'Plastic wives' defend 'beverly hills' decisions

Thursday 7 February 2013

Washington, Feb 2 : Breast augmentation, Botox, liposuction. Almost no cosmetic procedure is off limits for the four Hollywood women who are the stars of TLC's new reality TV show.

Veronica Matlock, Alana Sands, Danya Devon and Frances Marques are the "Plastic Wives," married to some of the most successful plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills, with all the perks. Namely, free plastic surgery.

Watch the full story on "Nightline" tonight at 12:35 a.m. ET and on "Good Morning America" tomorrow at 7 a.m. ET

Marques said she has had her breasts done four times. For Matlock, three times. Devon said she loves Botox.

"I'm sure this lifestyle seems a little crazy," Devon said. "This lifestyle, look, is crazy. This is Hollywood, though."

Their new show, which premieres on TLC, leaves little to the imagination about what life in and out of the operating room is really like. At home Sands, the wife of cosmetic dentist Dr. Kevin Sands, has three full-time nannies for her two kids, two full-time masseuses and a full-time chef.

"I'm not complaining," Sands said. "I'm not complaining at all."

For these wives, it's a no-appointment-necessary and no-payment-required lifestyle. They have unlimited access to the operating room, whatever they want, whenever they want -- even a personal procedure room at home for a little nip and tuck when the mood strikes them. They are proud of the work they had done, living billboards of their husbands' steady hands.

"I heard some advice a long time ago that has always stuck with me, and it's if you're considering a plastic surgeon, look at his wife," Devon said. "And that's a perfect example of the kind of work he most likely does."

"My husband is doing a consult for a Brazilian butt, he'll tell the women, 'I did it on my wife, here look, look at this picture,' and it does help," Marques said.

And they are quick to judge the work of other surgeons' wives.

"If we don't like them, we don't hang out with their wives," Sands said.

Their husbands might try to get them to stop getting plastic surgery, but they always seem to lose the battle. Matlock lovingly refers to her husband, Dr. David Matlock, a gynecological surgeon, as "the vagina man."

"One way to get exactly what I want is to say, 'All right, don't worry about it. I'll go to doctor so and so," Matlock said. "And he'll be like, 'Oh, no you don't.'"

Even when faced with the possibility of critics saying they are overdoing it, the ladies weren't fazed.

"We're not telling anybody they have to go do this," Devon said. "I'm all about, like, 'Look, here's what I did. Here's the information. Take it or leave it.' If you like it, great. If you don't, great. No worries."

But no amount of Botox can ward off aging and the pressure they feel to stay perfect. Devon, a former entertainment news anchor, recently turned 40 and said she was faced with the reality of wrinkles.

"In any other community in the world, this makes absolutely no sense, but it's Hollywood," she said. "I wanted to continue working in television. I wanted to continue working in front of the camera, and unfortunately, you hit 40, you want to continue working in TV, there are some things that you've got to think about."

So Devon said she asked her husband, Dr. Brent Moelleken, to help with everything from injections to nips and tucks.

"I'll still obsess about an acne scar or something, but I think most women do find things they obsess about. But look, I'm pretty happy," she said.

Sands said she is not addicted to plastic surgery, but in the past six months, she has been in her husband's office "a lot."

"I always see him in surgery doing people's teeth and I'm always like, 'Babe, just please do my teeth,'" she said.

Though plastic surgery is a $10 billion a year industry in the United States, plastic surgeon Dr. Lisa Cassileth said shows like "Plastic Wives" send the wrong message about body image and cosmetic surgery.

"I think if you have something you're walking around with, it's easy to fix, you don't need to live with it, O.K., there's a level where you can fix that," she said. "But for the day-to-day person, I think most people are only going to want to fix something if they wake up every morning and it bothers them and it's worth it. And that's a much smaller percentage than what we see on television."

Cassileth said she often spends her days correcting surgeries that she said have gone too far.

"The insider phrase is 'Beverly Hills,'" she said. "So when people come in and they're overdone, I say to them, 'I'm sorry, you're looking too Beverly Hills, and that's when you stop.'"

She has helped fix patients like Jillian Weisberg, who said another plastic surgeon injected a full syringe of juvederm into her lips and they ballooned.

"When people would come over to my house, they would laugh in my face," she said. "I looked ridiculous."

But some plastic wives can't seem to stop and their lives, just like their faces, seem glamorous, scar-free and flawless -- most of the time. Marques thought she had it all during her seven-year marriage to Dr. Ryan Stanton, until, she said, he left her. They are still friends and they run his plastic surgery business together.

"He got the midlife crisis and he wants to be with a younger women [sic] half of my age and so he left me because of that," Marques said. "Although I have done everything to keep myself young, he just -- I couldn't keep the man."

Even so, Marques said she even loves the name of the reality show, "Plastic Wives."

"I thought it was brilliant," she said. "We do a lot of plastic surgery, but we don't look nothing like plastic, you know, we don't look overdone."

And she still wants more.

"I am kind of addicted," Marques said. "There are so many things coming, so many new technologies, new implants, new Botox, new fillers, laser procedures and all that. And I want it all."

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Coolest new car tech that could be in your next ride

London, Feb 2 : Smartphones, tablets, and computers seem to evolve at a breakneck pace, but the personal technology in cars has consistently lagged behind.

That may finally be changing, though. Touchscreens, futuristic dashboards, and Internet connectivity options are all currently being worked on by automotive manufacturers, and you’ll be seeing these features on new car models starting this year.

Chevrolet is poised to refresh its MyLink media navigation system to act even more like the tablets and smartphones you already own.

Rather than static icons arranged in a specific order, as they are now in Chevys, you'll be able to edit and rearrange each set of apps, much like an iPhone screen. The MyLink update will support streaming radio, weather reports and hands-free calls, and allow you to save GPS directions. The smartphone-inspired software is scheduled to launch with the 2014 Chevy Impala later this year.


If a touchscreen dashboard just isn't your style, you might be interested in something a bit more futuristic. Several car companies have produced their own versions of virtual display technology that overlays information onto part of your windshield, while still allowing you to see the road without difficulty. These systems can give drivers information like speed, direction, and navigation guidance without taking their eyes off the road.

BMW, Hyundai, and Cadillac are a few of the companies working on similar systems, which should make it to consumer models of new vehicles within the next couple of years. There are also a handful of third party companies, like Pioneer, working on their own heads-up displays that can be added to practically any car or truck.

Good music can make a long commute bearable, and ensuring that the tunes pumping into your car meet your mood is paramount. To make the process of striking the perfect note more easy and intuitive, music technology company GraceNote built the MoodGrid. It’s a program that can generate musical playlists based on your feelings.

The grid provides 25 different mood squares which you can tap to activate. The sides of the grid act as specific moods such as Positive, Calm, Energetic, and Dark. Each time you touch a square, the system applies more of that feeling to its musical choices. If you're positive and energetic, the system will play upbeat, fast-tempo tunes, and the opposite is true if you're feeling a bit more mellow. If you’re in no specific mood, tapping towards the center of the grid will provide more of a mix.


The days of finding an address on the Web and typing it into a GPS unit are ending. Porsche's new Harman Aha Web search technology streamlines the process and lets you type your destination directly into the vehicle's interactive dashboard instead of fumbling around for your smartphone. The system then searches the Web for the most relevant results based on your location and presents them to you in an easy-to-browse list.

For example, you want to try out that new Chinese restaurant across town and can't remember the name. Rather than reaching for your iPhone at a stop light, you can simply type the relevant keywords into the Aha system and it will find it for you. It will even automatically program your vehicle's navigation system to get you there. This technology is just one step away from letting your car actually drive you to your destination on its own, but that’s coming too.

Car and technology companies like Audi and Google are getting closer to self-driving cars that could outsmart slow traffic and find a parking spot without human input. The vehicles use radar and camera sensors to avoid accidents and humans alike.

However, driverless cars are legal in only three states Google has pushed California legislators to allow its fleet of autonomous map-making cars to hit public streets, but that's a small victory in what is a long legislative process nationally. Still, most automakers are confident self-driving technology will reach consumers before 2020. Cadillac hopes to launch its "Super Cruise" automatic highway driving option by 2015.

Whether any of these new features make it into your next vehicle, they too will be replaced by something even wilder and unimaginably cool. Or think about it this way: In the 1950s, everyone thought we'd have flying cars by 2000, so maybe touchscreens and connected cars are OK for 2013.

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Biggest dinosaurs had brains the size of tennis balls

London, Feb 2 : An advanced member of the largest group of dinosaurs ever to walk the Earth still had a relatively puny brain, researchers say.

The scientists analyzed the skull of 70-million-year-old fossils of the giant dinosaur Ampelosaurus, discovered in 2007 in Cuenca, Spain, in the course of the construction of a high-speed rail track connecting Madrid with Valencia. The reptile was a sauropod, long-necked, long-tailed herbivores that were the largest creatures ever to stride the Earth. More specifically, Ampelosaurus was a kind of sauropod known as a titanosaur, many if not all of which had armorlike scales covering their bodies.

Sauropod skulls are typically fragile, and few have survived intact enough for scientists to learn much about their brains. By scanning the interior of the skull via CT imaging, the researchers developed a 3-D reconstruction of Ampelosaurus' brain, which was not much bigger than a tennis ball.

"This saurian may have reached 15 meters (49 feet) in length; nonetheless its brain was not in excess of 8 centimeters (3 inches)," study researcher Fabien Knoll, a paleontologist at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences, said in a statement.

The first sauropods appeared about 160 million years earlier than this fossil.

"We don't see much expansion of brain size in this group of animals as they go through time, unlike a lot of mammalian and bird groups, where you see increases in brain size over time," researcher Lawrence Witmer, an anatomist and paleontologist at Ohio University, told LiveScience. "They apparently hit on something and stuck with it — expansion of brain size over time wasn't a major focus of theirs."

