George Clooney is distant cousin of Abraham Lincoln

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Aunt Rosemary was not George Clooney‘s only famous relative. You can add a certain Civil War American president to the Oscar-winning actor’s family tree.

Politics has apparently run in the activist actor’s blood for centuries, as website Ancestry.com on Thursday revealed that the “Ocean’s 11″ star is distantly related to President Abraham Lincoln.

According to Ancestry.com, Clooney is the half-first cousin five times removed from Lincoln, the 16th president. The genealogy website breaks down the connection, explaining the “half” means that two of their ancestors were half-siblings – Lincoln’s mother Nancy Hanks was the half-sister of Clooney’s 4th great-grandmother Mary Ann Sparrow.

Hanks and Sparrow shared the same mother, Lucy Hanks, but had different fathers. Lucy Hanks was Lincoln’s maternal grandmother as well as the 5th great-grandmother of Clooney.

Clooney’s aunt was singer and actress Rosemary Clooney, who died in 2002.

Clooney, long noted for his political activism, is a major Hollywood backer of President Barack Obama. He hosted a Democratic Party fundraiser at his Los Angeles home in March that raised $ 15 million.

Lincoln, a Republican, is considered one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States. He led the country through the Civil War and is credited with the abolition of slavery, which officially became law in 1865 after his assassination.

He is the subject of an upcoming Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, which is to open in the United States next week.

Ancestry.com is offering free access to more than 20,000 documents showcasing Lincoln’s life, his family tree and the most pivotal moments of his presidential career. The details can be found at www.ancestry.com/lincoln.

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Chris Michaud and Jackie Frank)

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Ivermectin hair lotion found effective against lice

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A single 10-minute hair application of a drug used in oral form since the 1980s to control river blindness and other parasitic diseases eliminated head lice in nearly three of four children in a new study.

The lotion contains ivermectin and is sold under the brand name Sklice by Sanofi Pasteur, which paid for the study. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration used the results to approve topical ivermectin lotion in February.

“The advantage of it is, it’s a one-application, one-shot treatment,” lead author Dr. David Pariser of Eastern Virginia Medical School, in Norfolk, told Reuters Health.

The treatment “sounds like it has promise in a population itching to get rid of lice,” said Dr. Hannah Chow of Loyola University Health System in Illinois, who was not connected with the study.

“Knowing how difficult it is to completely remove all lice despite due diligence with treatment and nit picking, ivermectin has potential to reduce the spread of lice, thus reducing parental anxiety, missed school and work, and social embarrassment,” she said.

Hundreds of people worldwide suffer from head lice, which feed off blood and lay up to 300 eggs, which are the nits, during a month-long lifespan.

The cost of treating infestations – including the value of lost school days and parents forced to be out of work – is estimated at $ 1 billion a year in the United States. There’s also been concern about resistance to other insecticide treatments.

Using a lotion with 0.5 percent ivermectin, the researchers found that after 14 days it had worked in 73.8 percent of 141 volunteers – most of whom were children younger than 12. In comparison, 17.6 percent of the 148 kids (and a handful of adults) whose hair was treated with a drug-free form of the lotion were louse-free after two weeks.

Lotions were applied to dry hair and then rinsed out after 10 minutes. The immediate success rate, judged the day after the lotion application, was 94.9 percent in the test group and 31.5 percent in the control group.

“It gets the kids back to school and the parents back to work,” said Pariser.

The study, involving children in 11 states, did not compare the ivermectin to any other treatment.

However, in a previous study that did test other drugs as well, Pariser and his colleagues note that ivermectin showed a similar one-day success rate of 92.4 percent while malathion, an insecticide sometimes used to treat lice, cleared 82.4 percent of patients after one day.

“A topical drug formulation is indeed welcome and is expected to have less risk of systemic adverse events,” Dr. Oliver Chosidow of Henri-Mondor Hospital in Creteil, France, and Bruno Giraudeau of University Francois-Rabelais in Tours, France, said in an editorial published with the new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

But they advised that more-established techniques, such as treatments with permethrin or pyrethrin, or even malathion in cases of resistance, should be tried before using ivermectin.

