As relations between the US and Europe become increasingly strained because, uh, the NSA spied on 35 world leaders, the state-backed Deutsche Telekom has declared that it wants to create a national internet to protect Germany from future privacy infringements.
MILFORD, Conn. — Houses ripped in half. Neighborhoods submerged in floodwaters. Power lines snapped like twigs. National Guard troops patrolling shore communities in Humvees. Residents kayaking flooded city streets to reach stores for supplies, only to find them closed. A half-million homes without power, some for weeks or more.
It didn't get as much media attention as New York and New Jersey, but Connecticut — those states' smaller New England neighbor — was pounded by Superstorm Sandy. State officials say the storm killed five people and damaged more than 38,000 homes.
A year later, some parts of Connecticut are still recovering. And many victims trying to rebuild are navigating an increasingly stressful entanglement of insurance forms, relief applications and bureaucratic red tape.
A home left leveled by Hurricane Sandy in Fairfield, Conn., in 2012. (Dylan Stableford/Yahoo News)
"It makes you want to give up — there's a lot of confusion and misguidance," said Paola Goren, a graphic designer who lives in Milford, on Long Island Sound. It's one of the Connecticut cities hit hardest by Sandy — and one still reeling from Tropical Storm Irene the year before.
Goren spent months without heat, hot water or electricity after Sandy's storm surge flooded her 1928 Point Beach home. Now, she says, she's been inundated with paperwork — from insurance to federal and state aid — while trying to cover the mounting costs of rebuilding. She is just one of more than 12,000 Connecticut residents to register with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for federal disaster assistance.
According to FEMA, more than $283 million on federal disaster assistance, loans and insurance claims were paid to Connecticut during the six months following Sandy. In August, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced an additional $71.8 million in aid from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was on the way.
But some storm victims, like Joe Mirmina, say they've yet to see any of it.
Mirmina's three-story Milford home was flooded with five feet of water during Sandy. A city damage assessment concluded more than 50 percent of his home was damaged, triggering a federal requirement under the National Flood Insurance Program to elevate the house as part of the renovation. But Mirmina was denied bank and small-business loans, and FEMA aid has yet to materialize.
Mirmina, who paid $50,000 to rebuild after Irene, says he has enough in loans and savings to fix his home. But the cost of elevating it — at least $100,000, with federal guidelines limited to covering just $30,000 of that figure — is prohibitive.
"How is it that the government — whether it be city, state or federal — can force us to elevate our house at our expense to save the government money?" Mirmina asked.
Click image for RELATED SLIDESHOW: Hurricane Sandy Recovery from above. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
According to city officials, approximately 250 homes in Milford need to be raised. An additional 450 were near that threshold.
"We want to rebuild," said Mirmina, who's lived in his Milford home with his wife for 28 years. "But we can't afford to do it, and we can't walk away."
Displaced, Mirmina and his wife are now living in the home of his father, who had been ill and passed away after Sandy.
Laurie Robinson, a Milford Public Works employee who rode out the storm for two days in a second-floor addition on her 1953 cape-style home, is in a similar position. Waiting for financial assistance to rebuild, she's been living in a camper in the driveway of her home for the past year.
"I call it my studio apartment," Robinson said of the trailer, adding that she plans to use the aid she's received from the Salvation Army and Red Cross to winterize it.
Adding insult to injury, many of the same towns hit by Sandy were smacked anew in February by a blizzard that dumped more than three feet of snow in Connecticut, including 38 inches in Milford. Four Connecticut deaths were blamed on the winter storm.
In May, Goren launched a Facebook group — Storm Victims Unite — to organize and support fellow Sandy victims in Milford. It has about 100 members.
"The residents are really frustrated, and we can't blame them," Bill Richards, Milford's recovery coordinator, told the Wall Street Journal in July.
In Fairfield, another hard-hit coastal community, officials say about two dozen homes remain vacated. State Rep. Brenda Kupchick of Fairfield is fed up with the delays.
Click on image for RELATED SLIDESHOW: A ghost town on Staten Island. (Photo by Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News)
"FEMA is a disaster," Kupchick told Yahoo News. "The program doesn't work. The process is completely insane. People get frustrated and give up. It shouldn't be this convoluted."
Kupchick says she has tried to get information for her constituents from federal officials, but to no avail.
"It's almost impossible to find out anything," Kupchick said.
Officials at FEMA and HUD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Goren has had a similar experience at the city level.
"Every story they give us is different," she said. "It's basically a free-for-all."
"Ten months of frustration,” Milford Mayor Ben Blake said last month at a public forum on the recovery effort. “I understand the tensions."
Blake blamed, in part, "the alphabet soup that is the federal government assistance process."
And the frustration has reached Capitol Hill. "Many Irene and Sandy victims were, and are, out of their homes for over a year, which demonstrates the process is not fast enough," Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro said in an email to Yahoo News. "Connecticut residents are resilient, but no one should have to deal with this kind of uncertainty.”
Part of the reason Connecticut is often overlooked when it comes to Sandy might be because of the state's strong initial response.
"We didn't have sewage systems overrun, we didn't have subway systems overrun, we didn't have tunnels overrun, people drowning in their own homes," Malloy said in comparison to New York and New Jersey two weeks after the storm.
