Questions linger following Obama's reelection victory

President Obama celebrates his victory Wednesday, and plans a meeting with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

President Barack Obama has won re-election. The Republican Party faces a reckoning about its identity. In Florida, however, the election goes on.

The state whose dysfunctional voting methods traumatized the nation 12 years ago, is still up in the air.  The state was supposed to have been a major presidential battleground, but the morning after election day, it was still a question mark.

Instead of butterfly ballots and hanging chads, the problem appears to have been caused by a long ballot, high turnout and some mechanical failures.

Even the president, in his victory speech in Chicago, acknowledged the problem:

“I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time--by the way, we have to fix that.”

PHOTOS: America goes to the polls

On Wednesday morning, all precincts in Florida had finished reporting, and the totals gave an edge of more than 46,000 votes to Obama, about half of one percent.  Even without Florida’s 29 electoral votes, Obama accrued far more than the 270 he needed to secure re-election. (Without Florida, the total was 303 electoral votes for the president to GOP challenger Mitt Romney’s 206.)

The worst of the problems occurred in Miami-Dade, the state's largest county. Long lines began before the polls opened Tuesday and never let up; when the election was called for Obama, people were still standing in line at dozens of precincts. The Miami Herald reported that the last Miami-Dade voter finished just after 1 a.m.

A number of counties had not yet counted their absentee ballots. In Miami-Dade, elections workers still had to count 20,000 absentees. In Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, there were about 9,000 absentees yet to be counted. Elections officials said it would be Wednesday afternoon before the results would be final.

John Card, an attorney heading the Elections Protections monitoring effort in Miami-Dade on Tuesday, said voting actually went smoothly in much of the county. But in some precincts, he said, it was a "debacle."

Voters faced a ballot filled with complicated constitutional amendments and local issues. For some, it was 12 pages long. In some crowded precincts, scanners malfunctioned. In others, poll workers were confused about the state's new rules on address changes, Card said. Some voters were told they were ineligibleto vote, others may have been purged from rolls improperly.

LIVE: Presidential election results

"I do think they were a little overwhelmed in some places," he said. "A number of people got frustrated and left," said Card, whose organization is a coalition of advocacy groups. "The system played out in a way that denied them the right to vote."

The president’s victory may not have packed the same emotional punch as his historic 2008 win as the first African-American to win the presidency. But early Wednesday morning, as he stood on a Chicago stage to address the nation, he seemed to reconjure the conciliatory, high-minded politician the country first got to know four years ago.

That man—with the inspiring speeches and the ability to make Americans believe in their better angels--had sometimes disappeared under the fatigue, stress or just plain aversion to the brutal  campaign process.

The president attempted to set a peaceable tone for a country inflamed by hot partisan sentiment, stoked by the stunning amounts of money that had flowed unimpeded into the race.

Though his first term accomplishments, such as health care reform and a stimulus bill that most economists say helped stave off a second Great Depression, were accomplished with almost no Republican support, he vowed to be a better bi-partisan in his second term.

“I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together:  reducing our deficit;  reforming our tax code; fixing our immigration system; freeing ourselves from foreign oil.”

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

He also said he planned to meet with Romney “to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward.”

Before the president spoke, Romney, 65, the former Massachusetts governor, had conceded the election in a gracious but wistful speech before downcast supporters in Boston.

“I so wish that I’d been able to fulfill your hopes to consider as a course in a different direction,” Romney said in his brief speech, “but the nation chose another leader and so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and this great nation.” 

Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans began to grapple with the party’s future. The party kept control of the House, but despite its hopes for much of the election cycle did not wrest control of the Senate from Democrats. Montana incumbent Jon Tester was declared the victor over Republican Denny Rehberg Wednesday morning, saving for Democrats one of Republicans’ biggest pick-up hopes.

With Romney vanquished, the party’s putative leaders are its top legislators, House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

But Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, often touted as the ideological leader of the party’s conservative wing, will have solidified his importance as the GOP grapples with its ideological future, as well as with the demographic changes that contributed to its failure to recapture the White House.

