Japan finance minister Aso: weak yen result, not goal of anti-deflation policies

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Finance Minister Taro Aso on Sunday said it was not Tokyo's goal to weaken the yen and its policies were purely aimed at beating deflation, brushing off foreign concerns about currency wars ahead of a G20 meeting in Moscow.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's calls for aggressive action by the Bank of Japan (BOJ), which has prompted a slide in the yen, has raised alarm in Europe it could contribute to a "currency war" as other central banks adopt similar policies.

"We have launched policies aimed at ending deflation. As a result, the stock price has risen and the yen has weakened," Aso told Japanese public broadcaster NHK on Sunday. "(The yen weakness) is not the goal, the goal is to beat deflation," he said.

Japan may have to defend its actions at a Group of 20 meeting of financial leaders on February 15-16 to stem the criticism of its plan to revive the country's economic fortunes.

The BOJ last month agreed to double its inflation target to 2 percent and made an open-ended commitment to buying assets from 2014, measures intended to lift the economy out of its fourth recession since 2000 and years of deflation.

Aso also said that Japan "endured without complaining" when the yen strengthened as a result of the global financial crisis in 2008.

The yen on Friday skidded to its lowest level since May 2010. Last week the dollar rose 2 percent versus the yen and after 12 straight weeks of gains is up 16.6 percent on the Japanese currency.

(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/japan-finance-minister-aso-weak-yen-result-not-070740079--sector.html

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Panetta says politics at play in Hagel questioning (The Arizona Republic)

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Mexico probes if blast was attack or accident, 33 dead

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's government vowed on Friday to find out whether an explosion that killed 33 people at the headquarters of its state-run oil monopoly Pemex was a deliberate attack or yet another stain on the company's poor safety record.

Rescue workers continued to pull bodies from the debris on Friday and officials said the search would continue until they account for everyone inside the Mexico City building.

Government officials have refused to speculate over what caused the explosion on Thursday but said they had deployed large teams of experts to pore through the wreckage.

"The government is determined to find out the truth, whatever that may be ... whether it was an accident, negligence or an attack, whatever," Attorney General Jesus Murillo said on Friday evening. "We are not going to rule out anything."

He said the explosion did not cause a fire but refused to be drawn on what that implied about the cause. Parts of the reinforced concrete ground floor of the building caved in, and the ceiling was a mess of twisted metal pipes and ducts.

The blast at Pemex's complex in the capital killed at least 33 people and a further 121 were injured. The scenes of chaos have dealt another blow to Pemex's image, just as Mexico's new government is seeking to open up the oil industry to more private investment.

Speculation over the cause has ranged from a bomb attack, to a gas leak, to a boiler blowing up.

"A fatal incident like yesterday's cannot be explained in two hours. We are working with the best teams in Mexico and from overseas. We will not speculate," Pemex's chief executive, Emilio Lozoya, said on Friday.

FIRST TEST FOR NEW PRESIDENT

New President Enrique Pena Nieto declared three days of national mourning.

Pemex, which was created when Mexico nationalized its oil industry in 1938, is a symbol of self-sufficiency but it has also been blighted by corruption, inefficiency and frequent accidents costing hundreds of lives.

The latest Pemex disaster is one of the first serious tests for Pena Nieto, who must overcome the legacy of his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled for much of the last century.

After seven decades in power, the party gained a reputation for corruption and cover-ups that have made Mexicans skeptical of whether they are being told the truth.

Investors have been closely following how far he will go in enticing private capital to boost flagging oil output in a country that is the world's No. 7 producer.

"This incident speaks very poorly of the image of Pemex management, and that's interpreted as additional risk in the market," said Miriam Grunstein, an energy researcher at Mexico's CIDE think tank.

A Pemex official said the damaged area of the company's headquarters was used for human resources in the corporate and refining divisions. It did not have a boiler or gas installations, the official said.

