FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2004 file photo, Deputy Attorney General James Comey gestures during a news conference in Washington. President Barack Obama is preparing to nominate former Bush administration official James Comey to head the FBI, people familiar with the decision said Wednesday, May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2004 file photo, Deputy Attorney General James Comey gestures during a news conference in Washington. President Barack Obama is preparing to nominate former Bush administration official James Comey to head the FBI, people familiar with the decision said Wednesday, May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama is preparing to nominate former Bush administration official James Comey to head the FBI, people familiar with the decision said Wednesday.
Three people with knowledge of the selection said Obama planned to nominate Comey, who was the No. 2 in President George W. Bush's Justice Department. The three people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the selection ahead of Obama's announcement, which was not expected immediately.
Comey became a hero to Democratic opponents of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program when Comey refused for a time to reauthorize it. Bush revised the surveillance program when confronted with the threat of resignation by Comey and current FBI Director Robert Mueller, who is stepping down in September.
Comey's selection was first reported by NPR and was not expected to be announced for several days at least. Senate confirmation will be needed.
The change in leadership comes as the FBI and Justice Department are under scrutiny for their handing of several investigations. Obama has ordered a review of FBI investigations into leaks to reporters, including the secret gathering of Associated Press phone records and emails of a Fox News reporter. And there have been questions raised about whether the FBI properly responded to warnings from Russian authorities about a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. The agency, meanwhile, is conducting a highly-anticipated investigation into the Internal Revenue Service over its handling of conservative groups seeking tax exempt status.
Comey was deputy attorney general in 2005 when he unsuccessfully tried to limit tough interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists. He told then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that some of the practices were wrong and would damage the department's reputation.
Some Democrats denounced those methods as torture, particularly the use of waterboarding, which produces the same sensation as drowning.
Earlier in his career, Comey served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the nation's most prominent prosecutorial offices and one at the front lines of terrorism, corporate malfeasance, organized crime and the war on drugs.
As an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia, Comey handled the investigation of the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. military personnel.
Comey led the Justice Department's corporate fraud task force and spurred the creation of violent crime impact teams in 20 cities, focusing on crimes committed with guns.
Comey was at the center of one of the Bush administration's great controversies ? an episode that focused attention on the administration's controversial tactics in the war on terror.
In stunning testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007, Comey said he thought Bush's no-warrant wiretapping program was so questionable that Comey refused for a time to reauthorize it, leading to a standoff with White House officials at the bedside of ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Comey said he refused to recertify the program because Ashcroft had reservations about its legality.
Senior government officials had expressed concerns about whether the National Security Agency, which administered the warrantless eavesdropping program, had the proper oversight in place. Other concerns included whether any president possessed the legal and constitutional authority to authorize the program as it was carried out at the time.
The White House, Comey said, recertified the program without the Justice Department's signoff, allowing it to operate for about three weeks without concurrence on whether it was legal. Comey, Ashcroft, Mueller and other Justice Department officials at one point considered resigning, Comey said.
"I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," Comey told the Senate panel.
A day after the March 10, 2004, incident at Ashcroft's hospital bedside, Bush ordered changes to the program to accommodate the department's concerns. Ashcroft signed the presidential order to recertify the program about three weeks later.
The dramatic hospital confrontation involved Comey, who was the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's absence, and a White House team that included Bush's then-counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and White House chief of staff Andy Card, Comey said. Gonzales later succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general.
Comey testified that when he refused to certify the program, Gonzales and Card headed to Ashcroft's sick bed in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital.
When Gonzales appealed to Ashcroft, the ailing attorney general lifted his head off the pillow and in straightforward terms described his views of the program, Comey said. Then he pointed out that Comey, not Ashcroft, held the powers of the attorney general at that moment.
Gonzales and Card then left the hospital room, Comey said.
"I was angry," Comey told the panel. "I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general."
___
Associated Press Writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.
___
Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A plan by Attorney General Eric Holder to hold meetings with news organizations about guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters has run into snags over the terms of discussions.
The Justice Department wants the meetings to be off the record. The Associated Press issued a statement saying it wants any meeting to be on the record, meaning it could be the subject of news stories. And The New York Times said it won't attend because of the department's off-the-record ground rules.
The review of the guidelines called for last week by President Barack Obama come as the Justice Department deals with an outcry over its secret gathering of AP reporters' phone records and the emails of a Fox News journalist.
AP media relations manager Erin Madigan White said that if the session is not on the record, the news cooperative will offer its views in an open letter on how Justice Department regulations should be updated.
If the AP's meeting with the attorney general is on the record, AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll will attend, White said. She said AP expects its attorneys to be included in any planned meetings between the attorney general's office and media lawyers on the legal specifics.
