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Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Boston nurses tell of bloody marathon aftermath
BOSTON (AP) ? The screams and cries of bloody marathon bombing victims still haunt the nurses who treated them one week ago. They did their jobs as they were trained to do, putting their own fears in a box during their 12-hour shifts so they could better comfort their patients.
Only now are these nurses beginning to come to grips with what they endured ? and are still enduring as they continue to care for survivors. They are angry, sad and tired. A few confess they would have trouble caring for the surviving suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, if he were at their hospital and they were assigned his room.
And they are thankful. They tick off the list of their hospital colleagues for praise: from the security officers who guarded the doors to the ER crews who mopped up trails of blood. The doctors and ? especially ? the other nurses.
Nurses from Massachusetts General Hospital, which treated 22 of the 187 victims the first day, candidly recounted their experiences in interviews with The Associated Press. Here are their memories:
THEY WERE SCREAMING
Megann Prevatt, ER nurse: "These patients were terrified. They were screaming. They were crying ... We had to fight back our own fears, hold their hands as we were wrapping their legs, hold their hands while we were putting IVs in and starting blood on them, just try to reassure them: 'We don't know what happened, but you're here. You're safe with us.' ... I didn't know if there were going to be more bombs exploding. I didn't know how many patients we'd be getting. All these thoughts are racing through your mind."
SHRAPNEL, NAILS
Adam Barrett, ICU nurse, shared the patient bedside with investigators searching for clues that might break the case. "It was kind of hard to hear somebody say, 'Don't wash that wound. You might wash evidence away.'" Barrett cleaned shrapnel and nails from the wounds of some victims, side by side with law enforcement investigators who wanted to examine wounds for blast patterns. The investigator's request took him aback at first. "I wasn't stopping to think, 'What could be in this wound that could give him a lead?'"
THEIR FACES, THEIR SMILES
Jean Acquadra, ICU nurse, keeps herself going by thinking of her patients' progress. "The strength is seeing their faces, their smiles, knowing they're getting better. They may have lost a limb, but they're ready to go on with their lives. They want to live. I don't know how they have the strength, but that's my reward: Knowing they're getting better."
She is angry and doesn't think she could take care of Tsarnaev, who is a patient at another hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: "I don't have any words for him."
THE NEED FOR JUSTICE
Christie Majocha, ICU nurse: "Even going home, I didn't get away from it," Majocha said. She is a resident of Watertown, the community paralyzed Friday by the search for the surviving suspect. She helped save the lives of maimed bombing victims on Monday. By week's end, she saw the terror come to her own neighborhood. The manhunt, she felt, was a search for justice, and was being carried out directly for the good of her patients.
"I knew these faces (of the victims). I knew what their families looked like. I saw their tears," she said. "I know those families who are so desperate to see this end."
On Friday night, she joined the throngs cheering the police officers and FBI agents, celebrating late into the night even though she had to return to the hospital at 7 a.m. the next day.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/boston-nurses-tell-bloody-marathon-aftermath-200449911.html
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Taliban attacks kill 9 people in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Insurgents shot six police officers dead at a checkpoint and a suicide bomber killed three civilians at a shopping bazaar in two attacks in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday.
The attacks came during a surge in hostilities as Afghanistan's spring fighting season begins. This year's is being closely watched because Afghan forces must operate with less support from the international military coalition. With foreign forces due to hand over combat responsibilities to the local forces next year, the current fighting is a test of their ability to take on the country's insurgency.
Reflecting the surge in violence, the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office reported Sunday that insurgent-initiated attacks increased by 47 percent during the first quarter of 2013, compared to the same period last year. The U.S.-led NATO coalition has stopped releasing statistics on insurgent attacks in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's Defense Ministry said the Afghan army carried out 2,209 military operations during a monthlong period ending Sunday. During that time, 467 insurgents and 107 soldiers were killed, and 362 militants were arrested, the ministry said in a report issued Sunday.
