Muzaffar Salman/Reuters
People gathered to search for survivors under rubble after what activists said was a Scud missile hit in Aleppo's Tariq al Bab neighborhood on Friday.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Antigovernment activists in Syria said Scud missiles fired by the Syrian military slammed into at least three rebel-held districts of Aleppo on Friday, flattening dozens of houses, leaving at least 12 civilians dead and burying an undetermined number of others, perhaps dozens, under piles of rubble.
The assertion, corroborated by videos posted on the Internet, came one day after Syrian government targets in central Damascus were hit by multiple car bombings that were among the deadliest and most destructive so far in the nearly two-year-old conflict.
The reported attack on Aleppo’s Hamra, Tariq al Bab and Hanano areas with Scuds, which are not known for their accuracy, was the second time this week that the Syrian opposition has accused the military of using such missiles on Aleppo’s rebel-held areas.
Aleppo, the embattled northern city that was once Syria’s commercial capital during more peaceful times, has become one of the focal points of rebellion in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. On Tuesday, according to activists in Aleppo, a Syrian missile leveled part of Jabal Badro, another neighborhood controlled by the rebels, killing at least 19 people.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with contacts inside Syria, said in a statement that the victims of missile explosions in Aleppo on Friday included children and that the number of victims “is expected to rise significantly because there are dozens of wounded under the rubble.”
There was no immediate mention of the Aleppo attacks by Syria’s state-run media. The Web site of Syria’s official SANA news agency was dominated by the aftermath of the car bombings that had hit central Damascus on Thursday and had left more than 70 people dead. The ferocity and scope of those bombings were unusual for central Damascus, which up until now has been largely insulated from much of the carnage and destruction wrought by the conflict in the outer Damascus suburbs and other parts of the country.
Most of the casualties in Damascus were caused by an especially powerful bomb near the headquarters of President Assad’s Baath Party and the Embassy of Russia, which were both damaged, according to witnesses contacted inside Damascus and Russian news reports. SANA said a hospital and neighboring schools also were damaged.
No group has taken responsibility for the Damascus bombings but the government has said they were carried out by terrorists, its generic description of the alliance of armed rebels seeking to depose Mr. Assad. The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main Syrian group for the opposition which was meeting in Cairo at the time, condemned the bombings, as did its Western supporters, including the United States.
Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the United States denounces such bombings as “indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians or against diplomatic facilities, which violate international law, and we continue to emphasize that perpetrators on all sides have to be held accountable.”
Nonetheless, the bombings appeared to create a new source of diplomatic friction between the United States and Russia, which has consistently supported the Syrian government during the conflict and has rejected any proposed solution that would force Mr. Assad to relinquish power.
Russia’s mission to the United Nations accused the United States of blocking its attempt to seek approval of a Security Council statement that would have condemned the Damascus bombings as terrorism. The United States mission denied the Russian accusation, saying it had only requested that the Russian statement include a paragraph that also condemned the Syrian government’s “continued, indiscriminate use of heavy weaponry against civilians.”
Erin Pelton, a spokeswoman for the United States mission, said in news release posted Friday on its Web site that “Unfortunately, if predictably, Russia rejected the U.S. suggested language as ‘totally unacceptable’ and withdrew its draft statement.”
Other insurgency-related violence was reported by the Syrian Observatory and other activists elsewhere in Syria on Friday, including random sniping attacks in the north-central city of Raqqa that killed four people during an antigovernment demonstration, and seven people killed around a mosque in Dara’a, the southern city where the anti-Assad uprising first began in March 2011.
The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad network of activists, reported that fighters from the Free Syrian Army and other groups had taken control of at least two military facilities in the suburbs of Deir al-Zour, the eastern city that has been a battleground for many months. The report, which could not be corroborated, also claimed that rebels had gained control of a missile facility in Deir al-Zour that was formerly the site of a partly built nuclear reactor bombed by Israeli warplanes in 2007. Syria disclosed the existence of the missile facility four years ago at a technical meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
An Orange County anesthesiologist convicted of sexually assaulting three unconscious female patients has been sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation, despite the objections of prosecutors who wanted state prison time.
Yashwant Balgiri Giri, 60, pleaded guilty to a court offer to multiple felony counts related to the sexual battery of patients, including a 16-year-old, according to a statement from the Orange County district attorney's office.
Giri will have to register as a lifetime sex offender and will have his medical license revoked, in addition to the jail time and probation.
Prosecutors sought a state prison sentence, citing a violation of his "position of power and trust" with the women at a particularly vulnerable time.
