Chicago school closings: Shuttering these institutions is shortsighted, says one local mom

Chicago school closings are the largest number of school closings in the history of the country, and media reports haven't captured the anguish and dismay of more than 30,000 children and parents as they've lost their educational institutions.

By Hannah Hayes,?Guest Blogger / May 31, 2013

Chicago school closings brought out community activists in protest of the move by the city.

Hannah Hayes

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In my neighborhood tonight, chaos will reign. My neighbor, President Obama, will be staying in his part-time home just around the corner from me in Chicago. His occasional visits bring limited parking, random ID checks, and bomb sniffing dogs to our front lawn.

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But on warm summer nights, the street takes on a carnival-like atmosphere. Neighbors come out to chat and I sometimes get to meet people from the next block. The Secret Service agents are friendly enough, and when the barricades go up and traffic halts, people get out of their cars to stretch and enjoy the novelty of the president driving down this normally quiet residential street. More often than not, we recognize someone and invite them to join us for a drink on our stoop.

It can be inconvenient if you happen to be walking your dog without identification. But he was once our neighbor, and it?s all a part of living in this neighborhood.?

But I?m not feeling all that benevolent these days, and I may forego my usual stoop-sitting tonight. The truth is, a much more serious chaos has reigned in too many of Chicago's communities following last week's announcement that 50 Chicago neighborhood schools would be closed.

The closings made national news briefly, just like the murder of Hadiya Pendleton, the sparkly teen wielding a baton in the inaugural parade for President Obama, her Chicago neighbor. She was also a neighbor of mine and lived about a mile from my and the president?s homes.

Since Hadiya was killed in late January, the murders of 26 more teenagers did not make the news. Similarly, the brief blip last week about the largest number of school closings in the history of the country does not recount the anguish and dismay of 30,000-plus children and parents scrambling, wounded, and angry.?

In Chicago, we grew up hearing that Chicago is ?a city of neighborhoods,? a patchwork of tightly knit, culturally distinct, and ethnically proud communities that together make up our city. While this may be an idealized re-definition of segregation, no matter where you live, you belong to a community. This attack on the most important of neighborhood institutions has left us collectively demoralized. We see ourselves on the nightly news, segregated, characterized by crumbling schools and random violence.

Despite our pride at the notion of being a unique ?city of neighborhoods,? people all over the country know about community. It?s sometimes hard to describe as it shifts imperceptibly over the years. But we feel it, and we are bound to protect it.

The divide-and-conquer strategy of closures pits school against school. In this latest round, the initial hit list of 230 schools was pared to 120, then to 61, and eventually 50, while everyone waited anxiously, breathing a sigh of relief if their school was taken off the list.?

Sadly, our neighborhood middle school was not spared, although its closure was postponed for one year so the current class could graduate. Miriam Canter Middle School was named for a local activist who envisioned a racially and economically diverse school dedicated to kids precariously perched between childhood and full-fledged teen madness. Many of the devoted teachers at Canter live in the community. Last month, an article in The Nation recounted the hearings that drew hundreds of weeping teens, angry parents, and concerned community members demanding to know why they would close such a clearly successful school.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/LulG2-cGiqI/Chicago-school-closings-Shuttering-these-institutions-is-shortsighted-says-one-local-mom

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More precision from less predictability: A new quantum trade-off

May 29, 2013 ? Researchers at Griffith University's Centre for Quantum Dynamics have demonstrated that, contrary to what the Heisenberg uncertainty relation may suggest, particle properties such as position and momentum can be measured simultaneously with high precision.

But it comes at a cost.

The findings have been published in Experimental Test of Universal Complementarity Relations in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Co-author Dr Michael Hall said the work represents an important advance in the quantitative understanding and experimental verification of complementarity; arguably the most important foundational principle of quantum mechanics.

"Quantum mechanics is often thought to imply that you can estimate precisely how fast an electron is moving, or exactly where it is, but not both at the same time," Dr Hall said.

"The argument is that properties such as speed and position require physically incompatible or 'complementary' devices for their precise measurement and therefore, any device used to make a simultaneous measurement will give inherently imprecise estimates," he said.

"This argument was challenged by Einstein in 1935, who gave an example where the position and speed could be measured accurately at the same time, by exploiting quantum correlations with a second particle."

Professor Geoff Pryde, co-author and leader of the experimental team, said it is important to note that this is not in direct conflict with the well-known Heisenberg uncertainty relation, which requires only that the position and speed cannot both be predicted accurately beforehand, but it does leave open the important question of whether any quantum restrictions apply to simultaneous measurements.

"We have verified experimentally that Einstein was correct by using polarisation properties of photons rather than position and speed," Professor Pryde said.

"But we have also shown that a high degree of joint precision does not come for free; it is possible only if the measurement outcomes are sufficiently unpredictable, as quantified by a new generalisation of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation.

"As the uncertainty principle underlies many aspects of quantum information technology, ranging from entanglement verification to random number generation to the security of quantum cryptography, our work could have implications in all these areas."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/x9vQPPEd5QU/130529191041.htm

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Bestselling books the week of 5/26/13, according to IndieBound*

1. Inferno, by Dan Brown, Doubleday
2. And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini, Riverhead
3. A Delicate Truth, by John le Carr?, Viking
4. Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, Reagan Arthur Books
5. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Crown
6. The Burgess Boys, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House
7. The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud, Knopf
8. The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, Riverhead
9. The Redeemer, by Jo Nesb?, Knopf
10. Z, by Therese Anne Fowler, St. Martin's
11. Paris, by Edward Rutherfurd, Doubleday
12. Maya's Notebook, by Isabel Allende, Harper
13. Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Knopf
14. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra, Hogarth
15. The Hit, by David Baldacci, Grand Central

*Published Thursday, May 30, 2013 (for the sales week ended Sunday, May 26, 2013). Based on reporting from many hundreds of independent bookstores across the United States. For information on more titles, please visit IndieBound.org

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/S_gT-UgyLL8/Bestselling-books-the-week-of-5-26-13-according-to-IndieBound

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AP sources: Obama to name ex-Bush aide to head FBI

FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2004 file photo, Deputy Attorney General James Comey gestures during a news conference in Washington. President Barack Obama is preparing to nominate former Bush administration official James Comey to head the FBI, people familiar with the decision said Wednesday, May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2004 file photo, Deputy Attorney General James Comey gestures during a news conference in Washington. President Barack Obama is preparing to nominate former Bush administration official James Comey to head the FBI, people familiar with the decision said Wednesday, May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama is prepared to nominate James Comey, a former Bush administration official with bipartisan credentials, as the next FBI director. In a possible warning sign, the top Republican on the Senate committee that would review the nomination said Comey would face questions about his ties to Wall Street.

