Al-Shabab, the rebels linked to al-Qaida, have discouraged many parents from getting their children inoculated against polio, a disease that is an incipient problem in this Horn of Africa nation long plagued by armed conflict and disease, according to health workers who spoke to The Associated Press.

The al-Shabab extremists have been pushed out of virtually all of Somalia's cities and face continued military pressure from African Union and government troops. Health workers are gaining access to more children to give the life-saving polio vaccine. But some mothers and fathers are refusing the inoculation, apparently heeding the advice of the Islamic militants who warn that the vaccination exercise is part of a foreign conspiracy to kill or weaken Somali children.

Vaccination workers who walked door to door in the capital, Mogadishu, were turned away by some parents who often didn't state why they objected to the vaccination. One man told the workers to leave immediately because they were carrying "toxic things."

Al-Shabab militants are spreading rumors against the polio vaccine in communities where they still have some influence, alleging the vaccine can make girls barren and that it is manufactured in Christian countries, said a senior United Nations health worker in Somalia, who insisted on anonymity because he isn't authorized to speak about the vaccination program.

Al-Shabab did not respond to questions about the allegations that they are spreading rumors against the vaccination campaign.

"Al-Shabab are paranoid about potential infiltration by spy agencies disguised as humanitarian workers. That's probably a principal reason for discouraging vaccination," said Abdi Aynte, the director of the Somali-based think-tank Heritage Institute for Policy Studies.

Somali government officials say the numbers of parents who reject the immunization campaign are far fewer than those embracing it, but health workers don't want to leave any unvaccinated. They warn that it is important for every child to get the polio vaccine in order to eradicate in Somalia the disease that causes limb paralysis and can be fatal.

"It's a big challenge," said Safiyo Mohamed, a vaccination worker in Mogadishu. She said in rejecting the vaccine some families had brought up the case in Libya where foreign health workers including five Bulgarian nurses faced charges of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV in 1990s.

The polio vaccine, which is administered orally, is recommended for children aged 10 and under, but some parents are questioning why a 10-year-old needs protection against polio, said Biyod Yasin, a vaccination worker at Mogadishu's Hamarweyne Mother Child Centre.

At a world vaccine summit in Abu Dhabi last month, global health leaders and philanthropists presented a six-year, $5.5 billion plan that they hope will eradicate all types of polio disease.

The World Health Organization says Somalia is experiencing an outbreak of polio. WHO reported earlier this month that a 4-year-old Somali girl near the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya and two of her contacts tested positive for polio, the first confirmed cases in Kenya since July 2011. Four polio cases have been confirmed in Somalia so far this year, including two in Mogadishu. A vaccination campaign targeting 440,000 children began here on May 14, and a second round of the campaign that started Tuesday aim to vaccinate 644,000 children under the age of 10.

Health workers say they vaccinate hundreds each week despite the resistance. That the health workers can move around at all is a stunning turnaround in Somalia, which when al-Shabab radicals ran most of the country refused western medical care and food aid to desperate Somalis. The extremists imposed a strict form of Muslim Shariah law and carried out public whippings and beheadings.

With many regions of Somalia, including the capital, Mogadishu, under the rule of the moderate Muslim government and enjoying relative peace for the first time in 20 years, health care workers are expanding vaccination programs throughout the country. Health workers can now reach 40 percent of south-central Somalia, where the influence of the hardline Islamic insurgents is highest. Three years ago, health workers could access only 15 to 20 percent of that territory.

The years of conflict in Somalia has resulted in the country having child and maternal mortality rates that are among the highest in the world. One in every five Somali children dies before their fifth birthday, according to WHO, often for reasons including parental illiteracy and negligence.

"I don't want any of my children injected with that thing which I don't know what it is made of," said Nurto Hussein, a mother of seven who lives in Mogadishu. "They make the children sick instead of curing them. I put my trust in Allah."

James Loney homered twice, four Tampa Bay pitchers combined on a one-hitter and the Rays endured nearly five hours of rain delays before beating the Cleveland Indians 9-2 for their sixth straight win in a game that ended at 2:53 a.m.

Scheduled to start at 7:05 p.m., the game was delayed three times before finally resuming at 12:13 a.m. 2 hours, 39 minutes after the third and lengthiest delay. Before that there was uncertainty, confusion and, of course, rain.