PHOTOS: Mitt Romney’s past

In a statement released after midnight Tuesday, Boehner congratulated the president, noted that the Republicans have maintained their majority in the House of Representatives, and cautioned the president.

“If there is a mandate,” said Boehner, “it is a mandate for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs, which is critical to solving our debt.”

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Joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @jtanfani

Robin.abcarian@latimes.com

Twitter: @robinabcarian

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SparkTruck's Surprise Lesson: Using Design Skills to Build Kids' Character

When Eugene Korsunskiy and seven of his fellow students from Stanford University’s d.school set out to tour the nation in a brightly painted truck full of laser cutters and rapid prototyping machines, they thought they were bringing a chance to play with high-tech maker tools to school kids who hadn’t had one yet.

And they were: SparkTruck, the educational make-mobile, made 73 stops this summer, treating 2,679 elementary and middle school students to hands-on workshops covering the basics of electrical engineering and digital fabrication, and giving a chance to make cool stuff in the process, like small robotic creatures and laser-cut rubber stamps.

But as the summer progressed, the SparkTruck team learned an unlikely lesson. The most rewarding part of the trip wasn’t introducing the kids to new technologies. Instead it was something far more basic: watching them struggle with design problems.

Only one of the SparkTruck team had training in education. But when the group planned its workshops, Korsunskiy explained, they knew they wanted to emphasize the same skills and processes they’d learned in design school. “Somewhere in each activity, we wanted the kids to get stuck, physically or mentally,” he said.

The point wasn’t to torture children, but to force them to work through an open-ended problem on their own.

Some teachers were skeptical. “One teacher told us, ‘My students are so conditioned to thinking that I’ll give them the right answers,’” Korsunskiy said. She didn’t think the group’s approach, which Korsunskiy summarized as “giving [kids] the space but not giving them the answers,” would work.

Sure enough, the SparkTruck team noticed kids’ resistance. Presented with a design problem, students would get stuck — and as the teacher predicted, they would come to the facilitators and ask, ‘How do I do this?’ They would beg, plead, and get frustrated. The SparkTruck team would withhold answers, instead asking a kid with, for example, no idea how to keep her robot from falling over, ‘How do you think it cold be done?’

Eventually, the hard-nosed approach paid off. “After an interaction like that, you see a gear shift in [a kid's] head,” said Korsunskiy. “Once you make it clear that you’re not there to provide the answer, they completely rise to the challenge.”

Unwittingly, the team had stumbled into a big problem — and a gathering cultural debate. According to social scientists (and the journalists who popularize their work), American children are said to be weenies, much more helpless and less resourceful than their age-matched peers in other countries. In educational settings, American kids are worryingly lacking in the faculty known as “grit,” the one that allows people to power through difficult problems, absorbing and learning from setbacks rather than giving up.

The point isn’t that young Americans are destined to be this way, but that somehow, amid all our prosperity, we’ve stopped giving kids the conditions they need to become self-sufficient.

Could hands-on, design-inspired education help? Korsunskiy and his team think so. Design lessons, Korsunisky noted, are based around creative problem-solving. They’re not about memorizing right answers but about developing critical thinking skills, learning to work through problems in a repeated process of brainstorming, testing solutions, and going back to the drawing board. In short, this kind of education builds the very skills of perseverance and intellectual independence that parents, teachers, and social critics say that American children have in short supply.

For Korsunskiy, watching students hit a wall — and then figure out a way over (or around) it — was the most rewarding part of the SparkTruck experience.

Students of today aren’t necessarily going to need to know how to operate, say, a CNC router, he noted. But if this generation is to succeed, it will absolutely need to know “how to approach hairy, multi-variate problems without freaking out” — he name-checked climate change and the obesity epidemic — i.e., to be able to leverage the skills and mindset that a shop-class environment can instill.

As the summer went on, the SparkTruck team shifted focus, beginning to feel more like emissaries for that problem-solving mindset and design process, rather than for the bright, shiny machines in the back.

