6 S.C. counties to watch (Politico)

CHARLESTON, S.C. ? There are four regions to know in South Carolina: the Upstate, the Lowcountry, the Midlands and the Pee Dee. All are unique in their own way, but they won?t matter in equal degree in Saturday?s GOP primary.

The Upstate ? in particular, the socially conservative Greenville-Spartanburg area ? will be critical to Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich?s chances. The Lowcountry ? which includes Charleston and the coastal areas ? is where Mitt Romney will live or die.

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Ron Paul?s map is more opaque. There are aspects of his message that would appeal to various parts of the state but the dovish congressman hasn?t paid much attention to hawkish South Carolina. In 2008, he managed just 4 percent here.

Here are 6 counties across the state to follow on primary night to get a feel for who?s doing well and who?s not:

Greenville County

There?s a reason the candidates spent so much time in and around Greenville County: It?s the state?s most populous county and it?s strongly Republican. More votes were cast here in the 2008 GOP presidential primary than anywhere else in the state ? no other place came close. Home to Bob Jones University and also to Furman University, this was unfriendly terrain for Mitt Romney in 2008 ? he finished in fourth place here. For Newt Gingrich to capture the state, he?s going to have to perform well in Greenville.

Lexington County

Located in the Columbia metro area and home to conservative bedroom communities, Lexington County has produced some of the politicians who are most recognizable outside the state?s borders: Rep. Joe Wilson, Gov. Nikki Haley, state Sen. Jake Knotts. This Midlands county, situated roughly halfway between Greenville and Charleston, encompasses the politics of each ? it?s amenable to both socially conservative and free market-oriented candidates. John McCain captured the county with 33 percent in 2008, followed closely by Mike Huckabee, who finished in second place with 29 percent. If Romney is running in third place here, as he did in 2008, it?s a worrisome sign for him.

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Lose a job, prepare for really long job search

Bureau of Labor Statistics

The median amount of time it's taking for unemployed people to find new jobs is about 21 weeks.

Here?s the good news: Employers are hiring more workers than they are firing these days, a welcome turnaround from the darkest days of the Great Recession.

Here?s the bad news: If you are among those unlucky enough to lose your job now, you'd better prepare for a long job search.

The median duration of unemployment was 21 weeks or about five months as of December. That means half of all unemployed workers had been without a job for more than five months.

That?s actually an improvement from mid-2010, when the median duration of unemployment peaked at 25 weeks. But it?s still nearly three times what it was before the recession began and much higher than in previous tough job markets.

The main problem: There just aren?t enough jobs to go around.

Last year the economy added an average of about 137,000 jobs a month. While that?s better than when the economy was shedding jobs, it wasn?t nearly enough to absorb the millions of unemployed and new workers entering the market, said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

?That rate of job growth is simply not fast enough to really soak up all those who are unemployed and underemployed, and those who have left the labor market and will be coming back to the labor market,? Allegretto said.

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Allegretto doesn?t expect the situation to improve?much soon for the long-term unemployed.

That?s partly because there are still 13 million people who are unemployed and seeking work. It?s also because there are many other Americans out there who may have stopped looking for a job because the market was so bad, and will start looking again if the market improves.

Those excruciatingly long job searches are an especially big problem for older workers. The median duration of unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds was 16.3 weeks in December, compared with 31.4 weeks for 55- to 64-year-olds.

Related:

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Five years without work: Labor department will now track it

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How long do you think it would take you to find a new job?

Source: http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10192757-lose-a-job-prepare-for-a-really-long-job-search

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PFT: 'Hit me in the head,' Jacobs tells 49ers

AP

Who?s the greatest coach in NFL history? Any answer would have to consider the likes of Vince Lombardi, Paul Brown, George Halas, Don Shula, Bill Walsh and Chuck Noll. But Patriots owner Robert Kraft says his coach has them all beat.

Kraft said today that he believes Patriots coach Bill Belichick will be remembered as the best coach the league has ever seen.

?I think he?ll go down as the greatest coach in the history of the NFL, because he?s really competing in the era of the salary cap,? Kraft said, via Mike Reiss of ESPN.com. ?When I bought the team, it was the beginning of the salary cap, and I think a lot of great coaches had difficulty understanding how to balance the economics of the game and the budgets. His product knowledge is so great.?

Kraft raises an interesting point about the turnover of NFL rosters these days: Belichick is going for his fourth Super Bowl ring, which would tie him with Noll for the most ever, but Noll did it with the Steelers at a time when franchises could keep the nucleus of a great team together for a decade. The Patriots have only three players on this year?s roster ? Tom Brady, Kevin Faulk and Matt Light ? who were with the Patriots when they won the first Super Bowl under Belichick.

