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Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
VH1 ? Sneak Peek ? Love & Hip Hop
A new episode of ?Love & Hip Hop? will premiere at a NEW time starting Monday, December 5th at 8 PM ET/PT on VH1. Episode 204 (airs December 5 at 8/7c): “Olivia’s Reality” Description: Olivia meets with a music executive and gets a reality check. Get More: Love And Hip Hop
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Massive WWII bomb succesfully defused in Germany
Sandbags frame a 1.8 ton WWII bomb in river Rhine near Koblenz Saturday Dec. 3, 2011. Officials in Germany's western city of Koblenz say some 45,000 residents have to be evacuated because of a World War II era bomb discovered in the Rhine river. City officials said Saturday the massive British 1.8 ton bomb will be defused early Sunday, requiring all residents within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site to leave their homes for the day. The British bomb was found last week alongside a 275 pound bomb dropped there by U.S. forces during WWII. The bombs were discovered in the Rhine after its water level fell significantly amid a prolonged lack of rain. (AP Photo/dapd/ Harald Tittel)
Sandbags frame a 1.8 ton WWII bomb in river Rhine near Koblenz Saturday Dec. 3, 2011. Officials in Germany's western city of Koblenz say some 45,000 residents have to be evacuated because of a World War II era bomb discovered in the Rhine river. City officials said Saturday the massive British 1.8 ton bomb will be defused early Sunday, requiring all residents within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site to leave their homes for the day. The British bomb was found last week alongside a 275 pound bomb dropped there by U.S. forces during WWII. The bombs were discovered in the Rhine after its water level fell significantly amid a prolonged lack of rain. (AP Photo/dapd/ Harald Tittel)
Old ladies wait to be evacuated from a residential home for the elderly in Koblenz, Germany Sunday Dec. 4, 2011. Officials in the western German city of Koblenz say tens of thousands of residents have left their homes as experts prepare to defuse a massive World War II-era bomb discovered in the Rhine river. City officials said Sunday that some 45,000 residents living within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site had to evacuate for the day by 0800 GMT. It's one of Germany's biggest bomb-related evacuations since the war ended. The British 1.8 ton bomb could cause massive damage if it exploded. It was found last week alongside a 275-pound U.S. bomb after the Rhine's water level fell due to lack of rain. Both bombs are to be defused. (AP Photo/dapd/ Harald Tittel)
Gertrud Thurn (87) background, waits to be evacuated from a residential hom for the elderly in Koblenz, Germany Sunday Dec. 4, 2011. Officials in the western German city of Koblenz say tens of thousands of residents have left their homes as experts prepare to defuse a massive World War II-era bomb discovered in the Rhine river. City officials said Sunday that some 45,000 residents living within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site had to evacuate for the day by 0800 GMT. It's one of Germany's biggest bomb-related evacuations since the war ended. The British 1.8 ton bomb could cause massive damage if it exploded. It was found last week alongside a 275-pound U.S. bomb after the Rhine's water level fell due to lack of rain. Both bombs are to be defused. (AP Photo/dapd/ Harald Tittel)
Police guard a blocked shopping street in downtown Koblenz, western Germany Sunday Dec. 4, 2011. Officials in the western German city of Koblenz say tens of thousands of residents have left their homes as experts prepare to defuse a massive World War II-era bomb discovered in the Rhine river. City officials said Sunday that some 45,000 residents living within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site had to evacuate for the day by 0800 GMT. It's one of Germany's biggest bomb-related evacuations since the war ended. The British 1.8 ton bomb could cause massive damage if it exploded. It was found last week alongside a 275-pound U.S. bomb after the Rhine's water level fell due to lack of rain. Both bombs are to be defused. (AP Photo/dapd/Harald Tittel)
An army vehicle drives across the blocked Pfaffendorfer Bridge over Rhine river in Koblenz, western Germany Sunday Dec. 4, 2011. Officials in the western German city of Koblenz say tens of thousands of residents have left their homes as experts prepare to defuse a massive World War II-era bomb discovered in the Rhine river. City officials said Sunday that some 45,000 residents living within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site had to evacuate for the day by 0800 GMT. It's one of Germany's biggest bomb-related evacuations since the war ended. The British 1.8 ton bomb could cause massive damage if it exploded. It was found last week alongside a 275-pound U.S. bomb after the Rhine's water level fell due to lack of rain. Both bombs are to be defused. (AP Photo/dapd/Harald Tittel)
BERLIN (AP) ? A massive British World War II-era bomb that triggered the evacuation of about half of the 107,000 residents of Germany's western city of Koblenz was successfully defused Sunday, authorities said.
