Hollywood hacker honed his skills for years

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Long before Christopher Chaney made headlines by hacking into the email accounts of such stars as Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera, two other women say he harassed and stalked them online.

The women, who both knew Chaney, say their lives have been irreparably damaged by his actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid. Both say Chaney was calculated, cruel and creepy: he sent nude photos they had taken of themselves to their family members.

Their accounts as cybervictims serve as a cautionary tale for those, even major celebrities, who snap personal, and sometimes revealing photos.

Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., is set to be sentenced Monday and could face up to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to nine felony counts, including wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer, for hacking into email accounts of Aguilera, Johansson and Mila Kunis.

Aguilera said in a statement that although she knows that she’s often in the limelight, Chaney took from her some of the private moments she shares with friends.

“That feeling of security can never be given back and there is no compensation that can restore the feeling one has from such a large invasion of privacy,” Aguilera said.

Prosecutors said Chaney illegally accessed the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry between November 2010 and October 2011. Aguilera, Kunis and Johansson agreed to have their identities made public with the hopes that the exposure about the case would provide awareness about online intrusion.

The biggest spectacle in the case was the revelation that nude photos taken by Johansson herself and meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds were taken by Chaney and put on the Internet. The “Avengers” actress is not expected to attend the hearing, but she has videotaped a statement that may be shown in court.

Some of Aguilera’s photos appeared online after Chaney sent an email from the account of her stylist, Simone Harouche, to Aguilera asking the singer for scantily clad photographs, prosecutors said.

Chaney forwarded many of the photographs to two gossip websites and another hacker, but there wasn’t evidence he profited from his scheme, authorities said.

For the two women, who were only identified in court papers by their initials, their encounters with Chaney went from friendly to frightening.

One of the women, identified by the initials T.B., said she first met Chaney online in 1999 when she was 13 years old. She began talking with a girl named “Jessica” that later turned out to actually be Chaney.

Chaney figured out his victims’ email passwords and security questions and set a feature to forward a copy of every email they received to an account he controlled.

The woman said that in February 2009 her friends contacted her and let her know that several nude photos of her were uploaded to a public gallery. A year later, Chaney sent a link to a photo-sharing website he created and had her nude pictures sent to her father.

She said she spends several hours a week monitoring the Internet for her personal information and breaks into a sweat whenever she receives a Google alert email notifying her that her name has been mentioned online.

In her letter to U.S. District Judge S. James Otero, she said she thinks Chaney won’t stop and she still feels like he has control over her reputation, relationships and career.

Chaney was arrested in October 2011 as part of a yearlong investigation of celebrity hacking that authorities dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi.” Chaney’s computer hard drive contained numerous private celebrity photos and a document that compiled their extensive personal data, according to a search warrant.

Chaney has since apologized for what he has done, but prosecutors are recommending a nearly six-year prison sentence for him. They also want him to pay $ 150,000 in restitution, including about $ 66,000 to Johansson.

The second woman, identified in court papers only as T.C., said she was a close friend of Chaney’s for more than a decade. As early as 2003 she noticed her passwords were being reset and email she hadn’t looked at had been read by someone. She also said Chaney forwarded an invitation to an online photo gallery to her brother, who eventually saw naked pictures of her.

The woman said the night before she got married, Chaney deleted her email account and she was unable to correspond with a notary until she created a new email address.

In her letter to the judge, the woman said she’s been broken by the physical and emotional toll and can no longer recall what it was like to have a private life.

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Debating Gun Control, Post-Newtown

The Newtown (Conn.) elementary school massacre has reignited the debate about gun control. Firearm skeptics demand new restrictions. Gun proponents insist on respect for Second Amendment rights. Like abortion, guns evoke irreconcilable political and cultural cleavages. We live in a big country. Our conflicting values cannot all be neatly squared.

Still, rational discussion could lead to better understanding, mutual respect across ideological lines, and even some majority-backed changes. Slogans and symbolism contribute little. In that spirit, let’s review some of the proposals that politicians and others will talk about in coming weeks.

Demonization A couple of weeks before Newtown, our premier sports broadcaster used his Sunday Night Football halftime soapbox to issue a heartfelt appeal for reducing the prevalence of handguns. Responding to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, Bob Costas said, said: “Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.” Similar pained cries have echoed in the wake of the Connecticut disaster —for example, this column by the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik, entitled, “Newtown and the Madness of Guns.”

