Sesame Street Spoofs Downton Abbey

02/04/2013 at 03:30 PM EST

There's been plenty of drama on Downton Abbey this season but nothing compared to the challenges facing the residents of Upside Downton Abbey.

In a Sesame Street spoof of the hit PBS show, a Dowager Countess of Grantham lookalike requests several items from her butler, Carson, including tea, crumpets and a steak and kidney pie.

"I live to serve," he says, bringing her the food and drink. But each time the items fall to the ceiling because, the puppets discuss, everything is upside down on Upside Downton Abbey.

"Perhaps you can change the name from Upside Downton Abbey to Rightside Upton Abbey," Carson suggests.

"Then we could be right-side up and have our steak and kidney pie," the countess says, before officially changing the name and the direction of things in the home.

Then, of course, the steak and kidney pie comes crashing down on her head.

What would Maggie Smith say?

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Bullying study: It does get better for gay teens

CHICAGO (AP) — It really does get better for gay and bisexual teens when it comes to being bullied, although young gay men have it worse than their lesbian peers, according to the first long-term scientific evidence on how the problem changes over time.

The seven-year study involved more than 4,000 teens in England who were questioned yearly through 2010, until they were 19 and 20 years old. At the start, just over half of the 187 gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had been bullied; by 2010 that dropped to 9 percent of gay and bisexual boys and 6 percent of lesbian and bisexual girls.

The researchers said the same results likely would be found in the United States.

In both countries, a "sea change" in cultural acceptance of gays and growing intolerance for bullying occurred during the study years, which partly explains the results, said study co-author Ian Rivers, a psychologist and professor of human development at Brunel University in London.

That includes a government mandate in England that schools work to prevent bullying, and changes in the United States permitting same-sex marriage in several states.

In 2010, syndicated columnist Dan Savage launched the "It Gets Better" video project to encourage bullied gay teens. It was prompted by widely publicized suicides of young gays, and includes videos from politicians and celebrities.

"Bullying tends to decline with age regardless of sexual orientation and gender," and the study confirms that, said co-author Joseph Robinson, a researcher and assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. "In absolute terms, this would suggest that yes, it gets better."

The study appears online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, said the results mirror surveys by her anti-bullying advocacy group that show bullying is more common in U.S. middle schools than in high schools.

But the researchers said their results show the situation is more nuanced for young gay men.

In the first years of the study, gay boys and girls were almost twice as likely to be bullied as their straight peers. By the last year, bullying dropped overall and was at about the same level for lesbians and straight girls. But the difference between men got worse by ages 19 and 20, with gay young men almost four times more likely than their straight peers to be bullied.

The mixed results for young gay men may reflect the fact that masculine tendencies in girls and women are more culturally acceptable than femininity in boys and men, Robinson said.

Savage, who was not involved in the study, agreed.

"A lot of the disgust that people feel when you bring up homosexuality ... centers around gay male sexuality," Savage said. "There's more of a comfort level" around gay women, he said.

Kendall Johnson, 21, a junior theater major at the University of Illinois, said he was bullied for being gay in high school, mostly when he brought boyfriends to school dances or football games.

"One year at prom, I had a guy tell us that we were disgusting and he didn't want to see us dancing anymore," Johnson said. A football player and the president of the drama club intervened on his behalf, he recalled.

Johnson hasn't been bullied in college, but he said that's partly because he hangs out with the theater crowd and avoids the fraternity scene. Still, he agreed, that it generally gets better for gays as they mature.

"As you grow older, you become more accepting of yourself," Johnson said.

___

Online:

Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org

It Gets Better: http://www.itgetsbetter.org

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

Read More..

Priest molested girl who wore Snow White costume, records show

More disturbing stories of priests' molestations of children -- and questionable actions by church leaders -- emerged in 12,000 pages of once-confidential
personnel files.

The
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles posted the documents on its website Thursday night, an hour
after a Los Angeles judge ended 5-1/2 years of legal wrangling
over the release of the files with an order compelling the church to
make the documents public within three weeks.

