DYERSVILLE, Iowa (AP) - The sprawling eastern Iowa cornfields made famous by the movie "Field of Dreams" are being sold to a company that will preserve the site's baseball legacy, the owners announced Sunday.
Don and Becky Lansing said they have accepted an offer from Mike and Denise Stillman and their company, Go the Distance Baseball LLC, which will develop the site near Dyersville as a baseball and softball complex. A purchase price was not disclosed.
"We worked hard to maintain its wholesome allure, and our success says a lot about our nation's love affair with its national pastime," Becky Lansing said in a statement. "It truly is a special place."
The land has been in Don Lansing's family since 1906. The couple put the property up for sale at $5.4 million in May 2010. The parcel includes the two-bedroom house, baseball diamond, six other buildings and 193 acres - mostly cornfields - from the movie.
The film, released in 1989, was based on the book "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella and starred Kevin Costner. The site has been a popular tourist destination ever since.
The Lansings said earlier this year that they had gotten several inquiries about the site but were committed to finding a buyer that would preserve its legacy.
The Stillmans' plan for the property includes preservation of the existing buildings and development of "All-Star Ballpark Heaven," described as a complex including fields for baseball and softball tournaments and an indoor training facility. Go the Distance plans to offer tournaments for teams of players ages 18 and younger, professional-style training and skills competitions.
"We understand the impact that demographics, market trends and the economy will have on baseball and those who love the game in the next decade," Denise Stillman said. "... We are thrilled to continue the `Field of Dreams' legacy."
As for the Lansings, they'll live a few miles away and make visits to the site, "especially in summer when the corn is high. That's when the field is most magical," Don Lansing said.
? 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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COMMENTARY | Former President Jimmy Carter says former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be the best choice for Republicans to nominate to challenge Barack Obama in next year's presidential election.
Really?
Honestly, who cares what Jimmy Carter thinks when it comes to Republican candidates? I doubt there is a single Republican that does, and I suppose few Democrats care which Republican ultimately wins the nomination. That didn't stop Carter from making the statement on MSNBC last week, although he quickly added he still hoped Obama would win another term in the White House. Always the loyal Democrat to the end.
There is little surprise here. Obama has been about as successful as Carter was in his nightmare single term in office in the late 1970s. It seems only logical that Carter would see Obama worthy of a second term. But, unlike Carter -- who was a micro-managing chief executive -- Obama has a significantly more detached approach to governing. His first three years in office have been a hodge podge of mixed priorities that always seemed to be just a little too late and out of step with the public need at the time.
Where Carter was constantly portrayed as an American president who struggled over making a decision during the Iran hostage crisis, the current president is seen as one who is unable to decide what is important public policy until his advisers let him know.
Carter deserves serious accolades for his post-presidency performance though. He transformed from a do-nothing president to a widely sought after international statesman. For decades, he avoided sticking his nose into public policy affecting the sitting president, and focused on helping people through his involvement in Habitat for Humanity and serving democracy around the globe as a consultant and election observer. He wrote books, made speeches and -- to some extent -- tried to improve his legacy. He's been a model former president -- for the most part.
Whoever the Republicans ultimately nominate to challenge Obama is yet to be determined, but will likely be either Texas Gov. Rick Perry or Romney. Either would be a considerably more qualified man to replace Obama, who's lack of executive experience has so miserably hindered his administration.
BEIJING (Reuters) ? A Chinese official admitted on Friday that they had jumped the gun on a new tax on foreign workers mandating they pay social security contributions before the government had worked out exactly how the system would be implemented.
But Xu Yanjun, deputy head of the Ministry of Human Resources' National Social Security Management Center, said there would be no going back on the scheme, despite concerns in the business community it will push up already rising costs.
"Local government have not made full arrangements yet for receiving the payments or registering people, that is the case," he told a news briefing.
"Maybe the legislation process has delayed the implementation ... Local governments have had some difficulty implementing the measures at an operational level. It will take time."
Local tax authorities have been asked to get the system running by the end of the year, but foreigners will have to back-pay contributions to Oct 15 when the rules went into effect, Xu added.
More than 200,000 foreign workers will have to pay the contributions, as will their employers.
He was unable to say how foreigners would be able to access services such as unemployment benefits, since work visas are tied to jobs and become invalid in the event of being laid off, or if there would be a special visa issued to enable pension claims.
"There is a difference in the way laws are made here compared with in the West. In China it is a level-by-level process, with implementation done at the local level," Xu said.
"We cannot at the moment address all questions once and for all ... Some new problems have come up and we are working hard to address them and we need some time to do so, rather than answering yes or no to any question at the moment."
Foreign executives in China have complained that the scheme will increase costs further in the world's second largest economy, and that the plan is too vague and will be hard for companies to implement.
Xu said China was simply following international commitments with the rules incorporating foreigners into its social security net and was committed to "protecting their rights".
China's rules will make it more like policies in many EU countries, where citizens and foreigners alike pay into the system.
China's existing social security net offers very meager protection for its own citizens, especially compared with some of the more generous schemes in Europe, and Xu did not give details on what exactly foreigners would be eligible for.
The tax will be about 10 percent of salaries, he said, and individual contributions will be refunded upon workers leaving China, he added, without saying how that would work.
Xu blamed foreign countries, including the United States, for refusing or being unwilling to talk to China about bilateral tax exemption agreements, so employees who pay contributions at home do not have to do so again in China.
"It's not for me to say who is not willing to talk about this, but we have felt that up to now the United States has not proposed discussing this with us," he said.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Ken Wills)
NEW YORK ? NBA labor negotiations broke down for the second time in a week Friday, with players and owners still unable to figure out how to split the league's revenue and end the lockout.
After two days of making some progress on salary cap issues, the two sides brought the revenue split back into the discussion and got stuck on both.
Owners are insistent on a 50-50 split of revenues, while players last formally proposed they get 52.5 percent, leaving them about $100 million apart annually. Players were guaranteed 57 percent in the previous collective bargaining agreement.
"We made a lot of concessions, but unfortunately at this time it's not enough, and we're not prepared or unable at this time to move any further," union executive director Billy Hunter said.