It was one of Germany's biggest bomb-related evacuations since the war ended with some 2,500 police officers, firefighters and paramedics on duty across the city to secure the operation.
Experts successfully defused the British 1.8 ton bomb and a 275-pound U.S. bomb that had been discovered last month after the Rhine river's water level fell significantly due to a prolonged lack of rain, said Heiko Breitbarth, a spokesman for Koblenz's firefighters.
Some 45,000 residents, living within a radius of about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bomb site had to leave their houses early Sunday before the evacuation order was lifted in the evening, the city said on its website. Among those ordered to evacuate were seven nursing homes, two hospitals and a prison with some 200 inmates.
The British bomb could have cause massive damage in case it exploded.
"I did my job, that was all," lead defusing expert Horst Lenz told local daily Rhein Zeitung.
Finding unexploded bombs dropped by the Allies over Germany during World War II is common over 65 years after the war's end. The explosives are usually defused or detonated by experts without causing injuries.
Authorities in Koblenz had set up shelters for the evacuees and used buses to carry them to safety.
Train and road traffic came to a halt in the area, some 130 kilometers northwest of Frankfurt during the operation.
The residents of Koblenz, which was heavily bombed during World War II, are used to bomb scares. City officials said 28 smaller war bombs had been found there since 1999, the German news agency dapd reported. Such bombs are often found during construction work or by farmers plowing their fields.
Separately, another 200 people had to be evacuated from the southern German city of Nuremberg as experts there defused another bomb left from the war. The 70 kilogram (155 pounds) of unknown origin was defused in 15 minures, the city said in a statement.
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
nfl: Red-hot Dolphins preparing a roadblock for visiting Raiders. @AlbertBreer makes his week 13 picks: http://t.co/HPyNLHU5
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Red-hot Dolphins preparing a roadblock for visiting Raiders. @AlbertBreer makes his week 13 picks: bit.ly/ujYJvV 
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Lung Cancer's Hidden Victims: Those Who Never Smoked (HealthDay)
FRIDAY, Dec. 2 (HealthDay News) -- Opera legend Beverly Sills never smoked. Neither did actress and health advocate Dana Reeve, wife of the late actor Christopher Reeve.
And yet in 2007 and 2006, respectively, both joined the ranks of about 32,000 Americans each year who never touch a cigarette but die of lung cancer anyway.
In fact, experts say, one in every five cases of the leading cancer killer occurs in nonsmokers. The annual death toll among this group now approaches that of breast cancer (about 40,000 per year) and is roughly equal to that of prostate cancer (32,000). Many never-smoking women may also be unaware that they are more than twice as likely to die of lung cancer as they are of ovarian cancer (14,000 deaths per year).
Numbers like those have experts calling for a shift in the public's thinking on lung cancer, away from its label of "the smoker's disease."
"We say, 'If you have a lung, you can get lung cancer,'" said Linda Wenger, executive director of Uniting Against Lung Cancer (UALC), a nonprofit advocacy group aimed at reaching a better understanding of lung cancer. The group was founded after the death in 2001 of Joan Scarangello, an ABC and NBC journalist and lifelong nonsmoker who fell victim at age 47 to lung cancer.
"She was very healthy, she was a runner," Wenger said, but the disease claimed Scarangello as it has many never-smokers. "We need to look at lung cancer as being a cancer like any other," Wenger added.
Many experts believe that the stigma around smoking that accompanies lung cancer -- that its victims somehow "brought it on themselves" -- has dampened public sympathy for patients and hindered funding for research.
"The lung cancer research field is definitely the stepchild in the [cancer research] family, and we're sure a lot of that has to do with stigma," said Holli Kawadler, UALC's scientific program director. She noted that, in terms of funding received from the U.S. National Cancer Institute, "the numbers are $27,000 in research per cancer death for breast cancer, compared to only about $1,400 per cancer death for lung cancer."
"It's very disheartening for the whole field," Wenger said. "We have a partner out there, his wife has lung cancer but she never smoked. And she has the attitude that 'I never smoked, but cigarettes are going to kill me' because the money is not there for research, because of the smoking stigma."
Lung cancer's lethal nature may also be hindering efforts to boost awareness and funding for research, experts add.