Victims, their lawyers, reporters and other members of the public spent
hours Friday poring through records that stretched back to the 1940s and
provided details about the scope of abuse in church ranks never before
seen.

The archdiocese of Los Angeles learned in the late 1970s that one of
its priests had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy so violently that
he was left bleeding and "in a state of shock." The priest said he was
too drunk to remember what happened and officials took no further
action.

But two decades later, word reached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony
that the same priest was molesting again and improperly performing the
sacrament of confession on his victim. The archdiocese sprang to action:
It dispatched investigators, interviewed a raft of witnesses and
discussed the harshest of all church penalties — not for the abuse but for
the violation of church law.

"Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance … it
is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the
excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome," one cleric told
Mahony in a memo.

Full coverage: Priest Abuse Scandal

The case of Father Jose Ugarte is one of several instances detailed
in newly released records in which archdiocese officials displayed
outrage over a priest's ecclesiastical missteps while doing little for
the victims of his sexual abuse.

The files also suggested that the attempts to protect abusers from
law enforcement extended beyond the L.A. archdiocese to a Catholic order
tasked with rehabilitating abusers.

"Once more, we ask you to PLEASE DESTROY THESE PAGES AND ANY OTHER
MATERIAL YOU HAVE RECEIVED FROM US," the acting director of the order's
treatment program wrote to Mahony in 1988 in a letter detailing
therapists' reports about a prolific molester. "This is stated for your
own and our legal protection."

The order, the Servants of the Paraclete, closed the New Mexico
facility where many Los Angeles priests were sent amid a flood of
lawsuits in the mid-1990s. A lawyer for the order declined to comment,
but indicated in a 2011 civil court filing that all treatment records
were destroyed.

Mahony disregarded the order's advice, and therapy memos are among the most detailed records in the files.

One evaluation recounts how Father Joseph Pina, an East L.A. parish
priest, said he was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he
saw her in a costume.

"She dressed as Snow White … I had a crush on Snow White, so I
started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. In a report
sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse
was never reported to authorities.

"All so very sad," Mahony wrote years later after Pina was placed on leave. He was defrocked in 2006.

The limitations of the treatment at the Servants' center are evident
in the file. After months of therapy in 1994, Father John Dawson was
allowed to leave the facility for a weekend. Among the first things
Dawson, who had been accused of plying altar boy victims with pot and
beer, did was apply for a job at the Arizona Boys School in Phoenix.

Treatment center staff found out only after the school phoned Dawson to
arrange an interview. "Had they not called the Villa, it is doubtful
that Fr. Dawson would have informed us of that job application and
interview," according to a 1994 letter to Mahony's vicar for clergy,
Msgr. Timothy Dyer.

Responding to a public rebuke by his successor, Mahony
insisted Friday that he tried his best to deal with the priest molestation
scandal but fell short because not enough was known about the problem
early in his career.

In an extraordinary open letter to Archbishop Jose Gomez, Mahony
insisted Friday that he ultimately instituted state-of-the-art
protections against child sexual abuse
within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He seemed to
suggest that Gomez had acted unfairly by publicly announcing that he was
stripping the cardinal of any public role in the local church.

"Not once over these past years
did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices or
procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct
involving minors," he wrote.

PHOTOS: Cardinal Roger Mahony over the years

"Unfortunately, I cannot return now to the 1980s and reverse actions and
decisions made then," he added. "But when I retired as the active
archbishop, I handed over to you an archdiocese that was second to none
in protecting children and youth."

Mahony posted the letter on his blog Friday afternoon, hours after he said he had sent it to Gomez.

In a letter Thursday to parishioners, Gomez announced that "effective
immediately, I have informed Cardinal Mahony that he will no longer have
any administrative or public duties." The move came a week after the
release of church records showing Mahony worked to conceal abusers from
police in the 1980s.

