Federer's conqueror loses in 3rd-round letdown

Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine plays a return to Jurgen Melzer of Austria during their Men's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine plays a return to Jurgen Melzer of Austria during their Men's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

Andy Murray of Britain returns to Tommy Robredo of Spain during their Men's singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

Andy Murray of Britain reacts after defeating Tommy Robredo of Spain during their Men's singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

Kaia Kanepi of Estonia reacts as she defeats Angelique Kerber of Germany in a Women's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Angelique Kerber of Germany fails to play a return to Kaia Kanepi of Estonia in their Women's second round singles match at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Friday, June 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

LONDON (AP) ? The player who stunned Roger Federer in one of Wimbledon's greatest upsets didn't stick around very long.

Two days after eliminating the seven-time champion on Centre Court, Sergiy Stakhovsky fell to Jurgen Melzer in four sets Friday in the third round at the All England Club.

The 116th-ranked Ukrainian couldn't replicate the serve-and-volley magic that stifled Federer, losing 6-2, 2-6, 7-5, 6-3 to the left-handed Austrian. While Federer struggled with Stakhovsky's serve, Melzer broke him six times.

"I'm just a little disappointed that I got so blinded by the game I produced with Roger that I kept going with the same game I played against Jurgen, which was just not right," Stakhovsky said.

Stakhovsky, who called for the trainer and had his right ankle taped in the first set, kept coming to the net even though Melzer was zeroing in on his serve.

"I think I just played stupid," the Ukrainian said.

Doing everything right so far has been second-seeded Andy Murray, who trounced Tommy Robredo 6-2, 6-4, 7-5 under the Centre Court roof to cruise into the fourth round. The U.S. Open champion hasn't dropped a set this week in his bid to become the first British player to win the men's trophy in 77 years.

"I played my best match of the tournament so far," said Murray, who no longer has Federer or Rafael Nadal in his half of the draw and remains on course to meet No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the final.

Advancing to the third round were fourth-seeded David Ferrer and No. 13 Tommy Haas. No. 15 Nicolas Almagro was knocked out by Poland's Jerzy Janowicz in a third-round match.

Among the women, No. 7 Angelique Kerber was ousted in three sets in second-round play by Estonia's Kaia Kanepi. Kerber became the sixth player among the top-10 seeded women to go out.

With four of the top 10 men also gone after the second round, it equals the worst performance by the top 10 at any Grand Slam in the 45-year history of the Open era.

For the second straight day, play was disrupted by rain and the sliding roof was closed over Centre Court. Four men's singles matches didn't start and were rescheduled for Saturday, while three women's singles matches were suspended by darkness.

Among the uncompleted matches, 2011 champion and eighth-seeded Petra Kvitova was down a break in the third set to Ekaterina Makarova, 3-6, 6-2, 2-1.

In a tournament jolted by a rash of injuries and upsets, the player who caused the biggest surprise of them all came crashing back to earth.

Stakhovsky had snapped Federer's streak of reaching 36 Grand Slam quarterfinals on Wednesday, beating perhaps the game's greatest all-time player on the biggest stage in the sport.

On Friday, he was out on Court 3 and couldn't maintain his level of play against Melzer, a 32-year-old all-court player who has reached at least the fourth round of every Grand Slam.

Still, Stakhovsky will always have that momentous victory to hold onto.

"Nobody is going to take it away from me," he said. "If someone would ask me, 'Would you rather beat Roger and lose in next round?' I would always take it, obviously."

Stakhovsky said he struggled to cope with all the distractions and media interviews that came his way after the Federer match.

"It was quite hard for me because yesterday was a busy day," he said. "Everybody wanted to chat. Everybody wanted a piece. It just takes some time and energy off."

Melzer said he didn't care about the pressures on Stakhovsky and just came into the match ready to beat him with his serve returns.

"You go out there and show him that I'm not Roger Federer and I can return his serve and make him play tough volleys," he said. "That was my goal today."

Murray was dominant in beating the 29th-ranked Robredo. It was Murray's 14th straight match win on grass, a run that goes back to last year's London Olympics, where he beat Federer for the gold medal.

Murray lost serve only once and finished with 40 winners against 14 errors.

"I struck the ball very well from the start of the match," he said. "I had a lot of winners tonight and that was probably the most pleasing part because I did not serve very well on the first couple of matches. I hope I can keep playing better."

Murray will next face either No. 20 Mikhail Youzhny or Viktor Troicki.

In other men's play, Ferrer won an all-Spanish encounter against Roberto Bautista Agut to reach the third round for a sixth consecutive year.

Ferrer advanced with a scrappy 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5 win in a match originally scheduled for Thursday but pushed back because of rain. He will next face No. 26 Alexandr Dolgopolov.

Melzer will face Janowicz, who served 30 aces and beat Almagro 7-6 (6), 6-3, 6-4 on Centre Court to reach the fourth round at a Grand Slam for the first time.

Only six men and four women ? 10 total ? among the top 10 seeds reached the third round ? tying the performance at Wimbledon in 1996 (four men, six women) and the French Open in 1998 (two men, eight women).

It's the worst performance by the top 10 women's seeds at any Slam in the Open era. The previous low was five at the 2001 French Open.

In another twist, this tournament has produced the fewest five-set matches (12) over the first two rounds at Wimbledon in the Open era. The previous record was 13 in 1981.

Britain's Laura Robson beat 117th-ranked Colombian qualifier Mariana Duque-Marino 6-4, 6-1 under the Centre Court roof to reach Wimbledon's third round for the first time.

Robson, who won the Wimbledon girls' title in 2008, has steadily climbed the rankings and has a good chance of getting into the second week.

"It's a big win for me," Robson said. "Any match on Centre Court is a big one. It was a great atmosphere out there today, and the roof being closed just makes it louder."

Among the early casualties in the men's draw was Grigor Dimitrov, one of the rising stars in tennis. He was eliminated in the second round in a five-set, rain-delayed match that lasted more than four hours over two days.

With girlfriend Maria Sharapova cheering him from the stands on Court 3, the 29th-seeded Bulgarian fell to 55th-ranked Slovenian Grega Zemlja 3-6, 7-6 (4), 3-6, 6-4, 11-9.

Zemlja hit a forehand passing shot on his sixth match point to become the first Slovenian to reach the third round at the All England Club.

Dimitrov is known as "Baby Fed" for a playing style, especially his one-handed backhand in the manner of Roger Federer's. But like Federer, Dimitrov failed to get to Round 3.

"Things happen I guess for a reason," Dimitrov said. "But it's a good learning curve for me. I'm going to step out strong for the upcoming weeks."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-06-28-TEN-Wimbledon/id-be3a063e220748989c010dee37b75723

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NYC Council passes plans for new police oversight

NEW YORK (AP) ? The most expansive plans in years to impose new oversight on the New York Police Department passed the City Council early Thursday, as lawmakers voted to create an outside watchdog and make it easier to bring racial profiling claims against the nation's largest police force.