"Unlike other cancers where there is better funding, lung cancer patients aren't well enough to really advocate for themselves," explained Dr. James Dougherty, medical and scientific advisor for the Lung Cancer Research Foundation (LCRF), based in New York City. "When they get the diagnosis they often get sick pretty quickly, so they aren't about to publicly take on the role of saying 'Look, I have a problem, I need help.'"
Still, even with limited funding, scientists are slowly uncovering clues to the origins and distinct nature of lung cancer in never-smokers. One obvious starting point is the fact that women are affected far more often than men.
"Among never-smokers with lung cancer, women outnumber men two-to-one," Wenger said.
According to experts at the LCRF, the reasons for the disparity aren't clear, but early research is suggesting that, much like breast tumors, lung tumor aggressiveness in women appears linked to estrogen. Other factors, as yet unknown, may also be at play.
"We're also learning much more about the differences in the biology of [lung cancer in] smokers and nonsmokers," Dougherty added. He pointed to LCRF-funded research under way at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, "specifically looking at some new potential markers on the [tumor] cells of people who have never smoked. Hopefully that will lead to the identification of better treatment options for nonsmokers."
Determining risk factors that might place certain never-smokers at especially high risk for lung cancer is another focus of research. The dream, experts said, is to somehow devise an accurate "panel" of biological and other factors that could serve as a basis in pinpointing at-risk individuals who may need closer monitoring.
All of these research advances will depend on much better funding, however. In the meantime, the stigma of smoking that overshadows never-smokers newly diagnosed with lung cancer continues.
"We hear a lot from people that the first thing they are asked after diagnosis is, 'Did you smoke?'" said Kawadler. "That's very tough."
More information
Find out more about ongoing efforts to fight lung cancer at the Lung Cancer Research Foundation.
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Old media executives too busy, private for Twitter (Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) ? Twitter gives an instant snapshot of the buzz around television shows, computer game launches and even new ads, but many media executives are simply too busy to tweet or engage with the microblogging service very much themselves.
Digital reluctance is particularly strong amongst "old media" leaders, who told this week's Reuters Global Media Summit they were uncomfortable with sharing personal information, especially in 140-character bursts.
Maurice Levy, chief executive of advertising group Publicis, said Twitter and its social networking sister Facebook were simply not for him.
"I hate the idea that I would have to share things which are not for sharing or which are superficial," he said in Paris.
He said he kept tabs on social media in a professional capacity but he did not need to tweet to understand the importance of Twitter.
"I understand how to wash dishes. I don't do it regularly," he said.
His rival Martin Sorrell, of WPP, who has never been reluctant to air his views on television, was not keen to join Twitter's 200 million users either.
"I have enough to do answering your emails," he said. "I'm 66 years old. I'm almost in the glue factory."
Arnaud Nourry of French publisher Hachette said the character limit was Twitter's drawback, and said he preferred Facebook.
"I think communicating with text only with a very limited way of expression is not my style," he said.
The media executives were not keen to emulate musicians like Lady Gaga, sports stars like Shaquille O'Neal and Lance Armstrong or personalities such as Stephen Fry in using the medium to communicate with fans, or with investors.
Hearst Magazines president David Carey said he tweeted mostly corporate promotion and saved personal information for his friends and family.
"For the rest of the world, I don't think they are interested in who I had dinner with ... or where am I going for vacation," he said.
Others used San Francisco-based Twitter to monitor news sources, particularly from key journalists.
"I follow a whole bunch of journalists, but I don't tweet myself," said William Eccleshare, chief executive of outdoor ad company Clear Channel International.
Twitter is considered a leading initial public offering candidate for late 2012 or 2013, and it was worth about $8 billion on secondary markets in October.
It is ramping up efforts to generate more advertising revenues, which are expected to reach $145 million this year. Some observers had criticized its exclusive focus on building audience rather than sales in its early days.
The executives' comments show that Twitter may struggle to reach older decision-makers with ads, although younger guests at the summit were unsurprisingly far more engaged with Twitter.
"Of course," said Claire Boonstra, co-founder of augmented reality company Layar, when asked whether she was on Twitter.
"It's a great chance to connect, it's a great channel actually to share thoughts and opinions, and I also use it to stay up to date with friends of mine," she said. "But it's for me more business than personal."
Targeted ads group Criteo's Gregory Gazagne said: "I use LinkedIn and Facebook a lot more."
"When I'm on Linkedin and I publish things they are automatically published on Twitter. But it takes me too much time to manage all the social networks."
David Norris, founder and chief executive of U.S. digital fingerprinting start-up BlueCava, said he got all of his news from Twitter, letting the people he follows do the hard work of digging out information instead of searching for it himself.
