Teacher union representatives say OTHS school board's recent declaration of impa...

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Source: http://www.facebook.com/mywebtimes/posts/10152095702263266

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2,000-Year-Old Settlement Uncovered by Construction Workers in Mexico

A settlement estimated to be roughly 2,000 years old has recently been discovered in eastern Mexico, close to the city of Veracruz.

Information released by the country's National Anthropology and History Institute says that the settlement was first uncovered by construction workers.

Archaeologists arrived at the site later on. Once there, they did not take long to dig out 30 skeletons and the remains of an ancient pyramid.

The pyramid sits on a hill, close to the final resting place of these 30 people. It measures about 39 feet (12 meters) in height, and its style appears to be either Mayan or Tajin.

Investigations carried out thus far have revealed that 2 of the 30 people found buried at this location were mere children at the time of their death.

?All that is known so far is that of the 30 burials, two at least belong to infants,? reads a statement issued by Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute.

Scientists expect that they will know more about this group of individuals once they get the chance to thoroughly examine their skeletons.

Live Science informs us that figurines made from clay, mirrors, beads and animal remains were discovered scattered across this ancient settlement.

Most of the animal remains were unearthed from inside the 30 graves in the pyramid's proximity, and appear to belong to dogs, fish, birds, coyotes and the like.

It is likely that these animals were placed inside the graves so that they might accompany the deceased individuals in the underworld, and keep them company.

Oddly enough, researchers also came across fossilized teeth belonging to a long-lost species of Megalodon-like shark.

This discovery suggests that the people who built this settlement enjoyed collecting various artifacts, the same source details.

The artifacts dug out by archaeologists appear to have different origins, hence the experts' belief that they are dealing with the remains of a multicultural community.

?Analyses will enable us to see whether this site was multicultural, as is indicated by the materials found, or whether the inhabitants were all of the same genetic type,? the National Anthropology and History Institute stresses.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/2-000-Year-Old-Settlement-Uncovered-by-Construction-Workers-in-Mexico-368200.shtml

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Aviary has just launched its popular photo editor app for Windows Phone 8 and it's free for a limite

Aviary has just launched its popular photo editor app for Windows Phone 8 and it's free for a limited time. Download it now! It's free!

Source: http://gizmodo.com/aviary-has-just-launched-its-popular-photo-editor-app-f-787871619

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Ken Wedding's CompGov Blog: Mexico election update (finally)

Mexico election update (finally)

Have to wonder whether the outcome was determined by counting votes or political considerations.

See also: In Chicago, this would look like stuffing the ballot boxes

Francisco Vega officially wins Baja California governor's race

It?s finally official: Nearly a week after elections for governor in Baja California, the candidate for the conservative party that has ruled the state for a generation was declared the victor.

Francisco Vega of the National Action Party (PAN) narrowly defeated Fernando Castro Trenti of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The difference was fewer than 25,000 votes, a margin of slightly less than 3%.

The vote count, abruptly halted on election night, July 7, was completed over the weekend, and the PRI recognized its loss.

It had been critical to the PAN to hold on to Baja, where in 1989 it became the first political party ever to defeat the PRI by winning the governorship, a post it has held since?

For the PAN, keeping the top political job in Baja was also seen as important for the party?s continued cooperation with Pe?a Nieto?s government and its agenda of economic reforms, including a major overhaul of the giant state oil monopoly.

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Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed.

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The First Edition of What You Need to Know: Teaching Tools is now available from the publisher

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The Fifth Edition of What You Need to Know is now available from the publisher.

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Source: http://compgovpol.blogspot.com/2013/07/mexico-election-update-finally.html

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Insight: Smuggling rice to Thailand - like coals to Newcastle

By Apornrath Phoonphongphiphat and Naveen Thukral

SA KAEO, Thailand/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Hidden in 18-wheeler trucks, carts and pick-up vans, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rice are being smuggled from Cambodia and Myanmar into Thailand, although the country holds enough stocks to meet half the world's annual trade in the commodity.

A populist program to support prices has led to the Thai government paying its farmers almost double prevailing prices in Cambodia and Myanmar. Farmers and traders in the neighboring countries are trying to take advantage, sending their grain across the border to be sold into the Thai intervention scheme.

The equivalent of 750,000 tonnes of milled rice is being smuggled into Thailand a year, mainly from Cambodia and Myanmar, according to estimates of analysts and traders who have studied the illicit shipments.

"No one can differentiate which one is Thai rice and which one is Cambodian rice. That makes it easy to smuggle rice in and make a profit by selling it to the government," said Kiattisak Kalayasirivat, managing director at Thai trader Novel Agritrade.

The extent of the smuggling adds to a headache for Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who increased the support price for unmilled rice to 15,000 baht ($480) per tonne after she took power in 2011, to please her farmer vote-bank.