The other part might be the timing of the disaster. Two days after the nationally televised 12/12/12 concert benefiting Sandy victims, Connecticut became synonymous with an incomparable tragedy: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
While most everyone this week has been yawning at the release of new Surface Pro tablets, over in another corner Microsoft has been hard at work on getting new Windows Azure features out the door.
The list of this week's updates to Azure is wide-ranging, although some of it will be familiar to anyone who's followed the news of what Redmond's been planning for Azure.
The general availability of Windows Azure Backup As the name implies, this uses Azure's blob storage to provide cloud-based backup and restore for Windows Server or for System Center Data Protection Manager. In a nod to those uneasy about cloud storage, Microsoft has affirmed that not only is data encrypted before transmission, but the user -- not Microsoft -- keeps the encryption key.
Active Directory Microsoft's plans for Active Directory in Azure have been getting more ambitious of late, with its latest big add being single sign-on for all the SaaS offerings integrated into Azure (as well as a single place to access those apps if you're an end user). Among the less-publicized additions this time around: auditing reports that include things like automatically flagging suspicious log-in behaviors (e.g., logging in from multiple locations at once) and sign-in integration within Visual Studio.
Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Speaking of Visual Studio, the 2013 version just got support for the new revision of the Windows Azure SDK, version 2.2. Also among the features in 2.2 is Remote Debugging Cloud Services, which lets you plug Visual Studio into a debugger running in Azure as if you were debugging an application locally. Many of the other additions to Azure's development features -- e.g., the PowerShell cmdlets -- have been in roughly the same vein, that of closing the gap between what's done in the cloud and what's done locally.
The public preview of Hyper-V Recovery Manager This new feature allows System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and R2 private clouds to be replicated to and recovered from a secondary location. Again, in another nod to those paranoid about the cloud, application data is kept local and everything to, from, and in Azure is encrypted.
From the outside these may seem like little pieces, but they're adding up. InfoWorld's Eric Knorr has described Microsoft as "the sleeping giant of the cloud," with "the resources to crush it." Microsoft is in the middle of a difficult but fruitful transition away from the low-hanging fruit of commodity computing and toward the high-margin, far-reaching innovations possible as a services company.
Actually, Microsoft has had a decently large slice of its pie coming from most everything but the Windows division for some time now. Back in 2012, ZDNet's Ed Bott noted how large chunks of Microsoft's revenue were not from Windows at all, but from the company's business division, the entertainment and devices division (read Xbox), and the server division. It wouldn't be surprising at all if from now on the biggest news out of Redmond had nothing to do with Windows per se, and everything to do with Azure.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration is recommending new restrictions on prescription medicines containing hydrocodone, the highly addictive painkiller that has grown into the most widely prescribed drug in the U.S.
In a major policy shift, the agency said in an online notice Thursday that hydrocodone-containing drugs should be subject to the same restrictions as other narcotic drugs like oxycodone and morphine.
The move comes more than a decade after the Drug Enforcement Administration first asked the FDA to reclassify hydrocodone so that it would be subject to the same restrictions as other addictive painkilling drugs. The FDA did not issue a formal announcement about its decision, which has long been sought by many patient advocates, doctors and state and federal lawmakers.
For decades, hydrocodone has been easier to prescribe, in part because it is only sold in combination pills and formulas with other non-addictive ingredients like aspirin and acetaminophen.
That ease of access has made it many health care professionals' top choice for treating chronic pain, everything from back pain to arthritis to toothaches.
In 2011, U.S. doctors wrote more than 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone, making it the most prescribed drug in the country, according to government figures. The ingredient is found in blockbusters drugs like Vicodin as well as dozens of other generic formulations.
It also consistently ranks as the first or second most-abused medicine in the U.S. each year, according to the DEA, alongside oxycodone. Both belong to a family of drugs known as opioids, which also includes heroin, codeine and methadone.
Earlier this year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that prescription painkiller overdose deaths among women increased about fivefold between 1999 and 2010. Among men, such deaths rose about 3.5-fold. The rise in both death rates is closely tied to a boom in the overall use of prescribed painkillers.
The FDA has long supported the more lax prescribing classification for hydrocodone, which is also backed by professional societies like the American Medical Association.
But the agency's top drug regulator, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said in a statement Thursday: "The FDA has become increasingly concerned about the abuse and misuse of opioid products, which have sadly reached epidemic proportions in certain parts of the United States."
The FDA says it will formally request in early December that hydrocodone be rescheduled as a Schedule II drug, limiting which kinds of medical professionals can write a prescription and how many times it can be refilled.
The Controlled Substances Act, passed in 1970, put hydrocodone drugs in the Schedule III class, which is subject to fewer controls. Under that classification, a prescription for Vicodin can be refilled five times before the patient has to see a physician again. If the drug is reclassified to Schedule II, patients will only be able to receive one 90-day prescription, similar to drugs like OxyContin. The drug could also not be prescribed by nurses and physician assistants.
The FDA's request for reclassification must be approved by officials in other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services.
News of the FDA decision was applauded by lawmakers from states that have been plagued by prescription drug abuse, many who have been prodding the agency to take action for months.
"Today was a tremendous step forward in fighting the prescription drug abuse epidemic that has ravaged West Virginia and our country," said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, in a statement. "Rescheduling hydrocodone from a Schedule III to a Schedule II drug will help prevent these highly addictive drugs from getting into the wrong hands and devastating families and communities
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York noted that the FDA's own expert panel recommended the reclassification more than nine months ago.