Both passed with enough votes to override expected vetoes, marking an inflection point in the public debate and power dynamics that have set the balance between prioritizing safety and protecting civil liberties here.

Proponents see the legislation as a check on a police department that has come under scrutiny for its heavy use of a tactic known as stop and frisk and its extensive surveillance of Muslims, as disclosed in a series of stories by The Associated Press.

"New Yorkers know that we can keep our city safe from crime and terrorism without profiling our neighbors," Councilman Brad Lander, who spearheaded the measures with Councilman Jumaane Williams, said at a packed and emotional City Council meeting that began shortly before midnight and stretched into the early morning. In a sign of the national profile the measures has gained, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous was in the audience, while hip hop impresario Russell Simmons tweeted to urge the measures' passage.

Critics say the measures would impinge on techniques that have wrestled crime down dramatically and would leave the NYPD "pointlessly hampered by outside intrusion and recklessly threatened by second-guessing from the courts," in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's words. He vowed in a statement minutes after the vote to veto the measures and continue urging lawmakers to take his side.

But while it's too soon to settle how the initiatives may play out in practice if they survive the expected veto, they already have shaped politics and perception.

Besides giving ground to complaints that the NYPD hasn't been sensitive enough to civil rights and racial fairness, the legislation has put the three-term mayor and his popular police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, in the uncommon position of possibly losing a high-profile fight on public safety. They have gone to lengths to make their criticisms heard, most recently in a Monday news conference at which Bloomberg envisioned gang members lodging discriminatory-policing complaints and Kelly invoked "al-Qaeda wannabes."

Yet on Wednesday, council members rebuffed those concerns and approved the measures by a wide margin.

"It just became so polarized," said Eugene O'Donnell, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who follows issues related to the NYPD. "(The mayor and commissioner) just dug in their heels, for whatever reason, and they ended up with the City Council coalescing around a pretty dramatic set of steps."

The measures follow on decades of efforts to empower outside input on the NYPD, or at least facets of it. Then-Mayor John Lindsay's efforts to establish an independent civilian complaint board in the 1960s spurred a bitter clash with a police union, which said the panel would hinder policing and mobilized a referendum on it. Voters defeated it.

More than two decades later, private citizens were appointed to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which handles mainly misconduct claims against individual officers. A 1990s police corruption scandal spurred a recommendation for an independent board to investigate corruption; a Commission to Combat Police Corruption was established in 1995, but it lacks subpoena power.

Courts also have exercised some oversight, including through a 1985 federal court settlement that set guidelines for the NYPD's intelligence-gathering. And the City Council has weighed in before, including with a 2004 law that barred racial or religious profiling as "the determinative factor" in police actions, a measure Bloomberg signed.

The new measures are further-reaching than any of that, proponents and critics agree.

One would establish an inspector general with subpoena power to explore and recommend, but not force, changes to the NYPD's policies and practices. Various law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, have inspectors general.

The other would give people more latitude if they felt they were stopped because of bias based on race, sexual orientation or certain other factors.

Plaintiffs wouldn't necessarily have to prove that a police officer intended to discriminate. Instead, they could offer evidence that a practice such as stop and frisk affects some groups disproportionately, though police could counter that the disparity was justified to accomplish a substantial law enforcement end. The suits couldn't seek money, just court orders to change police practices.

The proposals were impelled partly by concern about the roughly 5 million stop and frisks the NYPD has conducted in the last decade, with more than 80 percent of those stopped being black or Hispanic and arrests resulting less than 15 percent of the time. But proponents also point to the department's spying on Muslims, which has included infiltrating Muslim student groups and putting informants in mosques, as the AP series showed.

The poor, mostly Muslim members of a South Asian advocacy group called Desis Rising Up and Moving "feel the impact of both issues ? surveillance, as Muslims ? and stop and frisk," which is prevalent in a Queens neighborhood where many members live, said Fahd Ahmed, the group's legal director.

Stop and frisk is already the subject of a federal lawsuit brought by four men who claim they were stopped solely because of their race, along with hundreds of thousands of others stopped in the last decade. A judge is considering whether to order reforms to the police policy. City attorneys argued the stops were lawful and not based on race alone.

"(The legislation) can have a tangible effect by virtue of the policy work that will come out of an inspector general's office and by virtue of the accountability that will come out of the profiling bill," said proponent Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "But, also, they will be a statement to the people of New York that we care about fair and just policing."

The NYPD has defended the surveillance and stop and frisks as legal, and critics of the new legislation point to another set of statistics: Killings and other serious offenses have fallen 34 percent since 2001, while the number of city residents in jails and prisons has fallen 31 percent.

"These dangerous pieces of legislation will only hurt our police officers' ability to protect New Yorkers and sustain this tremendous record of accomplishment," Bloomberg said in his statement Thursday.

They could tie the department up in lawsuits and complaints, inject courts and an inspector general into tactical decisions and make "proactive policing by police officers extinct in our city," he said.

If the measures ultimately survive, Bloomberg won't be in City Hall to see much of the outcome. The term-limited mayor leaves office this year.

Democratic mayoral candidates have generally said the practice needs changing. Some Republicans, meanwhile, have embraced the NYPD's view.

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nyc-council-passes-plans-police-oversight-063043528.html

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Obama has short list of potential Bernanke successors: source

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has assembled a short list of candidates to succeed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a source familiar with the process said on Thursday, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is running the search.

Bernanke is expected to leave when his second term as head of the central bank ends on January 31, after an eventful eight years in helping the U.S. economy recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression.

President Barack Obama hinted in a television interview this month that Bernanke would step down, comparing him to longtime FBI Director Robert Mueller, who agreed to stay two years longer in the job than he had planned, and is now to leave.

Lew has assembled a short list with help from several senior White House officials, the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

There was no information on who is on the list, although Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, former Obama adviser Lawrence Summers and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are considered to be likely leading choices.

"We decline to comment on speculation on any personnel matters until the president has made his decisions and is ready to announce them," said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman.

"The president believes that Chairman Bernanke is a vital and excellent partner in promoting our economic recovery and he continues to serve admirably and with distinction during this important time for our country," she said.

BERNANKE SILENT; YELLEN SEEN IN THE LEAD

Bernanke has yet to say whether he would like to serve another four years at the helm of the central bank, but has done little to dampen speculation he is ready to leave.

The likely succession could come at a delicate juncture for U.S. monetary policy.

Bernanke said last week that the central bank expected to lighten up later this year on the amount of money it is pumping into the economy each month through a bond-buying program.

He said the Fed would likely draw that program to a full close around the middle of next year, when policymakers at the central bank expect the jobless rate will have fallen to around 7 percent from its current 7.6 percent.

