Clashes between army, militants in Yemen kill 21 (Reuters)

ADEN (Reuters) – At least 12 militants and nine soldiers were killed in three clashes on Sunday in southern Yemen, where Islamists and separatists have launched several attacks during the country's bloody political crisis.

Twelve militants and two soldiers were killed outside Zinjibar -- the capital of the flashpoint southern province of Abyan, a military official said.

A local official later told Reuters that five soldiers were killed in a separate attack by militants near Zinjibar.

In the southern province of Lahej, a local official said two soldiers were killed in a shootout.

Thousands of people have fled the clashes between the army and militants believed to be close to al Qaeda in the southern province of Abyan, after its capital Zinjibar fell to militants last month.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's opponents have accused him of handing over Zinjibar to Islamists to reinforce his threat that the end of his three-decade rule, as demanded by protesters, would amount to ceding the region to al Qaeda.

In Lahej, where both separatists and Islamist forces have as much or more sway than the central government, gunmen have launched bold attacks in recent weeks.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, and Western countries fear protracted chaos could give al Qaeda a foothold in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula state.

Yemen straddles oil export routes and has been a cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

Saleh's supporters say he will return in days from Saudi Arabia where he is being treated after being wounded two weeks ago in an attack at his presidential palace.

(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf; Editing by Jan Harvey)

Yahoo! News

Delaware police investigate alleged contact between Weiner, teen

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York, admitted this week to sending inappropriate tweets to women during his marriage.Police: The teen was interviewed and did not disclose any inappropriate contactSpokeswoman: According to Weiner, the contact was not indecent

(CNN) -- Delaware authorities are investigating alleged contact between a local teen and Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has been under fire after admitting to inappropriate communications with women online.

"Detectives were made aware of alleged contact between Congressman Anthony Weiner and an area teen," New Castle County police said in a statement.

"Detectives have conducted an interview with the teen and she has made no disclosure of criminal activity nor inappropriate contact by the Congressman."

Weiner spokeswoman Risa Heller, in response to a question about the Delaware teen, said in a statement, "According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent."

The married Democratic representative from New York admitted this week that he engaged in sexually tinged communications with multiple women and lied about it.

CNN's Dana Bash and Holly Yan contributed to this report.

CNN

Whoopie pies spark food fight between Pennsylvania, Maine

BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa. — It consists of two round, textbook-thick, palm-sized chocolate cakes that sandwich a creamy vanilla filling to create one sinfully rich snack. It's the whoopie pie, a snack so beloved that residents in two states have cooked up a good-natured tug of war over which place is its rightful home — Maine or Pennsylvania?

A baker makes whoopie pies at the S. Clyde Weaver market in East Petersburg, Pa.

By Matt Rourke, AP

A baker makes whoopie pies at the S. Clyde Weaver market in East Petersburg, Pa.

A state legislator in Maine whipped up passions when he introduced a bill in January to make the whoopie pie Maine's official state dessert. Like a group of chefs tweaking a recipe, a legislative committee has since dropped "dessert" in favor of making the snack Maine's official "treat."

No matter — residents in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County say that's just baloney. Those round mounds of cakey goodness originated from kitchens of the area's Amish families, dating back generations, they say.

"We've had this thing going with the whoopie pie here for years and years and decades," John Smucker, CEO of the family-run company that owns the Bird-in-Hand Bakery, said as kitchen workers busily put together a batch of red velvet whoopie pies. "And all of a sudden they try to enter into the picture ... It's just a bunch of nonsense."

At the S. Clyde Weaver store in East Petersburg, staff piece together their version of the traditional chocolate-with-vanilla-filling variety.

By Justin David Graybill, AP

People hold signs at a whoopie pie rally held Feb. 19 at Penn Square in Lancaster, Pa.

"We do the original," baker Nancy Rexroad said. "When something's the original, you can't improve on it."