For years, scientists have wondered how the largest land animals ever lived with such tiny brains. "Maybe we should flip that question on their end — maybe we shouldn't ask how they could function with tiny brains, but what are many modern animals doing with such ridiculously large brains. Cows may be triple-Einsteins compared to most dinosaurs, but why?" Witmer said.

Their computer model also revealed the ampelosaur had a small inner ear.

"Part of the inner ear is associated with hearing, so the fact it had a small inner ear means it probably wasn't all that good at hearing airborne sounds," Witmer said. "It probably used a kind of hearing we don't think much about, which depends on sounds transmitted through the ground."

The inner ear is also responsible for balance and equilibrium, Witmer said.

"Given what we know about its inner ear, Ampelosaurus probably didn't put a real premium on rapid, quick jerky eye or head movements, which makes sense — these are relatively large, slow-moving, plant-eating animals," he said.

Knoll and his colleagues had previously developed 3-D reconstructions of another sauropod, Spinophorosaurus nigeriensis. In contrast to Ampelosaurus, Spinophorosaurus had a fairly developed inner ear.

"It is quite enigmatic that sauropods show such a diverse inner ear morphology whereas they have a very homogenous body shape," Knoll said. "More investigation is definitely required."

Currently scientists are debating whether sauropods held their heads near the ground, grazing on low vegetation, or high up like giraffes to browse on high leaves. "It could be that learning more about the inner ear could tell us what sauropod neck posture was like," Witmer said.

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Calif. couple sues over donations to Scientology

West Palm Beach, Feb 2: Two former members of the Church of Scientology claimed in a lawsuit filed that the church and its affiliates deceived members into donating millions of dollars to misrepresented causes.

Luis and Maria Garcia of Irvine, Calif., filed the complaint in federal court in Tampa, near the church's national headquarters in Clearwater. The couple claims they were duped into giving more than $420,000 for a building campaign, disaster relief efforts and other Scientology causes, only to find the bulk of the money went to inflate the church coffers and line the pockets of its leader, David Miscavige.

"The church, under the leadership of David Miscavige, has strayed from its founding principles," the lawsuit claims, "and morphed into a secular enterprise whose primary purpose is taking people's money."

In an emailed statement, Scientology spokeswoman Pat Harney said the church had not yet been served with the lawsuit, but challenged any contention that money was misappropriated.

"We understand from media inquiries this has something to do with fundraising and we can unequivocally state all funds solicited are used for the charitable and religious purposes for which they were donated," Harney said.

The Garcias were 28-year members of the church, rising to upper levels of Scientology. They left in November 2010 over their disenchantment with its direction under Miscavige, who has led the church since founder L. Ron Hubbard's death in 1986.

The lawsuit names various trusts and nonprofits linked to Scientology as defendants and says they collectively engage in fraud, unfair and deceptive trade practices and breach of contract in their fundraising.

Attorney Theodore Babbitt of West Palm Beach, who is among those handling the suit, said it would be followed by other similar claims from former Scientologists. He said the Garcias still believe in the precepts of Scientology and that the litigation is not a commentary on whether it is a true religion, a question that has dogged it across the world since it was founded in the 1950s. Babbitt said, ultimately, that question is irrelevant when considering its members' donations.

"Whether you're a church or not a church, you can't defraud people," he said.

Harney called the lawsuit "frivolous."

"The statements to the media made today about the church and its ecclesiastical leader by these bitter individuals are blatantly false," she said.

Among the accusations made in the lawsuit is that the Garcias and others were repeatedly approached with urgent requests for funding of Scientology work around the globe, such as disaster relief or campaigns for causes such as ending child pornography. Babbitt said high-ranking former Scientologists would testify that the church knowingly rerouted such collections for other spending, including financing a "lavish lifestyle" for Miscavige, stifling inquiries into church activities and finances, and intimidating members and ex-members.

A common tactic, Babbitt said, when a disaster unfolded somewhere in the world, would be to send a small group of Scientologists with a camera crew that would pay locals in the affected area to appear on camera. A scene would essentially be staged, he claims, in which people would be begging or appear to be starving, even if it weren't the case.

A cornerstone of church practice is personal counseling sessions, known as auditing, in which members disclose many facets of their personal lives. Babbitt says members' own financial status and the accounts they hold would be known from those sessions and then be used in tandem with footage from disaster sites in desperate and urgent pleas for money.

"There's an emergency, we need your money right now, we know that you have X dollars in the bank in Los Angeles," Babbitt said, offering a paraphrase of how a member might be approached.

In the end, little if any of the money collected for such causes reached its intended place, he said. Those contributions, the lawsuit claims, were collected by a Scientology-linked group called IAS Administrations, which Babbitt says former church members will testify accumulated more than $1 billion in contributions.

The Garcias also claim to have prepaid for auditing and training services that were never provided and for which a refund has never been received, and to have given about $340,000 for the church's planned Super Power building for high-level coursework.

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Missouri man, 93, charged with killing wife, 95

Kansas City, Feb 2: A 93-year-old man accused of killing his wife thought he had also stabbed himself to death and asked paramedics en route to the hospital "why I am I still awake?" authorities said.

Harry Irwin is charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of his 95-year-old wife, Grace, in south Kansas City, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.

A daughter of the couple found Grace Irwin bleeding on a bed and Harry Irwin laying still in a recliner with knife in his hand, according to a probable cause statement filed by detectives in the case.

Harry Irwin had apparently slit his wrists and plunged a knife into his chest, detectives said in the statement. Grace Irwin was pronounced dead at the scene.

On the way to the hospital, police said Irwin stated: "Yes, I killed her then killed myself. Why am I awake?"

Irwin said he tried to stab himself in the heart but he must have aimed too low and hit a rib, according to the probable cause statement.

He also said his wife was arguing and screaming at him all night and that he couldn't take it anymore, the statement said.

"Given the facts, a murder charge was warranted," Baker said. "No victim deserves someone else deciding when they will die."

Harry Irwin remained in the hospital, authorities said.

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Storm clouds crawling with bacteria

London, Feb 2 : The storm clouds in Earth's atmosphere are filled with microbial life, according to a new study.

The research, published in the journal PLoS One, revealed that hailstones drawn from storm clouds harbor several species of bacteria that tend to reside on plants, as well as thousands of organic compounds normally found in soil. Some of the bacterial species can seed the tiny ice crystals that lead to rain, suggesting they play a role in causing rain.

"Those storm clouds are quite violent phenomena," said study co-author Tina Santl Temkiv, an environmental chemist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "They are sucking huge amounts of air from under the clouds, and that's how the bacteria probably got into the cloud."

In the past, researchers have found bacterial life in clouds that drift over mountaintops. Bacteria have been found as far up as 24.8 miles  and may even survive as spores into space, Temkiv said.

Temkiv and her colleagues wanted to see if bacteria lived in the violent storm clouds that hover above the Earth's surface. To find out, they studied 42 hailstones that had formed in a thunderstorm over Ljubljana, Slovenia, in May 2009.

After carefully removing the outer layer and sterilizing the hailstone, they analyzed its chemical composition.

The team found thousands of organic, or carbon-containing, compounds — nearly as many as found in a typical river, Temkiv said. In addition, they found several species of bacteria that normally live on plants. Some of the bacteria make a pinkish pigment that allows them to withstand the punishing ultraviolet rays in the atmosphere.

Some of bacteria found are ice-nucleators, meaning they can act as seeds for ice crystals to attach to in the clouds above Earth. When these same ice crystals get large enough, they fall as rain or snow, depending on the air temperature.

The findings suggest that bacteria could influence weather patterns, possibly making rain, Temkiv said.

"They may be growing in clouds, increasing in number and then modifying the chemistry in the cloud but also in the atmosphere indirectly," she told LiveScience.

The researchers think the bacteria come from the air hovering just above Earth that gets swept into the storm clouds through updrafts. That would suggest the atmosphere is a thread that can connect distant ecosystems, and that certain bacteria may be better at colonizing faraway environments, Pierre Amato, a researcher at France's Blaise Pascal University who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

"Clouds can be thought of as transient ecosystems selecting for certain [types of bacteria] that are better fitted than others, and that can thus quickly disperse over the globe," Amato said. "Understanding how microbes disperse is relevant, of course, for epidemiology, and also for microbial ecology."

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Goldman cleared of all charges in doomed Dragon sale

New York, Feb 2: A federal jury gave Goldman Sachs Group Inc a sweeping legal victory in the $580 million sale of Dragon Systems Inc to Lernout & Hauspie, saying the Wall Street bank was not negligent in arranging a deal that ultimately collapsed 13 years ago.

The jury cleared Goldman of claims of negligence, intentional misrepresentation and breach of fiduciary duty, and others, in the civil case, according to the verdict announced in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Dragon founders Jim and Janet Baker, pioneers in the field of speech recognition software, accused Goldman investment bankers of being negligent in the 2000 sale of their company to Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie, which collapsed in a massive accounting fraud. The Bakers and two early Dragon employees sought several hundred million dollars in damages.

"We are pleased the jury rejected these claims. We fulfilled all our advisory duties to Dragon Systems," Goldman Sachs spokeswoman Tiffany Galvin said.

John Donovan, Goldman's lead lawyer on the case, declined to comment. But on a frigid day outside the federal courthouse, Donovan joined his legal team and smiled for a group picture.

The Bakers were not available for comment. Before the verdict was read, the couple sat closely together, as they had throughout the 23-day trial.

Their lawyers portrayed Goldman's investment bankers as a "bottom of the barrel" team that failed to properly vet concerns about Lernout & Hauspie's claims of skyrocketing sales in Asia.

