Marbisis News

Djokovic holds off Wawrinka; Sharapova advances

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Novak Djokovic held off a valiant Swiss player for a 5-hour, five-set victory Sunday night, extending his winning streak to 18 matches at the Australian Open and then ripping off his shirt to celebrate.

The big surprise: It was a fourth-round match against Stanislas Wawrinka of Switzerland, not a final against Roger Federer.

Djokovic edged the 15th-seeded Wawrinka 1-6, 7-5, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 12-10 in a momentum-swinging marathon, cashing in on his third match point to reach the quarterfinals for a 15th consecutive major tournament.

The style was reminiscent of his 5-hour, 53-minute final win here last year against Rafael Nadal.

"He deserved equally to be a winner of this match," said Djokovic, who is aiming to be the first man in the Open era to win three consecutive Australian titles. "I give him a lot of credit. He has all my respect. He was the aggressive player on the court. I was just hanging in there trying to fight."

Djokovic had beaten Wawrinka — the perennial No. 2 among Swiss tennis players to 17-time major winner Federer — in their 10 previous matches. He hadn't lost a head-to-head since 2006 and had won 11 straight sets between them.

The win "brings back the memories from 12 months ago with Rafa," he said. "We are midway through the tournament but it feels like a final to me."

Djokovic next faces Tomas Berdych, the 2010 Wimbledon finalist who advanced with a 6-3, 6-2, 7-6 (13) win over South Africa's Kevin Anderson.

Wawrinka was cramping and needed massages on both legs in the fifth set. He was so tired he decided not to challenge a decision on a call that went against him — wrongly, according to TV replays.

But he didn't think it made a difference in the end.

"In five sets, five hours, you always have some opportunity to win a set or to win the match," he said. "If you don't take it, he's going to take it.

"It's by far my best match I ever play, especially in five sets against the No. 1 player ... full house. At the end I was really, really close. For sure I'm really sad. ... But I think there is more positive than negative."

Fourth-seeded David Ferrer won 6-2, 6-1, 6-4 over No. 16 Kei Nishikori of Japan to set up an all-Spanish quarterfinal against Nicolas Almagro, who was leading 6-2, 5-1 when No. 8 Janko Tipsaveric retired from their fourth-round match.

Maria Sharapova has had almost no trouble on the women's side, beating Kirsten Flipkens of Belgium 6-1, 6-0 earlier Sunday to continue a dominant and unparalleled run in Melbourne.

The late-finishing men's match almost changed the complexion of the tournament.

Critics who questioned if anybody could challenge Djokovic, Federer and U.S. Open champion Andy Murray in the absence of Nadal at this tournament got an answer quickly.

Wawrinka stunned the top-ranked Djokovic with three service breaks in the first set and led 5-2 in the second before the 25-year-old Serb rallied by winning six consecutive games. But just as Djokovic seemed to be taking control of the match, Wawrinka launched his own comeback to win a long tiebreaker and force a fifth set.

Djokovic got to serve first in the fifth, giving him a psychological edge as long as he held his serve. In the end, Wawrinka didn't quite have the big-time experience.

Wawrinka had game point in the 22nd game but let Djokovic get on a roll. He saved his first match point with a service winner, then saved another.

At 1:40 a.m. local time, Wawrinka was whacking his head with the racket and biting the ball after giving Djokovic another match point. Moments later, he was slumped on the court.

Djokovic raised both arms, walked to the net and embraced his beaten rival, then pulled of his shirt and flexed — shades of the 2012 final.

The second-ranked Sharapova has lost only five games in four matches on the way to the quarterfinals, an Australian Open record that seems immaterial to the 25-year-old Russian.

"Well, I'm certainly happy to be playing this well but ... it only gets tougher from here," said Sharapova, who is playing her first tournament of 2013 after withdrawing from a warm-up event at Brisbane because of an injured right collarbone.

Steffi Graf conceded only eight games in her opening four matches here in 1989, when she won the second of her three straight Australian Open titles. Monica Seles matched that mark.

Sharapova has been even more dominant. She started with a pair of 6-0, 6-0 wins — the first time that has happened at a major tournament since 1985 — and then beat seven-time Grand Slam winner Venus Williams 6-1, 6-3 in the third round.

Sharapova next plays fellow Russian Ekaterina Makarova, who ousted fifth-seeded Angelique Kerber 7-5, 6-4. Sharapova beat Makarova in the quarterfinals here last year before losing the final to Victoria Azarenka.

Li Na, who reached the final here in 2011 and won the French Open later that year, saved a set point in the tiebreaker before beating Julia Goerges 7-6 (6), 6-1. She'll next play No. 4 Agnieszka Radwanska, who beat No. 13 Ana Ivanovic 6-2, 6-4 for her 13th consecutive win. Radwanska won the Auckland and Sydney titles before coming to Melbourne.

Loneliness Is Bad for Your Health, Study Suggests

Label: World

NEW ORLEANS — Feeling lonely? New research suggests you might want to reach out. Not only is loneliness an unpleasant condition, it can harm the body’s immune system.

The new study, presented Saturday (Jan. 19) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, reveals that people who are lonely experience more reactivation of latent viruses in their systems than the well-connected. Lonely people also are more likely than others to produce inflammatory compounds in response to stress, a factor implicated in heart disease and other chronic disorders.

“Both, in different ways, indicate that the immune system is a little out of whack,” said study researcher Lisa Jaremka, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University College of Medicine.

The lonely body

Jaremka and her colleagues were interested in immune links to loneliness because feeling socially disconnected is associated with poor health and chronic disease. They recruited 200 female breast cancer survivors, average age 51, and 134 overweight, middle-age adults with no major health problems.