"Each day that passes means rising abuse, and even death, at the hands of hydrocodone-based drugs," Schumer said in a statement.
Still, Thursday's action immediately sparked criticism from some professional groups that said that the tighter restrictions could have unintended consequences, such as burdening health care workers and patients.
"The FDA's reported decision will likely pose significant hardships for many patients and delay relief for vulnerable patients with legitimate chronic pain, especially those in nursing home and long-term care," said Kevin Schweers, a spokesman for the National Community Pharmacists Association.
In this undated photo released by charity ''The Smile of the Child'' shows a 4-year-old girl at an unknown location. Greek authorities on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 have requested international assistance to identify the four-year-old girl found living in a Gypsy camp with a couple arrested and charged with abducting her from her birth parents. A police statement says the child was located Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2013 near the town of Farsala, central Greece, during a nationwide crackdown on illegal activities in Gypsy camps. (AP Photo/The Smile of the Child)
In this undated photo released by charity ''The Smile of the Child'' shows a 4-year-old girl at an unknown location. Greek authorities on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 have requested international assistance to identify the four-year-old girl found living in a Gypsy camp with a couple arrested and charged with abducting her from her birth parents. A police statement says the child was located Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2013 near the town of Farsala, central Greece, during a nationwide crackdown on illegal activities in Gypsy camps. (AP Photo/The Smile of the Child)
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek police said Friday they have arrested a childless couple in Athens on suspicion of buying an 8-month-old Roma girl and trying to register her as their own, amid international uproar over another little girl who was found living with unrelated Gypsies in Greece.
Bulgarian authorities are now trying to establish whether a local Roma woman is the mother of that child, a strikingly fair girl aged 5 or 6 known as Maria. The woman has been tested for a DNA match and served with preliminary charges of child selling, but has not been detained.
The case of Maria has drawn global attention, playing on the shocking possibility of children being stolen from their parents or sold buy them. But its handling by media and authorities has raised concerns of racism toward the European Union's estimated 6 million Gypsies — a minority long marginalized in most of the continent.
The couple arrested in Athens on Wednesday allegedly paid a Roma woman 4,000 euros ($5,500) for the baby, a Greek police statement said. Authorities are looking for the baby's birth parents and potential intermediaries in the alleged transaction.
The suspects, aged 53 and 48, were expected to be charged later Friday with child abduction, which under Greek law can include cases where a minor is voluntarily given away by its parents outside the legal adoption process.
The same charges were brought against the couple with whom Maria was found living in a Roma settlement outside Farsala, in central Greece, a week ago. They have been jailed pending trial, are also suspected of fraudulently obtaining birth certificates for a total 14 children.
Greek authorities are trying to work out whether the children all exist, or whether the alleged document fraud was part of a welfare scam — the couple allegedly received more than 2,500 euros a month in family benefits.
They insist they were looking after Maria with their own five children after an informally arranged adoption.
The girl was placed into the care of a children's charity and her DNA details were provided to Interpol which has so far failed to match her to any missing children declared in its records, from Poland to the U.S.
On Wednesday, another Roma couple was charged with child abduction on the eastern Greek island of Lesvos, after police found them with a baby boy that was not their own. The couple allegedly told authorities that they were childless and had been given the baby by a Roma woman in Athens who had five children of her own and took pity on them.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The troubled rollout of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare policy on Thursday undergoes its first full-length public airing in a crowded congressional hearing room, where lawmakers will question technology contractors about the government's crippled Healthcare.gov website.
In proceedings before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, lawmakers are trying to determine why the online portal for uninsured Americans in 36 states has malfunctioned since its October 1 start, the beginning of a six-month enrollment period that is expected to draw at least 7 million people to sign up for federally subsidized private insurance for 2014.
Republicans who control the panel criticized top administration officials and contractors for assuring lawmakers over the summer that the system would work, only to produce an enrollment characterized by crashes, glitches and system failures.
"This is not about blame - this is about accountability, transparency, and fairness for the American public. The broken promises are many," said Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who chairs the committee.
"We still don't know the real picture as the administration appears allergic to transparency and continues to withhold enrollment figures," he said.
The Department of Health and Human Services and the White House have largely declined to disclose information about the problems plaguing the system, which cost nearly $400 million to build, according to a report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office.
Representative Henry Waxman, the lead Democrat on the panel, said the focus should be on fixing the glitches.
"If we want this law to work, we've got to get it right, we've got to fix it, not as the Republicans are trying to do, nix it and repeal it," he said.
The hearing marks the start of a new chapter in the Republican Party's opposition to the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which has withstood more than three years of political and legal attacks as President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy.
Upton's committee is one of at least three House panels planning to conduct hearings on several areas of reform - from insurance costs to potential security problems - where Republicans hope to find problems that can lead to legislation to dismantle the law or aid their 2014 election goal to winning the Senate.
Some of the 14 U.S. states that have built their own online marketplaces have been able to set aside difficulties and enroll people in insurance. But the federal exchange and its Healthcare.gov website continue to experience problems more than three weeks after launch. The Obama administration has largely blamed unexpected high volumes of nearly 20 million visitors.
The administration has until mid-November to iron out the rollout problems or risk jeopardizing its enrollment goal, according to experts.
CGI Federal, the main contractor for the website, said in prepared testimony for the committee that the initial bottlenecks that paralyzed Healthcare.gov stemmed from another contractor's software tool for creating consumer accounts.
