Five questions that will be answered by UFC 155

The UFC's end-of-the-year cards are usually stacked. Despite injuries, UFC 155 is no different. It features intriguing bouts that will answer some burning questions.

Did a knee injury hold back Cain Velasquez the first time he fought Junior dos Santos? When the two first met up last November, Velasquez reportedly had a badly injured knee. He was knocked out in 64 seconds. This time a (seemingly) healthy Velasquez will get to show if he deserves the heavyweight belt.

Has Chris Leben returned to form, for really real this time? Since Leben was on the original "Ultimate Fighter," he has been a man who wrestled with his demons. Most recently, those demons took the form of a banned pain killer which resulted in a one-year suspension from the UFC. Against Derek Brunson, Leben can show he's again the man who knocked out Wanderlei Silva.

Can Tim Boetsch be the next guy to challenge Anderson Silva? Though his original bout with Chris Weidman was called off because of an injury to Weidman, Boetsch still has another opportunity to show he can beat up opponents. He wants a chance to beat up Silva,* and this bout with Costa Phillippou is an opportunity for Boetsch's fighting to shine.

Or should Alan Belcher be the man to take on Silva? It's been more than three years since Belcher lost a fight. His last four fights have been stoppage wins. An impressive win over Yushin Okami could put him in line to fight for the middleweight belt.*

Is Todd Duffee still the knockout artist who once graced the octagon? Back in 2009, Duffee knocked out Tim Hague in a mere seven seconds. After that, the hype train was running behind him full steam. It was derailed when Mike Russow came back to knock Duffee out in the third round of their bout. Duffee was cut from the UFC, and is getting another shot at the octagon on Saturday. He'll fight Philip De Fries on the Facebook preliminaries, and get a chance to show if he can still knock people out very quickly.

*Assuming the next middleweight belt is based on competitiveness and earning a title shot by fighting, not by calling opponents out. Considering what has happened recently in the UFC welterweight and light heavyweight divisions, there are no guarantees.

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/five-questions-answered-ufc-155-221719074--mma.html

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Children, many ill, would be victims of Russia ban on U.S. adoption

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Family Christmas cards and smiling snapshots of children sent by their adoptive American parents fill Galina Sigayeva's office in Russia's second city St Petersburg.

Many of them were crippled by illness and in desperate need of medical care before her agency helped organize their adoption into U.S. families, she recalls.

Children's rights campaigners say kids like these will suffer most if President Vladimir Putin approves a law barring American adoptions that has been rubber-stamped by Russian lawmakers. The act retaliates against a new U.S. law that will punish Russians accused of human rights violations.

Critics of the bill say Russian orphanages are woefully overcrowded and the fate of vulnerable children should not be used as a bargaining chip in a bilateral feud.

"These children are not even offered to foreigners until they get a certain number of (adoption) refusals from Russians," said Sigayeva, a neatly-styled brunette who heads the New Hope Christian Services Adoption Agency.

"These are children with complicated diagnoses, really complicated. They are very ill children."

She smiled as she flipped through photos of children embraced by their adoptive parents, playing with family pets and enjoying presents and other trappings of holiday cheer.

"What surprises me is that here they all look so healthy, so fantastic, but you should see what they look like when they are taken from here," Sigayeva said.

"Some had to be carried to the border. We had a girl with hepatitis whom we helped from the emergency room."

Both sides in the heated debate surrounding the bill agree Russia's orphanage system is overwhelmed, riddled with corruption and mostly failing to place children in families.

More than 650,000 children are considered orphans in Russia - though some were rejected by their parents or taken from dysfunctional homes. Of that total, 110,000 lived in state institutions in 2011, according to the Ministry of Science and Education.

By contrast, in the United States - which has more than twice Russia's population - about 58,280 children were living in group homes and institutions last year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Adoptions by Russian families remain modest, with some 7,400 adoptions in 2011 compared with 3,400 adoptions of Russian children by families abroad.

Russian politicians say it is an embarrassment that the country cannot care for its own, and supporters of the measure argue it will help stimulate reform and domestic adoptions.

"Foreign adoption is a result of the state and society's lack of attention to orphans ... It is, if you will, a result of our indifference," Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told officials at a ruling party congress last week.

American families adopt more Russian children - 956 last year - than those of any other country. Of the children adopted by Americans in 2011, 9 percent - or 89 - were disabled, according to official Russian figures.

Opponents of the legislation - who include senior officials such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov - say politicking should not deprive orphans of this chance at better life.

