BERLIN ? Chancellor Angela Merkel won the support of German lawmakers to increase the firepower of the eurozone's bailout fund Wednesday and indicated that private investors like banks should take losses of at least 50 percent on their Greek debt holdings.
The leader of Europe's biggest economy headed to a high-stakes summit in Brussels with a strong mandate to seal a deal on Europe's increasingly unmanageable debt crisis after winning a parliamentary vote 503-89, with four abstentions.
Yet uncertainty remained over whether European leaders would be able to nail down a comprehensive plan to solve the debt crisis.
"The world is watching Europe and Germany; it is watching whether we are ready and able, in the hour of Europe's most serious crisis since the end of World War II, to take responsibility," Merkel told parliament before the vote.
"It would not be justifiable and responsible not to take the risk," she added. "I do not have a better alternative."
Europe has already bailed out three small eurozone members ? Greece, Portugal and Ireland ? but fears it cannot bail out the troubled economies of Italy and Spain, the third and fourth largest economies in the 17-nation currency bloc. It also knows that the first bailout for Greece was nowhere near big enough to keep the country from defaulting.
With that in mind, European officials are working on several plans at once ? resolving Greece's debt situation, strengthening the continent's banks, which are expected to take deeper losses on their Greek bonds than they had planned, making sure other eurozone nations don't need bailouts and boosting the EU bailout fund itself.
"We have to take important decisions today," Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who also chairs the eurozone's finance minister meetings, said in Brussels. "But probably we will not be able to get all the smallest details in."
European Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said it was too early to say whether there would be clear figures for writedowns on Greek debt or on the future firepower of the eurozone bailout fund, whose lending capacity is now at euro440 billion ($610 billion).
German opposition leaders briefed by Merkel say changes would take the fund's lending capacity above euro1 trillion ($1.4 trillion), but that has yet to be finalized.
Another open question was whether Italy will be able to convince its partners that it can get its economy back on track in return for help.
"Our Italian friends know exactly that we have to insist that tonight they tell us that we get important structural consolidation measures in Italy," Juncker said. "That is a must."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's spokeswoman Valerie Pecresse said the French leader commits "all his energy toward the success of this summit," aiming to forge a comprehensive solution to tackle the crisis.
One key issue in Brussels will be renegotiating a deal made in July under which Greece's private bondholders agreed to accept losses of 21 percent on their holdings of government debt. That figure is now seen by EU governments as too little.
Merkel said the summit's aim must be a solution that allows Greece to cut its debt load to 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020.
"That won't work without the private sector participating to a significantly higher extent" than was agreed in July, Merkel said.
She didn't spell out how much banks and other bondholders should contribute. But according to Greece's international creditors, a cut of 50 percent on the face value of Greek bonds now would take the country's debt to just above 120 percent of GDP.
Slovakia's outgoing Prime Minister Iveta Radicova joined Merkel's call, saying as she left for Brussels that investors' "writedown has to be higher than 50 percent."
A move to reduce the bonds' nominal value would significantly reduce the amount that Greece has to pay back when the bonds mature. It would go far beyond the tentative July deal, which focused only on lowering Greece's repayment rates and giving it more time to pay back its debt.
That would have reduced the financial pressure on Greece over the coming years, but would have done little to cut the country's overall debt load, which is set to spiral above an estimated 180 percent of economic output next year.
A global banking lobby group negotiating on behalf of private investors, the Institute of International Finance, said it had made a "significant new offer" on "a voluntary basis" Tuesday in the talks with European governments. Spokesman Frank Vogl did not give further details, and European officials said negotiations were still ongoing.
Merkel insisted that cutting Greece's debts alone won't solve the country's economic problems.
"Painful and necessary structural reforms must be implemented," she said.
She added that a "permanent surveillance" of Greece would therefore be "desirable." Athens' financial reform efforts have been monitored every three months by inspectors from the EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund since it received a bailout in May 2010. Greece has opposed calls for a permanent surveillance mechanism.
Merkel didn't mention Italy, where Premier Silvio Berlusconi averted a government collapse to clinch an overnight deal on emergency growth measures demanded by the EU.
Berlusconi and coalition partner Umberto Bossi reached a compromise on raising Italy's retirement age ? a point of disagreement that had threatened Berlusconi's leadership.
Merkel stressed the need to make sure the crisis doesn't spread further, saying that recapitalizing troubled banks is necessary.
"Anyone who wants private creditors to participate in debt sustainability must also ensure that a screening off, a protection against the danger of contagion, is decided at the same time," Merkel told lawmakers. "Anything else is simply irresponsible."
The EU summit will consider plans to boost the euro440 billion ($610 billion) European Financial Stability Facility, or EFSF, by offering government bond buyers insurance against possible losses and attracting capital from private investors and sovereign wealth funds.
Germany, as the largest economy in the 17-nation eurozone, will be paying out a large share of the bailout money.
In her speech, Merkel stressed the EU must be prepared to overhaul its treaties to overcome the crisis for good and ensure a better functioning of the eurozone's 17 nations and the EU's 27 members.
A future treaty must allow that eurozone countries not living up to their fiscal and budgetary responsibilities under the bloc's growth and stability pact be taken to the European Court of Justice, she said.
Wednesday's joint resolution underlines the German parliament's expectations that, once the changes are implemented, the European Central Bank will no longer need to buy government bonds.
The ECB has bought about euro97 billion ($135 billion) in European government bonds August ? a move that has caused concern in Germany.
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Gabriele Steinhauser in Brussels, Karel Janicek in Prague and Cecile Brisson in Paris contributed to this report.
Batman Arkham City Official Map App is a companion app for the popular Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 game Batman: Arkham City. It features completed maps with the locations of every Riddler Trophy and solutions to every Riddle.
This officially licensed map app for Batman: Arkham
Forum rules This forum is for OOC discussion about existing roleplays.
Please post all "Players Wanted" threads in the Roleplayers Wanted forum!
This topic is an Out Of Character part of the roleplay, ?Star City Chronicles?. Anything posted here will also show up there.
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Forum for completely Out of Character (OOC) discussion, based around whatever is happening In Character (IC). Discuss plans, storylines, and events; Recruit for your roleplaying game, or find a GM for your playergroup.
Are we able to have two characters? I was wondering if I could make siblings.
Fallen
Member for 3 years
This sounds cool, I'll get around to working on a character sometime today. Are melee fighterallowed to use an element? Well, my character that I was thinking of harnesses the power of the sun.
Last edited by ZeroTolerance on Wed Oct 26, 2011 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I'm a dreamcatcher but only nightmares I caught.
ZeroTolerance
Member for 0 years
@ Fallen - yes, you can have more than one character
@ ZeroTolerance - Thank You and ok
DarkPhoenix
Member for 0 years
Since this seemed to be centered around the new players, are we to all make low skilled/braand new players? Or what were the limitations on that? Sorry if I missed something u.u;.
Fallen
Member for 3 years
the main focus is on the new players, however there will be experienced players mixed in with the group. However those will only be players from the rp before this (Tamer Wars)
DarkPhoenix
Member for 0 years
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LOS ANGELES ? After a five-year delay, an Earth-observing satellite will be launched to test new technologies aimed at improving weather forecasts and monitoring climate change.
The $1.5 billion NASA mission comes in a year of weather extremes from the Midwest tornado outbreak to the Southwest wildfires to hurricane-caused flooding in New England.
"We've already had 10 separate weather events, each inflicting at least $1 billion in damages," said Louis Uccellini of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The satellite will lift off before dawn Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., aboard a Delta 2 rocket that will boost it into an orbit some 500 miles high.
The space agency already has a fleet of satellites circling the Earth, taking measurements of the atmosphere, clouds and oceans. But many are aging and need replacement.
