Source: www.cbsnews.com --- Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Last year, the Brooklyn Nets Coach smashed his Cadillac SUV into a utility pole in Long Island, N.Y. while intoxicated, police said ...
Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/cbsnews/feed/~3/YsDBGAumh1c/
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By Alister Bull and Pedro da Costa
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday the U.S. central bank still expects to start scaling back its massive bond purchase program later this year, but he left open the option of changing that plan if the economic outlook shifted.
While sticking closely to a time line to wind down the bond buying that he first outlined last month, Bernanke went out of his way in testimony to Congress to stress that nothing was set in stone.
"Our asset purchases depend on economic and financial developments, but they are by no means on a preset course," he said in remarks prepared for delivery to the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.
The remarks pushed up U.S. stock futures and government bond prices, while the dollar softened against the euro and the yen.
"There is something in these comments for everybody," said Omer Esiner, chief market analyst at Commonwealth Foreign Exchange in Washington. "Bernanke has done a good job of leaving himself plenty of maneuver room in terms of policy."
Bernanke's semi-annual testimony to Congress, which may be his last if the chairman steps down when his term ends in January, as many expect, will be followed by a lengthy question and answer session with the committee's members when the hearing begins at 10 a.m. (1400 GMT). He appears again before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.
The Fed has held overnight interest rates near zero since December 2008, while more than tripling its balance sheet to about $3.46 trillion with a series of bond purchases. In its third and latest asset purchase program, it has been buying $85 billion in U.S. Treasury and mortgage-related bonds each month to drive down borrowing costs and spur investment and hiring.
Bernanke set off a brief but fierce global market sell-off last month when he outlined plans to reduce this quantitative easing program, and he has joined a slew of officials since then who have spelled out their intention to keep rates near zero well after the bond buying ends.
Under the timeline Bernanke laid out on June 19, Fed policymakers would likely reduce their monthly bond buys later this year and halt them altogether by mid-2014, as long as the economic recovery unfolds as expected.
In his remarks on Wednesday, Bernanke said the pace of asset purchases could be reduced "somewhat more quickly" if economic conditions improved faster than expected. On the other hand, the current pace "could be maintained for longer" if the labor market outlook darkened, or inflation did not look like it was rising back toward the Fed's 2 percent goal.
"Indeed, if needed, the (Fed's policy-setting) committee would be prepared to employ all its tools, including an increase (in) the pace of purchases for a time, to promote a return to maximum employment in a context of price stability," Bernanke said.
STILL EASY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
While the end of the Fed's bond buying may be in view, Bernanke repeated that officials will keep rates near zero at least until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5 percent, as long as inflation remains in check. Most do not expect rates to rise until sometime in 2015.
He also said that the Fed would look closely at any decline in unemployment to see whether it was being driven by strength in hiring or a decline in the number of Americans looking for work, in which case the central bank would be more patient before raising rates.
Any rate hike cycle, he said, would be gradual.
Some Fed officials have been concerned about the low level of inflation, with the central bank's preferred price gauge running well below its target.
Data on Tuesday, however, showed that inflation firmed last month, while confidence among home builders soared to a 7-1/2 year high this month.
On Thursday, however, the government said groundbreaking for homes fell to a 10-month low. In addition, retail sales were weak in June, and second-quarter GDP is expected to come in at around a dismal 1 percent annual rate, painting a very mixed picture for Fed policymakers.
Bernanke said the economic recovery was continuing at a moderate pace thanks to a stronger housing sector, which was helping conditions in the labor market improve gradually.
He also repeated that the Fed felt the risks to the economy had decreased since the fall.
But he said higher taxes and cuts in federal spending could still turn out to exert a larger drag on U.S. growth than expected, and that worsening conditions overseas could hurt conditions back home.
"With the recovery still proceeding at only a moderate pace, the economy remains vulnerable to unanticipated shocks, including the possibility that global economic growth may be slower than currently anticipated," he said.
