The U.S. military is planning to elevate the role of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan as it shifts away from a combat focus to a mission that places greater emphasis on training Afghan forces and raids to kill senior insurgent leaders, senior U.S. officials said.

President Obama said Sunday that he deserves to be reelected because his administration has made progress on the economy, but he acknowledged there is much more work to do.

“I deserve a second term, but we’re not done,” Obama said during a pre-Super Bowl interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer.

University of Southampton and Penn State researchers have demonstrated a technique to embed electronics into optical fibres, which if commercialised would enable simpler and cheaper telecommuniations kit.…

Microsoft has published the specification for C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), its new system for heterogeneous parallel processing in C++. When Microsoft first announced C++ AMP in June last year, it said that it wanted to make the AMP specification open to all.

AMP has been developed by Microsoft with input from AMD and NVIDIA. Microsoft's implementation allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards (via the company's DirectCompute API), though the specification should also permit OpenGL/OpenCL-based implementations.

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Movies studios are moving on the defunct Limewire, filing a complaint in a US Federal Court to take their cut from the company’s copyright infringments.…

Israel is right to be concerned about Iran's push to join the league of nations that possess nuclear weapons, but diplomacy - not military intervention - remains the "preferred solution" to averting a potential arms race in the Middle East, President Barack Obama said Sunday.

Israel is right to be concerned about Iran's push to join the league of nations that possess nuclear weapons, but diplomacy - not military intervention - remains the "preferred solution" to averting a potential arms race in the Middle East, President Barack Obama said Sunday.

Your article on the increased vigour of business lobbying in favour of Heathrow expansion (Report, 2 February) neglected to ask a simple question: does the UK need more airport capacity? We'd suggest no. A recent report by WWF and the Aviation Environment Federation shows that there is already sufficient runway and terminal capacity in the south-east and other regions to meet demand to 2050.

It's important to note too that the UK Climate Change Act has set a legally binding target to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 and aviation is expected to contribute to the achievement of this target. The advice of the Committee on Climate Change is that aviation emissions return to 2005 levels by 2050. However, the spokespeople from BAA, British Airways' parent company IAG, and from London business lobby group London First all fail to mention climate change, or carbon emissions.
Jean Leston
Senior transport policy adviser, WWF-UK

• Stansted has land to accommodate a second runway, so why can't this option be taken seriously. And why can't Stansted become a hub airport? It is better placed to serve the Midlands and the north, and compared to Heathrow it sits in a relatively unpopulated rural area. Stansted must have a strong case on environmental and amenity grounds, which may not carry much weight with the Heathrow lobbyists but should make it a serious contender. It would need a new high-speed rail link to London and the east coast mainline, and would not come cheap, but to dismiss it would be a lost opportunity.
Bill Hunter
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire

Much has been written in the media recently about fathers being denied the right to have a full and meaningful relationship with their children because of inadequacies in the legal framework (Divorced fathers to get more access to children, 3 February). For 90% of divorcing and separating couples, the courts are not needed because they are able to reach agreement between themselves, or with the help of a solicitor. For others, the dispute becomes so bitter that a court has to intervene to decide on the important and emotionally charged questions of how the child's time is divided between the parents and their respective homes, on schooling, holidays and so on.

The starting point for the courts is and must continue to be the rights of the child. For parents the issue is – or should be – their responsibilities, not their "rights". Where court processes are necessary, they must be speeded up. Sadly for children, cuts in family legal aid and in family court services will lead to greater delay. So there is much to be put right – but that will not be achieved by prioritising the rights of adults over the rights of children.
Desmond Hudson
Chief executive, Law Society

• Mindful of recent cases where children and their mothers have been killed by fathers, it is not ministers who should brace themselves for a backlash – in their case from single mothers. It is the vulnerable children who will be endangered by the decision of the government to bow to the misleading demands of Fathers4Justice for greater access for fathers, regardless of risk, and in doing so ignoring the recommendations of the independent review for no change to the existing law.
Gillian Dalley
London

I well remember the Lucas Aerospace plan (A utopia we nearly had, 1 February), but I also have an even older memory. In 1945 I was an apprentice in the aircraft industry, producing torpedo bombers for the war in the Pacific, when the war ended and millions were redeployed from both the arms industry and the forces. Almost overnight many of my colleagues disappeared, but not into oblivion or the dole; they began the job of repairing the devastation resulting from six years of war and creating a new and better society. That this was possible was down to two factors: political will, and advance planning, both singularly missing today. One factor that was not considered was money, any more than it had been a restriction on the war effort.

