S&P criteria change reduces ratings on big banks
(Reuters)
NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Standard & Poor's reduced its credit ratings on 15 big banking companies, mostly in the Europe and United States, on Tuesday as the result of a sweeping overhaul of its ratings criteria.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N), Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N), Barclays Plc (BARC.L), HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA.L) and UBS AG (UBSN.VX), were among the banks that had their ratings reduced by one notch each. A notch is one third of a letter rating.
S&P also left the ratings of 20 banks as they were and raised the ratings of two in announcing results from its new ratings criteria to 37 of the world's biggest banking companies. The agency also updated ratings for dozens of bank subsidiaries of the companies.
Although S&P began warning the markets more than a year ago that it was revising its ratings, the announcement comes at a time when the markets for bank debts are fragile.
"Banks could see higher funding costs," said Guy LeBas, chief fixed income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.
S&P officials said earlier this month they would gradually roll out the updated ratings for more than 750 banking companies worldwide, starting with an announcement about the biggest banks. The remaining announcements are due in coming weeks.
The outcome of the re-rating of the biggest banks was worse than S&P has forecast for all banks. S&P officials said earlier this month they expected about 20 percent of all banks would see their ratings drop, while 20 percent would get higher ratings and 60 percent would stay the same.
Spokespersons for Bank of America, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
S&P's overhaul is part of a broad, multi-year drive by the agency to improve its products and repair its reputation, which was badly tarnished by having wrongly put triple-A ratings on securities backed by subprime mortgages. The agency is owned by McGraw-Hill Companies Inc (MHP.N).
In response to growing pressure on their credit ratings, some banks have updated contingency plans for a downgrade. They have also refreshed disclosures on the potential impact they may suffer through ratings triggers built into obligations under existing derivatives contracts, funding commitments and borrowing arrangements.
(Reporting by David Henry; additional reporting by Richard Leong, Lauren Tara LaCapra, Rick Rothacker, Joe Rauch and Jed Horowitz; editing by Andre Grenon)
New study to test unusual hypothesis on beta brainwaves
New study to test unusual hypothesis on beta brainwavesPublic release date: 28-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
Before she could seek to convince the world that her computer model of a key brain circuit explains a fundamental, 80-year-old mystery of neuroscience with potential relevance to Parkinson's disease, Stephanie Jones sought to convince Christopher Moore. The new Brown neuroscience professors are now close collaborators, but when they first started talking about the beta oscillations of the cortex, Moore thought Jones was plain wrong, if not a bit nuts.
"I was a complete non-believer," he said. "I told her I didn't think this idea could be right."
Jones retorted, "Now he's testing the model's predictions."
What Jones and Moore now agree upon and will seek to prove with an $830,000 National Science Foundation grant awarded this month is that neurons in the cortex experience beta oscillations (cycles of activity at a rate of about 20 times a second) when they receive a combination of two input signals in just the right two places at the right time and with the right strength. The signals, they believe, originate from the distant basal ganglia and reach the cortex by way of the thalamus.
The research sounds arcane and technical, but these beta oscillations are powerful and meaningful phenomena that have eluded explanation since they were first detected nearly a century ago. Abnormally strong beta oscillations in the cortex are directly associated with Parkinson's disease. The waves seem to increase as we age, even in healthy people. And when the region of the brain that processes the sense of touch, say in the fingers, is overwhelmed by beta oscillations, the processing doesn't happen.
"If you have the beta rhythm in the sensory cortex, our data strongly suggest you will fail at a perceptual task," Moore said, recalling a past human experiment. "You can be sitting here and you tell me you are trying, I know you are trying, you are pushing buttons just like you are trying, but if your cortex happens to show beta right when I tap your finger, you are not going to feel it."
Finding an accurate explanation of beta oscillations might not only help explain why the brain's perceptual circuits are wired the way they are, but could also provide doctors with a rational means for improving deep-brain stimulation treatments for Parkinson's disease and maybe obsessive compulsive disorder where they apply electrical current to parts of the brain that Moore and Jones suspect of relaying beta signals.
"You'd have a mechanistic understanding of why that change [from stimulation] created that change in the circuit," Jones said.
One day at lunch ...
The two launched their discussion a few years ago in the cafeteria at Massachusetts General Hospital when Moore, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jones, then at the hospital, realized that the circuits he studied in the physical brain were the very ones she modeled in a computer. In particular they shared an interest in a touch-perception circuit, technically known as a "thalamocortical circuit in the somatosensory system."
After they began to collaborate, Jones shared that her computational model suggested human data on beta oscillations could best be produced by a delivering a two-signal trigger to neurons in the circuit. One signal comes in at the far end of a neuron where the cell's long branches, or dendrites, extend out. The other, she said, would have to come in at the base of that tree-like structure, where the dendrite extends out from the cell.
In neuroscience orthodoxy, no one has ever said that beta oscillations are triggered by such a combination of two signals but then, orthodoxy has so far failed to explain beta oscillations.
Moore had his doubts but experiments began to show indeed that Jones's model, which simulated a circuit of about 300 cells of about five types, predicted what he could observe in real animal brains. In 2009 and 2010 the two began to publish together in the Journal of Neurocience, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and Neuroimage. All the while they puzzled over where these beta-stimulating, two-factor signals could be coming from. Eventually they traced them, at least hypothetically, back to the "non-specific" area of the thalamus and farther back to the basal ganglia.
At Brown for the big moment
Although each researcher maintains other collaborations, they jumped at the chance to come to Brown last summer. Here they said can collaborate without crossing any bridges and they have access to Brown's computing resources, which can allow Jones's model to expand and run faster.
The groundwork of their hypothesis, their increasingly close collaboration, and their access to resources made their first grant application at Brown a success. Now all they have to do is find out if they are right or wrong.