Yingluck's support base is mostly in rural districts, and her government mistakenly bet that Thailand could corner the world rice market by building up stocks.

Instead, the government, already running a budget deficit of 300 billion baht ($9.59 billion) this fiscal year, is struggling to fund the multibillion-dollar program and find buyers for the grain. Ratings agency Moody's warned in June that "populist measures" were a risk to financial discipline.

The government said last month that losses from the scheme amounted to $4.4 billion in the crop year that ended in September 2012.

Thailand now sits on rice stockpiles of 18 million tonnes, almost double a normal year's exports and nearly half of annual global trade of 38 million.

It is mostly holding on to the stocks since it will make a huge loss if the rice is sold. The intervention price of $480 per tonne of unmilled rice translates to $750 a tonne for milled rice. Milled rice is quoted around $475 a tonne in Thailand's open market and around $400 a tonne in Vietnam, traders said.

From No. 1, Thailand has dropped to the world's No. 3 rice exporter behind India and Vietnam.

The quality of the rice in its warehouses has also dropped because most of the smuggled grain is broken rice, which is then blended with full-grain Thai rice.

Because of that, the spread between 5 percent and 100 percent broken rice available in Thailand has narrowed to just $30 a tonne currently from $60 a tonne in June last year and $85 in 2011. "The spread has tightened up very dramatically," said Ben Savage, managing director of London-based Jackson Son and Co, a rice broker since 1860.

CAT RUNNING AFTER A MOUSE

Thailand's porous border with Cambodia, to the east, has no natural barriers like rivers and villagers easily cross between the two countries. Smuggling of rice appears to be rampant.

"As long as our prices are high and they can make a profit, we won't stop them," Pakkarathorn Teainchai, the governor of Sa Kaeo province on the border with Cambodia, told Reuters. "It's like a cat running after a mouse,"

"Recently we confiscated 60 tonnes of rice. There's bound to be more that we can't prevent."

Noppadol Thetprasit, head of a customs post in the Aranyaprathet district of Sa Kaeo, said he recently intercepted 30 tonnes of rice being smuggled from Cambodia, but he knows more must be getting through at smaller crossing points that lack his facilities.

"The rice is being carried into Thailand on villagers' small carts, and is then reloaded onto bigger trucks and moved on to other provinces in Thailand to be resold," Noppadol said.

The smuggling is happening on a far bigger scale than the talk of villagers and carts would suggest. Thai officials say some smugglers use 18-wheel trucks to bring rice into the country.

Small-scale smuggling had occurred previously but volumes have jumped with the advent of the high intervention price.

The International Grains Council in London estimated the equivalent of 750,000 tonnes of milled rice a year was coming into Thailand, senior economist Darren Cooper said. That would be about 900,000 tonnes of unmilled rice, or paddy.

"Clearly shipments (to Thailand) started going up since the intervention scheme started," Cooper said. "It is highly attractive for the neighboring countries to try and get as much rice across to Thailand as possible and supply into the scheme."

The United States Department of Agriculture put Thai rice imports at 600,000 tonnes a year in the first two years of the scheme, jumping from 200,000 tonnes in 2010/11.

BLIND EYE

In Cambodia, the authorities turn a blind eye to the smuggling. Khung Vun, president of the Rice Millers Association in Banteay Meanchey province on the border, says customs and police officials will wave grain through as long as a general export permit can be produced.

In 2012, legal rice exports to all countries by Cambodia amounted to 205,717 tonnes, according to its official data.

Thon Virak, director of Cambodian state-owned rice exporter Green Trade, estimated up to 300,000 tonnes of paddy rice was smuggled into Thailand in 2012 and a similar amount in 2011.

"This year, the number will decline because crossing points have been closed," he said in Phnom Penh, referring to stepped-up border policing on the Thai side.

In Myanmar, a shortage of good-quality mills restricts demand for legal exports and encourages smuggling out.

Aung Kyaw Htoo, agribusiness manager at cargo surveyor SGS in Yangon, estimated around 120,000 tonnes of rice was smuggled into Thailand in 2012, most of it lower-quality broken grain.

He said he understood the rice was sold into the intervention scheme, although other analysts said some of it could have been bought by noodle makers and feedstuff producers who, because of state buying, find Thai grain scarce or costly.

COMMERCE MINISTER SACKED

Thailand announced it would cut the intervention price to 12,000 baht per tonne last month, but reversed the decision on the day it took effect, giving in to farmers who had threatened protests.

Before rowing back on the cut, Yingluck sacked Commerce Minister Boonsong Teriyapirom, after public criticism that he had failed to be credible or transparent about the costs of the scheme.

New commerce minister Niwatthamrong Bunsongphaisan says the government will sell up to 1.5 million tonnes of rice a month for the rest of year through tenders and will also try to sell to other governments.