New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson said in a statement: "It isn't appropriate for us to attend an off the record meeting with the attorney general. Our Washington bureau is aggressively covering the department's handling of leak investigations at this time."
The planned meetings are to take place over the coming weeks. The department said Holder plans to engage with news media organizations, including print media, wire services, radio, television, online media and news and trade associations. Discussions are to include news media executives and general counsels as well as government experts in intelligence and investigative agencies.
The initial meetings over the next two days are to be with several Washington bureau chiefs of national news organizations.
Obama has asked Holder to report to him on any recommended policy changes by July 12.
"After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate."
So, that 'half life' is for buried bones in fairly specific situations. It doesn't apply everywhere.
Best part of all, is that story you linked to has its own related stories, and the first link is another story where they recovered DNA from 19,000 year old eggshells.
The second link is a story about sequencing the DNA from 100,000+ year old polar bears. Where the 'cold DRY' environment allows DNA to be preserved.
WASHINGTON ? Haynes Johnson, a pioneering Washington journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the civil rights movements and migrated from newspapers to television, books and teaching, died Friday. He was 81.
The Washington Post reported he died at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. In a statement to the Post newsroom, Managing Editor Kevin Merida said Johnson died of a heart attack.
Johnson was awarded a Pulitzer in 1966 for national reporting on the civil rights struggle in Selma, Ala., while with the Washington Evening Star. He spent about 12 years at the Star before joining its chief rival, The Washington Post, in 1969. Johnson was a columnist for the Post from 1977 to 1994.
Dan Balz, the Post's senior political reporter, said Johnson was already a legend before they got to work together at the newspaper.
"I don't say this lightly. He was a great journalist," Balz said Friday. "He had everything a good reporter should have, which was a love of going to find the story, a commitment to thorough reporting and then kind of an understanding of history and the importance of giving every story kind of the broadest possible sweep and context."
Former Post executive editor Leonard Downie told the newspaper, "Haynes was a pioneer in looking at the mood of the country to understand a political race. Haynes was going around the country talking to people, doing portraits and finding out what was on people's minds. He was a kind of profiler of the country."
The author, co-author or editor of 18 books, Johnson also appeared regularly on the PBS programs "Washington Week in Review" and "The NewsHour." He was a member of the "NewsHour" historians panel from 1994 to 2004.
"I knew I wanted to write about America, our times, both in journalism and I also wanted to do books," he told C-SPAN in 1991. "I wanted to try to see if I could combine what I do as a newspaper person as well as step back a little bit and write about American life, and I was lucky enough to be able to do that."
Johnson had taught at the University of Maryland since 1998.
"Hundreds of our students learned how to cover public affairs from one of the best journalists America has ever known," Merrill College Dean Lucy Dalglish said in a written statement released by the university. "It was equally obvious to anyone who looked through the window that Haynes was in his element in the classroom. His entire face lit up when he was in the middle of a classroom discussion."
Johnson had attended graduation ceremonies on Monday for the university's journalism college.
Kathryn Oberly, Johnson's wife, told the school's Capital News Service that Johnson entered the hospital earlier this week for heart tests and died Friday morning of a heart attack.
Johnson also had teaching stints at George Washington University, Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.
He was born in New York City on July 9, 1931. His mother, Emmie, was a pianist and his father, Malcolm Johnson, a newspaperman. The elder Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Sun in 1949 for his reporting on the city's dockyards, and his series suggested the story told in the Oscar-winning film "On the Waterfront."
Johnson studied journalism and history at the University of Missouri, graduating in 1952. After serving three years in the Army during the Korean War, he earned a master's degree in American history from the University of Wisconsin in 1956.
Johnson resisted working in New York journalism to avoid being compared to his father. He worked for nearly a year at the Wilmington (Del.) News-Journal before joining the Star as a reporter.
He received a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the civil rights struggle in Selma, Ala., where hundreds of marchers bound for the state capital of Montgomery were brutally beaten in March 1965 by state and local law officers. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to the city, and after a federal judge found that the demonstrators had a right to march, they completed their journey later that month.
"Haynes had roots in the South," Balz said. "He was raised in New York, but he had Southern roots. He had a special appreciation for the civil rights struggle and what African Americans were going through."
It wasn't long before Ben Bradlee, the newly appointed executive editor of The Washington Post, came calling. As Bradlee was seeking to elevate the newspaper, he recruited both Johnson and The New York Times' David S. Broder to strengthen the paper's political reporting.
"He reached out, held out his hand, and I grabbed it, and that was it," Johnson recalled in Jeff Himmelman's 2012 biography of Bradlee. "There was no contract, nothing. It was just, `Come, we want you,' and I've never forgotten that."
Johnson's books include "The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election," (2009) with Balz; "The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years" (2001); and "The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point" (1996) with Broder, who died two years ago.
