Pedometers play up every step you take

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Pedometers have ticked off many miles since Leonardo da Vinci sketched his version, essentially a pendulum for walkers, in the 15th century.

While step counting will never be a magic fitness pill, experts say this most pedestrian of gadgets can put extra spring in an ambulatory routine.

“Just as a watch can’t make a person be on time, a pedometer can’t make a person active,” said Dr. Barbara Bushman, an exercise specialist and personal trainer with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). “But it’s a good tool for promoting physical activity.”

Bushman said research has shown that in various populations, wearing a pedometer helps with weight loss, as well as encouraging focus on physical activity.

A summary of 26 different studies showed that pedometer users walked at least 2,000 more steps each day than nonusers, according to the Harvard Health Letter, produced by experts at Harvard Medical School. Also, using a pedometer helped them increase overall physical activity levels by 27 percent.

For most healthy adults, 10,000 steps per day is a reasonable goal, according to ACSM.

Bushman recommends pedometers as an adjunct to activity and notes that old-fashioned pedometers can be an inexact measure of exercise volume. Position also matters.

“Tilting, angling, placing it off the body or on a loose waistband can affect accuracy,” she said, noting the devices don’t pick up non-ambulatory activities, such as stationary cycling or rowing.

She did a study with third-graders who wore the pedometers to encourage them to be more active during recess.

“But they figured out if they just jiggled in the seat they could trick the counter,” she said. “It did make them fidget more.”

INCREASING FITNESS AWARENESS

To test the accuracy of a pedometer, Bushman suggests, count out 20 paces. If the counter reads within 18 to 22, it’s considered a reasonably accurate step counter.

Gregory Chertok, a sport psychology counselor and fitness trainer at the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Center in Englewood, New Jersey, said studies show that just wearing a pedometer can increase fitness awareness.

“A pedometer is almost like a workout buddy, an ever-present truth teller,” he said. “It provides constant, immediate feedback, and so acts as a behavior modification tool.”

There is also the power of numbers.

“Most goals people set are measurable, numeric, so just having the number can encourage you to set your own goal,” he said.

Chertok added that pedometers also help people realize that everyday activities, such as walking up stairs or through supermarket aisles, count toward that goal.

MONITORING PROGRESS

“Accountability is a big issue,” Chertok explained, “accountability and social support.”

Just as working out in groups increases exercise adherence, he suggests, a pedometer can be effective because people know they are being monitored, even if you’re monitoring yourself.

To build a better pedometer, companies are moving from the spring-load, or old-fashioned, to microchip.

Garmin Ltd’s 201 model is a wrist unit that uses GPS satellites to trace your outdoor workout. Besides showing speed, distance, pace, time and laps, it can even point you back to your starting place.

Using MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) technology, the technology in very small devices, Striiv is among the companies making pedometers that are smarter and contain no moving parts.

“It’s the next generation,” said Dave Wang, chief executive of the Redwood City, California-based company.

The new technology, he maintains, improves stepping accuracy to within one percent of every 100 steps on normal terrain.

Last month the company rolled out a free iPhone app that can be used alone or in conjunction with its Play Smart Pedometer that enables users to compete in various games and challenges via Facebook and email.

The new generation of pedometers can track running, and even climbing, but calories remain the final frontier.

“Calories are a little hard,” Wang admits, although his pedometers do take a stab at it.

“We look at your height, your weight, your gender, your age, your cadence, your altimeter increase if you’re walking up a hill,” he said. “But at the end of the day … it’s a guess.”

(Editing by Patricia Reaney and Jeffrey Benkoe)

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Top 5 Apps Your Kids Will Love This Week

Chris Crowell is a veteran kindergarten teacher and contributing editor to Children’s Technology Review, a web-based archive of articles and reviews on apps, technology toys and video games. Download a free issue of CTR here.

