news20090908lat

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[World > Asia]
Ahmadinejad levels new broadside at opponents
The Iranian president's fresh rebuke of political foes, along with continued defiance on the nuclear issue, suggests that recent postelection protests haven't prompted him to change his ways.
By Borzou Daragahi
September 8, 2009

Reporting from Beirut - Three months after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derided his opponents as "dirt and dust," sending hundreds of thousands of angry protesters into the streets, he risked enraging them again Monday by likening them to "pollutants" staining "the gown of the revolution."

The comment, during prepared remarks at a news conference, drew an immediate rebuke from a conservative clerical association in the holy city of Qom, which urged the president and his staff to "concentrate their minds seriously on economic woes and social challenges and avoid uttering unnecessary and provocative remarks."

But along with Ahmadinejad's defiant and boastful tone on the sensitive nuclear issue, Monday's statement also suggested that three months of the worst domestic unrest in the Islamic Republic's history had not caused the president to change his ways.

At the news conference, the president dismissed the Obama administration's mid-September deadline for responding to Western offers of talks about Iran's nuclear program and said threats of sanctions or war would not move Tehran.

"The present approach will bring [the West] nothing," he told reporters. "Iranians have learned their lessons well on how to live through crises and go unscathed. All crises will be turned into opportunities. The Iranian nation will never be harmed under any circumstances."

As the U.N. General Assembly prepares to convene this month, Ahmadinejad's tone on domestic and international affairs suggests no solution on the horizon for an issue that has divided the Security Council and shaken the region.

In Vienna on Monday, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei lamented a "stalemate" in efforts to begin talks over Iran's nuclear program. He also took Tehran to task for refusing to answer questions about possible military aspects of its program and abide by Security Council demands to stop sensitive nuclear activities.

"Iran's future intentions concerning its nuclear program need to be clarified to respond to the international community," he told the atomic agency, according to a copy of his prepared remarks.

Iran insists its nuclear enrichment program is meant solely for peaceful energy production and scientific advancement. Ahmadinejad maintained that Iran had resolved all questions regarding the nature of its nuclear program.

But the U.S., Israel and international arms control experts strongly disagree. They suspect that Iran is slowly creating the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and point to a set of documents, derided as forgeries by Tehran, that purport to show that Iran engaged in experiments consistent with a clandestine nuclear weapons program until 2003.

ElBaradei urged Iran to "respond fully to all the questions raised by the agency" about the documents.

The Obama administration has called for direct diplomatic talks with Iran as a way of resolving the nuclear issue, and asked that Tehran respond to its offer before the General Assembly convenes.

Ahmadinejad said he planned to attend the General Assembly gathering to meet with the American people and media, but would "debate" U.S. officials only in public.

"The era of secret and clandestine meetings to solve problems has ended," he said. "In the presence of world media, anything can be discussed."

Later, authorities stormed an office where supporters of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi are investigating claims of abuse by security forces. Those conducting the raid seized documents while refusing to show a warrant or identification, according to the website Norooznews.ir.



[The Slatest] from [Slate Magazine]

New Ahmadinejad, Same as Old Ahmadinejad

A couple of months ago, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his political opponents were "dirt and dust." Yesterday, he called them "pollutants" who were staining "the gown of the revolution." And what many predicted would be a more conciliatory tone toward the West doesn't seem likely to materialize as he made clear that he has no intention to adjust to any deadlines imposed by a foreign government. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed frustration yesterday that he hasn't been able to get answers about Iran's nuclear program.

Read original story in Los Angeles Times | Tuesday, 8 Sep 2009

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[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Science]
In Taming Dogs, Humans May Have Sought a Meal
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 7, 2009

The dog has so many fine qualities it is hard to know which it was prized and bred for by the early people who first domesticated its noble ancestor, the wolf. Was it the dog’s valor in the hunt, perhaps, or its role as night watchman, or its strength in pulling a sled, or its companionable warmth on cold nights?

A new study of dogs worldwide, the largest of its kind, suggests a different answer, one that any dog owner is bound to find repulsive: wolves may have first been domesticated for their meat. That is the proposal of a team of geneticists led by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Sampling the mitochondrial DNA of dogs worldwide, the team found that in every region of the world all dogs seem to belong to one lineage. That indicates a single domestication event. If wolves had been domesticated in many places, there would be more than one lineage, each leading back to a local population of wolves.

The single domestication event seems to have occurred in southern China, where the dogs have greater genetic diversity than those elsewhere. The region of highest diversity is usually the place of origin because a species tends to lose diversity as it spreads.

Dr. Savolainen sampled a part of the dog genome, the mitochondrial DNA, and was able to estimate the time of the domestication — probably around the period that hunter-gatherers first settled down in fixed communities in China, about 11,000 to 14,000 years ago. Those people would have had an organized culture that enabled them to make muzzles, and possibly cages, that would have been needed to handle wolves.

There is a long tradition of eating dogs in southern China, where dog bones with cut marks on them have been found at archaeological sites.

Dr. Savolainen said wolves probably domesticated themselves when they began scavenging around the garbage dumps at the first human settlements, a theory advocated by Ray Coppinger, a dog biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. As the wolves became tamer, they would have been captured and bred. Given local traditions, Dr. Savolainen suggests, the wolves may have been bred for the table.

Thus, dogs may have thus insinuated themselves into human life by means of garbage and dog meat, but they quickly assumed less demeaning roles. Once domesticated, they rapidly spread west from the eastern end of the Eurasian continent.

Most people do not eat dogs, so they must have spread so quickly for other reasons, perhaps because of their use as guard dogs or in pulling sleds, Dr. Savolainen said.

His report was written with Jun-Feng Pang of the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China, who analyzed the DNA of the many Chinese dogs in the study. It was published last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

In 2002, Dr. Savolainen wrote that dogs had been domesticated from wolves in East Asia, a conclusion that was challenged last month by a team at Cornell University. The Cornell team said genetic diversity was as high in African village dogs as in those in China.

Dr. Savolainen disputed the Cornell calculation in his new report, contending that diversity was, in fact, higher in Chinese dogs.

Adam Boyko, a member of the Cornell team, said that Dr. Savolainen’s team had now built a plausible hypothesis from detailed genetic data but that other explanations might still be possible, including that dogs had been domesticated at a second site, outside China, and had spread everywhere but China.

