June 29, 2013 ? University Hospitals (UH) Eye Institute will be one of the first medical centers in the United States to offer the Argus? II Retinal Prosthesis System ("Argus II").
The Argus II is the first and only "bionic eye" to be approved in countries throughout the world, including the U.S. It is used to treat patients with late stage retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Argus II was developed by Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., located near Los Angeles.
In preparation for the launch of Argus II later this year, implanting centers, including UH, will soon begin to accept consultations for patients with RP. UH is one of a select number of medical centers in 12 major markets in the nation, and the only one in Cleveland and the state of Ohio, chosen by Second Sight to offer the Argus II, which received FDA approval earlier this year.
Argus II works by converting video images captured by a miniature camera, housed in the patient's glasses, into a series of small electrical pulses that are transmitted wirelessly to an array of electrodes on the surface of the retina. These pulses are intended to stimulate the retina's remaining cells resulting in the corresponding perception of patterns of light in the brain. Patients then learn to interpret these visual patterns thereby regaining some visual function.
"This is a remarkable breakthrough," said Suber S. Huang, MD, MBA, Director, UH Eye Institute's Center for Retina and Macular Disease, who also served as the Independent Medical Safety Monitor for clinical trials of the system and gave the summary closing to the FDA Ophthalmic devices panel.
"The system offers a profound benefit for people who are blind from RP and who currently have no therapy available to them. Argus II allows patients to reclaim their independence and improve their lives."
RP is a rare inherited, degenerative eye disease that often results in profound vision loss to the level of bare light perception or no light perception. It affects nearly 100,000 Americans. Noted Cleveland businessman and professional sports owner Gordon Gund is blind from this disease.
"We are thrilled that several of the nation's top hospitals will be the first to offer Argus II to patients in the U.S.," said Brian Mech, Vice President of Business Development, Second Sight. "After an intensive and difficult selection process, these sites were chosen for their cutting-edge approach to medicine and unparalleled commitment to patient care. We are confident that RP patients seeking treatment at these centers will benefit greatly from the best-in-class services these sites provide."
Argus II had more than 20 years of work in the field, three clinical trials, more than $100 million in public investment by the National Eye Institute, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, and an additional $100 million in private investment.
Square Enix?s Naoki Yoshida, producer/director of Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn, spoke with Famitsu during E3 about the long-delayed PC/PS3/PS4 MMOG. Yoshida took over production of the game in 2010 after its original bug-riddled incarnation on PC became a high-profile critical disaster.
During the lengthy interview, Yoshida addressed concerns that the game will appeal to players both in Japan and the West, a feat that recent FF titles have generally failed to pull off.
?I want to make a game that will appeal to both markets,? he said. ?Western audiences have said the previous FF was too linear and not dark enough. On the other hand, when you go to Comic-Con or Japan Expo overseas you see a lot of people cosplaying as FF characters. Just like in Japan, the opinion of fans in the West is divided. So I?m taking the classic FF aesthetic and making it darker; that appeals to me, and it will appeal to certain fans in Japan and in the West.
?To be honest there?s not much difference now between the opinion of fans in Japan and in the West on FFXIV. They all think the Miqo?te are cool characters, for example, haha.?
MMORPGs are not especially popular in Japan, where PC gaming remains niche and many people prefer local multiplayer to online play.
?There aren?t as many people playing MMO games in Japan as in the West, so we?ve worked hard to make sure that the gameplay and the graphics are up to scratch for players in the West,? admitted Yoshida. ?The old FFXIV had an especially negative impact in Japan; so if a Western audience says the new game is great, I can take that as a straight response. There are differences in internet culture and opinions go up and down. The aim is to make something that people feel is interesting enough to try.?
FFXIV was originally destined for release on PS3 as well as PC, but the PS3 version was postponed while the game received an overhaul that is still ongoing. The game is now in beta-testing and is slated for release on 27 August 2013 on PS3 and PC, with a PS4 version further down the line in 2014.
When asked for his opinion on PS4, Yoshida replied, ?There?s so much memory! It?s fast! It has a lot of eye-catching features, like the social functions, integration with various devices, the touchpad on the DualShock 4, but the memory is a really big deal. In the case of FFXIV, when you have hundreds of customised characters on screen at once, it is after all hard to avoid a memory bottleneck.?
It may seem odd that Square Enix is even bothering with the PS3 version at all, since the PS4 version will surely be closer in quality to the PC rendition than the PS3 can hope to achieve. But Yoshida said that Square Enix has its reasons to persevere with the PS3 release.
?For one thing, we promised PS3 owners this game and we?ve kept them waiting for a long time,? he said. ?Even when the game was delayed for PS3, we promised that it would eventually come out. Another reason is that the game is a MMORPG with a monthly billing model, and so we want to make the game open to as many players as possible and have them look forward to new content as we update the game. Even if a lot of PS3 users migrate to PS4, I don?t expect PS4 to have two million users overnight. It took a long time for people to switch from PS2 to PS3 you know.
?But for players who want to have PC-parity visuals and more characters on screen, there is the option of PS4. Both versions are on the same server, so you can carry your character and account across.?
Yoshida detailed aspects of the gameplay and character classes, before going on to discuss planned expansion packs and patches.
