Kicking off a hectic week for Obama's nuclear agenda, his administration rolled out a strategy review that renounced U.S. development of new atomic weapons and could herald further cuts in America's stockpile.
The announcement, calling for reduced U.S. reliance on its nuclear deterrent, could build momentum before Obama signs a landmark arms control treaty with Russia in Prague on Thursday and hosts a nuclear security summit in Washington next week.
But Obama's revamped strategy is likely to draw criticism from conservatives who say his approach could compromise U.S. national security and disappoint liberals who wanted the president to go further on arms control.
The long-delayed nuclear policy statement could also deepen U.S. strains with China by expressing concern about Beijing's military buildup, including growing nuclear might.
"We are taking specific and concrete steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons while preserving our military superiority, deterring aggression and safeguarding the security of the American people," Obama said in remarks issued by the White House.
The United States for the first time is forswearing use of atomic weapons against non-nuclear countries, a break with a Bush-era threat of nuclear retaliation in the event of a biological or chemical attack.
But this comes with a major condition. Those countries would be spared a U.S. nuclear response only if they are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran and North Korea would thus not be protected.
"If there is a message for Iran and North Korea here, it is ... if you're not going to play by the rules, if you're going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters.
The Nuclear Posture Review, as the policy document is known, stated: "The threat of global nuclear war has become remote, but the risk of nuclear attack has increased."
The NPR is required by Congress from every U.S. administration but Obama set expectations high after he vowed to end "Cold War thinking" and won the Nobel Peace Prize in part for his vision of a nuclear-free world.
Seeking to set an example, the Obama administration said the United States would consider use of nuclear weapons only in "extreme circumstances" and committed to not developing any new nuclear warheads.
But it said that while reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security, the United States would strengthen its conventional arsenal...
Beleaguered Brown sends Brits to ballot box: (NBC) Center-left Labour Party trailing in polls behind Conservatives. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday announced May 6 as the date for a parliamentary election which could bring down the curtain on 13 years of rule by his center-left Labour Party.
Brown met with Queen Elizabeth to request a dissolution of parliament, a formality which marks the start of a month-long campaign for one of the most unpredictable elections in Britain for almost two decades.
The opposition Conservatives lead Labour in opinion polls. But the election result is far from certain as public support for both main parties remains volatile and the opposition faces a big challenge in securing power.
An ICM poll in Tuesday's Guardian newspaper showed Labour only four percentage points behind the Conservatives and on course to remain the largest party, albeit without an overall majority.
A separate YouGov poll for the Sun newspaper, however, showed the Conservatives enjoying a 10 point lead. An Opinium poll for the Daily Express showed the same.
But even those last two polls point to a hung parliament in which no party has an overall majority because support for the Conservatives is unevenly distributed in Britain's 650 parliamentary constituencies.
With the exception of Labour's landslide victory in 1997, no party has secured more than a five percent swing in the national vote at a general election since 1950. The Conservatives require a swing of 6.9 percent to secure an outright win.
An inconclusive election result is rare in Britain and is the nightmare scenario for financial markets, which want a clear outcome and the promise of firm action to tackle a budget deficit running at almost 12 percent of GDP.
Failure by either of the main parties to win a majority could hand a pivotal role to the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats, who will be trying to maintain a bloc of around 60 MPs in parliament.
How best to run an economy slowly emerging from the worst recession since World War II is likely to be the central theme in the campaign, entwined with issues such as how best to manage public services in straitened times...
The outgoing parliament, which has served a full five years, has been tarnished by a scandal over members' expenses that angered Britons. As many as 150 members of parliament are stepping down, many with reputations harmed by the scandal.
All three main parties have suffered and some analysts expect fringe parties and independent candidates to pick up extra votes at the polls.
Adding spice to the campaign will be an innovation in British politics — live television debates between Prime Minister Brown, Conservative leader Cameron and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg.
From First Read - NBC political analysis
*** Ch-ch-changes: The controversy over the RNC’s $2,000 expenditure at a sex/bondage-themed-club has now entered its second week. Last night’s development: The RNC’s chief of staff, Ken McKay, resigned (or was he fired?) and was replaced by Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Leavitt, who was Michael Steele’s campaign manager in his ’06 Senate race. And McKay’s departure means that Steele’s top consultants who were close to McKay -- Curt Anderson, Wes Anderson, and Brad Todd -- are now out, too. “Given our firm’s commitments to campaigns all over the country we have concluded it is best for us to step away from our advisory role at the RNC,” the trio said in a statement. “We have high personal regard for the chairman and always have; we wish him well.” The separation can, at best, be described as mutual.
