A Palestinian envoy arrived Thursday in China’s capital to discuss the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel and their bid to upgrade their status at the Cheap Beats By Dre U.N., in the latest sign of Beijing’s growing influence in the Middle East.
Bassam al-Salhi’s arrival came hours after a cease-fire in the fiercest fighting in years between Israel and Hamas militants. Eight days of airstrikes and artillery attacks by Israel and rocket attacks by Palestinian militants had killed 161 Palestinians and five Israelis.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wants China’s help in pressing for an upgrade in the Palestinians’ U.N. status from permanent observer to nonmember observer, which could boost their chances of joining additional U.N. bodies such as the International Criminal Court, where they could attempt to prosecute Israel.
Israel and the U.S. oppose the move, saying Palestinians should negotiate their statehood via peace talks and not conduct unilateral moves.
"We are aware that the United States will press relevant sides not to Beats By Dre Cheap issue the resolution, but we count on China for its weight that is parallel to that of the America," al-Salhi told China’s state Xinhua News Agency ahead of his three-day trip. Al-Salhi was to meet with China’s foreign minister on Friday.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China supported the establishment of an independent and sovereign state of Palestine.
"China understands, respects and supports Palestine’s decision" to seek nonmember observer status Beats By Dre Cheap at the U.N., Hua said.
China has increasingly played a more active diplomatic role in the Middle East. It recently announced its own four-point plan for a political solution to the Syrian conflict, although observers said it was vague and did not significantly add to past peace plans that have failed.
The Egyptian-sponsored cease-fire that took effect Wednesday night in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict promises to halt years of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel and ease border closings that have stifled Gaza’s economy. But vague language in the agreement and deep hostility between the combatants make it far from certain that the bloodshed will end.http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphoneswholesale.com/

Johnathan Montgomery spent the past four years in a Virginia state prisonsaying the same thing a lot of inmates do: He was innocent.
Convicted in 2008 of molesting a 10-year-old girl outside her grandmother’sHampton home when he was 14, he insisted the alleged 2000 assault neverhappened. Turns out, he was telling the truth.
After the woman recently recanted her story, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell onTuesday issued a conditional pardon to Montgomery, allowing him to be freed intime for Thanksgiving at his father’s home in Vale, N.C.
The truth sets you free, Montgomery, now 26, said Tuesday night, shortlyafter being released from the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarrat, Va.,where reporters awaited him.
It’s not exactly clear why the woman, Elizabeth Paige Coast, recanted herstory, but she was working as a clerk for the Hampton, Va., police department atthe time.

The Associated Press does not typically identify alleged victims of sexualassault. However, Coast is being identified because authorities say she admittedfabricating the story and because she has been charged with perjury.
According to media reports, prosecutors say that Coast told investigatorsthat her parents caught her looking at pornographic websites in 2007 when shewas 17, so she concocted a story of prior sexual abuse to explain her behavior.When the alleged assault occurred, Montgomery lived across the street fromCoast’s grandmother in Hampton, Va. The two had previously played together.
When she devised the assault story she didn’t think anything would happen toMontgomery because he had moved with his father and stepmother to North Carolinain 2004, Virginia prosecutors said. But based on her testimony, he was convictedof aggravated sexual battery and other charges and was sentenced to 7 陆 years inprison.
Since she was a victim in the case, every time we did something in thecourts she received a notification. Every time we did something in the courts itreminded her of this lie, and maybe it finally got to her, Montgomery’s father,Dave Montgomery said.
The AP could not locate a working telephone number for Coast, who ignoredreporters’ questions after leaving a court hearing earlier this month.
While Johnathan Montgomery said that he was thrilled at being freed, he saidhe was livid with Coast for her lies when he learned she had recanted. He saidthat although his bitterness had subsided, he didn’t forgiver her for the falseaccusation and the time he lost.
It’s just too awful, he said, Cheap Beats By Dre adding that he’s planning to write a bookabout his ordeal. She can’t take it back. She did what she did and she has todeal with the consequences.http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphoneswholesale.com/
He said he coped as best as he could behind bars. A fellow inmate gaveMontgomery a tattoo on his right forearm of a masked anime character from theshow Bleach that he said represented a struggle and the need to continuallykeep fighting. Among the few possessions he left prison with was a Sudoku bookthat included a meaningful quote, If you’re going through hell, keep ongoing.
I looked at that and said ’Wow.’ And that’s what we’re doing, he toldreporters on Wednesday.
Exonerations in the U.S. prison system are rare. Since 1989, there have been1,020 cases of prisoners who were later cleared of all charges, according to theNational Cheap Beats By Dre Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of MichiganLaw School and the Northwestern University School of Law. There were about 7.2million adults in prison in 2010, according to the most recent federalstatistics available.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to sanction the leaders of Congo’s M23 rebel force, which hours earlier occupied the eastern Congolese city of Goma as U.N. peacekeepers stood by without resisting.
But it did not name two countries accused by Congo of supporting the rebels: Rwanda and Uganda.
The council demanded that the M23 rebels withdraw from Goma, disarm and disband, and insisted on the restoration of the crumbing Congolese government authority in the country’s turbulent East.
The resolution Cheap Beats adopted imposes targeted sanctions, including a travel ban and assets freeze, on the M23 rebel group leadership. Individual nations are supposed to enforce the sanctions and report to the council.
The resolution also calls for an immediate end to external support to the rebels and asks the U.N. secretary-general to report on the allegations of foreign support http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphoneswholesale.com while expressing its readiness to take appropriate measures.
It took the rare step in a resolution of singling out two M23 commanders by name: Innocent Kaina and Baudouin Ngaryu, and called for the council’s sanctions committee to review their activity and unnamed other individuals.
Unnamed in the resolution were Rwanda and Uganda, which have been identified as supporters of the M23 rebellion by a U.N. panel of experts’ report due out Friday that has been leaked to Chea Dr Dre Beats some media.
Human Rights Watch said Tuesday that an advance copy of the report that it has reviewed names Rwanda and Uganda as supporting M23.
"Sadly, this resolution fails to name Rwandan officials known by the U.N. to have supported M23’s atrocities from day one," said the U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, Philippe Bolopion. "Despite its influence on Rwanda, in public the U.S. government has been inexplicably silent," he added.
Congolese special envoy Serahin Ngwei accused Rwanda of arming the M23 and providing troops to back them in his speech to the council.
Rwanda’s representative spoke to the council after the vote to deny that his country is involved in the Congolese rebellion. Uganda has previously denied involvement.
Without naming Rwanda or Uganda, the resolution said the council was worried that "external support continues to be provide to the M23, including through troop reinforcement, tactical advice and the supply of equipment, causing a significant increase of the military abilities of the M23."
It condemns M23 for attacking civilians, U.N. personnel and humanitarian relief workers, and accused M23 of "summary executions, sexual and gender based violence and large scale recruitment and use of child soldiers."
The resolution calls on "all actors"Cheap Beats to use their influence on M23 "to bring about an end to attacks."
Over the weekend, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Rwandan President Paul Kagame to ask him to intervene and stop the M23 offensive, according to a statement issued at U.N headquarters in New York.
Ban also spoke Beats By Dre Cheap Sunday to Uganda’s President Museveni, it said. Museveni, in his capacity as chairperson of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region, indicated that he had spoken to the M23 rebels and called for calm.
On Wednesday the Security Council will review the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo, named MONUSCO, which has an authorized strength of 22,000 uniformed personnel, but now has a total of 19,100 in the country including 17,700 military and 1,400 international police. The new resolution asks the U.N. chief to recommend possible redeployment, and possible "additional force multipliers."
Nearly 1,500 U.N. peacekeepers in Goma stood by as the M23 swept in to avoid triggering a battle, a U.N. spokesman said Tuesday.
The peacekeepers "cannot substitute for the efforts of national forces" in Goma, a city of 1 million, said the deputy spokesman for the secretary-general, Eduardo del Buey.