"It's a very awkward way to do this, "said Maddon, who spent the weather stoppages monitoring the storms on an iPad in his office. "But if you're going to stick around that long you might as well win."

The teams were delayed a total of 4:49, long enough for the calendar to change before nine innings were played. It ended just before 3 a.m., giving the teams a short turnaround before a 1:05 start on Saturday.

It was the majors' third marathon game in two days. On Thursday night, Kansas City and St. Louis were delayed an hour before the first pitch and another 4 hours, 32 minutes by rain before the Royals beat Cardinals 4-2 well after 3 in the morning.

And about 20 minutes after the Rays got their final out, the San Diego Padres finished off a 4-3, 17-inning victory over the Toronto Blue Jays that took 4:58.

Afterward, Tampa Bay's Evan Longoria went on Twitter to thank the few thousand fans who hung around until the end.

"A sincere thanks to each and every fan that stuck around to watch that game!" Longoria wrote. "You all made it fun. (hash)ClevelandRocks."

Matt Joyce and Loney connected for two-run homers in Tampa's five-run third inning off Scott Barnes (0-1), who replaced starter Corey Kluber following the weather stoppages. Loney added a solo shot to make it 6-2 in the eighth.

Jamey Wright (1-1) came in for unbeaten Tampa starter Matt Moore and pitched three innings for the Rays, who went an AL-best 18-10 in May. Cleveland's only hit was Ryan Raburn's RBI double in the fifth off Josh Lueke.

Cesar Ramos pitched three hitless innings for his first career save.

The teams had little choice but wait out the long delays. With a forecast for heavy rain on Saturday and Sunday, crew chief Fieldin Culbreth and the umpires figured they had to try to get in one game with the possibility the whole weekend could get washed out. The teams aren't scheduled to meet again this season.

The game was delayed 1 hours, 57 minutes at the start, 13 minutes in the second inning and then for another 2:39 before it started again in front of a crowd that began as more than 30,000 and dwindled to just a few thousand, who waited it out and were rewarded for their patience.

At about 11 p.m., Maddon, Indians manager Terry Francona, Cleveland general manager Chris Antonetti and two umpires did a walking tour of the saturated outfield grass to inspect the conditions. Not long after that, the overworked grounds crew was summoned again to get the field ready and at 12:13 a.m. Wright threw a pitch to Nick Swisher.

At one point during the third delay, Maddon, with the hood of his blue sweatshirt pulled over his head to try and stay dry, took a stroll through the soggy outfield and thought it might be unplayable.

But in the end, he felt Culbreth and his crew handled things well.

"It was very confusing to everybody," Maddon said. "Fieldin and the boys, umpiring wise, they were handed this. The group here felt the Indians really wanted to play the game tonight."

Francona, too, praised the umpires.

"I thought they handled it very well," he said.

After thunderstorms blasted through the area, the 7:05 p.m. start was pushed back to 9:02 p.m. and the teams took the field under threatening skies.

Kluber got two outs in the second inning when play was halted by rain at 9:18 as Culbreth ordered the grounds crew to put the tarp on the field. But within seconds of the infield being covered, the rain stopped and the game was re-started just 13 minutes later.

Kluber gave up a walk and got Desmond Jennings to line out for the last out in the second when the rain resumed after three minutes of play and the game was stopped again at 9:34 p.m.

Both Maddon and Francona met separately with the umpires as fans scrambled to stay dry. The Indians announced they reduced $1 dollar hot dogs to 50 cents as a way of thanking fans for enduring the rain. During the third delay, fans watched out-of-town games on the giant scoreboard and cheered when Baltimore beat the first-place Detroit Tigers on a walkoff homer, moving the Indians into a temporary tie atop the AL Central.

Joyce said players wondered if they would ever take the field.

"We were actually in the dark pretty much the whole night," he said. "It's tough. A lot of guys were ready to go home and play a doubleheader (Saturday)."

The Rays came out swinging after the lengthy delays as Joyce and Loney homered off Barnes in the third to give Tampa Bay a 5-0 lead.

Yunel Escobar singled with one out, and with two outs, Joyce drove Barnes' pitch 411 feet over the wall in right-center for his 10th homer. Kelly Johnson walked and scored on Longoria's double, and Loney followed with his sixth homer, a shot that drew boos from the doused fans hanging around.