*** Steele isn’t going anywhere -- for now: The big question everyone is asking: Will Steele be able to hold on to his job? All signs are still pointing to yes. First, we hear that the RNC is set to announce to a big fundraising haul from March (fueled in large part due to health care’s passage). It could be the committee's best fundraising month under Steele and PERHAPS the best single fundraising month in the history of the committee (for a midterm year). Second, the new consulting team Steele will bring in also will buy him some time (and perhaps some love from the establishment community that was upset it didn’t get a piece of the consultant pie when the Andersons stepped in). And third, we’re just too far into this cycle -- it’s just seven months until Election Day -- to make this kind of change. To be forced out, a large group of state party chairs would have to get together. And at this point, those folks have their own issues to deal with (including their own state conventions and campaigns). But one thing is crystal clear (and it was crystal clear before the sex-themed club story broke last week): Steele is not coming back to lead the RNC during the 2012 cycle. For all intents and purposes, he appears to be a lame duck chairman.
*** The Karzai problem: Here’s maybe the biggest story few are talking about: the Obama White House’s problem with Afghanistan President Karzai. “Karzai's startling threat to join the Taliban if foreigners don't stop meddling in Afghanistan and his strident criticism of the West's role have worsened relations with Washington at a time when the U.S. military wants closer cooperation ahead of a potentially decisive offensive this summer,” the AP wrote yesterday. “Karzai has been fuming for months about what he considers Washington's heavy hand. He's gambling that blaming outsiders for the troubles in a society with a long tradition of resisting occupation will bolster his stature at home - while carrying little risk because the U.S. has no choice but to deal with him.” What's driving this latest shift in rhetoric? How could Karzai be saying this just DAYS after meeting personally with the president. What's he up to? Today's "Daily Rundown" has an interview with one of the U.N. officials Karzai called out by name: Peter Galbraith.
China-based hackers stole India secrets: (NBC) The identity and motivation of the hackers remain unknown. China-based hackers stole Indian national security information, 1,500 e-mails from the Dalai Lama's office and other sensitive documents, a new report said Tuesday.
Researchers at the University of Toronto said they were able to observe the hacking and trace it to core servers located in China and to people based in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The researchers said they monitored the hacking for the past eight months.
The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive. Separate reports earlier this year said security investigators had traced attacks on Google and other companies to China-based computers...
The report describes a hacking operation called the "Shadow network" that researchers were able to observe as it broke into computers and took information, including computers at Indian diplomatic offices in Kabul, Moscow and elsewhere.
The report said the researchers were able to recover Indian national security documents marked "secret" and "confidential," including ones referring to security in India's far northeast, which borders China. Others related to India's relationships in the Middle East, Africa and Russia.
Researchers also recovered 1,500 e-mails sent from the Dalai Lama's office between January and November 2009, the report said.
A map in the report showed computers were compromised on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. One was a United Nations computer, at the U.N.'s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
"In addition we found personal banking information, scans of identification documents, job (and other) applications, legal documents and information about ongoing court cases," the report said.
U.S. court rules against FCC on Net neutrality: (NBC) Ruling is setback for agency's push for national broadband plan. A federal court threw the future of Internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt Tuesday with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC's authority to impose such "Net neutrality" obligations on broadband providers.
The ruling marks a serious setback for the FCC, which is trying to adopt official net neutrality regulations. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat, argues that such rules are needed to prevent phone and cable companies from using their control over Internet access to favor some online content and services over others.
The decision also has serious implications for the massive national broadband plan released by the FCC last month. The FCC needs clear authority to regulate broadband in order to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including a proposal to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities.
Comcast and the FCC had no immediate comment.
The court case centered on Comcast's challenge of a 2008 FCC order banning the company from blocking its broadband subscribers from using an online file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent. The commission, at the time headed by Republican Kevin Martin, based its order on a set of Net-neutrality principles it adopted in 2005 to prevent broadband providers from becoming online gatekeepers. Those principles have guided the FCC's enforcement of communications laws on a case-by-case basis.
But Comcast had argued that the FCC order was illegal because the agency was seeking to enforce mere policy principles, which don't have the force of regulations or law. That is one reason that Genachowski is now trying to formalize those rules.
The cable company had also argued that the FCC lacks authority to mandate Net neutrality because it deregulated broadband in a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005.