As they have always done, Moore will lead the physiological side of things. He'll use optogenetics, a new technology in which scientists engineer brain cells to be turned on or off by flashes of light, to take over the circuits of mice from the basal ganglia to the cortex. He'll be able to see whether turning off particular cells in the basal ganglia, for example, causes beta oscillations in the somatosensory cortex to stop, as the hypothesis and the model would suggest.
Meanwhile, Jones will expand the model to incorporate those upstream parts of the brain, the basal ganglia and the thalamus, so that it is more complete. She plans to feed what Moore sees in his experimental results back into the model to refine it as well.
The grant runs through the end of October 2014, which should be enough time for Moore and Jones to find out whether they have traced beta oscillations to their neural roots.
Moore simultaneously discounts and revels in speculation about what the hypothesis would say about the brain if it is indeed true. Does the basal ganglia, which is implicated in habit formation, use beta oscillations to briefly shut down sensory processing in the cortex so that it can focus the brain on that task of forming habits which is why Jones wonders whether it could also relate to OCD? If he took control of the beta oscillations in a mouse, could he give the mouse Parkinsonian symptoms and then turn them off at will?
For now the implications will have to wait for the more basic step of confirming the hypothesis. Like the beta oscillations themselves, the hypothesis may only come to fruition through a perfect combination of researchers coming together at Brown with perfect timing.
###
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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.
New study to test unusual hypothesis on beta brainwavesPublic release date: 28-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
Before she could seek to convince the world that her computer model of a key brain circuit explains a fundamental, 80-year-old mystery of neuroscience with potential relevance to Parkinson's disease, Stephanie Jones sought to convince Christopher Moore. The new Brown neuroscience professors are now close collaborators, but when they first started talking about the beta oscillations of the cortex, Moore thought Jones was plain wrong, if not a bit nuts.
"I was a complete non-believer," he said. "I told her I didn't think this idea could be right."
Jones retorted, "Now he's testing the model's predictions."
What Jones and Moore now agree upon and will seek to prove with an $830,000 National Science Foundation grant awarded this month is that neurons in the cortex experience beta oscillations (cycles of activity at a rate of about 20 times a second) when they receive a combination of two input signals in just the right two places at the right time and with the right strength. The signals, they believe, originate from the distant basal ganglia and reach the cortex by way of the thalamus.
The research sounds arcane and technical, but these beta oscillations are powerful and meaningful phenomena that have eluded explanation since they were first detected nearly a century ago. Abnormally strong beta oscillations in the cortex are directly associated with Parkinson's disease. The waves seem to increase as we age, even in healthy people. And when the region of the brain that processes the sense of touch, say in the fingers, is overwhelmed by beta oscillations, the processing doesn't happen.
"If you have the beta rhythm in the sensory cortex, our data strongly suggest you will fail at a perceptual task," Moore said, recalling a past human experiment. "You can be sitting here and you tell me you are trying, I know you are trying, you are pushing buttons just like you are trying, but if your cortex happens to show beta right when I tap your finger, you are not going to feel it."
Finding an accurate explanation of beta oscillations might not only help explain why the brain's perceptual circuits are wired the way they are, but could also provide doctors with a rational means for improving deep-brain stimulation treatments for Parkinson's disease and maybe obsessive compulsive disorder where they apply electrical current to parts of the brain that Moore and Jones suspect of relaying beta signals.
"You'd have a mechanistic understanding of why that change [from stimulation] created that change in the circuit," Jones said.
One day at lunch ...
The two launched their discussion a few years ago in the cafeteria at Massachusetts General Hospital when Moore, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jones, then at the hospital, realized that the circuits he studied in the physical brain were the very ones she modeled in a computer. In particular they shared an interest in a touch-perception circuit, technically known as a "thalamocortical circuit in the somatosensory system."
After they began to collaborate, Jones shared that her computational model suggested human data on beta oscillations could best be produced by a delivering a two-signal trigger to neurons in the circuit. One signal comes in at the far end of a neuron where the cell's long branches, or dendrites, extend out. The other, she said, would have to come in at the base of that tree-like structure, where the dendrite extends out from the cell.
In neuroscience orthodoxy, no one has ever said that beta oscillations are triggered by such a combination of two signals but then, orthodoxy has so far failed to explain beta oscillations.
Moore had his doubts but experiments began to show indeed that Jones's model, which simulated a circuit of about 300 cells of about five types, predicted what he could observe in real animal brains. In 2009 and 2010 the two began to publish together in the Journal of Neurocience, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and Neuroimage. All the while they puzzled over where these beta-stimulating, two-factor signals could be coming from. Eventually they traced them, at least hypothetically, back to the "non-specific" area of the thalamus and farther back to the basal ganglia.
At Brown for the big moment
Although each researcher maintains other collaborations, they jumped at the chance to come to Brown last summer. Here they said can collaborate without crossing any bridges and they have access to Brown's computing resources, which can allow Jones's model to expand and run faster.
The groundwork of their hypothesis, their increasingly close collaboration, and their access to resources made their first grant application at Brown a success. Now all they have to do is find out if they are right or wrong.
As they have always done, Moore will lead the physiological side of things. He'll use optogenetics, a new technology in which scientists engineer brain cells to be turned on or off by flashes of light, to take over the circuits of mice from the basal ganglia to the cortex. He'll be able to see whether turning off particular cells in the basal ganglia, for example, causes beta oscillations in the somatosensory cortex to stop, as the hypothesis and the model would suggest.
Meanwhile, Jones will expand the model to incorporate those upstream parts of the brain, the basal ganglia and the thalamus, so that it is more complete. She plans to feed what Moore sees in his experimental results back into the model to refine it as well.
