"Iron Lady" Thatcher made Britain great again - Cameron

By Estelle Shirbon and Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron led tributes to Margaret Thatcher on Wednesday, remembering a divisive and combative leader who transformed the country and set a political course still followed today.

In a special session of parliament, Cameron said his fellow Conservative "defined and overcame the great challenges of her age" after a remarkable journey from the family grocer's shop to the highest office in the land.

But in death as in life, Britain's first female prime minister sharply divided opinion and was accused by opponents of destroying working class communities with "brutal contempt".

It was the first time parliament had been recalled from holiday for the death of a public figure since Queen Elizabeth's mother died in 2002, underlining the importance of a leader who won three elections and reshaped British politics.

"She drew the lines on a political map that we here are still navigating today," said Cameron, wearing a dark suit and tie. "She made the political weather, she made history and let this be her epitaph ... she made our country great again."

Thatcher, who died at 87 on Monday from a stroke, overturned post-war political consensus, winning battles over union reform, nuclear arms and state ownership of industries, Cameron added.

"She certainly did not shy from the fight and that led to arguments, to conflict, yes even to division," Cameron said. "But what is remarkable, looking back now, is how many of those arguments are no longer arguments at all."

In an emotional session scheduled to last for up to seven hours, members of parliament who are still fiercely divided over Thatcher debated her legacy and traded anecdotes and jokes.

Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband said she was a "unique and towering figure". However, some in his party went on the attack, condemning her as a heartless free marketeer who unleashed an age of greed that undermined British society.

"Too many industries, too many working class communities in the north were laid waste in those years," said former minister Michael Meacher. "And many of those are still desolated today."

"She was someone who took the fight to her opponents, who deployed a scorched earth policy to destroy them, which polarised the country."

Another Labour lawmaker, David Winnick, said Thatcher's economic policies, such as privatisation, spending cuts and a move away from heavy industry, caused "immense pain and suffering to ordinary people".

The rows of empty benches on Labour's side of the Commons were testimony to antipathy to Thatcher.

A few hours into the debate, barely a dozen Labour members were taking part. Even the Conservative seats were only a little more than half full as it went on into the evening.

Tulips and lilies were placed at the foot of a Thatcher statue outside the parliamentary chamber she dominated for years and which was the scene of a devastating resignation speech by her deputy Geoffrey Howe that precipitated her downfall in 1990.

'TRUE BLUE'

Plans for next Wednesday's funeral have become a security headache.

Parties in several cities to celebrate her death ended in arrests and media reported police may pre-emptively arrest known trouble-makers before they travel to her funeral.

Codenamed "Operation True Blue", the ceremonial funeral with military honours will begin with a procession through London to a service at St Paul's Cathedral.

In a break with protocol, marking Thatcher's stature, the Queen and her husband Prince Philip will attend. The last time the monarch attended a prime minister's funeral was when Winston Churchill died in 1965.

Thatcher's son Mark said she would have been "enormously proud and grateful" that the monarch was going to her funeral.

"My mother would be greatly honoured as well as humbled by her presence," he said. "By any measure, my mother was blessed with a long life and a very full one."

Many opposed to Thatcher's free-market ideology say she was too divisive a figure to be sent off in a style usually reserved for royals like Princess Diana or the Queen Mother.

"Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she'd have wanted," said filmmaker Ken Loach, whose films denounce the impact of Thatcher's policies on the working class.

"THE WITCH IS DEAD"

The Official Charts Company said the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead", from "The Wizard of Oz", had climbed to number 10 in the singles chart after a campaign by Thatcher haters.

Such reactions were condemned by Conservatives as well as by some Labour figures such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In Brixton, a south London area hit during the Thatcher era by riots in 1981, protesters scaled a cinema and replaced movie titles with the words "Margaret Thatchers dead LOL" (sic). They also hung a banner that read "The bitch is dead".

Disturbances took place in Liverpool and Glasgow, two cities ravaged by Thatcher's dismantling of state industries.

Hundreds of police and soldiers will guard the funeral. Security forces will have to watch for protesters and the threat from dissident groups from northern Ireland.

Thatcher escaped assassination in 1984 when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) blew up a hotel where she was staying. The IRA laid down arms as part of a peace deal, but Thatcher remains a hate figure to many on the other side of the Irish Sea.

