Rockies outfielder Michael Cuddyer extended his hitting streak to 26 games with a two-out RBI single to center off of Giants starter Matt Cain this afternoon. As it stands at the time of this writing, it has accounted for the Rockies? only run as the two teams are locked at one run apiece in the sixth inning. The single also extended Cuddyer?s consecutive on-base streak to 45 games.
As mentioned yesterday, Cuddyer has been the best-hitting outfielder in baseball through the first three months and should earn a spot on the NL All-Star roster despite receiving virtually no press.
IndiGo Airlines may lose a good chunk of its commanders to AirAsia India as around 100 of its pilots have applied for jobs with the proposed carrier, say sources. Besides a hefty package that AirAsia India is offering to the pilots, there are other reasons, like better working conditions, for these pilots to move out, say Indigo sources. "As many as 100 commanders have sought jobs with AirAsia India. And this is not only for higher packages, but also for better working conditions," airline sources told PTI. A text message sent to the IndiGo spokesman did not yield any response.
AirAsia, in collaboration with Tata Sons and Telestra TradePlace of Arun Bhatia, plans to launch a budget airline by the end of the year with its headquarters in Chennai. AirAsia is expected to bring in competitive pricing in the domestic aviation market with its "nano" airfares and may pose a direct competition to IndiGo, which is the undisputed leader in the low-cost segment now.
Incidentally, both IndiGo and AirAsia, have Airbus operations. IndiGo currently has around 1,000 pilots to operate its fleet of 66 Airbus planes. Out of these, nearly 60 per cent of them are commanders. "An IndiGo commanders' average take-home salary is around Rs 3.20-3.30 lakh a month, which is below the industry level. As against this, AirAsia India is offering a take-home salary of Rs 4-4.20 lakh a month," sources said.
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's leading religious authority warned of "civil war" on Friday and called for calm as political factions clashed ahead of major rallies the opposition hopes can force the Islamist president to quit.
A member of the ruling Muslim Brotherhood was shot dead overnight. Dozens of people were wounded in Alexandria, many by shotgun pellets, when opposition marchers clashed with Islamists on Friday, two days before President Mohamed Mursi's critics hopes millions take to the streets to demand new elections.
"Vigilance is required to ensure we do not slide into civil war," clerics of the Al-Azhar institute said. In a statement broadly supportive of Mursi, it blamed "criminal gangs" who besieged mosques for street violence which the Brotherhood said has killed five of its supporters in a week.
The movement's political wing warned of "dire consequences that will pull the country into a violent spiral of anarchy". It held liberal leaders, including former top U.N. diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, personally responsible for inciting violence by hired "thugs" once employed by the ousted dictator, Hosni Mubarak.
Opposition leaders also condemned the violence.
In Alexandria, at least 36 people were wounded, a Health Ministry source said, many by birdshot when hundreds scuffled outside a local office of the Muslim Brotherhood. A Reuters reporter saw about a dozen men break off from an anti-Mursi march on the seafront to throw rocks at the building's guards.
They responded. Bricks and bottles flew. Gunshots went off. Ambulances arrived. Military helicopters hovered overhead.
There was no immediate sign of trouble as thousands of Islamists gathered round a Cairo mosque after weekly prayers to show support for Mursi. His opponents hope millions will turn out on Sunday to demand new elections, a year to the day since he was sworn in as Egypt's first freely chosen leader.
"I came to support the legitimate order," said Ahmed al-Maghrabi, 37, a shopkeeper from the Nile Delta city of Mansoura whose hand bore grazes from street fighting there this week. "I am with the elected president. He needs to see out his term."
There was a mostly festive atmosphere in the hot sunshine, with vendors selling mango and cakes and banners flying.
Some opposition gatherings were also under way. A handful of protesters watched security men ringing the presidential palace, the focus for Sunday's Cairo rally. Mursi has moved elsewhere.
A few thousand milled around in the capital's Tahrir Square, cradle of the revolution. Some waved red cards reading "Out!", in preparation for the big demonstration against the president.
The army, which heeded mass protests in early 2011 to push aside Mubarak, has warned it will intervene again if there is violence and to defend the "will of the people". Both sides believe that means the military may support their positions.
The United States, which funds Egypt's army as it did under Mubarak, has urged compromise and respect for election results. Egypt's 84 million people, control of the Suez Canal and treaty with Israel all contribute to its global strategic importance.
The European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton urged all sides to keep protests peaceful, build trust and show a "spirit of dialogue and tolerance".
ECONOMY
In Alexandria, opposition marchers said they feared the Brotherhood was usurping the revolution to entrench its power and Islamic law. Others had economic grievances, among them huge lines for fuel caused by supply problems and panic buying.
"I've nothing to do with politics, but with the state we're in now, even a stone would cry out," said 42-year-old accountant Mohamed Abdel Latif. "There are no services, we can't find diesel or gasoline. We elected Mursi, but this is enough.
"Let him make way for someone else who can fix it."
Al-Azhar, an ancient academy which traditionally maintains a distance from the political establishment, urged the opposition to accept Mursi's offer of dialogue and abandon demonstrations.
Opposition leaders dismissed Mursi's proposal on Wednesday to include the fragmented opposition in panels to review the constitution and promote reconciliation, saying such offers led nowhere because the Brotherhood refuses to dilute its power.
A liberal activist on the march in Alexandria, Abdelrahman Abdel Wadoud, 27, said: "We are telling Mursi 'your last speech confirms your failure' ... And on June 30 we will go out and will not leave until Mursi leaves."
VIOLENCE
The Brotherhood said one of its members was shot dead and four wounded at a provincial party office in the Nile Delta city of Zagazig overnight and blamed anti-Mursi activists, whom it portrays as a mixture of secularists and Mubarak loyalists.