Which isn’t to say that the machines aren’t helpful for grabbing the attention of students — and educators too.

“When we say we have laser cutters and 3-D printers on board, that makes it way more exciting to principals and teachers,” Korsunskiy said. “We sneak the thing about creativity in the back door.”

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“Dad’s Army” star Clive Dunn dies aged 92

LONDON (Reuters) – British actor Clive Dunn, best known as a bumbling old butcher in the popular World War Two sitcom “Dad’s Army”, has died, his agent said on Wednesday.

Dunn passed away on Tuesday, Peter Charlesworth said, adding that he believed the actor died in Portugal where he has lived for many years. He was 92.

As Lance-Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army – a hit television series in the 1960s and 1970s about a group of local volunteer members of the Home Guard – Dunn was famous for catchphrases such as “Don’t panic!” and “They don’t like it up ‘em.”

He also had a No. 1 hit song with “Grandad” in 1971, which he performed several times on TV music show “Top of the Pops”.

Dunn was born in London in 1920 and enrolled in an acting academy after leaving school.

He played several small roles in films in the 1930s before serving in the army in World War Two, ending up in prisoner-of-war and labor camps for four years.

After the war he worked in music halls before enjoying success as Jones in Dad’s Army.

Underlining his ability to play characters far older than his real age, he followed Dad’s Army with a five-year run in children’s comedy series “Grandad” as an elderly caretaker.

According to the BBC, he is survived by his wife Priscilla Morgan and two daughters, Jessica and Polly.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Alarm Over India’s Dengue Fever Epidemic

Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

A man at the Yamuna River, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Filthy standing water abounds in New Delhi. More Photos »

NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.

India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world’s nations.

“The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse,” said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization’s lead dengue coordinator.

The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.

Here in India’s capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic’s growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.

Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls’ parents treated them at home but then Sneha’s temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.

“Sneha has been given five liters of blood,” said Neelam, who has one name. “It is terrible.”

Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.

“I’d conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations,” said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.

A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue’s actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, “which was deliberated at the highest levels,” is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.

“There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher,” the official said. “Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure.”

The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India’s “massive underreporting of cases” has contributed to the disease’s spread. Experts from around the world said that India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness’s vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.

“When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it’s a joke,” said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India’s population is 60 times larger.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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Mothers from Central America search for missing kin in Mexico

SALTILLO, Mexico — The mothers knock on the doors of flophouses and morgues. They sift through pictures of prisoners and the dead. Clutching pictures of their own, some from long ago, they ask the same questions, over and over.

Have you seen him? Does she look familiar?

Occasionally, there is a reported sighting. More often, it's another shake of the head, a "Sorry, no." And with that, weariness stooping their shoulders and worry sagging their faces, they board their bus and move on to another town.

By last weekend, these mothers, wives and sisters of missing Central American migrants had already crossed some of Mexico's most dangerous territory in their two-bus caravan.

Following a route often used by migrants northward along the Gulf Coast to the U.S., they had entered the country in the south through Tabasco state. They traveled through Veracruz and Tamaulipas, sites recently of horrific massacres of Central Americans and others, stopping along the way to ask and search — against all the odds wishing for a happy ending.

By the time they finish what has become an annual mission organized by several migrant rights and church groups, they will have traveled to 23 cities and towns in 14 states in 19 days. A total of nearly 3,000 miles.

Aboard the buses, with the lived-in feel of ordered chaos, the women pass the time dozing, chatting, occasionally watching a movie.

Despite their pain, or perhaps because of it, they find friendship. The Nicaraguans share stories of their experiences during their country's civil war, telling of relatives killed or forced into armies; the Hondurans recount tales of their nation's utter, violent poverty that fuels one of the world's highest homicide rates and drives their children to seek lives elsewhere.

Emotions soar and fall. The women joke and tease one another and laugh. Then, suddenly, one remembers the son she is missing and breaks into sobs and another moves to her side to comfort her.