That other contractor, United Health Group unit Quality Software Services Inc (QSSI), said its software was overwhelmed by the unexpectedly high volume of visitors.
Both companies also pointed to the administration, which QSSI blamed for a "late decision" to require visitors to create accounts for problems. Written testimony from CGI described the administration as "the ultimate responsible party" because of its role as systems integrator.
The House oversight focus will switch next week to the administration as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appears before Upton's panel and her lieutenant, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee.
Rebecca Greenberg made her first visit to StoryCorps with her mother. This time, her father Carl joined them for some laughter and reminiscing.
StoryCorps
Rebecca Greenberg made her first visit to StoryCorps with her mother. This time, her father Carl joined them for some laughter and reminiscing.
StoryCorps
When we first heard from Laura Greenberg and her daughter, Rebecca, in 2011, Laura recounted what it was like to grow up in a family that was, as she explained it, "not normal."
"We're yelling and we're pinching and we're hugging and we're cursing and we peed with the door open," she said about her childhood in Queens, N.Y., in the 1950s. "I didn't know this was not normal behavior. I didn't know people had secrets, you didn't tell your mother everything."
Laura recalled how her father would conduct an imaginary orchestra in front of the stereo in his boxer shorts, and when she met Carl, Rebecca's father.
"He was cute, but very, very quiet and I scared the crap out of him. The first time he kissed me he had a nosebleed all over his face he was so nervous. It was terrible," she laughed — before adding that, 35 years later, they were still married.
Now, Laura and Rebecca are back in a StoryCorps booth in Atlanta. But this time, they're not alone — now it's Carl's turn to share his side of the family story.
"So your first kiss, we heard about how you bled all over Mom," Rebecca asks him. "Do you have any different take on that story?
"That's how it happened," Carl says. "But I do have some Laura stories. We were having people over. She was going to make spaghetti, didn't have enough. So she broke the package of spaghetti in half, so she figured she had twice as much."
Laura Greenberg, left, and her daughter Rebecca in 2011.
StoryCorps
Laura Greenberg, left, and her daughter Rebecca in 2011.
StoryCorps
"And Carl had to explain to me, a pound is a pound," Laura laughs.
"He's from a New England family and I remember we would sit at the dinner table at his house when we were dating, and no one would talk," Laura recalls. "And then I would start to giggle. I would get this psychotic hysterical laughter. So they already knew I was nuts.
"And I said, 'This is so refreshing.' They don't ask about when I'm getting my period, or how much money I make, or did I make a doody today. You know, my family was so intrusive."
Initially, quiet Carl wasn't such a hit with Laura's parents. Her mother called him by the wrong name for years, Carl laughs.
"It's so weird because our family now is the most functional of all our friends," Rebecca says. "I mean, all my friends, they would rather hang out at my house with my parents than hang out with me."
Doing a StoryCorps interview was Rebecca's idea. Laura says she thought their initial interview was too humorous to make it to air. "You know, when I listen on my way to work, I'm crying and my mascara's running," she says. "And they're very tender, you know, heart-felt stories. And I said, 'They're not ever going to play ours.'
"But we didn't do it for that," Laura adds. "We just did it to have that experience and share that moment. And have it forever."
Delivery Status Touch has been update for iOS 7, with a refreshed interface and some iOS 7-exclusive features. Background notifications are supported, letting the status of your packages update when the app is closed. AirDrop sharing lets you share your package status with others around you. You can also share deliveries with via SMS or iMessage. Barcode scanning is also faster on iOS 7.
But there are more features that can be accessed by every user, not just those running iOS 7. Calendar support lets you add estimated delivery dates to your calendar if you want. Turn this feature on in Delivery Status' settings under Notifications. You can now archive your deliveries, rather than deleting them. You can now sync with iCloud, and your favorites will now sync with iCloud even if you use Junecloud to sync the rest of your data. 1Password integration lets you easily look up your passwords.
This update is available now. When you grab it, let me know what you think!
With hot new phones and tablets hitting the market at a breakneck pace, frequent upgrading can become a cost-prohibitive endeavor. Today, Walmart is taking some of the sting out of that process by adding tablet computers to its in-store trade-in program.
Walmart recently began accepting smartphones for trade-ins, so this news makes for a natural extension of the earlier program at the world’s largest retailer. It was launched reportedly in response to consumer requests after the smartphone trade-in program experienced considerable success. At present, tablet trade-ins will be accepted at more than 3,600 Walmart and Sam’s Club locations around the United States.
As with a phone, the value of a used tablet depends heavily on its condition. Devices which power on and which are completely intact, with no cracks, missing parts, non-functional keys, and no liquid damage, are considered by Walmart to be in “working” condition. If any of the above conditions is true – or the unit can’t be operated due to a lost security code – it is considered “not working” by the company.
That classification can make the difference between a sizeable trade-in value and relatively nothing. For example, consider a 32GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1” powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor: in “working” condition this device will net you $80 as a Walmart trade-in. In “not working” condition, the same tablet will get you a mere 10 bucks. You can check the value of any tablet you’d like to trade in online at Walmart’s trade-in website.
Walmart says that its top trade-in price is about $300. Of course, all trade-in values are applied toward the purchase of a new tablet from the retailer.
Remember, Walmart isn’t the only game in town when it comes to trading in your tablet. Amazon, GameStop, Best Buy, and T-Mobile all currently accept tablets for trade-in. In the above example of a 32GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, Amazon’s maximum trade-in price of $130 is the current leader of the pack.