?It?s hard to be specific because all sorts of things could change with the launch, but personally I hope to release an expansion pack within about a year and a half of the start of the service,? he said. ?It could be two years, though, because a year and a half could be too tight to create the volume of content we?re aiming for. As for update patches, we?ll probably release one every two and a half or three months ? four times a year.?
It?s been a rocky road to PlayStation for this ambitious project. With the release finally in sight, it won?t be long till we know whether the development team?s reshuffling has paid off. The proof will come not only in the subscription figures but on the cosplay catwalk too.
The timing of the deletion of emails from NDSU President Dean Bresciani?s inbox has always been interesting. It appears as though the mass-deletion of tens of thousands of emails took place between the time when an open records request from Forum Communicatinos was fulfilled and when an open records request from Legislative Council was received.
The folks at Forum Communications have gone back and compared the results of their open records request with the one from Legislative Council and found inconsistencies involving dozens of emails:
The newspaper compared the results of its own open records request for Bresciani?s emails, made in March, with those that the North Dakota Legislative Council received after a similar request in April and found that 53 emails were missing from the results of the council?s request.
Nearly all of the emails in the Legislative Council?s request were sent by Bresciani, with few incoming emails that would sit in an inbox, suggesting that at least part of the president?s inbox was deleted sometime after The Forum?s open records request was fulfilled in late April.
The missing emails, mostly innocuous replies to Bresciani from fellow school employees, are just a fraction of the 45,375 emails that were allegedly deleted from Bresciani?s account sometime in the two weeks leading up to the Legislative Council?s request for the president?s emails ? a possible violation of the state?s open records law. The emails are now at the heart of a probe by Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem?s office.
This in and of itself may not be all that shocking a revelation. A few dozen innocuous emails probably aren?t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But what it absolutely shows is that emails were disappearing.
And, despite previous claims from university system officials that they couldn?t verify if emails had been deleted or not, they are now acknowledging that fact. ?After being asked about the 53 missing emails identified by the Forum, NDSU and North Dakota University System officials confirmed Friday that ?a large number of emails? have been deleted,? reports Kyle Potter. ?Bresciani and other university staff initially said they couldn?t verify whether any emails had been deleted from Bresciani?s account.?
Also, Bresciani?s claim that his system was ?compromised? has been shot down:
[Bresciani] also suggested his account may have been compromised by university system staff in a ?personally directed and malicious? effort against him. But Wallman and Feldner said in the statement that the only outsiders who accessed the president?s account were fulfilling open records requests.
Days ago I had filed an open records request with NDUS spokeswoman Linda Donlin asking for the log information showing the deletion of the files. After initially acknowledging my request I?ve gotten no further communications for Donlin (who is part of the staff upheaval going on, it seems) but a university system source has given me a screen shot of the log showing the deletion of emails:
We can now dismiss a lot of the spin and self-serving explanations coming from President Bresciani?s office and other sources and focus on some facts:
The emails were absolutely deleted from Bresciani?s inbox.
Bresciani?s inbox was not ?compromised? by anyone from the university system office, despite his wild allegations.
NDSU did not fully complete the legislature?s request for emails given the discrepancies between the Forum Communications request and the Legislative Council request.
The questions that need to be answered is who deleted the emails, and were they deleted inadvertently or as an conscious effort to avoid an open records request? The latter, remember, is potentially a felony.
Word I?m getting from university system sources is that there were thousands of emails now-discovered that weren?t turned over to the legislature. That, if true, is damning.
The genesis story: the long-lead up to every console's launch usually leaves one in its wake. Typically, we get some sanitized version, appropriately molded by corporate PR and fed to the public with the crust cut off. But when you're Mark Cerny, lead PlayStation 4 architect, and you've literally grown up with the games industry and the PlayStation brand itself, the tale you get to tell tends to be more truthful, mesmerizing, and chock full of the hard knocks that make success stories so great. And that's just what Cerny delivered at Gamelab in Barcelona this week, recounting the whirlwind career that led him to have the heaviest hand in shaping Sony's next-gen platform.
Not familiar with the man's esteemed background? Then sample this bit of historical trivia: Cerny was the youngest Atari employee at age 17 (!). How's that for inspiring? Oh, and what's more, Cerny even fesses up to the egotistical attitude that flattened Sony's PlayStation 3 launch (spoiler alert: it has to do with crushing third-party devs). There's much, much more insider-y goodness packed into the 45 minute-plus video after the break. Go on, now. Watch it. You'll be better for it, we promise.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? Iran's president-elect called his win in national elections this month a vote for change and vowed Saturday to remain committed to his campaign promises of moderation and constructive interaction with the outside world.
Hasan Rouhani's promises of outreach could lower the political temperature between Iran and the West and perhaps nudge the country's ruling Islamic establishment toward a more flexible approach in its standoff over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.
Rouhani has already promised greater openness on the nuclear issue while at the same time siding with the hard-liner establishment that refuses to halt uranium enrichment. He believes it's possible to strike a deal that would allow the Islamic Republic to keep enriching uranium while assuring the West it will not produce a nuclear weapon.
The U.S. and its allies fear Iran may ultimately be able to develop nuclear arms. Tehran has denied the charges, saying its program is peaceful and aimed at generating electricity and producing radioisotopes to treat cancer patients.
The reformist-backed Rouhani won a landslide majority in June 14 presidential election, defeating his conservative and hardline rivals. He will succeed hardline outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad early August.