In his speech, Mursi denounced his critics but admitted some mistakes and offered talks to ease polarization in politics that he said threatened Egypt's new democratic system. But opposition leaders said their protests on Sunday would go ahead.
"Dr. Mohamed Mursi's speech of yesterday only made us more determined in our call for an early presidential vote in order to achieve the goals of the revolution," the liberal opposition coalition said after its leaders met to consider a response.
"We are confident the Egyptian masses will go out in their millions in Egypt's squares and streets on June 30 to confirm their will to get the January 25 revolution back on track."
It is hard to gauge how many may turn out but much of the population, even those sympathetic to Islamic ideas, are deeply frustrated by economic slump and many blame the government.
Previous protest movements since the fall of Mubarak have failed to gather momentum, however, among a population anxious for stability and fearful of further economic hardship.
(Reporting by Shaimaa Fayed, Patrick Werr, Asmaa Alsharif, Tom Perry, Maggie Fick, Yasmine Saleh, Omar Fahmy, Alexander Dziadosz, Omar Fahmy and Shadia Nasralla in Cairo and Abdelrahman Youssef in Alexandria; writing by Alastair Macdonald; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
You're not looking to bang every person you meet online. Sometimes, you're just looking for friends. But somehow, meeting someone you know online platonically has become a far more awkward endeavor than a random OKCupid date. You know her but you dont know her. Do you shake hands? Do you hug? Do you do that open-palmed half-wave? God forbid she goes for the hug and you go for the handshake like you're in some jerking, uncoordinated, chest-poking dance.
Jon Stewart is in the Middle East working on his first directorial project, but the host of "The Daily Show" took a few minutes to check in on his program via Skype Thursday.
Temporary host John Oliver told Stewart that not much had changed on the show since the now-director started his 12-week leave of absence.
"The only key things are we play softball against the Mets on Monday, and Bruce Springsteen comes to play every Tuesday night," Oliver jested. "We didn't think they'd be things you'd enjoy."
Turns out they are things Stewart would enjoy.
"What?! That's my favorite musician! What?! I wanna come hoooome!" Stewart jokingly cried.
Earlier, a newly bearded Stewart told Oliver that he was "doing a phenomenal job" holding down the fort, but that he wasn't tuning in every night.
"I don't watch it all the time because it's too weird," Stewart said. "It's like watching someone have sex with your wife's desk."
The comedian said he missed his staff "like crazy cakes." Though he's enjoying his work on "Rosewater," an adaptation of Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari's best-selling memoir "Then They Came For Me," he called the experience "weird as hell."
The film and memoir tell the tale of Bahari's arrest by the Iranian government in 2009 while he was there covering the election results. He was tortured for 118 days. After his October release, Bahari appeared on "The Daily Show" in late November to share details of his captivity.
Yet, usually many people usually do not even give you a second consideration for lower automobile insurance rates, and that can be a fault, when you could easily save a good deal of money by purchasing low and effective %anchor_text policy schemes. The first type is Medical payments or Personal Injury Protection. Insurance companies can even raise the rates with the policy years following your incident happened.
If you lose your health care insurance for any reason, or you possess a situation as noted above, you ought to immediately get hold of your auto insurer and plunge to primary medical coverage. The car will need to be from gear to crank. A retirement discount is often a third discount offered to qualifying people.
Let's see how these providers fare under our scrutiny. An insurance provider know that the student with a's and b's is responsible and will drive with resposibility. Legal advise from an experienced whiplash neck personal injury lawyer can significantly raise the case value.
This specific addresses harm to a new party's property including autos, posts, walls, etc. Sometimes, once you've requested a quote, many insurance agents may haunt you in making a sale. In the actual scenario, people owning cars must get themselves insured.
If a person elects to lessen the limits they purchase for his or her automobile insurance plan, then the insurance company is only responsible for that amount up on the limit. It is if a good decision to discover all the providers, compare the rates and after that apply for your required services. However, the seems and simplicity with possessing it integrated on the radio will be worth the added cost.
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Insurers with lower than $10 million were included if they'd 10 or higher complaints against them. I am sending you this written notice to request cancellation of my insurance policies effective (date you're planning to cancel). Business insurance policies are available, either direct or via a broker, from your business insurance providers in South Africa further down.
There is also an option to get primary medical benefits on your insurance policy. You won't find this with other insurance firms, including State Farm Insurance, Allstate Insurance, Progressive Insurance , AAA Auto Insurance or Farmers Insurance. Your car battery needs to be recharged soon before it completely dies, allowing you with a motor vehicle, truck, or van that wont start and having to pay for money for a fresh battery.
About the Author: Let me inroduce myself, my name is Margarito Nickerson however I never actually liked that name. Accounting is how I support my family. As a guy what I truly such as is crosswords and I'll be starting something else in addition to it. My family resides in Kansas and my household loves it.Let me inroduce myself, my name is Vivan but I don't such as when people use my complete name. My day job is a workplace manager and it's something I actually take pleasure in. My spouse doesn't like it the means I do however what I really like doing is kites and I would never offer it up. Kansas is our birth location and I like every day living here.
Speaker John Boehner says leaders will craft their own version of the legislation the Senate overwhelmingly passed to give millions in the country illegally a path to citizenship.
2. RETIRED GENERAL REPORTED TARGET OF LEAK PROBE
The investigation of the leaking of classified information about a 2010 cyberattack on Iran's nuclear facilities is focusing on Marine Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright.
3. OBAMA DOWNPLAYS SNOWDEN SEARCH
The president called the NSA leaker a "29-year-old hacker" and said it wasn't worth wheeling and dealing with other countries to win his extradition to face espionage charges in the U.S.
