BEIJING ? Prosecutors said Friday they indicted a former fugitive at the center of China's biggest corruption scandal and that he has confessed to bribery and smuggling.
The move brings authorities a step closer to a conclusion in one of China's most lurid, long-running corruption cases in which the chief suspect fled to Canada and fought extradition for more than a decade.
Prosecutors in the eastern city of Xiamen have indicted Lai Changxing for allegedly masterminding a network that smuggled everything from cigarettes to cars and oil and bribed dozens of government workers between 1996 and 1999, China's state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Lai and other key members of the syndicate have "confessed to the facts of the smuggling and bribery charges without concealing anything," the report said.
Lai became China's most-wanted man after he fled to Canada in 1999 and fought extradition for 12 years until he was deported in July.
Before fleeing to Canada he lived a life of luxury in China complete with a bulletproof Mercedes Benz. He is alleged to have run a mansion in which he plied officials with liquor and prostitutes.
At the time, state TV splashed pictures of the network's allegedly ill-gotten gains: A tiger skin rug laid out on a conference table, confiscated cars belonging to corrupt bureaucrats, a sack of gold rings, and a picture of a young woman, said to be a lover kept for one official by Lai.
Scores of officials and executives involved have been imprisoned and some executed over the scandal. Among those punished were a former deputy police minister, who was quietly removed from his posts as vice minister for public security and deputy chief of an anti-smuggling task force. The deputy mayor of Xiamen and the city's customs chief were also punished.
Chinese media have said Lai's alleged smuggling operation was valued at $10 billion.
China's Communist Party has struggled to control widespread practices of embezzlement, taking kickbacks, and influence peddling that have degraded public faith and sometimes led to violent protest.
The government's task of fighting corruption remains arduous, said senior Communist Party leaders Friday at a meeting presided over by Chinese President Hu Jintao, according to a statement on the central government's website.
Efforts should be made to fight graft in the construction sector and to address corruption linked to excessive official celebrations and seminars and government cars, the statement said.
In Canada, Lai had avoided deportation by arguing he could face the death penalty or be tortured and would not get a fair trial in his home country.
But that legal battle ended in July when a federal court in Vancouver ruled Lai should not be considered a refugee and upheld his deportation.
China promised Canada that Lai would not get the death penalty in 2001 when then-President Jiang Zemin sent the Canadian prime minister at the time, Jean Chretien, a diplomatic note with assurances Lai would not be executed if returned.
(Reuters) ? That Adele's "21" will rank as the year's top-selling album is no surprise - the English singer-songwriter's hits "Rolling in the Deep" and "Someone Like You" dominated playlists in 2011. What is surprising is that "21," released by independent British label XL Recordings, sold more than 5 million copies.
The last time an album topped the year-end chart with more than 5 million copies sold was in 2004, when Usher's "Confessions" moved 7.9 million, according to Nielsen Soundscan, which supplied all sales data for this story.
Indeed, music sales overall are expected to end 2011 up more than 3 percent from last year. Not coincidentally, the last time overall music sales rose by so much was in 2004 as well.
The resurgence in sales is welcome news for the music industry. A meager 1 percent increase in digital sales last year created widespread panic that the format had already plateaued.
Nielsen analyst David Bakula attributed the rebound to a strong release slate, plus retailers getting more aggressive with pricing and promotions.
For instance, Lady Gaga's album "Born This Way" was priced at 99 cents - less than one-tenth the price of most albums - in a special deal, helping drive sales beyond her core fans, he said. The promotion on Amazon.com angered other retailers who were selling the album at full price, however.
"In 2004, you had one massive album driving sales," said Bakula, senior vice president of entertainment analytics for Nielsen. "This year is similar in that you have one really great story that everyone is talking about."
Digital sales are expected to end 2011 close to 10 percent higher, prompting Bakula to proclaim the sales performance "a great resurgence."
Physical albums still outsell digital albums by a 2:1 margin. But total music sales, which would include digital singles, are now split 50-50 between physical and digital.
TOPPING 5 MILLION
To put Adele's sales figures in context, the more than 3.5 million physical albums she sold this year would have been good enough to take the top spot in each of the last three years without even adding in digital sales. Album sales include LPs, compact discs and digital albums.
Figures for the year's best-selling album declined every year from 2004 to 2008. They hit an all-time low in 2008 when Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III" took the top spot with sales of just 2.9 million, the first time an album claimed the best-seller title with sales of less than 3 million.
Since 2008, however, sales of the top-selling album of the year have increased, though not by much. Taylor Swift took the top spot in 2009, selling 3.2 million copies of "Fearless." Eminem's "Recovery" finished 2010 as the year's best-seller with 3.4 million copies.
"Adele's performance this year shows the demand for great original music," Bakula said. "Here's an artist that had moderate success before, but nothing of this magnitude, and she's doing it all on two singles."
Amy Winehouse's death from alcohol poisoning in July also factored into Adele's sales performance. Bakula said the attention Winehouse's death received stoked interest among fans to sample other soulful, jazz-infused female British singer-songwriters, like Adele and Duffy. As a result, in addition to buying "21," consumers dipped into Adele's back catalog, making her prior release, "19," one of the year's top 25 best-sellers.