The emotionalism is understandable. Yet railing against guns in general gets us nowhere. What are Costas and Gopnik suggesting? Confiscating some, most, or all of the 300 million firearms already in private hands? The Second Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, says that’s not happening. Our democratically grounded political system says that’s not happening. The United States, for better or worse, is a gun culture. Nearly half of American households have one or more guns, according to Gallup. Publicly mourning the degree to which firearms are woven into the fabric of our society only plays into the hands of those who contend that any discussion about regulating guns is a pretext for prohibition. The hard truth for gun foes is that the firearms are out there, and they’re not going away.

Assault weapons President Barack Obama supports a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban, according to White House aides. After asserting this position during his 2008 campaign, Obama dropped it, fearing a politically costly fight with the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress. The Newtown shooting revives the issue because the killer used an assault weapon—more precisely, a semiautomatic military-style rifle—to kill most, and possibly all, his victims, according to the Connecticut medical examiner.

We tried an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004. It didn’t work. To avoid the restrictions of a poorly written law, gun manufacturers simply made cosmetic design changes and then enjoyed a sales boom. American gun enthusiasts reliably buy more of any make or model opponents want to deny them. Moreover, while black matte military-style rifles may look especially ominous to the uninitiated, they’re not more lethal, shot-for-shot, than grandpa’s wooden-stock deer hunting rifle (which is derived from an earlier generation of military weapons). Fully automatic machine guns—capable of firing a stream of bullets as long as the trigger is depressed—are already unavailable, unless you have a special permit. And finally, any proposal to ban the manufacture and sale of new assault weapons would do nothing about the many millions lawfully owned by private citizens. Democrats are not going to propose impounding rifles already in private gun racks.

Large-capacity magazines The coming proposals to limit the size of magazines, the spring-loaded boxes that contain ammunition, are more relevant, if no less controversial, than assault weapons “bans.” In a mass killing, the lethality of a semiautomatic rifle (or pistol) relates to how quickly and often the shooter can fire before reloading. Law enforcement officials said Sunday that the Newtown shooter used multiple 30-round magazines with his rifle, firing something on the order of 100 rounds in a very short period.

It’s not difficult to buy a 50-round “drum” magazine. Banning civilians from owning such magazines, it seems to me, would not infringe on anyone’s Second Amendment rights. Perhaps the same could be said for 30-round magazines, or 20-round magazines. Choosing the cap is necessarily arbitrary. The assault weapons ban of 1994-2004 prohibited the manufacture and sale of new magazines exceeding 10 rounds. In theory, we could reinstitute that rule.

The problem with restricting magazine capacity is that to make such a limitation meaningful, Congress would have to ban the possession of large magazines, not just the sale of new ones. Otherwise, the millions of big magazines already on the market will provide an ample supply to future mass killers. As a matter of political and law enforcement reality, are lawmakers prepared to send sheriffs and police out to take away all privately owned magazines exceeding 10 rounds? In the 1990s, the answer was no. Has that changed? I doubt it.

Background checks Here is where there’s room for achievable, meaningful improvement. The existing computerized background-check system screens out felons, minors, and other prohibited categories. The system has gaps, however. It covers only sales by federally licensed firearm dealers. “Private collectors” are allowed to sell guns without background checks. By some estimates, 40 percent of all sales slip through this gaping loophole. It ought to be closed. Nonlicensed sellers could be required to conduct their transactions via a licensed dealer, who would receive a small fee.

Improving the background-check system would make it more difficult for some significant number of shady characters to obtain guns. (They could still acquire them illegally, of course.) The Newtown shooter tried to buy a rifle at a local store shortly before his rampage and was turned away when he wouldn’t submit to a background check.

However, an improved background-check system would not have stopped the Newtown killer from doing what he did: scooping up his mother’s legally acquired guns before shooting her and all those teachers and children. Mass killers tend to be young men who, despite deranged minds and evil hearts, prepare carefully. Some have clean records before going berserk. Others obtain their weaponry from relatives or friends. Fixing background checks is worth doing. It won’t stop the next Newtown.

Mental illness Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. Congress and executive branch agencies at the federal and state level can do more to make sure that disparate and often disorganized records of individuals who’ve been found to have serious mental health problems find their way into the background-check system. The law already prohibits people who’ve been adjudicated mentally ill from buying firearms. We need to do a better job of collecting and disseminating the relevant information.