Those comments spurred a big selloff in stock markets around the globe and sent the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note soaring. It reached a 22-month high of 2.67 percent on Monday.

Fed officials have mounted a concerted effort to convince markets they overreacted to the chairman's remarks, and they have underscored the central bank's commitment to keep overnight interest rate near zero until unemployment drops to at least 6.5 percent. Stock markets have since stabilized and bond yields have fallen back.

The market volatility, however, underscored the tricky task the Fed faces in stepping away from the controversial and unprecedented easing of monetary policy Bernanke led.

To combat the deep recession and heal the scars from the financial crisis that followed the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, the Fed pressed overnight rates to near zero, where they have been since December 2008. It also more than tripled its balance sheet to $3.4 trillion through a series of bond purchases.

The next chairman of the central bank will likely face the task of unwinding that monetary largesse.

In a Reuters poll of economists earlier this month, the vast majority said Obama was likely to tap Yellen to take over.

Yellen, who has served as Fed vice chair since October 2010, is considered a forceful advocate of aggressive action to lift unemployment. If nominated and confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first woman to lead the central bank.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Douwe Miedema and Tim Ahmann; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-shortlist-succeed-federal-chairman-bernanke-003944227.html

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Hedge fund alternative investors love ? Bankrate, Inc.

Institutional investors are increasingly turning to mutual funds over hedge funds for strategy diversification. Just over a quarter, 26 percent, of institutions use hedge funds for exposure to long-short strategies this year, compared to 61 percent in 2010, according to a survey released this week by Morningstar and Barron's.

Long-short mutual funds take mostly long positions, buying investments they believe will go up, while hedging their bets with a smaller amount of short positions, or investments they think will go down. There are other types of alternative strategies --?for instance, market neutral strategies that take long and short positions but avoid stocks to lessen volatility. In general, alternative investment strategy funds "provide a smoother ride over time," says Nadia Papagiannis, CFA, director of alternative fund research at Morningstar.

During the events of 2008, institutional investors found themselves stuck in illiquid, highly leveraged hedge funds that only a year or two before had returned outsized returns.

"In 2008, hedge funds delivered high losses. Investors were stuck with illiquid investments they had to pay management fees on but couldn't get out of," says Papagiannis.

Mutual funds offer liquidity and transparency, plus lower fees for similar strategies. "When you are getting double-digit returns, it's?OK to pay 2 percent management fees and a 20 percent performance fee. But with mediocre returns, that eats away at benefits. Plus, if you can find something with lower costs, that is something that as a fiduciary, you have look at," she says.

The average expense ratio of the long/short equity fund category on the Morningstar website is 1.96 percent.

Advisers to small investors are also interested in the risk-management benefits of alternative strategies. For investors, allocating a portion of their portfolio to an alternative strategy fund helps cushion the downside when big stock market drops happen. That downside cushion means less return on the upside as well.

"In order to build wealth over time, you need to have a little bit of a smaller upside and a lot smaller downside. That way, you can build wealth more effectively over time rather than having a couple good up years and then big down years," says Papagiannis.

Investors scared of living through another stock market drop like the one in 2008 and 2009 may want to consider incorporating some strategies that behave differently than the rest of their investments.

Follow me on Twitter: @SheynaSteiner.

***
Senior investing reporter Sheyna Steiner is a co-author of "Future Millionaires' Guidebook," an e-book written by Bankrate editors and reporters. It's available at all the major e-book retailers.

Source: http://www.bankrate.com/financing/investing/hedge-fund-alternative-investors-love/

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Scientist working to break vicious cycle causing vision loss in diabetes

Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Toni Baker
tbaker@gru.edu
706-721-4421
Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University

AUGUSTA, Ga. it's a vicious cycle that robs people with diabetes of their vision.

The hallmark high glucose of the disease causes inflammation that produces free radicals that cause inflammation that produces more free radicals, explains Dr. Manuela Bartoli, vision scientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

If that's not bad enough, the body's endogenous system for dealing with free radicals also is dramatically impacted by diabetes, said Bartoli, who recently received a $1.8 million grant from the National Eye Institute to try to bolster that system and interrupt the destructive cycle.

Nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population has diabetes, according to the National Diabetes Foundation, and nearly half those individuals will develop diabetic retinopathy, according to the National Eye Institute.

Culprit free radicals are actually normal byproducts of the body's constant use of oxygen and, despite their derivative status, also are important signaling molecules in the body. Problems result when there are too many, like in diabetes, and their natural tendency to bond starts wreaking havoc on cells and DNA. In fact, excessive levels are thought to be a major contributor to a wide variety of diseases as well as aging.

The thioredoxin system typically works to maintain a healthy level of free radicals by neutralizing excess but, like many body systems, the thioredoxin system slows with age and diabetes hastens the process.

"This increase in free radicals results in an inability to put them to good use," Bartoli said. "Instead, we accumulate the damage they induce." In the case of the eyes and diabetes, over time the overwhelmed system destroys blood vessels that deliver blood and nutrition. In another biological irony, the starving eyes grow new blood vessels but they are fragile, leaky and often misplaced so ultimately they destroy vision.

Bartoli believes a selenium supplement could give the thioredoxin system the shot in the arm needed to stay efficient and effective. Selenium is a byproduct itself, resulting from copper-refining and used to make glass, alloys and more. It is also found in fish, nuts and grains.

Thioredoxin reductase, a protein essential to the recycling of the system, is dependent on selenium and Bartoli has found that protein's activity is reduced in an animal model of diabetic retinopathy and in retinas of human diabetic donors. Bartoli believes the cascade of cellular change resulting from high glucose levels impairs thioredoxin reductase. So she wants to better understand how the system works, exactly what happens to thioredoxin reductase and whether supplements of selenium can help the natural antioxidant system work better in diabetes.

In a related study, funded by the International Retinal Research Foundation, she is looking for an early sign of eye damage and possibly another window of intervention.

Currently, swelling of the macula the central part of the retina responsible for central vision is the first sign of treatable trouble. Anti-inflammatories injected into the eyes can help.

However increased blood levels of uric acid, a part of the inflammatory process that leads to swelling, may be an earlier indicator, Bartoli said. Uric acid is a byproduct of purine metabolism and is typically eliminated in the urine. High uric acid levels are associated with cardiovascular disease and gout as well as diabetes but it hasn't been well studied in the eye.

"We want to validate hyperuricemia as a risk factor for progression of diabetic retinopathy," she said. So she and her colleagues are measuring levels in the blood and eye fluid to see if they correlate with each other and with progressive eye damage. They also are reducing uric acid levels by giving two drugs already on the market, one that blocks formation and another that enhances excretion. Thinking that uric acid levels also may be a biomarker, she eventually wants to see how uric acid levels correlate with disease progression in humans.

