Good Morning! Today is Friday March 15th, 2013. Here are today's top and most interesting headlines from ACN:
HIV Cure Progress -- VW Shares The Wealth -- The Growing Consensus On Banks -- Nuclear Power: The Future Lies In The Past -- Bill Gates: 'Capitalism Means..." -- "47%" Bartender Speaks Out -- Cable News' Coverage Of Cuts To Poor? -- Higgs Boson Discovered -- Scientists Grow New Teeth -- Samsung's Runaway Train -- A Subway To Carry Nukes? -- Chavez's Role In New Pope -- "Spring Is Coming" Obama, Netanyahu And The Red Line -- The Carnival Dream?
MORE HIVE IS CURED: FIRST A BABY, NOW 14 ADULTS
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| (Image: Bruce Forster/Getty) |
Two weeks after the revelation that a baby has been "cured" of HIV, reports suggest that a similar treatment can cure some adults too. Early treatment seems crucial, but does not guarantee success.
Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute's unit for regulation of retroviral infections in Paris analysed 70 people with HIV who had been treated with antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) between 35 days and 10 weeks after infection – much sooner than people are normally treated.
VW SHARES MORE THAN $1.1 BILLION IN PROFITS WITH WORKERS
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| Reuters |
Volkswagen is coughing up a massive NZ$1.1 billion in bonuses to workers after a record year.
The company sold 9.3 million vehicles, up nearly 12 per cent, in boosting revenues by more than 20 per cent to NZ$305 billion during 2012.
That pushed its pre-tax profit to an asonishing NZ$40 billion. Net profits came in at NZ$10.1 billion.
VW's success, however, doesn't just go to shareholders with the company's German workforce sharing some of the record profits.
VW says it will pay German workers a bonus of around €7200 or a little over NZ$11,000 at the current exchange rates. The bonus is being given to around 100,000 employees in Germany.
''The Volkswagen team has done an excellent job in 2012, and this team effort pays off for everyone.''
BIG BANKS HAVE A BIG PROBLEM
The largest banks in the United States face a serious political problem. There has been an outbreak of clear thinking among officials and politicians who increasingly agree that too-big-to-fail is not a good arrangement for the financial sector.
Six banks face the prospect of meaningful constraints on their size: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. They are fighting back with lobbying dollars in the usual fashion – but in the last electoral cycle they went heavily for Mitt Romney (not elected) and against Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown for the Senate (both elected), so this element of their strategy is hardly prospering
THE FUTURE OF NUCLEAR POWER RUNS ON THE WASTE OF OUR NUCLEAR PAST
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| Image Credit: Justin Randall |
BILL GATES: CAPITALISM MEANS MORE BALDNESS RESEARCH GETS MORE FUNDING THAN MALARIA
Capitalism means that there is much more research into male baldness than there is into diseases such as malaria, which mostly affect poor people, said Bill Gates, speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering's Global Grand Challenges Summit.
"Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives," he said. "The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding. But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria."
WORLD'S MOST INFLUENTIAL BARTENDER GOES PUBLIC
"You shouldn't have to be able to afford $50,000 to hear what a candidate actually thinks." -Scott Prouty, the bartender who secretly taped Mitt Romney's "47%" remarks, on why he felt obligated to come forward.
The most influential bartender in history came forward Wednesday night to reveal himself as Scott Prouty, the source behind Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” video. His answer to why he felt obligated to publish the video was one of the best of the interview.
CABLE NEWS COVERS CUTS TO WHITE HOUSE TOURS, IGNORES CUTS TO PROGRAMS FOR THE POOR
Thanks to Congressional gridlock, automatic budget cuts took effect 14 days ago, threatening 700,000 jobs and gutting fundsfor vital programs in housing assistance, early childhood education, disaster relief, and national security. Secret Service staffing was also impacted, prompting the cancellation of White House tours last week. Republicans immediately attacked the decision as a political move designed to turn the public against the sequester and 14 Republican senators signed a letter demanding information.
The media has also latched on to preserve the White House tours, while largely ignoring other much more devastating sequester cuts. As Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out on Wednesday, there are 12,000 news stories concerning White House tours and less than 1,000 about the sequester’s impact on housing assistance programs, which disproportionately affect low-income Americans.
EVIDENCE THAT PARTICLE DISCOVERED AT CERN IS HIGGS BOSON
Geneva, 14 March 2013. At the Moriond Conference today, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented preliminary new results that further elucidate the particle discovered last year. Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.
Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles, and its quantum properties. For example, a Higgs boson is postulated to have no spin, and in the Standard Model its parity – a measure of how its mirror image behaves – should be positive. CMS and ATLAS have compared a number of options for the spin-parity of this particle, and these all prefer no spin and positive parity. This, coupled with the measured interactions of the new particle with other particles, strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson.
TESTING OUT NEW TEETH
Cells taken from adult human gums can be combined with cells from the molars of fetal mice to form teeth with viable roots, according to research published this week in the Journal of Dental Research. The method remains a long way from clinical use, but the findings represent a step toward the goal of growing bioengineered replacements for lost teeth.
Teeth develop when embryonic epithelial cells in the mouth combine with mesenchymal cells derived from the neural crest. Previous studies have shown that these cells can be combined in the lab to formal normal teeth, but the challenge was to find non-embryonic source of the cells that could be used in the clinic.
SAMSUNG HAS AN UNSTOPPABLE HIT IN S4
No, it's not too early to declare the Galaxy S4 a roaring success.
So what if the latest flagship smartphone from Samsung Electronics won't be out for another month (at least)? Or that Samsung hasn't yet released any pricing information? Or that all of its key features had already been leaked in advance? Or that it's not even that different from theGalaxy S3?
The fact is, Samsung will sell boatloads of this phone, and the foundation for its success was laid down awhile ago.
As I explained earlier, Samsung has been relentless when it came to marketing the Galaxy S franchise and building out its brand, which broke out with the Galaxy S2 and truly hit mainstream awareness with the Galaxy S3.
THAT'S NO TRAIN! AIRFORCE EYES SUBWAY FOR NUCLEAR MISSILES
The Air Force wants to upgrade its aging nuclear missiles and the hundreds of underground silos that hold them. One idea it’s exploring: the construction of a sprawling network of underground subway tunnels to shuttle the missiles around like a mobile doomsday train. As one does.
As first reported by Inside Defense, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center will award several study contracts next month worth up to $3 million each to research the idea. A broad agency announcementfrom the Air Force describes the hair-raising concept, intended to keep the weapons secure through 2075, as a system of tunnels where nuclear missiles are shuttled around on rails or some undefined “trackless” system.
The advantage of the world’s deadliest subway: During an atomic holocaust, mobile missiles are harder for an adversary to target than a static silo. Missiles could be positioned at launch holes placed at “regular intervals” along the length of the tunnels.
DID VENEZUELA'S CHAVEZ NUDGE CHRIST IN PICK OF SOUTH AMERICAN POPE
(Reuters) - Late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's influence may have stretched into the afterlife and had a hand in Christ's decision to opt for a Latin American Pope, acting President Nicolas Maduro said on Wednesday.
"We know that our commander ascended to the heights and is face-to-face with Christ," Maduro said at a Caracas book fair. "Something influenced the choice of a South American pope, someone new arrived at Christ's side and said to him: 'Well, it seems to us South America's time has come.'"
Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected in a surprise choice to be the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church on Wednesday, the first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years.
OBAMA WON'T TRIP OVER NETANYAHU'S IRAN "RED LINE"
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama visits Israel next week at the onset of spring - the "red line" previously drawn by his host, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to trigger an attack on Iran's nuclear sites.
But an Israeli-Iranian war, Washington's nightmare as it tries to scale back defense commitments abroad and avoid a draining Gulf oil crisis, does not appear trip-wire imminent.
Officials and analysts say Iran has warded off the Israeli threat by calibrating its mid-level uranium enrichment so that it does not accrue enough fuel for a potential first bomb - the threshold Netanyahu warned about in a United Nations speech in September.
CARNIVAL CRUISE HAS PROBLEMS....AGAIN
(CNN) -- Another Carnival cruise ship is having problems. This time the Carnival Legend is having technical difficulties that are affecting its sailing speed, the travel company said Thursday.
The Legend is on the last leg of a seven-day Caribbean cruise that departed Tampa on Sunday, March 10, according to a statement from the cruise company.
The news comes after the Carnival Dream became a nightmare for some passengers Wednesday when power went off, some toilets stopped working and no one was allowed to get off the vessel -- despite the fact that the ship was docked at Philipsburg, St. Maarten, in the eastern Caribbean.
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