Still, Adele's sales total is less than half of the more than 11 million copies that "No Strings Attached" from N'Sync sold in 2000. That year marked the last time the top spot featured an album that sold in excess of 10 million, underscoring the dramatic impact that legitimate digital distribution channels like Apple's iTunes and illegal file-sharing sites such as Limewire have had on the music industry.
Five years before Kesey and his Merry Pranksters embarked on their historical/hysterical trip of trips, swashbuckling surf rats Jack Murphy and Dick Catri dosed Brevard County, Florida, with their own new transcendental turn-on in 1959. While "Murph The Surf" would eventually gain infamy as an international jewel thief, Catri assumed his role as the "Godfather of East Coast Surfing" by spending the next five years embracing waveriding culture in its original birthplace, the Hawaiian Islands.
Catri returned to Central Florida to open Satellite Beach Surf Shop in 1964, Shagg's Surf Shop in 1966 and Catri Surfboards in 1968 -- in the process conceiving the most influential team of surfing talent ever assembled this side of the Mississippi, and laying the foundation for what has become the most technologically dialed epicenter for surfboard design and manufacturing on the East Coast.
Fast-forward 52 years from Catri and Murphy's first fateful stop here, and anyone can see Brevard County is still that epicenter.
"It all starts in the water," says Larry Pope, who is legendary not only for his surf photography, but for being the sanding backbone of the Eastern boardbuilding industry for nearly four decades (probably laying his foam-caked hands on more surfboards than any other living human). "All these guys were really good surfers, and we can surf year-round down here pretty consistently. It obviously wasn't this giant Quiksilver/Billabong world we live in now, so the only way to make a living and stay around surfing was to work in the boardbuilding industry."
These surf-slackers were no idiots, but rather the genetic byproduct of some of the most brilliant and well-conditioned engineers, technicians and astronauts in the world. The John F. Kennedy Space Center's booming space program (and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's growing accommodation for missile defense testing) effectively superseded the agricultural-based economy, and Brevard's population vaulted from 23,700 in 1950 to 91,900 by 1958 -- just prior to Catri and Murph's explosive touchdown. The Apollo program based out of Merritt Island spiked the population to 247,500 over the next decade. Obviously many of those smart, adventurous people birthed smart, adventurous sons seeking to engineer better vehicles on which to navigate their own mysterious, aqueous nebula. But being such a naive culture, they first needed a rocket boost. Unsurprisingly, that boost came from California, and later, Hawaii.
After joining the Coast Guard in 1956, Santa Cruz surfer/boardbuilder Johnny Rice got stationed on the East Coast. Over the next eight years, Rice surfed and shaped boards from New Jersey to Florida. More west coasters would soon follow throughout the early '60s -- some fleeing arrest warrants, some simply en route to somewhere else.
"We were pretty clueless early on," admits Pope. "It took Californians passing through here to teach the first-generation guys how to do what they did. Donnie Mulhern [legendary Californian transplant/ boardbuilder] taught me, and many others. Guys came here for different reasons -- some honest, some illicit -- and there was a bit of a mule train going through here at one point [laughs]. But businesses were built and the seeds were sewn. It started with two guys, which became eight, and then multiplied quite fast. Eventually, every surfer here wanted to make boards. Guys from Hawaii would even come through on their way to Europe and show us things. We didn't have our own identity so we had to assume theirs."
By the mid 1970s, internationally revered pros like Claude Codgen and Mike Tabeling had started their own labels (Sunshine Surfboards and Tabeling Surfboards, respectively), while other Golden Age surf stars were able to transcend the grueling, tedious life of making surfboards with successful forays into retail, contest promotion, marketing management and filmmaking. As far as exporting, Catri's factory was the only real game in town until 1978 when Cocoa Beach brothers Ed and Jim Leasure took the knowledge, experience and contacts they had gained working under Catri and opened their own factory, transforming into what is today known as Quiet Flight Surfboards -- one of the country's largest surfboard manufacturers -- every blade hand-shaped and glassed in their original Cocoa Beach factory.
"None of these guys started out shaping," continues Pope. "They had to pay their dues, run the gauntlet of sanding and rubbing out and working their way up the chain. No one just stepped into an owner/operator position. They all had to go through the apprentice stage. But we didn't have ideas of our own, so we had to get them from somewhere else. Greg Loehr and Jeff Crawford would come back from Hawaii with information they'd gotten over there, people they met over there would come back through Brevard with ideas... Even New Jersey guys like Grog [Greg Mesanko] would live here in the winter to tap into what we had, before it became the fashionable, snowbird thing to do."
Brevard County became the junction for the cutting-edge, linking the progressive think tanks of Hawaii and California with the limited, ignorant boardbuilding culture north of the Sunshine State. In other words, season after season this growing fraternity of Floridian surfer-shapers brought home what they learned in the Pacific, and gave the rest of the East Coast a convenient relay point.
But not all theories came from the outside; some were homegrown. A top-shelf competitor, Pipeline ace, and respected shaper since 1967, Greg Loehr began experimenting with epoxy resin for surfcraft in 1981, branding his company Resin Research a year later. Loehr has remained epoxy technology's most outspoken champion despite being ridiculed and demonized at times by polyester advocates throughout various points along the timeline of modern surfboard evolution. Thirty years, one Clark Foam closing, and dozens of stiffer EPA regulations later, Loehr is the one who now gets to say, "I told you so." As of 2011, not every surfboard company uses epoxy to some degree to build a board...just most of them.
