Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Lloyds to reveal hike in PPI compensation costs

LONDON (Reuters) - Lloyds Banking Group is expected to say the cost of compensating customers mis-sold loan insurance will be far higher than previously thought when it reports third-quarter results on Thursday.

Britain's biggest retail bank has already set aside 4.3 billion pounds to repay customers wrongly sold payment protection insurance (PPI), far higher than rivals as it had the biggest share of the PPI market.

Analysts say the final figure could rise by as much as 2.3 billion pounds.

The issue threatens to overshadow Chief Executive Antonio Horta-Osorio's success in turning around the bank's performance following a bailout in 2008 which left it 40 percent state-owned.

Lloyds has reduced its loan book, cut costs and reined in bad debts as part of a recovery plan and the rate of the bank's progress has led to optimism it could restore dividend payments in 2014.

However, that is expected to be determined by the outcome of discussions with Britain's financial regulator and upon clarity over new capital requirements for banks to be implemented by European regulators.

Citi analysts expect Lloyds to make an underlying pretax profit of 685 million pounds while Deutsche Bank is forecasting an underlying pretax profit of 531 million pounds, up from 419 million in the same period the year before.

The bank, which has more than 30 million customers and was a sponsor of the London Olympic Games, made an underlying pretax profit of 1.06 billion pounds in the first half, up 715 million pounds on the previous year.

Lloyds shares remain well below the 63 pence level at which Britain acquired its stake in the bank, however. They closed on Wednesday at 40.575 pence, meaning the taxpayer is sitting on a loss of over 8 billion pounds.

The rising cost of PPI compensation continues to weigh on investor sentiment and the bank could also face costs to compensate small firms sold complex interest rate swaps although it has so far said this will not be material.

Rival Barclays on Wednesday confirmed it had increased the amount it had set aside to deal with claims by 700 million pounds to 2 billion pounds and the industry could face an overall bill of up to 15 billion pounds.

Lloyds was saddled with billions of pounds of losses after buying troubled rival HBOS at the height of the 2008 crisis, in a deal that was brokered by the Labour government of the time.

(Reporting by Matt Scuffham; Editing by Mike Nesbit)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lloyds-reveal-hike-ppi-compensation-costs-000720843--finance.html

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Monday, October 29, 2012

High Web Hosting Services | Healthuse - Health & Fitness Tips

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Source: http://www.healthuse.com/high-web-hosting-services.html

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Thursday, October 25, 2012

3 Types of Eating Disorders | Care2 Healthy Living

  • Health Guru
  • October 24, 2012
  • 3:30 pm
  • 10 comments
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get healthy living updates

Eating disorders, like anorexia and bulimia, affect women, teens, and even men. Fear of weight gain, poor body image, low self-esteem, and a quest to be thin are just some of the emotional symptoms. Watch this to learn what disordered eating does to your body.

Read more: Conditions, Food, Health, Mental Wellness, Videos, Videos, anorexia, anorexia nervosa, binge eating, bulimia, eating disorders

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Source: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/3-types-of-eating-disorders.html

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Media Advisory: Canada Economic Development

SAINT-F?LICIEN, QU?BEC--(Marketwire - Oct. 24, 2012) - Representatives of the media are invited to a news conference during which the Honourable Denis Lebel, Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities and Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, will announce funding to six snowmobile clubs in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region.

Date: Friday, October 26, 2012
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Location: Club Relais des Buttes Inc.
2337 Rivi?re-aux-Saumons
Saint-F?licien

Keep up with the latest news from Canada Economic Development by visiting www.dec-ced.gc.ca or subscribing to @CanEconDev on Twitter.

Source: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=1717378&sourceType=3

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Most large treatment effects of medical interventions come from small studies

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

CHICAGO ? In an examination of the characteristics of studies that yield large treatment effects from medical interventions, these studies were more likely to be smaller in size, often with limited evidence, and when additional trials were performed, the effect sizes became typically much smaller, according to a study in the October 24/31 issue of JAMA.

"Most effective interventions in health care confer modest, incremental benefits," according to background information in the article. "Large effects are important to document reliably because in a relative scale they represent potentially the cases in which interventions can have the most impressive effect on health outcomes and because they are more likely to be adopted rapidly and with less evidence. Consequently, it is important to know whether, when observed, very large effects are reliable and in what sort of experimental outcomes they are commonly observed. ? Some large treatment effects may represent entirely spurious observations. It is unknown how often studies with seemingly very large effects are repeated."

