The actress is feeling blue for 'X Men'! Check out other cute and candid moments from the stars
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Wednesday, May 22, 2013
NASA launching experiment to examine the beginnings of the universe
May 21, 2013 ? When did the first stars and galaxies form in the universe? How brightly did they burn their nuclear fuel?
Scientists will seek to gain answers to these questions with the launch of the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRIment (CIBER) on a Black Brant XII suborbital sounding rocket between 11 and 11:59 p.m. EDT, June 4 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Jamie Bock, CIBER principal investigator from the California Institute of Technology, said, "The first massive stars to form in the universe produced copious ultraviolet light that ionized gas from neutral hydrogen. CIBER observes in the near infrared, as the expansion of the universe stretched the original short ultraviolet wavelengths to long near-infrared wavelengths today. CIBER investigates two telltale signatures of first star formation -- the total brightness of the sky after subtracting all foregrounds, and a distinctive pattern of spatial variations."
"The objectives of the experiment are of fundamental importance for astrophysics, to probe the process of first galaxy formation, but the measurement is also extremely difficult technically," he noted.
This will be the fourth flight for CIBER on a NASA sounding rocket. The previous launches were in 2009, 2010, and 2012 from the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. After each flight the experiment or payload was recovered for post-calibrations and re-flight.
For this flight CIBER will fly on a larger and more powerful rocket than before. This will loft CIBER to a higher altitude than those previously obtained, thus providing longer observation time for the instruments. The experiment, which will safely splash down in the Atlantic Ocean more than 400 miles off the Virginia coast, will not be recovered.
CIBER previously flew on two-stage Black Brant IX sounding rockets. Bock said, "The collection of data from the three flights allows us to compare data and rigorously test sources of potential systematic error from both the instrument and astrophysical foregrounds. We have been through the end-to-end process in analyzing our data, so we understand the benefits of going with a non-recovered Black Brant XII. We also know the performance of the instrument very well from these flights and that makes us confident going forward with this more capable but final flight."
The 70-foot tall four-stage Black Brant XII rocket will carry CIBER to an altitude of about 350 miles. According to Bock, "This flight is pioneering a new direction in the astrophysics program in that we are flying our instrument on a non-recovered Black Brant XII. The XII gives us a significantly higher trajectory, providing about 560 seconds of flight time above 250 km (155 miles) altitude, compared with 250 seconds on standard Black Brant IX flights out of White Sands."
"Our experience in the near-infrared waveband is that we see appreciable emission from the atmosphere up to 250 km. The higher trajectory allows us to do some new things that are not possible on a Black Brant IX. For example, we expect to have enough independent images of the sky to directly determine the in-flight gain of the infrared cameras, which will allow us to measure background fluctuations in single exposures. This gives us a much more direct way to compare with satellite data than the statistical combinations we have had to use to date. The higher trajectory of course comes with a price in that the payload is not recovered," he said.
CIBER is a cooperative instrument designed and built by the California Institute of Technology, University of California Irvine, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). The same team is also developing an improved follow-on experiment, with more capable optics and detector arrays, that will be completed next year.
Backup launch days for this project are June 5 -- 10.
To find out more about NASA's sounding rocket missions, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sounding-rockets/
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Teen Symposium on Holocaust marks 25th anniversary - Lifestyles ...
Textbooks only accomplish so much in conveying the gravity of the Holocaust.
But when students - and their teachers - meet people with a tangible connection to it, they gain a deeper understanding of one of the darkest chapters in human history.
That's been the longtime goal of the annual Teen Symposium on the Holocaust, sponsored by the Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Jewish Federation of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
The symposium will celebrate its 25th anniversary today and Wednesday at Marywood University. Over its two days, about 1,450 students and teachers from more than 20 schools will spend a full day in classroom workshops geared to different aspects of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's systematic murder of six million European Jews during World War II.
This year's symposium keynote speaker is Sonia Goldstein, a survivor of the Stutthof concentration camp. She's making her second symposium appearance.
Also slated to appear at the symposium are: World War II veteran Alan Moskin, one of the liberators of the Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp; Ela Weissberger, a member of the children's cast of the opera "Brundib?r" at the Theresienstadt concentration camp; Sol Lurie, a survivor of the Buchenwald camp; and local survivor Sam Rosen, a regular visitor to the symposium.