Maine state Rep. Paul Davis got things brewing with a bill to laud the whoopie pie. Davis got the idea from speaking with people at the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival, which last year attracted 4,000 visitors to Dover-Foxcroft, part of Davis' district.

Amos Orcutt, president of the Maine Whoopie Pie Association, was one of the Mainers who lobbied Davis to make a stand. In a phone interview, Orcutt, whose full-time job is president of the University of Maine Foundation, said he got steamed after reading a New York Times story on whoopie pies in March 2009 that cited food historians on the likelihood that the whoopie pie got its start in Pennsylvania.

"Having grown up in Maine, I used that well-worn term 'appalled and aghast,' so I started looking into it," Orcutt said. "A lot of our older alumni said, 'Oh no, I remember whoopie pies as a child."

Davis said he's been told Maine whoopie pies may date back as far as 1925. The website for Labadie's Bakery in Lewiston, Maine, says bakers there started making whoopie pies that year.

About the time he read the Times story, Orcutt said a local high school's mock legislature exercise proposed a "bill" to give the whoopie pie the official dessert designation.

"One thing led to another, and folks kept saying, 'Well, gee, you've got to do something about it,'" Orcutt said. Davis estimates that about 400 to 500 bakeries — from commercial operators to small-town markets to individuals who sell kitchen-baked goods at farmers markets — sell whoopie pies.

Word of Davis' bill reached the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau in Lancaster, and organizers there decided to answer back. They touted a website — www.saveourwhoopie.com — that likened Maine's actions to "confectionary larceny."

Area residents say Amish and other Pennsylvania Dutch families have passed down whoopie pie recipes for generations. Smucker said his bakery's recipe dates back at least 50 years to his grandmother's kitchen. Further west in Pennsylvania, the treats were also known in the Johnstown area as "gobs."

Dan Neff, owner and president of the S. Clyde Weaver market, said he suspected that one possible origin for the whoopie pie was home cooks looking for a creation to replace cream-filled doughnuts, which would be difficult to make in a home kitchen.

Smucker relayed another story passed on in Bird-in-Hand about the origin of the "whoopie pie" name in 1958, in which one in a group of young Amish women exclaimed "whoopie" when checking on the progress of her cakes in the oven. (Several variations of the story have made the rounds.)

It's also about that time, Smucker said, that whoopie pies started to become a more popular snack in the larger community.

Residents are backing their bakers. Visitors bureau spokesman Joel Cliff said about 1,700 signatures have been collected for an online petition "objecting to any other state, county or town claiming the whoopie pie as its own."

The Hershey Farm Restaurant and Inn, in Strasburg, makes over 100 different flavors for its Whoopie Pie Festival which started six years ago — or several years before the Maine event.

And 21-year-old Josh Graupera of Lancaster got so worked up after hearing about Maine's move that he and a friend organized a rally in downtown Lancaster on Feb. 19 attended by 100 people, including one person who carried a sign "Give Me Whoopie, or Give Me Death."

"We thought we would organize as many people as possible to stand up and say, 'You're not going to take our heritage from us,'" he said. "This is a Lancaster County tradition."

All sides say they're turning up the heat all in good fun.

"They can have their lobsters," Graupera said.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Obama's new team blurs lines between defense, intelligence

WASHINGTON — President Obama welcomed a new team of warriors, spies and diplomats Thursday to the "urgent challenges" of defending America's interests on multiple fronts overseas despite dwindling resources and a crushing national debt.

President Obama announces the new members of his national security team on Thursday. From left: Leon Panetta as secretary of Defense, Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director, Lt. Gen. John Allen as commander for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Ryan Crocker as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

By Alex Wong, Getty Images

President Obama announces the new members of his national security team on Thursday. From left: Leon Panetta as secretary of Defense, Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director, Lt. Gen. John Allen as commander for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Ryan Crocker as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

The appearance of current and future Pentagon, CIA and Afghanistan war leaders ? pending Senate confirmations ? was emblematic of the increasingly blurred lines between Obama's defense and intelligence communities.

