A video of a device purporting to be the Samsung Galaxy S IV has landed on YouTube. It shows a large handset, initially with the back off and the battery removed, before the battery is inserted, the plastic back snapped on and the phone is turned on. As it boots up, it displays Chinese carrier China Unicom's Wo logo before loading what appears to be a version of Samsung's TouchWiz UI.
Raleigh?s Dos Taquitos restaurant must fork over almost $50,000 in back pay to 26 employees the U.S. Department of Labor says were shortchanged.
Investigators from the department?s Wage and Hour Division found that Dos Taquitos violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and child labor laws. They said the restaurant paid workers a weekly salary that sometimes averaged less than the federal minimum wage. The workers didn?t receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week.
Plus, investigators found that a 14-year-old employee worked longer hours than child labor laws permit and it failed to document the ages of workers under 18.
Dos Taquitos agreed to settle the case instead of going to court.
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HELENA, Mont. (AP) ? U.S. Sen. Max Baucus has been here before.
Back during the Clinton era, the Democrat faced a choice: support an assault weapons ban urged by a president from his own party and risk angering constituents who cherish their gun rights, or buck his party. He chose the ban, and nearly lost his Senate seat.
Now, as he begins his campaign for a seventh term, Baucus faces the question again. For weeks, gun foes have sought assurances he would oppose the assault weapons ban. But it was only this past week he said he would oppose it.
That decision alone doesn't settle the issue for his re-election campaign. His opponents are watching closely, eager to pounce as he navigates a series of other gun control proposals, including an expected call for universal background checks.
Baucus' predicament is one that a group of Democrats like him in the West and South are facing. They hail from predominantly rural regions of the country where the Second Amendment is cherished and where Republicans routinely win in presidential elections.
From Montana to Louisiana, these anxious voters have made at least six Democratic senators a little uneasy heading into next year's election season. Both sides are aware that gun-owners' rights are taking shape as a campaign issue that could shift the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.
"Make no mistake ? it is a very delicate dance for rural state Democrats," said Barrett Kaiser, a Democratic political consultant.
"I would be stunned if the Montana congressional delegation said anything but 'hell no' to gun control measures," he added.
Part of the concern comes from a proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would ban assault weapons and high-capacity clips. The plan is a response to calls for new gun restrictions from President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school.
Gun control is a top-agenda item for many Democrats, and they'll need all the votes they can to push changes.
Baucus knows, though, that a gun control vote "opens the door for whoever challenges him, because Montanans do not want the federal government restricting guns. That is clear as day," said Republican state Rep. Scott Reichner, who was Mitt Romney's campaign chairman in Montana.
"It would be a monumental mistake on his part" to support federal gun control legislation, Reichner said.
Gun rights carry sway in Montana. The state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks says Montana "boasts more hunters per capita than any other state in the nation." State lawmakers have been discussing measures to expand gun rights. And a pro-gun group, the Montana Shooting Sports Association, has set up a website that is updated with Baucus' public statements on gun policy.
Other Democratic senators that Republicans are watching closely include Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.
Democrats control the Senate, but if Republicans pick off these seats they could take the chamber.
Pryor already has said he won't support an assault weapons ban, and the measure is unlikely to clear the Senate. Gun activists still worry that other restrictions they oppose are in the works.
"I don't think the assault rifle ban, the semi-auto ban, has been the real objective," said Gary Marbut of the Montana Shooting Sports Association. "I think that is where the rubber meets the road, federal gun registration."
The gun rights crowd considers mandatory registration as an unconstitutional overreach of federal authority and the close attention paid to all discussions on the topic show how carefully Baucus and others must tread.
Baucus would appear to be a shoo-in for re-election. He's the third most senior U.S. senator and the chairman of the Finance Committee, which lets him prioritize many Montana projects.
He's also a consummate dealmaker who routinely collects endorsements from Republican-allied groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And he's worked hard over the years to become the only Senate Democrat with an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association.
