BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bombs targeting soccer players and young men who had gathered to watch a match in Iraq killed seven people on Saturday.
A roadside bomb in a busy market killed another three people, bringing the death toll to 10, police and medics said.
The violence is part of a trend of increasing militant attacks since the start of the year, which claimed more than 1,000 lives in May alone, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian bloodletting of 2006-7.
In recent days, men playing in local soccer fixtures and watching matches have been the targets - after spates of attacks on both Sunni and Shi'ite mosques and the security forces.
The reason behind the attacks on soccer players and spectators is not clear.
Police and medics said the bomb was planted inside a coffee shop in central Baghdad and killed four young men who had gathered to watch an under 20s international match between Iraq and Chile on television.
Twin roadside bombs exploded near a soccer stadium, killing three players in Muqdadiya, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of the capital, and the blast in the market left a further three people dead in a town west of Baghdad, police said.
Earlier this week, twin blasts at a neighborhood football stadium killed five players and two blasts tore through cafes where scores of young men had gathered to watch another match, killing eight people.
Concerns that Iraq may lapse back into full-scale sectarian conflict have mounted in recent months amid tensions fuelled by the civil war in neighboring Syria, where mainly Sunni rebels are fighting to overthrow a leader backed by Shi'ite Iran.
Sunni insurgents including al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate have been regaining ground, recruiting from the country's Sunni minority, which resents Shi'ite domination since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled former dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
(Reporting by Kareem Raheem in Baghdad and a Reuters reporter in Baquba; Writing by Isabel Coles; Editing by Alison Williams)
The fashions of the 1990s weren't always the most flattering, but Jennifer Aniston has always looked good in everything, right? Likewise, what teenage girl circa 1991 didn't wish she was BFFs with Tiffani Thiessen (aka: Kelly Kapowski) from Saved By The Bell, scrunchies and all? And let’s face it, with artists like Whitney Houston blowing up the charts, who didn’t want to party like it was 1999?
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. celebrity chef Paula Deen saw more lucrative deals evaporate on Thursday despite her renewed apologies for using a racial slur, as retailer Target Corp and drug company Novo Nordisk A/S joined the list of sponsors distancing themselves from the doyenne of Southern cooking.
But in a sign that Deen could make a comeback, her upcoming cookbook "Paula Deen's New Testament," which features "lightened up" recipes, shot to the top of the Amazon books best-sellers list this week on pre-orders for the October 15 release. And her "Southern Cooking Bible" is No. 2 on the list.
Experts say not all may be lost for Deen despite the exodus of sponsors and they point to the comeback of another domestic maven, Martha Stewart, who was able to rebuild her career and image after serving jail time for insider trading.
Deen, 66, has been in damage control mode after a deposition surfaced last week in which she admitted to using the "N-word." She released online apology videos and made a tearful appearance on NBC's "Today" on Wednesday.
For Robert Passikoff, president and founder of Brand Keys Inc, a consumer and brand loyalty consulting firm, Deen's apology was "too little, too late."
"She came across as very defensive and when you are talking about contrition, the two words don't really go together," Passikoff said.
"While she had reasonable brand values that worked for her sponsors, she's not the only one available and these days sponsors don't need to take a chance on folks that self destruct," he added.
Forbes estimated Deen's earnings at $17 million in 2011, placing her fourth on its list of highest-earning chefs last year as her privately held company, Paula Deen Enterprises, expanded.
The contract with Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company, came in 2012 after she revealed that she had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. As spokeswoman for the maker of diabetes care and equipment she would earn an estimated $6 million over three years, according to Forbes.
The company said in a statement that it had "mutually agreed" with Deen to suspend her partnership with the company "while she takes time to focus her attention where it is needed."
FANS RALLY IN SUPPORT
Deen's merchandising deals, which include cookware, homeware and books, have an estimated value of about $7 million, according to Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for market researcher The NPD Group.
Cohen also estimated Deen's food and restaurant branding deals added another $6 million to $7 million to her empire.
Retail giants Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Target and Home Depot Inc all cut ties with Deen within 24 hours of her "Today Show" appearance.
"We have made a decision to phase out the Paula Deen merchandise in our stores as well as on Target.com," Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said in a statement. "Once the merchandise is sold out, we will not be replenishing inventory."