Three people with knowledge of the selection said Wednesday that Obama planned to nominate Comey, who was the No. 2 at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. Comey was general counsel to Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates from 2010 until earlier this year and now lectures at Columbia Law School.

Comey would replace Robert Mueller, who has held the job since shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which forced the FBI to transform itself into one of the nation's chief weapons in the war on terror. Mueller's last day on the job is Sept. 4.

The White House may hope that Comey's Republican background will help him through Senate confirmation at a time when some of Obama's nominations have been facing tough battles. But Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicated Comey's confirmation hearing would raise questions about the Obama administration's investigations of Wall Street.

Grassley said in a statement late Wednesday he had not heard from the White House about Comey's nomination but said Comey possessed a lot of important experience on national security issues.

"But, if he's nominated, he would have to answer questions about his recent work in the hedge fund industry," Grassley said. "The administration's efforts to criminally prosecute Wall Street for its part in the economic downturn have been abysmal, and his agency would have to help build the case against some of his colleagues."

The change in leadership comes as the FBI and Justice Department are under scrutiny for their handing of several investigations. Obama has ordered a review of FBI investigations into leaks to reporters, including the secret gathering of Associated Press phone records and emails of a Fox News reporter. And there have been questions raised about whether the FBI properly responded to warnings from Russian authorities about a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. The agency, meanwhile, is conducting a highly anticipated investigation into the Internal Revenue Service over its handling of conservative groups seeking tax exempt status.

Comey was deputy attorney general in 2005 when he unsuccessfully tried to limit tough interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists. He told then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that some of the practices were wrong and would damage the department's reputation.

Some Democrats denounced those methods as torture, particularly the use of waterboarding, which produces the sensation of drowning.

Comey's selection was first reported by NPR and was not expected to be announced for several days at least. It was confirmed to the AP by three people speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the selection ahead of Obama's announcement. Senate confirmation will be needed.

Comey became a hero to Democratic opponents of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program when Comey refused for a time to reauthorize it. Bush revised the surveillance program when confronted with the threat of resignation by Comey and Mueller.

Earlier in his career, Comey served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the nation's most prominent prosecutorial offices and one at the front lines of terrorism, corporate malfeasance, organized crime and the war on drugs.

As an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia, Comey handled the investigation of the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. military personnel.

He led the Justice Department's corporate fraud task force and spurred the creation of violent crime impact teams in 20 cities, focusing on crimes committed with guns.

Comey was at the center of one of the Bush administration's great controversies ? an episode that focused attention on the administration's controversial tactics in the war on terror.

In stunning testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007, Comey said he thought Bush's no-warrant wiretapping program was so questionable that Comey refused for a time to reauthorize it, leading to a standoff with White House officials at the bedside of ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Comey said he refused to recertify the program because Ashcroft had reservations about its legality.

Senior government officials had expressed concerns about whether the National Security Agency, which administered the warrantless eavesdropping program, had the proper oversight in place. Other concerns included whether any president possessed the legal and constitutional authority to authorize the program as it was carried out at the time.

The White House, Comey said, recertified the program without the Justice Department's signoff, allowing it to operate for about three weeks without concurrence on whether it was legal. Comey, Ashcroft, Mueller and other Justice Department officials at one point considered resigning, Comey said.

"I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," Comey told the Senate panel.

A day after the March 10, 2004, incident at Ashcroft's hospital bedside, Bush ordered changes to the program to accommodate the department's concerns. Ashcroft signed the presidential order to recertify the program about three weeks later.

The dramatic hospital confrontation involved Comey, who was the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's absence, and a White House team that included Gonzales, Bush's counsel at the time, and White House chief of staff Andy Card, Comey said. Gonzales later succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general.

Comey testified that when he refused to certify the program, Gonzales and Card headed to Ashcroft's sick bed in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital.

When Gonzales appealed to Ashcroft, the ailing attorney general lifted his head off the pillow and in straightforward terms described his views of the program, Comey said. Then he pointed out that Comey, not Ashcroft, held the powers of the attorney general at that moment.

Gonzales and Card then left the hospital room, Comey said.

"I was angry," Comey told the panel. "I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general."

___

Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.

___

Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-05-30-Obama-FBI/id-e01ff3eb899b4cb08490eab3376d3918

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Wit, grit and a supercomputer yield chemical structure of HIV capsid

May 29, 2013 ? A team led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has described for the first time the 4-million-atom structure of the HIV's capsid, or protein shell. The findings, highlighted on the cover of the May 30 issue of Nature, could lead to new ways of fending off an often-changing virus that has been very hard to conquer.

Scientists have long struggled to decipher how the HIV capsid shell is chemically put together, said senior author Peijun Zhang, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Structural Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

"The capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its structure in detail could lead us to new drugs that can treat or prevent the infection," she said. "This approach has the potential to be a powerful alternative to our current HIV therapies, which work by targeting certain enzymes, but drug resistance is an enormous challenge due to the virus' high mutation rate."

Previous research has shown that the cone-shaped shell is composed of identical capsid proteins linked together in a complex lattice of about 200 hexamers and 12 pentamers, Dr. Zhang said. But the shell is non-uniform and asymmetrical; uncertainty remained about the exact number of proteins involved and how the hexagons of six protein subunits and pentagons of five subunits are joined. Standard structural biology methods to decipher the molecular architecture were insufficient because they rely on averaged data, collected on samples of pieces of the highly variable capsid to identify how these pieces tend to go together.

Instead, the team used a hybrid approach, taking data from cryo-electron microscopy at an 8-angstrom resolution (a hydrogen atom measures 0.25 angstrom) to uncover how the hexamers are connected, and cryo-electron tomography of native HIV-1 cores, isolated from virions, to join the pieces of the puzzle. Collaborators at the University of Illinois then used their new Blue Waters supercomputer to run simulations at the petascale, involving 1 quadrillion operations per second, that positioned 1,300 proteins into a whole that reflected the capsid's known physical and structural characteristics.

The process revealed a three-helix bundle with critical molecular interactions at the seams of the capsid, areas that are necessary for the shell's assembly and stability, which represent vulnerabilities in the protective coat of the viral genome.