The latest ? about the size of a small school bus ? is more sophisticated. It carries five different types of instruments to collect environmental data, including four that never before have flown into space.
One of the satellite's main jobs is to test key technologies that will be used by next-generation satellites set to launch in a few years.
NOAA meteorologists plan to feed the observations into their weather models to better anticipate and track hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather.
The information will "help us understand what tomorrow will bring," whether it's the next-day forecast or long-term climate change, said Andrew Carson, the mission's program executive at NASA headquarters.
The satellite is part of a bigger program with a troubled history. Originally envisioned as a joint civil-military weather satellite project, ballooning costs and schedule delays caused the White House last year to dissolve the partnership.
Under the restructuring, the Defense Department is building its own military satellites while NASA is developing a new generation of research satellites for NOAA. Friday's launch is considered the first step toward that goal.
The satellite was supposed to fly in 2006, but problems during the development of several instruments forced a delay. NASA invested about $895 million in the mission while NOAA and the Air Force contributed $677 million.
For the launch, NASA invited 20 of its Twitter followers to Vandenberg, where they will receive front-row seats to view the liftoff.
Once in orbit, the satellite, built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., will spend the next five years circling the Earth from pole to pole about a dozen times a day. Data will be transmitted to a ground station in Norway and routed to the United States via fiber optic cable. NASA will manage the mission for the first three months before turning it over to NOAA.
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Online:
Mission details: http://www.nasa.gov/npp
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Follow Alicia Chang's coverage at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia
Christian Ponder showed on Sunday that he?s better than Donovan McNabb.
Aaron Rodgers showed that he?s better than every other player in the NFL.
Ponder, the rookie making his debut as the Vikings? starting quarterback, put on a solid showing and kept the Vikings close and competitive with the Packers. But Rodgers was brilliant, leading the way as the Packers held on to win a closer-than-expected game, 33-27.
Rodgers completed 24 of 30 passes for 335 yards, with three touchdowns and no interceptions. His passer rating has now been higher than 110 in all seven of the Packers? games this season, and he?s the biggest reason that the defending champions are 7-0.
As for Ponder, he did a lot of things that the Vikings should like ? and also some things the Vikings won?t like. He can run, but he probably runs more often than the Vikings? coaching staff would prefer, taking off running before reading through all his progressions, and getting hit a lot, sometimes lowering his shoulder into a tackler when he?d be better off sliding. And he can pass, but he does make his share of rookie mistakes, including two interceptions into the hands of Charles Woodson.
Overall, Ponder completed 13 of 32 passes for 219 yards, with two touchdowns and two interceptions. But his performance in leading the Vikings on two scoring drives in the fourth quarter was better than those numbers would suggest. He can be a good player, and he clearly deserves the starting job over McNabb.
But he?s nowhere near the level of Rodgers. And no team in the league is on the same level as the Packers.
PHOENIX ? A federal judge Friday dismissed Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's lawsuit that accuses the Obama administration of failing to enforce immigration laws or maintain control of her state's border with Mexico.
The dismissal by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton comes in a counter-lawsuit filed by Brewer as part of the Justice Department's challenge to Arizona's controversial immigration enforcement law.
The Republican governor was seeking a court order that would require the federal government to take extra steps, such as more border fencing, to protect Arizona until the border is controlled.
Her attorneys argued that her lawsuit was necessary to help bring relief to Arizona from the burdens of being a busy illegal entry point into the country.
The governor's lawsuit didn't seek a lump-sum award, but rather asked for policy changes in the way the federal government reimburses states for the costs of jailing illegal immigrants who are convicted of state crimes. Such changes would have given the state more money.
Justice Department lawyers, who asked the judge to throw out the lawsuit, argued that federal court isn't the right place to consider the political questions raised by Brewer.
They also contended that several claims by the governor should be thrown out because a court rejected similar legal claims in a 1994 case brought by Arizona, and an appeals court decision prohibits Brewer from moving forward with her case.
The Justice Department sued the state of Arizona last year in a bid to invalidate Arizona's immigration enforcement law. Bolton put key parts of the law on hold, such as a provision requiring police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person's immigration status if officers had "reasonable suspicion" the person was in the country illegally.
Brewer has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her appeal of Bolton's ruling.
When H. Eugene Stanley heard that Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy, a small part of him was thrilled.
Of course, the news was distressing. The firm?s seismic collapse had disastrous consequences, not only for the global economy but also for Stanley?s daughter-in-law, who became instantly unemployed. But Lehman?s downfall was exactly the kind of rare event that Stanley, a physicist at Boston University, had been expecting.
?Many economists will tell you that the chances of something really big and bad happening are really, really small,? Stanley says. But when viewed through a different lens, he contends, catastrophic events ? such as Lehman filing for bankruptcy in 2008 ? aren?t exceptional but inevitable.
At the time of Lehman?s collapse, Stanley had been exploring the notion that extreme economic events, the bubbles and crashes of financial markets, might be described by a mathematical law ? a tidy law, like acceleration due to gravity. And he isn?t the only outsider who has had an eye on the markets. Scientists from a range of fields have been poring over financial data, finding some curious patterns in the process.
These patterns suggest that standard economic models based on the notion of equilibrium ? markets will fluctuate but then settle down like the surface of a still pond ? may not capture the whole story. Freak events may be a normal part of long-term economic behavior. If that?s true, then the mathematical methods guiding Wall Street?s estimation of risk are seriously flawed, offering a dangerous false sense of security.
?You have to understand that the bad events can be really, really bad,? says J. Doyne Farmer, who is trained in physics and does research spanning several disciplines at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. ?And there?s a significant chance that over a five-year period we will get hit by a really big event. That?s where the rubber really hits the road.??
Gaussian-colored glasses
Discounting extreme events as improbable is a long-held tradition in economics, notes Stanley. Many mathematical models assume that financial data, such as changes in the price of a stock, fit what is known as a Gaussian, or normal, distribution ? the good old bell curve. Most data cluster around an average. Move to either side of the average, and the data points become increasingly scarce, tapering off in a predictable way. A blizzard in July or the Dow Jones dropping 20 percent in one day are considered so rare that they might as well be impossible.
The Gaussian bell?s roots in finance go back to work by French mathematician Louis Bachelier, who modeled changes in share prices in the early 1900s. Bachelier recognized that some of his model?s assumptions were flawed, including the premise that the probability of extreme events is vanishingly small (he reportedly called such events ?contaminators?). Yet these assumptions were preserved in later models, including the Black-Scholes formula, which underlies much of Wall Street?s estimation of risk.
In some respects, the long reign of this Gaussian approach isn?t that surprising. Many things measured in the real world fit the Gaussian mold, says Mark Newman of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Take the height of adult American males: It generally hovers around 6 feet, or about 180 centi?meters. Plot the number of men with heights lower and higher, and the data points on either side taper off quickly. ?You don?t get a mile-high human,? Newman says.
With truly Gaussian distributions, measurements that appear extraordinary, such as a person a mile tall, are probably flukes; perhaps the measurer didn?t know how to use a ruler or made a mistake in writing down the number. Termed ?outliers,? these data points are often thrown out of the analysis.
But when it comes to financial data, a growing body of research suggests that outliers can be more like babies than bathwater. Such events may still be very rare; Stanley says that the probability that stocks would crash as they did on Black Monday in 1987 was ?as close as you can come to never.? Yet Black Monday still happened. And while much of finance does behave within the bounds of a normal distribution, ignoring the rare, large events doesn?t capture reality.
When rare extremes are included in the picture ? if there really are a handful of mile-tall men ? then one of the bell curve?s sloping sides doesn?t come tidily to a close. It splays out in what?s known as a long (or fat or heavy) tail. Researchers analyzing financial data are finding these tails over and over and over again.