The grant runs through the end of October 2014, which should be enough time for Moore and Jones to find out whether they have traced beta oscillations to their neural roots.
Moore simultaneously discounts and revels in speculation about what the hypothesis would say about the brain if it is indeed true. Does the basal ganglia, which is implicated in habit formation, use beta oscillations to briefly shut down sensory processing in the cortex so that it can focus the brain on that task of forming habits which is why Jones wonders whether it could also relate to OCD? If he took control of the beta oscillations in a mouse, could he give the mouse Parkinsonian symptoms and then turn them off at will?
For now the implications will have to wait for the more basic step of confirming the hypothesis. Like the beta oscillations themselves, the hypothesis may only come to fruition through a perfect combination of researchers coming together at Brown with perfect timing.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PIC: Kylie Jenner Dating Singer Cody Simpson!
(omg!)
Kylie Jenner's love life is heating up!
On Sunday, Kim Kardashian's youngest sister, 14, hit The Grove in L.A. with a cute blond: Australian pop singer Cody Simpson.
PHOTOS: Kylie's first modeling gig
"Yes, they went on a date," a source close to the tween model and reality star tells Us. Jenner and Simpson, also 14, met and flirted at last week's Breaking Dawn: Part 1 premiere in Hollywood "and have been inseparable since," the source adds.
PHOTOS: Kylie dazzles at Kim's wedding
And, so far, things are looking good for Simpson and Jenner, the youngest in the Jenner-Kardashian clan. (She's the youngest child of Kris and Bruce Jenner, who also have model daughter Kendall, 16.)
"I would say they are dating," the source surmises. "They are a couple! They are so cute together."
PHOTOS: Kardashian family album
Tell Us: Do Kylie and Cody make a nice pair?
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Petrol bombs thrown near Cairo's Tahrir Square
(Reuters)
CAIRO (Reuters) ? Egyptian youths threw petrol bombs and fired guns in clashes on Tuesday near Cairo's Tahrir Square, where protesters have been camped out demanding the military hand over power to civilian rule, witnesses said.
An organizer of the sit-in protest said the trouble started when an unidentified group had tried to enter the square. State media said the clashes were between protesters and street vendors but this could not be independently verified.
At least 10 shots were heard as the trouble flared near the Egyptian museum at one end of the square, where protesters have been urging the departure of the army generals who replaced Hosni Mubarak in February.
Two protesters suffered eye injuries in the violence, the state news agency MENA reported. An ambulance was seen driving into the area.
The violence disrupted what had been two largely peaceful days of voting in the first phase of a parliamentary election, the first since Mubarak was ousted.
The square, where the protesters have been camped out since November 18, has been calm for several days. Last week, roads around Tahrir were the theatre for some of the worst violence since Mubarak was toppled: 42 people killed in Cairo and elsewhere in violence triggered by protests against the generals.
The protesters say the generals are trying to manipulate their position to preserve power and privilege. The generals say they will hand power to an elected president by mid-2012.
SECURITY GROUPS
The television footage showed petrol bombs arching through the night sky and exploding on the road by the Egyptian museum and close to the protesters' encampment.
Mohammed al-Saeed, speaking to Egyptian state television, said the protesters had organized volunteer security groups "to protect people and families in the square" from the youths.
It was unclear who threw the petrol bombs and who fired the shots and what motivated them, but state television said earlier clashes had involved street vendors.
In an earlier sign of tensions in the square, scuffles had flared between dozens of street vendors who have been selling goods to the protesters camped out there.
The flare-up prompted medics working in the square to step in to stop the scuffles, they said. Some of those involved in the brawl wielded sticks and vendors' stalls were damaged.
(Additional reporting by Reuters Television, Dina Zayed, Ali Abdelatti and Peter Millership; Writing by Edmund Blair and Tom Perry; Editing by Andrew Roche)
Britain pulls embassy staff out of Iran: sources
(Reuters)
TEHRAN (Reuters) ? Britain has evacuated all its diplomatic staff from Iran, Western diplomatic sources told Reuters on Wednesday, a day after protesters stormed and ransacked its embassy and a residential compound.
Britain said it was outraged by the attacks and warned of "serious consequences." The U.N. Security Council condemned the attacks "in the strongest terms." U.S. President Barack Obama called on Iran to hold those responsible to account.
No comment was immediately available from the British government on the reported withdrawal of embassy staff from Iran.
On Tuesday, Iranian protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran, smashing windows, torching a car and burning the British flag in protest against new sanctions imposed by London.
The attacks occurred at a time of rising diplomatic tension between Iran and Western nations, which last week imposed fresh sanctions over Tehran's nuclear program that they believe is aimed at achieving the capability of making an atomic bomb.
Iran, the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, says it wants nuclear plants only for the generation of electricity.
The embassy storming was also a sign of deepening political infighting within Iran's ruling hardline elites, with the conservative-led parliament attempting to force the hand of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and expel the British ambassador.
"Radicals in Iran and in the West are always in favor of crisis ... Such radical hardliners in Iran will use the crisis to unite people and also to blame the crisis for the fading economy," said political analyst Hasan Sedghi.
Several dozen protesters broke away from a crowd of a few hundred outside the main British embassy compound in Tehran, scaled the gates, broke the locks and went inside.
Protesters pulled down the British flag, burned it and put up the Iranian flag, Iranian news agencies and news pictures showed. Inside, the demonstrators smashed windows of office and residential quarters and set a car ablaze, news pictures showed.
One took a framed picture of Queen Elizabeth, state TV showed. Others carried the royal crest out through the embassy gate as police stood by, pictures carried by the semi-official Fars news agency showed.
All embassy personnel were accounted for, a British diplomat told Reuters in Washington, saying Britain did not believe that any sensitive materials had been seized.