"Russia is not able to provide for all its orphans," Boris Altshuler, director of the Moscow-based Rights of the Child advocacy group, said. "Although 1,000 is a small fraction - it was a help."

Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets has said the ban would violate international treaties on child rights, and the Kremlin's own human rights council called it unconstitutional.

"AMERICAN ROULETTE"

The ban responds to a U.S. law known as the Magnitsky Act which punishes Russians suspected of being involved in the death in custody of anti-graft lawyer Sergei Magnistky in 2009, and of other human rights violations, by barring them from entering the United States.

In a pointed echo of the Magnitsky Act, Russia's legislation is named the Dima Yakovlev law, after a Russian-born toddler who died of heat stroke after his American adoptive father left him locked in a sweltering car.

His death and that of 19 other Russian-born children in the hands of U.S. citizens in the last decade has helped drive support for the bill and for tougher adoption rules in a deal with the United States in June.

"It's American roulette," said Pavel Astakhov, Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner and a supporter of the ban.

"One handicapped girl from Russia got lucky. She was Jessica Long - a Paralympic champion. Another did not. She was Masha Allen ... who was raped by her pedophile adoptive father."

DISABLED CHILDREN

If Putin signs it into law, the ban will come into force on January 1, most immediately affecting the fate of children whose adoption is in the works.

The placement of 46 children with American families will be cancelled, Astakhov told the Interfax news agency on Wednesday.

Sigayeva said a six-month halt on American adoptions until a new bilateral deal entered force in November showed how it would aggravate problems in Russia's strained child-protection system.

"Hospitals were overwhelmed. There was no room in orphanages or hospitals for children whom their parents had rejected. So what's next then?" said Sigayeva, whose agency has helped place some 200 children in American families since 1992.

Advocates who work with disabled children say a reform proposal drafted by Astakhov ignores their plight. They say it calls for a reduction in the number of institutions caring for children with disabilities without explaining how they will find foster homes and medical care.

"No concrete measures are being suggested. Nothing exists but a lot of children's pain, which will only increase now," said Sergei Koloskov, a campaigner for children with Down's Syndrome.

"They are being left parentless in addition to being ill."

(Additional reporting by Alexander Chizhenok in St. Petersburg; Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Douglas Busvine and Peter Graff)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/children-many-ill-victims-russia-ban-u-adoption-123222651.html

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Obama Hawaii Vacation Home: First Look!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/12/obama-vacation-home-first-look/

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Five killed in Yemen clashes, brigadier shot dead

SANAA (Reuters) - At least five militants were killed and three soldiers wounded in Yemen on Tuesday in fighting near a damaged oil pipeline east of the capital Sanaa, a defense ministry official and residents said.

In a separate incident, two gunmen riding a motorbike shot dead Brigadier Fadel Mohammed Ali, an adviser to the minister of defense, outside the ministry's offices in Sanaa, a police source said. Further details were not immediately available.

The fighting in turbulent Maarib province broke out when government troops backed by air strikes tried to secure the pipeline and repair damage inflicted last month by local militants, the official said.

Yemen's oil and gas pipelines have repeatedly been sabotaged by Islamist fighters or tribesmen since an uprising erupted last year, causing fuel shortages and slashing export earnings for the impoverished country.

The country's stability is a leading security goal for the United States and Gulf Arab allies because of its strategic position next to top oil exporter Saudi Arabia and shipping lanes, and because it is home to one of the most active wings of al Qaeda.

Under an agreement reached earlier this month between tribal chiefs and the government, tribes in Maarib were meant to stop militants from attacking the pipeline in return for a halt to air strikes in the area.

A local official said troops were deployed on Tuesday after tribesmen failed to secure the pipeline or to hand over fighters involved in the killings of 17 army officers and soldiers in an ambush earlier in December. They were killed while inspecting the pipeline.

The affiliation of the militants in Maarib is unclear. Local sources said some had links to al Qaeda, while others were involved in kidnapping foreigners to pressure the government to release jailed kinsmen.

OFFICER WOUNDED IN CAPITAL

Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has mounted operations in Saudi Arabia and attempted attacks against the United States, which has stepped up strikes by drones.

In a separate development, the ministry of defense said one man was arrested in Sanaa on Tuesday for planting a bomb in the car of an officer at the Central Security Forces. The attempt to blow up the car was foiled, the ministry said.

In another sign of growing lawlessness in the capital, Colonel Sameer al-Gharbani, an officer in the Republican Guard, was critically wounded in Sanaa in an attack by unidentified gunmen, a source at the Guard told Reuters.