4. WHAT MANDELA'S DAUGHTER SAYS
Her father is still able to open his eyes and react to family's touch. South Africa's government said his condition is critical but stable.
5. WHO TRAINED BOSTON BOMB SUSPECTS
An indictment against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev suggests the Tsarnaev brothers learned how to make pressure-cooker explosives on the Internet, not from a terror network.
6. OBAMA TRIES TO BUILD AFRICAN LEGACY
The president has been to his father's home continent twice in five years, less frequently than both Bush and Clinton.
7. PROSECUTORS DETAIL CASE AGAINST HERNANDEZ
They say the ex-New England Patriot orchestrated the shooting of Odin Lloyd because he talked to the wrong people at a nightclub.
8. HOW HOT WILL THE WEST GET
Death Valley in California is expecting a high of 124 and some officials worry it might get too hot to fly airplanes.
9. HOSPITALS TRY TO KEEP THEIR HANDS CLEAN
Some are testing a system that uses beepers, buzzers and lights to remind workers to use hand sanitizer and to report those who don't.
10. SURPRISING NBA DRAFT PICK AND TRADE
Anthony Bennett of UNLV was chosen by Cleveland over favored Nerlens Noel, and the Nets and Celtics pulled off a blockbuster trade that gave Brooklyn Kevin Garnett.
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Orange County real estate investor and Realtor Gabe Cole presents two different investment strategies to exploit the opportunities in today?s real estate market. The longer term buy and hold have been proven time and time again as a super long run wealth builder. The Fannie Mae Homepath program is a wonderful opportunity to buy investment property with less money out of pocket.
The short term buy and flip model continues to be alive and well and Gabe shows you the method he?s implementing with a few of his clients to make the most and profit in with this model.
Should you could have any questions or would really like additional info about real estate and investing, be at liberty to contact Gabe Cole at 949.395.4223 or visit his website at www.gabecolerealestate.com.
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After Great Dane success, cancer doc eyes brain tumorsPublic release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Garth Sundem garth.sundem@ucdenver.edu University of Colorado Denver
2 University of Colorado Cancer Center publications set stage for K9 cancer vaccine test with human glioblastoma
Michael Graner, PhD, is a CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at the CU School of Medicine. So when his 12-year-old Great Dane got sick, he knew what to do.
"We got Star from the Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue," Graner says. "She got her name because she was always smiling, like a movie star waiting for photos. She'd already been to so many shelters, we didn't want to change her name again and so we kept it."
At 12, after many years with the Graners, Star had already reached about double the average lifespan for the breed. When she collapsed during a coughing fit, Graner discovered the cause: lung cancer, specifically advanced bronchoalveolar adenocarcinoma with metastasis to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was grim, with a median survival from diagnosis of only about 6-27 days. And Star was well past the age when she could've tolerated chemotherapy or radiation.
"With that diagnosis, chemotherapy has only a 10-15 percent response rate and she was old with her prognosis and the drug side effects let's just say chemotherapy wasn't viable. We didn't want to make her any sicker," Graner says.
So he turned to his specialty, immunotherapy. The idea is to circumvent the immune system's nasty habit of recognizing cancer as its own tissue instead of seeing it as an invading disease and attacking it. By using engineered vaccines to prime the immune system to recognize tumors, cancer immunologists are using the body's own defenses to clear itself of the disease. In this case, the treatment was fairly simple and carried almost no chance of side effects that could make Star any less comfortable: a 10-gram sample of her tumor was enriched into an injectable vaccine that contained a high concentration of heat shock proteins in "chaperone-rich cell lysate" (CRCL), which tell the immune system's T-cells what to attack.
"We expected to see solid metastases within days," said Graner. "But, you know, then the months started to go by. The important thing to us was her quality of life was really good. It was really simple and it certainly didn't hurt." You can read about the treatment and results in a paper in the International Journal of Hyperthermia, on which Graner collaborated with Laura Epple, DVM, now a PhD candidate in the Graner Lab.
Finally, at 44 weeks more than ten times the best they should have hoped for! Star showed aggressive progression of the disease. At nearly a year after the diagnosis of a disease that should have killed her within a month, Graner and his family made the difficult decision to euthanize Star.
"We still have a couple of her cell lines here in the lab," Graner says. "In that way, she's kind of immortal."
Another chance for Star's immortality comes from her potential for her experience to extend the lives of human brain cancer patients. See, Graner has continued his studies with the CRCL-rich vaccines of the type that led to Star's dramatic and prolonged improvement.
"It's one thing to treat mice in these fake systems and another to treat a naturally arising tumor that had a poor prognosis," Graner says. Along with Kevin Lellehei, chair of Neurosurgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Graner recently submitted a proposal to the FDA to treat human glioblastoma with CRCL vaccine. "Star's success may make it much easier for the FDA to approve similar treatment with human glioblastoma," Graner says.
In Graner's proposed trial, human brain cancer patients would continue to receive the standard of care to treat the disease and would also intersperse treatment with the experimental vaccine, whose benefit he hopes to show, but which is also unlikely to cause additional harm.
He describes a similar protocol that failed to get approval from the European Medicines Agency.
"This isn't a brand new idea," Graner says. "But until now there had been some gaps in our understanding." One of these gaps was the fact that while previous researchers had hypothesized that tumor chaperone proteins carried the peptides that, when enriched and reinjected as a vaccine, could sensitize the immune system to tumor tissues, previous studies hadn't identified these peptides.
In another recent paper, also published in the International Journal of Hyperthermia, Graner describes what he calls, "taking these proteins and beating the peptides off them to see what they are." Sure enough, many of the peptides isolated from tumor samples were derived from proteins unique to cancer this means that a CRCL vaccine was likely to result in an immune response directed specifically at tumor tissue and not at surrounding, healthy tissues.
