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TEHRAN, Iran?? A U.S. official said Sunday that Washington had no indication that a drone that had crashed in Iran had actually been shot down.
Only on msnbc.com
In Tehran, state television quoted a military source as saying that Iran's military had shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone aircraft in eastern Iran.
"There is absolutely no indication up to this point that Iranians shot down this drone," the official told NBC News.
The NATO-led force in Afghanistan said the drone the Iranians claim to have shot down may be an unarmed surveillance drone that was lost last week while flying over western Afghanistan. A surveillance drone flying over western Afghanistan had gone out of control late last week and may be the one Iran said it had shot down over its own airspace, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Sunday.
"The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a U.S. unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status," an ISAF statement said.
The statement about the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was issued in Kabul and released to reporters covering an international conference on Afghanistan in the German city Bonn. Iran's armed forces have shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that violated Iranian airspace along the country's eastern border, the official IRNA news agency reported Sunday.
Iran is locked in a dispute with the U.S. and its allies over Tehran's disputed nuclear program, which the West believes is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Iran denies the accusations, saying its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and that it seeks to generate electricity and produce isotopes to treat medical patients.
The type of aircraft Iran says it downed, an RQ-170 Sentinel, is made by Lockheed Martin and was reportedly used to keep watch on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan as the raid that killed him was taking place earlier this year.
The surveillance aircraft is equipped with stealth technology, but the U.S. Air Force has not made public any specifics about the drone.
Iran said in January that two pilotless spy planes it had shot down over its airspace were operated by the United States and offered to put them on public display.
The Islamic Republic holds frequent military drills, primarily to assert an ability to defend against a potential U.S. or Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.
Tehran has focused part of its military strategy on producing drones for reconnaissance and attacking purposes.
Iran announced three years ago it had built an unmanned aircraft with a range of more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers), far enough to reach Israel.
Ahmadinejad unveiled Iran's first domestically built unmanned bomber aircraft in August 2010, calling it an "ambassador of death" to Iran's enemies.
NBC News, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45541622/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/
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Scientists have developed a vaccine that protects mice against a deadly form of the Ebola virus.
First identified in 1976, Ebola fever kills more than 90% of the people it infects.
The researchers say that this is the first Ebola vaccine to remain viable long-term and can therefore be successfully stockpiled.
The results are reported in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
Ebola is transmitted via bodily fluids, and can become airborn. Sufferers experience nausea, vomiting, internal bleeding and organ failure before they die.
Although few people contract Ebola each year, its effects are so swift and devastating that it is often feared that it could be used against humans in an act of terroism.
All previously developed vaccines have relied on injecting intact, but crippled, viral particles into the body.
Long-term storage tends to damage the virus, paralysing the vaccine's effectiveness.
The new vaccine contains a synthetic viral protein, which prompts the immune system to better recognise the Ebola virus, and is much more stable when stored long-term.
The vaccine protects 80% of the mice injected with the deadly strain, and survives being "dried down and frozen," said biotechnologist Charles Arntzen from Arizona State University who was involved in its development.
He said the next step is to try the vaccine on a strain of Ebola that is closer to the one that infects humans.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/science-environment-16011748
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MOSCOW -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party struggled to hang onto its majority in Russia's parliamentary election, results showed Monday, suggesting Russians were wearying of the man who has dominated Russian politics for more than a decade.
Rival parties and election monitors said even a result of around 50 percent was inflated, alleging ballot-stuffing and other significant violations at the polls. Many expressed fears that the vote count would be manipulated.
Putin wanted to see his United Russia party do well in Sunday's election as a sign of popular support for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away. Despite the sobering setback, he was still expected to have little trouble reclaiming the position he held from 2000 to 2008.
Putin has systematically destroyed any potential challengers and most Russians do not see any credible alternatives, despite growing dissatisfaction with his strongman style. Grumbling over pervasive official corruption and the gap between ordinary people and the superrich has become widespread.