Of course, at home, Greg's reputation for innovation and endurance was without question. At one point he was the busiest "power shaper" for Pete Dooley's Natural Art Surfboards. As the ASP World Tour, aerial surfing, and the thruster marked the early 1980s as the unofficial beginning of the sport's postmodern era, Natural Art logos became emblematically synonymous with East Coast progression with Dooley and company's legion of badass teamriders. Meanwhile, Sebastian Inlet spawn and aerial surfing pioneer Matt Kechele was test-driving his own shapes (and logos) on the ASP World Tour. Gathering steam to set the world afire, a prepubescent Kelly Slater started bagging ESA titles and magazine shots with Quiet Flight, and later, Kechele logos emblazoned on his day-glo boards. Starting Spectrum Surfboards in 1980, Craig Bobbitt was sponsoring his own share of stars-in-the-making, namely Gulf Coasters Cory and Shea Lopez, who probably spent more childhood days in Brevard than Indian Rocks Beach to take advantage of the contest scene, gain industry contacts, and practice their sport in waves that actually break.
"Those were interesting times," says Pensacola transplant Steve Forstall, who shaped for Spectrum in those early days and estimates they were building 4000 boards a year out of the factory on Tomahawk Drive in Indian Harbour Beach, which joins Satellite Beach, Indialantic and the Melbourne mainland. "I've still got the board I shaped for Cory [Lopez] when he was a grom, before concave bottoms and fin systems. I see it every day on the roof of my factory. I was just this kid from Pensacola who was willing to power it out because I wanted to live surfing and boardbuilding. Me and Joe Shriver would do 40 a week, which was good money in those days."
And on it went, growing and growing through the fish resurgence and mass funshape production, through custom composites and Blank Monday and China and a thousand other revolutions and catastrophes that were either overblown or underappreciated. To try and list every surfer who's ever made a buck or tried to carve out a living mowing foam in Brevard County would be an outrageous proposition. For a more proper model, just look at their top local exports: In the ASP World Tour's 30 years of existence, Brevard County has placed eight surfers in the sport's most elite pantheon (Matt Kechele, Charlie Kuhn, Todd Holland, Kelly Slater, Danny Melhado, Bryan Hewitson, CJ Hobgood and Damien Hobgood) -- four times that of any other Eastern region. And every single one of those surfers rode boards, at one time or another, built by one or more of the craftsmen mentioned here and in the frames that follow. Today, over 20 major surfboard producers call the Space Coast home.
As far as factories here," says consummate shaper Ricky Carroll, "there's Quiet Flight, then ours, R&D Surf, in Rockledge, which is two miles from Clay Lyles', but most people know Tomahawk Drive as the center. You can go all the way back to when Dick Catri was building boards over on Tomahawk. There are more guys in a concentrated area there, but all in all Brevard has always been the Mecca of surfboard building on the East Coast -- partially due to its climate and partially derived from when Clark Foam decided to open their big warehouse here in the '70s, which made it easier for guys to build boards because we didn't have to get all our materials shipped to us. Most of the shapers get along, too. We all know that we're in the same boat -- some on a bigger scale than others, but we all love the same thing."
"Oh, guys may get along here," snickers Pope, "but you'll rarely hear one of them say they were wrong about a design. Shapers here are very opinionated. But that's what makes them keep going and going and going..."
And going, boldly, where no surfing community has gone before. It isn't called the "Space Coast" for nothing.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. ? Sam Ostarello had 16 points and 10 rebounds to help No. 20 Purdue defeat Oakland 66-47 on Tuesday afternoon.
It was Ostarello's first double-double of the season and the second of her career.
Courtney Moses scored 16 points and made four 3-pointers for the Boilermakers (9-3), who won their second straight since their upset loss at Central Michigan. Purdue won even though its leading scorer, Brittany Rayburn, scored just seven points on 2-for-8 shooting. She had averaged 15.1 points.
Sharise Calhoun scored 12 points and Zakiya Minifee and Bethany Watterworth each added 11 for Oakland (5-5), which had won two straight, including a victory over ACC opponent Clemson.
Oakland hadn't played since a wild win over Illinois-Chicago on Dec. 11 when Calhoun made a game-winning shot from beyond half court in the 48-45 victory.
Not too long ago we mentioned a new Reddit app called BaconReader for Reddit. The screenshots looked so clean and slick I decided I had to try it out and give it the courtesy of a full-blown review. After having spent some time with it, I'm glad I did.
If any of you members of the Android Central nation are also Redditors, you know how hard it is to find a good Reddit app in the Market. Interfaces aren't intuitive, comment threads are a mess, and clicking links opens up your browser, which takes away time from more browsing.
BaconReader manages to remedy all of those things in a tight, beautiful package. The interface is incredibly minimalist, with white and grey being the dominant colors. The monochromatic look of it gives an almost metallic look, not overbearing on the eyes while also not being boring to look at. It's so efficiently tidy, it just works.
If you tap any thread, you'll be taken either to the link it links to or the text. If there's loads of comments on it, the comment thread is not only color-coded, but also optimized for your mobile screen. Long paragraphs are neatly arranged within the confines of your display, and that's a victory in and of itself.