A Congolese military spokesman has expressed frustration over the lack of action by the peacekeepers.
But del Buey said the decision was made on the ground by the U.N. force commander. "There has to be a value judgment made," he said. "Do you open fire and put civilians at risk, or do you hold your fire, continue your patrols, observe what’s happening and remind the M23 that they are subject to international Cheap Beats By Dre humanitarian and human rights law?"
The U.N. troops, operating under the name MONUSCO, still hold the airport, del Buey said.http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphoneswholesale.com/

The Marine Corps is forming the Cheap Beats By Dre first squadron of pilots to fly the next-generation strike fighter jet, months after lawmakers raised concern that there was a rush to end the testing of an aircraft hit with technical problems.http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphoneswholesale.com/
So far two veteran pilots of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing have been trained to fly the F-35B. They are becoming the first members of the Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 that will debut at a ceremony Tuesday at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Ariz.
The first F-35B arrived Friday and 15 more are slated to arrive over the next year. The Defense Department has pumped a half a billion dollars into upgrading the facilities, hangars and runways at the base to make way for the next-generation fighter jet, officials said.
The pilots of the new squadron are expected to fly the aircraft by year’s end.
The Marines are the first in the military taking the steps toward putting the planes in operation. The F-35B would replace Cold War-era aircraft such as the F/A-18 Hornet and AV-8B Harrier.
It’s a pretty big milestone that a lot of people are looking at and judging, said Marine Capt. Staci Reidinger, a spokeswoman at the Yuma base. The lessons learned will be shared.
Tuesday’s inauguration comes only months after leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee suggested that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rushed a decision to develop the Marine Corps version of the fighter jet.
In a letter sent in February to the Pentagon chief, Sens. Carl Levin, the committee chairman, and John McCain, the panel’s top Republican, questioned whether the F-35B had met the criteria to warrant an end to its probation. The F-35B had been on a two-year probation because of significant testing problems.
Levin, D-Mich., and McCain, R-Ariz., wrote that the program has enjoyed some success over the last few months, after several years of having fallen short. But they said more problems with the F-35B’s structure and propulsion, potentially as serious as those that were originally identified a year ago, have been found. This is salient where the F-35B has completed only 20 percent of its developmental test plan to date. Your decision, therefore, appears at least premature.
Neither McCain nor Levin could be reached for comment on the squadron.
The developer of the aircraft, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co., is building three versions of the F-35 鈥� one each for the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.
Schedule delays and cost overruns have dogged the F-35’s development, making it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program ever. Ten years in, the total F-35 program cost has jumped from $233 billion to an estimated $385 billion. Recent estimates suggest the entire program could exceed $1 trillion over 50 years.
Aviation safety consultant and retired Marine Corps Col. Pete Field, who served as the former director of the Naval Test Pilot School, said the Marine Corps’ F-35B is the most complicated of the three versions because it can take off from shorter runways and land vertically. One of the problems earlier on in its development was it was heavier than predicted, Field said.
It was lightened substantially, but Field said that could also mean structural problems in the long run.
It remains to be seen if the F-35B has a long life and is structurally sound, said Field, who was the chief test pilot for the F/A-18. We won’t know for two to three years after it’s been in operation. If nothing crops up, perhaps the engineers have done their best work.

The F-35B stands out among military aircraft because it can be launched from small Navy ships and land in confined areas, allowing it to support ground troops on smaller battlefields. Its sophisticated stealth capabilities also means, like the Air Force’s F-22, the aircraft can fly into enemy territory without being detected by radar.
All we can do is hope that they have solved all the program problems and that they’ve got a pretty good airplane, Field said.
Former Marine and Rep. Duncan Hunter, Jr., R-Calif., who is the only member of Congress to have served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said he trusts the decision of Panetta and Marine Corps leaders.
The 35B is going to take the Marine Corps to a new level of sophisticated flight technology, Hunter told The Associated Press. The ability for the F-35B to take off and land in an Cheap Beats By Dre extremely constrained lading zone, that’s huge for what it brings to the table. The Harrier was a great airplane but it was also limited. It doesn’t have all the new technology. The F-35B has that.
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Damon Vix didn’t have to go to court to push Christmas out of the city of Santa Monica. He just joined the festivities.
The atheist’s anti-God message alongside a life-sized nativity display in a park overlooking the beach ignited a debate that burned brighter than any Christmas candle.
Santa Monica officials snuffed the city’s holiday tradition this year rather than referee the religious rumble, prompting churches that have set up a 14-scene Christian diorama for decades to sue over freedom of speech violations. Their attorney will ask a federal judge Monday to resurrect the depiction of Jesus’ birth, while the city aims to eject the case.
It’s a sad, sad commentary on the attitudes of the day that a nearly 60-year-old Christmas tradition is now having to hunt for a home, something like our savior had to hunt for a place to be born because the world was not interested, said Hunter Jameson, head of the nonprofit Santa Monica Nativity Scene Committee that is suing.
Missing from the courtroom drama will be Vix and his fellow atheists, who are not parties to the case. Their role outside court highlights a tactical shift as atheists evolve into a vocal minority eager to get their non-beliefs into the public square as never before.
National atheist groups earlier this year took out full-page newspaper ads and hundreds of TV spots in response to the Catholic bishops’ activism around women’s health care issues and are gearing up to battle for their own space alongside public Christmas displays in small towns across America this season.
In recent years, the tactic of many in the atheist community has been, if you can’t beat them, join them, said Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center and director of the Newseum’s Religious Freedom Education Project in Washington. If these church groups insist that these public spaces are going to be dominated by a Christian message, we’ll just get in the game 鈥� and that changes everything.

In the past, Cheap Beats By Dre atheists primarily fought to uphold the separation of church and state through the courts. The change underscores the conviction held by many nonbelievers that their views are gaining a foothold, especially among young adults.http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphoneswholesale.com/
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a study last month that found 20 percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an increase from 15 percent in the last five years. Atheists took heart from the report, although Pew researchers stressed that the category also encompassed majorities of people who said they believed in God but had no ties with organized religion and people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious.
We’re at the bottom of the totem pole socially, but we have muscle and we’re flexing it, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation. Ignore our numbers at your peril.
The trouble in Santa Monica began three years ago, when Vix applied for and was granted a booth in Palisades Park alongside the story of Jesus Christ’s birth, from Mary’s visit from the Angel Gabriel to the traditional cr猫che.
Vix hung a simple sign that quoted Thomas Jefferson: Religions are all alike — founded on fables and mythologies. The other side read Happy Solstice. He repeated the display the following year but then upped the stakes significantly.
In 2011, Vix recruited 10 others to inundate the city with applications for tongue-in-cheek displays such as an homage to the Pastafarian religion, which would include an artistic representation of the great Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The secular coalition won 18 of 21 spaces. The two others went to the traditional Christmas displays and one to a Hanukkah display.
The atheists used half their spaces, displaying signs such as one that showed pictures of Poseidon, Jesus, Santa Claus and the devil and said: 37 million Americans know myths when they see them. What myths do you see?
Most of the signs were vandalized and in the ensuing uproar, the city effectively ended a tradition that began in 1953 and earned Santa Monica one of its nicknames, the City of the Christmas Story.
The Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee argues in its lawsuit that atheists have the right to protest, but that freedom doesn’t trump the Christians’ right to free speech.
If they want to hold an opposing viewpoint about the celebration of Christmas, they’re free to do that 鈥� but they can’t interfere with our right to engage in religious speech in a traditional public forum, said William Becker, attorney for the committee. Our goal is to preserve the tradition in Santa Monica and to keep Christmas alive.
The city doesn’t prohibit churches from caroling in the park, handing out literature or even staging a play about the birth of Jesus and churches can always set up a nativity on private land, Deputy City Attorney Jeanette Schachtner said in an email.
The decision to ban the displays also saves the city, which had administered the cumbersome lottery process used to award booths, both time and money while preserving the park’s aesthetics, she said.