In the first study, the researchers analyzed the blood of the breast cancer survivors for antibodies against cytomegalovirus, a herpes virus. These common viruses can remain dormant and symptomless inside the body. Even when active, they may not cause symptoms, but they do trigger the immune system to produce antibodies, or protective proteins that help the immune system hunt down the rogue viruses. Higher antibody levels indicate higher levels of activated virus. The participants also filled out questionnaires about their loneliness and social connectedness. [7 Personality Traits That Are Bad For You]

The results revealed that the lonelier the participant, the higher the levels of cytomegalovirus antibodies in the blood.

“It’s definitely indicating that the immune system is compromised in some way,” Jaremka told LiveScience. “It’s unable at that time, for whatever reason, in this case loneliness perhaps, to keep that virus under control.”

In a second study, the researchers measured inflammatory proteins called cytokines in 144 of the breast cancer survivors as well as the healthy though overweight middle-age adults. The participants gave a blood sample and then were subjected to the stress of having to give an impromptu speech and do mental math in front of a panel of people in white lab coats. To up the anxiety, the panel gave the participants no encouragement.

“No matter what they say and no matter what jokes they crack, no matter how much they smile, the panel just stares at them, basically,” Jaremka said.

The researchers also triggered the participants’ immune systems with a harmless compound from bacterial cells before taking a second blood sample.

The lonelier the person, the higher the levels of cytokine interleukin-6 after the stressful speech. This cytokine is important for healing in the short term, because it promotes inflammation — think of the redness and swelling that accompanies a healing cut. However, when cytokines react too readily, inflammation can be harmful. Chronic inflammation has been linked to coronary heart disease, arthritis, Type 2 diabetes and even suicide attempts.

Loneliness and stress

Researchers have long known that chronic stress has a similar inflammation-producing, immune-disrupting effect on the body. Loneliness, in fact, may act as its own source of chronic stress, Jaremka said. Earlier research shows that close and connected relationships are necessary to help people thrive; without them, people are under a constant stressful cloud of missing this crucial social connection.

People who are lonely also tend to react more strongly to negative events in their lives, Jaremka said. If lonely people experience daily life as more stressful, it may cause chronic stress, which in turn disrupts the immune system.

Solving the problem is harder than telling lonely hearts to go out and seek more close friends, Jaremka said — it’s easier said than done. But if researchers can figure out how loneliness results in poor health, they may be able to come up with treatments that disrupt the links, in essence making loneliness less of a burden, at least physically.

The study shouldn’t be seen as all doom and gloom, Jaremka said. The flip side is that those who feel close to friends and family can know that their health is likely getting a boost from those relationships.

“People who feel socially connected are experiencing positive outcomes,” she said.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Mali war turns musicians into military

Label: Lifestyle

French-led Mali offensive

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Until recently, Mali was better known for its music, mosques and manuscripts than for conflict

Andy Morgan: Music and culture are Mali's shop-window to the world, its primary asset

Conflict turns musicians, artists and writers into frontline soldiers, says Morgan

Morgan: In Mali they're still singing, still writing, still fighting

Editor's note: Andy Morgan recently ended a seven-year stint as manager of Touareg rockers Tinariwen, leaving the music industry after 29 years to concentrate on writing. He has contributed features and reviews to The Independent, fRoots, Songlines, NME and Rolling Stone, and is currently working on books about the Sahara and West Africa.

(CNN) -- It's safe to assume that most people outside West Africa had never even heard of Mali until a few weeks ago. If they had, there's a good chance it was thanks to some beautifully flowing song or instrumental by one of the country's many world-renowned musicians: Salif Keita, Tinariwen, Oumou Sangare, Toumani Diabate, Rokia Traore... the list is long.

If it wasn't music then it might have been Mali's priceless medieval manuscripts that drew their attention, or its majestic mud-built mosques, its filmmakers, poets, photographers and writers.

Like Jamaica or Ireland, Mali's music and culture are its primary asset, its shop-window to the world, its "gold and cotton" as one famous musician put it.

Andy Morgan is a world music journalist and former manager of Touareg band Tinariwen.

Certainly, very few people would have included the words "Mali" and "Islamism" in the same sentence before April last year, when Islamist militia took control of over two thirds of the country and started amputating the hands of thieves, stoning adulterers and whipping women who happened to venture out into the streets 'improperly' dressed.

With the arrival of French forces and the mass hostage seizure at the Algerian oil facility of In Amenas, Mali and Islamism are two words that now appear not only to be inextricably linked but on the front page.

Six reasons why Mali matters

Of course, the association goes back much further than April 2012.

Al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) moved south from Algeria and into Mali's remote northern deserts over a decade ago. It proceeded to amass a fortune from kidnapping, smuggling and money laundering whilst undermining the local economy, disrupting social relations and destroying the local tourist industry.

It brought along a hardcore form of Islam inspired by Wahabism and a hatred of the West that was previously almost unheard of in Mali, a country which has long contented itself with gentler and more tolerant brands of Sufism richly tinted by local pre-Islamic beliefs.

AQIM also managed to hijack a rebellion against the central government in Bamako by the nomadic Touareg people of the north that had been grinding on and off for the best part of fifty years.

This conflict, which first erupted in 1963, was always about power, influence and the self-determination of a marginalized people. It was also about preserving the Touareg's unique Berber culture. It had never been about imposing hard line Islam on anyone. But from round 2006 onwards, Touareg nationalism and Islamic terrorism became inextricably confused with each other.

Why Africa backs French in Mali

Indeed, there's a widespread theory, confirmed by the word of just a few bit-players in the drama but lacking any more conclusive evidence, that certain parties who were utterly averse to the idea of an independent Touareg state -- the Malian government, Algeria and others -- either deliberately implanted AQIM in the region, or at the very least tolerated its presence there.