“Ivermectin should be the last choice, whether topical (for still-infested persons) or oral (especially for mass treatment),” they said.

Interviewed by Reuters Health by phone and e-mail, Chow speculated that more than one application of ivermectin lotion might be necessary because the treatment didn’t work in all cases.

“Knowing that new lice could re-hatch in seven to 10 days if ivermectin didn’t completely kill all nymphs, live lice and newly laid nits, I wonder if a second application will be recommended,” she said. “I would still advocate nit picking at this point.”

“If you do this, think about retreating and continue to be very vigilant,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Yor2zt New England Journal of Medicine, online October 31, 2012.

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Jobs Numbers Will Come Out on Friday, ‘as Scheduled’

11 a.m., Oct. 31, 2012 — The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed to me on Oct. 31 that it will release the monthly jobs report on schedule this Friday. That takes the wind out of the sails of conspiracy theorists, who speculated that the administration might use Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to delay a bad jobs number that would hurt President Barack Obama’s chances of reelection. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, channeling his inner Jack Welch, had earlier tweeted: “Labor Dept says may release latest Unemployment figures until after election. Par for course. Why release something might hurt Obama elect?”

I called the BLS a little before 10 a.m. on Wednesday to find out whether the number would or would not be delayed because of Sandy. The receptionist said all calls were being referred to a spokesman at the U.S. Labor Dept., the BLS’s parent agency. When I got an answering machine at that number, I went back to Gary Steinberg, a spokesman for BLS, who—after checking with his boss for several minutes—came on the line and said: “The employment situation will be released, as scheduled, on Friday.”

The report on the October employment situation could have a huge impact on an extremely tight election because the economy’s continued weakness—and what to do about it—has been the most important issue in the campaign.

Now that the jobs report is definitely coming out, conspiracy theorists will have to pivot to attacking the numbers themselves, as former General Electric (GE) Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch did a month ago.

—Peter  Coy

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Hurricane’s death toll rises to 65 in Caribbean

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — As Americans braced Sunday for Hurricane Sandy, Haiti was still suffering.

Officials raised the storm-related death toll across the Caribbean to 65, with 51 of those coming in Haiti, which was pelted by three days of constant rains that ended only on Friday.

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

The country’s ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides are especially vulnerable to flooding. The bulk of the deaths were in the southern part of the country and the area around Port-au-Prince, the capital, which holds most of the 370,000 Haitians who are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Santos Alexis, mayor of the southern city of Leogane, said Sunday that the rivers were receding and that people were beginning to dry their belongings in the sun.

“Things are back to being a little quiet,” Alexis said by telephone. “We have seen the end.”

Sandy also killed 11 in Cuba, where officials said it destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of houses. Deaths were also reported in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. Authorities in the Dominican Republic said the storm destroyed several bridges and isolated at least 130 communities while damaging an estimated 3,500 homes.

Jamaica’s emergency management office on Sunday was airlifting supplies to marooned communities in remote areas of four badly impacted parishes.

In the Bahamas, Wolf Seyfert, operations director at local airline Western Air, said the domestic terminal of Grand Bahamas‘ airport received “substantial damage” from Sandy’s battering storm surge and would need to be rebuilt.

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Hurricane Sandy wallops Internet commerce just as hard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – From Fab.com to Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc, e-commerce companies scrambled on Tuesday to get goods to buyers on time after Hurricane Sandy tore a swathe of destruction across the U.S. northeast.

The storm — which severed power to warehouses and offices, ripped up rails and roads and shuttered airports — challenged the notion that Internet retailers might benefit from problems at store chains exposed to the elements.

Fab.com, a fast-growing design e-commerce start-up based in New York City, handled unusually strong volumes on Monday as people hunkered down at home. Then the problems began.

Fab operates out of two warehouses in hard-hit New Jersey, one self-owned and another run by warehouse company Dotcom Distribution. With both lacking power as of mid-afternoon, no packages were making it out the door on Tuesday.