Graner writes that, "Parental proteins [that would be targets for the immune cells] are components of major signaling networks of vital importance for cancer cell survival, proliferation, and migration."
With the immune system sensitized, the unique genetic mutations that allow cancer cells to act cancerous would also mark them for destruction. With this research gap filled and with Star demonstrating the vaccine's effect, Graner is hopeful his proposed trial will make it to human patients soon.
"She was a real sweetie," Graner says of Star. "Hopefully her contribution to the world has just begun."
###
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?
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.
After Great Dane success, cancer doc eyes brain tumorsPublic release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Garth Sundem garth.sundem@ucdenver.edu University of Colorado Denver
2 University of Colorado Cancer Center publications set stage for K9 cancer vaccine test with human glioblastoma
Michael Graner, PhD, is a CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at the CU School of Medicine. So when his 12-year-old Great Dane got sick, he knew what to do.
"We got Star from the Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue," Graner says. "She got her name because she was always smiling, like a movie star waiting for photos. She'd already been to so many shelters, we didn't want to change her name again and so we kept it."
At 12, after many years with the Graners, Star had already reached about double the average lifespan for the breed. When she collapsed during a coughing fit, Graner discovered the cause: lung cancer, specifically advanced bronchoalveolar adenocarcinoma with metastasis to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was grim, with a median survival from diagnosis of only about 6-27 days. And Star was well past the age when she could've tolerated chemotherapy or radiation.
"With that diagnosis, chemotherapy has only a 10-15 percent response rate and she was old with her prognosis and the drug side effects let's just say chemotherapy wasn't viable. We didn't want to make her any sicker," Graner says.
So he turned to his specialty, immunotherapy. The idea is to circumvent the immune system's nasty habit of recognizing cancer as its own tissue instead of seeing it as an invading disease and attacking it. By using engineered vaccines to prime the immune system to recognize tumors, cancer immunologists are using the body's own defenses to clear itself of the disease. In this case, the treatment was fairly simple and carried almost no chance of side effects that could make Star any less comfortable: a 10-gram sample of her tumor was enriched into an injectable vaccine that contained a high concentration of heat shock proteins in "chaperone-rich cell lysate" (CRCL), which tell the immune system's T-cells what to attack.
"We expected to see solid metastases within days," said Graner. "But, you know, then the months started to go by. The important thing to us was her quality of life was really good. It was really simple and it certainly didn't hurt." You can read about the treatment and results in a paper in the International Journal of Hyperthermia, on which Graner collaborated with Laura Epple, DVM, now a PhD candidate in the Graner Lab.
Finally, at 44 weeks more than ten times the best they should have hoped for! Star showed aggressive progression of the disease. At nearly a year after the diagnosis of a disease that should have killed her within a month, Graner and his family made the difficult decision to euthanize Star.
"We still have a couple of her cell lines here in the lab," Graner says. "In that way, she's kind of immortal."
Another chance for Star's immortality comes from her potential for her experience to extend the lives of human brain cancer patients. See, Graner has continued his studies with the CRCL-rich vaccines of the type that led to Star's dramatic and prolonged improvement.
"It's one thing to treat mice in these fake systems and another to treat a naturally arising tumor that had a poor prognosis," Graner says. Along with Kevin Lellehei, chair of Neurosurgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Graner recently submitted a proposal to the FDA to treat human glioblastoma with CRCL vaccine. "Star's success may make it much easier for the FDA to approve similar treatment with human glioblastoma," Graner says.
In Graner's proposed trial, human brain cancer patients would continue to receive the standard of care to treat the disease and would also intersperse treatment with the experimental vaccine, whose benefit he hopes to show, but which is also unlikely to cause additional harm.
He describes a similar protocol that failed to get approval from the European Medicines Agency.
"This isn't a brand new idea," Graner says. "But until now there had been some gaps in our understanding." One of these gaps was the fact that while previous researchers had hypothesized that tumor chaperone proteins carried the peptides that, when enriched and reinjected as a vaccine, could sensitize the immune system to tumor tissues, previous studies hadn't identified these peptides.
In another recent paper, also published in the International Journal of Hyperthermia, Graner describes what he calls, "taking these proteins and beating the peptides off them to see what they are." Sure enough, many of the peptides isolated from tumor samples were derived from proteins unique to cancer this means that a CRCL vaccine was likely to result in an immune response directed specifically at tumor tissue and not at surrounding, healthy tissues.
Graner writes that, "Parental proteins [that would be targets for the immune cells] are components of major signaling networks of vital importance for cancer cell survival, proliferation, and migration."
With the immune system sensitized, the unique genetic mutations that allow cancer cells to act cancerous would also mark them for destruction. With this research gap filled and with Star demonstrating the vaccine's effect, Graner is hopeful his proposed trial will make it to human patients soon.
"She was a real sweetie," Graner says of Star. "Hopefully her contribution to the world has just begun."
###
[ | 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.
Numerous cultures believe that the world is borne atop a monumental animal deity?be it the Iroquois' Great Turtle or the World Serpents and Elephants from Hindu mythology?so why not a Great Elk?
The animation team at awesome and modest produced this hypnotic visual interpretation to Pete Van Leeuwen's subtle song.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Social Security is approving disability benefits at strikingly high rates for people whose claims were rejected by field offices or state agencies, according to House investigators. Compounding the situation, the agency often fails to do required follow-up reviews months or years later to make sure people are still disabled.
Claims for benefits have increased by 25 percent since 2007, pushing the fund that supports the disability program to the brink of insolvency, which could mean reduced benefits. Social Security officials say the primary driver of the increase is demographic, mainly a surge in baby boomers who are more prone to disability as they age but are not quite old enough to qualify for retirement benefits.