April has been the deadliest month this year for security forces and Afghan and foreign civilians. According to an Associated Press tally, 222 people have been killed in violence around the nation this month, including Sunday's nine fatalities.
The Taliban assault on the checkpoint came early Sunday in the Dayak district of Ghazni province, killing six police officers, wounding one and leaving one missing, said Col. Mohammad Hussain, Ghazni's deputy police chief. One of many Afghan local police forces was running the checkpoint. The forces are recruited at the village level to protect their townships from insurgents and other fighters, including criminals. The local forces are nominally under the control of the Afghan Interior Ministry.
On Friday, Taliban insurgents attacked a local police checkpoint in Andar, a district of Ghazni province neighboring Dayak. They killed 13 officers, according to Sidiq Sidiqi, the Interior Ministry spokesman.
The second Sunday attack hit Paktika province, which borders Ghazni. A suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a shopping bazaar around midday, killing three people and wounding five civilians and two police officers, said Mokhlis Afghan, the spokesman for the provincial governor. Among the dead was Asanullah Sadat, who stepped down as the district's governor two years ago.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for Taliban, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing. In an email to reporters, he said Taliban used the bomber to target Sadat because of his close relations with the Afghan government and the U.S.
___
AP writer Rahim Faiez contributed to this report.
___
Online: The ANSO report: www.ngosafety.org
___
Follow Thomas Wagner on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/tjpwagner .
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/taliban-attacks-kill-9-people-afghanistan-120103968.html
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Flight of Boston Marathon bombing suspects ended in mayhem
By Jonathan Allen
(Reuters) - As a massive manhunt geared up for the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing on Thursday evening, the brothers wanted in the attack decided to take their chances by venturing into the streets near their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Before the night was out, one of the young men was dead, crushed beneath his own hijacked getaway car, while the other cowered in a boat, bleeding heavily, as police closed in.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, broke their cover hours after authorities released photographs of the suspects. It is unclear why they decided to remain in the area so long after Monday's attack.
The evening began to unravel when the brothers encountered Sean Collier, a 26-year-old police officer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to accounts by police and government agencies.
Collier had been responding to a call of a disturbance at the university's Cambridge campus. Whether that call was connected to the brothers is unclear. Earlier reports that the pair had robbed a nearby convenience store were later withdrawn by the authorities.
In any case, Collier's body was found in his car at about 10.30 p.m. on Thursday. He had been shot multiple times, in what Boston Police Chief Ed Davis described as an assassination-style murder.
The brothers, meanwhile, were fleeing west across Cambridge to the nearby suburb of Watertown in a hijacked car. For a time, the car's owner was an unwilling passenger and listened as the pair told him that they had bombed the marathon earlier in the week.
After about half an hour, the brothers pulled into a gas station and forced the man to withdraw cash from an ATM before leaving him behind. Apparently unknown to them, police were tracking their movements using the man's cellphone, left behind in his car. Somewhere along the way, they stole a second a car.
AT LEAST SIX BOMBS
At about 12:30 a.m. on Friday, a police officer from the suburb of Watertown found the brothers, each now in his own stolen car, on a quiet street. Almost immediately, the brothers emerged from their vehicles and began firing, Edward Deveau, the chief of Watertown police, said in an interview with CNN on Saturday.
He said other officers arrived to find themselves in the middle of a gun battle, including a transit police officer who would be shot in the groin. About 200 rounds were shot in five or 10 minutes.
The brothers, armed with handguns and a rifle, also lobbed explosive devices, some resembling crude grenades, according to Deveau.
Police believe they had at least six bombs, three of which exploded, Deveau said. One was a pressure cooker bomb similar to a device used in the marathon bombing, Boston police said.
Towards the end of the battle, Tamerlan began walking towards the officers, shooting as he approached. Then, a few feet from the officers, his ammunition ran out, Deveau said.