In fact, what Belichick has done in building the Patriots dynasty at a time when there really aren?t dynasties in the NFL is so different than what any of those great coaches of the past did that it?s hard to even compare them. But Kraft has a good point when he suggests that Belichick?s achievement surpasses them all, because it comes at a time when it?s harder to build a dynasty than it ever has been before.

?I think we?re privileged to have him as a head coach,? Kraft said. ?I think he has done an outstanding job.?

And if he earns another Super Bowl ring this year, he may have done the most outstanding job that any coach has ever done.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/01/19/brandon-jacobs-urges-the-49ers-to-deliver-helmet-to-helmet-hits/related/

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Pakistan PM defends president at Supreme Court (AP)

ISLAMABAD ? Pakistan's prime minister struck a conciliatory tone in an appearance before the Supreme Court Thursday, trying to cool down a political and legal crisis destabilizing the nuclear-armed country.

The unusual appearance by a head of government before a high court was the latest move in a high-stakes struggle between the civilian regime, the judges and Pakistan's powerful army generals, who have seized power three times since 1947.

At stake is the future of Pakistan's leadership and its ties to the U.S. Relations between the two countries have been strained since last May's unilateral U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Pakistan's elected government is locked in bitter conflict with the army over a secret memo asking for Washington's help in curtailing the power of the generals after the bin Laden raid. The army was outraged by the memo, allegedly sent by the government, and pushed the Supreme Court to set up a commission to investigate. The government insists it did not send the memo.

On Thursday the Supreme Court stepped into another part of the struggle, a decade-old Swiss corruption case involving President Asif Ali Zardari. Some believe the military is maneuvering the court to depose Zardari and his government, while others point to bad blood between the president and the court's chief justice.

Against that complicated and tense background, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani agreed to honor a summons to appear before the court to answer charges he was ignoring the judiciary.

The court wants government prosecutors to formally ask Swiss authorities to reopen a shelved graft probe against Zardari, who was found guilty in absentia in a Swiss court in 2003 of laundering millions of dollars in kickbacks from Swiss companies. Zardari appealed, but in 2009 Swiss prosecutors dropped the case after a request from the Pakistani government.

Gilani insisted that Zardari is immune from prosecution. Judges didn't immediately accept that, but they adjourned for two weeks to hear more arguments in the case.

For two years, the government has been refusing orders to reopen the decade-old corruption case against Zardari, infuriating the judiciary. Zardari loyalists have long claimed that the court wants to get the president out of office, regardless of the law.

"It is my conviction that he (Zardari) has complete immunity inside and outside country," Gilani said in a 10-minute speech that was laced with humility. "I have no intention of ridiculing the court. We have the highest regard for the court."

Later, Gilani's lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, offered a concession to the court, agreeing to argue the issue of the president's immunity when the hearing resumes on Feb. 1. The government previously insisted presidential immunity was a right, and therefore didn't need to be debated in court.

"I will bow to the court order and will also speak on immunity to satisfy the court that the president has complete immunity," Ahsan told reporters.

Security was especially tight during the court session, which was also attended by several of Gilani's ministers and coalition partners. Police lined the roads in front of the Supreme Court, and two helicopters hovered over the building during the hearing.

Supporters and opponents of the government competed for attention outside the court. A group of about a dozen women chanted, "Long live Zardari!" while several dozen lawyers shouted slogans in favor of the court chief justice and against the president.

Political analysts said events at the court Thursday indicated something of a thaw.

"This will definitely contribute to reduce the tension, but it is not the end of the problems for the president," said political science professor Hasan-Askari Rizvi.

The crisis is distracting Pakistan's leaders from the severe economic and security challenges it faces, not least the threat posed by Islamist militants with links to al-Qaida who are waging war on the state.

On Thursday, gunmen seized two foreign aid workers, an Italian and a German, from just outside their office in the central Pakistan town of Multan, police and intelligence officials said.

The men were bundled into a car in a supposedly secure part of Multan, said the officials, who didn't give their names because of the sensitivities surroundings crimes involving foreigners.

The Italian government confirmed one its citizens had been kidnapped in Multan.

The men were working for a development agency helping victims of the 2010 floods, the officials said. They declined to say who they believed abducted the men.

Kidnappings for ransom are common in Pakistan. Islamist militants also abduct people and are currently holding at least three foreigners.

Last year, gunmen kidnapped an American from the Punjabi city of Lahore, and al-Qaida now claims to be holding him.

___

Associated Press writer Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad and Khalid Tanveer contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan

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Russian Claim that US Radar Downed Mars Probe Is False (SPACE.com)

Russian space industry officials say the United States may have accidentally destroyed Russia's most expensive and ambitious space mission since the Soviet era. But the accusation doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Officials at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, told newspapers that radar signals sent into space by the U.S. might have caused the catastrophic failure of its Phobos-Grunt probe, a spacecraft that was intended to go to one of Mars' moons but instead went haywire shortly after its Nov. 9 launch, got stuck in Earth's orbit, and finally crashed into the Pacific Ocean Sunday (Jan. 15).

