Volunteers help SKorea battle online porn; one says it's 'like shovelling snow in a blizzard'

SEOUL, South Korea - Moon Tae-Hwa stares at his computer, dizzy and nauseous from the hours of porn he's viewed online. He feels no shame — he says he's "cleaning up dirty things."

Moon is among the most successful members of the "Nuri Cops" (roughly "net cops"), a squad of nearly 800 volunteers who help government censors by patrolling the Internet for pornography in their spare time.

Unlike most developed nations, pornography is illegal in South Korea, though it remains easy for its tech-savvy population to find. More than 90 per cent of South Korea's homes have high-speed Internet access, and more than 30 million of its 50 million people own smartphones.

Moon says it's like "shovelling snow in a blizzard," but neither he nor the government show any sign of giving up the fight.

Egypt opposition urges more protests against Dec. 15 constitutional referendum

CAIRO - Egypt's opposition said Sunday it will keep up protests against a referendum on a disputed draft constitution but stopped short of advocating either a boycott or a "no" vote less than a week before the ballot.

The opposition was still pushing for Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to cancel the Dec. 15 referendum, saying they reject the process entirely and refuse to call it legitimate.

The referendum over a disputed draft constitution has deeply polarized Egypt and sparked some of the bloodiest clashes between Morsi supporters and opponents since he came to power in June.

In a sign of how jittery the government about holding the referendum, Morsi has ordered the military to maintain security and protect state institutions until the results of the referendum are announced.

The new presidential decree, published in the official gazette, would be effective starting Monday. The military is asked to co-ordinate with the police on maintaining security and would also be entitled to arrest civilians.

Morsi insists on holding the referendum on schedule. Instead, as a concession to his opponents, he rescinded decrees he issued last month granting him almost unrestricted powers, giving himself and the panel that drafted the constitution immunity from judicial oversight.

The decrees sparked the protests. Opponents said they were issued initially to protect the disputedconstitution from numerous court challenges.

Rushing the approval of the constitution in a late night session in the panel further inflamed those who claim Morsi and his Islamist allies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are monopolizing power and trying to force their agenda into practice.

The opposition sent hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, in unprecedented mass rallies for the largely secular groups since they led the popular uprising last year that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

This prompted protests by Morsi supporters and sparked bouts of street battles that left at least six people dead and hundreds wounded.

Several offices of the Muslim Brotherhood also have been ransacked or torched in the unrest.

The National Salvation Front, an umbrella opposition group of liberal and leftist parties, said at a news conference Sunday that holding the referendum in such an atmosphere would lead to more strife. It called for another mass demonstration on Tuesday.

The front said Morsi and the regime are "gambling by driving the country toward more violent clashes that are dangerous for its national security."

In a sign of the continued tension, Misr 25 TV, affiliated with the Brotherhood, announced that an alliance of Islamist groups will hold rival rallies on Tuesday in support of "legitimacy."

Senior Brotherhood leaders accuse the opposition of seeking to topple Morsi and undermine his legitimacy.

The draft charter was adopted despite a last minute walkout by liberal and Christian members of the Constituent Assembly. The document would open the door to Egypt's most extensive implementation of Islamic law or Shariah, enshrining a say for Muslim clerics in legislation, making civil rights subordinate to Shariah and broadly allowing the state to protect "ethics and morals."

It fails to outlaw gender discrimination and mainly refers to women in relation to home and family. The charter also has restrictive clauses on freedom of expression.

Khaled Dawoud, a spokesman for the National Salvation Front, said the opposition is hoping to continue its pressure to lead Morsi to reconsider holding the referendum "and give us more time to discuss a new draft."

"We will try our best so that this referendum doesn't take place," he said.

In his announcement a day earlier, Morsi replaced the scrapped decrees with a new one that doesn't give him unrestricted powers, but allows him to give voters an option if they decide to vote "no" on the disputed draft charter.