You can also login to your Reddit account, and from there, post or change your preferred subreddits, all from the app. If you tap the "front page" button, you'll be given a dropdown menu of all the subreddits you're subscribed to, and if you tap the "what's hot" button, you can filter your results based on what's new, rising, top, etc.
Posting from BaconReader is also a breeze. Simply tap the top-right button (that looks suspiciously similar to a generic compose button), and you're taken to the submit screen. From here you can submit a link, type in text, or upload a picture, just like you would on Reddit's full site.
There's also the ability to both check your received messages and send messages, all from inside BaconReader. Add in a fully-featured settings menu that lets you define if thumbnails are loaded, if you open links from inside the app, or what domains are black or whitelisted (to name a few), and you've got what is probably the most powerful mobile Reddit experience available in the palm of your hand.
BaconReader for Reddit is by far the best Reddit app on Android right now, hands down. The clean interface, ease of use, and powerful rendering of Reddit all put this one ahead of the pack, and if you're even a light user of Reddit, I wouldn't go without it.
BaconReader for Reddit is free in the Android Market. We've got pictures and download links after the break.
Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are on the move again ? and settling down Brad Pitt-style!
The talk show host and her gal have purchased the Malibu home of Brad and Angelina Jolie for a paltry $12 million.
RELATED: Buy Ellen DeGeneres' $49 Million Beverly Hills Estate!
The four-bedroom, four-bath, 4,000 square foot beachfront abode is a snug "downsize" from their $49 million 15,000 square foot home that's been featured in Architectural Digest.
Pitt, who purchased the house after his split with Hollywood's hottest woman Jennifer Aniston, originally listed the house for $13.5 million.
Ellen and Portia's new pad overlooks the ocean, complete with private beach access, a pool and tennis court ? can't complain about that!
CHECK OUT: The Big Picture: Today's Hot Pics!
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It's never easy being the favorite. Just ask the Miami Heat or the Boston Red Sox.
But Melanie Amaro has been considered The X Factor front-runner since her very first audition, never faltering under the pressure, giving stellar performance after stellar performance every week on Fox. That didn't change last night.
The talented crooner belted out two covers - one chosen by America, "Hero," the other on her own, "Feeling Good" - and only cemented her status as the contestant to beat.
"You’re the greatest female that ever graced this stage," L.A. Reid told Melanie. "You are the truth."
This past March, 42 years into his life prison sentence for assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan stood in front of a parole board and repeated the same thing he had been saying at parole hearings for decades: that he had no memory of the shooting or his subsequent trial and confession of guilt. For the 14th time, his application was denied. Two weeks ago, Sirhan's attorneys filed the latest in a series of appeals that aim to get Sirhan back in front of a judge to correct what they call "an egregious miscarriage of justice."
Sirhan, they argued, had been hypnotized to carry out the crime.
In addition to presenting expert audio analysis indicating that there were two guns fired from different directions and a claim that a bullet from Kennedy's neck was switched out to match Sirhan's gun, the filings bolster a long-repeated conspiracy theory asserting that Sirhan was a victim of hypnosis, an unwitting shill whose Arab name made him an easy scapegoat and drew attention from the true architects of the assassination. According to the new pleadings, "[Sirhan] was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno-programing and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed." [Where Do Murderous Tendencies Come From?]
Anticipating the skeptical firewall that the phrase "hypno-programming" raises in many inquiring minds, the filings also maintain that, "The public has been shielded from the darker side of the practice. The average person is unaware that hypnosis can and is used to induct antisocial conduct in humans."
If nothing else, Sirhan's lawyers may be right about a general lack of public awareness on the true potential of hypnosis. According to Dr. Richard Kluft, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University and the past-president of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the scenario that Sirhan's legal team advances is "certainly within the realm of plausibility."
To put the seemingly far-fetched theory into context, Kluft notes that it is undisputed and freely available information that U.S. government security agencies have extensively researched the possibility of creating so-called "hypnotic assassins" and "hypnotic couriers." (A hypnotic courier would theoretically memorize a classified message while under hypnosis and then only be able to retrieve that information if provided with the proper post-hypnotic cue by the message's intended recipient, thus eliminating the possibility that the agent could divulge the information if captured and tortured.) Information on whether and how covert organizations have put the findings of their hypnosis research ? such as that conducted in the CIA's allegedly discontinued human experimentation program MKULTRA ? to use, however, is harder to obtain.
According to Kluft, it is not possible to hypnotize someone to do something that obviously violates their beliefs or desires. In hypnosis, though, context is everything. Say, for example, an unethical hypnotist wanted to hypnotize a suggestible vegetarian to eat a steak. If the hypnotist simply put the vegetarian into a state of hypnosis and then presented him or her with a steak, identified it as a steak, and told the person to eat it, the hypnotized vegetarian would almost certainly refuse.
But if the hypnotist put a vegetarian into a state of hypnosis and then made repeated misleading suggestions that in a short period of time a waiter would deliver a mouth-watering, mock-meat, soy-based protein slab that would be both delicious and meat-free, and then proceeded to order genuine filet mignon, the vegetarian would probably be more amenable to taking a bite.
The very uncomfortable and very serious question, then, is whether an exceptionally suggestible human brain, manipulated in just the right way, might be seduced by its delusions into committing an act far beyond the violation of a dietary code ? namely, gunning down a gifted politician in the early stages of an auspicious bid for the American presidency. Could a hypno-programmed Sirhan Sirhan really have fired on Kennedy if he didn't actually want to?