"That's how I know AA just filed for bankruptcy," said Norris, who had just flown in to London from Los Angeles on American Airlines. "They work for me. That's how it's supposed to be."
(Additional reporting by Lisa Richwine in New York, Leila Abboud in Paris and Georgina Prodhan in London; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)
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Friday, December 2, 2011
World's central banks act to ease market strains
The Euro sculpture is reflected in a puddle on the lid of a bin that stands in the Frankfurt Occupy camp at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Nov.30, 2011.(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
The Euro sculpture is reflected in a puddle on the lid of a bin that stands in the Frankfurt Occupy camp at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Nov.30, 2011.(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
A ferret looks out of the jacket of an activist of the Frankfurt Occupy movement at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011.(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Two ferrets look out of the jacket of an activist of the Frankfurt Occupy movement at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011.(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) ? The central banks of the wealthiest countries, trying to prevent a debt crisis in Europe from exploding into a global panic, swept in Wednesday to shore up the world financial system by making it easier for banks to borrow American dollars.
Stock markets around the world roared their approval. The Dow Jones industrial average shot up more than 400 points. The stock market rose more than 5 percent in Germany and more than 4 percent in France.
The action represented the most extraordinary coordinated effort by the central banks since they cut interest rates together in October 2008, at the depths of the financial crisis.
While it should ease borrowing for banks, it does little to solve the underlying problem of mountains of government debt in Europe, leaving markets still waiting for a permanent fix. European leaders gather next week for a summit on the debt crisis.
The European Central Bank, which has been reluctant to intervene to stop the growing crisis on its own continent, was joined in the decision by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland.
"The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity," the central banks said in a joint statement.
And China, which has the largest economy in the world after the European Union and the United States, reduced the amount of money its banks are required to hold in reserve, another attempt to free up cash for lending.
The display of worldwide coordination was meant to restore confidence in the global financial system and to demonstrate that central banks will do what they can to prevent a repeat of 2008.
That fall, fear settled in after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a storied American investment house. That caused banks around the world to severely restrict lending to each other. The credit freeze triggered panic among investors, which resulted in a meltdown of stock markets.
On Oct. 8, 2008, the ECB and central banks in the United States, England, China, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland cut interest rates together after a series of high-stakes phone calls.
The Dow fell that day, during the worst of the financial meltdown. But that action, like Wednesday's, was a signal from the central banks to the financial markets that they would be players, not spectators.
Three years later, investors have been nervously watching Europe to see whether they should take the same approach and dump stocks. World stock markets have been unusually volatile since last summer.
The European crisis, which six months ago seemed focused on the relatively small economy of Greece, has since metastasized. It now threatens the existence of the euro, the common currency used by 17 countries in Europe.
But beyond that, the crisis has the potential to wreak worldwide economic havoc. Fear in financial markets could cause lending to dry up, both from banks to businesses and consumers and from banks to each other.
There have been early signs, particularly in Europe, that it is becoming more difficult to borrow money ? especially as U.S. money market funds scale back their lending to banks in the euro nations because of perceived risk from the debt crisis.
European banks cut business loans by 16 percent in the third quarter. And no one knows how much European banks will lose on their massive holdings of bonds of heavily indebted countries. Until the damage is clear, banks are reluctant to lend.
Banks are also being pressed by European govermments to increase their buffers against possible losses. That helps stabilize the banking system but reduces the amount of money available to lend to businesses.
"European banks are having trouble borrowing in general, including in dollars," said Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed ofifcial and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "The Fed did the Europeans a favor."
The joint effort will make it less expensive for banks around the world to borrow dollars if they need them. Loans made in U.S. dollars are important because dollars are the No. 1 currency for international trade.
Under the agreement, the central banks are reducing by half a percentage point ? to about 0.6 percent ? the rate they charge banks for short-term dollar loans. The lower rate is designed to get credit flowing again.
In May 2010, as the European debt crisis started to bite, the Federal Reserve agreed to swap dollars for foreign currencies held by other leading central banks. The foreign central banks could then lend dollars to their banks.
The Fed had run a similar program from December 2007, when world financial markets were weakening because of fear about subprime mortgages, until February 2010. It had run other programs before, but much smaller.
This time, the agreement was supposed to expire Aug. 1, 2012. Wednesday's announcement extends it six months, until Feb. 1, 2013.
"It shows that policymakers are on the case," said Roberto Perli, managing director at the International Strategy & Investment Group, an investment firm. He said it has symbolic value even if it does not have a big impact on credit markets.