Johnson and Broder helped redefine Washington reporting, getting outside the Beltway to talk with voters about candidates and issues, rather than letting politicians dictate daily coverage. Both then wove that reporting into broader articles that examined the political process, the workings of government and the mood of the country.
"Hayes was a giant," journalism professor and author Carl Sessions Stepp commented on the University of Maryland's website. "He had the mind of a scholar and the soul of a regular citizen, and nobody has ever better combined insider digging and outside-the-Beltway pulse-taking."
Gene Roberts, who helped lead The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times and co-authored a book on media coverage of the civil rights movement, said he was amazed with Johnson's work ethic.
"I think he was one of the most important reporters in the country during his journalistic career and later as he got more into books," Roberts said. "I was amazed. Most writers take a breather between books, but when he finished one book he always started immediately on another book."
Johnson and Roberts taught together at the University of Maryland. Roberts said Johnson was an inspirational teacher and a serious historian. In recent years, he said, Johnson had been focused on having his father's "Waterfront" articles printed in book form.
He had just begun work on a 19th book, looking at the speed with which breaking news was covered in the social media era, according to Capital News Service.
Johnson married Julia Ann Erwin in 1954; they had three daughters and two sons and later divorced. In 2002, Johnson married Kathryn Oberly, an associate judge on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
___
Zongker contributed from Washington.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE: Barry Schweid reported on foreign policy, the Supreme Court and national politics for The Associated Press in Washington for more than 50 years.
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Why is it that when I'm clicking the login button, it appears to have an error which is Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException and many more. Whenever I click that button, it appears. Please, help me. Thanks in advance.
Note: I made the layout of this program using NetBeans at the same time I'm using Dr. Java. I'm in a rush already and I'm not that familiar with the Layout Managers that's why I used NB. Btw, this program will prompt the user to input a username and password(which is fixed but it is not yet written in this post) then click the login button to proceed to another window. The other button serves for an exit button.
Is This A Good Question/Topic? 0
Replies To: Event Queue Error -- Null Pointer Exception
#2 Evillium ?
Reputation: 0
Posts:16
Joined:18-January 13
Re: Event Queue Error -- Null Pointer Exception
Posted Today, 01:27 PM
Which button is the login button? Which Jbutton? Usually when there is a null pointer exception you declared a variable twice on accident.
#3 g00se ?
Reputation: 2113
Posts:8,802
Joined:20-September 08
Re: Event Queue Error -- Null Pointer Exception
Posted Today, 02:57 PM
Quote
JTextField jTextField1 = new JTextField();
Yes, you did declare it twice (and possibly others)
jTextField1 = new JTextField();
is what that should be These could be of interest http://technojeeves....with-cardlayout http://technojeeves....tion-login-form
#4 pbl ?
Reputation: 8027
Posts:31,159
Joined:06-March 08
Re: Event Queue Error -- Null Pointer Exception
Posted 50 minutes ago
Your JButton are declared twice: - as instance variable - as local variable in myComponents() method
and you will never learn Java using a GUI Builder. Write your own GUI and you won't have that stupid type of error
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn't enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.
The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya's post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country's cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.
A senior administration official said the FBI has identified a number of individuals that it believes have information or may have been involved, and is considering options to bring those responsible to justice. But taking action in remote eastern Libya would be difficult. America's relationship with Libya would be weighed as part of those options, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.
The Libyan Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Waiting to prosecute suspects instead of grabbing them now could add to the political weight the Benghazi case already carries. The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans weeks before President Barack Obama's re-election. Since then, Republicans in Congress have condemned the administration's handling of the situation, criticizing the level of embassy security, questioning the talking points provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her public appearances to explain the attack and suggesting the White House tried to play down the incident to minimize its effect on the president's campaign.
The FBI released photos of three of the five suspects earlier this month, asking the public to provide more information on the men pictured. The images were captured by security cameras at the U.S. diplomatic post during the attack, but it took weeks for the FBI to see and study them. It took the agency three weeks to get to Libya because of security problems, so Libyan officials had to get the cameras and send them to U.S. officials in Tripoli, the capital.
The FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies identified the men through contacts in Libya and by monitoring their communications. They are thought to be members of Ansar al-Shariah, the Libyan militia group whose fighters were seen near the U.S. diplomatic facility prior to the violence.
Republican lawmakers continue to call for the Obama administration to provide more information about the attack. The White House released 99 pages of emails about the talking points drafted by the intelligence community that Rice used to describe the attack, initially suggesting they were part of a series of regional protests about an anti-Islamic film. In those emails, administration officials agreed to remove from the talking points all mentions of terror groups such as Ansar al-Shariah or al-Qaida, because the intelligence pointing to those groups' involvement was still unclear and because some officials didn't want to give Congress ammunition to criticize the administration.