(Reporting By Jason Webb)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thatchers-funeral-plans-divisive-iron-lady-herself-135415828.html

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Obama sending long-awaited 2014 budget to Congress

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama on Wednesday is sending Congress his 2014 budget, an effort to achieve an elusive "grand bargain" to tame runaway deficits that have soared above $1 trillion for each of the past four years.

Obama's spending blueprint for the 2014 budget year would accomplish the deficit cuts through a combination of further tax increases, further reductions in the growth of spending and reductions in the growth of the government's biggest benefit programs, Social Security and Medicare.

But instead of moving Congress nearer a grand bargain, the Obama's proposals so far have managed to anger Republicans and Democrats alike.

Obama's Democratic allies have attacked him for pursuing cuts in Social Security and Medicare, while Republicans have rejected the president's efforts to raise taxes further.

The president's spending and tax plan for the budget year that begins Oct. 1 is two months late. The administration blames the delay on the lengthy "fiscal cliff" negotiations at the end of December and then fights over the March 1 automatic spending cuts.

The president's plan tracks an offer he made to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, during December's budget negotiations, which Boehner ended up walking away from because of his opposition to higher taxes on the wealthy.

The Obama budget proposal will join competing budget outlines already approved by the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-run Senate.

Congress is unlikely to get down to serious negotiations until this summer, when the government will once again be confronted with the need to raise the government's borrowing limit or face the prospect of a first-ever default on U.S. debt.

As part of the administration's effort to win over Republicans, Obama will have a private dinner at the White House with about a dozen GOP senators Wednesday night. The budget is expected to be a primary topic, along with proposed legislation dealing with gun control and immigration.

Early indications are that the budget negotiations will be intense. Republicans have been adamant in their rejection of higher taxes, arguing that they will not go further than the $600 billion increase on top earners over a decade that was part of the late December agreement to prevent the government from going over the "fiscal cliff."

The administration maintains that Obama's proposal is balanced with the proper mix of spending cuts and tax increases.

"The president's been clear that it's going to take broad and shared sacrifice," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in an interview on National Public Radio. "He would not find it acceptable to make only reductions in entitlement programs. That we need also to raise revenues so that we have a fair balance of what the deficit reduction will come from."

The most sweeping proposal in Obama's budget is a switch in the way the government calculates the annual cost-of-living benefits for the millions of recipients of Social Security and certain other benefit programs from the current method tied to changes in the consumer price index.

The new method, known as chain-weighted CPI, takes into account changes that occur when people substitute goods rising in price with less expensive products. It results in a slightly lower annual reading for inflation.

The switch to modified CPI inflation formula would cut spending on government benefit programs by $130 billion over 10 years, although the administration said it planned to protect the most vulnerable. The change would also raise about $100 billion in higher taxes because the current CPI formula is used to adjust tax brackets each year. A lower inflation measure would mean more money taxed at higher rates.

Once the COLA change is fully phased in, it is estimated that it would mean about $560 less in annual benefits for a typical 75-year-old receiving benefits and $984 less for someone 85.

The White House has said it would reduce deficits by a total of $1.8 trillion over a decade, reducing the annual red ink to the $500 billion range by 2016 and down to 1.7 percent of the size of the economy in 10 years. When the deficit program proposed by the president is combined with $2.5 trillion in deficit reductions already approved, it would total $4.3 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade.

Obama has presided over four straight years of annual deficits totaling more than $1 trillion, reflecting in part the lost revenue during a deep recession and the government's efforts to get the economy going again and stabilize the financial system.

The Obama budget's $1.8 trillion in new budget cuts would take the place of the automatic $1.2 trillion in reductions required by a 2011 budget deal. That provision triggered $85 billion in automatic cuts for the current budget year and those reductions, known as a "sequester," would not be affected by Obama's new budget.

The budget plan already passed by the GOP-controlled House would cut deficits by a total $4.6 trillion over 10 years on top of the $1.2 trillion called for in the 2011 deal. The budget outline approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate tracks more closely to the Obama proposal, although it does not include changes to the cost-of-living formula for Social Security.