If it works, the rates on dollar loans will drop, and stock and bond markets will calm down. The banks' action is not a direct fix for the debt crisis in Europe, but it shows that the banks are able to take coordinated action to ease credit.
The decision to cut the interest charged on the dollar swaps was taken by the Federal Reserve following a video conference meeting held by Fed officials on Monday morning.
The Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's policy-setting panel, approved the decision on a 9-1 vote. The president of the Fed's regional bank in Richmond, Va., voted no.
In New York, the stock market jumped at the opening bell and added to its gains throughout the morning.
The Dow was up 438 points at its highest, or more than 3 percent. Holding those gains would give the Dow its best day since Aug. 11. Wednesday's advance also swung the Dow from a loss for the year to a gain.
The high for the day also put the Dow within six points of 12,000. It has not closed at that level since Nov. 15.
Stocks closed 5 percent higher in Germany, 4.2 percent in France and 3.2 percent in Britain. European stocks had posted big gains earlier this week because investors saw hope that countries would settle on an attempted fix for the European debt crisis.
Stock markets in Asia finished lower for the day. They closed before the Fed and other central banks announced their joint action. The statement came out at 8 a.m., in the middle of the European trading day and hour and a half before the market opened in New York.
Borrowing costs for countries across Europe fell, an encouraging sign. The yield on benchmark 10-year national bonds fell 0.25 percentage points in Belgium, 0.2 points in Spain, 0.13 points in France and 0.06 points in Germany.
The yield on 10-year Italian bonds fell 0.06 points to 7.03 percent. The 7 percent level is significant because it is considered the point at which a country's borrowing costs become unsustainable. Yields above 7 percent forced Ireland, Portugal and Greece to seek bailouts.
In the U.S., the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 2.09 percent from 2 percent late Tuesday. That is a sign that investors are willing to take money out of assets considered super-safe, such as U.S. government debt, and invest it in riskier assets like stocks. It is also a sign of increased confidence in the U.S. economy.
An out-of-control crisis in Europe would come just as the United States economy is beginning to pick up after it faltered in the spring and summer. It grew at an annual rate of 2 percent in July, August and September, the strongest since late last year.
It will take more than that to bring down unemployment in the U.S., which has been stuck at about 9 percent for more than two years, but the U.S. has added jobs for 13 months in a row. The government's next read on unemployment comes out Friday.
In Europe, countries like Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy overspent for years and racked up annual budget deficits that have left them with backbreaking debt. Italy alone owes euro1.9 trillion, or 120 percent of what its economy produces in a year.
The ECB has extended unlimited amounts of short-term credit to banks, but has balked at expanding a limited program to support the borrowing of troubled countries by buying their bonds on the secondary market.
To go along with the monetary union created by the euro, European leaders have explored creating a fiscal union ? giving a central authority control over the budgets of sovereign nations.
One reason the ECB has resisted major action so far: It worries that bailing out free-spending countries would only encourage them to do it again, a concept known as moral hazard.
The ECB has also worried that injecting too much money into the European economy would trigger inflation. Its single mandate is price stability. By contrast, the Fed has a dual mandate ? price stability and encouraging employment. Unemployment is above 20 percent in some European countries. If the ECB had employment as a mandate, it could use that as a reason to buy government bonds.
The coordinated action was a demonstration of how interconnected the world financial system is, and that the debt loads of countries like Italy and Greece are everyone else's problem, too.
Germany's economy depends heavily on exports, and if the euro collapses, weaker countries in Europe would be left with their own devalued currencies. If that happened, or if economic output collapsed, they couldn't buy as many German goods.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States depends on Europe for 20 percent of its own exports. And if the debt crisis pulls Europe into a recession, that would drag down the U.S. economy just when it may be beginning to turn around.
Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, lowered its rating at least one notch Tuesday for the four largest banks in the U.S. ? Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.
S&P was the agency that stripped the United States government of its top-notch rating last summer, when Congress was gridlocked over whether to raise the federal government's borrowing limit.
And China, one of the only places in the world where the economy is growing quickly, needs the U.S. and Europe both to stay healthy. Growth in Chinese exports has declined from 36 percent in March compared with the year before to 16 percent in October.
China will reduce the amount of money that its commercial lenders must hold in reserve by 0.5 percentage points of their deposits. It was the first easing of Chinese monetary policy in three years.
___
Wiseman reported from Washington. AP Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger contributed from Washington.
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