It was hoped that the strategy would attract military aid and doom the Touareg nationalist project to failure. The theory might seem strange given the damage that terrorism has wrought in both Mali and Algeria but most Touareg I know accept it as gospel. We'll probably never know the whole truth.

What's certain is that the Sahara is one of the hardest places on earth for an outsider to understand. Its interlocking cogs of power and influence -- geopolitical, regional, governmental, tribal, mineral, criminal, spiritual, clan and family -- are fiendishly complex.

No foreign intervention can hope to achieve any long-term benefits if it cannot get to grips with the underlying political and social mechanism of this vast region.

2011 brought the Arab Spring and the end of Muammar Gadhafi, who had long been a stabilizing force in the Sahel, and both a promoter and a hinderer of Touareg nationalist ambitious. His weapons arsenals were opened up to armed groups of every stripe and in January 2012, the Touareg used this opportunity to reignite their rebellion in northern Mali. But it was al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb who eventually took control, either directly or through a network of alliances.

Now Mali's hopes lie with the French, who intervened on Friday January 11, after months of diplomatic wrangling at the U.N. and elsewhere.

France 'not a pacifist nation'

So the world has a new front on the global war on terror and France has a new battle to fight in Africa.

Within northern Mali itself, however, and throughout the Muslim world, this is not seen as a war on terror but as a cultural conflict, one that pits a group of people who feel that the future of their society will be best served by rejecting Western liberal values and returning to the core tenets of Islam against another group who believe in religious tolerance, secularism, democracy and music.

This conflict turns musicians, artists and writers into frontline soldiers.

Saudi Arabia destroyed its mausoleums and silenced its musicians decades, even centuries, ago. In the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, many musicians, writers and cultural figures were killed, prompting others to flee overseas.

In Mali they're still singing, still writing, still fighting, for the time being at least.

In this new battleground in the cultural wars of the Muslim world, a distant mirror of the religious wars that shook Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, Malian musicians are taking a stand. That's why music matters. That's why Mali matters.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Andy Morgan.

Wrigley proposal: New seats, more restaurants, more bathrooms

Label: Health

Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts discusses Sammy Sosa and the renovation of Wrigley Field.

Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts said Saturday the team will fund an ambitious $300 million renovation plan at Wrigley Field if the city eases some of its restrictions around Wrigley Field.

“The fact is that when you look at all of the limitations that we have, whether that’s signage in the outfield, which we are not allowed to do, or what kind of stuff we do in the park or around the park, I think we’d just like a little more flexibility to have some options on that stuff,” Ricketts said after a question-and-answer session with fans at the Cubs Convention.

“We have an opportunity cost there that’s tremendous. Just give us some relief on some of these restrictions, and we’ll take care of (renovating) Wrigley Field.”

Among the proposed improvements the Cubs revealed are larger concourses, additional restaurants, more bathroom and concession areas, expanded suites and amenities for the players, including a larger home clubhouse, batting cages and additional training facilities. A new roof would replace the wooden roof, new seats would be installed and the façade would return to its 1930s-era luster.

The project would be done during offseasons over a five-year period in what team business President Crane Kenney termed “the greatest (stadium) restoration project ever.”

In order to pay for it, the Cubs are asking for the ability to enhance their revenue streams in the same fashion as other teams, without having to ask permission from the city.

“We’d like to be treated like a private institution,” Ricketts told fans. ““We have a lot of restrictions. We compete against our rooftop partners across the street. They compete on price and we compete against them on a regular basis.

“We’re told what we can do to the park. We’re told what we can do in the park. We’re told what we can do around the park. We think, from our position, if you just let us run our business, we can get started on some substantial renovations, make the fan experience better, make the player experience better, and really preserve the park for the next 50 years. We’re not a museum. We’re a business.”

Some of the restrictions Ricketts alluded to include:

Signage: The bleacher vista may be significantly altered if the Cubs get their way. In 2010, the Cubs agreed to a four-year moratorium on additional advertising signs that would rise above the Wrigley Field bleachers in order to gain city approval of a Toyota outfield sign. That moratorium expires after this season, and the Cubs would like to increase their outfield signage, along with other areas in the ballpark. They’re the only team with signage restrictions.

Co-owner Laura Ricketts said the restriction on signage puts the team at a disadvantage, “but also forces us to be extra creative in the advertising that we do have, and that makes Wrigley Field, in my opinion, the most special place to watch a ballgame in all of baseball… With our renovations, that’s definitely something we want to preserve going forward.”

Night games: A city ordinance granted the Cubs permission to play 18 night games a year starting in 1988. In 2004, the city council approved an increase of four night games per year through 2006, giving them their current allotment of 30. The Cubs haven’t said how many more night games they need, but one source said “half,” or 41, would suffice, including an occasional Saturday night game. The Cubs also would like the return of 3:05 p.m. starts on Friday, believing the weekend restrictions are an anachronism in a commercialized area.

Concerts: An agreement in 2005 between the Cubs and the city gave the Cubs permission to hold two Jimmy Buffet concerts that summer, with the team donating $150,000 of the proceeds to neighborhood schools and reserving 3,000 concert tickets for purchase by people who lived within one mile of the ballpark. The Cubs agreed to hold 29 night games in 2006 instead of the permitted 30. In 2009, the city allowed the Cubs to hold three concerts, including two by Elton John and Billy Joel. The Cubs haven’t said how many concerts they’d like, but they’d like to increase it without having to ask for city permission.