There was retiring Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director, laughing alongside CIA Director Leon Panetta, Obama's choice to replace Gates on July 1. Beside them stood Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, Obama's choice for CIA director.

The revolving doors of national security extended to Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen, like Petraeus a veteran of Iraq, now likely to succeed him in Afghanistan, and Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, who the president wants for a second tour in Kabul.

The team will bring "counsel, continuity and unity of effort," Obama said, noting, "We are a nation still at war." Even with trillion-dollar budget deficits and a looming battle over controlling the $14.3 trillion national debt, he said, "We cannot compromise our ability to defend our nation or our interests around the world."

Obama's selections, contemplated at the White House for months, won bipartisan support amid indications the Democratic-controlled Senate will confirm all four nominees. "The president is to be commended for choosing competence and continuity," said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

The announcement came amid turmoil abroad and the need for austerity at home. Panetta, a former White House chief of staff and budget director, warned of "hard choices" and the need to be "disciplined in applying our limited resources." Petraeus, who turned around the Iraq war in 2007, expressed only "guarded optimism about the trajectory of the mission" in Afghanistan.

Obama noted that Panetta, 72, began his four decades of public service as an Army intelligence officer, and that Petraeus, 58, has been "a lifelong consumer of intelligence."

The appointments "probably speak well for the continued fusion of effort between the intelligence community and the military to achieve our objectives in the war on terror," said Stephen Hadley, former White House national security adviser to George W. Bush. "People now see over the last 10 years how closely related on the battlefield intelligence and the military has become."

Jane Harman, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and, like Panetta, a former Democratic congresswoman from California, noted the two bureaucracies have been at odds in the past. Former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to boost the Pentagon's intelligence capabilities so it wouldn't be so dependent on the CIA.

"There's traditionally been tension between intelligence and defense. They haven't liked each other," Harman said. "The collaboration between Panetta and Petraeus really fits the needs right now."

Given the current upheaval in the Middle East, Harman said, the new team's job is nothing short of "developing a new American narrative for what our role is in the world."

Former Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam veteran once considered to be a possible Pentagon chief himself, said intelligence is now "thread throughout the fabric of all policy-making."

Soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said, must be "part-time warriors, part-time psychologists, part-time mayors" and much more.

Gates, 67, lauded by Democrats and Republicans for his 4? years of service in the Bush and Obama administrations, choked up in talking about the sacrifices of today's troops, including those who return wounded from the battlefield.

"I've done my best to care for them as though they were my own sons and daughters," he said, "and I will miss them deeply."

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button. Read more.

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Whoopie pies spark food fight between Pennsylvania, Maine

BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa. — It consists of two round, textbook-thick, palm-sized chocolate cakes that sandwich a creamy vanilla filling to create one sinfully rich snack. It's the whoopie pie, a snack so beloved that residents in two states have cooked up a good-natured tug of war over which place is its rightful home — Maine or Pennsylvania?

A baker makes whoopie pies at the S. Clyde Weaver market in East Petersburg, Pa.

A state legislator in Maine whipped up passions when he introduced a bill in January to make the whoopie pie Maine's official state dessert. Like a group of chefs tweaking a recipe, a legislative committee has since dropped "dessert" in favor of making the snack Maine's official "treat."

No matter — residents in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County say that's just baloney. Those round mounds of cakey goodness originated from kitchens of the area's Amish families, dating back generations, they say.

"We've had this thing going with the whoopie pie here for years and years and decades," John Smucker, CEO of the family-run company that owns the Bird-in-Hand Bakery, said as kitchen workers busily put together a batch of red velvet whoopie pies. "And all of a sudden they try to enter into the picture ... It's just a bunch of nonsense."

At the S. Clyde Weaver store in East Petersburg, staff piece together their version of the traditional chocolate-with-vanilla-filling variety.

By Justin David Graybill, AP

People hold signs at a whoopie pie rally held Feb. 19 at Penn Square in Lancaster, Pa.