Giri, who lives in Cypress, was working at Placentia-Linda Hospital at the time of the crimes, prosecutors said. He previously worked at several hospitals in Anaheim and Lakewood.
Through a spokeswoman, Placentia-Linda Hospital declined to comment.
Prosecutors said that in February 2009, while a 16-year-old was unconscious from medication, Giri assaulted the girl when a scrub nurse preparing surgery tools had her back turned. The nurse witnessed the assault, prosecutors said, and reported it immediately to a hospital official.
Prosecutors allege that the hospital did not report the incident to police at the time.
In March 2011, prosecutors said, a hospital employee witnessed Giri fondling the breasts of a 36-year-old woman while she was under anesthesia for an outpatient surgery procedure.
An employee allegedly witnessed the incident Prosecutors said the fondling continued for an extended period of time, as his actions were concealed from the surgeon and nurse.
Soon after an investigation began, Giri resigned from his duties at the hospital.
After he was arrested in May 2011, a third alleged victim stepped forward, saying she had been assaulted by Giri.
In April 2010, prosecutors said, Giri assaulted a 27-year-old woman while she was being put under anesthesia but before she was unconscious. Prosecutors said he touched the woman under the pretense of performing an examination, although it had no legitimate medical purpose.
During a sentencing hearing, a statement from the then-36-year-old woman, who was fondled, was read by prosecutors.
"His actions make me question every single doctor, nurse, medical decision and procedure I encounter within my everyday life," she said. "I not only fear for myself, I fear for my child, my friends, my family. This is a burden caused by the perverted actions of this predator."
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-- Rick Rojas
Photo: Yashwant Balgiri Giri. Credit: Orange County district attorney's office.
02/20/2013 at 04:30 PM ET
AKM-GSI (2)
Miley Cyrus has been very open about fiancé Liam Hemsworth’s fondness for her bold new do — and he’s obviously a fan of her increasingly funky ensembles as well.
And now that we’ve spotted Hemsworth’s brother Chris out with his wife, Elsa Pataky, who’s rocking a Cyrus-esque ensemble herself, we have to wonder: do the Hemsworth boys have a type?
Both of the Aussie hotties’ significant others share an affinity for shredded denim, chunky engineer boots and choppy, super-short blonde hair.
And when we spotted the tiny girls standing next to the bulky brothers, both clad in V-necks, slouchy jeans and aviators, we admit we had to do a double take to deduce which couple was which.
Fortunately, Chris travels with the ultimate accessory — his adorable baby daughter — which makes them a bit easier to tell apart. But we still have to guess there’s a lot of confusion around the Hemsworth household at holidays.
Tell us: Do you and your siblings go for the same “type?” Are you amused that the Hemsworth boys seem to?
–Alex Apatoff
GET MORE STAR DATE STYLE INSPIRATION HERE!
For the March issue of The Atlantic, I spoke with linguists about this thingggg we’re doing with words — a growing habit in which otherwise reasonable people cavalierly add extra letters to the words in their texts, emails, tweets, and so forth — to find out why. One of the experts I met while working on that piece was Tyler Schnoebelen, a recent PhD from Stanford who wrote his dissertation on emotion in language and blogs about newsworthy word-findings at Corpus Linguistics. He’s been focusing lately on the phenomenon of word lengthening or “expressive lengthening” on Twitter. (He’s also one of the researchers behind a recent study about how men and women tweet.) For his dissertation, he analyzed data consisting of 3,775,174 tweets from 102,304 different English-speaking authors, tweeted in the six months between January to June of 2011 in the U.S. He was looking at the way people used emoticons in their tweets, but in that exploration he found something else: Along with those emoticons, people were adding letters to their words, too. Or toooooo. In the interest of learning more about why word lengthening exists, even on an inherently character-limited social media platform like Twitter, I turned to him with a few questions.
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What words get lengthened the most on Twitter, and why? The main ones are the expressive things you don’t think of as words — mmmm, oh, ah, aw. You can put as many letters on those as you want. That gets extended to words like hey, no, yes, and the letters that get extended are usually the ones you can hold onto, vowels or ns or ses. Then it gets even crazier — OMgggg or LMAOoo or LOLlll, though you’re not actually saying “laughing my ass off off off” or “laugh out loud loud loud loud.” From that there’s extending real words you can’t pronounce, shittttt or happppppy or amazinggggg. You start with these expressions that don’t have a proper spelling, things no one tells you how to write, and you add and go beyond that to make words more affective and expressive.
