China bird flu virus found in more markets

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese authorities have found traces of a new bird flu virus that has killed six people in more areas in Shanghai, state media reported, after authorities slaughtered over 20,000 birds at a large poultry market in the city.

State-run Xinhua news agency said samples of the H7N9 virus were found at two markets selling agricultural products in the Minhang district of Shanghai, a city of 23 million people that is China's financial hub.

The markets were near the Huhuai live poultry market where infected pigeons were discovered earlier in the week and where the culling was carried out.

The new strain of bird flu has infected 16 people in China, all in the east of the country. Six people have died, and the outbreak has spread concern overseas and sparked a sell-off in airline shares in Europe and Hong Kong.

The strain does not appear to be transmitted from human to human, but authorities in mainland China and Hong Kong said they were taking extra precautions.

Shanghai has banned all live poultry from other parts of the country from entering the city, and has now closed three markets to stem the spread of the virus, Xinhua said.

Hong Kong's government said it is intensifying surveillance of travelers and poultry coming into the city.

China and Hong Kong were badly hit by the 2002-2003 epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that started in China and killed about one-tenth of the 8,000 it infected worldwide.

(Reporting by Adam Jourdan in SHANGHAI and Farah Master in HONG KONG; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-bird-flu-virus-found-more-markets-shanghai-031011386.html

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Google Says Facebook Home Demonstrates Android's Openness, Framing Apple As Restrictive

Google’s statement on Facebook’s introduction of “Home” was short and sweet, but very telling, so let’s dissect it a little bit. As we noted earlier, Facebook went with Android first because of its flexibility, basically it’s easy to customize. Other platforms, not so much. Zuckerberg even mentioned that Windows Phone might be a bit easier to work with, calling it out as “somewhere in the middle” of Android and iOS. Here’s what Google said to us a little while ago: The Android platform has spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices. This latest device demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular. You’ll notice that the first thing that the company says is that there are “hundreds” of different types of devices running its mobile operating system. In the past, that’s been seen as a bad thing, due to fragmentation. Here, Google is clearly positioning this as an advantage, that is has more choices for consumers than say, Apple has. Secondly, “this latest device,” being the HTC First, which is pre-installed with Facebook Home, demonstrates flexibility. There’s that word again. Clearly, Google is firing a rocket at its competitor Apple, which is notoriously very stiff when it comes to customization. In Apple’s mind, its users don’t know what they want to see until it shows it to them. By letting a company like Facebook take over the first experience a user has when it wakes up their phone, they are giving away pretty much everything. Again, Google points this out as a competitive advantage. In an extended version of the statement to VentureBeat, Google made sure to pump up its own products at the same time: And it?s a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience from Google Play ? the heart of the Android ecosystem ? along with their favorite Google services like Gmail, Search, and Google Maps. In this added bit, Google makes sure to bring the attention back to its baked-in Android services, like search, email and maps. Is that Google getting a little bit jealous of all of the fuss over Facebook? Not at all. These companies are competitive in the sense that they’re both after eyeballs, but when it comes to social interactions, they couldn’t be more different. Forget the Google+ argument here, it wasn’t built to be a competitor to Facebook. Google owns search and email

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/yNcSrDQvL3M/

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Northridge kidnapping suspect Tobias Dustin Summers believed to be in Mexico

The principal suspect in the kidnapping and sexual assault of a 10-year-old Northridge girl was spotted in a video crossing to Mexico and Los Angeles officials said Friday they are working with Mexican authorities and the FBI to track him down.

Tobias Dustin Summers, 32, was seen on the video crossing a footbridge into Tecate, Mexico, Police Chief Charlie Beck said Friday.

Beck would not disclose the day the video was taken. He said officials are uncertain if Summers returned to the United States.

"We are working with the FBI and Mexican authorities to try to locate him," Beck said. "In the end, we believe it will be a citizen who turns him in. "

Beck said it was not known if he was still in Tecate or elsewhere in Mexico.

