From trick-or-treating with their kids to attending ghoulish parties, celebs love to play dress-up! Can you guess who's who?
Source: http://www.ivillage.com/celebrity-halloween-costume-trivia-quiz/1-b-291738?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Acelebrity-halloween-costume-trivia-quiz-291738Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is testifying Wednesday on Capitol Hill. She can expect some heated questions about the rugged rollout of the Affordable Care Act. President Obama, meanwhile, heads to Boston to talk about health care in the afternoon.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. More hearings come today on the messy rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will face questions from the House, Energy and Commerce Committee. Now, yesterday, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid testified before a different committee. Marilyn Tavenner offered consumers an apology for the problems at the healthcare.gov website.
(SOUNDBITE OF HEARING)
MARILYN TAVENEER: We know that the consumer experience has been frustrating for many Americans. Some have had trouble creating accounts and logging into the site while others have received confusing error messages or had to wait for slow response times. This initial experience has not lived up to our expectations or the expectations of the American people and it is not acceptable.
INSKEEP: Now, as the hearings continue, the president goes to Boston today. He'll be talking about healthcare. And we're going to talk about healthcare now with NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson, who's on the line. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. So why in Boston for the president?
LIASSON: Well, it's a bit of counterprogramming to the Sebelius hearings, but he'll also be making the point about the arc of enrollment. In Massachusetts, which of course was the model for his healthcare plan, only 123 people signed up in the first month. That's .3 percent of the eventual enrollment. And a full 20 percent signed up in the final month.
This is why the administration doesn't want to give enrollment numbers until mid-November. But...
INSKEEP: So they're basically trying to say it was very slow in Massachusetts.
LIASSON: That's right.
INSKEEP: Don't hammer us for being too slow.
LIASSON: That's right. But on a call yesterday, the administration admitted that there are limitations to the Massachusetts analogy. Yes, it was the model for the president's plan, but it's also very different - so much smaller - and it had bipartisan support from the very beginning.
INSKEEP: Now, here's some awkwardness. Republicans are pointing out news reports that a lot of people are seeing their policies, their old policies, cancelled or their premiums go up under the new Obamacare rules. Does the White House have any answer to that?
LIASSON: Well, it does, but here's the problem. In order to sell the plan back in 2009, the president said this a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period.
LIASSON: But that's just not true in every case. What we're talking about here is about five percent of the population who are in the private individual market. They don't get their healthcare through their employer or through Medicare or Medicaid. And some of them - we don't know how many of them - are seeing their plans canceled when their 12-month contracts come up because their plans don't meet the new standards for coverage in the Affordable Care Act.
Now, some of these people are going to have to pay a little more. Some of them will pay less. The White House says in the end more people will end up with better coverage and in some cases cheaper coverage because of the subsidies. But the fact is, the Affordable Care Act is a disrupter. This is why the White House wanted this rolled out after the president was reelected.
And the problem is that the president raised expectations. He went out and said the website will be as easy to use as buying a plane ticket on Kayak. He said your insurance won't change if you like it. But health insurance is very complicated. There are premiums and there are deductibles and there are co-pays and the law affects different people in different ways.
So for every positive anecdote, you can find a negative one. The president made it sound so simple and those promises are now coming back to haunt him.
INSKEEP: But I do want to ask, Mara Liasson, because this is a debate that has been so heated, so intense, and the people who are saying that the president was untruthful or even that he lied are in some cases people who have talked about death panels in the law, who've said the IRS was going to be coming after people with squads of goons.
They've talked about socialism. There's been extraordinary rhetoric surrounding this entire debate for years. Is it a little late for anyone to complain about anybody being untruthful?
LIASSON: It's never too late...
(LAUGHTER)
LIASSON: I mean, the problem is that today, when Secretary Sebelius takes the stand - of course Republicans will call for her resignation, but she's going to get questions not just about the website. Now the focus is on this new line of attack: Why are people's plans being changed when the president said they wouldn't be? And why are people getting cancellation notices at the same time they can't get on the website to look for a new plan?