"This gives students the chance to meet the people who experienced (the Holocaust) in different ways. It allows the history to come alive for them, and allows for interchange," said Tova Weiss, director of HERC. "The point is to have them here, to sensitize them, to bring history to life."
Through the sessions, students not only gain better insight into the intolerance and bigotry that led to the Holocaust, but they also learn how many good people put themselves in harm's way and tried to help, Mrs. Weiss said.
In addition, parallels are drawn between the Holocaust and more recent genocides, like the ones in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, leading to many interesting discussions. Each classroom includes a trained facilitator to help initiate conversations between students, teachers and speakers.
Mary Jo Walsh, principal of Fell Charter School in Carbondale, has sent the school's eighth-graders to the symposium for the past six years. She's been so impressed with the symposium that the school is now getting ready to implement its own Holocaust curriculum for grades four and higher.
"I think the biggest thing they get out of it is empathy. It is amazing to watch," Ms. Walsh said. "They come back from this, and they are completely changed. It's almost as if someone has lifted a shade and they can see the whole world now. ... It's had an impact on my teachers, too."
Slow shift
Holocaust education didn't figure all that prominently in schools back when HERC formed in the 1980s, nor were there many survivors speaking publicly about their experiences, Mrs. Weiss said.
HERC started by donating books to school libraries, but eventually the organization came to the realization that it should bring students and teachers together for an immersive, all-day experience.
The first symposium drew about 250 people. Each year, it grew a little more, to the point where HERC needed to add a second day to give more schools the chance to participate.
Over the years, the symposium has featured survivors of Auschwitz and the Kindertransport, as well as the African-American World War II vet Leon Bass, who witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald while himself being subjected to racism and segregation. The late local vet and concentration camp liberator Abe Plotkin was a regular, and the keynote address is named in his honor.
"The students have been exposed to a very broad variety of speakers," Mrs. Weiss said.
Mrs. Weiss said some students get so much out of the experience that they ask to come back the next year. As she sees it, if a kid goes back to his or her school and refuses to take part in a racist joke in the lunch room, then the symposium has made a difference for the better.
"We've heard from so many teachers who've said it's changed kids' behavior," she said. "A lot of them feel that in some ways it's life changing."
Contact the writer: jmcauliffe@timesshamrock.com, @jmcauliffeTT on Twitter
Source: http://thetimes-tribune.com/lifestyles/teen-symposium-on-holocaust-marks-25th-anniversary-1.1492324
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After Getting Booted From Apple's App Store, Mobile Privacy App Clueful Returns On Android
Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing -- or possibly because of its own behavior?-- is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful's maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/lXF6SGj25CM/
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Tuesday, May 21, 2013
JMIR--Mapping mHealth Research: A Decade of Evolution | Fiordelli ...
Advertisement: Preregister now for the Medicine 2.0 Congress
Review
Mapping mHealth Research: A Decade of Evolution
Maddalena Fiordelli, PhD; Nicola Diviani, PhD; Peter J Schulz, PhD
Institute of Communication and Health, Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland
Maddalena Fiordelli, PhD
Institute of Communication and Health
Faculty of Communication Sciences
University of Lugano
Via G. Buffi, 13
Lugano, 6900
Switzerland
Phone: 41 586664757
Fax: 41 586664647
Email:
ABSTRACT
Background: For the last decade, mHealth has constantly expanded as a part of eHealth. Mobile applications for health have the potential to target heterogeneous audiences and address specific needs in different situations, with diverse outcomes, and to complement highly developed health care technologies. The market is rapidly evolving, making countless new mobile technologies potentially available to the health care system; however, systematic research on the impact of these technologies on health outcomes remains scarce.Objective: To provide a comprehensive view of the field of mHealth research to date and to understand whether and how the new generation of smartphones has triggered research, since their introduction 5 years ago. Specifically, we focused on studies aiming to evaluate the impact of mobile phones on health, and we sought to identify the main areas of health care delivery where mobile technologies can have an impact.
Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted on the impact of mobile phones and smartphones in health care. Abstracts and articles were categorized using typologies that were partly adapted from existing literature and partly created inductively from publications included in the review.