There is not a simple answer. It is all but inconceivable that Sirhan could have been picked up off the street and then successfully hypnotized to kill against his will after one session with a master hypnotist, but if hypnosis is combined with brainwashing regimens and used to make persistent suggestions that a subject misperceive external circumstances and re-contextualize personal beliefs, its limits are not well defined, Kluft said.
"Post-hypnotic subjects can be induced to misunderstand their circumstances and, as a result of them misunderstanding their circumstances, do and say some things that are very likely to be potentially detrimental and injurious," said Kluft, careful to note that he cannot speculate on Sirhan's past or present mental state specifically, as he has not personally evaluated him. "In the most general sense, you can't make a person do something against their principles with hypnosis, but you can deceive them as to what's truly the case so that they may wind up doing something that they themselves regard as reprehensible but that they did under circumstances of not really getting the whole picture."
It would be very unlikely for an appeal be granted based solely on new evidence of hypnosis in a crime that occurred more than 40 years ago, said Stephen J. Morse, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. But if Sirhan's attorneys do manage to win their client a re-trial based on any of their latest allegations, proof that he was in a state of hypnosis at the time of Kennedy's assassination would absolve him of responsibility. "All crimes require some prohibited act as one of the elements," Morse explained. "In most American jurisdictions, an act performed under hypnosis is not considered an 'act' and thus the defendant would simply be acquitted of the crime charged."
This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on?Facebook.
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected Friday to approve a tough new rule to limit emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxic substances from the country's power plants, according to people with knowledge of the new standard.
Though mercury is a known neurotoxin that can be profoundly harmful to children and pregnant women, the air pollution rule has been more than 20 years in the making, repeatedly stymied because of objections from coal-burning utilities about the cost of installing pollution-control equipment.
The new regulation is not expected to differ markedly in its rigorous emissions targets and timetable from a draft rule proposed by the EPA in March, said people who were briefed in broad terms about it. Scheduled to be formally announced Monday, the rule follows on the heels of several Obama administration decisions to shelve environmental standards to mollify a sharply critical business community, including a high-profile decision this summer to halt new standards to cut smog.
Some analysts cautioned that the rule still could be delayed if it got caught up in the political horse-trading in Washington to pass spending legislation. Still, if it lands as expected, the long-awaited rule governing toxic substances is sure to rile powerful utilities and their congressional allies who have doggedly lobbied the administration over the last few weeks to weaken or delay the standards.
"Clean air will be the biggest environmental accomplishment of the Obama administration, and the forthcoming mercury rule will be the crowning achievement of an already strong clean-air resume," said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Clean Air Program.
Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an industry lobbying group, said the sweeping implications of the new rule mean that utilities would not accept them easily.
"In the history of the Clean Air Act, there has never been a greater intervention into the power sector than with this regulation," Segal said. "So it stands to reason that we will likely see a substantial amount of litigation around this."
The EPA and the administration declined to comment on the pending rule.
The fight to dilute the new regulation has centered on the amount of mercury that can be emitted and the timetable to install pollution control equipment. In its draft rule, the EPA determined that the industry standard should be 1.2 pounds of mercury per million BTUs of energy produced. Industry wants 1.4 pounds. But the EPA arrived at its figure based on a formula set out under the Clean Air Act, and analysts said the agency therefore cannot deviate from it.
The act would give companies three years to clean up their emissions of mercury and about 70 other toxic substances, and utilities could appeal for at least one more year as they install the necessary equipment. Much of industry has argued that the timetable is too tight and could lead to rolling blackouts. One group, the American Public Power Assn., told the White House that its members needed more than seven years to comply with the mercury rule.
Over the last few weeks, however, the timetable argument has been undermined by dissension within industry. Most notably, Ralph Izzo, chairman of the Newark, N.J.-based utility Public Service Enterprise Group, wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal in which he said that companies have known for decades that the mercury rule would take effect and some, like his, have already installed the needed equipment at their coal-fired plants.
"EPA's proposed clean-air rules will have a modest impact on plant retirements," Izzo wrote in his rebuttal to a story in the newspaper. "Regulations are not the death knell you would have everyone believe, but provide a clear path for responsible coal generation. Action is long overdue."
About a dozen states have already approved rules to cut mercury and other toxic substances. Industry has argued that the health benefits of reducing mercury through a federal standard are overstated.
But Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council said the estimated public health effects had played a considerable role so far in getting the administration to stick to the standards it proposed in March. People get exposed to mercury mainly by eating contaminated fish. Mercury exposure damages the developing brains of fetuses and children.
The EPA estimates that by 2016, the proposed rules could avert between 6,800 to 17,000 premature deaths annually, a greater benefit than most other federal health and environmental rules are estimated to achieve.