"The capsid is very sensitive to mutation, so if we can disrupt those interfaces, we could interfere with capsid function," Dr. Zhang said. "The capsid has to remain intact to protect the HIV genome and get it into the human cell, but once inside it has to come apart to release its content so that the virus can replicate. Developing drugs that cause capsid dysfunction by preventing its assembly or disassembly might stop the virus from reproducing."

The project was funded by National Institutes of Health grants GM082251, GM085043 and GM104601 and the National Science Foundation.

"By using a combination of experimental and computational approaches, this team of investigators has produced a clearer picture of the structure of HIV's protective covering," said the National Institutes of Health's Michael Sakalian, Ph.D., who oversees this and other grants funded through an AIDS-related structural biology program. "The new structural details may reveal vulnerabilities that could be exploited by future therapeutics."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/tMgcKXARwnE/130529133403.htm

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Rescuers save newborn from sewer pipe in China

BEIJING (AP) ? A newborn boy is recovering in a Chinese hospital after being rescued from a sewage pipe below a squat toilet by firefighters, who sawed off an L-shaped section and then delicately dismantled it to free the trapped baby.

A tenant heard the baby's cries in the public restroom of a residential building in Zhejiang province in eastern China on Saturday and notified authorities, according to the state-run news site Zhejiang News. A video of the two-hour rescue that followed was broadcast widely on Chinese news programs and websites late Monday and Tuesday.

The child ? named Baby No. 59 from the number of his hospital incubator ? was reported safe in a nearby hospital, and news of the rescue prompted an outpouring from strangers who came to the hospital with diapers, baby clothes, powdered milk and offers to adopt the child.

The baby weighed 2.8 kilograms (6.2 pounds) and still had his placenta attached to his body, reports said. His heart rate was low and there were grazes on his head and limbs, but he was largely unscathed, according to Zhejiang Online, the province's official news portal.

It was not immediately clear how the baby ended up in the toilet, but police said they were treating the case as an attempted homicide. The Pujiang county police bureau said on its official microblog account that the boy's mother has been located and that an investigation is ongoing, but gave no further details.

A duty officer at the Pujiang Public Security Bureau reached by phone late Tuesday said he had no information and that staffers involved in the investigation had left for the day.

On China's popular Twitter-like microblogs, some users expressed pity for the child and horror at his ordeal. Most bloggers speculated that the child had been abandoned and dumped by his parents down the toilet.

The landlord of the building in Pujiang county told Zhejiang News that it was unlikely the birth took place in the restroom because there was no evidence of blood and she was not aware of any recent pregnancies among her tenants.

The baby was stuck in an L-shaped portion of the sewage pipe with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (3 inches).

The video shows rescuers sawing off a section of the pipe along a ceiling that apparently was just below the restroom. The rescuers then rushed that section of pipe to a hospital, where firefighters and medics alternately used pliers and saws to rip apart the pipe and free the baby.

Despites the offers to adopt Baby No. 59, a doctor at the hospital said the boy would be handed over to social services if his parents did not claim him, Zhejiang News said.

In China, reports of babies being abandoned are common and fuel public anger against a strict one-child policy that imposes huge fines on parents who violate the rules. The policy has been blamed as a factor causing parents to abandon unwanted children, though they are usually baby girls whose parents want sons due to a traditional preference for male heirs.

___

Online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHW_fn2W9HQ

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/rescuers-save-newborn-sewer-pipe-china-151621491.html

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Diamonds, nanotubes find common ground in graphene

May 28, 2013 ? What may be the ultimate heat sink is only possible because of yet another astounding capability of graphene. The one-atom-thick form of carbon can act as a go-between that allows vertically aligned carbon nanotubes to grow on nearly anything.

That includes diamonds. A diamond film/graphene/nanotube structure was one result of new research carried out by scientists at Rice University and the Honda Research Institute USA, reported today in Nature's online journal Scientific Reports.

The heart of the research is the revelation that when graphene is used as a middleman, surfaces considered unusable as substrates for carbon nanotube growth now have the potential to do so. Diamond happens to be a good example, according to Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and Honda chief scientist Avetik Harutyunyan.

Diamond conducts heat very well, five times better than copper. But its available surface area is very low. By its very nature, one-atom-thick graphene is all surface area. The same could be said of carbon nanotubes, which are basically rolled-up tubes of graphene. A vertically aligned forest of carbon nanotubes grown on diamond would disperse heat like a traditional heat sink, but with millions of fins. Such an ultrathin array could save space in small microprocessor-based devices.

"Further work along these lines could produce such structures as patterned nanotube arrays on diamond that could be utilized in electronic devices," Ajayan said. Graphene and metallic nanotubes are also highly conductive; in combination with metallic substrates, they may also have uses in advanced electronics, he said.

To test their ideas, the Honda team grew various types of graphene on copper foil by standard chemical vapor deposition. They then transferred the tiny graphene sheets to diamond, quartz and other metals for further study by the Rice team.

They found that only single-layer graphene worked well, and sheets with ripples or wrinkles worked best. The defects appeared to capture and hold the airborne iron-based catalyst particles from which the nanotubes grow. The researchers think graphene facilitates nanotube growth by keeping the catalyst particles from clumping.

Ajayan thinks the extreme thinness of graphene does the trick. In a previous study, the Rice lab found graphene shows materials coated with graphene can get wet, but the graphene provides protection against oxidation. "That might be one of the big things about graphene, that you can have a noninvasive coating that keeps the property of the substrate but adds value," he said. "Here it allows the catalytic activity but stops the catalyst from aggregating."

Testing found that the graphene layer remains intact between the nanotube forest and the diamond or other substrate. On a metallic substrate like copper, the entire hybrid is highly conductive.

Such seamless integration through the graphene interface would provide low-contact resistance between current collectors and the active materials of electrochemical cells, a remarkable step toward building high-power energy devices, said Rice research scientist and co-author Leela Mohana Reddy Arava.

Co-authors of the study are Honda senior scientists Rahul Rao and Gugang Chen; Rice graduate student Kaushik Kalaga; Masahiro Ishigami, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Central Florida; and Tony Heinz, the D.M. Rickey Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry at Rice.