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Spot the Dot

$ 3.99 Ages 3-up Overall rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars Why we like it: Spot the Dot turns a children’s book into a lively, engaging experience. Based on the book by David Carter, Spot the Dot is a “needle in the haystack” or “I Spy” type of app, where the same item — a small colored dot, is hidden in nine screens. Need to know: On some pages the dot is hidden in a moving illustration, and the dot moves around, extending the utility of this app, despite the limited number of pages. This is a great app for a group of children to play together. Ease of use: 9/10 Educational: 10/10 Entertaining: 9/10

Click here to view this gallery.

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If you’re getting in the mood for the holiday season, A Charlie Brown Christmas is one app that both kids and nostalgic parents are sure to enjoy. And while you’re sharing, why not stretch your brain and see if you remember those isosceles triangles and quadrilaterals as well as your kids do. Those are just some of the apps in store for you this week!

The folks at Children’s Technology Review shared with us these five top apps from their comprehensive monthly database of kid-tested reviews. The site covers everything from math and counting to reading and phonics.

Check back next week for more Top Kids Apps from Children’s Technology Review.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Clarke’s 218 puts Australia on front foot

BRISBANE (Reuters) – Australia captain Michael Clarke scored a brilliant unbeaten double century to give the hosts a remarkable 37-run first innings lead on the fourth day of the first test against South Africa on Monday.

Supported first by a maiden century from opener Ed Cowan in a record stand of 259, and then by Mike Hussey‘s 86 not out, Clarke’s 218 helped lift Australia from 40 for three when he took to the crease on Sunday to 487 for four when stumps were drawn.

It was Clarke’s sixth test century, and his third double hundred, in the 15 tests since he was named captain last year in the wake of the Ashes humiliation and Australia’s quarter-final exit at the World Cup.

Although by no means a chanceless knock, the 31-year-old played with patience when South Africa’s vaunted pacemen got anything out of the Gabba track before punishing anything loose with some fine shot-making.

When he carried his bat back to the pavilion at the end of the day to the raucous cheers of a sparse crowd at the famous Brisbane ground, Clarke had faced 350 balls over 504 minutes and scored 21 fours.

“I’m very happy with that,” Clarke, who accumulated his 1,000 test run of the year during the innings, said in an interview on the boundary.

“I didn’t feel great at the start and I think Ed Cowan batted beautifully.

“We’re in a great position with a 30-odd lead. I’d like another 70 odd runs in the morning and then I want to have a crack with the ball. We’ll see what happens.”

Cowan departed for 136 in heartbreaking fashion just before tea, run out at the non-striker’s end when Dale Steyn got a finger to a Clarke drive that hit the stumps and the opener was caught out of his crease backing up.

RECORD PARTNERSHIP

His partnership with Clarke was an Australian record for the fourth wicket at the Gabba, beating the 245 Clarke and Mike Hussey made against Sri Lanka in 2007.

Cowan’s wicket was the only wicket to fall on the day and Hussey started pouring on the runs as if determined to get the record back for his own partnership with his captain.

The 37-year-old bucked his poor recent form against South Africa by reaching his half century off just 68 balls with a drive through long-off and was closing on a century of his own when play ended.

It was Hussey’s cut four off Morne Morkel with which Australia overhauled South Africa’s first innings tally of 450 and put themselves in with an unlikely chance of even winning a test which lost an entire day to rain on Saturday.

Clarke’s negotiation of the “nervous nineties” for his century had been fraught and he was nearly run out going for a second run that would have brought him to the hundred mark.

There were no such jitters on his approach to the two hundred mark, which he passed by slapping the ball through mid-on for two runs before giving the badge on his helmet another kiss.

Cowan’s century was a retort to those critics who have consistently questioned his place in the team since he made his debut in last year’s Melbourne test against India.

The 30-year-old lefthander reached the mark two overs after lunch by pulling a short Vernon Philander delivery for four to the square leg boundary, beginning his joyous celebrations before the ball hit the rope.

South Africa’s number one test ranking is on the line in the series, which continues with matches in Adelaide and Perth after Brisbane.

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More than one U.S. soldier shot Afghans, says local investigator

TACOMA (Reuters) – A shooting rampage in March that left 16 Afghans dead in two villages was the work of more than one person, an Afghan police investigator testified on Sunday, contradicting the U.S. government’s account.

