travel to amsterdam

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Anti-militia protest attacked in Libya

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) ? Hundreds of Libyan pro-democracy advocates marched in Tripoli on Friday, denouncing militias' recent blockade of government buildings and coming under attack briefly by supporters of the armed groups, in the latest sign of the turmoil that threatens the country's first elected authorities.

Raising banners that read "No democracy with force," the protesters marched on the capital's Algeria Square and Martyrs' Square but were attacked by counterdemonstrators who tore their placards and forced them back, witnesses said. Protesters then marched to the headquarters of the Cabinet to voice support for the government.

"They beat us up with the sticks of the placards and chased us away," Mohammed al-Kirkari, an activist who was in the march told the local al-Ahrar TV network.

In the eastern city of Benghazi, vocal anti-militia activist and leading rights lawyer Fathi Terbal said he received death threats and was forced to read out a statement in support of the militias' moves.

Terbal had been at the forefront of the 2011 popular uprising against Moammar Gadhafi's rule, which descended into civil war and ended with the dictator's death eight months later.

"What is happening now aborts the principles of the revolution," he said. "Going out today is a national duty for all Libyans ... if you don't (demonstrate) today, we will all pay the price," he said, adding that he and other activists were attacked on Thursday while meeting in a Benghazi hotel to organize protests.

Libya's elected government and parliament depend on militias ? initially formed of former rebels who fought Gadhafi's forces ? to maintain security given the absence of a unified police and military since Gadhafi's fall. However, the militias have mushroomed in numbers, loyalties and agendas.

The latest showdown with the government is rooted in a struggle among the country's biggest political blocs over a contentious bill dubbed the "Isolation Law." If passed, it would effectively dismiss many of Libya's current leaders for the mere fact that they had served under Gadhafi decades ago, regardless of their role during the uprising. The law in it is initial form would have ousted the current head of Congress, Mohammed al-Megarif, Prime Minister Ali Zidan, and the liberal-leaning politician Mahmoud Jibril. Jibril leads National Forces Alliance, which enjoys the largest number of seats for a signal bloc.

Over the past six days militias ? some of which are suspected to be backed by rivals of the NFA bloc in parliament ? have encircled the foreign and justice ministries and stormed the interior ministry and state-TV in Tripoli. They have a variety of demands, one of which is for parliament to pass the law.

Lawmakers said earlier that parliament, which suspended its sessions on Tuesday after militias' takeover, will meet on Sunday to pass the law.

One version of the law posted on the parliament's Facebook page allows some figures to be exempted from the ban, if they are supported by two thirds of parliament. However, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Construction party, said earlier that there would be no exceptions.

Tripoli's showdown between supporters and detractors of the militias recall mass protests that erupted in Benghazi last year after militants killed?U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens three other Americans there. An extremist militia called Ansar al-Shariah was suspected of being behind the attack. Thousands of Benghazi residents marched the streets calling for the disbanding of the militias and the formation of a unified army and police. Those demonstrators took control of the headquarters of Ansar Shariah's militias.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/anti-militia-protest-attacked-libya-183938077.html

shaun white carolina panthers Revolution TV Show bankofamerica rosh hashanah rosh hashanah boardwalk empire

Friday, May 3, 2013

Switzerland shuts the door on EU migrants: A new 'us vs. them' in Europe?

News that Switzerland is capping residence permits for Western Europeans reached the Monitor's Europe bureau chief as she was having her own intolerable immigration experience.

By Sara Miller Llana,?Staff writer / April 25, 2013

A cafe is seen in Zurich is seen in this photo taken April 18.

Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters/File

Enlarge

The anti-immigration class across Europe has found many new adherents as of late, especially in the most economically devastated countries, like Greece and Italy. But now these Europeans might themselves become the unwelcome migrants, at least in Switzerland.

Skip to next paragraph Sara Miller Llana

Europe Bureau Chief

Sara Miller Llana?moved to Paris in April 2013 to become the Monitor's Europe Bureau?Chief. Previously she was the?paper's?Latin America Bureau Chief, based in Mexico City, from 2006 to 2013.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Why the alleged Boston bombers' mom probably won't be extradited (+video)

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva may stay out of American custody because the US and Russia do not have a bilateral extradition treaty, despite efforts by Moscow to negotiate one.

By Fred Weir,?Correspondent / April 28, 2013

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva at a news conference in Dagestan, Russia, on Thursday. Her sister Maryam, right, is with her.

Musa Sadulayev/AP

Enlarge

The mother of the two Boston bombing suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, has become a focus of interest after it emerged that her name had been added to a key terrorist watchlist in 2011 and fresh materials, including wiretaps, handed over to the US by the Russians showed her "vaguely discussing" jihad with her elder son two years ago.?

Skip to next paragraph Fred Weir

Correspondent

Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998.?

Comcast profit rises 17 percent in 1Q

NEW YORK (AP) ? Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company and owner of NBCUniversal, on Wednesday said its net income rose 17 percent in the latest quarter, powered by continued strong results from its cable operations.

Price increases on cable TV helped boost numbers, as subscribers paid an average of $3.40 more per month compared to the same period last year.