The disability program has been swamped by benefit claims since the recession hit a few years ago. Last year, 3.2 million people applied for Social Security Disability or Supplemental Security Income.
In addition, however, management problems "lead to misspending" and add to the financial ills of the program, investigators from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee say.
"Federal disability claims are often paid to individuals who are not legally entitled to receive them," three senior Republicans on the House committee declared in a March 11 letter to the agency. Among the signers was the committee's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa of California.
Social Security acknowledges a backlog of 1.3 million overdue follow-up reviews to make sure people still qualify for benefits. But agency officials blame budget cuts for the backlog, saying Congress has denied the funds needed to clear it.
Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle said the agency follows the strict legal definition of disability when awarding benefits. In order to qualify, a person is supposed to have a disability that prevents him from working and is expected to last at least a year or result in death.
"Even with this very strict standard, there has been growth in the disability program, and the primary reason for this growth is demographics," Hinkle said. He noted that approval rates have declined as applications for benefits have increased.
The most common claimed disability was bone and muscle pain, including lower back pain, followed closely by mental disorders, according to the program's latest annual report.
"Pain cases and mental cases are extremely difficult because ? and even more so with mental cases ? there's no objective medical evidence," said Randall Frye, a Social Security administrative law judge in Charlotte, N.C. "It's all subjective."
Nearly 11 million disabled workers, spouses and children get Social Security disability benefits. That's up from 7.6 million a decade ago. The average monthly benefit for a disabled worker is $1,130.
An additional 8.3 million people get Supplemental Security Income, a separately funded disability program for low-income people.
If Congress doesn't act, the trust fund that supports Social Security disability will run out of money in 2016, according to projections by Social Security's trustees. At that point, the system will collect only enough money in payroll taxes to pay 80 percent of benefits, triggering an automatic 20 percent cut in benefits.
Congress could redirect money from Social Security's much bigger retirement program to shore up the disability program, as it did in 1994. But that would worsen the finances of the retirement program, which is facing its own long-term financial problems.
The House oversight subcommittee on entitlements is scheduled to hold the first of several hearings on the disability program Thursday. The hearing will focus on the role of administrative law judges in awarding benefits.
Most Social Security disability claims are initially processed through a network of local Social Security Administration field offices and state agencies, usually Disability Determination Services, and most are rejected. If your claim is rejected, you can ask the field office or state agency to reconsider. If your claim is rejected again, you can appeal to an administrative law judge, who is employed by Social Security.
The hearing process takes an average of a little more than a year, according to Social Security statistics. The agency estimates there are 816,000 hearings pending.
So far this budget year, the vast majority of judges have approved benefits in more than half the cases they've decided, even though they were reviewing applications that had typically been rejected twice by state agencies, according to Social Security data.
Of the 1,560 judges who have decided at least 50 cases since October, 195 judges approved benefits in at least 75 percent of their cases, according to the data, which were analyzed by congressional investigators.
"This is not one or two judges out there just going rogue and saying they are going to approve a lot of cases," said Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Energy, Policy, Health Care, and Entitlements. "This is a very, very high rate" of approving claims.
The union representing administrative law judges says judges are required to decide 500 to 700 cases a year in an effort to reduce the hearings backlog. The union says the requirement is an illegal quota that leads judges to sometimes award benefits they might otherwise deny just to keep up with the flow of cases, according to a federal lawsuit filed by the judges' union in April.
"I wouldn't want to suggest publicly that judges are not following the law or the regulations," said Frye, the North Carolina law judge who also is president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges , But, he added, "Would you want your surgeon to be on a quota system, to have to do so many surgeries every morning? Mistakes are going to be made when you force that kind of system on professional folks whose judgment, skill and experience are critical to coming to a good result."
The agency denies there is a case quota for judges, saying the standard is a productivity goal. The agency has declined to comment on the lawsuit. Former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said he set the goal in 2007 to help reduce the hearings backlog.
Once people get benefits, their cases are supposed to be reviewed periodically to make sure they are still disabled. The reviews are called continuing disability reviews, or CDRs.
For people whose disabilities are expected to improve, CDRs should be done in six to 18 months, according a 2010 report by the agency's inspector general. If improvement is possible ? but not necessarily likely ? reviews should be done every three years. People with disabilities believed to be permanent should get reviews every five to seven years.
At the end of 1996, there was a backlog of 4.3 million overdue reviews. In response, Congress authorized about $4 billion to fund a seven-year effort to wipe it out, and the backlog was erased in 2002.
But after the funding dried up, the number of annual reviews performed by the agency decreased and the backlog grew. Last year, the agency conducted 443,000 continuing reviews.
President Barack Obama's proposed budget for next year includes $1.5 billion to address the backlog, a nearly 50 percent increase over present funding. With the increase, the agency says it would be able to conduct slightly more than 1 million reviews.
"We have completed every CDR funded by Congress, but our administrative budget has been significantly reduced, resulting in three straight years of funding levels nearly a billion dollars below the president's budget requests," Hinkle said. "As a result, we have lost more than 10,000 employees since the beginning of (fiscal year) 2011. We currently have a backlog of 1.3 million CDRs, which we would be able to address with adequate, dedicated program integrity funding from Congress."
___
Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap
BERLIN (AP) ? German authorities are investigating two men of Tunisian origin suspected of planning to use model airplanes for terrorist attacks, prosecutors said Tuesday, as police in Germany and Belgium raided a series of sites searching for evidence of "possible attack plans and preparations."
No one was arrested in Tuesday's raids, which were carried out in the Stuttgart and Munich areas of southern Germany and in Saxony in eastern Germany, federal prosecutors said in a statement. One site in Belgium was raided, German officials said without elaborating.
Prosecutors said the investigation involved possible charges of "preparation of a serious, state-threatening act of violence," but they did not mention membership in any specific terrorist organization.
