Widespread use of bottled water by kids may contribute to tooth decay, dentists and government health officials warn. Amy Wilson, 42, a New York mom, heard about the possible link after her middle son had to have six cavities filled at age 4.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/46814033#46814033
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CAIRO (AP) ? An International Monetary Fund team was due to leave Cairo Wednesday without securing an agreement over a $3.2 billion loan to help boost the nation's battered economy.
Holding up the deal was political wrangling between the Islamist-dominated parliament and the government, an arm of the ruling military.
Economists say Egypt needs to sign the loan agreement within six months to shore up confidence in an economy hit hard by the effects of political unrest following Hosni Mubarak's ouster last year.
The IMF has made broad political consensus a condition for the loan, but both the country's powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the second most powerful party, Al-Nour, said Wednesday they will not support accepting the loan as long as the government's plan remains vague.
The $3.2 billion dollar loan is about a quarter of what the government says Egypt needs to prop up reserves and external financing in order to avoid an uncontrolled devaluation of the Egyptian currency.
The stand-off leaves Egyptian politicians and officials with just a few months to quibble, since Cairo will eventually have to sign the deal with the IMF, according to the London-based consultancy Capital Economics.
"In the near-term, uncertainty is never a good thing for financial markets," said Neil Shearing, a senior economist at Capital Economics.
"Two months is probably the maximum we can wait," he said. "It's not the case that the deal needs to be signed and delivered and done in two months, but Egypt cannot go for six more months without some kind of assistance."
Egypt elects a new president at the end of May, and the winner is to be announced a month later. Then the military pledges to hand over power, putting a time frame around the contacts over the loan. If the military leaves it all for the new civilian government, the six-month target might not be met.
The chief economist of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, Abdel-Hafez al-Sady, told The Associated Press that the Cabinet has put forth a plan to request the money, but it has not said how Egypt would spend the funds or repay the loan.
On Monday, Al-Sady and other Brotherhood leaders met with the head of the IMF delegation, regional director Masoud Ahmed. The IMF team had meetings with members of parliament on Tuesday and wound up its three-day visit Wednesday.
Finance Minister Mumtaz al-Said told the Al-Ahram daily that the IMF did not object to the government's economic program. He blamed the dispute on the Brotherhood and other parties that want to see the government replaced.
The Brotherhood's party, which controls nearly half of seats in parliament, wants transparency, al-Sady said.
"The Brotherhood does not trust the current government, because ministers are not giving us correct figures," he said.
The party has been in a power struggle with the ruling generals, who took power after Mubarak was forced to step down last year in a popular uprising. The Brotherhood's lawmakers have recently stepped up calls for the current government, appointed by the military, to be fired.
Al-Sady said that the government has promised to review its economic program for the loan, but that so far "we are just hearing words and not seeing action."
Similarly, the head of the ultraconservative Islamic Al-Nour party, which controls 25 percent of seats in parliament, said his party rejects the government's plan and said that corruption under Mubarak persists under the new government.
"All the various committees in parliament have rejected the government's political platform," Emad Abdel-Ghafour told the AP.
The year of political uncertainty and unrest have decimated tourism and driven investors away, and a persistent wave of strikes and protests have badly hit productivity. The government has used foreign currency reserves to protect the local currency from collapse.
The country's net international reserves were down 50 percent year-on-year by the end of December, leaving serious questions about how the country can raise new funds to cover a widening deficit.
Aid packages from the EU, oil-rich Arab Gulf states and elsewhere are contingent on Egypt signing off on the IMF loan.
A newly launched grass roots campaign called "Drop Egypt's Debt" is lobbying for loans taken during Mubarak's era to be written off as "illegitimate debts."
Associated Pressanencephaly kevin youkilis tesla model x lou gehrig act jenny mccarthy toby mac
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
Compass by Lawrence Malstaf
I am wearing cyborg trousers. And they are angry, totalitarian trousers. When they sense that I?m walking in forbidden zones, or I dare to approach another human being, a motor-driven weight swings violently around my waist, stopping suddenly to force me off balance, to cajole me into walking in another direction. I can fight it - but the weight shift produces a powerful and uncomfortable wrenching force. It?s much easier not to resist.
