MACON, Ga. (AP) - The Development Authority of Bibb County has agreed to sign a resolution that should mean the museum will remain open in Macon for the next year.
The authority agreed on Tuesday to sign a resolution approving a lease of the hall from the state to the authority.
It also approved an agreement between the authority and NewTown Macon, which will take over management of the hall.
The Telegraph newspaper reports (http://bit.ly/sV6xFr ) attorney Chix Miller says the lease runs for one year with options for two more years. Miller says the Peyton Anderson Foundation has already paid for the first year.
Nearly two years ago, the state put out a request for proposals to take over the sports hall and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, which was closed in June.
Information from: The Macon Telegraph, http://www.macontelegraph.com
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) ? More than 100 journalists or other media staff were killed in 2011, up from last year's toll, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said on Friday, calling on U.N. Secretary General Bank Ki-moon to act to help protect the profession.
Violence against the media was worst in Pakistan, Iraq and Mexico, each of which saw 11 deaths.
One of those killed in Iraq was a freelance working for Reuters Sabah al-Bazee.
In total, 106 were killed in 2011, compared with 94 in 2010. In addition, 20 journalists or other media staff, died in accidents and natural disasters, the IFJ said.
Most of those named by IFJ were frontline journalists. The rest were cameramen, drivers and other media support staff.
The Brussels-based IFJ blamed the 2011 death toll on governments' failure to protect journalists and punish those responsible for violence against them.
It has written to the U.N. secretary general calling for action.
"In a situation where governments are in denial or indifferent to what has become a regular pattern of targeted killings of journalists, it is incumbent upon yourself and the United Nations to remind them of their responsibility to protect journalists," IFJ President Jim Boumelha wrote in a letter to Ban made public on Friday.
The IFJ represents more than 600,000 journalists in 131 countries around the world.
Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reported 66 journalists had been killed worldwide in 2011 and said Pakistan had been the second most dangerous country for news coverage for the second year running.
No, seriously, it's bad. So much so that the spouses of a little more than one year parted on expletive terms and spent the holidays 7,000 miles apart.
After planning to fly her family via private jet to husband Brand's London hometown for the holidays, Perry changed course, opting to fly to Hawaii.
The reason? "They had a massive fight," an insider says. "She was like, 'F--k you. I'm going to do my own thing.' Russell replied, 'Fine, f--k you too.'"
Which explains why, come December 25, the record-setting singer was seen splashing in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Kauai sans wedding ring.
Meanwhile, Brand was catching up with some pals in a pub in chilly Coverack, Cornwall, without his ring on either. They're definitely having problems.
"They haven't split up just yet, but things aren't good," acknowledged the source, adding that the divorce rumors are untrue, but rooted in reality.
"The fighting is getting worse."
At issue? Among other things, explains another source: "Katy doesn't think that Russell respects her parents' Christian beliefs or her friends."
UPDATE: Looks like it's officially over, as the actor filed divorce papers today. Follow the link for the scoop on Russell Brand and Katy Perry's divorce.
Broadway and film legend Carol Channing is mourning the loss of her fourth husband and childhood friend Harry Kullijian.
Rancher-turned-local politician Kullijian died near the couple's home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. on Monday after suffering an aneuryism, a family spokesman told the Associated Press.
PHOTOS: Stars we lost in 2011
Now 90, the celebrated singer and actress met Kullijian over 70 years ago when they were both students at the same middle school in San Francisco.
The duo reunited in 2002, after the death of Kullijian's first wife; Channing had filed for divorce from her third husband Charles Lowe in 1998.
VIDEO: Carol Channing's 2010 visit with Us Weekly
Together, the elderly couple founded the Channing-Kullijian Foundation to support arts education in schools.
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Source: www.donanimhaber.com --- Tuesday, December 27, 2011 D?nyan?n en b?y?k sanal ma?azalar?ndan biri olan Amazon, elektronik okuyucular ile ba?lad??? tablet maceras?na Kindle Fire modeliyle devam ediyor. Kindle Fire, ?ift ?ekirdekli TI OMAP 4430 i?lemcisi, 7" IPS ekran? ve en ?nemlisi de 199$ 'l?k sat?? fiyat?yla olduk?a iyi sat?? rakamlar?n? yakalam?? durumda. ...
You won't get an email from Apple asking you to update your billing information. But if you think you got one in recent days, delete it; it's a phishing scam designed to snatch that info from you, and it's definitely not from the Cupertino company.
The "vast phishing attack," as Mac software security firm Intego calls it, began around Christmas Day, and seeks to prey on those who got new Apple gear for the holiday. The spammers don't know whether you did or not; they do know that with Apple products as popular as they were on holiday gift lists, the odds are in their favor of getting some hits on this.
The email's subject line is "Apple update your Billing Information." Says Intego: "These well-crafted emails could fool many new Apple users, especially those who may have found an iPhone, iPod or iMac under their Christmas tree, and set up accounts with the iTunes Store or the Mac App Store for the first time. The messages claim to come from 'appleid@id.apple.com.'" And here's what it says:
Intego
Looks official, right?