But lawyers for Goldman said it was not the investment bank's job to sniff out the accounting fraud that ultimately doomed Lernout & Hauspie and made the remaining stock held by the Bakers worthless. In fact, Goldman said Dragon rushed into the sale and brushed aside advice to hire outside accountants to examine Lernout & Hauspie's books in more detail.

The Bakers owned 51 percent of the company, but were able to sell only a few million dollars' worth of the L&H shares they received in the all-stock deal before the collapse.

Takeovers can carry a variety of risks for buyers and sellers, as illustrated by large charges recently reported by a pair of corporate America's biggest names.

Last week, Caterpillar Inc told investors it will take a $580 million charge in its just-ended fourth quarter after uncovering an accounting fraud in a subsidiary of a Chinese company it acquired last summer.

Hewlett-Packard Co took an even bigger hit, in November warning it would book an $8.8 billion charge after discovering "serious accounting improprieties" at Autonomy, a British software company it bought the previous year.

In counter claims brought by Goldman, the jury found that Janet Baker had made negligent misrepresentations to Paul Bamberg and Robert Roth, Dragon employees who held 5.54 percent and 2.75 percent, respectively, of the company's stock. The jury said Baker caused damages, but no figure was given in the verdict.

The jury also said Goldman proved that Janet Baker breached her fiduciary duty to Bamberg and Roth. The jury said Jim Baker breached his fiduciary duty to Bamberg, but not to Roth, according to the verdict.

During the trial, jurors heard testimony, largely by video, from a lineup of Goldman Sachs executives, including Gene "Tiger" Sykes, who today runs the bank's mergers and acquisition business and who denied any role in the Dragon deal.

Dragon's attorneys said the bank had assigned "D-team" investment bankers to advise Dragon, which they argued the bank made because the software company was one of its smaller clients.

"It is regrettable that the plaintiffs went to such lengths to unfairly and publicly attack the reputations of the Goldman Sachs bankers who advised Dragon Systems," said Goldman's Galvin. "Those bankers have our full support."

Alan Cotler, a lawyer for the Bakers, told the jury the couple lost their life's work when Lernout & Hauspie collapsed and went into bankruptcy. The Bakers tried to get their technology back, but were unsuccessful.

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Union membership falls to lowest percentage in 76 years

New York, Feb 2: The percentage of workers belonging to unions tumbled to 11.3 percent in 2012, the lowest percentage in 76 years, led by dramatic declines in states where lawmakers have put organized labor in the political crosshairs, government figures showed.

The total number of union members fell by nearly 400,000, from 11.8 percent of the workforce in 2011, the Labor Department report on union membership said. The rate of 11.3 percent of the workforce was the lowest since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

Almost half the losses in the last year were in the industrial Midwest -- Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan -- where states with Republican-led governments have led an assault on unions.

Indiana passed a so-called "right-to-work" law in February, 2012 making payment of union dues voluntary for workers. Wisconsin passed severe restrictions on public sector unions in 2011, but they were blocked by the courts for part of 2012.

Ohio also passed curbs on public sector unions in 2011, but they were overturned by referendum the same year. Michigan last month passed a right-to-work law that has not yet taken effect.

Robert Bruno, professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, said a growing number of laws that make organizing workers more difficult were part of the reason for "an incremental erosion" of the labor movement.

"It goes back a couple of decades, that there has been a growing number of anti-labor policies," Bruno said. "We have the weakest labor law and enforcement of labor law in the entire Western industrialized world," he said.

Some of the most brutal fights over collective bargaining have taken place at the state level. A federal appeals court upheld a controversial Wisconsin law restricting the power of public-sector unions.

Last year, organized labor also suffered big membership losses in states considered union strongholds and controlled by Democrats, including Illinois and New York. Lawmakers grappling with public employee pension crises and sharp drops in tax revenue have sought concessions from public workers.

"It reflects a number of things beyond labor's control, such as the state of the economy," said Harley Shaiken, labor relations professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

"It used to be big labor and big business. Now we have small labor and big business," he said.

On the other hand, unions made strong gains in traditionally weak states for organized labor, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma and even Texas, due to booming local economies.

Some analysts blame unions for the drop. Membership has been falling since 2008, when it was 16.1 million, or 12.4 percent of the workforce, federal data shows. It peaked in 1954, when 28.3 percent of workers were represented by organized labor.

"They must now admit that they are not investing enough staff and funds in organizing and not embarking on an imaginative journey to rediscover the relevancy of unions," said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. "Essentially, workers are feeling tremendous job insecurity ... Yet as today's figures suggest, workers are not turning to unions to act as their voice."

The report also showed full-time unionized workers had median weekly earnings of $943, 27 percent more than the $742 of those whose pay was not collectively bargained.

The activist group Center for Union Facts, which is critical of the labor movement, said unions have made salary and benefit demands that have hurt the budgets of corporations and the public sector.

Slow recovery from the 2007-09 recession has hurt revenues of state and local governments, forcing them to eliminate jobs and to cover the swelling costs of healthcare and pensions by cutting spending in other areas.

"It's not a secret that some politicians chose to cut public education funding, balance the budgets on the backs of students and slash the education workforce," Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, a 3 million member union, said in a statement on the report.

In 2012, public sector unions lost 234,000 members. Nearly 80 percent of that decline was in organizations representing local government workers, primarily teachers. More than a third, 35.9 percent, of public-sector workers belonged to unions, compared with just 6.6 percent of those in the private sector.

From December 2007, near the start of the recession, to December 2012, state and local governments shed 489,000 jobs.

"That's a highly unionized sector and we know the public sector has been doing poorly in this recovery," said William Briggs, chief economist for the largest U.S. union, the AFL-CIO, and former undersecretary at the U.S. Labor Department. "The weakness isn't just a union story. It's a story about the economy not functioning the way we hope it would."

He noted the age group with the lowest membership rate - only 4.2 percent for workers aged 16 to 24, compared with 14.9 percent for those aged 55 to 64 - was also the one struggling most to find full-time jobs.

Black workers had the highest union membership rate, at 13.4 percent, followed by whites at 11.1 percent, Hispanics at 9.8 percent and Asians at 9.6 percent. Black men alone had a rate of 14.8 percent, as African-American women mostly hold public jobs, Briggs said.

Women made up 57 percent of the public sector workforce in 2012 and accounted for 72 percent of the union membership decline, the National Women's Law Center said.

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Hyundai posts surprise fourth-quarter profit fall on currency, mileage fiasco

Seoul, Feb 2 : Hyundai Motor Co posted a surprise quarterly profit decline after a stronger local currency and the cost of compensating drivers in North America for overstated fuel-economy claims dented car sales.

The Korean won strengthened almost 8 percent against the dollar last year, its biggest gain since 2009, reducing the value of Hyundai Motor's overseas revenue in local currency terms and hurting the carmaker's price competitiveness abroad. To make matters worse, the yen eased by 11 percent, handing Hyundai's competitive edge back to its Japanese rivals.

Hyundai, ranked fifth in global sales with affiliate Kia Motors , posted a 1.89 trillion won ($1.77 billion) net profit for October-December, missing a consensus forecast of 2.15 trillion won in a poll of 15 analysts.

The profit decline, down 6 percent from 2 trillion won a year earlier, was the first since Hyundai Motor switched accounting rules in 2011.

Hyundai's fourth-quarter earnings were also hit after the company set aside funds to cover the cost of compensating customers for overstated fuel-economy claims on some cars sold recently in the United States and Canada. Hyundai and affiliate Kia Motors said they would help drivers pay for the additional fuel costs. Analysts projected provisions of about 300 billion won to 400 billion won.

The worse-than-expected earnings results came despite record car sales in the quarter.

Hyundai, which has enjoyed strong sales growth in recent years by offering stylish, yet affordable models such as Sonata and Elantra, sold 1.23 million vehicles in the fourth quarter, up 11 percent from a year earlier.

The automaker, led by founding family member Chung Mong-koo, also boosted sales at its new China plant as Japanese rivals reeled from anti-Japanese sentiment. Hyundai has outperformed the shrinking Europe market and increased U.S. gains, albeit at a slower pace.

Shares in Hyundai Motor extended their losses, down 3.7 percent after the results, versus the wider market's (.KS11) 0.7 percent fall.


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China HSBC flash PMI hits two-year high in January

Beijing, Feb 2 : Growth in China's giant factory sector accelerated to a two-year high in January, a preliminary private survey showed, as manufacturers received more local and foreign orders in an encouraging sign for the country's economic rebound.

The HSBC flash purchasing managers' index (PMI) rose to 51.9 in January, the highest since January 2011 and above the 50-point level that shows accelerating growth in the sector from the previous month.

The PMI, the earliest preview of China's economic health in 2013, is the latest indication that the world's second-largest economy is steadily recovering from a near two-year cool-down.

"Despite the still tepid external demand, the domestic-driven restocking process is likely to add steam to China's ongoing recovery in the coming months," Qu Hongbin, chief China economist at HSBC, said.

Asian investors welcomed the data.

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan defied nervousness over Apple Inc's disappointing earnings to edge up 0.1 percent, while the Australian dollar steadied from an earlier slip.

HSBC said the sub-indices for output, new orders and employment that account for three quarters of the flash PMI all improved in January to hover above 50.

The output index climbed to 22-month highs while the employment sub-index was at its highest since May 2011.

Demand for Chinese exports also improved slightly this month, the flash index showed, but it shed little light on whether the pick-up would last.

China's exports had a surprisingly strong spurt in December, contributing to the country's emergence from a protracted cool-down, though analysts worry the rebound would be short-lived on soft U.S. and European demand.

On the other hand, analysts said the gentle up-swing in domestic activity appears to be sustainable and should drive China's economic recovery.

"The consumer is coming back," said Tim Condon, an ING economist in Singapore.

Chinese shoppers have spent more in recent months after the country's successful leadership change last year and a stabilizing euro zone raised confidence, he said.