It is unclear how he will do that without offering grain at cut-rate prices to exporters or governments, and that may lead to charges of dumping. The United States and others have already sounded warning noises at the World Trade Organisation because of Thailand's lack of transparency on sales and stocks. ($1 = 31.0150 Thai baht)

(Additional reporting by Prak Chan Thul in Phnom Penh, Aung Hla Tun in Yangon and Andrew R.C. Marshall in Bangkok; Writing by Alan Raybould, Editing by Jason Szep, Amran Abocar and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/insight-smuggling-rice-thailand-coals-newcastle-212529951.html

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PolyU scientist seeks to identify genes causing rare cancer

Working in collaboration with an international team of researchers, Dr Vincent Keng Wee-keong, Assistant Professor of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)'s Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology, has developed a sophisticated model for studying "Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumors" (MPNSTs), thus paving the way for further discovery of new genes and genetic pathways that may provide new therapeutic targets for related cancer treatment.

MPNST is a rare but aggressive type of tumor that is associated with extremely poor prognosis. It is believed that many genetic changes are required for both sporadic and NF1-associated tumor development, although the exact cause of MPNSTs is still not yet known. MPNSTs can occur sporadically or in the context of neurofibromatosis type 1 (gene NF1) tumor syndrome, a disease that occurs approximately one in 3,000 people worldwide. Of great concern is that around 10 percent of these NF1 patients will develop MPNSTs.

Due to the invasiveness and high metastatic occurrence of MPNSTs, current treatment regimes such as surgical resection, radiotherapy and chemotherapeutic treatments have proven to be ineffective. The current five-year survival rate for patients with metastatic MPNST is less than 25 percent. "We desperately need more accurate models of the disease in order to cure it", Dr Vincent Keng said.

In order to identify genes leading to MPNSTs, Dr Keng has been collaborating with researchers from University of Minnesota, Cincinnati Children's Hospital and University of Florida in the US; and the Institute of Predictive and Personalized Medicine of Cancer in Spain. The team has adopted The Sleeping Beauty transposon method, which is a powerful genetic tool and an unbiased approach, in a tissue-specific manner in mice.

Further analysis of these MPNSTs in this study uncovered 745 cancer candidate genes (both known and new genes). Genes and signaling pathways that cooperate in MPNST formation were also identified. In this study, the role of FOXR2 was demonstrated as an important oncogene or cancer-causing gene for MPNSTs development and turning off this gene drastically decreases the growth ability of these tumors. Researchers also found many of the MPNSTs have dual loss of NF1 and PTEN genes, both of which can suppress tumor formation.

Dr Vincent Keng has also previously shown that this pairing of lost genes causes MPNST formation in a paper published in Cancer Research last year. In his laboratory, research is continuing in both mouse models and human cell lines to obtain more effective therapeutic regimes for this deadly disease.

The MPNSTs research was published earlier this year in the international journal Nature Genetics (May 2013 Issue).

Press Contacts
Dr Vincent Keng Wee-keong
Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology
Tel: (852) 3400 8728
Email: vincent.keng@polyu.edu.hk

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Researchsea-AsiaResearchNewsScience/~3/hlfYTteIVDs/1

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Bosnia: Women breach cordon to reach massacre site

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) ? A group of women broke Saturday through a police cordon and entered a former warehouse in Bosnia to lay flowers where their loved ones were killed during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Bosnian Serb police said they didn't use force, but the women ? who are Muslim Bosniaks ? alleged that the police beat them, injuring eight.

The head of the Bosnian Serb police, Gojko Vasic, said the women had no permission to enter the facility because it is private property but that they cut their way through a fence. He said one woman hit a police officer over the head with her mobile phone.

Munira Subasic, who led the group of women, said she was bruised when police beat "us with elbows and feet."

On July 11, 1995, Serb forces overran the eastern town of Srebrenica and executed more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys in what became known as the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazi era.

According to a U.N. war crimes tribunal, about 1,000 of the victims were brought to the warehouse in the nearby village of Kravice, locked inside and gunned down on July 13. Soldiers then threw hand grenades inside to finish off potential survivors.

The bodies were buried in mass graves but then excavated again a few months later by the perpetrators with bulldozers and buried at other locations to hide the crime. Many of the bodies were torn apart.

This past week, Subasic buried two bones of her then-18 year-old son; more of his remains have not yet been recovered.

Ethnic tensions still simmer in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the warehouse lies in the Bosnian Serb half of the country, which has its own police force.

Relatives of the victims have never been allowed to visit the warehouse to pay their respects, but this year the women, carrying pliers, were determined to get inside. Subasic said the people injured mainly suffered bruises, but that "every victory had a price and so does this one."

"In 1995, they forced our children inside and today they beat us to prevent us from getting in," she said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bosnia-women-breach-cordon-reach-massacre-170828786.html

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