Stephen O’Brien, an expert on the genetics of domestication at the National Cancer Institute, said Dr. Savolainen’s argument for a single domestication event in southern China was “a pretty good conclusion” but one that could be strengthened by a more thorough sampling of wolves throughout the world.

A team of American researchers is examining the genetics of dogs and wolves with a so-called dog chip, a device that is programmed to recognize thousands of different sites on the dog and wolf genome, not just the mitochondrial DNA studied by Dr. Savolainen. The data have not yet been published, but some of it “doesn’t agree completely” with an East Asian origin of dogs, Dr. O’Brien said.

The disputes about the origins of dogs arise because researchers are just cutting their teeth on what Dr. O’Brien called “genomic archaeology.”

“It’s a brand new field,” he said. “We’re just learning how to do it.”

Domestication of the dog and other animals is both of intrinsic interest and of relevance to the human past. “Domestication was really the lever by which civilization was able to organize into communities larger than those of foraging families,” Dr. O’Brien said.

Dogs were evidently so useful to early people that they spread like wildfire. On the basis of current evidence, they were the first species to be domesticated.



[The Slatest] from [Slate Magazine]

Were Wolves Domesticated for Meat?

In the largest study of its kind, a group of geneticists says that all dogs appear to descend from one lineage, which would indicate the world's dogs all came from "a single domestication event." If, as others suspect, wolves were domesticated in several places independently, they should have more than one lineage. But it seems the single domestication event took place in southern China somewhere around 11,000 to 14,000 years ago, where there has long been a tradition of eating dogs. But even if they were first captured for their meat, it doesn't seem that remained their primary purpose for very long, considering how rapidly they spread.


Read original story in The New York Times | Tuesday, 8 Sep 2009

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[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Politics]
Deeply Divided House Democrats Return to Work -- and the Same Set of Problems
By Paul Kane, Ben Pershing and Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 8, 2009

After a nearly 40-day recess that was anything but restful, House Democrats are returning to work Tuesday still unsettled over pending health-care legislation and sure only that the people have had their say.

They are in almost the exact position they were in when they left the Capitol in late July. Conservatives are still leery of supporting a government-funded, or public, insurance option. Freshman lawmakers from suburban districts remain fearful of increasing taxes for their wealthy constituents to pay for the new measure and await alternatives from moderate Senate Democrats. And progressives, who are demanding the most far-reaching reform since the Great Depression, are still threatening to bring down the legislation if it does not contain a robust version of the public option.

In the lead-up to President Obama's critical Wednesday night address to a joint session of Congress, interviews with a cross section of about 15 House Democrats and half a dozen aides show that there is still overwhelming support for some overhaul of the health-care system. But the caucus remains deeply divided over the details of the more than 1,000-page measure and now faces a public that is more skeptical than when House committees began drafting the plan two months ago.

"We knew a lot of work still needed to be done, so no, not a lot has changed," said Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.), a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of 52 Democrats from moderate-to-conservative districts.

House Democrats are the canaries in the coal mine for Obama's most important domestic policy issue. As originally planned, the House was already to have passed its health-care legislation, with a far-reaching public option for insurance, based on Democratic votes, as Republicans have lined up in almost unanimous opposition to the House version. Despite their large majority, Democrats faced internal opposition in late July and agreed to delay the vote until late September at the behest of dozens of Blue Dogs and other Democrats worried about the public's view of the legislation.

House Democrats are still expected to take the first step on the legislation, assuming that the frenzy of early August -- with the continual image on cable news of Democrats at town hall meetings with angry voters opposed to the proposal -- has not solidified opposition within their own ranks.

Party leaders contend that the time spent at home gave the public unprecedented input on the legislation, allaying concerns of some Democrats who feared casting a vote before facing their constituents in August.

Democratic and Republican aides said the past 40 days brought an unparalleled level of public participation at forums, with some lawmakers reporting to their leaders that 1,000 people showed up at events last month, compared with the 30 people who attended town hall meetings in the same location during previous August breaks. By late last week, House Democrats said that since Aug. 1, their members had held 1,029 public forums, teleconferences with constituents or health-care gatherings in their districts.

"I think this month can be viewed as participatory democracy, members going out and talking to the people," said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). "Nobody can say we haven't taken the time to look" at the legislation.

But House Republicans, who held hundreds of their own town hall meetings that drew more than 100,000 voters, according to preliminary estimates, viewed the break as a galvanizing moment for opposition to the Democratic legislation. "I heard people saying, 'Look, we need health-care reform. We need to do something to lower the cost of health insurance for families and small businesses and lower the cost of health care,' " said Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), the third-ranking GOP leader. "But I also heard people say that they don't want a government-run plan that is going to lead to a government takeover of health care."

Clearly, the recess did not go as scripted for House Democrats.

As the 5 1/2 -week break began July 31, Democrats handed out seven-inch-long pocket cards for their members to carry like political shields. The cards listed popular parts of the legislation to be emphasized at town hall meetings, including banning insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions and prohibiting them from dropping or declining to renew coverage for people who become sick.

Instead, according to rank-and-file members from all corners of the caucus, lawmakers spent most of August rebutting misleading claims, such as the myth that the legislation would create federal "death panels" for elderly patients.

"A lot of what they've heard and they don't like isn't really in the bill," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who supports the legislation. "President Obama needs to start talking about what's in the bill, not what's not in the bill. Whenever I see him on TV, he's talking about what's not in the bill."

The popular parts of the measure mask a deep-seated ideological conflict within the 256-member House Democratic caucus. Eventually, Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will have to begin choosing sides on the final makeup of the legislation, which is being compiled from the work of three committees. Each concession to one bloc of the caucus threatens to create opposition from another.

Pelosi continues to voice support for a public insurance plan, suggesting that she cannot pass a bill that does not include it. This has put her at odds with some Obama advisers, who are signaling that they are willing to do without a public option if the House and Senate can approve other major pieces of the legislation.

But liberals, whose ranks dominate the House caucus, view a public insurance plan as the linchpin of the entire effort because, they say, it fosters competition with private insurers, driving down the cost of premiums and other services.

