The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the fighting concentrated near the command center in Mannagh air base, under rebel siege for months. It said rebels fired tank shells at the building.

The attack on Mannagh came after Syrian troops backed by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters captured the strategic central town of Qusair near the border with Lebanon on Wednesday.

Aleppo-based activist Mohammed Said said rebels failed to advance in the attack on the air base that continued until early Friday.

Syria's conflict started with largely peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad's regime in March 2011 but turned into a civil war.

More than 70,000 people have been killed, according to the United Nations.

The JFA said their embassy had to intervene to help with the coach's entry into the country on Wednesday when the team arrived from New Zealand to prepare for their 2014 World Cup qualifier against the Socceroos next week.

The two countries had signed an agreement before World Cup qualifiers to appoint a local representative to meet visiting teams at the airport to help with any logistical delays, the JFA said.

"The Jordanian football association had completed all the entry procedures for the entire members of the delegation in accordance with the diplomatic methods and obtained the formal visas to enter Australia to all members of the delegation," the FA said in a statement on their website (jfa.com.jo).

"The Jordanian football association will ask for official clarifications from the Australian football association and notify the international federation, FIFA, on the matter."

Football Federation Australia said they had sent a liaison officer and a security officer to meet the Jordanian delegation.

"FFA regrets any inconvenience caused, but the operations of Australian Customs is not a matter over which FFA has control," an FFA spokesman said in a statement.

"We respect the right of Customs to carry out its lawful duties as it sees fit."

Jordan and Australia are locked on seven points in Group B of the final round of Asian qualifying for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil, with the Socceroos in third spot on goal difference.

Japan (14 points) have already claimed one of the two automatic qualifying sports for the finals with second-placed Oman on nine points, though they have played one more game than Australia and Jordan.

The team finishing third in the five-team group can still qualify for Brazil, but must win a two-legged playoff against the equivalent finisher in Group A before another playoff against the fifth-placed team in South America. (Reporting by Ian Ransom in Melbourne and Greg Stutchbury in Wellington; Editing by Alison Wildey/Peter Rutherford)

Critics said the dark mysteries, mind-bending codes and history-laced tourism in "Inferno" will thrill Brown devotees, but panned the U.S. author for passages they said were more suited to a Hollywood film script than a novel.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon returns in this latest sequel to the blockbuster book and film franchise to follow a trail of clues about 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri across Florence, Venice and Istanbul in a race to save the world from a deadly artificial plague.

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin said the novel has a shaky opening that appears to put Brown's "brainiac franchise" in trouble, but recovers swiftly.

"To the great relief of anyone who enjoys him, Mr. Brown winds up not only laying a breadcrumb trail of clues about Dante (this is "Inferno," after all) but also playing games with time, gender, identity, famous tourist attractions and futuristic medicine," she wrote.

Sales of the book reached the highest level of customer pre-orders at retailer Waterstones since the release of Harry Potter author JK Rowling's adult fiction "The Casual Vacancy" last year.

The Independent newspaper's Boyd Tonkin called the novel "clunky but clever" in a review that asks whether Brown can make a go of one of the oldest plots in fiction - mad scientist threatens world with doom machine.

"Can Brown re-engineer these over-familiar devices of outbreak, pestilence and contagion into a viable organism? However clunkily, he can," Tonkin writes.

But Financial Times reviewer AN Wilson panned "Inferno" as a "nonsensical story" loaded with "scientific gobbledygook" and pointing out Brown's repetitive reliance on the fame of every historical site Langdon comes across.

"The prof and his doctor race past 'Florence's famed Cathedral', and Vasari's 'famed Studiolo', not forgetting the 'world-famous Uffizi Gallery'," Wilson wrote.

"Inferno reads less like a novel than a 'treatment' for a thriller film."

Back in America, USA Today's Brian Truitt offers Brown's novel three and a half stars out of four in a review that calls the book "one hell of a good read".

"Brown has a definite formula in place for putting Langdon through his paces, but watching him go through hell is about as close as a book can come to a summertime cinematic blockbuster," Truitt wrote.

Brown's religion-themed mystery novel "The Da Vinci Code," was published in 2003 and was made into a hit film starring Tom Hanks. It spent more than a year at the top the New York Times bestseller list.

(Reporting by Li-mei Hoang; Writing by Paul Casciato; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Evidence from these ancient periods suggests humans produced new tools, and used symbolism in wall engravings. The findings suggest a tight link between abrupt climate changes and the emergence of modern human traits, researchers say.

