Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/293637319?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Chicken lays giant egg with another egg inside it (+video)
Chicken lays giant egg: A hen in a village in China's?Guizhou Province has reportedly lain a nearly half-pound egg that had another egg inside it. How often does this happen?
There are fairy tales of hens laying golden eggs. But few if any about a hen laying three eggs. Three eggs in one that is.A hen in a small village in China's Guizhou Province has apparently lain a remarkable egg.
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According to New Tang Dynasty Television, the egg weighed almost half a pound. Inside were two yolks, plus another fully formed egg, making for a three-yolker.
?I?m more than 80 now, but I?ve never seen eggs like this before,? Ms. Yang, the hen's owner, told NTD.
This is not the first time this particular hen has reportedly lain a giant egg. Yang says she's dropped?five oversized ova in the past three weeks, and she speculated that the eggs have something to do with the hen's diet of rice, which the hen prefers to corn. ?
Is this the biggest egg ever measured? Oddly enough, the Guinness Book of World Records created their?Worlds Largest Chicken Egg category only recently, in 2011. That was in response to a hen in Yell County, Ark., laying an egg that, according to CNN,?weighed 5.4 ounces and measured 3 1/2 inches long.?
This record was reportedly topped a year later by?Franciscana, a hen in Colombia who reportedly laid an egg weighing 8.6 ounces, which would have made it even bigger than the Chinese hen's egg.?
For what it's worth, the record for the smallest egg ever laid goes to a hen in West Virginia?in 2011. Her egg weighed just over a tenth of an ounce, and was about the size of a penny.?
But what about the egg inside the egg? How rare is that?
Like almost everything on the Internet, this video might, of course, be a hoax. But eggs-within-eggs are not unheard of in nature.?This 2008 video from the New Scientist magazine explains how Matryoshka eggs are formed.?Basically, abnormal contractions push the egg back up the hen's oviduct and into the ovary, where it becomes surrounded by another egg.
An egg curator at the British Natural History Museum?describes this?as "a relatively rare occurrence." But if you do ever see an egg inside another egg, at least you now know which came first.
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Google expands its high-speed Fiber service to second Kansas location
By Steve Keating ORLANDO, Florida, March 20 (Reuters) - Rory McIlroy's decision to skip the Arnold Palmer Invitational surprised the tournament host, who expressed his disappointment on Wednesday that the world number one was not at Bay Hill this week. The 83-year-old Palmer said he had jokingly suggested he might break McIlroy's arm if he did not show up but did not try to force the young Northern Irishman into making an appearance. "Frankly, I thought he was going to play, and I was as surprised as a lot of people when he decided he was not going to play," said Palmer. ...
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-expands-high-speed-fiber-second-kansas-location-040525534.html
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US, Karzai deal leaves most US commandos in Wardak
An Afghan Army soldier secures the hill overlooking the Kart-e Sakhi mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 20, 2013. Thousands of Afghans will celebrate on Thursday, March 21, 2013, the Iranian New Year Nowruz, marking the first day of spring and the beginning of the year on the Iranian calendar. (AP Photo/Ahmad Jamshid)
An Afghan Army soldier secures the hill overlooking the Kart-e Sakhi mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 20, 2013. Thousands of Afghans will celebrate on Thursday, March 21, 2013, the Iranian New Year Nowruz, marking the first day of spring and the beginning of the year on the Iranian calendar. (AP Photo/Ahmad Jamshid)
Afghan defense ministry spokesman General Zahir Azimi gestures during a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 20, 2013. The U.S. military and the Afghan government reached a deal Wednesday on the pullout of American special operations forces and their Afghan counterparts from a contentious eastern province. President Hamid Karzai has blamed the troops for egregious human rights abuses in Wardak province, allegations that U.S. military officials have steadfastly denied. (AP Photo/Ahmad Jamshid)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Afghanistan's president on Wednesday relented in his demand for all U.S. special operations forces to withdraw from a strategic province east of the capital, agreeing to a compromise calling for the pullout of one team implicated in abuse allegations that the Americans have rejected.
The dispute underscores the fragile negotiations under way as Hamid Karzai seeks to redefine and expand control of his country and the United States and its allies prepare to end their combat missions by the end of 2014.
Wardak province is viewed as a gateway to Kabul and has been the focus of counterinsurgency efforts in recent years. But Karzai last month ordered all U.S. special operations forces out after local villagers accused Afghan troops working with the Americans there of torture, illegal detentions and other abuses.