"People chose a new path ... People said in this election: We want change," Rouhani told a conference in Tehran Saturday. "The best language of the people is the ballot box. The people's vote is very obvious. There is no ambiguity."
Rouhani's election has revived hopes for a mutually acceptable deal over Iran's disputed nuclear program, as it was seen in part as a referendum on Iran's nuclear diplomacy. The country's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, a hard-liner who supported a policy of resistance, finished third in the vote, which was widely seen as rejection of his tough stance on the nuclear issue.
Rouhani said he will keep his promise of following a path of moderation in domestic and foreign policy.
"Moderation in foreign policy is neither surrender nor conflict, neither passivity nor confrontation. Moderation is effective and constructive interaction with the world," he said.
The final word on all state matters, particularly on the nuclear issue, lies with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but a strong president can influence decision-making.
Rouhani has vowed that he will seek to have the stinging economic sanctions against Iran lifted and work with international powers to settle the nuclear issue through active diplomacy and dialogue.
The president-elect also said that the ruling system needs to allow more freedom for Iran's relatively young population.
"Happiness is people's right," he said. "I thank police for increasing the threshold of their tolerance." He was referring to wild street celebrations after he was declared winner of the election.
Iran's anti-vice police sporadically detain youths on vague charges of not observing Islamic codes. During Ahmadinejad's presidency, many detainees claimed to be mistreated while in detention.
"We should talk to girls and boys in the same way we talk to our own children. People's dignity must be preserved. Humiliating people is not acceptable but giving (polite) notice (of a morality offense) is fine," Rouhani said.
Signage for a T-Mobile store is pictured in downtown Los Angeles, California August 31, 2011. REUTERS/Fred??
(Reuters) - T-Mobile US Inc agreed to buy wireless spectrum covering the Mississippi Valley region from U.S. Cellular Corp for about $308 million in cash.
The fourth-largest U.S. wireless service provider said the additional spectrum will allow it to expand its 4G LTE network across 29 markets covering 32 million people in several southern states.
(Reporting by Chandni Doulatramani in Bangalore; Editing by Anthony Kurian)
Editor?s note:?Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Stanford Law School, Director of Research at Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and VP of Innovation and Research at Singularity University. The passage of immigration reform by the Senate was a big step forward. The bill is far from perfect, but goes a long way towards solving Silicon Valley?s talent shortage -- and America?s immigrant exodus. But big hurdles lie ahead as anti-immigrant groups regroup. Extreme elements of the right will be fighting to close the borders while their counterparts on the left -- Big Labor in particular -- work to undermine high-skilled immigration.
BEIRUT (AP) ? Intense shelling by Syrian government troops on a village in the country's south killed at least eight women and girls overnight as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad pushed ahead with an offensive against rebels near the border with Jordan, activists said Friday.
Buoyed by an influx of fighters from the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and other foreign Shiite Muslim militants, the Syrian regime has grabbed the initiative in the nation's more than 2-year-old conflict in recent weeks, capturing a strategic town near the border with Lebanon and squeezing rebel positions around the capital, Damascus.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the shelling overnight targeted the village of Karak, in eastern Daraa, and killed four women and four girls. The Observatory relies on a wide network of activists on the ground in Syria for its information
A video posted on a Facebook page of activists from Daraa showed the bodies of the women and children allegedly killed in the shelling wrapped in blankets placed on the ground of a home. Another video from the village showed residents carrying others wounded into vehicles amid wails by women and children and signs of panic.
The videos appeared genuine and were consistent with other AP reporting of the events.
The United Nations has estimated that more than 6,000 children are among the some 93,000 people killed in Syria's more than 2-year-old conflict, which started with largely peaceful protests against the rule of President Bashar Assad. The uprising morphed into an armed rebellion in response to a brutal government crackdown on the protest movement.
In recent weeks, government troops have gone on the offensive against rebel-held areas to try to cut the opposition's supply lines and secure Damascus and the corridor running to the Mediterranean coast, which is the heartland of the president's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Regime forces have also made inroads in the south. Syria's state news agency said Friday government troops were chasing "terrorist cells" in the city of Daraa, the birthplace of the anti-Assad uprising, as well as the surrounding countryside, including along the border with Jordan. It did not mention Karak.
SANA said 18 opposition fighters including Jordanians, a Saudi and a Chechen, were killed and weapons were seized. It did not refer to civilian casualties.
State-owned Al-Ikhbariya TV also reported that government forces seized a truck loaded with weapons and ammunition in the central Homs province apparently destined for rebel fighters. The truck included with anti-tank missiles, machine guns, shoulder propelled grenades and communication devices, the station said.
The United States and its allies recently said they will help arm the rebels amid reports that Washington's Gulf allies have already sent some much-coveted anti-tank missiles to select groups of fighters. The U.S. is still trying to sort out which rebels exactly will be given weapons and how, fearing that advanced arms may fall in the hands of Islamic extremists in the rebel ranks.
Meanwhile, the Observatory said a rare attack in Damascus's old city Thursday was caused by an explosive device planted near a Shiite charity organization. The attack, which killed four people, was first believed to be a suicide attack near a church.
State media showed pictures of the body of the suspected suicide bomber in the ancient quarter. Residents had disagreed on the target of the attack but a government official also said a bomber wearing an explosive belt blew himself up near the Greek Orthodox Church.