In the 1990s ? when Stanley coined the term ?econophysics? to describe such research ? two of Stanley?s graduate students spotted a signature long tail in U.S. market data. The team analyzed every transaction for 1,000 stocks in the major markets, looking at how much the prices of those stocks changed and how often. The more than 200 million data points included a handful of extremes, causing the graph to splay outward.
Instead of dismissing such tails because they don?t fit the models, researchers might need to rework the models because they don?t fit the data, Stanley and others argue. ?The model should really be driven by the data,? he says. ?For a physicist, there are no outliers. If I saw a glass of water float up in the air, we?d have to re-examine the law of gravity.?
The late mathematician Beno?t Mandelbrot, father of fractals, made a similar observation in the 1960s after examining variation in cotton prices. He later called the Gaussian distribution ?a model child,? one ?which is commonly called ?normal,? but in fact deserves less and less to be considered as such.?
Power up
Long tails are a mathematical clue that a different kind of behavior may be at play, one that physicists have long been fascinated by. When data follow what is called a power law distribution, the outlandish data points that generate the tail aren?t aberrant freaks; they fit right in.
A commonly cited power law, often referred to as Zipf?s law, represents populations of towns and cities. While the majority of places people live are fair- to-middling-sized, a handful, such as New York City, have populations that are crazy large, so large that they are hard to fit with all the other towns and cities on a typical graph. To better visualize such distributions, researchers can analyze their data logarithmically ? a mathematical sleight of hand that compresses the distance between the numbers. When a power law is at play, the plotted logarithms of the data don?t skew awkwardly but fall on an elegant straight line.
A classic case of the power law in economics (although it has recently been disputed) is the distribution of wealth, described by Italian Vilfredo Pareto in 1896. The wealth of the richest people is orders of magnitude greater than that of the ordinary. Forbes put Bill Gates? net worth as of September at $59 billion; try fitting that on a traditional chart with everybody else?s.
A new analysis of transactions on the S&P 500 share index and the German DAX Future stock market also uncovered power laws at work. As prices start to rise or fall, larger and larger chunks of stock are sold with greater and greater frequency, Stanley, Tobias Preis of Boston University and Artemis Capital Asset Management, and Johannes Schneider of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The trade volume and the time between successive trades both exhibit power law behavior.
The researchers also observed a peculiar trait of power laws: They are ?scale-free.? Say, for example, that computer files 2 kilobytes in size are one-fourth as common as files of 1 kilobyte. Under a power law regime, file sizes of 2 megabytes would be one-fourth as common as those of 1 megabyte, and so on. Like Mandel?brot?s fractal geometry of a coastline or cauliflower whorl, whether you view from afar or zoom in with a microscope, the proportions remain the same.
These data suggest to Stanley that global financial crashes and the bubbles that precede them aren?t outliers. The same mechanisms that cause the smaller blips occurring in markets daily may also be generating bigger crashes.
Knowing that such extreme events will happen doesn?t mean researchers can predict when, Stanley says. But acknowledging power law behavior may help investors and regulators pin the right number on risk. Having a power law distribution changes how often you?d expect to see an event sitting far from the data?s average, a distance measured in ?standard deviations.? With a Gaussian model, an event that?s 100 standard deviations out ? so far out it?s considered impossible ? has a probability of about 1 in 10350. With a power law distribution, that likelihood shoots up to 1 in 108, Stanley notes.
Farmer, who made a small fortune working in the financial sector throughout the 1990s, says knowing how often big events may hit is crucial for estimating risk: ?You have to understand your tail.?
Recent work by Farmer, Stefan Thurner of the Medical University of Vienna and Yale economist John Geanakoplos suggests that some investment strategies can actually create a power law long tail. Say you see an underpriced stock. You buy it, which normally would push the price up a bit. But if you?re using leverage (borrowed money) to try to amplify your returns, and then the bank cuts you off, you might be forced to sell prematurely or sell off other assets. This selling can push prices down and then other outfits may sell too, because they see the price sliding.
?Heavy-tailed events can be caused by leverage,? Farmer says. ?It can create a crash.? His team?s simulations suggest that adding leverage to a market tips the distribution of price changes from a Gaussian to a power law distribution. And when banks cut off many borrowers to control risk, the situation can get worse, the team reported in 2009 in a Santa Fe Institute working paper.
Power laws in one area of the economy may lead to others, says economist Xavier Gabaix of New York University?s Stern School of Business. The power law distribution of CEO pay may arise from the interplay between a phenomenon known as the economics of superstars and a power law that exists for firm size, he and colleague Augustin Landier, who is now at the Toulouse School of Economics in France, reported in 2008 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Even though there are only slight differences in talent within the cream of the crop, firms want the best CEO. Competition among large firms for really good CEOs can lead to huge differences in income, especially when some firms are supersized, the researchers contend.
Another consequence of firm size?s power law is that major events, such as an employee strike or the invention of the smartphone, don?t dissipate gently through the market. When superlarge firms, such as Nokia, have huge successes or failures, these events can steamroll their way across an entire economy. In fact, such idiosyncratic shocks to the 100 largest U.S. firms may account for about one-third of the volatility seen in the whole market, Gabaix reported in May in Econometrica.
An eye on outliers
Some researchers argue that understanding the whole economic picture will mean incorporating more than just power laws. Occasionally crashes are so large that they are outliers even from the power law distribution, says Didier Sornette of ETH Zurich. Their specialness makes them predictable, says Sornette, who calls the standout events ?dragon-kings.?
?Dragons are not like the ordinary animals you meet in the zoo,? Sornette says. ?They require new mechanisms, new biology to explain them.? The ?kings? part of the name refers to the fortunes of royal families, which after centuries of concentrating wealth have so much that they no longer even fit in Pareto?s distribution of wealth.
?We believe that there are events that are in a class of their own,? Sornette says. ?While the power law distribution is a good characterization of the distribution of returns, it actually misses the elephant in the room, the dragon-king.?
Sornette and his colleagues argue that understanding dragon-kings may help economists spot markets teetering toward crashes. Out-of-control growth can be one sign of an approaching dragon-king. When herding behavior among investors amps up, a stock?s or index?s growth rate can increase faster than exponentially, leading to more herding, Sornette says. This positive feedback among investors, the same sort of feedback that concentrates the wealth of kings, brings the system to a tipping point. About two-thirds of the time, a crash results, Sornette wrote in a 2009 paper online at arXiv.org.
Working out of the Financial Crisis Observatory at ETH Zurich, Sornette and his colleagues are now trying to use this aggressive growth as a signature to identify crashes before they happen (often encrypting the data so as not to influence the markets).
The researchers seem to be on to something. While other market watchers remained enthusiastic about the outlandish growth of the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index into the summer of 2009, Sornette and his colleagues announced on July 10 that a downturn was coming. They predicted that the bubble burst would begin between July 17 and 27. It popped on July 29.
Though great strides are being made in understanding outliers, how to reconcile the newfound importance of seemingly freak events with traditional models based on stability and equilibrium isn?t yet clear.
Many economists agree that current models grossly oversimplify things: ?Almost no economists think that the Gaussian is a very good approximation of reality,? Gabaix says.
But power law math is much messier than Gaussian math. Even figuring out where a power law distribution begins can be tough. Pareto?s classic case of income probably follows a power law only in its tail, for example, with the wealth of the majority of the population based on labor for pay.
To keep things simple, models leave out a lot, Gabaix says. The key, and a very difficult thing, is making sure that the most important ingredients are included. ?Power laws,? he says, ?are one of those intriguing facts that force people to write new theories that hopefully will explain them.?
A DIFFERENT DISTRIBUTION
When displayed on a typical graph, data that follow a power law distribution form a long tail (below, top graph). But graph the same data on a log scale and they fall onto a straight line (bottom graph). By applying several statistical tests, a recent analysis identified data sets that probably show power law behavior (bottom).
