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ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2012) ? A study recently published in Nature Genetics has found new evidence for a link between the body clock hormone melatonin and type 2 diabetes. The study found that people who carry rare genetic mutations in the receptor for melatonin have a much higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
The findings should help scientists to more accurately assess personal diabetes risk and could lead to the development of personalised treatments.
Previous research has found that people who work night shifts have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Studies have also found that if volunteers have their sleep disrupted repeatedly for three days, they temporarily develop symptoms of diabetes.
The body's sleep-wake cycle is controlled by the hormone melatonin, which has effects including drowsiness and lowering body temperature. In 2008, a genetic study led by Imperial College London discovered that people with common variations in the gene for MT2, a receptor for melatonin, have a slightly higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
The new study reveals that carrying any of four rare mutations in the MT2 gene increases a person's risk of developing type 2 diabetes six times. The release of insulin, which regulates blood sugar levels, is known to be regulated by melatonin. The researchers suggest that mutations in the MT2 gene may disrupt the link between the body clock and insulin release, leading to abnormal control of blood sugar.
Professor Philippe Froguel, from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, who led the study, said: "Blood sugar control is one of the many processes regulated by the body's biological clock. This study adds to our understanding of how the gene that carries the blueprint for a key component in the clock can influence people's risk of diabetes.
"We found very rare variants of the MT2 gene that have a much larger effect than more common variants discovered before. Although each mutation is rare, they are common in the sense that everyone has a lot of very rare mutations in their DNA. Cataloguing these mutations will enable us to much more accurately assess a person's risk of disease based on their genetics."
In the study, the Imperial team and their collaborators at several institutions in the UK and France examined the MT2 gene in 7,632 people to look for more unusual variants that have a bigger effect on disease risk. They found 40 variants associated with type 2 diabetes, four of which were very rare and rendered the receptor completely incapable of responding to melatonin. The scientists then confirmed the link with these four variants in an additional sample of 11,854 people.
Professor Froguel and his team analysed each mutation by testing what effect they have on the MT2 receptor in human cells in the lab. The mutations that completely prevented the receptor from working proved to have a very big effect on diabetes risk, suggesting that there is a direct link between MT2 and the disease.
The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the National Institute for Health Research and the Medical Research Council in the UK and the Agence National de la Recherche, the Contrat de Projets Etat-R?gion Nord-Pas-De-Calais, the Soci?t? Francophone du Diab?te, the Fondation Recherche M?dicale and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.
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>> the florida primary will be an early test of republican strength among the nation's fast-growing latino population. the gop candidates have been paying special attention to latino voters in florida , knowing their support both now and in november could hold one of the keys to the white house . nebraska's ron allen picks up our coverage.
>> reporter: in florida the campaign has a distinctive latin beat. [ speaking spanish ]
>> reporter: an aggressive push to court the state's fastest-growing electorate. latino voters. now more than 13% in florida . important in the gop primary and probably even more crucial in november. is this vote in the left hand election going to swing the tide one way or the other?
>> florida 's always a close state, and yes, it can.
>> reporter: patrick publishes a 90-year-old multi-lingual newspaper in tampa. it's a lot more complicated than it used to be?
>> absolutely, and florida especially we have a mix of cubans, puerto ricans , mexicans, venezuelans, colombians.
>> reporter: cuban conservative republicans used to dominate, galvanized by tough anti-castro policies. however, a big influx from places like puerto rico , american citizens who tend to support democrats.
>> who do you like?
>> i like obama.
>> do you think you'll always vote democrat?
>> yes, i think, till now.
>> reporter: president obama won the latino vote 2-1. then, latino voters helped sent republican marco rubio to the u.s. senate .
>> the biggest priority right now should be jobs.
>> reporter: latinos also have a generational divide. adrian mar 10 knees and his wife are republicans. their daughter prefers democrats. their son emmanuel --
>> republican, democrat, independent?
>> independent.
>> reporter: right down the middle. not listen to your grandparents, not listen to your mother.
>> nope.
>> reporter: what's the candidate to do?
>> they need to realize that they can't just come up with a quick sound bite and get hispanics in the state of florida .
>> reporter: for every vote often counts. down to the wire, a race for latino voters wielding increasing political clout. ron allen , nbc news, tampa.
Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/46183159/
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LJUBLJANA (Reuters) ? The Slovenian parliament confirmed conservative Janez Jansa as prime minister on Saturday, almost two months after an inconclusive December 4 election, parliamentary speaker Gregor Virant said.