And while trade-ins may offer simplicity, don’t forget that they aren’t the only game in town. Ebay remains a thriving market for used phones and tablets, and if you’re willing to put a little extra effort into selling your old device, you can earn a little additional cash over a trade-in. Here, used Galaxy Tab 2 tablets typically sell for $350 to $400 on the site, but condition (and the luck of the auctioneer) are always a major factor in the hammer price.
[ This sponsored article was written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of PCWorld. ]
In this police handout photo taken on Thursday , Oct. 17, 2013, Christos Salis, 39, right, and his companion Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40, or Selini Sali — as the woman has two separate sets of identity papers. pose with the little girl only known as "Maria" in the Larisa regional police headquarters, Greece. Police in Greece have released the photographs of a couple alleged adductors of a girl known “Maria” after they were formally taken onto pre-trial custody and an international search for the girl’s parents intensified. (AP Photo/Greek Police)
In this police handout photo taken on Thursday , Oct. 17, 2013, Christos Salis, 39, right, and his companion Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40, or Selini Sali — as the woman has two separate sets of identity papers. pose with the little girl only known as "Maria" in the Larisa regional police headquarters, Greece. Police in Greece have released the photographs of a couple alleged adductors of a girl known “Maria” after they were formally taken onto pre-trial custody and an international search for the girl’s parents intensified. (AP Photo/Greek Police)
In this undated photo released by charity ''The Smile of the Child'' shows a four-year-old girl at an unknown location. Greek authorities on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 have requested international assistance to identify the four-year-old girl found living in a Gypsy camp with a couple arrested and charged with abducting her from her birth parents. A police statement says the child was located Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2013 near the town of Farsala, central Greece, during a nationwide crackdown on illegal activities in Gypsy camps. (AP Photo/The Smile of the Child)
In this undated photo released by Greek Police shows a four-year-old girl at an unknown location. Greek authorities on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 have requested international assistance to identify the four-year-old girl found living in a Gypsy camp with a couple arrested and charged with abducting her from her birth parents. A police statement says the child was located Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2013 near the town of Farsala, central Greece, during a nationwide crackdown on illegal activities in Gypsy camps. (AP Photo/Greek Police)
SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — A Roma woman in remote town in central Bulgaria has undergone DNA testing as authorities investigate if she is the mother of a suspected abduction victim in neighboring Greece known as "Maria" whose case has triggered a global search for her real parents.
Sasha Ruseva, 35, had been tested for a match and served with preliminary charges of child selling, but was not detained, Bulgarian authorities said Thursday.
Ruseva appeared on Bulgarian television after being questioned at a police station in the town of Nikolaevo, 280 kilometers (175 miles) east of the capital, Sofia, and admitted she once left a baby behind in Greece while working there, but was not sure if Maria was her daughter.
"I don't know if it's her. How would I know that? I didn't take any money. I just didn't have enough money to feed her," Ruseva said speaking on TV, which showed pictures of her and her family outside her mud-floored village home outside the town.
Several of the children seen at the village were barefoot or looked poorly cared for.
"I intended to go back and take my child home, but meanwhile I gave birth to two more kids, so I was not able to go back," Ruseva said.
Bulgarian Interior Ministry chief secretary Svetlozar Lazarov said Ruseva had told police she had seen televised pictures of a Greek Roma couple who had looked after Maria and recognized them as the same people with whom she left her child.
A blond-haired and fair-skinned girl aged 5 or 6, Maria, was discovered last week near Farsala in central Greece during a police raid on a Gypsy settlement. DNA tests on the Roma couple revealed they weren't her parents and the two were charged with abduction and document fraud.
They insist they were looking after Maria with their own five children after an informally-arranged adoption.
The girl was placed into the care of a children's charity and her DNA details were provided to Interpol which has so far failed to match her to any missing children declared in its records, from Poland to the U.S.
But the global interest has also raised concerns that news coverage of Maria and actions taken by authorities in the high-profile case are fueling racist sentiment against the Gypsy minority, who number around 6 million in the European Union.
"The long-standing problem of negative media reporting on minorities has vehemently re-emerged with the cases of the children found in Roma families ... propagating age-old myths portraying Roma as child-abductors," the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks said in a statement.
In the central Romanian town of Sibiu, Dorin Cioaba, an influential Gypsy community leader widely known as the king of the Roma, said the Greek couple's story sounded plausible.
"Roma families love their children very much. They would give their lives for their children," Cioaba told Associated Press Television News.
"What I think (happened) is that young woman who abandoned the child gave her to this family knowing that if she leaves her on the street, she will end up in a state orphanage or even taken by someone, sold and trafficked ... Maybe this girl did not grow up in a the best environment. But I don't believe what I have heard that this little girl was traumatized."
___
Olimpiu Gheorhgiu reported from Sibiu, Romania. Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania, and Elena Becatoros, Nicholas Paphitis and Derek Gatopoulos in Athens contributed to this report.
It's just been announced that Robin Thicke will also be performing at the MTV EMA's and we can't help but wonder if Robin will have ANOTHER collab performance with Miley Cyrus!
Probably not, seeing as how he doesn't want to take responsibility for what happened at the VMA's! So he probably has no desire to be caught up in another media whirlwind!