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You wrote a post about a friend who’d seen the word dumb tweeted as DUMBBB, which inspired you to take a look at which specific letters were added most frequently and why. Ooo was a big winner. Why do you think people pick the particular letters they do? People love the o! I think it’s something about rounding your lips; it’s iconic of getting your mouth around something. Your lips, pursing forward, going out into the world … there’s something there.
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What about the more unusual added letters, like b or g? I think the gs are the most fun. People who use them are really taking this idea that you can extend things and going crazy with it. You can’t pronounce a word like Omgggg, but it’s been lifted away from the speech itself. In real speech, which is normally face to face, there are so many different ways to communicate — I’m not just happy but really happy — but we don’t have that in a tweet or text or email. Adding letters is a version of a big intonation, raised eyebrows.
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In terms of voicing, vowels make sense to lengthen because when we’re speaking that’s what we’re doing. Sometimes there are consonants, s or n, we do that in speech, too. But you don’t pronounce the b in dumb in English, so what does adding that letter mean? The end is a nice attractive spot, maybe, that gets across that you’re doing something. Clearly when people are doing this they’re being playful.
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So this is all about adding feeling to our too-brief 140-character missives? It’s not a waste of space, I guess, because of emotional layering gained? If you look at these words, a lot of them are from the expressive class. You’re already expressing some emotional state with them — aw — or you’re using them for augmentative purposes, like so and lots of affirmatives and negations: yeahhh, nooo, yesssss. But I think it’s telling that some of the other more frequent words that get extra letters are unpronounceable. People are trying to give some flavor to the communication. These additions really help get the point across and share intonation. That’s part of it: You can hear them in your ear.
Are specific usages unique to different people or subsets of Twitter? People using LMFAOOO tend to talk about Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj; there’s a hip-hop feel to that. People who write knowww with extra ws or youuu with extra us also use the word mum, they spell thankyou as one word, and they use xoxoxo.
Do you add letters to tweets or emails or texts? I’m a fond of adding extra ooos like most poeple. I don’t think I do it excessively. I tend to make my hms a single.
There’s also a kind of a social meme-ing to these things. I’m tempted to use v. for very but I can’t help but associate that with Bridget Jones, who does that in her diary, and I have a problem with someone reading me as Bridget Jones. I tentatively aded a v. in a tweet the other day. I rearranged and deleted and put it back several times. Other people may not have a reference like this.
It makes you wonder how long the “curse of Bridget Jones” will hold. Speaking of things evolving and changing, this kind of behavior tends to inspire rants about how proper language and grammar is dying. What do you think about that? As far as I understand, [the ranters] are full of it. This represents changing conventions; we’re not becoming impaired. We all have cues, while we’re talking on the phone, for instance, and we’d have even more if we were face to face. What we’re usually doing is negotiating what we know about a particular person and what we know about people in general. It has to do with expectations, my experience with you and everybody else. We generally accommodate each other. Over the course of a conversation, our vowels become more alike. Any of these things can be going on below our level of awareness, or they can come up to our level of awareness. We can tweak them, we can notice them.
Your research focused on tweets in which people had used emoticons. Do you think emoticon-users are more likely to add letters to the words they tweet? They very much do exist together, emoticons and adding letters. It’s easy to call these habits nonstandard, but whether they’re really nonstandard …10 percent of tweets use emoticons. As for the percent of letters added to words, I don’t know. They’re clearly very frequent, especially the expressive sound ones. Emoticons and added letters are not warring with each other; in fact, they go together very well. It’s speculation, but my guess is, if you’re fine with lengthening, you’re probably fine adding emoticons.
What other things do people do on Twitter in order to convey emotion? Other types of punctuation. You can underline, you can bold, you can do all caps. People do all caps all the time. Putting asterisks around words has existed for a long time, and tends to be used on the internet with verbs indicating what you are doing at the moment (*smiles*). Or you see underscore, word, underscore. Those punctuation techniques will give you a sense that this is important, but not a sense of how it’s said. The all-caps gives you a sense of how it’s said, but many people hear or read it as shouting, and you don’t always mean to do that. The awwwww (expressing condolences) is not something you shout. You can’t shout mmmm.
Mmmmm. Do you see an end to the “trend” of adding letters? Once we get to the point of digesting audio tweets, we won’t need to add letters.
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Last Update, 4:47 p.m. In the aftermath of a deadly bombing in Damascus on Thursday, a man emerged from a small knot of bystanders crowded around a camera crew from Syrian state television to vent his anger at the foreign Islamist fighters he held responsible. “We the Syrian people,” he said, “place the blame on the Nusra Front, the Takfiri oppressors and armed Wahhabi terrorists from Saudi Arabia that are armed and trained in Turkey.”
