Iran warns off foreign planes during naval drill: report

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran has warned off foreign surveillance planes that have tried to approach its forces during naval drills in the Strait of Hormuz, an Iranian military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The drills, which began on Friday, are aimed at showcasing Iran's military capability in the shipping route through which 40 percent of the world's sea-borne oil exports pass.

Iran has threatened to block the strait if it comes under military attack over its disputed nuclear program. The United States has said it would not tolerate any obstruction of commercial traffic through the strait.

"So far about 30 warnings have been given to reconnaissance and surveillance planes of extra-regional forces that wanted to approach the area where the drills are taking place," Commander Amir Rastegari told the semi-official Mehr news agency.

He said the planes had been warned to keep out of Iranian air space and away from the site of the exercises.

The official IRNA news agency quoted Rastegari as saying the foreign planes kept away after Iran issued warnings because they were "afraid of being destroyed" by Iranian forces.

Six days of drills are taking place in an area of about 1 million sq km in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman and northern parts of the Indian Ocean.

State television reported that naval forces had successfully test fired Qader (Capable) coast-to-sea and Nour (Light) surface-to-surface missiles.

Rastegari was quoted as saying by Iran's English-language Press TV that the Qader cruise missile with a range of 200 km had "successfully and precisely hit and destroyed its mock enemy target".

On Sunday, Iran said its special forces and diving units had drilled defending ports and the coastline against attack.

Iran held a similar 10-day drill in December 2011 and sent a submarine and a destroyer into the Gulf four months ago just as U.S. and allied navies were conducting exercises in the same waters to practice keeping oil shipping lanes open.

Israel has threatened to launch military strikes against Iran's nuclear program which many in the West fear is aimed at developing a nuclear weapons capability. Iran says it is only interested in generating electricity and other peaceful projects.

Iran holds military exercises several times a year and regularly unveils advances in domestically-produced military hardware. Defense analysts say Iran often exaggerates its military strength.

(Reporting by Zahra Hosseinian; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

(This story was refiled to clarify that date of previous drill was December 2011 in the eleventh paragraph)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iran-warns-off-foreign-planes-during-naval-drill-141334229.html

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5 Real Estate New Year's Resolutions You Should Make | AOL Real ...

By Brendon Desimone

At the end of every December, people make all kinds of resolutions for the coming year. Typically, these are things they want to improve about themselves, ways to make their day-to-day personal or work life better, or ideas to put them on track for a change. Many times these surface as a result of mistakes made in the past 12 months.

When it comes to real estate, resolutions don't necessarily apply as it's unlikely that you do a real estate transaction each year. Furthermore, you can't actually resolve to buy your neighbor's house or sell your $350,000 home for $1 million. Well, you could, but you'd probably be setting yourself up for disappointment right from the start.

Some things are simply out of a would-be buyer or seller's control. But, as a would-be buyer or seller, you can learn from and make resolutions based on those who have gone before you. There exists a former buyer who, if he could, would resolve to have done more legwork before buying. Conversely, there's a current seller who resolves to take the next under-asking-price offer from a buyer more seriously.

Whether you plan to buy or sell, there are some real estate resolutions that buyers and sellers can -- and should -- make. Here are five to get you started.

Buyers: Resolve to Get Your Financial House in Order

Planning a home purchase takes time and effort, so you should consider meeting with a mortgage professional early in the year. Know your credit score and understand what your financial situation looks like from a lender's perspective. If you have credit issues, identify what they are and the necessary steps to correct them. Sometimes, it can take six months to see your FICO score move up the much-needed 20 points to get you a better mortgage rate. A good real estate agent can recommend an experienced, local mortgage professional. Local is always important, because many real estate deals are made on relationships, and being able to meet face-to-face with your mortgage professional can be a big plus.

Sellers: Resolve to Think of Your Home as a Product

Start clearing out old stuff now. If there are things deep in your closets that you don't think you'll use between January and the time you move, consider a storage locker or making space in the garage. Does your real estate agent suggest that the basement needs a paint job? Get some painting bids now. Have you always hated how the bathroom vanity takes up so much space? Consider changing it now so buyers will perceive your bathroom as bigger. This will also help you spread out the costs of home repairs and changes over several months.