Another nine hours through hot, dusty cactus fields brought them here to Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila state, where the top leader of the notorious Zetas paramilitary cartel was slain by government forces last month. By all accounts, it is the Zetas who most routinely and viciously prey on the migrants, thousands of whom have gone missing in recent years — kidnapped, killed, pressed into involuntary labor by drug traffickers, or simply lost to poverty and desperation.

Dilma Pilar Escobar last heard from her daughter, Olga, in January 2010. Olga had taken off from their home in Progreso, Honduras, leaving behind five children, with the plan of reaching the United States. Like so many others, her idea was to earn a little money, make things a little easier for her mother and her children.

Now Escobar is raising her grandchildren, listening to their questions every night about when their mother might come home. She is running out of answers.

"I've looked in hospitals, in morgues," said Escobar, 55. "We see so much about what's happening in Mexico on TV. It puts a lot in your head."

Escobar was inspired to make the trip in part by a local radio program that attempts to help families with missing relatives.

"It gave me the push to come here," said the woman with dark, unsmiling eyes, grasping an 8-by-10 photo of Olga that hangs from her neck on a green cord.

In each city or town, the mothers stage a public event to make their presence known. A Mass. A march. Here in Saltillo, they converged on the downtown Plaza de Armas, the pale-blue-and-white that adorns all Central American flags fluttering in the breeze ahead of the slow march of mothers. They hung their photos of loved ones on clotheslines at the center of the square.

The women — about 40 on this year's caravan — sleep on cots in churches or in "migrant houses," shelters set up by a number of communities, where they also receive donated meals.

"We are facing a humanitarian tragedy," Tomas Gonzalez, a Franciscan friar who runs a shelter in Tabasco, told the women. "Mexico has become a cemetery for migrants."

In August 2010, 72 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and a handful of other countries were slain execution-style, hands tied behind backs, shot once in the head, in Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas. Among the youngest was 15-year-old Yedmi Victoria Castro of El Salvador. The Zetas were presumed responsible. Dozens more bodies were found in the same region in the months that followed.

Not a week goes by, it seems, without fresh reports of hidden graves and unidentified dead. But the Mexican government has been slow to recognize the epidemic of missing persons, only this year moving to toughen legislation and expand the collection of DNA samples and other data.

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Why Blind Mole Rats Don't Get Cancer

By Ian Steadman, Wired UK

Blind mole rats don’t get cancer, and geneticists have worked out why: Their cells kill themselves with a poisonous protein when they multiply too much.

Mole rats, which live in underground burrows throughout Southern and Eastern Africa, and the Middle East, are fascinating creatures. The naked mole rat, in particular, is the only cold-blooded mammal known to man, doesn’t experience pain, and is also arguably the only mammal (along with the Damaraland mole rat) to demonstrate eusociality — that is, they live in large hierarchical communities with a queen and workers, like ants or bees.

They’re also cancer-proof, which was found in 2011 to be down to a gene that stops cancerous cells from forming. The same team thought that two other cancer-proof mole rat species might have similar genes, but instead it turns out that they do develop cancerous cells. It’s just that those cells are programmed to destroy themselves if they become dangerous.

The two species examined by the University of Rochester’s Vera Gorbunova and her team were the Judean Mountains blind mole rat (Spalax judaei) and the Golan Heights blind mole rat (Spalax golani), which live within small regions of Israel. The team took cells from the rodents and put them in a culture that would force them to multiply beyond what would happen within the animals’ bodies. For the first seven to 20 multiplications, things looked fine, but beyond 20 multiplications the cells started rapidly dying off.

Examining the cells as they died revealed that they had started to produce a protein, IFN-β, that caused them to undergo “massive necrotic cell death within three days”. In effect, once the cells had detected that they had multiplied beyond a certain point, they killed themselves.

It contrasts with the self-preservation method seen in the cells of naked mole rats, which have a hypersensitivity to overcrowding, which stops them from multiplying too much. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gorbunova hypothesizes that the blind mole rats’ unique habitat — almost entirely underground — might mean that they “could perhaps afford to evolve a long lifespan, which includes developing efficient anti-cancer defences”. Blind mole rats have extremely long lifespans by rodent standards, often living beyond 20 years at a time.

