NEW YORK (Reuters) ? AOL Inc Chief Executive Tim Armstrong remains committed to keeping the company independent and is not looking at Yahoo's assets even as AOL's larger rivals seek to consolidate.
Armstrong said during Reuters' Global Media Summit on Monday that AOL has not signed a nondisclosure agreement with Yahoo, its much larger competitor that is currently seeking a possible sale of its assets.
Several potential bidders interested in Yahoo have signed confidentiality agreements in recent weeks.
The former Google executive reiterated the company's strategy of growing the AOL brand, once known for its dial up services, into a media powerhouse dependent on advertising revenue.
In October Reuters quoted sources as saying that Armstrong had been meeting with top shareholders about a possible combination with Yahoo. But Armstrong said that he was only responding to shareholder questions about AOL's future in the event of a Yahoo sale.
"We tried to answer the question to the least of our ability," Armstrong said.
AOL would be left out in the cold if Yahoo ended up in the hands of one of its competitors. Microsoft, for instance, is open again to the possibility of a Yahoo takeover after being infamously rebuffed in 2008. Microsoft recently signed a confidentiality agreement to look at Yahoo's books, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Armstrong brushed off those concerns, emphasizing that AOL's focus is on becoming a top online content destination.
"Our strategy has been built in an 'Art of War' way," he said referencing the book by the ancient Chinese military general Sun Tzu, beloved by modern executives.
Armstrong faces the difficult task of convincing investors, who have sent AOL shares down more than 40 percent year-to-date, that his strategy is working, however.
He argued that the company, once a by-word for online access, has made great strides. Revenue is down only 6 percent in the third quarter, versus more than 20 percent in the same period a year ago, while at the same time AOL has been slashing costs. Armstrong repeatedly placed AOL's performance in the context of the decade-long marriage with Time Warner, roundly criticized as one of the worst mergers in corporate history. AOL was spun off from Time Warner in 2009.
The two-year turnaround, which has consisted of several acquisitions, sales, and management restructuring, has made AOL an attractive place for top talent, Armstrong argued despite the recent departures of high-ranking executives like Brad Garlinghouse, head of its Silicon Valley office and Saul Hansell, the former New York Times writer who headed its Seed content platform.
"People will continue to see a drumbeat of talent coming to the company," he said.
Armstrong also had to cope with the recent departure of Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch. AOL acquired the influential blog a year ago for about $30 million, according to a source at the time.
Arrington's departure hasn't dented the cache of the technology blog, insisted Armstrong.
"TechCrunch, from a valuation standpoint has gone up since we acquired it," Armstrong said. "It's been very successful both from a traffic and profitability (standpoint). It's a more successful business than when we bought it a year ago."
(Reporting by Jennifer Saba and Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Peter Lauria and Carol Bishopric)
BEIJING (Reuters) ? China's Commerce Minister plans to lead an investment delegation to Europe next year, in hopes that the crisis roiling the continent will open up some plum assets for acquisition.
China has been reluctant to publically commit to buying additional European bonds, despite European pleas for help in shoring up finances there, but could be much more interested in getting hard assets for its cash.
"Next year, we will continue to send a delegation for promoting trade and investment to the European countries," Chen Deming told a gathering of Chinese firms with overseas investments on Monday.
"Some European countries are facing a debt crisis and hope to convert their assets to cash and would like foreign capital to acquire their enterprises. We will be closely watching and pushing forward the progress."
His comments are in keeping with an editorial in the Financial Times this weekend by Lou Jiwei, the head of China Investment Corp (CIC), who wrote that China was keen to make equity investments in Western infrastructure, especially in Britain.
Chen warned that China may fight back if other countries use trade protectionism against it.
Chinese officials repeatedly emphasize the overseas deals that have fallen through because of political opposition; although far more Chinese purchases have cleared with few problems.
China's largest state-owned shipping firm COSCO (1919.HK) has already made a major investment into Greece's historic Piraeus port (OLPr.AT), as part of Greek divestment plans.
Broadly speaking, overseas investment by Chinese state-owned enterprises has so far been primarily geared toward resources purchases, while CIC has been criticised at home for taking equity stakes in Western financial institutions.
CIC was particularly interested in infrastructure projects where governments could offer lower taxes or discounted bank loans in return for investment, Lou wrote in the Financial Times.
China has been colder to pitches to buy more European nations' bonds without getting anything in return. A Spanish delegation was met with polite disinterest from Chinese officials earlier this month, sources said.
The visiting Spanish minister also tried to interest CIC in upcoming divestments of state holdings in savings banks known as cajas, in the national lottery company, airports and other infrastructure.
Commerce Minister Chen cautioned reporters that China itself faces risks of further economic slowdown in 2012.
Annual inflation in 2011 is likely to exceed 5.5 percent -- overshooting the government target of 4 percent -- and inflationary pressures will continue next year, Chen said.