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left. arrives for an EU summit in Brussels on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011. Big banks find themselves under pressure in Europe's debt crisis with finance chiefs pushing to raise billions of euros in capital and accept huge losses on Greek bonds they hold. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left. arrives for an EU summit in Brussels on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011. Big banks find themselves under pressure in Europe's debt crisis with finance chiefs pushing to raise billions of euros in capital and accept huge losses on Greek bonds they hold. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives for an EU summit in Brussels on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011. Big banks find themselves under pressure in Europe's debt crisis with finance chiefs pushing to raise billions of euros in capital and accept huge losses on Greek bonds they hold. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
BRUSSELS (AP) ? Greece's prime minister pleaded Sunday for a comprehensive solution to the European debt crisis that has swallowed his country and is threatening to suck in larger economies, but European leaders said the world may have to wait a few more days.
So far, the continent's banks have been at the center of marathon talks in Brussels. European Union leaders gathering in the city will ask banks to accept much bigger losses on Greek bonds to ease the pressure on the country and to raise billions more in capital to weather those losses.
Austria's chancellor said the cut in the value of Greek government bonds will likely be raised "in the direction of 40 to 50 percent."
"A cut in the debt is the right step," Werner Faymann told Austrian newspaper Wiener Kurier. The comments were confirmed by one of his aides.
But the grand plan originally promised for Sunday has been put off yet again, raising questions about whether Europe has the will to act boldly and quickly enough to help Greece dig out of its debt, prevent bigger countries like Spain and Italy from falling into a similar hole, and calm markets that have reacted negatively to the turmoil. Another summit of EU heads of government is scheduled for Wednesday.
Meetings this weekend have made progress on reducing Greece's debt after a new report showed that worsening economic conditions mean it could take the country decades to emerge from the crisis. Greece is in revolt, reeling from several rounds of budget cuts that have sparked a series of strikes and riots.
"Greece has proven again and again that we are making the necessary decisions to make our economy sustainable, and make our economy more just," Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou told reporters as he headed into Sunday's meetings. "We are doing what we need from our side ... but it's been proven now that the crisis is not a Greek crisis. The crisis is a European crisis, so now is the time that we as Europeans need to act decisively and effectively."
The report from Greece's international creditors said they would likely have to lend Athens more money unless banks accept a 60 percent writedown of the bonds they hold.
The eurozone and the International Monetary Fund have already been propping up Athens with euro110 billion ($150 billion) in rescue loans since May 2010.
Another rescue of a similar size was agreed to in July, but it's now clear that deal did not go far enough. For instance, it called for only a 21 percent cut in Greek bond holdings; leaders are now discussing a much more significant reduction, though an exact percentage has not yet emerged.
The near certainty of having to accept steeper losses on their Greek bond holdings is one of the reasons banks across Europe ? not only in the 17-country eurozone ? will be forced to shore up their capital buffers.
A European official said Saturday that new rules agreed by EU finance ministers force banks to raise just over euro100 billion ($140 billion). The official was speaking on condition of anonymity because the rules were pending approval from EU leaders.
However, Sunday it was uncertain whether EU leaders would even be able to sign off on those rules. A draft of summit conclusions from Sunday morning only welcomed the progress made by finance ministers, adding that the final decision would be made by yet another finance ministers' meeting on Wednesday ahead of a second summit the same day.
The search for a comprehensive solution has divided the continent, and despite progress this weekend many obstacles remain.
Leaders are in the difficult position of not being able to decide on anything until everything is in place, since each piece of the puzzle affects the others.
The biggest sticking point is how to most effectively use Europe's bailout fund to make sure Italy and Spain don't see their borrowing costs spiral out of control as happened with Greece, Portugal and Ireland. The EU doesn't have enough money to rescue Italy and Spain as it did the other three countries; analysts say the EU must act now to eliminate the possibility of their collapse.
Until it does, the continuing uncertainty will roil markets and slow growth across Europe and even the world.
"The crisis in the eurozone is having a chilling effect on all our economies, Britain included. ... We have to deal with this issue," British Prime Minister David Cameron said on his way into the meeting of the heads of the 27 countries in the European Union.
Britain does not use the euro. Later in the day, the leaders of countries the 17 that use the euro will meet on their own.
Other leaders tried to lower expectations for Sunday's meetings, saying the real decisions will be made Wednesday at another emergency summit.
"Let's put the expectations in context: Don't count on decisions today," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
Disagreements between Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy over how to use the bailout fund, which is called the European Financial Stability Facility, are largely responsible for the delay.
France wants the fund to be allowed to tap the massive cash reserves of the European Central Bank ? an option Germany rejects. And weaker economies are wary of agreeing to the other two parts of the grand plan ? bigger bank capital and cuts to Greece's debt ? without assurance that the bailout fund is ready to provide support.
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Associated Press writers Raf Casert, Elena Becatoros, Slobodan Lekic and Don Melvin contributed to this report.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia ?? The heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz, died Saturday in the U.S. after an illness. He was 85.
The death of the crown prince ? who was the half brother of the ailing Saudi King Abdullah ? opens questions about succession.
NBC News reported that Sultan died at a hospital in New York City. He is expected to be buried Tuesday in Riyadh.
'A strong leader'
Sultan, who was the oil-rich kingdom's deputy prime minister, had been defense minister and minister of aviation for about four decades.
"With grief, King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz mourns the death of Sultan bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud, crown prince and his brother," the palace said in a statement.
Saudi television broke its schedules early on Saturday to broadcast Koranic verses accompanied by footage of the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam's holiest site.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the crown prince as "a strong leader and a good friend to the United States over many years, as well as a tireless champion for his country."
Sultan underwent surgery in New York in February 2009 and spent nearly a year abroad recuperating in the United States and at a palace in Agadir, Morocco. According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from January 2010, Sultan had been receiving treatment for colon cancer since 2009.
Sultan oversaw a defense spending spree which made the kingdom one of the world's biggest arms buyers.
Sultan had an intestinal cyst removed in 2005 and had spent several months abroad for treatment and recreation.
Advanced weapons
While Saudi Arabia insisted he was fully cured, diplomats in Riyadh said he gradually retreated from participating in decision-making and often worked only for one or two hours a day.
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Many of his duties had been informally shifted to other princes, most notably to his son Khaled who led Saudi and Arab forces during the 1991 war to remove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army from Kuwait. Prince Khaled, who is assistant defense minister, is also the owner of influential pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.
While defense minister, Sultan spent hundreds of billions to modernize the forces of the country where Islam was born 1400 years ago, doubling the regular armed forces to more than 100,000 men and buying advanced weapons from all over the world.
Born in Riyadh, Sultan was educated by private tutors and spoke some English. He also went to a school for princes.
He was keen to maintain close ties with the West, especially the United States, though like the rest of the royal family he distanced himself from the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in 2003.
Story: Obama: All US troops out of Iraq by end of year
The most likely candidate for the throne after Sultan is Prince Nayef, the powerful interior minister in charge of internal security forces. After Sultan fell ill, the king gave Nayef an implicit nod in 2009 by naming him second deputy prime minister, traditionally the post of the third in line.
Anyone who rises to the throne is likely to maintain the kingdom's close alliance with the United States. But there could be internal differences. Abdullah has been seen as a reformer, making incremental changes to improve the position of women, for example, and to modernize the kingdom despite some backlash from the ultra-conservative Wahhabi clerics who give the royal family the religious legitimacy needed to rule. Nayef, for example, is often seen as closer to the clerics.
Abdullah is aged in his late 80s and underwent back surgery earlier this month but has been pictured since then in apparently good health.