Putting a positive spin on the disappointing returns, Putin said "we can ensure the stable development of the country with this result." But he appeared glum when speaking to supporters at United Russia headquarters and limited his remarks to a terse statement.
United Russia held a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma, which allowed it to change the constitution unchallenged. But the party is increasingly disliked, seen as representing a corrupt bureaucracy and known to many as the "party of crooks and thieves."
The Communist Party appeared to benefit from the protest vote, with exit polls and the early returns predicting it would get nearly 20 percent, up from less than 12 percent four years ago.
But Putin should still have no serious difficulties getting his laws passed. The two other parties in parliament also looked set to gain seats, and both have consistently voted with United Russia. Even the Communists pose only tempered opposition.
The results with 75 percent of the precincts counted showed about 50 percent for United Russia. This was in line with an exit poll conducted by the VTsIOM polling agency that had United Russia tallying 48.5 percent and another done by the FOM polling agency that had it winning 46 percent of the vote. The two polls were reported by the two state television channels.
Complete results were expected at 0600 GMT Monday (1 a.m. EDT).
About 60 percent of Russia's 110 million registered voters cast ballots, down from 64 percent four years ago.
Only seven parties were allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups were barred.
Several parties complained Sunday of extensive election violations aimed at boosting United Russia's vote count, including party observers being hindered in their work.
Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said his party monitors thwarted an attempt to stuff a ballot box at a Moscow polling station where they found 300 ballots already in the box before the start of the vote.
He said incidents of ballot-stuffing were reported at several other stations in Moscow, Rostov-on-Don and other areas. In the southern city of Krasnodar, unidentified people posing as Communist monitors had shown up at polling stations and the real observers from the party weren't allowed in, Zyuganov said.
Russia's only independent election monitoring group, Golos, has come under strong official pressure and its website was incapacitated by hackers on Sunday. Golos was still able to field more than 2,000 observers, and they reported numerous violations, director Liliya Shibanova said.
She said many of the violations involved absentee ballots, including so-called "cruise" or "carousel" voting where people with the ballots are bused to multiple polling stations. Many people complained that they were forced to get absentee ballots and hand them over to their bosses.
Shibanova said some of the worst violation were in the Volga River city of Samara, where observers and election commission members from opposition parties were barred from verifying that the ballot boxes were properly sealed at all polling stations.
Social media were flooded with messages reporting violations. Many people reported seeing buses deliver groups of people to polling stations, with some of the buses carrying young men who looked like football fans.
In Moscow, several journalists, including a photographer for The Associated Press, were briefly detained after taking pictures at a polling station.
Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister during Putin's first presidential term, said he and other opposition activists who voted Sunday are under no illusion that their votes will be counted fairly.
"It is absolutely clear there will be no real count," he said. "The authorities created an imitation of a very important institution whose name is free election, that is not free and is not elections."
In a number of Russian regions, the official results differed sharply from the exit polls, with United Russia doing far better than the polls indicated.
A few dozen activists of the Left Front opposition group tried to stage a protest just outside Red Square on Sunday, but were quickly dispersed by police, who detained about a dozen of them. Later in the evening, police said they arrested more than 100 other opposition demonstrators at another Moscow square and about 70 in St. Petersburg.
The websites of Golos and Ekho Moskvy, a prominent, independent-minded radio station, were down on Sunday. Both said the failures were due to denial-of-service hacker attacks. Ekho Moskvy's site came back up after the polls closed.
Golos, which is funded by U.S. and European grants, has come under heavy official pressure in the past week after Putin accused Western governments of trying to influence the election and likened recipients of Western aid to Judas.
Shibanova, the Golos leader, said its hotline was flooded Sunday with automated calls that effectively blocked it. Prior to the vote, many of the group's activists were visited by security agents, while Shibanova was held for 12 hours at an airport and forced to hand over her laptop.
The group had compiled some 5,300 complaints of election-law violations ahead of the vote, most of which were linked to United Russia. Roughly a third of the complainants ? mostly government workers and students ? said their employers and professors were pressuring them to vote for the party.