Jansa has 15 days to put forward a cabinet charged with driving economic growth and introducing reforms to stop the country's credit rating from being cut - but he has a corruption trial hanging over him, which could derail his premiership if he were found guilty.
The cabinet must be confirmed by parliament, in which Jansa's five-party coalition has a solid majority.
Jansa, also prime minister from 2004 to 2008, has promised to cut taxes, red tape and the budget deficit, ease the credit crunch and raise the retirement age in the euro zone member.
"The first steps of this government will be stabilisation of public finances ... decrees to give impetus to economic growth and enable formation of new jobs," Jansa told reporters after the vote, saying he hoped the new government would be voted in by February 10.
President Danilo Turk said earlier this week that Jansa lacked legitimacy for the post because of a trial, which began in September, in which he and four co-defendants are charged with bribery over a 2006 deal for Finnish armoured vehicles worth 278 million euros ($365 million). Jansa denied all charges.
Earlier this month parliament rejected Turk's candidate as prime minister, centre-left Zoran Jankovic. Jankovic's Positive Slovenia party won most votes at the election but was unable to form a coalition that would have a majority in parliament.
Jansa's centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) signed a coalition pact this week with the centre-right People's Party and New Slovenia, the centrist Civic List of Gregor Virant and the pensioners' party Desus. The five parties hold 50 out of 90 seats in parliament.
On Friday credit rating agency Fitch cut Slovenia's sovereign debt rating by two notches to A because of a deterioration in the economic outlook.
All major credit agencies have cut Slovenia's rating since September because of the political crisis, lack of reforms and the deepening euro zone debt crisis, and put it on negative watch. Slovenia is rated A+ by Standard&Poor's and A1 by Moody's.
The political crisis started in September when parliament ousted the centre-left government of Prime Minister Borut Pahor amid internal coalition squabbles and an inability to implement reforms that would speed economic growth.
"The new government will have a hard time because of the need for big budget savings ... and because it is made of five parties which are very different," Meta Roglic, an analyst at the daily Dnevnik, told Reuters.
"Even so it might succeed in staying in power for the full four-year mandate, particularly since it can expect that the opposition will support some of the main economic reforms," she added.
Slovenia's budget deficit soared to some 5.5 percent of GDP in 2011 from a balanced budget in 2007 because of lower tax income and high government spending.
On Thursday, the government's macroeconomic institute said Slovenia's economic growth would slow to 0.2 percent this year from 0.5 percent in 2011 because of lower export demand and low domestic spending.
Slovenia was the fastest-growing euro zone member in 2007 but its export-oriented economy was badly hit by the global crisis and shrank by 8 percent in 2009. Recent data showed another recession was possible as the economy shrank by 0.5 percent in the third quarter of 2011.
(Reporting By Marja Novak; Editing by Tim Pearce)
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Lumia 710 busting through Rogers' door in February for $149 or $99, you call it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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WASHINGTON ? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says she wants to step off the "high wire of American politics" after two decades and is again tamping down speculation that she might stay in government if President Barack Obama wins a second term.
Clinton told State Department employees on Thursday that she is ready for a rest and is paying no attention to the Republican presidential candidate debates. She said she wants to find out just how tired she is after working flat out as first lady, senator, aspiring presidential candidate and finally the top U.S. diplomat.
"I have made it clear that I will certainly stay on until the president nominates someone and that transition can occur" if Obama wins re-election, she told a town hall meeting. "But I think after 20 years, and it will be 20 years, of being on the high wire of American politics and all of the challenges that come with that, it would be probably a good idea to just find out how tired I am."
But, she appeared to leave the door open for a possible eventual return, adding to laughter from the crowd that "everyone always says that when they leave these jobs."
As secretary of state, Clinton is barred from partisan politics and she acknowledged that it is unusual not to be participating in this election season. But, she said she is enjoying being away from the fray and hasn't watched any of the GOP debates.
"It is a little odd for me to be totally out of an election season," she said. "But, you know, I didn't watch any of those debates."
Clinton said she expected the campaign for November's election to "suck up a lot of the attention" normally devoted to foreign policy issues but she joked that that might actually help the State Department.
"The good news is maybe we can even get more done if they are not paying attention, so just factor that in."
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BANGKOK ? Oil prices hovered near $99 a barrel Wednesday, a day after Australia announced it was joining a boycott by Western nations against Iran, the world's No. 3 oil exporter, over a suspected nuclear weapons program.