"Health-care reform without a good public option is not health-care reform at all," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), a leader among House liberals. "We have to do this. That's why we're in the majority. That's why we have the White House."

Woolsey and more than 60 House Democrats sent Pelosi a letter last month vowing to vote against any reform measure that does not include a strong public option. That is more than enough Democrats to torpedo reform if Obama accepts a centrist approach.

But the latest version of the public plan in the House legislation -- the product of a late July compromise brokered by Pelosi, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and a quartet of Blue Dog Democrats -- may be too expansive for dozens of other Democrats who want to see this plank delayed for several years or dropped altogether.

"I'm hoping we can find some middle ground," Herseth Sandlin said of the public option. "But if not, it should not be included."

Lawmakers from swing districts in the suburbs and rural regions went home to find constituents fearful of increased government involvement in the private economy. That view extends from the potential government option in health care to the bailout of the financial sector, the takeover of Detroit's carmakers and the $787 billion stimulus plan that many voters think has done little to stop job losses.

"Whether folks agree with it or not, the problem is there is so much skepticism of the elected officials, they don't believe us," said Rep. Frank M. Kratovil Jr. (D-Md.), who was narrowly elected last fall. Kratovil's recess began with a poster board image of him hanged in effigy outside his Eastern Shore office in a protest of the health-care plan. He said he remains undecided on the legislation.

Many Democrats do not want the House to act until they know what will happen in the Senate. That chamber has been stalled all summer as a bipartisan group of six senators on the Finance Committee has tried to reach a compromise that does not include a public option, costs much less than the $1.2 trillion House version and does not include a surtax on the wealthy.

If the Senate bill does not include a public option, many House Democrats will not want to vote for it in their version, because it would be unlikely to survive a House-Senate conference on the two measures.

The ultimate key to the legislation's fate in the House may rest with the roughly 80 lawmakers elected in the past three years, when the political tide was running strongly in Democrats' favor. Some come from rural districts and have joined the Blue Dog Coalition, but many are progressive in their approach to health-care reform, believing they were elected on a promise to offer change.

If enough of them can support the final legislation, leaders think they will be able to get a bill narrowly approved this fall and onto the president's desk before Christmas.

"I think, if anything, the mood has changed to be more favorable to health-care reform," said Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio), who won her Columbus-based seat in 2008 by less than 1 percent of the vote.

"Personally, I'm probably more confident than when recess began," added Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.), another freshman. She held 18 town hall meetings in her northwestern Pennsylvania district, which stretches from Pittsburgh's suburbs to Erie, and found that three-quarters of her constituents support some form of health-care overhaul.

CONTINUED newswp2

news20090908wp2

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Politics]
Deeply Divided House Democrats Return to Work -- and the Same Set of Problems
By Paul Kane, Ben Pershing and Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 8, 2009

CONTINUED FROM wp2

"If I had just been listening to the media, I don't think I would have been as confident," she said.



[The Slate Dozen] from [The Slatest]

Forty Days Later, House Democrats Back to Same Problems

After the recess, House Democrats "are in almost the exact position they were in when they left," declares the Washington Ppst. This is not how it was supposed to play out. When the recess got started, Democratic leaders urged their colleagues to emphasize some of the popular parts of the legislation during the town-hall-style meetings. Instead, they found themselves playing defense and dispelling rumors about the legislation. While Republicans may have used the high levels of public participation in the forums to unite against the legislation, Democrats didn't get any closer to resolving the differences inside their own party. Many insist that while the media may have focused on the angriest sound bites, the majority of their constituents did express some sort of support for reforming the system. But there are deep disagreements in how to go about it. Some liberals insist that they won't support a bill that doesn't include a public insurance plan, while Democrats in more conservative districts want to avoid anything that makes it look like the government is increasing its involvement in the private sector.

Read original story in The Washington Post | Tuesday, 8 Sep 2009

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[Today's Paper] from [The Wall Street Journal]

[World > U.S. Politics]
SEPTEMBER 8, 2009
Key Week for Obama Starts on Feisty Note
By JANET ADAMY, JONATHAN WEISMAN and GREG HITT

CINCINNATI -- President Barack Obama kicked off a crucial week for his top domestic priority by pressing for a new government-run health-insurance program just as key senators moved closer to a bipartisan deal that leaves out the public plan.

Speaking at a boisterous Labor Day rally of AFL-CIO members in Cincinnati, Mr. Obama sought to rally his fractious Democratic base in this swing region of a crucial swing state. Falling back on campaign flourishes he hasn't used since the election drive, he led chants and blasted Republicans for what he said was their lack of a solution for fixing the health system. "I continue to believe that a public option...will help improve quality and bring down costs," he told the crowd to applause.

But the president faces a more delicate task as Congress returns to Washington Tuesday from a bruising month-long recess that turned into a battle over the president's signature domestic-policy issue. To revive his health agenda, Mr. Obama will address Congress in a special joint session Wednesday where he will more clearly spell out what he can and can't accept in a final health bill, according to White House aides.

Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, said Mr. Obama needs to do more than restate his priorities. "It's time for the president to hit the reset button and work with Republicans for better solutions, before more debt is piled on our children and more American jobs are destroyed," Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, said.

Mr. Obama is expected to reiterate his support for creating the public-health-insurance plan despite pressure from Republicans and some moderate Democrats to back away from the idea. Yet he is likely to leave the door open for a compromise on the issue. Mr. Obama will emphasize what he says the health-care system would look like without change, depicting a scenario of rising costs, more uninsured Americans and more efforts by insurance companies to block those with pre-existing medical conditions from buying insurance, the aides said.

Obama Steadfast on Health Care
2:02
Speaking in Ohio, President Barack Obama told union members he still believes in the "public option" as part of health-care reform. Courtesy of Reuters.
His support for the public plan sets up a split with the Senate Finance Committee, which has been drafting the health bill that has been seen as the only hope of winning bipartisan support for a health overhaul in Congress. Over the weekend, the committee's chairman, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, distributed a draft of his health proposal that leaves out the public plan in order to win support from a small group of Republicans. Mr. Baucus's plan costs less than $900 billion over 10 years and would expand insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans.

In recent days, the White House has signaled it could step in to broker a bipartisan deal on its own, particularly through negotiations with Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the key Republicans on the Finance Committee. While the White House insists it hasn't decided whether to present formal legislation, it has been drafting legislative language on health proposals since earlier this summer, a White House official said.