The research was supported by the Honda Research Institute.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/6yrLEyMtlfg/130528160949.htm

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Rescuers save a newborn from sewer pipe in China

BEIJING (AP) ? Chinese firefighters have rescued a newborn boy from a sewer pipe below a squat toilet, sawing out an L-shaped section and then delicately dismantling it to free the cocooned baby, who greeted the rescuers with cries.

A tenant heard the baby's sounds in the public restroom of a residential building in Zhejiang province in eastern China on Saturday and notified authorities, according to the state-run news site Zhejiang News. A video of the two-hour rescue that followed was broadcast widely on Chinese news programs and websites late Monday and Tuesday.

The child ? named Baby No. 59 from the number of his hospital incubator ? was reported safe in a nearby hospital, and news of the rescue prompted an outpouring from strangers who came to the hospital with diapers, baby clothes, powdered milk and offers to adopt the child.

Police are treating the case as an attempted homicide, and are looking for the mother and anyone else involved in the incident.

The landlord of the building in Pujiang county told Zhejiang News that it was unlikely the birth took place in the toilet room because there was no evidence of blood and she was not aware of any recent pregnancies among her tenants.

The baby was stuck in the L-joint of pipe with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (3 inches).

The video shows rescuers sawing out a section of the pipe along a ceiling that apparently was just below the restroom. The rescuers then rushed that section of pipe to a hospital, were firefighters and medics alternately used pliers and saws to rip apart the L-joint and free the baby.

Despites the offers to adopt Baby No. 59, a doctor at the hospital said the boy would be handed over to social services if his parents do not claim him, Zhejiang News said.

___

Online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHW_fn2W9HQ

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-05-28-China-Infant%20in%20Sewer/id-2785b29fac014b1486637ac0352b806d

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U.K. Banks Cut 189,000 Heads - More Jobs May Go

It's tough out there.

Britain?s four biggest banks will have eliminated about 189,000 jobs by the end of this year from their peak staffing levels, bringing employment to a nine-year low amid a dearth of revenue. More cuts may follow.

Royal?Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Lloyds?and Barclays will employ about 606,000 people worldwide by the end of 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That?s 24% below the peak of 795,000 in 2008 and the least since 2004, when they employed 594,000 globally.

The firms are under pressure from investors to reduce fixed costs as Europe?s sovereign debt crisis crimps income from investment banking as loans sour in the region. The four firms posted $164bn of revenue for 2012, 13% less than in 2008. Costs as a proportion of revenue increased over the period.

'The continuing cost-cutting announcements you?ve been getting reflect an incredibly difficult revenue environment and that?s new', said Simon Maughan, an analyst at Olivetree Securities Ltd. in London. 'The big bulky mass layoffs, such as they were, are probably gone, but that?s not to say staff numbers wont drift lower because it?s a struggle to grow the top line'.

Hit the link below to access the complete Bloomberg article:

U.K. Banks Cut 189,000 With Employment at Nine-Year Low

U.K. House Prices Rise Most in Six Years on London Demand Surge

Singapore Law Professor Convicted of Sex-For-Grades Corruption

image: ? Torpe

Source: http://hereisthecity.com/2013/05/28/uk-banks-cut-189000-heads-more-jobs-may-go/

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'The Voice' Recap: Top Eight Show Off 'ThatPower' In Live Rounds

Amber Carrington channels her inner Adele and Michelle Chamuel puts her 'big voice' on display before two more contestants are eliminated.
By Natasha Chandel

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1708057/the-voice-recap-highlights-top-8-performances.jhtml

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Business Cloud Computing: Privacy Is Just As Important As Security ...

Guest author Luke Burns is a partner at Ascent Venture Partners.

Security and privacy are often mentioned in the same breath, but when it comes to cloud computing, security tends to be the dominant subject. But should it be? While there are seemingly endless security threats, cloud providers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable in addressing them.

When it comes to privacy, though, cloud vendors have not made the same progress. In fact, it?s more than likely that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies breach the customer?s perception of data privacy regularly.

I?m not referring simply to consumer companies and their problems with privacy, e.g. Facebook sharing personal data with advertisers. Enterprise SaaS companies face their own unique challenges around customer data usage, even though those issues have not received the same level of scrutiny.

Enterprise Services Know A Lot About Their Customers

The challenging aspects of SaaS privacy arise from the close relationship between vendor and customer - a situation vastly different than in days of on-premise software. As the name suggests, SaaS vendors provide a service, and with that service comes the ability to log every keystroke and mouse click that a customer makes using their software.

Why would a SaaS vendor do that?

Think about customer relationship management (CRM) software as an example. What would you think if your CRM took note every time you updated a contact, and then made that updated contact information available to other users with that same business connection? Sounds like a pretty useful service for customers, doesn't it?

What Are Your Expectations For Data Privacy?

But does it breach your expectation of data privacy? SaaS opens up the door to increased interaction and partnership between a customer and a vendor, but it also opens the door for misuse.

One particularly interesting area with privacy concerns is the use of the metadata (data about the data). Let?s say, for example, there is a clear agreement that all data is owned by the customer and can?t be used by the vendor. But would that agreement also include things like the number of users (salespeople) actively using a CRM system or the number of new sales leads entered in a given quarter or the number of meetings booked?

This type of data could yield tremendous insight to an individual trying to gauge sales activity at a given company or within a given sector. Would use of this metadata be covered under data ownership or could the SaaS vendor sell those insights to the highest bidder with a clear conscience?

Then there?s obfuscated or anonymized data. Is it OK for a SaaS provider to use your data to create unattributed market statistics? Imagine a financial SaaS vendor that could create a composite view of all the private companies using its system and publish average earnings growth over various periods of time. Or a customer-service SaaS vendor that could create benchmarks on average time to close a trouble ticket. In each case, the vendor is producing valuable data points it can use for profit. Should there be any type of reimbursement for customers, or is it just a cost of doing business?

Who Owns The Intellectual Property?

Many SaaS platforms offer robust tools to customize the experience for individual customers and companies. These customizations often reflect significant investment in design and development and sometimes reflect proprietary business processes. How much exposure to these customizations does a SaaS vendor have? Could it use these customizations as templates for future product enhancements that might be offered to competitors of the customers that originally created them?

We?re just scratching the surface of potential privacy issues that can arise with SaaS vendor relationships.

Don?t get me wrong; I?m not saying companies should avoid SaaS. In fact, I think the benefits of embracing software in the cloud far outweigh the potential risks. The close relationship developed between a SaaS vendor and its customers has the potential to deliver significant payback, especially for companies embracing SaaS not for cost savings, but for business transformation.