The reasons why this is, though, are still all hypothetical, as the precise mechanism that triggers the production of the IFN-β is still unknown. The hope is that this research could eventually lead to new therapies for cancer in humans.

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Ivorian reggae singers bury rivalry for “peace” tour

ABIDJAN (Reuters) – As darkness falls over Ivory Coast‘s lagoon-side commercial capital a steady thumping cuts through the tropical night.

But where once the thud of heavy weapons set the Abidjan‘s residents scrambling indoors for cover, tonight it is a reggae bass line that draws them out.

Here, little over a year ago, supporters of then-president Laurent Gbagbo and his rival Alassane Ouattara were fighting a brief post-election civil war, the final deadly showdown of a decade-long political crisis.

After years teetering precariously between war and peace, the flames of division, xenophopia and anger – fanned in no small degree by some of the country’s most famous musicians – exploded into a conflict in which more than 3,000 people died.

One of Ivory Coast’s leading reggae artists, Serge Kassy, even rose to become a leader and organizer of Gbagbo’s Young Patriots street militia – a group accused of numerous atrocities during the war. Kassy is now in exile.

“When I looked at the musical scene in Ivory Coast, I realized that we ourselves went too far,” said Asalfo Traore of the zouglou band Magic System, one of the few groups that refused to take sides during the crisis years.

“It was when everything was ruined that we wanted to glue the pieces back together. But it was too late.”

Now, long-divided musicians are once again coming together, hoping to use their influence, so destructive for so long, to help Ivory Coast heal its deep wounds, and the country’s leading rival reggae artists are showing the way.

REGGAE RIVALRY

The long feud between Alpha Blondy and Tiken Jah Fakoly is a thing of legend in the reggae world, though neither has been willing to say what was behind the bad blood.

Both men come from Ivory Coast’s arid north and share a musical genre. But the similarities stop there.

Alpha, considered the father of Ivorian reggae, takes the stage in Abidjan clad in a shimmering pink suit, golden tie and Panama hat of an urban dandy. Tiken wears the traditional flowing robes of his northern Malinke tribe.

During the crisis, Alpha remained in Ivory Coast, while Tiken, a vocal critic of President Gbagbo‘s regime, went into exile in neighboring Mali.

They had so successfully avoided each other during their long parallel careers that before he picked up the phone to approach Alpha with the idea of uniting for a series of peace concerts, Tiken claimed they’d met only twice.

“Before going to the Ivorians to ask them to move towards reconciliation, it was important for us to show a major sign. That’s what we did,” Tiken told Reuters.

Out of a meeting in Paris was born a simple idea: six concerts in six towns across a country once split between a rebel north and government-held south, bringing together musicians from across the political spectrum to push for peace.

“No one’s died over the problems between Tiken and me,” said Alpha. “There are things that are more serious than our little spats, our pride and our vanities.”

Uniting the Ivorian music scene proved relatively easy in the end. Uniting the country could prove a tougher task.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Some 18 months since the war ended, reconciliation in Ivory Coast is going nowhere.

Though Ouattara is praised by international partners for quicky turning around the economy, critics complain he has done little to foster unity. He has so far refused to prosecute those among his supporters accused of atrocities during the war.

Meanwhile Gbagbo, who lost the run-off election but garnered 46 percent of votes, is in The Hague on war crimes charges.

The leaders of his FPI political party are either dead, in jail or living in exile, from where they are accused by United Nations investigators of organizing deadly armed raids on Ivorian police, military and infrastructure targets.

“People came here for Alpha, Tiken Jah and artists they only ever see on TV, not for reconciliation,” said high school teacher Michel Loua in Gagnoa, the second stop on the tour in Gbagbo’s home region.

“The politicians have made a business of it. They talk up reconciliation when it suits them, otherwise they could care less,” he said.