___

Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor, Jim Kuhnhenn and Donna Cassata contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-sending-long-awaited-2014-budget-congress-070201216--finance.html

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Iran says 37 killed in earthquake in south

An Iranian woman reacts as she sits among the rubble of buildings after an earthquake struck southern Iran, in Shonbeh, Iran, Tuesday, April 9, 2013. A 6.1 magnitude earthquake killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more in a sparsely populated area in southern Iran on Tuesday, Iranian officials said, adding that it did not damage a nuclear plant in the region. (AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Mohammad Fatemi)

An Iranian woman reacts as she sits among the rubble of buildings after an earthquake struck southern Iran, in Shonbeh, Iran, Tuesday, April 9, 2013. A 6.1 magnitude earthquake killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more in a sparsely populated area in southern Iran on Tuesday, Iranian officials said, adding that it did not damage a nuclear plant in the region. (AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Mohammad Fatemi)

An Iranian woman receives medical treatment after an earthquake struck southern Iran, in Shonbeh, Iran, Tuesday, April 9, 2013. A 6.1 magnitude earthquake killed dozens and injured hundreds more in a sparsely populated area in southern Iran on Tuesday, Iranian officials said, adding that it did not damage a nuclear plant in the region. (AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Mohammad Fatemi)

Map locates an earthquake which struck Iran

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? A 6.1 magnitude earthquake killed at least 37 and injured hundreds more in a sparsely populated area in southern Iran on Tuesday, Iranian officials said, adding that it did not damage a nuclear plant in the region.

The report said the earthquake struck the town of Kaki some 96 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Bushehr, a town on the Persian Gulf that is home of Iran's first nuclear power plant, built with Russian help.

"No damage was done to Bushehr power plant," Bushehr provincial governor Fereidoun Hasanvand told state TV. He said 37 people had died so far and 850 were injured, including 100 who were hospitalized.

The plant's chief, Mahmoud Jafari, confirmed the site's condition to semi-official Mehr news agency, saying that it is resistant to earthquakes of up to magnitude eight.

Water and electricity were cut to many residents, said Ebrahim Darvishi, governor of the worst-hit district Shonbeh.

The UN's nuclear watchdog agency said on its website that it had been informed by Iran that there was no damage to the plant and no radioactive release and, based on its analysis of the earthquake, was not seeking additional information. The International Atomic Energy Agency statement indicated that it was satisfied there was little danger.

Shahpour Rostami, the deputy governor of Bushehr province, told state TV that rescue teams have been deployed to Shonbeh.

Three helicopters were sent to survey the damaged area before sunset, said Mohammad Mozaffar, the head of Iran's Red Crescent rescue department. He said damage was particularly bad in the village of Baghan.

Kaki resident Mondani Hosseini told The Associated Press that people had run out into the streets out of fear.

Dozens of aftershocks have been reported by the official IRNA news agency since the earthquake, which occurred at 16:22 local time, 11:58 GMT.

Iran announced three days of mourning.

The quake was felt across the Gulf in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where workers were evacuated from high-rise buildings as a precaution.

Earlier on Sunday a lighter earthquake jolted the nearby area. Iran is located on seismic faults and it experiences frequent earthquakes.

In 2003, some 26,000 people were killed by a 6.6 magnitude quake that flattened the historic southeastern city of Bam.

In Russia, the head of the state agency responsible for the Bushehr project said the reactor was not producing fission by chain reaction when the tremor occurred.

"Personnel at the station are continuing to work in a normal regime, the radiation conditions are within the norms of natural background," Igor Mezenin was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.

____

AP writers George Jahn in Vienna and James Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-04-09-ML-Iran-Earthquake/id-d1e31362d15847809431a1920479ba7d

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Lift weights to lower blood sugar? White muscle helps keep blood glucose levels under control

Apr. 7, 2013 ? Researchers in the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan have challenged a long-held belief that whitening of skeletal muscle in diabetes is harmful.

In fact, the white muscle that increases with resistance training, age and diabetes helps keep blood sugar in check, the researchers showed.

In addition, the insights from the molecular pathways involved in this phenomenon and identified in the study may point the way to potential drug targets for obesity and metabolic disease.

