WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The economy is headed in the right direction but more needs to be done to speed up the recovery and put more people back to work, a top White House economic adviser said on Friday.
"There is a lot more of work to be done, given how many jobs were lost during the Great Recession," Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers told CNBC television.
Employers added 175,000 jobs to their payrolls in May, up from a gain of 149,000 in April, the Labor Department said on Friday. The unemployment rate rose a tenth of a percentage point to 7.6 percent as more people entered the labor force.
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by James Dalgleish)
Prime Minister Hun Sen's new law criminalizing denial of the Khmer Rogue genocide is a barely disguised political move, not a gesture of goodwill, say analysts.
By Elizabeth Barber,?Contributor / June 7, 2013
Hundreds of former Khmer Rouge victims' bone and skulls are displayed in a memorial at Choeung Ek "Killing Field" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Heng Sinith/AP
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Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen today pushed through legislation that makes it illegal to deny the Khmer Rouge genocide, but his critics say it has little to do with promoting atonement for his country's tragic past.
Skip to next paragraph Elizabeth Barber
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Elizabeth Barber is an intern on The Christian Science Monitor?s Web desk. She holds a master?s degree from Columbia Journalism School and a bachelor?s degree in International Relations and English from SUNY Geneseo. Before coming to the Monitor, she was a freelance reporter at DNAinfo, a New York City breaking news site. She has also been an intern at The Cambodia Daily, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and at Washington D.C.?s The Middle East Journal.
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Passed unanimously in a special session of the country?s National Assembly, the new law mandates a jail term of up to two years and fines of $1,000 for anyone convicted of denying the 1975-1979 genocide, during which Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge slaughtered some 1.7 million people.
Though formally said to be a gesture of support for the ongoing trials of leading Khmer Rogue leaders, analysts say the law is far more about political advantage for Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge official who has been the unchallenged leader of Cambodia since 1998.
The new law comes quickly on the heels of controversial comments allegedly made by Kem Sokha, president of the main opposition party.?In May the government released an audio clip purportedly of the president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party saying that Vietnamese soldiers who reported the aftermath of an an infamous atrocity at a Khmer Rouge prison had imagined what they saw, according to The Phnom Pehn Post.?
Kem Sokha said?that the audio clip?was edited to take his words out of context, according to?The Phnom Penh Post. But the mere suggestion that Kem Sokha denied the atrocities could taint his image.?Nearly 20,000 people were tortured and murdered at the Khmer Rogue?s S-21 prison in Phnom Penh during a four-year long nightmare for Cambodia that has not faded from the national consciousness.?
Opposition party members note that they had for years been pressing for such a law, but also point out that the prime minister had only made moves toward such a law when politically convenient, according to a separate Post?article. The opposition objects to the fact that the law was passed with no debate, arguing that a law that has the potential to be abused should be thoughtfully drafted and subjected to careful scrutiny.
"It is a shame that the law should be passed in a rushed way in response to political comments," wrote Phuong Pham, a researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where she is studying the Cambodian public's attitude toward the Khmer Rogue trials, in an e-mail. "Kem Sokha, the opposition leader, is not a genocide denier, and any charges would be clearly politically motivated."
No opposition party members were present at the session that unanimously approved the bill on Friday morning. The prime minister's ruling party elected to remove all 27 members from their posts on Wednesday, amid election controversy. The ruling party was upset that?two different opposition parties had merged to challenge it in July's elections.
On Thursday, the opposition parties sent a letter to the National Assembly president asking that the vote on the law be postponed. The letter also proposed a tongue-in-cheek amendment to the law banning former leading members of the Khmer Rouge from holding public office. That would include the prime minister, Hun Sen, as well as several other leading members of his government. Hun Sen belonged to the Khmer Rogue before defecting to Vietnam and later rolling back into Cambodia, eventually claiming the post of prime minister.?
A member of the unofficial "10,000 Days in Office" dictator?s club, Hun Sen has profited enormously from the genocide more than three decades ago, cobbling together a dubious narrative in which he rescued the troubled country from Pol Pot?s agrarian "Year Zero" and crafted it into a emergent economic center in Southeast Asia. Last month, he told reporters that Cambodia would have been ?a coconut plantation? without his leadership, according to The Cambodia Daily.
