The recently-released bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi sheds new light on the role of Michael Morell, the CIA's former deputy director, in the official talking points explanations put forward after the attack.

"I think, given what was said by him and others, and where they're headed, down the political road, would justify revisiting this issue," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Fox News.

The Senate report states that on Sep. 15, 2012, four days after the attack and one day before U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on Sunday talk shows blaming the assault on a demonstration over a video, Morell and others at the CIA received a critical email that reported the attacks were "not/not an escalation of protests." Fox News was the first broadcast network to report there were no protests outside the consulate at the time of the attack on Sept. 17, 2012.

The email was from the CIA chief of station who was on the ground in Libya.

"The chief of station is the senior intelligence officer for the entire United States government," said Sam Faddis, who writes extensively about the CIA and intelligence community. "You would really have to have some incredibly overwhelming factual evidence to disregard that and there is no indication of that in the report at all."

Five former intelligence officials contacted by Fox News agreed with Faddis' assessment of the importance of the chief of station's email, but declined to speak on camera, citing personal reasons.

"The way the agency works, he's been running 24 hours a day to nail every fact, and probably they have been sending dozens of messages a day to Washington D.C.," Faddis said of the CIA station chief.

"And now he's reaching out four days into this, emailed directly to the most senior levels of his organization, saying again with the big red crayon as clearly as he can, there were no protests."

While the report does not explain when Morell read the email, it says that on the same day, September 15, he twice edited the talking points about the incident, excising about half the text-- including prior warnings to the State Department.

The word"Islamic" was cut, but "demonstrations" stayed in.

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Report sheds light on ex-CIA deputy director's role in Benghazi attack talking points

Recent studies conducted by the University Commission on Women show that compared to other universities, the number of female faculty members at both the associate and full professor level is lacking.

According to a 2012 Status on Women Report conducted by the UCW, women are underrepresented as tenure or tenure-track faculty at universities across the nation.

At the assistant professor level, the male-to-female ratio is about 1:1, said Beverly McPhail, director of the Womens Resource Center and longtime secretary to the UCW. At the associate professor level, male-to-female is about 2:1, and at the full professor level, the male-to-female ratio is 6:1.

The University Commission on Women is responsible for informing and advising President Khator and other senior administrative leaders, as well as the general university community, on issues and concerns that have an impact on women at the University.

The Commission is currently investigating and benchmarking policies and practices with peer institutions and also aligning our accomplishments and mission with Universities Strategic Initiatives, said Vince Lee, a newly appointed member of the Commission.

In 2007, approximately 62.4 percent of the faculty members at United Statespublic four-year institutions were male and 37.6 percent were female, according to the U.S. Department of Education in 2007. At UH, 71.2 percent were male and 28.8 percent were female since Fall 2010, according to the Office of Institutional Research in 2010.

To me, the gender gap in attaining full professor rank is probably the most striking, said Aimee Chin, associate professor at the Department of Economics and chair member of one of the subgroups of the UCW, the Children on Campus Committee.

I am an economist who spends considerable time teaching and using statistical methods to separate causal relationships from mere correlations, she said, so I very much understand that many factors underlie these observed gender gaps reported there. But the decrease in percentage of females from the entry level to top level is quite dramatic, and one has to ask what can be done to develop and retain talented female faculty.

Differences in the numbers of faculty members, both male and female, are not the only staggering statistic UH women currently face.

The numbers presented in the report also show that men on average out-earn women in almost every category, McPhail said.

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Commission sheds light on female professors

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Jan 31, 2014 2:42pm

Bruno Mars is set to join the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Sundays Super Bowl halftime show, but center stage wasnt always so youthful. Since Janet Jacksons infamous wardrobe malfunction, the show took a geriatric turn for a few years over the last decade before it slowly moved back to the younger set.

Donald Miralle/Getty Images

A decade has passed since Janet Jackson sparked controversy when her nipple surfaced on national television during Superbowl XXXVIII. Jackson, then 37, performed with then-23-year-old Justin Timberlake, singing Timberlakes 2002 song, Rock Your Body.

The next year, rock superstar Paul McCartney brought viewers into a Beatles time warp of sorts at the 2005 Super Bowl halftime show, when he rocked out on songs first released in the 1960s. His performance marked a geriatric turn for the artists taking over the Super Bowl field between the games first and second halves.

Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

The Rolling Stones continued the Super Bowls classic rock fix in 2006, opening the show with a rendition of Start Me Up, which was first released in 1981. Lead singer Mick Jagger, then 62, ran around on stage with vigor unmatched by many his age.

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Super Bowl Sheds Gray Hair for Youthful Halftime Performers

Investing.com -

Investing.com - U.S. stock markets were mildly lower after the open on Monday, as investors looked ahead to key U.S. economic data later in the day to gauge the strength of the economy and for further indications on the future course of monetary policy.

During early U.S. trade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.15%, the S&P 500 dipped 0.1%, while the Nasdaq Composite index shed 0.1%.