Tiago V. Pereira, Ph.D., of the Health Technology Assessment Unit, German Hospital Oswaldo Cruz, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and colleagues conducted a study to evaluate the frequency and features of very large treatment effects of medical interventions that are first recorded in a clinical trial. For the study, the researchers used data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) and assessed the types of treatments and outcomes in trials with very large effects, examined how often large-effect trials were followed up by other trials on the same topic, and how these effects compared against the effects of the respective meta-analyses.

Among 3,545 available reviews, 3,082 contributed usable information on 85,002 forest plots (a graphical display designed to illustrate the relative strength of treatment effects in multiple studies). Overall, 8,239 forest plots (9.7 percent) had a nominally statistically significant very large effect in the first published trial, group A; 5,158 (6.1 percent) had a nominally statistically significant very large effect found only after the first published trial, group B; and 71,605 (84.2 percent) had no trials with significant very large effects, group C. The researchers found that nominally significant very large effects arose mostly from small trials with few events. For the index trials, the median [midpoint] number of events was only 18 in group A and 15 in the group B. The median number of events in the group C index trials was 14.

The authors also observed that 90 percent and 98 percent of the very large effects observed in first and subsequently published trials, respectively, became smaller in meta-analyses that included other trials; the median odds ratio decreased from approximately 12 to 4 for first trials, and from 10 to 2.5 for subsequent trials.

Topics with very large effects were less likely than other topics to address mortality. Across the whole CDSR, there was only 1 intervention with large beneficial effects on mortality and no major concerns about the quality of the evidence (for a trial on extracorporeal oxygenation for severe respiratory failure in newborns).

"? this empirical evaluation suggests that very large effect estimates are encountered commonly in single trials. Conversely, genuine very large effects with extensive support from substantial evidence appear to be rare in medicine and large benefits for mortality are almost entirely nonexistent. As additional evidence accumulates, caution may still be needed, especially if there is repetitive testing of accumulating trials. Patients, clinicians, investigators, regulators, and the industry should consider this in evaluating very large treatment effects when the evidence is still early and weak," the researchers write.

###

Paper: JAMA. 2012;308[16]:1676-1684

JAMA and Archives Journals: http://www.jamamedia.org

Thanks to JAMA and Archives Journals 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.

This press release has been viewed 49 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124764/Most_large_treatment_effects_of_medical_interventions_come_from_small_studies

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Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Apple's brand will secure Ipad Mini's success over cheaper Google Nexus 7

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School bus, truck crash in Pa. _ without drivers

BEAVER FALLS, Pa. (AP) ? Police don't plan to cite the drivers of a truck and school bus which crashed in western Pennsylvania.

But only because neither vehicle had a driver when they wrecked.

Police in Patterson Township tell the Beaver County Times (http://bit.ly/UBPOwQ ) the incident happened just before 10 a.m. Tuesday when the parked bus began to roll down a hill. Police aren't sure why that happened, because the driver had engaged the parking brake.

The bus rear-ended a parked truck, which also began rolling down the hill alongside the bus, until the truck flipped onto its side. The bus continued on, shearing off one utility pole and hitting another before rolling to a stop a few feet from the porch of a home.

Nobody was hurt.

Patterson Township is about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

___

Information from: Beaver County Times, http://www.timesonline.com/

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/school-bus-truck-crash-pa-without-drivers-142913966.html

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Pats looking forward to seeing London

pats.jpg

Shane Vereen has two goals this week. He wants to win a football game on Sunday and, as he puts it, ``I want to see the soldiers outside the palace that can't smile.''

Vereen was talking about the guards at Buckingham Palace. He said he might try to make them smile, but his goal is to get his picture taken with them.

He will have his chance because the Patriots are playing in London on Sunday, as the visiting team against the St. Louis Rams. The Pats shifted their focus directly to that game Wednesday, with the talk split about the game and going to England.

``I've never been to Europe before. I'm excited to go, see what it's all about,'' said Shane Vereen. ``I think it's fun; to break the routine and get to go out of the country will be something fun.''

``We're going to travel a little earlier in the week,'' pointed out Ridley of the plans to leave on a red-eye flight Thursday night. ``But we'll try to keep everything as normal as we can.''

``I haven't been to London before. I'm looking forward to making the trip,'' he said. ``Hopefully we can get the `W' then the flight (home) won't be as long.''

Source: http://blogs.providencejournal.com/sports/patriots/2012/10/pats-looking-forward-to-seeing-london.html

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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

GFI Software launches VIPRE? Antivirus 2013 in the Middle East ...