Since last Friday, Deen has also been dropped by pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc and Food Network, owned by Scripps Network Interactive Inc, home of Deen's cooking shows.
Home-shopping network QVC, owned by Liberty Media Corp, has taken a wait-and-see approach with Deen, saying it was putting a "pause" on her involvement with the network.
Sears Holdings Corp, which stocks Deen's products, said on Thursday it was still deciding the future of the partnership.
"Now she's going to be given an opportunity down the road ... to rebuild and retool," NPD Group's Cohen said. "She may never get (her brand) back to the same level, but there's enough people who will sympathize with her."
QVC said in its statement that "People deserve second chances."
Some companies that have partnered with Deen have stood behind her, including Landies Candies and Sandridge Food Corp, which said it is "proud to provide unwavering support for Paula Deen."
Deen's comeback may come down to her loyal fans, many of whom have come out in force on social media to voice their support, some threatening in Facebook and Twitter posts to boycott the companies dropping the chef.
"The consumers have a very short memory ... in a few years from now, no one is going to remember what Paula Deen did," Cohen said. "American consumers are very forgiving and very forgetful."
(Additional reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Mary Milliken)
Contact: Megan Fellman fellman@northwestern.edu 847-491-3115 Northwestern University
New approach can control large complex networks, from cells to power grids
As the world becomes increasingly connected, the need to ensure the proper functioning of its many underlying networks -- such as the Internet, power grids, global air transportation and ecological networks -- also is increasing. But controlling networks is very difficult.
Now a Northwestern University research team has developed the first broadly applicable computational approach identifying interventions that can both rescue complex networks from the brink of failure and reprogram them to a desired task.
"A fundamental property of networks is that a perturbation to one node can affect other nodes, potentially causing the entire system to change behavior or fail," said Adilson E. Motter, who supervised the research. "We have turned this principle on its head for something positive: to control network behavior. This novel approach to control could have a transformative impact on the field of complex networks."
Motter is the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
In a demonstration of its broad applicability, Motter and his colleagues used their framework both to mitigate cascading failures in a power-grid network and to identify potential drug targets in a biochemical signaling network of human cancer.
The findings will be published June 27 by the journal Nature Communications.
The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities, Motter said. The emergence of global air transportation and computer networks, for example, brings obvious benefits but at the price of facilitating the spread of diseases and malware.
Furthermore, ecological networks are increasingly affected by perturbations stemming from human actions, and a growing number of human diseases are being linked to malfunction of cellular and molecular networks.
Networks defy human control, however, even in the simplest cases, not only because complex networks consist of a large number of complicatedly connected parts but mainly because they respond nonlinearly to disturbances: A small disturbance can create a disproportionately large problem.
"Previous and recent research on network control done in the network science community has focused mainly on linear models, for the excellent reason that it is in principle much simpler to manipulate linear dynamics," said Sean P. Cornelius, the lead author of the paper. He is a graduate student in Motter's research group.
"Real networks are nonlinear, however, which at first could be regarded as bad news but turns out to be a blessing in disguise," Cornelius said. "In the case of complex networks, ignoring nonlinearity would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water."
Key to the authors' framework is their accounting of this nonlinear nature of the dynamics in real networks. In such systems, the size of the response is generally not proportional to the size of the disturbance. Accordingly, small control interventions can lead to a large response that propagates through the entire network, rescuing or reprogramming it.
A breakthrough in the newly developed control approach is the development of a computational method that identifies small perturbations, which, after propagating through the network, will bring the system to the desired final state. In the parlance of dynamical systems theory, the authors exploit what are known as "basins of attraction" -- sets of network states that eventually will converge to a given stable state (or "attractor") of the system.
A complicating factor in the networks under consideration is that, in practice, control interventions applied by humans only can modulate a very small fraction of all nodes in the network. The framework developed by the Northwestern researchers helps identify the critical nodes for controlling large networks.
"This can be one node out of tens, hundreds or even thousands of nodes, depending on the application," said Motter, who also is an executive committee member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). "In treating a disease, for example, doctors cannot directly control all of the many thousand genes in a cell, but we can hope to influence them indirectly by manipulating a few key genes that will then influence the others."
