CAIRO (AP) ? An Egyptian security official says ousted president Hosni Mubarak has slipped in the bathroom in the prison where is serving a life sentence, hitting his head.
The official says the ailing Mubarak, 84, was treated in Cairo's Tora prison Saturday for head injuries and a chest bruise. He says Mubarak slipped before two months ago but did not injure himself.
The report comes at a particularly tense moment in the transition that has followed Mubarak's 2011 overthrow, as millions of Egyptians vote in a highly contentious referendum on a draft constitution written by a mostly Islamist panel.
Mubarak was convicted of failing to stop killings of protesters during the uprising. There have been conflicting reports about his health.
The official spoke anonymously as he wasn't authorized to talk to reporters.
DETROIT (AP) ? A preliminary review of Detroit's finances has determined that the city is not on target to fulfill promises to the state that allowed the city to avoid having an emergency manager appointed to oversee it, the state Treasury Department said Friday.
The review started Tuesday "has found that a serious financial problem exists in the city," Treasury spokesman Terry Stanton said in a news release. The state will likely appoint a review team to take a closer look at the city's books, he said.
That could lead to the appointment of an emergency manager and state oversight of the city under the state's current emergency manager law. The Legislature passed revised emergency manager legislation this week, but it would have no bearing on Detroit's situation because Gov. Rick Snyder hasn't signed it and if he does, it wouldn't go into effect until March, Stanton said.
There is no timeline under which a review team has to be appointed, according to Stanton.
Detroit's has been experiencing a fiscal meltdown for years, so the finding of the preliminary review by Treasurer Andy Dillon's office is not surprising.
"This is part of the process. There is nothing new here," Mayor Dave Bing said Friday night in a statement. "We continue to be focused on our financial restructuring plan."
But the Democrat Dillon and Republican Gov. Rick Snyder have complained that Bing's restructuring is taking too long to show positive results.
The city is billions of dollars in debt and has a budget deficit of more than $200 million. Detroit has been meeting payroll and paying some of its bills from millions of dollars in bond money released by the state from an escrow account.
Some of the payments have been delayed while the city worked to meet certain "milestones" tied to improving its finances. Most recently, the state withheld $10 million after the City Council failed to approve the contract for an outside law firm to assist Bing.
The council finally approved that $300,000 contract and other measures this week and the state released the money to the city.
But the Treasurer's preliminary review still determined that Detroit has violated the Uniform Budgeting and Accounting Act, which requires the city's budget to be amended as soon as it becomes apparent that an amendment is necessary.
Due to financial reporting problems, the city's cash flow projections also fluctuate monthly. That makes it difficult to "make informed decisions regarding its fiscal health," according to Dillon's office.
An estimate in August projected a cash deficit of $62 million by June 30, 2013. But an October estimate placed the projected deficit at $84 million, while November's had it at $122 million.
Bing has said he will lay off 400 to 500 city employees in the new year, roughly 5 percent of the workforce, to help straighten Detroit's poor public finances and avoid an emergency manager.
Bing, Snyder and Dillon entered into a consent agreement in the spring that would allow Bing to implement his changes with help from the state without an overseer appointed by Snyder.
The cities of Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Flint, Ecorse and Allen Park currently are under managers, as are the Muskegon Heights, Highland Park and Detroit public school districts.
The state Legislature, in an effort to bolster the emergency manager law, passed a bill this week requiring financially troubled local governments to choose one of four state-imposed remedies and replaces a similar law rejected last month by voters. Those options include acceptance of an emergency manager, bankruptcy, enter into mediation or join the state in a consent agreement similar to the current one involving Detroit.
Critics say each is trip-wired to ensure the same thing that voters rejected at the polls: state-imposed oversight.
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Follow Corey Williams on Twitter at http://twitter.coreyapreporter
Democrats and Republicans agree the solution to the nation's out-of-control health care spending won't be wrapped up with a "fiscal cliff" bargain and short-term spending cuts.
"There are a lot of conservatives and a lot of centrists and lot of progressives who believe we need comprehensive reform," said Robert Moffit, Medicare expert for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "Medicare's long-term debt is $37 trillion -- that's not going to be solved in the next three weeks dealing with the fiscal cliff."
That's where the similarities end.