"We provide for the first time really good evidence that the occurrence and disappearance of these first finds of human innovation are linked to climate change," said study author Martin Ziegler, an earth science researcher at Cardiff University in Wales.

Before these periods of innovation, , with the most impressive technology being hand axes, Ziegler said. But during these wet periods, more advanced stone and bone tools appear in the fossil record, as well as painted symbols on cave walls that suggest the development of language.

Archaeologists have also found some of the first evidence of constructed plant beds during these periods, and shells thought to be worn as adornments or jewelry, Ziegler said. Among the most important periods analyzed in the study date to 71,000, and a period between 64,000 and 59,000 years ago. []

In the study, Ziegler's team reconstructed South Africa's climate over the last 100,000 years. They pieced together the record by analyzing sediment cores taken from the offshore region near the southeastern tip of Africa.

Chemicals within the sediment suggest how much rainfall fell nearby, Ziegler said, as well as other indicators of climate.

The climate reconstruction agrees with records from elsewhere in the world. During these lush periods in South Africa, much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa was experiencing a drought, while much of the Northern Hemisphere was very cold, Ziegler said. The study suggests that cold conditions in the north reoriented Atlantic Ocean currents, shifting the global monsoon belt with its torrential rains to the south, he said.

The study shows an association, but not a cause-and-effect relationship between wetter conditions and human innovation. But it may be that during these periods, drought farther north forcedinto South African refuges, leading to a "bottleneck" of competition, and cross-cultural fertilization, Ziegler said.

Future work may look at the connection between human populations elsewhere, and local climate shifts.

But insights from these locations in South Africa are vital, because they are thought to "re?ect the emergence of modern behaviors of innovation, language and cultural identity," the authors wrote in the study, published today (May 21) in the journal Nature Communications.

Emailor follow him onor. Follow us , or. Article originally on LiveScience.com.

Much as it was with last summers health care reform case, the immediate reaction will be on the results, with Americans quickly digesting the rulings, identifying the winners and losers, and debating the outcomes.

Each of these cases will be huge; together, they offer the justices the opportunity to put their stamp on the law of equality for decades to come. The precedents set in these cases will reverberate for years, shaping the meaning of the Constitutions promise of equality for all persons.

The key question is whether the Roberts Court will be able to produce a coherent vision of the Constitution, true to its text and history, which explains the results across these landmark cases.

The basic history at the heart of these cases is clear.

First, the guarantees of the 14th Amendment are universal. While the 14th Amendment was written in the aftermath of slavery, it protects all persons. In guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to all persons, the 14th Amendment was designed to guarantee equal rights and forbid arbitrary discrimination against any group or class of persons.

Second, this broad affirmation of equality was no accident. The Framers of the 14th Amendment considered and rejected proposed language that would have forbidden racial discrimination by the government and nothing else.

Far from establishing a constitutional ban on the use of race by the government, the Framers rejected proposals that would have forbidden racial classifications by the government and opted to write a sweeping guarantee of equal rights that protects all Americans, whether black or white, man or woman, heterosexual or gay.

Indeed, the Framers recognized that, after two centuries of state-sponsored slavery, the government had to take race into account in order to foster equality.

Third, the Framers of the 14th Amendment made a structural change in the powers of the federal government, giving Congress the power to protect fundamental rights and enforce the Constitutions new command of equality under the law. Cementing this change, the 15th Amendment gave Congress the power to protect the right to vote free from racial discrimination.

This text and history should be at the core of the arguments in these cases, but they were basically missing in action when these historic cases were argued this fall and spring.

On the right, the courts conservatives touted the idea that the Constitution is color-blind as the central meaning of the 14th Amendment.

Guided by Chief Justice Roberts view that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, the five conservative justices, after the oral argument in Fisher, seemed poised to strike down the University of Texas modest use of race in choosing a diverse student body, a ruling that would make a sea-change in the law that could affect universities across the nation.

The colorblindness theory is also at the heart of the conservative case against the Voting Rights Act. As Justice Scalia memorably put it during the Shelby County argument, the court had a constitutional responsibility to intervene to prevent perpetuation of racial entitlements.

Finally, it explains the basic conservative position, espoused most forcefully during oral argument in Perry by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia, that the 14th Amendment permits states to prohibit same-sex marriage. In their view, the 14th Amendment is primarily a guarantee of racial equality, therefore it permits states to deny to gay men and lesbians the right to marry, one of our most cherished fundamental rights, largely because states have, for a long time, had marriage laws that discriminated against gay men and lesbians.