-- Harriet Ryan, Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers, Mitchell Landsberg and Teresa Watanabe

Photo: At a news conference Friday at the
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Esther Miller, 54, holding photos
of other victims, breaks down while talking about being abused by a
Catholic priest when she was a young girl.
Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: Doctors to Prescribe Self-Help Books, Poetry for Mental Health Ills

LONDON — Doctors in England will soon be prescribing books as well as pills to patients suffering from anxiety and depression.

In a government-endorsed initiative supported by medical associations and librarians, physicians will be sending patients to their local libraries for a range of approved self-help titles targeted at those suffering from mild to moderate mental health problems.

Patients are also being encouraged to turn to what The Bookseller magazine described as “uplifting novels and poetry.”

Extolling the potentially curative powers of literature, the Reading Agency charity quoted research that showed reading reduced stress levels by 67 percent.

The charity, which is a partner in the new Books on Prescription program announced this week, quoted the New England Journal of Medicine as saying reading also cut the risk of dementia by more than a third.

The list of 30 approved self-help titles available on prescription from May includes page-turners like “The Feeling Good Handbook,” “How to Stop Worrying” and “Overcoming Anger and Irritability.”

“There’s growing evidence that shows that self-help reading can help people with certain mental health issues get better,” Miranda McKearney, the Reading Agency’s director said.

The sick often rely on the Internet to search for advice on symptoms and cures that can turn out to be unreliable. Doctors will now be able to write a prescription that gives patients immediate membership to their local library and access to recommended titles.

It is the first so-called bibliotherapy initiative to have received such high-level official backing from health authorities and librarians.

Campaigners for public libraries have applauded the program but worry that not enough is being done to protect the libraries themselves. Last year, 200 libraries were closed and another 300 are reportedly facing closure or being handed over to volunteers this year.

The Reading Agency meanwhile has come up with a core list of Mood-boosting Books designed to promote feeling good.

It includes proven classics such as “The Secret Garden,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but also upbeat titles from the likes of Bill Bryson, the best-selling U.S. humorist.

Development of the book prescription idea was paid for by the Arts Council England, which distributes public money to arts projects.

The Reading Agency has applied for funding from the government, which it says spends £14 billion, or $22 billion, a year treating mental health.

So, should sufferers of depression or panic attacks be advised to curl up with a good book? Or is this just a new health fad to find an alternative to costly medication and therapy.

The Reading Project is soliciting suggestions for stress-relieving books at the Twitter hashtag #moodboosting.

If you think there might be something in it, send us your own suggestions for therapeutic reading. And, while you’re at it, let us know any titles that are best avoided when we’re feeling low.

Read More..

Kuwaiti gets five years for insulting ruler

KUWAIT (Reuters) – A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to five years in prison on Sunday for insulting the emir on Twitter, a rights lawyer and news websites said, in the latest prosecution for criticism of authorities via social media in the Gulf Arab state.

The court gave Kuwaiti Mohammad Eid al-Ajmi the maximum sentence for the comments, news websites al-Rai and alaan.cc reported.

In recent months Kuwait has penalized several Twitter users for criticizing the emir, who is described as “immune and inviolable” in the constitution.

“We call on the government to expand freedoms and adhere to the international (human rights) conventions it has signed,” said lawyer Mohammad al-Humaidi, director of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights, commenting on the case.

Courts in Kuwait generally do not comment to the media.

Amnesty International said in November Kuwait had increased restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly.

It urged Kuwait to ensure protection for users of social media, whether they supported or opposed the government, as long as they did not incite racial hatred or violence.

Kuwait, a U.S. ally and major oil producer, has been taking a firmer line on politically sensitive comments aired on the internet. Twitter is extremely popular in the country of 3.7 million.

In January, a court sentenced two men in separate cases to jail time for insulting the emir on Twitter.

In June 2012, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.

Two months later, authorities detained Sheikh Meshaal al-Malik Al-Sabah, a member of the ruling family, over remarks on Twitter in which he accused authorities of corruption and called for political reform.