Unlike in European monarchies, the line of succession does not move directly from father to eldest son, but has moved down a line of brothers born to the kingdom's founder Ibn Saud, who died in 1953.
NBC News, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
(Reuters) ? Groupon Inc plans to raise as much as $540 million in an initial public offering, less than previously planned, as the daily deals website grapples with a weak equity market, executive departures and questions about its accounting and business model.
The company aims to sell 30 million shares, or less than 5 percent of the company, at between $16 and $18 each, according to a regulatory filing on Friday.
The midpoint would value Groupon $10.8 billion, far less than the $20 billion initially expected but still above the $6 billion that Google Inc offered to pay for the business last year.
Despite the lowered valuation, some analysts said they thought the IPO, which is expected to come to market in early November, could still struggle. They point to questions over the long-term viability of a business that faces fierce competition and low barriers of entry.
The fact that Groupon has changed its accounting twice under pressure from regulators, and lost two chief operating officers this year, also has not instilled confidence.
"This offer strikes me as very, very unattractive," said Josef Schuster, founder of Chicago-based IPO research and investment house IPOX Schuster. "I think it's over-valued."
He said the scaling back of the size of the IPO and the small float suggests that there will be more shares to come to market. Depending on demand, the IPO will raise between $480 million and $540 million, compared with a previous target of $750 million.
The deal is one of the most closely watched IPOs in recent years. If it succeeds, it will bode well for other companies also considering going public, including social gaming company Zynga and online social network Facebook.
Groupon is set to launch a roadshow next week with Chief Executive Andrew Mason, Chief Financial Officer Jason Child and product head Jeff Holden to attract potential investors.
SMALLER LOSSES
The online daily deal industry has exploded into a multibillion-dollar business since Groupon was launched in late 2008. That growth has attracted hundreds of rivals, including giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon.com Inc.
One of the main question marks over Groupon has been whether the company can become profitable any time soon. Friday's IPO filing disclosed third-quarter results and some progress toward profitability.
On a pro forma operating basis, which excludes stock-based compensation, Groupon said it lost $2 million in the third quarter, down from $62 million in the second quarter.
Groupon's North American business generated a pro forma operating profit of $19 million in the third quarter.
Groupon's International segment lost $21 million in the third quarter, compared with a pro forma operating loss of $52 million in the second quarter.
Groupon reduced its losses partly by keeping a lid on marketing spending. Earlier this year, the company hired Richard Williams from Amazon as its new head of marketing to help make its marketing more efficient.
NET REVENUE RISES
Groupon reported gross billings of $1.16 billion in the third quarter, up 25 percent from the previous quarter and 496 percent from the same period last year.
Gross billings represent the money Groupon collects from selling online discount coupons. The company pays a lot of this money later to the merchants participating in the deals. What is left over is reported as net revenue.
Groupon said third-quarter net revenue was $430 million, up 10 percent from the second quarter and 426 percent from a year earlier.
The company said it had 30 million customers at the end of September, up from 23 million three months earlier. Customers are subscribers who have bought one of Groupon's coupons.
Repeat customers, people who have purchased more than one Groupon, climbed to 16 million in the third quarter from 12 million at the end of the second quarter, the company also said in its filing.
Average revenue per Groupon sold was $13 in the third quarter, up from $12 in the previous quarter. The average number of Groupons sold per customer was 4.2, up about 5 percent from the previous three-month period, according to the filing.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co and Credit Suisse are leading the underwriters on the offering. The shares are expected to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol "GRPN."
(Reporting by Alistair Barr in San Francisco, additional reporting by Clare Baldwin in New York; Editing by Bernard Orr, Lisa Von Ahn and Steve Orlofsky)
A Libyan former rebel fighter kicks a graffiti depicting Moammar Gadhafi with "Allah Hakbar, God is Great" written on top, on a checkpoint border of Ras Ajdir between Tunisia and Libya, late at night Thursday Oct. 20, 2011. The death Thursday of Gadhafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
A Libyan former rebel fighter kicks a graffiti depicting Moammar Gadhafi with "Allah Hakbar, God is Great" written on top, on a checkpoint border of Ras Ajdir between Tunisia and Libya, late at night Thursday Oct. 20, 2011. The death Thursday of Gadhafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Moammar Gadhafi now joins the ranks of other powerful foreign leaders, many of them dictators or autocrats, who have battled the United States only to come to a bad end.
But even after the demise of Libya's "Brother Leader," plus Osama bin Laden, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, there is no shortage of other influential heads of state around the world determined to criticize and challenge the U.S., notably in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran.
In those countries, leaders have accused the United States of abusing its status as the world's sole surviving superpower and de facto leader of the West, in some cases playing to doubts about U.S. intentions in order to help cement their authority at home and enhance their prestige abroad.
These themes tap a deep vein abroad and probably will continue to resonate.
Among the regimes and leaders likely to remain a thorn in the side of the U.S.:
?The Castro regime. Fidel Castro himself, who survived CIA assassination plots, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the U.S. economic embargo to excoriate and antagonize the United States from Cuba for more than half a century, formally resigned as president in February 2008 due to illness. But he handed the reins to his brother, Raul, and the revolutionary regime survives. Cuban-U.S. trade is minimal and there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries. The U.S. accuses the Cuban government of trampling on human rights and silencing dissent, while Havana portrays itself as a victim of U.S. bullying.
?Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a popular left-wing activist and former military officer elected in 1998 who instituted radical changes in economic and social policy, including expanding state control of the oil industry. Chavez has accused Washington of plotting to invade Venezuela, called for containment of the U.S., aligned himself with Cuba and signed major arms deals with Russia to build Venezuela into a regional power. The U.S. likes to portray Venezuela as more of an irritant than an adversary, but that could change if Chavez adopts more aggressive policies.
? Kim Jong Il of North Korea, a Stalinist-style nation with a 1 million-strong army that has been a challenge for the U.S. since the Korean War. In recent years the U.S. has sought to persuade Kim to give up his small nuclear weapons program, offering economic aid and diplomatic favors as bargaining chips. But the U.S. accuses Kim of repeatedly reneging on promises to disarm while selling weapons expertise abroad. The U.S. and other nations accused Pyongyang last year of torpedoing a South Korean navy ship and shelling a South Korean island. With the North Korean leader believed to be gravely ill, the key to Washington's future relations with Pyongyang may be Kim's son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Un.
?Iran's clerical leadership. The theocratic regime in Tehran has demonstrated little tolerance for dissent and a deep and abiding hostility to Washington since the overthrow of the U.S.-backed regime of the shah of Iran in 1979. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's broadsides against the U.S. and Israel are a regular feature of U.N. General Assembly meetings, but his is just one voice among many in the Iranian government, which Western analysts say consists of a jigsaw puzzle of anti-Western factions. The present conflict with Washington grows out of concerns about Iran's support for terror groups in the Middle East but mainly focuses on Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The U.S. says Iran is laying the groundwork for a nuclear weapons program that could threaten the Middle East, U.S. and Europe. Iran says it is interested only in peaceful nuclear technology.
Not all of the world's strongmen are regarded as enemies of the U.S.; during the Cold War and beyond, many were treated as stalwart allies. Even today, the U.S. occasionally criticizes President Aleksander Lukashenko of Belarus, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, but it maintains diplomatic relations.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has dominated Russian politics for more than a decade, has been sharply critical of the U.S. in the past, accusing Washington of dictating to others in its conduct of foreign policy. Despite continuing differences over missile defense and Middle East policies, though, the Obama administration has worked hard to improve ties and the U.S. and Russia are working together on issues of mutual interest.
The U.S. also has strong relations with absolute monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states which have strongly fought grass-roots activists and democracy movements in their countries.