"Manufacturers are seeing the pick-up in spending growth as a reason to expand production," Condon said.

General Motors Co said last week it will add 400 dealers in China this year as it looks to keep growing faster than China's overall automotive industry which is expected to expand by 8 percent this year.

The new export orders sub-index rose to 50.1 in January, up from December's 49.2 that pointed to waning demand.

The sub-index was persistently weak in the past year, rising above the 50-point threshold for only three months in 2012 and at times contradicting China's official trade data.

HSBC's final PMI had showed China's new export orders cooling in December, at odds with government data that said exports zoomed to seven-month highs that month.

The jump in exports, alongside generous government investment in infrastructure, helped to pull China's economy out of its worst downturn in three years between October and December to grow 7.9 percent from a year earlier.

But the late spike in activity was not enough to prevent China from sinking into its slowest annual pace of economic expansion in 13 years in 2012, growing 7.8 percent.

Many analysts are cautiously optimistic about China's economic prospects this year and are betting on steady state investment to stabilize growth. Exports, however, are expected to remain a drag.

A poll this week showed analysts predict China's annual economic growth would rebound a shade to 8.1 percent this year.

But faster growth is also expected to fuel inflation.

While a majority of the 24 analysts polled believed China would not change its monetary policy this year, a third of them thought the central bank could raise interest rates in the second half of 2013.

The flash PMI showed price pressures may be building. The input price sub-index was at its highest since September 2011, while the output price sub-index pulled back slightly.

HSBC said its PMI survey is based on a poll of purchasing executives from over 420 manufacturing firms, and that the flash PMI is compiled from responses from 85 percent to 90 percent of that pool.

But in a sign that China's recovery could be uneven, German engineering conglomerate Siemens AG warned that demand from China was likely to remain weak for the coming months after it saw global orders for industrial automation and drive technology slide in its first quarter.

"The United States and Germany developed well, but China's demand as an industrial country will pick up again in the second half of the year at the earliest," Siemens' finance chief Joe Kaeser told journalists.

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Netflix in surprise holiday-driven profit, shares jump 35 percent

New York, Feb 2: Netflix Inc surprised Wall Street with a quarterly profit after the video subscription service added nearly 4 million customers in the United States and abroad, sending its shares 35 percent higher in after-hours trading.

The dominant U.S. video rental and streaming company had warned three months ago a letter to investors that it was likely to see a loss for the October to December period, attributing it to startup costs for its expansion into Scandinavia.

But Netflix underestimated the impact of the busy holiday season, when sales of tablets, phones and Internet-connected TVs helped boost subscriptions even as the company faced competition from companies such as Hulu and Amazon.com Inc.

Netflix reported $8 million in net income for the fourth quarter, or 13 cents per share. Revenue rose 8 percent to $945 million from the same quarter a year earlier.

"We just saw tremendous growth over the holidays," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in an interview.

The company also forecast it will add 1.7 million members in the first three months of 2013, though it predicts net income will be "relatively flat" due to declining DVD profits and higher global operating costs.

Shares of the company surged 35 percent to $139.80 in after-hours trading. They closed at $103.26, up nearly 6 percent before its earnings announcement.

"They did surprisingly well with subscriber growth and profitability," Lazard Capital Markets analyst Barton Crockett said. "It was a very good quarter."

Wall Street analysts on average had expected Netflix to report a quarterly loss of 13 cents per share. A year ago, Netflix had earnings of $41 million, or 73 cents per share, on revenue of $876 million.

Activist investor Carl Icahn, who holds an almost 10 percent stake in Netflix and who has said that he felt the company was an attractive takeover target, has seen the value of his shares increase by $445.3 million to $768.9 million since he started buying them in September.

"We have no further news about his intentions, but have had constructive conversations with him about building a more valuable company," Hastings and CFO David Wells said in a quarterly letter to investors.

Netflix reported full-year net income of $17 million in 2012, a 92 percent decrease from a year earlier as the company's costs increased, on revenue of $3.6 billion.

Skeptics have questioned Netflix's ability to keep writing large checks to Hollywood TV and movie studios for the rights to their content. In addition to Amazon and Hulu, competitors also include Redbox Instant by Verizon, a joint venture between Coinstar Inc's Redbox and Verizon, plus video-on-demand offerings from cable TV providers.

But the Los Gatos-based company said it added 2.1 million customers during the fourth quarter to its U.S. streaming business, its largest segment, for a total of 27.2 million at the end of 2012. In international markets, the company signed up 1.8 million new customers.

Netflix said it expects more U.S. streaming growth in the first three months of 2013 compared with a year ago. The company next week will release the first 13 episodes of its political drama "House of Cards" starring Kevin Spacey, part of its push into exclusive original series that it hopes will bring in new customers.

"The fact that our growth remains this strong despite intensifying competition, and our already substantial U.S. market penetration, underlines the large opportunity ahead," the letter said.

In December, Netflix signed a deal for exclusive rights to new Walt Disney Co movies starting in 2016. Hastings said he would like to strike the same type of arrangement to stream movies from Sony Corp's movie studio, though he added that "there's no specific piece of content we must have."

With Sony, "our appetite's just like it was for Disney. It's strong. We're interested," he said.

The U.S. DVD-by-mail service, which Netflix is moving away from, shrunk by 380,000 customers in the fourth quarter to 8.2 million.

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Apple's iPhone disappointment fans doubt on growth

San Francisco, Feb 2 : Apple Inc missed Wall Street's revenue forecast for the third straight quarter after iPhone sales came in below expectations, fanning fears that its dominance of consumer electronics is slipping.

Shares of the world's largest tech company fell 10 percent to $463 in after-hours trade, wiping out some $50 billion of its market value - nearly equivalent to that of Hewlett-Packard and Dell combined.

Apple said it shipped a record 47.8 million iPhones in the December quarter, up 29 percent from a year earlier. But that lagged the 50 million that analysts on average had projected.

Expectations heading into the results had been subdued by news of possible production cutbacks by some component suppliers in Asia, triggering fears that demand for the iPhone, which accounts for half of Apple's revenue, and the iPad could be slowing.

But some investors clung to hopes for a repeat of years of historical outperformance, analysts said.

"It's going to call into question Apple's dominance in the space. It's still one of the strong players, the others being Samsung and Google. It's still a two-horse race, but Android continues to grow rapidly," said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu.

"If you step back a bit, it's clear they shipped a lot of phones. But the problem is the high expectations that investors have. Apple's conservative guidance highlights the concerns over production cuts coming out of Asia recently."

Apple is forecasting revenue of $41 billion to $43 billion in the current, second fiscal quarter, lagging the average Wall Street forecast of more than $45 billion.

Fiscal first-quarter revenue rose 18 percent to $54.5 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $54.73 billion, though earnings per share of $13.81 beat the Street forecast of $13.47.

Apple also undershot revenue targets in the previous two quarters, and these results will prompt more questions on what Apple has in its product pipeline, and what it can do to attract new sales and maintain its growth trajectory, analysts said.

Net income of $13.07 billion was virtually flat with $13.06 billion a year earlier on higher manufacturing costs. The year-ago quarter also had an extra week compared to this year.

Gross margins consequently slid to 38.6 percent, from 44.7 percent previously.

"You can't just keep rolling out iPhones and iPads and think that everybody needs a new one," said Jeffrey Gundlach, who runs DoubleLine Capital LP, the $53 billion bond firm. "The mini? What is that all about? It is a slightly smaller iPad — so what? So that is our new definition of innovation?"

"There are plenty of competitors like Samsung and other legitimate competitors like them," added Gundlach, one of the highest-profile Apple bears. He maintains a $425 price target.

Taking into account the drop in shares in the after-hours trading, Apple's stock is now down 34 percent from its September record high and the company has lost about $227 billion in market value.

Shares of several of Apple's suppliers crumbled. Chip suppliers Skyworks and Cirrus Logic both fell more than 6 percent. Qualcomm Inc slipped 1.8 percent.

Intense competition from Samsung's cheaper phones - powered by Google's Android software - and signs that the premium smartphone market may be close to saturation in developed markets have also caused a lot of investor anxiety.

Meanwhile, sales of the iPad came in at 22.9 million in the fiscal first quarter, roughly in line with forecasts.

On the brighter side, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said that iPhone sales more than doubled in greater China - a region that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has vowed to focus on as its next big growth driver.

The company will begin detailing results from that country going forward. Revenue from the region totaled $7.3 billion, up 60 percent from the year-ago December quarter.

"These results were OK, but they definitely raised a few questions," said Shannon Cross, analyst with Cross Research. "Gross margin trajectory looks fine so that's a positive and cash continues to grow. But I think investors are going to want to know what Apple plans to do with growing cash balance."

"And other questions are going to be around innovation and where the next products are coming from and what does Tim Cook see in the next 12 to 18 months."

In an unusual move for Apple, which typically does not respond to speculation, Cook addressed the production cutback rumors at length on the conference call and questioned the accuracy of rumors about its plans.

Media reports earlier this month said the company is slashing orders for iPhone 5 and iPad screens and other components from its Asian suppliers.

"Even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business, because the supply chain is very complex," he said, adding that Apple has multiple sources for components.

"Yields might vary. Supplier performance can vary. The beginning inventory positions can vary. There's just an inordinately long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what's going on," he said.

Apple's initial iPhone and iPad mini sales were hurt by supply constraints, but Cook expects supply to balance demand for the iPad mini this quarter. He also acknowledged that iPad was cannibalizing its high-margin Macintosh computers, but said it was a huge opportunity for the company.

"On iPad in particular, we have the mother of all opportunities here, because the Windows market is much, much larger than the Mac market is," he said. "And I think it is clear that it's already cannibalizing some."

In another departure from tradition, Apple intends to tweak the way it both reports results and publishes forecasts.