(Reporting by Aileen Wang and Ken Wills; Writing by Lucy Hornby; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
RT @nalts I love you. But if a $2 waffle maker came between us... I'd have to kill you. http://t.co/JJtwiAtz
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) ? The mother of one of three American students arrested during a protest in Cairo says they're preparing to leave Egypt.
Joy Sweeney tells The Associated Press that her 19-year-old son Derrik and two other students are expected to fly from Cairo to Frankfurt, Germany, late Friday U.S. time.
She says her son will fly from there to Washington on Saturday and then on to St. Louis, where he'll arrive late Saturday night.
Sweeney says she's "ecstatic" and plans to make her son a belated Thanksgiving dinner.
The three college students who attend the American University in Cairo were arrested Sunday on the roof of a university building near Cairo's Tahrir Square. Officials accused them of throwing firebombs at security forces fighting with protesters.
Contact: David Cameron david_cameron@hms.harvard.edu 617-960-7221 Harvard Medical School
Carefully selected young, healthy neurons can functionally integrate into diseased brain circuitry
BOSTON, MA -- Neuron transplants have repaired brain circuitry and substantially normalized function in mice with a brain disorder, an advance indicating that key areas of the mammalian brain are more reparable than was widely believed.
Collaborators from Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) transplanted normally functioning embryonic neurons at a carefully selected stage of their development into the hypothalamus of mice unable to respond to leptin, a hormone that regulates metabolism and controls body weight. These mutant mice usually become morbidly obese, but the neuron transplants repaired defective brain circuits, enabling them to respond to leptin and thus experience substantially less weight gain.
Repair at the cellular-level of the hypothalamus -- a critical and complex region of the brain that regulates phenomena such as hunger, metabolism, body temperature, and basic behaviors such as sex and aggression -- indicates the possibility of new therapeutic approaches to even higher level conditions such as spinal cord injury, autism, epilepsy, ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease.
"There are only two areas of the brain that are known to normally undergo ongoing large-scale neuronal replacement during adulthood on a cellular level -- so-called 'neurogenesis,' or the birth of new neurons -- the olfactory bulb and the subregion of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, with emerging evidence of lower level ongoing neurogenesis in the hypothalamus," said Jeffrey Macklis, Harvard University professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and HMS professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and one of three corresponding authors on the paper. "The neurons that are added during adulthood in both regions are generally smallish and are thought to act a bit like volume controls over specific signaling. Here we've rewired a high-level system of brain circuitry that does not naturally experience neurogenesis, and this restored substantially normal function."
The two other senior authors on the paper are Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, and Matthew Anderson, HMS professor of pathology at BIDMC.
The findings are to appear Nov. 25 in Science.
In 2005, Jeffrey Flier, then the George C. Reisman professor of medicine at BIDMC, published a landmark study, also in Science, showing that an experimental drug spurred the addition of new neurons in the hypothalamus and offered a potential treatment for obesity. But while the finding was striking, the researchers were unsure whether the new cells functioned like natural neurons.
Macklis's laboratory had for several years developed approaches to successfully transplanting developing neurons into circuitry of the cerebral cortex of mice with neurodegeneration or neuronal injury. In a landmark 2000 Nature study, the researchers demonstrated induction of neurogenesis in the cerebral cortex of adult mice, where it does not normally occur. While these and follow-up experiments appeared to rebuild brain circuitry anatomically, the new neurons' level of function remained uncertain.
To learn more, Flier, an expert in the biology of obesity, teamed up with Macklis, an expert in central nervous system development and repair, and Anderson, an expert in neuronal circuitries and mouse neurological disease models.
The groups used a mouse model in which the brain lacks the ability to respond to leptin. Flier and his lab have long studied this hormone, which is mediated by the hypothalamus. Deaf to leptin's signaling, these mice become dangerously overweight.
Prior research had suggested that four main classes of neurons enabled the brain to process leptin signaling. Postdocs Artur Czupryn and Maggie Chen, from Macklis's and Flier's labs, respectively, transplanted and studied the cellular development and integration of progenitor cells and very immature neurons from normal embryos into the hypothalamus of the mutant mice using multiple types of cellular and molecular analysis. To place the transplanted cells in exactly the correct and microscopic region of the recipient hypothalamus, they used a technique called high-resolution ultrasound microscopy, creating what Macklis called a "chimeric hypothalamus" -- like the animals with mixed features from Greek mythology.
Postdoc Yu-Dong Zhou, from Anderson's lab, performed in-depth electrophysiological analysis of the transplanted neurons and their function in the recipient circuitry, taking advantage of the neurons' glowing green from a fluorescent jellyfish protein carried as a marker.
These nascent neurons survived the transplantation process and developed structurally, molecularly, and electrophysiologically into the four cardinal types of neurons central to leptin signaling. The new neurons integrated functionally into the circuitry, responding to leptin, insulin, and glucose. Treated mice matured and weighed approximately 30 percent less than their untreated siblings or siblings treated in multiple alternate ways.