U.S. officials say the FBI has proof that the five men were either at the scene of the first attack or somehow involved because of intercepts of at least one of them bragging about taking part. Some of the men have also been in contact with a network of well-known regional Jihadists, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
The U.S. has decided that the evidence it has now would be enough for a military operation to seize the men for questioning, but not enough for a civilian arrest or a drone strike against them, the officials said. The U.S. has kept them under surveillance, mostly by electronic means. There was a worry that the men could get spooked and hide, but so far, not even the FBI's release of surveillance video stills has done that.
FBI investigators are hoping for more evidence, such as other video of the attack that might show the suspects in the act of setting the fires that ultimately killed the ambassador and his communications specialist, or firing the mortars hours later at the CIA base where the surviving diplomats took shelter ? or a Libyan witness willing to testify against the suspects in a U.S. courtroom.
But Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he is concerned the Obama administration is treating terrorism as criminal actions instead of acts of war that would elicit a much harsher response from the United States.
"The war on terror, I think, is a war and at times I get the feeling that the administration wants to treat it as a crime," McKeon said Tuesday.
Administration officials have indicated recently that the FBI is zeroing in.
"Regardless of what happened previously, we have made very, very, very substantial progress in that investigation," Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers last week.
That echoed comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry to lawmakers last month.
"They do have people ID'd," Kerry said of the FBI-led investigation. "They have made some progress. They have a number of suspects who are persons of interest that they are pursuing in this and building cases on."
But options for dealing with the men are few and difficult, U.S. officials said, describing high level strategy debates among White House, FBI and other counterterror officials. Those confidential discussions were described on condition of anonymity by four senior U.S. officials briefed on the investigation into the attack.
The U.S. could ask Libya to arrest the suspects, hoping that Americans would be given access to question them and that the Libyans gather enough evidence to hold the men under their own justice system. Another option is to ask the Libyans to extradite the men to the U.S., but that would require the U.S. to gather enough solid evidence linking the suspects to the crime to ask for such an action.
Asking other countries to detain suspects hasn't produced much thus far. In this case, the Egyptian government detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad for possible links to the attack, but it remains unclear if U.S. intelligence officers were ever allowed to question him.
Tunisia allowed the U.S. to question Tunisian suspect Ali Harzi, 28, who was arrested in Turkey last October because of suspected links to the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack, but a judge released him in January for lack of evidence.
Finally, the U.S. could send a military team to grab the men, and take them to an offsite location such as a U.S. naval ship ? the same way al-Qaida suspect Ahmed Warsame was seized by special operations personnel in 2011 in Somalia. He was then held and questioned for two months on a U.S. ship before being read his Miranda rights, transferred to the custody of the FBI and taken for trial in a New York court. Warsame pleaded guilty earlier this year and agreed to tell the FBI what he knew about terror threats and, if necessary, testify for the government.
The U.S. has made preparations for raids to grab the Benghazi suspects for interrogation in case the administration decides that's the best option, officials said. Such raids could be legally justified under the U.S. law passed just after the 9/11 terror attacks that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida, officials said. The reach of the law has been expanded to include groups working with al-Qaida.
The option most likely off the table would be taking suspects seized by the military to Guantanamo Bay, the facility in Cuba that Obama has said he wants to close.
"Just as the administration is trying to find the exit ramp for Guantanamo is not the time to be adding to it," said Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guant?namo.
Beyond being politically uncomfortable, it's less effective, he said. "There've been a total of seven cases completed since 2001," with six of them landing in appeals court over issues with the legitimacy of the charges.
___
Online:
FBI notice: http://tinyurl.com/cmdqnvx
Follow Dozier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kimberlydozier or http://bigstory.ap.org/tags/kimberly-dozier
Defense Distributed's plan is to put the power of guns in the hands of every person with access to the internet and a 3D printer. Until now, however, we'd only seen the Liberator pistol built using an expensive industrial-grade printer -- despite the fact that the blueprints for gun have been downloaded by thousands of people who don't have access to such a high-end machine. One of those folks decided to put the Liberator in the hands of the printing proletariat by making it with a consumer-level Lulzbot A0-101 3D printer, a nail and some common screws.
This new version, called the Lulz Liberator, differs from the original in that it's got a rifled barrel and uses metal hardware to hold it together (as opposed to printed plastic pins). Printing it took around two days and used about $25 worth of generic ABS material, and the pistol produced was fired successfully nine times, but its creator claims it could've shot more. It's still a far cry from a Glock or Beretta, of course, as the gun misfired several times, and removing spent shell casings required the use of a hammer. So, it's not quite ready for prime time, but it's one more bit of proof that the age of printed pistols is officially upon us.