But one wrong gun vote could energize his opposition.
Though Baucus specifically rejected the assault rifle ban, he stopped short of mentioning expanded background checks by name. Baucus indicated he prefers the focus was elsewhere.
"Instead of focusing on new laws, Max believes the first step should be effectively enforcing the laws already on the books," Baucus spokeswoman Jennifer Donohue said Thursday.
The entire debate represents a potential replay of the most difficult fight of his career, when Baucus voted for the 1993 Brady Bill that established background checks and the original 1994 ban on assault rifles and high-capacity clips.
Those votes led to the closest election in four decades of politics for Baucus, a narrow victory in a bitter campaign against Republican Denny Rehberg.
The other Democratic senators in rural states could find themselves in similar fights and have been cagey over the issue. Most have taken a wait-and-see approach.
The NRA last month launched an advertising campaign aimed squarely at this group, sending a strong message. The organization did not return a call seeking comment.
Democratic political operatives say the NRA could be overplaying its hand this time, arguing some sportsmen may be willing to listen to moderate proposals.
Still, Baucus and his colleagues aren't likely to take risks and by next year's election, he and others could seek to turn the issue to their advantage by using a pro-gun stance to appeal to conservative and libertarian-minded voters.
"Why wouldn't he want to talk about guns?" said Montana State University political scientist David Parker. "Sen. Baucus is as about as middle of the road as they get in the United States Senate. What he doesn't want to do is have himself painted as a national Democrat or as an Obama Democrat."
(Reuters) - Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for killing 48 Syrian soldiers and state employees in Iraq last week, saying their presence proved collusion between the Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Unidentified gunmen last week attacked a convoy of Syrians who had fled across the border into Iraq from a Syrian rebel advance, and were being escorted back home through the western province of Anbar, Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.
"Military detachments succeeded in annihilating an entire column of the Safavid army," al Qaeda's Iraqi wing, Islamic State of Iraq, said in a statement posted online, referring to the dynasty that ruled Shi'ite Iran from the 16th to 18th centuries. Tehran is Assad's closest regional ally.
"The lions of the desert and the men entrusted with difficult missions laid ambushes on the road leading to the crossing," it said.
The group said the presence of the Syrians in Iraq showed the Baghdad government's "firm co-operation" with Assad. The Syrian leader's Alawite faith is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.
Iraq's Defence Ministry has blamed the attack, which also killed nine Iraqi soldiers, on Syrian armed groups it said had infiltrated the country.
The conflict war in Syria, where mainly Sunni rebels are fighting to topple Assad, is straining Iraq's own precarious sectarian and ethnic balance of Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds.
Since December, tens of thousands of Sunni protesters have staged demonstrations, especially in Anbar province, venting frustrations that have built up since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein and empowered majority Shi'ites.
Islamic State of Iraq and other Sunni Islamist groups oppose Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is close to Iran. Iraq says it takes no side in the Syrian conflict.
The militant group said the Iraqi government had failed to conceal "the reality of its firm co-operation" with Assad.
While violence in Iraq has eased since sectarian slaughter that killed tens of thousands peaked in 2006-2007, insurgents have carried out at least one major attack a month since U.S. forces left in December 2011. Bombings and killings still happen daily, often aimed at Shi'ite areas and local security forces.
(Reporting by Suadad al-Salhy; Eediting by Isabel Coles and Alistair Lyon)
Results released for first multicenter study of hybrid revascularizationPublic release date: 10-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Quinn Eastman qeastma@emory.edu 404-727-7829 Emory Health Sciences
The first multicenter study of hybrid revascularization shows that the emerging procedure for treating coronary artery disease has a similar rate of major adverse events in the first year, compared with percutaneous intervention (stenting).
Hybrid revascularization is a minimally invasive blend of coronary bypass surgery and stenting. It has been described as a "best of both worlds" strategy for treating multi-vessel coronary artery disease. Surgeons avoid opening the patient's sternum, which facilitates recovery, while keeping the durability of bypass surgery for the most important of the blocked coronary arteries.