Elsewhere in the city gunmen opened fire at the house of Transport Minister Mohammed Nasser Ahmed, wounding two of his guards, a transport ministry official said.

The string of attacks happened less than a week after President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi overhauled the armed forces as part of Gulf-brokered power-transfer plan that helped ease former President Ali Abdullah Saleh from power in February.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari; Writing by Mahmoud Habboush and William Maclean; Editing by Pravin Char)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/five-killed-yemen-clashes-brigadier-shot-dead-112810772.html

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Report: Nokia's Windows RT Tablet Will Have a Surface-Like Keyboard Cover

According to a report from The Verge, Nokia's going to out its own Windows RT tablet early next year. That's fine; it would be weirder if they weren't. But what's a little less expected is that the company's elves are hard at work on creating a keyboard cover of their very own. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/W6oKQyfySAs/report-nokias-windows-rt-tablet-will-have-a-surface+like-keyboard-cover

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Kate Middleton Baby Names: What Should She Name Royal Heir(ess)?

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One in US, one in Russia: Young brothers divided

Courtesy Thomas family

John and Renee Thomas with their son, Jack, 7, who was adopted from Russia at the age of 3. Jack is hoping for his brother, Nikoly, now in a Russian orphanage, to join him in the United States.

By Kari Huus, NBC News

This Christmas, the best gift 7-year-old Jack Thomas could get would be the arrival of his little brother, Nikoly, who lives in an orphanage in Kursk, Russia.

"When Jack is asked about his family, he talks about his brother," said his father, John Thomas, speaking from the family?s home in Minnetonka, Minn. "He always asks, 'When is he coming home?' We just tell him we?re waiting for the call."

Jack has been waiting several years, a long time for a little boy. What he doesn?t know is that a feud between politicians in Moscow and Washington could destroy his chance to grow up with his brother.

On Friday, Russian lawmakers passed a bill that would prohibit Americans from adopting Russian children, and if that bill is signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, it would cast doubt on even those adoptions already in the pipeline.

For John Thomas and his wife, Renee ? and very likely hundreds of other expectant American families and Russian children ? the latest political shift could mean?a delay, a new hurdle or a brick wall.

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The?U.S. State Department and some high-level officials in Moscow have lambasted the legislation as punishing Russian children?who need families in an effort to retaliate against Washington.

But the bill has gained ground amid a wave of nationalism, fueled by anger over a U.S. human rights bill singling out Russia and by several highly publicized?cases of U.S. adoptions that ended tragically.

Since the end of the Soviet era in 1991, Americans have adopted about 60,000 children from Russia, making it one of the main countries of origin for non-domestic adoptions in the United States, according to U.S.?government statistics.?At the?peak of the trend in 2004, Americans brought?5,862 children into their homes. In 2011, the number was down to 962 ? a product of well-intentioned policy shifts, bureaucracy, corruption and other difficulties.

See the US Action Plan on Children in Adversity

European Children Adoption Services

Jack Thomas, at the age of 3, just before he was adopted from Kursk, Russia, by Americans John and Renee Thomas. He is now 7 years old and growing up in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis.

Even with foreign adoptions, which are allowed after giving Russians priority, Russia has an estimated 700,000 children living in institutions, nearly 80,000 of them orphaned, and the rest abandoned or taken away by the state because the parents were judged unfit to take care of them.

The?Thomases have experienced the painful, stop-start nature of the Russian adoption process in their quest for Nikoly.

It was in December 2008, when they were finalizing their adoption of 3-year-old Eduard, whom they named Jack, that they learned he had a baby brother. They started the adoption application process for Nikoly as soon as they could, after a required waiting period.

Compliments of the Thomas family

Renee Thomas in December 2010 meeting Nikoly at an orphanage in Kursk, Russia. He was 18 months old at the time, and Thomas says she expected he would join the the family within a matter of months. Nikoly is now 4 and remains in institutional care in Russia.

A year later, John and Renee Thomas, who work as an attorney and a building contract negotiator, again flew to Moscow and then went by rail to Kursk to meet Nikoly, whom they call Theodore or Teddy. He was?18 months old. Renee Thomas says she thought it would take about the same amount of time to adopt him as it had with Jack, and expected to travel to Kursk sometime in the spring of 2010 to get him.

The Thomases?are?still waiting.

One of the reasons for delay, they say,?is the horror caused by a woman in Tennessee who put her 7-year-old son, whom she had adopted in Russia, on a one-way flight to Moscow in 2010, with the explanation that the child was "mentally unstable" and she could no longer take care of him.