He was tackled by the officers, who attempted to handcuff him in the street. Meanwhile, Dzhokhar had gotten back into a car and raced towards the group.
"One of them yells, 'Look out!', and here comes the black SUV, the carjacked car, directly at them," Devaux said.
The officers were able to dive out of the way. Tamerlan was not. He was hit by his brother's car and dragged a short way down the street, Deveau said, leaving a streak of blood in the asphalt that was still visible on Saturday, according to residents.
Tamerlan would later be pronounced dead at a hospital, while the younger brother disappeared into the night, leaving the car abandoned and fleeing on foot.
As the manhunt dragged on through Friday, residents of the Boston area were urged to stay indoors as officers in combat gear went house to house in a cordoned-off zone of about 20 streets in Watertown.
Even as authorities were announcing that the "stay-indoors" request was being lifted at about 6 p.m., a call came in to the Watertown police that there appeared to be someone hiding in a boat stored in a backyard about half a mile from the earlier shootout.
The hiding place was just outside of the perimeter of the manhunt during the day, police said.
Officers stormed the property around 7 p.m., and once again a flurry of gunfire reverberated on the streets of Watertown. Police lobbed stun grenades in an attempt to immobilize whoever was in the boat.
But police did not immediately rush the boat once the initial gunfire subsided. They said they hoped to take the suspect alive and were concerned that Dzhokhar might be carrying additional explosives or that the boat's half-full gas tank might be ignited.
As the siege dragged on for more than an hour, a police robot moved in to lift a plastic sheeting covering the boat.
An FBI negotiator stared down at the boat from the second floor of the house, relying on a helicopter flying overhead with heat-tracking devices to confirm that someone was still moving beneath the tarpaulin.
It took the negotiator 15 or 20 minutes, but, eventually, a badly injured Dzhokhar emerged from beneath the tarpaulin, lifting his shirt as instructed to show he was unarmed.
Dzhokhar, who had lost a considerable amount of blood, was loaded into an ambulance and rushed under police escort to Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in serious condition.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Lovering; editing by Frank McGurty and Xavier Briand)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/flight-boston-marathon-bombing-suspects-ended-mayhem-231007942.html
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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
S&P sets new milestone, led by tech and financials
By Angela Moon
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 climbing to a new all-time intraday record as investors scooped up technology and financial shares that recently lagged other sectors' gains.
The S&P 500 was the latest major U.S. stock market index to join the recent trend of repeatedly breaking record highs. The Dow Jones industrial average has been setting new highs for the past few weeks.
Financial shares helped lead the advance, with the S&P financial sector index <.spsy> gaining 1.2 percent, while the S&P information technology sector index <.splrct> gained 1.9 percent. In the past month, both sectors have lagged as investors pushed into more defensive areas, including healthcare and consumer staples.
Boosting the Nasdaq, Facebook Inc
The benchmark S&P 500 rose as high as 1,587.80, breaking the record intraday level of 1,576.09 set on October 11, 2007. The Dow hit yet another intraday milestone, rising as high as 14,817.06.
The Federal Reserve unexpectedly released the minutes from its most recent policy-setting meeting five hours early. The minutes showed a few policymakers expected to taper the pace of asset purchases by mid-year and end them later this year, while several others expected to slow the pace a bit later and halt the quantitative easing program by year-end.
The softer economic data that has been seen since the Fed last met is likely to give the market a reason to not pay much attention to the time frame for ending QE discussed in the minutes, said Kate Warne, investment strategist at Edward Jones in St Louis.
"I was a little surprised that they were discussing the end of QE by the end of the year as though somehow all the signs we were seeing suggested the economy was going to continue to show strong gains," Warne said.
"At the time of those minutes, we knew the sequester was quite likely to have a negative effect and that there were many other things suggesting we would see not as strong economic growth through the middle of the year."
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 142.16 points, or 0.97 percent, at 14,815.62. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 18.68 points, or 1.19 percent, at 1,587.29. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 57.52 points, or 1.78 percent, at 3,295.38.