Results: The final sample consisted of 117 articles published between 2002 and 2012. The majority of them were published in the second half of our observation period, with a clear upsurge between 2007 and 2008, when the number of articles almost doubled. The articles were published in 77 different journals, mostly from the field of medicine or technology and medicine. Although the range of health conditions addressed was very wide, a clear focus on chronic conditions was noted. The research methodology of these studies was mostly clinical trials and pilot studies, but new designs were introduced in the second half of our observation period. The size of the samples drawn to test mobile health applications also increased over time. The majority of the studies tested basic mobile phone features (eg, text messaging), while only a few assessed the impact of smartphone apps. Regarding the investigated outcomes, we observed a shift from assessment of the technology itself to assessment of its impact. The outcome measures used in the studies were mostly clinical, including both self-reported and objective measures.
Conclusions: Research interest in mHealth is growing, together with an increasing complexity in research designs and aim specifications, as well as a diversification of the impact areas. However, new opportunities offered by new mobile technologies do not seem to have been explored thus far. Mapping the evolution of the field allows a better understanding of its strengths and weaknesses and can inform future developments.
(J Med Internet Res 2013;15(5):e95)
doi:10.2196/jmir.2430
KEYWORDS
mHealth; systematic review; health outcomes
In the last decade, mobile health (mHealth), the branch of eHealth broadly defined as ?the use of mobile computing and communication technologies in health care and public health? [1], has been constantly expanding. Mobile applications for health can target heterogeneous audiences such as doctors, nurses, patients, or even healthy people [1]. Different features of mobile phones may address specific needs in different situations. Available literature suggests that the use of mobile phones serves a wide variety of purposes [2], such as smoking cessation, weight loss, diet and physical activity, treatment adherence, and disease management. The biggest advantages of using mobile devices, and in particular mobile phones, for health are that these devices are personal, intelligent, connected, and always with people [3,4]. Therefore, they can serve patients both in everyday life and during hospitalization or rehabilitation, as well as health care providers during emergency or routine visits. Current evidence suggests that the use of mobile technology can improve diagnosis and compliance with treatment guidelines, as well as patient information, and can increase administrative efficiency [5]. In particular, short message service (SMS) text messaging reminders have been shown to be a simple and efficient option for health services to use in order to improve service delivery, resulting in health benefits for the patients who receive them [6]. Mobile phone technologies have also been shown to be effective in smoking cessation, weight loss, physical activity, diabetes management, STD prevention and treatment, and hypertension [7].
The mobile phone market is constantly evolving. The first digital mobile phones appeared in the early 1990s, and since then, mobile technology has continued to be refined thanks to the development of new features and better networks. Current smartphones have been defined as ?mobile telephones with computer features that may enable them to interact with computerized systems, send e-mails, and access the web? [8]. Over a third of US mobile phone users own a smartphone [3,9], and it is estimated that 67.6% of adults worldwide own a mobile phone [2,10], making it the most equitable communication technology [1]. It has been argued that mobile phones could be a solution to overcome the traditional digital divide derived from the introduction of the Internet because they provide new opportunities to reach underserved and previously unreachable parts of the population worldwide, especially in developing countries [2].
Mobile technology, with its diffusion and characteristics, holds a great potential for health care applications. However the use of mobile phones in health care delivery has not been fully explored, and the diverse outcomes of mHealth have barely been documented. Although some literature reviews cover one part or the other of the field [6,11,12], an overall picture is still missing, possibly due to the field?s constant evolution. A recent methodological review sought to map the domain of mobile phone health interventions [13], but it relied on describing the design of the interventions, with a clear focus on technology, rather than the outcomes. As the authors stated, their motivation lay in the fact that ?effectiveness reviews can be best done at the level of a particular pathology?, while they wanted to draw a more comprehensive taxonomy of the field.
The main objective of this paper, as stated in the title, is to map the field, but without omitting the outcome measures. This means that our intention is to investigate how the impact of mobile phones on health has been assessed in peer-reviewed scientific literature. In particular, we are interested in understanding the evolution over the past decade, how the interventions have been developed, the main health care delivery areas where the impact of mobile technologies has been assessed, the methodology and features used, and finally, the type of outcome measures and general impact of the intervention.