Now compare that situation with the one reported by Amelia Gentleman (After all the pep talks and CV workshops, where are the jobs?, 1 February). Although there are many differences between 1945 and 2012, there are in common many unmet needs (a housing shortage most obviously) and yet millions are unemployed instead of contributing to fulfilling those needs. The Labour party's five-point plan is far too feeble a response. The two Eds, the trade unions and the millions of people suffering from the cuts should be demanding far more radical policies. The Green New Deal would be a good start, but only a start.
Frank Jackson
Harlow, Essex

• Surely there is a lesson to be learned from the Lucas workers' initiative – that something is wrong with the structure of most commercial enterprises. Yet it is only recently that the question of workers' representation on company boards has come to the fore. Immediately after the war the control commission in the British zone of occupied Germany designed a reconstructed basis for their war-torn industry to build for the future. Those foundations were built on a tripartite system of unions, management and shareholders. The idea was of equal interdependence. We have all seen how strong German industry has grown.

We already have some examples that lead the way, with workers' participation in the John Lewis Partnership. There is a huge potential in the workforce that isn't released because of the restricted notion of how firms should be organised. What is needed is to enfranchise the workplace through the introduction of industrial democracy. What has been the point of 150 years of state education if it hasn't equipped workers to have an equal status at work?
John Lloyd
Organiser, South Shropshire Green party

• As an education officer for the southern region of the GMWU (now the GMB) in the late 70s we regularly invited representatives of the Lucas Aerospace union combined committee to contribute to shop steward courses. They talked about working collaboratively across the unions – skilled and unskilled, white collar and manual – and inspired us by their commitment and vision.

I agree with Anne Karpf's conclusion that there was never a more urgent moment to revive this type of plan. She quotes Marxism Today as saying at the time that "socialism in one company" was not a viable option. But that's hardly a reason for inaction. The Lucas Aerospace committee knew that their plan couldn't exist in glorious isolation but that if the idea caught on it could, to coin a phrase, light a fire. That fire would in turn question the market, the profit motive and the recessions, redundancies and poverty that invariably follow.
Jol Miskin
Sheffield

• Anne Karpf rightly reminds us of the visionary work of the Lucas shop stewards, but she also highlights a key problem for today's unions with their publicly perceived "no" role. As a union member I should be happy to see funds used to develop a modern version of the Lucas Aerospace vision, and so enable both the trade unions and the Labour party to take a more positive stance. Identifying predatory capitalism is a beginning, but given the nature of shareholding in British companies the likelihood of any radical change is zero. By working together, for a change, the unions and Labour could offer a new and positive approach to the voters.
David Kennedy
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

• Many congratulations on printing this timely and important article by Anne Karpf. With unemployment increasing and the public's disaffection with the government's belligerent foreign policy growing, the government should think again about our vast arms industry. By converting its factories to benign manufacturing of technologies that people need and want that utopia could be finally realised.
Jim McCluskey
Twickenham, Middlesex

When a contract expires and the union and the company bargain over a new one, there are a few possibilities. In the majority of cases, after negotiation, they come to an agreement, in all likelihood involving compromises on both sides. If they can't reach an agreement, a strike by workers is a possible outcome—but one that's declining in frequency, "just one-sixth the annual level of two decades ago," Steven Greenhouse reports. Another outcome, or perhaps cause, of stalled negotiations is becoming more common, though: The lockout, which has:

We've seen it in both the NFL and the NBA in the past year, of course. But in many cases, companies lock out workers who are struggling even to stay in the middle class, because they won't give up the things that might put them in the middle class. Companies lock out workers to get them to give up their pensions, to pay more for health care, to accept pay cuts, to sacrifice job security. They rely on no one noticing (besides the workers, for whom their contempt is already clear), and on any public notice the lockouts do gain assigning blame at least equally to the workers—after all, shouldn't they feel lucky just to have jobs, and be willing to make whatever concessions management demands? As Charles Pierce wrote of the NBA lockout:

That's what's on the rise: Management attempting to exercise control over their workers—in a brutal display of power. Give in to us or lose your paycheck right now.

