Syrian troops used children 'as human shields'

The United Nations on Tuesday accused Syrian troops of using children as "human shields," as UN chief Ban Ki-moon demanded access to the town of Al-Heffa amid fears of a new "massacre" by regime forces.

Branding Damascus as one of the worst offenders on its annual "list of shame" of conflict countries, the UN said in a report that Syrian children as young as nine had been victims of killing and maiming, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence.

"Rarely, have I seen such brutality against children as in Syria, where girls and boys are detained, tortured, executed, and used as human shields," Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN special representative for children in armed conflict, told AFP before releasing the report.

Ban said in a statement meanwhile that "intensive military operations" by government forces against the central province of Homs and firing from helicopters on other towns had caused heavy civilian casualties.

Residents and activists say government helicopter gunships have strafed rebel positions in Al-Heffa, a town of 30,000 near the border with Turkey, and tanks were parked on the outskirts.

The UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) said it had received reports of "a large number of civilians, including women and children trapped inside the town and are trying to mediate their evacuation."

One Syrian activist broke down in tears as she told AFP via Skype that tanks were parked on the edge of Al-Heffa.

"They have never come this close before," Sem Nassar said, adding: "There's only one doctor working to treat the wounded in the town," and that most residents had fled.

Ban joined UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan in demanding that unarmed military observers from UNSMIS be let into Al-Heffa.

Such reports prompted Washington to voice concerns Assad's regime is planning to carry out new atrocities, after the massacre of 55 people last week in Al-Kubeir and at least 108 near Houla on May 25-26.

"The United States joins joint special envoy Kofi Annan in expressing deep alarm by reports from inside Syria that the regime may be organising another massacre," US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Nuland said the tactics showed the Assad regime, cracking down on the most severe threat to his family's four-decade rule, was "increasingly desperate."

Human rights groups estimate that about 1,200 children have died during the 15-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, whose brutal crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired protests has been widely condemned.

The UN report said that Syrian government forces rounded up dozens of boys aged eight to 13 before an attack on the village of Ain al-Arouz in Idlib province on March 9.

The children were "used by soldiers and militia members as human shields, placing them in front of the windows of buses carrying military personnel into the raid on the village," it said.

Quoting witnesses, the UN report said Syrian military and intelligence forces, as well as pro-government shabiha militiamen, surrounded the village for an attack that lasted more than four days.

Among the 11 dead on the first day were three boys aged 15 to 17. Another 34 people, including two boys aged 14 and 16 and a nine-year-old girl, were detained.

"Eventually, the village was reportedly left burned and four out of the 34 detainees were shot and burned, including the two boys aged 14 and 16 years," the Children in Armed Conflict report said.

The report was completed before the Houla massacre on May 25, when 49 of the 108 victims were said to be children, some as young as two and three, who were shot in the head or had their skulls smashed with blunt instruments.

On the ground on Tuesday, 10 civilians were killed when the Al-Jbaible neighbourhood of the eastern city of Deir Ezzor was hit by mortars fired by regime forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The mortar attacks come a day after 12 people were killed, including three children, when a car bomb exploded in Al-Joura neighbourhood of Deir Ezzor, the Britain-based group said.

It said that Hreitan in the northern province of Aleppo was subjected to violent shelling on Tuesday morning, adding that clashes with rebels at the entrances to the town have led to "heavy losses among regime troops."

Syrian army helicopters fired on rebel stronghold towns on Monday, leaving at least 106 people dead nationwide, including 77 civilians and 23 Syrian troops, activists said.

Reports of high daily death tolls are becoming the norm in Syria where over 14,000 people have been killed since the anti-regime revolt erupted in March 2011, according to the Observatory.

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Men's Tidying is not any Taboo - CareCrunch Answers

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5 dead, 13 injured in small plane crash near Kiev

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iOS v Android: why Schmidt was wrong and developers still start on Apple

It's WWDC time. Like, tomorrow. And we expect to see plenty of fun announcements , not least of which being a brand new mobile operating system, iOS 6. It's the type of Apple product every iPhone owner can enjoy, and I'm more than pumped to bring yo ...

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Real Estate/Property Management jobs, Eagan jobs, Minnesota jobs

About Pinnacle.

