show interest in early-stage clean energy companies, both through corporate investment arms and through full acquisitions. Their behavior displays promising parallels to the early days of the biotechnology industry. When biotechnology startups like Genentech began to acquire other startups to retain their edge, pharmaceutical incumbents were forced to enter the acquisition melee to remain competitive. This same trend is now playing out in the solar energy sector: yesterday's startups FirstSolar and SunTech are becoming today's acquirers, and GE's acquisition of thin-film solar company PrimeStar Solar earlier this summer is intended to allow the giant to go head-to-head with FirstSolar for the thin-film market. Corporate venture capital is also increasingly common, as shown by the $300 million fund established by GE, ConocoPhillips, and NRG, as well as notable activity from Total, Dow, 3M, and Procter & Gamble.

    Since energy startups operate in an ecosystem dominated by incumbents, they can benefit dramatically from use of incumbent resources. Working with larger companies gives startups access to manufacturing capabilities, distribution channels, and credible brand names, which are even more important in capital-intensive, incumbent-dominated, and relatively risk-averse industries. While customers may be hesitant to purchase equipment from a nascent startup, GE CEO Jeff Immelt has quipped, "No utility CEO will ever get fired for working with GE." In turn, established manufacturing players like GE, Schneider Electric and Applied Materials can benefit from integrating new technologies into their production lines and distribution channels, allowing them to develop new product offerings and expand to international markets where government incentives and market dynamics make clean energy technologies more economic.

    Perhaps most importantly, the large balance sheets of established manufacturing companies are well positioned to carry startups across the financing gap between demonstration and large-scale commercialization, which is often referred to as "the valley of death". Startups such as Amyris have relied upon partnerships with incumbents to help them pursue less capital intensive paths. This is becoming an increasingly popular trend, and allows VCs to focus on their traditional sweet spot of riskier, less capital-intensive phases of these startups' life cycles. Moreover, if incumbents choose to acquire a startup outright, they provide a sustainable exit mechanism for investors that can outlast any possible closing of the IPO window.

    In comparison to the biotechnology industry, where each pharmaceutical company has relatively similar capabilities, each energy technology is more specialized and hence has a smaller set of incumbents that could realize strong synergies from an acquisition. This means that startups risk being held hostage to the greater negotiating power of incumbents, who can force down prices when the startup has fewer outside options relative to the sale. Moving forward, the larger funds run by dedicated investors and the increased possibility of an IPO (our points 1 and 2 above) will give startups greater staying power in their negotiations with incumbents. Despite these developments, startups should be conscious of the path to an acquisition when they first take VC money and think about approaches to raise less dilutive equity capital. The use of computational modeling to demonstrate viability, developing modular technology, and focusing on manufacturing components rather than systems are all approaches that startups in this space have taken to successfully become more capital efficient in the early stages of their development.

    By using these strategies, clean energy startups can better position themselves for acquisitions and promising exits. In turn, we believe that a vibrant acquisition market will provide a strong incentive for entrepreneurs to build clean energy companies and for VCs to invest in them, creating an innovation pipeline that can help us meet our global energy and climate challenge.

    (Click on the table below to see at full size.)

    Figure 1.jpg

    Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/10/quiet-revolution-clean-energy-finance.html

    bears bears lions terrelle pryor aaron hernandez aaron hernandez san francisco 49ers

    Rick Perry's Youth Appeal (The Atlantic Wire)

    Now what about selling to the rest of us??

    Related: Jon Stewart to GOP: Your Candidates Aren't the Problem, It's You

    Related: Rick Perry's VP Pick Is the Answer to His Prayers

    This feature may not be reproduced or distributed electronically, in print or otherwise without the written permission of uclick and Universal Press Syndicate.

    Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/atlantic/20111027/pl_atlantic/rickperrystaxplan44194

    doctor saab megalodon human centipede ancient egypt paranormal activity 2 the great gatsby