The researchers then investigated the precise extent to which these new neurons had become wired into the brain's circuitry using molecular assays, electron microscopy for visualizing the finest details of circuits, and patch-clamp electrophysiology, a technique in which researchers use small electrodes to investigate the characteristics of individual neurons and pairs of neurons in fine detail. Because the new cells were labeled with fluorescent tags, postdocs Czupryn, Zhou, and Chen could easily locate them.
The Zhou and Anderson team found that the newly developed neurons communicated to recipient neurons through normal synaptic contacts, and that the brain, in turn, signaled back. Responding to leptin, insulin and glucose, these neurons had effectively joined the brain's network and rewired the damaged circuitry.
"It's interesting to note that these embryonic neurons were wired in with less precision than one might think," Flier said. "But that didn't seem to matter. In a sense, these neurons are like antennas that were immediately able to pick up the leptin signal. From an energy-balance perspective, I'm struck that a relatively small number of genetically normal neurons can so efficiently repair the circuitry."
"The finding that these embryonic cells are so efficient at integrating with the native neuronal circuitry makes us quite excited about the possibility of applying similar techniques to other neurological and psychiatric diseases of particular interest to our laboratory," said Anderson.
The researchers call their findings a proof of concept for the broader idea that new neurons can integrate specifically to modify complex circuits that are defective in a mammalian brain.
The researchers are interested in further investigating controlled neurogenesis -- directing growth of new neurons in the brain from within -- the subject of much of Macklis's research as well as Flier's 2005 paper, and a potential route to new therapies.
"The next step for us is to ask parallel questions of other parts of the brain and spinal cord, those involved in ALS and with spinal cord injuries," Macklis said. "In these cases, can we rebuild circuitry in the mammalian brain? I suspect that we can."
###
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Jane and Lee Seidman Fund for Central Nervous System Research, the Emily and Robert Pearlstein Fund for Nervous System Repair, the Picower Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Autism Speaks, and the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation.
David Cameron
Citation:
Science, Vol. 334 (6059), November 25, 2011
"Transplanted Hypothalamic Neurons Restore Leptin Signaling and
Ameliorate Obesity in db/db Mice" by Czupryn et al.
Harvard Medical School (http://hms.harvard.edu) has more than 7,500 full-time faculty working in 11 academic departments located at the School's Boston campus or in one of 47 hospital-based clinical departments at 17 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes. Those affiliates include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Childrens Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Forsyth Institute, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Hebrew SeniorLife, Joslin Diabetes Center, Judge Baker Childrens Center, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, and VA Boston Healthcare System.
Celebrating the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1811, Massachusetts General Hospital (http://www.massgeneral.org) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of nearly $700 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School and consistently ranks in the top four in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is a clinical partner of the Joslin Diabetes Center and a research partner of the Harvard/Dana-Farber Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit http://www.bidmc.org.
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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.
Contact: David Cameron david_cameron@hms.harvard.edu 617-960-7221 Harvard Medical School
Carefully selected young, healthy neurons can functionally integrate into diseased brain circuitry
BOSTON, MA -- Neuron transplants have repaired brain circuitry and substantially normalized function in mice with a brain disorder, an advance indicating that key areas of the mammalian brain are more reparable than was widely believed.
Collaborators from Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) transplanted normally functioning embryonic neurons at a carefully selected stage of their development into the hypothalamus of mice unable to respond to leptin, a hormone that regulates metabolism and controls body weight. These mutant mice usually become morbidly obese, but the neuron transplants repaired defective brain circuits, enabling them to respond to leptin and thus experience substantially less weight gain.
Repair at the cellular-level of the hypothalamus -- a critical and complex region of the brain that regulates phenomena such as hunger, metabolism, body temperature, and basic behaviors such as sex and aggression -- indicates the possibility of new therapeutic approaches to even higher level conditions such as spinal cord injury, autism, epilepsy, ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease.
"There are only two areas of the brain that are known to normally undergo ongoing large-scale neuronal replacement during adulthood on a cellular level -- so-called 'neurogenesis,' or the birth of new neurons -- the olfactory bulb and the subregion of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, with emerging evidence of lower level ongoing neurogenesis in the hypothalamus," said Jeffrey Macklis, Harvard University professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and HMS professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and one of three corresponding authors on the paper. "The neurons that are added during adulthood in both regions are generally smallish and are thought to act a bit like volume controls over specific signaling. Here we've rewired a high-level system of brain circuitry that does not naturally experience neurogenesis, and this restored substantially normal function."
The two other senior authors on the paper are Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, and Matthew Anderson, HMS professor of pathology at BIDMC.
The findings are to appear Nov. 25 in Science.