The U.S. also faces the challenge of helping prevent newly liberated countries from retreating from democracy. While Taliban leader Mullah Omar was driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001, his movement made an impressive comeback and could once again become a major force in Afghanistan politics as the U.S. withdraws.
From the U.S. perspective, the survival of openly hostile regimes may be less important than the rise of rival economic and political powerhouses like China, India, Brazil and Russia, a trend that some experts say could one day create a world where the United States becomes one major power among many competing for influence and markets.
One of those countries could be Libya.
Gadhafi's death Thursday is just the beginning of a critical new phase in Libya's history, said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The leaders of the Libyan rebellion inherit a divided population, a ruined economy and a barely functioning state ? all crippled by decades of Gadhafi's erratic rule.
"He left Libya with a unique set of problems," Cordesman said. "You'd have to go back to Nero or Caligula to find someone who was able to impose their own personal eccentricities on a state to the degree that Gadhafi did."
MANILA?? Pole dancing to the music of a 20-piece live orchestra, including violins? Yes, says one Philippine pole dance troupe that seeks respect for its art and athleticism.
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Against the background of women around the world turning to pole dancing as a form of exercise, the Manila-based group Polecats proved at a recent weekend show that performances are no longer only for strip clubs and sleazy bars ? or just for women, either.
As the orchestra played classical-style arrangements of modern songs, dancers of both genders swung and climbed gracefully up 12-foot poles, combining flexibility, strength, and moves bordering on acrobatics, with sensuality.
"You don't go to Cirque du Soleil to get turned on, although maybe you will, but I just want people to see that we're really good at what we do, and not just hot," said Christina Dy, the Polecats director.
Routines involving swings and twirls require balance, concentration and a high level of technical skills, and that is what audiences should appreciate, she added.
"I just want people to see that this is very hard ... if you just want the hair flipping, the grinding and all that, the boob popping, you can get that anywhere," she said.
'Might be sexy'
The group has gathered male performers, as well as male viewers, by focusing on the athletic aspects of performing, said Job Bautista, the first man to become a regular Polecats members.
"Now here in the Philippines we're trying to promote the more acrobatic type of pole dancing, which we Polecats think is more suited to men," he said.
The group employed the help of fast-strutting practitioners of Parkour ? a movement method of French origin involving running, jumping, vaulting, and rolling around obstacles ? to introduce new routines that would appeal to men.
The group expects more male recruits as soon as lessons for men start in full this month.
"There are a lot of big movements like balancing and pulling yourself up on the pole. It might be sexy in a way, but not only for girls," said Parkour practitioner Flynn Siy.
Organizations such as the International Pole Dance Fitness Association have been advocating professional pole dancing for fitness and sport. Ultimately, the goal is to include it in the Olympics.
In a reflection of this growing respectability, the audience included many professionals and dance lovers, along with foreign residents of Manila.
"Every kid has dreamed of climbing a pole, and this takes it to a completely different level," said Sally Clark, an environmentalist from the United States and long-term Philippines resident.
"I think it's much harder than it looks, so yeah, I might try it sometime if I have the chance."
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Tips from the journals of the American Society for MicrobiologyPublic release date: 20-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Sliwa jsliwa@asmusa.org 202-942-9297 American Society for Microbiology
Human Norovirus In Groundwater Remains Infective After Two Months
Researchers from Emory University have discovered that norovirus in groundwater can remain infectious for at least 61 days. The research is published in the October Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Human norovirus is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis. The disease it causes tends to be one of the more unpleasant of those that leave healthy people unscathed in the long run, with diarrhea and vomiting that typically last for 48 hours. Norovirus sickens one in 15 Americans annually, causing 70,000 hospitalizations, and more than 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The results answer a question of great importance to public health, which had driven researcher Christine Moe and her colleagues to conduct this research: If well water becomes contaminated with noroviruses--perhaps from leaking sewer lines or a septic tankhow long do these noroviruses survive in water, and when would it be safe to drink from that well?
To answer that question, they prepared a safety-tested virus stock solution. They then put a known amount of this solution into a container of groundwater from an Atlanta well, which had met Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards.
The researchers then tested the virus infectivity at days naught, 4, 14, 21, 27, and 61, by having volunteers drink the water on those days. The durability of the virus' infectivity was unexpected, says Moe. Most of the 13 volunteers became infected at various time points, exhibiting among them the complete range of norovirus symptoms, which endured for as long as five days post challenge. "We were surprised to observe that even the volunteers that drank the water 61 days after we had added the virus still got infected with the norovirus," says Moe.
Norovirus may remain infective far longer than 61 days. The researchers stored the groundwater at room temperature in the dark, using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction to determine how much viral RNA remained after 622 days, and again after 1,266 days. They found no reduction after the first interval, and very little at the end of the second interval. Unfortunately, funding was insufficient to test infectivity in human volunteers beyond day 61.
"This study provides further evidence of the need to treat groundwater used for drinking water," says Moe, adding that the Environmental Protection Agency and other decision-makers who regulate drinking water need to take these findings into account, particularly since roughly half the US population relies upon groundwater for drinking.
To ensure that the volunteers' health would not be compromised, the investigators conducted the study in a special research unit of Emory University Hospital, while taking a variety of other precautionary measures.
Anticipating a question about who would volunteer to participate in a study with such potentially unpleasant consequences, Moe says that some volunteers have said that "they want to see how good their immune system is, and whether they will actually get sick." Three of the 13 volunteers did not become sick. One volunteer was the local librarian "who came to the research unit with a huge bag of books that she wanted to read while she was in the study," says Moe.
(S.R. Seitz, J.S. Leon, K.J. Schwab, G.M. Lyon, M. Dowd, M. McDaniels, G. Abdulhafid, M.L. Fernandez, L.C. Lindesmith, R.S. Baric, and C.L. Moe, 2011. Norovirus infectivity in humans and persistence in water. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 77:6884-6888.)
Women Can Self-Test for HPV, Easily and Accurately
A team of German researchers has shown that women can accurately test themselves for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, the most common cause of cervical cancer. The research is published in the October Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
"The high sensitivity of this self-sampling method guarantees to identify nearly all HPV-infected women," says first author Yvonne Delere, of the Robert Koch Institute of the Ministry of Health, Berlin.
Worldwide, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women, with half a million new cases and a quarter million deaths, annually, according to the World Health Organization. Virtually all cases are linked to certain strains HPV.
In the study, the researchers compared self sampling with conventional endocervical brush samples obtained by gynecologists in two groups of women 20-30 years of age, with (55 women) and without (101 women) a recent suspicious cytological smear. The two sampling methods were in accord in the two groups 84 and 91 percent of the time, respectively. Overall, the women rated the self-sampling method easy, at 12 on a scale of 0 (easy) to 100 (difficult).
The Netherlands has already introduced the new technique into cervical cancer screening programs, and Delere hopes to see the method become widespread in developing countries, where women frequently lack easy access to medical personnel and testing.
The researchers note that concordance between the conventional and the self-sampling methods is good despite the fact that the techniques sample different areas. The cervical brush sampling is directed towards the transformation zone, the area on the cervix where abnormal cells most commonly develop, while the lavage includes the whole cervical area.
"The higher prevalence of HPV, hr-HPV, and HPV16 in cervicovaginal lavage samples may be explained by additional infections at extracervical sites," according to the paper. "Since these infections may be a reservoir for virus infecting the cervical epithelium at the transformational zone, they are probably epidemiologically relevant. Therefore, cervicovaginal lavage sampling may be superior to cervix-directed sampling for future HPV prevalence studies."
Among teenaged girls, the transformation zone lies on the cervix's outer surface, where it is more vulnerable to infection than it is in adult women.