Liberal Democrats, especially in the House, are stepping up warnings that they won't vote for a plan without a public option. That suggests conflict in Congress if Mr. Baucus succeeds in pushing his plan through the Senate and the health bills come to a House-Senate conference committee, although that is still several stages away.

Representatives of the six Senate Finance Committee members who are negotiating the plan declined to comment. Mr. Baucus didn't make his proposal public.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was noncommittal when asked about Mr. Baucus's plan. "Obviously we'd be pleased if the Finance Committee throughout the course of the next few days came up with a proposal that can get through their committee hopefully with bipartisan support," he said.

Mr. Obama offered clues to his Wednesday address in his remarks before union members Monday. He said he envisions a system where people no longer worry about losing insurance coverage when they change jobs or get sick. He also called for cutting $100 billion in Medicare spending to insurance companies, signaling his support for proposals to cut payments that insurers receive for private insurance plans administered through Medicare.

And the president distilled his call for health-care changes into a few simple phrases, something Democrats have been pleading for. "That's what we're talking about," he told the crowd. "Security and stability for folks who have health insurance, help for those that don't -- the coverage they need at a price they can afford."

"The most important thing that he did here was take this thing head-on," Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said after the speech. "He's beginning to lead."

Mr. Baucus distributed his plan Saturday to the small group of senators who've been negotiating for months to reach an agreement. Instead of having a public plan, it calls for creating a batch of new nonprofit insurance cooperatives aimed at providing competition to private insurers.

The plan requires most Americans to carry health insurance and gives tax credits to low- and middle-income people to help them buy insurance, reaching as high as a family of four that earns about $66,000 a year. For the poorest Americans, it would expand the federal-state Medicaid program to include those earning as much as 133% of the poverty level. The plan sets aside some money to help states pay for the expansion, according to people familiar with the proposal.

Unlike other health proposals in the House and Senate, the plan wouldn't require employers to provide health insurance to workers, a concession aimed at winning support from Republicans. Instead, it would require companies whose workers receive government subsidies for insurance to cover the cost of those tax credits up to a certain level, people familiar with the plan said. That is likely to appease businesses, which have vigorously opposed mandating that employers cover workers.

Mr. Baucus's proposal closely resembles what the committee was seeking before the Senate left Washington for the August recess. The group of six senators plans to meet Tuesday where they could further refine the proposal before it goes to the broader committee for consideration. Besides Mr. Baucus and Ms. Snowe, the six senators are Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), Jeff Bingaman (D., N.M.), Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) and Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.). The full committee could act as soon as late this week on the plan.

Mr. Baucus's plan is paid for through a series of new revenue increases and spending cuts and is designed to not widen the deficit.

The committee needed to plug a $100 billion shortfall in the plan's budget over a decade, and Mr. Baucus assembled a combination of spending changes and revenue increases to make up for the gap, according to people familiar with the proposal. The main new item is an across-the-board fee placed on insurance companies that is based on their market share and is estimated to raise tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, according to people familiar with the plan. Another plank of the plan would tax insurance companies on particularly generous health-insurance plans.

Committee members had decided against the across-the-board fee earlier in the negotiations, but Mr. Baucus revived it in an effort to keep the new insurance levies from hitting middle-income people, according to people familiar with the plan.

The insurance industry balked at the fee proposal. "New taxes on health-care coverage will only make coverage less affordable for families and small businesses," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's main trade group.

Other sources of funding for the Finance Committee plan include cuts to Medicare, including reductions in the type of private-insurance-plan payments Mr. Obama outlined in his speech. People close to the committee said the cuts wouldn't reduce benefits to senior citizens. The plan also raises money by limiting the tax benefits of so-called flexible-spending accounts that consumers can use to pay for certain medical expenses, and changing the income threshold for itemizing medical deductions.

To make it easier to buy insurance, the plan calls for new health-insurance exchanges that would provide standardized information on insurance plans and pricing.

The proposal prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people with a pre-existing health condition or dropping their coverage once they become ill. It also calls for caps on consumers' out-of-pocket medical costs.

news20090908wsj2

Obama Breaks Out Campaign-Style Rhetoric for Health Care

As President Obama gets ready for his address before a joint session of Congress Wednesday, he riled up his base by giving a rousing speech to union workers, where he made it clear he's ready to step out of the sidelines and fight for health care reform. He abandoned his patient, professorial approach and began doing what many Democrats have been begging for months: stake out positions and defend them with short, simple sound bites. "Security and stability for folks who have health insurance, help for those that don't," he said, "the coverage they need at a price they can afford." He told the supportive crowd of union workers that it was time to stop debating and start acting. There was lots of applause when Obama spoke up in favor of the government-run insurance plan. Meanwhile, Sen. Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate finance committee, distributed a draft of his proposal over the weekend that, as expected, doesn't include a public option. The New York Times has the most details on the Baucus plan that advocates imposing fees on insurance companies as well as others in the health care industry. It would also expand Medicaid and offer a cheaper catastrophic insurance option for those under 26.

Read original story in The Wall Street Journal | Tuesday, 8 Sep 2009

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Global terrorism]

Three terrorists convicted of plotting to blow up jets over Atlantic
> Liquid explosives were to be concealed in soft drink bottles
> US feared 9/11 scale al-Qaida attack was already under way

Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 September 2009 21.58 BST
Article history

British terrorists planned to blow up at least seven transatlantic flights from London, murdering more than 1,500 people in a plot on a scale to rival the September 11 attacks, a jury found today.

As three men now face life sentences after being found guilty of conspiring to explode liquid bombs on airliners flying from Britain to North America, the former head of US homeland security at the time of their arrests has revealed that the threat was taken so seriously that President George Bush was repeatedly briefed on the status of a UK surveillance operation on the London council flat being used as a terrorist bomb factory.

The plan involved inserting liquid explosives into empty bottles of Lucozade and Oasis, colouring the liquid so it appeared to be the same as the original.

The cell, based in east London and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, was supposed to carry out what counter-terrorism officials say was an al-Qaida-inspired suicide mission, motivated by rage at British and US foreign policy.