Benchmark crude for March delivery was down 6 cents to $98.89 per barrel in the late afternoon Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 63 cents to end at $98.95 in New York on Tuesday.
Brent crude for March delivery was up 31 cents at $110.34 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange in London.
Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd announced Tuesday during a trip to London that his government had decided to follow the European Union, which announced Monday it would ban the import of Iranian crude starting in July.
The initiative to use oil to force Iran back to nuclear talks began last month, when the U.S. enacted new sanctions targeting Iran's central bank and its ability to sell petroleum abroad. The U.S. doesn't buy Iranian oil, but the new sanctions make it harder for Iran to sell crude.
Asian countries, already Iran's biggest customers, aren't joining the Europeans in banning Iranian crude. The move has been harshly criticized by oil-ravenous China, which is believed likely to sop up any excess Iranian crude at advantageous prices.
Meanwhile, analysts said that oil prices, amid expectations of tightening supplies, would remain somewhat elevated until the dust settles.
"There are other nations that will be boycotting Iran. That is probably adjusting market expectations of tighter supplies," said Natalie Robertson, a commodities analyst with ANZ Banking Group in Melbourne.
"There is going to be a rebalancing. Iran will have to find new customers for its crude since its usual customers are cutting down imports. During that period, there is going to be some time while the market adjusts to the imbalances, and that is what is keeping prices supported."
In other energy trading, heating oil rose 0.8 cent to $3.02 per gallon and gasoline futures were up 0.7 cent at $2.82 per gallon. Natural gas rose 5.5 cents to $2.61 per 1,000 cubic feet.
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NEW YORK ? Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that New York police used "terrible judgment" in showing counterterrorism trainees a documentary-style film that says Muslim extremists are masquerading as moderates to destroy America from within.
Bloomberg said police have stopped showing officers "The Third Jihad," a 72-minute movie that has been branded inflammatory by some Muslim organizations and was produced by a conservative group called the Clarion Fund.
"Somebody exercised some terrible judgment," he said in Albany. "As soon as they found out about it, they stopped it."
The criticism was unusual for Bloomberg, who in recent months has vigorously defended the police department's counterterrorism efforts after an Associated Press investigation exposed a secret program to gather intelligence on Muslim neighborhoods.
Bloomberg said neither he nor Police Commissioner Ray Kelly knew about the film being shown.
"The Third Jihad" contains TV images of Hezbollah rocket attacks, children being held hostage by Muslim militants and a woman it says was arrested in Iran for wearing immodest clothing. It shows pictures it says were taken from Islamic videos and websites, including a doctored image of an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
It accuses Muslim extremists of posing as moderates and charges several Muslim organizations with being soft on terrorism. Speakers interviewed in the film say "Islamism is like cancer" and urge a "battle for our civilization."
The film is narrated by M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Foundation for Democracy, based in Phoenix. Jasser rejected Bloomberg's criticism.
"I could not disagree more," Jasser said. "For him to say that without contradicting any of the facts that are presented in the movie is, I think, careless."
The film features interviews with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and other experts. Kelly himself appears on camera, talking about Muslim converts in prison and the danger of terrorists using nuclear weapons.
But Kelly found the video objectionable and regretted consenting to the interview five years ago, said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne, a department spokesman.
The New York-based Clarion Fund did not return calls for comment. Its website, Radicalislam.org, says Clarion was founded in 2006 by Raphael Shore. Shore is a former leader of Aish HaTorah, a chain of Jewish educational centers.
The movie was shown on a continuous loop while officers were signing in for counterterrorism training sessions from October to December 2010, according to police documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank at New York University. As many as 1,489 officers who underwent training, including 68 lieutenants, may have seen it, the documents say.
Browne said that the police brass did not approve the use of the movie and that the decision to play it was made by a sergeant, who has since been reprimanded.
"This was never used in training, period. It was never authorized for use in training, period," Browne said.
The screening of the film inside the 36,000-member police department has been known for months, but police previously said only a few officers had seen it. They stopped showing it after a trainee complained.
The film was used as "intermission filler" and to "provide information for students during breaks to keep their attention focused on counterterrorism issues," Assistant Chief George W. Anderson wrote in one of the documents obtained by the Brennan Center.
Anderson wrote that he believed the video was given to police by someone in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security said it didn't authorize the distribution of the movie.