For his part, Vix is surprised 鈥� and slightly amused 鈥� at the legal battle spawned by his solitary act but doesn’t plan anything further.
That was such a unique and blatant example of the violation of the Cheap Beats By Dre First Amendment that I felt I had to act, said the 44-year-old set builder. If I had another goal, it would be to remove the ’under God’ phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance 鈥� but that’s a little too big for me to take on for right now.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Jordanian authorities have threatened to crack down on those who incite violence during protests with an iron fist, while opposition groups pledge to continue demonstrations in the kingdom.
The protests, which erupted on Tuesday across the country in response to the聽government’s聽raising fuel and gas prices, are the largest and most sustained聽to hit the country since the start of uprisings in the region nearly two聽years ago.
We will hit with an iron fist those who violated the law by stirring聽unrest, Hussein Majali, Jordan’s police chief, said on Thursday.
Armed men聽taking advantage of street chaos caused by the protests, fired on聽two police stations late on Wednesday, wounding 17 people, including 13 police聽officers, officials said. One of the assailants was killed in the ensuing聽firefight.
Assailants stormed a police station in Irbid, in the country’s far north,聽and fired on officers there on Wednesday night.
Another police station came under attack in聽the northern Amman suburb of Shafa Badran, where聽automatic weapons were used.
In Salt, northwest of capital Amman,聽protesters set fire to a civil affairs office.
The scene was less deadly in Amman itself on Wednesday night, although up to 1,000 people had spilled onto the streets.
Hundreds of young men gathered at a usually busy road junction in the capital, facing off with riot police, who shot tear gas as tensions rose.
The unrest was not confined to the country’s north, as about聽2,000 protesters in the city of Karak, about 140km south of Amman,聽shouted: Down, down with you,www.beatsbydregoogle.com Abdullah, and Get out and leave us alone as they marched through the town on Wednesday, shattering shop windows, witnesses and police said.
Bulding deficit
The violence started聽on Tuesday night after news spread of the price increases, under which the cost of household gas will rise by 53 per cent and petrol around 12 per cent.
The measure aims to rein in a bulging budget deficit and secure a $2bn loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Minutes after state television announced the price rises, several thousand Jordanians poured into the streets.
The hikes, followed by an 11 per cent increase in public transport fares, drew sharp condemnation from the opposition, which warned of civil disobedience in the run-up to January general elections.
The street is seething with anger and an explosion is coming, said聽Zaki Bani Irsheid, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s most powerful opposition group.
We want to create a Jordanian Spring with a local flavour – meaning reforms in the system while keeping our protests peaceful.
Tuesday’s violence
In Amman, around 500聽demonstrators clashed on Tuesday with anti-riot police and hurled stones at them after they were prevented from holding a sit-in near the interior ministry on Gamal Abdel Nasser Circle.
They set tyres and garbage containers ablaze and tried to block the main road between there and nearby Firas Circle in Jabal Hussein neighbourhood, but police prevented them and fired tear gas, an AFP journalist reported.
Violent demonstrations broke out earlier this week across all 12 of Jordan’s governorates, police said.
Protesters burned tyres to block traffic, torched police and private cars and at least 20 government offices, including court buildings. Police said at least 120 people have been arrested nationwide.
In the northwestern city of Salt, tens of protesters unsuccessfully tried to storm the residence of Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur, while in the southern city of Maan, demonstrators fired in the air to force riot police out of town, wounding one officer, police said in a statement.
Protesters have demanded the resignation of Nsur and his 36-day-old government. Police聽used tear gas and water cannons to break up the protest聽outside his home in Salt on Tuesday night.
Jordan has been hit by frequent, but small, anti-government protests over the past 23 months, but these demonstrations have squarely shifted the focus from the government to the king.

Michigan’s ban on affirmative action Cheap Beats By Dre in college admissions was declared unconstitutional Thursday by a deeply divided federal appeals court, six years after state voters said race could not be an issue in choosing students.
In an 8-7 decision, the court said the 2006 amendment to the Michigan Constitution is illegal because it presents an extraordinary burden to opponents who would have to mount their own long, expensive campaign through the ballot box to protect affirmative action.
That burden undermines the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change, said Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., writing for the majority at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
The court said having supporters and opponents debate affirmative action through the governing boards of each public university would be much fairer than cementing a ban in the constitution, which it referred to as home of the highest level of public policy.
The court did not comment on a portion of the amendment that deals with government hiring.
The decision is limited to states in the 6th Circuit, which includes Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. But it also raises the odds that the U.S. Supreme Court may get involved. A very similar law in California was upheld by a San Francisco-based appeals court, and the Supreme Court could choose to resolve the conflicting decisions of the 9th Circuit and the 6th Circuit on voter-approved bans.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, a supporter of the ban, said he will ask the nation’s highest court to take the case.
Entrance to our great universities must be based upon merit, he said.
George Washington, a Detroit attorney for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, said the ruling is a tremendous victory. He predicted the case will move to the Supreme Court.
What this really means is thousands of blacks and Latinos who would not have had a chance to go to our most selective universities will have the chance to become lawyers, doctors and leaders of all fields, Washington said.
As the college admissions process for 2013 Beats By Dre Cheap heats up, it wasn’t immediately clear what campuses would do in light of the ruling. Officials at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University said they were reading the decision.
At the University of Michigan, 8 percent of undergraduates this fall are black or Hispanic, compared to almost 11 percent in 2008. The number of black female undergraduates is down 27 percent compared to 2008, according to university data.
This is the second time that the appeals court has examined Michigan’s affirmative action issue. A three-judge panel last year also found the ban unconstitutional for similar reasons. But after a plea from Schuette, the entire court decided to take a fresh look at the matter, with new filings and arguments leading to the new ruling Thursday.
In a 32-page opinion, the court’s majority explained the difficulties that it sees for students under the constitutional amendment. For example, there’s nothing barring someone from citing family alumni connections when applying to a college. But the court said a student seeking to use race to influence the admissions process now is shut out unless the constitution is changed again.
Michigan cannot force those advocating for consideration of racial factors to traverse a more arduous road without violating the Fourteenth Amendment, the court said. We thus conclude that Proposal 2 reorders the political process in Michigan to place special burdens on minority interests.
In dissent, Cheap Beats Judge Danny Boggs said the majority relied on an extreme extension of two Supreme Court cases to justify its decision, one in 1969 involving the repeal of a fair housing law in Akron, Ohio, and the other in 1982 involving an effort to stop racial integration in Seattle schools.
We have the citizens of the entire state establishing a principle that would in general have seemed laudable, Boggs said of Michigan.
Another dissenter, Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, said the will of 58 percent of voters in 2006 has been shredded.
Michigan has chosen to structure its university system such that politics plays no part in university admissions at all levels. … The Michigan voters have http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com therefore not restructured the political process in their state by amending their state constitution; they have merely employed it, Gibbons said.
Besides Michigan, six states have banned racial preferences in admissions: Washington, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, California and Florida. In Texas and Georgia, leading public universities use a race-neutral system, though the University of Texas has maintained some use of affirmative action.
Since a 2003 Supreme Court decision, universities have been allowed to use racial preferences if they choose, Beats By Dre Cheap though they are not compelled to do so. The court last month heard arguments in a case that could change that precedent. Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant, is suing the University of Texas.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Cheap Beats By Dre Walt Zeboski, who chronicled Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and a succession of California governors as a photographer for The Associated Press, has died. He was 83.
Zeboski died Monday at his home in Sacramento after battling pneumonia. His death was confirmed Tuesday to the AP by his wife, Virginia Zeboski.
She said the family brought her husband home Friday from Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento and provided hospice care for him over the weekend.
Colleagues remembered Zeboski for his journalistic integrity and dedication to the wire service.
He had a newsman’s instinct, said Sacramento-based AP photographer Rich Pedroncelli, Cheap Beats who described Zeboski as a mentor. He knew where to be when he needed to be there.