Trials for 2 out of 4 Khmer Rogue leaders ? the first and only Khmer Rogue leaders to be tried for the genocide ? are currently ongoing in Cambodia, reported The Christian Science Monitor, racing against the failing health of the aging defendants. One defendant died in prison of heart failure in February. The only defendant to have been sentenced so far, Kaing Guek Eav, the former head of the S-21 prison, was transported to a prison in Cambodia?s Kandal Provincial Prison yesterday, where he will serve a life sentence, The Cambodia Daily reported.
On Friday night, Henry Kissinger, Timothy Geithner, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will meet at a luxury hotel in Watford, England, along with a total of 140 delegates from 21 countries. For three days, they will discuss the major problems facing the world. This is the Bilderberg Group meeting, but it is easy to mistake it as some vast?nouveau-Freemason conspiracy. But it is likely far less ominous and far more boring than it sounds.
This undated handout artist rendering provided by Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences shows a reconstruction of Archicebus achilles in its natural habitat of trees. One of our earliest primate relatives was a hyperactive wide-eyed creature so small you could fit a few of them in your hand, if they would just stay still long enough, new fossil evidence shows. (AP Photo/Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
This undated handout artist rendering provided by Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences shows a reconstruction of Archicebus achilles in its natural habitat of trees. One of our earliest primate relatives was a hyperactive wide-eyed creature so small you could fit a few of them in your hand, if they would just stay still long enough, new fossil evidence shows. (AP Photo/Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? New fossil evidence of the earliest complete skeleton of an ancient primate suggests it was a hyperactive, wide-eyed creature so small you could hold a couple of them in your hand ? if only they would stay still long enough.
The 55-million-year-old fossil dug up in central China is one of our first primate relatives and it gives scientists a better understanding of the complex evolution that eventually led to us. This tiny monkey-like creature weighed an ounce or less and wasn't a direct ancestor. Because it's so far back on the family tree it offers the best clues yet of what our earliest direct relatives would have been like at that time, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"It's a close cousin in fact," said study author Christopher Beard, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He said it is "the closest thing we have to an ancestor of humans" so long ago.
Primate is the order of life that includes humans along with apes, monkeys, and lemurs. Humans and other primates are set apart from other mammals because of our grasping five fingers and toes, nails, and forward-facing eyes. And this new species called Archicebus achilles fits right in, Beard said.
Among primates there are three suborders: anthropoids, which include apes, monkeys and us; and two other suborders that include lemurs and the lesser known tarsiers. This new species is in the same grouping as tarsiers, but close to the offshoot branch in the family tree where humans come from. The fossil includes anthropoid-like features.
"It's a cute little thing; it's ridiculously little," Beard said. "That's one of the more important scientific aspects of the whole story."
With a trunk only 2.8 inches long, the furry creature was about as small as you can get and still be a mammal, Beard said. Just like elephants and horses, the farther back in time you get for some of today's bigger mammals, the smaller they get, Beard said.
Because it was so small and warm-blooded, it had to eat bugs and move constantly to keep from losing internal heat, Beard said.
That means, Beard said, our earliest primate relatives were "very frenetic creatures, anxious, highly caffeinated animals running around looking for their next meal." They lived in a tree-lined area near a Chinese lake, swinging around trees in a hotter climate, Beard said.
Outside experts praised the study as significant, confirming what some thought about our primate ancestors. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution, said this fossil's mix of different features illustrate the fascinating and crucial changes that occur around major evolutionary branch points in our family tree.
The study also bolstered another theory that early primates first developed in Asia, even though humans evolved nearly 50 million years later in Africa, Beard said.
___
Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears .
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy recently demonstrated the fine art of shaving your head in space. It's more complicated than you might think.
By Mike Wall,?Space.com / June 4, 2013
Astronaut Chris Cassidy shaved his head while on the International Space Station to welcome his new crewmate Luca Parmitano.