Sheffield Avenue: The Cubs have for years been looking to turn Sheffield Avenue into a street-fest on selected weekends, after the successful “Wildcat Way” during the Northwestern-Illinois football game at Wrigley. But opposition by local businesses have been an obstacle. Ricketts pointed to Yawkey Way, the street outside Fenway Park with stands, food kiosks and other activities. “We think it’s a good idea,” he said. “We think it can really add to the fan experience. We’ve been to Yawkey Way and we think we can do something comparable. (Sheffield) is already closed. Why can’t we put something on it that’s nice for families or for fans coming to games?”

The Cubs shelved plans for the much-hyped triangle building, instead opting for an open area west of the park that can be used for things like movies, an ice rink and a farmer’s market. The plan to add parking was also removed, since polls told them Cubs fans didn’t want more congestion next to the ballpark.

Kenney said the Cubs wouldn’t need to remove the landmark status for the proposed changes.

“The marquee, the ivy, the scoreboard, we’d be the last ones who would want to touch those,” he said. “The landmark ordinance really isn’t our problem. It’s just the ability to add some of the marketing elements we need and to host games when we feel like it.”

While a Jumbotron is not in the works yet, the Cubs are open to the possibility, while maintaining the hand-operated scoreboard. Kenney said polls show Cubs fans will support a Jumbotron, a shift in attitude from what they used to say. He added the team is removing the LED board under the center-field scoreboard to improve the aesthetics, as fans suggested.

psullivan@tribune.com

Twitter @pwsullivan

Veteran jihadist claims bloody Algeria siege for al Qaeda

Label: Business

ALGIERS/IN AMENAS, Algeria (Reuters) - A veteran Islamist fighter claimed responsibility on behalf of al Qaeda for the Algerian hostage crisis, a regional website reported on Sunday, tying the bloody desert siege to France's intervention across the Sahara in Mali.

Algeria said it expected to raise its preliminary death tolls of 23 hostages and 32 militants killed in the four-day siege at a gas plant deep in the Sahara.

Western governments whose citizens died nevertheless held back from criticizing tactics used by their ally in the struggle with Islamists across the vast desert.

"We in al Qaeda announce this blessed operation," Mokhtar Belmokhtar said in a video, according to the Sahara Media website, which quoted from the recording but did not immediately show it.

"We are ready to negotiate with the West and the Algerian government provided they stop their bombing of Mali's Muslims," said Belmokhtar, a one-eyed veteran guerrilla who fought in Afghanistan in 1980s and in Algeria's civil war in the 1990s.

Belmokhtar's fighters launched their attack on the In Amenas gas plant before dawn on Wednesday, just five days after French warplanes began strikes to halt advances by Islamists in neighboring northern Mali.

European and U.S. officials say the raid was almost certainly too elaborate to have been planned in so short a time, although the French campaign could have been one trigger for fighters to launch an assault they had already prepared.

"We had around 40 jihadists, most of them from Muslim countries and some even from the West," Sahara Media quoted Belmokhtar as saying. Algerian officials say Belmokhtar's group was behind the attack but he was not present himself.

Some Western governments have expressed frustration at not being informed in advance of the Algerian authorities' plans to storm the complex. However, Britain and France both defended the Algerian action in public.

"It's easy to say that this or that should have been done. The Algerian authorities took a decision and the toll is very high but I am a bit bothered ... when the impression is given that the Algerians are open to question. They had to deal with terrorists," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a televised statement: "Of course people will ask questions about the Algerian response to these events, but I would just say that the responsibility for these deaths lies squarely with the terrorists who launched this vicious and cowardly attack."

"We should recognize all that the Algerians have done to work with us and to help and coordinate with us. I'd like to thank them for that. We should also recognize that the Algerians too have seen lives lost among their soldiers."

OIL VULNERABILITIES EXPOSED

The Islamists' assault has tested Algeria's relations with the outside world, exposed the vulnerability of multinational oil operations in the Sahara and pushed Islamist radicalism in northern Africa to centre stage.

Algeria, scarred by the civil war with Islamist insurgents in the 1990s which claimed 200,000 lives, has insisted there would be no negotiation in the face of terrorism.

France especially needs close cooperation from Algeria to have a chance of crushing Islamist rebels in northern Mali. Algiers has promised to shut its porous 1,000-km border with Mali to prevent al Qaeda-linked insurgents simply melting away into its empty desert expanses and rugged mountains.

Algeria's permission for France to use its airspace, confirmed by Fabius last week, also makes it much easier to establish direct supply lines for its troops which are trying to stop the Islamist rebels from taking the whole of Mali.

Algeria's Interior Ministry had reported on Saturday that 23 hostages and 32 militants were killed during the assaults launched by Algerian special forces to end the crisis, with 107 foreign hostages and 685 Algerian hostages freed.

Minister of Communication Mohamed Said said the toll would rise when final numbers were issued in the next few hours: "I am afraid unfortunately to say that the death toll will go up," Said was quoted as saying by the official APS news agency.

Private Algerian television station Ennahar said on Sunday that 25 bodies had been discovered at the Tiguentourine plant, adding that the operation to clear the base would last 48 hours.

The bodies were believed to belong to hostages executed by the militants, said Ennahar TV, which is known to have good sources within Algerian security.

With so much still unknown about the fates of foreigners held at the sites, countries that have faced casualties have yet to issue full counts of the dead. The plant was run jointly by Britain's BP and Norway's Statoil with the Algerian state oil company. A Japanese engineering firm and a French catering company also operated there.

In London, Cameron said three British nationals were confirmed killed and another three plus a British resident were also believed to be dead. One American has been confirmed killed. Statoil says five Norwegians are missing. Japanese and French citizens are also among those missing or presumed dead.