The recent Twitter cases have been carried out under the state security law and penal code. Last year Kuwait passed new legislation aimed at regulating social media.

Public demonstrations and debates about local issues are common in a state that allows the most dissent in the Gulf, but Kuwait has avoided the kind of mass unrest that unseated four heads of Arab states in 2011.

But tensions intensified between authorities and opposition groups last year ahead of a parliamentary election deemed unfair by opposition politicians and activists.

The opposition movement said new voting rules introduced by Sheikh Sabah by emergency decree in October would skew the December 1 election in favor of pro-government candidates. The emir said the old voting system was flawed and that his changes were constitutional and necessary for Kuwait’s “security and stability”.

(Reporting by Ahmed Hagagy, Writing by Sylvia Westall; editing by Sami Aboudi and Andrew Roche)

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Ben Affleck Wins Directors Guild Award, But Doesn't Consider Himself a 'Real Director'

By Oliver Jones and Alison Schwartz

02/03/2013 at 03:00 PM EST

Ben Affleck at the Directors Guild Awards

Tammie Arroyo/AFF

Oscar, who?

Ben Affleck took home the top prize Saturday night at the 65th Annual Directors Guild Awards in Los Angeles, where he once again reigned supreme following a snub from the Academy Awards.

It was a celebratory evening for Affleck – and it was also date night with his doting wife, Jennifer Garner, by his side (and often with her hand on his back).

"I have to just thank my wife for being the best person in the world. I love you," Affleck, 40, told the audience as he accepted the award for outstanding directorial achievement for Argo. "I don't need to look at the teleprompter to know why I want to thank you. I want to thank you because I love you."

He added: "I want our daughters to break boundaries."

He also tipped his hat to fellow nominee Steven Spielberg, telling the Lincoln director, "Steven, there is nothing to even say about a guy whose got 11 of these ... This is the guy whose face is in Wikipedia when you type in director."

That wasn't Spielberg's only shout-out of the night. As Girls mastermind Lena Dunham, also a first-time winner, accepted honors for television comedy directing, she playfully warned, "Steven Spielberg, I am coming for you. Ben Affleck, I already came for you."

Not that Affleck considers himself a tried-and-true director.

"I worked really, really hard to try to become the best director that I could be," he said. "I don't think that this makes me a real director, but I think it means I'm on my way."

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New rules aim to get rid of junk foods in schools

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most candy, high-calorie drinks and greasy meals could soon be on a food blacklist in the nation's schools.

For the first time, the government is proposing broad new standards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more healthful.

Under the new rules the Agriculture Department proposed Friday, foods like fatty chips, snack cakes, nachos and mozzarella sticks would be taken out of lunch lines and vending machines. In their place would be foods like baked chips, trail mix, diet sodas, lower-calorie sports drinks and low-fat hamburgers.

The rules, required under a child nutrition law passed by Congress in 2010, are part of the government's effort to combat childhood obesity. While many schools already have improved their lunch menus and vending machine choices, others still are selling high-fat, high-calorie foods.

Under the proposal, the Agriculture Department would set fat, calorie, sugar and sodium limits on almost all foods sold in schools. Current standards already regulate the nutritional content of school breakfasts and lunches that are subsidized by the federal government, but most lunchrooms also have "a la carte" lines that sell other foods. Food sold through vending machines and in other ways outside the lunchroom has never before been federally regulated.

"Parents and teachers work hard to instill healthy eating habits in our kids, and these efforts should be supported when kids walk through the schoolhouse door," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said.

Most snacks sold in school would have to have less than 200 calories. Elementary and middle schools could sell only water, low-fat milk or 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice. High schools could sell some sports drinks, diet sodas and iced teas, but the calories would be limited. Drinks would be limited to 12-ounce portions in middle schools and to 8-ounce portions in elementary schools.

