Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/305761871?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, May 16, 2013
Pakistan vote count shows big Sharif win
ISLAMABAD (AP) ? The vote count from last weekend's nationwide elections in Pakistan on Tuesday indicates a big win for former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's party.
Figures released by the country's election commission, based on 254 of the 269 races where the counting has been completed, show Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N party will likely get a majority in the national assembly, setting him up to be prime minister for the third time.
As the new premier, the 63-year-old Sharif, a devout Muslim and a populist, is expected to supplant President Asif Ali Zardari as the international face of a nuclear power whose increasing instability and Islamic militant havens are a global concern, especially at a time when the West is looking to end the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
Sharif's party so far has won 123 of the 254 directly elected national assembly seats, the commission spokesman Khursheed Alam said. The commission is still compiling results for 15 seats, and Alam said it hopes the remaining results will be released by Tuesday evening.
Earlier reports from the election commission on Tuesday wrongly indicated that the count was over.
The White House said President Barack Obama had spoken with Sharif by telephone to congratulate him on his party's success. White House spokesman Jay Carney called the election and peaceful transfer of power a "significant milestone" in Pakistan's progress toward a more democratic political system.
The vote marked the first time a civilian government completed its full five-year term and transferred power in democratic elections.
There are 272 directly-elected seats in the lower house of parliament, but races for three seats were not held because a candidate had died. A new vote will be scheduled for those seats after alternative names are proposed.
Independent candidates who normally join the party that forms the government won 25 seats. The combination would give Sharif's party more than the 137 directly elected seats they need to have a majority.
There are an additional 70 seats for women and minorities that are apportioned to the parties based on how well they do in the general election.
The outgoing ruling Pakistan People's Party won 31 seats. The party was battered by allegations of corruption and complaints that it did nothing to address power blackouts and inflation. Almost all of the seats that it did win were in the party's stronghold of Sindh province.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party led by former cricket star Imran Khan won 26 seats, which is a huge improvement for a party that boycotted the 2008 election and only claimed one seat in the 2002 vote.
Khan's supporters have protested the vote as unfair, and the cricket star has claimed vote-rigging in the port city of Karachi and in Punjab province. Many of the young people who have come out to vote for Khan have also taken to the streets in recent days in protests in Karachi and Islamabad calling for recounts and new elections in many areas.
But many election observers who monitored the vote have said it was relatively fair.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said they did not find any evidence of systematic rigging and called on all parties to accept the vote.
The Free and Fair Election Network, a Pakistani monitoring group with thousands of observers, has described the balloting in Punjab as "relatively fair."
"The elections were held in a free and fair manner," said the election commission spokesman, Alam, adding the commission was examining complaints it received.
Sharif visited Khan in the hospital Tuesday, where he is recovering from a serious fall last week in which he injured his back, and urged him to accept the election results.
____
Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Islamabad and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pakistan-vote-count-shows-big-sharif-win-101449454.html
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Wednesday, May 15, 2013
FBI opens criminal probe of tax agency, audit cites disarray
By David Ingram and Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday he had ordered the FBI to open a criminal probe in a growing scandal over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative political groups for extra tax scrutiny.
Holder's announcement came about four hours before an inspector general's report on the IRS portrayed the tax agency as plagued by disarray and "insufficient oversight" during its struggles to review the cases of hundreds of advocacy groups that claimed they should be tax exempt.
The audit, which drew some backlash from IRS officials, also underscored what the agency had acknowledged last Friday: that the IRS had used "inappropriate criteria" for evaluating tax-exempt groups, in part by singling out scores of conservative Tea Party and "Patriot" organizations for increased scrutiny.
The report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration sharply criticized the way the IRS had screened the conservative groups, citing poor management and processing delays. The report suggested that such practices could damage public confidence in the agency.
The criteria used to target the conservative groups "gives the appearance that the IRS is not impartial in conducting its mission," the report said. However, the report stopped short of saying the IRS actions had been politically motivated.
For President Barack Obama - who late on Tuesday said the report showed that the IRS had failed to apply the law fairly in dealing with conservative groups - the revelations have added to a sense of a White House under siege.
Republicans continue to bash the Obama administration's handling of the attack last year on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. And on Monday, Obama's Justice Department came under bipartisan fire for seizing phone records of journalists from the Associated Press as part of a wide-ranging criminal probe into intelligence leaks.
In Washington on Tuesday, the IRS case appeared to have the most potency, as lawmakers and administration officials alike described the symbolic and legal importance of having a non-partisan tax agency that Americans can trust.
For the IRS and the U.S. government, the stakes are particularly high in the scandal because the tax agency is playing an increasingly significant role not only in vetting the tax status of non-profit groups that dabble in politics, but also in enforcing parts of Obama's ongoing overhaul of the nation's healthcare system.
Some of the IRS's conservative critics, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz, have said the current scandal is a sign that the agency shouldn't be trusted to enforce a vast array of tax regulations related to healthcare.