"As the ancients said: 'The eyes are the mirror of the soul.' We also know that whatever happens in the eye is an expression of what is happening in the rest of the body," Bartoli said. "We want to better understand the causes of inflammation in the eye in diabetes and find better ways to manage it as well as byproducts such as uric acid. Ultimately, of course, we hope to protect sight."

A National Eye Institute fellowship to GRU Graduate Student Folami Lamoke also is supporting the thioredoxin sudies. Bartoli is a faculty member in the MCG Department of Ophthalmology and the GRU James and Jean Culver Vision Discovery Institute.

###

Media Contact:

Toni Baker
Communications Director
Medical College of Georgia
Georgia Regents University
706-721-4421 Office
706-825-6473 Cell
tbaker@gru.edu

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Toni Baker
tbaker@gru.edu
706-721-4421
Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University

AUGUSTA, Ga. it's a vicious cycle that robs people with diabetes of their vision.

The hallmark high glucose of the disease causes inflammation that produces free radicals that cause inflammation that produces more free radicals, explains Dr. Manuela Bartoli, vision scientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

If that's not bad enough, the body's endogenous system for dealing with free radicals also is dramatically impacted by diabetes, said Bartoli, who recently received a $1.8 million grant from the National Eye Institute to try to bolster that system and interrupt the destructive cycle.

Nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population has diabetes, according to the National Diabetes Foundation, and nearly half those individuals will develop diabetic retinopathy, according to the National Eye Institute.

Culprit free radicals are actually normal byproducts of the body's constant use of oxygen and, despite their derivative status, also are important signaling molecules in the body. Problems result when there are too many, like in diabetes, and their natural tendency to bond starts wreaking havoc on cells and DNA. In fact, excessive levels are thought to be a major contributor to a wide variety of diseases as well as aging.

The thioredoxin system typically works to maintain a healthy level of free radicals by neutralizing excess but, like many body systems, the thioredoxin system slows with age and diabetes hastens the process.

"This increase in free radicals results in an inability to put them to good use," Bartoli said. "Instead, we accumulate the damage they induce." In the case of the eyes and diabetes, over time the overwhelmed system destroys blood vessels that deliver blood and nutrition. In another biological irony, the starving eyes grow new blood vessels but they are fragile, leaky and often misplaced so ultimately they destroy vision.

Bartoli believes a selenium supplement could give the thioredoxin system the shot in the arm needed to stay efficient and effective. Selenium is a byproduct itself, resulting from copper-refining and used to make glass, alloys and more. It is also found in fish, nuts and grains.

Thioredoxin reductase, a protein essential to the recycling of the system, is dependent on selenium and Bartoli has found that protein's activity is reduced in an animal model of diabetic retinopathy and in retinas of human diabetic donors. Bartoli believes the cascade of cellular change resulting from high glucose levels impairs thioredoxin reductase. So she wants to better understand how the system works, exactly what happens to thioredoxin reductase and whether supplements of selenium can help the natural antioxidant system work better in diabetes.

In a related study, funded by the International Retinal Research Foundation, she is looking for an early sign of eye damage and possibly another window of intervention.

Currently, swelling of the macula the central part of the retina responsible for central vision is the first sign of treatable trouble. Anti-inflammatories injected into the eyes can help.

However increased blood levels of uric acid, a part of the inflammatory process that leads to swelling, may be an earlier indicator, Bartoli said. Uric acid is a byproduct of purine metabolism and is typically eliminated in the urine. High uric acid levels are associated with cardiovascular disease and gout as well as diabetes but it hasn't been well studied in the eye.

"We want to validate hyperuricemia as a risk factor for progression of diabetic retinopathy," she said. So she and her colleagues are measuring levels in the blood and eye fluid to see if they correlate with each other and with progressive eye damage. They also are reducing uric acid levels by giving two drugs already on the market, one that blocks formation and another that enhances excretion. Thinking that uric acid levels also may be a biomarker, she eventually wants to see how uric acid levels correlate with disease progression in humans.

"As the ancients said: 'The eyes are the mirror of the soul.' We also know that whatever happens in the eye is an expression of what is happening in the rest of the body," Bartoli said. "We want to better understand the causes of inflammation in the eye in diabetes and find better ways to manage it as well as byproducts such as uric acid. Ultimately, of course, we hope to protect sight."

A National Eye Institute fellowship to GRU Graduate Student Folami Lamoke also is supporting the thioredoxin sudies. Bartoli is a faculty member in the MCG Department of Ophthalmology and the GRU James and Jean Culver Vision Discovery Institute.

###

Media Contact:

Toni Baker
Communications Director
Medical College of Georgia
Georgia Regents University
706-721-4421 Office
706-825-6473 Cell
tbaker@gru.edu

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/mcog-swt062713.php

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Spiral galaxies like Milky Way bigger than thought

June 27, 2013 ? Let's all fist bump: Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope.

CU-Boulder Professor John Stocke, study leader, said new observations with Hubble's $70 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, designed by CU-Boulder show that normal spiral galaxies are surrounded by halos of gas that can extend to over 1 million light-years in diameter. The current estimated diameter of the Milky Way, for example, is about 100,000 light-years. One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles.

The material for galaxy halos detected by the CU-Boulder team originally was ejected from galaxies by exploding stars known as supernovae, a product of the star formation process, said Stocke of CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. "This gas is stored and then recycled through an extended galaxy halo, falling back onto the galaxies to reinvigorate a new generation of star formation," he said. "In many ways this is the 'missing link' in galaxy evolution that we need to understand in detail in order to have a complete picture of the process."

Stocke gave a presentation on the research June 27 at the University of Edinburgh's Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in Scotland at a conference titled "Intergalactic Interactions." The CU-Boulder research team also included professors Michael Shull and James Green and research associates Brian Keeney, Charles Danforth, David Syphers and Cynthia Froning, as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Blair Savage.

Building on earlier studies identifying oxygen-rich gas clouds around spiral galaxies by scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College and the University of California, Santa Cruz, Stocke and his colleagues determined that such clouds contain almost as much mass as all the stars in their respective galaxies. "This was a big surprise," said Stocke. "The new findings have significant consequences for how spiral galaxies change over time."

In addition, the CU-Boulder team discovered giant reservoirs of gas estimated to be millions of degrees Fahrenheit that were enshrouding the spiral galaxies and halos under study. The halos of the spiral galaxies were relatively cool by comparison -- just tens of thousands of degrees -- said Stocke, also a member of CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, or CASA.

Shull, a professor in CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department and a member of CASA, emphasized that the study of such "circumgalactic" gas is in its infancy. "But given the expected lifetime of COS on Hubble, perhaps another five years, it should be possible to confirm these early detections, elaborate on the results and scan other spiral galaxies in the universe," he said.

Prior to the installation of COS on Hubble during NASA's final servicing mission in May 2009, theoretical studies showed that spiral galaxies should possess about five times more gas than was being detected by astronomers. The new observations with the extremely sensitive COS are now much more in line with the theories, said Stocke.