The second objective of this review is to understand, after the 5 years since the introduction of the new generation of smartphones (eg, the iPhone in 2007), whether and how these devices have triggered research. The appeal of these new devices resides in the fact that they include several computer-like built-in features (eg, the GPS or the accelerometer) allowing the monitoring of a whole series of behaviors. Additionally, new mobile operating systems allow users to customize their devices according to their needs, by downloading apps available for free or for a low price from a central store. Klasnja and Pratt named this kind of feature ?native application? [13], which is a typical complex and sophisticated application that can be implemented on major smartphone platforms (iOS, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, and Windows Phone). In 2012, smartphone users spent US $8 billion for paid apps in the top 5 app platforms, and the European mobile app market size reached ?1.68 billion [14]. Therefore, iPhones and similar devices are potentially very interesting for application in health care?they already integrate most of the features that researchers previously had to add to traditional mobile phones in order to use them for health-related purposes and monitoring [15,16].
The objective of this study was to provide a comprehensive picture of how the impact of mHealth was assessed in the scientific literature in its first decade of existence. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was conducted in which relevant studies were categorized in a two-step process. The first step included the review of the titles and abstracts of all publications that were identified as potentially relevant, with the goal of assessing whether they might meet the inclusion criteria for the systematic review. Selected abstracts were categorized at this stage using general typologies partly adapted from existing literature [1,2,12] and partly created inductively from a subsample of the publications. Categories referred to the type of methodology used, the impact area (ie, remote monitoring, data gathering, communication, self-management, training/education, improve adherence, health promotion), and the type of study. In a second step, all the publications not excluded during the abstract and title review stage underwent a full-text review. All publications that met all eligibility criteria (see below) made up the final sample.
Search Strategy
In February 2012, five electronic databases (CINAHL, Communication and Mass Media Complete, PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science) were systematically searched. The choice of databases was deemed to reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Among the most used medical databases, we decided to include PubMed only, since it comprises MEDLINE, while Embase was excluded because it has a stronger drug coverage, which was not relevant for the purposes of our research. A list of keywords was created around the two domains of ?health? and ?mobile technology?. A search string was constructed using both the conjunction ?AND? and the disjunction ?OR? logical operators ([health OR medicine OR medical OR telemedicine OR health care OR ?mHealth? OR ?mobile health? OR ?m?health? OR ?mobile?health?] AND [?mobile phone? OR ?cell phone? OR ?cellphone? OR ?cell?phone? OR ?smartphone? OR ?iPhone? OR ?blackberry? OR ?android?]). The search was based on metadata, ie, title, abstract, and keywords. Reference lists of selected studies were also checked for other potentially relevant studies.
Selection Criteria
Eligibility criteria for inclusion were as follows: records had to be written in English and discuss/acknowledge the role of mobile technology as a tool for promoting, managing, or monitoring health. This could include interventions, cross?sectional studies, literature reviews, conceptual papers, etc. All articles dealing with health effects of mobile phones (eg, effects of non-ionizing radiation on health or effect of mobile phone use on adolescents) were excluded. Records had to be officially published, either online or in print in a peer-reviewed publication (ie, journal articles, book chapters, and published proceedings papers). This means that poster presentations, (extended) abstracts, and encyclopedia entries were excluded. No time restriction was given; all publication dates were eligible for inclusion. Also, there was no restriction on the field of studies, ie, records that could be classified as social sciences, humanities, medicine, and others were all included.
The exclusion criteria that accounted for the biggest number of excluded articles included the following: the study provided descriptive summaries of mHealth programs but failed to provide an evaluation of the program; study provided a short description of multiple mHealth programs without providing specific details on an mHealth intervention; and the study focused on mHealth application design. The title and abstract review allowed us to exclude system design articles and to better identify all the studies that involved people in the testing of the intervention. A full-text article review was therefore conducted only on studies evaluating and assessing mHealth applications. The categories for full-text review were the following: continent where the study took place, condition addressed, type of technology, features used, basis for the intervention development, study design, sample size, aim of the evaluation, outcome measures, and overall impact assessed.
The flowchart in Figure 1 summarizes the different steps of the literature search and review process. A first search identified 4039 articles. After checking for duplicates, 747 articles met the predefined inclusion criteria. Initially, articles were categorized by type of study: quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, review, and system design. Since articles in the last typology described the development of a mobile technology but did not include any actual testing, they were excluded from further analysis together with reviews, reducing the final sample to 352 articles. More than half of the 352 studies (56%) included at least some testing of a mobile phone application via proper interventions or in small samples. Most of the studies analyzed (86%) applied a quantitative methodology and were designed to address simultaneously one or more impact areas. An upsurge was noted, starting from 2008, when the articles doubled in comparison with the previous year, and this upward trend reached its maximum in 2011 (36% of the total in a 10-year time period). The search of scientific databases without a time limit yielded an article distribution on the topic over 10 years, from 2002 to 2012.