As things stand, federal health care spending will increase from 5% of the gross domestic product now to almost 10% in 2037, and continue to grow from there, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That's in part because health care costs overall are increasing, and because Baby Boomers are starting to hit Medicare age.
When it comes to the details of reducing long-term spending on Medicare, which cost an estimated $560 billion this year, Republican proposals that seem simple enough can cause unseen problems while those promoted by Democrats, including those in the 2010 health care law, are often hard to quantify. And one provision of the law aimed directly at curbing higher Medicare costs - the Independent Payment Advisory Board - has been under constant attack by Republicans as a form of health care rationing.
"People have these narrow budget blinders on, and they miss the big picture of lowering health care costs," said David Certner, AARP's legislative policy chief. "It's better for the federal government in the short-term, but it's worse for everybody else."
During last year's debt-ceiling crisis, Republicans and the Obama administration seemed close to some kind of agreement to raise the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67. Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of Obama's deficit-reduction commission, also said he supported an age increase.
The president's re-election and the June Supreme Court decision upholding the health care law mean it will remain in place. Seniors who would have to wait until age 67 for Medicare will now have the ability to buy health insurance.
Moffit said the age should be raised higher, to 68, which would save $244 billion over 10 years.
While increasing the eligibility age provides clear cost savings on paper, it may also shift costs without working to contain them elsewhere in Medicare and the health care system overall, said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation.
One part of the health care law that was created specifically to save money remains a target of Republicans during the fiscal cliff debate - the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation said one proposal being discussed would bring the board into play earlier than now allowed in the health care law. Beginning in 2013, IPAB must present proposals to save money if projected spending goes above a certain amount. Medicare is not expected to hit that amount until 2021, based on CBO estimates.
Last month, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., again vowed to repeal IPAB, calling it a "rationing" board, even though the law specifically prohibits the board from cutting care to seniors. The board is required to cut Medicare spending when its budget is too high. It is not allowed to determine what kind of care a person receives. Congress can vote to reverse the board's decisions if they can save the same amount of money with another plan. The CBO determined that getting rid of the board would cost $3.1 billion over the next 10 years.
(c) Copyright 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
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A drug used to treat HIV might defuse deadly staph infectionsPublic release date: 14-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Christopher Rucas Christopher.Rucas@nyumc.org 212-404-3525 NYU Langone Medical Center / New York University School of Medicine
New findings could potentially lead to novel approaches to treat deadly staph infections
A new study by NYU School of Medicine researchers suggests that an existing HIV drug called maraviroc could be a potential therapy for Staphylococcus aureus, a notorious and deadly pathogen linked to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations each year. Their study is published online this week in Nature.
"What are the chances that a drug for HIV could possibly treat a virulent Staph infection?" asks Victor J. Torres, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology, and senior author of the study. "These findings are the result of a fantastic collaboration that we hope will result in significant clinical benefit." Staph causes toxic shock syndrome, pneumonia, and food poisoning, among other illnesses, and is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.
The discovery arose from a serendipitous finding that was a part of a collaborative study between Dr. Torres, a bacteriologist, and immunologist Derya Unutmaz, MD, associate professor of microbiology and pathology and medicine, whose laboratories are adjacent to each other.
They focused on a receptor called CCR5 that dots the surface of immune T cells, macrophages, and dendritic cells. Sixteen years ago, researchers at NYU School of Medicine discovered that CCR5 is the receptor HIV uses to gain entry into T cells in order to replicate, spread, and cause an infection that can progress into AIDS.
That same receptor has now been found to be critical to the ability of certain strains of Staph to specifically target and kill cells with CCR5, which orchestrate an immune response against the bacteria. The scientists discovered that one of the toxins the bacterium releases, called LukED, latches on to CCR5 and subsequently punches holes through the membrane of immune cells, causing them to rapidly die. The LukED toxin belongs to a family of proteins called leukotoxins, encoded and produced by Staph to fight off the immune system's defenses.
This discovery was made after Dr. Torres asked Dr. Unutmaz and fellow HIV researcher Nathaniel Landau, PhD, professor of microbiology, if he might use some of the human immune cells they had collected over the course of their HIV studies. The laboratories of all three scientists are adjacent to each other. Dr. Torres was trying to find out which immune cells were affected by different leukotoxins. Dr. Unutmaz gave him a T cell line, which they were using for their HIV infection studies and had previously engineered to express CCR5, to test the effects of these toxins.