___
Jim Heintz, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Vladimir Isachenkov contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS Updates with 75 percent of precincts counted. Corrects that Putin's speech was longer than two sentences. Complete results expected at 0600 GMT Monday (1 a.m. EDT Monday). For global distribution.)
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) ? Obese adults in the United States use a number of prescription drug types more frequently than normal-weight adults, says a new study from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Medications to treat high blood pressure and high cholesterol topped the list. Roughly a third of obese adults over the age of 20 used at least one drug to lower blood pressure and one in five used a cholesterol-lowering drug. That compares to about 17 percent of normal-weight adults on blood pressure meds and one in 10 on cholesterol drugs.
More than a third of U.S. adults are obese, according to the CDC, putting them at increased risk of several medical conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, stroke and some cancers.
"Given the health risks of obesity, these results aren't terribly surprising -- they put numbers to a trend we already suspected was taking place," said Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, a general internist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the study.
Researchers, led by Dr. Brian Kit at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, analyzed prescription medication use among adults in a nationally representative sample of 10,000 Americans.
The team defined obesity as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher. BMI is a measure of weight relative to height, so for a 5'9'' tall person, for example, a BMI of 30 is roughly equal to being 35 pounds above normal weight.
When they looked at the use of 10 different drug classes between the years 2005 and 2008, the researchers found higher numbers of obese Americans were taking eight of the 10 medication types.
In addition to blood pressure and cholesterol drugs, medications for treating diabetes, asthma and thyroid problems, as well as antidepressants and painkillers, were taken by a higher proportion of obese people in some or all age groups.
Sex hormones were the only class of drugs used less by obese people, and sedatives were used about equally among weight groups.
The obese participants were also more likely to be on multiple medications at once, although the researchers saw a similar pattern among adults over 65, regardless of weight.
Among all women over 65, more than 90 percent were taking one medication, 66 percent were taking three or more drugs and 39 percent were taking five or more drugs. Men in the same age group had roughly the same usage.
While obesity is one factor that may contribute to a person's pattern of prescription drug use, the study found that regardless of weight status, prescription medication use is high among all groups, especially older adults, Kit told Reuters Health in an email.
More than 50 percent of normal weight adults over 20 used one or more prescription medications.
Though the researchers examined the magnitude of prescription drug use, they did not evaluate whether medications were being appropriately prescribed and used.
The findings, they write in Annals of Epidemiology, could just reflect doctors following current treatment guidelines for risk factors like high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Still, all medications come with side effects, and using more than one prescription drug at once only raises the risk of "adverse events," they warn.
In 2008, approximately 10 percent of health care spending went toward prescription medications, the authors note. And the results of the study suggest that weight is among the factors that contribute to prescription drug use and expenditures.
We now have a better understanding of the types of medications used by obese versus normal weight adults, said Kit.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/tgOWgu Annals of Epidemiology, November 21, 2011.
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111202/hl_nm/us_obese
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By Rosa Golijan
A Facebook status update could be up to 420 characters long in March 2009, 500 characters in July 2011, and 5,000 characters in September 2011.
But now? Now you can post status updates that are over 60,000 characters long, according to?Facebook's?Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik.?In case you're wondering how far over 60,000 you can go: The character limit is set at 63,206.
How'd Facebook come up with this ridiculously large, and unusual, character limit? Bob Baldwin, the software engineer who set the new number, explains:
Don't worry if that flies over your head ??geeky calculations tend to require several cups of coffee and a bit of homework for most of us.
Should Facebook updates really be up to 63,206 characters long?
169821
Yes! I need all that space!
9%
169822
63,206 characters? I need more!
6%
169823
No! I don't want to see people write that much!
43%
169824
Yes, but only if people are signed up for mandatory writing classes and grammar lessons.