Many who are dangerously mentally ill escape treatment that would prevent them from harming themselves and others. Short of mass murder, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people commit crimes and end up in prison without adequate antipsychotic medication. It’s too difficult for relatives, friends, teachers, and others to civilly commit dangerously mentally ill individuals before they do harm.

Taking steps well short of incarceration—our current de facto policy for warehousing the dangerously mentally ill—would be a humane alternative for all concerned, and it could prevent school shootings. This is not gun control, per se, yet it deserves urgent attention.

Personal responsibility People who own guns need to keep them away from children and psychologically troubled members of their households. With the right to own firearms comes great responsibility. We don’t yet know all the details about the Newtown killer and his deceased mother. Yet it’s hard to imagine what she was thinking: a disturbed, antisocial, 20-year-old son and a half-dozen guns?

The most important gun control can’t be legislated. It’s common sense.

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Keep thimerosal in vaccines: pediatricians

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A mercury-containing preservative should not be banned as an ingredient in vaccines, U.S. pediatricians said Monday, in a move that may be controversial.

In its statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) endorsed calls from a World Health Organization (WHO) committee that the preservative, thimerosal, not be considered a hazardous source of mercury that could be banned by the United Nations.

Back in 1999, a concern that kids receiving multiple shots containing thimerosal might get too much mercury – and develop autism or other neurodevelopmental problems as a result – led the AAP to call for its removal, despite the lack of hard evidence at the time.

“It was absolutely a matter of precaution because of the absence of more information,” said Dr. Louis Cooper, from Columbia University in New York, who was on the organization’s board of directors at the time.

“Subsequently an awful lot of effort has been put into trying to sort out whether thimerosal causes any harm to kids, and the bottom line is basically, it doesn’t look as if it does,” Cooper, who wrote a commentary published with the AAP’s statement, told Reuters Health.

In a 2004 safety review, for example, the independent U.S. Institute of Medicine concluded there was no evidence thimerosal-containing vaccines could cause autism. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came to the same conclusion in 2010.

With the exception of some types of flu shots, the compound is not used in vaccines in the United States, which are distributed in single-dose vials.

And nobody is arguing that should change, according to Dr. Walter Orenstein, a member of the AAP Committee on Infectious Diseases and a researcher at the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta.

But in countries with fewer resources – where many children still die of vaccine-preventable diseases – it’s cheaper and easier to use multi-dose vials of vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus, for example.

Thimerosal prevents the rest of a multi-dose vial from getting contaminated with bacteria or fungi each time a dose is used.

Researchers estimated it could cost anywhere from two to five times as much to manufacture vaccines for developing countries without thimerosal, and both transporting vaccines and keeping them refrigerated would be much harder as well.

“If we had to take the thimerosal out of those multi-dose vials, we’re having a hard time completing the task of getting every kid immunized now, that would add a tremendous burden,” Cooper said – and more children would probably die as a result.

“Children who can now be protected from these life-threatening diseases could become vulnerable,” Orenstein told Reuters Health.

The new statement is published in the AAP’s journal Pediatrics.

Thimerosal contains a type of mercury called ethyl mercury. Toxic effects have been tied to its cousin, methyl mercury, which stays in the body for much longer.

Earlier this year, the WHO said replacing thimerosal with an alternative preservative could affect vaccine safety and might cause some vaccines to become unavailable.

Mercury, however, is still on the list of global health hazards to be banned in a draft treaty from the United Nations Environment Program – which would mean a ban on thimerosal.

Reducing mercury exposure “is a wonderful thing,” Orenstein said.

However, “We need this exception because thimerosal is so vital for protecting children.”

He said keeping thimerosal in vaccines is essential mostly for humanitarian reasons – although preventing childhood diseases in the developing world could also help the U.S. because other countries can serve as reservoirs for illness.

“For American parents, this is more looking at the world and our role and responsibility in protecting the children of the world than it is a direct impact,” Orenstein said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online December 17, 2012.

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Kat Von D Accepts DJ Deadmau5′s Marriage Proposal — Via Twitter

Saturday was just another crazy day in the love life of Kat Von D – you know, marriage proposals via Tweet, etc.