(Additional reporting by Paige Gance in Washington and Nick Olivari in New York; Editing by Neil Stempleman and Tim Ahmann)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/facing-lawmakers-bernanke-walk-fine-line-fed-policy-041029383.html
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Source: www.greencarcongress.com --- Tuesday, July 16, 2013
California?s Interagency Working Group on Refinery Safety released its draft report outlining steps and recommendations to improve public and worker safety at and near the state?s oil refineries. The Interagency Working Group, composed of thirteen agencies and departments and the Governor?s office, was formed following the fire at Chevron?s Richmond oil refinery last August. The fire created a vaporized plume that spread to surrounding communities. The Working Group met over eight months to examine ways to improve public and worker safety through enhanced oversight of refineries, and to strengthen emergency preparedness in anticipation of any future incident. Regular internal meetings were informed by meetings with a wide variety of stakeholders including those from industry, labor, community and environmental groups, academic institutions, and local emergency response units. The report includes an assessment of the current state of refinery safety with input from stakeholders, a study by the RAND Corporation, and findings by the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal OSHA), the US Chemical Safety Board, and Chevron?s own internal investigation. Recommendations of the working group include: Create an Interagency RefineryTask Force by 1 September 2013, housed within the California Environmental Protection Agency, to coordinate agencies? activities and carry out the recommended actions. As directed by the Governor?s Office ...
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/greencarcongress/TrBK/~3/fJSwzwJBZzg/caref-20130716.html
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Israel has launched a forced repatriation of Eritrean migrants that amounts to a grave violation of their human rights because of the risk of persecution in their reclusive homeland, an advocacy group said on Monday.
Authorities have been trying to curb African immigration as Israelis fear that they may eventually be outnumbered. But humanitarian groups say that forcibly returning African migrants home often exposes them to rights abuses including torture.
Some 60,000 Africans, including 35,000 Eritreans, have walked over a long porous desert border with Egypt into Israel since 2006, Israeli government figures show, and many live in gritty districts of Tel Aviv.
Israel regards most as illegal job-seekers but rights agencies say many should be considered for political asylum because of poor human rights records of their home governments.
Hotline for Migrant Workers (HMW), an Israeli human rights group, said an initial group of 14 Eritrean men were flown to Asmara, the Eritrean capital, on Sunday, after receiving $1,500 each from Israeli authorities.
They were driven to the airport from one of two desert detention centers that Israel has expanded. A law passed a year ago, and now being contested in its high court, allows the country to jail migrants it says arrived illegally.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry declined to comment on the HMW report, other than to say that some "people are returning hom." She did not give their nationalities.
The men who left on Sunday were the first sent back to Eritrea, which was accused last year by the UN human rights chief of practicing torture and summary executions.
Israel had said in the past that it was seeking third-country destinations for Eritreans.
Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator for HMW, a group that objects to most deportations of migrants, told Reuters the latest repatriations were "a grave human rights violation."
Rozen said those repatriated had signed consent forms but she argued their agreement could not be seen as voluntary because Israeli authorities made clear the only way they would be freed from detention was by returning home.
She said at least one of the Eritreans had said he was a military deserter, and could face punishment at home.
A Tel Aviv-based representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees monitoring migrants' treatment in Israel had no immediate comment. She said she was seeking confirmation from Israel of the Eritreans' repatriation.
New York-based Human Rights Watch also condemned the new repatriations. In a statement emailed to news media, Gerry Simpson, a senior HRW refugee researcher, accused Israel of "using the threat of prolonged detention to force Eritrean and Sudanese nationals to give up their asylum claims."
Worldwide, HRW said, around 80 percent of Eritrean asylum seekers are granted some form of protection because of credible fears of persecution relating to punishment for evading indefinite military service in Eritrea and other widespread rights abuses in the small Horn of Africa state.
At least one group of Africans was flown out of Israel to South Sudan in the past year and other migrants have been offered cash to leave voluntarily. Some 2,000 Africans are being held in the southern detention centers.
(Reuters)
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The approach has unlocked a trove of microbial diversity, obtained from nine diverse environments on Earth, such as hydrothermal vents, a bioreactor and a gold mine
Image: Nature magazine
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An emerging technique for analyzing genomes has given scientists a look at microbes that were until now difficult to study, revealing unexpected links among different branches of the tree of life.
Led by Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the US Department of Energy?s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, researchers used single-cell sequencing to read the genomes of 201 bacterial and archaeal cells taken from nine diverse environments, such as hydrothermal vents and an underground gold mine. None of the organisms had ever been sequenced or cultivated in a laboratory. The results are published today in Nature.
?This is an astounding paper,? says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado?Boulder. ?The achievement of hundreds of genome sequences from single cells at a shot is an entirely new level of microbiology.?
Single-cell sequencing enables scientists to decipher the genome of just one cell by amplifying its DNA by 1-billion-fold,?opening the way to studying ?microbial dark matter?. These are organisms that have been discovered through methods such as metagenomics studies ? which examine batches of micro-organisms living in a common environment ? but are difficult or impossible to grow in the lab.
Woyke and her group attempted to explore this dark matter by selecting a highly diverse range of microbes and sequencing a portion of their genomes (which could range from less than 10% to more than 90% depending on the cell). The sequences clarified the microbes? relationships to one another and to other species.