Whether the stock market rally can push even higher will depend on how the earnings season shapes up, Warne said.
"Overall, the trend is higher, but we could certainly see disappointing earnings be a catalyst for a short-term pullback."
Among the 5 percent of S&P 500 companies that have reported results so far, almost three-quarters have topped expectations, according to Thomson Reuters data.
But quarterly profits are expected to grow just 1.5 percent from a year ago, down from a January estimate of 4.3 percent. The lowered expectations could make it easier for companies to beat analysts' estimates and propel the market further.
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Hospital operator Health Management Associates Inc
(Editing by Jan Paschal)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stock-futures-point-higher-start-081151044--finance.html
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Monday, April 8, 2013
Car Insurance Rate Quotes in Oklahoma on the Cheap Zach on ...
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It?ll be effective if you can compare low car insurance quotes in Oklahoma instantly online. There are some providers of auto insurance quotes provider that available offer their service online. You can access it on the line of internet network by using your private computer. There are some quotes actually that available for you for reducing premium after signed with certain company. It?s time for you to save time by using these auto insurance quotes providers.
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Source: http://zachshelby.org/car-insurance-rate-quotes-in-oklahoma-on-the-cheap/
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Sunday, April 7, 2013
Report: Anti-Semitic incidents surge in 2012
FILE - In this Monday, March 19, 2012 file photo, police officers gather at the site of a shooting where a gunman opened fire in front of a Jewish school in a city in Toulouse, southwestern France. Israeli researchers and Jewish leaders on Sunday reported 30 percent jump in anti-Semitic violence and vandalism last year, topped by a deadly school shooting in France, and expressed alarm about the rise of neo-Nazi parties in Hungary, Greece and other countries. (AP Photo/Bruno Martin, File)
FILE - In this Monday, March 19, 2012 file photo, police officers gather at the site of a shooting where a gunman opened fire in front of a Jewish school in a city in Toulouse, southwestern France. Israeli researchers and Jewish leaders on Sunday reported 30 percent jump in anti-Semitic violence and vandalism last year, topped by a deadly school shooting in France, and expressed alarm about the rise of neo-Nazi parties in Hungary, Greece and other countries. (AP Photo/Bruno Martin, File)
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) ? Israeli researchers and Jewish leaders on Sunday reported a 30 percent jump in anti-Semitic violence and vandalism last year, topped by a deadly school shooting in France, and expressed alarm about the rise of far-right parties in Hungary, Greece and other countries.
Following a two-year decline in the figures, the annual report on worldwide anti-Semitic incidents recorded 686 attacks in 34 countries, ranging from physical violence to vandalism of synagogues and cemeteries, compared to 526 in 2011. The report was issued at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across Europe.
The report linked the March 2012 shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, where an extremist Muslim gunman killed four, to a series of copycat attacks, particularly in France, where physical assaults on Jews almost doubled.
Researchers who presented the report at the university on Sunday said they had also found a direct correlation between the strengthening of extreme right-wing parties in some European countries and high levels of anti-Semitic incidents, as well as attacks on other minorities and immigrants.
They said Europe's economic crisis was fueling the success of parties like Jobbik in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece and Svoboda in Ukraine.
Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, called for strong action by the European Union, charging that governments ? particularly Hungary ?were not doing enough to curb these parties' activities and protect minorities.
"Neo-Nazis have been once again legalized in Europe, they are openly sitting in parliaments," said Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress.
Golden Dawn swept into Greece's parliament for the first time in June on an anti-immigrant platform. The party rejects the neo-Nazi label but is fond of Nazi literature and references. In Hungary, a Jobbik lawmaker has called for Jews to be screened as potential security risks. The leader of Ukraine's Svoboda denies his party is anti-Semitic but has repeatedly used derogatory terms to refer to Jews.