In another delay that Renee Thomas believes cost their adoption another year, the Russian government shut down adoptions for review and re-accreditation of all adoption agencies that work in Russia.

European Children Adoption Services

Nikoly in an undated photo taken at an orphanage in Kursk, Russia. (The red splotches on his face are believed to be a type of antiseptic.)

In addition, the Thomas? dossier has gone before a series of judges in Russia, some of whom have rejected it without a stated reason, and others setting forth requirements that they are not able to meet under U.S. law. Even so, there are Russians trying to help them run the gauntlet, and they figured the problems would get ironed out.

"We expected to be traveling soon" to get Nikolai, said John Thomas. ?

Just last month, when a newly negotiated bilateral adoptions agreement came into effect, designed to smooth out the process and help safeguard adopted children, things appeared to be looking up.

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"These adoptive parents have really been through the ringer," said Johnson. "This was a bilateral treaty signed by our two governments. We really celebrated it. I thought we could turn our attention to other countries. But we?re really back to Russia again."

Kids pay in human rights spat
The ban that passed the Russian parliament grew out of a dispute over human rights.

On Nov. 16, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act passed by a landslide in the U.S. House and Senate. Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who exposed massive fraud allegedly committed by a group of Russian officials. He was arrested and died in police custody 11 months later under suspicious circumstances. Among other things, the bill denies visas and freezes assets of the Russian officials implicated by Magnitsky.

The new U.S. law sparked an angry reaction from Moscow and fueled popular anti-American sentiment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin claims the U.S. is "poisoning ties" between the two countries with a law that bans Russians who abuse human rights and is backing a Russian draft law banning adoption by Americans. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.

Vladimir Putin said that the law singling out Russia "contaminates our relations."

Russian legislators then drafted a bill to counter the U.S. law, with provisions restricting organizations and individuals linked to the United States.

Just before the first vote in the Duma, the proposed ban on American adoptions of Russian children was tacked on as an amendment. The legislation was named after 21-month-old Dima Yakovlev, a Russian boy who died in Virginia after his adoptive father left him alone in a hot SUV for nine hours.

Americans may lose right to adopt Russian kids

After the Duma approved the legislation on Friday, the U.S. State Department registered its disapproval.

"If Russian officials have concerns about the implementation of (the adoption) agreement, we stand ready to work with them to improve it and remain committed to supporting inter-country adoptions between our two countries," said acting State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell. "The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to political aspects of our relationship."

The bill is now heading for Putin?s desk for his signature.

Compliments of the Thomas family

John Thomas and his son, Jack, who was adopted from Russia at the age of 3, in an undated picture taken at their home in Minnetonka, Minn.

Opponents of the ban are still hoping that the president will veto the bill, despite his comments while campaigning for re-election that?U.S. adoptions should no longer be allowed. More recently he has remained silent on the issue.

Over the past week, Russian opponents of the ban have launched petitions and small protests at the parliament building, and several high-level officials have registered strong opposition to it, including Russia?s foreign minister and education minister.

Johnson of the National Council for Adoption says he?s hoping the domestic opposition will dissuade Putin from signing the adoption ban into law.

"One good thing that?s happening ? is a movement brought on by Russian citizens and the foreign minister who has spoken out against this legislation ? saying it?s not the right way to stick it to America,? he said. "Hopefully more politicians will feel comfortable speaking out."

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Barring that, he said, he hopes Russia will at least make provisions to finalize the adoptions that are already in process.

"There is a precedent ? to negotiate pipeline cases," he said, citing examples in Guatemala and Kyrgystan. "But given the animosity that Russians feel towards this, I hope that?s not a conversation we have to have."

For the Thomases,?despite politics, the adoption effort is now in overdrive. They understand that Nikoly, who turned 4 in June, could be moved at any time ?? and in fact may have been moved already to a Russian institution for children as old as 18.

"That's major," said John Thomas. "That's where bad things start to happen."

For Renee Thomas, her greatest fear is that the boys will not be allowed to grow up together.?But she tries to stay positive for Jack.

"????This morning as I was making him breakfast, he said 'Mom, wouldn't it be great if we woke up Christmas morning and Santa left presents and Teddy under the tree?' My response was 'Let's hope for next year.'"

Follow Kari Huus on Facebook

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/24/16077076-boys-christmas-wish-adoption-of-little-brother-caught-in-us-russia-spat?lite

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