Courtesy of Chris Cassidy / NASA / Space.com
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Shaving your head is the simplest of haircuts here on Earth, but it presents some special challenges in space, as NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy recently demonstrated.
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Cassidy shaved his head in orbit late last month to welcome chrome-domed Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, who arrived at the?International Space Station?on May 28 along with NASA's Karen Nyberg and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here and get the full-on Luca Parmitano look for the hatch-opening ceremony," Cassidy said in a NASA?video showing the head-shaving process. "So please join me [at] Chris' Barber Shop."
Cassidy held a hair trimmer up to the camera, then connected it to a vacuum cleaner using a long tube.
"Otherwise, the hair would get all over the place," he explained.
Then Cassidy commenced buzzing his hair, which was pretty short to begin with. He stopped halfway through the process and smiled at the camera, showing off a temporary mohawk.
"I don't think I've looked like this since Plebe Summer," the former Navy SEAL said as he shaved off the mohawk, referring to the training program the United States Naval Academy puts all of its incoming freshmen through.
After finishing with the clippers, Cassidy reached for a razor to give himself Parmitano's sleek, smooth-pated look.
"I wonder if he does this every day," Cassidy said before wiping his newly shorn scalp down with a small white towel. "It kinda hurts."
While head-shaving may not have been filmed in space before, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield demonstrated how he?shaved his face in microgravity?in April.
Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Pavel Vinogradov launched toward the orbiting lab aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on March 28. Along with Parmitano, Nyberg and Yurchikhin, they make up the crew of the space station's current Expedition 36.
Cassidy, Misurkin and Vinogradov are slated to return to Earth in September. Their three crewmates will remain in orbit a few more months, coming home in November.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall?and?Google+.?Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?or?Google+. Originally published on?SPACE.com.
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Surgeons at Duke University Hospital implant bioengineered veinPublic release date: 6-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Avery sarah.avery@duke.edu 919-660-1306 Duke University Medical Center
Kidney dialysis patient first in US to receive blood vessel grown in laboratory
DURHAM, N.C. In a first-of-its-kind operation in the United States, a team of doctors at Duke University Hospital helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and implanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease.
The procedure, the first U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is an off-the-shelf, human cell-based product with no biological properties that would cause organ rejection.
Using technology developed at Duke and at a spin-off company it started called Humacyte, the vein is engineered by cultivating donated human cells on a tubular scaffold to form a vessel. The vessel is then cleansed of the qualities that might trigger an immune response. In pre-clinical tests, the veins have performed better than other synthetic and animal-based implants.
"This is a pioneering event in medicine," said Jeffrey H. Lawson, M.D., PhD, a vascular surgeon and vascular biologist at Duke Medicine who helped develop the technology and performed the implantation. "It's exciting to see something you've worked on for so long become a reality. We talk about translational technology developing ideas from the laboratory to clinical practice and this only happens where there is the multi-disciplinary support and collaboration to cultivate it."
Clinical trials to test the new veins began in Poland in December with the first human implantations. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a phase 1 trial involving 20 kidney dialysis patients in the United States, followed by a safety review. Duke researchers enrolled the first U.S. patient and serve as study leaders.
The initial trial focuses on implanting the vessels in an easily accessible site in the arms of kidney hemodialysis patients. More than 320,000 people in the United States require hemodialysis, which often necessitates a graft to connect an artery to a vein to speed blood flow during treatments. Current options have drawbacks. Synthetic vascular grafts are prone to clotting, leading to frequent hospitalizations, and harvesting veins from the patient's own body involves a separate procedure, with the risk of infection and other complications.
If the bioengineered veins prove beneficial for hemodialysis patients, the researchers ultimately aim to develop a readily available and durable graft for heart bypass surgeries, which are performed on nearly 400,000 people in the United States a year, and to treat blocked blood vessels in the limbs.
"We hope this sets the groundwork for how these things can be grown, how they can incorporate into the host, and how they can avoid being rejected immunologically," Lawson said. "A blood vessel is really an organ it's complex tissue. We start with this, and one day we may be able to engineer a liver or a kidney or an eye."