The standards will cover vending machines, the "a la carte" lunch lines, snack bars and any other foods regularly sold around school. They would not apply to in-school fundraisers or bake sales, though states have the power to regulate them. The new guidelines also would not apply to after-school concessions at school games or theater events, goodies brought from home for classroom celebrations, or anything students bring for their own personal consumption.

The new rules are the latest in a long list of changes designed to make foods served in schools more healthful and accessible. Nutritional guidelines for the subsidized lunches were revised last year and put in place last fall. The 2010 child nutrition law also provided more money for schools to serve free and reduced-cost lunches and required more meals to be served to hungry kids.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has been working for two decades to take junk foods out of schools. He calls the availability of unhealthful foods around campus a "loophole" that undermines the taxpayer money that helps pay for the healthier subsidized lunches.

"USDA's proposed nutrition standards are a critical step in closing that loophole and in ensuring that our schools are places that nurture not just the minds of American children but their bodies as well," Harkin said.

Last year's rules faced criticism from some conservatives, including some Republicans in Congress, who said the government shouldn't be telling kids what to eat. Mindful of that backlash, the Agriculture Department exempted in-school fundraisers from federal regulation and proposed different options for some parts of the rule, including the calorie limits for drinks in high schools, which would be limited to either 60 calories or 75 calories in a 12-ounce portion.

The department also has shown a willingness to work with schools to resolve complaints that some new requirements are hard to meet. Last year, for example, the government relaxed some limits on meats and grains in subsidized lunches after school nutritionists said they weren't working.

Schools, the food industry, interest groups and other critics or supporters of the new proposal will have 60 days to comment and suggest changes. A final rule could be in place as soon as the 2014 school year.

Margo Wootan, a nutrition lobbyist for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said surveys by her organization show that most parents want changes in the lunchroom.

"Parents aren't going to have to worry that kids are using their lunch money to buy candy bars and a Gatorade instead of a healthy school lunch," she said.

The food industry has been onboard with many of the changes, and several companies worked with Congress on the child nutrition law two years ago. Major beverage companies have already agreed to take the most caloric sodas out of schools. But those same companies, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, also sell many of the non-soda options, like sports drinks, and have lobbied to keep them in vending machines.

A spokeswoman for the American Beverage Association, which represents the soda companies, says they already have greatly reduced the number of calories that kids are consuming at school by pulling out the high-calorie sodas.

___

Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick

Read More..

Priest molested girl in 'Snow White' costume, files reveal

More disturbing stories of priests' molestations of children -- and questionable actions by church leaders -- emerged in 12,000 pages of once-confidential
personnel files.

The
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles posted the documents on its website Thursday night, an hour
after a Los Angeles judge ended 5-1/2 years of legal wrangling
over the release of the files with an order compelling the church to
make the documents public within three weeks.

Victims, their lawyers, reporters and other members of the public spent
hours Friday poring through records that stretched back to the 1940s and
provided details about the scope of abuse in church ranks never before
seen.

The archdiocese of Los Angeles learned in the late 1970s that one of
its priests had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy so violently that
he was left bleeding and "in a state of shock." The priest said he was
too drunk to remember what happened and officials took no further
action.

But two decades later, word reached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony
that the same priest was molesting again and improperly performing the
sacrament of confession on his victim. The archdiocese sprang to action:
It dispatched investigators, interviewed a raft of witnesses and
discussed the harshest of all church penalties — not for the abuse but for
the violation of church law.

"Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance … it
is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the
excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome," one cleric told
Mahony in a memo.

Full coverage: Priest Abuse Scandal

The case of Father Jose Ugarte is one of several instances detailed
in newly released records in which archdiocese officials displayed
outrage over a priest's ecclesiastical missteps while doing little for
the victims of his sexual abuse.

The files also suggested that the attempts to protect abusers from
law enforcement extended beyond the L.A. archdiocese to a Catholic order
tasked with rehabilitating abusers.