The U.S.-led coalition denied the allegations. But NATO said Karzai and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the U.S. commander of all allied forces, had agreed Wednesday to remove a team of commandos and turn over security to government forces in Wardak's Nirkh district, the center of the allegations.
British Army Lt. Gen. Nick Carter, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said it will be "business as usual" for U.S. special operations forces elsewhere in the restive province.
In an interview from Kabul with Pentagon reporters, Carter also described a somewhat vague timeline for the Nirkh transition, saying it will come "once the plan has been put together and there is confidence on all sides that it is possible" for the Afghans to take over security there.
Clarifying an earlier statement from NATO, Carter said the Afghan local police who work with U.S. special operation forces could stay on in some form, possibly paired with elite Afghan troops in place of the Americans ? or they might be replaced by conventional Afghan forces, but that would be up to the Afghan security chiefs to determine.
The deal took more than three weeks for U.S. and Afghan security officials to craft and was reached more than a week after the expiration of the deadline for the U.S. pullout initially set by Karzai.
The compromise came after a string of anti-American rhetoric from the Afghan leader that appears aimed at gaining favor with the Afghan public as he nears the end of his second and final term.
Karzai has long complained the U.S. special operations forces and their Afghan partners have operated outside his control, but he must tread a delicate balance between his calls for a faster withdrawal and the continued need for foreign protection.
His demand that U.S. commandos withdraw from Wardak province, for example, raised fears that the move would leave the area and the neighboring capital of Kabul more vulnerable to al-Qaida and other insurgents who are active there.
The agreement will speed up the handover of security in the troubled province, faster than U.S. officials and some members of Karzai's own government had recommended or planned.
Carter suggested that the shift in Nirkh will serve as a test for the broad NATO plans to gradually shift security control of the country to the Afghans and withdraw U.S. and NATO combat forces by the end of 2014.
"This is a very interesting pilot, if you like, in terms of how transition will occur over the course of the next year or so," he said. "Wardak is probably one of most complicated provinces that we have had to deal with, and how this goes, I think, will be a good bellwether of how the overall transition process works."
Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi said Afghan forces were ready to fill the gap.
"The international forces are ready to withdraw the special forces from Nirkh district of Maidan Wardak province, and Afghan army units are going to replace them in the coming days," Azimi said at a news conference Wednesday in Kabul.
Speaking ahead of the announcement of the deal, Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi said Afghan security forces would take control of the entire province eventually, so the gradual transfer "can be a testing period."
Faizi insisted earlier this week that an Afghan-American man working for the U.S. special operations forces was filmed abusing a suspect, on U.S. orders. The spokesman said the video was obtained during an Afghan defense ministry investigation, which was completed over the weekend.
Dunford rejected the abuse charge in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. He said a recently completed U.S. investigation found the interpreter in question was not working with U.S. forces at the time of the incident.
"We've investigated this three times, so I'm confident," Dunford said. "There were no U.S. forces in or around that incident, and the interpreter was not in our employ at the time of the incident."
The U.S. maintains dozens of small special operations posts across Afghanistan intended to help extend security and Afghan government influence to more remote, Taliban strongholds that are beyond the geographic range of the Afghan army or police. American commandos partner with small bands of Afghan Local Police or "ALP," a force roughly 20,000 strong that was created by the U.S., and later incorporated into the Afghan Interior Ministry. While the units work with Americans, they answer to the local district police chief, according to an Afghan security official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the program.
But Karzai's national security council has delayed an Interior Ministry request to recruit and train another 45,000 local police. Karzai believes the units are "outside his control," Faizi said, adding that some members have been caught preying on locals with impromptu checkpoints, or abusing the civilians under their care.
U.S. and Afghan officials point out the Afghan Interior Ministry handed over five local police accused of rape for prosecution last year. The men were given lengthy jail sentences. But the United Nations mission to Afghanistan says accountability among the units is uneven, varying from province to province.
With the Wardak disagreement resolved, U.S. and Afghan officials can now work on the delayed transfer of the Parwan Detention Center to the Afghans. Dunford told the AP that the two sides still had to come up with an acceptable way to allow the U.S. to check that the detainees they hand over are being treated humanely, as well as a way to cement Karzai's assurances that 30-40 detainees the U.S. considers dangerous will not be released.