Demonstrators waved flags symbolizing martyrdom and held aloft portraits of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has the final say on matters of state in Iran.
Another group of protesters broke into a second British compound at Qolhak in north Tehran, the IRNA state news agency said. Once the embassy's summer quarters, the sprawling, tree-lined compound is now used to house diplomatic staff.
An Iranian report said six British embassy staff had been briefly held by the protesters. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the situation had been "confusing" and that he would not have called them "hostages."
"Police freed the six people working for the British embassy in Qolhak garden," Iran's Fars news agency said.
A German school next to the Qolhak compound was also damaged, the German government said.
BRITAIN OUTRAGED
Police appeared to have cleared the demonstrators in front of the main embassy compound, but later clashed with protesters and fired tear gas to try to disperse them, Fars said. Protesters nevertheless entered the compound a second time, before once again leaving, it said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron chaired a meeting of the government crisis committee to discuss the attacks, which he said were "outrageous and indefensible."
"The failure of the Iranian government to defend British staff and property was a disgrace," he said in a statement.
"The Iranian government must recognize that there will be serious consequences for failing to protect our staff. We will consider what these measures should be in the coming days."
The United States, alongside the European Union and many of its member states also strongly condemned the attacks.
There have been regular protests outside the British embassy over the years since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed shah, but never have any been so violent.
The attacks and hostage-taking were a reminder of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran carried out by radical students who held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The United States cut diplomatic ties with Iran after the hostage-taking.
(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Hashem Kalantari in Tehran, Parisa Hafezi in Istanbul, William Maclean and Adrian Croft in London and Arshad Mohammed in Washington. Writing by Jon Hemming, editing by Ralph Gowling)
It?s a dog! It?s a photo! It?s ? candy?
(The Newsroom)
Art student Joel Brochu clearly has a lot of time on his hands.
Brochu created a startlingly life-like image of a beagle taking a bath made entirely out of ... sprinkles. Yes. The teeny-tiny candy sprinkles that most people put on cupcakes. And eat.
For 8 months, Brochu patiently placed 221,184 sprinkles in 6 colors to create the "photo." He started the project as an example of "pointillism," the technique of using tiny dots to create an image. Needless to say, Brochu got a little carried away with the candy.
Rhode Island First Lady Stephanie Chafee, center, embraces Vice President of Patient Care Services of South County Hospital Barbara Seagrave following a news conference to discuss the state's efforts to encourage mothers to breastfeed infants, including eliminating the distribution of free infant formula to mothers when they are discharged from the hospital, at the State House in Providence, R.I., Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
Rhode Island First Lady Stephanie Chafee, center, embraces Vice President of Patient Care Services of South County Hospital Barbara Seagrave following a news conference to discuss the state's efforts to encourage mothers to breastfeed infants, including eliminating the distribution of free infant formula to mothers when they are discharged from the hospital, at the State House in Providence, R.I., Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) ? New mothers in Rhode Island will no longer leave the hospital with a free goody bag of infant formula.
To encourage breastfeeding, the state's seven birthing hospitals stopped formula giveaways this fall, apparently making it the first state to end the widespread practice.
State health officials hailed the decision Monday, noting that breastfeeding has been proved healthier than formula for both infants and mothers. Stephanie Chafee, a nurse and the wife of Gov. Lincoln Chafee, called the decision a critical step toward increasing breastfeeding rates.
"As the first 'bag-free' state in the nation, Rhode Island will have healthier children, healthier mothers, and a healthier population as a whole," Chafee said. "This is a tremendous accomplishment."
Formula will still be available to new mothers who experience difficulties with breastfeeding.
The new policy isn't intended to force women into nursing their children, according to Denise Laprade, a labor and delivery nurse and lactation consultant at Woonsocket's Landmark Medical Center, which eliminated free formula distribution last month. She said the focus is instead on parental education and helping mothers decide what's best for their child.
"We never make any woman feel guilty about her decision," Laprade said. She said she has received few complaints from parents about the new policy, though she said the older nurses needed a little time to adjust.
Thirty-eight percent of Rhode Island mothers nurse their babies six months after birth, compared with 44 percent nationally, according to a report issued this year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
State Health Director Michael Fine said the state hopes to raise the percentage of Rhode Island mothers nursing at six months to 60 percent by 2020.
Public health officials in Massachusetts endorsed a ban on free formula samples in 2005, but the regulation was rescinded by then-Gov. Mitt Romney before it took effect. Getting the new policy in place in small Rhode Island was easier, since it's not a law or regulation and required the agreement of only seven hospitals.
Nationally, about 540 of the nation's 3,300 birthing hospitals have stopped the formula giveaways, according to Marsha Walker, a registered nurse in Massachusetts and co-chairwoman of "Ban the Bags," a campaign to eliminate formula giveaways at maternity hospitals.
Walker said the bags given to new mothers ? typically containing a few days' worth of formula ? amount to a sophisticated marketing campaign by formula manufacturers.
"Hospitals should market health and nothing else," she said. "When hospitals give these out, it looks like an endorsement of a commercial product."
The International Formula Council, a trade group representing formula manufacturers, opposes the end of free formula samples. In a statement, the council notes that sample bags also include "key educational materials" on how to use and store formula.
"Mothers should be trusted to make good choices for their babies," the council said in its statement. "More than 80 percent of U.S. infants will be given formula at some point during their first year of life ... these educational materials are needed by the vast majority of mothers to ensure infant formula is prepared correctly and the baby's health is not jeopardized."
New mom Crystal Gyra said that while the new policy is well-intended, women should have the option of taking home formula samples. The Providence woman said she gladly accepted the free formula she received after giving birth to her daughter Gianna, now 2 months old. Gyra gives her daughter formula.