The FCC now defines broadband as a lightly regulated information service. That means it is not subject to the obligations traditional telecommunications services have to share their networks with competitors and treat all traffic equally. But the agency argues that existing law gives it authority to set rules for information services, including Net neutrality rules.
Tuesday's court decision rejected that reasoning, concluding that Congress has not given the FCC "untrammeled freedom to regulate activities over which the statute fails to confer ... commission authority."
With so much at stake, the FCC now has several options. It could ask Congress to give it explicit authority to regulate broadband. Or it could appeal Tuesday's decision to the Supreme Court.
But both of those steps could take too long because the agency "has too many important things they have to do right away," said Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group Free Press. Free Press was among the groups that alerted the FCC to Comcast's behavior after The Associated Press ran tests and reported that the cable company was interfering with attempts by some subscribers to share files online.
The more likely scenario, Scott believes, is that the agency will simply reclassify broadband as a more heavily regulated telecommuniciations service. And that, ironically, could be the worst-case outcome from the perspective of the phone and cable companies, he noted.
"Comcast swung an ax at the FCC to protest the BitTorrent order," Scott said. "And they sliced right through the FCC's arm and plunged the ax into their own back."
Women guilty of feeling too guilty, study shows: (NBC) ... Men are guilt-deficient, suggests the study, which was published in a recent issue of The Spanish Journal of Psychology. We lack “interpersonal sensitivity,” while women suffer from destructive guilt largely imposed by society.
So women need support, while men need fixing. “This study highlights the need for educational practices and socializing agents to reduce the tendency towards anxious-aggressive guilt in women, and to promote interpersonal sensitivity in men,” write the authors of the study, which was led by Dr. Itziar Extebarria of the Unversity of the Basque Country in Spain...
To Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosopher at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men,” this sounds like yet another example of the social sciences pathologizing plain old maleness.
Using such a study to explain Edwards or Tiger Woods, she said, which is what some of the media and blog coverage of this study did, “risks confusing the issue. Anytime you study men and women, and ask them about their emotions; women always admit to a far more complex range of emotions … .These studies always make me wonder if they are really just measuring basic sex differences.”
The answer is yes, explained Elizabeth Shirtcliff, a psychologist and behavioral endocrinologist at the University of New Orleans. The fact is, men are supposed to feel guilt less intensely because men are, generally, less empathetic than women. It’s the way evolution made us. But few people want to talk about it in those terms.
“Unfortunately, this is controversial,” sighed Shirtcliff. “Anytime you talk about gender differences there are politics involved.” For example, she said, “it does not fit with our modern egalitarian view we want to raise boys with.”
The research team tested 360 men and women from three age groups. The participants described how they would feel in a series of scenarios such as, “You have forgotten that today is one of your friends’ or relations’ birthday and you know that this type of thing is very important to him/her, and that he/she likes people to remember.”
The results led to researchers to conclude that “habitual guilt [by which they mean a kind of internalized feeling of guilt] was more intense in women than in men in all three age groups studied.” When it came to “interpersonal guilt,” the kind of guilt related to how our action or inaction affects others, it was “significantly more intense in women than in men in the adolescent group, and in the 25-33 age group, the pattern of results was similar.” Older men, however, achieved a kind of interpersonal guilt parity with women...
In his book "The Essential Difference," the Cambridge University neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sacha of “Borat” fame) wrote: “The female brain is predominately hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominately hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”
That’s a generalization, of course. These traits exist on a bell curve with some women being naturally more systems-oriented and some men being naturally more empathetic, but the generally greater female capacity for empathy matters because guilt depends on empathy.
Both Shirtcliff and Sommers refer to sex differences as complementary rather than oppositional. Women have been endowed by evolution with neurochemicals that promote mothering, nurturing, bonding. Empathy is required for all three...
“Empathy is wonderful,” she continued. “We can share emotions. We can feel someone else’s pain. But that comes at a cost, and that cost is the higher preponderance of anxiety and depressive disorders” in women.
On the other hand, men generally feel guilt less intensely, partly because we have a huge testosterone payload. It makes us take more chances, be more a little more callous about our actions, not spend time worrying about our decisions once they’re made. This is good, argued Sommers. “Men may be more stoical and that may be adaptive for society. We need to have 25-30 year old men not ruminating” but building, sometimes even fighting.
The downside is that men risk engaging in what Shirtcliff calls “hypermasculine” behavior. We can become bullies, even, at the far extremes, rapists and torturers.
That's where civilization comes in. While we are driven by our respective biologies, civilization can help impose some constructive control on how our genes are expressed. So rather than trying to make men more like women, Sommers suggested, society should help men express their innate masculinity in productive ways. She uses an old-fashioned word to describe what she means: “gentlemen.”