They said the probe's electronics could have been damaged when the spacecraft flew through powerful radar from a U.S. station in the Marshall Islands, which they said was being used to track an asteroid at the time. "There is a possibility that [Phobos-Grunt] accidentally entered the area covered by the radar, which resulted in a failure of its electronics caused by a megawatt impulse," a space industry source told the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

U.S.-based radar astronomers say Russia's accusation is not at all plausible. For one thing, said Martin Slade of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "there is no asteroid-tracking radar in the Marshall Islands."

Furthermore, the Phobos-Grunt probe was in low-Earth orbit, at an altitude of 200 kilometers (120 miles), when it started to malfunction. Even if radar were being emitted and received in the Marshall Islands, "radar cannot?interfere with electronics at?that altitude," Slade told Life's Little Mysteries. [Why Must Electronic Devices Be Turned Off During Takeoff?]

In fact, it's unlikely that the probe encountered any beam strong enough to damage its systems. Jean-Luc Margot, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated the amount of radiation that the Phobos-Grunt probe would have (hypothetically) experienced had it accidentally crossed through the most powerful radar beam in the world ? the one emitted by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

"The amount of exposure is about 10,000 times less than the level that is considered safe for humans by the FCC," Margot said.

For more evidence that radar is an unlikely culprit, consider that commercial jets routinely pass through these radar beams, and because they fly at much lower altitudes than the space probe, they experience beams with power densities 400 times higher than the beam the probe would have experienced, Margot said. For these reasons, he finds the idea that crossing a radar beam would have damaged the Russian spacecraft "very difficult to believe."

According to Slade, a much more likely explanation for the probe's failure is outlined at RussianSpaceWeb.com, an English-language website based in Russia. The website cites a brief that was supposedly leaked from space industry sources to the online forum "Novosti Kosmoavtiki" today (Jan. 17). [The Worst Space Debris Events of All Time]

"The most likely culprit in the failure of the probe's propulsion unit to ignite soon after it had entered orbit on Nov. 9 was a programming error in the flight control system," the site states. "Post-failure tests (apparently simulating in-flight conditions) revealed that in 90 percent of cases, the processor of the main flight control computer onboard the spacecraft would be overloaded. It could easily lead to [computer] crashes and rebooting as more systems were being activated after the spacecraft had left the range of Russian ground control stations after reaching orbit."

Following the initial system crashes, the leaked brief suggests, new problems arose. A transmitter onboard the probe was running extremely inefficiently, consuming 200 watts of power for every 40 watts it transmitted. "As a result, the probe slowly drained its rechargeable power batteries and then its emergency power source, ? leading to a complete deactivation of onboard systems on Nov. 28, 2011," the website states.

The dead craft orbited for nearly two months before plunging back to Earth.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/space/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/space/20120117/sc_space/russianclaimthatusradardownedmarsprobeisfalse

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Fungus killing more bats than previously thought

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Fungus killing more bats than previously thought
Number of bats that have succumbed to Geomyces destructans in North America and Canada now put at 5.7 million to 6.7 million, several times more than earlier estimates.Federal researchers say an infectious and lethal cold-loving fungus sweeping through parts of North America and Canada has killed millions more bats over the last five years than previously estimated.

Source: L.A. Times
Posted on: Wednesday, Jan 18, 2012, 8:48am
Views: 16

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116773/Fungus_killing_more_bats_than_previously_thought

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Beyonce's Bandmate Michelle Williams: Blue Ivy Is "Absolutely Gorgeous" (omg!)

"Glory," indeed!

Beyonce's former Destiny's Child bandmate was among those who has already met Blue Ivy Carter, the singer's first child with hubby Jay-Z, born in NYC on Jan. 7.

PHOTOS: Beyonce's bikini body

"She is absolutely gorgeous. We were all in love," Williams, 31, told USA Today at Saturday's BET Honors in Washington, D.C.

Beyonce, 30, Jay-Z, 42 and their little one have not yet been photographed since the much-reported birth went down in a posh, private "executive suite" at Lenox Hill Hospital two weekends ago.

PHOTOS: How Beyonce rocked her baby bump

But the superstar couple "have already settled into their role of being parents, and it's just awesome to see," Williams added.

Also at the BET event, fellow Destiny's Child survivor Kelly Rowland was more reluctant to dish on the most talked-about baby of the new year.

PHOTOS: Who's the cutest A-list baby of them all?

"That will be something that everybody will have to experience the same way I did," the "Commander" singer said. "That's for her parents to disclose, not myself."

Little Blue birth was "emotional and peaceful," Beyonce and Jay-Z said in a statement last week. "We are in heaven."

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