Intego says if you click on the link in the message, you'd be taken to a "realistic-looking sign-in page, then, after entering your Apple ID and password, you?ll be taken to a page asking you to update your account profile, notably entering your credit card information. Again, this page looks realistic, and many of the elements it contains are taken from Apple's own Web pages."
But if you moved your cursor over the link in the message and waited for a "tooltip to pop up," you'd see this:
Intego
The URL that's shown is not an apple.com address, Intego says, "but rather a numerical address (we've blurred the first part of the address). At the end of the address is a page called apple.htm, which could fool people, but that?s not what?s important. Always look at the part right after the http:// in the URL: if it's not something.apple.com (it could be www.apple.com, store.apple.com, or something else), then it's bogus."
Thanks to Intego for the heads-up and the reminder that phishing scams may be at their worst during the holidays, but can also proliferate after them, too.
? Via TheNextWeb
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MOSCOW -- Saturday's protest was doubly impressive in that so many could have made excuses not to show.?It was snowing, it was bone-chillingly cold, and?it was the beginning of the Russian holiday season. Anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 people, by my guess, filled up Avenue Prof. (Andrei) Sakharov (the USSR's once infamous dissident) in Moscow and it must have signaled to the Kremlin "observers," hiding behind tinted glass in four-wheel drive vehicles beyond the police barriers, that the unprecedented protest two weeks earlier had been no fluke.
But where does it go from here? Will this protest movement -- marked so far by restraint, humor and non-violence -- turn a Russian winter into a "Russian Spring"?
There are already ominous signs.
Alexander Aleshkin / Getty Images
Demonstrators take part in a mass anti-Putin rally on Saturday in Moscow.
Alexei Navalny, a passionate orator who until recently was known only to social networkers as an anti-corruption blogger, is quickly emerging as the new face of the anti-Vladimir Putin opposition. He roused the crowd on Saturday, declaring that if the movement weren't peaceful it could easily have taken over the Kremlin with the Russian crowd at hand. But, he warned, that could change if Putin connived to steal the NEXT presidential election, in March. "If these crooks and thieves go on cheating us, if they continue telling lies and stealing from us, we will take what belongs to us with our own hands.''
This wasn't just crowd-pleasing rhetoric coming from an aspiring leader. Many protesters, like 30-year-old Vasily Gnuchev, a normally quiet, self-employed architect, see red when faced with the possibility, even likelihood, that Prime Minster Vladimir Putin will not only win the presidency but rule for yet another two six-year terms.
"It's absolutely unacceptable that the man who's in power [already] for 12 years will be here for 12 years more!," Vasily spurted out in a rented apartment in dire need of repairs, literally red with anger. "We don't want another revolution, or bloodshed, but if Putin is going to win then there may be a "Russian Spring -- not an Arab Spring but a Russian one."
Putin, after the initial shock of barely scraping by in the parliamentary elections of Dec. 4, said nothing about the protests for a week,? then treated them with contempt. He finally realized he had to engage, and (through the usual conduit of Russian President cum Putin spokesman Dmitri Medvedev) announced on Thursday a set of positive political reforms, none of which would take effect until the next cycle, in?six years.
Which makes Vasily see red ... again. ''We don't have?six years to wait. And we know what will come of it in?six years. It will be blah- blah-blah and nothing else!'
Some of my Russian analyst friends in Moscow are quick to point out that Russia is not the Middle East. That the Arab Spring happened to dictatorships based on violence and repression. And that Russia -- with all of its abuses -- is still an open society with a market economy and that the "Freedom Genie" can never be put back into the bottle.
Fyodor Lukyanov is one of President Medvedev's advisers on human rights who took the courageous step this week of calling for the annulment and repeat of the Dec. 4 ?parliamentary elections. He believes the only way Putin can win back his popularity is by running a squeaky clean and transparent campaign for president.
"Putin may go to a second round -- that's?OK, ?he can still beat any of the contenders in the second round,'' says Lukyanov. ''And he will have his legitimacy back -- maybe not in the amount he had 10 years ago, but a big part of the population believes that Putin is much better than anybody else.''
For many protesters, the animosity goes way beyond Putin the candidate. Vasily's father, Fyodor, now 50, says he watched in shock as the Soviet Union fell 20 years ago, then in horror as Russia passed, rudderless, through a decade of economic collapse and war. And then came Putin. Stability. Prosperity. "All over the country there was a scream of joy when we got rid of this alcoholic, Yeltsin. We finally saw a man who was sane, who was physically fit, and he wasn't reading from his notes," recalled the older Gnuchev.
His son Vasily says he was too young to remember the bad old days of democratic Russia. But he prospered under Putin, and always felt free. And that's the real problem. The Putin regime's reportedly widespread electoral fraud pulled the rug from under a whole generation who believed in their leader, who believed in?Putinism. "Now we see that everything is a lie," Vasily explained. "The Kremlin just stole our votes? -- it's just incompatible with the picture of the world we grew up in."