The final sample for the full-text review included 117 [17-133] articles out of the 352 described above. After title and abstract review, an additional 157 articles were excluded because of no actual testing, while another 78 were excluded during full-text revision for different reasons (eg, no patients involved, mobile device other than phone, study duplicates). Looking at this past decade (Figure 2), we again observed an upsurge in the field: from 1 article in 2002 to 30 articles in 2011. The largest upsurge again came between 2007 and 2008, when the articles almost doubled, similar to what was already noted during the abstract review phase.
In order to better reflect the objectives of our review and to mirror the development over time, all the results are presented by splitting our observation period in two halves (2002-2007 and 2008-2012). The first period includes 23 articles, while the second period includes 94. The 117 articles in the final sample were published in 77 different journals, which can be grouped in four disciplinary fields: technology, medicine, social sciences, and the intersection between technology and medicine. During the first half of the observed decade, most of the articles on mHealth were published in medical journals (52%) and in journals focused on medicine and technology (44%).The remaining 4% of articles were published in journals focused only on technology. In the second half, the share of articles published in medical journals grew from 52% to 60%, while coverage of the topic by technology journals did not change (4%). At the same time, a decrease in the share of articles published by journals dealing with medicine and technology was observed (from 44% to 35%). In the second period, we found one article from a new disciplinary field, the social sciences.
The geographical areas focusing on this type of research were mainly Europe (34%) and North America (33%). However, if we look at results split by time periods, Europe?s interest seems to decrease from the first period (52%) to the second (30%), and the same happens in Asia (from 17% to 10%). A different picture can be found on all the other continents, where the number of studies in the field increased. This is the case in North America (from 17% to 37%), Australia (from 13% to 15%), and especially Africa (from 0% to 6%) and South America (from 0% to 2%).
Specific health conditions addressed in the studies ranged from diabetes to mental health, from obesity to well-being and postoperative care. Figure 3 shows the number of articles for every health condition for which mHealth applications were studied. As shown in the graph, diabetes has received a great deal of attention. Moreover, after grouping the conditions into larger classes, it becomes clear that the focus of mHealth research is chronic conditions (74 studies), followed by prevention/well-being (22 studies), and acute conditions (21 studies).
In reviewing the background of the studies, we found that a description of the development of the intervention, and especially of how this was grounded, occurred more often in the second period (84%) than in the first (65%). During the last 5 years, only 1 study was uniquely theory-based (1%), while the majority was evidence-based (73%) or based both on theory and evidence (10%); 15 studies (16%) provided a more general description that was based on neither theory nor previous evidence.
From a methodological point of view, the majority of articles were clinical trials (50%), followed by pilot studies (44%). However, both of these study designs diminished over the last years of our observation period as new types of research designs were introduced, namely observational studies (2% of all articles in the second part of the observation period), case studies (2%), case series (2%), and cross-sectional studies (2%). The samples used to test mobile health applications were mostly small (less than 50 people) in both the first (61%) and the second half (49%) of our observation. Interestingly in the second half, the number of medium-sized samples increased (from 17% to 33%). Larger samples were used in 21 (19%) articles; however, they were more frequent in the first half of the observation (22%) than in the second half (18%).
Moving from research methodology to the actual target of investigation, ie, mobile phones, our classification highlighted a more rigorous and diversified description of the technology used in interventions. In recent years, new kinds of mobile phones have been used, such as smartphones (8%) and ad hoc phones (3%), which are devices developed specifically by the researchers to manage a specific condition. Unfortunately, the kind of mobile phone used was not even specified most of the time (71% of the overall sample).
We identified seven main categories of mobile features used in the studies, and an article could fall in one or more of these (ie, the categories were not mutually exclusive). Half of the studies (49%) applied text messaging, and 32% applied some features developed ad hoc for a specific condition. Add-ons (eg, a glucometer to measure blood sugar or a pedometer for physical activity) were used in 12% of the cases together with ad hoc features. Other features such as voice (10%), video (6%), and multimedia messaging service (MMS) (3%) were used less frequently. Native applications for smartphones were applied in 7 studies (6%) out of the 8 using smartphones. However, none of them applied already existing and publicly available apps.