In 2005, Jeffrey Flier, then the George C. Reisman professor of medicine at BIDMC, published a landmark study, also in Science, showing that an experimental drug spurred the addition of new neurons in the hypothalamus and offered a potential treatment for obesity. But while the finding was striking, the researchers were unsure whether the new cells functioned like natural neurons.
Macklis's laboratory had for several years developed approaches to successfully transplanting developing neurons into circuitry of the cerebral cortex of mice with neurodegeneration or neuronal injury. In a landmark 2000 Nature study, the researchers demonstrated induction of neurogenesis in the cerebral cortex of adult mice, where it does not normally occur. While these and follow-up experiments appeared to rebuild brain circuitry anatomically, the new neurons' level of function remained uncertain.
To learn more, Flier, an expert in the biology of obesity, teamed up with Macklis, an expert in central nervous system development and repair, and Anderson, an expert in neuronal circuitries and mouse neurological disease models.
The groups used a mouse model in which the brain lacks the ability to respond to leptin. Flier and his lab have long studied this hormone, which is mediated by the hypothalamus. Deaf to leptin's signaling, these mice become dangerously overweight.
Prior research had suggested that four main classes of neurons enabled the brain to process leptin signaling. Postdocs Artur Czupryn and Maggie Chen, from Macklis's and Flier's labs, respectively, transplanted and studied the cellular development and integration of progenitor cells and very immature neurons from normal embryos into the hypothalamus of the mutant mice using multiple types of cellular and molecular analysis. To place the transplanted cells in exactly the correct and microscopic region of the recipient hypothalamus, they used a technique called high-resolution ultrasound microscopy, creating what Macklis called a "chimeric hypothalamus" -- like the animals with mixed features from Greek mythology.
Postdoc Yu-Dong Zhou, from Anderson's lab, performed in-depth electrophysiological analysis of the transplanted neurons and their function in the recipient circuitry, taking advantage of the neurons' glowing green from a fluorescent jellyfish protein carried as a marker.
These nascent neurons survived the transplantation process and developed structurally, molecularly, and electrophysiologically into the four cardinal types of neurons central to leptin signaling. The new neurons integrated functionally into the circuitry, responding to leptin, insulin, and glucose. Treated mice matured and weighed approximately 30 percent less than their untreated siblings or siblings treated in multiple alternate ways.
The researchers then investigated the precise extent to which these new neurons had become wired into the brain's circuitry using molecular assays, electron microscopy for visualizing the finest details of circuits, and patch-clamp electrophysiology, a technique in which researchers use small electrodes to investigate the characteristics of individual neurons and pairs of neurons in fine detail. Because the new cells were labeled with fluorescent tags, postdocs Czupryn, Zhou, and Chen could easily locate them.
The Zhou and Anderson team found that the newly developed neurons communicated to recipient neurons through normal synaptic contacts, and that the brain, in turn, signaled back. Responding to leptin, insulin and glucose, these neurons had effectively joined the brain's network and rewired the damaged circuitry.
"It's interesting to note that these embryonic neurons were wired in with less precision than one might think," Flier said. "But that didn't seem to matter. In a sense, these neurons are like antennas that were immediately able to pick up the leptin signal. From an energy-balance perspective, I'm struck that a relatively small number of genetically normal neurons can so efficiently repair the circuitry."
"The finding that these embryonic cells are so efficient at integrating with the native neuronal circuitry makes us quite excited about the possibility of applying similar techniques to other neurological and psychiatric diseases of particular interest to our laboratory," said Anderson.
The researchers call their findings a proof of concept for the broader idea that new neurons can integrate specifically to modify complex circuits that are defective in a mammalian brain.
The researchers are interested in further investigating controlled neurogenesis -- directing growth of new neurons in the brain from within -- the subject of much of Macklis's research as well as Flier's 2005 paper, and a potential route to new therapies.
"The next step for us is to ask parallel questions of other parts of the brain and spinal cord, those involved in ALS and with spinal cord injuries," Macklis said. "In these cases, can we rebuild circuitry in the mammalian brain? I suspect that we can."
###
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Jane and Lee Seidman Fund for Central Nervous System Research, the Emily and Robert Pearlstein Fund for Nervous System Repair, the Picower Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Autism Speaks, and the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation.
David Cameron
Citation:
Science, Vol. 334 (6059), November 25, 2011
"Transplanted Hypothalamic Neurons Restore Leptin Signaling and
Ameliorate Obesity in db/db Mice" by Czupryn et al.
Harvard Medical School (http://hms.harvard.edu) has more than 7,500 full-time faculty working in 11 academic departments located at the School's Boston campus or in one of 47 hospital-based clinical departments at 17 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes. Those affiliates include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Childrens Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Forsyth Institute, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Hebrew SeniorLife, Joslin Diabetes Center, Judge Baker Childrens Center, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, and VA Boston Healthcare System.