"It helped me," she said of the samples. "They should leave it up to the women to decide whether they want to take the samples or not. We're smart enough to figure it out."
Union National Bank joins the International Finance Corporation's ...
IFC is rated "AAA" by both Moody's and S&P. IFC covers payment risks for over 200 banks across more than 80 countries; as such the agreement would allow UNB to undertake risk exposures in more markets, with the safeguarding of the cover provided by the IFC.
Ms. Mona Zein Eldin SVP & Head of Financial Institutions & Structured Finance at Union National Bank commented that "Joining the IFC's GTFP would allow UNB to expand its geographic coverage into markets which it has previously shunned and thus promoting growth in trade flows in addition to expanding the scope of services extended to our clients. Under the GTFP, UNB as a Confirming Bank would partially or fully benefit from guarantees of IFC in covering payment risks on issuing banks in emerging and non investment grade markets."
Ms. Mona added that "Union National Bank is very proud to be cooperating with a prestigious organization such as the International Finance Corporation and to become a Confirming bank under IFC's Global Trade Finance Programme. We look forward to working actively with International Finance Corporation on this Global Trade Finance Programme."
Under their program, GTFP offers Confirming Banks a partial or full guarantee in covering payment risks on banks in emerging markets for trade related transactions. These guarantees are transaction-specific and may be evidenced by a variety of underlying instruments such as: letters of credit, trade-related promissory notes, accepted drafts, bills of exchange, guarantees, bid and performance bonds and advance payment guarantees.
The program combines global reach and maximum flexibility to assist trade finance deals by covering large and small transactions across countries. A dedicated trade unit serves business requirements, covering up to 100% of transaction values as well as providing tenors of up to three years to support capital goods imports.
Why does Mars Curiosity rover have a laser raygun?
NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, is armed with a laser to zap rocks, not Martians. The laser can vaporize rocks at a distance of 23 feet.
Yes, NASA's Mars rover has a laser gun.
Skip to next paragraph
But there are no plans for Curiosity to zap Martians.
This cool little laser ? and it is tiny ? is designed to vaporize a pin-head sized area of Martian rock. The laser heats up the rock, and turns it into a glowing ionized gas. It's part of an instrument on the rover Curiosity known as the "ChemCam." The ChemCam observes the flash of vaporized rock and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify the chemical elements in the rock. The laser has a range of about 23 feet.
Here's how NASA describes the process:
"The pinhead-size spot hit by ChemCam's laser gets as much power focused on it as a million light bulbs, for five one-billionths of a second. Light from the resulting flash comes back to ChemCam through the instrument's telescope, mounted beside the laser high on the rover's camera mast. The telescope directs the light down an optical fiber to three spectrometers inside the rover. The spectrometers record intensity at 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light. Different chemical elements in the target emit light at different wavelengths."
If the ChemCam analysis proves interesting, the Curiosity rover can move in and drill or scoop up an actual sample of the rock. The pulse laser can also be used to "dust off" an interesting rock formation with a series of short bursts.?
NASA officials note that earlier Mars rover missions have been unable to identify some of the lighter elements, such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, lithium and boron. They note, for example, that a Mars mission in 2005 looked at an outcrop called "Comanche," and it took years of analyzing indirect evidence before the team could confidently infer the presence of carbon in the rock. ChemCam can identify carbon with one shot.
The idea for putting a laser on a Mars rover is traced by NASA back to 1997. At the time, Roger Wiens was a geochemist with the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was working on an idea for using lasers to investigate the moon. Wiens visited a chemistry laboratory building where a colleague, Dave Cremers, had been experimenting with a different laser technique. Cremers set up a cigar-size laser powered by a little 9-volt radio battery and pointed at a rock across the room.
"The room was well used. Every flat surface was covered with instruments, lenses or optical mounts," Wiens recalls in a NASA web site. "The filing cabinets looked like they had a bad case of acne. I found out later that they were used for laser target practice."
The ChemCam fits into Curiosity's mission to understand the chemistry of Mars and is? "an important next step in addressing the issue of life in the universe,"? John Grotzinger, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.,? told The Christian Science Monitor's Pete Spotts recently.
The Mars mission, launched Saturday Nov. 26, aims to reconstruct from the planet's minerals the history of water, a liquid essential to life as researchers currently understand it. As Spotts wrote:
"The record of environmental conditions early in the planet's history, when it was thought to have been at its wettest, is believed to be written in the layers of rock the Mars Science Laboratory's team has identified in Gale Crater, a 100-mile-wide impact feature with a mountain that soars three miles high from the center of the crater's floor.
After an eight-and-a-half-month cruise, a nail-biting final descent aims to place the six-wheeled robotic chemist squarely in the crater.
If all goes well, Curiosity will initially spend 98 weeks traversing some 12 miles or more ? driving, drilling, then analyzing the drill tailings to help build a picture of the environments that existed at the location as the planet made the transition from a wet planet, to a periodically wet planet, to the desiccated orb humans are visiting today."
BOSTON (AP) ? A university professor has pleaded not guilty to viewing child pornography on his laptop during a flight from Salt Lake City to Boston.
Grant Smith, a professor at the University of Utah, was ordered held on $75,000 bail Monday and told to have no unsupervised contact with children.
Massachusetts State Police say the 47-year-old Smith was sitting in first class Saturday afternoon when another passenger saw pornographic images, alerted a flight attendant and emailed a relative who contacted law enforcement.
Smith was arrested after landing on a charge of possession of child pornography. His lawyer says he has no criminal record.
Smith is a professor in the materials science and engineering department at Utah. He has been placed on administrative leave.
