Amnesty Int: Ivory Coast torturing detainees

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — Ivory Coast security officials are torturing dozens of detainees by administering electric shocks and other forms of abuse, Amnesty International alleged Friday.

The victims include people charged with endangering state security in the wake of a recent spate of attacks targeting military installations. Since early August, unknown gunmen have carried out roughly 10 attacks at checkpoints, military bases and other installations throughout the country, including in the commercial capital of Abidjan.

United Nations officials have said that more than 200 people have been detained on suspicion of involvement in the attacks, and that torture has been documented at multiple detention facilities.

Gaetan Mootoo, West Africa researcher for Amnesty, said an investigation team received reports of a range of abuses during a recent month-long visit.

“We were able to meet dozens of detainees who told us how they have been tortured by electricity or had molten plastic poured on their bodies,” Mootoo said. “Two of them have been sexually abused. Some have been held for many months denied contact with their families and access to lawyers.”

Army spokesman Cherif Moussa denied the torture allegations Friday. “Our camps are not concentration camps,” he said.

However, he acknowledged the possibility that individual soldiers may occasionally “go beyond what they are allowed to do” when dealing with inmates.

He added that the government tried to ensure that inmates’ rights were respected. “We want to prove that we are not abusing people’s rights,” he said. “We’re working for the state’s security. We’re working for the people’s security.”

Earlier this month, the Associated Press interviewed former detainees at a military camp in the southwestern port town of San Pedro who described widespread beatings as well as the use of electric shocks. A guard at the camp corroborated most of the claims, though camp commanders denied them.

In its statement Friday, Amnesty described how one detainee, a police officer, had died as a result of the torture he endured at the San Pedro camp.

“Serge Herve Kribie was arrested in San Pedro on August 21 by the national army and interrogated about recent attacks,” Amnesty said. “He was stripped naked, tied to a pole, had water poured on his body, and was then subjected to electric shocks. He died a few hours later.”

Amnesty said that some detainees were only released after ransoms were paid. One detainee told the rights group: “My parents first paid 50,000 CFA (a little under US $ 100) and then after my release, my jailers went at my house and demanded a higher sum. I told them that I couldn’t pay such an amount and they agreed to receive 20,000 CFA more (about US$ 40).”

The government has blamed the attacks on allies of former President Laurent Gbagbo, who was arrested in April 2011. Gbagbo’s refusal to cede office after losing the November 2010 election to now-President Alassane Ouattara sparked six months of violence in which at least 3,000 were killed.

Amnesty researchers also met with some of the more than 100 Gbagbo allies – including his wife, Simone – who are being detained on charges stemming from the post-election violence.

“Some of them told us that despite the fact that they have been held since April 2011, they only saw an investigating judge twice for less than a few hours,” Mootoo said.

Despite widespread evidence that forces loyal to Ouattara also committed atrocities during the violence, none have been arrested or credibly investigated, sparking allegations of victor’s justice.

Also Friday, in Amsterdam, judges at the International Criminal Court rejected a request for release by former president Gbagbo, who is being detained on suspicion of crimes against humanity.

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Star Silicon Valley analyst felled by Facebook IPO fallout

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The firing of Citigroup stock analyst Mark Mahaney on Friday in the regulatory fallout from Facebook Inc's initial public offering was greeted with shock and dismay in Silicon Valley, where Mahaney was a well-known and well-liked figure.

"Pretty shocked," was the reaction of Jacob Funds Chief Executive Ryan Jacob, who described Mahaney as one of the most respected financial analysts covering the Internet industry.

"I'd put him at the top. If not at the top, then near the top," said Jacob. "He really knew what to look for."

In addition to firing Mahaney, Citigroup paid a $2 million fine to Massachusetts regulators to settle charges that the bank improperly disclosed research on Facebook ahead of its $16 billion IPO in May.

The settlement agreement said Mahaney failed to supervise a junior analyst who improperly shared Facebook research with the TechCrunch news website. (Settlement agreement: http://r.reuters.com/pyj63t)

The settlement agreement also outlined an incident in which Mahaney failed to get approval before responding to a journalist's questions about Google Inc -- and told a Citigroup compliance staffer that the conversation had not occurred -- even after being warned about unauthorized conversations with the media.