Military prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accusing him of killing the villagers, mostly women and children, when he ventured out of his remote camp on two revenge-fueled forays over a five-hour period in March.

The government believes Bales was solely responsible for the deaths, and survivors have testified to seeing only a single soldier. But several indirect accounts have suggested that more than one U.S. soldier was involved.

“One person did not have the courage to go to the villages in the dark of night,” Major Khudai Dad, the Afghan Uniform Police’s chief of criminal techniques in Kandahar City, told a hearing at a U.S. Army base via video link from Kandahar.

“There’s no way it is one person,” said Dad, speaking through an interpreter. Dad visited three compounds several thousand meters apart in the villages of Alkozai and Najiban around 8 a.m. on March 11, hours after the attacks.

“One person cannot do this work,” said Dad, adding that he spent only one hour at the three compounds, fearing Taliban attacks.

Dad was the sole witness on the seventh day of testimony before an ‘Article 32′ hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, which will establish whether Bales will face a court martial and possible death penalty if found guilty.

The shootings in Kandahar province marked the worst case of civilian slaughter blamed on an individual U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War and damaged already strained U.S.-Afghan relations.

SECOND SHOOTER THEORY

On Saturday, a U.S. investigator told the hearing that the wife of one of the victims told her during questioning in June that she saw more than one soldier on the night in question.

Army criminal investigator Leona Mansapit said the wife of Mohamed Dawood, who was killed in the village of Najiban, recalled a gunman entering the couple’s room shouting about the Taliban, while another man, a U.S. soldier, stood at the door.

This woman was persuaded by male family members not to testify to the hearing, an Army source, who asked not to be named, said on Sunday.

Dad said he took bullet shells from three different compounds, which were several kilometers apart, and turned them over to the Afghan National Army, who passed them on to U.S. investigators.

“In those three areas, where the incidents were, I was thinking and I’m thinking that is not a thing that one person would do,” he said.

A veteran of four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bales faces 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder, as well as charges of assault and wrongfully possessing and using steroids and alcohol while deployed.

Prosecutors have already presented physical evidence to tie Bales to the crime scene, with a forensic investigator saying a sample of blood on his clothing matched a swab taken in one of the compounds where the shooting occurred.

Bales’ lawyers have not set out an alternative theory to the prosecution case, but have pointed out inconsistencies in testimony and highlighted incidents before the shooting in which Bales lost his temper easily, possibly setting up an argument that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Gathering evidence and witness statements was complicated by the speedy burial of victims, the inability of U.S. investigators to access the crime scenes for three weeks after the violence, and the dispersal of possible witnesses after treatment at a Kandahar hospital.

(Reporting By Laura L. Myers, writing by Bill Rigby; Editing by John Stonestreet)

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BBC must reform or die, says Trust chairman

LONDON (Reuters) – The BBC could be doomed unless it makes radical changes, the head of its governing trust said on Sunday, after its director general quit to take the blame for the airing of false child sex abuse allegations against a former politician.

Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, said confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch‘s media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.

“If you’re saying, ‘Does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul?’, then absolutely it does, and that is what we will have to do,” Patten, a one-time senior figure in Prime Minister David Cameron‘s Conservative Party and the last British governor of Hong Kong, told BBC television.

“The basis for the BBC’s position in this country is the trust that people have in it,” Patten said. “If the BBC loses that, it’s over.”

George Entwistle resigned as director general on Saturday, just two months into the job, to take responsibility for the child sex allegation on the flagship news programme Newsnight.

The witness in the report, who says he suffered sexual abuse at a care home in the late 1970s, said on Friday he had misidentified the politician, Alistair McAlpine. Newsnight admitted it had not shown the witness a picture of McAlpine, or approached McAlpine for comment before going to air.

Already under pressure after revelations that a long-time star presenter, the late Jimmy Savile, was a paedophile, Entwistle conceded on the BBC morning news that he had not known – or asked – who the alleged abuser was until the name appeared in social media.

