California Students Protest Education Cuts

By Jesse McKinley

SAN FRANCISCO — Angered by increases in tuition and budget-related cuts in government financing, students and faculty members at California public schools and colleges planned protests across the state on Thursday, as leaders on both sides of the political divide in the state promised answers for its educational crisis.

Called a “strike and day of action to defend public education” by organizers, the demonstrations are expected to last all day at marquee institutions like the University of California, Berkeley, and U.C.L.A., which are part of the state’s 10-campus University of Californiasystem.

Organizers also hoped to hold rallies at colleges in New York City; Detroit; Austin, Tex.; and several other cities outside California.

California’s public universities were the sites of loud demonstrations last fall, when the state Board of Regents approved a 32 percent increase in undergraduate fees — essentially tuition. Students took over buildings on the Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses in protest.

On Thursday morning, officials at U.C. Santa Cruz were turning cars away from the campus’s main entrance, according to the university’s Web site, and were telling employees not to come to work. Dozens of protesters had effectively closed a secondary entrance to the west of the main one. There were also reports of a broken windshield and of protesters surrounding cars that tried to enter the campus. In Berkeley, about 100 protesters blocked Sather Gate, a central pedestrian walkway on campus.

One of those was Rafael Velazquez, 23, a graduate student in the School of Education, who plans to be a public high school teacher.

“My whole family went to California public schools,” said Mr. Velazquez, who has a younger brother in fifth grade. “I plan to be a teacher, but it’s not my job prospects I’m worried about. It’s the whole system”.

The demonstrations were being backed by a variety of labor unions and by student groups and left-wing groups, with events also planned at elementary schools, high schools, community colleges and the 23-campus California state college system, which is separate from the state universities.

At San Francisco State, part of the college system, protesters assembled at the business building, using a picket line and tables to block one entrance. Nancy K. Hayes, the dean of the College of Business, said administrators were concerned for student safety.

“Our students thought it was going to be a protest, not a blockage,” she said. “They’re undergrads and they’re young and they’re scared”.

In Los Angeles, outside Westwood Charter, an elementary school on the west side of the city, parents and even small children handed out fliers about the protests along the carpool lane Thursday, and e-mail in-boxes were flooded with information encouraging parents to participate.

A midday rally was also planned on the steps of the capitol in Sacramento, where Gov.Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican in his last year in office, met with education officials and students on Wednesday. At the meeting, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that the layoffs and increased class sizes at some state schools were “terrible”.

The bottom line, he said, was that “they need much more money”.

Where the money could come from is unclear. California faces a new $20 billion state deficit, and schools at almost every level have already begun cutting back spending in the expectation of cuts in state financing. San Francisco’s school district, for example, is facing a $113 million shortfall that threatens the jobs of some 900 teachers.

Alberto Torrico, the Democratic majority leader in the State Assembly, has proposed a new 12.5 percent tax on revenue from oil and gas production in California, a measure that he says could raise $2 billion for higher education. But with any new tax in the state requiring a two-thirds majority, its prospects seemed uncertain.

Still, Mr. Torrico — who is from the city of Fremont on the east side of San Francisco Bay — said he had gathered 60,000 signatures on petitions in support of his plan.

“It’s really not a bill any more,” Mr. Torrico said of his proposed law, which is due to be debated this summer. “It has become a movement out there”.

Malia Wollan contributed reporting from Berkeley, Calif., and Gerry Shih from San Francisco

The New York Times

Be aggressive, Danjuma tells Jonathan

The chairman of the presidential Advisory Committee Theophilus Danjuma (RTD), GCON, has advised the Acting President Goodluck Jonathan to act fast and aggressively effect the needed transformation in the country.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the 25-man committee which was held at the council chambers of the presidential villa, today, he urged Mr. Jonathan to make the fight against corruption pro-active rather than reactive.

“This is a decisive moment in our history,” he said. “At such moments God always ensures that a nation possesses significant personalities who are to act as his agents for change. You, Mr. Acting President, are the significant personality that God has chosen at this time to take your place at the front in the struggle to save our country. Because the times are extra-ordinary, the measures that need to be taken are not only urgent but also extra-ordinary”.

He added that “unless you take those measures quickly the goodwill which you now enjoy may be lost”.

Next

Mind-reading computers turn heads at CeBIT

Devices allowing people to write letters or play pinball using just the power of their brains have become a major draw at Hannover's high-tech CeBIT fair this week.