The IRS's embattled acting commissioner, Steven Miller, met privately with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, apparently seeking to calm the political uproar, even as some Republicans called for his resignation.
The IRS said on Monday that Miller, then the IRS deputy commissioner, was first informed in early May 2012 that some groups seeking tax-exempt status had been "improperly identified by name" and subjected to extra scrutiny.
Lawmakers say that neither Miller nor his predecessor, Douglas Shulman, ever made them aware of the targeting.
Senator Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the tax-writing Finance Committee, said that Miller - who spent more than two decades working his way up through the IRS bureaucracy and was named acting chief six months ago - should step down.
"He basically misled me," Hatch told reporters. "I really think it is time for him to leave."
'HEADS NEED TO ROLL'
Hatch was part of a growing Republican chorus on Capitol Hill calling for the resignations of Miller and Lois Lerner, head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations office. Lerner apologized on behalf of the agency when she revealed the targeting of conservative groups last week.
Conservative groups, particularly those that have sprung up in recent years to promote limited government and lower taxes, have long complained about mistreatment by the IRS.
On Tuesday, Miller met with Senator Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee who has promised that his panel will conduct its own investigation of the IRS case. Miller later declined to answer reporters' questions.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell urged Obama to make all of those who knew about IRS misconduct available for questioning, and said there should be "no more stonewalling."
"Heads need to roll today," said Republican Representative Vern Buchanan, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the IRS and is scheduled to hold a hearing on the scandal on Friday.
It's unclear precisely what charges a criminal probe of the IRS could yield.
Analysts said that a federal criminal prosecution of IRS employees for allegedly violating a taxpayer's speech rights - by delaying or rejecting a conservative group's legitimate claim to tax-exempt status, for example - could be unprecedented and that the offense would need to be egregious.
Holder said on Monday that the FBI "is coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken."
He said that the actions disclosed so far "were, I think as everyone can agree, if not criminal, they were certainly outrageous and unacceptable. But we are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations."
Despite efforts by some conservative commentators to cast the IRS troubles as something akin to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s - or to former President Richard Nixon's use of the IRS to target his political enemies - there was no sign of White House involvement.
Obama spokesman Jay Carney said the results of independent investigations must be known "before we can jump to conclusions about what happened, whether there was a deliberate targeting of groups inappropriately and, if that's the case, what action should be taken."
THREE YEARS OF TARGETING
The targeting of conservative groups began in 2010, shortly after the emergence of the conservative Tea Party movement. The movement helped Republicans gain control of the U.S. House in the 2010 elections.
Hundreds of Tea Party-inspired groups have formed in recent years, and the IRS has struggled to handle campaign finance issues dealing with such politically active organizations seeking tax-exempt status. Such groups generally can be tax-exempt as long as they do not directly support particular political candidates.
Higher-level IRS officials took part in discussions as far back as August 2011 about targeting by lower-level tax agents of Tea Party and other conservative groups, according to documents reviewed by Reuters on Monday.
The documents show the offices of the IRS's chief counsel and deputy commissioner for services and enforcement communicated about the targeting with lower-level officials on August 4, 2011, and March 8, 2012, respectively.
The communications occurred weeks and months before Shulman, then the commissioner of the IRS, told congressional panels in late March 2012 that no groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny by the tax agency.
The IRS has been dragged reluctantly into partisan politics at a time when it is also under increasing pressure to make rulings on campaign finance issues and matters related to implementation of Obama's 2010 healthcare overhaul.
The agency must impose an excise tax on large employers if they fail to meet certain minimum healthcare coverage requirements for employees. In addition, the IRS must provide tax credits to low- and middle-income taxpayers who seek healthcare coverage on one of the new state-based insurance exchanges.
Timothy Jost, a specialist on the healthcare overhaul who teaches law at Washington and Lee University, said the controversy has no real bearing on implementation of Obama's healthcare laws, aside from politics.
"I just don't see a connection, other than that I'm sure there will be efforts to make one," Jost said.
(Additional reporting by Patrick Temple-West, Thomas Ferraro, Richard Cown, Kim Dixon, Kevin Drawbaugh, Susan Heavey and Laura MacInnis; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by David Lindsey and Eric Beech)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fbi-opens-criminal-probe-u-tax-agency-audit-013827835.html
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Become a marathon runner with the protein PGC-1alpha
May 14, 2013 ? Even with a greater muscle mass, a sprinter cannot win a marathon. His specially-trained and strengthened muscles will fatigue faster than the endurance-trained muscles of a long distance runner. The research group of Prof. Christoph Handschin of the Biozentrum, University of Basel, shows that during endurance exercise the protein PGC-1? shifts the metabolic profile in the muscle.
The results are published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Marathon runners complete a special training program to improve their endurance capacity. Accordingly, their muscles are able to sustain the provision of energy using aerobic, hence oxygen consuming processes. Untrained athletes and also bodybuilders reach however, in a much earlier stage, a condition where their muscles produce energy without oxygen. This results in the production of lactate in the muscles. At the same time, the muscles begin to fatigue and the legs become heavy.