Researchers coax self-assembling materials into flowers, corals and other complex shapes
By Luciana Gravotta
Image: Wim L. Noorduin, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Artists and material scientists alike bend, melt and mold materials into useful and aesthetically pleasing forms. But nothing human hands have made can match the intricacy of convoluted corals or the delicate and unique geometry of a snowflake. In a study published yesterday in Science researchers exploited nature?s sculpting methods to create visually stunning 3-D structures that may change the way nano- and micro-materials are made.
Organisms alter their growth patterns in response to changes in their environments. For example, a seashell may switch from a spotted to a striped pattern if there is a change in the temperature, acidity or carbon dioxide level of the water. Wim L. Noorduin, a materials science engineer at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), used the same concept to coax self-assembling materials to ripple, spiral and bend into structures that resemble leaves, stems, flowers, vases and corals.
The fantastic micro-bouquets showcased in this slide show are not sculpted, but rather grown by design. Noorduin and his colleagues built these crystal structures in a stepwise fashion: first grow the vase, then the stems and finally the petals. The original images are black and white but the researchers false-colored each structure according to the sequence in which it was formed.
? View the Nanosculptured Flora Slide Show
Many nanostructures such as silicon memory cells are etched using lithography, a precise but expensive and labor-intensive technique that can only be used on flat surfaces. ?There is nothing now to create 3-D structures,? says professor of material science at SEAS, Joanna Aizenberg, who is principal investigator of the study and a pioneer in biomimetics (the use of biological systems as templates for creating materials or designing machines). The new technique is the first that can design and build 3-D structures. It is simple, cheap and efficient, as a whole forest of micro-flowers can assemble themselves simultaneously.
Although the structures created in this study are just for show, the technique has potential for future applications. The folds of these 3-D microstructures pack a large amount of surface area into a tiny space?an important consideration for the production of chemicals that depend on catalysts, substances that speed up chemical reactions. The more surface area available, the more catalysts you can add?and the more efficient the reaction.
The process can also be used to make nonsymmetrical (chiral) structures that may be useful for microcircuits, because chirality plays a role in conductivity.
? View the Nanosculptured Flora Slide Show
The technique still needs to be refined before it can be used in these types of applications. The team has developed a mathematical model that maps how the structures evolve, which is important for designing new shapes. Noorduin says they are now working on devices that will allow them to very precisely control the environmental conditions in order to standardize shapes and sizes. They will also need to figure out how to maintain the same level of control for other materials such as carbon, which is used for nanotubes.
Three years after having initiated the project, Noorduin says he still goes back to admire some of his favorite samples. He sits in front of the scanning electron microscope and peers through the lens: ?It feels like diving into a strange coral reef,? Noorduin says. ?You can spend hours looking at them.?
Eurovision Song Contest favourite Denmark won the competition on Saturday night, while Germany plunged to 21st place ? the worst showing in five years ? amidst speculation that it was payback for Angela Merkel?s hated policies.
The German commentator for the show said the country?s weak showing might not be the fault of its entry Cascada.
?We are in a difficult situation,? said Thomas Schreiber from the ARD TV network. ?There is surely a political situation.? He said he didn?t want to say that Germany?s poor showing was a slap in the face for Angela Merkel, but ?you also have to see that it wasn?t just Cascada, but Germany on stage.?
The live song contest took place in Malm?, as last year?s winner was the Swedish singer Loreen.
Emmelie de Forest, at 20 the youngest contestant, won as expected with the song ?Only Teardrops.? Azerbaidjan, the 2011 winner, was second followed by the Ukraine. Some 125 million people watched the show, organisers said.
Cascada?s lead singer Natalie Horler said she was ?super disappointed? with her placement, but the lead up to the competition was ?the most awesome week of my life, of my career.? She said it was hard to know how the vote would come in.
Since Denmark won, next year?s competition will likely take place in Copenhagen, with the final set for May 17, 2014.
Researchers identify a potential new risk for sleep apnea: AsthmaPublic release date: 19-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Nathaniel Dunford ndunford@thoracic.org American Thoracic Society
ATS 2013, PHILADELPHIA ? Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have identified a potential new risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea: asthma.
Using data from the National Institutes of Health (Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)-funded Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study, which has been following approximately 1,500 people since 1988, researchers found that patients who had asthma were 1.70 times (95% CI=1.15-2.51) more likely to develop sleep apnea after eight years.
"This is the first longitudinal study to suggest a causal relationship between asthma and sleep apnea diagnosed in laboratory-based sleep studies," said Mihaela Teodorescu, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine at the university, who will present the research at ATS 2013. "Cross-sectional studies have shown that OSA is more common among those with asthma, but those studies weren't designed to address the direction of the relationship."