But Rami Abdul-Rahman, the director of the Observatory, said investigation by activists on the ground indicated that a device was planted near the Shiite charity, and it blew up when this man was walking past. The Observatory originally reported that the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber. The church and charity are only around two dozen meters (yards) apart.
The conflict has increasingly taken on sectarian overtones. The rebels fighting to remove Assad are largely Sunnis, and have been joined by foreign fighters from other Muslim countries. The regime of Assad is led by the president's Alawite sect and his forces have been joined by fighters from Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah militant group, a factor that has helped fan the sectarian nature of the conflict.
In an apparent snub to the targeting of a religious institution, The main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, said in a statement Friday that it "rejects" actions that violate the unity of Syrians and fuels sectarian strife, blaming the regime for attempting to incite it.
"The unfortunate practices of various individuals do not reflect the true values of the revolution," the statement said. "The Syrian Coalition reiterates that those who commit crimes and infringe on international conventions will be identified, pursued and brought to justice."
Impertinent. Mumbling. Offended. Teary-eyed. Rachel Jeantel, star witness for the prosecution in George Zimmerman's murder trial, was all of those, and more, as her testimony Wednesday provided new details into Trayvon Martin?s last moments and infused racially loaded commentary into an already-sensitive trial.
Contentful, a startup out of Berlin, is today releasing a beta of a platform that it hopes will be the future of how companies manage their content in a multi-screened world, where nearly any physical object has a shot at being a piece of "hardware." It is also announcing a seed round of an undisclosed amount from Balderton and Zendesk backer Point Nine Ventures to help further that vision.
Ancient skull This skull of a Late Pleistocene horse, Equus lambei, was found in permafrost in the Klondike region of the Canadian Yukon. (D.G. Froese / University of Alberta /June 26, 2013)
By Geoffrey Mohan
June 26, 2013, 3:46 p.m.
Researchers have unraveled the genetic code of a wild horse that loped across the frozen Yukon about 700,000 years ago, making it the oldest creature by far to reveal its DNA to modern science.
Until recently, experts believed it was impossible to recover useful amounts of DNA from fossils that old. The previous record holder for oldest genome belonged to a polar bear that lived more than 110,000 years ago. The horse sequence, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, amounts to a dramatic increase in how far back scientists can peer into the biochemical history of advanced life.
The DNA was extracted from a 6-inch slice of a fossilized horse leg bone that was found nine years ago. Under normal conditions, DNA begins to degrade soon after death. But this bone was preserved in permafrost at Thistle Creek in Canada's Yukon Territory.
Dating techniques revealed that the animal lived in an epoch when woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and giant beavers shared turf with ancestral humans.
The work "opens great perspectives as to the level of details we can reconstruct of our origins and the evolutionary history of every animal on the planet," said study leader Ludovic Orlando of the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
Orlando and an international team of collaborators pieced together even the tiniest of DNA fragments recovered from the bone. Such genetic puzzle assembly generally includes multiple samples from each part of the genome, sometimes as many as five or 10. In this case, the so-called coverage was just 1.12.
That's not enough detail to say much about what the horse looked like, said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark who worked on the study. Team members suggested the horse was about the size of a modern Icelandic or Arabian horse, though it probably was less muscular, and perhaps slower.
"If they were fast runners, it was not because of the same genes we know of today," Orlando said.
As part of the genetic sleuthing, the team also sequenced the DNA of a 43,000-year-old horse fossil, five modern domesticated horses, a wild Przewalski's horse native to the Mongolian steppes, and a donkey from the Copenhagen Zoo named Willy.
By comparing all of these genomes, the researchers determined that the most recent common ancestor of all these species ? as well as zebras ? lived 4 million to 4.5 million years ago. That's about 2 million years earlier than previously thought, and allows for far more time for horses to have evolved into the animals we know today.
The findings offered a window into 29 regions of the domestic horse's genome that differed from that of the wild Przewalski's horse, suggesting these changes were part of their evolutionary path toward domestication. Some of those changes involved the immune and olfactory systems.
The analysis also offers hope for the fate of the Przewalski's horse, an endangered animal whose DNA showed no signs of interbreeding with modern horses.
"It is 100% wild," Willerslev said. "There is no domestic genetics present in that horse. Which of course suggests these guys are really worth preserving."
The DNA analysis revealed that the species has enough genetic variety to enable it to recover if conservation efforts can be sustained. Once considered extinct in the wild, the horse was reintroduced to the Mongolian steppes in 1985.
Other scientists who specialize in sequencing ancient DNA praised the work on the Canadian horse. But they cautioned that it wouldn't help them decode the DNA of human ancestors who lived so long ago.
"We've known for a long time now that DNA preservation is exceptionally good in permafrost compared to other environments," said Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the study. "Unfortunately, with the exception of Otzi the Iceman, none of our ancestors have been so obliging as to die under circumstances where the remains are frozen soon after death and remain frozen until discovery."
Paleogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who has studied the Neanderthal genome, was also pessimistic: "We are not going to find very ancient humans preserved in permafrost."
Alright iPhoneographers, our weekly photo contest is back! This week, the topic will be sunsets. It's summer time and we know lots of you are out and about whether it's on a beach, hiking, or doing other fun summer activities. Sunsets are one of the most beautiful things in nature and summer is a perfect time to catch lots of them. We want to see what kind of sunsets you're seeing where you're at.