The self-sampling device, the Delphi Screener, is a sterile, syringe-like device containing five milliliters of buffered saline. One operates it by plunging the handle, releasing the saline into the vagina, holding it down for five seconds, then releasing the handle, so that the device retrieves the fluid. Next, one plunges the lavage specimens into prelabeled coded tubes, and mails it to the laboratory.
(Y. Delere, M. Schuster, E. Vartazarowa, T. Hansel, I. Hagemann, S. Borchardt, H. Perlitz, A. Schneider, S. Reiter, and A.M. Kaufmann, 2011. Cervicovaginal self-sampling is a reliable method for determination of prevalence of human papillomavirus genotypes in women aged 20 to 30 years. J. Clin. Microbiol. 49:3519-3522.)
Newly Discovered Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance Genes
Waters polluted by the ordure of pigs, poultry, or cattle represent a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes, both known and potentially novel. These resistance genes can be spread among different bacterial species by bacteriophage, bacteria-infecting viruses, according to a paper in the October Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
"We found great quantities of bacteriophages carrying different antibiotic resistance genes in waters with fecal pollution from pigs, cattle, and poultry," says Maite Muniesa of the University of Barcelona, Spain, an author on the study. "We demonstrated that the genes carried by the phages were able to generate resistance to a given antibiotic when introduced into other bacteria in laboratory conditions," says Muniesa.
Although we often think of antibiotic resistance genes as evolving into existence in response to the antibiotics that doctors use to fight human disease and that agribusiness uses to fatten farm animals, microbes had undoubtedly been using both antibiotics and resistance genes to compete with each other for millions of years before antibiotics revolutionized human medicine and resistance genes threatened their efficacy to the point where the World Health Organization considers them to be one of the biggest risks to human health.
Thus, the Spanish researchers suspect, based on their study, that these resistance gene reservoirs are the product of microbial competition, rather than pressure from human use of antibiotics. They note that the pasture-fed cattle in their study are not fed antibiotics, and they suggest that even if antibiotic feed additives were banned, new resistance genes might emerge while old ones spread from these reservoirs into bacteria that infect humans.
And if resistance genes are being mobilized from these reservoirs, it becomes important to understand how the resistance genes are transmitted from phage to new bacterial species, in order to develop strategies that could hinder this transmission, limiting the emergence of new resistance genes, says Muniesa.
(M. Colomer-Lluch, L.Imamamovic, J. Jofre, and M. Muniesa, 2011. Bacteriophages carrying antibiotic resistance genes in fecal waste from cattle, pigs, and poultry. Antim. Agents Chemother. 55:4908-4911.)
New Insights Into Insulin Resistance Could Lead to Better Drugs for Diabetics
Research published in the October Molecular and Cellular Biology moves us closer to developing drugs that could mitigate diabetes.
Diabetes afflicts an estimated 26 million Americans, while 79 million have prediabetes. In other words, one in three Americans confronts this disease. Diabetes raises the risk of heart disease and stroke by as much as fourfold, and it is the leading cause of blindness among adults 20-74. It is also the leading cause of kidney failure.
In earlier research, four years ago another team of researchers showed that they could boost insulin sensitivity in experimental rodents by giving the animals a drug called myriocin. People with diabetes have a condition called insulin resistance, which renders them poorly able to process sugar. That results in high blood sugar, which damages the blood vessels, leading to many of diabetes' ills. In their study, that team, led by Johannes M. Aerts of the University of Amsterdam, observed a decrease in a compound called ceramide, which sits on cell membranes in the circulatory system, which they postulated was responsible for the rise in insulin sensitivity.
In the new study, Xian-Cheng Jiang of Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, and his collaborators set out to confirm this earlier work, using a genetic approach.
The new research provides strong evidence that ceramide was not causing insulin sensitivity, but that another membrane-bound compound, sphingomyelin, might be doing so.
Ceramide is the substrate for the last step in a five step cascade that produces sphingomyelin. In that step an enzyme called sphingomyline synthase 2 (SMS2) cleaves ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. The first enzyme in this pathway is called serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT).
To test the hypothesis that ceramide is involved in modulating insulin resistance the researchers used knockout mice for each of these enzymes. They postulated that (partially) knocking out the first enzyme in the cascade would decrease ceramide levels while knocking out the last enzyme in the sphingomyelin pathway would boost ceramide levels, since that enzyme uses ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. Thus, SPT knockout mice would have greater insulin sensitivity, while SMS knockout mice would have reduced insulin sensitivity.
Surprisingly, while ceramide levels changed as predicted, that change did not influence insulin sensitivity, which was higher in both groups.
The research has important implications for drug development for mitigating diabetes. Myriocin proved highly toxic and major efforts to modify the drug to reduce that toxicity have been fruitless. Myriocin's toxicity probably stems from the fact that it inhibits the first step of the sphingomyelin biosynthetic pathway, affecting all the downstream biology, says Jiang. The discovery that knocking out the last step in the biosynthetic pathway improves insulin sensitivity means that drug treatments could target that last enzyme, SMS, leaving the rest of that biosynthetic pathway to function normally.
(Z. Li, H. Shang, J. Liu, C.-P. Liang, Y. Li, Y. Li, G. Teitelman, T. Beyer, H.H. Bui, D.A. Peake, Y. Zhang, P.E. Sanders, M.-S. Kuo, T.-S. Park, G. Cao, and X.-C. Jiang, 2011. Reducing plasma membrane sphingomyelin increases insulin sensitivity. Mol. Cell. Biol. 31:4205-4218.)
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Tips from the journals of the American Society for MicrobiologyPublic release date: 20-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Sliwa jsliwa@asmusa.org 202-942-9297 American Society for Microbiology
Human Norovirus In Groundwater Remains Infective After Two Months
Researchers from Emory University have discovered that norovirus in groundwater can remain infectious for at least 61 days. The research is published in the October Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Human norovirus is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis. The disease it causes tends to be one of the more unpleasant of those that leave healthy people unscathed in the long run, with diarrhea and vomiting that typically last for 48 hours. Norovirus sickens one in 15 Americans annually, causing 70,000 hospitalizations, and more than 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The results answer a question of great importance to public health, which had driven researcher Christine Moe and her colleagues to conduct this research: If well water becomes contaminated with noroviruses--perhaps from leaking sewer lines or a septic tankhow long do these noroviruses survive in water, and when would it be safe to drink from that well?
To answer that question, they prepared a safety-tested virus stock solution. They then put a known amount of this solution into a container of groundwater from an Atlanta well, which had met Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards.
The researchers then tested the virus infectivity at days naught, 4, 14, 21, 27, and 61, by having volunteers drink the water on those days. The durability of the virus' infectivity was unexpected, says Moe. Most of the 13 volunteers became infected at various time points, exhibiting among them the complete range of norovirus symptoms, which endured for as long as five days post challenge. "We were surprised to observe that even the volunteers that drank the water 61 days after we had added the virus still got infected with the norovirus," says Moe.
Norovirus may remain infective far longer than 61 days. The researchers stored the groundwater at room temperature in the dark, using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction to determine how much viral RNA remained after 622 days, and again after 1,266 days. They found no reduction after the first interval, and very little at the end of the second interval. Unfortunately, funding was insufficient to test infectivity in human volunteers beyond day 61.
"This study provides further evidence of the need to treat groundwater used for drinking water," says Moe, adding that the Environmental Protection Agency and other decision-makers who regulate drinking water need to take these findings into account, particularly since roughly half the US population relies upon groundwater for drinking.
To ensure that the volunteers' health would not be compromised, the investigators conducted the study in a special research unit of Emory University Hospital, while taking a variety of other precautionary measures.
Anticipating a question about who would volunteer to participate in a study with such potentially unpleasant consequences, Moe says that some volunteers have said that "they want to see how good their immune system is, and whether they will actually get sick." Three of the 13 volunteers did not become sick. One volunteer was the local librarian "who came to the research unit with a huge bag of books that she wanted to read while she was in the study," says Moe.