Apart from breaking out results from China, the company also will no longer provide a single revenue or gross margin outlook. It began providing the range it expects to hit, rather than the often-ludicrously conservative estimates that Apple was once notorious for.

The new policy took many by surprise.

"Before people could always ignore the guidance," said Dan Niles, Chief Investment Officer of AlphaOne Capital Partners, LLC. "Apple is telling investors that they need to pay attention to the guidance and you can't ignore it, which is basically what we all did in the past."

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3 months on, Bla village reels under darkness

Baramulla, Feb 2 : Residents of Gowhan Laddi Jungle in this held Kashmir district are up in arms against the Power Development Department (PDD) for its failure to repair a transformer even after three months.

A delegation of residents of the area told Greater Kashmir that the transformer developed some snag in November last year.

Since then our area has been reeling under darkness. The delegation said that PDD officials recently told them that transformer would not be restored in the area as huge amount of electricity bill is pending against the residents of the area.

When contacted the Executive Engineer Power Development Baramulla Irshad Ahmad said that he is unaware about the matter. However, he assured that he would look in to the matter.

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Govt employee commits suicide

Jammu, Feb 2 : Anm occupied Jammu and Kashmir government employee allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself from a ceiling fan at his office in Samba district, about 32 kms from here.

Kartar Chand, an employee of state Animal Husbandry department, hanged himself from ceiling fan at his office in Vijaypur area of Samba district, a senior police officer said.


The reason which prompted Chand to take the extreme step was yet to be ascertained, he said.

A case has been registered and the matter is being probed further, police said.

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‘IHK yet to register 98.5% eligible old persons under national

Srinagar, Feb 2 : The occupant IHK government is yet to register 98 per cent old persons under a centrally-sponsored scheme on pension, a study has revealed.

The study conducted by the National Level Monitoring (NLM), a central agency tasked to look into the issue, has revealed that the State’s Social Welfare Department was yet to bring 98 percent eligible old persons under the ambit of the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAPS).

The NLM had been mandated with looking into the delivery of the scheme at grassroots and identify the lacunas and discrepancies therein, if any. The centrally-sponsored scheme is meant for old people living the Below Poverty Line who are eligible for a monthly pension of Rs 325.  The NLM report says the agency visited 135 villages in April-May 2012 for sampling.

These include Anantnag (Islamabad), Budgam, Baramulla, Doda, Jammu, Kargil, Kathua, Kupwara, Poonch, Pulwama, Rajouri, Srinagar and Udhampur. “It was found that only 2645 beneficiaries were drawing old age pension and at least in 98.5 per cent of these villages eligible old persons not yet covered under the scheme,” the report reads. 

A senior officer in the Social Welfare Department said that lack of adequate staff at district and tehsil levels has hit the scheme badly. “The scheme sadly doesn’t have any provision for engaging separate staff at the district or tehsil level. With the result, it becomes difficult to handle the scheme properly. We are already under-staffed. So it will take us time to collect data on old age person in the State,” the officer, wishing anonymity, said.
The officer said the scheme has no clear-cut deadline for submission of forms by potential beneficiaries. “We continue to receive forms throughout the year, which makes it ultimately difficult to make final selection of the beneficiaries at the end of the year,” the officer said.

When contacted, the Director Social Welfare Department Bashir Ahmed Bhat, said: “We spend Rs 9 rupees every month on old age people but problem is that we cannot register them beyond a limit. The centre as well as the state government has put a cap on it.” Director SWD Jammu, MH Batti, did not agree with the findings of the report. “All those people who have approached us have been covered. There might be some rare cases which haven’t been covered. I doubt the findings of this report,” he claimed.

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Body location plays part in scratching pleasure

Islamabad, Feb 2 : An itch is just an itch. Or is it? New research from Gil Yosipovitch, M.D., Ph.D., professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and a world-renowned itch expert, shows that how good scratching an itch feels is related to the itch's location.

While previous studies by Yosipovitch have shown the pleasurability of itching, analysis of itch relief at different body sites and related pleasurability had not been performed until now. The study was published by the British Journal of Dermatology.

"The goal of this study was to examine the role of the pleasurability of scratching in providing relief for itch," Yosipovitch explained. "We first evaluated whether itch intensity was perceived differently at three body sites, and then we investigated the potential correlation between the pleasurability and the itch relief induced by scratching."

Yosipovitch and colleagues induced itch on the ankles, forearms and backs of 18 study participants with cowhage spicules, which come from a type of legume found in tropical areas that are known to cause intense itching. The spicules were rubbed gently in a circular motion for 45 seconds within a small area of the skin and removed with adhesive tape once itch was induced. Itch intensity and scratching pleasurability were assessed every 30 seconds for a duration of five minutes using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) to rate intensity -- 0 for no itch, up to 10 for maximum unbearable itch.

Their results show that itch was perceived most intensely at the ankle and back, while the perception of itch and scratching relief were less pronounced on the forearm. Another major finding of the paper, as Yosipovitch explains, is that "the pleasurability of scratching the ankle appears to be longer lived compared to the other two sites." Yosipovitch said this research helps lead to a better understanding of itch and how to relieve it for people who have skin disease.

"We see commonly involved areas such as the ankle and back in itchy patients with skin disorders caused by eczema or psoriasis," he said. "We never understood why those areas were more affected, and now we better understand that itch in these areas is more intense and pleasurable to scratch."

Yosipovitch said that while it is known that small nerve fibers are involved in unpleasant sensations such as itch and pain, he and other researchers now suspect that there are also specific nerve fibers involved in pleasure.

"If we could translate this to a treatment that induces a pleasurable relief sensation without damaging the skin, we may be able to help itchy patients," he said.

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Scientists illuminate cancer cells' survival strategy during dangerous dissemination

Islamabad, Feb 2 : A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has discovered key elements of a strategy commonly used by tumor cells to survive when they spread to distant organs. The finding could lead to drugs that could inhibit this metastasis in patients with tumors.

A cell that breaks away from the primary tumor and finds itself in the alien environment of the bloodstream or a new organ, normally is destroyed by a process known as apoptosis. But tumor cells that express high levels of a certain surface protein are protected from apoptosis, greatly enhancing their ability to colonize distant organs. How this protein blocks apoptosis and promotes metastasis has been a mystery -- until now.

"What we found in this study is that it's not the increased expression of the protein per se that protects a tumor cell, but, rather, the cleavage of this protein by proteolytic enzymes," said Scripps Research Professor James P. Quigley. "This cleavage triggers a signaling cascade in the tumor cell that blocks apoptosis." Quigley is the principal investigator for the study, which was recently published by the journal Oncogene.

"We think that a reasonable strategy for inhibiting metastasis would be to try to prevent the cleavage of this surface protein using antibodies or small-molecule drugs that bind to the cleavage site of the protein," said Elena I. Deryugina, a staff scientist in Quigley's laboratory and corresponding author of the manuscript.

The cell-surface protein at the center of this research is known as CUB Domain Containing Protein 1 (CDCP1). In 2003, a postdoctoral fellow in Quigley's laboratory, John D. Hooper, discovered and co-named CDCP1 as a "Subtractive Immunization Metastasis Antigen," also finding that it is highly expressed on the surfaces of metastasis-prone human tumor cells.

Quigley's laboratory and others soon found additional evidence that CDCP1 plays a major role in enabling metastasis. Clinical studies reported CDCP1 on multiple tumor types and linked its presence to worse outcomes for patients. Deryugina and Quigley reported in 2009 that CDCP1, when expressed in tumor-like cells, strongly promotes their ability to colonize new tissues and that unique monoclonal antibodies to CDCP1, generated in Quigley's lab, significantly block CDCP1-induced tumor colonization. Hooper, who now leads a laboratory at the Mater Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia, reported in a cell culture study in 2010 that most of the CDCP1 protein on the cell membrane could be cleaved by serine proteases. This cleavage event seems to lead to the biochemical activation of the internal fragment of CDCP1 by a process called tyrosine phosphorylation, in this case involving the cancer-linked protein Src.

"What was missing was evidence in live animals that connected CDCP1 biochemically to the blocking of apoptosis and successful metastasis," said Deryugina.

In the new study, Deryugina and her colleagues in the Quigley laboratory, including first author Berta Casar, a postdoctoral fellow, set out to find such evidence.

Hooper supplied the Scripps Research scientists with transformed human embryonic kidney (HEK) cells, which don't naturally express CDCP1, but were forced to express the gene for CDCP1. Casar and Deryugina injected these CDCP1-expressing HEK cells into chick embryos, and found that the CDCP1 proteins on these HEK cells began to be cleaved by resident enzymes to the shorter form. After 96 hours, the proteins were no longer detectable in their full-size, pre-cleaved form. The CDCP1-expressing HEK cells were four times as likely to survive in the chick embryos than were control CDCP1-negative HEK cells. The same results were obtained with HEK cells that express a mutant, non-cleavable form of the CDCP1 protein.

The Scripps Research team then did experiments in live animals with human prostate cancer cells naturally expressing CDCP1 to show that the cleavage of CDCP1 by a serine protease enzyme is the key event that promotes tumor cell survival. "When we blocked CDCP1 cleavage using our unique anti-CDCP1 antibodies, or added a compound that selectively inhibits serine protease enzymes, CDCP1 was not cleaved, and the CDCP1-expressing cancer cells lost almost all their ability to colonize the tissues of chick embryos," said Casar.

Casar and Deryugina also confirmed that in live animals CDCP1's cleavage leads to the biochemical activation of its internal fragment by tyrosine phosphorylation involving the cancer-linked proteins Src and PKCd. This was followed by the downstream activation of the anti-apoptosis protein Akt and the inhibition of apoptosis-mediating enzymes. The team verified these results with a variety of experimental setups, including tests of tumor-cell lung colonization in mice and tests in which Src signaling was blocked with the anti-Src drug Dasatinib.