The bioengineered vein is the product of a 15-year collaboration between Lawson and Laura Niklason, M.D., PhD, co-founder of Humacyte and a former faculty member at Duke who is now at Yale. Lawson and Niklason teamed up in the late 1990s after discovering they shared an interest in engineering blood vessels.
Building on work Niklason began as a bioengineering post-doctoral student, the duo worked to perfect the technology in animal models and eventually moved to develop veins for human implantation.
"The bioengineered blood vessel technology is a new paradigm in tissue engineering," said Niklason, professor and vice chair of anesthesia, professor of biomedical engineering, Yale University, and founder of Humacyte. "This technology is a key step for patients with end-stage renal disease and can potentially avoid surgical interventions and hospitalizations. The fact that these vessels contain no living cells enables simple storage onsite at hospitals, making them the first off-the-shelf engineered grafts that have transitioned into clinical evaluation."
Overcoming setbacks and frustrations, the researchers notched numerous advancements, starting with the biodegradable mesh as the scaffolding for the veins. The mesh, easily manipulated into any shape, is formed into a blood vessel of varying lengths and widths.
When seeded with smooth muscle cells, the mesh gradually dissolves as the cells grow in a special medium of amino acids, vitamins and other nutrients. One key improvement, which strengthens the bioengineered tissue, is a pulsing force introduced during the growth process, in which the nutrients are pumped through the tube in a heartbeat rhythm to build the physical properties that are similar to native blood vessels.
After a couple of months, a life-like vein results.
Originally, the researchers sought to develop veins using a person's own cells to seed the scaffolding, reducing the risk that the patient's body would reject the implanted tissue. But growing personalized veins took too much time and ruled out mass production, so the researchers changed tack to develop a universal product.
Using donated human tissue to grow on the tubular matrix, they wash the resulting vein in a special solution to rinse out the cellular properties, leaving a collagen structure that does not trigger an immune response.
"At the end of the process, we have a non-living, immunologically silent graft that can be stored on the shelf and used in patients whenever they need it," Niklason said. "Unlike other synthetic replacements made of Teflon or Dacron, which tend to be stiff, our blood vessels mechanically match the arteries and veins they are being sewn to. We think this is an advantage."
When implanted in animals, the vein grafts actually adopt the cellular properties of a blood vessel. They don't just elude rejection; they become indistinguishable from living tissue as cells grow into the implant.
"They are functionally alive," Lawson said. "We won't know until we test it if it works this way in humans, but we know from the animal models that the blood travels through the blood vessels and they have the natural properties that keep the blood cells healthy."
Lawson's first patient, a 62-year-old man from Danville, Va., who has required kidney dialysis for years, received the bioengineered vein graft in a two-hour procedure on June 5, 2013.
###
Note to editors: B-roll and photos of the bioengineered vessel and the implantation procedure are available by contacting (919) 660-1306 or sarah.avery@duke.edu.
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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.
Surgeons at Duke University Hospital implant bioengineered veinPublic release date: 6-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Avery sarah.avery@duke.edu 919-660-1306 Duke University Medical Center
Kidney dialysis patient first in US to receive blood vessel grown in laboratory
DURHAM, N.C. In a first-of-its-kind operation in the United States, a team of doctors at Duke University Hospital helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and implanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease.
The procedure, the first U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is an off-the-shelf, human cell-based product with no biological properties that would cause organ rejection.
Using technology developed at Duke and at a spin-off company it started called Humacyte, the vein is engineered by cultivating donated human cells on a tubular scaffold to form a vessel. The vessel is then cleansed of the qualities that might trigger an immune response. In pre-clinical tests, the veins have performed better than other synthetic and animal-based implants.
"This is a pioneering event in medicine," said Jeffrey H. Lawson, M.D., PhD, a vascular surgeon and vascular biologist at Duke Medicine who helped develop the technology and performed the implantation. "It's exciting to see something you've worked on for so long become a reality. We talk about translational technology developing ideas from the laboratory to clinical practice and this only happens where there is the multi-disciplinary support and collaboration to cultivate it."