(S.R. Seitz, J.S. Leon, K.J. Schwab, G.M. Lyon, M. Dowd, M. McDaniels, G. Abdulhafid, M.L. Fernandez, L.C. Lindesmith, R.S. Baric, and C.L. Moe, 2011. Norovirus infectivity in humans and persistence in water. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 77:6884-6888.)
Women Can Self-Test for HPV, Easily and Accurately
A team of German researchers has shown that women can accurately test themselves for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, the most common cause of cervical cancer. The research is published in the October Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
"The high sensitivity of this self-sampling method guarantees to identify nearly all HPV-infected women," says first author Yvonne Delere, of the Robert Koch Institute of the Ministry of Health, Berlin.
Worldwide, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women, with half a million new cases and a quarter million deaths, annually, according to the World Health Organization. Virtually all cases are linked to certain strains HPV.
In the study, the researchers compared self sampling with conventional endocervical brush samples obtained by gynecologists in two groups of women 20-30 years of age, with (55 women) and without (101 women) a recent suspicious cytological smear. The two sampling methods were in accord in the two groups 84 and 91 percent of the time, respectively. Overall, the women rated the self-sampling method easy, at 12 on a scale of 0 (easy) to 100 (difficult).
The Netherlands has already introduced the new technique into cervical cancer screening programs, and Delere hopes to see the method become widespread in developing countries, where women frequently lack easy access to medical personnel and testing.
The researchers note that concordance between the conventional and the self-sampling methods is good despite the fact that the techniques sample different areas. The cervical brush sampling is directed towards the transformation zone, the area on the cervix where abnormal cells most commonly develop, while the lavage includes the whole cervical area.
"The higher prevalence of HPV, hr-HPV, and HPV16 in cervicovaginal lavage samples may be explained by additional infections at extracervical sites," according to the paper. "Since these infections may be a reservoir for virus infecting the cervical epithelium at the transformational zone, they are probably epidemiologically relevant. Therefore, cervicovaginal lavage sampling may be superior to cervix-directed sampling for future HPV prevalence studies."
Among teenaged girls, the transformation zone lies on the cervix's outer surface, where it is more vulnerable to infection than it is in adult women.
The self-sampling device, the Delphi Screener, is a sterile, syringe-like device containing five milliliters of buffered saline. One operates it by plunging the handle, releasing the saline into the vagina, holding it down for five seconds, then releasing the handle, so that the device retrieves the fluid. Next, one plunges the lavage specimens into prelabeled coded tubes, and mails it to the laboratory.
(Y. Delere, M. Schuster, E. Vartazarowa, T. Hansel, I. Hagemann, S. Borchardt, H. Perlitz, A. Schneider, S. Reiter, and A.M. Kaufmann, 2011. Cervicovaginal self-sampling is a reliable method for determination of prevalence of human papillomavirus genotypes in women aged 20 to 30 years. J. Clin. Microbiol. 49:3519-3522.)
Newly Discovered Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance Genes
Waters polluted by the ordure of pigs, poultry, or cattle represent a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes, both known and potentially novel. These resistance genes can be spread among different bacterial species by bacteriophage, bacteria-infecting viruses, according to a paper in the October Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
"We found great quantities of bacteriophages carrying different antibiotic resistance genes in waters with fecal pollution from pigs, cattle, and poultry," says Maite Muniesa of the University of Barcelona, Spain, an author on the study. "We demonstrated that the genes carried by the phages were able to generate resistance to a given antibiotic when introduced into other bacteria in laboratory conditions," says Muniesa.
Although we often think of antibiotic resistance genes as evolving into existence in response to the antibiotics that doctors use to fight human disease and that agribusiness uses to fatten farm animals, microbes had undoubtedly been using both antibiotics and resistance genes to compete with each other for millions of years before antibiotics revolutionized human medicine and resistance genes threatened their efficacy to the point where the World Health Organization considers them to be one of the biggest risks to human health.
Thus, the Spanish researchers suspect, based on their study, that these resistance gene reservoirs are the product of microbial competition, rather than pressure from human use of antibiotics. They note that the pasture-fed cattle in their study are not fed antibiotics, and they suggest that even if antibiotic feed additives were banned, new resistance genes might emerge while old ones spread from these reservoirs into bacteria that infect humans.
And if resistance genes are being mobilized from these reservoirs, it becomes important to understand how the resistance genes are transmitted from phage to new bacterial species, in order to develop strategies that could hinder this transmission, limiting the emergence of new resistance genes, says Muniesa.
(M. Colomer-Lluch, L.Imamamovic, J. Jofre, and M. Muniesa, 2011. Bacteriophages carrying antibiotic resistance genes in fecal waste from cattle, pigs, and poultry. Antim. Agents Chemother. 55:4908-4911.)
New Insights Into Insulin Resistance Could Lead to Better Drugs for Diabetics
Research published in the October Molecular and Cellular Biology moves us closer to developing drugs that could mitigate diabetes.
Diabetes afflicts an estimated 26 million Americans, while 79 million have prediabetes. In other words, one in three Americans confronts this disease. Diabetes raises the risk of heart disease and stroke by as much as fourfold, and it is the leading cause of blindness among adults 20-74. It is also the leading cause of kidney failure.
In earlier research, four years ago another team of researchers showed that they could boost insulin sensitivity in experimental rodents by giving the animals a drug called myriocin. People with diabetes have a condition called insulin resistance, which renders them poorly able to process sugar. That results in high blood sugar, which damages the blood vessels, leading to many of diabetes' ills. In their study, that team, led by Johannes M. Aerts of the University of Amsterdam, observed a decrease in a compound called ceramide, which sits on cell membranes in the circulatory system, which they postulated was responsible for the rise in insulin sensitivity.
In the new study, Xian-Cheng Jiang of Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, and his collaborators set out to confirm this earlier work, using a genetic approach.
The new research provides strong evidence that ceramide was not causing insulin sensitivity, but that another membrane-bound compound, sphingomyelin, might be doing so.
Ceramide is the substrate for the last step in a five step cascade that produces sphingomyelin. In that step an enzyme called sphingomyline synthase 2 (SMS2) cleaves ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. The first enzyme in this pathway is called serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT).
To test the hypothesis that ceramide is involved in modulating insulin resistance the researchers used knockout mice for each of these enzymes. They postulated that (partially) knocking out the first enzyme in the cascade would decrease ceramide levels while knocking out the last enzyme in the sphingomyelin pathway would boost ceramide levels, since that enzyme uses ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. Thus, SPT knockout mice would have greater insulin sensitivity, while SMS knockout mice would have reduced insulin sensitivity.
Surprisingly, while ceramide levels changed as predicted, that change did not influence insulin sensitivity, which was higher in both groups.
The research has important implications for drug development for mitigating diabetes. Myriocin proved highly toxic and major efforts to modify the drug to reduce that toxicity have been fruitless. Myriocin's toxicity probably stems from the fact that it inhibits the first step of the sphingomyelin biosynthetic pathway, affecting all the downstream biology, says Jiang. The discovery that knocking out the last step in the biosynthetic pathway improves insulin sensitivity means that drug treatments could target that last enzyme, SMS, leaving the rest of that biosynthetic pathway to function normally.
(Z. Li, H. Shang, J. Liu, C.-P. Liang, Y. Li, Y. Li, G. Teitelman, T. Beyer, H.H. Bui, D.A. Peake, Y. Zhang, P.E. Sanders, M.-S. Kuo, T.-S. Park, G. Cao, and X.-C. Jiang, 2011. Reducing plasma membrane sphingomyelin increases insulin sensitivity. Mol. Cell. Biol. 31:4205-4218.)
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Public release date: 20-Oct-2011
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