Celebrating the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1811, Massachusetts General Hospital (http://www.massgeneral.org) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of nearly $700 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School and consistently ranks in the top four in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is a clinical partner of the Joslin Diabetes Center and a research partner of the Harvard/Dana-Farber Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit http://www.bidmc.org.
[ | 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.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. ? Frederik Meijer, who built the regional retail powerhouse Meijer Inc. while nurturing his lifelong love of the arts, died late Friday at a hospital in western Michigan. He was 91.
The billionaire passed away at the Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids after suffering a stroke in his home early Friday morning, according to a statement issued by the company.
Meijer was credited with starting the supercenter store format in the 1960s that made Meijer a successful Midwest retailer. By 2009, Meijer had 180 of the giant stores throughout Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio with annual sales of $15 billion.
He and his wife also gave millions of dollars to causes in the Grand Rapids area, and arts projects were major benefactors.
"The Meijer family thanks everyone for their thoughts and prayers and requests their privacy be respected at this difficult time," the company's statement said.
Meijer was 14 when his Dutch immigrant father, Hendrik, opened his first grocery store in Greenville in 1934 with $338.76 worth of merchandise purchased on credit. The younger Meijer worked 40 hours a week at the store throughout high school.
"We were hard up, and you know what? I didn't even feel deprived," he said in a 2002 interview. "I had a good time in the store, I was a decent student in school ? I had a B-plus average."
Meijer and his father expanded their grocery operation in 1962 to include general merchandise, creating their first Thrifty Acres supercenter.
"I really enjoyed working with my dad till he died (in 1964, at age 80)," Meijer said. "We had a marvelous relationship."
The stores were renamed Meijer in 1984, and the company became one of the nation's largest family-owned retail businesses. Frederik Meijer was 82 before he took the title of chairman emeritus and began devoting less time to the company.
One of his three sons, Hank Meijer, previously said his father never thought he knew more than anyone else, so he trusted people to do their jobs and listened to the advice of others.
Meijer was born Dec. 7, 1919, in Greenville and in 1946 married Lena Rader after meeting her at the first Meijer store in Greenville, where she was a clerk. They spent their honeymoon visiting new stores.
The Meijers donated generously to programs in the Grand Rapids area through the foundation he established in 1990.
The Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, a 125-acre botanical garden outside Grand Rapids, opened in 1995. A 30-acre sculpture park featuring two dozen works by important modern sculptors was added seven years later.
Meijer collected sculptures for years, filling a garage with statues of animals and people before he found a home for many of them in the botanical garden. Those pieces, placed throughout the garden, are separate from the works in the sculpture area.
His interest in the arts stemmed from his youth. Even in the hardest of times, his parents made sure their children learned about culture.
"When I was young, I had piano lessons, clarinet lessons and violin lessons," he said. "My sister had piano, violin and viola (lessons). I was encouraged to sing in choirs. ...
"The point is, no matter how hard up we were in the Depression, certain things like that ? music lessons ? came as a part of life, rather than saying we couldn't afford it."
Meijer carried that belief to the community. Declaring that city dwellers needed to get outdoors to preserve "mental stability," he donated seed money to develop a network of hiking and cycling trails in western Michigan.
"Beyond raising a family and working and surviving, that's where the arts come in, and that's the sugar and spice," he said.
Meijer is survived by his wife, Lena, and sons Hank, Doug and Mark. Funeral arrangements are pending.
The death was first reported by The Grand Rapids Press.
T-Mobile UK today announced the launch of the launch of a mid-end Android smartphone, the Vivacity. It's got a 3.5-inch display at WVGA resolution, a 5-megapixel camera, Wifi, GPS and all that jazz. It's going for just £10 per month on a 24-month plan, or for £99 on Pay As You Go.
Gamers, if you?re in the market to replace your worn out keyboard that has been abused over the years due to gaming for hours on end, QPAD has unveiled the MK-85 gaming keyboard that features N-key roll over, a feature that we?re sure many gamers will appreciate, or come to appreciate.
They keyboard will feature non-tactile, non-audible Cherry MX Red switches, blood red LED backlighting, programmable keys, USB and audio hub functionality, and probably its most important selling point, the N-key roll over.
If you?re wondering what the N-key roll over is, essentially it?s an anti-ghosting function. What this means for gamers of FPS and MMOs is that you will be able to pull of a string of commands without a hitch, so you can reload, strafe, check the map, jump, crouch, etc all at once without your keyboard getting confused. The technology behind N-key will detect correct keypresses even when many keys are being pressed at the same time.
Now if this sounds like a keyboard you would love to get your hands on, the QPAD MK-85 will start shipping next month and will retail for ?145 (~$200).
WASHINGTON (AP) ? CIA officers are asking people to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of the first American killed in the Afghan war by donating to help the children of their fellow fallen.