Greenhouse focuses on the American Crystal Sugar lockout, which has now stretched to six months. "With American Crystal earning record profits before the lockout, the workers strongly opposed its push for concessions," he writes. Management "denies that it is seeking to break the union." But this is the company whose CEO compared a union contract to cancer, saying "At some point that tumor's got to come out. That's what we're doing." As for the significant costs of the lockout, including the cost of hiring replacement workers and dealing with accidents resulting from having inexperienced replacement workers doing tasks that require experience and skill, the CEO presented those as an investment.

As you'd expect, this is devastating the lives of 1,300 locked out workers, who have gone without paychecks for months because—it bears repeating—they wouldn't just cave when a hugely profitable company demanded that they accept benefit cuts and allow it to outsource jobs.

Nursing home workers in Connecticut are in the second month of a similar struggle, having been locked out shortly before Christmas. HealthBridge Management demanded that the workers at the West River Health Care Center in Milford accept a pension freeze, with new hires not getting any pension; pay $1,500 for individual health insurance up to $7,300 for family coverage; lose their paid lunch breaks; accept cuts on sick days and holidays and overtime pay. In addition to those direct hits at workers' wages and benefits, HealthBridge was demanding they make enormous concessions on job security and stability, giving up guaranteed hours so that a full-time worker could be made part-time with no notice or recourse, hours and shifts could be changed without notice or negotiation, allowing management to cut staffing levels to the bare minimum. (Workers report that those staffing levels have already been cut, from "six nursing assistants for each floor of 60 residents" under previous ownership to "five, and sometimes four" under current ownership.) HealthBridge touted a 12 percent pay raise they were offering in exchange for all of this—but that doesn't come close to covering the benefit cuts, let alone the loss of job security.

The workers, represented by SEIU 1199, asked HealthBridge to agree to binding arbitration, but HealthBridge said not unless workers accepted a pension freeze prior to beginning arbitration. The union offered a concession on health care costs, though not at the rates management had demanded. Management claimed it wasn't a concession at all. This strategy by HealthBridge isn't just about the Milford nursing home—it's intended as a blueprint for the five other unionized nursing homes the company runs in Connecticut. And even beyond—HealthBridge is in turn owned by Care One, which in November was ruled by the National Labor Relations Board to have illegally fired four workers in New Jersey. Workers at the Milford nursing home are waiting for the NLRB to rule on their claim that HealthBridge has not been bargaining in good faith.

Here's the best part about HealthBridge and Care One's war on their workers: At the same time as the companies are trying to get nursing home workers earning $32,000 a year to accept pension freezes and health care cuts, Daniel Straus, Care One's owner, is acting as Mr. Benevolent Major Philanthropist. His signature act of philanthropy is that he has endowed the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University, where visiting fellows are paid $100,000 for a year of subsidized living in Manhattan to do research related to a yearly theme, with "a determination not to be merely an 'ivory tower', but to merge premier academic and intellectual conditions with community integration and a sense of public service." Incidentally, while Straus is demanding that his $32,000 a year nursing home workers give up their paid lunch breaks, his $100,000 a year fellows are provided with a weekly lunch.

The model of the research institute is a wonderful one that can contribute greatly to scholarship on important topics, like law and justice. But the notion that someone can be accepted and even fawned over as a believer in and supporter of anything including the word "justice" while doing what Daniel Straus is doing to his workers is a perfect symbol of how our society has come to accept that there are different rules for the 99 percent and the 1 percent. In a just and equitable society, you wouldn't get to be hailed as a voice for public service while trying to accelerate the race to the bottom for vulnerable workers.

Workers joined with NYU students to protest this week at NYU, and family members of nursing home patients joined a candlelight vigil in Milford, where:

“You are dealing with patients who are frail, insecure, and who depend on the familiar faces and personalities of their caregivers,” read the letter. “How would you feel if one of your family members was treated this way?”

But Daniel Straus wouldn't have to worry about that. He can afford to endow an institute in his parents' memory.