This is not the first time a law enforcement agency has come under fire over its counterterrorism training materials. The FBI was criticized last year for presentations used in a training session that painted a negative picture of Islam. The FBI and other federal agencies pledged to review all their training materials.
Muslim activists said films like "The Third Jihad" are one-sided and teach police cadets that all Muslims are suspect.
"It's clearly a propaganda, anti-Muslim film," said Linda Sarsour, a member of the Muslim-American Civil Liberties Coalition. "It's overly dramatic, piecing together things out of context and threading it together to make this very false narrative about Muslim Americans."
A recent AP series detailed efforts by the New York Police Department to infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods and mosques with aggressive programs designed by a CIA officer. Documents reviewed by the AP revealed that undercover officers known as "rakers" visited businesses such as Islamic bookstores and cafes, chatting up store owners to gauge their views. They also played cricket and eavesdropped in ethnic clubs.
The surveillance efforts have been credited with enabling police to thwart a 2004 plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station.
Critics said the efforts amount to ethnic profiling and violate court guidelines on intelligence-gathering.
___
Read AP's previous stories and documents about the NYPD at: http://www.ap.org/nypd
___
Associated Press Writers Michael Gormley, Eileen Sullivan, Tom Hays and Deepti Hajela contributed to this report.
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Moreover, there is a sense in Israel that the ultra-Orthodox are somehow the most authentic of Jews and therefore the proper keepers of religious traditions. When I first moved to Israel 15 years ago, I immediately became active in Women of the Wall, a group of women who have been praying aloud at the Western Wall, where there are separate sections for men and women. On the men's side, there is loud singing, group prayer, and reading from the Torah scroll, while on the women's side there is only silent individual prayer. For raising our voices in prayer, we have been harassed and even physically attacked by ultra-Orthodox men and women alike. The fact that I, a tax-paying Israeli citizen, could not pray as I wished at a public religious space, seemed to me an unthinkable violation. But most of Israeli society, including both the modern religious and the secular, was not nearly so outraged.
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Senator John Kerry apparently showed up to an event at the White House honoring the Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins Monday in?costume. Ouch!?The 68-year-old Senator has two black eyes and a broken nose, the results of a hockey injury. We bet the Bruins felt his pain. Have a quick recovery, Senator!?
RELATED: Who's Bankrolling the Super Committee: Senate Democrats
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NEW YORK ? NBC and its G4 cable sister will crown an "American Ninja Warrior" this summer ? and it's a good bet that person will be tired.
The network said Tuesday that it will air a summer competition series putting contestants through an arduous obstacle course, sort of a serious version of ABC's "Wipeout" series. Regional rounds will winnow a field of 100 contestants before a winner is chosen at a Las Vegas course.
Weekly episodes will air on NBC and G4, both networks owned by the Comcast Corp. Spokesman Dave Welch says it hasn't yet been determined how many episodes will air or when the show will premiere.
The competition began three years ago. NBC aired the finale last season and was pleased by the ratings, leading to the expansion.
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SUNDAY, Jan. 22 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers have identified three new genomic regions they believe are linked with breast cancer that may help explain why some women develop the disease.
All three newly identified areas "contain interesting genes that open up new avenues for biological and clinical research," said researcher Douglas Easton, a professor of genetic epidemiology at the University of Cambridge in England.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, with about 1 million new cases annually worldwide and more than 400,000 deaths a year.
Scientists conducting genome-wide association studies -- research that looks at the association between genetic factors and disease to pinpoint possible causes -- had already identified 22 breast cancer susceptibility loci. Locus is the physical location of a gene or DNA sequence on a chromosome.
"The three [newly identified] loci take the number of common susceptibility loci from 22 to 25," said Easton.
However, the three new susceptibility loci might explain only about 0.7 percent of the familial risks of breast cancer, bringing the total contribution to about 9 percent, the researchers said.
Michael Melner, scientific program director for the American Cancer Society, said this current research adds some important new clues to existing evidence, but he agreed that the number of cases likely associated with these three variants is probably low.
"So the total impact in terms of patients would be fairly small," Melner said.
The study is published online Jan. 22 in Nature Genetics.
To find the new clues, Easton's team worked with genetic information on about 57,000 breast cancer patients and 58,000 healthy women obtained from two genome-wide association studies.
The investigators zeroed in on 72 different single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A SNP -- pronounced "snip" -- is a change in which a single base in the DNA differs from the usual base. The human genome has millions of SNPs, some linked with disease, while others are normal variations.