"We do the original," baker Nancy Rexroad said. "When something's the original, you can't improve on it."

Maine state Rep. Paul Davis got things brewing with a bill to laud the whoopie pie. Davis got the idea from speaking with people at the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival, which last year attracted 4,000 visitors to Dover-Foxcroft, part of Davis' district.

Amos Orcutt, president of the Maine Whoopie Pie Association, was one of the Mainers who lobbied Davis to make a stand. In a phone interview, Orcutt, whose full-time job is president of the University of Maine Foundation, said he got steamed after reading a New York Times story on whoopie pies in March 2009 that cited food historians on the likelihood that the whoopie pie got its start in Pennsylvania.

"Having grown up in Maine, I used that well-worn term 'appalled and aghast,' so I started looking into it," Orcutt said. "A lot of our older alumni said, 'Oh no, I remember whoopie pies as a child."

Davis said he's been told Maine whoopie pies may date back as far as 1925. The website for Labadie's Bakery in Lewiston, Maine, says bakers there started making whoopie pies that year.

About the time he read the Times story, Orcutt said a local high school's mock legislature exercise proposed a "bill" to give the whoopie pie the official dessert designation.

"One thing led to another, and folks kept saying, 'Well, gee, you've got to do something about it,'" Orcutt said. Davis estimates that about 400 to 500 bakeries — from commercial operators to small-town markets to individuals who sell kitchen-baked goods at farmers markets — sell whoopie pies.

Word of Davis' bill reached the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau in Lancaster, and organizers there decided to answer back. They touted a website — www.saveourwhoopie.com — that likened Maine's actions to "confectionary larceny."

Area residents say Amish and other Pennsylvania Dutch families have passed down whoopie pie recipes for generations. Smucker said his bakery's recipe dates back at least 50 years to his grandmother's kitchen. Further west in Pennsylvania, the treats were also known in the Johnstown area as "gobs."

Dan Neff, owner and president of the S. Clyde Weaver market, said he suspected that one possible origin for the whoopie pie was home cooks looking for a creation to replace cream-filled doughnuts, which would be difficult to make in a home kitchen.

Smucker relayed another story passed on in Bird-in-Hand about the origin of the "whoopie pie" name in 1958, in which one in a group of young Amish women exclaimed "whoopie" when checking on the progress of her cakes in the oven. (Several variations of the story have made the rounds.)

It's also about that time, Smucker said, that whoopie pies started to become a more popular snack in the larger community.

Residents are backing their bakers. Visitors bureau spokesman Joel Cliff said about 1,700 signatures have been collected for an online petition "objecting to any other state, county or town claiming the whoopie pie as its own."

The Hershey Farm Restaurant and Inn, in Strasburg, makes over 100 different flavors for its Whoopie Pie Festival which started six years ago — or several years before the Maine event.

And 21-year-old Josh Graupera of Lancaster got so worked up after hearing about Maine's move that he and a friend organized a rally in downtown Lancaster on Feb. 19 attended by 100 people, including one person who carried a sign "Give Me Whoopie, or Give Me Death."

"We thought we would organize as many people as possible to stand up and say, 'You're not going to take our heritage from us,'" he said. "This is a Lancaster County tradition."

All sides say they're turning up the heat all in good fun.

"They can have their lobsters," Graupera said.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button. Read more.

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Air controllers to get more rest between shifts

The Federal Aviation Administration has acknowledged a widespread problem with tired controllers. In recent months there have been five instances of controllers dozing off while on duty. The latest happened early Saturday on a late-night shift in Miami.

STORY: Another air-traffic controller discovered sleeping on jobThe new rules will give controllers at least nine hours off between shifts, compared with eight now. Controllers won’t be able to swap shifts to get a long weekend unless there’s at least nine hours off from the end of one shift to the start of the other. More managers will be on duty during the early morning hours and at night to remind controllers that nodding off is unacceptable.

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