Former Pemex worker Ricardo Marin, 53, said there was nothing in the building that would explode and that the kitchen, where there would be gas, was on the other side.

"The only thing that occurs to me is that it was an attack - but against whom? There's no one with an important job down there," he said, waiting outside the Pemex hospital where a friend was in intensive care. "Maybe it could be a message to Pena Nieto, but not even that has any logic."

Pemex office worker Alfonso Caballero, who was one floor above the blast at the time, said he did not smell any gas and guessed it had been caused by machinery.

Mexican officials have not ruled out sabotage.

An official at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said an "international response team" was on its way to Mexico City at the request of the Mexican government. The team includes explosive specialists and fire experts.

Pemex CEO Lozoya said the four floors most affected by the explosion normally had about 200 to 250 people working on them. About 10,000 staff work in the entire complex.

Red Cross official Isaac Oxenhaut said the ceiling had collapsed in three lower floors of the Pemex building.

The blast followed a September fire at a Pemex gas facility near the northern city of Reynosa that killed 30 people. More than 300 were killed when a Pemex natural gas plant on the outskirts of Mexico City blew up in 1984.

Eight years later, about 200 people were killed and 1,500 injured after a series of underground gas explosions in Guadalajara, Mexico's second-biggest city. An official investigation found Pemex was partly to blame.

'NO PRIVATIZATION'

Whatever caused the explosion, the deaths and destruction will put the spotlight back on safety at Pemex, which only a couple of hours beforehand had issued a statement on Twitter saying it had managed to improve its record on accidents.

"I suspect this was a bomb," said David Shields, an independent Mexico City-based oil analyst. "There are clandestine armies across Mexico, not just the (drug) cartels."

Shields pointed to the bombing of several Pemex pipelines in the eastern state of Veracruz in 2007. A shadowy Marxist rebel movement took credit for some of the blasts.

Meanwhile, George Baker, director of Energia.com, a Houston-based energy research center, said past history suggested the government could seek to exploit the incident.

He pointed to the 1992 Guadalajara blast and the subsequent deal that followed to overhaul the Pemex administration led by then-President Carlos Salinas, like Pena Nieto a PRI member.

"Salinas said he wanted a response from Pemex, and months later Pemex announced a restructuring. The restructuring had nothing to do with the Guadalajara accident, but it was used as a pivot to do something," Baker said.

Pena Nieto has yet to reveal details of his Pemex reform plan, which already faces opposition from the left.

Both Pena Nieto and his finance minister were this week at pains to stress the company will not be privatized.

(Additional reporting by Adriana Barrera, Simon Gardner, Krista Hughes and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix; Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Kieran Murray, Louise Ireland, Vicki Allen, Eric Beech and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mexico-probes-blast-attack-accident-33-dead-011910964.html

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Fury over video of Egypt protester stripped and beaten

By Shaimaa Fayed and Peter Graff, Reuters

CAIRO -- After eight days of protests that killed nearly 60 people, a video of one demonstrator stripped naked, dragged across the ground and beaten with truncheons by helmeted riot police has fired Egyptians to a new level of outrage.

Hamada Saber, a middle-aged man, lay in a police hospital on Saturday, the morning after he was shown on television naked, covered in soot and thrashed by half a dozen policemen who had pulled him to an armored vehicle near the presidential palace.

President Muhammed Morsi's office promised an investigation of the incident, which followed the deadliest wave of bloodshed of his seven-month rule. His opponents say it proves that he has chosen to order a brutal crackdown like that carried out by Hosni Mubarak against the uprising that toppled him in 2011.

The violence continues in Egypt and Friday it spread to the presidential palace. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

"Morsi has been stripped bare and has lost his legitimacy. Done," tweeted Ahmed Maher, founder of the April 6 youth movement that helped launch the anti-Mubarak protests.

Another protester was shot dead on Friday and more than 100 were injured, many seriously, after running battles between police and demonstrators who attacked the palace with petrol bombs.