However, the conservative justices have no answer to the basic, incontrovertible fact that the Framers of the 14th Amendment wrote the Equal Protection Clause as a broad guarantee of equality for all persons and not as a flat ban on the use of race by the government.

Indeed, as the courts conservatives have refused to recognize, the Framers of the 14th Amendment enacted the nations very first affirmative action programs. The universal equality of all persons under the law, not colorblindness, is what drives the 14th Amendment.

The courts liberal justices could have asked questions during oral argument to make these points central to the case.

For example, in Fisher, they could have asked Fishers attorney to square his argument with the fact that the Framers of the 14th Amendmentthe originators of affirmative actionrecognized that the government may use race to foster equality.

In Perry, they could have put the texts broad guarantee of equality for all persons front and center, making the point that a history of discrimination does not make discrimination constitutional.

In Shelby County, they could have forced the Alabama county challenging the Voting Rights Act to own up to the fact that the Constitution expressly grants Congress the power to prevent racial discrimination in voting.

But they did not. Instead, by and large, they focused their attention on the specifics of the cases and the courts past precedents. This basic posture left them on the defensive, particularly in a case, like Fisher, where the conservatives are intent on changing the law. Thus, in Fisher, when Chief Justice Roberts and others made powerful arguments attacking the concept of critical mass at the heart of the courts past precedents permitting universities to use race to achieve diversity, the courts liberal justices had little to fall back on.

The end result was that the courts progressive justices missed an opportunity to show that the Constitutionthe document as opposed to the doctrinewas very much on their side in these landmark cases.

While the core principles at the heart of the 14th Amendment are clearuniversal equality of all persons; the modest use of race to foster equality; and congressional power to protect fundamental rightsthe courts case law is, in places, more muddled, providing an opening for conservatives on the Roberts Court this term to rework, reshape, or even abandon longstanding prior rulings.

The test for both sides in these critical cases is whether their opinions can be squared with the Constitutions first principles when it comes to the meaning of equality.

Doug Kendall is founder and president and David H. Gans is director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program of , a think tank, law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitutions text and history.

Recent Constitution Daily Stories

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton, already the front-runner in the minds of many Democrats for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, is writing a memoir about world affairs and her time as secretary of state that will likely fuel more speculation about her political future.

The presidential prospects of Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, are a subject of feverish speculation in Washington and elsewhere as Democrats look to see over the horizon past President Barack Obama.

The book, her fifth, is to be published next year, and a tour to promote the memoir in 2014 would serve only to generate more guessing about her plans for 2016.

Her inner circle insists Clinton has made no decision one way or the other. This has not stopped the formation of a "Ready for Hillary" political action committee to promote her potential candidacy and seek volunteers and monetary contributions.

Among the subjects Clinton will explore are the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, diplomacy pertaining to Iran and North Korea and relations with U.S. allies.

"Hillary Clinton's extraordinary public service has given her a unique perspective on recent history and the challenges we face," said Jonathan Karp, president and publisher of the Simon & Schuster Publishing Group who will edit Clinton's as-yet untitled book.

The book will also address trends in economics, energy and climate change, democracy and human rights, the critical role of women and girls, technology and innovation and health and human development, Simon & Schuster said on Thursday.

When she left the State Department February 1, Clinton, 66, had been suffering from a blood clot near her brain. She said she needed some time to rest and to settle on ways she can help women and children in the United States and around the world.

She is now re-emerging. Last month she announced that she now supports marriage rights for gay Americans. Back when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 she had backed civil unions for gay couples.

On Tuesday night in Washington, she spoke about global women's rights at an event held by the non-governmental organization Vital Voices, sharing the stage with a potential 2016 rival, Vice President Joe Biden.

She will give her first paid speech in Dallas on April 24, the day before she attends ceremonies there marking the opening of George W. Bush's presidential library.

Polls show Clinton as the runaway frontrunner at this stage among Democrats for their party's 2016 presidential nomination and that she leads all potential Republican contenders, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

(Additional reporting by Chris Michaud in New York and Susan Heavey in Washington; editing by Jackie Frank)

The 44-year-old South African, who pulled out of the PGA Tour's Wells Fargo Championship and Players Championship earlier this month due to the same ailment, will be replaced in the field by a successful qualifier for the season's second major.