After a two-month hot and heavy romance with Canadian DJ Deadmau5 (followed by a November breakup), the pair is not only back together, they’re engaged — and it all went down on Twitter.

PLAY IT NOW: Meet The Six Little McGhees

“I can’t wait for Christmas so…. Katherine Von Drachenberg, will you marry me?” Deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) Tweeted on Saturday, along with a photo of the engagement ring he plans to get the tattoo artist.

Click HERE to see the ring – complete with a diamond flanked by (what else?!) two skulls!

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Stars Who Got Engaged In 2012

Kat replied with a series of exclamation points, to which Deadmau5 romantically responded with, “Holy f***ing s**t. im engaged and stuff!”

The freshly-minted engaged couple then thanked their followers for their support.

“Mi corazon!!! Thank you all for the lovely congratulations!” Kat wrote. “Please excuse me while I go squeeze the hell out of my fiance!”

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Guess The Celebrity Ink!

“Thanks for the well wishes and support from the horde and everyone else!” Deadmau5 Tweeted. “brb while i spend the rest of my evening with my future wife ”

VOTE: Will Kat & Deadmau5 make it down the aisle?

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Hollywood’s Smokin’ Hot Couples

Prior to her whirlwind romance with Deadmau5, Kat was recently engaged to Sandra Bullock’s ex-husband, Jesse James, but the now-ex-couple broke it off in June, 2011.

As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, Kat and her new fiance, dubbed “Kat and Mau5″ (mouse), were first spotted together in September, and the DJ called Kat “The love of my life” just one month later.

One month after his declaration of love, the pair broke up.

– Erin O’Sullivan

Copyright 2012 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Iran media: Son of ex-president released on bail

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian media say the son of influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been released on bail.

Several papers, including the pro-reform Etemad daily, say Mahdi Hashemi was released late Sunday and immediately went to his father’s home.

Authorities arrested the younger Hashemi in late September, a day after he returned to Iran from Britain.

He is held on charges of fomenting unrest in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term in office. Hashemi also faced corruption charges.

His arrest came days after his sister, Faezeh, was taken into custody to serve a six-month sentence on charges of making propaganda against Iran’s ruling system.

Since Rafsanjani backed Ahmadinejad’s reformist challenger in 2009, his family has come under pressure from hardliners.

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Robert Zemeckis on taking “Flight” with Denzel Washington – and his socks

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – When director Robert Zemeckis read the script for “Flight,” he knew he was ready to make another live-action movie.

The filmmaker’s previous three films – “The Polar Express,” “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol” – were shot in the motion-capture technique, in which human actions are recorded, then used to digitally animate computer characters.

“When this screenplay came along, I thought it shouldn’t be done in performance capture, it shouldn’t be done in 3D,” Zemeckis told the audience Wednesday night at TheWrap’s screening series in the Regent Theatre in Westwood. “I’m always led by the screenplay.”

He called his last three films in digital cinema “great training” for returning to a cast of live actors, given that motion-capture films are shot on much shorter schedules, and he only had 45 days for “Flight.”

“My biggest concern about doing a movie with so little time is, would the cast – when you do a drama like this – have enough days to get what you need?” he told TheWrap’s awards editor Steve Pond in the Q&A that followed the screening.

So he and star Denzel Washington spent hours hashing out the character of Captain Whip Whitaker, the alcoholic, if brilliantly talented, pilot who miraculously lands his nose-diving airliner but faces possible jail-time because he had alcohol and cocaine in his system at the time of the crash.

“That’s the really fun part of moviemaking, just understanding the character,” Zemeckis said. “Then deciding everything from what kind of car he’s going to drive to what color socks he’s going to wear.”

Pond looked surprised.

“By the time you started shooting, you knew what color Denzel’s socks should be?” he asked.

“If I’m on set and a set decorator asks, ‘what color should that door be?’ and I don’t have an answer, there’s a problem,” the 61-year-old director said. “I feel that, as a director, I should be able to answer that question of what socks he was wearing.”

But the pressure of returning to live-action and directing what he called a “serious, adult film” with hero cycles reminiscent of Greek mythology, is difficult. He needed a creative partner.

Screenwriter John Gatins, who had begun working on the screenplay in 1999, joined him for the month-and-a-half-long shoot in Georgia.

“I needed a creative soulmate, someone who’s there in the movie,” he said. “In the heart of battle to say everyone is suggesting we change this line and have the writer there to say, no way. We drove back and forth to the set in the same car every day.”