The researchers focused on three SNPs -- on chromosomes 12p11, 12q24 and 21q21.
Easton's team found that the variant on the 12p11 chromosome is linked with both estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer (which needs estrogen to grow) and estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer. The other two variants are only linked with ER-positive cancers, they said.
One of the newly identified variants is in an area with a gene that has a role in the development of mammary glands and bones. Easton said it was already known that mammary gland development in puberty is an important period in terms of determining later cancer risk. "But these are the first susceptibility genes to be shown to be involved in this process," he said.
One of the other SNPs is in an area that can affect estrogen receptor signaling, the researchers found.
Melner, noting some of the research is "fine tuning" of other work, said in his view the new understanding of the signaling pathways and their genetic links is the most important finding.
"When you delineate a pathway, you bring up new potential targets for therapy," he said. "The more targets you have, you open up the potential for having multiple drugs and attacking a cancer more easily, without it becoming more resistant."
Overall, Melner added, the results underscore the complexity of the different mechanisms involved in breast cancer development.
More information
For more about the genetics of breast cancer, visit the American Cancer Society.
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At first glance, the numbers look bad: "American Idol's" season premiere was down nearly 5 million viewers from last year's, the biggest season-to-season drop in franchise history.
At second glance, the numbers don't look bad at all: "AI" was Wednesday's dominant show, averaging 21.6 million, per estimates, and scoring a still-huge, if diminished, 7.4 demo rating among 18-to-49-year-olds.
RELATED: So, which singing show makes the most stars?
So, which is it? Is "Idol" over ? or not?
The American public expects a lot from its president, but no one expected the Al Green song sample he delivered Thursday n...
Let's examine both sides of the argument, starting with ...
'Idol's' back with same winning formulaIT'S OVER
1. "America's Got Talent," "The Voice" and "The X Factor" Have Sapped Its Power: Or tapped out its audience. How many vocal runs can an ear stand? How many talent competitions can a viewer sit down for? "Idol's" success hasn't began imitation, it's begat a lot of imitation, and fatigue is setting in.
2. Nothing Lasts Forever: It happened to "The Cosby Show." It happened to "CSI." It would've happened to "Seinfeld," too, if "Seinfeld" had tried to push its luck into a second decade. No long-running show is No. 1 forever. Numbers-wise, "Idol" has been doing the slow fade since, no lie, Sanjaya Malakar was voted off midway through season six, back in 2007.
Report: Lythgoe vows to pay Seacrest's salaryIT'S NOT OVER
1. It's Not Where You Start, It's Where You Finish: Last year, "Idol" posted its smallest-ever debut (not including season one), and suffered, at the time, its biggest-ever season-to-season drop. But by the time Scotty McCreery was being doused with confetti, the franchise was enjoying its biggest finale in years.
2. It's Not Bragging When It's True: As "Idol's" powers-that-be told TV critics this month, its show is the one show that regularly produces stars who regularly sell music. That's the real X factor, and "AI" has it.
Early 'Idol' favorite has lengthy arrest record3. It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Until another show actually beats "American Idol," it's still No. 1. And make no mistake: "Idol" was No. 1 last night. Unless tonight's episode tops it, it'll probably be the week's No. 1 (non-football) show. The bottom line: It's not over; it's No. 1.
PHOTOS: After American Idol--Where Are They Now?