The contest begins today and ends Wednesday, July 3rd, at 10pm Eastern time.
The prize: A 4-pack of 5x5" DeepSquare Prints of your own photos
In addition to a thumbs up from the iMore crew and all of us yelling about how great of an iPhoneographer you are, you'll also win a 4-pack of 5x5 inch DeepSquare Prints from our friends over at Static Pixels who were nice enough to sponsor this week's photo contest.
Static Pixels will allow you to turn any four of your photos into beautiful DeepSquare prints to hang on your own walls.
The rules
The rules of entry are very simple. The photo must have been taken with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (we'll check the EXIF data of the original file to verify) and any edits must have been done with an iPhone or iPad app. No Photoshop, Lightroom, or other external editing programs! If you have external lens accessories such as an Olloclip or other snap-on lens, you are more than welcome to use them.
You can submit as many photos as you'd like, but remember, this is a contest, so make sure you submit your best work!
Resources
Now, before you run off to take your photo, remember that it's not technical skill alone that will claim this prize. Even if you're not the best photographer (yet!), a great eye and a great subject can still get you the win.
However, a little help can never hurt, so make sure you check out our iPhone photography series for some tips.
How to submit
Submitting your photos is easy. just head over to the iMore Photography Forum and post your photos to the official contest thread. Don't forget to state which apps, if any, you used to edit your photo!
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - For the best part of a year, the minds of European policymakers have focused on one overriding issue - banking union.
By establishing stricter oversight of Europe's banking sector and a unified system for dealing with any problems, they hope to draw a line under more than three years of debt and economic turmoil by separating countries from their banks.
For months, a summit of EU leaders on June 27-28 was flagged by officials as an important 'landmark' on the road towards a fully fledged banking union. But it now looks more likely to produce a letdown than a breakthrough.
There are unlikely to be any significant decisions given upcoming German elections, continued disagreement over how banking problems should best be resolved and the fact that financial markets are no longer exerting the same pressure.
"We're in a holding pattern until after the German elections in September," said a senior diplomat involved in preparing files for the summit. "Nothing controversial can happen until then, at least in terms of economic policy."
Ever since banking union started to take shape in mid-2012, Germany has been wary of it. It is concerned that as the currency union's largest and most powerful economy, it will end up on the hook for other countries' debts if a single, EU-wide system for sorting out problems is put in place.
Combined with German frustration at having to bail out weaker eurozone members including Greece and Portugal, it is not surprising Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to keep any banking union controversies out of the debate ahead of the September 22 vote, when she will bid for a third term.
She is being helped by the inability of EU finance ministers to agree on how best to go about cleaning up bad banks. Nearly 20 hours of meetings in Luxembourg last Friday again failed to reach a deal.
As a result, the Thursday-Friday summit will focus on youth unemployment and the need to reinvigorate growth in the EU - worthy goals but ones that some leaders feel are a distraction.
"If we don't discuss a common resolution of banks in crisis at the next meeting, I have a feeling that the December 2013 deadline for this will also not be met," Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta said last week.
While other countries such as Finland, France and the Netherlands share Italy's concerns about a delay, there is little sign the slowdown is having an effect on financial markets, where minds are more occupied by central bank policy in the United States, Japan and at the European Central Bank.
"Market sentiment is really of the view that banking union will come at some point in time, it's a mid-range goal," said Carsten Brzeski, an economist with ING Bank in Brussels.
"In that respect, Merkel has prevailed. Muddling through has become an accepted and successful policy strategy. Europe is muddling through in very small steps."
PITFALLS AHEAD
The danger is that muddling through becomes complacency or procrastination.
If concrete progress on banking union - originally conceived of as a three-step process involving a single supervisor, a single resolution mechanism and a single bank deposit-guarantee scheme - is put off until after the German election, the chances are that nothing will happen until mid-2014 or later.
It takes around six weeks to form a coalition in Germany, which means the next EU leaders' summit in October will come too soon to deal with the outstanding issues, and it is unlikely much progress can be made before the December EU gathering either, officials acknowledge.
Then early 2014 will be dominated by campaigning for the European Parliament elections in May. If the anti-EU vote turns out to be strong, as expected, it will complicate the appointment of a new president of the European Commission, a process in which the parliament has an increased say.
Policymakers may have to wait until after that process is complete, and perhaps until a new Commission is in place, before they can seriously crack on with implementing banking union.
"Europe is probably capable of making steady, but incremental, progress without an overarching vision for the next few years," said Alex White, an economist with JP Morgan, playing down the prospect of any progress at the summit.
"Leaders look increasingly unlikely to do much that is both additive and transformative for the region in the near term."
While that may be acceptable, it doesn't come without risks.
If the anti-EU vote in next May's elections is particularly strong, and it therefore proves very difficult to appoint new presidents to the European institutions, the EU could find itself in a power vacuum while also not having made any progress on sorting out its banks - one of the origins of the crisis.
(Reuters) - Prospective borrowers ranging from U.S. companies to county governments on Monday shelved a raft of deals to raise new capital or refinance debt as a suddenly uncertain interest rate environment dented demand.
In the municipal bond market, half a dozen deals aimed at raising collectively more than $300 million were postponed, while several companies pulled plans to refinance syndicated bank loans. Corporate bonds, meanwhile, passed a fourth day with no deals brought to market, either in the risky high-yield sector or the safer investment-grade sphere.