GFI Software? today announced the launch of VIPRE Antivirus 2013 and VIPRE Internet Security 2013, bringing the latest evolutions of the company?s advanced and easy-to-install-and-use antivirus products to consumers in the Middle East region. The latest versions build upon VIPRE?s excellent detection rates and low impact on PC performance, helping to not only protect users? PCs from malware but also identify and fix any vulnerabilities that are present.

?The updates we?ve made to VIPRE 2013 enhance what the product has always delivered ? simplicity and effectiveness,? said John Spoor, Regional Director MEA at GFI Software. ?However, effective AV is not the only concern many people have. The average Internet user does not have the time or inclination to manage AV software. They simply want a product they can easily install that protects against threats aimed at them, and one that doesn?t interfere with their PC?s performance. They don?t have time to manage third-party software either, but they sure would like a simple and intuitive way to fix any weaknesses in their PC due to third-party applications. VIPRE 2013 identifies these weaknesses and fixes them.??

John Spoor

Easy to Install

Pre-installed AV solutions or fragments of earlier AV programs can cause conflicts and installation problems for consumers. In VIPRE 2013, GFI has introduced VIPRE Easy Install. This feature searches for many antivirus products and removes them completely, allowing for a trouble-free installation.

Vulnerability and Patch Management

Vulnerabilities in third-party software products can be exploited by malware and other viruses. Many consumers do not update their software products regularly, leaving their machine open to attack. In VIPRE Internet Security 2013, GFI has added VIPRE Easy Update. This automatically finds and applies updates to out-of-date software. In addition, VIPRE warns the user if the Windows updating system is configured incorrectly, and assists in getting this corrected.

Attractive Combination of Simplicity and Effectiveness

VIPRE Antivirus uses Active Protection?, heuristics and other highly sophisticated detection methods to protect against more than 100,000 new threats every day, including the latest viruses, adware, spyware, worms, rootkits, bots, Trojans and other malware. Providing advanced zero-day threat detection, the engine also works efficiently without impacting system performance, and in many cases, improves PC performance by detecting and removing malware that slows it down.

Additional new features found in VIPRE Antivirus 2013 and VIPRE Internet Security 2013 include:

VIPRE Rapid Scan ? Makes subsequent scans significantly faster after initial VIPRE scan and optimizes deep scans that normally take an hour so that they can be completed in 10 minutes or less.

Enhanced anti-rootkit technologies ? Finds and disables malicious hidden processes, threats, modules, services, and files on user systems.

Removable device scanning ? Scans USB sticks, CD/DVD-ROMS and external hard drives for threats automatically, before they can access and infect a PC.

Antivirus, anti-phishing email security ? Protects against email viruses, with direct support for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and any email program that uses POP3 or SMTP; strips emails of phishing links, blocking access to phishing websites.

Pricing and Availability

VIPRE Antivirus 2013 is available available now through our distributor E2E. A single-user annual subscription is priced at just $39.99. VIPRE Internet Security 2013 is also available now for $49.99 for one year per user.?All subscriptions include threat definition updates, software upgrades, free tech support, a free subscription to VIPRE Security News (optional) and a 100% money-back guarantee within 30 days of purchase.

To learn more about VIPRE Antivirus 2013 or GFI Internet Security 2013, please visit http://www.vipreantivirus.com, click here to download a free 30-day, full-featured trial, or send an email to vipresales@gfi.com.

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Source: http://www.qatarisbooming.com/2012/10/23/gfi-software-launches-vipre%C2%AE-antivirus-2013-in-the-middle-east/

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Felix Baumgartner offers U.N. chief skydiving lesson

UNITED NATIONS (AP) ? Supersonic skydiver Felix Baumgartner wants to teach U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon how to skydive.

Baumgartner made the offer Tuesday during a photo opportunity where the U.N. chief spoke admiringly of Baumgartner's death-defying leap last week from a balloon 24 miles (39 kilometers) above the Earth, breaking the sound barrier and setting a world record.

When Ban said that he had never skydived, the Austrian offered up his services.

"Here's your chance, I'll teach you to skydive," Baumgartner said.

While Ban looked less-than-enthusiastic about the skydiving lesson, he did call Baumgartner "the most courageous person in the world."

Ban's spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told reporters that while the secretary-general usually deals with weighty issues involving conflicts and wars, he also thinks it is important to engage other parts of society.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/felix-baumgartner-offers-un-chief-skydiving-lesson-202717109.html

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Milky Way's black hole getting ready for snack

ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2012) ? Get ready for a fascinating eating experience in the center of our galaxy. The event involves a black hole that may devour much of an approaching cloud of dust and gas known as G2.