I hate the fact that I need to carry a bag around with me. It's annoyingly heavily, annoyingly gets in the way and just annoyingly annoying. I'm totally jelly of the people who can live bag free. How do you do it? Where do you people put stuff? Don't you have stuff? Laptops? Headphones? Papers? I don't know, files? Floppy disks and CD-ROMs and USB sticks and chapstick or something. You have to have something! Where do these somethings go! When I was in high school, I never carried a bag because I put everything in my locker and only pulled out what I needed, when I needed. That was a good life. Someone needs to invent a locker for real life. But until then, buy yourself a nice Chrome Laptop Bag for 50% off. -CC More »
Worldwide, dengue fever strikes roughly 50 million people every year and takes the lives of thousands, but specific therapies or a vaccine for this mosquito-borne illness remain unavailable. A report coming out in the online journal mBio? on December 13 describes a new discovery about how the body fights the dengue virus, a finding that could explain differences in the ability to fight off the virus and help in developing a drug to boost this response.
Dengue is relatively unknown here in the U.S., but according to the World Health Organization the global incidence of dengue infection has been rising alarmingly in the past decades. Today, 2.5 billion people are at risk from dengue fever and from dengue hemorrhagic fever, a lethal complication of infection. Despite the high infection rates, there are currently no specific treatments for dengue fever and no vaccine to prevent infection with the dengue virus. Many scientists who study the disease have been searching for ways to boost the human immune response to dengue so that it can't gain a foothold in the body.
Researchers from Washington University, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, report a new finding that a part of the immune system called mannose-binding lectin (MBL) is involved in targeting dengue viruses for destruction. MBL recognizes sugar molecules present on the outsides of many different kinds of viruses and bacteria. When it finds these sugars, MBL activates the complement system, which targets foreign materials in the body for destruction in any of a number of cruel ways. Scientists have known that the complement system takes a hit during dengue infection, but until now no one knew that it was also involved in getting rid of dengue viruses.
"Before, people thought the complement system was involved primarily in pathogenesis," says Sujan Shresta, an Associate Professor at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, who reviewed the paper and was not involved in the work. "This paper is the first to look at the role of the complement system in the context of protection" from the dengue virus, says Shresta.
This is an important discovery in terms of human health, continues Shresta, because different people naturally make different amounts of MBL. Some people have high levels of MBL, some people have low levels, a fact that may help explain why some individuals are able to fight off the virus while others are not.
The authors showed that blood samples with high levels of MBL neutralized dengue more efficiently than samples with lower levels of MBL. This finding suggests that people with high MBL levels in their blood could well be better at fighting dengue infection.
This is a clue that could help scientists create therapies for the disease. "You could develop antivirals that work through a similar mechanism," to deactivate dengue viruses, says Shresta. Vaccines could also be designed to activate this pathway, she says, helping boost the normal functions of the immune system to fight off infection.
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American Society for Microbiology: http://www.asm.org
Thanks to American Society for Microbiology for this article.
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BRUSSELS (Reuters) ? Talks on the size of loans from euro zone national central banks to the International Monetary Fund are starting at a technical level after euro zone finance ministers gave the green light to explore the idea last Tuesday, officials said on Saturday.
Euro zone finance ministers agreed on Tuesday to rapidly explore boosting the resources of the IMF through bilateral loans, so that the Fund can match the new firepower of the euro zone bailout fund, which is being leveraged.
"No amount has been discussed at the political level," one senior euro zone official involved in the talks said.
"Discussions are only starting at the technical level, so right now any number is pure speculation," the official said.
The euro zone wants to boost IMF resources so that the fund could provide a credible backstop should the euro zone's third and fourth largest economies of Italy and Spain be cut off from the markets and need a multi-year emergency loan program.
Euro zone officials have offered various guesses on the possible size of loans to the IMF, ranging from "significantly less than 100 billion euros" to "several hundred billion euros."
"Work on this is still going on. It is premature to talk about numbers," a second euro zone official familiar with the talks said. Two other euro zone officials confirmed no amounts have been discussed yet.
The euro zone's bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), has uncommitted resources of around 250 billion euros, while the IMF's lending capacity now is around $380 billion (283 billion euros).
MULTIPLYING FIREPOWER
Depending on investor interest in the two leveraging options approved on Tuesday for the EFSF by euro zone ministers, the fund could multiply its firepower several times -- although it is expected to be short of the four times leverage envisaged six weeks ago because of rapidly deteriorating market conditions.
If IMF resources were to be increased to "adequately match" the EFSF, as the Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker said after euro zone ministers met on Tuesday, the aim could be to multiply the funds several times as well.
The EFSF alone could not handle a Spain or Italy bailout now. Even if it joined forces with the IMF at the IMF's current lending capacity, it might still not be enough. The only institution with adequate firepower is the European Central Bank.
Because the ECB is not a member of the IMF, but euro zone countries are, it would be through national central banks of the euro zone that the increase of resources to the IMF would take place, euro zone officials said.
The money could be either put in the IMF's general revenue account or a special trust fund for the euro zone only. The advantage of the general account would be that all IMF members would be liable for the repayment of the loans.
The special trust fund, on the other hand, would be able to intervene on the secondary markets, for example.
Euro zone officials hope that emerging market economies like China, Russia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia would participate with their own cash in the resource increase.
"It remains to be seen how exactly that could be done, but of course the more participation the better," a third euro zone official said.
Euro zone officials said that a decision to increase IMF resources, while already heralded by an agreement at the G20 summit in Cannes to explore it, could be made at the next meeting of G20 finance ministers in Mexico in February.