So yes, people - everyone has exaggerated and been untruthful in the past, but right now the big questions of credibility and competence are directed at the administration, and Sebelius is going to bear the brunt of them today.
INSKEEP: Mara, thanks as always.
LIASSON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Lori Ann White
law@slac.stanford.edu
650-926-4897
Stanford University
New evidence that iron is spread evenly between the galaxies in one of the largest galaxy clusters in the universe supports the theory that the universe underwent a turbulent and violent youth more than 10 billion years ago. That explosive period was responsible for seeding the cosmos with iron and other heavy elements that are critical to life itself.
Researchers from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), jointly run by Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shed light on this important era by analyzing 84 sets of X-ray telescope observations from the Japanese-US Suzaku satellite. Their results appear in the Oct. 31 issue of the journal Nature.
In particular, the researchers looked at iron distribution throughout the Perseus cluster, a large grouping of galaxies about 250 million light-years away.
"We saw that iron is spread out between the galaxies remarkably smoothly," said Norbert Werner, an astrophysicist at KIPAC and lead author of the paper. "That means it had to be present in the intergalactic gas before the Perseus cluster formed."
The even distribution of these elements supports the idea that they were created at least 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. According to the paper, during this time of intense star formation, billions of exploding stars created vast quantities of heavy elements in the alchemical furnaces of their own destruction. This was also the epoch when black holes in the hearts of galaxies were at their most energetic.
"The combined energy of these cosmic phenomena must have been strong enough to expel most of the metals from the galaxies at early times and to enrich and mix the intergalactic gas," said co-author and KIPAC graduate student Ondrej Urban.
To settle the question of whether the heavy elements created by supernovae remain mostly in their home galaxies or are spread out through intergalactic space, the researchers looked through the Perseus cluster in eight different directions. They focused on the hot, 10-million-degree gas that fills the spaces between galaxies and found the spectroscopic signature of iron reaching all the way to the cluster's edges.
The researchers estimate that the amount of iron in the cluster is roughly equivalent to the mass of 50 billion suns.
"We think most of the iron came from a single type of supernovae, called Type Ia supernovae," said former KIPAC member and co-author Aurora Simionescu, who is currently with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency as an International Top Young Fellow.
In a Type Ia supernova, a star explodes and releases all its material to the void. The researchers believe that at least 40 billion Type Ia supernovae must have exploded within a relatively short period on cosmological time scales in order to release that much iron and have the force to drive it out of the galaxies.
The results suggest that the Perseus cluster is probably not unique and that iron along with other heavy elements is evenly spread throughout all massive galaxy clusters, said Steven Allen, a associate professor at Stanford and head of the research team.
"You are older than you think or at least, some of the iron in your blood is older, formed in galaxies millions of light years away and billions of years ago," Simionescu said.
The researchers are now looking for iron in other clusters and eagerly awaiting a mission capable of measuring the concentrations of elements in the hot gas with greater accuracy.
"With measurements like these, the Suzaku satellite is having a profound impact on our understanding of how the largest structures in our universe grow," Allen said. "We're really looking forward to what further data can tell us."
###
The research was supported by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and by the US Department of Energy.
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 30-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Lori Ann White
law@slac.stanford.edu
650-926-4897
Stanford University
New evidence that iron is spread evenly between the galaxies in one of the largest galaxy clusters in the universe supports the theory that the universe underwent a turbulent and violent youth more than 10 billion years ago. That explosive period was responsible for seeding the cosmos with iron and other heavy elements that are critical to life itself.
Researchers from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), jointly run by Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shed light on this important era by analyzing 84 sets of X-ray telescope observations from the Japanese-US Suzaku satellite. Their results appear in the Oct. 31 issue of the journal Nature.
In particular, the researchers looked at iron distribution throughout the Perseus cluster, a large grouping of galaxies about 250 million light-years away.
"We saw that iron is spread out between the galaxies remarkably smoothly," said Norbert Werner, an astrophysicist at KIPAC and lead author of the paper. "That means it had to be present in the intergalactic gas before the Perseus cluster formed."