Since the death in 2001 of CIA officer Mike Spann, a total of 23 stars have been added to the wall at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters that honors CIA operatives lost. Many were killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The clandestine world rarely breaks its silence, especially when it comes to family, but the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation notes about 56 children of those killed in the line of duty will need educational support over the next 17 years.
Spann was part of a small group of CIA paramilitary officers who went into Afghanistan just 16 days after the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Less than two months later, the CIA along with U.S. Special Forces Green Berets and a massive aerial bombing campaign helped Afghan militias drive out the ruling Taliban.
Spann was killed when hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners, guarded by just a handful of Afghans, tried to escape from a fortress jail in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan.
Spann is survived by his wife, Shannon, a retired CIA officer, and three children.
WASHINGTON ? Congress' failed deficit-cutting supercommittee has faded away, but the pressure on lawmakers to quickly confront a stack of expensive economic issues is only growing.
Before leaving town for Christmas and New Year's, lawmakers face decisions on whether to renew payroll tax cuts that have meant an average of nearly $1,000 for more than 120 million families this year. Congress also must determine whether to extend unemployment benefits for millions of long-term jobless Americans.
Without action, both expire Jan. 1.
Also on the list: Whether to prevent a 27 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors that occurs on New Year's Day. And oh, yes ? figuring out how to avoid an embarrassing mid-December government shutdown, something that has become a frequent exercise in today's bitterly divided Congress.
Protecting the payroll tax cuts, jobless benefits and doctors' payments could cost $200 billion or more. But faced with a limp economy, the huge federal debt, next year's presidential and congressional elections, and the supercommittee's finger-pointing, partisan breakdown, clashes over each are inevitable.
"Right now people are so mad and suffering so much from fiscal fatigue that it's really hard to say what they want," Steve Bell, a longtime Senate Republican budget aide who studies economic policy at the moderate Bipartisan Policy Institute, said of lawmakers.
There had been some hope of including language dealing with the payroll tax, jobless benefits and Medicare payments to doctors in whatever debt-cutting proposal the supercommittee produced.
That would have improved their chances of approval because Congress was to consider the debt panel's package under special expedited procedures. Without that protection, the fate of the payroll tax, unemployment and Medicare proposals is more clouded, with battles expected over the size of each and how ? if at all ? to pay for them.
"There at least would have been some sugar for everybody's taste buds" if the proposals were part of a supercommittee package, said Joseph Minarik, a former Democratic congressional aide and now research director for the nonpartisan, business-led Committee for Economic Development.
Helping the chances for eventual enactment of the three proposals is a consensus among many economists that each initiative helps the economy by pumping billions of dollars into it.
The action is likely to start in the Democratic-led Senate, where leaders are expected to force a vote on a proposal to extend the payroll tax cut. The proposed extension would be paid for by boosting levies on people earning $1 million or more per year ? making it certain to fail but providing Democrats with a vote they hope to use against GOP candidates next year.
"Tell them, `Don't be a Grinch,'" Obama told a cheering crowd in Manchester, N.H., on Tuesday, saying that's the message they should send Congress. "Don't vote to raise taxes on working Americans during the holidays."
In response, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, used a written statement to note that in September, Republicans told Obama "that we stand ready to have an honest and fruitful discussion with him regarding the payroll tax extension, and that invitation stands."
In a deal with Obama last year, Congress cut the 6.2 percent payroll tax ? which helps finance Social Security ? to 4.2 percent for this year. That has saved 121 million families an average $934 this year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Obama has proposed cutting it to 3.2 percent next year at a cost of $179 billion, plus adding another $69 billion in payroll tax breaks for employers. With Republicans and some Democrats wary of the national debt ? which surpassed $15 trillion last week ? the price tag well could shrink.
Meanwhile, Democrats also want to renew unemployment benefits that provide people with up to 99 weeks of coverage before the extra benefits expire Jan. 1. Without the added coverage, benefits ? which average under $300 a week ? would last a maximum of 26 weeks.
Without action, more than 2 million people would lose unemployment coverage by mid-February, according to the Labor Department. It would cost an estimated $45 billion to renew the extra benefits for a year.
Preventing the cut in Medicare payments to doctors is estimated to cost more than $20 billion next year. It is considered a near certainty that Congress will address it because of the clout that Medicare and doctors have with lawmakers.
Within minutes of Monday's announcement that the supercommittee had failed, the American Medical Association was warning that the 27 percent cut would "force many physicians to limit the number of Medicare and TRICARE patients they can care for in their practices."
TRICARE is the military's health program.
House leaders don't plan to bring the jobless benefits, payroll tax or Medicare reimbursement measures to the chamber's floor next week.
Congress is also far behind on nine crucial spending bills, covering everything from the Pentagon to environmental programs. Three spending bills have been completed.
Most government agencies are functioning on temporary authority that expires Dec. 16. If the remaining nine spending bills are not finished by then, lawmakers will have to vote to keep them open or face an angry public that polls show already has undisguised contempt for Congress.