Buyers: Resolve to Start Feeling Out the Market Early

You may think you only need to go to open houses once you're ready to buy. But in reality, a buyer needs a couple of months learning the marketing, understanding home values, the prices per neighborhood and the market in general. Going to open houses in the neighborhoods where you want to buy will allow you to start feeling out the market. It may also be the best way to meet your future real estate agent. Many agent/buyer relationships are forged at open houses.

Once you engage an agent, you may make several offers before you get into your dream home. Having your agent along for the ride will allow you to compare and contrast homes you've visited to the home you eventually buy. The homes you see and your experience feeling out the market will serve as the building blocks toward becoming an informed buyer and making your best offer.

Sellers: Resolve to Understand Your Timing and Exit Strategy

One of the biggest stresses on a seller is trying to plan a purchase and a sale at the same time. Can you afford to close on the new home before selling? If so, for how long? Do you need to sell the property first? If so, will the potential sale price support a home purchase in the neighborhood you want to be in? If not, what other areas should you be looking in? Selling and buying at the same time brings up all kinds of financial, emotional and physical stress.

Uprooting yourself from your home is not easy. What if you have to go into short-term housing? How will you get that set up and how long would you need to commit for? If you can afford to purchase and then sell, do they need to happen quickly? Are there things you can be doing in your current home so that once your new home closes, you'll be ready to list? It's a lot to think about and plan for, and it helps to have a strategy in place well before you have to take action.

Buyers and Sellers: Resolve to Engage a Real Estate Agent Now

Planning a home purchase or sale takes time. Engaging a real estate agent early in the process will allow you to have an expert on hand as you start to put the pieces together. A good real estate agent doesn't just show and sell homes: They can be your strategic adviser, even well in advance of any actual transaction.

On the seller side, if you pulled a permit to install some new windows or replace some dry rot in 2005, likely the contractor issued a permit. But did he close it out? A good agent will figure that out and clean it up before it becomes a transaction issue. You should use your agent to literally get your house and listing in order.

For buyers, having an agent with you from the start is like having an experienced second set of eyes and ears. Having so many transactions under the belt and years of market knowledge in their head, a real estate agent's opinions, thoughts and ideas can save you a lot of time and money. What's more, they can keep you on the right path toward identifying the best home, and they'll see you through the process all the way to the closing.

See more on Zillow:
Ways to Get Creative in a Real Estate Transaction
Is Pricing Low the Way to Go?
5 Mistakes Sellers Should Avoid in Today's Market

More on AOL Real Estate:
Find out how to calculate mortgage payments.
Find homes for sale in your area.
See celebrity real estate.
Find homes for rent in your area.

Follow us on Twitter at @AOLRealEstate or connect with AOL Real Estate on Facebook.

Source: http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2012/12/31/5-real-estate-new-years-resolutions-you-should-make/

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Did Lucy walk on the ground or stay in the trees?

Dec. 31, 2012 ? Much has been made of our ancestors "coming down out of the trees," and many researchers view terrestrial bipedalism as the hallmark of "humanness." After all, most of our living primate relatives -- the great apes, specifically -- still spend their time in the trees. Humans are the only member of the family devoted to the ground, living terrestrial rather than arboreal lives, but that wasn't always the case.

The fossil record shows that our predecessors were arboreal habitu?s, that is, until Lucy arrived on the scene. About 3.5 million years ago in Africa, this new creature, Australopithecus afarensis, appeared; Lucy was the first specimen discovered. Anthropologists agree that A. afarensis was bipedal, but had Lucy and her legions totally forsaken the trees? The question is at the root of a controversy that still rages.

"Australopithecus afarensis possessed a rigid ankle and an arched, nongrasping foot," write Nathaniel Dominy and his co-authors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "These traits are widely interpreted as being functionally incompatible with climbing and thus definitive markers of terrestriality," says Dominy, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth.