The CU-Boulder team used distant quasars -- the swirling centers of supermassive black holes -- as "flashlights" to track ultraviolet light as it passed through the extended gas haloes of foreground galaxies, said Stocke. The light absorbed by the gas was broken down by the spectrograph, much like a prism does, into characteristic color "fingerprints" that revealed temperatures, densities, velocities, distances and chemical compositions of the gas clouds.

"This gas is way too diffuse to allow its detection by direct imaging, so spectroscopy is the way to go," said Stocke. CU-Boulder's Green led the design team for COS, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder for NASA.

While astronomers hope the Hubble Space Telescope keeps on chugging for years to come, there will be no more servicing missions. And the James Webb Space Telescope, touted to be Hubble's successor beginning in late 2018, has no UV light-gathering capabilities, which will prevent astronomers from undertaking studies like those done with COS, said Green.

"Once Hubble ceases to function, we will lose the capability to study galaxy halos for perhaps a full generation of astronomers," said Stocke. "But for now, we are fortunate to have both Hubble and its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to help us answer some of the most pressing issues in cosmology."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/JOkGclMu0Qg/130627102625.htm

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This Is How Japan Trolls Google Street View

Google Street View trolling is not new. People around the world love pulling hijinks when they see the Google Street View apparatus rolling down the street. Folks in Japan did some truly epic trolling.

As IT Media points out, writers at Japanese humor site Daily Portal Z got the drop that the Google Street View would be making its way through Tokyo. So, a while ago, the DPZ writers showed up near Mitaka Station, all carrying masks so they could turn themselves into "human pigeons". The result has recently appeared on Google (see for yourself here).

They even watch you even as you make your way down the street. *shudder*

This kind of stuff isn't new for the site: Last February, PDZ did a story on wearing a pigeon mask in public. Here were the results:

Google???????????????????????... [IT Media]

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

Source: http://kotaku.com/this-is-how-japan-trolls-google-street-view-569742023

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All-time greatest TV shows and movies are ...

Pop culture

Anna Chan and Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, TODAY

8 hours ago

Summer's here! And while many favorite and critically acclaimed shows have ended their seasons (see you next year, Don Draper!), summer blockbusters are starting to show up in theaters and many popular television programs are returning to the airwaves.

Warner Bros. / HBO / FOX / Paramount

"Casablanca," "The Sopranos," "The Simpsons" and "The Godfather Part 2" all made Entertainment Weekly's list of top movies and TV shows ever.

And as the summer entertainment season kicks into gear, Entertainment Weekly is preparing to unveil its list of All Time Greatest TV Shows and Movies Wednesday morning on TODAY.

Gangsters, outlaws, star-crossed lovers and creepy shower killers are among those viewers meet in the magazine's top five films list. And while we?re not revealing which movie is the magazine's No. 1 pick, we can tell you none of the movies that made the top five came along after America?s bicentennial. Think the suave 1940's charm of ?Casablanca,? or "Citizen Kane's" saga of old-school journalism, and the gritty and engrossing tales of mob life in ?The Godfather,? 1972 and ?The Godfather Part 2,? 1974.

In fact, there?s a flurry of bad men ? and one bad woman ? at the top of the list. ?Casablanca? has its Nazis of course, and ?The Godfather? films feature their share of murder and mayhem, horse heads in beds and characters who end up sleeping with the fishes. ?Bonnie and Clyde? came out in 1967 but tells the tale of famed outlaws from 30 years prior. And 1960?s legendary ?Psycho? is dubbed the ?granddaddy of all slasher films,? and it kept some of us out of the shower like ?Jaws? kept us out of the ocean.

On the small screen, only one of the magazine's top five picks for All Time Greatest TV Shows is still on the air. (Seriously, "Breaking Bad," "Walking Dead" and "Game of Thrones" didn't crack the summit of the list!) And that still-on-the-air comedy, Fox's very long-running "The Simpsons," is also the only animated program anywhere in the top 70.

The rest of the top five is evenly split with two truth-filled sitcoms featuring stellar comedians ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show," 1970-1977, and "Seinfeld," 1989-1998) and two crime-dramas with complex, not-always-good-guy leads who became TV legends ("The Sopranos," 1999-2007, and "The Wire," 2002-2008).

Tune in to TODAY Wednesday to see how Entertainment Weekly ranked these shows and movies in their All Time Greatest list!

Which movies and TV shows would put in your top 5? Click on "Talk about it" below and give us your list!

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/all-time-greatest-tv-shows-movies-are-6C10423399

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Caroline Kennedy Lights Memorial Flame In Ireland, Marking 50th Anniversary Of JFK Visit (PHOTOS)

Caroline Kennedy helped Ireland celebrate the 50th anniversary of her father's visit to the country by lighting an eternal flame Saturday.

According to UPI, Kennedy lit the flame in New Ross, the County Wexford town her great-great-grandfather left in 1848.

A torch lit from the eternal flame at President John F. Kennedy's graveside arrived in Ireland on June 20.

The AP reports on the ceremony:

The flame had been carried Olympics-style from JFK's plot in Arlington Cemetery by aircraft to Dublin, then by Irish navy vessel up the River Barrow to the New Ross dockside. It was the first time the Kennedy eternal flame had been passed along in this fashion.

"May it be a symbol of the fire in the Irish heart, imagination and soul," Kenny told more than 10,000 who had gathered along the river bank.

Several members of Ireland's Special Olympics team helped carry the flame from the Irish naval vessel to the ceremony, a gesture to the memory of JFK's sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics movement. She died in 2009.

And in a symbolic passing of the family political torch, Caroline Kennedy asked her 20-year-old son, Jack, to handle the main Kennedy part of the ceremony. His polished and idealistic speech reflected his long-expressed hopes to follow his grandfather into U.S. national politics after graduating from Yale.

See pictures of Kennedy lighting the flame in Ireland below:

(Photo by Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images)

(Photo by PA)

Gabrielle Dunkley contributed to this report.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/caroline-kennedy-flame_n_3495909.html

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Three planets in habitable zone of nearby star: Gliese 667c reexamined

June 25, 2013 ? A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully packed habitable zone.

Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. Just over one third of the mass of the Sun, it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667 (also referred to as GJ 667), 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). This is quite close to us -- within the Sun's neighbourhood -- and much closer than the star systems investigated using telescopes such as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.

Previous studies of Gliese 667C had found that the star hosts three planets with one of them in the habitable zone. Now, a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escud? of the University of G?ttingen, Germany and Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has reexamined the system. They have added new HARPS observations, along with data from ESO's Very Large Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Magellan Telescopes, to the already existing picture [1]. The team has found evidence for up to seven planets around the star [2].

These planets orbit the third fainter star of a triple star system. Viewed from one of these newly found planets the two other suns would look like a pair of very bright stars visible in the daytime and at night they would provide as much illumination as the full Moon. The new planets completely fill up the habitable zone of Gliese 667C, as there are no more stable orbits in which a planet could exist at the right distance to it.