Comcast also continued to recruit new broadband and phone customers at a brisk pace, and broke 10 million phone customers for the first time in the quarter. It's the country's fourth-largest home phone company, behind AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink.

The Philadelphia-based company earned $1.44 billion, or 54 cents per share, in the first quarter. That was up from $1.22 billion, or 45 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.

Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting earnings of 50 cents per share.

Revenue rose 2.9 percent to $15.31 billion. Analysts were expecting half a percent more, at $15.38 billion.

Comcast's revenue didn't grow as fast as usual because it broadcast the Super Bowl last year, but didn't this year. Excluding that effect, revenue would have grown 4.7 percent, it said.

Comcast lost 60,000 cable-TV subscribers, breaking a trend of slowing losses. However, it's still better than smaller cable companies at keeping customers in the face of competition from satellite and phone companies.

At NBCUniversal, revenue fell 2.4 percent compared to last year's quarter, when NBC aired the Super Bowl. CBS aired it this year. However, NBCUniversal's operating cash flow, a measure of profitability, rose.

As of March, Comcast owns all of NBCUniversal. It bought the 49 percent it didn't own from General Electric Co. for $16.7 billion. It bought it initial stake in 2011 and was planning to buy the rest over time, but announced in January that it was buying out GE years ahead of schedule.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-05-01-Earns-Comcast/id-0b94f393e4874278be8ea422d4c997ab

Masters 2013 Lone Star College 42 louisville basketball Ready for Love ncaa annette funicello

Genetic mutation linked with typical form of migraine headache

May 1, 2013 ? A research team led by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Francisco has identified a genetic mutation that is strongly associated with a typical form of migraine.

In a paper published on May 1 in Science Translational Medicine, the team linked the mutation with evidence of migraine in humans, in a mouse model of migraine and in cell culture in the laboratory.

The mutation is in the gene known as casein kinase I delta (CKIdelta).

?This is the first gene in which mutations have been shown to cause a very typical form of migraine,? said senior investigator Louis J. Pt??ek, an investigator at HHMI and a professor of neurology at UCSF. ?It?s our initial glimpse into a black box that we don?t yet understand.?

Migraine, the causes of which are still unknown, affects 10 to 20 percent of all people, and causes ?huge losses in productivity, not to mention immense suffering,? said Pt??ek. Typical symptoms include a pounding headache; lowered pain threshold; hypersensitivity to mild stimuli including sound and touch; and aura, which Pt??ek describes as ?a visual sensation that presages the headache to come.?

The paper presents both clinical and basic scientific evidence that the mutation causes migraine.

In the study, the scientists first analyzed the genetics of two families in which migraine was common, and found that a significant proportion of migraine sufferers in the families either had the mutation or were the offspring of a mutation carrier.

In the laboratory, the team demonstrated that the mutation affects the production of the casein kinase I delta enzyme, which carries out a number of vital functions in the brain and body. ?This tells us that the mutation has real biochemical consequences,? said Pt??ek.

The scientists then investigated the effects of the mutation in a line of mice that carry it. ?Obviously, we can?t measure headache in a mouse,? Pt??ek noted, ?but there are other things that go along with migraine that we can measure.?

Pain threshold, explained Pt??ek, can be lowered in mice by the administration of nitroglycerin. The mutant mice had a significantly lower threshold for nitroglycerin-induced peripheral pain than did normal mice.

Another piece of evidence was cortical spreading depression (CSD), a wave of electrical ?silence? in the brain that follows electrical stimulation, spreading out from the point of stimulation in a predictable pattern. The researchers found that the mutant mice had a significantly lower electrical threshold for the induction of CSD.

The CSD experiments are ?especially intriguing,? said Pt??ek, because it is known that CSD spreads through the brain at 3 millimeters per minute. ?Functional brain imaging has shown that in the occipital lobes of people with migraine aura, changes in blood flow spread at the same rate.?

Finally, Pt??ek and his team found that astrocytes ? brain cells that are essential to neuronal functioning and health ? from the brains of mutant mice showed increased calcium signaling compared with astrocytes from the brains of normal mice.

?This is significant because we think astrocyte functioning is very, very relevant to migraine,? said Pt??ek. ?This is an enzyme, and so it modifies proteins. The question is, which protein or proteins does it modify that is relevant to migraine? How does it change astrocyte activity??

The research ?puts us one step closer to understanding the molecular pathway to pain in migraine,? he said. ?And, as we come to a clearer understanding, we can start thinking about better therapies. Certain molecules might be targets for new drugs.? There are good drugs now, said Pt??ek, ?but they only help some patients, some of the time. The need for better treatments is huge.?

The CKIdelta mutation is ?far from the only mutation likely to be associated with migraine,? Pt??ek cautioned. ?There are likely several, in different combinations in different people. This is simply the first one we?ve found.?