Huge crowds at the world's biggest technology trade fair gathered round a man sitting at a pinball table, wearing a cap covered in electrodes attached to his head, who controlled the flippers with great proficiency without using hands.

"He thinks: left-hand or right-hand and the electrodes monitor the brain waves associated with that thought, send the information to a computer, which then moves the flippers," said Michael Tangermann, from the Berlin Brain Computer Interface.

But the technology is much more than a fun gadget, it could one day save your life. Scientists are researching ways to monitor motorists' brain waves to improve reaction times in a crash.

In an emergency stop situation, the brain activity kicks in on average around 200 milliseconds before even an alert driver can hit the brake. There is no question of braking automatically for a driver - "we would never take away that kind of control," said Tangermann.

"However, there are various things the car can do in that crucial time, tighten theseat belt, for example," he added.

Using this brain-wave monitoring technology, a car can also tell whether the driver is drowsy or not, potentially warning him or her to take a break.

At the g.tec stall, visitors watched a man with a similar "electrode cap" sat in front of a screen with a large keyboard, with the letters flashing in an ordered sequence.

The user concentrates hard when the chosen letter flashes and the brain waves stimulated at this exact moment are registered by the computer and the letter appears on the screen.

The technology takes a long time at present - it took the man around four minutes to write a five-lettered word - but researchers hope to speed it up in the near future.

Another device allows users to control robots by brain power. The small box has lights flashing at different frequencies at the four points of the compass.

The user concentrates on the corresponding light, depending on whether he wants the robot to move up, down, left or right and the brainwaves generated by viewing that frequency are monitored and the robot is controlled.

The technology is being perfected for physically disabled people, who can communicate and operate other devices using their brain.

"In future, people will be able to control wheelchairs, open doors and turn on their televisions with their minds," said Clemens Holzner from g.tec. 

The CeBIT runs until Saturday.

AFP 

The Local | Germany

Cheryl Cole looks miserable after crunch meeting with Ashley

Cheryl Cole looked dejected and gloomy as she arrived at Heathrow Airport following showdown talks with husband Ashley in France

The troubled star had just arrived back in England after visiting cheating hubby Ashley Cole in a French clinic where he is undergoing treatment on his ankle.

She was snapped at Heathrow waiting for a connecting flight to take her back out of the UK. 

It is not known where she is now heading or for how long, although there are rumours that she is jetting off to LA - her newly-found ‘safe house’.

The 26-year-old Girls Aloud star was dressed in sombre grey colours with oversized black shades hiding her eyes.

She looked uncomfortable and on edge, suggesting the planned make-or-break talk with Chelsea defender Ashley did not go well.

They made the meeting to discuss the future of their marraige after Ashley's alleged flings and sex-photo texting rumours surfaced.

Cheryl fled to LA to escape the whirlwind surrounding her relationship but when further accusations were thrown at Ashley, enough was enough and the brunette bombshell publically announced her split from Cole when she arrived back in the UK.

Ashley left the pair's Surrey mansion to seek medical care in a French clinic and he was said to be 'down' about his marriage breakdown. 

The X Factor judge finally agreed to meet her partner after he bombarded her with phone calls and messages pleading to meet and talk.

The England player even offered to check himself into sex rehab.

Metro.uk

Putin views reopening of Russia-Georgia border as positive sign

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the reopening of the only land border crossing between Russia and Georgia was a sign of improving ties between the two countries.

"This is a new facility, it creates good new opportunities for direct contacts between people... This is the first stage, an act symbolizing the development of Russian-Georgian ties," Putin said at a meeting with Georgian opposition leader Nino Burdzhanadze.

The former speaker of the Georgian parliament, once an ally of President Mikheil Saakashvili, came to Moscow for talks with Russian political leaders, saying that such dialogue was crucial for Georgia.

"I believe that in this complicated situation, the steps that ease the life of ordinary people are very important, and they should be taken," Burdzhanadze said.

Russia closed the Verkhny Lars checkpoint on the border with Georgia for reconstruction in July 2006. Tbilisi called the move an "unfriendly act." The checkpoint was reopened Monday.

Burdzhanadze is one of a growing number of Georgian opposition leaders seeking to start political dialogue between Russia and Georgia, calling it crucial for Georgia's future. Former Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli has visited Moscow several times in recent months.

However, Georgian parliamentary deputies loyal to Saakashvili have already accused Burdzhanadze of "treason" over her Moscow visit.