We invest in great people. That's why clients trust us with their real estate investments!
At Pinnacle, we consider our employees our most valuable asset. In fact, our number one key business objective is to attract and retain the best talent in the industry! At Pinnacle, the key to our continued success and competitive advantage is our people.

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    About the job..

    As a Maintenance Technician at Pinnacle, you play an important role onsite Maintenance staff. A Maintenance Technician is a hands-on professional who acts under the direction of the Service manager and performs installations, repairs, and replacements for a multi-million dollar apartment community. Your job is vital to the satisfaction of our residents because appearance of the property and maintenance operations is one of the biggest reasons residents choose a Pinnacle managed property to call home. At Pinnacle, we value our Maintenance Staff, provide career training, and a clear career path for individuals who are looking for advancement opportunities.
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    ComScore: Nearly a quarter of US smartphone owners have tablets, love their video

    Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 review wrap-up

    If you've got a smartphone, it's increasingly likely that you're also carrying a tablet as a sidearm. ComScore understands that 23.6 percent of American smartphone owners also have an iPad, Kindle Fire or some other large touchscreen slab as of April. That's only 16.5 percent of all cellphone owners in the land, but that's a huge jump from 9.7 percent of smartphone owners (4.7 percent of cellphone owners) just one year earlier. And if you do own a slate, odds are that you're watching your fair share of movies and cat videos. More than half of tablet users, 53 percent, fire up the likes of Netflix or YouTube at least once a month, with almost a tenth (9.5 percent) tuning in daily. Tablet lovers are unsurprisingly three times more likely to watch than their smartphone counterparts, suggesting that it's just a short hop from buying a tablet to catching up on Daily Show episodes.

    ComScore: Nearly a quarter of US smartphone owners have tablets, love their video originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Jun 2012 14:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

    Permalink   |  sourceComScore  | Email this | Comments

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    Researchers watch tiny living machines self-assemble

    ScienceDaily (June 10, 2012) ? Enabling bioengineers to design new molecular machines for nanotechnology applications is one of the possible outcomes of a study by University of Montreal researchers that was published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology June 10. The scientists have developed a new approach to visualize how proteins assemble, which may also significantly aid our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which are caused by errors in assembly.

    "In order to survive, all creatures, from bacteria to humans, monitor and transform their environments using small protein nanomachines made of thousands of atoms," explained the senior author of the study, Prof. Stephen Michnick of the university's department of biochemistry. "For example, in our sinuses, there are complex receptor proteins that are activated in the presence of different odor molecules. Some of those scents warn us of danger; others tell us that food is nearby." Proteins are made of long linear chains of amino acids, which have evolved over millions of years to self-assemble extremely rapidly - often within thousandths of a split second -- into a working nanomachine. "One of the main challenges for biochemists is to understand how these linear chains assemble into their correct structure given an astronomically large number of other possible forms," Michnick said.

    "To understand how a protein goes from a linear chain to a unique assembled structure, we need to capture snapshots of its shape at each stage of assembly said Dr. Alexis Vall?e-B?lisle, first author of the study. "The problem is that each step exists for a fleetingly short time and no available technique enables us to obtain precise structural information on these states within such a small time frame. We developed a strategy to monitor protein assembly by integrating fluorescent probes throughout the linear protein chain so that we could detect the structure of each stage of protein assembly, step by step to its final structure."

    The protein assembly process is not the end of its journey, as a protein can change, through chemical modifications or with age, to take on different forms and functions. "Understanding how a protein goes from being one thing to becoming another is the first step towards understanding and designing protein nanomachines for biotechnologies such as medical and environmental diagnostic sensors, drug synthesis of delivery," Vall?e-B?lisle said.

    This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Le fond de recherch? du Qu?bec, Nature et Technologie. The article, "Visualizing transient protein folding intermediates by tryptophan scanning mutagenesis," published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, was coauthored by Alexis Vall?e-B?lisle and Stephen W. Michnick of the D?partement de Biochimie de l'Universit? de Montr?al. The University of Montreal is known officially as Universit? de Montr?al.

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    Story Source:

    The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Universit? de Montr?al, via AlphaGalileo.

    Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


    Journal Reference:

    1. Alexis Vall?e-B?lisle, Stephen W Michnick. Visualizing transient protein-folding intermediates by tryptophan-scanning mutagenesis. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nsmb.2322

    Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

    Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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