Unity was never a problem, Alpha said, until politicians began to play the ethnic identity card in the struggle for power that followed the death of independence President Felix Houphouet-Boigny in 1993. And even after the violence and massacres, it is still not the problem today.

“Ivorians are not divided. That’s what I discovered,” he said on the last night of the tour. “If there are people that need reconciliation, it’s not the artists or the people. It’s the politicians,” he said.

Minutes later he was on stage singing “Course au Pouvoir”, a 16-year-old song that has found new relevance today with its lyrics: “There’s blood on the road that leads to the tower of power. Innocent blood.”

Having wrapped up their tour, Tiken, Alpha and the rest of the musicians are due to meet with President Ouattara and plan to call for the release of all pro-Gbagbo prisoners not accused of involvement and killings as a sign of good will.

The move has been called for by human rights groups as well as the FPI, who list it as one of their pre-conditions for dialogue. And though Ouattara has given no indication he is open to the possibility, many feel it is an unavoidable step towards lasting peace.

(Editing by Richard Valdmanis, editing by Paul Casciato)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Vital Signs: Limits to Resveratrol as a Metabolism Aid

Resveratrol, the red wine component shown to be helpful in improving metabolic function in obese or diabetic people, has no discernible effect on healthy women who are not obese, a new experiment has found.

In a small 12-week randomized, double-blinded trial, researchers gave 29 normal weight postmenopausal women either 75 milligrams a day of resveratrol or a placebo, testing their metabolic function at the start and end of the study.

Blood concentrations of resveratrol increased in the group given the supplements, but the scientists found no difference between them and those given the placebo in body composition, resting metabolic rate or glucose tolerance (a test for insulin resistance and diabetes).

The study, to be published in this week’s issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, found that blood pressure, heart rate, C-reactive protein levels (a measure of inflammation), LDL, HDL and total cholesterol were unaffected by resveratrol. In other words, resveratrol blood concentrations were associated with no quantifiable changes, beneficial or otherwise, in any measure of metabolic function.

Does this mean that resveratrol offers no benefits? Not necessarily, said the senior author, Dr. Samuel Klein, a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “We only show that metabolically healthy people get no benefits to begin with,” he said. “We have no way of knowing whether it will prevent future metabolic complications.”

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Facing Protests, China’s Business Investment May Be Cooling

SHIFANG, China — Local leaders were all smiles this summer at a groundbreaking ceremony for a vast copper smelting project that seemed like the answer to the chronic unemployment that has plagued this city in northern Sichuan ever since a devastating earthquake in 2008.

Reuters

A protest against plans to expand a petrochemical plant in Ningbo, China, last month. More investment projects are running into opposition from a growing Chinese middle class concerned about environmental damage.

But within days, the tree-lined plaza at the heart of the city was packed with thousands of youths, protesting that the $1.6 billion factory would pose a pollution hazard. After two nights of street battles pitting youths against the riot police, city leaders canceled the smelter.

“The environment is more important” than new investments or jobs, said a young woman sitting on a recent afternoon at the cafe across the street from the plaza, now empty except for a clutch of retirees gathered under the clock tower.

China’s economic boom over the last three decades has depended overwhelmingly on a build-at-all-costs investment strategy in which pollution concerns, the preservation of neighborhoods and other such questions have been swept aside. But that approach is starting to backfire, posing one of the biggest challenges for the new generation of Chinese policy makers who will take over at the Communist Party Congress, which starts on Thursday.

New investment projects used to be seen as the best way to keep the Chinese public happy with jobs and rising incomes, assuring social stability — a paramount goal of the Communist Party — while frequently enriching local politicians as well.

But from Shifang in the west to the port of Ningbo in the east, where a week of sometimes violent protests forced the suspension on Oct. 28 of plans to expand a chemical plant, more projects are running into public hostility.

In many cases, they are running into opposition not just from farmers who do not want their houses and fields confiscated, but also from a growing middle class fearful that new factories will lead to more environmental damage.

In response to this and other worries about the economy, a number of influential officials and business leaders in China have stepped up their calls for changes aimed at increasing the efficiency of investment and simultaneously shifting the country toward a greater reliance on consumption.