That unrest followed eight days of violence that saw dozens of protesters shot dead in the Suez Canal city of Port Said and Mursi respond by declaring a curfew and state of emergency there and in two other cities.

But none of the bloodshed -- which the authorities have blamed on the need for police to control violent crowds -- has quite resonated like the images of police abusing a man at their feet -- clearly helpless, prone and no possible threat.

"Stripping naked and dragging an Egyptian is a crime that shows the excessive violence of the security forces and the continuation of its repressive practices -- a crime for which the president and his interior minister are responsible," liberal politician Amr Hamzawy said on Twitter.

The incident was an unmistakable reminder of the beating of a woman by riot police on Tahrir Square in December 2011. Images of her being dragged and stomped on -- her black abaya cloak torn open to reveal her naked torso and blue bra -- became a rallying symbol for the revolution and undermined the interim military rulers who held power between Mubarak's fall and Mursi's rise.

Harsher police action
The rise of Morsi -- the first freely elected leader in Egypt's 5,000-year history -- is probably the single most important change achieved by two years of revolts across the Arab world. But seven months since taking office, he has failed to unite Egyptians. Street unrest and political instability threaten to render the most populous Arab state ungovernable.

At least two more people were killed in clashes in Egypt. The violence forced President Mohammad Morsi to cut short a trip to Europe and return to Cairo. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.

The latest round of violence was triggered by the second anniversary of the uprising against Mubarak and death sentences handed down last week in Port Said over a soccer stadium riot.

Morsi?has had little opportunity to reform the police and security forces he inherited from Mubarak and the military men.

But the police action against protests this time has been far deadlier than it was even a few months ago, when bigger crowds demonstrated against a new constitution. That suggests to opponents that Mursi has ordered a tougher response.

"The instructions of the interior minister to use excessive violence in confronting protesters does not seem like surprising behavior given the clear incitement by prominent figures in the presidency, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood to which the president belongs, and other parties in solidarity with them," said Khaled Daoud, spokesman for the opposition National Front.

The liberal, leftist and secularist opposition accuses Mursi of betraying the revolution that toppled Mubarak by concentrating too much power in his own hands and those of his Muslim Brotherhood, a formerly underground Islamist movement.

/

On the second anniversary of the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, huge crowds take to the streets in five cities.

Morsi?and the Brotherhood accuse the opposition of stoking street unrest to further their demands for a national unity government as a way to retake power they lost at the ballot box.

In announcing an investigation into the beating of Saber, Morsi's?office made clear he was still pointing the blame at the political opponents who have encouraged protests.

"What has transpired over the past day is not political expression, but rather acts of criminality. The presidency will not tolerate vandalism or attacks on individuals and property. The police have responded to these actions in a restrained manner," Morsi's?office said.

"Doubtless, in the heat of the violence, there can be violations of civil liberties, and the presidency equally will not tolerate such abuses. In one incident, an individual was seen to be dragged and beaten by police. The Minister of Interior has, appropriately, announced an investigation."

Related:

Fire breaks out in Egypt's presidential palace grounds amid violent clashes

Egypt army chief: Using military to secure the streets is 'very risky'

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/02/16818236-video-of-protester-stripped-and-beaten-fires-egypt-fury?lite

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Pay Less for Expensive Products by Finding Their Market Clones

When a company sees an opportunity to charge more, it takes it. That's why you'll often find the same product marketed differently for more or less money. If you want to save on an expensive item, however, you just need to find its cheaper clone.

Personal finance and frugal living blog Wisebread points out a number of market clones that you can save your money on. Here's one particularly ridiculous item:

Excedrin Migraine and Excedrin Extra Strength are exactly the same product except that Excedrin Migraine costs a dollar or more per 24 caplet bottle. Again, generics can save you even more.