To speed the work, the remaining nine measures might be wrapped into one massive package exceeding $800 billion ? a price tag sure to appall tea party lawmakers, making passage complicated.
Two other items are virtually certain to wait until next year because the full impact of congressional inaction would not be felt for months or longer.
Without action, more than 20 million additional families would see their 2012 tax bills grow because they would have to pay the alternative minimum tax, a program initially designed to ensure that wealthy people don't completely escape tax obligations. A one-year fix would cost $90 billion.
Several dozen tax breaks for businesses, including a large one for corporate research and development, expire on Jan. 1. Renewal could cost more than $30 billion.
___
Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.
CLEVELAND (Reuters) ? Seven men from an Amish splinter group in Ohio were arrested on federal hate crimes charges on Wednesday, accused of involvement in humiliating attacks on fellow Amish involving cutting off their beards and hair.
The men face charges linked to multiple religiously-motivated physical assaults, and the most serious charges could carry a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted, the Department of Justice said in a statement.
"The defendants forcibly restrained multiple Amish men and cut off their beards and head hair with scissors and battery-powered clippers, causing bodily injury to these men while also injuring others who attempted to stop the attacks," the statement said.
The assaults were viewed as particularly egregious for the Amish because, once married, Amish men typically do not trim their beards and Amish women do not cut their hair for religious and cultural reasons.
The attacks took place throughout the fall in three counties south of Cleveland, one of the country's largest concentrations of Amish.
Among the arrested was the breakaway sect's leader, Bishop Samuel Mullet Sr. of Bergholz, Ohio, who was accused of orchestrating the beard-cuttings as revenge for being shunned by the Amish community.
Also arrested were Mullet's family members, Johnny S. Mullet and Daniel S. Mullet of Bergholz and Lester S. Mullet of Hammondsville, Ohio. Police also arrested Levi F. Miller, Eli M. Miller, and Emanuel Schrock, all of Bergholz.
The men were expected to be arraigned later on Wednesday.
In one of the attacks, earlier this month, an elderly Amish man had his hair and beard chopped off by his son and grandsons, who have ties to the sect. The man, however, did not press charges, sticking with the Amish tendency not to contact police, Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said.
The attack drew the focus of the FBI.
"I'd like to see Sam Mullet convicted and taken from the community," Abdalla said after the November attack. "You just can't realize the power and domination he has over his people."
In October, five accused attackers -- Daniel, Johnny, and Lester Mullet, as well as Levi and Eli Miller -- were arrested on state charges of kidnapping and aggravated burglary after they were accused of attacking a family of five.
(Writing by Eric Johnson in Chicago; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)
WASHINGTON ? The supercommittee's failure reflects the nation's divide: Americans crave both the Republicans' demand for low taxes and the Democrats' insistence on protecting social programs. So far, no group or leader has persuaded them they can't have both and there's no quick solution in sight.
It's possible the stalemate won't be broken by the time of the 2012 elections, nearly a year away. Some GOP strategists think Republicans can oust President Barack Obama and win control of both chambers of Congress. That would enable them to enact much of their agenda, and Americans could render a judgment on its results.
Or, perhaps, Democrats will score big victories that will force Republicans to yield some ground.
The bipartisan supercommittee's collapse stems from an all-too-familiar reality of modern politics. Republican lawmakers respond to activists who overwhelmingly oppose higher taxes. And Democrats answer to activists who will tolerate no nicks in Medicare, Social Security and other programs without steeper taxes on the wealthy.
The same differences pushed the nation to the brink of default last summer, prompting the first-ever downgrade of the government's creditworthiness.
Yet no leader or group has convinced enough Americans that everyone must accept some pain to bring taxes and government services more closely in line. So the federal debt hit $15 trillion last week. And the government suffered another embarrassment Monday, immediately spooking U.S. markets and possibly unsettling foreign markets in the days ahead.
Nineteenth Century Americans venerated Henry Clay as "the Great Compromiser" for helping resolve knotty national problems. Today, that title would almost surely be hurled as an insult, especially at a rally or caucus to nominate someone for Congress.
The supercommittee's six Democrats and six Republicans knew they would be criticized for failing to reach an accord. But they saw a worse fate in straying too far from their respective parties' uncompromising stands on taxes and social programs.
Many veteran politicians expect more versions of recent elections, which were heavily influenced by partisan activists who put a scare into lawmakers threatening to veer from party orthodoxy.
"Compromise is not where the incentives are in the political process right now," said former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who once headed the GOP's House campaign committee. Because so many House districts are solidly Republican or solidly Democratic, he said, "members are judged by what their primary electorate thinks of them."
Eventually, Davis said, repeated failures to tame the deficit might inflict so much pain on Americans -- possibly through a severe recession or even depression -- that today's primary-dominated voting patterns will change.