The BBC, celebrating its 90th anniversary, is affectionately known in Britain as “Auntie”, and respected around much of the world.

But with 22,000 staff working at eight national TV channels, 50 radio stations and an extensive Internet operation, critics say it is hampered by a complex and overly bureaucratic and hierarchical management structure.

THOMPSON’S LEGACY

Journalists said this had become worse under Entwistle’s predecessor Mark Thompson, who took over in the wake of the last major crisis to hit the corporation and is set to become chief executive of the New York Times Co on Monday.

In that instance, both director general and chairman were forced out after the BBC was castigated by a public inquiry over a report alleging government impropriety in the fevered build up to war in Iraq, leading to major organisational changes.

One of the BBC’s most prominent figures, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, said since the Iraq report furore, management had become bloated while cash had been cut from programme budgets.

“He (Entwistle) has been brought low by cowards and incompetents,” Paxman said in a statement, echoing a widely-held view that Entwistle was a good man who had been let down by his senior staff.

Prime Minister Cameron appeared ready to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, believing that “one of the great institutions of this country” could reform and deal with its failings, according to sources in his office.

Patten, who must find a new director general to sort out the mess, agreed that management structures had proved inadequate.

“Apparently decisions about the programme went up through every damned layer of BBC management, bureaucracy, legal checks – and still emerged,” he said.

“One of the jokes I made, and actually it wasn’t all that funny, when I came to the BBC … was that there were more senior leaders in the BBC then there were in the Chinese Communist Party.”

Patten ruled out resigning himself but other senior jobs are expected to be on the line, while BBC supporters fear investigative journalism will be scaled back. He said he expected to name Entwistle’s successor in weeks, not months.

Among the immediate challenges are threats of litigation.

McAlpine, a close ally of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has indicated he will sue for damages.

Claims for compensation are also likely from victims who say Savile, one of the most recognisable personalities on British television in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, sexually abused them as children, sometimes on BBC premises.

INQUIRIES

Two inquiries are already under way, looking at failures at Newsnight and allegations relating to Savile, both of which could make uncomfortable reading for senior figures.

Police have also launched a major inquiry into Savile’s crimes and victims’ allegations of a high-profile paedophile ring. Detectives said they had arrested their third suspect on Sunday, a man in his 70s from Cambridgeshire in central England.

Funded by an annual licence fee levied on all TV viewers, the BBC has long been resented by its commercial rivals, who argue it has an unfair advantage and distorts the market.

Murdoch’s Sun tabloid gleefully reported Entwistle’s departure with the headline “Bye Bye Chump” and Patten said News Corp and others would put the boot in, happy to deflect attention after a phone-hacking scandal put the newspaper industry under intense and painful scrutiny.

He said that “one or two newspapers, Mr. Murdoch’s papers” would love to see the BBC lose its national status, “but I think the great British public doesn’t want to see that happen”.

Murdoch himself was watching from afar.

“BBC getting into deeper mess. After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as paedophile,” he wrote on his Twitter website on Saturday.

It is not just the BBC and the likes of Entwistle and Patten who are in the spotlight.

Thompson, whom Entwistle succeeded in mid-September, has also faced questions from staff at the New York Times over whether he is still the right person to take one of the biggest jobs in American newspaper publishing.

Britain’s Murdoch-owned Sunday Times queried how Thompson could have been unaware of claims about Savile during his tenure at the BBC as he had told British lawmakers, saying his lawyers had written to the paper addressing the allegations in early September, while he was still director general.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey and Sophie Hares)

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Still photos from Hitchcock’s “Mountain Eagle” film up for auction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A newly discovered collection of still photos from Alfred Hitchcock’s lost silent film “The Mountain Eagle” is going up for auction in Los Angeles next month.

On Thursday, auction house Profiles in History said the 59 photos were made for the British thriller director’s personal archive in the 1920s. Thirty-five of the photos come from Hitchcock‘s 1929 silent film “The Manxman,” and 24 from “The Mountain Eagle,” which are expected to attract the most interest.

The photos are expected to fetch more than $ 25,000 at the December 15-16 auction.