Lawmakers Look to Rein In Their Investing - The Caucus
The coverage was hard-hitting and shocking to some: Members of Congress received special opportunities to get in on the ground floor of stock offerings, and were actively trading in shares of companies ?whose prosperity they influence and whose conduct they help to regulate.?
Those words weren?t from this month?s ?60 Minutes? piece raising questions about the Wall Street dealings of top lawmakers or a new book exploring the same issue. They appeared in the 1968 expos? ?The Case Against Congress? by the muckrakers Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who laid out dubious financial maneuvers by lawmakers seeking to enrich themselves using their powerful positions and inside knowledge.
Finger-pointing over shady stock dealing in the hallways of the House and Senate is almost as old as Congress itself ? the infamous Cr?dit Mobilier scandal of the 1870s was partially about members of Congress cashing in on discounted railroad stock. Efforts to do something about it have never gained traction, leaving in doubt whether members of Congress and their well-informed staff advisers are subject to laws governing insider trading or free to profit from it.
But in this era of Occupy Wall Street protests and public loathing of Congress, the sentiment toward any nexus between Congress and Wall Street seems to have changed considerably. In the wake of the ?60 Minutes? story on Nov. 13, about 90 House members of both parties have been racing to sign on to legislation limiting Congressional trading, which Representative Louise Slaughter, Democrat of New York, has been introducing since 2006 to little effect.
?My colleagues are really starting to understand that light needs to be shed on insider trading and political intelligence which has been creeping into the halls of Congress for years now,? Ms. Slaughter said after the Financial Services Committee agreed to hold a hearing on the measure. ?There are 535 of us privileged enough to serve in this Congress, and the fact that any one of us would think to personally profit off the information that?s shared with us upsets me greatly.?
The bill she drafted with Representative Tim Walz, Democrat of Minnesota, would prohibit lawmakers from trading on knowledge gained from their status; prevent them from sharing that information; and establish new requirements for reporting transactions of $1,000 or more within 90 days.
The Dec. 6 hearing in the House was scheduled by Representative Spencer Bachus, the Alabama Republican who chairs the committee and was one of the lawmakers who came under scrutiny from ?60 Minutes,? though he challenged any suggestion that he traded improperly.
In the Senate, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is set to convene a hearing Thursday on new bills very similar to Ms. Slaughter?s ?Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge? or Stock Act.
Senator Scott P. Brown, the Massachusetts Republican who faces a difficult re-election bid, has introduced one; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat who is also up next year, is taking the lead on a competing bill that would change Congressional and Senate rules to ban insider trading.
?When members of Congress personally benefit from the legislation that they shape and vote on, there is a clear conflict of interest, and its effect on legislation can be corrosive,? Mr. Brown wrote in a letter to his colleagues.
Top lawmakers appear ready to get on board even if they might not be totally up to speed on the legislation.
?I?m not familiar with the details,? Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and House majority leader, told reporters recently about the Stock act, saying his sense was that it required more disclosure.
?If there is any sense of impropriety or any appearance of that, we should take extra steps to make sure the public?s cynicism is addressed,? he said.
Given the political environment, members of Congress appear eager to insulate themselves not only from the suggestion that they have some market advantage over average Americans but also from what they expect could become a potent campaign charge in a year when many usually safe incumbents could face a challenge.
Sarah Palin provided the contours of the political argument in an opinion article she published in The Wall Street Journal after the ?60 Minutes? report, asking how ?politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C., as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires??
?The corruption isn?t confined to one political party or just a few bad apples,? she wrote. ?It?s an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It?s an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.?
Many members of Congress say the problem is being exaggerated and that the vast majority of lawmakers play by the rules and would not take advantage of their position for financial gain.
But at a time when many American families are struggling financially and when anything Wall Street carries a negative connotation, members of Congress have evidently decided that even if there is no insider trading, they?d better do something about it.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) ? Restaurants around the world will soon use new DNA technology to assure patrons they are being served the genuine fish fillet or caviar they ordered, rather than inferior substitutes, an expert in genetic identification says.
In October, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved so-called DNA barcoding ? a standardized fingerprint that can identify a species like a supermarket scanner reads a barcode ? to prevent the mislabeling of both locally produced and imported seafood in the United States. Other national regulators around the world are also considering adopting DNA barcoding as a fast, reliable and cost-effective tool for identifying organic matter.
David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Washington-based Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said he has started discussions with the restaurant industry and seafood suppliers about utilizing the technology as a means of certifying the authenticity of delicacies.
"When they sell something that's really expensive, they want the consumer to believe that they're getting what they're paying for," Schindel told The Associated Press.
"We're going to start seeing a self-regulating movement by the high-end trade embracing barcoding as a mark of quality," he said.
While it would never be economically viable to DNA test every fish, it would be possible to test a sample of several fish from a trawler load, he said.
Schindel is organizer of the biennial International Barcode of Life Conference, which is being held Monday in the southern Australian city of Adelaide. The fourth in the conference series brings together 450 experts in the field to discuss new and increasingly diverse applications for the science.
Applications range from discovering what Australia's herd of 1 million feral camels feeds on in the Outback to uncovering fraud in Malaysia's herbal drug industry.
Schindel leads a consortium of scientists from almost 50 nations in overseeing the compilation of a global reference library for the Earth's 1.8 million known species.
The Barcode of Life Database so far includes more than 167,000 species.
Mislabeling is widespread in the seafood industry and usually involves cheaper types of fish being sold as more expensive varieties. A pair of New York high school students using DNA barcoding of food stocked in their own kitchens found in a 2009 study that caviar labeled as sturgeon was actually Mississippi paddlefish.
In a published study a year earlier, another pair of students from the high school found that one-fourth of fish samples they had collected around New York were incorrectly labeled as higher-priced fish.