“The biggest impact to us right now is that our warehouses have no power,” said Jason Goldberg, founder and chief executive of Fab.com. “We’re doing everything humanly possible to send packages as quickly as possible.”

Retailers from New York to Washington are starting to re-open and re-staff in the aftermath of Monday’s destruction. But many of Fab.com’s fellow Internet retailers were still struggling to fill orders, handle customer service and keep websites running ahead of the crucial holiday season.

Those efforts are geared at ensuring buyers do not wait too long for their products — and averting a damaging backlash against their sites and reputation.

Amazon.com warned merchants on Tuesday that use its shipping service, Fulfillment by Amazon, that Sandy might impact the handling of orders. Third-party sellers on its marketplace that handle their own shipping were instructed to contact shoppers directly about their orders.

It advised them to temporarily deactivate online listings should they be unable to meet usual shipping standards.

“Because the Internet is an opaque purchasing method, customers don’t always understand where their product is coming from or if they are going to be affected,” said Eric Heller, head of Marketplace Ignition, which helps online retailers sell through websites such as Amazon.com. “We’re encouraging sellers to proactively reach out to buyers that may be affected.”

RECOVERY PLANS

EBay pursued a similar tactic, emailing shoppers who purchased items from merchants that may have been impacted by the storm in recent days, asking for patience. It recommended that affected eBay Store-subscribers put their pages in “vacation mode” to control purchasing and show shoppers that their operation has been temporarily disrupted, a spokeswoman said.

And Gilt Groupe, which runs a popular high-end fashion website, expects delivery times to take one to three days longer than normal, said Kevin Ryan, founder and CEO of the company.

Beyond logistics tangles, loss of power and telecommunications have hurt Internet firms that rely on telephone and Web-based customer service in the absence of store staff.

Fab.com’s offices a block from New York’s Hudson River were blacked out and closed until further notice. About a third of employees lacked power as of Tuesday afternoon. A dozen camped out at Goldberg’s home working on recovery plans and preparing the company’s online holiday stores for their Thursday launch.

Gilt’s offices in New York have been difficult to access, so the company has not been able to run its usual photoshoots for a few days, Ryan said.

“We will need to get back in soon or there will not be any new sales up,” he said. “I think we will get back in by Thursday and everything will be OK.”

Others like online eyeglasses start-up Warby Parker, in the SoHo district of New York City, sought temporary solutions to a loss of power and Web access. It found a temporary office that it will start using on Wednesday to handle customer inquiries.

“We’ve been scrambling to get our systems up and running,” said co-founder Dave Gilboa.

(Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; Editing by Edwin Chan and Chris Gallagher)

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Court rules against Polish rocker who tore up Bible

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland‘s Supreme Court opened the way on Monday for a blasphemy verdict against a rock musician who tore up a Bible on stage, a case that has pitted deep Catholic traditions against a new desire for free expression.

Adam Darski, front man with a heavy metal group named Behemoth, ripped up a copy of the Christian holy book during a concert in 2007, called it deceitful and described the Roman Catholic church as “a criminal sect”.

His supporters say it was an act of artistic expression, but conservatives say he offended the sensibilities of Catholics in Poland, the homeland of the late Pope John Paul II and one of the religion’s most devout heartlands in Europe.

The Supreme Court was asked to rule on legal arguments thrown up by the musician’s trial in a lower court on charges of offending religious feelings.

It said a crime was committed even if the accused, who uses the stage name Nergal, did not act with the “direct intention” of offending those feelings, a court spokeswoman said.

That interpretation closed off an argument used by lawyers for Darski, who said he had not committed a crime because he did not intend to offend anyone.

The lower court will now decide if he is guilty. The maximum sentence is two years in jail, under Poland’s criminal code. However, it is extremely rare for anyone convicted of this kind of crime in Poland to serve prison time.

“(The decision) is negative and restricts the freedom of speech. The court decided that this is allowed in a democratic system,” Jacek Potulski, a lawyer for Darski, told Reuters.