ThThe US former homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, told the Guardian the US administration was on such a state of heightened alert about the plot that it turned back a plane in midair two days before the arrests, believing a terror suspect was on board.

The men were arrested in August 2006, just two days before it was feared they would stage a dry run of the plot – but the US had wanted the plotters arrested days earlier, fearing that British police would miss the start of the attack.

Chertoff said of the plot: "This stood out as being of a very substantial dimension, advanced, specific and sophisticated and of a scale comparable to 9/11."

Yesterday at Woolwich crown court, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain were found guilty of conspiracy to murder by detonating the bombs on airliners. The liquid bombs, disguised in drinks bottles, were so ingenious, relying on batteries and detonators carried separately, that they would have bypassed airport security. UK scientists, who constructed versions of the devices, concluded that if exploded, they would have punched a hole in the aircraft skin.

The plot was disrupted on 10 August 2006, leading to chaos at airports and restrictions which remain in force today on the amount of liquids travellers can carry aboard.

The men were previously put on trial last year, but while the first jury convicted the three chief defendants of conspiracy to murder, they stopped short of concluding that they had targeted planes. After a lengthy retrial, a new jury convicted them after 54 hours of deliberations.

None of five other defendants was convicted of the airline charge, but one, Umar Islam, was convicted of conspiracy to murder. Of the other four, one was cleared on all counts, and the jury was unable to agree verdicts on the other three men. Next week the CPS will decide whether to seek retrials of the men for whom the jury failed to reach a verdict, and the judge will sentence those found guilty.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner John McDowall, head of Scotland Yard's counter terrorism command, said the convicted men intended to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale. They intended to cause carnage through a series of co-ordinated explosions and bring terror into the lives of people around the globe. Apart from massive loss of life, these attacks would have had enormous worldwide economic and political consequences."

One man, Donald Stewart-Whyte, was acquitted on all charges, three years after he was first arrested. In a statement read outside court, his solicitor demanded a public apology from the Crown Prosecution Service for putting him on trial on the basis of "spurious" evidence.

The lawyer, Bernie Duke, said: "We also invite the CPS to issue a public apology to Mr Stewart-Whyte and his family for the terrible wrong done to them. Mr Stewart-Whyte will continue to speak out against terrorism and fight against the slur that there is any connection between true Islam and terrorism."

The investigation and trials are estimated to have cost £35m. It was the biggest counter-terrorism operation in UK history, involving hundreds of police officers and MI5 agents.

During the surveillance, a bug caught one man recording a suicide video. Other videos were recovered after the arrest and in one, Ali warned of "body parts … decorating the streets" if Muslims were not left alone, and said he had yearned to take part in violent jihad since he was a teenager.

Before the arrests Washington pressed Britain to arrest the men earlier than police had planned, but Scotland Yard wanted to let the cell – which was under the tightest surveillance – continue so more evidence could be gathered to put before a jury.

The arrest in Pakistan, at the urging of the US, of the plot's alleged mastermind, Birmingham-born Rashid Rauf, led UK police to bring their own arrests forward. Scotland Yard and MI5 feared if the UK cell learned of Rauf's arrest they would either try to escape or rush forward their attack, fearing imminent capture.

Chertoff told the Guardian: "Rauf was the link between the plotters and the al-Qaida end. We know there was a connection to al-Qaida central."



[The Slatest] from [Slate Magazine]

British Jury Convicts Three of Planning To Blow Up Planes

Three years after the plot was uncovered, a jury found that the terrorists planned to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic flights on a single day using liquid explosives. In a different trial last year, three men were found guilty of murder but not of targeting airplanes. Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of homeland security, said that the plot was being followed closely by officials on both sides of the Atlantic, and that the United States wanted British police to arrest the plotters earlier out of fear that the attack would be launched earlier than expected. It involved the biggest counterterrorism operation in British history. The man who headed counterterrorism operations for Scotland Yard at the time writes in the Times that nervous American officials almost foiled the investigation because they were worried it was "going to slip through our hands." It seems a decision, which some believe can be traced back to former Vice President Dick Cheney, by U.S. officials to arrest the plotters' main contact in Pakistan forced British police to arrest the suspects before they could collect all the evidence.

Read original story in The Guardian | Tuesday, 8 Sep 2009

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Food]
Elimination of food waste could lift 1bn out of hunger, say campaigners
Excessive consumption in rich countries 'takes food out of mouths of poor' by inflating food prices on global market
Adam Vaughan
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 September 2009 17.25 BST Article

Eliminating the 6.7m tonnes ofwasted food thrown away annually in the UK could lift nearly 1 billion malnourished people out of hunger worldwide, experts claim.

Government officials, food experts and representatives of the retail trade brought together by the Food Ethics Council argue that excessive consumption of food in rich countries inflates food prices in the developing world. Buying food, which is then often wasted, reduces overall supply and pushes up the price of food, making grain less affordable for poor and undernourished people in other parts of the world. Food waste also costs consumers £10.2bn a year and when production, transportation and storage are factored in, it is responsible for one fifth of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.

Tristram Stuart, author of a new book on food waste and a contributor to a special food waste issue of the Food Ethics Council's magazine, said: "There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. In a globalised food system, where we are all buying food in the same international market place, that means we're taking food out of the mouths of the poor."

He added that the production of wasted food also squanders resources, and said that the irrigation water used by farmers to grow wasted food would be enough for the equivalent domestic water needs of 9bn people.

Food waste costs every household in the UK between £250 and £400 a year, figures that are likely to be updated this autumn when the government's waste agency WRAP publishes new statistics. Producing and distributing edible food that goes uneaten and into waste also accounts for 18m tonnes of CO2, around 5% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.

But Tom MacMillan, executive director of the Food Ethics Council, warned that reducing food waste alone would not be enough to alleviate hunger, because efficiency gains in natural resources are routinely cancelled out by growth in consumption. "Food waste is harmful and unfair, and it is essential to stop food going into landfill. But the irony is that consumption growth and persistent inequalities look set to undo the good that cutting food waste does in reducing our overall use of natural resources and improving food security," he said.

MacMillan explained that the land and resources freed up by cutting food waste would likely be put to producing and consuming other things, such as growing more resource-intensive and expensive foods, bio-energy or textile crops. "Now is the moment all parties should be searching out ways to define prosperity that get away from runaway consumption. Until they succeed, chucking out less food won't make our lifestyles more sustainable," he said.