"We knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more," says Tuomi. "By adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star's habitable zone is very exciting!"

Three of these planets are confirmed to be super-Earths -- planets more massive than Earth, but less massive than planets like Uranus or Neptune -- that are within their star's habitable zone, a thin shell around a star in which water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right. This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system [3].

"The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star -- instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them," adds co-author Rory Barnes (University of Washington, USA).

Compact systems around Sun-like stars have been found to be abundant in the Milky Way. Around such stars, planets orbiting close to the parent star are very hot and are unlikely to be habitable. But this is not true for cooler and dimmer stars such as Gliese 667C. In this case the habitable zone lies entirely within an orbit the size of Mercury's, much closer in than for our Sun. The Gliese 667C system is the first example of a system where such a low-mass star is seen to host several potentially rocky planets in the habitable zone.

The ESO scientist responsible for HARPS, Gaspare Lo Curto, remarks: "This exciting result was largely made possible by the power of HARPS and its associated software and it also underlines the value of the ESO archive. It is very good to also see several independent research groups exploiting this unique instrument and achieving the ultimate precision."

And Anglada-Escud? concludes: "These new results highlight how valuable it can be to re-analyse data in this way and combine results from different teams on different telescopes."

Notes

[1] The team used data from the UVES spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile (to determine the properties of the star accurately), the Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS) at the 6.5-metre Magellan II Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the HIRES spectrograph mounted on the Keck 10-metre telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii as well as extensive previous data from HARPS (the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) at ESO's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile (gathered through the M dwarf programme led by X. Bonfils and M. Mayor 2003-2010.

[2] The team looked at radial velocity data of Gliese 667C, a method often used to hunt for exoplanets. They performed a robust Bayesian statistical analysis to spot the signals of the planets. The first five signals are very confident, while the sixth is tentative, and seventh more tentative still. This system consists of three habitable-zone super-Earths, two hot planets further in, and two cooler planets further out. The planets in the habitable zone and those closer to the star are expected to always have the same side facing the star, so that their day and year will be the same lengths, with one side in perpetual sunshine and the other always night.

[3] In the Solar System Venus orbits close to the inner edge of the habitable zone and Mars close to the outer edge. The precise extent of the habitable zone depends on many factors.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/DpMy_6AWEjY/130625073544.htm

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Angelina Jolie urges world to end rape in war

UNITED NATIONS (AP) ? Angelina Jolie made her debut before the U.N.'s most powerful body as a special envoy for refugees Monday and urged the world's nations to make the fight against rape in war a top priority.

The actress told the Security Council that "hundreds of thousands ? if not millions ? of women, children and men have been raped in conflicts in our lifetimes."

Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said the Security Council has witnessed 67 years of wars and conflict since it was established "but the world has yet to take up warzone rape as a serious priority."

"You set the bar," she told the council. "If the ... council sets rape and sexual violence in conflict as a priority it will become one and progress will be made. If you do not, this horror will continue."

British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who presided over the meeting, stressed that "in conflicts in nearly every corner of the globe, rape is used systematically and ruthlessly, in the almost certain knowledge that there will be no consequences for the perpetrators."

Soon after Jolie spoke, the council adopted a legally-binding resolution demanding the complete and immediate cessation of all acts of sexual violence by all parties to armed conflict. It noted that sexual violence can constitute a crime against humanity and a contributing act to genocide, called for improved monitoring of sexual violence in conflict, and urged the U.N. and donors to assist survivors.

It was the broadest resolution adopted by the council on the sexual violence in conflict. Hague said Britain plans to follow-up by convening a global gathering during the annual General Assembly meeting of world leaders in September to keep up the pressure for action.

Hague said at a discussion later at the Ford Foundation that his prime motivation for pressing for global action against sexual violence was the 1990s war in Bosnia, partly because of an adviser but also because of Jolie's 2011 film, "In the Land of Blood and Honey," about former lovers who end up on the opposite sides of the conflict. He said he arranged the film's British premiere at the Foreign Office and has been campaigning with Jolie since then, including a visit to Congo in March, "to move the stigma and the shame from the victim to the perpetrator."

"The time has come for the world to take a strong and determined stand to make clear that the systematic use of rape as a weapon is not acceptable in the modern world and our objective is to change the entire global attitude to these issues," Hague said.

Getting the whole world talking about sexual violence in conflict and the need to punish perpetrators not victims "will shift attitudes ? maybe over a period of years, but we have begun," he said.

Jolie, who has traveled extensively in her role as goodwill ambassador, recalled several of the survivors she had met ? the mother of a five-year-old girl raped outside a police station in Goma in eastern Congo, and a Syrian woman she spoke to in Jordan last week who asked to hide her name and face "because she knew that if she spoke out about the crimes against her she would be attacked again, and possibly killed."

"Let us be clear what we are speaking of: Young girls raped and impregnated before their bodies are able to carry a child, causing fistula," Jolie said, referring to an injury caused by violent rapes that tear apart the flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina, leaving the girls unable to control their bowels or bladder.

She continued: "Boys held at gunpoint and forced to sexually assault their mothers and sisters. Women raped with bottles, wood branches and knives to cause as much damage as possible. Toddlers and even babies dragged from their homes, and violated."

Zainab Hawa Bangura, the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, told the council that two weeks ago she visited Bosnia where an estimated 50,000 women were victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence during the war, but only a handful of perpetrators have been prosecuted.

Later, at the Ford Foundation, she said that on an African trip with Hague, she visited the village of Mambasa in eastern Congo's Ituri district where 11 babies aged 6 to 12 months had been raped, 59 children aged 1 to 3 years old had been raped and 182 girls aged 5 to 15 years old had been raped.

"Who will rape a baby?," Bangura asked. "It means you want to wipe the community away. That's the only explanation you can have."

Jolie pleaded with the Security Council ? and all countries ? to implement the resolution and not let the issue drop.

"Meet your commitments, debate this issue in your parliaments, mobilize people in your countries, and build it into all your foreign policy efforts," she urged. "Together, you can turn the tide of global opinion, shatter impunity and finally put an end to this abhorrence."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paid tribute to Jolie for being the voice of millions forced to flee their homes "and now for the many survivors of wartime rape whose bodies have been used as battlegrounds."

He called on all leaders to apprehend and prosecute perpetrators "and be part of a global coalition of champions determined to break this evil."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/angelina-jolie-urges-world-end-rape-war-160231702.html

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EMW kick-starts JuiceBox, a $99 Level 2 DIY charging station

Electric vehicle charging stations aren't cheap: one of the most affordable Level 2 (240V) units sells for $450 and only supplies 16A. Electric Motor Works (EMW) -- which is best known for its electric conversion kits -- wants to change this with JuiceBox, a 15kW Level 2 EV charger that costs just $99 in kit form (plus $10 shipping). The device, which is launching on Kickstarter today, supplies up to 62A and operates on both 120V and 240V. It's built around an Arduino microcontroller and EMW is making both the hardware and software open source.