(Additional reporting by Ilona Wissenbach; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Outsiders on the front linesPublic release date: 1-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Professor Orna Sasson-Levy sassono@mail.biu.ac.il Sociologists for Women in Society
Listening to political protest from women soldiers in Israel
Dec. 1, 2011 --- Women have a long history of protesting war, but anti-war protest by women who've served as soldiers is a relatively new phenomenon. While there's a growing rate of women serving in western militaries (with some women in combat roles), little is known about how military service shapes the political attitudes of women and connects them with larger antiwar movements.
A new study looks at this from the perspective of 20 Israeli women soldiers who've served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), whose testimonies regarding their military service were published as "Women Breaking the Silence." (Breaking the Silence is a protest movement founded to oppose the Israeli presence in the OPT; it first appeared in the public arena in 2004 and was composed of men who had completed their compulsory military service in the occupied territories.)
The women's voices introduce new perspectives into the field of antiwar protest, in Israel and beyond. Lead author Orna Sasson-Levy, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University - Israel, says the research shows that "military service can be a new source for women's power in politics." She co-authored the work with professors Yagil Levy and Edna Lomsky-Feder. The paper will be published in the December issue of Gender & Society.
While their experience in the occupied territories gave the women who were studied a new authority to speak out, they are still seen as outsiders within the military. On the one hand, the women are told that they are needed; indeed, only women soldiers may search Palestinian women at checkpoints or handle the Jewish female civilian population. Despite this, during their military service "the women have to cope with hostility, discrimination, exclusion, and silencing" from their male counterparts. The men showed their hostility and distrust to the women through ongoing initiation rites, including challenging them to exhibit more violence toward Palestinians, researchers found.
Caught in this contradictory position, researchers say that the female soldiers who testified about their military service focused their criticism of the occupation on two major themes: criticism of "militarized masculinity" and identification with the suffering of Palestinian civilians. Yet when male soldiers spoke out in protest, the focus of their testimonies wasn't empathy with Palestinian victims. Rather, the soldiers saw themselves as victims of the occupation rather than as victimizing others.
Tal, a female solider, described the behavior of her male counterparts during house searches. When a deputy company commander came back bragging about how badly troops had "messed up" a house they'd searched, Tal says, "Instead of thinking 'We are such men,' in my mind I was thinking about those poor women who are now cleaning up the mess that the soldiers made, and the fear of the children who are at home, seeing their house getting messed up. I mean, things like that happen and then we're surprised that at the age of 18 they blow themselves up?"
What's Different?
Like other women in Israel, the women in this study were drafted around the age of 18, for two years. Often, they were the first women in combat companies, or they were the first women to serve in support roles in the OPT.
In the past, women engaged in anti-war protest as mothers citizens concerned with the next generation, or feminist or human rights agendas. Now, with more and more women engaged in active military campaigns, they can -- and are -- using "their military service as a source of symbolic capital that can serve to legitimize criticism of the military and its actions."
As antiwar voices, these narratives are unique. The women don't challenge the occupation directly, but they do critique the military's sexism, and portray occupation itself as a masculine phenomenon that shapes both the soldiers' behavior and the damage they inflict.
This ambivalent military experience for women -- serving in combat zones on the one hand, and being perceived as outsiders who have to struggle for their legitimacy on the other -- introduces new themes into women's discourse of protest.
The women who spoke out in Israel criticize the behavior of the soldiers they've seen abuse Palestinians, and describe it "as raging, infantile, military machismo."
The few women who dared raise even the most measured criticism were marked as leftists and informers, were socially ostracized, and had to pass more initiation rites than others to prove their loyalty to the army and the state, researchers say. Other women mentioned the loneliness of service carried out by only a few women among dozens of men in a sexually charged atmosphere brimming with contempt for women, inferior living conditions, and undervalued roles.
Women Soldiers in the U.S. vs. Israel
Just as women in Israel are speaking out, U.S. women returning from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan have also been involved in protest, with some women joining groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War or Veterans for Peace. Despite that, researchers say these experiences of female protest have not been widely studied. And women in the U.S. military have turned to the courts and Congress in their attempts to change the hierarchical structure of the institution. In Israel, the scholars point out, mandatory conscription elicits the voices of women as citizens, rather than as employees.
Israel is also unique in comparison to other countries since it is the only Western country that has had a policy of compulsory conscription for both men and women since the establishment of the state in 1948. While men serve three years in the army, women serve for two years and comprise 34 percent of the regular army.
Historical Perspective
Since the mid- twentieth century women have gained access to combat roles, but not without struggle. Following the shift to professional militaries, and the European Court ruling in 2000 that EU member states must recruit women on an equal basis, there has been a growing rate of women's participation in western militaries. Outside the EU, women constitute nearly 14 percent of the various branches of the U.S. military, 21 percent of the South African National Defense Forces, and more than 17 percent of the Canadian military.
Historically, motherhood is the most often used reason to legitimize women's social struggles. Some of the major examples are the Women's Peace Party established during World War I (known today as the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom) and Women Strike for Peace, which acted first against nuclear armament and later against the Vietnam War. Both groups used maternal politics as an antidote to a male-dominated, militarist culture that privileges the experience of war.
###
Gender & Society is consistently ranked as one of the top journals in both Women's Studies and Sociology. It is published by Sociologists for Women in Society, a non-profit, scientific and educational organization with more than 1,000 members.