"It's my expectation that Gen. Dunford is making good progress in terms of his discussions with the president on all of this, and that we will be working towards a resolution to the problem during the course of the next week or so," said deputy commander Carter.
___
Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar, Afghanistan, contributed.
___
Dozier can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier.
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Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Report: Microsoft Is Being Investigated for Bribery
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Osborne boxed in by austerity on budget day
By William Schomberg
LONDON (Reuters) - Chancellor George Osborne faces the daunting task on Wednesday of delivering another austerity budget to a country impatient with near-zero growth.
The chancellor of the exchequer, as he is formally known, will make more cuts to day-to-day public spending as he tries to free up some cash for investment.
He is also likely to announce another round of weaker economic forecasts which may push back further his targets for fixing Britain's fiscal problems.
Crucial for financial markets, Osborne may announce a review of the Bank of England's official remit of targeting inflation of 2 percent. Alternatively, he may take the bolder step of making growth less of a secondary objective for the bank - moves that could lead to further economic stimulus.
Despite a slump in opinion polls, Osborne and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron are sticking to their push to fix Britain's budget deficit and rising public debt, hoping for a recovery before they fight for re-election in two years time.
In a message on Twitter posted a few hours before he stands up in parliament, Osborne said he would "present a budget that tackles the economy's problems head on, helping those who want to work hard and get on."
Cameron's spokesman prepared the way for another round of belt-tightening, saying on Tuesday that the country still faced "an unprecedented peacetime economic crisis", more than four years after the near collapse of the banking system.
Committed to fiscal austerity, Osborne may seek to get the Bank of England to do more with monetary policy to mend the weak growth that has knocked the government off its fiscal targets.
When the government took office in 2010, the budget deficit was a hefty 11 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), hammered by a global economic slump and years of over-reliance on London's giant international banks to provide tax revenues.
Britain's independent budget watchdog at the time predicted the deficit would fall to 1.1 percent of GDP by 2015-16, in part due to the tough cost-cutting measures laid out by Osborne.
But the watchdog said in December the deficit in the fiscal year ending this month, on a like-for-like basis, is likely to be 7.7 percent of GDP, among the highest in the European Union.
Rather than grow by nearly 3 percent this year - as forecast in 2010 - Britain's economy may be back in a recession again, while rising inflation is hurting households.
There was some good news for Osborne before his budget announcement. The number of Britons claiming unemployment benefit fell in February to a 20-month low, data showed, although wage growth has lagged inflation.
GROWTH QUANDARY
The government puts much of the blame on the crisis in the euro zone, Britain's main export market. The opposition Labour Party shows no mercy in hammering Osborne for his austerity.
Some inside Cameron's coalition are now showing unease. The Liberal Democrat business minister has questioned whether markets would punish Britain if it borrowed to fund growth.
Business leaders largely agree that fixing Britain's fiscal health should remain a government priority, for now. But John Longworth, head of the British Chambers of Commerce, thinks the government might need to reverse course and borrow more if there is no prospect of growth within six months: "It would be a sort of defibrillator approach to the economy," he said.
Osborne will announce on Wednesday that some government departments will have to cut spending by a further 1 percent in each of the next two financial years, on top of previously announced cuts to ministerial budgets, to provide an extra 2.5 billion pounds for investment.
"If this is the only additional investment in infrastructure in the budget, it will be a huge disappointment," said Chris Leslie, a Labour finance spokesman.
Other budget measures will include tax breaks to help working parents pay for childcare from 2015. There might also be further cut to corporate tax rates and an increase in the tax-free allowance for individuals' incomes, local media have said.
CENTRAL BANK
Many in financial markets will pay most attention to what Osborne says about the Bank of England's inflation remit. He wants the central bank to do more to boost growth on top of the 375 billion pounds it has spent on buying government debt. It has also cut interest rates to a historic low of 0.5 percent.
The pound has lost about 7 percent of its value against the dollar so far this year. Much of the fall is due to speculation that the Bank of England might be encouraged to pump more money into the economy, either before or after its new governor, Mark Carney, arrives from the Bank of Canada in July.
The bank said on Wednesday its policy committee remained split 6-3 on the need for more bond-buying with concerns growing about the potential for extra stimulus to aggravate inflation by weakening sterling.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/osborne-boxed-austerity-budget-day-001311596--business.html
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