And this wasn’t the first time Zemeckis had filmed a massive plane crash.

His 2000 live-action movie, “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks, began with a FedEx plane plummeting down in the South Pacific.

“Cameras got smaller, which made things a lot easier,” he said. “We have a lot of digital effects, a lot of physical effects – everything is like a giant, sort-of special effects stew.”

And with a tight schedule and a tighter $ 31 million budget, Zemeckis had to reintroduce himself to those cameras and figure out ways to shoot certain scenes without building expensive sets.

In one, Washington and his co-stars Kelly Reilly and James Badge Dale – whose brief but important cameo as an oracle-like cancer patient gives the film its Greek-like quality – are furtively smoking cigarettes in the stairwell of a hospital.

The cramped space and inevitable audio echo make for a difficult scene to shoot – most directors of Zemeckis’ stature would just build a staircase to shoot in.

He didn’t.

“I couldn’t believe I was actually shooting that in a real stairwell,” he said, laughing. “That really brought me back to my film school experience.”

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E-Hailing Comes to New York City

Catching a cab in midtown Manhattan at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon is the closest most New Yorkers will ever get to hunting. You have to know the patterns of your prey: its favorite haunts, its preferred routes, its tendency to vanish when your need is most acute (during rainstorms, for example). You have to outwit all the cab-poachers lurking in the shadows.

Yesterday, however, New York City emerged from the hunter-gatherer cab era. The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission voted 7-0 (with two abstentions) to allow people to find, hail, and pay for taxis using smartphones. So-called “e-hailing” is already hugely popular in San Francisco, London, Chicago, Dublin, and other cities, where services such as Uber, Hailo, GetTaxi, and Flywheel are competing to sign up both cab users and drivers. Users love the convenience of being able to scan for nearby cabs and then summon one with a touchscreen tap. Cabdrivers are able to spend less time driving around looking for fares and more time carrying paying customers.

Not everyone was thrilled at the prospect, however. The taxi market in New York is divided between yellow cabs, which can only be hailed on the street, and livery cabs, which passengers call on the phone for pickups. Livery cab companies fear that e-hailing will allow yellow cabs to take their business. A few city council members also expressed concern in letters to the TLC that e-hailing will make it harder for people without smartphones to get cabs.

As a result, the TLC only approved a one-year e-hailing pilot program, with restrictions. E-hails will only be able to summon cabs from a half mile away in the heart of Manhattan and a mile and a half elsewhere, to minimize the number of frustrated street hailers who have to watch empty cabs drive by them on the way to e-hail pickups. And to prevent drivers from privileging e-hails over street hails, drivers cannot charge more for e-hails than the taxi meter fare.

Among the most active of the e-hail services in pushing for the change was Hailo. The company already dominates the London market, with more than half of the city’s cabs using it. Over the past year, the company has been signing up drivers in New York, persuading many of them with research it has done showing that up to 40 percent of a cabdriver’s time is spent searching for fares. And though New York cabbies can’t yet use Hailo to connect with passengers, the driver version of the app already allows them to connect with each other, sharing information about traffic and demand. The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Jay Bregman, said he’s very happy with the TLC’s decision. “We are thrilled to be taking this technology, which has worked so well in the rest of world, to the New York market.”

As Bregman sees it, the stipulations in the ruling will blunt its impact a bit. The limits on the e-hailing radius may, as he puts it, “cut some value out of the system.” And the requirement that e-hail payments go through existing cab credit-card swipe machines might slow the implementation as well. The companies that make the swipe machines, known as TPEP (for Taxicab Passenger Enhancements Project) equipment, have been reluctant to collaborate with e-hailing companies, since payment through the apps would cut into the income from swipe machine fees. (The TLC gave itself an out on this requirement, stipulating that if the integration process proves too onerous, the TLC chair can just waive the requirement.) Nonetheless, Bregman promises that Hailo will be ready to go by mid-February, the pilot program’s official start.

Of course, none of this helps solve what for New Yorkers is the biggest problem with smartphones in cabs: their tendency to fall out of pockets or purses onto the backseat, never to be seen again.