"Within one hour flat, T cells with CCR5 all died when exposed to LukED" says Dr. Torres, whereas a similar T cell line that lacked the receptor was completely resistant to the toxin's effects. This observation quickly led to another set of experiments to determine that the LukED toxin was indeed interacting with the receptor and that its presence on the cell surface was necessary for the toxin to kill the cells.
The investigators then treated cells with CCR5 with maraviroc, a drug on the market that binds to CCR5 and blocks HIV infection, and then exposed the cells to the Staph toxin. The result, the scientists say, was astonishing. "It was remarkable. Maraviroc completely blocked the toxic effects of this leukotoxin at doses similar to those used to inhibit HIV infection" Dr. Unutmaz says.
"The goal in blocking the toxin with maraviroc or similar agents is to give the upper hand to the immune system to better control the infection," Dr. Torres adds. The researchers further corroborated the critical role of CCR5 in Staph infections using a mouse model. When they infected mice susceptible to Staph infection with strains that contain the LukED toxin, almost all the mice died. However, mice that were genetically engineered to lack CCR5 on their cells survived this lethal Staph infection.
Based on these findings, the investigators hope that future human clinical trials will determine whether drugs that block CCR5, such as maraviroc, could help the immune system to control the infection and potentially save lives.
###
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A drug used to treat HIV might defuse deadly staph infectionsPublic release date: 14-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Christopher Rucas Christopher.Rucas@nyumc.org 212-404-3525 NYU Langone Medical Center / New York University School of Medicine
New findings could potentially lead to novel approaches to treat deadly staph infections
A new study by NYU School of Medicine researchers suggests that an existing HIV drug called maraviroc could be a potential therapy for Staphylococcus aureus, a notorious and deadly pathogen linked to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations each year. Their study is published online this week in Nature.
"What are the chances that a drug for HIV could possibly treat a virulent Staph infection?" asks Victor J. Torres, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology, and senior author of the study. "These findings are the result of a fantastic collaboration that we hope will result in significant clinical benefit." Staph causes toxic shock syndrome, pneumonia, and food poisoning, among other illnesses, and is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.
The discovery arose from a serendipitous finding that was a part of a collaborative study between Dr. Torres, a bacteriologist, and immunologist Derya Unutmaz, MD, associate professor of microbiology and pathology and medicine, whose laboratories are adjacent to each other.
They focused on a receptor called CCR5 that dots the surface of immune T cells, macrophages, and dendritic cells. Sixteen years ago, researchers at NYU School of Medicine discovered that CCR5 is the receptor HIV uses to gain entry into T cells in order to replicate, spread, and cause an infection that can progress into AIDS.
That same receptor has now been found to be critical to the ability of certain strains of Staph to specifically target and kill cells with CCR5, which orchestrate an immune response against the bacteria. The scientists discovered that one of the toxins the bacterium releases, called LukED, latches on to CCR5 and subsequently punches holes through the membrane of immune cells, causing them to rapidly die. The LukED toxin belongs to a family of proteins called leukotoxins, encoded and produced by Staph to fight off the immune system's defenses.
This discovery was made after Dr. Torres asked Dr. Unutmaz and fellow HIV researcher Nathaniel Landau, PhD, professor of microbiology, if he might use some of the human immune cells they had collected over the course of their HIV studies. The laboratories of all three scientists are adjacent to each other. Dr. Torres was trying to find out which immune cells were affected by different leukotoxins. Dr. Unutmaz gave him a T cell line, which they were using for their HIV infection studies and had previously engineered to express CCR5, to test the effects of these toxins.
"Within one hour flat, T cells with CCR5 all died when exposed to LukED" says Dr. Torres, whereas a similar T cell line that lacked the receptor was completely resistant to the toxin's effects. This observation quickly led to another set of experiments to determine that the LukED toxin was indeed interacting with the receptor and that its presence on the cell surface was necessary for the toxin to kill the cells.