Some lawmakers doubtlessly see this coming, Davis said. "But the incentives in the system do not reward you for being ahead of the curve."
Congress reflects the public divide over tax and spending priorities. A new Quinnipiac poll found that 73 percent of Republicans want to address the deficit with spending cuts only, while only a third of Democrats hold that view.
More than half of Democrats favor a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts. Only one Republican in five agrees.
Independent voters, as usual, occupy a middle ground. Slightly more independents favor a spending-cuts-only approach to a strategy that includes some new taxes. But neither option hit 50 percent in the poll.
In 2006, independent voters broke heavily for Democrats, helping that party regain the House majority. In 2008, independents again favored Democrats for Congress, and they helped elect Obama.
But last year, independent voters swung strongly to Republicans, who regained control of the House. Strategists in both parties are angling for independents' support next year.
One possible way to break Washington's cycle of logjams is for independent voters to increase in number and to insist on systemic changes in practices such as congressional redistricting and Senate filibuster powers.
Nathan Daschle, who heads a political networking firm called Ruck.Us, and whose father was a Democratic Senate leader, said the only way he can envision "really changing the incentives of our political system" is to have huge numbers of Republican and Democratic voters switch their affiliation to independent.
William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked in Bill Clinton's White House, sees two possible turning points before the 2012 elections. Pro-military lawmakers from both parties might succeed where the supercommittee failed, he said, by crafting a tax-and-spending compromise that would avert the cuts scheduled at the Defense Department.
Or, Galston said, Europe's financial problems and the United States' political gridlock might lead to so much economic damage that even devout liberals and solid conservatives will have to rethink their intransigence.
"If people decide there's no difference between the United States and the Eurozone," Galston said, "we may discover the hit we took in global esteem in the summer was just the beginning of the decline."
Peter G. Peterson, a former Commerce secretary and leading critic of deficit spending, said in a statement Monday: "Meaningful deficit reduction requires both parties to vote for a plan that does not reflect their partisan litmus tests."
For now, many lawmakers see that idea as a one-way ticket out of Congress in their next primary elections. Such thinking points to more gridlock ahead.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE ? Charles Babington covers politics for The Associated Press.
DUBAI (Reuters) ? Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh flew to Saudi Arabia Wednesday to sign a deal brokered by Gulf states that would ease him from office, Yemeni state media said, after protracted protests against his rule that have crippled the country.
No more details were given about the signing ceremony, to which opposition representatives were invited. Saleh has backed out of such a deal at the last minute three times already.
The development came after U.N. envoy Jamal Benomar, with support from U.S. and European diplomats, managed to devise a compromise to implement the power transfer deal crafted by the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
"The president ... arrived this morning in Riyadh on a visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, following an invitation from the Saudi leadership, to attend the signing of the Gulf initiative and its operational mechanism," state news agency Saba said.
The political deadlock over protests aimed at outsing Saleh after 33 years of rule has rekindled conflicts with Yemen's Islamist militants and separatists, threatening anarchy in a country Washington regards as a front line against al Qaeda.
Saba said Saleh had received a telephone call from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Tuesday to thank him "for his efforts to extract Yemen out of the crisis in a peaceful way."
The unrest has also raised fear of civil war on the borders of Saudi Arabia, the world's No. 1 oil exporter and a crucial U.S. ally. The fears are shared by Saleh's erstwhile U.S. allies who had long backed him in their fight against al Qaeda.
Benomar said Tuesday that details of the signing of the accord -- a stage at which it has collapsed before -- were being hammered out, after an agreement in principle.
Diplomats and opposition officials said Saleh flew to Saudi Arabia the GCC Secretary-General, Abdul Latif Al-Zayyani, refused to go to Sanaa to attend the signing ceremony. Officials say Zayyani had been embarrassed before when Saleh kept dignitaries in suspense before he refused to sign the accord.
Saleh was forced to seek treatment in Saudi Arabia for injuries suffered in an apparent assassination attempt in June after the last time he spurned the deal, which ushered in street battles that devastated parts of his capital Sanaa.
Under the GCC plan, Saleh would shift all his powers to his deputy, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who will form a new government with the opposition and call for an early presidential election within three months.
A Yemeni official said Tuesday that the accord was facing opposition from some senior politicians in Saleh's General People's Congress (GPC) strongly opposed to signing it.
Saleh would keep his title until a new president is elected.
A Yemeni official said that renegade general Ali Mohsen, who broke away from the Yemeni army after protests began in February, and tribal leader Sadeq al-Ahmar, who are not part of the accord, may try to obstruct the deal.
Those figures, along with Saleh's son and a nephew who commands a key paramilitary unit, form a balance of forces on the ground that analysts say none is likely to tip, making a political resolution the only way out of Yemen's deadlock.
(Reporting by Martina Fuchs; Writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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