Held without a hit through four innings by Moore and the journeyman Wright, the Indians cut it to 5-2 in the fifth on a sacrifice fly by Yan Gomes and Raburn's two-out RBI double.

NOTES: It was Loney's first multihomer game since Sept. 7, 2007. ... Maddon said there has been discussion about starting Moore on Sunday, built it's more likely he will next in Detroit next week. ... Browns offensive linemen, including Pro Bowler Joe Thomas, visited the Indians clubhouse before the game and then crowded into the dugout to stay out of the rain. Thomas couldn't convince one of the rookies to do a belly slide across the tarp for money. ... Indians closer Chris Perez, on the disabled list with a sore right shoulder, will be reevaluated Sunday before the next step in his rehab is mapped out. ... Rays RHP Alex Colome, who made his major league debut Thursday in Miami, was optioned to Triple-A Durham. LHP Jeff Beliveau was recalled, but later optioned so Rays RHP Chris Archer can make his season debut Saturday.

People in 14th-century London consumed a variety of texts, often linked together in bound volumes. Arthur Bahr, a literature professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores these habits in his new book "Fragments and Assemblages" (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

"usually survive as fragments, and at the same time, they are also very often assemblages of multiple, disparate works," Bahr told . The interesting question is whythese works were grouped together in that way, Bahr said.

The printing press hadn't yet been invented, so people copied manuscripts by hand and bound them together, often including many different kinds of text in a single volume. []

For example, the chamberlain for the city of London in the 1320s, Andrew Horn, possessed bound manuscripts that contained a mixture of legal treatises, French poetry and descriptions of London, among other things.

But Horn's bound manuscripts weren't just a random hodgepodge, Bahr said. Rather, Horn juxtaposed different texts to create "literary puzzles" for the reader. Placing poems next to legal documents portrayed law and literature as a kind of yin and yang, Bahr said.

The custom of cobbling together many different texts might explain the origin of"The Canterbury Tales," a linked set of stories that could be read in different orders. Chaucer arranged them in a loose sequence, but he also invited reader participation, Bahr said.

Consider the "Miller's Tale," a somewhat crude comedy in "The Canterbury Tales" about a miller, his wife and her lover. In preparing to tell the story, Chaucer warns the reader that if they don't like dirty stories, they should skip to another section in the book. More than just a joke, the warning encourages readers to view the text in a new order. Skipping around in text may not seem new, but it is surprising, Bahr pointed out.

Medieval manuscripts also reveal the multilingual culture of 14th-century England, Bahr said. Chaucer wrote in English, but Latin was the language of the church and state, while French was the language of the upper classes. Welsh and other regional languages were also widely spoken.

Medieval scholars praise Bahr's book for unifying the divided time period and showing how the production of literature was an ongoing process.

The findings also reveal that today's sophisticated consumers of diverse global media may not be so different from consumers in the Middle Ages.

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The draft decision by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) means Eylea will compete in Britain with Novartis's established product Lucentis as a treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Novartis already has a separate discount scheme in place for Lucentis. The size of the discounts offered on both drugs is commercially confidential.

Eylea and Lucentis are both injected into the eye to counter wet AMD, which affects a tiny part of the retina at the back of the eye.

NICE decides if drugs should be paid for on the state health service and its decisions are followed closely both by drug companies and health authorities in other countries. NICE said on Friday it expected to publish final guidance on Eylea in August 2013.

Germany's Bayer and U.S.-based Regeneron are collaborating on Eylea, with Regeneron maintaining exclusive rights in the United States and Bayer - which licensed the drug from its partner - marketing it elsewhere.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

With at least 10in one night this week leveling neighborhoods, killing six and injuring dozens it might be tempting to call the twisters yet another instance of climate-fueled weather. But not so fast.

While most climate scientists agree that global warming is driving record heat waves, widespread drought, heavy rain and floods, intense hurricanes, and even monster snowstorms, tornadoes at least for now are a different story.

"With tornadoes, what we don't know is as much as what we do know,'' said Michael Wehner, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Global warming is making wet places wetter and dry places drier, and creating moisture-laden air that fuels hurricanes and snowstorms, making them much worse than they otherwise would be in a climate unchanged by human behaviors. []

But we can't necessarily say the same the same about tornadoes, at least not yet. The tornado connection to global warming is tenuous, and for several reasons. Chief among them is the fact that climate change apparently affects the two major factors influencing tornadoes energy and wind shear in completely opposite ways.