Maybe instead of Mileybird, Robin will team up with fellow performer Katy Perry for an epic Blurred Lines/Roarperformance!
Whatever he decides, we're sure it won't be too family friendly! LOLz!!
Snoop Lion was also announced as a performer and he joins Imagine Dragons, Afrojack, and The Killers who will also lend their musical talents to the stage.
The EMA's are set to air on November 10 from Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome and we're sure there will be LOOOOOTS of drama from the show.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Global equity markets edged higher on Thursday, boosted by signs of growth in China's manufacturing sector, while rising expectations that the Federal Reserve will keep its stimulus efforts in place for months kept U.S. Treasuries yields near three-month lows.
Wall Street opened higher a day after the S&P 500 index broke a four-session winning streak as investors grappled with a host of corporate earnings and muddled economic data.
The low Treasuries yields kept the dollar pressured while helping the euro as the Fed's easy monetary policy outweighed weaker euro zone data. The euro was up 0.3 percent at $1.3816, having earlier hit $1.3824, its strongest level since November 2011, while the dollar fell broadly, hitting a near nine-month low of 79.081 against a basket of currencies.
Fed policy is seen as very data dependant, though economic indicators over the coming month are likely to be skewed by the effects of the government shutdown. That could limit insight on the actual state of the economy and to what degree the shutdown and the fight over raising the debt ceiling harmed growth.
"What we've been seeing since the government shutdown and debt ceiling was resolved is a desire to jump back into Treasuries," said Jason Rogan, managing director in Treasuries trading at Guggenheim Partners in New York.
"Most market participants are of the mind that the Fed is on hold for the foreseeable future."
Treasuries have rallied since data on Tuesday showed employers added fewer jobs than expected in September, stroking fears the economy was slowing, even before the government's 16-day shutdown.
However, on Thursday the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note was down 6/32, its yield at 2.5052 percent.
Data showed activity in China's vast factory sector reached a seven-month high this month, easing concerns about a slowdown in Chinese exports, which would point to weakening global demand.
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 87.50 points, or 0.57 percent, at 15,500.83. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up 4.83 points, or 0.28 percent, at 1,751.21. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 20.37 points, or 0.52 percent, at 3,927.44.
European shares recovered their poise, climbing back toward five-year highs thanks to strong corporate results and the encouraging manufacturing data from top metals consumer China.
The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index was up 0.4 percent at 1,284.89, recovering from the previous session's fall and climbing back toward Tuesday's five-year highs of 1,291.93.
MSCI's world equity index added 0.2 percent, slightly retracing losses of 0.6 percent on Wednesday, when markets were rocked by fears that a spike in Chinese short-term rates could hurt growth.
The U.S. manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index rose at its slowest pace in a year this month and factory output contracted for the first time since late 2009. The survey was conducted partly during the 16-day U.S. government shutdown, which economists expect will slow overall U.S. growth slightly in the last three months of 2013.
Markit's PMI index for the 17-nation euro area showed business activity eased slightly in October after a pick-up in September, though it confirmed that the region's economic recovery was taking root.
MIXED EARNINGS
U.S. corporate earnings continue to pour in, with 47 S&P 500 components expected to report on Thursday, including Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc after the close of trading.
"The earnings picture was not supposed to be that great this quarter and in fact we are seeing that. The thing that is disappointing is top-line revenue, and those are not good signs," said Keith Bliss, senior vice-president at Cuttone & Co in New York.
"So what is going to drive the market from that point is going to be Washington policy and Fed policy."
In commodities trading, gold was the biggest mover, up 0.4 percent to $1,336.50 an ounce, nearing a four-week high as the outlook for an unchanged Fed policy heightened concerns about inflation risk.
"Postponement of tapering means higher liquidity in the market, probably higher inflation risks in the longer term," Commerzbank analyst Eugen Weinberg said. "That's likely to lead to higher interest in gold."
Brent crude futures slipped 0.5 percent to near $107 a barrel as rising supplies of crude oil in the United States drove prices toward a two-month low, while U.S. crude fell for a fourth straight session to its lowest since June. But the selling was not as heavy as in the previous session.
Brent crude oil was down 49 cents to $107.31 a barrel while the U.S. crude oil benchmark, also known as West Texas Intermediate or WTI, shed 47 cents to $96.49 a barrel.
Copper edged down to its lowest in more than a week as concerns about the current tight credit conditions in China and its impact on demand offset the brighter growth outlook.
(Additional reporting by Jan Harvey and Jessica Mortimer in London; Editing by Dan Grebler)
If only Smash had been this consistently riveting onscreen. Katharine McPhee and her series director Michael Morris stole some of the spotlight away from Kim Kardashian's engagement and Prince George's christening this week when the pair were photographed making out in broad daylight in an L.A. parking lot -- in spite of their marriages to other people.
And, while Morris' actress wife of ten years Mary McCormackallegedly kicked him out of their home after finding out the news, McPhee's situation is a little different. As rumored, the actress and American Idol runner-up, 29, has been separated from producer husband Nick Cokas for at least six months, multiple sources confirm to Us Weekly.
In Plain Sight star McCormack and Morris share three kids together and reportedly split their time between L.A. and New Mexico. The actress, 45, "is so cool and the nicest person," the second insider adds. "It's so sad that this happened to her. She's truly great."