In the new decree, if the constitution is rejected, Morsi would call for new elections to select 100-member panel to write a new charter within three months. The new panel would then have up to six months to complete its task, and the president would call for a new referendum with a month.

The process would add about 10 more months to Egypt's raucous transition, but could answer some of the opposition demands of a more representative panel to write the charter, if the elections are not swept by Islamists.

The opposition has held a sit-in outside the presidential palace since Friday. A rally of a few thousand marched to join them Sunday.

In a nearby area, several hundred Morsi supporters held a rival rally, lining the street and chanting to traffic: "Islamic Islamic," saying that voting day "will bring stability."

Syrian rebels capture parts of army base in north

Syrians wait in line for food distribution at a refugee camp near the Turkish border, in Azaz, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Manu Brabo)" title="Syrians wait in line for food distribution at a refugee camp near the Turkish border, in Azaz, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Manu Brabo)

BEIRUT (AP) — Activists say Syrian rebels have captured parts of a large army base in the country's north, just west of the city of Aleppo.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the rebels entered the Sheik Suleiman base on Sunday afternoon, after weeks of fighting.

The development indicates the rebels are strengthening their grip on northern areas near the Turkish border. Last month, they captured another large base near Aleppo.

The Observatory says the rebels seized a key sector of the base. Amateur videos released by activists showed gunmen walking inside the base, carrying a jihadist black Islamic flag.

The footage also shows rebels driving around in a captured tank and manning heavy anti-aircraft machine guns. The activist videos appear genuine and correspond to AP's reporting on the events depicted.

20-Year-Old Report Successfully Predicted Warming: Scientists

Meltwater creates a 60-foot deep (18.2 meter) canyon in the polar ice sheet.

Time has proven that even 22 years ago climate scientists understood the dynamics behind global warming well enough to accurately predict warming, says an analysis that compares predictions in 1990 with 20 years of temperature records.

After an adjustment to account for natural fluctuations, the predictions and the observed increases matched up, the current research found.

The predictions in question come from the first climate assessmentreport issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) in 1990. The IPCC is an internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change, drawing on the expertise of thousands of scientists, so its reports carry special weight. The most recent assessment report came out in 2007.

The accuracy of the 1990 predictions is notable because scientists, 22 years ago, relied on much more simplistic computer models than those now used to simulate the future, said one of the researchers behind the current analysis, Dáithí Stone, now a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He worked on the analysis while at the University of Cape Town and University of Oxford.

What's more, two decades ago, scientists could not have anticipated a number of potentially climate-altering events. These included the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, which spewed sunlight-blocking particles into the atmosphere, as well as the collapse of industry in the Soviet Union or the economic growth of China, Stone and David Frame, of Victoria University Wellington in New Zealand, write in work published online today (Dec. 9) in the journal Nature Climate Change.

But 22 years ago, scientists understood one crucial factor:

"The prediction basically depended on how much carbon dioxide was already in the atmosphere, and that has been what's important," Stone said. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

What matters is the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution; short-term changes in emissions have relatively little effect on overall warming, Frame and Stone write.

Other climate scientists have come to the same conclusion; one recent paper warned significant emissions cuts must happen soon to limit warming to a manageable level.

The 1990 report offered a best estimate of an increase of 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) by 2030, which at the halfway point in 2010, translates to warming of 1 degree F (0.55 degrees C).

Stone and Frame compared this expected increase to two sets of temperature records for 1990 through 2010, which showed increases of 0.63 degrees F (0.35 degrees C) and 0.7 degrees F (0.39 degrees C), respectively.

The 1990 prediction did require an adjustment, since it did not take into account natural variability — which includes the chaotic nature of weather as well as longer-term natural patterns, such as the El Niño/La Niña cycle.

When Frame and Stone took natural variability into account, they found that the observed warming was consistent with the IPCC's best estimate for warming.

Take No Notice 50 year Ago They Were Predicting An Ice Age:

The Boy Who Cried Warming (Documentary)