Titled Compass, this wearable robotic ?orientation device? is one of the interactive exhibits at Robots and Avatars, an exhibition at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, Merseyside. Along with London design company Body>Data>Space and Slovenian art collective Kibla, FACT has put together a show revealing some of the ways robots and on-screen avatars could change our lives, as the borders between our physical and virtual lives begin to blur.
The work of Belgium-based artist Lawrence Malstaf, Compass looks peculiar, like an inside-out car wheel; the alloy wheel rim is on the outside and a tyre?s inner tube lines its interior. I stepped inside it and hoisted it up to waist height, whereupon Malstaf?s colleague Tom Kok switched on a pump, inflating the inner tube so that it fitted me tightly. With a couple of supporting braces fastened over my shoulders I was ready to go.
I felt like I was wearing a wrap-around version of a cinema ice cream vendor?s tray. Resting my forearms in two half drainpipes handily provided to protect the wearer's limbs from the weights whizzing around the wheel rim, I pressed the start button and began to wander around a dark, square room. Malstaf has placed magnetic-field-generating coils beneath some of the carpet tiles, which produce ?forbidden zones? that Compass senses, and interprets as off limits to me. In addition, infrared sensors tell the device when I try to associate with humans - something else that?s off limits. When I transgress its rules, it tries to throw me of course with haptic compulsion. After a while I get the message and by tentatively exploring the space I?m in, I learn from the robot?s responses how to use it without hassle.
Crude though it is, it was intriguing to have a robotic technology attempt to control me in this way. With location-aware technology proliferating, could something like this, in an offender-monitoring tag or anklet, one day make life difficult for criminals? And why "kettle" demonstrators if you could slap these on the ringleaders and steer them where you want? Compass embodies a concept we might, or at least ought to, be familiar with - a technology that it is easier not to resist. The realisation that giving in to the machine is a lot less hassle than resisting it echoes the way millions of us have already grudgingly accepted a host of invasive technologies for the sake of an easier life. Many of us resign ourselves to Facebook?s baffling privacy settings and risk ID theft, sign up to Google?s free services which, post-hoc, have now all been linked to profile us, or simply own a smartphone stuffed with free apps that mine contacts data, because it is just too hard to do things another way. Will we cave just as easily to robotic invasions? Probably.
Putting control firmly back in human hands, a static robot model perched on a plinth presents an entertaining idea. Called RoboVox, it?s a downscaled version of this?eight-metre-high monster robot that?s been touring Europe. It receives text messages and a computer inside the robot converts your SMS to speech, voiced in a slightly-bored-voice-of-doom patois with red LEDs across its "mouth" illuminating every syllable. Creator Martin Bricelj hopes people will get it to voice ?your statement, protest or declaration of love?. RoboVox is aiming to give a voice back to people whose voices usually get ?lost in the sound of the mass?, using more technology to combat the depersonalising effect of information overload.
ADA by Karine Smigla-Bobinski
But this focus on empowering the individual is notably lacking from some of the other exhibits. ADA, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is described as an ?analogue drawing prosthetic?, which aims to create a crowdsourced set of images from the collective movements of FACT visitors. The transparent plastic helium balloon - four metres in diameter - is covered in 10-centimetre-long spikes made of coal. The idea is that visitors bounce ADA off the walls (this is great fun by the way, and involves much ducking as the ball whizzes past with its spiky coal pencils spinning), so the coal impacts make random marks on the papered walls. It?s a very low-tech way of coding for an image, says Smigla-Bobinski, so she named it after Ada Lovelace, co-worker and programmer of Charles Babbage?s 19th-century mechanical, cogwheel-based proto-computer, The Difference Engine. As you enter the room, ADA is floating in the space before you. It?s a cool idea, and one I?d describe as "off the wall" - if it wasn?t also off the floor.
A locally-developed exhibit called MeYouAndUs requires less active interaction. The best way to describe it is a time-delayed video mirror. A camera shoots the crowd in one of the gallery?s rooms and these images are shown on an oversized LCD TV after a time delay. With other effects, such as speeding up the delayed action intermittently, you get an engrossing and slightly unpredictable result that it?s hard to stop watching. On a second screen, people arriving in the room see video of their head, chest, midriff, legs and feet chopped and swapped with those of many other visitors.
