http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/world/middleeast/isis-grip-on-libyan-city-givesit-a-fallback-option.html?

ref=world&_r=0

ISIS Grip on Libyan City Gives It a

Fallback Option
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, BEN HUBBARD and ERIC SCHMITTNOV. 28, 2015
MISURATA, Libya Iraqi commanders have been arriving from Syria, and the first public beheadings have started.
The local radio stations no longer play music but instead extol the greatness of the Islamic States self-proclaimed
caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
When the Libyan arm of the Islamic State first raised the groups black flag over the coastal city of Surt almost
one year ago, it was just a bunch of local militants trying to look tough.
Today Surt is an actively managed colony of the central Islamic State, crowded with foreign fighters from around
the region, according to residents, local militia leaders and hostages recently released from the citys main prison.
The entire Islamic State government there is from abroad they are the ones who are calling the shots, said
Nuri al-Mangoush, the head of a trucking company based here in Misurata, about 65 miles west of the Islamic States
territory around Surt. Many of its employees live in Surt, and five were jailed there recently.
As the Islamic State has come under growing military and economic pressure in Syria and Iraq, its leaders have
looked outward.
One manifestation of the shift is a turn toward large-scale terrorist attacks against distant targets, including the
massacre in Paris and the bombing of a Russian charter jet over Egypt, Western intelligence officials say. But the
groups leaders are also devoting new resources and attention to far-flung affiliate groups that pledged their loyalty
from places like Egypt, Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere. There are at least eight in all, according to Western
officials.
Of those, by far the most important is based in Surt, a Libyan port city on the Mediterranean about 400 miles
southeast of Sicily. Western officials familiar with intelligence reports say it is the only affiliate now operating under
the direct control of the central Islamic States leaders. In Libya, residents of Surt and local militia leaders say the
transformation of the Islamic State group here has been evident for months.
Libya is the affiliate that were most worried about, Patrick Prior, the Defense Intelligence Agencys top
counterterrorism analyst, said at a recent security conference in Washington. Its the hub from which they project
across all of North Africa.
The leadership of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is now clenching its grip on Surt so tightly that
Western intelligence agencies say they fear the core group may be preparing to fall back to Libya as an alternative
base if necessary, a haven where its jihadists could continue to fight from even if it was ousted from its original
territories.
Contingency planning, said a senior Defense Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to
discuss intelligence. Western officials involved in Libya policy say that the United States and Britain have each sent
commandos to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence on the ground. Washington has stepped up airstrikes
against Islamic State leaders. But military strategists are exasperated by the lack of long-term options to contain the
group here.
The Islamic State has already established exclusive control of more than 150 miles of Mediterranean coastline
near Surt, from the town of Abugrein in the west to Nawfaliya in the east. The militias from the nearby city of
Misurata that once vowed to expel the group completely have all retreated. Only a few checkpoints manned by one or
two militiamen guard the edge of the Islamic States turf, where its fighters come and go as they please.
Militia leaders and Western officials estimate that the groups forces in Libya now include as many as 2,000
fighters, with a few hundred in Surt and many clustered to the east, around Nawfaliya. A flurry of recent bombings,

assassinations and other attacks has raised fears that the city of Ajdabiya, farther to the east, is the groups next
target. Its conquest could give the Islamic State control of a strategic crossroads, vital oil terminals and oil fields south
of the city.
What is more, in the tangle of factions that have taken over whatever remains of the Libyan government, Islamic
State fighters have been receiving weapons and other support from the accumulated oil wealth that should belong to
the Libyan state. And they are getting the weapons through an intermediary who himself played a peripheral role in
the deadly attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/science/scientists-link-moons-tilt-and-earthsgold.html