A report on Thursday’s bombing in Damascus from Syrian state television’s YouTube channel.
Pointing at the ruined street near the headquarters of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Baath Party, the man described the location as “a civilian place — a mosque, an elementary school, the homes of local families.”
Watching a copy of the report online, Rime Allaf, a Syrian writer monitoring the conflict from Vienna, noticed that this man on the street, whose views so closely echoed those of the Syrian government, had a very familiar face. That is because, as opposition activists demonstrated last June, the same man had already appeared at least 18 times in the forefront or background of such reports since the start of the uprising.
After she posted a screenshot of the man’s latest appearance, Ms. Allaf observed on Twitter that “it would be funny if there weren’t so many victims of Syria regime terrorism!”
As The Lede noted last year, the man was even featured in two reports the same day during a small pro-Assad rally in Damascus.
Two pro-Assad television channels in Syria interviewed the same man on the street at a rally in July 2012.
Mocking the dark comedy of government-run channels recycling the same die-hard Assad supporter in so many reports, activists put together several video compilations of his appearances in the state media. The most comprehensive, posted online last June, featured excerpts from 18 reports.
A compilation of Syrian state media reports featuring the same Assad supporter again and again.
Another highlight reel, uploaded to YouTube 13 months ago by a government critic, showed that after the man had spoken at least five times on state-run television, he appeared in the background of a BBC report wearing a military uniform.
A man who is frequently interviewed on Syrian state television in civilian dress appeared in the background of a BBC report wearing a military uniform.
As longtime readers of The Lede may recall, during the dispute over Iran’s 2009 presidential election, opposition bloggers noticed that one particularly die-hard supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also appeared again and again and again in photographs of pro-government rallies.
While there is no way to determine just who is responsible for Syrian television’s frequent interviews with this same man on the street, there is some evidence that Iran has advised Syria on how to report bombings on state television.
Last year, when The Guardian published a trove of hacked e-mails taken from the in-boxes of Syrian officials, one message forwarded to the president appeared to include advice from Iranian state television’s bureau chief in Damascus on what his Syrian counterparts should report after bombings. That e-mail, from Hussein Mortada, a Lebanese journalist who runs coverage of Syria for the Iranian government’s satellite news channels, complained that the government was not heeding directions he had received “from Iran and Hezbollah,” the Lebanese militant group, about who Syria should blame for bomb attacks. “It is not in our interest to say that Al Qaeda is behind” every bombing, Mr. Mortada wrote, “because such statements clear the U.S. administration and the Syrian opposition of any responsibility.”
There were few details Wednesday on how the body of a missing Canadian tourist ended up at the bottom of a water tank on the roof of a downtown hotel.
For days, residents of the Cecil Hotel thought something was amiss. At least one said there was flooding in one of the fourth-floor rooms, while others complained about weak water pressure.
One of those complaints led a hotel maintenance worker to check Tuesday on one of the large metal water cisterns on the roof, where he discovered the body of an unidentified woman in her 20s at the bottom of the tank.
Authorities said late Tuesday the body was that of Elisa Lam, 21, a Vancouver, Canada, woman last seen at the hotel Jan. 31.
"We're not ruling out foul play," said LAPD Sgt. Rudy Lopez, noting that the location of the remains "makes it suspicious."
Los Angeles police investigators searched the roof of the Cecil with the aid of dogs when Lam was reported missing about three weeks ago. Lopez said he didn't know if the tanks were examined.
"We did a very thorough search of the hotel," he said. "But we didn't search every room; we could only do that if we had probable cause" that a crime had been committed.
Once a destination for the rich and famous in the 1930s and '40s, the Cecil has gradually deteriorated, mirroring the decay of downtown Los Angeles, particularly in the skid row area. With rock-bottom rents and flexible stays, the historic 1927 building attracted those who were a step away from homelessness.
The Cecil also became a magnet for criminal activity. Most notably it was the occasional home to infamous serial killers Jack Unterweger and Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez. Even after a multimillion-dollar makeover in 2008, police said they frequently respond to the Cecil for calls relating to domestic abuse and narcotics.
In 2010, the hotel was the scene of a bizarre incident in which a Los Angeles city firefighter who had been honored as paramedic of the year said he was stabbed while responding to a distress call. But police found inconsistencies in the story and no assailant was ever located.
On Tuesday, the Cecil grappled with a deeper mystery.
According to detectives with the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division, Lam came to Los Angeles from Vancouver on Jan. 26. While they did not discuss her exact movements or whether she visited anyone here, they believe her ultimate destination was Santa Cruz. Lam's reasons for visiting California were unclear, detectives said.