But wait, there's more! The company is also crowdfunding a Premium Edition of JuiceBox ($199 in kit form) which adds time-of-day charging, a color LCD, ground-fault plus output protection (for outdoor use) and a unique enclosure (hopefully as funky as the one in the picture above). While the DIY kits only require basic assembly and soldering skills, you'll be able to buy fully assembled versions for $100 more. At $329 (shipped), a ready-to-use JuiceBox Premium Edition undercuts other similar charging stations by several hundred dollars. The catch? You'll have to supply your own cables (or buy them separately from EMW), including one with a standard J1772 EV connector. Hit the source link below to check out the campaign, and take a look at the PR after the break.

Filed under: Transportation

Comments

Source: EMW (Kickstarter)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/24/emw-kick-starts-juicebox-a-99-level-2-diy-charging-station/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Crazy Guy Threatened To Kill ?Soul Mate? Miranda Kerr

Crazy Guy Threatened To Kill “Soul Mate” Miranda Kerr

Model Miranda Kerr’s life was threatened by a a 52-year-old man named Steven C. Swanson, who made plans to travel to her Los Angeles home to kill her! Swanson called L.A. police to share his plans to “rescue” his “wife” and “soul mate” next month. Scary stuff! Swanson was was taken into custody after he ...

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Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/06/crazy-guy-threatened-to-kill-soul-mate-miranda-kerr/

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Series of bomb attacks in Iraq kill at least 42

BAGHDAD (AP) ? A series of evening bombings near markets in and around Baghdad and other blasts north of the capital killed at least 42 people and wounded dozens of others Monday in the latest eruption of bloodshed to rock Iraq.

The attacks were the latest in a wave of violence that has claimed more than 2,000 lives since the beginning of April. Militants, building on Sunni discontent with the Shiite-led government, appear to be growing stronger in central and northern Iraq.

The violence came as tens of thousands of Shiites poured into the holy city of Karbala, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Baghdad, for the annual festival of Shabaniyah, marking the anniversary of the birth of the ninth-century Shiite leader known as the Hidden Imam. Tight security measures were in force to try to prevent insurgent attacks on the worshippers.

One of the deadliest attacks came at night when two bombs placed near a market blew up less than a minute apart in Baghdad's mostly Shiite neighborhood of Husseiniyah, killing ten people and wounding 30 others.

Police said the second bomb went off among a group of people who had gathered at the scene to help the victims of the first blast.

Bassem Hazim, a merchant from Husseiniyah, said he was preparing for night prayers when he heard an explosion. He went out to see what happened.

"As we came near the blast site, a second bomb went off in the crowd. We helped carry some wounded people to the hospital. All the shops closed and all the shoppers fled, he said, but "government officials are busy with trips abroad and contracts while the country is bleeding."

Earlier, police said that two car bombs exploded within minutes on a commercial street in the mixed neighborhood of Jihad in western Baghdad, killing nine people and wounding 21 others, police said.

Also, four people were killed and nine others were wounded when a car bomb exploded near a line of shops in the Shiite-dominated area of al-Shurta al-Rabeaa.

Interior Ministry spokesman Saad Maan Ibrahim said that al-Qaida is avoiding direct confrontation with the security forces and instead are choosing civilian targets.

"By attacking soft targets like markets, al-Qaida wants to send a message that they are still active and still capable of striking anywhere in Iraq," he said.

Police said car bomb exploded near a supermarket on a main commercial street in the Shiite Karrada neighborhood, killing five people and wounding 16.

Just after sunset, police said a car bomb went off near an outdoor market in the Shiite suburb of Nahrawan, killing four civilians and wounding 15 others.

Minutes later, a car bomb went off near a market in the Shiite-majority neighborhood of New Baghdad. Police said that three people were killed and 10 others were wounded. Minutes later, a second car bomb hit a bus stop in the same neighborhood, killing two people and wounding eight others.

Also, two people were killed in a car explosion in the Christian-Shiite neighborhood of Garage al-Amana in southeastern Baghdad.

In the morning, a provincial police officer in Ninevah said a suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into an army patrol in the city of Mosul, killing a soldier and a police officer. He said that seven people, including two civilians, were wounded. Mosul is 360 kilometers (220 miles) northwest of Baghdad.

Another officer said a second bomber blew set off his explosive-rigged belt inside a university campus in the city of Tikrit, killing a police officer. The city is 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad.

Two medical officials confirmed casualty figures. All spoke anonymously as they were not authorized to release information to reporters.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but security forces and Shiite residents are frequently targeted by al-Qaida's Iraq branch.

___

Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/series-bomb-attacks-iraq-kill-least-42-193647756.html

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Nikkei: Microsoft porting first-party game franchises to Android and iOS

Microsoft is selective about where its first-party game franchises appear -- outside of lightweight releases like Kinectimals and Wordament, it prefers to use games as technology showcases and system sellers. It may not be picky for much longer, though, as Nikkei claims that Microsoft has reached a deal with Japan's KLab to develop Android and iOS versions of its first-party titles. The deal reportedly includes adaptations of both PC and Xbox games, and would start with a free-to-play variant of Age of Empires that could launch before the end of the 2013 fiscal year. We've reached out to Microsoft to verify the rumor, but it's clear that the arrangement could be a breakthrough for gamers who aren't wedded to Microsoft's existing mobile strategy.

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Tablets, Microsoft

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Via: Reuters

Source: Nikkei (subscription required)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/24/nikkei-microsoft-porting-first-party-games-to-android-ios/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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The Secret Ops of the ?Government Communications Headquarters?

?The innocent have everything to fear, mostly from the guilty, but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ?The innocent have nothing to fear.???Terry Pratchett (British author), in Snuff (Doubleday, 2011).

For many people, personal privacy vs widespread surveillance has been a major issue for decades. However, some thought it might have been happening but chose to downplay it. Others didn?t want to know and just didn?t care. Edward Snowden?s recent revelations indicate it is happening and that we should all care. ???

Former National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has now turned his attention to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the NSA. On Friday, Snowden released documents to The Guardian newspaper in the UK to back up his claims that GCHQ has secretly accessed fibre optic cables carrying huge amounts of internet and communications data. According to The Guardian, the agency is able to tap into, analyse and store data. Snowden told the newspaper that the NSA has a more prolific British ally in GCHQ. (GCHQ is one of three UK intelligence agencies, alongside MI5 and MI6.)