John Puskas, MD, professor of surgery and associate chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Emory University School of Medicine, was national principal investigator for the study and is scheduled to present the results at the American College of Cardiology meeting in San Francisco.
Participating institutions included: Brigham and Women's, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Lankenau Hospital (Pennsylvania), Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center, Ohio State, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia and Vanderbilt. The data coordinating center was housed in the Department of Health Evidence & Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The study was funded by a Challenge grant part of the 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and was conducted in association with the NHLBI Cardiothoracic Surgery Trials Network.
The study was a prospective cohort study that enrolled 200 hybrid patients and 98 patients who would have been eligible for a hybrid procedure, but had multi-vessel percutaneous intervention (PCI) instead.
"We started by taking a snapshot of each participating center's catheterization lab over three months," Puskas says. "That was over 6,500 patients, but only a fraction were eligible. They had to have a pattern of coronary artery disease that could be reasonably treated with either hybrid techniques or multivessel percutaneous intervention: both an LAD (left anterior descending) lesion and a significant stenosis in at least one other non-LAD coronary artery. This was a group of patients with low to medium complexity coronary artery disease."
The primary measure of safety was the rate of major adverse coronary and cerebrovascular events (MACCE: includes death, heart attack, stroke or repeat revascularization procedure). Over the first year, hybrid patients had a MACCE rate of 11 percent (0.143 events per patient-year) while PCI patients had a rate of 10 percent (0.119 events per patient year), with hybrid revascularization displaying a trend toward a MACCE rate lower than PCI after the first year. Patients were followed for up to an average of 17.5 months and over that time, the MACCE rate for hybrid revascularization patients was 0.868 times that for PCI patients, adjusted for baseline risk.
"A question this study starts to address is, whether short-term outcomes and complications over the first year are comparable between these two alternative therapies," Puskas says. "These results suggest that hybrid revascularization is as safe in the first year, with a trend to benefit over the longer term. It would be a challenge to markedly out-perform PCI over the first year we expect that if hybrid revascularization has an advantage, it will come out over the next few years."
He explains that multivessel coronary bypass surgery usually includes a left internal mammary artery (LIMA) graft for the blockage in the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD), along with veins from the legs for the other blocked vessel(s). The LIMA graft has several advantages: most importantly, the LIMA graft stays open longer than vein grafts, because the LIMA is conditioned to higher blood pressures.
"We know the left internal mammary artery graft is the most durable treatment for that [LAD] blockage, so we expect there will be fewer repeat revascularizations in the hybrid group of patients," he says.
Hybrid revascularization keeps the LIMA graft for the LAD while using coronary stents for other non-LAD blockages, allowing a minimally invasive approach and avoiding use of the heart-lung machine.
"In light of the growing adoption of this treatment paradigm, a randomized trial of hybrid revascularization is now needed to rigorously evaluate its safety and efficacy relative to PCI," says Deborah D. Ascheim, MD, associate professor of health evidence & policy and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and principal investigator of the study's data coordinating center,
The results of the current study, Puskas agrees, support the Hybrid Observational Study Investigators' plans to conduct such a trial.
###
Co-author Michael Halkos, MD, assistant professor of surgery at Emory University School of Medicine, is giving a presentation Saturday, March 9 (6:45 pm ET), on the results of hybrid revascularization at Emory only.
2011 publication on hybrid revascularization and bypass surgery study at Emory:
http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/92/5/1695
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Results released for first multicenter study of hybrid revascularizationPublic release date: 10-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Quinn Eastman qeastma@emory.edu 404-727-7829 Emory Health Sciences
The first multicenter study of hybrid revascularization shows that the emerging procedure for treating coronary artery disease has a similar rate of major adverse events in the first year, compared with percutaneous intervention (stenting).