A supercomputer simulation prepared by two Lab physicists and a former postdoc suggests that some of G2 will survive, although its surviving mass will be torn apart, leaving it with a different shape and questionable fate.

The findings are the work of computational physicist Peter Anninos and astrophysicist Stephen Murray, both of AX division within the Weapons and Complex Integration Directorate (WCI), along with their former postdoc Chris Fragile, now an associate professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and his student, Julia Wilson.

They came up with six simulations, using the Cosmos++ computer code developed by Anninos and Fragile, which required more than 50,000 computing hours on 3,000 processors on the Palmetto supercomputer at Clemson University in Columbia, S.C.

Previous simulations of the upcoming event had been done in two-dimensions, but the Cosmos++ code includes 3D capability, as well as a unique "moving mesh" enhancement, allowing the simulation to more-efficiently follow the cloud's progression toward the black hole.

The black hole is known as Sgr A*. "Sgr" is the abbreviation for Sagittarius, the constellation near the center of the Milky Way. Most galaxies have a black hole at their center, some thousands of times bigger than this one.

"While this one is 3-to-4 million times as big as our sun, it has been relatively quiet," according to Murray. "It's not getting fed very much." Contrary to their name, black holes can appear very bright. That's because gas orbiting them loses energy via friction, getting hotter and brighter as it spirals inward before falling into the black hole.

The composition of the G2 cloud is still a mystery.

Astronomers originally noticed something in the region in 2002, but the first detailed determinations of its size and orbit came only this year. The dust in the cloud has been measured at about 550 Kelvin, approximately twice as hot as the surface temperature on Earth. The gas, mostly hydrogen, is about 10,000 Kelvin, or almost twice as hot as the surface of the sun.

Its origin is still unknown.

Murray says: "The speculation ranges from it having been an old star that had kind of a burp and lost some of its outer atmosphere, to something that was trying to be a planet and couldn't quite manage it because the environment was too hot."

As the cloud approaches the black hole and begins to fall into what Murray describes as "a gravity well" beginning next September, it will begin to shed energy, causing it to heat to incredibly high temperatures, visible to radio and X-ray telescopes on Earth as well as orbiting satellites such as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

But it won't be a collision course.

The point at which a stellar object can no longer escape being swallowed by a black hole is known as the Schwarzschild radius, a quantity whose value depends on the black hole's mass, the speed of light and the gravitational constant.

The cloud will actually pass far enough away that it will escape the point of no return by approximately 2,200 Schwarzschild radii, which in this case is about 200 times as far as Earth is from the sun.

But the supercomputer simulations show that the cloud will not survive the encounter.

According to Anninos: "There's too much dynamical friction that it experiences through hydrodynamic instabilities and tidal stretching from the black hole. So a lot of its kinetic energy and angular momentum will be dissipated away and it will just sort of break up into some sort of incoherent structure. Much of it will join the rest of the hot accretion disk around the black hole, or just fall and get captured by the black hole. It will lose a lot of its energy but not all of it. It will become so diffuse that it's unlikely that any remnant of the gas will continue on its orbital track."

The close encounter will take several months. The entire event is predicted to last less than a decade.

The simulation is posted on the Web. It shows the cloud modeled as a simple gas sphere, near the point in its orbit where it was first discovered. As it approaches Sgr A*, a process known as tidal stretching increasingly distorts the cloud. By the end of 2012, the cloud will be nearly five times longer than it is wide.

Along with tidal stretching, the cloud also experiences resistance in the form of ram pressure as it tries to plow through the hot interstellar gas that already fills the space around Sgr A*. The interactions of G2 with this background gas cause further disruptions to the cloud from Rayleigh-Taylor and Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. Collectively, these effects act to strip some material from the cloud and feed it into Sgr A*.

An article describing the simulation research will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/AiyPlh_Chfc/121022145447.htm

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Monday, October 22, 2012

No One Cares If a Tightrope-Walking Robot Falls To Its Death

It might sound terribly morbid, but part of the fascination of watching a human perform a dangerous tightrope walk is the risk that they could potentially fall. So when you've got a robot risking its life, the stunt is considerably less exciting. More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/S32gbYVIV9U/no-one-cares-if-a-tightrope+walking-robot-falls-to-its-death

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The nanomechanical signature of breast cancer