The two Tunisians are suspected of "procuring information and objects to commit Islamic extremist explosive attacks with remote-controlled model airplanes," prosecutors added. They gave no further information on the two men and didn't identify them.
However, the public broadcaster in southwestern Germany, SWF, quoted unnamed sources as saying that the two were studying aeronautics in Stuttgart and were suspected of trying to develop techniques for remotely piloting model planes using GPS technology.
German authorities would not say whether the alleged plot was far advanced, but the German news agency, quoting unnamed security sources, said the suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year.
The agency said authorities had recently detected "an increased interest in explosives and model aircraft."
However, authorities added that the national terror threat had not been raised, suggesting police believe the alleged plan ? if there were one ? was in early stages.
Among the locations raided were the apartments of four acquaintances of the two men who were suspected of financing Islamic extremism, officials said. The investigation also targeted another acquaintance suspected of money laundering. None of the suspects was identified.
Last November, a U.S. man, Rezwan Ferdaus, was sentenced to 17 years in prison over a plot to fly remote-controlled model planes packed with explosives into the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
Last year, Spanish police released a video they claimed showed suspected al-Qaida members training for a bombing raid using a model plane. Two Russians of Chechen origin were charged with possession of explosives but were released in April for lack of evidence. A Turk living in Spain was also arrested but later released.
Germany has seen only one successful attack by an Islamic radical ? the fatal shooting of two U.S. airmen at Frankfurt airport in 2011 by a Kosovo native who grew up in Germany and became radicalized by watching jihadist propaganda on the Internet.
However, there have been several attempted attacks in the country, which is a major contributor to international forces in Afghanistan.
Separately Tuesday, French authorities said police detained six people in the Paris region on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks in France.
Sheri was the first (fake) victim on the "Whodunnit?" premiere.
As the premiere episode of ABC's reality TV murder mystery "Whodunnit?" opened Sunday night, a voiceover explained that the contestants knew they were there to play a game, but "what they don't know is: The game is murder."
As it turned out, the contestants weren't the only ones who didn't quite know all the details. For instance, viewers knew the show was a murder mystery, but it's now clear what many of them didn't know was that the murders weren't real.
That's right, despite the fact that killing off contestants would be illegal (and, of course, just plain wrong), some believed that two players might have actually been killed as part of the show.
Concerned viewers even took to Twitter after the first person, Sheri, met her (not really) final fate.
Even after contestant Melina said, "In my heart, I know it's not a dead body, but it feels too real," some viewers remained suspicious.
When Dontae fled the "Whodunnit?" mansion in flames at the end of the show, even more shocked viewers tweeted their fears.
Of course, there was no need to worry about anyone. The mystery -- not the murder -- is the reality in this competition.
Check out the next faux fatalities when "Whodunnit?" airs Sunday night at 9 p.m. on ABC.
Six issues the press must cover to hold power in this province accountable.
Premier Clark's mandate puts nature in the crosshairs. Who will protect B.C.'s environment?
Now that the BC Liberals have a new four-year mandate we need media vigilance more than ever.
Although to see it in action you wouldn't know it, the press has special constitutional protection both in our written and unwritten constitutions which give it a unique position in our society. Thomas Jefferson put it this way: "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
And yet, at a moment when our liberties are fast eroding, the press, which should be fearless in our defence, has gone silent.
There are two ways the media can become pointless: By disseminating untruths or not saying anything at all. And by depriving the public of the true state of affairs. Postmedia, owners of the Vancouver Sun and Province and therefore key to the conversation in this province, appears to me guilty of both shortcomings.
I can only conclude that in the last 12 years, they have muzzled both Vaughn Palmer and Mike Smyth. How else can you explain the virtual absence of columns critical of fish farms, so called "run of river" atrocities, pipelines and tanker traffic? You will look in vain to find even the most blurred line from these two excellent writers critical of any of the "establishment" positions on these matters. In fact, the Sun seems to give the fish farm spokespeople an op-ed piece on demand.
Now we are seeing the ranks of journalists dramatically thinning at both papers, as staff is reduced to cut costs. Who is left to do the reporting we desperately need?
Here are several enormous issues ongoing and new coming down the track where media vigilance of the days of yore will be needed.
Fish farms.?Many seem unable to understand that the reason fish farmers don't want to go on shore is the expense of getting water to the fish and -- here is the main problem -- cleaning up after themselves. Thus it can be seen that the major cost of fish farms is borne by us, the public of B.C. What is so difficult to understand about that?
We, the public of B.C. see our waters polluted and our wild salmon destroyed so that large international companies make a handsome profit unbothered by the nuisance of paying for the use of their location and damages for the consequences that flow from their actions.
So-called 'run of river' projects. This donation of our wild rivers to Independent Power Projects (IPPs) so that they can make power, is one of the great heists in history. Their dams (and that's what they are) divert water within rivers to generate power that BC Hydro is compelled to buy at double the market price and up to 10 times what they can produce it for themselves. And, it must be emphasized, nearly all of it is produced during run-off time when BC Hydro doesn't need it but must buy anyway. They are on a "take or pay" contract forced upon BC Hydro by the Liberal government. Thanks to this unbelievable Liberal government policy, BC Hydro isnow in future debt to IPPs for some 50 to 60 billion dollars.
This has all been achieved with hardly a peep from the mainstream media! BC Hydro, the jewel in the provincial crown is now financially ruined by greedy business, urged on by a far right-wing government with nary a murmur by the mainstream media! BC Hydro, if in the private sector, would be bankrupt and escapes bankruptcy only because it can turn to us the public for their ongoing fiscal requirements. This is scandal of major proportions yet unmentioned by the media who are supposed to be protecting the province from this sort of corporate and government fiscal vandalism.