The report by the university's Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry found little correlation between the increase of anti-Semitic attacks and Israel's military operation in Gaza in November. While there was a spike in incidents at the time, it was much smaller in number and intensity than the one that followed the Toulouse attack, said Roni Stauber, the chief researcher on the project.
"This shows that the desire to harm Jews is deeply rooted among extremist Muslims and right-wingers, regardless of events in the Middle East," he said.
The release of the report was timed to coincide with Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was starting Sunday at sundown.
__
On the net:
http://www.kantorcenter.tau.ac.il/
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Friday, April 5, 2013
Near-death experiences can be more vivid than real life
Long after a near-death experience, people recall the incident more vividly and emotionally than real and false memories, new research suggests.
"It's really something that stays in the mind of people as a clear trace, and it's even more clear than a real memory," said Vanessa Charland-Verville, a neuropsychologist in the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege in Belgium. She, along with colleagues, detailed the study online March 27 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Mysterious phenomenon
Roughly 5 percent of the general population and 10 percent of cardiac-arrest victims report near-death experiences, yet no one really knows what they are, Charland-Verville told LiveScience.
Across cultures and religions, people describe similar themes: being out of body; passing through a tunnel, river or door toward warm, glowing light; seeing dead loved ones greet them; and being called back to their bodies or told it's not time to go yet.
Some think near-death experiences show the spirit and body can be separated. Others say oxygen deprivation or a cascade of chemicals in the failing brain are to blame. Some believe near-death experiences reveal the existence of God or heaven.
But what makes finding an explanation even more complicated is that healthy people in meditative trances and those taking hallucinogens, such as ketamine, describe very similar experiences, Charland-Verville told LiveScience.? [Trippy Tales: The History of 8 Hallucinogens]
Life-changing events
Because it's impossible to monitor these events in real time, Charland-Verville and her colleagues spoke with those who had gone through these trancelike states, sometimes years earlier.
"People are transformed forever by the experience," she said. "People say they're more empathic, they changed jobs, they're giving, they want to help the planet."
The team gave memory questionnaires to eight coma survivors who had near-death experiences, six who had coma memories but no memory of near-death experiences, seven who had no memories of their coma, and 18 people who had not had any of these experiences.
The questions assessed people's memories of imagined events as well as memories of near-death events, comas and emotional events from real life.
Even years later, the near-death experiences seemed hyperreal. In fact, they were remembered more clearly and emotionally than all other types of memories.
Charland-Verville speculates that these experiences have shaped religious symbols across cultures since the dawn of time. Now, the researchers want to study the brain activity of these individuals.
"If it changed people's lives, there must be something different in their brain functioning," she said.
Unanswered questions
The findings, though fascinating, can't answer whether the mind and body can be separated, said Christian Agrillo, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy who was not involved in the study.
"But it seems to suggest that what people recall in that moment is particularly genuine," Agrillo told LiveScience. "It's not a false memory that occurs after the event."
In addition, the study was small and asked people after the fact, making it tricky to draw firm conclusions, Zalika Klemenc-Keti?, a physician at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, wrote in an email.
In addition, "the study does not answer the question of whether [near-death experiences] really happened to patients or are only hallucinations, (which can be also perceived as real)," Zalika Klemenc-Keti? wrote.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose.?Follow?LiveScience @livescience, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/near-death-experiences-more-vivid-real-life-181840001.html
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Dresses donated to rural Alaskan prom held in shadow of a sleeping volcano
In a rural Alaskan boarding school, away from moms and dads, prom dresses are hard to come by. But thanks to a volunteer organization teamed up with Alaskan Airlines, girls at this boarding school received free dresses and primping for their big night.?
By Staff,?Associated Press / April 4, 2013
Volunteer hair stylist Khit Sypakanphay of Anchorage, Alaska, right, fixes the hair of Mount Edgecumbe High School student Kaitlyn Love of King Cove, Alaska, before her prom. The Prom Princess program, which secures donated dresses and brings in hair stylists and nail artists to get the students ready for their prom, is in its fifth year.