It's that humiliation -- indeed, violation -- mixed with anger that seems to drive many Russian, middle-class protesters into the streets -- even when the elements are conspiring against them -- and will keep the pressure on Putin, with promises of more protests to come. But what if this "people power" movement really blossoms, only to be thwarted yet again, not in a free and fair election come March, but by another brazen, Putin-led ploy to retain power?
Lukyanov admits he's "cautiously pessimistic." "Unfortunately," he told me, "Russian and Soviet and pre-Soviet history shows us that those in power are capable of making almost any mistakes and stupidities."
On the one hand,? "Russian people" determined to take back the country they feel they've lost, and on the other,? "Russian power" equally determined to hold onto it. What's next? "It's absolutely impossible to predict the course of events in 2012," offered Lukyanov.
Whatever happens, those two driving forces of 2012 look to be on a collision course.
Jim Maceda is an NBC News correspondent based in London who has covered the Soviet Union and Russia since the 1980s.
Suzanne Sullivan holds a photo of her son Christopher Sullivan, an Army soldier, outside her home in San Bernardino, Calif., Saturday, Dec. 24, 2011. Sullivan, who survived a suicide bombing last December while serving in Afghanistan, is now in critical condition after a gunman shot him during his homecoming home party Friday in San Bernardino. (AP Photo/The San Bernardino Sun, Gabriel Luis Acosta)
Suzanne Sullivan holds a photo of her son Christopher Sullivan, an Army soldier, outside her home in San Bernardino, Calif., Saturday, Dec. 24, 2011. Sullivan, who survived a suicide bombing last December while serving in Afghanistan, is now in critical condition after a gunman shot him during his homecoming home party Friday in San Bernardino. (AP Photo/The San Bernardino Sun, Gabriel Luis Acosta)
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) ? A decorated Army soldier recovering from injuries suffered in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan has been shot at his homecoming party, and family members say he's paralyzed and in critical condition.
Christopher Sullivan, 22, was shot late Friday while trying to break up a fight between his brother and another man at a San Bernardino, Calif., residence.
"My son didn't deserve this. He served his country," his mother, Suzanne Sullivan, told the San Bernardino Sun (http://bit.ly/sjycMA).
Suzanne Sullivan said her son suffered two gunshot wounds to his back, which shattered his spine. Family members told the newspaper that the shooting late Friday left Sullivan paralyzed and in critical condition.
Police said Sullivan's brother and a partygoer got into an argument over football. When Sullivan moved to intervene, the man pulled a gun and opened fire.
The gunman fled the scene before police arrived.
Sullivan was wounded in a suicide bombing attack last year in Kandahar while serving with the 101st Infantry Division. He suffered a cracked collar bone and brain damage in the attack and has been recovering in Kentucky where he is stationed. He was awarded a Purple Heart.
Sullivan was home on leave when the shooting occurred.
"To come home to this, it's so unfair," his aunt Theresa Marquez told the newspaper.
His enlistment would be complete in April, after which Sullivan had planned to come home to go to college.
Family members are calling on the shooter to surrender.
Sure, it may seem counterintuitive, but as anyone who grew up playing with a Slinky, a Squirmle, or Silly Putty can attest, it?s often the strangest toys, the ones that freak us out or make us squeal, that become our childhood favorites. They also allow kids to explore a culture through its toys, bringing the sense of discovery that comes with traveling right into your living room.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2011) ? Microscopic spheres form strings in surprising alignments when suspended in a viscous fluid and sheared between two plates -- a finding that will affect the way scientists think about the properties of such wide-ranging substances as shampoo and futuristic computer chips.
A team of scientists at Cornell University and the University of Chicago have imaged this behavior and have explained the forces causing it for the first time. Its findings appear in the Dec. 19-23 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"The experimental breakthrough revealed that these string structures were perpendicular to the shear instead of parallel to it, contrary to what many in the field were expecting," said Aaron Dinner, associate professor in chemistry at UChicago and a study co-author.
The experiment was led by Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics at Cornell, who custom-built a device that would enable him simultaneously to exert shearing forces on suspended colloids (the spheres) and image the resulting motion at 100 frames per second with a confocal microscope. Imaging speed was critical to the experiment because the string-like structures appear only at certain shear rates.
"This issue of strings has been pretty controversial. I'm not sure that we've solved all the controversies associated with them, but at least we've made a step forward," Cohen said.
Shearing forces affect the dynamic behavior of paint, shampoo and other viscous household products, but an understanding of these and related phenomena at the microscopic level has largely eluded a detailed scientific understanding until the last decade, Dinner noted.
Futuristically speaking, these forces potentially could be harnessed to produce microscopic patterns on computer chips or biosensors via special paints that flow easily when layered in one direction, but becomes hard when layered in another direction.
Cohen's objective was more scientifically immediate: to devise an experiment that would overcome the technical difficulties associated with measuring the mechanical properties of the colloidal strings while also imaging their formation. "The holy grail is to be able to understand how the structure leads to the mechanical properties and then to be able to control the mechanical properties by influencing the structure," Cohen explained.