"We think he is holed up somewhere because he doesn't really blend in," Beck said.

Summers is the prime suspect in the kidnapping and sexual assault of the girl on March 27 in what was believed to have started as a burglary. The girl was released about 12 hours later in the Woodland Hills area with bruises.

She was believed to have been taken to an abandoned house where the attacks occurred.

"We have a problem with abandoned and foreclosed houses throughout the city because of the mortgage crisis," Beck said.

An accomplice, Daniel Martinez, 30, was arrested on Sunday. He has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and burglary charges. Beck would not say what has linked the two men to the crime

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_22962841/northridge-kidnapping-suspect-tobias-dustin-summers-believed-be?source=rss

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Weston finance board votes tonight on budget | The Weston Forum

The Weston Board of Finance? is scheduled to make a decision tonight, Thursday, April 4, on the final town, school, and capital budgets to send to the public for a vote.

The finance board meets at 8 p.m. in the Meeting Room at town hall.

A public hearing on the budget proposals was held Wednesday, April 3. Coverage of that meeting, as well as of the finance baord?s deliberation meeting, will be in next week?s April 11 edition of The Weston Forum.

On the table are a town operating budget of $11,690,441 (a 3.32% increase over the current year), a $46.29-million school budget (a 1.55% increase), and a combined $1,128,728 town and school capital budget (a 30.2% decrease).

The Board of Selectmen approved the town, capital, and debt service requests and recommended a $100,000 reduction to the school budget request. The selectmen?s school budget recommendation puts it at a 1.31% increase from the current operating budget.

More school reductions

However, the school board met last week, on Thursday, March 28, and discussed making even more reductions to its already-approved budget request. As a result, the school board is expected to ask the finance board for an even lower school budget: $45,765,418 ? $528,250 less than originally requested, and $178,226 more than the current budget. The new request is a 0.39% increase from the current budget.

A press release from the school district said, ?This lower budget was based on aggressive re-bidding of the employee health benefits and several other cost saving strategies? since the school board voted on its budget proposal.

When it voted Feb. 1, the district was estimating the cost for health insurance because insurance bids had not yet come back. The bid results, however, led the schools to change carriers, resulting in a $438,307 savings.

Other changes that have occurred since Feb. 1 and their corresponding savings include:

? An additional retirement ($44,576).

? Reduction of a full-time teaching position to a 0.6 full-time equivalent, or FTE, ($24,730).

? A change in the technology lease ($15,294).

? Received quote on liability, auto, and property insurance ($5,343).

Finance board authority

The finance board has the authority to reduce or increase the town and/or the school budgets, but it has line item control only over the town budget; it is up to the school district to decide how the money ultimately approved is spent.

The amounts approved will go before voters at the Annual Town Budget Meeting (ATBM), set for Wednesday, April 24, at 8 p.m. in the Weston High School auditorium.

According to the new town charter, the budgets may not be increased by the ATBM. Also, a minimum of 2% of all the town?s qualified voters must be present at the ATBM in order to reduce any portion of the budget; if that quorum exists, reductions must be approved by a majority present at the ATBM.

The budgets approved at the ATBM go to a machine referendum vote for final approval.

Machine votes may be cast at the high school immediately following the ATBM, as well as the following Thursday, May 2, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the Weston Middle School gymnasium.

Source: http://www.thewestonforum.com/9613/weston-finance-board-votes-tonight-on-budget/

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Study: Dementia tops cancer, heart disease in cost

Cancer and heart disease are bigger killers, but Alzheimer's is the most expensive malady in the U.S., costing families and society $157 billion to $215 billion a year, according to a new study that looked at this in unprecedented detail.

The biggest cost of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia isn't drugs or other medical treatments, but the care that's needed just to get mentally impaired people through daily life, the nonprofit RAND Corp.'s study found.