Another key experiment by Scripps Research scientists indicated that plasmin, a blood-clot-thinning serine protease, is the principal cleaver of CDCP1 in metastasizing tumor cells. In mice that lack plasmin's precursor molecule, plasminogen, CDCP1-bearing tumor cells showed an absence of CDCP1 cleavage and lost nearly all their ability to survive in lung tissue.

Breakaway tumor cells commonly travel to distant organs via the bloodstream, so their use of an abundant bloodstream enzyme such as plasmin as a survival booster makes sense. "Plasmin has long been linked to cancer," Quigley said. "Unfortunately, it has such an important function in thinning blood clots that using plasmin-inhibiting drugs in cancer patients might do more harm than good."

"Blocking the cleavage of CDCP1 using antibodies or other CDCP1-binding molecules seems to be a more promising strategy," said Deryugina. She and Casar are investigating.

The other co-authors of the paper, "Blocking of CDCP1 cleavage in vivo prevents Akt-dependent survival and inhibits metastatic colonization via PARP1-mediated apoptosis of cancer cells," were Yaowu He and Mary Iconomou, of the Hooper laboratory.

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New drug release mechanism utilizes 3-d superhydrophobic materials

Islamabad, Feb 2 : According to a recent study, there is a new mechanism of drug release using 3D superhydrophobic materials that utilizes air as a removable barrier to control the rate at which drug is released.

Boston University (BU) graduate student Stefan Yohe, under the mentorship of Mark Grinstaff , PhD, BU professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry, and Yolonda Colson, MD, PhD, director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Cancer Center, prepared drug-loaded superhydrophobic meshes from biocompatible polymers using an electrospinning fabrication method.

By monitoring drug release in aqueous solution and mesh performance in cytotoxicity assays, the team demonstrated that the rate of drug release correlates with the removal of the air pocket within the material, and that the rate of drug release can be maintained over an extended period.

"The ability to control drug release over a 2-3 month period is of significant clinical interest in thoracic surgery with applications in pain management and in the prevention of tumor recurrence after surgical resection," said Colson. Colson is also a thoracic surgeon at BWH with an active practice focused on the treatment of lung cancer patients.

This approach along with the design requirements for creating 3D superhydrophobic drug-loaded materials, the authors write, should facilitate further exploration and evaluation of these drug delivery materials in a variety of cancer and non-cancer applications.

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Taliban eager to negotiate, peace meeting attendees say

Kabul, Feb 1 : The Taliban are interested in negotiating and renouncing violence after 2014, Afghan politicians attending the Dubai Peace Meeting said.

Speaking to TOLOnews, the National Front spokesman Sayed Fazel Sancharaki said that all the parties attending the meeting wanted to stop the bloodshed and find a peaceful resolution to the Afghan conflict through negotiation.

"All the parties emphasised to have negotiations and were interested in stopping the bloodshed after this," he said.

The attendees also stressed that Taliban were interested in renouncing violence and ending the conflict after more than a decade of combat.

"The Taliban have agreed that war is not a solution for Afghanistan and there should a political resolution," Afghan Analyst Wahid Muzhda said.

The two-day gathering was organised by the international group Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in order to boost political resolutions for Afghanistan.

Another meeting is expected to be organised by the United Nations in Turkmenistan's Ishqabad city in the near future to bring the interested parties together again.

The Taliban said in a statement that they had not sent any representatives to Dubai for the conference.

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Army may restrict Afghanistan exemptions in new redundancy round

Kabul, Feb 1 : The army is expected to set out the details of a fresh redundancy round as it seeks to cut almost 5,000 posts by the end of the year, the Guardian can reveal.

Letters will be sent to commanders who will explain to personnel the areas from which 4,800 jobs will have to go. Officers will be told who can be exempted from the process this time round, as the army continues to shrink by a fifth to a total of 82,000 personnel.

With so many people having left over the past two years, the army has had to consider whether it can continue to ringfence all soldiers who are preparing for service in Afghanistan.

One option that has been looked at involves exempting only troops actually serving in Helmand province on a six-month tour, putting at risk staff still months away from being deployed.

"The pool of people is shrinking all the time and you can get into a position when you are exempting a large percentage of the army. That isn't fair on the ones who are left," said a Whitehall source. "None of this is easy. There is no painless way of doing this any more."

Ministers have been criticised for appearing to lean on senior army officers to accept as many voluntary redundancies as possible, to minimise the number of people being sacked. However, government sources say the decision over who goes is entirely for the army and there has been no direct interference.

"We all want as few compulsory redundancies as possible, but the final say will come from the army, not ministers or the Ministry of Defence," said an official.

Ministers had privately urged the army to cut 10,000 jobs this time, making it the last tranche. But the head of the army, General Sir Peter Wall, and the chief of the defence staff, General Sir David Richards, are understood to have pushed back against this idea.

They feared this suited a political rather than a military agenda. A further, final cut will be announced later this year or early in 2014, which means some army personnel will find out about compulsory redundancies in the runup to the next general election.

During early consultations Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, had suggested halting army recruitment as another way of making the cuts needed. But he was persuaded against this because of the damaging effect it would have in years to come.

"We did this once before and it leaves you with gaps in capability that are very difficult to deal with," an officer said.

The army has been the hardest hit of all the services in terms of the numbers being cut. Twenty thousand posts will have been axed by the time the process is complete, and some in the MoD fear this will not necessarily be the end of it.

The department's budget is under intense pressure and it is unclear how extra savings of more than £200m will be made after 2015, following measures announced in last year's autumn statement.

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Uncertain future: Afghanistan on its own

Kabul, Feb 1 : As the US and Afghanistan agree to a speedy handover of combat operations to the Afghans, Amin Saikal says there are concerns about whether the Afghan National Army and the government can manage on their own.

The US president Barack Obama and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai have now agreed to a speedy handover of all combat operations to the Afghans, with American troops switching to a supporting, training and counter-terrorism role until their withdrawal by the end of 2014.

The process is likely to commence as early as April this year. Both leaders have expressed confidence in the capability of the Afghan Security Forces to do the job. However, this may not turn out to be the case.

A new Pentagon report, released in December 2012, states clearly that of the 23 brigades of the Afghan National Army (ANA), which now has a total troop strength of about 200,000, only one was ready to take on independent operations, and even then with American air support. The rest of the brigades have not achieved a capacity to replace the US and the allied forces.

Many credible military analysts believe that most of the ANA soldiers are still poorly trained and equipped, and that they suffer from low morale, high rates of desertion, malpractices and drug addiction, as well as a lack of strong allegiance to the central government.

The ANA is in many ways a microcosm of Afghanistan's mosaic society where clan, tribal, ethnic, sectarian and linguistic identification and loyalty to local power holders, or what have popularly become known as warlords, still hold strong sway. It is also trained in a piecemeal fashion by the US and its various NATO and non-NATO allies, and lacks national cohesion and uniformity of training.

The fact that it has only a very fledgling air force - something that the US has promised to deliver but has not done so in view of the risks and costs involved - does not help the ANA's fighting capacity either.

To complicate the situation further, most of the ANA troops come from non-ethnic Pashtun minorities. The Pashtuns, who form about 42 per cent of Afghanistan's estimated 30 million population, and to whose particular tribe the Taliban and their affiliates belong, are substantially under-represented in the ANA. Traditionally, the non-Pashtun troops have shown a marked reluctance to fight in Pashtun-dominated provinces, which are the hotbed of insurgency along the border with Pakistan.

This is not to claim that strenuous efforts have not been made to build the ANA as an effective force. What is evident is that the ANA is nowhere near capacity to hold out on their own against the Taliban and their supporters for very long. The same, and indeed more so, applies to the Afghan Police Force, Local Police Force and Border Guard, which are riddled with corruption and have not proved to be terribly effective. The ranks of these forces and the ANA, like the Karzai government as a whole, are penetrated by the armed opposition. A result has been a dramatic increase in inside or 'green on blue' killings and assassination of government or government-associated leading figures, especially over the last two years.

This situation has ignited a debate in Washington about the number of troops the US could leave behind under a new status of force agreement with Afghanistan beyond 2014, and has confronted president Obama with serious quandaries. Whilst the US military has argued for a fairly substantial number, somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 for supporting the Afghan forces and conducting counter-terrorism operations, some political figures, including vice president Joe Biden, the newly-nominated secretary of state, John Kerry, and secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, appear to favour either a total withdrawal or, if absolutely necessary, no more than a few thousand troops, provided that they will have complete immunity from Afghan law.

On the other hand, president Karzai - who is well aware of the weaknesses of his government and Afghan security forces, but is keen to play a nationalist card for domestic consumption - has insisted on the continuation of substantial American military, financial and economic assistance.

Yet, he is unwilling either to grant immunity to American soldiers or to engage in serious democratic and anti-corruption reforms. He has also failed to show much gratitude to Washington for all its human and material assistance over the last 11 years. Karzai continues to think that America needs him and Afghanistan more for its anti-terrorist operations against Al Qaeda and its supporters, especially in Pakistan, than vice-versa. However, in reality, he is not in as strong a bargaining position. President Obama has already demonstrated in the case of Iraq that he cannot and will not consent to the presence of American troops abroad without immunity from national laws.

Whatever the final outcome, most indications are that the US and its allies are tired of the very costly and unwinnable Afghan war, and that they want to exit from Afghanistan as soon as possible and focus on their own serious financial and economic difficulties.

Karzai had all the opportunities in the world since his political ascension in December 2001 with the full US and, for that matter, international support to build enduring state institutional foundations for a stable and secure Afghanistan. But he squandered it all by promoting such policies and practices that centred upon his interests and those of his family members and cronies around him. He could have opened a new and constructive chapter in the turbulent evolution of Afghan politics and society. Instead, he has acted like a traditional ruler, lacking in both vision and consideration for the future of Afghanistan.