Cohen, PhD'01, received his doctorate in physics at UChicago, as did lead author Xiang Cheng, PhD'09, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell who assembled the team; and co-author Xinliang Xu, PhD'07, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago. The study co-authors also included Stuart Rice, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Chemistry at UChicago and a 1999 recipient of the National Medal of Science.
As members of UChicago's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, Rice and Dinner are part of a larger effort to determine how materials behave under the influence of various dynamic forces. Some of their physics colleagues analyze forces operating on macroscopic scales, while chemists such as Rice and Dinner attempt to assess how those findings might apply to microscopic phenomena.
Rice and his UChicago co-authors used computer simulations to develop a precise explanation for the string-like colloidal structures that formed in the Cornell experiment. "The previous simulations all left out the consequences of the flow created in the supporting fluid as the particles move, the so-called hydrodynamic forces," Rice said.
"A very large fraction of the work in the field neglects hydrodynamic forces because it's hard. You try and get away with what you can," Rice noted with amusement. "But in this case it turns out that the inclusion of those forces is the crucial element."
The simulations allowed the UChicago team to control various experimental parameters to assess their relative importance. "You can play God," Rice said. "The important finding is the overwhelming role of the lubrication forces and the anti-intuitive result that they create."
The lubrication force comes into play when two colloids come together to behave much like macroscopic ball bearings soaking in a reservoir of goopy fluid.
"Pulling them apart would be working against the fluid and so it would be very hard," Dinner said. "So actually, when you get a collision in these colloidal systems, those lubrication forces hold them together much longer, and that actually allows for some of the unique dynamics that give rise to the structure. That was specifically what the simulations showed."
Xu, the UChicago postdoctoral scholar, adapted a mathematical formula developed by John Brady at the California Institute of Technology to simplify the simulations, which ran for days and weeks at a time. "Every time you rearrange the particles, the interactions are different," Rice said. "If you were to calculate that directly, it would be extremely tedious."
But Xu's adapation of Brady's formula enabled him to generate a table of hydrodynamic interactions that listed each particle configuration. Xu found that he could accurately simplify the simulation by focusing on just two of the experiment's seven layers of colloids.
The simulations and the experiment showed that even after three centuries of study, the field of hydrodynamics continues to yield surprising discoveries. "We are still discovering novel behavior that is fundamentally determined by the hydrodynamics," Rice noted.
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Lindsay Lohan is modeling with clothes on for a change.
The troubled but resurgent starlet, whose Playboy issue is flying off the shelves, has just become the face (and body) of Jag Jeans (whatever that is)!
In fact, the Jag campaign was shot at the SLS Hotel in L.A. by Yu Tsai, the man behind the camera for Playboy's Marilyn-themed Lindsay Lohan pics.
It pays to get out there and network, people!
Lohan continues to make sultry facial expressions, as usual, while tussling her hair and rocking barely-there jean shorts ... in an ad for jeans. Whatever.
"As Jag Jeans' endorser, Lindsay embodies strength and fearlessness, is unafraid to be who she is, and is fierce yet exudes feminine grace," the brand says.
Tsai said in a press release that, "Lindsay did not disappoint ... Lindsay was so involved with the shoot that she would go as far as adjusting items on the set."
"She even requested scissors so she could personally fray the edges of her black crepe blouse because she believed it would look better that way."
"Lindsay would take a hands-on approach to her shots. She was more than willing to change her hairstyle mid-shoot and even used her own personal jewelry."
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. ? Penn State may still be without a replacement for fired coach Joe Paterno by the time the Nittany Lions play in the TicketCity Bowl on Jan. 2
The six-person search committee is taking a "very deliberate and measured approach to the process in order to identify the coach that best fits the requirements of the position," acting athletic director Dave Joyner said Thursday in a written statement.
School president Rodney Erickson and Joyner had both said they hoped to have a new coach before No. 24 Penn State's bowl game.
But Thursday, Joyner said a new coach would be introduced "at the appropriate time," and the statement offered no specific timeline.
Erickson was out of town Thursday for the holidays. Spokesman Bill Mahon said Joyner was providing Erickson with regular updates.
"I think they have both emphasized the most important element here is to get the right coach, not speed up the timing of the search," Mahon said. "There is no update on possible timing."
Longtime defensive coordinator Tom Bradley has been running the program on an interim basis since school trustees fired Paterno on Nov. 9 in the aftermath of child sex abuse charges against retired defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.
Paterno is not a target of an into the Sandusky case by the state attorney general's office, though he was dismissed amid mounting criticism that school leaders should have done more to prevent alleged abuse. Sandusky, who has maintained his innocence, is awaiting trial.
Making a good hire, and soon, is generally seen as a critical step to secure the future of Penn State's storied football program. A couple of recruits have already revoked their commitments to the school in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.
Erickson said earlier this month one of the top criteria in the coaching search is "how that person would fit into the value system of Penn State, which clearly has to be honesty, integrity and commitment to excellence in academics."
According to Joyner, the school "is continuing to talk with individuals that we're interested in and work through the interview process." He called it a "very important hire for Penn State."
Bradley and defensive line coach Larry Johnson are among those who have been interviewed.