This modern live video take on bendy fairground mirrors is insanely popular. ?People really, really love it - there?s something weirdly compelling about it. People are fascinated by their own image and their identities being combined,? says FACT director Mike Stubbs, who?s also a film maker. And they?re planning to go global - FACT plan to link MeYouAndUs to a gallery in Ghana, allowing identities from multiple countries to be merged to get ?very diverse communities interacting,? says Stubbs.
If people can adore an installation that hijacks their live image - mocks it even, by mashing it up with those of others - something odd is happening. Has the latter-day prevalence of CCTV got us caving into image-related invasions of privacy without a thought? It seems the time for resistance passed before we even noticed we had a choice.
Robots and Avatars is exhibited at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology,? Liverpool, UK and runs?until 27 May 2012
?
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John H. Seinfeld, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, was recognized for research leading to a greater understanding of the origin, chemistry and evolution of particles in the atmosphere. Seinfeld's work has helped foster efforts to control the effects of air pollution on public health.
Seinfeld's recent work includes research into how soot billowing from diesel trucks and industrial smokestacks contributes to climate change and how biogenic emissions from plants and trees affects air quality. He also recently helped administer one of the largest air-quality experiments in the Los Angeles Basin.
Kirk R. Smith, a professor of global environmental health at UC Berkeley, was recognized for research demonstrating the debilitating risk of air pollution in developing nations. A disproportionate share of the risk falls on women and children. Many children fall behind in cognitive development because of their exposure, Smith's work has shown.
Smith demonstrated that acute exposure to air pollutants occurs in rural, indoor settings in countries where biomass and coal are the primary sources of fuel. Pollutants of that nature represent one of the world's greatest health threats. Smith has documented a heightened risk of pneumonia, cataracts, tuberculosis, heart disease and chronic lung disease.
"Professors Smith and Seinfeld are giants in the efforts to understand and reduce the devastating impacts of air pollution," Owen T. Lind, a biology professor at Baylor University and the chairman of the award's executive committee, said in a statement. Lind said the pair's research has "dramatically advanced our understanding of the ways in which air pollution threatens our health as individuals and the health of the planet."
Seinfeld said that he was "delighted and humbled" to receive the award, and that he was optimistic that scientists will continue to make progress in tackling air pollution and tracing pollutants to their source.
"A great deal of progress has been made in understanding what these particles are and where they're coming from," he said. "Certainly, the efforts that have been made in the last two decades in controlling air pollution in general, and especially in California and Los Angeles, are showing results."
Smith was traveling Monday and could not be reached for comment.
The Tyler Prize, administered by USC, is named for the prize's founders, John and Alice Tyler. It has been awarded since 1973 to researchers and authors who "confer great benefit upon humankind through environmental restoration and achievement."
Previous winners include Edward O. Wilson, a biologist and naturalist, and Jane Goodall, a conservationist and one of the world's leading experts on chimpanzees.
Smith and Seinfeld will each receive a $100,000 cash prize and a gold medal.
scott.gold@latimes.com
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Mitt Romney scored a win in Puerto Rico's Republican primary this weekend, pocketing all of the territory's 20 GOP delegates (because he finished with more than 50 percent of the vote) in the bruising race for the GOP presidential nomination.
With about 83 percent of total ballots accounted for early Monday in Puerto Rico, the Republican presidential candidate had garnered more than 98,000 votes.
That's 83 percent of the total, with Rick Santorum a distant second at 8 percent.
The other two candidates, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, each won approximately 2 percent of the votes cast, according to CNN's Puerto Rico results.
Even as the vote was being counted in Puerto Rico, Romney, Santorum and the others were already back on the mainland vying for delegates.
Illinois holds its primary on Tuesday and Louisiana on Saturday.
CNN's latest delegate estimates show Romney with 518 delegates to Santorum's 239. Gingrich has 139 delegates, and libertarian champion Paul has 69.
To secure the nomination, 1,144 delegates are needed. Romney has the inside track, but his opponents have shown zero willingness to quit the fight.
By blocking Romney from reaching that benchmark - even if they fall short themselves - they could vie for the nomination at the GOP national convention.
Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and Romney's chief rival of late, was in Louisiana late Sunday, where he is expected to win the primary.
Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was in Illinois where polls indicate he holds a small lead over Santorum, with Gingrich and Paul well behind.
Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/03/puerto-rico-primary-results-mitt-romney-wins-easily/
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