Profiles in History described them as a rare Hollywood treasure, and a window into one of the most searched-for lost films in history.

No prints have been found of Hitchcock’s 1926 film “The Mountain Eagle,” which is one of the top movies in the British Film Institute’s quest for lost films. Only a few still photos have turned up of the black and white film, which Hitchcock described as “awful.”

Researchers have said it was set in Kentucky, but filmed in Austria. The plot revolved around a wicked father, a crippled son and a teacher.

The auction house declined to name the seller, saying the photos came from a source close to Hitchcock who had saved them for decades, unaware of which films they came from.

“The Mountain Eagle” was the second of Hitchcock’s more than 50 films. He is best known for his classic thrillers, including “Psycho” and “The Birds.”

Hitchcock died in 1980 at the age of 80. His legacy is being re-examined in the upcoming feature film “Hitchcock,” starring Anthony Hopkins, and the HBO film “The Girl” starring Toby Jones as the master of suspense.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

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Right or Wrong, Gallup Always Wins

In the weeks before the 2012 election, Gallup was an outlier among political pollsters. It showed an electorate leaning Romney, when most others showed a dead heat. The discrepancy sparked controversy among poll watchers. By the election’s eve, Gallup fell back in line with the consensus, narrowly underestimating President Barack Obama’s support. But for Gallup, the miss hardly matters: Its name was in the papers for weeks leading up to the election. And that’s the point.

Tracking the presidential race every four years is the most public work Gallup does, and it keeps the company’s storied brand in the spotlight from the primaries through the first Tuesday in November. But conducting far less glamorous research that helps businesses hone their operations—much like a management consultant—is how Gallup makes money. Corporations and organizations pay the firm to do everything from querying customers about new services they’d like to quizzing employees about how happy they are with their benefits. The flashier business of tracking the road to the Oval Office is a flyspeck in the company’s operations and means next to nothing to its bottom line. “It’s a small part of what we do overall,” says Frank Newport, Gallup Poll editor-in-chief.

In 1935, George Gallup was head of market research at the advertising firm Young & Rubicam in New York when he opened a small polling shop on his own time. The next year he boldly forecast that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be reelected. The Literary Digest, which ran the biggest and best-known poll at the time, predicted that Roosevelt’s Republican challenger, Alf Landon, would prevail. Gallup, who published the results of his political surveys in a column in the Washington Post, said the Digest had a skewed sample of right-leaning magazine subscribers, car owners, and phone customers. “His political surveys kept finding that the Literary Digest was wrong,” says Susan Ohmer, a professor of film and television at the University of Notre Dame and author of George Gallup in Hollywood. “And he had the guts to say so publicly. He became famous overnight.” In 1948, Gallup gave up his day job at Rubicam, put his name on his polling business, and made it his life’s work. The company continues its much-watched political tracking almost three decades after his death.

“The Gallup Poll is our legacy gift from Dr. Gallup to the United States’ leaders and the world,” says Chief Executive Officer Jim Clifton. The opinion surveys, he says, cost the company about $ 10 million a year and bring in scant revenue. That’s not because they can’t find political customers. Clifton says the company receives requests for “hundreds of projects” but turns them all down. “We don’t work for Democrats or Republicans or any special-interest groups,” he says.

Gallup can afford to lose money on public opinion work because it takes in “high nine figures in revenue,” Clifton says, consulting for about 200 clients, many of them Fortune 500 companies. A privately held company with about 2,000 employees, Gallup occupies an unusual niche between market research and strategic consulting. From centers in Nebraska and Texas, as well as smaller offices in 40 cities around the world, its hundreds of interviewers make thousands of calls every day to ask questions about everything from voting habits and employment status to personality traits and customer satisfaction. Gallup’s statisticians crunch the numbers; their daily political and public opinion results are made available free of charge, burnishing the brand. But most of the interviewing is specifically designed to help give clients advice about getting the most out of employees and serving customers better. The company also has its own publishing imprint that cranks out management titles such as StrengthsFinder 2.0.