He said he was not giving up. “We are still arguing that we were dealing with art, which allows more critical and radical statements,” the lawyer said.

Ryszard Nowak, a conservative former member of parliament who has for years been lobbying for the musician’s conviction, said he had been vindicated.

“The Supreme Court said clearly that there are limits for artists which cannot be crossed,” Nowak told Polish television.

The Catholic church and its teachings have been at the heart of Polish life for generations, but changes in society are challenging the dominance of the faith.

Opinion polls show that while 93 percent of Poles identify themselves as Catholics, the proportion who attend church or pray regularly is in decline, especially among young people.

Large parts of Polish society have also started to drift away from some of the church’s teachings, especially its ban on contraception and its opposition to homosexual partnerships.

“When it comes to bishops’ opinions on controversial social issues, I listen to them, but I don’t treat them as an absolute authority,” said Aleksandra Pulchny, a 22-year-old law student from Rybnik, in southern Poland.

In one indication of the changes in society, the blasphemy trial does not appear to have harmed Darski’s show business standing. He is one of four judges on “The Voice of Poland,” a talent show broadcast on national public television.

(Additional reporting by Rob Strybel; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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AstraZeneca deepens collaboration with academia

LONDON (Reuters) – British academic researchers have secured 7 million pounds ($ 11 million) of funding from the country’s Medical Research Council (MRC) to investigate a range of potential new drugs made available free-of-charge by AstraZeneca.

The move is the latest example of how the pharmaceutical industry is experimenting with new research models involving greater collaboration with external partners.

The MRC money will pay for work on 15 research projects covering Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases. Eight will involve clinical trials of potential new drugs and seven will focus on earlier work in laboratory and animal models.

Scientists were encouraged to apply for MRC funding after Britain’s second-biggest drugmaker made available a total of 22 compounds. AstraZeneca did initial tests on these chemicals but then put them on hold for a variety of reasons.

Should something promising come out of the MRC-funded work, the financial benefits will be shared between AstraZeneca and the academic institution which made the discovery, the MRC and AstraZeneca said on Wednesday.

Many drug companies are looking outside their own walls for help in developing new medicines and the concept has been embraced particularly enthusiastically by AstraZeneca, which has suffered a lean period of in-house discovery.

Earlier this year, for example, the group decided to slash its internal neuroscience research staff to around 40 from more than 800, creating instead a “virtual” research unit for brain disorders.

AstraZeneca’s recent poor track record in research contributed to the early departure of former CEO David Brennan on June 1 and his replacement by Pascal Soriot on October 1. ($ 1 = 0.6241 British pounds)

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)

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Living standards ‘may stagnate’

30 October 2012 Last updated at 20:01 ET

Millions of poor and middle-income households may be bypassed by any economic recovery, a think tank says.

The Resolution Foundation argues that their living standards could stagnate for the next 10 years, ending no higher in 2020 than they were in 2000.

The think tank blames this prospect on the demise of administrative and manufacturing jobs in the UK economy.

It warns that high unemployment will continue to depress wages and calls for state subsidies to boost employment.

“On current trends the outlook for the bottom half of the working population is bleak even once growth returns,” the Foundation says.

“This stagnation of living standards can be averted if action is taken.

“Success in boosting low pay, raising skills, and increasing female employment could see a typical middle income family better off by £1,600 (after inflation) a year by 2020,” the think tank adds.

The UK economy pulled out of recession, again, in the third quarter of this year.

But the economy’s annual output is still no higher than it was at the start of 2007, shortly before the start of the credit crunch, international banking crisis, and the consequent international recession.

‘Too little debate’

Continue reading the main story

Ministers will agree with some of the Commission’s answers, and reject others. But they will likely admit that it highlights some very important questions about the future shape of the economy”

End Quote

UK unemployment rose sharply and since the middle of 2009, the official unemployment rate has been hovering around the 8% level.

As a recent analysis by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed, the combined effect of the recession – mainly high unemployment, stagnating wages and rising prices – has slashed living standards.