But both sides of that equation, the vendor and the customer, need to fully understand the bargain and the trade-offs made between privacy and business value.

Asking The Tough Privacy Questions

Similar to their IT security due diligence, companies need to ask questions about the privacy of their data before they enter into a cloud vendor relationship.

Who owns the data? How many copies of the data are there? How can you ensure that data is erased or unreadable in the event that a customer chooses to decommission or change service providers? And especially, What is the vendor's acceptable use of a company?s cloud-based data?

Hopefully, better awareness and transparency about these issues will build trust and help business-facing cloud vendors avoid the lawsuits that have afflicted their consumer-facing cousins.

Source: http://readwrite.com/2013/05/28/business-cloud-computing-privacy-is-just-as-important-as-security

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Climate researchers discover new rhythm for El Ni?o

May 27, 2013 ? El Ni?o wreaks havoc across the globe, shifting weather patterns that spawn droughts in some regions and floods in others. The impacts of this tropical Pacific climate phenomenon are well known and documented.

A mystery, however, has remained despite decades of research: Why does El Ni?o always peak around Christmas and end quickly by February to April?

Now there is an answer: An unusual wind pattern that straddles the equatorial Pacific during strong El Ni?o events and swings back and forth with a period of 15 months explains El Ni?o's close ties to the annual cycle. This finding is reported in the May 26, 2013, online issue of Nature Geoscience by scientists from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Meteorology Department and International Pacific Research Center.

"This atmospheric pattern peaks in February and triggers some of the well-known El Ni?o impacts, such as droughts in the Philippines and across Micronesia and heavy rainfall over French Polynesia," says lead author Malte Stuecker.

When anomalous trade winds shift south they can terminate an El Ni?o by generating eastward propagating equatorial Kelvin waves that eventually resume upwelling of cold water in the eastern equatorial Pacific. This wind shift is part of the larger, unusual atmospheric pattern accompanying El Ni?o events, in which a high-pressure system hovers over the Philippines and the major rain band of the South Pacific rapidly shifts equatorward.

With the help of numerical atmospheric models, the scientists discovered that this unusual pattern originates from an interaction between El Ni?o and the seasonal evolution of temperatures in the western tropical Pacific warm pool.

"Not all El Ni?o events are accompanied by this unusual wind pattern" notes Malte Stuecker, "but once El Ni?o conditions reach a certain threshold amplitude during the right time of the year, it is like a jack-in-the-box whose lid pops open."

A study of the evolution of the anomalous wind pattern in the model reveals a rhythm of about 15 months accompanying strong El Ni?o events, which is considerably faster than the three- to five-year timetable for El Ni?o events, but slower than the annual cycle.

"This type of variability is known in physics as a combination tone," says Fei-Fei Jin, professor of Meteorology and co-author of the study. Combination tones have been known for more than three centuries. They where discovered by violin builder Tartini, who realized that our ear can create a third tone, even though only two tones are played on a violin.

"The unusual wind pattern straddling the equator during an El Ni?o is such a combination tone between El Ni?o events and the seasonal march of the sun across the equator" says co-author Axel Timmermann, climate scientist at the International Pacific Research Center and professor at the Department of Oceanography, University of Hawai'i. He adds, "It turns out that many climate models have difficulties creating the correct combination tone, which is likely to impact their ability to simulate and predict El Ni?o events and their global impacts."

The scientists are convinced that a better representation of the 15-month tropical Pacific wind pattern in climate models will improve El Ni?o forecasts. Moreover, they say the latest climate model projections suggest that El Ni?o events will be accompanied more often by this combination tone wind pattern, which will also change the characteristics of future El Ni?o rainfall patterns.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/8uaxbC6Z_5Y/130527100628.htm

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Suspected rebels kill 24, wound 37 in east India

NEW DELHI (AP) ? Officials reacted with outrage Sunday to an audacious attack by about 200 suspected Maoist rebels who set off a roadside bomb and opened fire on a convoy carrying Indian ruling Congress party leaders and members in an eastern state, killing at least 24 people and wounding 37 others.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accompanied by party President Sonia Gandhi, visited the injured in a hospital in the Chhattisgarh state capital and said the government would take firm action against the perpetrators.

"We are devastated," said Gandhi, who denounced what she called a "dastardly attack" on the country's democratic values.

Rajnath Singh, president of the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, said the country should unite in its fight against the Maoist insurgency.

The convoy was attacked Saturday in a densely forested area about 345 kilometers (215 miles) south of Raipur, Chhattisgarh's capital, as the Congress members were returning from a party rally.

Four state party leaders and eight police officers were among those killed. Other victims were party supporters.

Police initially reported that 28 people were killed, but they later changed the death toll to 24. It was not clear why it had been revised.

Police officer R.K. Vij said 11 of the 37 injured were in serious condition.

Police identified one of those dead as Mahendra Karma, a Congress party leader in Chhattisgarh who founded a local militia, the Salwa Judum, to combat the Maoist rebels. The anti-rebel militia had to be reined in after it was accused of atrocities against tribals ? indigenous people at the bottom of India's rigid social ladder.

The dead also included state Congress party chief Nand Kumar Patel and his son. The injured included former federal minister Vidya Charan Shukla, 83, police said.

The Press Trust of India news agency said the attackers blocked the road by felling trees, forcing the convoy to halt. Vij said the suspected rebels triggered a land mine that blew up one of the cars. The attackers then fired at the Congress party leaders and their supporters before fleeing.

Congress is the main opposition party in the state. It has stepped up political activities, trying to win the support of tribals, ahead of state elections scheduled to be held by December.

K.P.S. Gill, a former police chief of Punjab state who has written widely on reform, said the attack was "a very horrifying incident."

However, Gill said the state government was incapable of devising a strategy to tackle the Maoist threat. "They don't have the political will and bureaucratic and police set-up to prevent such attacks," he said.

He said the state government had ignored the need for special forces to tackle the threat. "Most of the special forces in the state are being used for non-operational duties like guarding state politicians," he said.

Prime Minister Singh has called the rebels India's biggest internal security threat. They are now present in 20 of India's 28 states and have thousands of fighters, according to the Home Ministry.

The rebels, known as Naxalites, have been fighting the central government for more than four decades, demanding land and jobs for tenant farmers and the poor. They take their name from the West Bengal village of Naxalbari where the movement began in 1967.