Raising capital has been challenging to say the least since last Wednesday when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sent interest rates soaring by outlining a plan to wind down the central bank's massive stimulus program.
Known as quantitative easing and consisting of $85 billion a month in bond purchases, the program was instrumental in a rally of bonds, equities and commodities, and had driven interest rates to record lows. But since Bernanke's comments last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury Note has shot up 37 basis points, briefly touching a two-year high of 2.67 percent on Monday.
"We need to have panic selling (in Treasuries) out of the way and a stable level on the 10-year Treasury," before the new-issue market can return, said Scott Schulte, senior investment-grade corporate bond syndicate manager at Citigroup.
That needs to be followed by borrowers willing to sell bonds at higher yields than they had to under the Fed's easy-money regime.
Corporate bonds had been flying off the shelves until recently as companies looked to refinance at record low rates and yield-hungry investors were ready to sign checks. Since Bernanke first floated the notion last month of a pull back from bond buying, corporate bonds have fallen hard and are now down for the year by 3.74 percent on a total return basis, according to the Barclays investment-grade index.
"The level to which investment grade corporate bonds are interest rate sensitive will certainly be an eye-opener to many total return investors when they open up their quarterly statements on June 30," said Edward Marrinan, head of Royal Bank of Scotland's US research.
Said CrediCorp Capital CEO Christian Laub: "What we know is that we won't see cheap financing like we did in the early half of the year."
MUNI BOND SALES STALL; LOAN REFINANCINGS SHELVED
Municipal issues have also slowed to a crawl, with bond sales worth $331 million postponed on Monday. That brought the total value of deals shelved since mid-June to $2.6 billion.
A steep price drop in the $3.7 trillion municipal bond market has lifted yields on bonds due in 10 and 30 years to levels not seen since 2011.
"Public officials do not want be the ones selling a deal at yields which result to be top of the market," said a municipal bond analyst who declined to be named. "They prefer to wait for the market to calm down and become more stable before pushing ahead with their sales."
Loop Capital, a muni bond underwriter, recently cut its estimate for 2013 muni issuance to $360 billion from $400 billion, but Loop Managing Director Chris Mier said they may cut their forecast more if present conditions persist.
Still, the two big munis deal of the week remain on the calendar for now: $1.3 billion each from the state of Illinois and the city of Los Angeles.
In the syndicated loan market, Loan Pricing Corp, a unit of Thomson Reuters, reported that Beats Electronics, the consumer audio company founded by rapper Dr. Dre, pulled a $600 million to $650 million senior secured loan deal designed to finance a dividend recapitalization.
Meanwhile, aircraft part manufacturer PRV Aerospace shelved a proposed repricing due to market conditions, sources told LPC.
STOCK ISSUANCE ALSO HURT
Equity capital raising is also at risk, bankers said. At least 10 initial public offerings are due to price this week and analysts said some could be postponed, while IPO activity is expected to slow in the coming weeks.
Bankers remain hopeful that two of this week's biggest IPOs, a $1.3 billion offering by industrial distribution company HD Supply and a $642 million offering by technology distribution company CDW Corporation, will price. But both deals are not yet covered and are facing some pushback on valuation.
"It's a nervous and anxious time this week for IPO investors," said IPO Boutique's managing director Scott Sweet.
Last week, specialty retailer Five Below Inc postponed a secondary share offering citing "current capital market conditions."
Further south, Azul Linhas A?reas Brasileiras SA, Brazil's third-biggest airline, is considering postponing an IPO scheduled for as early as next month and expected to raise some $450 million because of market conditions.
The end of the upcoming quarter, as well as the July 4 U.S. holiday contribute to the expected slowdown, but poor after market performance of recent IPOs such as perfume company Coty Inc and in-flight wireless provider Gogo Inc are also to blame.
(Writing by Rodrigo Campos; Reporting by IFR Markets credit team, Loan Pricing Corp and Reuters Chicago and New York bureaus; Editing by Dan Burns and Andre Grenon)
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Over the years, a perception has grown of what Lifetime fare is supposed to be: prolific ripped-from-the-headlines television movies and biopics.
And then there's the perception of what Lifetime's programs aren't supposed to be: Emmy winners. In the almost three decades since the network was launched, Lifetime has only been nominated seven times in the television movie category, and it has never won.
But "Steel Magnolias", Lifetime's TV version of the 1989 movie about a group of Southern women who gather around a beauty salon, flies in the face of those perceptions and might give the network a strong chance to break through with voters as well as viewers.
Asked if the movie represents a departure for Lifetime, the network's executive vice president of programming, Rob Sharenow, told TheWrap that he "absolutely" thinks it is, adding that Lifetime worked to attract the caliber of talent to the project that doesn't normally appear in made-for-television movies.
Executive producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who are also working on the Lifetime miniseries "Bonnie and Clyde", NBC's live broadcast of "The Sound of Music" and their second consecutive Academy Awards show, said they weren't worried that "Steel Magnolias" didn't fit the network.
"We never look at the network and say, ?Is this the kind of stuff they want to do?' We always look at what we want to do," Zadan told TheWrap.