Gallup, says Clifton, is not to be confused with market researchers like Nielsen (NLSN) or SymphonyIRI Group that help companies find out their market share in “hubcaps or candy bars.” Its competitors, he says, are consultants such as McKinsey and Bain & Co. Gallup, however, doesn’t give advice about mergers and acquisitions; instead, it focuses on employees and customers. Gallup tracks all of Wells Fargo’s (WFC) 270,000 employees, for instance, with a regular questionnaire to assess aptitude and satisfaction and surveys millions of the bank’s customers to see how it can capture more business.

Clifton became CEO of Gallup in 1988, four years after its founder died, when Clifton’s family company, Selection Research (SRI), bought it for an undisclosed price from Gallup’s sons. According to the New York Times report on the sale, SRI had $ 45 million in revenue at the time, compared with Gallup’s $ 10 million. “The company [Gallup] was losing money,” says Jack Honomichl, who publishes an annual list of the top 50 market-research firms and covered the sale for Advertising Age. SRI, which specialized in personnel testing, bought the firm, Honomichl says, “to get ahold of the Gallup name.” SRI’s own market-research wing was having trouble getting people to stay on the phone. “If you call and say you’re SRI, to be honest about it, they hang up on us, and it ruins the quality of the data,” Clifton told the New York Times then. Things have changed. “We definitely get higher cooperation rates than anybody in the country,” he now says. “That Gallup Poll brand gives us a little cachet. Sort of a Tiffany’s (TIF) thing, rather than a Wal-Mart (WMT).”

The bottom line: Gallup’s call on the presidential vote missed narrowly. Its lesser-known consulting business will still benefit from all the publicity.

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U.S. investigator in Afghan rampage case suggests gunman not alone

TACOMA, Washington (Reuters) – The wife of an Afghan villager killed in a rampage blamed on a decorated U.S. officer told an Army investigator that more than one soldier was present when her husband was shot dead at their home in March, the investigator testified on Saturday.

Military prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accusing him of killing 16 villagers, mostly women and children, when he ventured out of his remote camp on two revenge-fueled forays over a five-hour period in March.

The wife’s account, relayed by Army criminal investigator Leona Mansapit, appeared to cast doubt on the government’s case that Bales alone was responsible for the deaths, although survivors have so far testified to seeing only a single soldier.

The U.S. government, which has been laying out its case against Bales in a pre-trial hearing aimed at deciding whether he can be sent for court martial, says a coherent and lucid Bales acted alone and with “chilling premeditation”.

Mansapit said that the wife of Mohamed Dawood, who was killed in the village of Najiban, recalled a gunman entering the couple’s room shouting about the Taliban, while another man, a U.S. soldier, stood at the door.

The shootings in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province marked the worst case of civilian slaughter blamed on an individual U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War and damaged already strained U.S.-Afghan relations.

Mansapit said the wife, who spoke to her through an interpreter, said one of the men pulled her husband out of the door, while the other stopped her from following. One of the men then put a gun to her husband’s head and killed him, while the other continued to yell about the Taliban, grabbing her by the hair and slamming her head against the wall, she said.

Mansapit, who was called by the defense, recalled the woman as saying that outside there were more soldiers “speaking English among themselves”. She put the woman’s age at about 25 but did not name her. It was not immediately clear whether the wife would testify to the hearing herself.

The testimony came a day after a father and two sons described being attacked by a sole U.S. soldier in their family compound in the Afghan village of Alkozai. So far, the only sworn references to more than one soldier have been second hand.

AFGHAN TESTIMONY

A veteran of four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bales faces 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder, as well as charges of assault and wrongfully possessing and using steroids and alcohol while deployed.

Prosecutors have already presented physical evidence to tie Bales to the crime scene, with a forensic investigator saying a sample of blood on his clothing matched a swab taken in one of the compounds where the shooting occurred.

Bales’ lawyers have not set out an alternative theory to the prosecution’s case, but have pointed out inconsistencies in testimony and highlighted incidents before the shooting where Bales lost his temper easily, possibly setting up an argument that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Gathering evidence and witness statements was complicated by the speedy burial of victims, the inability of U.S. investigators to access the crime scenes for three weeks after the violence, and the dispersal of possible witnesses after treatment at a Kandahar hospital.