In addition to cutting down on waste, experts suggested food waste that does end up in bins could be dealt with in more environmentally friendly ways.

Paul Bettison, chair of the Local Government Association environment board, wrote: "Many councils are now giving residents a separate bin for their food waste. Leftovers are being turned into fertiliser, or gas to generate electricity. In some areas, in-vessel composting and anaerobic digestion are playing a key role in cutting council spending on landfill tax and reducing methane emissions."

But there are obstacles to generating energy and producing compost from food waste, he warned. "Lack of infrastructure is holding back the drive to make getting rid of food waste cheaper and greener. Councils do not want to collect leftovers without somewhere to send them, but nobody wants to build the places to send food waste until it is being collected."

Writing in the magazine, the retail industry defended sell-by and use-by dates, which were criticised as confusing by environment secretary Hilary Benn in June. Andrew Opie, director of food and consumer policy at the British Retail Consortium, wrote: "Certainly, some customers aren't clear about what the different dates mean but getting rid of them won't reduce food waste. Customer education will."

Last month, the government also criticised supermarket "bogof" offers (buy one get one free) that encourage shoppers to buy food they don't need and which ends up unused in bins, adding to the UK's food waste mountain.

The renewed push for action on food waste comes comes as a National Zero Waste Week by online campaigners and bloggers gets under way, encouraging individuals to go one day without putting anything in their bins.

Food waste tips from the web

• Don't fall for "three for two" deals on fresh food unless you'll definitely use them - Susan Smillie, Guardian food blogger

• Plan weekly meals and stick to shopping lists - Susan Smillie

• Keep your fridge at 1-5 degrees to make chilled food last for longer - lovefoodhatewaste.com

• Remove bad apples! One bad apple can spoil the barrel, so separate fruit which is ripening faster than the others - Womens' Institute

• Just chuck your leftover veggies into a stockpot to make a delicious stock for soups - Thomasina Miers, MasterChef winner and food writer

• Use your eyes and nose as a guide and ignore the sell-by date - Guardian user "hrhpod" on the Word of Mouth blog

• Watch your portion sizes and make sure plates are being completely cleared at mealtimes - Annette Richards on lovefoodhatewaste.com

• Make sure vegetables are stored correctly, with root vegetables kept in cool dark locations rather than refrigerators - "leuan" on Word of Mouth

• Leave most vegetables and fruit in the fridge until a day or two before you're going to use them: you could extend their life by a fortnight - lovefoodhatewaste.com

• Make DIY frozen ready meals by freezing excess food, such as mashed potato, into portions - Sarah Beeny

Share your tips for avoiding food waste on our Green Living Blog and you could win a £60 composter

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Travel and transpoart]
Children face cycling bans over schools' safety concernsNew academic year sees children discouraged or banned from cycling short distance to schools
Peter Walker
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 September 2009 10.39 BST Article

Significant numbers of children face active official discouragement and even bans against cycling to and from school, cycle campaigners have warned as a new academic year gets under way.

As state pupils in most of the UK returned for the new term over the past week – those in Scotland went back earlier – most travelled to school in cars, on buses or on foot. Just a tiny minority did so on a bicycle, despite rising levels of obesity and inactivity.

Many would actively like to ride but are prevented from doing so by a mixture of parental worries and school policies which range from warnings about safety to effective bans through a refusal to allow bikes to be kept on school grounds, campaigners say.

Debra Rolfe from CTC, the UK's biggest cycling campaign group, said: "It's very hard to say exactly how big a problem this is. We often get contacted by parents raising this as an issue, but they don't want to make too much of a fuss because their children aren't keen on standing out.".

The issue appears to be most acute in primary schools, some of which refuse outright to allow pupils to travel by bike even though most generally live within a radius of a mile or so.

Sam O'Shea, now 11, has become a reluctant local cause celebre in Portsmouth, Hampshire, after his school refused to let him ride, even though he was a keen weekend cyclist who had passed the government's new cycling proficiency test, known as Bikeability. His mother, Angela, spent months arguing that Sam's one-mile journey to St Paul's primary school, nearly all on cycle paths, was safe, a view supported by an official risk assessment. Even after she successfully petitioned the council to convert the narrow road outside the school to one way traffic the headteacher and governors refused to budge.

"Whatever objections they came up with we provided a solution, but then they'd move the goalposts again. It soon became clear that they just weren't interested," she said. "The best they could offer was that I would drive behind him and take the bike home when he arrived, and then come back with the bike in the afternoon. It was crazy."

In response to such cases the CTC has produced a Right to Ride to School leaflet for the start of the new academic year, noting that schools cannot issue outright cycling bans and advising parents how to lobby.

"In some schools it can just be a waste of time," said one senior official involved in government efforts to promote cycling, speaking anonymously. "They start off sounding interested, but then you meet the headteacher and he says, 'Well, my niece was knocked off her bike and it's clearly too dangerous. I'm not having my pupils cycling.'"

Other schools openly state that cycling is discouraged due to safety, said the CTC's Rolfe, while others provide nowhere secure for bikes to be stored. "A lot of bike sheds have disappeared over the year. It's difficult to pin down statistics but that seems to be the case."

The paradox is that this battle is taking place while the Westminster is spending tens of millions of pounds a year sending so-called cycling champions into schools to encourage the practice, while helping to fund Bikeability courses. The bike advisers are now working in more than 400 English schools through a scheme run by Cycling England, a body funded by the Department for Transport.

"It's not a quick fix. The hope is that it becomes a virtuous spiral – as more and more people cycle, more children will be encouraged to take it up," said Phillip Darnton, the chairman of Cycling England. At present, he said, well under 1% of primary school pupils ride to work with about 2% doing so in secondary schools, figures Darnton concedes is "pathetic".

His organisation has warned the government that without official intervention there could be a "lost generation" who never experience cycling: "If you look at parents who are, say, aged 22 to 35, many of them haven't really ridden bikes. If their child has a bike they don't know how to mend a puncture, or adjust the brakes, they don't know the right height for a saddle. They can't teach their children."