The even distribution of these elements supports the idea that they were created at least 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. According to the paper, during this time of intense star formation, billions of exploding stars created vast quantities of heavy elements in the alchemical furnaces of their own destruction. This was also the epoch when black holes in the hearts of galaxies were at their most energetic.
"The combined energy of these cosmic phenomena must have been strong enough to expel most of the metals from the galaxies at early times and to enrich and mix the intergalactic gas," said co-author and KIPAC graduate student Ondrej Urban.
To settle the question of whether the heavy elements created by supernovae remain mostly in their home galaxies or are spread out through intergalactic space, the researchers looked through the Perseus cluster in eight different directions. They focused on the hot, 10-million-degree gas that fills the spaces between galaxies and found the spectroscopic signature of iron reaching all the way to the cluster's edges.
The researchers estimate that the amount of iron in the cluster is roughly equivalent to the mass of 50 billion suns.
"We think most of the iron came from a single type of supernovae, called Type Ia supernovae," said former KIPAC member and co-author Aurora Simionescu, who is currently with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency as an International Top Young Fellow.
In a Type Ia supernova, a star explodes and releases all its material to the void. The researchers believe that at least 40 billion Type Ia supernovae must have exploded within a relatively short period on cosmological time scales in order to release that much iron and have the force to drive it out of the galaxies.
The results suggest that the Perseus cluster is probably not unique and that iron along with other heavy elements is evenly spread throughout all massive galaxy clusters, said Steven Allen, a associate professor at Stanford and head of the research team.
"You are older than you think or at least, some of the iron in your blood is older, formed in galaxies millions of light years away and billions of years ago," Simionescu said.
The researchers are now looking for iron in other clusters and eagerly awaiting a mission capable of measuring the concentrations of elements in the hot gas with greater accuracy.
"With measurements like these, the Suzaku satellite is having a profound impact on our understanding of how the largest structures in our universe grow," Allen said. "We're really looking forward to what further data can tell us."
###
The research was supported by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and by the US Department of Energy.
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
By now, you know that the National Security Agency tracks the online movements of US citizens with the cooperation of major Internet corporations. But now, the Washington Post reports that according to documents from NSA whistleblower and fugitive Edward Snowden, the organization is also spying on us through Google and Yahoo, without these companies' knowledge.
As with any company or connected home, these two corporations have gateways to the outer, entirely public Internet. The NSA has successfully tapped into these links, providing them with a wealth of information that they did not yet have, including not just the metadata revealed in Snowden's initial disclosures, but actual content, such as text and video.
The amount of information is staggering. A top-secret report from January 2013 states that this project, called MUSCULAR, acquires millions of records daily from Google and Yahoo. In one 30-day period ending in January, the NSA collected over 181 million new records from these secret sources.
This is in addition to PRISM, the previously Snowden-disclosed program that gathered information on US citizens with the cooperation of Google, Yahoo, and other high-profile Internet companies such as Facebook and Microsoft.
Not surprisingly, Google and Yahoo have publically condemned the reports of government hacking. A Google spokesperson told the Washington Post that the company was “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity." But the spokesperson also admitted that there were reasons to worry. "We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we continue to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links.”
And Yahoo has stated that “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”
The NSA didn't do this alone. Their British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was also involved in MUSCULAR. Like the NSA, the GCHQ has had its own spying scandals. Last June, it was discovered that they had tapped fiber optic cables to intercept the electronic communications, and that they collected data from visiting foreign politicians.
The NSA does its MUSCULAR data mining outside of the country--a legal advantage. The organization must follow relatively strict rules about data gathering in the United States. But if data is picked up overseas, the government can assume that at least one of the people involved is a foreigner, and therefore not subject to as much protection.
According to NSA head Keith Alexander, all of this is entirely justifiable. "None of this shows that [the] NSA is doing something illegal, or that it has not been asked to do," he said in an interview immediately after the leaks. "It's legal, it's necessary, and it's authorized in every case."
[ This sponsored article was written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of PCWorld. ]
If you ever, for a second, wondered questions like what's the purpose of life or why the Internet exists or what are you going to eat for lunch today, the answer is simply this magical software tool created by GitHub user LindseyB. It automatically turns any Star Wars quote into an animated GIF, complete with caption of said quote.