Less Lactate with Endurance Training
The reason for this difference: the muscles switch their metabolism during endurance training. Importantly, amongst others, the production of the protein PGC-1? is stimulated. Mice with a permanently increased PGC-1? develop the same high endurance muscles as those in trained athletes. Handschin and his team were able to show in these mice that PGC-1? prevents the formation and accumulation of lactate in the muscles. For this, the researchers trained the mice for an hour on the treadmill. After a few minutes, the lactic acid rates increased in the untrained mice, followed by performance degradation and exhaustion. Mice with a high PGC-1?, however, maintained their performance levels until the end of the training. Their lactate levels remained low despite a high training load. "As it turned out," said Handschin, "PGC-1? changed the composition of an enzyme complex. This reduced the formation of lactate. Also, the remaining lactate in the muscle is converted and used immediately as energy substrate."
Sport Therapy for Diabetics
Also in human skeletal muscle, PGC-1? controls the balance between the formation and degradation of lactate. Disturbances in lactate metabolism are common in obese and diabetic patients. The stimulation of PGC-1? production by endurance exercise activity is therefore an important approach to improve the metabolism in these patients. This could help prevent the resulting damage and progressive physical limitations to the body caused by metabolic diseases.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/LfcDMoELUnw/130514112751.htm
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Video: IRS Scandal: Tip of the Iceberg?
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Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/cnbc/51885012/
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Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Research helps paint finer picture of massive 1700 earthquake
May 14, 2013 ? In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west coast of North America. Though it was powerful enough to cause a tsunami as far as Japan, a lack of local documentation has made studying this historic event challenging.
Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have helped unlock this geological mystery using a fossil-based technique. Their work provides a finer-grained portrait of this earthquake and the changes in coastal land level it produced, enabling modelers to better prepare for future events.
Penn's team includes Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, along with then lab members Simon Engelhart and Andrea Hawkes. They collaborated with researchers from Canada's University of Victoria, the National Taiwan University, the Geological Survey of Canada and the United States Geological Survey.
The research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs along the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States to Vancouver Island in Canada. This major fault line is capable of producing megathrust earthquakes 9.0 or higher, though, due to a dearth of observations or historical records, this trait was only discovered within the last several decades from geology records. The Lewis and Clark expedition did not make the first extensive surveys of the region until more than 100 years later, and contemporaneous aboriginal accounts were scarce and incomplete.
The 1700 Cascadia event was better documented in Japan than in the Americas. Records of the "orphan tsunami" -- so named because its "parent" earthquake was too far away to be felt -- gave earth scientists hints that this subduction zone was capable of such massive seismic activity. Geological studies provided information about the earthquake, but many critical details remained lost to history.
"Previous research had determined the timing and the magnitude, but what we didn't know was how the rupture happened," Horton said. "Did it rupture in one big long segment, more than a thousand kilometers, or did it rupture in parcels?"
To provide a clearer picture of how the earthquake occurred, Horton and his colleagues applied a technique they have used in assessing historic sea-level rise. They traveled to various sites along the Cascadia subduction zone, taking core samples from up and down the coast and working with local researchers who donated pre-existing data sets. The researchers' targets were microscopic fossils known as foraminifera. Through radiocarbon dating and an analysis of different species' positions with the cores over time, the researchers were able to piece together a historical picture of the changes in land and sea level along the coastline. The research revealed how much the coast suddenly subsided during the earthquake. This subsidence was used to infer how much the tectonic plates moved during the earthquake.
"What we were able to show for the first time is that the rupture of Cascadia was heterogeneous, making it similar to what happened with the recent major earthquakes in Japan, Chile and Sumatra," Horton said.
This level of regional detail for land level changes is critical for modeling and disaster planning.
"It's only when you have that data that you can start to build accurate models of earthquake ruptures and tsunami inundation," Horton said. "There were areas of the west coast of the United States that were more susceptible to larger coastal subsidence than others."
The Cascadia subduction zone is of particular interest to geologists and coastal managers because geological evidence points to recurring seismic activity along the fault line, with intervals between 300 and 500 years. With the last major event occurring in 1700, another earthquake could be on the horizon. A better understanding of how such an event might unfold has the potential to save lives.
"The next Cascadia earthquake has the potential to be the biggest natural disaster that the Unites States will have to come to terms with -- far bigger than Sandy or even Katrina," Horton said. "It would happen with very little warning; some areas of Oregon will have less than 20 minutes to evacuate before a large tsunami will inundate the coastline like in Sumatra in 2004 and Japan in 2011."
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the United States Geological Survey and the University of Victoria. Simon Engelhart and Andrea Hawkes are now assistant professors at the University of Rhode Island and the University of North Carolina, respectively. Their co-authors were Pei-Ling Wang of the University of Victoria and National Taiwan University, Kelin Wang of the University of Victoria and the Geological Survey of Canada's Pacific Geoscience Centre, Alan Nelson of the United States Geological Survey's Geologic Hazards Science Center and Robert Witter of the United States Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center.
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