Meanwhile in Denmark...
For Mikael Colville-Andersen, taking seven-year-old Felix and Lulu, nearly two, to their school and adjoining playgroup in Copenhagen is simplicity itself.

"Sometimes he'll ride on his bike and I'll take her on mine, sometimes I carry them both on a cargo bike," says Colville-Andersen, who writes a series of cycling blogs from the Danish capital. "It's completely normal, everybody does it. There are bike lanes everywhere. If I look out of my window now I can see maybe 100 cyclists."

His children, like all others in Denmark, will receive comprehensive bike safety training before leaving primary school. "It's in the curriculum and it's in the culture, and it has been for many years."

Cycling England's Darnton, however, fears that comparisons with such countries is "not terribly helpful" due to the amount of work still needed in the UK: "I once asked a European official how we could copy what they had done and he said, 'Start a long time ago.'"

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[SN Today] from [ScienceNews]

[SN Tosay]
Blue halos of doom
Under ultraviolet light, rings around the brown spots in aging bananas may signal the transition from ripe to rotten
By Jenny Lauren Lee
Web edition : Monday, September 7th, 2009

Ghostly rings of light surround the dying brown spots in overly ripe bananas, researchers report. The halos, which glow intensely blue under ultraviolet light, may mark the beginnings of cell death and may signal to animals such as apes that the bananas are ready for eating.

Bernhard Kräutler of the University of Innsbruck in Austria and his colleagues had already found that yellow bananas have a blue hue under UV light. Green bananas, on the other hand, don’t. The blue, the researchers knew, comes from a class of fluorescent chemicals that are produced and build up when chlorophyll breaks down.

In the new study, reported online September 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team determined what happens under UV light when the bananas become overripe. Though the brown spots themselves are dull, the team found that a ring of flesh surrounding the spots glows with an intensity three times that of the yellow peel. By analyzing the light, the researchers found that the chlorophyll-breakdown chemicals were more abundant in the rings than elsewhere in the banana.

Scientists do not yet know if the halo serves any biological purpose for the bananas. But Kraeutler speculates that animals may use the light to see whether fruit is ripe or rotten.

For example, he says, scientists have postulated that apes use color vision to detect fruit in the woods and that they see short-wavelength light, such as blue light verging on ultraviolet, better than humans do. “There’s a very high correlation between the ability to see fruit and the development of color vision,” Kraeutler says.

The halos may also provide a way for researchers to study cell death in bananas, and possibly other plants, without resorting to invasive procedures.

So far these fluorescing by-products of chlorophyll breakdown have only been found to accumulate in one other plant, the peace lily. The fluorescing chemicals, though briefly present, also do not seem to build up a glow in apples and pears.


[SN Today]
Three genes linked to Alzheimer’s disease risk
Genome studies highlight gene variants that may give new directions to studies of the neurodegenerative disorder
By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition : Monday, September 7th, 2009

Scientists have a new lead on genes that contribute to the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Comparing subtle genetic spelling variations in nearly 12,000 Alzheimer’s patients with almost 19,000 other people revealed three genes associated with the disease, two international teams of researchers report online September 6 in Nature Genetics.

These genes are the first to be implicated in the risk of getting the common form of Alzheimer’s since the variant of the apolipoprotein E gene APOE4 was identified in 1993. That gene’s influence may explain about 20 percent of cases of Alzheimer’s disease, says Philippe Amouyel of the French health research agency INSERM in Lille and coauthor of one of the new studies. But researchers knew other genes must be involved since 60 to 80 percent of the risk of developing the disease is genetic.

“If there were another gene that had the large effect like APOE, we would have seen it already,” says John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s research center at Washington University in St. Louis. Since no other genes stood out, scientists decided to take a statistical approach and look for common variants of genes that could have subtle influence on the development of the disease.

Both groups found single “letter” differences, called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, in the DNA surrounding the gene for clusterin. Also known as CLU or APOJ, clusterin is thought to help remove the plaque-forming molecule amyloid-beta from the brain. Amyloid-beta molecules clump together and somehow kill neurons in a process that isn’t fully understood (SN: 8/16/08, p. 20).

The two studies “are remarkably consistent with each other,” says Caleb Finch, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who was not involved in either of the studies. Finch predicts that the new studies will kindle more interest in the neurobiology of clusterin, a protein that his previous work has suggested may be important. It’s still not clear exactly how the new variant affects levels of the protein in the brain, he says.

“I’m open-minded about further complexities in the clusterin story and about further gene candidates,” he says.

In one of the new studies, a group led by Julie Williams of Cardiff University in Wales also discovered variants near a gene encoding the PICALM protein, short for phosphatidylinositol-binding clathrin assembly protein. That protein is involved in “controlling what gets into the cells and how it is transported to the rest of the cell,” Williams says. PICALM may help regulate the entry of a precursor to amyloid-beta into neurons, and also participates in regulating communications between neurons.

Amouyel’s group identified a third gene variant linked to a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Called CR1, the complement component receptor gene codes for an immune system protein that punches holes in invading bacteria and plays a role in inflammation. Inflammation has been fingered as a probable culprit in the development of Alzheimer’s, but studies of inflammation have produced mixed results. On one hand, inflammation is necessary to clear amyloid-beta and other toxic debris from the brain. But too much inflammation damages tissues, Williams says. The form of CR1 identified in the study seems to have a protective effect against developing Alzheimer’s disease, but the researchers don’t yet know if the variant increases or decreases inflammation, she says.

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 7 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.883
News
Flab and freckles could advance stem cell research
Alternative tissues shown to yield reprogrammed cells aplenty.
By Elie Dolgin

Fat cells and pigment-producing skin cells can be reprogrammed into stem cells much faster and more efficiently than the skin cells that are usually used — suggesting large bellies and little black moles could provide much-needed material for deriving patient-specific stem cells.

"More than one type of adult somatic cell can serve as a target for reprogramming to a pluripotent state," says William Lowry, a stem-cell biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research. "You don't have to use fibroblasts. There are other possibilities."

Reprogramming human skin cells remains woefully inefficient; typically, it takes about a month for 1 in 10,000 fibroblast skin cells to give rise to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Such iPS cells can, like embryonic stem cells, develop into any cell type. So researchers have been on the lookout for tissue types that can more speedily and easily be turned pluripotent. Several alternative human cells have been shown to work — including blood, hair, bone marrow, and neural stem cells — but most have these have not boosted success rates. One exception is hair-like keratinocytes plucked from a baby's foreskin¹, but this is an unsuitable source for adult patients.