Mahaney declined to comment.

Mahaney got his start in the late 1990s, during the first dot-com boom where he worked at Morgan Stanley for Mary Meeker, one of the star analysts of the time. He went on to work at hedge fund Galleon Group before moving to Citigroup in 2005. Unlike most of his New York-based peers in the analyst world, Mahaney worked in San Francisco's financial district, close to the companies and personalities at the heart of the tech industry.

Earlier this month, Mahaney was named the top Internet analyst for the fifth straight year by Institutional Investor. The review cited fans of Mahaney who praised a "systematic" investment approach that allows him to avoid the "waffling" often evidenced by other analysts.

Mahaney's Buy rating on IAC/InteractiveCorp in April 2011, when the stock traded at $33.32, allowed investors to lock in a 51 percent gain before he downgraded the stock to a Hold at $50.31 a few months later, according to Institutional Investor.

But it wasn't only his stock picks that put him in good stead. He earned kudos for simply being a nice guy.

"He's a kind and thoughtful person and that's evident in the way he deals with people," said Jason Jones of Internet investment firm HighStep Capital. "He's very well liked on Wall Street because of that."

A CAUTIOUS VIEW ON FACEBOOK

Mahaney was only indirectly involved in the incident involving the Facebook research, according to the settlement agreement by Massachusetts regulators released on Friday. But the actions of the junior analyst who worked for him provide an unusual glimpse into the type of behind-the-scenes information trading that regulators are attempting to rein in.

While the Massachusetts regulators did not identify any of the individuals by name, Reuters has learned that the incident involved TechCrunch reporters Josh Constine and Kim-Mai Cutler as well as Citi junior analyst Eric Jacobs.

Jacobs, Constine and Cutler all did not respond to requests for comments.

In early May, shortly before Facebook's IPO, Jacobs sent an email to Cutler and Constine. Constine attended Stanford University at the same time as Jacobs.

Constine, who studied social networks such as Facebook and Twitter for his 2009 Master's degree in cybersociology at Stanford, had a close friendship with Jacobs, according to the settlement agreement.

"I am ramping up coverage on FB and thought you guys might like to see how the street is thinking about it (and our estimates)," Jacobs wrote in the email. The email included an "outline" that Jacobs said would eventually become the firm's 30-40 page initiation report on Facebook.

He also included a "Facebook One Pager" document, which contained confidential, non-public information that Citigroup obtained in order to help begin covering Facebook after the IPO.

Asked by Constine if the information could be published and attributed to an anonymous source, Jacobs responded that "my boss would eat me alive," the agreement said.

A spokeswoman for AOL Inc, which owns TechCrunch, declined to answer questions on the matter, saying only that "We are looking into the matter and have no comment at this time."

Ironically, Mahaney was one of a small group of analysts at the many banks underwriting Facebook's IPO who had cautious views of the richly valued offering. Mahaney initiated coverage of the company with a neutral rating.

Analysts at the top three underwriters on Facebook's IPO - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan - started the stock with overweight or buy recommendations.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Facebook had pre-briefed analysts for its underwriters ahead of its IPO, advising them to reduce their profit and revenue forecasts.

Facebook, whose stock was priced at $38 a share in the IPO, closed Friday's regular session at $21.94 and has traded as low as $17.55.

"There were tens of billions of dollars in losses based on hyping the name, a lack of skeptical information and misunderstanding the company," said Max Wolff, chief economist and senior analyst at research firm GreenCrest Capital.

"It's highly unfortunate and darkly ironic that one of the signature regulatory actions from this IPO so far involves punishing analysts for disseminating cautious information about Facebook," he added.

(Editing by Jonathan Weber, Mary Milliken and Lisa Shumaker)

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“Chasing Mavericks” Review: surfing saga wipes out on dry land

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Regarding legendary MGM bathing beauty Esther Williams, producer Joe Pasternak once famously quipped, “Wet, she’s a star.”