But not so fast; this interpretation may be a rush to judgment in light of new evidence brought to light by Dominy and his colleagues. They did what anthropologists do. They went out and looked at modern humans who, like Lucy, have feet adapted to terrestrial bipedalism, and found these people can still function as effective treeclimbers.

Co-authors Vivek Venkataraman and Thomas Kraft collaborated with Dominy on field studies in the Philippines and Africa that inform their PNAS paper. Venkataraman and Kraft are Dartmouth graduate students in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology PhD program in the Department of Biological Sciences, and are supported by National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships.

The studies in Uganda compared Twa hunter-gatherers to their agriculturalist neighbors, the Bakiga. In the Philippines, the researchers studied Agta hunter-gatherers and Manobo agriculturalists. Both the Twa and the Agta habitually climb trees in pursuit of honey, a highly nutritious component of their diets. They climb in a fashion that has been described as "walking" up small-diameter trees. The climbers apply the soles of their feet directly to the trunk and "walk" upward, with their arms and legs advancing alternately.

Among the climbers, Dominy and his team documented extreme dorsiflexion -- bending the foot upward toward the shin to an extraordinary degree -- beyond the range of modern "industrialized" humans. Assuming their leg bones and ankle joints were normal, "we hypothesized that a soft-tissue mechanism might enable such extreme dorsiflexion," the authors write.

They tested their hypothesis using ultrasound imaging to measure and compare the lengths of gastrocnemius muscle fibers -- the large calf muscles -- in all four groups -- the Agta, Manobo, Twa and Bakiga. The climbing Agta and Twa were found to have significantly longer muscle fibers.

"These results suggest that habitual climbing by Twa and Agta men changes the muscle architecture associated with ankle dorsiflexion," write the scientists, demonstrating that a terrestrially adapted foot and ankle do not exclude climbing from the behavioral repertoire of human hunter- gatherers, or Lucy.

In their conclusions, the Dartmouth team highlights the value of modern humans as models for studying the anatomical correlates of behavior, both in the present and in the dim past of our fossil ancestors.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Dartmouth College. The original article was written by Joseph Blumberg.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Vivek V. Venkataraman, Thomas S. Kraft, and Nathaniel J. Dominy. Tree climbing and human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1208717110

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Nj87vBz84zw/121231161043.htm

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Storm8 Grabs 2M Downloads In One Day On Christmas

How big is Christmas for mobile app developers? For one San Francisco Bay Area-based game maker, it meant 2 million downloads in a single day. Christmas is unsurprisingly the biggest day of the year for many app makers as consumers unwrap brand-new phones and rush to the store to test out new apps. Storm8, which is a bootstrapped casual game developer out of Redwood Shores, saw four times the number of downloads they normally experience on a Tuesday. They also saw about 2.5 million hours of gameplay that day and up to 4.5 times the level of average revenue per daily active users, as consumers spent more on in-app purchases. Holiday-themed items like virtual Christmas trees and snow globes were the most popular. The 4x increase that Storm8 saw is consistent with what other analytics companies have picked up over the holidays. Flurry, an analytics company that tracks more than 260,000 apps, reported that device activations more than quadrupled to 17.4 million on Christmas Day. They saw a similar quadrupling effect last Christmas. On top of that, app downloads more than doubled to 328 million on Christmas, they reported. How does Storm8′s 2 million downloads in one day compare to other developers? Well, when Instagram released its Android version, it saw 1 million downloads on the first day and 5 million downloads over the first six days for the app. Rovio also said last year that it was seeing about 1 million downloads a day for its Angry Birds franchise. As for Storm8, it’s a casual game developer that was co-founded by a few early former Facebook employees. They’ve grown to have more than 150 employees and 400 million downloads without taking any venture funding (as a matter of choice and as the funding environment for gaming developers has changed substantially over the last year).