Karzai's term of office is due to end in 2014, but he may leave an Afghanistan with its future very much hanging in the balance.


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Giant goat-cheese fire closes Norwegian roadway for six days

London, Feb 1: This may be the cheesiest story you’ll read all day—literally. That’s because 27 metric tons of flaming goat cheese burned inside a Norwegian road tunnel, closing nearly two miles of the road for six days.

Brunost, a Norwegian cheese considered a delicacy, was being shipped in a truck that caught fire. No one was hurt in the incident, which firefighters were finally able to put out.

"This high concentration of fat and sugar is almost like petrol if it gets hot enough," Viggo Berg, a policeman, said.

As the website Nordic Nibbler explains, brunost is not technically a traditional cheese. It is made from the whey of goat’s milk and can contain up to 30 percent fat. It is described as having a “slightly salty and surprisingly sweet flavor with a hint of goat about it.”

The BBC reported that the truck’s driver noticed the cheese had caught fire and was forced to abandon the truck about 300 feet from the tunnel’s exit. Toxic fumes emanating from the smoldering brown cheese kept firefighters at bay for several days before they could attempt to extinguish the flames.

"I didn't know that brown cheese burns so well," added Kjell Bjoern Vinje, an official with the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.

Had the fire occurred in the U.S., officials could have looked to Pennsylvania for help, where they spent dealing with a giant soda spill that shut down a stretch of highway when hundreds of gallons of the soft drink froze on the road.

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News crew attacked by swarm of bees during live report

New York, Feb 1: Every news reporter hopes his or her work will garner flocks of readers and stir a buzz. The key is to avoid getting stung by an unreliable source.

But a Florida news crew experienced a more painful version of swarm journalism when bees attacked the reporters during a live broadcast.

CBS12’s Carl Pugliese says the attack came after he launched a drone camera into the air as part of the team’s report on the demolition of a local building.

Shortly after the drone took flight, the bees began attacking it. Pugliese, not realizing what was happening, then lowered the drone closer to the ground to inspect it.

That’s when the swarm moved in, attacking him and CBS12 cameraman Chad Ellison. Meanwhile, Jenna Caiazzo, embarking on her first assignment for the station, stayed safely ensconced inside the news van during the assault.

Pugliese was eventually forced to dive into his SUV and bring down the drone from inside. Unfortunately, some of the bees followed him into the vehicle.

Reporters are occasionally attacked by bees, and you can find an assortment of such incidents on YouTube. But this is the first incident we know of in which a swarm attached to an aerial drone.

CBS12 reports that the drone itself was covered in stingers and what Pugliese called “bee goo.” You can read the full report and watch a video of the incident on their site.


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Is space big enough for two asteroid-mining companies?

London, Feb 1 : The latest company to launch into the asteroid-mining business isn't worried about competition from its biggest rival, saying that the resources of deep space are vast enough to support a bustling new industry off Earth's surface.

The new company, Deep Space Industries, Inc., announced that it plans to mine asteroids for metals, water and other resources, with the goal of helping humanity spread throughout the solar system. Another company with similar goals, the billionaire-backed Planetary Resources, unveiled its own plans last April.

Both companies can coexist and prosper, Deep Space officials said during a press conference.

"We love Planetary Resources," Deep Space chairman Rick Tumlinson said. "Space is big. There's room for everybody."

Deep Space and Planetary Resources will go after near-Earth asteroids, many of which are rich in water and a variety of different metals.

Both firms aim to split asteroid water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, which are the chief components of rocket fuel. Asteroid-derived propellant could be dispensed from off-planet "gas stations," allowing satellites and journeying spacecraft to top up their tanks cheaply and efficiently.

Such off-Earth depots could extend the lives of satellites and make manned trips to far-flung destinations like Mars much more economically viable, advocates say.

The metals and other materials, meanwhile, could be used to construct habitats, solar-power satellites and other spacecraft, potentially jump-starting an in-space manufacturing industry. Precious metals such as platinum and gold could also be delivered to Earth for terrestrial use.

So far, astronomers have identified more than 9,000 near-Earth asteroids, with about 1,000 being added to the rolls every year. Such numbers suggest there are more than enough to keep two mining companies busy for a long time, Deep Space officials said.

"There are two or three million near-Earth asteroids," said Deep Space CEO David Gump. "There's room for everyone to prosper, I think."

The startup of two asteroid-mining firms — along with the rise of private spaceflight companies such as California-based SpaceX — is a sign that humanity may finally be taking real steps toward the long-held dream of permanent space settlement, Tumlinson said.

"One company may be a fluke," he said. "Two companies showing up? That's the beginning of an industry."

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Boehner pressures senate to pass budget or have pay withheld

Washington, Feb 1 : Despite President Obama's call for Congress to prioritize issues like immigration reform and address climate change during his inaugural address, House Speaker John Boehner said that the House of Representatives will instead continue its focus on fiscal responsibility, including a plan to balance the budget over the next decade.

"There are a lot of priorities for the Congress [and] a lot of priorities for the president, but right now the biggest issue is the debt that's crushing the future for our kids and our grandkids," Boehner, R-Ohio, said. "Taxpayers understand that you can't keep spending money that you don't have, so we're going to continue to focus, especially here over this next 90-, 120-day period, on bringing some fiscal responsibility to Washington."

Boehner, who conducted his first news conference since Dec. 21 this evening, said the House will move forward on its No Budget No Pay act, which directs both chambers of Congress to adopt a budget resolution for FY 2014 by April 15, 2013. If either body fails to pass a budget, members of that body would have their paychecks put into an escrow account starting on April 16 until that body adopts a budget. But, because of the 27 th Amendment, any pay that is withheld would eventually be released at the end of the current Congress, even if a budget doesn't ever pass.

"Over the last four years, House Republicans have offered plans, our budget plans. We've done our budgets but it's been nearly four years since the Senate has done a budget," he said. "Most Americans believe you don't do your job you shouldn't get paid. That's the basis for No Budget, No Pay. It's time for the Senate to act."

The bill, H.R. 325, also temporarily suspends the statutory debt limit until May 18, granting the Treasury Department the additional borrowing authority to meet obligations that require payment over the next three months.

Facing trillion dollar annual budget deficits, Boehner told the House Republican Conference this afternoon that the GOP will advance a budget that becomes balanced over the next 10 years.

"It's time for us to come to a plan that will in fact balance the budget over the next 10 years," he added. "It's our commitment to the American people and we hope the Senate will do their budget as they should have done over the last four years."

Still, the country's growing $16 trillion federal deficit would not balance by then, and Boehner stressed that Republicans are not open to new tax revenue as part of a comprehensive plan to reduce the deficit.

"We are not going to raise taxes on the American people," Boehner insisted. "Nobody on our side is interested in raising taxes on the American people. It's time to deal with the serious problem that we have, which is spending."

That is sure to be a point of contention among Democrats. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer rejected the GOP's doggedness that new revenue would not be part of a package to reduce the deficit.

"We absolutely reject that. The president absolutely rejects it, I reject it, period," Hoyer, D-Md., said during a pen and pad briefing with reporters. "Going forward, revenues are going to still need to be part of the solution, as are cuts and restraints and reduction of growth. All are going to have to be part of it."

The House is expected to vote on a three-month increase to the debt limit, a move intended to sync up the next slate of fiscal deadlines facing Congress and provide lawmakers with more time to work out a so-called "Big Deal" on deficit reduction.

As he left the news conference, Boehner ignored a question about whether he believes the measure will pass. Still, the president has promised not to veto it and many congressional Democrats appear open to supporting it.

"This bill is a game bill. It's not a substantive response to a serious problem," Hoyer said. "Having said that, I've made it very clear that defaulting is not an option. All the Republicans leaders believe it's not an option. And so I think, in that context, I'll have to look at it."

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What holds energy tech back? The infernal battery

Washington, Feb 1: As 21st century technology strains to become ever faster, cleaner and cheaper, an invention from more than 200 years ago keeps holding it back. It's why electric cars aren't clogging the roads and why Boeing's new ultra-efficient 787 Dreamliners aren't flying high.

And chances are you have this little invention next to you right now and probably have cursed it recently: the infernal battery.

Boeing is the first company to make extensive use in an airliner of technology's most advanced battery — lithium ion. But a Jan. 7 battery fire aboard a Dreamliner in Boston, followed by a similar meltdown in Japan, led authorities around the world to ground the fleet this month, highlighting a longstanding safety problem that engineers have struggled with.

In 2006 and 2007, more than 46 million cellphone batteries and 10 million laptop batteries — all lithium ion — were recalled because of the risk of overheating, short-circuiting and exploding. Additional safety features have been installed since then on lithium ion batteries used in consumer electronics.

As for the electric car industry, lithium ion batteries have proved to have two major drawbacks: They are costly, and they do not allow automobiles to go far enough between rechargings. A123, a maker of lithium ion batteries for electric cars, went bankrupt last year because of poor demand and high costs after receiving a $249 million federal grant.

Lithium ion batteries, which store more energy at a higher voltage and a lighter weight than earlier types, represent the most recent big jump in battery technology. And that took place nearly a quarter of a century ago.

"We need to leapfrog the engineering of making of batteries," said Lawrence Berkeley National Lab battery scientist Vince Battaglia. "We've got to find the next big thing."

But none of the 10 experts who talked to media said they know what that big thing will be yet, or when it will come.

"If you crack it ... it'll change the world," said Carnegie Mellon University materials science professor Jay Whitacre.

Batteries are so crucial to a greener energy future that the Obama administration has spent more than $2 billion to jump-start the advanced battery industry, including setting up what some experts say is a mini-Manhattan Project for batteries.