MULTINATIONAL HOSTAGE-TAKERS

Said reported that the militants had six different nationalities and the operation to clear the plant of mines laid by the hostage-takers was still under way.

Believed to be among the 32 dead militants was their leader, Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri, a Nigerien close to Belmokhtar.

Mauritanian news agencies identified the field commander of the group that attacked the plant as Nigeri, a fighter from one of the Arab tribes in Niger who had joined the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in early-2005.

That group eventually joined up with al Qaeda to become Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). It and allied groups are the targets of the French military operation in Mali.

The apparent ease with which the fighters swooped in from the dunes to take control of an important energy facility, which produces some 10 percent of the natural gas on which Algeria depends for its export income, has raised questions over the country's outwardly tough security measures.

Algerian officials said the attackers may have had inside help from among the hundreds of Algerians employed at the site.

Security in the half-dozen countries around the Sahara desert has long been a preoccupation of the West. Smugglers and militants have earned millions in ransom from kidnappings.

The most powerful Islamist groups operating in the Sahara were severely weakened by Algeria's secularist military in the civil war in the 1990s. But in the past two years the regional wing of al Qaeda gained fighters and arms as a result of the civil war in Libya, when arsenals were looted from Muammar Gaddafi's army.

(Additional reporting by Balazs Koranyi in Oslo, Estelle Shirbon and David Alexander in London, Brian Love in Paris, Daniel Flynn in Dakar; Writing by David Stamp; Editing by Peter Graff)

Fiery Orioles manager Earl Weaver dead at 82

Label: Technology

BALTIMORE (AP) — Earl Weaver, the fiery Hall of Fame manager who won 1,480 games with the Baltimore Orioles seemingly was engaged in nearly as many arguments with umpires, has died. He was 82.

Dick Gordon, Weaver's marketing agent, said Saturday that Weaver died while on a Caribbean cruise sponsored by the Orioles. Gordon said Weaver's wife told him that Weaver went back to his cabin after dinner and began choking between 10:30 and 11 Friday night. Gordon said a cause of death has not been determined.

The Duke of Earl, as he was affectionately known in Baltimore, took the Orioles into the World Series four times over 17 seasons but won only one title, in 1970. His .583 winning percentage ranks fifth among managers who served 10 or more seasons in the 20th century.

"Earl Weaver stands alone as the greatest manager in the history of the Orioles organization and one of the greatest in the history of baseball," Orioles owner Peter Angelos said. "This is a sad day for everyone who knew him and for all Orioles fans. Earl made his passion for the Orioles known both on and off the field. On behalf of the Orioles, I extend my condolences to his wife, Marianna, and to his family."

Weaver was a salty-tongued manager who preferred to wait for a three-run homer rather than manufacture a run with a stolen base or a bunt. While some baseball purists argued that strategy, no one could dispute the results.

"He was an intense competitor and smart as a whip when it comes to figuring out ways to beat you," said Davey Johnson, who played under Weaver in the minor leagues and with the Orioles from 1965 to 1972.

Weaver had a reputation as a winner, but umpires knew him as a hothead. Weaver would often turn his hat backward and yell directly into an umpire's face to argue a call or a rule, and after the inevitable ejection he would more often than not kick dirt on home plate or on the umpire's shoes.

He was ejected 91 times, including once in both games of a doubleheader.

Asked once if his reputation might have harmed his chances to gain entry into the Hall of Fame, Weaver admitted, "It probably hurt me."

Those 91 ejections were overshadowed by his five 100-win seasons, six AL East titles and four pennants. Weaver was inducted into the Hall in 1996, 10 years after he managed his final game with Baltimore at the end of an ill-advised comeback.

In 1985, the Orioles' owner at the time, Edward B. Williams, coaxed Weaver away from golf to take over a struggling squad. Weaver donned his uniform No. 4, which had already been retired by the team, and tried to breathe some life into the listless Orioles.

Baltimore went 53-52 over the last half of the 1985 season, but finished seventh in 1986 with a 73-89 record. It was Weaver's only losing season as a major-league manager, and he retired for good after that.

"If I hadn't come back," Weaver said after his final game, "I would be home thinking what it would have been like to manage again. I found out it's work."

Weaver finished with a 1,480-1,060 record. He won Manager of the Year three times.

"I had a successful career, not necessarily a Hall of Fame career, but a successful one," he said.

Weaver came to the Orioles as a first base coach in 1968, took over as manager on July 11 and went on to become the winningest manager in the history of the franchise.

"Earl was such a big part of Orioles baseball and personally he was a very important part of my life and career and a great friend to our family," Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken said. "His passion for the game and the fire with which he managed will always be remembered by baseball fans everywhere and certainly by all of us who had the great opportunity to play for him. Earl will be missed but he can't and won't be forgotten."

He knew almost everything about the game. He was also a great judge of human character, and that's one of the main reasons why he was loved by a vast majority of his players even though he often rode them mercilessly from spring training into October.

"His bark was worse than his bite, but you had to know him and kind of grow up with him, and then you loved him like a father," Johnson said. "He was a used-car salesman in the minor leagues during the offseason, so he learned a lot of ways to sell you on just about anything."

Pat Dobson, who pitched two seasons under Weaver, said, "Certainly, the years I played for him were the two most enjoyable years I've had."

During games Weaver smoked cigarettes in the tunnel leading to the dugout and he never kicked the habit. He suffered a mild heart attack in August 1998, and the Orioles' manager at the time, Ray Miller, wondered aloud how his mentor was holding up.

"I wouldn't want to talk to him if he hasn't had a cigarette in 10 days," Miller joked. "They've probably got him tied to a chair."

Weaver was a brilliant manager, but he never made it to the majors as a player. He finally quit after spending 13 years as a second baseman in the St. Louis organization.