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Outsiders on the front linesPublic release date: 1-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Professor Orna Sasson-Levy sassono@mail.biu.ac.il Sociologists for Women in Society
Listening to political protest from women soldiers in Israel
Dec. 1, 2011 --- Women have a long history of protesting war, but anti-war protest by women who've served as soldiers is a relatively new phenomenon. While there's a growing rate of women serving in western militaries (with some women in combat roles), little is known about how military service shapes the political attitudes of women and connects them with larger antiwar movements.
A new study looks at this from the perspective of 20 Israeli women soldiers who've served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), whose testimonies regarding their military service were published as "Women Breaking the Silence." (Breaking the Silence is a protest movement founded to oppose the Israeli presence in the OPT; it first appeared in the public arena in 2004 and was composed of men who had completed their compulsory military service in the occupied territories.)
The women's voices introduce new perspectives into the field of antiwar protest, in Israel and beyond. Lead author Orna Sasson-Levy, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University - Israel, says the research shows that "military service can be a new source for women's power in politics." She co-authored the work with professors Yagil Levy and Edna Lomsky-Feder. The paper will be published in the December issue of Gender & Society.
While their experience in the occupied territories gave the women who were studied a new authority to speak out, they are still seen as outsiders within the military. On the one hand, the women are told that they are needed; indeed, only women soldiers may search Palestinian women at checkpoints or handle the Jewish female civilian population. Despite this, during their military service "the women have to cope with hostility, discrimination, exclusion, and silencing" from their male counterparts. The men showed their hostility and distrust to the women through ongoing initiation rites, including challenging them to exhibit more violence toward Palestinians, researchers found.
Caught in this contradictory position, researchers say that the female soldiers who testified about their military service focused their criticism of the occupation on two major themes: criticism of "militarized masculinity" and identification with the suffering of Palestinian civilians. Yet when male soldiers spoke out in protest, the focus of their testimonies wasn't empathy with Palestinian victims. Rather, the soldiers saw themselves as victims of the occupation rather than as victimizing others.
Tal, a female solider, described the behavior of her male counterparts during house searches. When a deputy company commander came back bragging about how badly troops had "messed up" a house they'd searched, Tal says, "Instead of thinking 'We are such men,' in my mind I was thinking about those poor women who are now cleaning up the mess that the soldiers made, and the fear of the children who are at home, seeing their house getting messed up. I mean, things like that happen and then we're surprised that at the age of 18 they blow themselves up?"
What's Different?
Like other women in Israel, the women in this study were drafted around the age of 18, for two years. Often, they were the first women in combat companies, or they were the first women to serve in support roles in the OPT.
In the past, women engaged in anti-war protest as mothers citizens concerned with the next generation, or feminist or human rights agendas. Now, with more and more women engaged in active military campaigns, they can -- and are -- using "their military service as a source of symbolic capital that can serve to legitimize criticism of the military and its actions."
As antiwar voices, these narratives are unique. The women don't challenge the occupation directly, but they do critique the military's sexism, and portray occupation itself as a masculine phenomenon that shapes both the soldiers' behavior and the damage they inflict.
This ambivalent military experience for women -- serving in combat zones on the one hand, and being perceived as outsiders who have to struggle for their legitimacy on the other -- introduces new themes into women's discourse of protest.
The women who spoke out in Israel criticize the behavior of the soldiers they've seen abuse Palestinians, and describe it "as raging, infantile, military machismo."
The few women who dared raise even the most measured criticism were marked as leftists and informers, were socially ostracized, and had to pass more initiation rites than others to prove their loyalty to the army and the state, researchers say. Other women mentioned the loneliness of service carried out by only a few women among dozens of men in a sexually charged atmosphere brimming with contempt for women, inferior living conditions, and undervalued roles.
Women Soldiers in the U.S. vs. Israel
Just as women in Israel are speaking out, U.S. women returning from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan have also been involved in protest, with some women joining groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War or Veterans for Peace. Despite that, researchers say these experiences of female protest have not been widely studied. And women in the U.S. military have turned to the courts and Congress in their attempts to change the hierarchical structure of the institution. In Israel, the scholars point out, mandatory conscription elicits the voices of women as citizens, rather than as employees.
Israel is also unique in comparison to other countries since it is the only Western country that has had a policy of compulsory conscription for both men and women since the establishment of the state in 1948. While men serve three years in the army, women serve for two years and comprise 34 percent of the regular army.
Historical Perspective
Since the mid- twentieth century women have gained access to combat roles, but not without struggle. Following the shift to professional militaries, and the European Court ruling in 2000 that EU member states must recruit women on an equal basis, there has been a growing rate of women's participation in western militaries. Outside the EU, women constitute nearly 14 percent of the various branches of the U.S. military, 21 percent of the South African National Defense Forces, and more than 17 percent of the Canadian military.
Historically, motherhood is the most often used reason to legitimize women's social struggles. Some of the major examples are the Women's Peace Party established during World War I (known today as the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom) and Women Strike for Peace, which acted first against nuclear armament and later against the Vietnam War. Both groups used maternal politics as an antidote to a male-dominated, militarist culture that privileges the experience of war.
###
Gender & Society is consistently ranked as one of the top journals in both Women's Studies and Sociology. It is published by Sociologists for Women in Society, a non-profit, scientific and educational organization with more than 1,000 members.
[ | 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.
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Public release date: 1-Dec-2011
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