The work reveals that some conventional boundaries between the kingdoms of life are not as rigid as has been thought. For instance, the researchers suggest that one bacterial lineage synthesizes purine bases ? building blocks of DNA and RNA ? using enzymes previously thought to exist only in archaea. Meanwhile, three of the archaeal cells sequenced in the study harbor sigma factors, which initiate RNA transcription and have previously been found only in bacteria.
The researchers also found a bacterium that has ?recoded? the three-letter series of bases UGA ? known as the opal stop codon. In almost every other organism, this nucleotide sequence signals the cell to stop translating RNA into protein. But in this organism, it tells the cell to make the amino acid glycine. The team propose to place it into a new bacterial phylum, called Gracilibacteria.
A similar recoding has been found in another bacterium, suggesting that the code of life may be more flexible than scientists have assumed.
?If you consider all the novelty we found in these 201 genomes, it?s astounding, because we?re only looking at a small part of the tremendous diversity out there,? Woyke says.
The researchers say that their work can help put more leaves on the bare branches of the tree of life. Woyke and her colleagues estimate that although there are millions of microbial species falling into at least 60 major phyla, 88% of all cultivated microbes fall into just four bacterial phyla.
Their in-depth studies gave enough new information about microbial relationships to better classify about 340 million sequence reads from previous metagenomics projects. But, they estimate, some 16,000 cells would need to be sequenced to cover even half the world?s unstudied microbial lineages. So the field still has a long way to go, says Jeffrey McLean, a microbiologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, California.
?This highlights the power of single-cell genomics, but also reveals the need to increase our efforts to close this huge knowledge gap of the microbial diversity on Earth,? McLean says.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on July 14, 2013.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/Vnna3jnHwRE/article.cfm
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The City of San Jose and its more than 5,000 employees will now be using Microsoft Office 365, Windows Azure and StorSimple to expand productivity, reduce operational costs, and deliver improved services to more than 984,000 residents in the Silicon Valley.
?The combination of these services supports both our long-term technology strategy and the immediate needs of our employees and residents,? said Vijay Sammeta, San Jose?s chief information officer. ?We turned to Office 365 for secured cloud productivity, which in turn will help us lower our total cost of ownership and support a more mobile and connected workforce of the future. The combination of Windows Azure and StorSimple will enable us to streamline storage infrastructure support, which enables our people to make the shift from basic backend operations to citizen engagement and service delivery.?
The city?s transition to Microsoft?s enterprise cloud platform will begin this summer, and cross-organization implementation will take about six months. For more on the benefits and reasons the ?capital of Silicon Valley? is moving to Office 365, Windows Azure, and StorSimple, check out the Microsoft press release, the Office 365 blog, the?Azure team blog,?or the Microsoft on Government blog.
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Jennifer Warnick
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Many US retailers use a variety of sales-boosting strategies, including tracking shoppers in stores. Retailers can track individuals? movements throughout the store, sensors collecting information from smartphones as they connect to Wi-Fi, NYT reports.
The sensors can monitor which departments the shoppers? visit and how much time they spend there.
Today many retailers use the tracking system to have proper sales, The New York Times reports. Companies can recognize returning shoppers by their smartphone identification codes and even gather data about the mood and behavior of the clients. When a customer downloads a retailer?s app or provides an email address while using an in-store WiFi, the service shows his full profile with the number of? recent visits, preferences and? purchase history.
Another retailer Nordstrom has used tracking since October 2012, claims it is no longer using data collection in the stores.
While retailers assure customers they do not collect sensitive data and the tracking is anonymous, the majority of shoppers get nervous about it. ?I think it?s outrageous?, John Soma, executive director of the University of Denver Privacy Foundation, told Denver?s ABC7. ?What are they going to do with that data? Are they going to keep it forever? Are they going to aggregate it? Are they going to sell it to 'affiliates?' We just don't know. That's what's so troubling to me".
Still, physical retailers argue that they are doing nothing more than e-commerce sites do online, only aiming to serve their customers better.
Meanwhile, some consumers are happy to trade privacy for deals and bonuses. Gift cards and cash in exchange for tracking apps seem not so frightening.
?I would just love it if a coupon pops up on my phone. Stores are trying to sell, so that makes sense,? - Linda Vertlieb, a blogger from Philadelphia, told The New York Times.
Anyone can turn their phone off and take the battery out before heading into one of the stores that are equipped with those sensors.
Source: http://rt.com/business/smartphone-us-store-wifi-112/
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