"He talked about how he could drive in 100 runs a year, score 100 runs and never make an error," Johnson said. "He said he never got to the big leagues because the Cardinals had too many good players in front of him."

Robots find rare whales in weather humans can’t

Label: World

BOSTON (AP) — The Outer Fall area in the central Gulf of Maine is believed to be a mating ground for the endangered North Atlantic right whale, but it’s not always hospitable to humans. On a recent trip, endless, steep swells jostled the research boat Endeavor, while gusts transformed the steady sleet into eye-stinging projectiles.

The miserable conditions, though, were exactly what whale-detecting robots being tested on the voyage were built to beat.

The torpedo-shaped underwater robots, called gliders, can read calls from four types of endangered whales and relay their locations in real time. And they can do it in weather too harsh for the plane and boat surveys now relied on to find the whales.

On a three-week trip between November and early December, the gliders developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution located nine right whales. The robots also led the Endeavor into an area where researchers were able to observe the whales firsthand, once the waters calmed.

“The system worked, quite frankly, beyond my expectations,” said WHOI scientist Mark Baumgartner, a project co-leader.

The gliders are primarily about protecting whales, since knowing where the often-hard-to-find whales are can help regulators devise rules that prevent often fatal human contract, such as ship strikes.

The robots are about six feet long with short wings. They aren’t new, but their ability to almost instantly recognize the whales is.

In 2005, they were deployed in the Gulf of Maine carrying recorders scientists needed to retrieve and listen to before they could figure out what whales the glider had found. Seven years and about $ 1 million later, the gliders boast a processor that so far recognizes a total of 15 of the distinctive calls made by four types of endangered baleen whales: right, fin, humpback and sei.

A second after hearing the call, the glider identifies the whale it thinks it heard and surfaces every two hours to transmit the data via satellite, Baumgartner said.

Scientists can react to the data and direct the gliders, which are GPS-equipped, to a wide range of locations during the five weeks it can stay at sea. That mobility is an advantage over an existing system which uses stationary underwater microphones placed on buoys near a shipping lane into Boston to listen for right whales.

The gliders also measure various environmental conditions like temperature and salinity that can offer clues why whales are in certain places at certain times. For instance, high concentrations of algae — which draw the tiny crustaceans that baleen whales eat — can indicate whales go there to feed.

But their indifference to bad weather is perhaps the gliders most critical feature.

“We know we’re not seeing where all the whales are, and flying is expensive and dangerous. The gliders offer this fantastic opportunity to find another way of locating whales,” said Peter Corkeron, leader of the large whale team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast office, which will use data collected from the gliders.

The gliders can’t replace planes and boats because they can’t replace human observation. The right whales, for instance, are tracked individually, and that’s impossible without a person to identify the animals by distinctive, hardened patches of skin on their nose and jaw.

Such extensive efforts to find and learn about the animals reflect just how rare they’ve become, particularly the North Atlantic right whale. The animal has a population of around 550, and no one wants to push it to extinction.

One of its primary protections regionally is mandatory, seasonal speed restrictions for vessels traveling in three areas off the coast of New England. But those restrictions, enacted in 2008, expire in 2013, and there’s pressure now to determine if the rules have worked and should remain in place, said Mike Asaro, a marine mammal policy specialist at NOAA.

The gliders can augment efforts to protect the whales while ensuring shipping companies aren’t slowing down — and losing money — for nothing, he said.

“The more information we get on where right whales are, and the better able we are to predict where they are going to be, we can put those speed restrictions in the best possible spot,” he said.

The gliders need more time to prove their reliability, Asaro said. But he and Corkeron agree it’s had a strong start.

“You’ve got something that can move around the place and locate whales,” Corkeron said. “It’s huge step forward.”

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Why Africa backs French in Mali

Label: Lifestyle

French-led Mali offensive

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

French intervention in Mali could be turning point in relationship with Africa, writes Lansana Gberie

France's meddling to bolster puppet regimes in the past has outraged Africans, he argues

He says few in Africa would label the French action in Mali as 'neo-colonial mission creep'

Lansana: 'Africa's weakness has been exposed by the might of a foreign power'

Editor's note: Dr. Lansana Gberie is a specialist on African peace and security issues. He is the author of "A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone." He is from Sierra Leone and lives in New York.

(CNN) -- Operation Serval, France's swift military intervention to roll back advances made by Jihadist elements who had hijacked a separatist movement in northern Mali, could be a turning point in the ex-colonialist's relationship with Africa.

It is not, after all, every day that you hear a senior official of the African Union (AU) refer to a former European colonial power in Africa as "a brotherly nation," as Ambroise Niyonsaba, the African Union's special representative in Ivory Coast, described France on 14 January, while hailing the European nation's military strikes in Mali.

France's persistent meddling to bolster puppet regimes or unseat inconvenient ones was often the cause of much outrage among African leaders and intellectuals. But by robustly taking on the Islamist forces that for many months now have imposed a regime of terror in northern Mali, France is doing exactly what African governments would like to have done.

Lansana Gberie

This is because the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), Ansar Dine and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are a far greater threat to many African states than they ever would be to France or Europe.

See also: What's behind Mali instability?

Moreover, the main underlying issues that led to this situation -- the separatist rebellion by Mali's Tuareg, under the banner of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), who seized the northern half of the country and declared it independent of Mali shortly after a most ill-timed military coup on 22 March 2012 -- is anathema to the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

Successful separatism by an ethnic minority, it is believed, would only encourage the emergence of more separatist movements in a continent where many of the countries were cobbled together from disparate groups by Europeans not so long ago.