Company records show http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com Zeboski was hired as a permanent AP employee in 1966 and that his photography career spanned more than three decades, mainly in Sacramento. He covered four California governors, including Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown and George Deukmejian, as well as countless political power players in the state Legislature.
In 1980,Beats By Dre Cheap he covered all aspects of Reagan’s life on the presidential campaign trail, including a stop in Philadelphia for a fundraiser for then-U.S. Senate candidate Arlen Specter. Zeboski also captured quiet moments of Reagan and his wife, Nancy, on horseback at their ranch north of Santa Barbara and aboard a campaign plane.
He served as photo editor when colleague Slava Sal Veder snapped an image of POWs arriving at Travis Air Force Base from Vietnam as part of Operation Homecoming in 1973. The image of a beaming young woman, arms widespread, greeting her father won the Pulitzer Prize.
I think he was just a consummate photographer, one of the best I’ve ever seen, said former AP reporter Steve Lawrence, who recalled how Zeboski’s dedication often meant rushing back to the office to develop film.
The photographer also snapped iconic images of the era, including labor leader Cesar Chavez, armed members of the Black Panther Party, U.S. Sen. George McGovern, who lost to President Richard Nixon in 1972 in a historic electoral landslide, and Lynette Squeaky Fromme, the infamous Charles Manson disciple who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford during a stop in Sacramento.
Zeboski captured Fromme sitting in a U.S.Cheap Beats Marshal’s vehicle as she returned to jail in 1975, an image that continues to get frequent use.
He also captured Queen Elizabeth II’s 1983 visit to Yosemite National Park and the first disabled climber to scale El Capitan.
Virginia Zeboski, 90, said her husband often risked his own safety to get the shot.
He didn’t complain. He just did what he was told to do, she said. One time they had him flying upside down in a helicopter taking pictures of the Yosemite Valley, and that was scary.
The couple met in Indiana, where he began his AP career as a wire photo operator. The AP bureau was in the offices of The Indianapolis Star, where the two sat across from each other, separated by a glass wall.
They celebrated their 60th anniversary this year.
Chea Dr Dre Beats In addition to his wife, Zeboski is survived by his son, Jan, and seven grandchildren. The family planned a celebration Saturday at their home.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is telling top donors that President Barack Obama won re-election because of the gifts he had already provided to blacks, Hispanics and young voters and because of the president’s effort to paint Romney as anti-immigrant.
The president’s campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift, Romney said in a call to donors on Wednesday. He made a big effort on small things.
Romney said his campaign, in contrast, had been about big issues for the whole country. He said he faced problems as a candidate because he was getting beat up by the Obama campaign and that the debates allowed him to come back.
In the call, Romney didn’t acknowledge any major missteps, such as his 47 percent remarks widely viewed as denigrating nearly half of Americans, his lack of support for the auto bailout, his call for illegal immigrants to self-deport, or his change in position on abortion, gun control and other issues. He also didn’t address the success or failure of the campaign’s strategy of focusing on the economy in the face of some improvement in employment and economic growth during the months leading up to Election Day.
Obama won the popular vote by about 3.5 million votes, or 3 percent, and won the Electoral College by a wide margin, 332-206 electoral votes. Exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks showed that Obama led Romney by 11 percentage points among women and won better than 7 of 10 Hispanic voters and more than 9 of 10 black voters.
Romney called his loss to Obama a disappointing result that he and his team had not expected, but he said he believed his team had run a superb campaign. He said he was trying to turn his thoughts to the future, but, frankly, we’re still so troubled by the past, it’s hard to put together our plans for the future.
Romney’s finance team organized the call to donors. A person who listened to Romney’s call provided details about it to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the call was private. The Los Angeles Times first reported Romney’s remarks.
Among the gifts Romney cited were free health care in perpetuity, which he said was highly motivational to black and Hispanic voters as well as for voters making $25,000 to $35,000 a year.
Romney also said the administration’s promise to offer what he called amnesty to the children of illegal immigrants 鈥� what he termed the so-called DREAM Act kids helped send Hispanics to the polls for Obama.
Young voters, Romney said, were motivated by the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and being able to remain on their parents’ health insurance plans. Young women had an additional incentive to vote for Obama because of free contraception coverage under the president’s health care plan, he said.
I’m very sorry that we didn’t win, he told donors. I know that you expected to win. We expected to win. We were disappointed; we hadn’t anticipated it.
Romney said he and his team were discussing how his donor group could remain connected and have an influence on the direction of the Republican Party and even the selection of a future nominee 鈥� which, by the way, will not be me.
Asked about Romney’s remarks, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a potential contender for the GOP nomination in 2016, strongly condemned those in the GOP who classify voters based on income, race or age and said the party cannot concede wide swaths of voters and expect to win elections.
We have got to stop dividing the American voters, Jindal told reporters in Las Vegas, where the Republican Governors Association was meeting. We need to go after 100 percent of the vote, not 53 percent. We need to go after every single vote.

Cheap Beats By Dre Oil prices have shown a recent dip due to worries about the upcoming fiscal cliff as well as a lowered forecast for demand. 聽If a major drop in oil prices ensues,www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com it could threaten the activity in places like North Dakota, which just today announced a record for annual oil production.
Construction, investment and the population have all taken off in the state, thanks in part to advances tapping the oil-rich Bakken shale formation. Initially discovered in the 1950s, it covers 25,000 square miles of North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada.
Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council told Fox News,Chea Dr Dre Beats companies have found the Bakken’s edges and technique has improved. You begin putting multiple wells on a pad… the drilling rigs are becoming more efficient. You can walk your rig, you can slide your drilling rig, and begin producing oil immediately, Ness said. Production has jumped from less than 500,000 barrels a day in December 2011 to the current rate of more than 728,000 barrels a day.
Ness said oil prices are always a concern because it costs a lot to develop the Bakken’s high demand, sweet crude. He added the investor community is critical and the fiscal cliff would mean less money for investors to put in. 聽There’s only one Bakken at this point. Other people are searching for it (another one) across the world, but the Bakken is a world class resource.
Williston, North Dakota is in the the thick of it all. 聽Just the oil companies alone are spending about 2-billion dollars a month on their investments, just to drill the wells out here, Tom Rolfstad, executive director of Williston Economic development, said.
Rolfstad said there is a ripple effect of new homes, businesses and infrastructure, Cheap Beats By Dre There is a tremendous amount of new, new, new, pretty much everywhere you look.
A typical Bakken well is projected to produce for 30 years. Ness said this means domestic energy, For every barrel we produce in the Bakken, we need one less barrel from some unfriendly country.
Lynn Helms, Beats By Dre Cheap Director of North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources said besides oil prices, the threat of federal regulations and taxation are also risks to the Bakken’s bright future, …we’re constantly making trips to Washington, D.C. 聽We’re always in contact with our senators and our congressman and we’re working really hard to try to avoid any kind of train wrecks.
Helms said it helps that the state has a high percentage of privately owned property, it’s booming because there is not a lot of federal land. 聽And the state has a reputation for being business friendly, …we have a very rigorous process you have to go through in North Dakota if you’re going to impose rules or regulations on the private industry.
Chea Dr Dre Beats It could be argued this is paying off for North Dakota, which enjoys an estimated $1.6 billion budget surplus and the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. 聽The state has also moved up the ladder past states like California and Alaska… it’s second only to Texas in oil production.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Army prosecutors on Tuesday asked an investigative officer to recommend a death penalty court-martial for a staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a predawn rampage, saying that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales committed heinous and despicable crimes.
Prosecutors made their closing arguments after a week of testimony in the preliminary hearing. Prosecutors say Bales, 39, slipped away from his remote base at Camp Belambay in southern Afghanistan to attack two villages early on March 11. Among the dead were nine children.
The slayings drew such angry protests that the U.S. temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before American investigators could reach the crime scenes.
Terrible, terrible things happened, said prosecutor Maj. Rob Stelle. That is clear.