Pipelines. This issue from an environmental point of view can be simply stated. We know that there will be spills and we know from experience such as the Kalamazoo River tragedy that they can never be thoroughly cleaned up. The clear question is this -- seemingly because companies promise, cross my heart and to die that they can and will clean-up spills, the main question is unasked by the mainstream media --?how the hell can they get heavy machinery and crew into the Rockies? The Rocky Mountain Trench? The Coast Range? The Great Bear Rain Forest?
The plain answer is that you cannot clean up anywhere because you can't get to it and are unable to do much even if you could because of where the two major pipelines are planned to be.
Premier Clark talks about "world class" clean-up techniques to cover off spills that would take an act of God to deal with. This is pure sophistry. If the best efforts are bound to fail, what does it matter if they are "world class"? The truth is that diluted bitumen is all but impossible to clean up and, due to the geography of where the pipelines are to go, there's no way of getting crews and heavy machinery to the spill anyway.
Tankers. Tankers will have spills and the amount of oil to be shipped makes it clear that some will be major ones that simply cannot be cleaned up. We know from spills of ordinary oil they are impossible to clean -- the Exxon Valdez demonstrated that beyond doubt. But here we're dealing with bitumen, a tar-like substance which only floats for a very short time. With traditional spills, clean up is done by "rafting", which, in effect, contains the spill so it can be removed. This is only partly successful for crude or refined oil that will float for awhile until winds and tides play their role. Bitumen, soon after if gets on water, sinks like a stone. We learned that from the Enbridge Kalamazoo spill nearly three years ago which remains uncleaned.
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). This is, Premier Clark tells us, the savior of B.C.'s fortunes. It will pay off our debt and we'll have a provincial fund with over $100 billion in it.
Much of this natural gas will come in the form of "fracking," a technique which drills vertically, for often over a more than a kilometer, then drills horizontally in between layers of shale using huge quantities of chemically charged water, to blow the oil or gas to the surface.
There has been little environmental research done. Virtually none independently.
Where does the water come from? Where does it go when it has been made undrinkable and unusable? What about the stability of the ground when the oil and gas has been removed?
The government's entire fiscal policy is wrapped around the premier's dreams of a huge bonanza of gas revenues. Before the May election, this bonanza was just a year or so away. Now it is 2018, she hopes.
It's all eyewash. It's not going to happen. The world is awash in natural gas including Premier Clark's putative client China. On Sunday, June 16, this was announced in The South China Morning Post: "It sounds like an engineer's pipe dream -- a 9,000-kilometre-long pipeline stretching from Turkmenistan in Central Asia to Hong Kong and bringing energy to the homes of more than 500 million people along the way."
While this gas comes from Turkmenistan, we already know that China and Russia have huge shale gas reserves. Somehow Premier Clark is banking on LNG, natural gas that has the enormous cost of liquefying it attached, will sell like hotcakes in places with plenty of their own gas in reserve. Dream on!
While we learn more and more about increasing deposits of both oil and natural gas worldwide, we have an "opposition" that also thinks that B.C. LNG will put us all on easy street.
Northern Gateway. Premier Clark did not nix the Enbridge pipeline as some assume. She merely told The Joint Review Panel that B.C. opposes on environmental grounds. At the same time she has told the Alberta government -- and indeed the world -- that B.C. will consent if some money comes its way and that "world-leading oil-spill response and clean-up systems" are in place. She has to know, as stated above, that this latter condition is, I emphasize, plain sophistry since she must know that in truth there is no response and clean-up possible, world class or not.
The plain fact is that unless an informed public rises against these assaults on our intelligence, B.C.'s environment will take blows from which it never can recover.
Environmental groups are fighting valiantly on all of these fields of combat but they have no media to investigate and report, fairly, on what they are doing.
There are no media holding the government's feet to the power. There are no media scrappers like the late Marjorie Nichols, the late Jack Webster and, dare I say it, Rafe Mair in the mainstream media.
That's why it's critical that citizens read the Wilderness Committee, The Common Sense Canadian of which I am a co-founder and columnist and, of course, The Tyee. They must also inform themselves by the periodic releases of organizations like The Living Oceans Society, the Georgia Strait Alliance and many other fine groups that concentrate on various aspects and locations of environmental importance. ??
With the NDP reeling after its election collapse, the media must do the work of holding the government and business accountable. The question we face is whether the media's owner will allow that to happen, and even if they did, there are enough people left in newsrooms to perform the vital role of citizens' advocate.
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LONDON (Reuters) - Plants do complex arithmetic calculations to make sure they have enough food to get them through the night, new research published in journal eLife shows.
Scientists at Britain's John Innes Centre said plants adjust their rate of starch consumption to prevent starvation during the night when they are unable to feed themselves with energy from the sun.
They can even compensate for an unexpected early night.
"This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation," mathematical modeler Martin Howard of John Innes Centre (JIC) said.
During the night, mechanisms inside the leaf measure the size of the starch store and estimate the length of time until dawn. Information about time comes from an internal clock, similar to the human body clock.
"The capacity to perform arithmetic calculation is vital for plant growth and productivity," JIC metabolic biologist Alison Smith said.
"Understanding how plants continue to grow in the dark could help unlock new ways to boost crop yield."
(Reporting by Nigel Hunt; editing by Keiron Henderson)
June 24, 2013 ? MIT biologists have discovered a mechanism that allows cells to read their own DNA in the correct direction and prevents them from copying most of the so-called "junk DNA" that makes up long stretches of our genome.
Only about 15 percent of the human genome consists of protein-coding genes, but in recent years scientists have found that a surprising amount of the junk, or intergenic DNA, does get copied into RNA -- the molecule that carries DNA's messages to the rest of the cell.