Now, a pair of research groups have generated iPS cells from two easily obtainable cell types in half the time and with much-improved success rates. In one study, reported online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Joseph Wu and Michael Langaker at Stanford University School of Medicine in California converted fat tissue into iPS cells². In the other, published last week in the Journal of Cell Science, Konrad Hochedlinger and his colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston reprogrammed melanocytes, the skin cells that produce pigmented skin³.

Fat chance

The Stanford researchers used liposuction to extract a couple litres of fat from the bellies of four overweight individuals aged 40 to 65. They then treated the tissue to remove all the gooey, globular fat, leaving behind a collection of fat tissue stem cells. Unlike standard techniques, which require about a month to culture skin biopsies to populations large enough for the reprogramming process, the fat tissue was ready to go after two days of pretreatment.

What's more, the cellular reprogramming took only two more weeks and was 20-times more efficient than when converting fibroblasts using the same technique. "We basically shave off six to eight weeks compared to what the other guys are doing with fibroblasts," says Wu, who is now working to find safer ways to reprogram fat without using viruses.

{“This is thus far the most efficient and effective cell type yet to be described.”
Ron Evans
Salk Institute}

"This is thus far the most efficient and effective cell type yet to be described for generation" of iPS cells, says Ron Evans, a molecular physiologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, who has "eerily similar" unpublished results, due to be published in PNAS, showing that more than 1% of fat cells can be turned pluripotent.

Wu and his colleagues also created the first human iPS cells using a slightly tweaked protocol that did not involve mouse "feeder" cells, which nurture the tissue with supportive proteins but can lead to contamination with animal products — a big no-no for therapeutic purposes. "That eliminates a number of problems years from now when we try to translate this work into the clinic," says Farshid Guilak, a tissue engineer at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Skin deep

The poor chances of successfully reprogramming skin fibroblasts also led Hochedlinger's team to look for alternative sources. The researchers found that melanocytes undergo reprogramming after just 10 days and with five-fold greater success rates compared with fibroblasts.

Despite the improved efficiencies, Lowry doubts that many researchers will abandon skin cells in favour of fat cells or melanocytes. Huge banks of skin cells and bone marrow cells already exist, he says, so "you're probably going to stick with what you already have access to".

Langaker disagrees. "There's a lot of fat in America, unfortunately, and it's a renewable source of cells," he says. "I believe that the number of cells you get from fat and how quickly you're ready to go with them is a huge strategic advantage."

References
1. Aasen, T. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 1276-1284 (2008). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
2. Sun, N. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA advance online publication doi:10.1073/pnas.0908450106 (2009).
3. Utikal, J., Maherali, N., Kulalert, W. & Hochedlinger, K. J. Cell Sci. adv
ance online publication doi:10.1242/jcs.054783 (2009).


[naturenews]
Published online 7 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.888
News
Nobelist's brain institute wins reprieve
Court prevents host from pulling the plug on cash-strapped Italian research lab.
By Alison Abbott

A civil court in Rome has ordered the Santa Lucia Foundation not to shut off any more amenities to an institute founded by centenarian Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini — for the moment, at least.

The foundation had planned to cut off supplies of carbon dioxide and compressed air, essential for tissue culture, today, and disconnect all electricity from the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI) by the end of the month. But now the injunction forces it to hold off.

The judge requested on Saturday that the foundation try to reach an agreement with EBRI before a second hearing on 23 September.

The institute began work in Rome in 2005 after a competition to identify a host. It was intended to bypass Italy's sluggish bureaucracy and create the sort of scientifically competitive environment rare in life sciences in the country.

{“EBRI has unfortunately never made payments on time.”
Luigi Amadio
Santa Lucia Foundation}

The Santa Lucia Foundation, which also runs a private hospital in Rome, won the competition, in part by offering 10 years' rent-free accommodation in a new building. EBRI, now home to 28 research groups, is required only to pay expenses — around €500,000 per year.

Levi-Montalcini's 100th birthday earlier this year was marked with national celebrations in Italy. But EBRI has not won the political support that she anticipated and has struggled financially.

Now the foundation wants to terminate the contract. Its director general, Luigi Amadio, requested advance payment of this year's expenses instead of retrospective payment. EBRI objected at first, but completed payments by July.

The foundation nonetheless proclaimed EBRI "not financially sustainable". During July it cut off telephones, stopped cleaning contracts and severed electricity connections to rooms containing –80 °C freezers.

Amadio says that in the past couple of years, "EBRI has unfortunately never made payments on time".

Empty promises?

When the affair became public last week, research minister Mariastella Gelmini declared her intention to find a solution. Gelmini had promised the institution a gift of €500,000 during Levi-Montalcini's birthday celebrations, but this has not yet materialized.

{“This all happened very suddenly and has left people confused.”
Alberto Bacci
European Brain Research Institute}

Amadio says that the Santa Lucia Foundation has received at least €50 million less than it was entitled to in reimbursement from the region of Lazio, which includes Rome, for the clinical activities of its hospital in recent years, and this is why it has to cut costs. "If this problem were to be resolved positively, the foundation could re-examine a possible new agreement with EBRI," he says.

But the regional president of Lazio, Piero Marrazzo, says that the foundation has received all it is due, and that it should not mix issues relating to hospital financing with its research activities. Marrazzo has also offered general support to EBRI and says he is prepared to help negotiate a solution.

Scientists at the institute are meanwhile treading water. Neuroscientist Alberto Bacci, who won one of the first European Research Council large and prestigious Starting Independent Researchers Grants in 2007, says he trusts that a solution will be found but admits that things are not easy.

"This all happened very suddenly and has left people confused," he told Nature. "But I am trying to carry on working and to keep morale high."

"All the parties will meet this week in the research ministry to try to work things out," says Piergiorgio Strata, the science director of EBRI. "There was no reason to evict us on short notice like this."

In the meantime, the region of Piedmont and the University of Turin have offered to host EBRI if it should lose its home, says Strata, himself a professor at the university.