Green Bay quarterbacks coach Tom Clements was scheduled to have a phone interview last week, USA Today has reported. At Packers practice Thursday, Clements declined comment on whether he was interested in the job and would not confirm if he had interviewed for it.
Nebraska's Bo Pelini also emerged this week on the seemingly endless rumored list of potential college-level prospects. Pelini after practice Tuesday called the reports irresponsible and untrue, and said he had not interviewed at Penn State.
As for the Nittany Lions, players have gone home for the holidays. They are scheduled to regroup Monday in Dallas to prepare for the bowl game against No. 20 Houston.
___
Sports Writer Chris Jenkins in Green Bay, Wis., contributed to this report.
For a while on Thursday, it wasn?t clear whether USC quarterback Matt Barkley was announcing his plans for playing football in 2012 or running for public office.
And then, at one point, Barkley?s micro-Favre ?will-he-or-won?t-he? routine seemed like a bad SNL skit, especially when he was abruptly interrupted while standing in front of a Christmas tree decorated with, among other things, full-size french horns by eleven piping pipers, twelve drumming drummers, and two of the nine ladies dancing.
Ultimately, Barkley made it clear that he?ll be staying at USC.? While he?s not the first player to pass up an opportunity to pass the football at the highest level, he?s the most recent ? and thus he?ll become the centerpiece of the debate regarding whether guys should leave early.
Most football players play college football because they hope to play pro football.? Statistically speaking, few ever do.? But when a college player is deemed ready to play at the next level, it?s akin to a Doogie Howser-style student, who has accelerated his studies and thus has become ready to graduate.? While that typically means departing before finishing the requirements of a degree, a degree can always be obtained later, after the pro playing career has ended.
The vague notion that the degree should be obtained before leaving for the NFL comes at least in part from the college coaches who want to see the kids continue to play for free preying on the fairly linear thinking in which parents and grandparents who didn?t go to college often engage.? For families who have yet to see a child march with cap and gown, getting the degree becomes almost as important as getting paid to play football.
In the end, getting paid to play football should be the primary concern.? At the college level, they aren?t.? (Presumably.)? Players like Barkley put themselves at risk on every snap.? A serious injury could permanently derail the dream to play in the NFL ? or, at a minimum, delay it significantly.
But at least the player will be able to earn dramatically less money in another industry, thanks to his degree.
The new rookie wage scale makes it even more important to strike while the iron is hot.? For starters, the financial difference that results from moving up only one pick in the top 10 has become dramatically smaller than it used to be, reducing the benefit of returning to school for a year and bumping up the draft stock by a few spots.? And with the truly big money now delayed until the player makes it to his second NFL contract, it?s more important than ever to start ticking off the years under that first NFL contract.
Some will now compare Matt Barkley to Matt Leinart, the last USC quarterback to decide to exhaust his eligibility.? Significant differences exist, however.? Leinart had accomplished everything that he could have accomplished at the college level, winning a Heisman and a national title ? along with earning that all-important degree.? When he decided to take ballroom dancing and a victory lap or two around sorority row, Leinart triggered real questions about whether he wants to be a football player, or whether he wants to be a celebrity.
For Barkley, NCAA sanctions have kept him from pursuing a BCS title or a Pac-Whatever championship.? It surely also kept him from being a serious candidate for a Heisman Trophy.? And so his college experience isn?t truly complete.
Regardless, any decision to stick around by a college athlete will conjure memories of what Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino supposedly tells his players who are deemed to be ready to make the jump to the NBA.
?You can go and help your family,? Pitino says.? ?Or you can stay and help mine.?
A fresh contender for your blow-out 2012 Olympic gaming rig: AMD's first 28nm GPU, the Radeon HD 7970. It's scheduled to arrive on January 9th, priced at $549 -- nearly $200 more than its direct ancestor, the 6970. Then again, this newcomer packs some supremely athletic specs, including a 925MHz engine clock that can be readily OC'd to 1.1GHz, 2,048 stream processors and an uncommonly muscular 384-bit memory bus serving 3GB of GDDR5. At the same time, AMD hopes to make the card more practical than the dual-processor 6990 by bringing the card's power consumption down to less than 300W under load and a mere 3W in 'long idle' mode, and promising quieter cooling thanks to improved airflow and a bigger fan. We'll have to wait for benchmarks in January before we hand out any medals, but in the meantime NVIDIA's forthcoming 28nm Kepler GPU might want to step up its training schedule.
Update: Pre-release reviews are out already and our round-up will follow imminently.
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Autologous stem cell transplantation does not improve os in patients with follicular lymphomaPublic release date: 21-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Zachary Rathner Zachary.Rathner@oup.com 301-841-1286 Journal of the National Cancer Institute
High-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation (HDC-ASCT), for previously untreated patients with advanced follicular lymphoma (FL) does not improve overall survival compared with conventional-dose chemotherapy alone, according to an online study published December 21 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Follicular lymphoma is the most common sub-type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in North America, characterized by a long natural history, with multiple remissions and relapses following treatment. A number of chemotherapy regimens have been combined with ASCT in randomized clinical trials to treat follicular lymphoma, however, the effects of HDC-ASCT on event-free survival have varied.