This film image released by Columbia Pictures shows Matt Damon, left, and George Clooney in "The Monuments Men." A spokesman for Sony Pictures said Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, that the film will now be released in the first quarter of next year, instead of its planned release date of Dec. 18. “Monuments Men,” which Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in, had been expected to be a top Oscar contender. (AP Photo/Columbia Pictures - Sony, Claudette Barius)
This film image released by Columbia Pictures shows Matt Damon, left, and George Clooney in "The Monuments Men." A spokesman for Sony Pictures said Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, that the film will now be released in the first quarter of next year, instead of its planned release date of Dec. 18. “Monuments Men,” which Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in, had been expected to be a top Oscar contender. (AP Photo/Columbia Pictures - Sony, Claudette Barius)
NEW YORK (AP) — George Clooney's World War II drama "The Monuments Men" is being pushed to 2014 and out of the fall awards season.
The movie will now be released in the first quarter of next year, instead of its planned release date of Dec. 18, a spokesman for Sony Pictures said Wednesday. "Monuments Men," which Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in, had been expected to be among the top Oscar contenders.
The film could still compete for awards next year, but the early-in-the-year positioning suggests Sony doesn't expect it to. Movies released early in the year — much less sought-after territory than the lucrative holiday movie-going season — rarely garner any awards interest.
Sony said the film is being delayed so Clooney can finish the film's extensive visual effects.
"The Monuments Men," which also stars Matt Damon and Bill Murray, is about a World War II platoon whose mission is to rescue artworks from the Nazis. Based on a true story, the film is adapted from Robert Edsel's book "The Monuments Men: Allie Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History."
Reportedly made for $65 million, Clooney has conceived of "The Monuments Men" as a popular period drama tinged with comedy in the mold of "The Great Escape." While an early 2014 release takes the film out of the awards hunt, it could find more room at a less crowded box office.
"The Monuments Men" is only the latest film to shift out of the fall movie-going season. Previously pushed into 2014 were "Foxcatcher," ''Grace of Monaco" and "The Immigrant."
The Los Angeles Times first reported the release date change.
For the first time since 1999, the two teams with the best record in baseball will meet in the World Series. The Boston Red Sox host the St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway Park tonight.
Enough said, let's bring in NPR's Mike Pesca. Hey, Mike.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hi.
GREENE: You're going to be at the game.
PESCA: Yes.
GREENE: So we have the two teams with the two best records. That has to tell us something about his World Series. Or maybe in this crazy world of sports it tells us nothing.
PESCA: Or in the crazy sport of baseball, actually you're right, it kind of doesn't. I mean you mentioned 1999, that was a stinker of a World Series. The Yankees swept the Braves. The Braves had a much better record even than the Yankees did. And then you go back to some recent series were teams that were wildcards and, quote-unquote, "snuck in" like in 2002. The Angel/Giants that went seven - that was a great World Series. So yes, there's not a whole lot of correlation.
In general the correlation between the regular season and the postseason often becomes tenuous. We see things like great players through the regular season slump. We see nobodies delivering the clutch. And that's because the baseball season is so long, it gives us a false sense of how good or bad anyone could be on a given day.
I mean if a guy is a 300 hitter that says what? Oh, that guy can hit. But if you take any seven-game snapshot may be he's a 180 hitter over that snapshot. You know, it's more likely he'll be a 320 hitter or a 300 hitter but there's far from a guarantee in the sport of baseball.
GREENE: So we'll watch to see who the heroes that will emerge.
PESCA: I'm being paid to, yes.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Well, let's start with the St. Louis Cardinals. I mean a franchise that just a stays right towards the top. What makes them so good?
PESCA: That's it, steady efficiency. I mean they have a great farm system. They have so many good pitchers that they have Shelby Miller, a young 15-game-winner. He's like the sixth guy on their staff. They're very good from top to bottom. They have few weaknesses. They have the Cardinal Way which has been derided a little bit for its arrogance. I don't know if the players themselves buy into it, as much some of the very proud fans do.
But they do have an ethic of success and culture in getting things done. And they are a model organization in this sport.
GREENE: Well, besides the beards that the Boston Red Sox players have grown to bond together, what gives them the chance to come on top of the Cardinals?
PESCA: I think looseness. I think, you know, sheer talent from top to bottom. I think their strategy of hitting crucial game-winning grand slams in the last series, if they could light upon that strategy again...
GREENE: That would work, two of them and the American League championships series.
PESCA: Yes. And it has this great study in contrasts because you know Boston, which is this real loose team which is a team with a lot of characters who embraces them. And you have the Cardinals, a team that, you know, Adam Wainwright - starter in Game 1 - set up one of his last opponents, Adrian Gonzalez, was behaving in a Mickey Mouse fashion by being too enthusiastic. Some Cardinals players also criticized the Yasiel Puig for perhaps over-celebrating, and not knowing how the game should be played.
So, you know, you have this contrast between those who criticize others for being Mickey Mouse, and the Red Sox who are just plain goofy.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: Goofy and slow, right? I mean one thing we know about this we know about this World Series with the Red Sox involved, we're going to have some long games.
PESCA: They are pretty fast on the bases but, man, do they take their time. Clay Buchholtz, even with no one on base, their pitcher takes between like 18 and 26 seconds to deliver a pitch, one-nothing games going almost four hours. The Red Sox do take up a lot of your patience. But then, I guess, they deliver the big dramatic hits when it counts. Still, could we do that here in three and a half hours, guys? Is that too much to ask?