But the foreign Islamists who had been allies to the Tuaregs at the start of their rebellion had effectively sidelined the MNLA by July last year, and have since been exercising tomcatting powers over the peasants in the area, to whom the puritanical brand of Islam being promoted by the Islamists is alien.

ECOWAS, which is dominated by Nigeria -- formerly France's chief hegemonic foe in West Africa -- in August last year submitted a note verbale with a "strategic concept" to the U.N. Security Council, detailing plans for an intervention force to defeat the Islamists in Mali and reunify the country.

ECOWAS wanted the U.N. to bankroll the operation, which would include the deployment a 3,245-strong force -- to which Nigeria (694), Togo (581), Niger (541) and Senegal (350) would be the biggest contributors -- at a cost of $410 million a year. The note stated that the objective of the Islamists in northern Mali was to "create a safe haven" in that country from which to coordinate "continental terrorist networks, including AQIM, MUJAO, Boko Haram [in Nigeria] and Al-Shabaab [in Somalia]."

Despite compelling evidence of the threat the Islamists pose to international peace and security, the U.N. has not been able to agree on funding what essentially would be a military offensive. U.N. Security Council resolution 2085, passed on 20 December last year, only agreed to a voluntary contribution and the setting up of a trust fund, and requested the secretary-general "develop and refine options within 30 days" in this regard. The deadline should be 20 January.

See also: Six reasons events in Mali matter

It is partly because of this U.N. inaction that few in Africa would label the French action in Mali as another neo-colonial mission creep.

If the Islamists had been allowed to capture the very strategic town of Sevaré, as they seemed intent on doing, they would have captured the only airstrip in Mali (apart from the airport in Bamako) capable of handling heavy cargo planes, and they would have been poised to attack the more populated south of the country.

Africa's weakness has, once again, been exposed by the might of a foreign power.
Lansana Gberie

Those Africans who would be critical of the French are probably stunned to embarrassment: Africa's weakness has, once again, been exposed by the might of a foreign power.

Watch video: French troops welcomed in Mali

Africans, however, can perhaps take consolation in the fact that the current situation in Mali was partially created by the NATO action in Libya in 2010, which France spearheaded. A large number of the well-armed Islamists and Tuareg separatists had fought in the forces of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, and then left to join the MNLA in northern Mali after Gadhafi fell.

They brought with them advanced weapons, including shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles from Libya; and two new Jihadist terrorist groups active in northern Mali right now, Ansar Dine and MUJAO, were formed out of these forces.

Many African states had an ambivalent attitude towards Gadhafi, but few rejoiced when he was ousted and killed in the most squalid condition.

A number of African countries, Nigeria included, have started to deploy troops in Mali alongside the French, and ECOWAS has stated the objective as the complete liberation of the north from the Islamists.

The Islamists are clearly not a pushover; though they number between 2,000 and 3,000 they are battle-hardened and fanatically driven, and will likely hold on for some time to come.

The question now is: what happens after, as is almost certain, France begins to wind down its forces, leaving the African troops in Mali?

Nigeria, which almost single-handedly funded previous ECOWAS interventions (in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, costing billions of dollars and hundreds of Nigerian troops), has been reluctant to fund such expensive missions since it became democratic.

See also: Nigerians waiting for 'African Spring'

Its civilian regimes have to be more accountable to their citizens than the military regimes of the 1990s, and Nigeria has pressing domestic challenges. Foreign military intervention is no longer popular in the country, though the links between the northern Mali Islamists and the destructive Boko Haram could be used as a strategic justification for intervention in Mali.

The funding issue, however, will become more and more urgent in the coming weeks and months, and the U.N. must find a sustainable solution beyond a call for voluntary contributions by member states.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Lansana Gberie.

2 shot to death in separate attacks on South, Northwest sides

Label: Health

About 9:15 p.m., a man was shot to death inside a Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, 5500 W. North Ave. (January 19, 2013)

Two young men were shot to death during another night of gun violence in Chicago Friday: One inside a well-lit restaurant along a thoroughfare that divides the West and Northwest Sides, the other in a dark gangway on a South Side block populated by vacant brick buildings.

The Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen at 5500 W. North Ave. where Marshall Fields-Hall died is fortified: a chain link fence with barbed and razor wire encircles part of the roof near cooling units and thick glass separates the dining area from the cash registers. Food and money exchange hands through small openings at the counter.

Fields-Hall's killer was on foot when he fired four shots into the restaurant from the outside about 9:15 p.m., police said, close enough to the glass window that detectives had to step over shell casings and red tape when they opened the door to get inside. The holes in the glass, spiderwebbed by the impact, were all within a couple inches of each other, and there were bits of glass on a small ledge inside.

Photo: Scene of fatal shooting

2 shot in Englewood neighborhood

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Reggie Stiff was working in the back of the restaurant preparing an order when the shooting began. The pops didn't sound like gunfire, he said, but more like "a hammer hitting a table real hard."

He came out from the back and the workers up front were "just looking dazed," he said.

Fields-Hall, 21, who lived nearby on the 1500 block of North Luna Avenue, was unresponsive on the scene when police found him but was taken to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, police said. He was pronounced dead there at 9:55 p.m.

Across the street, separated by three police cars and crime scene tape stretched by strong wind, Fannie White stood with her two great grandchildren, who were playing on a small concrete stoop in front of a boarded-up sandwich shop, running in circles around a brick pillar on the corner of a patio.

"I adopted him as my grandson," Fannie White said. "It's really hard."

White said she wasn't sure how she was going to explain the death to the children, who knew Fields-Hall.

Trese Butler stood next to White and the children, trying to understand what happened after someone had called her to say her friend was shot and that people were talking about it on Facebook.