The connection between asthma and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) was even stronger among participants who developed asthma as children. Childhood-onset asthma was associated with 2.34 times (95% CI=1.25-4.37) the likelihood of developing sleep apnea.
The researchers also found that the duration of asthma affected the chances of developing sleep apnea. For every five-year increase in asthma duration, the chances of developing OSA after eight years increased by 10 percent.
Participants in the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, who were all between the ages of 30 and 60 in 1988, complete in-laboratory polysomnography, clinical assessments and health history questionnaires every four years. For the asthma-OSA study, the researchers focused on 773 cohort enrollees who did not have OSA (apnea-hypopnea index
The study adjusted for variables known to contribute to sleep apnea, including age, sex, body mass index (BMI), smoking, number of alcoholic drinks per week and nasal congestion. The study also took into account changes in BMI and the addition of new asthma cases.
During the eight-year follow-up period, 45 subjects developed asthma, and they were 48 percent more likely to develop new-onset sleep apnea. However, because the sample size was small, the increase lacked statistical significance.
"Forty-eight percent represents a large difference," said Paul Peppard, PhD, an assistant professor of population health sciences at the university and a principal investigator of the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study. "This is one result that calls for a follow-up study. If confirmed by a larger study with more asthma cases, the finding would have important clinical relevance."
He added, "For now, it makes sense for clinicians to consider asthma history, as well as more traditional factors associated with OSA such as obesity, when deciding whether to evaluate patients for OSA with a sleep study."
Although he considers the overall study that will be presented at ATS 2013 a "strong observational study," Dr. Peppard said it falls short of establishing causality between asthma and sleep apnea. He and Dr. Teodorescu plan to continue their study for at least another four years to look at the connection between asthma and sleep apnea over an even longer timeframe. They also hope other researchers will look at asthma and OSA in other cohorts in order to "solidify our study results."
Dr. Teodorescu believes that birth or child cohorts would be especially important to study, because the link between asthma and OSA in the Wisconsin study was strongest in those who had asthma as children. Such studies, she added, would incorporate a "more objective" diagnosis of asthma than simply asking participants if they were ever diagnosed as having the disease.
###
* Please note that numbers in this release may differ slightly from those in the abstract. Many of these investigations are ongoing; the release represents the most up-to-date data available at press time.
Abstract 45011
Asthma Predicts 8 Year Incidence Of Obstructive Sleep Apnea In The Wisconsin Sleep Cohort
Type: Late Breaking Abstract
Category: 16.05 - Sleep in Other Medical Disorders (SRN/PEDS)
Authors: M. Teodorescu1, J. Barnet2, T. Young2, P. Peppard2, L. Finn2, E. Hagen2, T. Denman1; 1University of Wisconsin / Madison School Of Med - Madison, WI/US, 2Medicine and Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health - Madison, WI/US
Abstract Body
Rationale: Cross-sectionally, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is more common among asthmatics, but whether asthma promotes development of OSA remains unknown. We aimed to determine if the presence or development of asthma affects the risk of new-onset OSA in Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study (WSCS) participants.
Methods: At four-year intervals, WSCS participants (ages 30-60 years in 1988) complete in-laboratory polysomnography, clinical assessments, and health history questionnaires. To examine the relation of self-reported physician-diagnosed asthma and incidence of new OSA, we modeled the association of presence of asthma and odds of developing OSA 8 years later, among participants free of OSA (apnea-hypopnea indexResults: Out of ~1500 WSCS participants with baseline studies, 773 had both baseline AHI
[ | 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.
Researchers identify a potential new risk for sleep apnea: AsthmaPublic release date: 19-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Nathaniel Dunford ndunford@thoracic.org American Thoracic Society
ATS 2013, PHILADELPHIA ? Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have identified a potential new risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea: asthma.
Using data from the National Institutes of Health (Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)-funded Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study, which has been following approximately 1,500 people since 1988, researchers found that patients who had asthma were 1.70 times (95% CI=1.15-2.51) more likely to develop sleep apnea after eight years.
"This is the first longitudinal study to suggest a causal relationship between asthma and sleep apnea diagnosed in laboratory-based sleep studies," said Mihaela Teodorescu, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine at the university, who will present the research at ATS 2013. "Cross-sectional studies have shown that OSA is more common among those with asthma, but those studies weren't designed to address the direction of the relationship."
The connection between asthma and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) was even stronger among participants who developed asthma as children. Childhood-onset asthma was associated with 2.34 times (95% CI=1.25-4.37) the likelihood of developing sleep apnea.
The researchers also found that the duration of asthma affected the chances of developing sleep apnea. For every five-year increase in asthma duration, the chances of developing OSA after eight years increased by 10 percent.