Just a day earlier, NBA Commissioner David Stern had said he would consider it a failure if the two sides didn't reach a deal in the next few days and vowed they would take "one heck of a shot" to get a deal.
Hunter said the league initially moved its target down to 47 percent during Friday's six-hour session then returned to its previous proposal of 50 percent of revenues.
"Derek (Fisher) and I made it clear that we could not take the 50-50 deal to our membership. Not with all the concessions that we granted," Hunter said. "We said we got to have some dollars."
No further talks have been scheduled.
Without a deal, Stern must decide whether to add more cancellations to the two weeks that have already been lost.
Union president Fisher said it was difficult to say why talks broke down, or when they would start up again.
"We're here, we've always been here, but today just wasn't the day to try and finish this out," he said.
Fisher said there were still too many system restrictions in the owners' proposal. Players want to keep a system similar to the old one, and fear owners' ideas would limit player movement.
And though they might be inclined to give up one if they received more concessions on the other, players make it sound as if they are the ones doing all the giving back.
The old cap system allowed teams to exceed it through the use of a number of exceptions, many of which the league wants to tweak or even eliminate. Hunter has called a hard cap a "blood issue" to players, and though the league has backed off its initial proposal calling for one, players think the changes owners want would work like one.
"We've told them that we don't want a hard cap. We don't want a hard cap any kind of way, either an obvious hard cap or a hard cap that may not be as obvious to most people but we know it works like a hard cap," Hunter said. "And so you get there, and then all of a sudden they say, `Well, we also have to have our number.' And you say, `Well wait a minute, you're not negotiating in good faith.'"
Hunter had said he believed 82 games were still possible with a deal by Monday, and the league hoped to make it happen. This latest setback likely makes that impossible.
When players offered to reduce their guarantee from 57 percent to 53 percent, Hunter said that would have transferred about $1.1 billion to owners over six years. Now, at 52.5, he said that would grow to more than $1.5 billion.
But even a 50-50 split would be too high for some hard-line owners, because it would reduce only $280 million of the $300 million they said they lost last season. Owners initially proposed a BRI split that players said would have had them around 40 percent.
Though they will miss a paycheck on Nov. 15, Hunter said each player would have received a minimum of $100,000 from the escrow money that was returned to them to make up the difference after salaries fell short of the guaranteed 57 percent of revenues last season.
The small groups that were meeting grew a bit Friday. Union vice presidents Chris Paul ? wearing a Yankees cap for his trip to New York ? and Theo Ratliff joined the talks, and economist Kevin Murphy returned after he was unavailable Thursday. Mavericks owner Mark Cuban stayed for the session after taking part Thursday.
___
Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: twitter.com/Briancmahoney
As breakthrough longevity technologies become available, the rich will certainly be the first to partake; they are the ones who will pay most of the early fixed costs for everything from flat-screen TVs to experimental medical treatments. Eventually, these life-extenders will reach everyone. The question is, how long will it take? If the gap between the fountain of longevity?s availability for the wealthy and accessibility for the poor is a negligible amount of time, the transition to a long-lived population will be smooth. But if the trickle-down takes a long time, we may indeed face serious social disruption?but not exactly the way In Time suggests. The movie assumes that large groups of people who know their lives could be saved will be complacent about their unnecessary deaths. In reality, those people could pick up arms and literally fight for their lives. Luckily, that scenario seems unlikely, thanks to technological progress.
Sometimes I think the euro zone debt crisis is like watching a remake of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day, with the screenplay written by Financial Times correspondents. I wake up and read the news coming from Europe: worries mount about a Greek default, contagion spreads across the continent, the euro zone leaders are lost in befuddled bickering, and then a new pact to fix the problems emerges, hailed as historic. Then I get up the next day to find we're in exactly the same place we were before, with the cycle just repeating itself. Again and again. The only difference is that Groundhog Day made me laugh. The euro crisis version makes me want to cry.
So today, again, we find ourselves with yet another supposedly historic agreement, the one that will finally, really, once-and-for-all put an end the debt crisis, the most dangerous threat to global financial stability today. But is this the big one? Or will I wake up tomorrow listening to the same euro zone version of "I Got You Babe," sung by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel? (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)
This latest pact, reached after all-night, hard-fought negotiations Thursday morning, is still short on details and has a long way to go before it can be called actual policy. But looking at the general outlines, I see some good aspects, some bad, and some truly ugly.
First, the good. The euro zone is finally getting real. Its leaders had been in denial that far greater and more comprehensive measures were necessary to quell the crisis, but this agreement shows they're waking up to reality. Everyone knew Europe's banks needed to be repaired; now, finally, we have a plan to recapitalize them. Everyone knew Greece needed a more drastic debt restructuring; now we have a bigger bailout (130 billion euros, or $180 billion) with a bigger reduction of debt. Everyone knew the euro zone's bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, or EFSF, was too small to fight contagion; now we have a deal to increase the fund's capabilities by using it to guarantee private bondholders against losses on sovereign debt purchases. These are all important ? in fact, crucial ? steps to tackling the debt crisis, and Europe's leaders should get kudos for taking them. (Read: "Euro Zone Strikes a Deal With Lots of Promise But Few Details")
But then there's the bad: As has been the custom, the plan is ultimately no more than a politically determined collection of half-measures. With voters at home turning more and more sour on euro bailouts, the zone's leadership has attempted to tackle the crisis with hardly any new money being put on the table. And, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. The bank recapitalization plan calls for banks to raise 106 billion euros ($150 billion) in fresh capital. But that's about half what private estimates say is necessary, so it's unlikely to be a final cure for Europe's banking woes. Nor is it clear what role European governments will play in providing that capital. On the expansion of the EFSF, the deal is aimed at giving the fund more firepower without adding any more ammunition. The actual size of the fund will remain the same; after the Greek bailout, no one is sure how much may actually be left. And as to that second bailout, Greece's situation will improve due to the 50% haircut being imposed on private bondholders. (Yes, imposed. Let's not kid ourselves that this debt restructuring is "voluntary." No one "voluntarily" loses half their money.) But Greece will still be stuck with a dangerously high debt burden. The new deal will lower its government debt to GDP ratio to a still-lofty 120% ? by the end of the decade. And even that estimate is based on unrealistic assumptions ? that Greece can close its budget gap with its economy in free fall, or raise tens of billions in a privatization program that has yet to get off the ground. So my guess is that this deal resolves none of the major issues. The Greek debt crisis will continue; the banking crisis will continue; and Europe still hasn't put its money where its rhetoric is.