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The nanomechanical signature of breast cancer
(Nanowerk News) The spread of cancer cells from primary tumors to other parts of the body remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. The research groups of Roderick Lim and Cora-Ann Schoenenberger from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, reveal in the journal Nature Nanotechnology ("The nanomechanical signature of breast cancer") how the unique nanomechanical properties of breast cancer cells are fundamental to the process of metastasis. The discovery of specific breast cancer ?fingerprints? was made using breakthrough nanotechnology known as ARTIDIS. Lim?s team has now been awarded about 1.2 million Swiss francs from the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) to further develop ARTIDIS.
Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women with 5500 patients being diagnosed with the disease in Switzerland each year. Despite major scientific advancements in our understanding of the disease, breast cancer diagnostics remains slow and subjective. Here, the real danger lies in the lack of knowing whether metastasis, the spread of cancer, has already occurred. Nevertheless, important clues may be hidden in how metastasis is linked to specific structural alterations in both cancer cells and the surrounding extracellular matrix. This forms the motivation behind ARTIDIS (?Automated and Reliable Tissue Diagnostics?), which was conceived by Dr. med. Marko Loparic, Dr. Marija Plodinec and Prof. Roderick Lim to measure the local nanomechanical properties of tissue biopsies.
feeling the tissue structure of a tumor biopsy by a nanometer-sized atomic force microscope tip
Using ARTIDIS to feel the tissue structure of a tumor biopsy by a nanometer-sized atomic force microscope tip. (Image: Martin Oeggerli)
?Fingerprinting? breast tumors
At the heart of ARTIDIS lies an ultra-sharp atomic force microscope tip of several nanometers in size that is used as a local mechanical probe to ?feel? the cells and extracellular structures within a tumor biopsy. In this way, a nanomechanical ?fingerprint? of the tissue is obtained by systematically acquiring tens of thousands of force measurements over an entire biopsy. Subsequent analysis of over one hundred patient biopsies could confirm that the fingerprint of malignant breast tumors is markedly different as compared to healthy tissue and benign tumors. This was validated by histological analyses carried out by clinicians at the University Hospital Basel, which showed a complete agreement with ARTIDIS. Moreover, the same nanomechanical fingerprints were found in animal studies initiated at the Friedrich Miescher Institute.
Plodinec, first author of the study, explains: ?This unique fingerprint reflects the heterogeneous make-up of malignant tissue whereas healthy tissue and benign tumors are more homogenous.? Strikingly, malignant tissue also featured a marked predominance of ?soft? regions that is a characteristic of cancer cells and the altered microenvironment at the tumor core. The significance of these findings lies in reconciling the notion that soft cancer cells can more easily deform and ?squeeze? through their surroundings. Indeed, the presence of the same type of ?soft? phenotype in secondary lung tumors of mice reinforces the close correlation between the physical properties of cancer cells and their metastatic potential.
ARTIDIS in the clinics
?Resolving such basic scientific aspects of cancer further underscores the use of nanomechanical fingerprints as quantitative markers for cancer diagnostics with the potential to prognose metastasis.?, states Loparic, who is project manager for ARTIDIS. On an important practical note, a complete biopsy analysis by ARTIDIS currently takes four hours in comparison to conventional diagnostics, which can take one week. Based on the potential societal impact of ARTIDIS to revolutionize breast cancer diagnostics, Lim?s team and the Swiss company Nanosurf AG have now been awarded about 1.2 million Swiss francs by the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) to further develop ARTIDIS into a state-of-the-art device for disease diagnostics with further applications in nanomedicine.
Over the next two years, Lim and colleagues will engage and work closely with clinicians to develop ARTIDIS into an easy-to-use ?push-button? application to fingerprint diseases across a wide range of biological tissues. As a historical starting point, the first ARTIDIS demo-lab has already been established at the University Hospital Eye Clinic to collect data on retinal diseases with the goal of improving treatment strategies.

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Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27055.php

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Sunday, October 21, 2012

One dead, six seriously injured in Arizona bus crash

WILLOW BEACH, Ariz. (AP) ? A charter bus carrying tourists back to Las Vegas from the Grand Canyon crashed on an Arizona highway, killing the driver and injuring more than 20 passengers, six of them seriously, authorities said.

The bus was northbound on Highway 93 on Friday night, nearing the Nevada state line, when the driver suffered a physical problem and lost control, the Arizona highway patrol said. The company that offered the tour said the driver may have suffered a heart attack.

The vehicle hit a ravine, tore up a small hill, and then bounced and lurched over rough terrain for more than 700 feet before stopping, damaging the front end but remaining upright, patrol spokesman Carrick R. Cook said.