The producers brought "Steel Magnolias" to Lifetime at a point when the network was looking for something special. "I think the original source material is timeless," Sharenow said of the 1987 play by Robert Harling, which was made into the hit feature starring Sally Field two years later. "It's one of the great pieces of American theater. It was a great movie. And we knew the story itself had enormous resonance with our audience. I think the big question for us was, How do you make it fresh and bring it into the new century in a different way?"
Zadan and Meron suggested an all African-American cast, an idea that Harling himself had floated years earlier as a way of showing how universal his play was.
"It immediately clicked as the right thing to do," Sharenow said. "I think it really speaks to the universality of the story - and it's exactly what we're trying to say about Lifetime. We don't want Lifetime movies to be factory-made. We want them to be acts of passion and love and creativity."
The project began to gain momentum after director Kenny Leon came on, followed by Queen Latifah in the role of M'Lynn, the mother who's desperately protective of her diabetic daughter. The executive producer, actress and rapper previously worked with Meron and Zadan on the Chicago and Hairspray movies.
"Kenny is a real actor's director," said Meron. "We said to Queen Latifah that he was going to direct her in a different way than she's had before, because he's very intense with actors. And she said, ?Good.'"
For the pivotal role of M'Lynn's daughter Shelby - a part that landed Julia Roberts her first Oscar nomination - the producers settled on up-and-coming Broadway actress Condola Rashad, the daughter of Phylicia Rashad. Condola was then joined by her mother, along with Alfre Woodard, Jill Scott and Adepero Oduye.
Other than small updates for advances in diabetes care and pop-culture references, the producers stuck to the source material for their movie, which they shot in Atlanta over only 18 days. The film earned praise from reviewers, and its premiere last October drew an audience of 6.5 million, Lifetime's third-best original-movie premiere ever.
"It's the perfect storm of good," Sharenow said. "It was incredibly high quality. It got incredibly high ratings. It was the highest-rated movie ever for women for us -- you can't ask for better than that."
But can it turn around Lifetime's typically tepid showing with Emmy voters? "I think we have an excellent chance," Sharenow said. "We've already gotten a lot of award attention. We had two NAACP Image awards for miniseries, and Alfre Woodard won. It was a little bit of an image game-changer in that we brought big talent and big stars to the network. It was a real win on all levels, and it set the bar for what we're trying to do going forward."
Hard to make us personally or financially responsible for our healthPublic release date: 18-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Martin Marchman Andersen mmarch@hum.ku.dk 45-20-83-14-75 University of Copenhagen
Free and equal access to medical treatment has been a staple of the Danish welfare state, but more and more Danes express the view that people treated for lifestyle diseases like smoker's lungs or obesity should pay for their own treatment as these patients are thought to be responsible for their own medical conditions. The logic behind this view is, however, dubious, says PhD Martin Marchman Andersen from the University of Copenhagen. In a new thesis, he shows how difficult it is to defend the claim that people are responsible for their health and that it is very unclear what they should be held cost-responsible for.
"It is a tempting idea that we could cut health expenses by letting patients suffering from so-called lifestyle diseases pay for their own treatment. But this requires that we as a society can justify the claim that these people actually are responsible for their own conditions particularly in a welfare state where we have free and equal access to medical treatment. It is not, however, a claim that is easy to justify if we accept that we are products of genetics and social circumstances," says PhD Martin Marchman Andersen from the University of Copenhagen.
Free will vs. genetics and social legacy
A 2011 survey from the University of Copenhagen showed that almost 50 percent of the Danes believe that obese people should pay for their own obesity operations if they are shown to be responsible for their conditions. And according to Martin Marchman Andersen, these ideas are gaining ground as the Scandinavian welfare states struggle in the wake of the financial crisis and as we learn more and more about the causes of lifestyle diseases.
"The main argument of why we should be held responsible for our own health is the belief that we have free will; free will is the idea that we are the causes of our own actions and that our behaviour is not triggered by external factors. So if we say that a young man takes up smoking of his own free will, we also say that there is no previous cause. But it is very difficult to imagine that there is no previous cause at all, for instance that everybody the young man knows is a smoker and that he therefore would be an anomaly if he did not take up smoking," Martin Marchman Andersen points out and adds:
"The point is that the causal relationships within biology, sociology, and psychology we usually employ when we want to understand human behaviour must apply to lifestyle diseases too. It is not very likely that a young man who takes up smoking is immune to his genetic make-up or his social circumstances in such a way that we can justify the claim that he is responsible for smoking."
This does not mean that patients can never be held responsible, but we need other arguments than the ones we have used so far. And Martin Marchman Andersen underlines that even if we as a society decided that some patients in certain circumstances are to be held responsible for their own health, it would not automatically follow that we could just write out hospital bills to smokers in treatment for smoker's lungs.
Are smokers an economic burden?
Marchman Andersen's research shows that if smokers are to be held financially responsible for their health problems, the condition must be that they are proven to be an economic burden for society even when the complex impact calculations have been made.
"Economists have tried to calculate whether smokers cost society more than non-smokers, but they have not been able to reach a conclusive answer. And all the studies suffer from the same problem; they compare the costs of smokers with the costs of non-smokers, and that is too simplistic a model," says Martin Marchman Andersen and expands the point:
"We know from numerous studies in social inequality within health that lower social groups have a higher probability of contracting a number of diseases - even if they are non-smokers. Merely comparing the costs of smokers with the costs of non-smokers may lead to the conclusion that smokers cost more than non-smokers for reasons that have nothing to do with smoking."