And now the ugly. The deal includes a proposal to tap China and other cash-rich emerging markets to participate in bolstering the EFSF, possibly through the IMF. French President Sarkozy is expected to phone Chinese President Hu Jintao to woo him into the scheme. This whole idea is truly pathetic. If I were Hu, I'd be insulted. The euro zone leaders are unwilling to spend more to solve their own debt crisis, so they think the Chinese are gullible enough to put in their savings? I don't think so. If Sarkozy called you up and asked for your paycheck to bailout Italy, would you give it to him? China is not a global ATM machine, or a charitable organization. In the end, China will invest its money as any other financier would ? in ways that increase its return and preserve its wealth. Perhaps the Chinese can be bribed into cooperating ? a notion has been floating about that Europe would promise Beijing more voting rights at the IMF. But even if China throws Europe a bone to boost its political influence in the region (or to gloat that the Europeans have come begging), the euro zone needs hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions. They're not getting that from China. (See why it's make-up or break-up time for the euro zone.)
So in the end, this historic agreement will likely get dumped in the dustbin of history like all of the other historic agreements. So the same cycle will repeat itself again. We'll probably be talking about a new grand agreement to halt the debt crisis by early next year. I guess it could be worse. I could be the groundhog.
Discovery announced in Science represents 'new paradigm' in the way drugs can be manufacturedPublic release date: 27-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Gabrielle DeMarco demarg@rpi.edu 518-276-6542 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, announce new method to build important heparin drug
Troy, N.Y. Robert Linhardt is working to forever change the way some of the most widely used drugs in the world are manufactured. Today, in the journal Science, he and his partner in the research, Jian Liu, have announced an important step toward making this a reality. The discovery appears in the October 28, 2011 edition of the journal Science in a paper titled "chemoenzymatic synthesis of homogeneous ultra-low molecular weight heparins."
Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Jian Liu, a professor in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have discovered an entirely new process to manufacture ultra-low molecular weight heparin.
The research shows that the drug is identical in performance and safety to the current and successful anticoagulant fondaparinux, but is purer, faster, and less expensive to produce.
"This research represents an entirely new paradigm in drug manufacturing," Linhardt said. "With this discovery, we have successfully demonstrated that replacing the current model of drug production with a chemoenzymatic approach can greatly reduce the cost of drug development and manufacturing, while also increasing drug performance and safety, and reduce the possibility of outside drug contamination. It is our hope that this is the first step in the adoption of this method for the manufacture of many other drugs."
The new process uses chemicals and enzymes to reduce the number of steps in production of fondaparinux from approximately 50 steps down to just 10 to 12. In addition, it increases the yield from that process 500-fold compared to the current fondaparinux process, and could decrease the cost of manufacture by a similar amount, according to Linhardt.
Fondaparinux, which is sold as a name-brand drug and was also recently approved by the FDA as a generic drug, is a synthetic anticoagulant used to treat deep vein thrombosis, with over $500 million in annual sales. It is part of a much larger family of anticoagulant drugs known as heparins. But, unlike most heparin products, it is chemically synthesized from non-animal materials. All other heparin-based drugs currently on the market use materials from the intestines of pigs and lungs of cattle as source materials. Such animal materials are more likely to become contaminated, according to Linhardt.
"When we rely on animals, we open ourselves up for spreading viruses and prion diseases like mad cow disease through the use of these heparins," Linhardt said. "And because most of the raw material is imported, we often can't be sure of exactly what we are getting."
But, fondaparinux is extremely costly to produce, according to Linhardt. "The process to produce the drug involves many steps to purify the material and creates tons and tons of hazardous waste to dispose of," Linhardt said.
The new process developed by Linhardt and Liu greatly reduces the number of steps involved in the production of the drug. This reduces the amount of waste produced and the overall cost of producing the drug.
"Cost should no longer be a major factor in the use or production of this drug," Linhardt said.
The process uses sugars and enzymes that are identical to those found in the human body to build the drug piece by piece. The backbone of the material is first built sugar by sugar and then decorated with sulfate groups through the use of enzymes to control its structure and function in the body.
Linhardt and Liu have already begun testing the drug in animal models with successful results and think the drug could be quickly transferred to the market.
"Because the new drug is biologically identical in its performance to the already approved fondaparinux, the approval process for this new drug should work very similar to the approval process used for fondaparinux," Linhardt said. He also thinks that this combined chemical and enzymatic synthesis can be quickly brought to patients in need and adapted for the production of many other improved carbohydrate-containing drugs.
"During this study, we were able to quickly build multiple doses in a simple laboratory setting and feel that this is something than can be quickly and easy commercialized to reduce the cost of this drug and help to shift how pharmaceutical companies approach the synthesis of carbohydrate-containing drugs."
The finding is part of a much larger body of work occurring in the Linhardt lab to completely replace all types of heparin-based or other glycoprotein-based drugs with safer, low-cost, synthetic versions that do not rely on foreign, potentially contaminated animal sources. More information on this research can be found here, here, and here.
###
The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Linhardt and Liu were joined in the research by Yongmei Xu, Haoming Xu, Renpeng Liu, and Juliana Jing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Sayaka Masuko of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Majde Takieddin and Shaker Mousa of the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Discovery announced in Science represents 'new paradigm' in the way drugs can be manufacturedPublic release date: 27-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Gabrielle DeMarco demarg@rpi.edu 518-276-6542 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, announce new method to build important heparin drug
Troy, N.Y. Robert Linhardt is working to forever change the way some of the most widely used drugs in the world are manufactured. Today, in the journal Science, he and his partner in the research, Jian Liu, have announced an important step toward making this a reality. The discovery appears in the October 28, 2011 edition of the journal Science in a paper titled "chemoenzymatic synthesis of homogeneous ultra-low molecular weight heparins."
Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Jian Liu, a professor in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have discovered an entirely new process to manufacture ultra-low molecular weight heparin.
The research shows that the drug is identical in performance and safety to the current and successful anticoagulant fondaparinux, but is purer, faster, and less expensive to produce.
"This research represents an entirely new paradigm in drug manufacturing," Linhardt said. "With this discovery, we have successfully demonstrated that replacing the current model of drug production with a chemoenzymatic approach can greatly reduce the cost of drug development and manufacturing, while also increasing drug performance and safety, and reduce the possibility of outside drug contamination. It is our hope that this is the first step in the adoption of this method for the manufacture of many other drugs."
The new process uses chemicals and enzymes to reduce the number of steps in production of fondaparinux from approximately 50 steps down to just 10 to 12. In addition, it increases the yield from that process 500-fold compared to the current fondaparinux process, and could decrease the cost of manufacture by a similar amount, according to Linhardt.
Fondaparinux, which is sold as a name-brand drug and was also recently approved by the FDA as a generic drug, is a synthetic anticoagulant used to treat deep vein thrombosis, with over $500 million in annual sales. It is part of a much larger family of anticoagulant drugs known as heparins. But, unlike most heparin products, it is chemically synthesized from non-animal materials. All other heparin-based drugs currently on the market use materials from the intestines of pigs and lungs of cattle as source materials. Such animal materials are more likely to become contaminated, according to Linhardt.
"When we rely on animals, we open ourselves up for spreading viruses and prion diseases like mad cow disease through the use of these heparins," Linhardt said. "And because most of the raw material is imported, we often can't be sure of exactly what we are getting."
But, fondaparinux is extremely costly to produce, according to Linhardt. "The process to produce the drug involves many steps to purify the material and creates tons and tons of hazardous waste to dispose of," Linhardt said.
The new process developed by Linhardt and Liu greatly reduces the number of steps involved in the production of the drug. This reduces the amount of waste produced and the overall cost of producing the drug.
"Cost should no longer be a major factor in the use or production of this drug," Linhardt said.
The process uses sugars and enzymes that are identical to those found in the human body to build the drug piece by piece. The backbone of the material is first built sugar by sugar and then decorated with sulfate groups through the use of enzymes to control its structure and function in the body.
Linhardt and Liu have already begun testing the drug in animal models with successful results and think the drug could be quickly transferred to the market.
"Because the new drug is biologically identical in its performance to the already approved fondaparinux, the approval process for this new drug should work very similar to the approval process used for fondaparinux," Linhardt said. He also thinks that this combined chemical and enzymatic synthesis can be quickly brought to patients in need and adapted for the production of many other improved carbohydrate-containing drugs.
"During this study, we were able to quickly build multiple doses in a simple laboratory setting and feel that this is something than can be quickly and easy commercialized to reduce the cost of this drug and help to shift how pharmaceutical companies approach the synthesis of carbohydrate-containing drugs."
The finding is part of a much larger body of work occurring in the Linhardt lab to completely replace all types of heparin-based or other glycoprotein-based drugs with safer, low-cost, synthetic versions that do not rely on foreign, potentially contaminated animal sources. More information on this research can be found here, here, and here.
###
The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Linhardt and Liu were joined in the research by Yongmei Xu, Haoming Xu, Renpeng Liu, and Juliana Jing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Sayaka Masuko of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Majde Takieddin and Shaker Mousa of the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
WASHINGTON ? Sales of new homes rose in September after four straight monthly declines, largely because builders cut their prices.
The Commerce Department says sales rose 5.7 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 313,000 homes. Still, that's less than half the 700,000 economists say must be sold to sustain a healthy housing market.
The median sales price of a new home fell 3.1 percent to $204,400 ? the lowest since October 2010. The number of new homes on the market was unchanged at 163,000, a record low.
Sales of new homes fell for four straight months before September and hit a six-month low in August. This year could be the worst year for sales since the government began keeping records a half century ago.
WASHINGTON ? The personal financial details of as many as 5,000 college students were temporarily laid bare for other students to view on the Education Department's direct loan website earlier this month, an education official testified Tuesday.
The students' information was available during a 67-minute window as officials were making a reconfiguration involving 11.5 million borrowers, said James Runcie, the Education Department's federal student aid chief operating officer. The change was designed to improve the website's performance times.
Runcie said students who logged on during the trouble period saw the personal details of other students.
Those whose information was exposed have been notified and offered credit monitoring services, Runcie said. The department shut down the website while the problem was resolved. "We responded as quickly as we could," he said.
Runcie's testimony came before a House Education and the Workforce subcommittee, which has been reviewing the Education Department's transition to directly issuing all student loans.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the subcommittee chairwoman, said the transition has meant more customer service problems and mistakes, including the recent security problem with the website.
"The implications of this kind of website malfunction are severe, particularly when it affects millions of borrows nationwide," Foxx said.
In a statement released after the hearing, Justin Hamilton, an Education Department spokesman, said the problem occurred on Oct. 12 and the department has no reason to believe students' information was misused or accessed by anyone with "malicious intent."
Congress changed the way student loans are issued last year as part of the law overhauling the nation's health care system. It essentially stripped banks of their role as middlemen in issuing the loans. All loans are now directly issued by the government. The expectation at the time was that the measure would result in $61 billion in savings over a decade. The billions saved are to pay for Pell Grants, provide resources to community and historically black colleges, help reduce the deficit and offset expenses from the health care legislation.
Runcie said the department uses rigorous security standards but is looking to soon roll out an additional safeguard. He also said the department appreciates suggestions on ways to make its website more user friendly, and plans to make changes.
Overall, Runcie said the transition to the direct loan program has been a success.
(Reuters) ? IBM's global sales chief Virginia Rometty will take over as CEO from Sam Palmisano in 2012, a move that may make her one of the most powerful women in business and technology.
Palmisano will remain chairman after nearly a decade as the company's chief executive, during which he helped transform Big Blue from a personal computing hardware company into a global services behemoth.