"Once more, we ask you to PLEASE DESTROY THESE PAGES AND ANY OTHER
MATERIAL YOU HAVE RECEIVED FROM US," the acting director of the order's
treatment program wrote to Mahony in 1988 in a letter detailing
therapists' reports about a prolific molester. "This is stated for your
own and our legal protection."

The order, the Servants of the Paraclete, closed the New Mexico
facility where many Los Angeles priests were sent amid a flood of
lawsuits in the mid-1990s. A lawyer for the order declined to comment,
but indicated in a 2011 civil court filing that all treatment records
were destroyed.

Mahony disregarded the order's advice, and therapy memos are among the most detailed records in the files.

One evaluation recounts how Father Joseph Pina, an East L.A. parish
priest, said he was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he
saw her in a costume.

"She dressed as Snow White … I had a crush on Snow White, so I
started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. In a report
sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse
was never reported to authorities.

"All so very sad," Mahony wrote years later after Pina was placed on leave. He was defrocked in 2006.

The limitations of the treatment at the Servants' center are evident
in the file. After months of therapy in 1994, Father John Dawson was
allowed to leave the facility for a weekend. Among the first things
Dawson, who had been accused of plying altar boy victims with pot and
beer, did was apply for a job at the Arizona Boys School in Phoenix.

Treatment center staff found out only after the school phoned Dawson to
arrange an interview. "Had they not called the Villa, it is doubtful
that Fr. Dawson would have informed us of that job application and
interview," according to a 1994 letter to Mahony's vicar for clergy,
Msgr. Timothy Dyer.

Responding to a public rebuke by his successor, Mahony
insisted Friday that he tried his best to deal with the priest molestation
scandal but fell short because not enough was known about the problem
early in his career.

In an extraordinary open letter to Archbishop Jose Gomez, Mahony
insisted Friday that he ultimately instituted state-of-the-art
protections against child sexual abuse
within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He seemed to
suggest that Gomez had acted unfairly by publicly announcing that he was
stripping the cardinal of any public role in the local church.

"Not once over these past years
did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices or
procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct
involving minors," he wrote.

PHOTOS: Cardinal Roger Mahony over the years

"Unfortunately, I cannot return now to the 1980s and reverse actions and
decisions made then," he added. "But when I retired as the active
archbishop, I handed over to you an archdiocese that was second to none
in protecting children and youth."

Mahony posted the letter on his blog Friday afternoon, hours after he said he had sent it to Gomez.

In a letter Thursday to parishioners, Gomez announced that "effective
immediately, I have informed Cardinal Mahony that he will no longer have
any administrative or public duties." The move came a week after the
release of church records showing Mahony worked to conceal abusers from
police in the 1980s.

-- Harriet Ryan, Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers, Mitchell Landsberg and Teresa Watanabe

Photo: At a news conference Friday at the
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Esther Miller, 54, holding photos
of other victims, breaks down while talking about being abused by a
Catholic priest when she was a young girl.
Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Read More..

Marxist Group Claims Attack on Embassy in Turkey

ISTANBUL — In a statement that called the United States “the murderer of the peoples of the world,” a Marxist group, with a history of political violence in Turkey, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at the American Embassy in Ankara.

The statement, which also denounced American foreign policy, was reportedly released by the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, and a translation was distributed by the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors the communications of extremist groups. The message, which was released on a Web site that has previously carried statements from the group, condemned Turkey’s policy of supporting Syria’s rebels against the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The statement included details that were similar to those released so far by the Turkish authorities, although the group’s message had a different first name for the bomber than the one given by Turkish officials and reported in the local news media.

The Turkish authorities said Saturday that the man who detonated himself at the American Embassy in Ankara on Friday, killing himself and one other, was a convicted terrorist who had twice attacked government facilities in Istanbul but was released from prison under an amnesty program.