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An oil rig floats in the distance as fishermen work in Havana Bay, Cuba, Thursday Jan. 19, 2012. The Chinese-built oil rig has arrived to Cuba to start exploratory drilling beneath the waters off Cuba's northern coast. Cuban leaders hope the rig will bring riches to a Communist country that is sorely in need of an economic boost. Spanish company Repsol is carrying out the exploratory effort under a contract with the Cuban government. (AP Photo/Javier Galeano)
An oil rig floats in the distance as fishermen work in Havana Bay, Cuba, Thursday Jan. 19, 2012. The Chinese-built oil rig has arrived to Cuba to start exploratory drilling beneath the waters off Cuba's northern coast. Cuban leaders hope the rig will bring riches to a Communist country that is sorely in need of an economic boost. Spanish company Repsol is carrying out the exploratory effort under a contract with the Cuban government. (AP Photo/Javier Galeano)
In this photo taken on Jan. 12, 2012, a boy sits on a horse drawn carriage while his father, unseen, cuts grass near an oscillating oil pump operated by the state oil company Cuba Petroleos, Cupet, in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba. A Chinese-built oil rig has arrived to Cuba in January to start exploratory drilling beneath the waters off Cuba's northern coast. Cuban leaders hope the rig will bring riches to a Communist country that is sorely in need of an economic boost. (AP Photo/Franklin Reyes)
In this photo taken on Jan. 12, 2012, a man waves from his classic car as he drives by oscillating oil pumps operated by the state oil company Cuba Petroleos, Cupet, in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba. A Chinese-built oil rig has arrived to Cuba in January to start exploratory drilling beneath the waters off Cuba's northern coast. Cuban leaders hope the rig will bring riches to a Communist country that is sorely in need of an economic boost. (AP Photo/Franklin Reyes)
In this photo taken on Jan. 12, 2012, Alfonso Arias rides his horse next to an oil pump operated by the state oil company Cuba Petroleos, Cupet, in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba. A Chinese-built oil rig has arrived to Cuba in January to start exploratory drilling beneath the waters off Cuba's northern coast. Cuban leaders hope the rig will bring riches to a Communist country that is sorely in need of an economic boost. Spanish company Repsol is carrying out the exploratory effort under a contract with the Cuban government. (AP Photo/Franklin Reyes)
In this photo taken on Jan. 12, 2012, oil worker Eduardo Garcia labors next to an oscillating oil pump run by state oil company Cuba Petroleos, Cupet, in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba. A Chinese-built oil rig has arrived to Cuba in January to start exploratory drilling beneath the waters off Cuba's northern coast. Cuban leaders hope the rig will bring riches to a Communist country that is sorely in need of an economic boost. Spanish company Repsol is carrying out the exploratory effort under a contract with the Cuban government. (AP Photo/Franklin Reyes)
HAVANA (AP) ? A huge drilling rig arrived Thursday in the warm Gulf waters north of Havana, where it will sink an exploratory well deep into the seabed, launching Cuba's dreams of striking it rich with offshore oil.
The Scarabeo-9 platform was visible from Havana's sea wall far off on the hazy horizon as it chugged westward toward its final drill site about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the capital, and 60 miles (90 kilometers) south of Key West.
Spanish oil company Repsol RPF, which is leasing the rig for about a half-million dollars a day, said it expects to begin drilling within days to find out whether the reserves are as rich as predicted.
"The geologists have done their work. If they've done it well, then we'll have a good chance of success," Repsol spokesman Kristian Rix said by phone from Madrid. "It's been a long process, but now we're at the point where we discover whether our geologists have got it right. It's a happy day."
It's been a long, strange journey for the Scarabeo-9, Repsol and Cuba, a process shadowed at every step by warnings of a possible environmental debacle and decades of bad blood between Cuba and the United States.
The U.S. trade embargo essentially bars U.S. companies from doing oil business with Cuba and threatens sanctions against foreign companies if they don't follow its restrictions, making it far more complicated to line up equipment and resources for the project.
To avoid sanctions, Repsol chose the Scarabeo-9, a 380-foot-long (115-meter), self-propelled, semisubmersible behemoth built in China and Singapore and capable of housing 200 workers. The rig qualifies for the Cuba project because it was built with less than 10 percent U.S.-made parts, no small feat considering America's dominance in the industry.
While comparable platforms sat idle in the Gulf of Mexico, the Scarabeo-9 spent months navigating through three oceans and around the Cape of Good Hope to arrive in the Caribbean at tremendous expense.
Even after the rig is in place, the embargo continues to affect just about every aspect.
The Scarabeo-9's blowout preventer, a key piece of machinery that failed in the 2010 Macondo-Deepwater Horizon disaster, is state of the art. But its U.S. manufacturer is not licensed to work with Cuba so replacement parts must come through secondary sources.
It's also more complicated to do things like the maintenance necessary to keep things running smoothly and decrease the chances of something going wrong.
If it does, Cuba would be hard-pressed to respond to a major spill on its own, and getting help isn't as simple as making a phone call to Washington. The embargo would require licenses to be issued for all manner of equipment and services for an emergency response.
Few U.S. companies so far have gotten permission to work with the Cubans in the event of a spill ? representing just 5 percent of all the resources thrown at the Macondo blowout, according to an estimate by Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.
Two U.S. companies have received licenses to export capping stacks, crucial pieces of equipment for stopping gushing wells, but related services like personnel and transportation have not been green-lighted, Hunt said.