Tornadoes, violently rotating columns of air spawned by thunderstorms, occur when available energy warm, moist air at low levels and cold, drier air above meets vertical wind shear, which provides the source of the rotation. Climate change enhances the former, also known as "convective available potential energy,'' or CAPE, and diminishes the latter.

As the planet warms, "the energy goes up, and the shear goes down,'' said Harold Brooks, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory. "Thus, we have one ingredient expected to become more favorable and another expected to become less favorable.''

Furthermore, the enormous natural variability in tornadoes makes it difficult to sort out any viable climate trends. Also, what seems like an increase in excessive violent tornado activity in recent years may in fact be the result of other factors. []

"Tornadoes are small, and the observational record shows increases that are simply due to more people in more places seeing them,'' said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist in the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

There also is a dearth of information about what happens to tornadoes over time. Tornado reporting and record-keeping practices have been fraught with problems. "Our database for evaluating long-term changes in tornadoes is pretty awful, so we really don't know how tornadoes might be changing,'' said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground.

Brooks agreed. "Tornado data collection has never been intended as a climate data set,'' he said. "Large changes have taken place in reporting procedures that make interpretation of the past very difficult.''

Tornadoes can be terrifying and destructive, causing about 70 deaths and 1,500 injuries in the United States annually, according to NOAA. The strongest ones feature rotating winds of more than 250 miles per hour; they can be as wide as 1 mile and stay on the ground for distances as far as 50 miles. The year 2011 brought an onslaught of vicious tornadoes, including a catastrophic twister that struck Joplin, Mo., in May, killing 161 people and destroying a third of the city.

They can happen anywhere there is enough moist air at low levels, cold dry air aloft and strong vertical wind shear. "Tornadoes are spawned in particular environments that occur more in the United States than anywhere else,'' Trenberth said. "It relates to the Rockies running north-south and the Gulf of Mexico being where it is. "Tornadoes are small in scale and not modeled in global models,'' he added, explaining why it is so difficult to link them to climate change. "Meteorologists can find two storms that look almost identical and in similar environments, and one spawns a tornado and one doesn't, so there is a large element of chance, evidently.''

Tornadoes are further complicated by the fact that certain small-scale processes friction at the ground, and where and how much rain evaporates within the parent thunderstorm also are critical. "Those are beyond our large-scale observational capabilities or predictions,'' Brooks said. []

No one knows whether tornadoes have increased in number or intensity, since the aforementioned changes in reporting practices "make the intensity question harder to answer,'' Brooks said, adding, "If you take the dataset of reports at face value, it appears intensity has decreased over the years, but there are a number of things that have led to lower ratings for the strongest tornadoes.''

There always have been strong tornadoes, but the intensity picture has become further muddled because "warnings are so much better now and houses are constructed better," Trenberth said.

Most climate scientists believe that clearer answers will be forthcoming with better climate modeling tools and patience.

"Better understanding of the relationships between the large-scale environments and tornadoes would help, but the big thing is waiting long enough to get better trend estimates,'' Brooks said.

Wehner agreed. "We need bigger computers, and better models,'' he said. "But what we really need is time. We don't yet have an answer. But, that doesn't mean we aren't thinking about it.''

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(Reuters) - A Lebanese immigrant in Chicago on Thursday was sentenced to 23 years in federal prison for plotting an attack and planting what he thought was a bomb near the city's Wrigley Field baseball park.

Sami Samir Hassoun, 25, pleaded guilty last year to charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and an explosive device after he placed what he thought was a homemade bomb in a garbage can in the north-side neighborhood during a busy Saturday night, according to court records.

He told an FBI informant and undercover agents he wanted to expose the city's inadequate security measures and embarrass then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley into resigning, the criminal complaint against him said. It gave no further details as to motive.

In a series of planning meetings secretly tape-recorded by the FBI, Hassoun suggested various attacks including unleashing a virus on the city, poisoning its water supply, bombing the landmark Willis Tower skyscraper, attacking police officers or assassinating the mayor.