Hybrid revascularization is a minimally invasive blend of coronary bypass surgery and stenting. It has been described as a "best of both worlds" strategy for treating multi-vessel coronary artery disease. Surgeons avoid opening the patient's sternum, which facilitates recovery, while keeping the durability of bypass surgery for the most important of the blocked coronary arteries.
John Puskas, MD, professor of surgery and associate chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Emory University School of Medicine, was national principal investigator for the study and is scheduled to present the results at the American College of Cardiology meeting in San Francisco.
Participating institutions included: Brigham and Women's, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Lankenau Hospital (Pennsylvania), Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center, Ohio State, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia and Vanderbilt. The data coordinating center was housed in the Department of Health Evidence & Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The study was funded by a Challenge grant part of the 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and was conducted in association with the NHLBI Cardiothoracic Surgery Trials Network.
The study was a prospective cohort study that enrolled 200 hybrid patients and 98 patients who would have been eligible for a hybrid procedure, but had multi-vessel percutaneous intervention (PCI) instead.
"We started by taking a snapshot of each participating center's catheterization lab over three months," Puskas says. "That was over 6,500 patients, but only a fraction were eligible. They had to have a pattern of coronary artery disease that could be reasonably treated with either hybrid techniques or multivessel percutaneous intervention: both an LAD (left anterior descending) lesion and a significant stenosis in at least one other non-LAD coronary artery. This was a group of patients with low to medium complexity coronary artery disease."
The primary measure of safety was the rate of major adverse coronary and cerebrovascular events (MACCE: includes death, heart attack, stroke or repeat revascularization procedure). Over the first year, hybrid patients had a MACCE rate of 11 percent (0.143 events per patient-year) while PCI patients had a rate of 10 percent (0.119 events per patient year), with hybrid revascularization displaying a trend toward a MACCE rate lower than PCI after the first year. Patients were followed for up to an average of 17.5 months and over that time, the MACCE rate for hybrid revascularization patients was 0.868 times that for PCI patients, adjusted for baseline risk.
"A question this study starts to address is, whether short-term outcomes and complications over the first year are comparable between these two alternative therapies," Puskas says. "These results suggest that hybrid revascularization is as safe in the first year, with a trend to benefit over the longer term. It would be a challenge to markedly out-perform PCI over the first year we expect that if hybrid revascularization has an advantage, it will come out over the next few years."
He explains that multivessel coronary bypass surgery usually includes a left internal mammary artery (LIMA) graft for the blockage in the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD), along with veins from the legs for the other blocked vessel(s). The LIMA graft has several advantages: most importantly, the LIMA graft stays open longer than vein grafts, because the LIMA is conditioned to higher blood pressures.
"We know the left internal mammary artery graft is the most durable treatment for that [LAD] blockage, so we expect there will be fewer repeat revascularizations in the hybrid group of patients," he says.
Hybrid revascularization keeps the LIMA graft for the LAD while using coronary stents for other non-LAD blockages, allowing a minimally invasive approach and avoiding use of the heart-lung machine.
"In light of the growing adoption of this treatment paradigm, a randomized trial of hybrid revascularization is now needed to rigorously evaluate its safety and efficacy relative to PCI," says Deborah D. Ascheim, MD, associate professor of health evidence & policy and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and principal investigator of the study's data coordinating center,
The results of the current study, Puskas agrees, support the Hybrid Observational Study Investigators' plans to conduct such a trial.
###
Co-author Michael Halkos, MD, assistant professor of surgery at Emory University School of Medicine, is giving a presentation Saturday, March 9 (6:45 pm ET), on the results of hybrid revascularization at Emory only.
2011 publication on hybrid revascularization and bypass surgery study at Emory:
http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/92/5/1695
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Designed exclusively for plant lovers who just can't seem to get organized enough to keep their greenery alive, Stefano Claudio Bison's sponge pots absorb and hold onto as much moisture as possible every time they're watered. The pots are made from the same kind of sponges you wash your dishes or car with, and unlike boring clay pots they also come in a variety of fun colors. More »
BEIRUT (AP) ? Syrian rebels freed 21 U.N. peacekeepers on Saturday after holding them hostage for four days, ending a sudden entanglement with the world body that earned fighters trying to oust President Bashar Assad a flood of negative publicity.