"So what you have is a great big intelligent piece of iron without a crew," he said. "You can't just drop it on the hole and hope (the spill) will stop. It's not a cork."
Even Tyvek suits worn by cleanup crews cannot currently be exported to Cuba because potentially they could be used for the construction of bacteriological or chemical weapons, Hunt added.
Meanwhile cooperation between the two governments, which often struggle to see eye-to-eye on things as basic as delivering each other's mail, has been only bare-bones.
"With any other country ? Mexico, Canada or Russia ? we would already have in place agreements between the coast guards of the two countries," said Dan Whittle, Cuba program director for the Environmental Defense Fund. "There would be contingency plans written and publicly available. There already would have been drills, a comprehensive action plan for responding to a spill."
"We don't have that yet."
There has been some movement.
U.S. inspectors examined the rig last week in Trinidad and gave it a clean bill of health, though notably said that did not constitute any certification. And American representatives at a regional oil meeting last month in the Bahamas were left impressed by their Cuban counterparts' openness and willingness to share information.
But the countries' proximity has increased fears of a disastrous spill with the potential to foul not only Cuba's reefs and gleaming, white-sand beaches, but also, swept up by the Gulf Stream, the coast of Florida and the Atlantic Seaboard up to North Carolina.
Curiously, those fears have been cited by people on both sides of the embargo issue: Some say the prospect of environmental disaster shows the U.S. needs to lift the embargo and work with the Cubans in the interest of safety; others say the fact that the trade ban failed to prevent Cuba from drilling shows it needs to be made even tougher.
Some of the harshest criticism has come from Cuban-American members of Congress such as House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who recently accused the Obama administration of dropping the ball on Cuban drilling.
"Oil exploration 90 miles off the Florida coast by this corrupt, unaccountable dictatorship could result in horrific environmental and economic damage to our Gulf Coast communities, in addition to enriching the Castro tyranny," Ros-Lehtinen said.
The exact size of Cuba's offshore reserves, estimated at 5 billion to 9 billion barrels, is still unknown. And production would not come online for years, so any windfall is still on the horizon. But island officials are hopeful of a big strike that could inject much-needed cash into their struggling economy, and they're not asking anyone for permission.
"Cuba is going through its own change regardless of American foreign policy," said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate who met with Cuban officials in Havana this week on oil and other matters.
"This discovery, or potential discovery, of significant amounts of oil could dramatically change the economy of Cuba, and change the relationship with the United States in small ways and large," Durbin said while visiting Haiti on Thursday.
___
Associated Press videojournalist Pierre-Richard Luxama in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, contributed to this report.
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MEXICO CITY (AP) ? Mexico enacted tough new rules Thursday to ban advertising of "miracle cures" for weight loss, sagging body parts and more serious illnesses like prostate ailments, chronic fatigue and even cancer.
Mexico has a long history of faith healers and home remedies, but the problem has come to a head in the last few years with a constant stream of ads on television for more "scientific" sounding creams that supposedly lift or enlarge breast and buttocks, magnets that help users lose weight, or pills and powders that cure gastric problems or diabetes.
In a country with levels of diabetes and obesity among the highest in the world, the combination of a sick population and fake cures can be deadly.
"This is a fraud," said regulator Mikel Arriola, whose Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks is the agency in charge of regulating pharmaceuticals in Mexico. "It is a very serious public health problem, because people take these things instead of going to the doctor ... they lose time in getting treatment or getting cured."
Under the new rules, which take effect in 30 days, authorities can order media outlets to remove such advertising within 24 hours, and it steeply raises fines that can be levied on manufacturers and distributors that advertise the products.
The rules require that any product making a therapeutic claim will first have to prove it is listed in Mexico's pharmaceutical register. The register requires scientific proof of effectiveness and a scientific description of how the medicine or medical apparatus achieves its claimed effects.
That is probably not going to be possible for products like "Acu-Mag." Its advertising purports that when the tiny pad with eight bumps is placed in the outer ear and massaged a few minutes each day, it helps customers lose weight through what ads call "auricular therapy" ? an alternative medicine supposedly derived from acupuncture.
According to the manufacturer's published claims, the pad "helps you lose weight ten times faster than any other (method) ... eliminates anxiety, burns the fat on your body, improves digestion."
Arriola said the ad should no longer be able to air because it makes claims of medical treatment.