Mislabeling of fish ? which account for almost half the world's vertebrate species ? also poses risks to human health and the environment.
In 2007, several people became seriously ill from eating illegally imported toxic pufferfish from China that had been mislabeled as monkfish to circumvent U.S. import restrictions. Endangered species are also sold as more common fish varieties.
Next Stop Mars! Huge NASA Rover Launches Toward Red Planet
(SPACE.com)
This story was updated at 10:30 a.m. EST.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. ? NASA has launched its next Mars rover, kicking off a long-awaited mission to investigate whether the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life.
The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket today (Nov. 26) at 10:02 a.m. EST (1502 GMT), streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The huge robot's next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take 8 1/2 months.
Joy Crisp, a deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called the liftoff "spectacular."
"This feels great," she said as she watched the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral. [Photos: Curiosity Rover Launches to Mars]
Pamela Conrad, deputy principal investigator for MSL at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said, "Every milestone feels like such a relief."
NASA expected around 13,500 people to watch the liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, with many more viewing from surrounding areas, setting a record for the number of spectators watching an unmanned launch.
"It's a beautiful day," Conrad added. "The sun's out, and all these people came out to watch."
The work Curiosity does when it finally arrives should revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet and pave the way for future efforts to hunt for potential Martian life, researchers said.
"It is absolutely a feat of engineering, and it will bring science like nobody's ever expected," Doug McCuistion, head of NASA's Mars exploration program, said of Curiosity. "I can't even imagine the discoveries that we're going to come up with."
A long road to launch
Curiosity's cruise to Mars may be less challenging than its long and bumpy trek to the launch pad, which took nearly a decade.
NASA began planning Curiosity's mission ? which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) ? back in 2003. The rover was originally scheduled to blast off in 2009, but it wasn't ready in time.
Launch windows for Mars-bound spacecraft are based on favorable alignments between Earth and the Red Planet, and they open up just once every two years. So the MSL team had to wait until 2011.
That two-year slip helped boost the mission's overall cost by 56 percent, to its current $2.5 billion. But today's successful launch likely chased away a lot of the bad feelings still lingering after the delay and cost overruns.
"I think you could visibly see the team morale improve ? the team grinned more, the team smiled more ? as the rover and the vehicle came closer, and more and more together here when we were at Kennedy [Space Center]" preparing for liftoff, MSL project manager Pete Theisinger of JPL said a few days before launch.
A rover behemoth
Curiosity is a beast of a rover. At 1 ton, it weighs five times more than each of the last two rovers NASA sent to Mars, the golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in January 2004 to search for signs of past water activity.
While Spirit and Opportunity each carried five science instruments, Curiosity sports 10, including a rock-zapping laser and equipment designed to identify organic compounds ? carbon-based molecules that are the building blocks of life as we know it.
Some of these instruments sit at the end of Curiosity's five-jointed, 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) robotic arm, which by itself is nearly half as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity.
The arm also wields a 2-inch (5-centimeter) drill, allowing Curiosity to take samples from deep inside Martian rocks. No previous Red Planet rover has been able to do this, researchers say.
"We have an incredible rover," said MSL deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of JPL. "It's the biggest and most capable scientific explorer we've ever sent to the surface of another planet."
Assessing Martian habitability
Curiosity is due to arrive at Mars in early August 2012, touching down at a 100-mile-wide (160-km) crater called Gale.
While the rover's launch was dramatic, its landing will be one for the record books, if all goes well. A rocket-powered sky crane will lower the huge robot down on cables ? a maneuver never tried before in the history of planetary exploration. [Video: Curiosity's Peculiar Landing]
A giant mound of sediment rises 3 miles (5 km) into the Martian air from Gale Crater's center. The layers in this mountain appear to preserve about one billion years of Martian history. Curiosity will study these different layers, gaining an in-depth understanding of past and present Martian environments and their potential to harbor life.
Life as we know it depends on liquid water. So the rover will likely spend a lot of time poking around near the mound's base, where Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted minerals that form in the presence of water, such as clays and sulfates.
"Going layer by layer, we can do the main goal of this mission, which is to search for habitable environments, " Vasavada said. "Were any of those time periods in early Mars history time periods that could have supported microbial life?"
But if Curiosity climbs higher, its observations could shed light on Mars' shift from relatively warm and wet long ago to cold, dry and dusty today, researchers said.
"We want to understand those transitions, so that's why we're headed there [to Gale]," said Bethany Ehlmann of JPL and Caltech in Pasadena.
Setting the stage for life detection
Curiosity isn't designed to search for Martian life. In fact, if the red dirt of Gale Crater does harbor microbes, the rover will almost certainly drive right over them unawares.
But MSL is a key bridge to future efforts that could actively hunt down possible Martian lifeforms, researchers said. Curiosity's work should help later missions determine where ? and when ? to look.
"We don't really detect life per se," Vasavada said. "We set the stage for that life detection by figuring out which time periods in early Mars history were the most likely to have supported life and even preserved evidence of that for us today."
You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way
On Thanksgiving, Pinterest?s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. ?Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later. Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. And some don?t. I don?t know the founders, but I thought I?d take apart Pinterest?s story to discuss growth and virality in consumer web startups. Pinterest was not an overnight success. On the contrary, its growth was surprisingly modest after Turkey Day 2009. Take a look at Pinterest?s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. I took both ends of this chart and estimated monthly compounded growth over Pinterest?s lifetime, then interpolated the curve using constant growth and put the results in this Google Spreadsheet.