42%
VoteTotal Votes: 359
What you really should know is that this change means that you could theoretically post an entire novel in fewer than nine Facebook updates. (Assuming that the average novel is about 500,000 characters long.)?Alternatively, you could squeeze over 450 tweets, about 395 text messages, or one incredibly long rant into a single new text space.
No guarantees that your friends will read it though.
Related stories:
Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.
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Movie hits half-billion mark in less than two weeks.
By Gil Kaufman
Photo: Summit
"The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1" looks to dominate the box office for a good long time. After two weeks atop the list of top-grossing movies, the penultimate film in the vampires and werewolves epic has already raked in more than $508 million worldwide.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie is the ninth film this year to push past the half-billion mark globally, hitting the mark in just 12 days of release. So far, the movie has grossed $223.4 million in North America and $285 million internationally, for a grand total of $508.4 million.
"We couldn't be more pleased with the success of this film and a franchise that the fans have continued to support over the past several years," said Summit Entertainment co-chairmen Rob Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger in a statement. "Thank you to all involved with the films from the actors, filmmakers and Stephenie Meyer to the most important group of all, the global fan base that continues to drive a desire for more Edward, Jacob and Bella."
MTV News asked experts how long this domination can go on, especially since the only competition this weekend is the NC-17-rated full-frontal indie flick "Shame."
"It'll be close between ['Breaking Dawn - Part 1'] and 'The Muppets,' because ['The Muppets'] has much better word of mouth," said Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino, noting that it was too soon to say which would come out on top. He also predicted that the movie should finish its domestic run in the $300 million range and stay near the top until such holiday blockbusters as "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "Mission Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" on December 21.
"The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2" is scheduled to hit U.S. theaters on November 16, 2012.
Check out everything we've got on "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1".
For young Hollywood news, fashion and "Twilight" updates around the clock, visit HollywoodCrush.MTV.com.
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1675112/twilight-breaking-dawn-box-office.jhtml
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/45515927#45515927
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>>> a new twist in the disappearance of american robyn gardner in aruba . the prime suspect in the case is behind bars , but that could change with a key hearing scheduled for today. jeff rossen has the latest. good morning to you.
>> it may be a holiday in the states, but in aruba it's just another business day . a hearing is scheduled later today for gary giordano . he's been locked up in aruba for 111 days still not charged with anything. prosecutors ask the judge for yet another extension as his lawyers fight to get him out. it is as mysterious as they can. robyn gardner on vacation seemingly happy with gary giordano . one minute enjoying a beachside restaurant in aruba , the next missing, never to be seen again. giordano maintains his innocence, but police won't let him go. today prosecutors will try to convince the judge to hold him behind bars yet another 30 days .
>> we have sufficient information to say that mr. giordano is not telling us the truth.
>> giordano sticks by hi his story that he and robyn were snorkeling in aruba . she was swept under by the current as he got out of the rough water. you can see giordano looking for help in the exclusive surveillance videos minutes after she vanished.
>> the greatest challenge for investigators is trying to show what happened to her. did she run away ? did she walk away ? was she murdered?
>> investigators search the water and the rough terrain surrounding the beach where robyn was last seen. they brought in cadaver dogs. they even staged an elaborate reenactment of the crime, and no sign of robyn . just this week the dutch royal navy searched the sea again.
>> we have the divers going into the water. we use robots to search the water for the body.
>> reporter: giordano 's lawyer says the case against him is thin.
>> on the proof that i've seen, everything up until now that i've seen clears gary giordano and confirms his version of the facts.
>> now with today's hearing experts say the heat is on.
>> i think the aruban government and investigators are under intense pressure to solve this case. we know what happened in the natalee holloway case. we know that there was no one charged in that. i think the aruban government is going to do everything they can to try to get this one right.
>> today's hearing is a big deal . if the judge agrees to keep giordano locked up, this is the final extension. in 30 days prosecutors either have to charge him or let him go. carl, he could face murder or manslaughter charges in aruba .
>> jeff rossen , thanks.
Source: http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/45434975/
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