The impact areas to which interventions were directed were coded into seven categories, again not mutually exclusive. The majority of articles addressed health promotion (38%) and self-management (33%), but also communication (22%), remote monitoring (21%), data gathering (21%), improvement of adherence (20%), and training/education (13%). The focus on most of these areas increased over time, eg, on self-management (from 30% to 33%) and communication (from 17% to 23%). Only health promotion (from 29% to 27%) and training/education (from 13% to 10%) had a slight decrease.
Regarding the aims of the interventions, both the evaluation of the technology itself (35%) and of its impact on health outcomes (43%) dominated in the first 5 years. In the second half, however, interest clearly moved toward evaluating the impact of mobile technology on health outcomes (73%). While the majority of the studies investigated only the impact of the mobile application on health outcomes (51%), some also assessed both the technology and its impact on health outcomes (22%).
Another point of interest was the outcome measure used to assess the impact of mobile phones. In the majority of cases, the outcome measures were a combination of both self-reported and objective data (44% of the overall sample). If we look at the evolution over time, self-reported measures increased (from 9% to 20%), whereas objective measures decreased slightly (from 39% to 36%), and this was also the case for the combination of self-reported and objective measures (from 52% to 43%).
Our examination of the type of data collected showed that clinical measures were often the only outcomes observed (30%), and this phenomenon increased over time (from 22% to 31%). 14% of the articles were focused only on user assessment of the technology, even if this decreased during the observation period (from 17% to 13%). Psychosocial measures were the outcome in 9% of the studies, and this increased slightly over time (from 9% to 10%). The remaining articles (53%) considered outcomes deriving from all possible combinations of these main three. The most frequent combination was clinical measures together with user assessment of technology (17%).
An overall positive impact of the intervention was described by a total of 69 studies (60%). In the first period, the impact of the interventions was mainly either mixed (43%) or positive (57%). In the second part of the observation, the number of interventions with a positive impact slightly increased (60%), while the number of those with mixed impact decreased (33%). In this second period, interventions with negative (6%) or no impact (1%) were reported as well.
Source: http://www.jmir.org/2013/5/e95/
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Syrian Army, Hezbollah bear down on rebels in strategic Qusayr
Funnels of dirty gray smoke erupted silently from the center of Qusayr, followed seconds later by the ground-shaking thump of exploding artillery shells as the Syrian Army and Hezbollah pressed on today with a grueling offensive to capture the strategic Syrian rebel-held town.
From Lebanon's northern border in the Bekaa Valley, five miles to the south, Qusayr appeared in the dusty haze as a thin slash of white buildings amid a landscape of green orchards and fields. But the bucolic rural scene belies a bloody battle underway for Qusayr, with some 2,000 Syrian rebel fighters and as many as 30,000 civilians hunkered down in the ruins of the town, surrounded by a cordon of elite Syrian Army troops and battle-hardened fighters from the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah.
"If Qusayr is captured by the Syrian army then the war will be 70 percent over," says Abu Ali, a local businessman and Hezbollah supporter from the Shiite Lebanese town of Hermel, eight miles south of the border.
Although an exaggeration, Abu Ali's assertion illustrates the strategic significance of Qusayr. The town lies between Lebanon's northern border and Homs, Syria's third largest city and adjacent to the key highway linking the capital Damascus to the Mediterranean Coast port of Tartous.
RECOMMENDED: Sunni and Shiite Islam: Do you know the difference? Take our quiz.
The Syrian armed opposition took over Qusayr in February 2012, turning the town into an important transit point for arms and militants flowing from Lebanon to Homs, as well as a base from which to undermine regime control of the highway.
In recent weeks, President Bashar al-Assad's regime has focused on retaking Qusayr and strengthening its grip on the corridor linking Damascus to Tartous and the adjacent coastal mountains that are home to Syria's Alawite community, the Shiite splinter sect that forms the backbone of the Assad regime.
Syrian Army troops backed by Hezbollah fighters pushed eastward from a string of villages that, although located just inside Syria, are populated by Lebanese Shiites. Fierce battles broke out as the regime forces accompanied by Hezbollah fighters gradually seized a number of small villages populated mainly by Sunni supporters of the opposition. Retreating rebel forces struck back by firing Katyusha rockets at Shiite-populated Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon's northern Bekaa Valley.
By last week, the Syrian Army and Hezbollah had also seized some villages to the north of Qusayr, effectively surrounding the town.