But China’s leaders, including the outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have been talking about such a transformation for years with little sign of success, as state-controlled banks continue to lend huge sums to politically powerful state-owned enterprises and local governments.

Frenzied construction of roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines over the last decade has left China with world-class infrastructure. But it has also produced deeply indebted local governments that are struggling to finance more projects.

At the same time, vast unused capacity in practically every industrial sector has crippled profitability and left manufacturing companies straining to repay their borrowings, a problem that has been partly masked by banks in the habit of simply rolling over loans rather than recognizing losses.

“All Chinese industries are like that — can you dig out which area of Chinese industry is not in overcapacity?” said Li Junfeng, a longtime director general for energy at China’s top economic planning agency.

Investment reached 46 percent of China’s economic output last year. By comparison, Japan’s investment rate peaked at 36 percent, which it reached in the early 1970s; South Korea topped out at 39 percent in the late 1980s.

Growth in Japan and South Korea started to slow and eventually tumbled after investment peaked. The big question now is when China will run into the same limits, and how rapidly change will take place, said Diana Choyleva, an economist at Lombard Street Research in Hong Kong. “The potential for a big crisis is always there,” she said.

Even experts who strongly favor fundamental policy changes, like moving to a more market-oriented system for allocating bank loans and setting interest rates, doubt that China’s leaders are preparing to move quickly. Conversations at senior levels of the Communist Party appear to have focused so far on reducing the state’s role in the day-to-day management of many state-owned enterprises rather than selling them or breaking them up.

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Controversial Arizona nonprofit releases name of contributors -- more nonprofits

In a stunning reversal, an obscure Arizona nonprofit at the center of a legal battle over secret political contributions released on Monday morning the identity of its contributors, which it had been fighting tooth and nail to keep secret.

But the disclosure did little to shed light on who was behind the $11-million donation to a California campaign fund. The Arizona group, Americans for Responsible Leadership, identified its contributors only as other nonprofits.

The money was passed from Americans for Job Security to the Center to Protect Patient Rights to Americans for Responsible Leadership, according to state authorities. From there, the money was sent to a California campaign committee fighting Gov. Jerry Brown's tax-hike plan, Proposition 30, and pushing a separate ballot measure to curb unions' political influence, Proposition 32.

As of Sunday night, the Arizona nonprofit Americans for Responsible Leadership appeared ready to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to avoid disclosing any records to state authorities by election day on Tuesday.

The Fair Political Practices Commission has been trying for two weeks to audit the group to determine whether it is improperly shielding the identities of its donors. California regulations says contributors must be identified if they give to nonprofits with the intention of spending money on state campaigns.

Americans for Responsible Leadership reached an agreement with the commission to reveal its contributors on Monday morning, allowing state authorities to skip the audit process. However, the disclosure of more nonprofits did little to satisfy activists who were seeking contributors' true identities.

Derek Cressman of Common Cause, which originally filed the complaint against the Arizona nonprofit, called the group "irresponsible, cowardly money launderers."

Still, Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, said in a statement that the disclosure was "a significant and lasting victory for transparency in the political process.”

Lawyers for the nonprofit have previously argued that the group was being unfairly targeted for an audit that would violate the group's 1st Amendment rights.

State authorities sued for the records, and in a matter of days the legal battle had rocketed to the California Supreme Court. On Sunday, justices issued an unusual weekend decision ordering the nonprofit to begin handing over records that day.

After the order, Americans for Responsible Leadership appeared ready to resist again, signaling its plan to ask for an emergency stay from the U.S. Supreme Court.

"This proceeding raises critical First Amendment issues regarding the ability of an organization to freely associate and speak on vital election-related matter," a lawyer wrote in a letter to the court on Sunday night.

But lawyers backed away from that plan overnight. In a statement on Monday morning, the Arizona nonprofit's legal team did not explain why they stopped fighting the court order, saying only that a settlement was reached after "late-night discussions."

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