The fighters were inspired by Chinese Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and have drawn support from displaced tribal populations opposed to corporate exploitation and official corruption.

The government has offered to begin peace talks with the rebels, but without success. The Maoists demand that it first withdraw thousands of paramilitary soldiers deployed to fight the rebels.

Maoist rebels carried out two major attacks in Chhattisgarh in 2010. They ambushed a paramilitary patrol in April that year, killing 76 troops in their worst attack ever. A month later, they triggered a land mine under a bus carrying civilians and police, killing 31.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suspected-rebels-kill-24-wound-37-east-india-102615499.html

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'Crack baby' scare overblown, teen research says

CHICAGO (AP) ? Research in teens adds fresh evidence that the 1980s "crack baby" scare was overblown, finding little proof of any major long-term ill effects in children whose mothers used cocaine during pregnancy.

Some studies have linked pregnant women's cocaine use with children's behavior difficulties, attention problems, anxiety and worse school performance. But the effects were mostly small and may have resulted from other factors including family problems or violence, parents' continued drug use and poverty, the researchers said.

They reviewed 27 studies involving more than 5,000 11- to 17-year-olds whose mothers had used cocaine while pregnant. The studies all involved low-income, mostly black and urban families.

The review, led by University of Maryland pediatrics researcher Maureen Black, was released online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Widespread use of crack cocaine in the 1980s led to the "crack baby" scare, when babies born to crack users sometimes had worrisome symptoms including jitteriness and smaller heads. Studies at the time blamed prenatal drug use, suggested affected children had irreversible brain damage and predicted dire futures for them. These reports led to widespread media coverage featuring breathless headlines and heart-rending images of tiny sick newborns hooked up to hospital machines.

"The field of prenatal cocaine exposure has advanced significantly since the misleading 'crack baby' scare of the 1980s," the review authors said.

In recent years experts have mostly discounted any link, noting that so-called crack babies often were born prematurely, which could account for many of their early symptoms. Studies that tracked children beyond infancy have failed to find any severe outcomes.

In some studies included in the new review, crack-exposed teens had lower scores on developmental tests than other children but their scores were still within normal limits. Many studies found that the children's family environment or violence were directly related to the teen's performance regardless of whether their mothers had used cocaine during pregnancy, the researchers said.

The government's National Institute on Drug Abuse notes that it's tough to evaluate how drug use during pregnancy affects children's development because so many other factors play a role, including prenatal care, mothers' health and family environment.

____

Online:

Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-05-27-Crack%20Baby%20Research/id-f908c4711d1f41ccb8a3ffbdc9205305

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All the Stuff That Will Happen on the Internet in the Next 60 Seconds

The Internet is always hoppin'. Maybe parts of it will be slowing down just a little as everyone and their hermano tunes in to watch season four of Arrested Development, but it'll still be humming along.

This little video put together by BuzzFeed breaks down exactly what you can expect to be going on in the 'net's unseen annals during this 60 seconds, and the 60 seconds that follow. But the real question is what are those people in the apartment upstairs doing during this 60 seconds? Are they hosting an aerobics class or something? My god, quiet down. [BuzzFeedVideo]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/all-the-stuff-that-will-happen-on-the-internet-in-the-n-509886669

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French soldier stabbed in throat outside Paris

PARIS (AP) ? A French soldier was stabbed in the throat in a busy commercial district outside Paris on Saturday, and France's president said authorities are investigating any possible links with the recent slaying of a British soldier.

President Francois Hollande said the identity of the attacker was unknown and cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the assault on the uniformed soldier in the La Defense shopping area. The life of the 23-year-old soldier was not in danger, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The stabbing follows the slaying Wednesday of a British soldier, who was brutally stabbed on a London street in broad daylight in a suspected terrorist attack that has raised fears of potential copycat strikes.

"There could be a link, but we will look at all the elements," Hollande said during a news conference in Ethiopia, where he was traveling.

The British soldier, 25-year-old Lee Rigby, was attacked while walking outside the Royal Artillery Barracks in the Woolwich area of south London.

The gruesome scene was recorded on witnesses' cellphones, and a video has emerged in which one of the two suspects ? his hands bloodied ? boasted of their exploits and warned of more violence as the soldier lay on the ground. Holding bloody knives and a meat cleaver, the suspects waited for the arrival of police, who shot them in the legs, according to witnesses.

In the video, one of the suspects declared, "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you ... We must fight them as they fight us."

Two Muslim hard-liners have identified that suspect as Michael Adebolajo, a Christian who converted to Islam and attended several London demonstrations organized by banned British radical group al-Muhajiroun.

French security forces have been on heightened alert since their country launched a military intervention in the African nation of Mali in January to regain territory seized by Islamic radicals.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/french-soldier-stabbed-throat-outside-paris-175831453.html

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96% War Witch

All Critics (48) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (46) | Rotten (2)

Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen spent nearly a decade researching this docudrama about child soldiers in Africa, and the film feels as authoritative as a first-hand account.

A haunting take on unspeakably grim subject matter, shot on location in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A powerful and upsetting portrait of a young girl compelled into unimaginably horrific circumstances.

Nguyen, astonishingly, manages to wring something vaguely like a happy ending from this tragic story.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head.

The powerful things we expect from "War Witch" are as advertised, but what we don't expect is even better.

... driven by a remarkably natural, unaffected performance by Mwanza. And Nguyen, despite relying a little too heavily on the initial voice-over for exposition, is a confident and sensitive intelligence behind the camera.

You're likely to ponder its images, its insights into a very foreign (for most of us) location and the tragic situation of Komona (and others like her) for a long time to come.

Is it accurate depiction of Africa's child soldiers? I don't know, thank God. But it feels authentic to its very core, and that makes it as hard to forget as it is to ignore.

Brutal without turning exploitative, the result is harrowing and heartbreaking.

Nguyen creates a mesmerizing tone through his camerawork, editing, sound and the infusion of African folk imagery and ritual, but it's Mwanza's performance as Komona that makes "War Witch" feel so miraculous.

Nguyen reportedly worked on "War Witch" for a decade, and it shows in both the immediacy and authenticity of his tale, and the meticulous craft with which it's told.

Made with extremely clear-eyed restraint from harangues, sentiment, message-mongering, or anything else that would cheapen its central character's suffering and fight.

War Witch features a standout performance by Rachel Mwanza, but the supernatural visions don't really suit the film's tone and mood.