The details of every lockout are individual and appalling: NFL owners demanding that football players play more games in a season, knowing that it will appreciably shorten their lives; NBA owners issuing ultimatum after ultimatum well after basketball players had conceded enormous amounts of money; American Crystal Sugar's CEO comparing a union contract to a cancerous tumor even though his company had been wildly profitable under that exact contract; NYU lavishing Daniel Straus with praise for his commitment to ethics and justice even as he illegally fires workers and locks workers out and in every way works to increase the inequality between his income and the incomes of the workers who keep his businesses running. But the basic story of all of them is the same: Owners thought they could get more profit out of their workers. We know—JP Morgan tells us—that wage reductions drove corporate profit increases from 2000 to 2007. In the wake of the recession, with high unemployment and workers terrified that they'll be next, corporations have moved decisively to push wages down still more, to extract still more profits from workers through reductions to wages and benefits. Lockouts are just one tool of doing that, and they're visible only because they happen to unionized workers, who can fight back at least a little bit.

A DuPage County judge set bond of $3 million Sunday morning for a man charged with fatally stabbing a second grade teacher and wounding two others at a Naperville nightclub early Saturday.

CAIRO — The Egyptian government intends to prosecute at least 40 people, including some U.S. citizens, as part of an investigation into nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign funding, state media reported Sunday.

With war fatigue growing and an election looming, the Obama administration has bumpily embarked on its endgame in Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, closed-door strategizing over Taliban peace talks, the pace of NATO’s combat handover and withdrawal, and the future of U.S. relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan have suddenly become part of the public and political debate.

It seems the Komen Foundation folks were unprepared for the blowback — known in some circles as “Komen-tastrophe” — after their now apparently rescinded decision to halt funding to Planned Parenthood.

One day after coming in last place in the Nevada caucuses, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) said Sunday that he intends to move on to the next GOP presidential nominating states of Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich continued his attack against rival Mitt Romney on Sunday, vowing to fight on in the Republican presidential primary despite his distant second-place finish in the Nevada caucuses Saturday.

Is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani sorry that he’s not trying again this year to win the Republican presidential nomination?

In a word: No. And to be precise, it’s more accurate to add an exclamation mark, as in, ”No!”

LAS VEGAS — In a meeting room at the Palazzo hotel here over the past week, Newt Gingrich mapped out a detailed strategy that would keep him in the presidential race all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa in August.

On 4th Feburary 2012 Sheffield Pizza Hut Workers Union, part of the IWW, held a protest outside Pizza Hut in Crookes, Sheffield over their ongoing dispute over workers terms and conditions. Solidarity potests were held in Brighton, Bradford, Glasgow, London, Birmingham, Bristol , Hull, Liverpool, Calais, Portland, Vancouver and Berlin.

The dispute centers on several specifics aspect of the workers terms and conditions, pay for working on bank holidays, mileage rates and also recognition of the union. Whilst it has been standard practice to pay workers an enhanced rate for working bank holidays, Pizza Hut has decided that it will only pay the standard rate. Delivery drivers who use their own vehicles are given an allowance of 60p per delivery, a static rate which has remained unchanged for several years despite the soaring cost of fuel. Furthermore, "The Pizza Hut Workers Union also has concerns outside of this dispute, including delivery staffs safety gear, a decreasing pay packet that falls behind inflation and a demand for a real living wage for all Pizza Hut workers."

Newswire: Pizza Hut Workers Demand A Proper Slice | Solidarity Picket Glasgow With IWW Pizza Hut Workers Report | London Wobs' Solidarity Picket with IWW Pizza Hut | Pizza Hut Solidarity in Bradford | SchNEWS: Gimme A Slice OF The Action | Pizza Hut solidarity in Brighton | Solidarity Picket in Bristol with IWW Pizza Hut Workers

Links: Sheffield Pizza Hut Workers Union | IWW General Membership Branch Sheffield | IWW | Pizza Hut Workers Call Out for Solidarity | Liverpool Solidarity Federation picket Pizza Hut

Hackers being hunted by police worldwide eavesdropped on FBI and Scotland Yard officers investigating them.

The Internet outlaws, part of a loose coalition called Anonymous, got access to a telephone conference call between U.S. and British investigators and then posted a recording of their conversation on Friday.

"The FBI might ...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Three mushroom pickers took refuge in a hollowed out tree after getting lost in an Oregon forest, fighting wintry chills for six days and drinking water from streams until a helicopter pilot spotted them.

Belinda and Daniel Conne, along with their 25-year-old son, Michael, managed to reach ...

HOPE MILLS, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina authorities said they used a stun gun on a female motorist who blocked a McDonald's drive-thru for 20 minutes after employees refused to serve her because she cut in line.

Authorities said 37-year-old Evangeline Lucca bypassed the order screen and line and pulled ...