"We believe the driver experienced some sort of the medical condition and he just went off the road," the patrol said in a statement. No other vehicles were involved.

All 48 passengers were injured, but 27 of them were walking wounded with mainly bumps and bruises, Cook said.

"The passengers were pretty much bouncing around," he said.

The six most seriously hurt were flown by helicopter to University Medical Center in Las Vegas, while 15 others with less severe injuries were rushed to area hospitals by road.

UMC spokeswoman Danita Cohen said the six were being treated for nonlife-threatening injuries, such as broken bones and lacerations. She described them as being mostly over 50 years old.

Cook said most of the passengers appeared to be from Asia or Europe, but he didn't have details.

The passengers were returning to Las Vegas following a trip to the Grand Canyon when the crash occurred.

Tony Fiorini, president of Silver State Trailways, the California-based company bus company that operates tours from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, said the company believes its driver had a heart attack while on the road. "Fortunately, no one else was seriously injured," Fiorini said.

Fiorini declined to release the name or age of the driver and didn't say how long the driver had been with the company. "I'm mainly concern about my driver's family right now," he said.

It was the third time in recent years that a tour bus crash in the area claimed lives.

Two years ago, two people were killed and several others injured in a crash on an area highway. In January 2009, seven people died and 10 were injured when a charter bus carrying a group of Chinese tourists on a return trip from the Grand Canyon crashed on U.S. 93, the main highway leading to Hoover Dam.

Four hours after the crash, the bus was sitting upright about 30 feet off the shoulder of the road.

The highway near the crash site was reduced to one lane of traffic for several hours.

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AP writers Bob Seavey in Phoenix and Russell Contreras in Albuquerque, N.M. contributed to this story.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/1-dead-6-seriously-injured-arizona-bus-crash-083950138.html

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Tips On Planning The Hawaii Wedding Of Your Dreams On A Budget

By: Jennifer Rothchild

One of the biggest days in your life will be the day of your wedding. So long as you draw breath, you will remember this day. However, because it is so important, the plans that go into your wedding day can be stressful and difficult. After reading this article you will find many suggestions that will make your wedding day as good as it possibly can!
Let your caterer know you want an outdoor reception. Hot sunlight and strong winds can damage certain dishes, whilst chilly weather could spoil hot meals. You could utilize fancy covers to protect the dishes. Furthermore, consider hiring a refrigerator to keep beverages cool.
If you care about the bride, you will definitely be looking for ways to make sure her wedding is everything she has dreamed of. Planning a wedding and dealing with problems will make a bride stressed and anxious. You want to just run everything by her as well as make sure there is nothing that you are missing to ensure her happiness.
A thoughtful gift for destination wedding guests to receive is a basket of vacation goodies delivered to them in their room. Include maps, cameras, hats, disposable cameras, or guides on local attractions that they may want to visit. It would be nice to also include a guide to local restaurants to make it easy for them to eat.
Plan out fun and interesting group activities for the guests and members of the wedding party. Instead of your guests simply waiting for you to come down the aisle, plan a contest or a game for your guests to partake in while waiting for the wedding to begin. There are all kinds of things you can do, contests or fun, or try something like volleyball. The more fun your guests have, the better the entire event will be for everyone.
Choose someone who has an interest in photography that you will enjoy working with. They can help you with other stuff, like gathering the family for group shots, also.
An online itinerary will facilitate a smooth experience, especially for your out-of-town guests. This schedule allows everyone to know when and where they need to be. Include events such as the rehearsal, dinners, fittings and anything else they might need to appear at.
While it may seem obvious, remember that who you plan to marry should be the biggest consideration of all! Do not make a hasty decision. You should consider the things you enjoy in your companion, as well as the things that irritate you.
If a friend of yours has something you want to wear simply as them. This can give you the look you want to achieve and make the wedding even more special.
Instead of one large, expensive wedding cake, consider serving cupcakes or several small cakes. Many bakeries offer beautiful cupcakes with a variety of healthy fillings.
Don't let wedding planning get you down! You may have a lot to worry about, but the advice in this article will make the work you have to do much easier to manage. Soon, you'll be able to stop stressing about your wedding, and start looking forward to your big day instead.


About the Author:
Jennifer R is a freelance travel writer and often writes on many exotic locations and destination weddings. Her coverage on Hawaii Beach Weddings are second to none. She has been involved in covering over one hundred weddings on the various islands of Hawaii, in particular Oahu. Destination weddings in Hawaii do not have to be very expensive or stressful, and Jen will share with you the tips to make your day very special.

Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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"Trekkies" break world record at London convention

LONDON (Reuters) - Star Trek fans made history on Saturday by breaking the record for the largest gathering of people dressed as characters from the TV series at the "Destination Star Trek London" convention.

An estimated 1,083 costume-clad "trekkies" assembled at the event at London's ExCel centre, narrowly beating the previous record of 1,040 characters, which was set at the bigger, annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas in August.

The achievement will be officially verified by Guinness World Records within a few days, but organisers were confident they had topped the Las Vegas record.

The majority of record-breakers dressed in the colour-blocked uniforms of the Starfleet, with Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans peppering the crowd.

Trekkie Mark Whitfield went to extreme lengths to participate, wearing a full-body suit to emulate a mugato, a beast from "Star Trek: the Original Series".

"It looks silly, it's just a gorilla suit painted white with horns on it. It's very, very hot. In fact, I was on the verge of collapse when a very kind person gave me a bottle of water because I dehydrated quite badly," he said.

"Destination Star Trek London" is the first live Star Trek event in Britain for over a decade. Around 17,000 fans came to London to celebrate the 46-year-old TV and film franchise, which has spawned six television series and 11 feature films.

"NERDS"

Dawn Harris, 26, who had created an Orion slave girl costume and painted herself metallic green, said there was great enthusiasm for the world record attempt.

"There just hasn't been a convention in the UK for so long. So I think everyone wants to be involved in everything as much as they can. Everybody saw that guy jump out of a plane in space so people are drawn to things like that," she said, referring to Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking jump from a balloon near the edge of space last Sunday.

"Nerds like achieving missions. We've been set a quest and it must be achieved," Harris's fianc?, Ryan Croft, added.

Outlandish costumes were ubiquitous at the event, which saw Britain's first Klingon wedding on Friday. Swedish couple Jossie Sockertopp and Sonnie Gustavsson tied the knot in full Klingon attire and exchanged vows in the fictional and guttural-sounding language of the Star Trek characters.

The three-day convention also saw all five captains from the TV series appear on stage together for the first time.

The captains played by actors William Shatner (Captain Kirk), Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard), Avery Brooks (Captain Sisko), Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) and Scott Bakula (Captain Archer) joined forces to officially open the convention on Friday night.

Speaking ahead of the opening ceremony, 81-year-old Shatner appeared moved when discussing the show's loyal and sometimes obsessive fans in an interview with Reuters.

"It's an accumulation of a lot of work and a lot of people travelling from all over the world here. It's sort of monumental in its worth," Shatner said.

The veteran actor turned filmmaker has released the documentary "Get a Life!", which examines why fans attend conventions.

"The conclusion that I come to is that it's (Star Trek) mythological," Shatner told Reuters. "It's a desire for mythology that we don't have in this age."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/trekkies-break-world-record-london-convention-200832764.html

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Saturday, October 20, 2012

Boy's miracle cure makes 1st Native American saint

VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Jake Finkbonner was so close to death after flesh-eating bacteria infected him through a cut on his lip that his parents had last rites performed and were discussing donating the 5-year-old's tiny organs.

Jake's 2006 cure from the infection was deemed medically inexplicable by the Vatican, the "miracle" needed to propel a 17th century Native American, Kateri Tekakwitha, on to sainthood. Kateri will be canonized on Sunday along with six other people, the first Native American to receive the honor.

Jake is fully convinced, as is the church, that the prayers his family and community offered to Kateri, including the placement of a relic of the soon-to-be saint on Jake's leg, were responsible for his survival.

Jake, now 12 and an avid basketball player and cross-country runner, will be present at the canonization, along with hundreds of members of his own Lummi tribe from northwest Washington state and reservations across the U.S. and Canada who have converged on Rome to honor one of their own. It's a ceremony the Catholic Church hopes will encourage Native Americans to keep to their Christian faith amid continued resentment among some that Catholicism was imposed on them by colonial-era missionaries centuries ago.

"I believe everybody has a purpose on this earth," Jake's mother Elsa Finkbonner said this week soon after the family arrived in Rome for the ceremony. "I think this Sunday Jake will define his purpose, and that's to make Kateri a saint."

Jake, a poised, lanky kid who just got his braces off, seems perfectly at ease with his role in the whole thing, gracious and grateful to the doctors who performed 29 surgeries to save his life and reconstruct his face.

"It's a really special thing," Jake told The Associated Press, flanked by his parents on a hotel terrace sofa. "We've never been to Rome, and especially meeting the pope? It'll be an experience of a lifetime."