Goosen, a seven-times champion on the PGA Tour who is known for his unflappable temperament and good putting on fast greens, won the U.S. Open in 2001 at Southern Hills and again in 2004 at Shinnecock Hills.

The 2013 U.S. Open will be played at Merion from June 13-16. (Reporting by Mark Lamport-Stokes in Dublin, Ohio; Editing by Frank Pingue)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Merck & Co's experimental insomnia drug moved a step closer to U.S. approval on Wednesday after a panel of medical experts said it is effective and safe at lower doses.

The advisory panel was convened to help the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decide whether to approve the drug, suvorexant, which would be the first in a new class of sedatives that block chemicals in the brain called orexins that help keep people awake. The drugs are designed to help people fall asleep and stay asleep.

On Monday, the FDA's internal reviewers published a report expressing concern about suvorexant's potential to cause next-day sleepiness and impaired driving. They asked the committee to consider whether patients should be started at a lower dose than that recommended by Merck.

Merck proposed that elderly patients start by taking 15 milligrams of the drug and increase that to 30 if necessary. The company recommended non-elderly adults start on 20 milligrams and increase to 40 milligrams if needed.

On Wednesday, the FDA reiterated its opinion that there was little evidence in Merck's data to show that the higher dose was more effective than the lower dose, and considerable evidence to show it was less safe.

The FDA's reviewers pointed to an increase in the risk - especially at the higher doses - of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, impaired driving, and severe sleep disturbances.

Speaking for the FDA, Dr. Ronald Farkas noted cases in which patients had reported sleep paralysis and terrifying hallucinations. He also expressed the agency's concern about the drug's impact on driving.

"What we are trying to prevent is criminal prosecution of patients taking their drug as prescribed," he said.

The FDA's views were echoed by those of several patient advocacy groups.

"Like its predecessors, suvorexant's marginal benefit in extending overnight sleep time by a few minutes is achieved at the expense of prolonged, next-day drowsiness, with potentially fatal consequences," said Dr. Sammy Almashat, a researcher with Public Citizen's Health Research Group who noted that suvorexant stays in the body longer than all but one other sleep drug.

Still, the panel voted 13 to 3, with one abstention, that the drug could be used safely at the 15 and 20 milligram doses. It voted 8-7, with two abstentions, that the drug is not safe at 30 and 40 milligrams.

LOWER DOSE

Merck celebrated the vote, saying in a statement that it was "excited about the potential of suvorexant as a new and different approach to treating insomnia."

The FDA is not bound to follow the advice of its advisory panels but typically does so.

The FDA had asked the panel to consider whether patients should start with a 10 milligram dose, saying data from a smaller trial showed that amount might work for some people. Merck disputed that, saying 10 milligrams would not be effective.

The FDA also asked the panel if Merck should conduct an additional trial to further evaluate a 10 milligram dose. The panel voted against that. Some agreed that 10 milligrams would not be effective. Others agreed in principal with a lower starting dose, but most said a new trial would not add meaningfully to the information already in hand.

"When you have something new you don't know everything you would like to know," said Dr. Christian Guilleminault, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. However, he added: "I'm not sure that doing another study is going to bring us much more."

The FDA's concerns come amid a broader review of the safety of sleeping pills following hundreds of reports of driving accidents involving people taking zolpidem, the active ingredient in Sanofi SA's Ambien.

About 60 million prescriptions for these drugs were written in the United States in 2011, according to healthcare research firm I.M.S. Of those, roughly 40 million contained zolpidem.

In January, the FDA told drugmakers they should lower the recommended dose of zolpidem in women to 5 milligrams from 10 for immediate-release products including Ambien, Edluar and Zolpimist. The agency said doses for extended-release products should also be cut in half.

Dr. Jason Todd, a panel member and staff neurologist at NorthEast Neurology in Concord, North Carolina, said patients are adjusting to the lower dosing recommendations for Ambien.

"Before the recent changes I almost never saw a patient who would take 5 milligrams and stay with it," he said. "Now that 5 milligrams is recommended people are OK with 5 milligrams."

The panel's ultimate recommendation surprised some analysts who had expected, based on the FDA's review, that the meeting would be more contentious.

"Based on the overall discussion today and the voting of the panel, we believe that the probability of FDA approval for suvorexant has gone up meaningfully," Mark Schoenebaum, an analyst at ISI Group, said in a research note.

Having said that, he said: "We admit that predicting a final FDA decision is difficult."