?It?s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight? They (GCHQ) are worse than the US.? Edward Snowden

Although it is physically impossible for the intelligence agencies to read everyone?s emails, for instance, GCHQ can apparently record phone calls, read email and Facebook postings and review website traffic if they so wish. It can also access entire web use histories on individuals. Although GCHQ can only store certain data for 30 days, the Guardian says the practice is subject to little scrutiny. GCHQ operation can tap cables that carry global communications with the potential to carry 600 million daily ?telephone events?.

?If GCHQ have been intercepting huge numbers of innocent people?s communications as part of a massive sweeping exercise, then I struggle to see how that squares with a process that requires a warrant for each individual intercept.? Nick Pickles, Big Brother Watch director, as reported in The Guardian, 22 June.

This massive interception effort operates under two programmes: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation. GCHQ is tapping 200 internet links, each with a data rate of 10Gbps, and the agency has the technical capacity to concurrently analyze 46 of these 200 streams of data at a time.

The revelations come alongside reports of the NSA snooping on US and international citizens via the metadata held on them by telecommunication companies, and secret data-sharing agreements between the NSA and consumer-web giants, such as Facebook, Google, Apple and others under the PRISM?scheme.

GCHQ is able to capitalize on the UK?s position at the edge of Western Europe, by tapping into the vast quantity of data flowing through cables around the UK and abroad. Over 300 GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts sift through the data, which they use to identify communications relating to security, terror, organized crime, and economic well-being.

Britain and the US are the founding members of the Five-Eyes intelligence sharing agreement. The Five-Eyes are members of a special club of former British colonies that gather and intelligence with each other. Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the three other members.

?

According to The Guardian, Britain?s ability to tap these fibre-optic cables makes it the web eavesdropping powerhouse of the Five-Eyes, with the documents provided by Snowden saying that of the five, Britain has ?the biggest Internet access.?

?

The Guardian reports that British personnel on the team of 300 GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts sifting through the data have ?a light oversight regime compared to the US?

?

The newspaper reports that 850,000 NSA and employees and private American contractors have been able to access to the information gathered by CGHQ. One of the documents quotes NSA boss Gen. Keith Alexander as urging British spies to collect everything they could.

?Why can?t we collect at the signals, all the time? Sounds like a good summer homework project for Menwith,? is written at the top of a slide shown by the Guardian that supposedly quotes Alexander during a 2008 visit to the UK. The slide is titled, ?Collect-it-all.?

Menwith refers to RAF Menwith Hill, a secret signals intelligence gathering facility in the Yorkshire countryside run by the US.

GCHQ operatives tapped the fibre-optic cables over the last five years at the point where the transatlantic cables reach British shores ? these cables move Internet and telephone data from North America to Western Europe.? All of this was done with agreements with the communications companies, described by the document as ?intercept partners.?

Last week, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Robert Cole defended bulk collection of cellphone data and other business records to US lawmakers:

?If you?re looking for a needle in a haystack, you?ve got to get the haystack first,? said Cole during a June 18 House intelligence committee hearing on the matter. ?That?s why we have the ability under the [FISA] court order, to acquire . . . all of that data, we don?t get to use all of that data, necessarily.? As reported by John Reed in Foreign Policy on 21 June.

Britain and the US are rapidly perfecting the system to allow them to capture and analyse a large quantity of international traffic consisting of emails, texts, phone calls, internet searches, chat, photographs, blogposts, videos and the many uses of Google.

Writing in The Guardian on Friday 21 June, Henry Porter states:

?Mastering the Internet treats the rights of billions of foreign web users, the possible menace to the privacy of British and American citizens and the duties of their legislators with equal contempt. After Iraq and the banking crash, the world may come to see MTI as further evidence of a heedless delinquency in two of the world?s oldest democracies.?

Porter talks about the lack of meaningful oversight in both countries, the use of commercial companies in the surveillance process and the wholesale disregard for the fundamentals of both countries? democratic principles. Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights organisation Liberty, says that GCHQ are exploiting the fact that the internet is so international in nature and that what?s holding them back from going further is technological capability, certainly not ethics (1).

Why it matters, really matters

For too long, the majority in Britain has been led to believe that governments in major western liberal democracies operate with benign intentions, that the government acts on our behalf and in our interests and that only those with something to hide have anything to fear. The belief is forwarded that the loss of liberty and intrusions into our personal privacy are small prices to pay for ensuring our safety in a barbaric world that wants to attack and inflict terror on us.

It?s all part of the dominant narrative. It?s all part of a dominant narrative that seeks to mislead and to mask the real essence of power and the true nature of intent behind notions of patriotism, nationalism, bowing down to the flag, militarism and that ?we?, ?the nation? are in united in cause and belief. ??

What Snowden?s revelations illustrate is the unaccountable face of power. And this should concern us because it?s not the greater good of humankind, queen, flag or country that this power serves. It ultimately serves capital and the extremely wealthy, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of ordinary people across the world (2).

Look no further to see who funds the major political parties or individual politicians to do their bidding. Look no further than the backgrounds of many of these politicians. But, most important, look no further to see who owns the major corporations and banks and who sits on the bodies that hammer out major policies (3)(4)(5). It is the powerful foundations and think tanks headed or funded by private corporations that drive US and British policies, whether at home or abroad, and that includes the Project for a New American Century (6) and the resultant ongoing war of terror waged on countries across the world.

Western liberal democracy has been quite successful in making many at home blind to the chains that bind and which make them immune to the falsehoods that underpin the system. However, with the economic meltdown, ?austerity?, increasing public awareness of corporate crimes, disillusionment with mainstream politics and the ramping up of wars, paranoia and the stripping away of civil liberties, social control is no longer able to operate on the relatively benign level that it once did. The collapse of the economic system and its propping up has laid bare just who that system is set up to benefit. State violence and mass surveillance is now part of the changing agenda of liberal democracy that is no longer able to hide behind the pretence of being liberal or democratic. The mask has slipped and we are right to be concerned.

?The world has evidence of the totally monitored future that GCHQ and NSA plan for us and that political establishments turn a blind eye to?. fear still trumps everything. On Tuesday, the head of?NSA, General Keith B Alexander, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, insisted that many terror plots had been stopped by surveillance. In Britain, the foreign secretary, William Hague? was joined by three former home secretaries, Jack Straw, Lord (John) Reid and Alan Johnson, to reassure us that mass surveillance was indeed necessary to make interdictions and? that further powers were needed? The point about these latest revelations is that they show there are more than adequate powers for interception on both sides of the Atlantic and that the terror agenda and, to a lesser degree, the fear of paedophilia, may well have been used to elaborate a huge system of espionage and domestic surveillance.? ? Henry Porter, The Guardian 21 June.

?Notes

1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23012910

2) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/07/live-j01.html)

3) http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/tipping-balance-of-power.html

4) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-four-horsemen-behind-america-s-oil-wars/24507

5) http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/10/22/the-147-companies-that-control-everything/

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/britains-surveillance-state-the-secret-ops-of-the-government-communications-headquarters-gchq/5340053

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