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TeVT3QuaoMk/

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Celebrity Deaths 2012 - Stars Died, Dead, RIP | Gossip Cop

9:28 am, December 31st, 2012

PHOTOS

(GettyImages.com)

In 2012, we said goodbye to more than two dozen celebrities who had gifted us with decades of music, television, and movies.

Whether succumbing to a long illness or old age, expected or shocking, the loss of these stars hurt all the same.

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Source: http://www.gossipcop.com/celebrity-deaths-2012-stars-dead-died-rip/

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Dancing troupe of middle-class taxpayers: Obama's 'fiscal cliff' trump card?

President Obama took to the stage Monday to press Congress not to allow taxes to go up on middle-class taxpayers ? and he had a rambunctious group of them on hand to support him.

By Linda Feldmann,?Staff writer / December 31, 2012

President Obama smiles and gestures as he speaks about the 'fiscal cliff' Monday in the South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

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The campaign is over, but when President Obama stepped on stage Monday to make a statement on fiscal cliff negotiations, it felt more like a pep rally than a sober policy update on an issue of global import.

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The White House had packed the room, the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with some 200 ?middle-class taxpayers? ? and rather rambunctious ones, at that. A handful stood behind Mr. Obama, the rest filled the auditorium?s seats.

It was a veritable security blanket of middle-class taxpayers, there as a visual show of force for the president as he seeks to reach a deal with the Republicans to avert the tax hikes and deep spending cuts that automatically go into effect at midnight Monday. One said she was invited after she had ?answered some questions? on the White House?s Y2K web page ? named for the $2,000 that each middle-class household would save by not having its taxes go up.

Clearly, this event had been days in the making, and it was reminiscent of other middle-class focused events and travels Obama has had since he won reelection Nov. 6. ?

?Thank you for having us!? one attendee shouted after Obama welcomed the group.

The middle-class taxpayers cheered and stood when the president took the stage, called out to him as he spoke, and gave him another standing ovation when he finished. The event was mildly newsworthy: The president announced that a deal was ?within sight, but it?s not done.?

?So as of this point, it looks like I'm going to be spending New Year's here in DC,? he said. ?You all are going to be hanging out in DC, too.?

At that point, someone in the crowd invited the president over for New Year?s Eve.
?
?I can come to your house? Is that what you said?? Obama said. ?I don't want to spoil the party.?

?You are the party!? the attendee shouted back, to laughter from the crowd.

Obama then sought to turn the event back to its central purpose: to focus on the middle class and how a return to Clinton-era tax rates for all but the wealthiest 2 percent would be painful.
?
?The people who are with me here today, the people who are watching at home, they need our leaders in Congress to succeed,? Obama said.

Later in the afternoon, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor and echoed Obama?s statement: ?We are very, very close,? he said. But soon after, the news broke that the House would not vote on New Year?s Eve, meaning the United States will go over the edge of the cliff, at least temporarily. The hope, as of this writing, was that House and Senate leaders could gather enough votes to pass a deal early in 2013, and have it go into effect retroactively to Jan. 1.

And what about those middle-class taxpayers? Perhaps Obama is keeping them near at hand, just in case.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/isGyFEzKLNo/Dancing-troupe-of-middle-class-taxpayers-Obama-s-fiscal-cliff-trump-card

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China Now Has 1.104B Mobile Users, While Mobile Communications Revenue Totaled $116.26B Over First 11 Months of 2012

Statistics released yesterday?(link via Google Translate) by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) say that as of the end of November 2012, there were 1.104 billion mobile phone users in that country, an increase of nearly 118 million people during the first eleven months of 2012. This would mean that about 82% of China's population currently uses a mobile phone (though as commenters noted below, many of these mobile phones could have dual sim cards, which was not taken into account in the MIIT's report).?The number of 3G phone users reached 220 million, or about 20% of mobile phone users. Broadband Internet service users increased by 24.03 million in the first 11 months of the year, while the number of mobile Internet users increased by 111 million to 750 million.?From January to November 2012, mobile communications revenue in China totaled 724.53 billion yuan (or about $116.26 billion US dollars), an increase of 11% over the same period last year.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qWY3x5yFP1E/

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