Stelle cited statements Bales made after he was apprehended, saying that they demonstrated a clear memory of what he had done, and consciousness of wrong-doing.
Several soldiers testified that Bales returned to the base alone just before dawn, covered in blood, and that he made incriminating statements such as, I thought I was doing the right thing.
An attorney for Bales argued there’s not enough information to move forward with the court-martial.
There are a number of questions that have not been answered so far in this investigation, attorney Emma Scanlan told the investigating officer overseeing the preliminary hearing.
Scanlan said that it’s still unknown what Bales’ state of mind was the evening of the killings.
An Army criminal investigations command special agent had testified last week that Bales tested positive for steroids three days after the killings, and other soldiers testified that Bales had been drinking the evening of the massacre.
We’ve heard that Sgt. Bales was lucid, coherent and responsive, Scanlan said in her closing argument. We don’t know what it means to be on alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids.
The investigating officer said Tuesday that he would have a written recommendation by the end of the week, but that is just the start of the process. That recommendation goes next to the brigade command, and the ultimate decision would be made by the three-star general on the base. There’s no clear sense of how long that could take before a decision is reached on whether to proceed to a court-martial trial.
If a court-martial takes place, it will be held at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the Washington state base south of Seattle, and witnesses will be flown in from Afghanistan.
The military hasn’t executed a service member since 1961, and none of the six men on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., today were convicted for atrocities against foreign civilians. All of their crimes involved the killing of U.S. civilians or fellow service members.
In the most recent high-profile case at Joint Base Lewis-McChord before Bales, the Army did not seek a death penalty court-martial against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians for sport. In that case, the ringleader was sentenced to life in prison with possibility of parole.
Bales faces 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder. The preliminary hearing, which began Nov. 5, included nighttime sessions on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the convenience of the Afghan witnesses. Bales did not testify.
The witnesses included a 7-year-old girl, who described how she hid behind her father when a gunman came to their village that night, how the stranger fired, and how her father died, cursing in pain and anger.
None of the Afghan witnesses were able to identify Bales as the shooter, but other evidence, including tests of the blood on his clothes, implicated him, according to testimony from a DNA expert.
After the hearing concluded, Scanlan spoke with reporters, saying that in addition to questions about Bales’ state of mind, there are still questions of whether there were more people involved.
During testimony, a special agent testified that months after the killings, she was able to interview the wife of one of the victims, who recounted having seen two U.S. soldiers. Later, however, the woman’s brother-in-law, Mullah Baraan, who was not present at the shootings, testified that the woman says there was only one shooter. The woman herself did not testify.

Cheap Beats By Dre The trial of late strongman Moammar Gadhafi’s last prime minister, Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, is to open in the Libyan capital on Monday, the public prosecutor’s spokesman said.
Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi will appear tomorrow (Monday) on the occasion of a first case against him, Taha Baara said, adding that Mahmoudi faces charges of prejudicial acts against the security of the state.
Mahmoudi fled to neighboring Tunisia in September last year shortly after rebels seized Tripoli, effectively putting an end to more than four decades of iron-fisted Gadhafi rule.
He was extradited to聽Libya聽to face justice on June 24, despite warnings Chea Dr Dre Beats from http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com rights groups that he could face the death penalty.
In July, Mahmoudi protested his innocence from his prison cell in the Libyan capital.
I am not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, he told reporters during a visit to the prison organized by the authorities in an apparent bid to quash rumors he had been tortured.
I am ready to be tried by the Libyan people. I am sure of myself and of my innocence, he said at the time.
Along with Cheap Beats Seif al-Islam, the toppled dictator’s most high-profile son, Mahmoudi is one of the few remaining keepers of the many state secrets under Gadhafi, who was killed on October 20 last year.
A physician by training, Mahmoudi was loyal to Gadhafi until the end, serving as premier from 2006 up to the final days of his regime.
Mahmoudi had appealed his extradition from Tunisia on the grounds that he had applied for refugee status and could face execution if sent back to聽Libya.
From March 5, 2006 through the war of 2011, Mahmoudi was the Secretary of the General People’s Committee, the equivalent of the country’s prime minister.
He held a series of government posts before that, including health minister from 1992 to 1997, as well as shorter stints as minister of human resources and minister of infrastructure.
Mahmoudi oversaw vast fortunes in the oil-rich nation as chairman of the聽Libya聽Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world which was created in 2007 to restructure state enterprises.
He also oversaw the Libyan Oil and Gas Council which was created in 2006.
Gadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam, Cheap Beats By Dre arrested inside聽Libya聽a year ago, is awaiting to hear where he will stand trial for alleged crimes against humanity.
The authorities in Tripoli want him to stand in the dock inside聽Libya, but the International Criminal Court wants him to face justice in The Hague.
Judges in The Hague heard arguments last month by a lawyer for聽Libya聽and representatives of the ICC to decide where Seif, 40, and Gadhafi’s former spymaster Abdullah Senussi, 63, should be tried.
Seif has been in custody in the western Libyan hill town of Zintan since his arrest last Cheap Beats November.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Baine’s Books sits in the heart of this historic village, a Main Street institution where townspeople gather for coffee and conversation and, every Thursday after sundown, an open mic night that draws performers from near and far with guitars and banjos in hand, bluegrass and blues on their lips.
Talk of church and school, and most certainly music, almost always takes precedence at Baine’s. But we’ve stopped in at election time, and Lib Elder is at a corner table tucking into a chicken pot pie, an Obama-Biden button pinned to her blouse right next to her heart.
She knows without asking why a reporter has come to this corner of southern Virginia to write about an election that divided America among so many lines.
Red or blue. Left or right. Big government or small. Tea party or Occupy. Ninety-nine percent or 1. Employed or out-of-work. Black or white or brown.
This is, after all, ’where our nation reunited,’ said Elder, her voice tinged with slight sarcasm as she quotes the slogan adorning every sign into the town where, on Palm Sunday 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, marking the beginning of the end of the Civil War.
It’s a nice idea, that a place could symbolize peace and harmony and, even, healing after what was inarguably the most divisive time in our nation’s history.
It’s just not something that Elder finds particularly authentic after another cutthroat election year across these united states.
The acrimony is still too fresh and far too raw. There was the family member, related by marriage, who accused Elder of hating her country because she had sent him a fundraising email for Barack Obama; Elder mistakenly believed he was a Democrat. And the white teenagers at the Appomattox Railroad Festival who saw her Obama button and jeered: You know he’s black, don’t you?
Peace and harmony? Elder, for one, doesn’t see them. Not in Appomattox. Not in America. Not even now that Election 2012 is behind us at last.
I think we are much more divided, said Elder, who heard similar concerns when she made get-out-the-vote calls during the campaign. It’s not that people hate the election. … They just hate everybody screaming all the time. It’s harder to hear anything, the louder you get.
And these days, she added: Everybody’s voice is louder.
It’s a familiar election-year narrative, that Americans 鈥� not just the candidates, not just the parties, not just the pundits who shriek at us from partisan programming 鈥� but everyday Americans themselves are divided by an ever-widening gulf. We see it in the narrow margin separating winner from loser on Tuesday.
Exit polling also seems only to reaffirm these chasms. On one side we have most women, the poor, people of color, urbanites, young voters and those who worship infrequently. On the other we have most men, those who are rich and white, rural Americans, senior citizens and those who worship regularly.
Said Republican strategist and CNN commentator Alex Castellanos as he visibly agonized over this on election night: The country, right now, it is split into pieces.
But is all of this an every-four-year phenomenon that goes away when the yard signs come down and the Facebook tirades finally end, or at least subside? Can we do as our leaders do? Debate with fingers thrust in each other’s faces, tearing one another apart, and then shake hands, return to our corners and somehow attempt to live and work together once more?
In this slice of Virginia, a literal battlefield turned electoral battleground, there are those who are no longer sure.