MOSCOW, March 4 

RIA Novosti

‘Google’ Hackers Had Ability to Alter Source Code

By Kim Zetter

Hackers who breached Google and other companies in January targeted source-code management systems, security firm McAfee asserted Wednesday. They manipulated a little-known trove of security flaws that would allow easy unauthorized access to the intellectual property the system is meant to protect.

The software-management systems, widely used at businesses unaware that the holes exist, were exploited by the Aurora hackers in a way that would have enabled them to siphon source code, as well as modify it to make customers of the software vulnerable to attack. It’s akin to making yourself a set of keys in advance for locks that are going to be sold far and wide.

A white paper released by security firm McAfee during this week’s RSA security conference in San Francisco provides a couple of new details about the Operation Aurora attacks (.pdf) that affected 34 U.S. companies, including Google and Adobe, beginning last July. McAfee helped Adobe investigate the attack on its system and provided information to Google about malware used in the attacks.

According to the paper, the hackers gained access to software-configuration management systems (SCM), which could have allowed them to steal proprietary source code or surreptitiously make changes to the code that could seep undetected into commercial versions of the company’s product. Stealing the code would allow attackers to examine the source code for vulnerabilities, in order to develop exploits to attack customers who use the software, such as Adobe Reader, for example.

“[The SCMs] were wide open,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president for threat research. “No one ever thought about securing them, yet these were the crown jewels of most of these companies in many ways — much more valuable than any financial or personally identifiable data that they may have and spend so much time and effort protecting”.

Many of the companies that were attacked used the same source-code management system made by Perforce, a California-based company that makes products used by many large companies. McAfee’s white paper focuses on the insecurities in the Perforce system and provides suggestions for securing it, but McAfee said it will look at other source-code management systems in the future. The paper doesn’t indicate which companies were using Perforce or had vulnerable configurations installed.

As previously reported, the attackers gained initial access by conducting a spear-phishing attack against specific targets within the company. The targets received an e-mail or instant message that appeared to come from someone they knew and trusted. The communication contained a link to a website hosted in Taiwan that downloaded and executed a malicious JavaScript, with a zero-day exploit that attacked a vulnerability in the user’s Internet Explorer browser.

A binary disguised as a JPEG file then downloaded to the user’s system and opened a backdoor onto the computer and set up a connection to the attackers’ command-and-control servers, also hosted in Taiwan.

From that initial access point, the attackers obtained access to the source-code management system or burrowed deeper into the corporate network to gain a persistent hold.

According to the paper, many SCMs are not secured out of the box and also do not maintain sufficient logs to help forensic investigators examining an attack. McAfee says it discovered numerous design and implementation flaws in SCMs.

“Additionally, due to the open nature of most SCM systems today, much of the source code it is built to protect can be copied and managed on the endpoint developer system,” the paper states. “It is quite common to have developers copy source code files to their local systems, edit them locally, and then check them back into the source code tree…. As a result, attackers often don’t even need to target and hack the backend SCM systems; they can simply target the individual developer systems to harvest large amounts of source code rather quickly”.

Alperovitch told Threat Level his company has seen no evidence yet to indicate that source code at any of the hacked companies had been altered. But he said the only way to determine this would be to compare the software against backup versions saved over the last six months to when the attacks are believed to have begun.

“That’s an extremely laborious process, particularly when you are dealing with massive projects with millions of lines of code,” Alperovitch said.

Among the vulnerabilities found in Perforce:

• Perforce runs its software as “system” under Windows, giving malware the ability to inject itself into system-level processes and providing an attacker access to all administrative functions on the system. Although the Perforce documentation for UNIX tells the reader not to run the server service as root, it doesn’t suggest making the same alteration to the Windows service. As a result, the default installation on Windows runs as a local system, or as root.
• 
  
• By default, unauthenticated anonymous users are allowed to create users in Perforce, and no user password is required to create a user.
• 
  
• All information, including source code, that is communicated between the client system and the Perforce server is unencrypted and therefore easily sniffed and compromised by someone on the network.
• 
  
• The Perforce tools use weak authentication, allowing any user to replay a request with a cookie value that is easy to guess and obtain authenticated access to the system to perform “powerful operations” on the Perforce server.
• 
  
• The Perforce client and server store all files in cleartext, allowing easy compromise of all the code in the local cache or on the server.

The paper lists a number of additional vulnerabilities.

Wired

Iraqi elections, U.S. drawdown to proceed

By Lisa Daniel, American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON (March 3, 2010) -- Iraq's upcoming elections and the U.S. drawdown of troops there later this year will go on undeterred by suicide bombings today and previous attacks like it, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said today.