Nguyen's compassion and commitment to the issue is admirable, and at its best, War Witch is devastating.

War Witch is remarkable for the fact that it never strays into sentimentality or sensationalism.

...a love story between youngsters who are forced to become adults all too early in their lives.

This is a straight ahead essay on warfare at its worst and the survival of the human spirit at its best.

An astonishing drama set in Africa that vividly depicts the courage and resiliency of a 12-year-old girl whose spiritual gifts enable her to survive.

It is astonishing that film that contains such violence can have such a serene tone. The source of the serenity is the measured, calm narration by Komona (voice of Diane Umawahoro) that is the telling of her story to her unborn child

An exquisitely made film in direct contrast to the ugliness of its subject matter

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/war_witch/

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Wash. I-5 bridge collapse caused by oversize load

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. (AP) ? A truck hauling an oversized load struck an overhead bridge girder on the major interstate between Seattle and Canada, sending a section of the span and two vehicles into the Skagit River below. All three occupants suffered only minor injuries.

It happened about 7 p.m. Thursday on the north part of the four-lane Interstate 5 bridge near Mount Vernon, about 60 miles north of Seattle and 40 miles south of the Canada border, and disrupted travel in both directions.

Initially, it wasn't clear if the bridge just gave way on its own. But at an overnight news conference, Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste blamed it on a tractor-trailer carrying an oversize load that hit an upper part of the span. The vertical clearance from the roadway to the beam is 14.6 feet.

"For reasons unknown at this point in time, the semi struck the overhead of the bridge causing the collapse," Batiste said.

The truck made it off the bridge and the driver remained at the scene and cooperated with investigators. Authorities have not yet said what the truck was carrying.

Two other vehicles went into the water about 25 feet below as the structure crumbled. Three people were rescued and were recovering Friday.

Traffic could be affected for some time. The bridge is used by an average of 71,000 vehicles a day, so the roadblock will cause a major disruption in trade and tourism between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The Washington Transportation Department has set up detours. The closest bridge nearby is mostly used for local traffic between Mount Vernon and Burlington. The department also is recommending detours using Highway 20 and Highway 9 that add tens of miles to a trip. Drivers are urged to avoid the area if possible, especially over the Memorial Day weekend.

"The I-5 corridor is totally disrupted," said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who went to the scene Thursday night.

"Thanks to the rescuers and a little bit of luck, we had three Skagitonians who made it out of the Skagit River alive," Inslee said.

Dan Sligh and his wife were in their pickup on Interstate 5 heading to a camping trip when a bridge before them disappeared in a "big puff of dust."

"I hit the brakes and we went off," Sligh told reporters from a hospital, adding he "saw the water approaching ... you hold on as tight as you can."

Sligh, his wife and another man in a different vehicle were dumped into the chilly waters of the Skagit River.

Sligh and his wife were taken to Skagit Valley Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The other man was reported in stable condition at United General Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, hospital CEO Greg Reed said.

Sligh said his shoulder was dislocated in the drop into the water, and he found himself "belly deep in water in the truck." He said he popped his shoulder back in and called out to his wife, who he described as being in shock initially as they waited for rescuers to arrive in boats.

The bridge was inspected twice last year and repairs were made, Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson said.

"It's an older bridge that needs a lot of work just like a good number of bridges around the state," she said.

Transportation officials are working on plans for either a temporary or permanent replacement, she said.

The National Transportation Safety Board was sending an investigative team.

Jeremiah Thomas, a volunteer firefighter, said he was driving nearby when he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye and turned to look.

"The bridge just went down, it crashed through the water," he said. "It was really surreal."

Deyerin said the water depth was about 15 feet, and the vehicles half-visible in the water likely were resting on portions of the collapsed bridge.

Crowds of people lined the river to watch the scene unfold.

"It's not something you see every day," said Jimmy O'Connor, the owner of two local pizza restaurants who was driving on another bridge parallel to the one that collapsed. "People were starting to crawl out of their cars."

He said he and his girlfriend were about 400 yards away on the Burlington Bridge when they heard "just a loud bang."

"Then we looked over and saw the bridge was down in the water," he said.

He pulled over and saw three vehicles in the water, including the camping trailer that landed upside-down, he said.

The bridge was not classified as structurally deficient, but a Federal Highway Administration database listed it as being "functionally obsolete" ? a category meaning that the design is outdated, such as having narrow shoulders and low clearance underneath.

The bridge, which was inspected last August and November, was built in in 1955 and had a sufficiency rating of 47 out of 100 at its November 2012 inspection, Transportation Department spokesman Noel Brady said Friday. The state average is 80, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Washington state was given a C in the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2013 infrastructure report card and a C- when it came to the state's bridges. The group said more than a quarter of Washington's 7,840 bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

The bridge was 1,112 feet long and 180 feet wide, with two lanes in each direction, Brady said. There are four spans, or sections, over the water supported by piers. The span on the north side is the one that collapsed. It's a steel truss bridge, meaning it has a boxy steel frame.

The mishap was reminiscent of the August 2007 collapse of an I-35W bridge in Minneapolis that killed 13 people and injured another 145 when it buckled and fell into the Mississippi River during rush-hour.

Sligh was thankful.

His wife was "doing OK" and he had "lots of cuts," he said. "You're kind of pinching yourself and realize you're lucky to be alive."

___

Baker reported from Olympia, Wash. Associated Press writers Chris Grygiel in Seattle and Terry Tang in Phoenix also contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wash-5-bridge-collapse-caused-oversize-load-130116006.html

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How Many of These Viral YouTube Videos Did You Watch?

For YouTube's comedy week, Dane Boe created this music video 'We Didn't Star the Viral' (riffing off Billy Joel's We Didn't Star the Fire) that recaps pretty much all the viral videos that became infamous on YouTube over the last 8 years. You know the usual suspects: Keyboard cat, Star Wars kid, evolution of dance, Charlie bit my finger and oh so much more. Can you recognize them all? Did you watch them all? [Dane Boe via Neatorama]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/how-many-of-these-viral-youtube-videos-did-you-watch-509823114

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Euro Tour CEO apologizes for saying 'colored'

VIRGINIA WATER, England (AP) ? The head of the European golf tour apologized for using the term "colored" during a live television interview Thursday in which he was reacting to the spat between Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia.

European Tour CEO George O'Grady said that "most of Sergio's friends are colored athletes in the United States."