Besides Kateri, Pope Benedict XVI will declare another American a saint Sunday, Mother Marianne Cope, a 19th century Franciscan nun from Utica, New York ? near where Kateri lived two centuries earlier ? who cared for lepers exiled to Hawaii's Kalaupapa Peninsula. Another new saint is Pedro Calungsod, a Filipino teenager who was killed in 1672 along with his Jesuit missionary priest by natives resisting their conversion efforts.

The Catholic Church creates saints to hold up models for the faithful, convinced that their lives ? even lived hundreds of years ago ? are still relevant to today's Catholics. The complicated saint-making procedure requires that the Vatican certify a "miracle" was performed through the intercession of the candidate ? a medically inexplicable cure that can be directly linked to the prayers offered by the faithful. One miracle is needed for beatification, a second for canonization.

In Jake's case, Kateri was already an important figure for Catholics in the Lummi tribe, of which his father Donny is a member. A carved wooden statue sits in the church on the Lummi reservation near Bellingham, Washington, 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of the Canadian border, where Jake's grandparents worshipped and where Donny remembers being told of Kateri's story as a child.

Known as the "Lily of the Mohawks," Kateri was born in 1656 to a pagan Iroquois father and an Algonquin Christian mother in what is today upstate New York. Her parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight. She went to live with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for her faith, and she died in Canada when she was 24.

The Rev. Tim Sauer was the Finkbonner's parish priest in Ferndale, Washington ? as well as the visiting pastor on the Lummi reservation ? when Jake cut his lip while playing basketball on Saturday, Feb. 11, 2006. The necrotizing fasciitis bacteria that entered Jake's body through the cut immediately began spreading, and by the time Sauer arrived at Seattle Children's Hospital where Jake was airlifted two days later, Donny and Elsa Finkbonner were preparing to bury their son.

"At that point, we were desperate, and we were looking for anyone's help that would help our son," Donny said, recalling how doctors had said there wasn't much else for them to do but pray, and that they had come to terms with the possibility that their oldest of three children might not survive the week.

"We wanted Jake back with us desperately," he recalled. "But we were willing to give him up" to God.

Sauer, who performed the last rites ritual on Jake that Wednesday ? four days after he cut his lip ? said he immediately urged the Finkbonners and the congregation back on the reservation to pray to Kateri, thinking their shared Native American heritage and scarring diseases were relevant.

He said he did so first and foremost to save Jake, but also because he thought that Native Americans could use a "boost of faith" if one of their own were held up as a saint. Indigenous Catholics, he said, increasingly find themselves ostracized and criticized on their reservations for embracing and retaining the Christian faith spread by imperial colonizers.

"There's been a growing sense of a return to Native American spirituality on reservations, which are good things, but at the same time along with that has been some criticism that native people should let go of Christianity because that was brought by the 'white man' and should go back to their own native culture entirely," he said.

He said Kateri represents a perfect model for indigenous Catholics today, someone who resisted the ostracization of fellow natives and kept the faith.

For the devoutly Catholic Finkbonners, prayer was all they had left after Jake's doctors tried unsuccessfully for two weeks to stop the bacteria's spread. Jake was in a drug-induced coma for most of that time and says he doesn't remember much, a few memories "here and there, not all of it."

"Every day it would seem the news would get worse," Donny recalled. "I remember the last day that we met with the whole group of doctors, Elsa didn't even want to hear. She just got behind me and was holding on."

But rather than bad news, the doctors said the infection had stopped. "It was like a volcano that was erupting, and they opened him up and it was gone. It had stopped. It was a pretty amazing day," Donny said.

It took the Finkbonners several years to realize that the turning point had come a day after a friend of the family ? a nun named after Kateri ? had visited them in the hospital, prayed with them and placed a relic of the soon-to-be saint on Jake's leg.

"It took years for us to look at the calendar and recall that this is the day she came, this is the day she put the relic on, this is the day the infection stopped," Elsa said. "As the years of the investigation have gone on, little bits and pieces of puzzle seem to fall into place, and that's where it all makes sense now as to why Jake's story turned out so big."

Jake, who bears the scars of his ordeal, seems all too happy to be the center of attention this weekend. But he seems keen to move on from his celebrity. He has basketball tryouts when he gets back home and his studies ? he wants to be a plastic surgeon when he grows up. "Kateri was placed on this earth, and she has interceded on many people's behalf, she has defined her purpose," Elsa said. "I think Jake has bigger, larger plans in store for him."

___

Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/boys-miracle-cure-makes-1st-native-american-saint-041122051.html

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