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Child deaths and bitter cold in Syrian refugee camps

ZAATARI, Jordan (Reuters) – One-year-old Ali Ghazawi, born with a heart defect, faced a battle for survival even before his family fled Syria‘s civil war. It was a struggle he lost two weeks ago in the bitter winter cold of a tented refugee camp in north Jordan.

Ali died two days after undergoing a heart operation in Zaatari camp, which houses at least 32,000 refugees who escaped fierce bombardment in Syria’s rebellious southern province of Deraa, cradle of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

“I covered my son with two blankets, but he was not warming up, and he turned blue before he passed away in my hands,” said his sobbing 22-year-old mother, alone with a three-year-old daughter after she left her husband in Deraa and crossed the border in November.

Ali was the fourth baby to die in three weeks in the windswept camp. United Nations aid workers say none of the deaths were the direct result of conditions in Zaatari, yet they highlight the challenge facing relief agencies scrambling to provide basic shelter for half a million refugees in the region.

“These deaths are a result of cumulative factors, some related to shortage in needs and natural causes. But on top of that, the reality that conditions are harsh cannot be ignored,” said Saba Mobaslat, program director at Save the Children.

Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey each host more than 130,000 registered refugees, and relief workers predict the numbers will only increase as violence escalates around the capital Damascus.

Mirroring Syria’s youthful population, almost 65 percent of Jordan’s camp residents are newborns and young children.

“Every night we are getting children as young as four days old, six days old, one week, two weeks old, and it’s a real struggle to try to make sure that everyone survives,” said Andrew Harper, Jordan head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Women are giving birth on the border, and people are coming across pregnant. It’s a situation where we just need to redouble efforts, particularly as we move into winter, because you have hundreds of pregnant women who cross the border,” Harper said.

Families often send the most vulnerable to safety, he added, so alongside the very young in Zaatari are many older refugees. “Last night we had a couple who were 97 years old,” he said.

“CHILDREN’S CAMP”

Along the main road in the middle of the camp’s muddy and gravel streets, children of all ages race around the makeshift market place that sprang up after the camp opened in July.

Many families join in, out of enterprise or necessity, selling everything from hot falafel to household goods, old clothing and fresh vegetables.

“It’s a children’s camp. You walk into it and there are children everywhere. It’s in your face. The male adults are staying behind, and a woman comes with 10 children without her bread earner,” Mobaslat added.

In one of several UNICEF-run playgrounds, among seesaws, swings and volunteers giving music lessons, the scars of war are fresh in the minds of most children.

“I long for my home, and I hope Bashar falls to get back to my home. It’s much better than here, where we are humiliated,” said Mohammad Ghazawi, 12, who came to play after a break from selling cheap cigarettes.

Their elders complain that two thin blankets per refugee distributed in recent weeks were not enough to warm them in tents that let in rain water despite zinc reinforcements and waterproof layers that have helped insulate them.

“Kids are dying from cold and lack of blankets. My kids shiver at night, and one has constant diarrhea,” said Mohammad Samara, 46, who fled heavy shelling in the southern Syrian town of Busr al-Sham in October with his wife and four children.

Carsten Hansen, country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which has set up a heated tent that receives families on arrival, says much progress has been made to help distribute aid.

“Everybody is trying to mobilize resources … in order to react to bigger numbers and a huge influx,” Hansen said, adding that 6,000 gas heaters had been airlifted to Jordan to help heat the tent camp.

FROM CRISIS TO DISASTER?

Harper said UNHCR was working to prevent “this humanitarian crisis becoming a major disaster”. But he said that while aid teams were racing to improve conditions at Zaatari, there were 100,000 other registered refugees living outside the camp and probably another 100,000 unregistered, whose living conditions were not improving.

In Lebanon, too, host to 154,000 refugees, many face a bleak winter, and aid workers expect their numbers to more than double by the middle of next year.

In the Bekaa Valley town of Bar Elias, a woman from the northern Syria province of Idlib says her home for the last year has been a wooden shack with only plastic sheeting to protect from the rain. Plastic bags are stuffed into the roof as extra insurance against leaks. “There is no water, no electricity, no school for my kids,” she said in a croaky voice.

“My husband is sick. The situation is very bad.”

Mads Almaas, NRC country director in Lebanon, said many more may flee Syria over the winter to escape worsening conditions there, putting even greater strain on relief efforts.

“The violence will not only continue but also get worse. And even in the increasingly likely event of the fall of Assad, we don’t think the violence will end,” he said.