They, like Elder, sense that something has changed. That the much-discussed polarization of this election will live on long past it, in ways depicted by more than a mark on a ballot.
Friendships may wilt, suggested local lawyer Michael Brickhill, as some fade out of social circles that you no longer feel comfortable with … if there are strong differences of opinion.
He recalled a business dinner in California not long ago in which the group agreed not to invite a guy who’d been ranting about the election.
They were really, really afraid that he would not be able to relate on the common ground that we had formed, which had nothing to do with politics, Brickhill said.
Others may be hesitant to, at least publicly, brand themselves by party identity, said Bryan Baine, a former composition instructor who now owns the bookstore in Appomattox.

Cheap Beats By Dre World trade will stage a modest recovery in 2013, with businesses more confident than some politicians that slow economic growth will not spawn protectionism, HSBC said on Monday.
The bank said it expected trade to expand about 5 percent next year, http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphones-wholesale.com picking up to a range of 6-7 percent in 2014-2016, driven by ever-closer commercial links between emerging markets.
The 2013 projection is broadly in line with that of the World Trade Organisation, which expects growth of 4.5 percent, up from just 2.5 percent this year. It scaled back forecasts in September because Cheap Beats of widespread economic weakness, especially in Europe.
Lou Jiwei, the head of China’s $482 billion sovereign wealth fund, told Reuters in Beijing he was worried about rising protectionism in some Western countries.
But James Emmett, HSBC’s global head of trade, took a more sanguine view. If we look at what we’re hearing in the market, and what our clients are saying to us, this is not a topic that’s coming up regularly, he told Reuters in an interview.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper went so far last week as to say protectionism could push the world economy towards a prolonged recession.
In its latest forecast,Beats By Dre Cheap HSBC said it expected the pattern of global trade to be increasingly influenced by fast-growing Asian countries and by ’South-South’ trade between emerging economies.
For example, HSBC, a market leader in trade finance, is projecting Mexico’s imports from India will expand by 27 percent a year in 2013-2015. Malaysia’s shipments to Brazil could rise 14 percent a year over the same period, it says.
JUICY DISCOUNTS
HSBC is also bullish trade between China and India will continue to grow rapidly, driven by demand from middle-class consumers and facilitated by the use of the yuan, China’s currency, which is also known as the renminbi (RMB).
Emmett said HSBC had recently opened its first yuan-denominated letter of credit in India to finance imports from China.
Buyers of Chinese goods in emerging markets in particular Cheap Beats By Dre would find it increasingly attractive to bypass the dollar and pay directly in yuan, Emmett said.
In return for shedding exchange rate risk, Chinese exporters were willing to offer juicy discounts, he said.
We’re hearing factory-gate price advantages of somewhere between 2 and 10 percent by moving into the RMB, Emmett said.
The RMB will be an important part of the South-South emerging market trade flow as it will take some of the cost out of dealing with a third currency.http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphones-wholesale.com/

Cheap Beats By Dre President Obama, after winning a second term, is facing renewed pressure to approve the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline as one of his first orders of business.
The president had delayed approval of the project in January, amid vocal opposition by environmentalists. The decision created a rare alliance — both Republican lawmakers and unions clamored for an end to the stonewall, pointing to the thousands of jobs that could come with Keystone.
Now that Obama has secured another four years,www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com he doesn’t have to walk the tightrope between the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO. And everyone from Canadian officials to energy industry magnates voiced hope this week that the Obama administration would ultimately side with the jobs.
The latest was Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who according to Reuters said in India Cheap Beats Thursday that he’s optimistic the pipeline will be approved.
Evidently the next steps will be very soon, he said.
Mitt Romney, Chea Dr Dre Beats for his part, pledged to green-light the project on Day One if he had been elected. American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard indicated there’s no reason Obama can’t do the same.
Right off the bat, the president can approve the Keystone Pipeline and put thousands of Americans to work immediately, Gerard said in a statement.
The $7 billion pipeline project, which would transport tar sands crude from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, emerged at the center of an international fracas involving dozens of interest groups, the governments of Canada and the U.S., and a steady parade of celebrity protesters.
The State Department last fall postponed a final decision on the permit, before Obama in January rejected the application — in response to an effort by Republicans to compel a decision.
Since then, though, company TransCanada has submitted a new application that would reroute the project around the environmentally sensitive Nebraska region of Sand Hills.
Opponents of the project have cited environmental and health concerns — since the original route through Nebraska passed by a vital aquifer. They also cite the greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands production.
Keystone foes also weren’t letting up. Beats By Dre Cheap A coalition of environmental activists — from the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and other groups — swiftly announced a protest outside the White House on Nov. 18.
In a post-election open letter, they renewed their concerns that the pipeline would transport one of the world’s dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels.
It continued: Now that the election is over a decision by the president is imminent-the administration has hinted a decision could come in the first quarter of 2013. Here’s what’s changed since last year: the Arctic has melted disastrously. Here’s what hasn’t changed: Keystone XL is still a crazy idea, a giant straw into the second biggest pool of carbon. Even if it doesn’t spill, it would add 900,000 barrels of oil worth of carbon each day to the earth’s atmosphere.
Canadian officials, though, continue to press hard for the project’s approval. Canada’s natural resources minister went further than Harper, saying he thinks the project will ultimately be approved.
Cheap Beats I don’t know exactly why he postponed it, but the point is right now we’re not in the middle of an election campaign and it will be decided by the administration on its merits, he told Bloomberg.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Some 8,000 Syrian refugees fled to Turkey overnight in the face of escalating clashes between rebel forces and troops loyal to Damascus near the border, a foreign ministry official told AFP on Friday.
The latest influx brought the total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey to more than 120,000, the official added on condition of anonymity.
“Five thousand Syrians were taken to a camp in Akcakale town near the Syrian border and the others were to stay with their relatives in Turkey,” he said.
On Friday, dozens of army officers including two generals and 11 colonels also fled to Turkey to join opposition fighters, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.
Army defectors, flanked by their families, were taken to the Apaydin camp in Hatay province near the Syrian border where security is tighter.
Turkish officials refuse to give an exact number of Syrian generals currently on Turkish soil as some are returning to Syria to join the active fighters inside the conflict-wracked country.
The government said over 110,000 Syrian refugees live in several camps along its volatile border, as well as the exiled Syrian opposition’s political and military leadership, while many more are living in apartments or hotels throughout the country.
It was not immediately clear if the army defectors were among the 8,000 refugees who crossed into Turkey overnight.
The latest exodus was sparked by fierce clashes near the northeastern Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain, where at least 16 Syrian soldiers and 10 rebels were killed on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Rebel Free Syrian Army battalions stormed the majority Kurdish town after launching a two-pronged attack from across the border and the nearby Syrian village of Tal Half, the watchdog said.
Turkish media reported that the sound of gunfire was heard overnight in the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar, which lies across from Ras al-Ain.
Six Turks in the town were lightly wounded by ricocheting bullets from the Syrian side on Thursday, the Turkish official said. Local authorities warned residents to stay away from the border area while schools in the town will be closed for two days. Turkish military vehicles and forces moved to the border areas amid the ongoing clashes, according to local media reports.
Turkey has been strengthening its defences along the border since five of its nationals were killed by Syrian shells on October 3, inflaming tensions between Ankara and Damascus.
Since then, Turkish army has responded in kind to every shell falling on its territory from Syria.
Turkey fell out with its one-time ally after the regime’s unleashed a deadly crackdown on protests in March last year, and has joined in Arab and Western calls for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, Israel’s deputy prime minister Moshe Yaalon warned Damascus on Friday it would act to defend its sovereignty if the bloody fighting in Syria continued to spill over into the occupied Golan Heights.
His remarks, published on his official Twitter account, were made a day after three stray mortar rounds fired from Syria hit the occupied Golan, which Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move never recognised by the international community.