Rometty's ascension will make IBM the largest U.S. corporation by market value to be headed by a woman. It also sets up a rivalry with Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman for the unofficial title of most powerful woman in technology, mirroring a long-running rivalry between the two companies.
Rometty, 54, takes over on January 1. Shares in IBM slipped 0.7 percent after hours.
"Given Ginni's experience running the largest portion of the business by revenue, she was a logical choice," said Macquarie Securities analyst Brad Zelnick.
In nine years as IBM's leader, Palmisano, 60, exited low-margin businesses including PCs, printers and hard drives. He expanded the company's offerings in services, consulting and software.
Rometty most recently served as senior vice president of global sales for IBM after leading its global services business, where the company is the world's biggest provider of technology services.
"She has done well at IBM. She has contributed to their expansion overseas -- emerging markets -- and has done a fantastic job in that space," said Morningstar analyst Sunit Gogia. "All the public knowledge about her performance is very encouraging."
But "computing is an industry that is always evolving," Gogia said. "It's moving into an era of cloud computing. The company will have to reinvent itself for the future, stay with the times and maintain the revenue base when they do that."
(Reporting by Jim Finkle and Edwin Chan. Additional reporting by Jennifer Saba and Liana Baker in New York and Bill Rigby in Seattle. Editing by Gary Hill and Robert MacMillan)
Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, speaks at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition presidential candidate forum, in Des Moines, Iowa, Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011. A half-dozen GOP contenders flocked to Iowa on Saturday, barely 10 weeks before the state's Jan. 3 caucuses. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, speaks at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition presidential candidate forum, in Des Moines, Iowa, Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011. A half-dozen GOP contenders flocked to Iowa on Saturday, barely 10 weeks before the state's Jan. 3 caucuses. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Republican presidential contender Ron Paul said Sunday he wants to end federal student loans, calling it a failed program that has put students $1 trillion in debt when there are no jobs and when the quality of education has deteriorated.
Paul unveiled a plan last week to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget that would eliminate five Cabinet departments, including education. He's also wants young workers to be able to opt out of Social Security.
The student loan program is not part of those cuts, but Paul said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he'd kill the loan program eventually if he were president. That could put him at odds with some of his young followers, many of whom are college students.
Paul blamed government intervention in the economy for rising tuition.
"Just think of all this willingness to want to help every student get a college education," said Paul, who graduated from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania before earning a medical degree at the Duke University School of Medicine. "I went to school when we had none of those. I could work my way through college and medical school because it wasn't so expensive."
Annual tuition for Gettysburg College is $42,610 for the 2011-2012 academic year. Annual tuition at Duke's medical school runs $46,621, according to its web site.
Amid such rising costs, borrowing for college is at record levels. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says students and parents took out a record $100 billion last year, and owe more on student loans ? more than $1 trillion is outstanding ? than credit cards.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) ? A mystery that began nearly 2,000 years ago, when Chinese astronomers witnessed what would turn out to be an exploding star in the sky, has been solved. New infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, reveal how the first supernova ever recorded occurred and how its shattered remains ultimately spread out to great distances.
The findings show that the stellar explosion took place in a hollowed-out cavity, allowing material expelled by the star to travel much faster and farther than it would have otherwise.
"This supernova remnant got really big, really fast," said Brian J. Williams, an astronomer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Williams is lead author of a new study detailing the findings online in the Astrophysical Journal. "It's two to three times bigger than we would expect for a supernova that was witnessed exploding nearly 2,000 years ago. Now, we've been able to finally pinpoint the cause."
A new image of the supernova, known as RCW 86, is online at http://go.nasa.gov/pnv6Oy .
In 185 A.D., Chinese astronomers noted a "guest star" that mysteriously appeared in the sky and stayed for about 8 months. By the 1960s, scientists had determined that the mysterious object was the first documented supernova. Later, they pinpointed RCW 86 as a supernova remnant located about 8,000 light-years away. But a puzzle persisted. The star's spherical remains are larger than expected. If they could be seen in the sky today in infrared light, they'd take up more space than our full moon.
The solution arrived through new infrared observations made with Spitzer and WISE, and previous data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory.
The findings reveal that the event is a "Type Ia" supernova, created by the relatively peaceful death of a star like our sun, which then shrank into a dense star called a white dwarf. The white dwarf is thought to have later blown up in a supernova after siphoning matter, or fuel, from a nearby star.
"A white dwarf is like a smoking cinder from a burnt-out fire," Williams said. "If you pour gasoline on it, it will explode."
The observations also show for the first time that a white dwarf can create a cavity around it before blowing up in a Type Ia event. A cavity would explain why the remains of RCW 86 are so big. When the explosion occurred, the ejected material would have traveled unimpeded by gas and dust and spread out quickly.
Spitzer and WISE allowed the team to measure the temperature of the dust making up the RCW 86 remnant at about minus 325 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 degrees Celsius. They then calculated how much gas must be present within the remnant to heat the dust to those temperatures. The results point to a low-density environment for much of the life of the remnant, essentially a cavity.
Scientists initially suspected that RCW 86 was the result of a core-collapse supernova, the most powerful type of stellar blast. They had seen hints of a cavity around the remnant, and, at that time, such cavities were only associated with core-collapse supernovae. In those events, massive stars blow material away from them before they blow up, carving out holes around them.
But other evidence argued against a core-collapse supernova. X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton indicated that the object consisted of high amounts of iron, a telltale sign of a Type Ia blast. Together with the infrared observations, a picture of a Type Ia explosion into a cavity emerged.
"Modern astronomers unveiled one secret of a two-millennia-old cosmic mystery only to reveal another," said Bill Danchi, Spitzer and WISE program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now, with multiple observatories extending our senses in space, we can fully appreciate the remarkable physics behind this star's death throes, yet still be as in awe of the cosmos as the ancient astronomers."
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .
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WASHINGTON ? Iran should not misread the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as affecting the U.S. commitment to the fledgling democracy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday.
President Barack Obama's announcement Friday that all American troops would return from Iraq by the end of the year will close a chapter on U.S.-Iraq relations that began in 2003 with the U.S.-led invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Iran is expected to try to use the departure of U.S. troops to expand its influence on its neighbor.