Mark Thiessen/Associated Press
EnlargeFor girls, proms are all about the dresses. Kayla Wolfe just never imagined what it would take to pick one.
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First, there was what felt like a million questions. "What kind of dress was I looking for? What size am I? What kind of color? Long or short?" said the 15-year-old freshman at Mount Edgecumbe High School, a state-run boarding school in Sitka, Alaska.
Her answers gave her passage into a room stocked full of dresses ? a bounty that Kayla, or most students, in rural Alaska have never seen.
The dresses were brought to the school by the Seattle-based Prom Princess program, which brings the prom experience to Mount Edgecumbe, where many students don't have the resources or the help from their far-off families to get party dresses, tuxedos, and makeup for their big night.
"All of these people are here helping them (the students) out and doing all this stuff, and suddenly they realize they're a lot more important than they ever thought they were," said Ivy Lanthier, project director for the school's dorms. "That's the big thing."
In its fifth year of helping students at the school, the program arranges for donations of the dresses, discounted tuxes, and hair and makeup artists.
Mount Edgecumbe, which sits in the shadow of a dormant volcano, is the only state-run boarding school in Alaska. It has nearly 400 students, and about 80 percent this year are Alaska Native. Many, like Kayla, hail from small communities well off the state's limited road system. Many schools in these rural villages don't have proms, and ones that do aren't at Mount Edgecumbe's level.
Program founder Terri Bogren said she and other volunteers, mainly her co-workers at the Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, are proud of the teenagers for leaving their families and villages to get a better education, and this is a way to show their admiration.
"They don't have the family support to help them do this. So we're kind of like fairy godmothers here to help them make sure they can look as good as they want to go to their prom," she said.
Bogren got the idea for the program when she lived in Sitka and helped a niece, who was attending the school, get ready for the prom. That's when she realized other girls weren't going to the dance because they didn't have a dress.
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Thursday, April 4, 2013
Facebook demos biggest mobile move to date
MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) ? With its new "Home" on Android gadgets, Facebook aims to put its social network at the center of people's mobile experiences.
If users choose to download Facebook's Home software starting on April 12, the social network will become the hub of their Android smartphones. A phone from HTC that comes pre-loaded with Home will also be available starting that day, with AT&T Inc. as the carrier.
The idea behind the software is to bring Facebook content right to the home screen, rather than requiring users to check apps. "Home" comes amid rapid growth in the number of people who access Facebook from phones and tablet computers. Of its 1.06 billion monthly users, 680 million log in to Facebook using a mobile gadget.
The service is part of Facebook's move to shift its users' focus from "apps and tasks" to people, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Home's unveiling at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters on Thursday.
The new product, which resides on the home screen of Android phones, is a family of apps designed to help people share things with their Facebook friends. Rather than seeing a set of apps for email, maps and other services when they first turn on their phones, users will be greeted with photos and updates from their Facebook feeds. There will be ads too, eventually.
"We think this is the best version of Facebook there is," Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg says users can have an experience on Android phones that they can't have on other platforms. That's because Google makes the software available on an open-source basis, allowing others to adapt it to their needs.
Recognizing that text messaging is one of the most important tasks on a mobile phone, Facebook also showed off a feature called "chat heads." This lets users communicate with their friends directly from their phone's home screen ? without opening a separate app.
The move that coincides with rapid growth among the number of users who access the social network from smartphones and tablet computers and Facebook's aim to evolve from its Web-based roots into a "mobile-first" company.
"What Facebook wants is to put itself at the front of the Android user experience for as many Facebook users as possible and make Facebook more elemental to their customers' experience," said Forrester analyst Charles Golvin.
The new Home service won't be available on Apple's iPhone and iPad devices. Apple's iOS and Mac operating systems include features that integrate Facebook's services, but Zuckerberg says doing something like Home would require a closer partnership.