Clinical trials to test the new veins began in Poland in December with the first human implantations. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a phase 1 trial involving 20 kidney dialysis patients in the United States, followed by a safety review. Duke researchers enrolled the first U.S. patient and serve as study leaders.
The initial trial focuses on implanting the vessels in an easily accessible site in the arms of kidney hemodialysis patients. More than 320,000 people in the United States require hemodialysis, which often necessitates a graft to connect an artery to a vein to speed blood flow during treatments. Current options have drawbacks. Synthetic vascular grafts are prone to clotting, leading to frequent hospitalizations, and harvesting veins from the patient's own body involves a separate procedure, with the risk of infection and other complications.
If the bioengineered veins prove beneficial for hemodialysis patients, the researchers ultimately aim to develop a readily available and durable graft for heart bypass surgeries, which are performed on nearly 400,000 people in the United States a year, and to treat blocked blood vessels in the limbs.
"We hope this sets the groundwork for how these things can be grown, how they can incorporate into the host, and how they can avoid being rejected immunologically," Lawson said. "A blood vessel is really an organ it's complex tissue. We start with this, and one day we may be able to engineer a liver or a kidney or an eye."
The bioengineered vein is the product of a 15-year collaboration between Lawson and Laura Niklason, M.D., PhD, co-founder of Humacyte and a former faculty member at Duke who is now at Yale. Lawson and Niklason teamed up in the late 1990s after discovering they shared an interest in engineering blood vessels.
Building on work Niklason began as a bioengineering post-doctoral student, the duo worked to perfect the technology in animal models and eventually moved to develop veins for human implantation.
"The bioengineered blood vessel technology is a new paradigm in tissue engineering," said Niklason, professor and vice chair of anesthesia, professor of biomedical engineering, Yale University, and founder of Humacyte. "This technology is a key step for patients with end-stage renal disease and can potentially avoid surgical interventions and hospitalizations. The fact that these vessels contain no living cells enables simple storage onsite at hospitals, making them the first off-the-shelf engineered grafts that have transitioned into clinical evaluation."
Overcoming setbacks and frustrations, the researchers notched numerous advancements, starting with the biodegradable mesh as the scaffolding for the veins. The mesh, easily manipulated into any shape, is formed into a blood vessel of varying lengths and widths.
When seeded with smooth muscle cells, the mesh gradually dissolves as the cells grow in a special medium of amino acids, vitamins and other nutrients. One key improvement, which strengthens the bioengineered tissue, is a pulsing force introduced during the growth process, in which the nutrients are pumped through the tube in a heartbeat rhythm to build the physical properties that are similar to native blood vessels.
After a couple of months, a life-like vein results.
Originally, the researchers sought to develop veins using a person's own cells to seed the scaffolding, reducing the risk that the patient's body would reject the implanted tissue. But growing personalized veins took too much time and ruled out mass production, so the researchers changed tack to develop a universal product.
Using donated human tissue to grow on the tubular matrix, they wash the resulting vein in a special solution to rinse out the cellular properties, leaving a collagen structure that does not trigger an immune response.
"At the end of the process, we have a non-living, immunologically silent graft that can be stored on the shelf and used in patients whenever they need it," Niklason said. "Unlike other synthetic replacements made of Teflon or Dacron, which tend to be stiff, our blood vessels mechanically match the arteries and veins they are being sewn to. We think this is an advantage."
When implanted in animals, the vein grafts actually adopt the cellular properties of a blood vessel. They don't just elude rejection; they become indistinguishable from living tissue as cells grow into the implant.
"They are functionally alive," Lawson said. "We won't know until we test it if it works this way in humans, but we know from the animal models that the blood travels through the blood vessels and they have the natural properties that keep the blood cells healthy."
Lawson's first patient, a 62-year-old man from Danville, Va., who has required kidney dialysis for years, received the bioengineered vein graft in a two-hour procedure on June 5, 2013.
###
Note to editors: B-roll and photos of the bioengineered vessel and the implantation procedure are available by contacting (919) 660-1306 or sarah.avery@duke.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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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.
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Public release date: 6-Jun-2013
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