Co-authors of the paper are K.C. Brennan, MD, of UCLA and the University of Utah; Emily A. Bates, PhD, of UCSF and Brigham Young University, Utah; Robert E. Shapiro, MD, PhD, of the University of Vermont; Jekaterina Zyuzin of UCLA; William C. Hallows, PhD, Yong Huang, PhD and Hsien-Yang Lee, PhD, of UCSF; Christopher R. Jones, MD, PhD, of UU; Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, of UCSF; and Andrew Charles, MD, of UCLA.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Francisco, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

K. C. Brennan, E. A. Bates, R. E. Shapiro, J. Zyuzin, W. C. Hallows, Y. Huang, H.-Y. Lee, C. R. Jones, Y.-H. Fu, A. C. Charles, L. J. Ptacek. Casein Kinase I? Mutations in Familial Migraine and Advanced Sleep Phase. Science Translational Medicine, 2013; 5 (183): 183ra56 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3005784

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/YfPPxOnG9yM/130501145105.htm

Daily Show provisional ballot rush limbaugh rush limbaugh karl rove Election 2012 Results polling place

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Task management app / service Astrid is Yahoo's latest acquisition

Under new CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo has been working on expanding the services it offers across multiple platforms and its latest move on that front is the acquisition of Astrid. The Astrid Tasks and To-do list app is a popular productivity manager on Android and iOS, particularly notable for its tie-ins with Google Calendar and the ability to assign tasks to others. In a blog post, CEO and co-founder Jon Paris announced the company will be joining Yahoo's mobile team with a goal of "making the world's daily habits more inspiring and entertaining." As for existing users, the service will continue to work as-is for 90 days, and those who have paid for annual subscriptions to add on file storage, backup and more can expect refunds from Yahoo. There will also be a way for users to download all their data, although there aren't any details on that yet. Astrid had received funding from Google Ventures, among others, but as shown by the launch of Google Keep it seems the usual giants in tech will be focusing on in-house ways to offer productivity features.

Filed under: Software, Mobile

Comments

Source: Astrid Blog

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/k4GodfkBGWM/

Rajesh Khanna friday the 13th toy story 4 toy story 4 steam kristin chenoweth Robert Blake

Shedding light on the long shadow of childhood adversity

Apr. 30, 2013 ? Childhood adversity can lead to chronic physical and mental disability in adult life and have an effect on the next generation, underscoring the importance of research, practice and policy in addressing this issue, according to a Viewpoint in the May 1 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on child health.

David A. Brent, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, presented the Viewpoint at a JAMA media briefing.

Dr. Brent and co-author Michael Silverstein, M.D., M.P.H., of the Boston University School of Medi-cine, write that early child adversity, defined as child maltreatment, exposure to domestic violence, or living with a household member with serious mental illness, has been linked to myriad chronic conditions associated with premature death: smoking, substance abuse, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression, and attempted suicide. They add that causal pathways between early adversity and these multiple outcomes are thought to be mediated by changes in stress responsivity, and that animal models have demonstrated that these effects are transmitted from parent to child through epigenetic (the effect of environment on gene expression) mechanisms. "While the pathways by which adversity exerts its effects have not been as elegantly elaborated in humans, it is posited that these epigenetic changes can contribute to immune dysfunction, insulin resistance, and cognitive difficulties that in turn lead to risky behavior and predispose to emotional lability [instability] and depression."

"The good news is that, if detected early enough, the impact of family adversity on child health outcomes can be reversed, or at least attenuated. For example, if maternal depression is treated to remission, the patients' children show symptomatic and functional gains. Economic interventions that provide local employment and move parents out of poverty have been shown to be temporally related to a decreased risk for behavioral disorders in the children of the assisted families. Earlier foster placement can, to some extent, reverse the deleterious neurobiological and cognitive effects of extreme deprivation in infancy."

The authors write that these findings about early adversity and its sequelae have important implications for research, practice, and policy. With regard to research, a better understanding of the biological mechanisms by which early adversity exerts its effects, "definition of the critical periods when such effects are particularly deleterious, and identification of effective approaches to their remediation or prevention are warranted. In addition, the shared roots of leading causes of worldwide disability (such as cardiometabolic disease and depression) suggest opportunities for synergy, because interventions that would prevent the development of these conditions would have a substantial effect on public health worldwide."

"For clinicians, given the potent and long-reaching effects of family adversity on health outcomes, knowledge can be empowering. Physicians must be taught about the effects of adversity, how to detect it, and what steps to take once identified. Screening, referral, and monitoring of the presence of adversity and its effects early in the child's life may prevent or attenuate the destructive multigenerational effects of dysfunctional parenting that occur as a consequence of untreated psychiatric disorder," they write.

The authors add that physicians must also be advocates for social policies that can help families achieve what all parents want -- a secure environment for their children to develop into competent adults. "Home visitation programs for at-risk families of infants have been shown to have long-term positive effects on physical and mental health, education, employment, and family stability. Access to quality preschool education can help to buffer the deleterious effects of poverty."

"The economic cost -- in excess health care utilization, nonresponse to treatment, incarceration, loss of employment, decrease in productivity, and disability -- weighs heavily on families burdened with adversity but ultimately is borne by society as a whole. In the drive to improve quality of health care and contain costs, the huge price tag to society of early adversity cannot be neglected. Through research, clinical care, and advocacy, physicians can shine a light on the dark shadow of adversity and diminish its reach from generation to generation. Society can either invest in combating the effect of adversity on families now, or pay later."