Three Player Chess Means I'll Be Checkmated Twice As Much [Games]
Growing up with siblings I feel any game is better with more than just two players, so while this unique chess board that accommodates two opponents isn't a new idea, the gameplay sounds more polished than previous attempts. More »
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. The rocket will deliver a science laboratory to Mars to study potential habitable environments on the planet. (AP Photo/Terry Renna)
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. The rocket will deliver a science laboratory to Mars to study potential habitable environments on the planet. (AP Photo/Terry Renna)
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and Curiosity rover lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. The rocket will deliver a science laboratory to Mars to study potential habitable environments on the planet. (AP Photo/Terry Renna)
Backdropped by the Atlantic Ocean, the 197-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket rolls toward the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida Friday Nov. 25, 2011. Atop the rocket is NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover nicknamed Curiosity enclosed in its payload fairing. Liftoff is planned during a launch window which extends from 10:02 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. EST on Saturday Nov. 26. Curiosity, has 10 science instruments designed to search for signs of life, including methane, and will help determine if the gas is from a biological or geological source. (AP Photo/NASA
In this 2011 artist's rendering provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover examines a rock on Mars with a set of tools at the end of its arm, which extends about 2 meters (7 feet). The mobile robot is designed to investigate Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. (AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) ? A rover of "monster truck" proportions zoomed toward Mars on an 8?-month, 354 million-mile journey Saturday, the biggest, best equipped robot ever sent to explore another planet.
NASA's six-wheeled, one-armed wonder, Curiosity, will reach Mars next summer and use its jackhammer drill, rock-zapping laser machine and other devices to search for evidence that Earth's next-door neighbor might once have been home to the teeniest forms of life.
More than 13,000 invited guests jammed the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday morning to witness NASA's first launch to Mars in four years, and the first flight of a Martian rover in eight years.
Mars fever gripped the crowd.
NASA astrobiologist Pan Conrad, whose carbon compound-seeking instrument is on the rover, wore a bright blue, short-sleeve blouse emblazoned with rockets, planets and the words, "Next stop Mars!" She jumped, cheered and snapped pictures as the Atlas V rocket blasted off. So did Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist in charge of Curiosity's laser blaster, called ChemCam.
Surrounded by 50 U.S. and French members of his team, Wiens shouted "Go, Go, Go!" as the rocket soared into a cloudy sky. "It was beautiful," he later observed, just as NASA declared the launch a full success.
A few miles away at the space center's visitor complex, Lego teamed up with NASA for a toy spacecraft-building event for children this Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The irresistible lure: 800,000 Lego bricks.
The 1-ton Curiosity ? 10 feet long, 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall at its mast ? is a mobile, nuclear-powered laboratory holding 10 science instruments that will sample Martian soil and rocks, and with unprecedented skill, analyze them right on the spot.
It's as big as a car. But NASA's Mars exploration program director calls it "the monster truck of Mars."
"It's an enormous mission. It's equivalent of three missions, frankly, and quite an undertaking," said the ecstatic program director, Doug McCuistion. "Science fiction is now science fact. We're flying to Mars. We'll get it on the ground and see what we find."
The primary goal of the $2.5 billion mission is to see whether cold, dry, barren Mars might have been hospitable for microbial life once upon a time ? or might even still be conducive to life now. No actual life detectors are on board; rather, the instruments will hunt for organic compounds.
Curiosity's 7-foot arm has a jackhammer on the end to drill into the Martian red rock, and the 7-foot mast on the rover is topped with high-definition and laser cameras.
With Mars the ultimate goal for astronauts, NASA will use Curiosity to measure radiation at the red planet. The rover also has a weather station on board that will provide temperature, wind and humidity readings; a computer software app with daily weather updates is planned.
No previous Martian rover has been so sophisticated.
The world has launched more than three dozen missions to the ever-alluring Mars, which is more like Earth than the other solar-system planets. Yet fewer than half those quests have succeeded.
Just two weeks ago, a Russian spacecraft ended up stuck in orbit around Earth, rather than en route to the Martian moon Phobos.
"Mars really is the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system," said NASA's Colleen Hartman, assistant associate administrator for science. "It's the death planet, and the United States of America is the only nation in the world that has ever landed and driven robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, and now we're set to do it again."
Curiosity's arrival next August will be particularly hair-raising.
In a spacecraft first, the rover will be lowered onto the Martian surface via a jet pack and tether system similar to the sky cranes used to lower heavy equipment into remote areas on Earth.
Curiosity is too heavy to use air bags like its much smaller predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, did in 2004. Besides, this new way should provide for a more accurate landing.
Astronauts will need to make similarly precise landings on Mars one day.
Curiosity will spend a minimum of two years roaming around Gale Crater, chosen from among more than 50 potential landing sites because it's so rich in minerals. Scientists said if there is any place on Mars that might have been ripe for life, it may well be there.
The rover should go farther and work harder than any previous Mars explorer because of its power source: 10.6 pounds of radioactive plutonium. The nuclear generator was encased in several protective layers in case of a launch accident.
NASA expects to put at least 12 miles on the odometer, once the rover sets down on the Martian surface.
McCuistion anticipates being blown away by the never-before-seen vistas. "Those first images are going to just be stunning, I believe. It will be like sitting in the bottom of the Grand Canyon," he said at a post-launch news conference.
This is the third astronomical mission to be launched from Cape Canaveral by NASA since the retirement of the venerable space shuttle fleet this summer. The Juno probe is en route to Jupiter, and twin spacecraft named Grail will arrive at Earth's moon on New Year's Eve and Day.
Unlike Juno and Grail, Curiosity suffered development programs and came in two years late and nearly $1 billion over budget. Scientists involved in the project noted Saturday that the money is being spent on Earth, not Mars, and the mission is costing every American about the price of a movie.
"I'll leave you to judge for yourself whether or not that's a movie you'd like to see," said California Institute of Technology's John Grotzinger, the project scientist. "I know that's one I would."
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Public release date: 28-Nov-2011
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