The word "colored" was once widely used in the United States to refer to African-Americans but it is now considered antiquated and offensive. In some African countries, it is used to denote individuals of mixed racial ancestry.

"I deeply regret using an inappropriate word in a live interview for Sky Sports for which I unreservedly apologize," O'Grady, who is British, said in a statement released later Thursday.

Woods and Garcia have exchanged barbs over the past two weeks, dating to the third round of The Players Championship when Garcia implied that Woods purposely stirred up the gallery as the Spaniard was playing a shot.

But the situation got uglier Tuesday when Garcia and his Ryder Cup teammates were at a dinner. The emcee, Golf Channel's Steve Sands, jokingly asked Garcia if he would have Woods over for dinner during the U.S. Open.

"We'll have him round every night," Garcia replied. "We will serve fried chicken."

The remark was reminiscent of Fuzzy Zoeller's similar comment about Woods during his record-setting victory in the 1997 Masters, when Woods became the first player of black heritage to win a major.

Certain foods, fried chicken and watermelon in particular, have been used in dehumanizing caricatures of blacks as far back as the beginning America's segregation era in the 19th century. The imagery has become less common in the decades since integration, though Woods ? the only player of African-American heritage on the PGA Tour and the top player in the world ? has occasionally endured racially tinged insults.

Garcia initially released an apologetic statement and followed it up Wednesday at a news conference from the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, site of the European Tour's flagship event.

"I feel sick about it and I feel truly, truly sorry," he said.

Garcia said he meant to give a funny answer to a playful question, and it turned out to be "totally stupid and out of place."

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Woods said: "The comment that was made wasn't silly. It was wrong, hurtful and clearly inappropriate. I'm confident that there is real regret the remark was made. The Players ended nearly two weeks ago and it's long past time to move on and talk about golf."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/euro-tour-ceo-apologizes-saying-colored-170536004.html

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TSX dips on stimulus fears, sluggish data

By John Tilak

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's main stock index dipped on Thursday as fears the U.S. Federal Reserve will dial back its bond-buying program and pessimism following sluggish economic data from China and Europe fueled declines in all major sectors.

Weakness in Toronto-Dominion Bank further weighed on the market after the country's No. 2 lender reported earnings slightly below expectations.

Investors were nervous after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that a decision to scale back massive bond buying each month could come at one of the U.S. central bank's "next few meetings" if the economy looked set to maintain momentum.

The benchmark Canadian index, which tracked weak global markets, eased from gains made in the previous four sessions.

"It's the fallout of Ben Bernanke's testimony," said Gavin Graham, chief strategy officer at Integris Pension Management. "That's the first concrete suggestion that maybe they'll reduce the bond buying program."

The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index <.gsptse> closed down 94.41 points, or 0.74 percent, at 12,658.09.

"We all know that at some point, the Fed's going to have to do something to withdraw some of that liquidity they put in the marketplace," said Irwin Michael, portfolio manager at ABC Funds.

"It's a game of chicken," he added. "People are waiting to find out when, and they will probably react in the short run."

Other negative market factors included surveys showing China's factory activity shrank for the first time in seven months in May and that the euro zone economy was likely to contract again in the second quarter.

All of the 10 main sectors in the index were in the red.

Shares of energy producers fell 0.6 percent. Suncor Energy Inc , Canada's largest energy company, was down 0.6 percent at C$32.32.

Financials, the index's most heavily weighted sector, lost 0.4 percent. TD Bank

gave back 0.5 percent to C$83.65.

The materials sector, which includes mining stocks, was down 0.9 percent despite a rise in shares of gold companies.

Miner Teck Resources Ltd fell 4.3 percent to C$28.20, and fertilizer giant Potash Corp slipped 2.1 percent to C$43.01.

Among other active stocks, Nordion Inc jumped 11.6 percent to C$8.16 after the major provider of isotopes used in medical imaging said it will sell its targeted therapies division.

(Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson, Jeffrey Benkoe and James Dalgleish)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tsx-may-open-lower-bernankes-comments-125103006.html

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Genomic analysis lends insight to prostate cancer

May 23, 2013 ? Mayo Clinic researchers have used next generation genomic analysis to determine that some of the more aggressive prostate cancer tumors have similar genetic origins, which may help in predicting cancer progression. The findings appear online today in the journal Cancer Research.

"This is the first study to examine DNA alterations using next generation sequencing in adjacent Gleason patterns in the same tumor allowing us to correlate genomics with changes in pathology," says John Cheville, M.D., Mayo Clinic pathologist and one of the authors on the paper.

The standard method of evaluating prostate cancer biopsy samples is a numerical scoring system called Gleason grading. A pathologist examines the tumor sample under the microscope, giving it a Gleason score based on the pattern of its cells. Since many prostate cancers contain more than one pattern, the two most common patterns are added together to provide the Gleason score. The Gleason score is the strongest predictor of outcome, with high scores indicating more aggressive prostate cancer. This study focused on Gleason patterns of three and four (Gleason score 7), a combination that indicates a cancer with increased risk of progression.

"While each pattern had its own breakpoints, they shared identical ones, which implies a common origin," Dr. Cheville says. DNA changes associated with aggressive prostate cancer were identified in the lower Gleason pattern, indicating that genomic changes occurred before they could be recognized by a pathologist. By understanding these lineage relationships within a tumor, he says, physicians will be better able to predict progression of the cancer and, in turn, better manage patients including those who chose no treatment but enter a follow-up program called active surveillance.

To determine relationships among the Gleason patterns of each tumor sample the team used laser capture micro dissection, whole genome amplification and next generation sequencing. They examined 14 tumors and found over 3,000 unique chromosomal alterations among all tumors and 300 that appeared in at least two of the tumors. They also found that Gleason pattern 3 in each tumor had more alterations in common with its corresponding Gleason pattern 4 than it did with Gleason pattern 3 from other patients.

Others involved in the study are co-first author Irina Kovtun, Ph.D.; Stephen Murphy, Ph.D.; Sarah Johnson; Shabnam Zarei, M.D.; Farhad Kosari, Ph.D.; William Sukov, M.D.; R. Jeff Karnes, M.D. and George Vasmatzis, Ph.D.

The research was supported by a Waterman Biomarker Discovery grant; and by the Center for Individualized Medicine, the Office of Intellectual Property, and the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, all at Mayo Clinic. Tissue samples were provided by the National Institutes of Health.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/v--B1Xu51cw/130523162300.htm

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