Officials in Ankara said Saturday they were awaiting the results of a DNA test before releasing the bomber’s name, but officials in the Black Sea coastal town of Ordu identified him as Ecevit Sanli, 40, and said he was a registered citizen of their town. Authorities in Ordu said the bomber was identified by relatives through photographs.

The statement by the militant group included two photographs of the bomber (in one, he is holding an assault rifle, and a banner bearing the hammer-and-sickle communist symbol is behind him) that appeared to be the same person seen in photographs published by the news media. The group identified the bomber with the first name “Alisan.”

The attack, coming in the wake of the assault on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, by Islamic extremists, raised fears that it was the work of jihadists. That the bomber appears to have ties to a relatively minor Marxist group, which was responsible for political violence in the 1970s, is likely to challenge assumptions about the nature of international terrorism and the risks to American interests abroad. American officials, however, have not confirmed the identity of the attacker, nor a motive, and the United States plans to conduct an investigation.

The statement from officials in Ordu said on Saturday that Mr. Sanli spent four years in prison after being arrested in 1997 for attacking a military hostel and police station in Istanbul. He was then released in 2001 under an amnesty program for inmates with medical conditions, the statement said.

The authorities said Mr. Sanli lobbed a hand grenade during Friday’s attack just before detonating himself, suggesting there were actually two explosions.

As the investigation continues, the authorities are trying to determine whether Mr. Sanli had any collaborators. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Mr. Sanli had fled to Germany after being released from prison, and had returned to Turkey only a few days before the attack.

The group has struck American and western targets in Turkey before, including during the gulf war in the early 1990s, and in its statement Saturday, the group condemned the recent deployment by NATO of Patriot missile batteries in southern Turkey.

In a report published several days before the bombing, Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that Turkey’s support of Syrian rebels in their fight against the government of Mr. al-Assad, as well as the deployment by NATO of Patriot missile batteries, was rallying Turkey’s extreme left.

“The country’s political landscape still bears vestiges of violent leftist movements from the 1970s, as well as deeply anti-American ultranationalism,” he wrote. Mr. Cagaptay noted that some militant left-wing groups organized protests against the Patriot missile deployment in the southern port city of Iskenderun, where protesters have fired smoke grenades at NATO troops and burned American flags.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated, based on information supplied by the authorities, the year when Ecevit Sanli was released from prison. It was 2001, not 2002.

Read More..

Twitter, Washington Post targeted by hackers

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Social media giant Twitter is among the latest U.S. companies to acknowledge that it is among a growing list of victims of Internet security attacks, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. And now, The Washington Post is joining the chorus, saying that it discovered that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack in 2011.

Twitter said a blog post on Friday it detected attempts to gain access to its user data earlier in the week. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But Twitter discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users they describe as ‘a very small percentage of our users.”

Nonetheless, the company reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising the affected users.

The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

On Friday, The Washington Post disclosed in an article published on its website that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack, which was discovered in 2011. The company’s spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, didn’t offer any details including the duration of the attack or the origins. But according to sources that the paper quoted, who it said spoke on condition of anonymity, the intruders gained access as early as 2008 or 2009.

The cyberattack was first reported by an independent cybersecurity blog on Friday.

“Like other companies in the news recently, we face cybersecurity threats,” Coratti was quoted as saying. “We have a number of security measures in place to guard against cyberattacks on an ongoing basis.”

According to Coratti’s comments made to the newspaper, the company worked with security company Mandiant to “detect, investigate and remediate the situation promptly at the end of 2011.”

Coratti couldn’t be reached immediately for comment by The Associated Press.

China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.

“Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security,” the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. “The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities.”

Twitter’s director of information security, Bob Lord, said in the blog that the attack “was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident.”

“The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked,” Lord said. “For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”

One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee’s home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers “a toehold” in Twitter’s internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company’s system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users’ passwords.

The relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren’t on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company’s servers, Soltani said.

Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.

That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist’s movements.

“More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service,” Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist’s emails.

___

AP reporters Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, Raphael Satter in London and Didi Tang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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