It also gives what experts say is the most reliable estimate for how many Americans have dementia ? around 4.1 million. That's less than the widely cited 5.2 million estimate from the Alzheimer's Association, which comes from a study that included people with less severe impairment.

"The bottom line here is the same: Dementia is among the most costly diseases to society, and we need to address this if we're going to come to terms with the cost to the Medicare and Medicaid system," said Matthew Baumgart, senior director of public policy at the Alzheimer's Association.

Dementia's direct costs, from medicines to nursing homes, are $109 billion a year in 2010 dollars, the new RAND report found. That compares to $102 billion for heart disease and $77 billion for cancer. Informal care by family members and others pushes dementia's total even higher, depending on how that care and lost wages are valued.

"The informal care costs are substantially higher for dementia than for cancer or heart conditions," said Michael Hurd, a RAND economist who led the study. It was sponsored by the government's National Institute on Aging and will be published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia and the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Dementia also can result from a stroke or other diseases. It is rapidly growing in prevalence as the population ages. Current treatments only temporarily ease symptoms and don't slow the disease. Patients live four to eight years on average after an Alzheimer's diagnosis, but some live 20 years. By age 80, about 75 percent of people with Alzheimer's will be in a nursing home compared with only 4 percent of the general population, the Alzheimer's group says.

"Most people have understood the enormous toll in terms of human suffering and cost," but the new comparisons to heart disease and cancer may surprise some, said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the Institute on Aging.

"Alzheimer's disease has a burden that exceeds many of these other illnesses," especially because of how long people live with it and need care, he said.

For the new study, researchers started with about 11,000 people in a long-running government health survey of a nationally representative sample of the population. They gave 856 of these people extensive tests to determine how many had dementia, and projected that to the larger group to determine a prevalence rate ? nearly 15 percent of people over age 70.

Using Medicare and other records, they tallied the cost of purchased care ? nursing homes, medicines, other treatments ? including out-of-pocket expenses for dementia in 2010. Next, they subtracted spending for other health conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes or depression so they could isolate the true cost of dementia alone.

"This is an important difference" from other studies that could not determine how much health care cost was attributable just to dementia, said Dr. Kenneth Langa, a University of Michigan researcher who helped lead the work.

Even with that adjustment, dementia topped heart disease and cancer in cost, according to data on spending for those conditions from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Finally, researchers factored in unpaid care using two different ways to estimate its value ? foregone wages for caregivers and what the care would have cost if bought from a provider such as a home health aide. That gave a total annual cost of $41,000 to $56,000 per year for each dementia case, depending on which valuation method was used.

"They did a very careful job," and the new estimate that dementia affects about 4.1 million Americans seems the most solidly based than any before, Hodes said. The government doesn't have an official estimate but more recently has been saying "up to 5 million" cases, he said.

The most worrisome part of the report is the trend it portends, with an aging population and fewer younger people "able to take on the informal caregiving role," Hodes said. "The best hope to change this apparent future is to find a way to intervene" and prevent Alzheimer's or change its course once it develops, he said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-04-03-US-MED-Alzheimer's-Toll/id-6d05c45596474a4c8b420a33e34653a3

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German inflation rate down to 1.4 percent in March

BERLIN (AP) ? The annual inflation rate in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, slipped to 1.4 percent in March as a rise in energy prices slowed.

The official figure released Tuesday by the Federal Statistical Office compared with a 1.5 percent annual rate in February and 2 percent as recently as December. Though the March figure exceeded economists' forecast for 1.3 percent, it was the lowest since the end of 2010.

The statistical office says energy prices rose 0.5 percent in March, down from more than 3.5 percent in each of the previous three months.

The European Central Bank meets to consider monetary policy on Thursday. Falling inflation can leave room for interest rate cuts but the ECB isn't expected to lower its benchmark rate from a record-low 0.75 percent.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/german-inflation-rate-down-1-4-percent-march-123619437--finance.html

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