Biology itself can give men more empathy. When men bond with women, and help raise a family, our testosterone levels drop, our oxytocin levels rise, and, by the time we’re older, we do indeed become more empathetic and more receptive to at least some forms of guilt just as the Spanish study showed.
Shirtcliff jokingly called this progression “men as slow learners.” She also suggested that there is a good way to increase male empathy besides changing society. “I am happily married and if you want a bit of oxytocin, try the natural way: have an orgasm!”
Gay guys make generous uncles, study shows: (NBC) Homosexual men may perpetuate genes by nurturing nieces and nephews. Maybe everyone could use a gay uncle.
A new study found that homosexual men may be predisposed to nurture their nieces and nephews as a way of helping to ensure their own genes get passed down to the next generation.
Research has confirmed that male homosexuality is at least partly hereditary – it tends to cluster in families, and identical twin brothers of gay men are more likely to be gay than fraternal twin brothers, who do not share identical DNA.
genes are perpetuated, since homosexual males are less likely to reproduce than straight males. Basically, why haven't gay people gone extinct?
One idea is called the "kin selection hypothesis." Perhaps gay men are biologically predisposed to help raise the offspring of their siblings and other relatives.
"Maybe what's happening is they're helping their kin reproduce more by just being altruistic towards kin," said evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey of the University of Lethbridge in Canada. "Kin therefore pass on more of the genes which they would share with their homosexual relatives."
Vasey and his student Doug VanderLaan tested this hypothesis among a group of men called fa'afafine on the Pacific island of Samoa. Fa'afafine are effeminate men who are exclusively attracted to men as sexual partners, and are generally recognized and tolerated as a distinct gender category — neither male nor female.
The researchers surveyed about 300 fa'afafine, and found that they were significantly more likely to be altruistic toward their nieces and nephews than either single men or women, or mothers or fathers. The scientists call this behavior avuncular, or uncle-like.
The fa'afafine reported being much more willing to pay medical and school fees for their nieces and nephews, to help them with homework, babysit, teach them songs and dances. And a follow-up study confirmed that fa’afafine had indeed spent more money on their young relatives than straight people.
"I am convinced that the fa'afafine have significantly higher avuncular tendencies than men and women," Vasey told LiveScience. "And [the] latest batch of data seems to indicate that this manifests in [the] real world."
In their most recent study, the researchers tested whether fa'afafine are simply more altruistic toward everyone, or if their attention is targeted at their genetic kin. Only the latter would help explain how homosexual genes are passed down through generations.
"We thought maybe they just like helping kids in general, so we compared their avuncularity to kin and non-relations, and we found a significant difference," Vasey said. "They're interested in helping their nieces and nephews, and not in non-kin children."
This divergence differed from straight men and women, who tended to show a more equivalent level of altruism to related and non-related children. This implies that the behavior is an evolutionary adaptation, the researchers say.
"If fa'afafine have really been selected to be avuncular and this is an adaptation, then they would not be redirecting resources to non-kin children," Vasey said.
The researchers published their findings in a February issue of the journal Psychological Science.
The kin selection hypothesis was first proposed in the 1970s, but previous efforts to test it among gay male populations in Western societies found no effect. A study in Chicago and another in England found no difference between gay men and straight people in altruistic behavior toward family members.
"I thought, 'Well, I'll do the study in Samoa, it's a non-Western culture and I’ll get the exact same results and it'll be the nail in the coffin for this theory,'" Vasey recalled. "We analyzed the data and we found a significant result for avuncularity. I couldn't believe it. I told them go back and check the data — we must have made a mistake."
But subsequent attempts to reproduce the results confirmed the findings in Samoa.
Vasey said he suspects that the conditions just aren't right in modern Western societies for this genetic predisposition to express itself.
One major cultural difference is the individualistic nature of Western society, compared with the collectivistic culture in Samoa.
"We think we're close to our families, but Samoans are really close to their families," Vasey said. "People are more geographically connected in Samoa."
Additionally, there is less discrimination against fa'afafine, compared with the still-widespread homophobia that exists in many Western societies. Even if many Western gay men wanted to be doting uncles, their families might not always encourage it.
Vasey said the next step is to test whether this trend exists in other non-Western cultures where males with same-sex attractions are also accepted as a unique category.
He also said that he doesn't think the kin selection hypothesis entirely accounts for the endurance of gay genes, but that it likely plays a role in combination with other biological factors.
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