In an application to a form of cancer caused by abnormal survival of certain white blood cells, the researchers were able to identify potential curative interventions mediated by the control of only three genes or proteins, on average.
The researchers also applied their framework to a simple model of power-grid networks. "In these networks, it is critical that the power generators be synchronized with one another," Cornelius said. "But, under certain conditions, this state of affairs can be disrupted by, say, a tree falling on a power line."
The authors showed that by manipulating only a portion of the variables, it is in principle possible to restore power-grid synchrony following severe disturbances.
Similar results are relevant for the control of cascading failures in diverse systems, for ecosystems management and potentially for the mitigation of financial crises.
###
The title of the paper is "Realistic Control of Network Dynamics." In addition to Motter and Cornelius, the paper is co-authored by William L. Kath. He is a professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Megan Fellman fellman@northwestern.edu 847-491-3115 Northwestern University
New approach can control large complex networks, from cells to power grids
As the world becomes increasingly connected, the need to ensure the proper functioning of its many underlying networks -- such as the Internet, power grids, global air transportation and ecological networks -- also is increasing. But controlling networks is very difficult.
Now a Northwestern University research team has developed the first broadly applicable computational approach identifying interventions that can both rescue complex networks from the brink of failure and reprogram them to a desired task.
"A fundamental property of networks is that a perturbation to one node can affect other nodes, potentially causing the entire system to change behavior or fail," said Adilson E. Motter, who supervised the research. "We have turned this principle on its head for something positive: to control network behavior. This novel approach to control could have a transformative impact on the field of complex networks."
Motter is the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
In a demonstration of its broad applicability, Motter and his colleagues used their framework both to mitigate cascading failures in a power-grid network and to identify potential drug targets in a biochemical signaling network of human cancer.
The findings will be published June 27 by the journal Nature Communications.
The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities, Motter said. The emergence of global air transportation and computer networks, for example, brings obvious benefits but at the price of facilitating the spread of diseases and malware.
Furthermore, ecological networks are increasingly affected by perturbations stemming from human actions, and a growing number of human diseases are being linked to malfunction of cellular and molecular networks.
Networks defy human control, however, even in the simplest cases, not only because complex networks consist of a large number of complicatedly connected parts but mainly because they respond nonlinearly to disturbances: A small disturbance can create a disproportionately large problem.
"Previous and recent research on network control done in the network science community has focused mainly on linear models, for the excellent reason that it is in principle much simpler to manipulate linear dynamics," said Sean P. Cornelius, the lead author of the paper. He is a graduate student in Motter's research group.
"Real networks are nonlinear, however, which at first could be regarded as bad news but turns out to be a blessing in disguise," Cornelius said. "In the case of complex networks, ignoring nonlinearity would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water."
Key to the authors' framework is their accounting of this nonlinear nature of the dynamics in real networks. In such systems, the size of the response is generally not proportional to the size of the disturbance. Accordingly, small control interventions can lead to a large response that propagates through the entire network, rescuing or reprogramming it.
A breakthrough in the newly developed control approach is the development of a computational method that identifies small perturbations, which, after propagating through the network, will bring the system to the desired final state. In the parlance of dynamical systems theory, the authors exploit what are known as "basins of attraction" -- sets of network states that eventually will converge to a given stable state (or "attractor") of the system.
A complicating factor in the networks under consideration is that, in practice, control interventions applied by humans only can modulate a very small fraction of all nodes in the network. The framework developed by the Northwestern researchers helps identify the critical nodes for controlling large networks.
"This can be one node out of tens, hundreds or even thousands of nodes, depending on the application," said Motter, who also is an executive committee member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). "In treating a disease, for example, doctors cannot directly control all of the many thousand genes in a cell, but we can hope to influence them indirectly by manipulating a few key genes that will then influence the others."
In an application to a form of cancer caused by abnormal survival of certain white blood cells, the researchers were able to identify potential curative interventions mediated by the control of only three genes or proteins, on average.
The researchers also applied their framework to a simple model of power-grid networks. "In these networks, it is critical that the power generators be synchronized with one another," Cornelius said. "But, under certain conditions, this state of affairs can be disrupted by, say, a tree falling on a power line."
The authors showed that by manipulating only a portion of the variables, it is in principle possible to restore power-grid synchrony following severe disturbances.
