Hagel: Optimistic on reaching commando agreement

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Airborne Division during his visit to Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Airborne Division during his visit to Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division at Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel poses for a picture with a member of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division during his visit to Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel participates in the awarding of a Purple Heart to Sgt. Jeremyah Williams of the 426 Brigade Support Battalion, at Jalalabad Airfield in eastern Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. It is Hagel's first official trip since being sworn-in as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)

Ambulances arrive outside the Afghan Defense Ministry after a suicide bomber on a bicycle struck outside the ministry, killing at least nine Afghan civilians as U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel visited Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, March 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AP) ? U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he believes U.S. officials will be able to work things out with Afghan leaders who have ordered special operations forces out of Wardak province, even as commandos face a Monday deadline to leave.

Hagel's comments came on his first trip to Afghanistan as defense secretary. On his first morning in Kabul, two suicide bombings, one outside the Afghan Defense Ministry and the other near a police checkpoint in eastern Khost province, killed at least 19 people, including a U.S. contractor. A Taliban spokesman said the blast outside the defense ministry was a message to the visiting Pentagon chief.

The violence and the order to withdraw the special operations forces underscore the military and diplomatic complexities confronting the Obama administration and the U.S.-led NATO force as they work to end combat operations in 2014.

Hagel said he could hear the explosion during a meeting held at a safe location a distance away from the site.

"We're in a war zone, I've been in war. You know, so ? you shouldn't be surprised when a bomb goes off or there's an explosion," Hagel said.

Hagel is expected to meet Sunday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who ordered the U.S. forces to leave the province just outside Kabul because of allegations that Afghans working with the commandos were involved in abusive behavior and torture.

"I feel confident that we'll be able to work this out," Hagel told reporters during a stop at Jalalabad Airfield, where he met with commanders and spoke to troops.

U.S. officials insist they have seen no evidence that American forces were involved in the abuse of Afghan civilians.

"Each of those accusations has been answered, and we're not involved," said Brigadier Adam Findlay, NATO's deputy chief of staff of operations and a member of the Australian military. "There are obviously atrocities occurring there, but it's not linked to us, and the kind of atrocities we are seeing, fingers cut off, other mutilations to bodies, is just not the way we work."

A senior defense official said Saturday that while it's not yet clear what will come out of Hagel's meeting with Karzai, the U.S. believes the door is not closed to resolving the issues.

A coalition official who works with special operations forces said Saturday that while the commandos are ready to pull out, their operations are continuing at this point, and there is some hope that an 11th hour negotiation can be reached that will allow them to stay. The official said the Afghan forces in Wardak are not yet ready to operate without the continued assistance and training from the U.S. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Findlay said NATO officials have done "prudent planning" to withdraw special operations forces and replace them with conventional forces, if Karzai sticks to his edict after meetings this weekend with Hagel and the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph Dunford.

The order for the U.S. forces to leave comes despite worries that Wardak could be more vulnerable to the Taliban and insurgents. "What we've got to try to do is go to a middle ground that meets the president's frustration," but also keeps insurgents from using Wardak as a staging ground to launch attacks on the capital, Findlay told The Associated Press Saturday.

After a meeting with Karzai and the Afghan defense minister earlier Saturday, Dunford reiterated that a compromise allowing some commandos stay is possible.

"We agreed to continue to work this issue with his minister, to ensure that we have adequate protection for the force, that we were going to accomplish our security mission in Wardak, and also meet his concerns about moving Afghan forces in the lead," Dunford said.

On Saturday Hagel flew to Bagram Air Field, about an hour outside the capital, where he met with Maj. Gen. William Mayville, the U.S. commander of forces in the east. He also met with the commander of special operations forces in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Raymond Thomas.

There are about 10,000 U.S. and coalition special operations forces in the country training Afghan local police and commando units as well as battling insurgents.

Hagel ? who received two Purple Hearts after being wounded twice in Vietnam ? later handed out his first combat awards as Pentagon chief. He pinned Purple Hearts onto Sgt. Jeremyah Williams and PFC Harry Hikes, two 101st Airborne Division soldiers who were involved in a car bomb attack about 100 feet from their post at a base entry point. After the brief ceremony at Jalalabad Air Base, Williams said it was "an honor and a privilege" to receive his Purple Heart from Hagel.

Speaking to about 200 troops at the Jalalabad base, Hagel made it clear that he knows what they and their families are going through. He fielded several questions from soldiers worried about how the ongoing budget battle in Washington will affect their retirement and other benefits. He told them he is committed to insuring that their pay and benefits are not hurt, even though the $53 billion in cuts over the remainder of this fiscal year will "make our jobs more difficult."