So it goes with “Chasing Mavericks,” a biopic that features not enough stirringly gorgeous surfing footage and way too many clunky biopic clichés in telling the story of surf legend Jay Moriarity. With a storyline as by-the-numbers as a square dance, the movie’s one surprise comes with the closing credits – namely, that this trite “inspirational” movie is the product of two world-class filmmakers, Curtis Hanson and Michael Apted.

After a prologue in which eight-year-old Jay, already obsessed with the big waves, is rescued from drowning by his ten-hanging neighbor Frosty Hesson (Gerard Butler), we meet our lead character at age 15 and played by Jonny Weston. A talented young surfer, Jay sneaks off one morning and watches Frosty tackle Mavericks, a giant super-wave thought by many to be the stuff of legend.

Once he sees Mavericks, Jay has found his Mt. Everest, and he won’t rest until he can conquer it. He begs Frosty to train him, and so begins a 12-week course that will include the physical (paddling from Santa Cruz to Monterey, learning to go four minutes without breathing) and the mental (Jay writes essays for Frosty about observing the tides and conquering personal demons).

Naturally, the surf lessons become life lessons, whether it’s about taking a step back and finding the easy way through a situation or distinguishing the difference between fear (a good thing) and panic (not so much). Kario Salem’s screenplay ticks off the character development in the most predictable way possible; when Jay reveals early on that he has an unopened latter from the father who abandoned him as a child, we know that envelope’s going to be torn open in the final act.

Because of his positive attitude and many achievements at a relatively young age, Jay Moriarity became a legend in the surf world. Unfortunately, that mantle anchors the film – rather than portray Jay as the complex and interesting person he no doubt was, the movie reduces him to a paragon. Constantly upbeat and crowned in a halo of blond curls, Weston has nothing to play that can make Jay anything but a blank, shiny ideal.

Butler may still be grappling with his American accent, but at least Frosty has a flaw or two that give the actor something to do. The women in the film are handed even less to work with, stuck playing The Girlfriend (Leven Rambin) or The Boozy Mom Who Suddenly Isn’t Boozy Anymore (Elisabeth Shue). Abigail Spencer, as Frosty’s wife, gets some relatively complex moments, but even she is saddled with the requisite “Please don’t go surf Mavericks tonight, honey” speech.

None of the film’s many flaws matter when Jay or Frosty hops on a board and swims out to the waves. If the surfing scenes are real, then they’re breathtaking; if they’re faked, then they’ve been faked brilliantly. But for that, better to rent “The Endless Summer” or “Step Into Liquid” so you can cut right to the good stuff without having to wade through all the personal-growth and surrogate-family bushwa that “Chasing Mavericks” handles so badly.

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Modern Science Unravels Ancient Mummy Mysteries

Reported by Dr. Julielynn Wong:

Call it the coldest case ever.

New York researchers have used modern-day forensic science to reveal the faces of four ancient mummies from the 1^st century A.D.

“It was pretty exciting,” said Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University and lead author of a new study published in the journal ZÄS.  “We didn’t know what we were going to find.”

Brier and colleagues used a CT scanner to produce physical models of the mummies’ skulls. Then a crime artist, who only knew the mummy’s age and gender, used the models to recreate the mummies’ faces. The painstaking process took seven days per mummy.

“We were dying to see what it looked like,” Brier said.

The team then compared the faces to painted portraits entombed with the bandaged bodies.

Two of the four match-ups were strikingly similar.

A mummy from the British Museum was a small woman in her early 20s with delicate features, a narrow face and thick lips. Her face appears to match the features of her portrait. (Image credit: Caroline Wilkinson/University of Dundee Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification)

“It is believed that they were almost certainly painted during the lifetimes of the individuals and clearly were not idealized images,” Brier said of the portraits.

A second mummy from the British Museum was a large man in his 50s with a broad face, thick brow, flat nose, and heavy jaw. His face was very similar to his portrait, which may have been painted when he was younger. (Image credit: Caroline Wilkinson/University of Dundee Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification)

But one face didn’t match the portrait at all, leading the researchers to believe the ancient embalmers might have wrapped the mummy with the wrong portrait.

A mummy from the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen was a young man in his 30s with a wide nose, broad cheekbones, thick lips and rounded jawline. This face looked quite different from the portrait, hinting that a switch might have occurred. (Image credit: Caroline Wilkinson/University of Dundee Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification)

“It is possible that during the mummification procedure, when several bodies were being mummified at the same time, a mismatch occurred,” Brier said.