Similar results are relevant for the control of cascading failures in diverse systems, for ecosystems management and potentially for the mitigation of financial crises.
###
The title of the paper is "Realistic Control of Network Dynamics." In addition to Motter and Cornelius, the paper is co-authored by William L. Kath. He is a professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) ? Kenyan police say a terror suspect was killed in a gun battle and present weapons to the media. Hours later another suspect accused of terror links is dead in what police described as a shootout.
Witnesses and the family of the slain suspects tell a different story: That the suspects were arrested without a fight. One was handcuffed, and both were executed.
Human rights group, Muslim for Human Rights, says that police last week targeted the two terror suspects for execution. The group said Wednesday Kenya maintains a police death squad tasked with eliminating suspects with links to terror groups.
The head of Kenya's Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, Boniface Mwaniki, denied that a death squad exists, calling the allegations "outrageous."
June 26, 2013 ? In 2011 and 2012, research from China's Nanjing University made international headlines with reports that after mice ate, bits of genetic material from the plants they'd ingested could make it into their bloodstreams intact and turn the animals' own genes off. The surprising results from Chen-Yu Zhang's group led to speculation that genetic illness might one day be treated with medicinal food, but also to worry that genetically modified foods might in turn modify consumers in unanticipated ways.
Now, though, a research team at Johns Hopkins reports that Zhang's results were likely a false positive that resulted from the technique his group used. The new study, the Johns Hopkins group says, bolsters the case of skeptics who argued that genetic material from food would have little chance of surviving the digestive system, much less crossing the intestinal lining to enter the bloodstream. The study appears in the July issue of RNA Biology.
"It's disappointing in a sense -- it would open up so many therapeutic possibilities if microRNAs from food really could get into our blood and regulate our genes," says Kenneth Witwer, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, who led the new study. But beyond the fact that people won't be picking up prescription lettuce at the pharmacy anytime soon, he adds, the larger lesson is that scientific research's capacity for self-correction is alive and well.
Witwer said his group was intrigued by the earlier results, in which Zhang's group focused on microRNAs, molecules that are a chemical cousin of DNA. Rather than storing genetic information as DNA does, their primary role is to intervene in so-called "gene expression," the process of using genes' blueprints to build proteins. Because they affect whether and how much genes are actually used, microRNAs wield tremendous power, Witwer notes, "so it was startling to think that microRNAs from plants could get into the bloodstream, get into tissues, and regulate genes in those tissues."
Witwer teamed up with colleagues to check the results with a similar experiment of their own. They bought soy-based smoothies at a grocery store and tested their microRNA content, then fed the smoothies to macaques and took samples of the animals' blood.
Knowing that the concentrations of any plant microRNAs in the blood would be too low to measure directly, they used a common technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to bring up the concentration of the genetic material. PCR is designed so that only certain fragments of genetic material in a sample -- the ones researchers choose to target -- will be copied. Zhang's studies had also used PCR to look for plant microRNAs.
Just as Zhang had, the Johns Hopkins team found what appeared to be the targeted plant microRNAs in the macaques' blood. But when they ran the experiment several times, they got highly variable results: Sometimes the microRNAs were present in low concentrations, and sometimes not at all. In addition, the samples from before the macaques drank the smoothies were just as likely to have the microRNAs as were the post-smoothie samples -- a result that just didn't make sense if the source of the microRNAs was the plant material in the drinks.
To Witwer, the results indicated that what he was seeing was not the targeted plant microRNAs, but fragments of the macaques' own genetic material that were similar enough to the targeted segments that the PCR copied them at low levels.
To test this, the team used a new technique in which PCR takes place in tiny aerosolized droplets rather than in a test tube. The advantage, Witwer says, is that by effectively running tens or hundreds of thousands of reactions at the same time, researchers can see whether the outcomes of those reactions are consistent -- in other words, whether the results are meaningful or just a fluke. In this case, the results were all over the place, indicating that plant microRNAs weren't really present.
At the same time, Witwer cautions, it remains possible that very low levels of microRNAs could enter the blood. Even if this happened, though, he says it is unlikely that such small numbers of molecules could affect gene expression. Additional studies will be needed to determine whether low-level transfer occurs and whether any plant RNAs serve a function in the body.
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Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
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