Participants in the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, who were all between the ages of 30 and 60 in 1988, complete in-laboratory polysomnography, clinical assessments and health history questionnaires every four years. For the asthma-OSA study, the researchers focused on 773 cohort enrollees who did not have OSA (apnea-hypopnea index
The study adjusted for variables known to contribute to sleep apnea, including age, sex, body mass index (BMI), smoking, number of alcoholic drinks per week and nasal congestion. The study also took into account changes in BMI and the addition of new asthma cases.
During the eight-year follow-up period, 45 subjects developed asthma, and they were 48 percent more likely to develop new-onset sleep apnea. However, because the sample size was small, the increase lacked statistical significance.
"Forty-eight percent represents a large difference," said Paul Peppard, PhD, an assistant professor of population health sciences at the university and a principal investigator of the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study. "This is one result that calls for a follow-up study. If confirmed by a larger study with more asthma cases, the finding would have important clinical relevance."
He added, "For now, it makes sense for clinicians to consider asthma history, as well as more traditional factors associated with OSA such as obesity, when deciding whether to evaluate patients for OSA with a sleep study."
Although he considers the overall study that will be presented at ATS 2013 a "strong observational study," Dr. Peppard said it falls short of establishing causality between asthma and sleep apnea. He and Dr. Teodorescu plan to continue their study for at least another four years to look at the connection between asthma and sleep apnea over an even longer timeframe. They also hope other researchers will look at asthma and OSA in other cohorts in order to "solidify our study results."
Dr. Teodorescu believes that birth or child cohorts would be especially important to study, because the link between asthma and OSA in the Wisconsin study was strongest in those who had asthma as children. Such studies, she added, would incorporate a "more objective" diagnosis of asthma than simply asking participants if they were ever diagnosed as having the disease.
###
* Please note that numbers in this release may differ slightly from those in the abstract. Many of these investigations are ongoing; the release represents the most up-to-date data available at press time.
Abstract 45011
Asthma Predicts 8 Year Incidence Of Obstructive Sleep Apnea In The Wisconsin Sleep Cohort
Type: Late Breaking Abstract
Category: 16.05 - Sleep in Other Medical Disorders (SRN/PEDS)
Authors: M. Teodorescu1, J. Barnet2, T. Young2, P. Peppard2, L. Finn2, E. Hagen2, T. Denman1; 1University of Wisconsin / Madison School Of Med - Madison, WI/US, 2Medicine and Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health - Madison, WI/US
Abstract Body
Rationale: Cross-sectionally, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is more common among asthmatics, but whether asthma promotes development of OSA remains unknown. We aimed to determine if the presence or development of asthma affects the risk of new-onset OSA in Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study (WSCS) participants.
Methods: At four-year intervals, WSCS participants (ages 30-60 years in 1988) complete in-laboratory polysomnography, clinical assessments, and health history questionnaires. To examine the relation of self-reported physician-diagnosed asthma and incidence of new OSA, we modeled the association of presence of asthma and odds of developing OSA 8 years later, among participants free of OSA (apnea-hypopnea indexResults: Out of ~1500 WSCS participants with baseline studies, 773 had both baseline AHI
[ | 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.
BEIRUT (AP) ? About 30 security agents showed up just after midnight, breaking down the door to an apartment in the town of Daraya near the Syrian capital of Damascus. They grabbed a 24-year-old university student and drove off.
That was a year ago. The young man, who had been providing aid to Syrians displaced by the country's civil war, was never heard from again. His family was told by former prisoners that he ended up in one of the torture dungeons of President Bashar Assad's regime. They don't know if he's dead or alive.
More than two years into the conflict, such accounts have become chillingly familiar to Syrians. Intelligence agents have been seizing people from homes, offices and checkpoints, and human rights activists say the targets often are peaceful regime opponents, including defense lawyers, doctors and aid workers.
Syrian human rights monitors say the number of those disappeared without a trace is now in the thousands. By comparison, the official figure of those who disappeared in Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s is about 13,000, though rights activists say the actual figure is more than twice that.
In such "enforced disappearances," governments refuse to acknowledge detentions or provide information about those taken. The point traditionally is to get rid of opponents and scare the rest of the population into submission ? a rationale laid out in Adolf Hitler's "Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog)" decree of 1941.
In Syria, the goal is to "terrorize the society and dry up the revolution," said Anwar al-Bounni, a veteran defense lawyer and human rights campaigner in Damascus. "The regime focuses on arresting peaceful activists to turn it purely into an armed conflict."
However, numbers remain sketchy.
Four Syrian human rights monitors offered separate estimates ranging from about 10,000 to as many as 120,000 disappeared. The two lower estimates are based on information from families and released prisoners, while the higher figures are based on extrapolation from partial data.
Two international groups, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they believe a majority of detainees in Syria are held under conditions amounting to enforced disappearance. Amnesty said it estimates that tens of thousands of Syrians are in detention but does not have exact figures.