The investigators then treated cells with CCR5 with maraviroc, a drug on the market that binds to CCR5 and blocks HIV infection, and then exposed the cells to the Staph toxin. The result, the scientists say, was astonishing. "It was remarkable. Maraviroc completely blocked the toxic effects of this leukotoxin at doses similar to those used to inhibit HIV infection" Dr. Unutmaz says.
"The goal in blocking the toxin with maraviroc or similar agents is to give the upper hand to the immune system to better control the infection," Dr. Torres adds. The researchers further corroborated the critical role of CCR5 in Staph infections using a mouse model. When they infected mice susceptible to Staph infection with strains that contain the LukED toxin, almost all the mice died. However, mice that were genetically engineered to lack CCR5 on their cells survived this lethal Staph infection.
Based on these findings, the investigators hope that future human clinical trials will determine whether drugs that block CCR5, such as maraviroc, could help the immune system to control the infection and potentially save lives.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Two books illuminate how ideas of a post-racial world conflict with ongoing use of race in science
HAVE we gone beyond race? Many argue society has now overcome centuries of strife to become "post-racial" - a moment that law professor Sumi Cho of DePaul University in Chicago refers to as "the end of race history".
Two seemingly disparate developments have been used to lend support to this claim. In politics, Barack Obama's 2008 election as the first racial minority-member to become US president has been lauded as a racially transcendent moment. In science, the completion of the Human Genome Project's first draft in June 2000 offered seemingly definitive evidence that race is not real. As geneticist Craig Venter noted at the HGP announcement, "the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis".
Yet this supposed new era of race relations met a backlash on two fronts. The political dimension has been widely publicised; President Obama's first term has been distinguished by elements of hatred and disrespect unquestionably coloured by race.
Another, less well-known dimension has roots within the scientific community. Despite pronouncements that race is genetically meaningless, some researchers insist that there are natural divisions between human groups that align with social categories of race. They argue that taking account of biological differences between racial groups can lead to beneficial innovations such as better understandings of individual ancestry, race-specific therapies, and new tools that can help law-enforcement fight crime.
But science is not on the side of these scientists. It has been widely documented, for example, that the presumption of a biological basis for social categories of race can shape research methods as well as the interpretation of results. Such findings can lead to a troubling re-emergence of biological race in mainstream science that, despite good intentions, is not unlike past versions used to further racial subordination.
Two recent books by legal scholars address these issues. Jonathan Kahn's Race in a Bottle provides a stunning case study of BiDil, the first drug to receive approval by the US Food and Drug Administration as a race-specific therapy. It was designed to treat African-Americans suffering from heart failure - based mainly on a mistaken belief that there are meaningful disparities in heart failure outcomes between blacks and whites caused by biological differences. Although BiDil was initially created as a race-neutral drug, Kahn offers a compelling account of the many influences that turned what is in essence a combination therapy of two widely available generic treatments into a pill "for black people only".
With a meticulous yet accessible and entertaining narrative, Kahn outlines the broader legal and political landscapes that not only allowed BiDil to get as far as it did, but also actively provided an incentive for this approach as the "dream" of personalised medicine marches on. He then shows how an inflexible response from public agencies to these markets and innovations in a genomic age can effectively recreate the notion of biological race.
Dorothy Roberts's Fatal Invention, now out in paperback, extends this insight to examine how the re-emergence of biological race is having a broader impact - not only on innovations such as genetic ancestry-testing and racialised aspects of DNA forensics, but also on how we think about basic notions of racial difference. Advocates of biological race argue that today's use of race in biomedicine is different from past usages within science that supported racism, eugenics and questionable research practices.
Yet Roberts brilliantly identifies the continuity of thought on biological race that links past, present and, perhaps, future. She points out that the continued acceptance of biological race in science and medicine works, for example, to obscure social and environmental causes of the very disparities thought to necessitate race-specific interventions. This reframes minorities' poor health outcomes as a function of their "bad genes" rather than the discriminatory social practices that these groups endure. By identifying this historical thread, Fatal Invention offers remarkable insight into how persistent claims of racial difference as biological difference retain residual notions of racial hierarchy as poisonous today as at any time before.