In order to determine the impact of HDC-ASCT vs conventional-dose chemotherapy in adult patients with advanced follicular lymphoma, Murtadha Al Khabori in the Division of Medical Oncology and Hematology at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, and colleagues performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized control trials comparing chemotherapy alone to chemotherapy with ASCT.
The researchers identified relevant studies dating from 1947-2009 in the literature and publicly available databases to look at overall survival, event-free survival, and any adverse events associated with treatment from either conventional-dose chemotherapy or high dose-chemotherapy with ASCT.
Seven randomized clinical trials (RCTs) met the eligibility criteria. Of these seven, three showed moderate quality evidence that high-dose chemotherapy with ASCT did not improve the overall survival of adult follicular lymphoma patients. The four remaining RTCs highlighted low-quality evidence showing improvement in event-free survival for patients who received chemotherapy with ASCT. The absolute risk of death from treatment and adverse events did not vary between the two treatment groups.
The authors concluded that high-dose chemotherapy combined with ASCT did not improve overall survival in previously untreated adult patients with follicular lymphoma. However, the researchers note certain limitations of the study, namely that, "Trials with no statistically significant treatment effect or those that stopped early because of toxic effects in the ASCT arm are more likely not to be published." They add that data from the unpublished trials should be made available to better assess treatment effects and to develop future clinical trials. "Trials of ASCT in the context of current chemoimmunotherapy approaches in FL are needed to further evaluate the ability of intensification of therapy using ASCT to improve OS," the authors write.
In an accompanying editorial, Caron A. Jacobson and Dan L. Longo, M.D., at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, write that this meta-analysis is timely in light of recent data on the efficacy of maintenance rituximab, which when added to various chemotherapeutic regimens, has improved overall survival. Because of this, along with rituximab's low toxicity profile, Jacobson and Longo conclude, "We recommend rituximab maintenance therapy (in preference to HDC-ASCT) for patients achieving at least a partial response to first-line chemoimmunotherapy in the absence of any randomized controlled trials comparing the two." Furthermore, "HDC-ASCT is a powerful treatment strategy for patients with follicular lymphoma, but one that does not appear to be less effective in the setting of the first disease relapse than in primary treatment, and thus can be reserved for the salvage setting."
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Article: Michael Crump, MD, FRCPC Department of Medical Oncology and Hematology, Princess Margaret Hospital, 610 University Avenue, 5-110, Toronto, ON M5G 2M9, Canada
Email: Michael.Crump@uhn.on.ca
Editorial: Caron Jacobson MD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute 450 Brookline Avenue Boston, MA 02215
Email: cajacobson@partners.org
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Autologous stem cell transplantation does not improve os in patients with follicular lymphomaPublic release date: 21-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Zachary Rathner Zachary.Rathner@oup.com 301-841-1286 Journal of the National Cancer Institute
High-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation (HDC-ASCT), for previously untreated patients with advanced follicular lymphoma (FL) does not improve overall survival compared with conventional-dose chemotherapy alone, according to an online study published December 21 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Follicular lymphoma is the most common sub-type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in North America, characterized by a long natural history, with multiple remissions and relapses following treatment. A number of chemotherapy regimens have been combined with ASCT in randomized clinical trials to treat follicular lymphoma, however, the effects of HDC-ASCT on event-free survival have varied.
In order to determine the impact of HDC-ASCT vs conventional-dose chemotherapy in adult patients with advanced follicular lymphoma, Murtadha Al Khabori in the Division of Medical Oncology and Hematology at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, and colleagues performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized control trials comparing chemotherapy alone to chemotherapy with ASCT.
The researchers identified relevant studies dating from 1947-2009 in the literature and publicly available databases to look at overall survival, event-free survival, and any adverse events associated with treatment from either conventional-dose chemotherapy or high dose-chemotherapy with ASCT.
Seven randomized clinical trials (RCTs) met the eligibility criteria. Of these seven, three showed moderate quality evidence that high-dose chemotherapy with ASCT did not improve the overall survival of adult follicular lymphoma patients. The four remaining RTCs highlighted low-quality evidence showing improvement in event-free survival for patients who received chemotherapy with ASCT. The absolute risk of death from treatment and adverse events did not vary between the two treatment groups.
The authors concluded that high-dose chemotherapy combined with ASCT did not improve overall survival in previously untreated adult patients with follicular lymphoma. However, the researchers note certain limitations of the study, namely that, "Trials with no statistically significant treatment effect or those that stopped early because of toxic effects in the ASCT arm are more likely not to be published." They add that data from the unpublished trials should be made available to better assess treatment effects and to develop future clinical trials. "Trials of ASCT in the context of current chemoimmunotherapy approaches in FL are needed to further evaluate the ability of intensification of therapy using ASCT to improve OS," the authors write.