On September 18, 2010, undercover agents gave him a fake bomb in a backpack and told him that it was capable of wiping out half a city block, court documents said.

"The thought of what might have happened if it was real is horrific," said U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman, who presided over the sentencing, in a statement released by the U.S. Attorney's office.

Hassoun then drove to Wrigleyville, the neighborhood surrounding Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs. The area is known for its bars and restaurants and is densely populated, with blocks of apartment buildings.

He dropped the backpack into a trash can, before being arrested by law enforcement agents, according to the complaint.

Gettleman ordered Hassoun placed on five years of supervised release following his prison term and said he will be subject to deportation when he is released, according to the statement.

The sentencing comes six weeks after Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar allegedly set off two pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line, killing three people and injuring 264.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being held at a prison hospital west of Boston awaiting trial on charges that carry the possibility of the death penalty. His brother was killed during a shootout with police.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Lisa Shumaker)

The Mortgage Bankers Association said interest rates on fixed 30-year mortgage rates surged 12 basis points to average 3.90 percent in the week ended May 24. It was the highest level since May of last year and the biggest jump in 14 months.

The rise sent the seasonally adjusted index of mortgage application activity down 8.8 percent as refinancing applications tumbled 12.3 percent. It was the biggest drop in refinance applications this year as demand fell to the lowest level since December.

The refinance share of total mortgage activity decreased to 71 percent of applications from 74 percent the week before.

Still, the gauge of loan requests for home purchases, a leading indicator of home sales, rose 2.6 percent, suggesting potential homeowners may have sought to lock in a still-low rate.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said last week the Fed could scale back the pace of its bond purchases at one of the "next few meetings" if the economic recovery looked set to maintain forward momentum. The comments sowed concerns among investors that the Fed's ultra-loose policy could end sooner than expected.

Encouraging economic data last week also contributed to that view as home sales rose and durable goods orders improved.

"Rates rose in response to stronger economic data and an increasing chance that the Fed may soon begin to taper their asset purchases," Mike Fratantoni, MBA's vice president of research and economics, said in a statement.

The Fed is currently buying $85 billion a month in bonds and mortgage-backed securities as it seeks to keep borrowing rates low.

The low rates have helped the housing market, luring in buyers off the sidelines. The recovery in housing has been gaining traction since last year and data on Tuesday showed home prices saw their biggest annual increase in nearly seven years in March.

Rates had already been on the rise before Bernanke's comments and have gained 31 basis points since the start of the month.

The survey covers over 75 percent of U.S. retail residential mortgage applications, according to MBA.

(Reporting by Leah Schnurr; Editing by Diane Craft)

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Citizen scientists participating in the Space Warps project, which launches Wednesday (May 8), could help shed light on the mysterious pervading the universe and aid research into a number of other cosmic phenomena, organizers said.

"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how its distributed," Phil Marshall, a physicist at Oxford University in England and one of Space Warps' leaders, said in a statement. []

"Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about , including how many very-low-mass stars, such as brown dwarfs which arent bright enough to detect directly in many observations are lurking in distant galaxies," Marshall added.

The Space Warps project asks armchair astronomers to spot gravitational lenses in hundreds of thousands of deep-sky images. The human brain is more adept than computers at picking out patterns, and amateurs can do it about as well as professional astronomers can, organizers said.

Participants don't have to spend hours peering at their computers to make a meaningful contribution, Space Warps leaders said.

"Even if individual visitors only spend a few minutes glancing over 40 or so images each, thats really helpful to our research we only need a handful of people to spot something in an image for us to say that its worth investigating," Oxford's Aprajita Verma, another of Space Warps' principal investigators, said in a statement.

Space Warps is affiliated with the Zooniverse, a broad citizen-science website that helps connect the public with projects in a wide range of fields. The Zooniverse began in July 2007 with the launch of , which asks participants to classify galaxies according to their shape.

"The Zooniverse has always been about connecting people with the biggest questions, and now, with Space Warps, we're taking our first trip to the early universe," team member Arfon Smith, director of citizen science at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, said in a statement. "We're excited to let participants and planetarium visitors be the first to see some of the rarest astronomical objects of all."

You can join the Space Warps project starting on Wednesday by going to . Visitors to the site will get a quick tutorial on what to look for, and then the hunt will be on.

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