“We see the Syrian regime as responsible for what is happening along the border,” said Yaalon, a senior cabinet minister and former armed forces chief of staff. “The current situation in Syria could carry on for an extended and bloody period. If we see that it spills over in our direction, we know how to defend the citizens and the sovereignty of the State of Israel,” said the minister, who holds the strategic affairs portfolio.
“The other side has received a lot of messages recently and until now, has acted accordingly in Syria. I hope that in this incident too, there will be someone who takes this in hand.”
The three mortar rounds which struck the Golan on Thursday were the latest in a string of incidents in which fire has spilled across the ceasefire line onto the Israeli side.
“They are apparently shells fired in error during fighting between different forces inside Syria,” an army spokeswoman told AFP.
On Monday, an Israeli military vehicle patrolling the buffer zone was hit by gunfire, with the army acknowledging it was caused by “stray bullets.”
No one was injured but the incident prompted an Israeli complaint to the United Nations Security Council in which it described the gunfire as a “grave violation” of a 1974 agreement on security in the buffer zone.
“This represents a dangerous escalation that could have far-reaching implications for the security and stability of our region,” said Israel’s UN ambassador Ron Prosor.
“Israel has shown maximum restraint. However, Israel views the continued violations of the Separation of Forces agreement by the Syrian military forces with the utmost concern,” he said in a letter to the Security Council.
On Sunday, chief of staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz warned that Israel could become involved in the Syrian conflict.
“This is a Syrian affair that could turn into our affair,” he said on a visit to the sector, without elaborating.
Chief military spokesman Yoav Mordechai, who accompanied Gantz, warned that Israeli troops in the area were “ready at any moment for the fire to change direction and turn on us.”
A day earlier, three Syrian tanks entered Bir Ajam village, five kilometres (three miles) southeast of Quneitra, in the demilitarised zone, sparking another Israeli complaint to the UN.
Since Israel and Syria signed the 1974 disengagement agreement, a 1,200-strong unarmed UN force has patrolled the buffer zone.

Some 8,000 Syrian refugees fled to Turkey overnight in the face of escalating clashes between rebel forces and troops loyal to Damascus near the border, a foreign ministry official told AFP on Friday.
The latest influx brought the total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey to more than 120,000, the official added on condition of anonymity.
“Five thousand Syrians were taken to a camp in Akcakale town near the Syrian border and the others were to stay with their relatives in Turkey,” he said.
On Friday, dozens of army officers including two generals and 11 colonels also fled to Turkey to join opposition fighters, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.
Army defectors, flanked by their families, were taken to the Apaydin camp in Hatay province near the Syrian border where security is tighter.
Turkish officials refuse to give an exact number of Syrian generals currently on Turkish soil as some are returning to Syria to join the active fighters inside the conflict-wracked country.
The government said over 110,000 Syrian refugees live in several camps along its volatile border, as well as the exiled Syrian opposition’s political and military leadership, while many more are living in apartments or hotels throughout the country.
It was not immediately clear if the army defectors were among the 8,000 refugees who crossed into Turkey overnight.
The latest exodus was sparked by fierce clashes near the northeastern Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain, where at least 16 Syrian soldiers and 10 rebels were killed on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Rebel Free Syrian Army battalions stormed the majority Kurdish town after launching a two-pronged attack from across the border and the nearby Syrian village of Tal Half, the watchdog said.
Turkish media reported that the sound of gunfire was heard overnight in the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar, which lies across from Ras al-Ain.
Six Turks in the town were lightly wounded by ricocheting bullets from the Syrian side on Thursday, the Turkish official said. Local authorities warned residents to stay away from the border area while schools in the town will be closed for two days. Turkish military vehicles and forces moved to the border areas amid the ongoing clashes, according to local media reports.
Turkey has been strengthening its defences along the border since five of its nationals were killed by Syrian shells on October 3, inflaming tensions between Ankara and Damascus.
Since then, Turkish army has responded in kind to every shell falling on its territory from Syria.
Turkey fell out with its one-time ally after the regime’s unleashed a deadly crackdown on protests in March last year, and has joined in Arab and Western calls for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, Israel’s deputy prime minister Moshe Yaalon warned Damascus on Friday it would act to defend its sovereignty if the bloody fighting in Syria continued to spill over into the occupied Golan Heights.
His remarks, published on his official Twitter account, were made a day after three stray mortar rounds fired from Syria hit the occupied Golan, which Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move never recognised by the international community.
“We see the Syrian regime as responsible for what is happening along the border,” said Yaalon, a senior cabinet minister and former armed forces chief of staff. “The current situation in Syria could carry on for an extended and bloody period. If we see that it spills over in our direction, we know how to defend the citizens and the sovereignty of the State of Israel,” said the minister, who holds the strategic affairs portfolio.
“The other side has received a lot of messages recently and until now, has acted accordingly in Syria. I hope that in this incident too, there will be someone who takes this in hand.”
The three mortar rounds which struck the Golan on Thursday were the latest in a string of incidents in which fire has spilled across the ceasefire line onto the Israeli side.
“They are apparently shells fired in error during fighting between different forces inside Syria,” an army spokeswoman told AFP.
On Monday, an Israeli military vehicle patrolling the buffer zone was hit by gunfire, with the army acknowledging it was caused by “stray bullets.”
No one was injured but the incident prompted an Israeli complaint to the United Nations Security Council in which it described the gunfire as a “grave violation” of a 1974 agreement on security in the buffer zone.
“This represents a dangerous escalation that could have far-reaching implications for the security and stability of our region,” said Israel’s UN ambassador Ron Prosor.
“Israel has shown maximum restraint. However, Israel views the continued violations of the Separation of Forces agreement by the Syrian military forces with the utmost concern,” he said in a letter to the Security Council.
On Sunday, chief of staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz warned that Israel could become involved in the Syrian conflict.
“This is a Syrian affair that could turn into our affair,” he said on a visit to the sector, without elaborating.
Chief military spokesman Yoav Mordechai, who accompanied Gantz, warned that Israeli troops in the area were “ready at any moment for the fire to change direction and turn on us.”
A day earlier, three Syrian tanks entered Bir Ajam village, five kilometres (three miles) southeast of Quneitra, in the demilitarised zone, sparking another Israeli complaint to the UN.
Since Israel and Syria signed the 1974 disengagement agreement, a 1,200-strong unarmed UN force has patrolled the buffer zone.

The European Union welcomed on Friday progress made Cheap Beats By Dre by the U.N.’s civil aviation body toward a global deal to cut carbon emissions from the sector, raising hopes that the bloc may stand down from applying its controversial law that forces all airlines to pay for their pollution.
The governing council of the U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), based in Montreal, discussed on Friday how it could deliver a global approach to tackling airline emissions.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive, has said that a concrete global framework from ICAO would be a justification for changing its law.
The Chea Dr Dre Beats Commission has been under immense pressure to scrap the bloc’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which requires all airlines using European airports to pay for each ton of carbon they emit flying into and out of the continent.
China and India have refused to comply, http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphones-wholesale.com while both houses of the United States Congress have passed legislation that would make it illegal for its airlines to abide by the EU rules.
On Friday evening, EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard praised the good news from ICAO’s meeting.
Progress being made towards international regulation of aviation emissions. Congratulations to ICAO leadership! she wrote in a message on Twitter.
The Commission has been critical of ICAO’s progress on the issue, and said it had only decided to include airlines in its ETS after more than a decade of ICAO inaction.
NEXT STEPS
Friday’s ICAO council meeting ended with a new Chea Dr Dre Beats process and timeline for the body to agree on a global framework to help the aviation sector slash their greenhouse gas emissions.
ICAO is expected to assemble a high-level group of senior government officials representing different geographical regions next week, which will submit reports to the ICAO council for its next meetings in March and June, according to an ICAO spokesman.
It will be expected to submit a proposal for an official resolution by the end of the June council meeting, which would be presented to ICAO’s general assembly, which takes place once every three years, with the next scheduled for November 2013.