She was last seen Jan. 31 inside the elevator of the hotel. In surveillance footage, Lam is seen pushing buttons for multiple floors and at one point stepping out of the elevator, waving her arms.
A cause of death is still to be determined by county coroner’s officials, Lopez said.
A locked door that only employees have access to and a fire escape are the only ways to get to the roof. The door is equipped with an alarm system that notifies hotel personnel if someone is up there, Lopez said.
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— Andrew Blankstein and Adolfo Flores
MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida Governor Rick Scott backed a limited expansion of healthcare coverage for the poor on Wednesday, joining six other Republican governors who have agreed to the move under President Barack Obama's landmark reform law.
Scott, a vocal critic of the law known as Obamacare who had balked at expanding Medicaid, only agreed to the expansion after the federal government granted Florida a conditional waiver to privatize Medicaid statewide.
Scott said in a statement that he would only agree to the expansion for three years, however, while the federal government picks up all the costs.
"We will support a three year expansion of our Medicaid program under the new healthcare law, as long as the federal government meets their commitment to pay 100 percent of the cost during this time. This legislation would sunset after three years and need to be reauthorized," the statement said.
Scott's conditional endorsement of an expanded Medicaid program in Florida, a move that officials have said could add at least 1 million people to the state's Medicaid rolls, must still be approved by the Florida Legislature.
(Reporting by Tom Brown; editing by Andrew Hay)
Jodi Arias
Charlie Leight/The Arizona Republic/AP
"I just remember dropping the knife and being very freaked out and screaming," Arias, 32, said after two weeks of explicit direct testimony about her sex life with Alexander, including their kinky sex shortly before his death. She says the knife was the same one Alexander had used that afternoon when he tied her up for sex.
Facing the death penalty if convicted, Arias says her memory of June 4, 2008, clears up when she put the knife in the dishwasher. Driving off barefoot, she brought with her the rope she said Alexander had used to tie her up and a gun that she pulled from the top of his walk-in closet before shooting him.
"I was very scared and very upset. ... I just wanted to die," Arias testified. "I thought, 'My life is probably done now.'"
She says she decided to bury those feelings and try to act normal as she drove north into Utah to visit another man with whom she already had plans to see.
She says she tossed the gun in the desert, dropped the rope in a Dumpster near St. George, Utah, washed the blood from her hands with a case of bottled Costco water she kept in her trunk and put on a spare pair of work shoes.
The man she met, Ryan Burns, earlier testified that Arias was frisky and affectionate when she visited on June 5. Arias testified that she kissed Burns and cuddled with him the day after killing Alexander because, "I felt safe right there and, I figured, I just wanted to seem normal, like I didn't just do what I just did."
Arias also talked about how she and Alexander, a charismatic Mormon motivational speaker, had an off-and-on relationship in which he sometimes become violent or sadistic.
She says she had arrived at his Mesa, Ariz. home at 5 a.m. and although they took photos and video of themselves having sex, Alexander repeatedly became enraged with her – first for giving him badly scratched CDs of photographs of their trips together, then for dropping his camera.
She says that as Alexander chased her through a walk-in closet "like a linebacker," she grabbed a gun that she knew he kept on a top shelf. She says that she held up the gun, expecting that Alexander would stop charging at her, but he didn't.
"The gun went off, I didn't even mean to shoot, I didn't know my hand was on the trigger," Arias testified. She says that, as they wrestled on the ground, she assumed that she'd shot a hole in the wall, not that she'd hit Alexander. After that, she says, "there's a lot of that day that I don't remember, there's a lot of gaps.
"I have no memory of stabbing him," Arias told jurors, who have heard graphic testimony that Alexander was shot in the head and repeatedly stabbed, and that his throat was slashed ear to ear.
Arias testified she remembers standing in his bathroom, dropping the knife on the hard floor, and thinking, "that I just couldn't believe what had just happened and I couldn't rewind the clock and take it back." She did not recall dragging him to the bathroom or placing him in the shower, she said.
Arias also testified that she still loves Alexander – "It's a different love but yes, I do."
Since the slaying, Arias has changed her story, first saying she had no connection to the crime, then saying two masked intruders killed Alexander and almost killed her. "I basically told everyone what I could remember of the day, and that the intruder story was all B.S.," Arias said Wednesday afternoon at the close of her testimony.
Prosecutors suggest Arias killed Alexander out of jealousy after he pushed her out of his life and started dating someone else, and that the gun was actually a pistol that she stole from her grandparents' home in Yreka, Calif., weeks earlier.
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