To make the next breakthrough, researchers will have to master complex chemistry, expensive manufacturing, detailed engineering, a variety of different materials, lengthy testing, stringent safety standards and giant cost problems. It involves dealing with liquids and solids, metals and organic chemicals, and things that are in between, said Glenn Amatucci, director of the Energy Storage Research Group at Rutgers University.

"We're dealing with a system that you can imagine is almost alive. It's almost breathing," Amatucci said. "Trying to understand what's happening within these batteries is incredibly complex."

One reason the battery is the slowpoke of the high-tech highway is that it has conflicting functions. Its primary job is to store energy. But it's also supposed to discharge power, lots of it, quickly. Those two jobs are at odds with each other.

"If you want high storage, you can't get high power," said M. Stanley Whittingham, director of the Northeast Center for Chemical Energy Storage. "People are expecting more than what's possible."

On the commercial market, lithium ion batteries are generally ones small enough to fit into cellphones. But to power bigger items — from a Prius to a 787 — they get grouped together, increasing the juice they store and provide. That also increases the safety risk, experts say. The lithium ion battery that caught fire in a Boeing 787 weighed 63 pounds and was 19 inches long.

"You can't get around the fundamental thing is that lithium ion batteries are stuffed full of flammable liquid," Whitacre said.

Even one-in-a-million problems with lithium ion batteries can result in many fires because there are billions of them in use now, with dozens sometimes stacked together in a single device.

Experts say lithium ion batteries are more dangerous because their electrolyte, the liquid that allows ions to move between electrodes in the battery, is more flammable than the substance in older type batteries. Those older types include the lead-acid batteries in most cars and the nickel cadmium batteries that are often in video equipment and power tools.

Still, MIT materials science and engineering professor Gerbrand Ceder and others said the safety problems can be fixed.

Change doesn't come often in the battery field.

"The big advances in battery technology happen rarely. It's been more than 200 years and we have maybe five different successful rechargeable batteries," said George Blomgren, a former senior technology researcher at Eveready and now a private battery consultant. "It's frustrating."

Alessandro Volta — for whom the volt is named — invented the first useful battery in 1800. That was long before other breakthrough inventions like the internal combustion engine, telephone, car, airplane, transistor, computer and Internet. But all of those developments have seemed to evolve faster than the simple battery.

The lead-acid car battery "has been around for 150 years more or less," Whitacre said. "This is a remarkable testament to first how robust that chemistry is and how difficult change is."

Battery experts are split over what's next. Some think the lithium ion battery can be tinkered with to get major efficiency and storage improvements. Amatucci said he thinks we can get two to three times more energy out of future lithium ion batteries, while others said minor chemical changes can do even more.

But just as many engineers say the lithium ion battery has run its course.

"With the materials in the current lithium ion battery, we are definitely plateaued," Blomgren said. "We're waiting for something to come along that really does the job."

There are all sorts of new type batteries being worked on: lithium-air, lithium-sulfur, magnesium, sodium-ion.

"Right now it's a horse race," Blomgren said. "There's deficiencies in every technology that's out there. Each one of them requires a major solution."

One of the nation's best hopes for a breakthrough, said Battaglia, is John Goodenough, the man responsible for the 1979 breakthrough that led the first commercial lithium ion battery in 1991. He will receive the National Medal of Science at the White House next month. Goodenough is 90.

"I'm working on it," Goodenough, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said. "I'm optimistic in a sense that I'm willing to keep working on it. I think we can do some interesting things."

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‘Inigo Montoya’ shirt upsets travelers, leads to awkward flight

London, Feb 1 : Wynand Mullins of New Zealand told Stuff Magazine that he was asked to remove his T-shirt because other airline passengers found it intimidating.

And, yes, we suppose if one weren't familiar with "The Princess Bride," seeing a shirt that reads, "Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die," might be a little alarming, especially on board a plane. But in Mullins's defense: Who the heck hasn't seen "The Princess Bride"?

For the two or three of you who haven't, the movie features a character named Inigo Montoya, played by Mandy Patinkin of "Homeland." After seeing his father killed by an evil, six-fingered man, Montoya vows that when he crosses paths with the fiend, he will say, well, exactly what was printed on Mullins's T-shirt. (Spoiler alert: At the end of the movie, Montoya does find the fiend, and he says his line over and over. It's awesome.)

Mullins explained to Stuff that a flight attendant had approached him before takeoff and asked that he put on a different shirt due to some concerned passengers. Mullins told Stuff:

    I thought it was all a bit silly. The person next to me was laughing, because they knew the movie.

The flight attended apparently told Mullins she would attempt to find him another shirt, but never did, so the T-shirt stayed on. "I wouldn't be surprised if they had someone watching me the whole time," Mullins said. "The whole experience was a bit over the top, but also a bit comical."

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US securities fraud class actions tumble

Washington, Feb 1 : Fewer investors are taking corporate America to court for fraud.

The number of new federal securities fraud lawsuits seeking class-action status fell to a 7-year low in 2012, according to a study by Stanford Law School and Cornerstone Research released.

Just 152 such lawsuits were filed last year, down 19 percent from 188 in 2011, mainly because of fewer lawsuits challenging mergers.

Last year's total is also 20 percent below the average of 190 for the period from 1997 to 2012.

Only 2005, when 120 lawsuits were filed, was a quieter year for new cases. And in last year's fourth quarter, just 25 new securities fraud lawsuits were filed, the fewest in any quarter since 1997, the first year included in the study.

Big companies also were sued less in 2012 than in prior years. Seventeen companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index were named as defendants in 2012, versus an average of 31 over the prior decade.

Mark Holland, a securities litigation partner at Goodwin Procter in New York, said the dropoff in new cases may be linked to a recent lack of major market disruptions, such as the 2000 bursting of the technology bubble and the 2008 financial crisis.

Holland also said more lawyers may be turning to state courts to fight mergers.

"State court judges don't have the same tools as federal judges to get rid of cases quickly, so cases can last longer, which can result in more settlements," he said.

According to the study, just 13 merger-related securities fraud lawsuits were filed in federal courts last year, down from 43 in 2011.

The number of lawsuits tied to initial public offerings of Chinese companies, including those with questionable accounting, also dropped, falling to 10 from 31. Last year, moreover, had no new lawsuits tied to the 2008 financial crisis.

Helping to offset these declines was an increase in the number of lawsuits raising more traditional securities fraud claims, such as a failure to disclose market-moving news sooner.

Stanford and Cornerstone said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program begun after passage of the Dodd Frank financial reforms could spur more lawsuits.

The SEC has said in a report that it received 3,001 tips from October 2011 to September 2012. Nearly half related to corporate disclosures and financials, fraud in securities offerings or manipulation. It gave its first whistleblower award, of nearly $50,000, in August.

Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford law professor and former SEC commissioner, in a telephone interview said a successful SEC whistleblower program could herald more private lawsuits.

"The question is how many cases the SEC brings, how strong those cases are, and how easily will private party plaintiffs be able to 'piggyback' on disclosures from the commission's complaints," he said.

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IBM's shines with fourth quarter, 2013 outlook

New York, Feb 1 : IBM, the world's largest technology services company, gave a better than expected 2013 outlook after a solid fourth quarter that analysts say has more to do with Big Blue's smooth execution than a vibrant tech spending environment.

Companies had been widely expected to hold back on IT purchases in December in part because of worries about the so-called U.S. fiscal cliff. Automatic tax increases and spending cuts would have been triggered had Congress not made a deal to avert the cliff and could have pushed the weak U.S. economy into recession.

But International Business Machines Corp said that its quarterly results beat forecasts and it plans to achieve earnings of at least $16.70 a share for the full year, above analysts' consensus forecast of $16.57.

While some analysts said IBM's earnings may be a sign of an improved tech spending environment, others said the strong results were specific to IBM's business model.

"IBM is better positioned in a tough environment than most tech companies are," said Cindy Shaw, managing director at Discern.

IBM made a bold strategic move a decade ago when it bought PriceWaterhouse's consulting business and then decided to exit the PC business, betting its future was in finding solutions to business problems with the help of software and technology.

That strategy appears to have paid off.

"What IBM does better than anyone, with the exception of Accenture, is solving problems and I am not talking about taking out some costs, but really driving revenue," Shaw said.

In addition, she said, IBM was strong in "hot growth markets" such as data analytics, cloud computing, emerging markets and what IBM calls smarter planet, which aims to improve areas such as traffic, power grids and food production.

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu agreed, saying the success appeared to be more specific to IBM than the industry in general.

"The results show that the IBM advantage and business model - vertical integration of hardware and software - is difficult to replicate," he said.

"IBM has been doing this the longest and customers are very accustomed to it. They have a much stronger offering and brand name."

As a result quarterly net income rose 10 percent to $6.1 billion, or $5.39 a share from $4.71 a year earlier. Revenue dropped 1 percent to $29.3 billion due to the sale of its retail business in the third quarter.

Analysts had expected the Armonk, New York-based company to report net income of $5.95 billion, or $5.25 a share, on revenue of $29.05 billion.

Revenue grew in particular because of an 11 percent increase in IBM's growth markets in Brazil, India, Russia and China.

Software revenue was up 3 percent in the quarter.

Some analysts said IBM's better than expected results were a sign that tech spending might not have been as bleak as expected.

"It is better than what people had feared," said Brian Marshall, an analyst at ISI Group.

"Virtually every segment did a little bit better than people expected. It supports the fact that things are getting better out there at least from a tech industry standpoint."

Andrew Bartels, an analyst with research firm Forrester Research, said: "We were expecting a lot of companies were sitting on their wallets until it became clear what was going to become of the fiscal cliff.

"Given the fact it's Q4 with a cloud of the fiscal cliff, it's a positive indication that tech software will be doing better in the next couple of months."

IBM shares rose more than 4 percent to $204.50 after closing at $196.08 on the New York Stock Exchange.

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