The same goes for diphenhydramine when marketed as a sleeping agent. Benadryl is the same thing and often times you'll find it in bulk for less money than a 12-pack of the "sleeping pill" version. The moral of the story is simple: if you find something that seems overpriced and/or seems like it could have multiple uses, find out if there's a cheaper option. Many times there is. For more examples, hit up the post over at Wisebread.

Market Clones: How to Pay Drastically Less for Pricey Products | Wisebread

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/PRAwBc7LzBE/pay-less-for-expensive-products-by-finding-their-market-clones

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Genome-wide atlas of gene enhancers in the brain online

Friday, February 1, 2013

Future research into the underlying causes of neurological disorders such as autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia, should greatly benefit from a first-of-its-kind atlas of gene-enhancers in the cerebrum (telencephalon). This new atlas, developed by a team led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is a publicly accessible Web-based collection of data that identifies and locates thousands of gene-regulating elements in a region of the brain that is of critical importance for cognition, motor functions and emotion.

"Understanding how the brain develops and functions, and how it malfunctions in neurological disorders, remains one of the most daunting challenges in contemporary science," says Axel Visel, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab's Genomics Division. "We've created a genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the human brain - the switches that tell genes when and where they need to be switched on or off. This enhancer atlas will enable other scientists to study in more detail how individual genes are regulated during development of the brain, and how genetic mutations may impact human neurological disorders."

Visel is the corresponding author of a paper in the journal Cell that describes this work. The paper is titled "A High-Resolution Enhancer Atlas of the Developing Telencephalon." (See below for a list of co-authors.)

The cerebrum is the most highly developed region of the human brain. It houses the cerebral cortex, the so-called "gray matter" where complex information processing events take place, and the basal ganglia, a brain region that helps control movement throughout the body and is involved in certain types of learning. Many of the genes responsible for development of the cerebrum have been identified but most of the DNA elements responsible for expressing these genes - turning them on/off - have not. This is especially true for gene enhancers, sequences of DNA that act to amplify the expression of a specific gene. Characterizing gene enhancers tends to be difficult because an enhancer does not have to be located directly adjacent to the gene it is enhancing, but can in fact be located hundreds of thousands of DNA basepairs away.

"In addition to acting over long distances and being located upstream, downstream or in introns of protein-coding genes, the sequence features of gene enhancers are poorly understood," Visel says. "However, gene-centric studies have provided strong evidence that gene enhancers are critical for normal embryonic development of the brain and have also linked human diseases to perturbed enhancer sequences."

Visel and an international team of researchers met the challenges of systematic identification and functional characterization of gene enhancers in the cerebrum through a combination of ChIP-seq studies and large-scale histological analyses in transgenic mice, in which the activity patterns of human telencephalon enhancers can be studied. ChIP-seq, which stands for "chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing," is a technique for genome-wide profiling of proteins that interact with DNA.

This combination of approaches enabled Visel and his colleagues to identify over 4,600 candidate embryonic forebrain enhancers. Furthermore, studying mouse embryos they mapped the activity of 145 of these enhancers at high resolution to define where exactly in the developing brain they drive the expression of their respective target genes. The result is a comprehensive, electronically accessible database for investigating the gene regulatory mechanisms of cerebrum development, and for studying the roles of distant-acting enhancers in neurodevelopmental disorders.

"By mapping hundreds of gene enhancer sequences and defining where exactly in the developing brain they are active, our enhancer atlas provides important information to connect non-coding mutations to actual biological functions," Visel says.

As an example of how the enhancer atlas could be used in this manner, Visel says that if through genetic studies a certain region of the human genome has been linked to a specific neurological disorder but that region does not contain any protein-coding genes, checking the atlas could reveal whether the region is home to any distant-acting gene enhancers.

"If there is a gene enhancer in the region," Visel says, "researchers could determine exactly how the enhancer or a mutated form is related to the disorder. This encompasses a lot of territory in the human genome. More than half of all the disease-related DNA sequence changes discovered in genome-wide screens to date fall within the 98-percent of human genome sequences that do not code for proteins. These 'non-coding' sequences were once dismissed by many as 'junk DNA' but are now known to harbor critical gene regulatory functions."