In an accompanying editorial, Caron A. Jacobson and Dan L. Longo, M.D., at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, write that this meta-analysis is timely in light of recent data on the efficacy of maintenance rituximab, which when added to various chemotherapeutic regimens, has improved overall survival. Because of this, along with rituximab's low toxicity profile, Jacobson and Longo conclude, "We recommend rituximab maintenance therapy (in preference to HDC-ASCT) for patients achieving at least a partial response to first-line chemoimmunotherapy in the absence of any randomized controlled trials comparing the two." Furthermore, "HDC-ASCT is a powerful treatment strategy for patients with follicular lymphoma, but one that does not appear to be less effective in the setting of the first disease relapse than in primary treatment, and thus can be reserved for the salvage setting."
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Contact Info:
Article: Michael Crump, MD, FRCPC Department of Medical Oncology and Hematology, Princess Margaret Hospital, 610 University Avenue, 5-110, Toronto, ON M5G 2M9, Canada
Email: Michael.Crump@uhn.on.ca
Editorial: Caron Jacobson MD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute 450 Brookline Avenue Boston, MA 02215
Email: cajacobson@partners.org
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
SAN DIEGO ? In a story Dec. 14 on a lawsuit over a military jet crash that killed four people in 2008, The Associated Press reported that a Marine pilot who bailed out of his fighter jet over a San Diego neighborhood had been advised to make a potentially safer landing at a nearby Navy base over open water. Federal air traffic controllers and a military officer on a Navy aircraft carrier told the pilot to land at North Island in Coronado. Officers at Miramar Air Station, including the squadron's commanding officer, cleared the pilot to go to the inland base.
Linda Hogan and her 23-year-old fiance boy toy are headed to rehab.
Relationship Rehab. The VH1 spinoff of Celebrity Rehab. Obviously ...
The Hulk's 52-year-old ex-wife apparently has some issues to work out with Charlie Hill, and they've agreed to appear on the upcoming reality show. Taping is underway.
You two kids hang in there now.
Linda and Hulk Hogan finalized their divorce back in 2009, and Charlie Hill, who Linda had been dating since 2008, when he wasn't old enough to buy alcohol.
He proposed a year later. Hulk began dating a Brooke Hogan clone.
Joining them on the new show? DMX and Tashera Simmons, his estranged wife, with whom he is looking to repair their marriage. Should be CAN'T MISS television.
Sadly, the kaput Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries have not been asked to join the cast. Now that would be a ratings boost for the fledgling reality telecast.
GENEVA ? The World Trade Organization agreed Friday to allow Russia to become its newest member, giving a critical boost to the ailing economy of its biggest trading partner, the European Union.
Until now, Russia has been the only member of the Group of 20 leading world economies still outside the WTO, the global body that sets legally binding rules for international trade and mediates disputes.
The deal is expected to quickly increase EU exports by some euro4 billion ($5.2 billion) a year, EU trade officials say. Under the deal, Russians will be able to buy European-made goods at far lower prices and to sell its oil and gas more efficiently.
The 27-nation EU bloc is Russia's biggest trading partner for agriculture, fuels, mining and manufacturing. The EU buys 52 percent of Russia's exports, including the fossil fuels that keep Europe running. Russia, in turn, is third-biggest customer for EU exports, after the U.S. and China.
Elvira Nabiullina, Russia's minister of economic development, hailed the deal and said Russia is ready to help counter the risks of the global economic slowdown.
"We are ready to counter these risks actively," she told WTO trade ministers, just after their decision to welcome Russia.
The agreement is also likely to provide a boost for Russia's heavily state-managed economy, trade experts say, because it would bring the nation under international trade rules that could give outside investors more confidence.
"The EU has high expectations of Russia as a responsible partner able to respect rules," EU trade chief Karel De Gucht told the WTO.
As a WTO member, Moscow would provide annual reports to other members on its continuing privatization and gradually lower its average tariff ceiling to 7.8 percent from its current 10 percent.
A final hurdle to joining the WTO was the deal Russia signed with Georgia, its neighbor with whom it waged a brief war in 2008, to allow a neutral company to monitor all trade between the two nations.
Russia would become a WTO member next year, 30 days after it notifies WTO that the Russian Duma has ratified membership.
NEW STRIKES: Greek civil servants walked off the job for three hours on Thursday to protest austerity measures that include pension and salary cuts and the suspension of tens of thousands of workers on partial pay.
THE BACKDROP: The IMF and eurozone countries have been propping up Greece's economy with euro110 billion ($143 billion) in rescue loans since May 2010. In return, the country has imposed harsh austerity measures including slashing pensions and salaries and raising taxes that have driven the country into recession.
NEW LOANS: The protests come as Greece is negotiating the terms of a second rescue package worth euro130 billion with the eurozone and private bondholders.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2011) ? Physicists have announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced yet more tantalizing hints for the existence of the Higgs boson. The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, the international team of thousands of scientists -- including many from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) -- unveiled for the first time all the data taken over the last year from the two main detectors at the LHC: the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS). The results represent the largest amount of data ever presented for the Higgs search.
The Higgs boson is a hypothesized particle that endows every other particle with mass, and is the presumed last piece of the so-called Standard Model, the theory that describes how every particle interacts. According to physicists, the discovery of the Higgs boson, in whatever form it may take, is crucial for understanding the fundamental laws of physics.