"We wanted to figure out the relationship between muscle types and body metabolism, how the muscles were made, and also what kind of influence they have on diseases like type 2 diabetes," said Jiandie Lin, Life Sciences Institute faculty member and associate professor at the U-M Medical School.

Lin's findings are scheduled to be published online April 7 in Nature Medicine.

Much like poultry has light and dark meat, mammals have a range of muscles: red, white and those in between. Red muscle, which gets its color in part from mitochondria, prevails in people who engage in endurance training, such as marathon runners. White muscle dominates in the bodies of weightlifters and sprinters -- people who require short, intense bursts of energy.

"Most people are in the middle and have a mix of red and white," Lin said.

When you exercise, nerves signal your muscles to contract, and the muscle needs energy. In response to a signal to lift a heavy weight, white muscles use glycogen to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP) -- energy the cells can use to complete the task. While this process, called glycolysis, can produce a lot of power for a short time, the glycogen fuel soon depletes.

However, if the brain tells the muscle to run a slow and steady long-distance race, the mitochondria in red muscles primarily use fat oxidation instead of glycogen breakdown to generate ATP. The supply of energy lasts much longer but doesn't provide the burst of strength that comes from glycolysis.

People with diabetes see whitening of the mix of muscle.

"For a long time, the red-to-white shift was thought to make muscle less responsive to insulin, a hormone that lowers blood sugar," Lin said. "But this idea is far from proven. You lose red muscle when you age or develop diabetes, but is that really the culprit?"

To find out, the team set out to find a protein that drives the formation of white muscle. They sifted through microarray data sets from public databases and identified a list of candidate proteins that were prevalent in white muscle but not in red.

Further studies led the team to focus on a protein called BAF60c, a sort of "zip code" mechanism that tells the cells when and how to express certain genes. The Lin team made a transgenic mouse model to increase BAF60c only in the skeletal muscle. One of the first things they noticed was that mice with more BAF60c had muscles that looked paler.

"That was a good hint that we were going in the white-muscle direction," said lead author Zhuo-xian Meng, a research fellow in Lin's lab.

They used electron microscopy to see the abundance of mitochondria within the muscle, and confirmed that muscle from BAF60c transgenic mice had less mitochondria than the normal controls.

"We saw predicted changes in molecular markers, but the ultimate test would be seeing how the mouse could run," Lin said.

If the BAF60c mice could run powerfully for short distances but tired quickly, the scientists would be able to confirm that the BAF60c pathway was a key part of the creation of white muscle.

Using mouse treadmills, they compared the endurance of BAF60c mice to a control group of normal mice, and found that the BAF60c transgenic mice could only run about 60 percent of the time that the control group could before tiring.

"White muscle uses glycogen, and the transgenic mice depleted their muscles' supplies of glycogen very quickly," Lin said.

After some follow-up experiments to figure out exactly which molecules were controlled by BAF60c, Lin and his team were confident that they had identified major players responsible for promoting white muscle formation. Now that they knew how to make more white muscle in animals, they wanted to determine whether white muscle was a deleterious or an adaptive characteristic of diabetes.

The team induced obesity in mice by feeding them the "Super Size Me" diet, Lin said. On a high-fat diet, a mouse will double its body weight in two to three months. They found that obese mice with BAF60c transgene were much better at controlling blood glucose.

"The results are a bit of a surprise to many people," Lin said. "It really points to the complexity in thinking about muscle metabolism and diabetes."

In humans, resistance training promotes the growth of white muscle and helps in lowering blood glucose. If future studies in humans determine that the BAF60c pathway is indeed the way in which cells form white muscle and in turn optimize metabolic function, the finding could lead to researching the pathway as a drug target.

"We know that this molecular pathway also works in human cells. The real challenge is to find a way to target these factors," Lin said.

Lin is a research faculty member of the Life Sciences Institute, where his laboratory is located and all his research is conducted. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the U-M Medical School.