"Neither this attack nor any of the previous attempts to derail the electoral process and to destabilize the government have been or will be successful, nor do we anticipate that it will derail our responsible drawdown of forces in Iraq," Morrell said at a Pentagon news conference.

The United States has about 96,000 servicemembers in Iraq and will maintain that level in the weeks following the March 7 national elections, Morrell said. That troop strength is necessary to provide for a peaceful transfer of power, he explained. "But once that has been established, we are prepared to draw down dramatically" to get to President Barack Obama's goal of having 50,000 troops in Iraq by Sept. 1, he said.

Suicide bombers attacked two police stations and a hospital just outside Baghdad in Baqouba early today, reportedly killing dozens of people. "It's disgraceful, it's deplorable and we strongly condemn it," Morrell said of the attack, but he added that it would not deter the election or U.S. troop drawdown.

The elections mark the third time Iraqis have gone to the polls since the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the second time under the current constitution, Morrell noted. They are the first Iraqi national elections to take place without a large-scale insurgency and widespread sectarian violence, and unlike previous elections, he said, no major political parties or ethnic groups are boycotting the elections.

"This is an historic opportunity, and Iraqis recognize it as such," he said. "We expect participation to be broad across Iraq's ethnic and sectarian spectrum."

The United States and international organizations, including the United Nations, are assisting the Iraqi Independent High Commission as needed, "although frankly, they haven't needed much," Morrell said. Iraqi forces are leading security efforts, he told reporters, and U.S. stand ready to assist them if called upon.

"The bottom line is, this is the Iraqis' election, and all indications are that they are more than prepared to pull it off," he said.

U.S. Army

Handsome Chinese vagrant draws fans of 'homeless chic'

Identity of 'Brother Sharp' – dubbed China's coolest man – remains a mystery

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing

The photograph shows a starkly handsome Chinese man walking with a model's measured gait, and wearing a rag-tag but well co-ordinated overcoat on top of a leather jacket. His eyes peer into the middle distance, in what one fan described as "a deep and penetrating way", and he strides confidently forward.

But this is no catwalk model. This is a homeless man in the city of Ningbo. And now a band of web followers are calling him the coolest man in China.

His good looks and bohemian dress sense have won him thousands of online fans after a resident of Ningbo posted a picture online. Web users in China have called him the "Beggar Prince", the "Handsome Vagabond", and, most often, "Brother Sharp".

He is 5ft 8in, around 35 years old, and always has a cigarette between his fingers. He also appears to have a fondness for women's clothes, which has only served to fuel his status as a fashion icon. His good looks are reminiscent of popular Asian actors like Takeshi Kaneshiro or the Oscar- nominated Ken Watanabe.

One particularly striking picture juxtaposes Brother Sharp's with a model showing the latest Dolce & Gabbana collection. "Look at him wrinkle his brow... nothing needs to be said... sexy...", ran one comment on the Tianyu site.

Another wrote: "He doesn't really look like a beggar, more like a vagabond. The quality of this person's tops are all not bad, a down jacket, cotton jacket, even a leather jacket inside, and though they're a bit dirty, they're all in good condition, not the kind that beggars find from the trash".

The suggestion that homelessness can be cool chimes with a fashion trend that many have considered tasteless: in January, the designer Vivienne Westwood presented a "homeless chic" show in which models were styled to look like rough sleepers, a move prefigured by Ben Stiller's satirical film Zoolander, which featured a similar show called Derelicte. Two years ago the supermodel Erin Wasson revealed the homeless were her fashion inspiration, saying: "When I... see the homeless, like, I'm like, 'Oh my God, they're pulling out, like, crazy looks and they, like, pull shit out of like garbage cans'".

But anyone with similar designs on Brother Sharp's sartorial tips is out of luck. His identity remains a secret, and social workers in Ningbo say they want to keep it that way. "Homeless people are vulnerable. It is incorrect to use them for entertainment purposes". said one worker at a homeless centre in Ningbo. Brother Sharp is said to appear mentally disturbed when approached on the street.

In China, begging is technically illegal, as the Communist Party-run state provides all a citizen could need. In reality, the rapid development of the Chinese economy in the last 30 years has marginalised many.

The rumours surrounding Brother Sharp's true identity persist. Some say he is a university graduate who lost his mind after his girlfriend left him. Others have blogged about how they sought him out and tried to help him find work or to go back to his family, but that he appeared frightened and cried out without speaking.

The local government in Ningbo said it had a policy of looking after the homeless, and that it would extend the same treatment to Mr Sharp.

The Independent