Nor should ads for an herbal supplement called Prostaliv, which promises to reduce prostate enlargement and urinary problems in two to four weeks. Similar claims are made for Mulunggay, another herbal extract that is touted as being able to "combat 300 diseases" and control diabetes.
Anyone with real health issues who relies on such non-working treatments could wind up getting worse, "and that represents a cost for the government," Arriola said, because public hospitals have to treat sicker people.
But he added that supposed "miracle cures" are seldom outright dangerous. "Mainly what these companies are doing is selling a placebo, and spending a lot of money on advertising to promote it."
Executives at two of Mexico's largest vendors of such cure-alls could not be reached for comment. An employee at one of the companies appeared not to have heard of the new rules, and the other firm had an incorrect phone number listed with the Mexican stock exchange.
Companies do appear to have been taking note of the government's plan.
Some already run small-print slogans with their ads stating that "this is not a medicine." Arriola called that "an evasive maneuver" and said such ads won't be exempt from the new rules if they still make medical claims.
And the marketing companies also appear to be moving into less-regulated areas, such as corsets in various forms that are "guaranteed" to give wearers a perfect figure instantly. Those ads could continue to run, in theory, as long as they don't make claims that the product is doing anything but hiding fat.
President Felipe Calderon announced the new rules as a sort of crusade against the power of deceitful advertising.
"Every day, at every hour, on radio, television and the Internet, in print media, the public is literally being bombarded with a huge quantity of ads for all sorts of products that supposedly have curative powers," Calderon said. "They put the health and economic well-being of the population at risk."
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SAN FRANCISCO ? EBay reported on Wednesday that its net income grew sharply in the fourth quarter, helped by a gain from the sale of its remaining investment in Skype. Its results beat Wall Street's expectations, boosted by strong holiday sales at its namesake website and growth at PayPal, its online payments business.
Investors sent eBay's stock higher in after-hours trading. The company gave a first-quarter outlook that was shy of analysts' estimates. However, its guidance for the full year was stronger than expected, suggesting robust earnings momentum later in 2012.
CEO John Donahoe called 2011 an "inflection point for shopping." This means the lines between online and offline shopping are blurring, as even people who shop in retail stores are increasingly using their mobile devices to compare prices, check for deals or search for products.
If all goes as planned, that's where eBay comes in.
"For consumers and retailers, we intend to make shopping more locally convenient and more globally accessible," he said in a conference call with analysts. "This means enabling retailers of all sizes to reach consumers when, where and how those consumers want to shop."
EBay's long-term plan is to transform into a commerce company that melds the online and offline shopping worlds. As part of this effort, it has been expanding PayPal's reach beyond the Web, to mobile devices and tablets. The company is also testing a service that will let people use their PayPal accounts to shop in brick-and-mortar stores, though the program is still in the early stages.
The company earned $1.98 billion, or $1.51 per share, in the October-December quarter. That's up from $559 million, or 42 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier. Excluding special items such as the Skype gain, eBay Inc. says it earned 60 cents per share in the latest quarter, above the 57 cents that analysts were expecting.
Revenue grew 35 percent to $3.38 billion from $2.5 billion.
On average, analysts polled by FactSet expected revenue of $3.32 billion.
The e-commerce and online payments company said its PayPal business continued to grow, ending the quarter with more than 106 million active accounts. That's up 13 percent from a year earlier. Revenue jumped 28 percent to $1.24 billion and the business processed $33.4 billion worth of payments during the quarter. That's up 24 percent from a year earlier.
As more people used their smartphones and tablets to buy things online, payments made through mobile devices accounted for $4 billion of the total payments processed through PayPal ? a more than fivefold increase from the prior year.
The company's marketplaces business, which includes eBay.com and other e-commerce sites and businesses, saw its revenue grow 16 percent to $1.77 billion. Marketplaces' gross merchandise volume, an important metric that measures all items sold on eBay excluding vehicles, rose 10 percent to $16.5 billion.
EBay's outlook for the current quarter fell shy of expectations. The company expects adjusted first-quarter earnings of 50 cents to 51 cents per share on revenue of $3.05 billion to $3.15 billion. Analysts are predicting earnings of 54 cents per share on revenue of $3.16 billion.
For all of 2012, the company is forecasting adjusted earnings of $2.25 to $2.30 per share on revenue of $13.7 to $14 billion. Analysts are expecting $2 per share in earnings and $11.59 billion in revenue.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company's stock climbed 60 cents, or 2 percent, to $30.94 in after-hours trading after closing down 19 cents at $30.34.
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