Apple had no immediate comment.
The deeper mobile integration will likely help Facebook to attract more mobile advertisers. Though mobile ads were a big concern for Facebook's investors even before the company's initial public offering last May, some of the worry has subsided as the company muscles its way into the market.
Last year, Facebook began showing ads to its mobile audience by shoehorning corporate-sponsored content into users' news feeds, which also include updates from friends and brands they follow. Facebook now faces the challenge of showing people mobile ads without annoying or alienating them.
The mobile advertising market is growing quickly, thanks in large part to Facebook and Twitter, which also entered the space in 2012. Research firm eMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion, from $4.11 billion last year.
EMarketer said Wednesday that it expects Facebook Inc. to reap $965 million in U.S. mobile ad revenue in 2013. That's about 2.5 times the $391 million in 2012, the first year that Facebook started showing mobile ads. Clark Fredricksen, vice president at eMarketer, says "there are some clear reasons why a deeper integration with mobile operating systems and handsets make sense for Facebook. At the end of the day, the more deeply Facebook can engage consumers, no matter what device or operating system or handset," the better.
Facebook's stock rose 80 cents, or 3.1 percent, to $27.05 in afternoon trading following the announcement. It's still 23 percent below its initial public offering price of $35.
___
Barbara Ortutay reported from New York.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-unveils-home-android-phones-183648913--finance.html
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Lead poisoning toll revised to 1 in 38 young kids
NEW YORK (AP) ? Health officials say more than half a million young children are now believed to have lead poisoning in the United States.
The figure is roughly twice the previous high estimate. But that's because the government last year lowered the threshold for lead poisoning, so now more children are considered at risk.
Too much lead can be harmful to developing brains and can mean a lower IQ. The new number released Thursday translates to about 1 in 38 young children.
After lowering the standard, the government went back and looked at blood tests from children under 6 to determine how many have lead poisoning under the new definition.
Lead poisoning has been a waning concern, as leaded gasoline, paint and other sources have diminished.
____
Online:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lead-poisoning-toll-revised-1-38-young-kids-161220175.html
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Monkey Research Gives Insights Into New SARS-Like Virus - Health ...
WEDNESDAY, April 3 (HealthDay News) ? U.S. researchers say a newly developed model of infection in monkeys is giving valuable information on an emerging SARS-like virus that has health officials worried worldwide.
The new coronavirus was first spotted in September and is similar to the SARS virus that killed hundreds globally a decade ago. So far, 17 people in the Middle East and Europe have become infected with the new virus, and 11 of them have died.
According to researchers from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a model of infection developed in rhesus macaque monkeys indicates that illness symptoms begin to show within 24 hours of infection with the new strain. Those symptoms can include loss of appetite, fever, changes in breathing, cough and goosebumps, said a team led by Vincent Munster, chief of the virus ecology unit at the NIAID?s Laboratory of Virology.
In both monkeys and humans, the real danger comes from the fact that infection triggers illness deep in the lungs that can turn into pneumonia, the researchers said in an NIAID news release. The illness does not, however, seem to spread easily person-to-person, and the NIAID team hopes to find out whether the infection site, which is in the lower respiratory tract not the upper tract, might be a reason why.
The researchers published their findings online April 3 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Although cases of the new infection have so far occurred outside of North America, health officials are concerned that the illness could appear in the United States or Canada.
?We?re on the alert looking for this, and I think that?s why these cases are now being discovered,? Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., told ABCNews.com last week. ?People with puzzling pneumonia who we can?t figure out what?s going on right away are having specimens taken and sent to the reference lab for testing.?
Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they have alerted health departments in states and municipalities across the country to look out for suspicious illnesses among people who have recently been to the Middle East.
More information
There?s more on the new virus at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection.
Source: http://news.health.com/2013/04/03/monkey-research-gives-insights-into-new-sars-like-virus/
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