The group will make recommendations on a number of potential measures, including emissions trading programs, carbon offsetting programs, alternative fuels and aircraft carbon emission standards.
The group will decide whether ICAO should adopt a single global market mechanism that would be applied uniformly to all countries, or a framework uniting a patchwork of different national programs, according to people who observed the meeting.
Environmental groups cautiously welcomed ICAO’s decision to speed up work Chea Dr Dre Beats on a global measure to cut aviation emissions.
The work of the high level group on a framework must be seen as a stepping stone to a global market-based measure and should not replace this objective or become an obstacle to progress, said Tim Johnson, director of the Aviation Environment Federation.
But U.S. airlines, represented by lobby group Airlines for America, said that despite the progress that came out of ICAO this week, it still believes the U.S. government should continue to oppose the ETS.
Congress is still expected to take action next week to harmonize two different bills that have passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that would shield U.S. airlines from having to comply with the EU law.
We still believe the legislation is needed, and we are hopeful it can be acted on next week, said Jean Medina, a spokeswoman for the airline group.
Annie Petsonk, Cheap Beats By Dre international counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, said that President Barack Obama has a chance to help resolve the row by supporting ICAO’s work.
To a large extent, the US holds the key to real progress on a market-based measure now and this will be the first opportunity for Obama to show that he means what he said in his victory speech, she said, referring to his recent remarks that he does not want to children to live under the threat of global warming. http://www.cheapbeatsbydreheadphones-wholesale.com/

A top Chinese leader said Cheap Beats By Dre Thursday that there’s no evidence the British businessman whose murder became part of a major political scandal was a spy.
Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, who was put in charge of the mega-city of Chongqing in the scandal’s wake, also rejected the notion that his predecessor, the now-purged leader Bo Xilai, had left any positive legacy in his administration of the city.
Responding to reporters’ questions, Zhang belittled what was once heralded by the Chinese media as the Chongqing Model http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com a code phrase for the populist crime-fighting and social policies that made Bo beloved with his region’s poor.
I believe that this Chongqing Model does not exist at all, Cheap Beats Zhang said at a meeting of Chongqing delegates to the Communist Party conclave that opened Thursday.
Bo has been accused of violations ranging from corruption to involvement in covering up his wife’s murder of Briton Neil Heywood in a dispute. Zhang said he did not know when Bo would be put on trial.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Heywood was an informant for British intelligence. Zhang said in response to a reporter’s question that to date, he had not seen evidence that Heywood was a spy.
As the most powerful official in Chongqing, Bo had been considered a candidate for a seat on the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, and his toppling exposed sharp infighting in the party’s uppermost ranks.
Cheap Beats By Dre The scandal unfolded in early February after Bo’s then top aide Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, where he told the Americans his concerns about Heywood’s death. That prompted the British Embassy to request a new investigation, which uncovered that Heywood had been murdered. Bo’s wife was given a suspended death sentence for the murder in August.http://www.cheapbeatsbydre-drdrebeats.com/

Syrian President Bashar Assad vowed defiantly to live and die in Syria, saying in an interview broadcast Thursday that he will never flee his country despite the bloody, 19-month-old uprising against him.
The broadcast comes two days after British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that Assad could be allowed safe passage out of the country if that would guarantee an end to the civil war, which activists estimate has killed more than 36,000 people.
I am not a puppet, I was not made by the West for me to go to the West or any other country, Assad, 47, said in the interview with the English-language Russia Today TV. He spoke in English and excerpts of the interview were posted on the station’s website Thursday with an Arabic voiceover.
I am Syrian, I am made in Syria, and I will live and die in Syria, he said.
Assad also warned against foreign military intervention at a time when the West is taking steps to boost the opposition.
I don’t think the West is headed in this direction. But if it does, nobody can predict the consequences, he told the station. The full interview will be broadcast on Friday, the station said.
The excerpts show Assad casually talking and later walking with RT’s reporter outside a house, wearing a gray suit and tie. It was not clear where the interview took place.
The uprising against Assad’s regime began as mostly peaceful protests in March last year but quickly morphed into a civil war. The fighting has taken on grim sectarian tones, with the predominantly Sunni rebels fighting government forces. Assad’s regime is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
On Wednesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his country will deal directly with Syrian rebel military leaders. He spoke during a trip to visit Syrian refugees in Jordan. Previously, Britain and the U.S. have acknowledged contacts only with exile groups and political opposition figures 鈥� some connected to rebel forces 鈥� inside Syria.
He called on the U.S. to join his country in doing more to shape the Syrian opposition into a coherent force, saying the re-election of President Barack Obama is an opportunity for the world to take stronger action to end the deadlocked civil war.
The U.S. has been pressing for a new, more unified opposition leadership that will minimize the role of exiles and better represent those risking their lives on the frontlines. The initiative was being discussed on Thursday at an opposition conference in the Qatari capital of Doha.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose government has remained one of Syria’s most loyal and powerful allies, criticized the West for supporting the opposition, saying foreign powers should try to force both sides to stop fighting. Russia has shielded Damascus from strong international action at the U.N. Security Council.
He said Moscow would not support any resolution that would threaten the Syrian regime with sanctions. The remarks were posted on his ministry’s website Thursday.
If their priority is, figuratively speaking, Assad’s head, the supporters of such approach must realize that the price for that will be lives of the Syrians, not their own lives, Lavrov said. Bashar Assad isn’t going anywhere and will never leave, no matter what they say. He can’t be persuaded to take that step.
Assad has rarely appeared in public since the revolt began in March 2011. Last month, state TV showed him attending prayers for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha in Al-Afram Mosque in Al-Muhajireen district of Damascus, sitting on the floor and praying. He later was seen smiling and shaking hands with worshippers.
In several televised speeches this year, Assad has blamed the uprising on a foreign plot to destroy Syria and accused rebels of being mercenaries of the West and Gulf countries Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The daily death toll in the civil war has been averaging 100 people or more recently, killed in clashes between rebels and troops, and in artillery shelling and regime airstrikes on rebel-held areas.
At least 104 people were killed in fighting on Wednesday, according to the Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that relies on reports from activists on the ground. Most casualties 鈥� 31 people 鈥� were killed in the fighting between rebels and government troops in the suburbs Damascus as the rebels made a new push into the capital firing mortars at a presidential palace and a Palestinian refugee camp, said Rami-Abdul Rahman, the Observatory’s chief.
Four rebels were also killed in clashes with a pro-government faction in the Palestinian refugee camp in the capital on Wednesday, Abdul-Rahman said, adding that at least 30 soldiers were also killed that day, including 10 in Damascus and on its outskirts. There was not comment on the troops’ deaths from the government, which rarely reports regime casualties.
The Observatory said it has received reports of fresh fighting in the Damascus suburbs and in the neighborhood of Souseh in the capital on Thursday. It also said there were heavy clashes between anti-government gunmen and troops in northern Idlib province and in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city which has been a major front in the civil war since the summer.
Regime forces also battled opposition fighters trying to take control of a region in the far northeastern corner of the country, Turkey’s state-run agency reported. Two people in the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar were wounded by stray bullets from the fighting. Dogan news agency video showed people running for shelter in panic as a piece of shrapnel from the fighting reportedly landed on the grounds of the hospital in the town.
The clashes broke out in the town of Ras al-Ayn in al-Hasaka province in northeastern Syria, a few hundred meters (yards) from Ceylanpinar, the Anadolu Agency said.
The mayor for Ceylanpinar told The Associated Press that the rebels had taken over the border crossing of Ras al-Ayn Thursday. Ismail Aslan said in a phone interview that the rebel flag was flying on a building across the Turkish border. However, fierce fighting between rebels and government troops continued around what Asalan said was an intelligence building on the Syrian side of the border where the regime troops had retreated to.
Around 5,000 Syrians from Ras al-Ayn crossed into Ceylanpinar Thursday to escape the fighting and at least 14 Syrians were being treated for injuries in hospitals around the region, Aslan said.