Almaas said the United Nations would launch a regional response plan on Wednesday anticipating a total of 300,000 registered refugees in Lebanon by mid-2013. “At first we thought it was too high. Now we are concerned it is too low,” he said.

In Turkey, which hosts 136,000 refugees, camps for the most part have facilities such as portable electric heaters, and refugees receive three hot meals a day from the Red Crescent. But temperatures can plunge below freezing in the rugged terrain along the 900 kilometer (560 mile) border with Syria during the winter months, and rain can be torrential and cause flooding.

Overcrowding remains a concern, with extended families cramped in single tents and ever more refugees arriving as fighting across the border drags on.

Across the region, aid workers fear an explosion in violence could leave them seriously overstretched.

“Right now funds are sufficient. What is a challenge is if we get any shocks, something like 5,000-10,000 refugees arriving (in Lebanon) in a matter of hours,” Almaas said.

If fighting swept through the center of Damascus, thousands of Syrians could flee to the Lebanese border in a matter of hours. “For that, we are not prepared as the NRC. I also question the international community’s capacity.”

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut and Nick Tattersall in Ankara; Editing by Dominic Evans and Will Waterman)

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Tumblr Users Flock to Mashable Comment Thread

Tumblr Is Down

When Tumblr went down Wednesday evening, users flocked to Mashable to express their rage and disbelief.

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: Mysterious Package Addressed to Indiana Jones Arrives at UChicago]

Where were you the day that Tumblr went down? Whether you were at home, at work or on the move, it’s possible that you somehow ended up on Mashable. That was the case for thousands of Tumblr users, who, desperate for their GIF fix after a Tumblr outage on Wednesday, found themselves commenting on a Mashable story about the glitch.

Frustrated Tumblr frequenters left without a blogging platform transformed the comment thread on Mashable’s story into a makeshift Tumblr dashboard. Users gathered to commiserate, voice their anger and post GIFs to express their feelings. The micro-community that sprung up in the post made these the top comments on Mashable this week.

[More from Mashable: The Top Comments on Mashable This Week]

We recently renovated our commenting system to allow readers to embed video and images, a feature Wednesday’s commenters took full advantage of. By the time Tumblr was again functional, the story had accrued over 4,000 comments. Users traded domain names, discussed their blogs and, above all, bemoaned a lack of access to the site. YouTube user moviepimpdj posted a video of the rapidly moving comment thread.

This week we also saw major changes to Facebook’s privacy settings, with our readers feeling mixed emotions about the shift. The community mused on what 2013 might hold with respect to responsive design.

What were your favorite comments from the Mashable community this week? Get involved with the discussion by signing up for Mashable Follow. You could see your voice in our next weekly roundup!

Image courtesy of Flickr, kurichan+

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Nigeria governor, 5 others die in helicopter crash

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — A navy helicopter crashed Saturday in the country’s oil-rich southern delta, killing a state governor and five other people, in the latest air disaster to hit Africa’s most populous nation, officials said.

Nigeria‘s ruling party said in a statement that the governor of the central Nigerian state of Kaduna, Patrick Yakowa, died in the helicopter crash in Bayelsa state in the Niger Delta. The People’s Democratic Party’s statement described Yakowa’s death as a “colossal loss.”

The statement said the former national security adviser, General Andrew Azazi, also died in the crash. Azazi was fired in June amid growing sectarian violence in Nigeria, but maintained close ties with the government.

Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency, said four other bodies had been found, but he could not immediately give their identities.

The crash occurred at about 3:30 p.m. after the navy helicopter took off from the village of Okoroba in Bayelsa state where officials had gathered to attend the burial of the father of a presidential aide, said Commodore Kabir Aliyu. He said that the helicopter was headed for Nigeria’s oil capital of Port Harcourt when it crashed in the Nembe area of Bayelsa state.

Aviation disasters remain common in Nigeria, despite efforts in recent years to improve air safety.

In October, a plane made a crash landing in central Nigeria. A state governor and five others sustained injuries but survived.

In June, a Dana Air MD-83 passenger plane crashed into a neighborhood in the commercial capital of Lagos, killing 153 people onboard and at least 10 people on the ground. It was Nigeria’s worst air crash in nearly two decades.

In March, a police helicopter carrying a high-ranking police official crashed in the central Nigerian city of Jos, killing four people.

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