Hagel's trip comes at a turning point in the conflict, as U.S. and NATO allies set their timetable for the withdrawal of combat troops and pressure mounts on the U.S.-led effort to train the Afghan forces. And he must manage the transition as the U.S. ramps up what will be a difficult and expensive extraction of equipment from the country even as Congress slashes billions of dollars from the defense budget.

He has said he wants to use the trip to better understand what's going on in Afghanistan and to get an assessment on the progress of the Afghan forces as they prepare to take over the security of their own country.

____

Dozier reported from Kabul.

___

Follow Lolita C. Baldor on Twitter: http://twitter.com/lbaldor .

Follow Kimberly Dozier on Twitter: http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-09-AS-Hagel-Afghanistan/id-da7d2a84602c4585ae4922ee1b4abf52

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New study validates longevity pathway

Friday, March 8, 2013

A new study demonstrates what researchers consider conclusive evidence that the red wine compound resveratrol directly activates a protein that promotes health and longevity in animal models. What's more, the researchers have uncovered the molecular mechanism for this interaction, and show that a class of more potent drugs currently in clinical trials act in a similar fashion. Pharmaceutical compounds similar to resveratrol may potentially treat and prevent diseases related to aging in people, the authors contend.

These findings are published in the March 8 issue of Science.

For the last decade, the science of aging has increasingly focused on sirtuins, a group of genes that are believed to protect many organisms, including mammals, against diseases of aging. Mounting evidence has demonstrated that resveratrol, a compound found in the skin of grapes as well as in peanuts and berries, increases the activity of a specific sirtuin,SIRT1, that protects the body from diseases by revving up the mitochondria, a kind of cellular battery that slowly runs down as we age. By recharging the batteries, SIRT1 can have profound effects on health.

Mice on resveratrol have twice the endurance and are relatively immune from effects of obesity and aging. In experiments with yeast, nematodes, bees, flies and mice, lifespan has been extended.

"In the history of pharmaceuticals, there has never been a drug that binds to a protein to make it run faster in the way that resveratrol activates SIRT1," said David Sinclair, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics and senior author on the paper. "Almost all drugs either slow or block them."

In 2006, Sinclair's group published a study showing that resveratrol could extend the lifespan of mice, and the company Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which was started by HMS researchers, was founded to make drugs more potent than resveratrol. (Sinclair is a co-founder of Sirtris, a GlaxoSmithKline company, and remains a scientific advisor. Sirtris currently has a number of sirtuin-activating compounds in clinical trials.)

But while numerous studies, from Sinclair's lab and elsewhere, underscored a direct causal link between resveratrol and SIRT1, some scientists claimed the studies were flawed.

The contention lay in the way SIRT1 was studied in vitro, using a specific chemical group attached to the targets of SIRT1 that fluoresces more brightly as SIRT1 activity increases. This chemical group, however, is synthetic and does not exist in cells or in nature, and without it the experiments did not work. As a response to this, a paper published in 2010 surmised that resveratrol's activation of SIRT1 was an experimental artifact, one that existed in the lab, but not in an actual animal. SIRT1 activity in mice was, the paper claimed, at best an indirect result of resveratrol, and perhaps even a sheer coincidence.

As a result, a debate erupted over the particular pathway that resveratrol and similar compounds affected. Does resveratrol directly activate SIRT1 or is the effect indirect? "We had six years of work telling us that this was most definitely not an artifact," said Sinclair. "Still, we needed to figure out precisely how resveratrol works. The answer was extremely elegant."

Sinclair and Basil Hubbard, then a doctoral student in the lab, teamed up with a group of researchers from both the National Institutes of Health and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals to address this question.

First, the team addressed the problem of the fluorescent chemical group. Why was it required for resveratrol to rev up SIRT1 in the test tube? Instead of dismissing the result as an artifact, the researchers surmised that the chemical might be mimicking molecules found naturally in the cell. These turned out to be a specific class of amino acid, the building blocks of proteins. In nature, there are three amino acids that resemble the fluorescent chemical group, one of which is tryptophan, a molecule abundant in turkey and notable for inducing drowsiness. When researchers repeated the experiment, swapping the fluorescing chemical group on the substrate with a tryptophan residue, resveratrol and similar molecules were once again able to activate SIRT1.

"We discovered a signature for activation that is in fact found in the cell and doesn't require these other synthetic groups," said Hubbard, first author of the study. "This was a critical result, which allowed us to bridge the gap between our biochemical and physiological findings.