The team says they have seen what they call "excess events" -- a slight surplus of particle-collision events over what would be expected if the Higgs didn't exist. This suggests that the particle might have a mass between 115 and 127 gigaelectron volts (GeV, a unit of mass; in comparison, the mass of a proton is about 1 GeV). While the physicists can't yet claim discovery of the elusive particle, they are closer than ever, having ruled out a very large range of the Higgs's possible masses with great certainty.
But if physicists do not find the Higgs in the remaining mass range between 115 and 127 GeV, then it means the particle -- if it exists at all -- is of a more exotic form, requiring new theories of physics. Although remarkably successful, the Standard Model is incomplete, and an exotic form of the Higgs could help point the way toward a more complete theory -- which physicists say is an exciting challenge.
"This is the beginning of a game-changing time for particle physics," says Harvey Newman, professor of physics. Along with professor of physics Maria Spiropulu, Newman leads Caltech's group that works on the CMS detector.
The LHC searches for the Higgs boson by slamming together protons at near-light speeds, producing new particles like the Higgs in the process. The problem is that the particle is exceptionally short-lived, decaying into other smaller particles within a tiny fraction of a second of its birth. To find the Higgs, physicists have to pick through the remains of each proton collision and reconstruct what happened.
If the collisions successfully produce a Higgs, then the particle can decay in several ways, depending on its mass. The Caltech team helped analyze three of these decays, called channels, in which the Higgs either decays into two photons, a pair of particles called W bosons, or another pair called Z bosons.
Graduate students Yong Yang, Yousi Ma, Jan Veverka, and Vladlen Timciuc are all studying the photon-photon channel, searching for the Higgs as well as possible signs of new physics phenomena. Caltech Tolman Postdoctoral Scholar Emanuele Di Marco, helped lead the analysis of the W-boson channel for the CMS team. Spiropulu, graduate student Chris Rogan, and other colleagues have also done preparatory studies for the Z-boson channel, which they published in the Physical Review in 2010.
"The impressive data produced by the CMS is the result of the experiment's ability to cleanly identify and precisely measure the energies of photons, electrons, and positrons," says Adi Bornheim, a Caltech staff scientist who heads the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) detector group at CMS. Composed of 76,000 crystal detectors and weighing in at more than 90 tons, the calorimeter measures the energy of the electrons and protons produced by LHC collisions with high resolution.
"For the last 17 years, our group has led the way in constructing and calibrating the calorimeter, which has to be extremely precise for these demanding studies," adds Marat Gataullin, an assistant scientist at Caltech.
The collision experiments in 2010 and 2011 at the LHC operated only at half their designed energy levels, the researchers say. Still, the experiments exceeded design specifications for the proton beam's focus and intensity, producing about one quadrillion (a million billion) proton collisions and resulting in millions of gigabytes of data. Even though the latest experiments were more complicated than ever, the scientists in the ATLAS and CMS teams say they were able to analyze the data in record time, using new technology pioneered and developed by Newman's group at Caltech.
In order to confirm once and for all whether the Higgs exists as physicists understand it -- or if they'll need to come up with new theories -- the LHC will need be cranked up to collide protons with more energy. "We now need more data-three or four times the data that we expect the LHC to deliver in 2012," Newman says. The LHC is currently operating at around seven teraelectron volts (a TeV is a thousand times larger than a GeV), and scientists are considering boosting up the energy in the next year, which will help in the search. The LHC is designed to smash protons using energies as high as 14 TeV. "We foresee reaching 14 TeV by 2015, boosting the intensity by ten times starting in around 2022, and cranking up the energy to 33 TeV starting about 20 years from now," he adds. "This will open a vast new realm for exploration, and will surely revolutionize our understanding of the nature of matter and forces at the most basic level."
The Caltech CMS group, which includes eight graduate students and several postdocs, engineers, and technical staff, is working on many other projects in addition to the Higgs search, such as exploring supersymmetry (a theory that says every particle has a "supersymmetric" partner), searching for other exotic, theoretical particles, and developing new kinds of particle detectors.
"We're grateful for the achievements of the LHC team and our colleagues with CMS," Spiropulu says. "We are working hard on the final stage of improving the experiments and on publishing the results-both about the Higgs and possible new, exciting theories of physics-in the coming weeks and months."
For more information, go to the Caltech CMS website (http://hep.caltech.edu/cms), the CMS public site (http://cms.web.cern.ch/), and the American CMS site (http://uscms.org).
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D?nyan?n en b?y?k sanal ma?azalar?ndan biri olan Amazon, elektronik okuyucular ile ba?lad??? tablet maceras?na Kindle Fire modeliyle devam ediyor. Kindle Fire, ?ift ?ekirdekli TI OMAP 4430 i?lemcisi, 7" IPS ekran? ve en ?nemlisi de 199$ 'l?k sat?? fiyat?yla olduk?a iyi sat?? rakamlar?n? yakalam?? durumda. ...
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Public release date: 21-Dec-2011
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