Visel says the enhancer atlas also provides a "molecular toolbox" that can be used to re-locate the expression of certain genes to specific regions of the brain in experimental applications. This could help researchers gain new insights into how the brain develops and how the human brain has evolved.

"The evolution of the gene regulatory architecture may have been one of the drivers of the extremely advanced brains that we see in primates in general and humans in particular," he says.

While continuing to map and annotate additional enhancers, Visel and his colleagues are now also studying the biological mechanisms related to some of these enhancers in more detail.

"We still only partially understand how gene enhancers work in the context of a living brain, i.e., what proteins bind to them, how mutations change their function, and what exactly the role of these sequences is in the context of human neurological disorders," Visel says. "Clearly, there is more work to do."

###

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://www.lbl.gov

Thanks to DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126586/Genome_wide_atlas_of_gene_enhancers_in_the_brain_online

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Measure of US manufacturing jumps in December

WASHINGTON (AP) ? U.S. manufacturing activity grew at a faster pace in January, driven by an increase in new orders and more hiring at factories.

The Institute for Supply Management said Friday that its index of manufacturing activity jumped to 53.1 in January from 50.2 in December. It was the highest reading since April, when the index hit 54.1.

Any reading above 50 indicates expansion.

The second straight monthly increase in the index showed manufacturing is starting to grow again after struggling through most of 2012. Uncertainty about tax increases and deep government spending cuts led many companies to reduce orders for machinery and equipment earlier this year. And a weaker global economy dampened demand for U.S. exports.

The report was also encouraging because it showed that demand for factory goods increased even as consumers started to pay higher Social Security taxes. That left them with less take-home pay, which could hurt consumer spending.

The survey came hours after the Labor Department reported that the job market held steady at the end of last year even as economic growth stalled. The Labor Department said employers added 157,000 jobs in January and job growth was stronger than previously thought in December and November.

Manufacturers added 4,000 jobs last month, the fourth straight monthly increase.

"There's a fair bit of optimism here to start the year," said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist with BTIG LLC, a trading firm based in New York. He said the data show that the economy "is resilient to the debate in Washington" about possible tax increases and spending cuts.

Greenhaus said the solid manufacturing gains, especially in new orders and employment, suggest that "the larger story remains intact, of a moderate, ongoing recovery."

The ISM report showed that 13 of the 18 industries surveyed saw increased activity last month. They included manufacturers of plastics and rubber, textiles, furniture, printing, and apparel. Four industries reporting contraction: minerals, computers and electronics, wood and chemicals.

The survey's new orders index returned to growth, rising to 53.3 in January from 49.7 in December. Companies reported adding to their inventories in January after two months of declines, a sign that factories are preparing to boost production.

Slower growth in stockpiles was a key reason the economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the October-December quarter, the first contraction in 3 ? years. Deep cuts in defense spending and fewer exports also contributed to the decline.

Most analysts predict that the economy will grow again in the January-March quarter, though likely at a lackluster annual rate of around 1 percent. They expect the economy to expand about 2 percent for the full year.

A big question is how consumers respond to the increase in Social Security taxes. A person earning $50,000 a year will have about $1,000 less to spend in 2013. A household with two high-paid workers will have up to $4,500 less. Taxes rose after a 2 percent cut, in place for two years, expired Jan. 1.

Analysts expect the Social Security tax increase to shave about a half-point off economic growth in 2013, since consumers drive about 70 percent of economic activity.

The ISM is a trade group of supply management professionals. Its index is based on a monthly survey of manufacturing executives.

___

Daniel Wagner can be reached at www.twitter.com/wagnerreports .

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-02-01-US-Economy-Manufacturing/id-0ebd94d8d0284b6982490a576caa9d34

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