(Reporting by Toni Clarke in Washington; Editing by Alden Bentley, Leslie Adler and Edmund Klamann)

New research found that when people have positive feelings toward climate change, such as hopefulness or excitement, they are more likely to avoid seeking information about it. Those who felt concerned, anxious or depressed about the topic, on the other hand, were more likely to seek information about it, new research shows.

The study, published recently in the journal , surveyed 736 undergraduate students. After asking them how they felt about the topic, the study then looked to see how likely they were to seek and gather more knowledge about it, said study author Janet Yang, a researcher at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

While 63 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, 16 percent say they don't think that it is, according to the . The rest are undecided.

Most people51 percentalso say they don't think global warming is caused by people, or don't know, according to a Pew Research Center Survey. In other words, they do not know that manmade carbon dioxide is increasing worldwide temperatures, the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The most surprising result to Yang was that she uncovered a social "norm" to engage in information avoidanceif a person thought their peers were more likely to avoid information on the topic, then they were more likely to avoid information on it as well. Typically, as is the case with other environmental issues, social normswhat you believe other people want you to dolead people to seek more information, not less, Yang said.

"If you believe people think you should know more, you are more likely to seek out information," she said.

In this case, if a person spends time with others who avoid information about climate change, then they are more likely to do the same, she said.

The research suggests that when trying to inform people or get them to care about and do something regarding global warming, it may be useful to stir up some kind of emotional response.

"Stirring up emotion and using more visual story-tellingbased on the study I think that'd be effective at getting people to seek more information," she said. "We need to deliver a sense of urgency that can effectively stimulate emotional responses to this issue among the audience," the authors continued in the paper.

It could also be useful to portray information-seeking as responsible and favorable. Furthermore, it's important that people understand that they can do something about it; those who thought their actions have no effect were more likely to avoid seeking information, Yang said.

"Risk communication about climate change might benefit from arousing a sense of curiosity or debunking false beliefs about current knowledge so that people are not complacent with what they already know," the authors wrote.

Yang said that she cares deeply about climate change, because it will have "a huge impact on our generation and future generations." When she confronts climate change deniers, she tries to convince them that it's a real problem, if she thinks it's appropriate. But if it's a casual or dinner conversation, "I don't always engage, because I don't want to make people feel uncomfortable," she said. "But perhaps I should."

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) - With Washington state about to embark on a first-of-its-kind legal market for recreational marijuana, the budding ranks of new cannabis growers face a quandary over what to do with the excess stems, roots and leaves from their plants.

Susannah Gross, who owns a five-acre farm north of Seattle, is part of a group experimenting with a solution that seems to make the most of marijuana's appetite-enhancing properties - turning weed waste into pig food.

Four pigs whose feed was supplemented with potent plant leavings during the last four months of their lives ended up 20 to 30 pounds heavier than the half-dozen other pigs from the same litter when they were all sent to slaughter in March.

"They were eating more, as you can imagine," Gross said.

Giving farm animals the munchies is the latest outcome of a ballot measure passed by Washington voters in November making their state one of the first to legalize the recreational use of pot. The other was Colorado. Both were among about 20 states with medical marijuana laws already on their books.

The federal government still classifies cannabis as an illegal narcotic, and the Obama administration has not yet said what actions, if any, it will take in answer to the newly passed recreational weed statutes.

Matt McAlman, the medical marijuana grower who provided the pot leavings for Gross' pigs, says he hopes the idea expands with the likely impending expansion of Washington state's marijuana industry.

"We can have pot chickens, pot pigs, grass-fed beef," he said.

Draft regulations issued last week to govern the burgeoning recreational-use industry seem to leave open that possibility. The rules dictate that marijuana plant waste must be "rendered unusable prior to leaving a licensed producer or processor's facility," adding that mixing it with food waste would be acceptable.

Gross' pigs were butchered by William von Schneidau, who has a shop at the famous Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. In March, von Schneidau held a "Pot Pig Gig" at the market, serving up the marijuana-fed pork as part of a five-course meal.

He quickly sold out the remaining weed-fed meat at his shop but plans another pot-pig feast later this summer, he said.

"Some say the meat seems to taste more savory," he said.

The results beg the question of whether pot-fed pork contains any measurable traces of THC, the mind-altering chemical ingredient in cannabis.

The European Food Safety Authority reported in 2011 that "no studies concerning tolerance or effects of graded levels of THC in food-producing animals have been found in literature."

The agency also noted that "no data are available concerning the likely transfer of THC ... to animal tissues and eggs following repeated administration."

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Bob Burgdorfer)