"Next, we needed to identify precisely how resveratrol presses on SIRT1's accelerator," said Sinclair. The team tested approximately 2,000 mutants of the SIRT1 gene, eventually identifying one mutant that completely blocked resveratrol's effect. The particular mutation resulted in the substitution of a single amino acid residue, out of the 747 that make up SIRT1. The researchers also tested hundreds of other molecules from the Sirtris library, many of which are far more powerful than resveratrol, against this mutant SIRT1. All failed to activate it.

The authors propose a model for how resveratrol works: When the molecule binds, a hinge flips, and SIRT1 becomes hyperactive.

Although these experiments occurred in a test tube, once the researchers identified the precise location of the accelerator pedal on SIRT1?and how to break it?they could test their ideas in a cell. They replaced the normal SIRT1 gene in muscle and skin cells with the accelerator-dead mutant. Now they could test precisely whether resveratrol and the drugs in development work by tweaking SIRT1 (in which case they would not work) or one of the thousands of other proteins in a cell (in which they would work). While resveratrol and the drugs tested revved up mitochondria in normal cells (an effect caused activating by SIRT1), the mutant cells were completely immune.

"This was the killer experiment," said Sinclair. "There is no rational alternative explanation other than resveratrol directly activates SIRT1 in cells. Now that we know the exact location on SIRT1 where and how resveratrol works, we can engineer even better molecules that more precisely and effectively trigger the effects of resveratrol."

###

Harvard Medical School: http://hms.harvard.edu

Thanks to Harvard Medical School for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127211/New_study_validates_longevity_pathway

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Zaarly Shutters Its Reverse Craigslist Marketplace, Goes All In On Virtual Storefronts As Co-Founder Exits

After winning LA Startup Weekend, Zaarly almost immediately raised $1 million from a long list of notable investors (even "Steve jOBS"), and then raised $14 million more before the end of the year in a round led by Kleiner, while adding Meg Whitman to its board. Fast forward to today and you'll no longer find Zaarly's marketplace on the Web. And, with the next update to its mobile app, co-founder Bo Fishback tells us, its "request anything" model will disappear from the Zaarly experience completely.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TFbkKIGFa64/

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Catholic Church needs to remember its past and change

Thursday, March 7, 2013

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*Catholic Church needs to remember its past and change..

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TV Veteran Valerie Harper Battling Brain Cancer | ExtraTV.com

Actress Valerie Harper, best known for her Emmy-winning role as Rhoda Morgenstern on ?The Mary Tyler Moore Show? and its spin-off, ?Rhoda,? has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

People.com reports that Harper received the news on January 15, but told the magazine she is ready to face the disease with hope. "I don't think of dying," the 73-year-old said. "I think of being here now.?

Harper penned the memoir "I, Rhoda," and had been promoting the book until she fell ill in January.
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?The side of my face started to feel kind of numb. I was slurring my speech,? Harper told the New Yorker that month.
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The tests revealed she has leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare condition that occurs when cancer cells spread into the fluid-filled membrane surrounding the brain. Her doctors say she has as little as three months left to live.

Harper's friend Mary Tyler Moore said, "I'm absolutely devastated by this news. Valerie has given so much joy, laughter and love to the world. I join her fans and send much love and positive thoughts to her and her family during this difficult time."

"Mary Tyler Moore" co-star Ed Asner also said in a statement, "Valerie Harper is a century plan and I have come to know her much better in my latter years and have every confidence in the world that she will shock the hell out of us and survive to keep functioning as the great talent and human that she is."

Actress Roma Downey, who worked with Valerie on ?Touched By An Angel,? stopped by The Grove and told ?Extra?s? Mario Lopez, ?We?re going to keep her in our prayers. I love Valerie. I love working with her. She is a beautiful, wonderful, generous hearted women.? I send out all my love to Valerie.?
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Harper previously battled lung cancer in 2009.

Source: http://www.extratv.com/2013/03/06/tv-veteran-valerie-harper-battling-brain-cancer/

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How can Microsoft?s smartphone market share be shrinking in America?

RIO DE JANEIRO, March 5 (Reuters) - Brazil coach Luiz Felipe Scolari stood up for specialist dribbler Neymar on Tuesday, saying the flamboyant forward's reputation for falling down easily was undeserved and exaggerated. "He gets fouled 10 times a match, and possibly one or two of those free kicks shouldn't be awarded, but then that is normal in football," Scolari told a news conference on Tuesday. "The coaches who criticise Neymar, who claim he falls over or simulates fouls, do that because it's an easy way out for them. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-smartphone-market-share-shrinking-america-212847055.html

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