Support for the research was provided by the Michigan Diabetes Research and Training Center, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

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Journal Reference:

1. Zhuo-Xian Meng, Siming Li, Lin Wang, Hwi Jin Ko, Yongjin Lee, Dae Young Jung, Mitsuharu Okutsu, Zhen Yan, Jason K Kim, Jiandie D Lin. Baf60c drives glycolytic metabolism in the muscle and improves systemic glucose homeostasis through Deptor-mediated Akt activation. Nature Medicine, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nm.3144

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/health_medicine/nutrition/~3/lUjP0ObjLMs/130407132914.htm

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Brain's stress circuits undergo profound learning early in life, scientists find

Apr. 7, 2013 ? Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute have discovered that stress circuits in the brain undergo profound learning early in life. Using a number of cutting edge approaches, including optogenetics, Jaideep Bains, PhD, and colleagues have shown stress circuits are capable of self-tuning following a single stress. These findings demonstrate that the brain uses stress experience during early life to prepare and optimize for subsequent challenges.

The team was able to show the existence of unique time windows following brief stress challenges during which learning is either increased or decreased. By manipulating specific cellular pathways, they uncovered the key players responsible for learning in stress circuits in an animal model. These discoveries culminated in the publication of two back-to-back studies in the April 7 online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

"These new findings demonstrate that systems thought to be 'hardwired' in the brain, are in fact flexible, particularly early in life," says Bains, a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. "Using this information, researchers can now ask questions about the precise cellular and molecular links between early life stress and stress vulnerability or resilience later in life."

Stress vulnerability, or increased sensitivity to stress, has been implicated in numerous health conditions including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. Although these studies used animal models, similar mechanisms mediate disease progression in humans.

"Our observations provide an important foundation for designing more effective preventative and therapeutic strategies that mitigate the effects of stress and meet society's health challenges," he says.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Calgary, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal References:

1. Wataru Inoue, Dinara V Baimoukhametova, Tam?s F?zesi, Jaclyn I Wamsteeker Cusulin, Kathrin Koblinger, Patrick J Whelan, Quentin J Pittman, Jaideep S Bains. Noradrenaline is a stress-associated metaplastic signal at GABA synapses. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3373
2. Jaclyn I Wamsteeker Cusulin, Tam?s F?zesi, Wataru Inoue, Jaideep S Bains. Glucocorticoid feedback uncovers retrograde opioid signaling at hypothalamic synapses. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3374

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/k7ZzaCJsu0Q/130407133314.htm

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Italian govt speeds state payments to vendors

MILAN (AP) ? The Italian government has approved a decree to pay 40 billion euros ($52 billion) owed by government entities to private businesses over the next 12 months to help relaunch Italy's stagnant economy.

Premier Mario Monti acknowledged Saturday after his caretaker government adopted the decree that overdue payments had become "a bad habit" that put a heavy burden on business owners.

State entities on an average pay their bills six months after services are rendered and some 90 days after the official due date, which Monti said put Italy behind Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Delayed government payments are a major factor behind liquidity shortages faced by many small and medium-sized Italian companies. Reduced turnover in the recession means many businesses, in turn, are having trouble keeping up with even small debts.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/italian-govt-speeds-state-payments-vendors-160007775--finance.html

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US futures drop as jobs report comes up short

NEW YORK (AP) ? U.S. stock market futures are plunging after the Labor Department reported that the economy added just 88,000 jobs in March, the lowest gain in nine months.

Dow Jones industrial average futures slid 135 points to 14,396. Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 33 points to 2,752. S&P 500 futures slid 17 points to 1,537.50.

The number of jobs added was well below the 195,000 economists had predicted, and reflects a sharp slowdown in hiring after several months of strength. The slowdown may signal that the economy is heading into a weak spring

The unemployment rate dropped to 7.6 percent, but only because more people stopped looking for work. The percentage of Americans working or looking for jobs fell to 63.3 percent in March, the lowest in nearly 34 years.

The report weighed on world markets as well.

Despite positive news out of Germany, where a report showed industrial orders rebounded in February, a promising sign for first-quarter growth, Germany's DAX fell 1.9 percent to 7,663.

The news from France was not as promising. The French finance minister warned that the country will barely grow this year. The main market index, the CAC all slid 2 percent to 3,651. Britain's FTSE 100 dropped 1.7 percent to 6,234.14.

Earlier Japan's Nikkei hit a four-year high, boosted by enthusiasm for that nation's new central bank policies. But worries about bird flu in China and saber-rattling in North Korea weighed on other Asian markets.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-futures-drop-jobs-report-comes-short-125226400--finance.html

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