The ONS said that income per head, taking inflation into account, had fallen by more than 13% since the start of 2008.

To stop the benefits of any economic recovery simply being concentrated on the wealthier half of the population, the Resolution Foundation suggests a series of measures to redistribute income and wealth.

These include:

• more state subsidies for cheap childcare


• cutting the national insurance contributions paid by workers aged 55 or over


• ensuring that the government’s forthcoming Universal Credit system is as generous to second earners in a family as it will be to first earners


• switching child tax credit from parents of older children to those with younger ones


• reducing council tax bills for cheap properties by increasing the tax on expensive ones

Clive Cowdery, chairman of the Resolution Foundation, said: “There remains far too little debate about whether growth will benefit the broad majority of people.

“This wil not happen automatically but… things can be done to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared by all.”

BBC News – Business

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Pole gets 30 years for killing 6 on Channel Island

LONDON (AP) — A Polish builder who killed six people, including his wife and children, on the British Channel Island of Jersey has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Damian Rzeszowski, 31, carried out the knife attack in August 2011 at his home. He was said to have become depressed after his wife admitted to an affair.

Rzeszowski was convicted of six counts of manslaughter but cleared of murder. On Monday, Judge Michael Birt sentenced him to 30 years in jail for each victim, but the sentences are to run concurrently.

Rzeszowski’s victims were his wife Izabela Rzeszowska, 30; 5-year-old daughter, Kinga; 2-year-old son, Kacper; father-in-law, Marek Gartska, 56; his wife’s friend Marta De La Haye, 34; and her 5-year-old daughter, Julia.

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Facebook, Twitter abuzz with hurricane chatter

Whether you call it Frankenstorm, Stormpocalypse or simply Hurricane Sandy, the giant weather system barreling into the East Coast is a favorite topic of conversation on social media from Facebook to Twitter. As people post updates to friends and family, relay emergency information and lighten the mood with humor, it’s clear that discussing natural disasters on social media has become as much a part of the experience as stocking up on bread and batteries.

As of Monday afternoon, the hashtag “Sandy” had 233,000 photos posted on Instagram, the mobile photo-sharing service owned by Facebook. “Hurricanesandy,” meanwhile, had 100,000 photos and “Frankenstorm” had 20,000 and growing.

As they waited for the storm to hit over the weekend, people posted photos of hurricane-preparedness supplies ranging from canned goods to board games and bottles of wine. Empty grocery store shelves where bread should have been also showed up on Facebook and Instagram.

“There are now 10 pictures per second being posted with the hashtag “Sandy” – most are images of people prepping for the storm and images of scenes outdoors, said Instagram CEO Kevin Systorm in an emailed statement. “I think this demonstrates how Instagram is quickly becoming a useful tool to see the world as it happens – especially for important world events like this.”

By Monday, dispatches about storm preparations gave way to messages of anticipation and real-time updates. Among U.S. users, the terms “Sandy”, “Hurricane Sandy” and “Hurricane” were the most-used terms on Facebook, followed by “stay safe” and “be safe.” In fact, all of the top 10 most-mentioned phrases on Facebook related to the storm in some way among U.S. users, the company said. “Power,” ”cold,” ”my friends” and “prayers” were also in the top 10.

To gauge how much its users are talking about a particular topic, Facebook uses a measurement tool it calls the “talk meter,” which ranks terms around a topic or event on a scale of 1 to 10. Tops that generate the most buzz receive a 10. As of Friday afternoon, Sandy-related chatter was at 7.12, the company said. In comparison, the San Francisco Giants World Series win on Sunday night measured at 6.71 on Facebook.

On Twitter, Frankenstorm, FEMA — for Federal Emergency Management Agency — and New Jersey were among the top trending topics in the United States. Forecasters expected the hurricane’s center to come ashore in southern New Jersey Monday evening.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley reminded his more than 53,000 Twitter followers to “ALWAYS BE CHARGING.” Millions of East Coasters could experience electric power and landline telephone outages. As a result, power-hungry smart phones, laptops and tablet computers may become only way to communicate.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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