If we want to know whether a smoker is an economic burden, Martin Marchman Andersen concludes, we should compare the costs of the smoker with the counterfactual costs if he had never been a smoker. Only in cases where the former costs exceed the latter costs, we can say the smoker is an economic burden. The smoker's financial responsibility is, in other words, the difference between the two types of costs.
###
Contact
PhD Martin Marchman Andersen
University of Copenhagen
Phone: + 45 20 83 14 75
E-mail:mmarch@hum.ku.dk
Martin Marchman Andersen's PhD thesis "Health, personal responsibility, and distributive justice" consists of four articles which discuss personal responsibility in relation to distributive justice in health and health care from four different perspectives.
Two of the articles have already been published in the esteemed international journals Journal of Public Health and Public Health Ethics.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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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.
Hard to make us personally or financially responsible for our healthPublic release date: 18-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Martin Marchman Andersen mmarch@hum.ku.dk 45-20-83-14-75 University of Copenhagen
Free and equal access to medical treatment has been a staple of the Danish welfare state, but more and more Danes express the view that people treated for lifestyle diseases like smoker's lungs or obesity should pay for their own treatment as these patients are thought to be responsible for their own medical conditions. The logic behind this view is, however, dubious, says PhD Martin Marchman Andersen from the University of Copenhagen. In a new thesis, he shows how difficult it is to defend the claim that people are responsible for their health and that it is very unclear what they should be held cost-responsible for.
"It is a tempting idea that we could cut health expenses by letting patients suffering from so-called lifestyle diseases pay for their own treatment. But this requires that we as a society can justify the claim that these people actually are responsible for their own conditions particularly in a welfare state where we have free and equal access to medical treatment. It is not, however, a claim that is easy to justify if we accept that we are products of genetics and social circumstances," says PhD Martin Marchman Andersen from the University of Copenhagen.
Free will vs. genetics and social legacy
A 2011 survey from the University of Copenhagen showed that almost 50 percent of the Danes believe that obese people should pay for their own obesity operations if they are shown to be responsible for their conditions. And according to Martin Marchman Andersen, these ideas are gaining ground as the Scandinavian welfare states struggle in the wake of the financial crisis and as we learn more and more about the causes of lifestyle diseases.
"The main argument of why we should be held responsible for our own health is the belief that we have free will; free will is the idea that we are the causes of our own actions and that our behaviour is not triggered by external factors. So if we say that a young man takes up smoking of his own free will, we also say that there is no previous cause. But it is very difficult to imagine that there is no previous cause at all, for instance that everybody the young man knows is a smoker and that he therefore would be an anomaly if he did not take up smoking," Martin Marchman Andersen points out and adds:
"The point is that the causal relationships within biology, sociology, and psychology we usually employ when we want to understand human behaviour must apply to lifestyle diseases too. It is not very likely that a young man who takes up smoking is immune to his genetic make-up or his social circumstances in such a way that we can justify the claim that he is responsible for smoking."
This does not mean that patients can never be held responsible, but we need other arguments than the ones we have used so far. And Martin Marchman Andersen underlines that even if we as a society decided that some patients in certain circumstances are to be held responsible for their own health, it would not automatically follow that we could just write out hospital bills to smokers in treatment for smoker's lungs.
Are smokers an economic burden?
Marchman Andersen's research shows that if smokers are to be held financially responsible for their health problems, the condition must be that they are proven to be an economic burden for society even when the complex impact calculations have been made.
"Economists have tried to calculate whether smokers cost society more than non-smokers, but they have not been able to reach a conclusive answer. And all the studies suffer from the same problem; they compare the costs of smokers with the costs of non-smokers, and that is too simplistic a model," says Martin Marchman Andersen and expands the point:
"We know from numerous studies in social inequality within health that lower social groups have a higher probability of contracting a number of diseases - even if they are non-smokers. Merely comparing the costs of smokers with the costs of non-smokers may lead to the conclusion that smokers cost more than non-smokers for reasons that have nothing to do with smoking."
If we want to know whether a smoker is an economic burden, Martin Marchman Andersen concludes, we should compare the costs of the smoker with the counterfactual costs if he had never been a smoker. Only in cases where the former costs exceed the latter costs, we can say the smoker is an economic burden. The smoker's financial responsibility is, in other words, the difference between the two types of costs.
###
Contact
PhD Martin Marchman Andersen
University of Copenhagen
Phone: + 45 20 83 14 75
E-mail:mmarch@hum.ku.dk
Martin Marchman Andersen's PhD thesis "Health, personal responsibility, and distributive justice" consists of four articles which discuss personal responsibility in relation to distributive justice in health and health care from four different perspectives.
Two of the articles have already been published in the esteemed international journals Journal of Public Health and Public Health Ethics.
[ | 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.
Editor?s note:?Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Stanford Law School, Director of Research at Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and VP of Innovation and Research at Singularity University. The passage of immigration reform by the Senate was a big step forward. The bill is far from perfect, but goes a long way towards solving Silicon Valley?s talent shortage -- and America?s immigrant exodus. But big hurdles lie ahead as anti-immigrant groups regroup. Extreme elements of the right will be fighting to close the borders while their counterparts on the left -- Big Labor in particular -- work to undermine high-skilled immigration.
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Public release date: 18-Jun-2013
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