Bales’ lead civil defense attorney John Henry Browne, who is in Kandahar to question witnesses, complained early in the investigation that his team was denied access to villagers wounded in the attacks.

One of the villagers, a 15-year-old boy who was wounded in the rampage in Alkozai but survived by hiding, testified to the hearing at a U.S. Army base in Washington state that the shooter wore a U.S. military uniform.

“He put his pistol in my sister’s mouth and then my grandmother started wrestling with him,” the boy, introduced to the court by the single name of Rafiullah, said via video link from Kandahar Air Field. “He shot me in my legs.”

The boy’s testimony was consistent with the recollections of another teenage boy, Sadiquallah, who testified previously that he saw only a single American that night.

(Reporting By Bill Rigby; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Pravin Char)

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Mail.Ru cuts stakes in Groupon, Facebook, Zygna

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian email-to-social networking group Mail.Ru cut its stakes in U.S. internet firms Groupon, Facebook, and Zygna, according to the company’s website.

Mail.Ru now has a 0.52 percent stake in the world’s largest social networking site Facebook, 0.16 percent of U.S. game maker Zynga and 0.84 percent of daily deal website Groupon.

As of October 30, it had a 1.17 percent stake in Zynga, a 0.75 percent stake in Facebook and 4.12 percent of shares in Groupon.

It could raise between $ 200 million and $ 250 million from the sales, said Anastasia Obukhova, an analyst at VTB Capital in Moscow. Mail.Ru declined to comment on the disposals.

“We’ve always been very clear that Groupon, Zynga and Facebook, positioned inside of Mail, are financial assets, not strategic ones,” said Matthew Hammond, the investor relations director at Mail.Ru Group.

At the end of October, Mail.Ru, part-owned by metals tycoon Alisher Usmanov, sold 16 million Facebook shares, worth around $ 370 million, on top of a more than $ 700 million sale as part of Facebook’s initial public offering. That was followed by a hefty dividend payout to Mail.Ru’s shareholders.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova and Anastasia Teterevleva; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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Israel kills Gaza rocket crewman in second day of clashes

GAZA (Reuters) – An Israeli air strike killed a Palestinian militant in the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip on Sunday as a surge in cross-border violence entered its second day, local officials said.

Islamic Jihad, a smaller faction than Hamas which often operates independently, identified the dead man as one of its own, saying he was a member of a rocket crew hit by an Israeli missile in Jabalya, northern Gaza.

The Israeli military confirmed carrying out an air strike in the area. The death brought to six the number of Palestinians killed by Israel since four of its troops were hurt in a missile attack on their jeep along the Gaza boundary fence.

Islamic Jihad said it had fired 70 short-range rockets and mortar bombs across the border since Saturday, salvoes which drove Israeli residents to blast shelters. At least one Israeli, in the town of Sderot, was wounded, ambulance workers said.

Israel described the jeep ambush as part of a Palestinian strategy of trying to curb its countermeasures against possible cross-border infiltration. Israeli forces often mount hunts for tunnels and landmines on the inside of the Gaza boundary, creating a no-go zone for Palestinians.

“Of course we don’t accept their attempt to change the rules,” Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Israel’s Army Radio.

“The essence of the struggle is over the fence. We intend to enable the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) to work not just on our side but on the other side as well.”

Palestinians said four of Saturday’s dead were civilians hit by an Israeli tank shell while paying respects at a crowded mourning tent in Gaza’s Shijaia neighborhood. Israel denies targeting civilians.

The bloodshed puts internal pressure on Hamas, which, though hostile to the Jewish state, has sat out some of the recent rounds of violence as it tried to consolidate its Gaza rule and reach out to neighboring Egypt and other foreign powers.

Israel blames Hamas for any attacks emanating from Gaza, but has shown little appetite for a major sweep of the territory which might strain its own fraught ties to the new Islamist-rooted government in Cairo.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Todd Eastham)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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