Clinton said in a series of news show interviews that the U.S. would continue its training mission with Iraq and that it would resemble operations in Colombia and elsewhere. While the U.S. will not have combat troops in Iraq, she said the American presence would remain strong because of its bases in the region.
"Iran would be badly miscalculating if they did not look at the entire region and all of our presence in many countries in the region, both in bases, in training, with NATO allies, like Turkey," she told CNN's "State of the Union."
Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" about fears of civil war in Iraq after U.S. troops leave, Clinton said, "Well, let's find out. ... We know that the violence is not going to automatically end."
She added: "No one should miscalculate America's resolve and commitment to helping support the Iraqi democracy. We have paid too high a price to give the Iraqis this chance. And I hope that Iran and no one else miscalculates that."
The timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals had been agreed to by President George W. Bush and Iraqi leaders. Obama had campaigned for the presidency with the promise to end America's war in Iraq.
For months the Obama administration negotiated with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi officials to extend the stay of troops and to build permanent bases. Both sides saw advantages to keeping several thousand U.S. troops in Iraq as part of a training mission, but there was also strong opposition in the U.S. and Iraq for the American troops to stay.
A sticking point was the U.S. demand that American troops be granted legal immunity to shield them from Iraqi prosecution, a flashpoint for Iraqi anger over the Americans' special status in their homeland.
In Iraq, cheers and fears greeted Obama's announcement as the country pondered another period of uncertain transition. While many celebrated what they viewed as the end of a foreign occupation, there was also apprehension over what would happen without U.S. troops on hand to help control political and social divisions that still spark shootings and bombings.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the withdrawal decision "a serious mistake" that is viewed in the region as a victory for Iran. He also said the presence of U.S. bases elsewhere in the region will have little impact on Iraq.
"There was never really serious negotiations between the administration and the Iraqis," McCain told "This Week" on ABC. "I believe we could have negotiated an agreement. And I'm very, very concerned about increased Iranian influence in Iraq."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who also serves on the committee, criticized Obama for "not being able to close the deal" with Iraq, and he said the Iranians remain emboldened with "a shot in Iraq they would never had otherwise." He also expressed concern over Iran's nuclear program.
"The Iranians don't fear us at all," Graham said on "Fox News Sunday." He added: "At a time when we need troops in Iraq to secure the place against intervention by Iran and the bad actors in the region, we are going into 2012 with none. It was his job, the Obama administration's job, to end this well. They failed."
BRUSSELS ? EU finance ministers neared agreement Saturday on forcing banks to raise just over euro100 billion ($140 billion) to ensure they have enough cushion to weather further losses on their Greek bonds as well as market turmoil, a European official said.
In order to help Athens dig out of its debts ? and hopefully keep a cap on the amount of money they have to loan Greece ? the 17 countries that use the euro agreed Friday to ask banks to take bigger writedowns on Greek bonds. A new report suggests the value of Greek bonds might need to be slashed as much as 60 percent.
Taming Greece's debts is an important part of the euro debt crisis puzzle, but it could make banks across the continent ? not just in the eurozone ? more vulnerable at a time when they're already facing declining stock prices and finding it difficult to get regular loans for their day-to-day operations.
So when the eurozone finance ministers decided to reopen negotiations on Greek debt with the banks, the EU had to force its banks to reinforce their rainy-day funds.
Strengthening banks and slashing Greece's debts are critical to solving Europe's crisis, which is now threatening to engulf larger economies like Italy and Spain and is blamed for dampening growth across Europe and even the world.
"The crisis in the eurozone is doing real damage to many of the European economies, including Britain," George Osborne, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, said as he headed into Saturday's meeting. "We have had enough of short-term measures, sticking plasters that get us through the next few weeks."
The European official said EU leaders meeting Sunday should sign off on forcing the continent's biggest banks to raise just over euro100 billion in capital. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions between ministers were still ongoing.
The figure is likely to disappoint some analysts. A report by the International Monetary Fund has called for up to euro200 billion ($280 billion) to be poured into banks.
The new rules would force systemically important banks to raise their core capital ratios to 9 percent, compared with just 5 percent to 6 percent they needed to pass EU stress tests this summer. The ratio measures the amount of capital banks hold compared to their risky assets.
Greece, of course, has it far worse: The country is struggling through a third year of recession and record unemployment, which reached 16.5 percent in July. Deep anger is building against the Socialist government's repeated rounds of new austerity measures. A two-day general strike against the new cuts and taxes shut down much of the country this week and led to violent protests on the streets of Athens.
Pressure to contain the Greek crisis ramped up Friday after a new report from the country's debt inspectors ? the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF ? showed that its economic situation had deteriorated dramatically even since the summer.
If banks don't take bigger losses, the report said, Greece's debt would peak at a massive 186 percent of economic output in 2013 and only decline to 152 percent by the end of 2020.
That would prevent Greece from raising money on the markets until 2021 and require the eurozone and the IMF to fund an extra euro252 billion ($350 billion) in new loans to Greece through 2020, according to the report, which was marked confidential but was seen by The Associated Press.
Those funds would be in addition to Greece's first bailout of euro110 billion ($152 billion), which has been keeping the country afloat since May of last year, and another euro109 billion ($150 billion) rescue agreed to in July.
The report said that Greece's debts would have to be cut by 60 percent if the eurozone wants to avoid lending it more money. It did not make policy recommendations, and the European Central Bank opposes cutting Greece's debts further.
But finance ministers are clearly paying close attention to the experts' document. Austrian Finance Minister Maria Fekter told journalists Saturday that the eurozone's chief negotiator, Vittorio Grilli, had been asked to restart negotiations with banks.
That means the July deal, under which banks would have taken writedowns on their Greek bond holdings of about 21 percent, is definitively off the table.
Despite that significant progress, agreement on arguably the most important measure has remained elusive to eurozone leaders: boosting the firepower of the currency union's euro440 billion ($600 billion) bailout fund to keep the crisis from spreading.
Increasing the effectiveness of the fund ? called the European Financial Stability Facility ? is meant to help prevent larger economies like Italy and Spain from being unable to afford to borrow money from markets. That's exactly what happened to Greece, Portugal and Ireland and why those three EU countries needed bailouts.