Taken together, Race in a Bottle and Fatal Invention tackle one of the most important concerns pertaining to race facing our society today. How do we make sense of the re-emergence of biological race amid assertions that race no longer matters? There are no better scholars than Kahn and Roberts to help us think through these issues. The growing acceptance of post-racialism, premature as it may be, is forcing a new conversation on how race is no longer merely a social or political issue, but is becoming a distinctively biopolitical concern that requires us to bring our commitments to racial justice to science. Kahn and Roberts offer an unmatched articulation of this new biopolitical terrain that, regardless of your perspective, is must-read material.
Osagie K. Obasogie is an associate professor of law at the University of California, Hastings, with a joint appointment at UC San Francisco's Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley
Book information: Race in a Bottle: The story of BiDil and racialized medicine in a post-genomic age by Jonathan Kahn Columbia University Press ?24/$35
Fatal Invention: How science, politics, and big business recreate race in the twenty-first century by Dorothy Roberts New Press ?14.99/$19.95
Wow....a stupid post and a stupid answer. Just staying home watching the kids. WTF do you think stay at home moms do all day? Just sit around and watch kids? Shit...they go from sun up till sun down and sometimes after that. They cook, clean, make all the appointments, chauffeur, shop, laundry, schedule repairs or make them, decorate generically and seasonly, hostess gatherings, play nursemaid....and when they fall ill everything they do pilesup around their ears because no one else will do so much as clean a goddamned toilet.
Men stay home and wipe a surface and then tell us that, "this isn't so hard". Research has demonstrated this so many times that it should be wide spread knowledge. It doesn't matter if she stays home or he stays home...she still ends up doing the lions share.
Would I feel superior if I agreed to have a house husband? No...but the fact is I wouldn't agree to that. I've seen that in action and it just results in the same stuff as if both work...the woman still ends up doing the real work of maintaining the home.
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you need to establish a "self directed IRA". Not a big deal really. You set it up and rollover a portion of your exiting IRA into the new "self directed IRA' which is thru a custodian or trust. This will allow you to hold physical gold albeit in a depository somewhere. You can also own a bunch of other stuff like rental property, privately held business shares etc.
Go to Apmex.com and look around their site for more info. Otherwise just by ETF GLD, but when the SHTF, I think the real thing would be better. If you want to purchase gold thru an IRA and then bury it in your backyard, you are shit out of luck though.
Thanks, I'll check them out. Might make sense to go the custodial route, then cash out and buy the real thing if needed.
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Yesterday, 07:54 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Oregon Inlet NC
Posts: 779
Quote:
Hmmm. Gold. Buy high sell low?
Glad I am not the only one.
I'd like to have bought a shitpile of it 10 years ago.
Banks now say its illegal to keep valuables and currencies in safe deposit boxes.
As far as the price goes, I have been a miner all my life and have been selling more equipment to gold, silver and copper miners than you can shake a stick at for the last 4 years.
So I am about to sell what I bought at 700 as I personally think that supply will continue to increase reapidly, even in these inflationary times.
Im buying new houses for around $60 a sq foot to rent.
__________________
?Oooooooooole'!
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Today, 05:11 AM
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Forward City, Alabama
Posts: 3,630
it was 11 years ago
gold is going to $3500 minimum,silver $150.00 per oz
it will be a wild ride and take a lot of nerve to buy and hold
OP
even in a self directed IRA, you cannot take possession,Only your custodian and your custodian will have it held in a secure vault
buy on steep corrections
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Today, 06:24 AM
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Philadelphia
Posts: 2,130
Whatever you do. Dollar cost average your position. Depending on how much $$ you have take 3-12months to establish the entire position. That way you aren't trying to get in at a single point. Yes today may be the lowest it ever will be but it could also be the highest.
I have been using www.providentmetals.com over the past year to buy sIlver bars. They jave decent prices over spot. Who knows where it will be in a few years but this more of a long term position(20-40 years) for me. I intend to keep purchasing a little every month. They do have a IRA section so you can read up on how to set that up.
__________________ 1972 Formula 233F
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Today, 06:26 AM
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Fort Lauderdale
Posts: 596
Agree with Esuomm1. Unless the world really comes to an end GLD and SLV are your best bet especially for liquidity. If the world really ends I don't get the need for gold. Seems like ammo, food, etc would be the best currency.
__________________ Joe G.
"Whisker Away"
Glacier Bay 2665
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