"He just made 21. We're all trying to piece this together," said Butler, who walked to the scene from her home about a block away. "To me, he's still a baby."

After a couple minutes, the four left together, westbound on North Avenue. The four-lane road with parking on both sides is dotted with liquor stores, sandwich shops and blue-light police department cameras.

"This is the first Friday ever ain't nobody outside," Butler said before she left, adding that the block was usually bustling. "It's very rare. Very rare."

Across town, about the same time Fields-Hall was being taken to the hospital, police found 19-year-old Jovantay Alexander lying dead on his back between two brick buildings in the Back of the Yards neighborhood with a gunshot wound to the head.

Police had responded to a shots fired call and found Alexander where he had been shot. Police said nobody in the neighborhood, along the 5400 block of South Laflin Street, knew the man, who authorities said lived in the 1800 block of East 72^nd Street in the South Shore neighborhood. It doesn't appear that he affiliated with a gang.

A handful of detectives stood over Alexander with large flashlights, examining the rest of his body for wounds and other evidence. A single officer blocked northbound traffic on the one-way street, north of an alley that runs parallel to Garfield Boulevard.

Fields-Hall was the 28^th person killed in Chicago this year. Alexander was the 29^th. They were among at least eleven people shot Friday afternoon into Saturday morning across the city.

In the other shootings:

• A 35-year-old man told police he "heard shots and felt pain" when someone shot him just before 4 a.m. Saturday morning in the 1600 block of North Sawyer Avenue, police said. The man, who police said was a gang member, was taken from the Logan Square crime scene to Stroger hospital in stable condition with a gunshot wound to the arm, police said.

The victim had been paroled in 2011 after having served about 18 years in prison on first degree murder charges filed in 1993, when he was 16, according to state records. Police said he is a gang member who was shot at by the passenger in a white vehicle that approached him from the south as he tried to get into his car.

Algerian army stages "final assault" on gas plant

Label: Business

ALGIERS/IN AMENAS, Algeria (Reuters) - The Algerian army on Saturday carried out a final assault on al Qaeda-linked gunmen holed up in a desert gas plant, killing 11 of the Islamists after they took the lives of seven more foreign hostages, a local source and the state news agency said.

"It is over now, the assault is over, and the military are inside the plant clearing it of mines," a local source familiar with the operation told Reuters.

The state oil and gas company, Sonatrach, said the militants who attacked the plant on Wednesday and took a large number of hostages had booby-trapped the complex with explosives.

The exact death toll among the gunmen and the foreign and Algerian workers at the plant near the town of In Amenas close to the Libyan border remained unclear.

Earlier on Saturday, Algerian special forces found 15 burned bodies at the plant. Efforts were under way to identify the bodies, the source told Reuters, and it was not clear how they had died.

Sixteen foreign hostages were freed on Saturday, a source close to the crisis said. They included two Americans, two Germans and one Portuguese. Britain said fewer than 10 of its nationals at the plant were unaccounted for.

The attack on the plant swiftly turned into one of the biggest international hostage crises in decades, pushing Saharan militancy to the top of the global agenda.

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS

It marked a serious escalation of unrest in northwestern Africa, where French forces have been in Mali since last week fighting an Islamist takeover of Timbuktu and other towns.

The captors said their attack was a response to the French offensive. However, some U.S. and European officials say the elaborate raid probably required too much planning to have been organized from scratch in the week since France launched its strikes.

Scores of Westerners and hundreds of Algerian workers were inside the heavily fortified gas compound when it was seized before dawn on Wednesday by Islamist fighters who said they wanted a halt to the French intervention in neighboring Mali.

Hundreds escaped on Thursday when the army launched a rescue operation, but many hostages were killed.

Before the final assault, different sources had put the number of hostages killed at between 12 and 30, with many foreigners still unaccounted for, among them Norwegians, Japanese, Britons and Americans.

The figure of 30 came from an Algerian security source, who said eight Algerians and at least seven foreigners were among the victims, including two Japanese, two Britons and a French national. One British citizen was killed when the gunmen seized the hostages on Wednesday.

The U.S. State Department said on Friday one American, Frederick Buttaccio, had died but gave no further details.

Leaders of Britain, Japan and other countries have expressed frustration that the assault was ordered without consultation and officials have grumbled at the lack of information.

France's defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, declined to criticize the Algerian response to the crisis, however.

"The Algerian authorities are on their own soil and responding in the fashion they can. The overriding mission is to tackle the terrorists," he told France 3 television.

The base was home to foreign workers from Britain's BP, Norway's Statoil, Japanese engineering firm JGC Corp and others.

VETERAN JIHADIST

Algerian officials said the attackers may have had inside help from among the hundreds of Algerians employed at the site.

France says the incident proves its decision to fight Islamists in neighboring Mali was necessary.

The field commander of the Islamist group that attacked the plant is a veteran fighter from Niger called Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri, Mauritanian news agencies reported.

Security in the half-dozen countries around the Sahara desert has long been a preoccupation of the West. Smugglers and militants have earned millions in ransom from kidnappings.

The most powerful Islamist groups operating in the Sahara were severely weakened by Algeria's secularist military in a civil war in the 1990s. But in the past two years the regional wing of al Qaeda gained fighters and arms as a result of the civil war in Libya, when arsenals were looted from Muammar Gaddafi's army.

Al Qaeda-linked fighters, many with roots in Algeria and Libya, took control of northern Mali last year.

(Additional reporting by Balazs Koranyi in Oslo, Estelle Shirbon in London, Brian Love in Paris; Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Mark Trevelyan)

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Robots find rare whales in weather humans can’t

Why Africa backs French in Mali

2 shot to death in separate attacks on South, Northwest sides

Algerian army stages "final assault" on gas plant

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