British Couple Freed By Pirates After 1 Year

A British couple kidnapped off their private yacht by Somali pirates more than a year ago were set free Sunday, ending one of the most drawn-out and dramatic hostage situations since the rash of piracy began off East Africa.

Paul and Rachel Chandler looked relaxed and smiled through a small ceremony held in the Somali town of Adado after their morning release. Rachel Chandler told The Associated Press by phone: "We are happy to be alive."

Pirates boarded the Chandler's 38-foot yacht during the night of Oct. 23, 2009, while sailing from the island nation of Seychelles. The couple, married for almost three decades, took early retirement about four years ago and were spending six-month spells at sea.

Despite an international flotilla of warships and aircraft, pirates continue to prowl the Indian Ocean off Somalia seemingly at will, pouncing on pleasure craft, fishing vessels and huge cargo ships.

Efforts to free the couple by the Somali diaspora, the weak Mogadishu-based government and Britain had failed until now. The couple flew from Adado to Mogadishu and were scheduled to continue on to Kenya's capital.

"We are feeling happy but you know we will not be free until we arrive in Nairobi," Paul Chandler told AP.

In Mogadishu, Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed met the couple and said the government was pleased they had been freed. He said the government had "exerted every humanly possible effort to bring you back to your loved ones."

Earlier in Adado, the couple attended a ceremony attended by several dozen people. Rachel Chandler wore a bright red dress and red scarf around her shoulders. Paul Chandler wore a mauve-colored short shirt and a green patterned sarong.

Abdi Mohamed Elmi, a Somali doctor who has regularly attended to the couple and was involved in efforts to free them, said the Chandlers will now need more specialized attention.

"They need counseling and rest to recover from the situation they have been living in for the last 13 months," Elmi said. "But now they seem OK and were happy this morning. They had showers, changed clothes and had breakfast with us smiling."

Despite the Chandlers' release, Somali pirates still hold close to 500 hostages and more than 20 vessels. The pirates typically only release hostages for multimillion dollar ransoms.

Conflicting reports from Somali officials about the Chandlers' release said either a $300,000 ransom for "expenses" was paid or that a $1 million ransom that was contributed to by the Somali diaspora was paid.

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Waking Up From Recession, Las Vegas Still Hung Over

In Las Vegas, there's no shortage of ways a visitor can spend money. But for many Las Vegas residents, it's been a different story. Since the recession hit nearly three years ago, some have fallen on tough times. Host Liane Hansen visited Las Vegas last week and, in the first of two reports, takes a look at the city's current economic state in the midst of a deep recession.

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Low-Skilled Workers Struggle For Jobs In Las Vegas

Across the United States, we're hearing about green shoots of economic recovery, but Las Vegas is still quite literally a desert. At 15 percent, the city's unemployment rate is one of the nation's highest.

A week ago, Lorraine Valdez lost her job at a printing company. For her, it was the latest in a series of employment woes that have hit very close to home.

Reeling off a list, Valdez says, "My sister just got laid off. My daughter. My son. My boyfriend. Myself. There's like 10 people, just immediate family, that are looking for work."

A Crowded Job Search

Valdez is eligible for unemployment, but what she really wants is a job.

On Tuesday, Valdez, her boyfriend, and her daughter waited in the lobby of Nevada Job Connect, a state-run program that pairs job-seekers with potential employers.

As counselors enter the waiting area to call in new clients, rows of job-seekers lift their attention from paperwork, their faces a mixture of expectation and exhaustion. Valdez's boyfriend, Michael, fidgets with several rolled-up forms.

"I took auto tech in school and I found out I was better with my hands," he says, "so hopefully I can try and find a job doing oil changes or cars or machinery."

Valdez's 24 year-old daughter, Alysha, sips an iced coffee. She says she's "preferably looking for a bartending job because of the tips and stuff. But I'll just take whatever."

The three live together with Alysha's younger daughter in a small apartment. Valdez says they've scraped together enough money for this month's rent and half of next month's.

"I'm good till December," Valdez says, "but after that, we might have to move in with my other daughter."

Taking Stock Of Job Skills

Finally, Valdez's number gets called. In the office of employment counselor Krista Marshall, they sort through the pros and cons of Valdez's resume: She has a 10th-grade education, but she's willing to pursue her GED. She has limited computer skills, but some valuable work experience.

"Marketing and merchandising, that might be a good fit for you as well," Marshall says.

Valdez has a clear, unvarnished view of her own history, and where it's taken her.

"I had babies really early in life. I had my first baby at 16," she says. "I started working immediately. I've been working since I was 14 and a half."

But work has changed for Valdez over the years. "These days, it's not really labor and hands-on kind of stuff," she says. "It's more technical and using your brain. I don't have a lot of education in that, so I need to go get that."

A Crisis For Workers

Valdez's situation is far from unique, says John Restrepo, who runs an economic and public policy research firm in Las Vegas.

"The city is seeing the end-result of public and private policies that did not focus on developing the workforce, developing our human capital," he says.

During the growth boom of the past few decades, low-skilled workers flocked to Las Vegas by the hundreds of thousands for jobs in construction, the service sector and retail. It was a rapid but quite shallow kind of economic growth — one that's evaporated quickly in the recession.

And now, Restrepo says, workers like Valdez face a few very limited options.

"They have to either retrain themselves or leave town," he says. "Cause if they're sitting around waiting for those large numbers of low-skill, low-wage jobs to come back to the resort industry or the construction industry, that's not going to happen."

But that's the pessimism of an economist. In the face of gloomy statistics, Valdez knows she has to press on.

"I can't just lay down," she says. "I gotta keep going. I gotta. If I do the right thing, something will happen. Some door some way will open up and give me a chance."

And in the short run, doors seem to be opening for Valdez. A few days later, she has an interview with a cab company and a lead on a seasonal gig in a toy store — something that might keep her going at least through the Christmas season.

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Eyeless Larvae 'See' With Full Body Nerve Cells

Fruit fly larvae like the dark, but they have a problem: They don't have eyes. So finding the dark might seem tricky. Now, scientists in California have shown that the larvae's entire bodies are covered with nerve cells that can detect light.

These light-detecting nerve cells are quite different from what we humans have in our eyes.

"We look around the world and we see color and movement and form, and we can think about what we're seeing," says David Berson, a neuroscientist at Brown University.

There are special cells inside our eyes called rods and cones that translate light into nerve signals that our brain can turn into pictures. But Berson and others have found that there are also cells in our eyes that can detect light but don't contribute to making those pictures. These cells simply detect light intensity. That, Berson says, is useful too.

"As we step into a bright environment, our pupils constrict," he says. That reflex is triggered by these non-image-forming light detectors.

Light-Sensing Bodies

But let's step away from the oculo-centric world of human light detection and imagine you're a fruit fly larva. Larva is the wormlike stage before the flies pupate and then turn into adults.

It's not hard to understand why a fruit fly larva prefers the dark — it's safe and tasty when you're burrowing down deep in a banana. If it starts getting light, you're going the wrong way.

Yuh Nung Jan, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, says scientists know that the larvae have primitive eyelike structures that appear to play a role in light detection. But one of his students became interested in another kind of nerve cell that seemed to spread over the larva's entire body. He tagged these cells with a molecule that glowed green whenever he shone a light on them.

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