Scientists have been trying to figure out just what this RNA might be doing, if anything. In 2008, MIT researchers led by Institute Professor Phillip Sharp discovered that much of this RNA is generated through a process called divergent expression, through which cells read their DNA in both directions moving away from a given starting point.
In a new paper appearing in Nature on June 23, Sharp and colleagues describe how cells initiate but then halt the copying of RNA in the upstream, or non-protein-coding direction, while allowing it to continue in the direction in which genes are correctly read. The finding helps to explain the existence of many recently discovered types of short strands of RNA whose function is unknown.
"This is part of an RNA revolution where we're seeing different RNAs and new RNAs that we hadn't suspected were present in cells, and trying to understand what role they have in the health of the cell or the viability of the cell," says Sharp, who is a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. "It gives us a whole new appreciation of the balance of the fundamental processes that allow cells to function."
Graduate students Albert Almada and Xuebing Wu are the lead authors of the paper. Christopher Burge, a professor of biology and biological engineering, and undergraduate Andrea Kriz are also authors.
Choosing direction
DNA, which is housed within the nucleus of cells, controls cellular activity by coding for the production of RNAs and proteins. To exert this control, the genetic information encoded by DNA must first be copied, or transcribed, into messenger RNA (mRNA).
When the DNA double helix unwinds to reveal its genetic messages, RNA transcription can proceed in either direction. To initiate this copying, an enzyme called RNA polymerase latches on to the DNA at a spot known as the promoter. The RNA polymerase then moves along the strand, building the mRNA chain as it goes.
When the RNA polymerase reaches a stop signal at the end of a gene, it halts transcription and adds to the mRNA a sequence of bases known as a poly-A tail, which consists of a long string of the genetic base adenine. This process, known as polyadenylation, helps to prepare the mRNA molecule to be exported from the cell's nucleus.
By sequencing the mRNA transcripts of mouse embryonic stem cells, the researchers discovered that polyadenylation also plays a major role in halting the transcription of upstream, noncoding DNA sequences. They found that these regions have a high density of signal sequences for polyadenylation, which prompts enzymes to chop up the RNA before it gets very long. Stretches of DNA that code for genes have a low density of these signal sequences.
The researchers also found another factor that influences whether transcription is allowed to continue. It has been recently shown that when a cellular factor known as U1 snRNP binds to RNA, polyadenylation is suppressed. The new MIT study found that genes have a higher concentration of binding sites for U1 snRNP than noncoding sequences, allowing gene transcription to continue uninterrupted.
A widespread phenomenon
The function of all of this upstream noncoding RNA is still a subject of much investigation. "That transcriptional process could produce an RNA that has some function, or it could be a product of the nature of the biochemical reaction. This will be debated for a long time," Sharp says.
His lab is now exploring the relationship between this transcription process and the observation of large numbers of so-called long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). He plans to investigate the mechanisms that control the synthesis of such RNAs and try to determine their functions.
"Once you see some data like this, it raises many more questions to be investigated, which I'm hoping will lead us to deeper insights into how our cells carry out their normal functions and how they change in malignancy," Sharp says.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? Al-Qaida's North African branch says eight hostages it is holding are safe and a video will soon be released of the Europeans.
SITE Intelligence Group said Sunday that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, made the announcement Saturday through Twitter. AQIM says that captives from Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden are still alive. AQIM had before threatened to seek revenge against all countries taking part in the French-led intervention in Mali. Earlier this year the al-Qaida-linked group said it had killed a French hostage.
The al-Qaida affiliate, which became part of the terror network in 2006, is one of three Islamic militant groups in northern Mali. In January the French led an intervention that pushed the extremist groups from some of the major cities in the north.
BAGHDAD (AP) ? A suicide car bomb and other militant attacks killed nine people in northern Iraq on Saturday, officials said, the latest in a wave of violence that has killed nearly 2,000 Iraqis since the start of April.
The deadliest attack was in al-Athba village near the northern city of Mosul, when a suicide car bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a police patrol, a police officer said. Three civilian bystanders and one policeman died while six other people were wounded, he added.
With violence spiking sharply in recent months to levels not seen since 2008, al-Qaida in Iraq and other militant groups have been gathering strength in the area of Mosul, some 360 kilometers (220 miles) northwest of Baghdad.
In the city of Tuz Khormato, 210 kilometers (130 miles) north of Baghdad, gunmen on motorcycles riddled a civilian vehicle carrying four off-duty policemen with bullets, killing three and wounding another, a police officer said.
Another group of gunmen attacked a police checkpoint in the city of Samarra, killing two policemen and wounding four, another police officer said. Samarra is 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad.
Police also said two civilians were killed and nine wounded when a bomb ripped through a small market late Friday in Baghdad.
Four medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.
Also on Saturday, the United Nations said another 27 residents of a camp housing members of an Iranian exile group have been relocated to Albania. The move follows a deadly rocket attack on the facility last week.
A total of 71 residents of Camp Liberty have now relocated to the southeast European country, which has agreed to accept 210 of them. Germany has also offered to take 100 residents. The U.N. is urging other member states to accept some of the more than 3,000 living in Iraq.
The dissident group, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, is the militant wing of a Paris-based Iranian opposition movement that opposes Iran's clerical regime and has carried out assassinations and bombings there. It fought alongside Saddam Hussein's forces in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and several thousand of its members were given sanctuary in Iraq. It renounced violence in 2001, and was removed from the U.S. terrorism list last year.
Iraq's government wants the MEK members to leave, and the U.N. has been working to resettle them abroad.
Two residents of Camp Liberty were killed in a June 15 rocket attack on the facility. A Shiite militant group claimed responsibility, saying it wants the group out of Iraq.
______
Associated Press writer Adam Schreck contributed to this report.
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