The wide range of numbers also reflects the difficulty of collecting information at a time of chaos, on a practice the regime doesn't acknowledge.
A U.N. panel said in a 2013 report that when it asked about allegations of thousands of enforced disappearances in Syria, the Assad government responded that "there were no such cases in Syria" and that all arrests were being carried out legally.
The accounts by rights groups and those given to The Associated Press by relatives and friends of five of the missing tell a different story ? of arbitrary arrests, of detainees languishing incommunicado in underground cells that are so crowded they have to sleep standing up and of torture to the point of death.
A relative of the university student said that when security forces barged into her family's apartment in Daraya on May 19, 2012, they initially asked for a man who didn't live there.
They searched the apartment, and left, apparently to consult with an informer, said the woman who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of further regime reprisals. A different group returned a few minutes later and asked for the family member who was studying for a master's degree. The young man stepped forward and was taken, she said.
Three months later, a released prisoner told her that her relative was being tortured at a large detention center run by air force intelligence at Mezzeh Airport near Damascus.
Six months after the arrest, another released detainee told her he had fed her relative because he had lost use of his hands. A third former prisoner told her that her relative was taken to a prison hospital in very bad condition about five months ago, never returned and most likely had died.
Uncertainty weighs heavily on the families. "It is psychological torture for everyone in the family," she said in a phone interview from exile. "No news. One says he is dead, the other says he is not."
In the town of Banias on Syria's Mediterranean coast, the Sahyouni family has been living in limbo for two years.
In May 2011, three months after the start of what was then still a largely peaceful uprising, brothers Ghassan, Bashar and Mohammed Sahyouni reported to the local office of the military intelligence. They had joined the protests, but hoped to take advantage of an amnesty promised by Assad at the time.
Instead of being briefly questioned and released, they disappeared. Since then, the family has appealed to foreign observers for help and unsuccessfully tried to bribe officials to give them information.
Worry about the brothers grew exponentially when a 39-year-old member of the extended family was snatched from a coffee shop in October and his body was returned nine days later with signs of severe mistreatment, a relative of the brothers said on condition of anonymity, for fear of regime reprisals.
"When we got his body, he had blue legs, a deep wound in the head and cigarette burns on his chest," she said.
In Damascus, al-Bounni, the defense lawyer, said he personally knew of hundreds who had disappeared, some for weeks or months and others whose fate remains unknown.
Security forces seized fellow human rights activist Khalil Maatouk from his law office in Damascus on Oct. 2, al-Bounni said. Maatouk, who suffers from lung disease, has been missing since then.
"We asked through the Red Cross and the attorney general in Damascus, but received no answer about his place of detention and his health," al-Bounni wrote in an emailed response to questions, adding that Syrian law requires a detainee to be released or presented to a judge within 60 days.
The Syrian government has not said how many people it has arrested since March 2011. Those held incommunicado are even more vulnerable to torture than detainees acknowledged by the state, said Lama Fakih, the Syria researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Last year, the group provided details on 27 torture centers run by the four intelligence services across Syria, but said there are likely many more such facilities. Torture methods described by former detainees and regime defectors included beating victims with cables and sticks, pulling out their fingernails, tying them to boards in painful positions or hanging them from the ceiling by their wrists so their toes barely touch the ground.
The Violations Documentation Center in Syria, one of the rights monitors, said nearly 2,400 detainees have been killed in custody since March 2011, including 1,375 by torture.
Even after such deaths, families are often kept in the dark.
Rights activist Mohammed Alsaqqal was taken Oct. 9, but his wife was told only a month ago that he and his brother Iyad had died, al-Bounni said. "They delivered the IDs and personal belongings to the family, but they didn't deliver the bodies and didn't tell them about the place of burial," he said.
Rebel abuses have also increased in frequency and scale in recent months. International rights groups have accused the fighters of capturing and sometimes killing soldiers and suspected regime informers, although abuses by the Assad regime remain far more deadly, systematic and widespread.
The full scale of the disappearances in Syria may never be known. In some countries, the numbers are under dispute decades after conflicts end.
The U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which is pressing governments to provide information, still has nearly 43,000 open cases from 84 countries, more than one-third from Iraq.
But that's likely just a slice of the actual number of missing, said panel chairman Olivier de Frouville, a Paris-based international law professor. The working group has stringent criteria for cases it agrees to pursue, while relatives of the missing might be afraid to press for information or don't know the option exists, he said.
From Syria, the group has so far received only 72 cases, but the numbers are rising. "It is probably a very incomplete reflection of the phenomenon in the field," he said.
___
Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue and Zeina Karam in Beirut, Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank and Michael Warren in Buenos Aires, Argentina, contributed reporting.
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Public release date: 19-May-2013
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