Germany and France still disagree over how to do that and failed to make much progress on that front Friday night. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are meeting Saturday evening in the hopes of moving toward a deal.
The Greek crisis and its threat of contagion have led to calls for more robust intervention when it becomes clear that an EU country is in financial trouble.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Saturday that the EU along with the IMF should be able to directly intervene in the budgets of member states if they are receiving financial aid but failing to meet fiscal targets.
But not all EU nations share his view. The foreign ministers of Luxembourg and Finland cautioned that changing the EU treaty is too big a task to tackle now and the bloc should try instead to strengthen budget rules through existing channels.
Significant changes to the EU treaty would require national referendums in some countries, and winning approval for the current treaty from 27 nations took 10 years.
___
Elena Becatoros contributed to this report from Brussels.
What's happened in the business of video games this past week ...
QUOTE | "Wii U is not quite next generation." - Michael Pachter, Wedbush Securities analyst, talks in a new Q&A about the Wii U, Microsoft vs. Sony, NBA 2K12, and how Xbox Live TV might be a competitive edge against Sony.
QUOTE | "The $60 paid game is not going away." - EA Playfish London GM John Earner sees all games going social but he believes there will always be a market, even if limited, for triple-A console gaming.
QUOTE | "RPG AI is stalled." - Associate professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin and other experts on AI talk about the state of AI in games and where it's headed.
STAT | $2 billion ? The worldwide revenue that research firm EEDAR expects to be generated by DLC sales by the end of next year, as the number of HD console owners downloading content steadily rises.
QUOTE | "Steve Jobs made some great game platforms without really trying." - Electronic Arts and Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins talks about what Steve Jobs meant to the game industry.
QUOTE | "We expect Sony to be first to market." - Responding to rumors that Microsoft will launch 'Xbox Next' by the end of 2013, RW Baird analyst Colin Sebastian noted that, if anything, Sony's more likely to bring out PS4 first.
QUOTE | "The killer console will be your mobile device." - Kakul Srivastava of developer Tiny Speck discusses a future where gaming predominantly takes place on browsers and mobile devices.
QUOTE | "Sony does brilliant hardware." - EA COO Peter Moore comments on the upcoming PlayStation Vita, but at the same time he questions what the role of dedicated handheld gaming is at this point.
QUOTE | "Rockstar only scratching the surface." - Rockstar's Dan Houser talks about the big potential he still sees in open-world gaming despite having developed so many games in the genre.
STAT | 500,000 ? The number of copies Atlus' Catherine managed to sell in Japan and overseas, proving to be a hit for the publisher, given the niche nature of the game.
QUOTE | "Our big audacious goal to have 1 billion fans." - Rovio North American general manager Andrew Stalbow talks about building out way beyond Angry Birds to become a "next generation media company."
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) ? A political candidate in New Jersey is taking heat for tweeting that the way for a woman to keep her man is to be a "whore in the bedroom."
Republican state Senate candidate Phil Mitsch says he didn't mean to offend women. He says the comments were a version of advice given by others, including women.
Democrats attacked Mitsch for the tweet as well as others the candidate claims were doctored.
The state GOP has also withdrawn support, telling The Philadelphia Inquirer his comments made him unfit for office.
Mitsch's tweet read: "Women, you increase your odds of keeping your men by being faithful, a lady in the living room and a whore in the bedroom."
Even without the controversy, Mitsch was a long shot in solidly Democratic Camden County.
HOUSTON?? An elderly woman with an oxygen tank next to her sat in a Texas courtroom Friday after her four-decade run as a fugitive accused of murdering her husband by dousing him with hot grease came to an end.
Mary Ann Rivera made her first court appearance since being returned to Houston this week from Georgia, where she had been living since fleeing a murder charge in the October 1970 death of her husband, Cruz Rivera.
The 76-year-old, wearing an orange prison uniform and breathing in oxygen from a plastic tube that snaked from her nose and around her ears to a green tank on wheels, sat in a jury box with several other prisoners while her case was reset to Nov. 15. She will remain jailed without bond.
Rivera's friends and neighbors have said her various health issues include heart, back and breathing problems. Her health required that she be driven and not flown back to Houston.
Prosecutor Tina Ansari said the age of the case and possible witness issues could present some obstacles as authorities proceed in bringing Rivera to trial.
"An old case is never an easy case," she said.
Jules Johnson, one of Rivera's two public defenders, said he is still reviewing her case.
"It's a 40-year-old case. We have to sift through it," he said. He declined to comment further.
One of Rivera's sons, Mark Rivera, declined to comment when reached on Friday at his home in South Carolina.
One of her grandsons, who asked to remain anonymous, told WCTV that he felt "no ill feelings toward her."
"We understand what she did, and she told us her side of the story," he reportedly said. "My grandmother was always there for me. She was always there for all of us."
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According to court records, Rivera was accused of killing her husband by "throwing hot grease on him and by throwing other substances and liquids."
Cruz Rivera died several days later from liver problems that had been caused by his serious burns, Ansari said. Ansari said Rivera threw the hot grease on her husband after getting angry with him at their home. Ansari declined to comment on what caused the fight.
Authorities have said that Rivera had previously made some claims of abuse but that law enforcement was never called to the couple's Houston home on allegations of domestic violence.
Lorraine Robertson, one of Rivera's friends in Georgia, said the woman had indicated that her husband had slapped her once but "that was it."
Authorities say that after Rivera was indicted in November 1970, she posted a $10,000 bond and fled Houston with her three children, including twin sons. She eventually made her way to Lake Park, Ga., near the Florida border.
Friends in Georgia said Rivera worked as a waitress, raised her children and never spoke about her husband or her life in Texas until she was questioned by investigators before her arrest.
Rivera continued living in her Lake Park apartment until an investigator with the Harris County District Attorney's Office in Houston worked on the cold case for a couple of years, first tracking down Rivera's sons and eventually finding her Georgia address.
Officials with Georgia's Lowndes County Sheriff's Office arrested Rivera on Oct. 11 after being contacted by Houston police.