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: The journalists who are going to be at Fenway tonight, you guys grow beards or something to bond over this whole thing?
PESCA: I can't help it. I got a five o'clock shadow at two.
GREENE: Nice, can't wait to see it. NPR's Mike Pesca, who will be at tonight's game at Fenway Park Game 1 of the World Series. Mike, thanks.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
So far, Firefox OS has been limited to ultra-basic smartphones like the ZTE Open. LG is expanding the platform's reach today by releasing its inaugural Mozilla-powered handset, the Fireweb. The 4-inch device is still designed for newcomers between its 480 x 320 display, 1GHz Qualcomm processor and ...
Marie Benedicte Bjoernland, the head of the Norwegian domestic intelligence service PST, poses for a picture in her office in Oslo, Norway Wednesday Oct. 23 2013 during an interview with the Associated Press. PST tried to prevent one of the suspected gunmen in the Nairobi mall attack from joining Somali militants more than three years ago, but failed to talk him out of it, Bjoernland said. The man has been identified in Kenya as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a 23-year-old Somalia native whose family moved to Norway in 1999. (AP Photo/Tor Lindseth)
Marie Benedicte Bjoernland, the head of the Norwegian domestic intelligence service PST, poses for a picture in her office in Oslo, Norway Wednesday Oct. 23 2013 during an interview with the Associated Press. PST tried to prevent one of the suspected gunmen in the Nairobi mall attack from joining Somali militants more than three years ago, but failed to talk him out of it, Bjoernland said. The man has been identified in Kenya as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a 23-year-old Somalia native whose family moved to Norway in 1999. (AP Photo/Tor Lindseth)
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Norway's domestic intelligence service tried to prevent one of the suspected gunmen in the Nairobi mall attack from joining Somali militants more than three years ago, but failed to talk him out of it, the agency's chief said in an interview Wednesday.
The man has been identified in Kenya as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a 23-year-old Somalia native whose family moved to Norway in 1999. Norwegian authorities have still not named him, and had previously not said whether they knew of him before the four-day siege of the Westgate mall that killed nearly 70 people in the Kenyan capital.
But Marie Benedicte Bjoernland, the head of Norwegian security service PST, told The Associated Press that the Norwegian suspect was well known to her agency and that it even tried to dissuade him from becoming a jihadist.
"We had several talks with him ... before he left Norway more than three years ago," Bjoernland said at PST's headquarters in Oslo. "Obviously we didn't succeed, but there was quite an effort put into the preventive side of this."
Bjoernland declined to give details of the conversations, and said the Norwegian "most likely" died in the attack, though PST investigators haven't confirmed that. The Kenyan government said Sunday it believes it has recovered the remains of the four gunmen seen in CCTV footage carrying out the attack.
Security camera images showed what appeared to be Dhuhulow and three other gunmen firing coldly on shoppers as they made their way along store aisles after storming the upscale mall.
The Somali Islamic extremist group al-Shabab claimed responsibility, saying the September attack was retribution for Kenya's military involvement in Somalia.
Dhuhulow's sister told AP last week that her brother went to the Somali capital of Mogadishu for a three-month visit in 2009, then moved to Somalia for good in March of the following year. She said she didn't believe he was among the gunmen seen in the footage.
Just days after Dhuhulow's identity became known, Norwegian police issued international alerts for two Norwegian-Somali sisters, ages 16 and 19, who told their family they were traveling to Syria to join the civil war. They were last spotted on the Turkish-Syrian border.
"We see a growing problem when it comes to people traveling to war zones, and specifically the last year we've seen a growing number of persons traveling to Syria," Bjoernland said.
She said between 30-40 people have left Norway to take part in the Syrian civil war, but added that the number is uncertain and may be bigger.
That conflict has attracted hundreds of foreign fighters from European countries, many of whom have joined Islamic militant groups. Western security services are concerned that they could pose terror threats when they return home with combat experience and terrorist training — and possibly traumatized.
"When they are radicalized and when they are determined to go, for instance to Syria or other conflict areas, we don't have many legal measures to stop them," Bjoernland said.
Norway just recently made it illegal to receive training from terror groups. But even with that law it is difficult for authorities to prove that a suspected want-to-be militant is traveling abroad to train with or join jihadist groups.
"We do preventive work. We talk to them. We try to persuade them not to go, because it's a dangerous journey," Bjoernland said. "I wish we were more successful. We have succeeded in turning some around from traveling. But quite a few have actually left."
She called on other parts of society, including parents, child protective services, police and Muslim leaders to intervene when young Muslims are at risk of becoming radicalized.
At an event in San Francisco the popular professional networking service LinkedIn introduced a revamped iPad app along with Intro, a new service that hooks into Apple's Mail app to give you LinkedIn intel on your contacts. It works with most popular mail services, according to Engadget.
With an Intro profile installed on your iPhone and some reconfiguring of your Mail inbox, a new button appears underneath the header of inbound messages, linking the sender to their LinkedIn profile (if applicable). Expanded the profile shows you the contact's connections, experience and other information.
The new iPad version has a more iOS 7-inspired design and special features specific to the iPad release, like a gesture system that lets you add new members, like content, comment and share directly from the feed. The free app is available for download now.
LinkedIn is also readying a new release of Pulse, the news reader app that they acquired earlier this year. The new version of Pulse also sports an iOS 7-inspired design, a commenting system that works through LinkedIn and other new features. Its release is still pending.