The U.S. Institute of Supply Management is to produce data on manufacturing activity for January shortly after the open.

U.S. markets were given a negative lead from Europe and Asia after data showed that China's official non-manufacturing PMI slipped to its lowest level since December 2008 in January, falling to 53.4 from 54.6 in December.

The deterioration in the services sector adds to declining manufacturing PMIs. Data released over the weekend showed that China's official manufacturing PMI fell to a six-month low of 50.5 in January from 51.0 in December.

Meanwhile, market players continued to monitor liquidity conditions in emerging markets, such as Turkey and South Africa.

Emerging markets economies have been hard hit in recent sessions by worries over the impact of cuts in Federal Reserve stimulus and concerns over a slowdown in China.

Across the Atlantic, European stock markets were lower. The EURO STOXX 50 fell 0.45%, France's CAC 40 dropped 0.25%, Germany's DAX slumped 0.3%, while Britain's FTSE 100 inched down 0.1%.

Asian stock markets fell sharply on Monday, with Japan's Nikkei 225 Index ending down 2%. Markets in Shanghai and Hong Kong remained closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.

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U.S. stocks open lower ahead of ISM report; Dow sheds 0.15%

Riyadh: An obese Saudi Arabian man, weighing a staggering 610 kgs, has shed 320 kgs after a concerned Saudi king ordered him hospitalised months ago.

King Abdullah had ordered Khalid Mohsen Al-Shaeri to undergo treatment in Riyadh in August.

Suffering from extreme obesity, Shaeri from Jazan was successful in cutting down his weight from 610 kg to 290 kg following specialised treatment at the King Fahd Medical City (KFMC) in Riyadh.

Losing 320 kgs in four months is a record, Arab News quoted medical experts as saying.

Shaeri's treatment has now reached an advanced stage, Dr Ayed Al-Qahtani, consultant, laparoscopic surgery and obesity at KFMC was quoted as saying.

His heart and lungs are functioning properly and the medical team treating him has reported considerable improvement in his muscle power and ability to move his legs.

"We have also manufactured a custom-made huge wheelchair for him. This again is a record in that it is the largest medical chair in the world," Mr Qahtani was quoted as saying.

Twenty-one consultants and 15 nurses besides his mother have been taking care of Shaeri.

In the first three months of treatment, he lost 150 kg. A surgical operation of the abdomen helped him lose a further 170 kg.

"We have been providing him with special food imported from the US," Al-Qahtani said.

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Obese Saudi man sheds 320 kgs under order from King

By simulating the environment when corn was first exploited by people and then domesticated, Smithsonian scientists discovered that corn's ancestor, a wild grass called teosinte, may have looked very different then than it does today. The fact that it looks more like corn under these conditions may help to explain how teosinte came to be selected by early farmers who turned it into one of the most important staple crops in the world.

The vegetative and flowering structures of modern teosinte are very different from those of corn. These and other differences led to a century-long dispute as to whether teosinte could really be the ancestor of corn.

"We grew teosinte in the conditions that it encountered 10,000 years ago during the early Holocene period: temperatures 2-3 degrees Celsius cooler than today's with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at around 260 parts per million," said Dolores Piperno, senior scientist and curator of archaeobotany and South American archaeology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the project. "Intriguingly, the teosinte plants grown under past conditions exhibit characteristics more like corn: a single main stem topped by a single tassel, a few, very short branches tipped by female ears and synchronous seed maturation.

After the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide rose to today's 405 parts per million, the level in the control chamber where teosinte plants look like plants in the wild today -- tall, with many long branches tipped by tassels and seed maturation taking place over a period of a few months. Co-author Klaus Winter usually studies the effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on tropical plants as a senior staff scientist at STRI. Piperno and Winter devised a scheme to essentially travel back in time by comparing plants grown in modern conditions with plants grown in the early Holocene chamber.

"Now it appears to be an open question when in the Holocene teosinte became the plant very distinctive from maize in vegetative architecture and inflorescence sexuality that we see today and use as the baseline for research on maize domestication," said Piperno. "When humans first began to cultivate teosinte about 10,000 years ago, it was probably more maize-like -- naturally exhibiting some characteristics previously thought to result from human selection and domestication. The environment may have played a significant, if serendipitous, role in the transition through inducing phenotypic plasticity that gave early farmers a head start."

Phenotypic plasticity is an organism's ability to change in response to the environment, causing genetically identical organisms to look very different when they live in different conditions. As they formulate a "new modern evolutionary synthesis," in part with concepts that Darwin could not have known of, evolutionary biologists continue to debate the importance of the environment and plasticity on evolutionary change and the origins of the diverse forms of life on Earth today. However, new evidence shows that these environmental-phenotypic interactions are in a growing number of organisms. This is one of the first studies to examine the influence of these processes on plant domestication.

"Extending these concepts to domestication research allows anthropologists to become more fully engaged in modern evolutionary theory and practice," Piperno said.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Greenhouse 'time machine' sheds light on corn domestication

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