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President Barack Obama smiles after he said that environmental protesters who interrupted his speech were at the wrong event as he speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Faneuil Hall is where former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the 2012 presidential election, signed the state's landmark health care law in 2006, with top Democrats standing by his side. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama smiles after he said that environmental protesters who interrupted his speech were at the wrong event as he speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Faneuil Hall is where former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the 2012 presidential election, signed the state's landmark health care law in 2006, with top Democrats standing by his side. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Confronted with missteps in his own administration, President Barack Obama has frequently pleaded ignorance — suggesting he could not be at fault about things he did not know.
It's an argument with clear benefits but also inherent risks for the White House. Used too often, the tactic emboldens critics who claim the president is incompetent, detached and not fully in control.
Eager to protect Obama's time and concentration, his aides deliberate intensively about what to tell the president, current and former White House officials said. His advisers act as a triage team for an endless flood of information coming into the White House, continually making decisions about which snippets of data Obama might need.
What makes the cut: Information that's likely to require a presidential decision, come up during a public appearance or inform Obama's longer-term thinking, as well as major developments relating to national security or Obama's domestic priorities.
Everything else, including most of the myriad details of how policies and laws are carried out, remains with staff and agencies. If and when things go wrong, as they invariably do in the sprawling federal government, the White House can seek to sidestep uncomfortable questions by saying the issue never rose to the presidential level.
Month after month, for a full year before healthcare.gov website went live, Obama posed the same questions in regular meetings with his advisers and top health officials: "How's the website? Will it work," according to one official present for the meetings.
But nobody ever signaled to the president that deep-seated problems with the site would lead to a near-meltdown immediately after its debut, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal meetings.
"I told the president that we were ready to go. Clearly I was wrong. We were wrong," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress on Wednesday, shifting the blame from the president to herself.
A similar logic played out this week as a U.S. official said the president didn't learn until recently — five years into Obama's presidency — that the National Security Agency had been secretly monitoring the German chancellor's cellphone for a decade. And the White House said earlier this year that Obama was unaware of an investigation into whether IRS agents improperly targeted tea party groups for extra scrutiny, even though top White House aides knew.
Yet, White House officials said Obama has created a culture wherein aides are expected to err on the side of providing more information, and frequently sends staffers away from meetings with "homework assignments" when all of his questions haven't been answered.
And as the full extent of the healthcare.gov problems became clear, Obama told aides he wished they would have told him more — a directive that's not uncommon from Obama when he's caught off-guard by pitfalls, said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's senior adviser.
"The things that come back to bite you are the things you didn't know to tell him about," Pfeiffer said. "The last thing you want to do is not tell him something that's bad news that you think he doesn't want to hear."
"That will get you in trouble the fastest," Pfeiffer added.
Ari Fleischer, former President George W. Bush's press secretary, said after Bush was burned by bad information about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush stopped blindly accepting what he was told and began demanding that the CIA and other agencies walk through their logic in front of him.
"You want everybody to be looking over their shoulders, saying 'the boss is watching,'" Fleischer said.
Republicans have pounced on Obama's assertion to claim a failure of leadership when it comes to implementing the health care law, his signature legislative achievement. Said the Republican National Committee: "Will he ever take responsibility for — let alone become aware of — how he's running his government?"
In other cases, such as revelations the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed phone records for Associated Press journalists, the White House has insisted it would be inappropriate for Obama to be informed about law enforcement operations that are supposed to be carried out without political interference.
But officials who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations said it's reasonable Obama wouldn't know that the NSA was listening in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone.
Obama's prime method for digesting intelligence information is the highly classified daily briefing he receives each morning. But the sources for the data points in that report are scrubbed well before it reaches the president, said James Andrew Lewis, a former State Department official and national security expert.
"It doesn't say, 'Oh, by the way, this came from Angela Merkel's cellphone,'" Lewis said. "It's like he doesn't ask the cook, 'Where did you buy the chicken this week?'"
___
AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.
___
Follow Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-30-Obama-In%20the%20Know/id-55f81771035044c9ab72374c423f4965