Scientists Link Moons Tilt and

Earths Gold
By KENNETH CHANGNOV. 27, 2015
The moons orbit is askew, and two planetary scientists believe that they have come up with a good reason.
Intriguingly, their idea also explains why gold and platinum are found in the Earths crust, well within diggable reach.
The moon is believed to have formed out of a giant cataclysmic collisionearly in the history of the solar system when
an interplanetary interloper the size of Mars slammed into Earth and lofted a ring of debris circling over the Equator.
The debris coalesced into the moon.
At its birth, the moon was quite close to the Earth, probably within 20,000 miles. Because of the tidal pulls between
the Earth and moon, the moons orbit has slowly been spiraling outward ever since, and as it does, Earths pull
diminishes, and the pull of the sun becomes more dominant.
By now, with the moon a quarter million miles from Earth, the suns gravity should have tipped the moons orbit to lie
in the same plane as the orbits of the planets.
But it has not. The moons orbit is about 5 degrees askew.
That the lunar inclination is as small as it is gives us some confidence that the basic idea of lunar formation from an
equatorial disk of debris orbiting the proto-Earth is a good one, said Kaveh Pahlevan, a planetary scientist at the
Observatory of the Cte dAzur in Nice, France. But the story must have a twist.
Writing in this weeks issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Pahlevan and his observatory colleague Alessandro Morbidelli
propose the twist.
The moon did indeed form in the Earths equatorial plane, the scientists said, but then a few large objects, perhaps as
large as the moon, zipping through the inner solar system repeatedly passed nearby over a few tens of millions of
years and tipped the moons orbit.
A series of computer simulations show that the idea is plausible.
This mechanism works for a broad range of physical conditions, Dr. Pahlevan said.
Eventually the crisscrossing mini-planets would have been tossed out of the solar system, swallowed by the sun, or
slammed into the Earth or the other planets.
Robin M. Canup, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who wrote an
accompanying commentary in Nature, said the thousands of close passes that typically occur before an impact were a
really new realization by Dr. Pahlevan and Dr. Morbidelli.
While a single scattering event will only change the moons tilt slightly, Dr. Canup said, its the cumulative effect of
these many passes that can produce this tilt.
The scars of one or more moon-size objects hitting Earth would have long been erased by the tectonics of the shifting
surface, but those impacts would explain the gold, platinum and other precious metals in the Earths crust but not on
the moon.

Metals on the early Earth should have sunk to the interior. Thus, planetary scientists think that after the moon was
created, later collisions that provided the last 1 percent or so of the Earths mass added a veneer of precious metals.
A dearth of lunar metals argues for a few large metal-rich objects hitting the Earth rather than many small ones.
The computer simulations show that the chances of the moons getting hit are low. In the simulations, if there was one
object buzzing by, the moon was hit 9 percent of the time. With four objects, the chances of a lunar impact rose to 25
percent.
Not an overly likely outcome, which is good, Dr. Canup said.
Scientists including Dr. Canup had proposed other explanations for the tilt. I would say those relied on certainly
more complex processes and required rather narrow sets of conditions for success, Dr. Canup said. I think where
this has really stepped in is its a very simple mechanism.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/27/facebook-four-month-parentalleave-mark-zuckerberg

Facebook introduces four-month parental leave for all employees

Policy that will affect new fathers and people in same-sex relationships comes after CEO
Mark Zuckerberg announced he will take two months leave
Facebook is introducing four-month parental leave for all new fathers, days after Mark
Zuckerberg announced he would be taking two months of leave for the birth of his first
child.
Facebooks new parental leave policy extends the four-month leave option that was
already available to some employees such as current head of search Tom Stocky, who
took four months off following the birth of his child in 2013 to every full-time
employee of the company, regardless of gender or location.
The extension will mostly affect new fathers and people in same-sex relationships
outside the US, according to the companys head of human resources, Lori Matloff
Goler.
Goler added: Our approach to benefits at Facebook is to support our employees and the
people who matter most to them. We want to be there for our people at all stages of life,
and in particular we strive to be a leading place to work for families. An important part
of this is offering paid parental or baby leave.
After Stocky took four months leave in 2013, he wrote about how it had affected him.
Its with mixed emotions that I go back to office work tomorrow. I love that job, so Im
excited to get back into it, and Im curious to see if any elements of peoples career
concerns about my four-month absence have played out at all. But I also know that Im
going to miss my daughter terribly, and I already feel guilty that Im a bad parent for
spending so much less time with her.
When Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced in July that he and wife
Priscilla Chan were having a baby, many wondered if he would take paternity leave at all
in the workaholic culture of silicon valley. But four months later, he confirmed that he
would be taking two months off work once the baby was born.