The episode is bound to prompt new questions about U.N. operations in war-torn Syria. The peacekeepers were part of a force that has spent four decades monitoring an Israeli-Syrian cease-fire without incident.
The Filipino peacekeepers crossed from Syria to safety in Jordan on Saturday afternoon, said Mokhtar Lamani, the Damascus representative of the U.N.-Arab League peace envoy to Syria.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed their release, and called on all parties in Syria to respect the peacekeepers' freedom of movement.
The peacekeepers were seized Wednesday and were held in the village of Jamlah in southwestern Syria, near Jordan and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
Their captors from the Martyrs of the Yarmouk Brigades initially said they would only release the hostages once Syrian troops withdrew from the area. In the days leading up to the abduction, rebels had overrun several regime checkpoints and apparently feared reprisals.
However, as the abduction made headlines, the rebels eventually dropped their demand and began negotiating a safe passage for the peacekeepers with U.N. officials. On Friday, a U.N. team tried to retrieve the hostages, but aborted the plan because of heavy regime shelling of the area.
On Saturday, another U.N. team headed toward Jamlah to try again, said a rebel spokesman, who spoke via Skype, insisting on anonymity for fear of reprisals.
He said the U.N. team aborted the mission because of fighting in the area, and that the rebels instead escorted the hostages to the Syrian-Jordanian border.
Lamani said the U.N. team was near Jamlah and was waiting for the rebels to hand over the hostages when the rebels changed their minds and instead drove the peacekeepers to the Jordanian border.
"We don't know why (the rebels changed the plan), and there were lots of talks on this issue," he said. "We were surprised when we got the news through a TV station that they had reached Jordan."
Many rebel groups operate independently, despite efforts by the Syrian opposition to unify the fighters under one command. The abduction appeared to have been such a local initiative, and leaders of the political opposition repeatedly urged the Jamlah rebels to free the hostages.
On Friday, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland warned the rebels that holding the peacekeepers "is not good for them, it's not good for their reputation."
The peacekeepers are part of a U.N. monitoring mission known as UNDOF. It was set up in 1974, seven years after Israel captured the plateau and a year after it managed to push back Syrian troops trying to recapture the territory in another regional war.
The U.N. monitors have helped enforce a stable truce between Israel and Syria.
But in recent months, Syrian mortar shells overshooting their target have repeatedly hit the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. In Israel's most direct involvement so far, Israeli warplanes struck inside Syria in January, according to U.S. officials who said the target was a convoy carrying anti-aircraft weapons bound for Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia allied with Assad and Iran.
Israeli officials have expressed concern that the violence might prompt UNDOF to end its mission.
On Friday, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said "the mission in the Golan needs to review its security arrangements and it has been doing that."
He said the mission has been looking at different scenarios and arrangements on how to operate "in these new rather difficult and challenging circumstances."
It was the first time that Filipino peacekeepers, of whom 600 are deployed worldwide and 333 in the Golan Heights, have been seized. The incident has prompted President Benigno Aquino III to review the Philippines' contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations.
The Syria conflict began two years ago, starting with largely peaceful protests against Assad. A harsh regime crackdown triggered an armed insurgency that has turned into a full-scale civil war.
The U.N. estimates that the conflict has claimed more than 70,000 lives and forced nearly 4 million people from their homes. The fighting has devastated large areas of the country.
___
Associated Press writer Jamal Halaby in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.
A video of a device purporting to be the Samsung Galaxy S IV has landed on YouTube. It shows a large handset, initially with the back off and the battery removed, before the battery is inserted, the plastic back snapped on and the phone is turned on. As it boots up, it displays Chinese carrier China Unicom's Wo logo before loading what appears to be a version of Samsung's TouchWiz UI.
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Public release date: 10-Mar-2013
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