The fourth mummy’s nose looked more refined in the portrait than in the researchers’ prediction, but his “other facial features and proportions were so consistent between the reconstruction and portrait that no mix-up was indicated here,” Brier said.

A mummy from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was a man in his early 30s with a wide nose, square jaw and thick lips. His “touched up” portrait appears to show a younger man with a more narrow nose but similar lips and jaw. (Image credit: Caroline Wilkinson/University of Dundee Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification)

The study sheds light on the purpose of the portraits, which represented a shift from symbolic art to realistic art after the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 B.C.

“This study convinced us that some of these portraits were dead-on,” Brier said, adding that some portraits were likely styled to be more flattering to the deceased.

“This is a very sound manner of testing the hypothesis that the mummy portraits were made when the individual was alive,” said Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, who was not involved with the study. “It enhances our understanding of the concept of portraiture and its importance at this time.”

Brier would like to extend the study to include more mummies. But while there are more than 1,000 mummy portraits, less than 100 are still attached to the people they depict, he said.

“The difficulty is finding portraits that are still bound to the mummy,” he said. “Many portraits were taken off the mummies and sold during the 19th century and early part of the 20th century.”

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Obama, Romney campaign with eye on storm forecast

WASHINGTON (AP) — With an eye on the weather forecast, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are launching a 10-day sprint to the finish line in a contest increasingly about momentum vs. math.

A huge storm barreling toward the East Coast — and some battleground states — had both campaigns adjusting their travel schedules and canceling events. Even at this critical juncture of the campaign, neither side wanted to risk the appearance of putting politics ahead of public safety.

The president was pressing on with a campaign trip Saturday to New Hampshire, while Romney was blitzing through Florida.

But an email announcing that Vice President Joe Biden's Saturday rally in coastal Virginia Beach, Va., stated that the change was "being taken out of an abundance of caution to ensure that all local law enforcement and emergency management resources can stay focused on ensuring the safety of people who might be impacted by the storm."

Romney canceled a rally in Virginia Beach that was planned for Sunday, and aides said they were also considering scrapping two other events elsewhere in the state. None of Obama's campaign stops had been canceled, but he did adjust his travel schedule slightly. The campaign moved up his planned Monday departure for Florida to Sunday night to beat the storm.

Ten days from Election Day, Obama and Romney are tied nationally. But the president still appears to have more pathways to reaching the required 270 Electoral College votes.

The Obama campaign released a new TV ad Saturday urging Americans when they go into the voting booth to consider Romney's plans to roll back Wall Street reforms, transform Medicare into a voucher-like system and reduce spending on education while at the same time cutting taxes for the rich. The spot will air in Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Virginia, all key battleground states.

The Republican nominee is trying to seize the momentum mantle and turn a wave of GOP enthusiasm into an electoral victory.

"The debates have supercharged our campaign and the Republican team," Romney's campaign wrote in a fundraising email. "We're seeing more and more enthusiasm — and more and more support."

Obama's campaign pressed forward with a get-out-the-vote effort that aides said had them leading or tied in every competitive state. The president was eschewing the lofty rhetoric of his 2008 run in favor of warning supporters that skipping out on voting could cost him the election.

"In 2000, Gore vs. Bush, 537 votes changed the direction of history in a profound way and the same thing could happen," Obama said in an interview Friday with MTV.

Romney was switching his attention to Florida on Saturday after spending much of the week focused on shoring up support in Ohio. While the Midwestern swing state could be crucial to Romney's re-election prospects, he also faces tremendous pressure to carry Florida, which offers 29 Electoral College votes, the most of any swing state.

Obama carried Florida by just 3 percentage points in 2008 and polls show the candidates tied.

The former Massachusetts governor was scheduled to attend three rallies, the first in Pensacola along the state's conservative Panhandle. He then moves to suburban Orlando before finishing his day with an evening rally just outside of Tampa, the site of the Republican National Convention. Romney was to be joined at all three events by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

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Associated Press writer Steve Peoples in North Canton, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

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