"We blocked all the area around Qusayr to stop trouble coming to Lebanon," says Abu Khalil, a veteran Hezbollah fighter, justifying the militant Shiite group's assistance to Syrian troops.
COMING OUT INTO THE OPEN
Hezbollah's presence in Syria has steadily grown over the past year. Its leadership initially denied dispatching fighters into Syria to assist the Assad regime, but it has become impossible to hide its assistance as the number of fighters killed or wounded in action rises, nor stop the fervent chatter within Shiite circles in Lebanon.
"It is legitimate for Hezbollah to be fighting in Qusayr because they are still defending us here in Lebanon," says Rakkan Jafaar, the mayor of Sahlet al-My, a small village on the border beside Qasr. "The people in Qusayr used to joke about how they would come here and take our homes. If Qusayr is taken, the situation should improve for us here."
Syrian opposition sources claimed that more than 20 Hezbollah men were killed yesterday and more than 60 were wounded. Rebel fighters in touch with comrades on the ground in Qusayr insisted the number was even higher.
"We ambushed a Hezbollah unit on the edge of Qusayr and killed 40 of them and many more were wounded. We chopped them to pieces," says Abu Omar, a Lebanese Sunni volunteer fighter with the rebel Farouq Brigade, laughing as he made chopping motions with his hand.
He added that, having had a year to prepare, the rebel forces in Qusayr ? a mix of local "brigades" all fighting under the banner of the powerful Farouq Brigade ? were confident that they could hold out against the Syrian Army and Hezbollah. Hezbollah and rebel sources both say that defensive tunnel networks have been dug and numerous booby traps prepared in Qusayr.
"Qusayr will never fall. We are a very strong force," Abu Omar says.
He says that the rebels seized a substantial number of weapons from an air base just north of Qusayr that was overrun a few weeks ago. Today, thick clouds of black smoke billowed from the direction of that air base as Syrian troops fought to retake the facility.
HEZBOLLAH FUNERALS
There was little disguising the state of tension and activity in the northern Bekaa Valley Monday as the fighting raged a few miles to the north. At Maqneh, a Shiite village on the main highway running from Baalbek in the central Bekaa to the border, Hezbollah men had partially blocked the road with concrete blocks festooned with yellow party flags. A combatant in a full camouflage uniform, tan military boots, and a pair of sunglasses guided traffic along a detour. From further up the road came the sound of drums and a brass band, followed minutes later by the crackle of automatic rifle fire indicating that a funeral for a slain militant was underway.
A few miles north of Maqneh, at Rasm al-Hadeth, another funeral was being held. One fighter stood on the side of the road, a rifle slung around his neck as others directed traffic. In the late afternoon, Hezbollah vehicles ? SUVs with tinted windows and no number plates ? gathered at a junction in Baalbek. Men jumping out, brandishing AK-47 rifles. Shortly afterward, bursts of machine gun fire echoed across the town and its magnificent Roman temples as yet another fighter was laid to rest.
Closer to the border, ambulances, lights flashing and sirens blaring, weaved through traffic and potholes while flanked front and back by more Hezbollah vehicles.
The battle in Qusayr is Hezbollah's first major combat action since the end of the month-long war against Israel in 2006. Although the organization is dedicated to the confrontation against Israel, its cadres are now in Syria battling fellow Arab Muslims, albeit Sunnis. Meanwhile, Israeli jets penetrate Lebanese airspace on a daily basis. Two weeks ago they bombed suspected Hezbollah arms stockpiles outside Damascus in two separate sorties. Neither Hezbollah nor regime forces retaliated.
Syria is the lynchpin connecting Hezbollah by land to its patron Iran, serving as a conduit for the flow of arms and granting the Shiite group strategic depth. The collapse of the Assad regime would represent a serious blow to Iran and Hezbollah, leaving them isolated on opposite ends of the Middle East.
Hezbollah's rapidly expanding role in Syria is regarded as part of a strategic decision undertaken by the party, Damascus, and Tehran to safeguard the Assad regime at all costs. To soothe any misgivings among Hezbollah's rank and file, the party's leadership has crafted a narrative that the West and Israel are using militant Sunni jihadists to oust the Assad regime and weaken the "resistance front" of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah for the benefit of the Jewish state.