Rivera's arrest was the second in less than a week in a cold case being investigated by the district attorney's office's fugitive apprehension section. On Thursday, the DA's office said a 55-year-old man was arrested, also in Georgia, for a 1980 slaying near a Houston night club.
"If you are a fugitive from Harris County, you might as well surrender now," said District Attorney Pat Lykos.
Since the unit was formed in 2009, more than 40 fugitives have been arrested and returned to Harris County.
The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.
CAIRO (Reuters) ? An Egyptian court postponed hearing a demand to change the panel presiding over a case against ousted President Hosni Mubarak until December, potentially delaying the trial into whether he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of demonstrators.
Some of the lawyers representing families of those killed in an uprising against Mubarak's rule have demanded changes to the panel after complaining that it had failed to give them adequate time to question a key witness.
They said that Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads the army council now ruling Egypt, gave testimony at an earlier time than scheduled and had not been cross-examined by them.
The appeals court on Saturday adjourned its hearing until December 26, saying it needed to review Judge Ahmed Refaat's record and background, specifically requesting details of any consultancy positions he was involved in.
Egyptian judges are often used by government ministries or bodies, a practice that critics say has often brought the objectivity of some judges into doubt.
Judge Refaat has a reputation of working by the book and following procedures. He has been praised for his independence by the media.
The court had previously requested the minutes of Mubarak's trial to check the "legality of the court's proceedings."
Mubarak's trial is on hold until October 30, but the case is unlikely to resume until a verdict on changing the panel is issued, a delay that will add to public frustration over the pace of the trial.
Use of medications to suppress stomach acid in infants has skyrocketed, but the trend is neither based in science nor beneficial to babies, a commentary suggests.
Advertising for acid reflux medications, misinterpretations of infants' normal responses and an over- medicalized culture are to blame, according to Dr. Eric Hassall, a pediatric gastroenterologist from Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation in San Francisco.
One large study of about 1 million infants revealed a 7-fold increase in prescriptions for proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) for infants between 1999 and 2004, Hassall said. PPIs work by blocking the production of acid in the stomach (Prilosec, Prevacid and Nexium fall into this category).
That study also showed that prescriptions for one of the PPIs, made in a child-friendly liquid, rose 16-fold over the study period, and that PPIs were prescribed to approximately 0.5 percent of babies before they reached 1 year of age, with about half of those prescriptions coming before 4 months of age.
Spitting up and crying have "long been observed in otherwise healthy, thriving infants," with as many as 40 percent to 70 percent of infants spitting up on a daily basis, Hassall wrote. This reflux is normal, not gastrointestinal reflux disease (GERD).
But parents are bombarded with advertising, leading them to "blur the lines between normality and pathologies," Hassall wrote.
Hassall's commentary is published today (Oct. 20) in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Reasons for over-prescribing
The over-prescribing "owes a lot to advertising, specifically to use of the term 'acid reflux,'" Hassall wrote.
But spitting up is not due to an infant's inability to handle acid; hence, it is not acid reflux disease. Still, parents come into pediatricians' offices claiming that their child has acid reflux, and doctors willingly prescribe an acid-suppressing medicine, Hassall wrote.
Spitting up is due to large amount of food that an infant cannot hold; hence, it is normal and resolves on its own in at least 95 percent of infants, Hassall wrote. Yet crying and spitting up are increasingly "conflated into a diagnosis of GERD."
Excessive crying is all too easily interpreted as signifying stomach distress, but increased crying in the first three to five months is absolutely normal, he wrote. On rare occasions, an identifiable treatable cause, such as allergies to milk or diet, is the reason for excessive crying.
Ineffective treatment, potential harm
There is no science that backs using proton pump inhibitors for infants, but there is "GERD mania," according to Hassall. The largest clinical trial in infants found that a proton pump inhibitor was no better than placebo.
There is danger in reducing normal acid secretion. "Gastric acid is an early line of defense against infection and important for absorption of certain nutrients," Hassall wrote. A slew of health problems are more common in people who've taken acid-suppressing medications, including acute gastroenteritis, ?one type of pneumonia and food allergies. Infants might be at risk these illnesses just because they took a proton-pump inhibitor, he wrote.
PPIs could also cause nutritional deficiencies, which are especially worrisome when kids are growing and developing, Hassall wrote.
Another source of harm is misinformation. Hassall criticized a website that advises using doses "far in excess of the doses published in pediatric clinical studies." Parents do not realize that infants metabolize these medicines much more slowly than older kids do, so smaller doses are safer.
Diagnostic testing for GERD in infants is only warranted if symptoms are severe and do not go away, he wrote.
Remedies
To reduce the overuse of acid-suppressing medications, one place to start would be in stopping the routine use of words, such as GERD and acid reflux, in referring to infants. "These symptoms and signs are just "life," not a disease, and as such do not warrant drug therapy," Hassall wrote.
"I am just as guilty as the mothers, who come in distraught by crying and spitting up," Dr. Beth Tarini, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan, told MyHealthNewsDaily. "This is something that has been medicalized, and we need to tell parents that this is just an unfortunate bump in the road."
Reassurance is key, Tarini said, but she doubts pediatricians will be able to stem demand for the medications. With kids' cough medicines, and the over-treating of ear infections, she said it took the FDA to stop it.
"We may need the FDA to put the final nail on this one, too," she said.
Pass it on: Babies may be treated with acid reflux drugs they don't need, which might raise their risk for nutritional deficiencies or allergies.
This story was provided by MyHealthNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily on Twitter @Facebook.
Go ahead, admit it: You've probably searched Youtube for something you'd prefer nobody know about. Nyan Cat. Teletubbies. Justin Bieber. The iPhone. Hey, we won't judge.
There's a quick and easy way to cover your tracks, though. Just dive into the Youtube app, hit the menu button, then choose settings. There you have a couple of search settings options. One clears the search history. The other will "block videos containing restricted content from appearing in search results." It's a pre-emptive strike, if you will. And while it won't keep Justin Bieber from showing in your Youtube search results, it should keep your more nefarious searches away from prying eyes.
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Public release date: 27-Oct-2011
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What's happened in the business of video games this past week ...