It is a rationale that has been absorbed by the Hezbollah combatants. Asked how he felt to be fighting Arab Muslims today, having not fought Israeli troops for nearly seven years, Abu Khalil shook his head.
"No, we are fighting Israelis in Syria," he says. "Only they are wearing a dishdash and carrying the Quran. But it is the same Western and Israeli project that wants to weaken the resistance."
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-army-hezbollah-bear-down-rebels-strategic-qusayr-171700307.html
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Coal operator plans to open 7 mines in Pike County
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- A longtime coal operator plans to open seven mines in the heart of the eastern Kentucky coalfields in a venture expected to create more than 250 jobs in a hard-pressed region where several thousand mining jobs have disappeared in recent years.
Bill Smith said most of the coal extracted by his High Ridge Mining operation in Pike County will be shipped to China to help fuel its economy.
"We plan on mining a million tons a year," Smith said recently.
It's a business model that officials hope will rejuvenate the area's slumping coal industry as they increasingly look abroad at new markets.
"The short-term economic outlook for coal seems dismal, but due to the growth taking place in Asia, coal is needed to sustain it," said Pike County Judge-Executive Wayne T. Rutherford. He insists that makes the long-term outlook for eastern Kentucky coal "rather bright."
Officials expect Smith's new venture will draw large numbers of job applicants, including plenty of out-of-work miners.
"People are hurting," Rutherford said Monday. "Their quality of life has been hit like it's never been hit before."
Coal mining jobs in Kentucky have dropped from 15,500 in April 2012 to 11,700 this past April, according to state figures. In April 2009, the mining work force was 18,200.
The employment drop has coincided with a decline in output. Production in eastern Kentucky fell to 49.4 million tons last year, the lowest level since 1965, according to the report from the state's Department for Energy Development and Independence.
In western Kentucky's coal region, production was up slightly last year by 2.5 percent, to 42 million tons.
Pike County had a jobless rate of 11.1 percent this past March, well above the statewide rate of 8 percent in the same month.
It's part of a regional trend as the state's eastern coalfields continue to be plagued by widespread joblessness. Magoffin County had the highest unemployment rate in the state at 18.3 percent in March. Leslie County was second at 17.2 percent, followed by Harlan County at 16.8 percent and Letcher County at 16.7 percent.
Smith said his company will begin hiring workers in the coming months, with plans to staff 36 miners at each of the seven deep mines he's developing in Pike County.
Mining jobs are traditionally among the highest paying in the coalfields.
Rutherford said the region's coal economy has survived downturns in the past and that the current slump appears to have "bottomed out." He predicted that export markets in the emerging economies of China and India will lead the recovery.
He called Smith's venture "the first step in the healing process" for the region's signature industry.
However, a recent report indicated that the future isn't so bright for a mineral that has been an economic lifeline for generations in Appalachian.
The report from Morgantown, W.Va.-based Downstream Strategies said government data shows production in Central Appalachia is projected to fall from 185 million tons in 2011 to 128 million tons by 2020, a 31 percent drop. The region includes eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, along with lower-producing mines in Tennessee and Virginia. The region reached a production peak of 294 million tons in 1990 and 291 million tons in 1997.
Rutherford has said the report "paints one side of the picture," failing to recognize the export potential of the region's coal.
The Appalachian coal business is facing higher production costs and competition from other coal basins and natural gas. High-producing mines in the Western U.S. that can mine coal at a cheaper price are putting economic pressure on Central Appalachia.
Meanwhile, U.S. utilities increasingly are switching from coal to natural gas to generate electricity. Natural gas has become cheaper as supplies grow, and it produces fewer emissions of toxic chemicals and gases that contribute to climate change.
Coal supporters point to tougher regulations being enforced by the Obama administration as a main culprit for the industry's slump.
"This is a cycle we've been through for years," Rutherford said. "But we've never had our own government trying to put us out of business."
A release announcing Smith's new mining venture in Pike County did not say how much he plans to invest in the operation. Smith, who lives in the area near Raccoon Creek, said he is putting his "heart and soul" into the venture.
Smith's mines will be developed in the Big Creek, Johns Creek and Pond Creek areas of Pike County.
His venture is the latest upbeat signal for the mining industry in Pike County, the sprawling county the borders West Virginia and Virginia. Another coal operator reopened several idled mines a few months ago and called back about 200 miners, Rutherford said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/coal-operator-plans-open-7-190147908.html
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