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Hours before “snowquester†was expected to descend on the Washington area, business was heating up for Fairfax-resident Craig Smith. Smith, who co-owns Fairfax-based Twins Ace Hardware with his brother, says sales jumped 200 percent leading up to the storm. He had bought $20,000 worth of winter-related inventory in late November,  and without the promise of a large snowstorm, he was expecting to finish the year without selling much of the winter equipment he’d noticed gathering cobwebs in his store. Read full article >> Pressure on Merkel; new star of Iraqi politics; JP Morgan Chase under scrutiny; and Robert Diamond after the Libor scandal.The Fighting Irish reached an agreement with the Big East to defect to the Atlantic Coast Conference in all sports except football and hockey. More than 40 art shows presented in tandem with Asia Week New York capture the sweep of that continent’s many cultures and their histories. • 'He's a player that I like very much,' says manager• Manchester United striker out for month with hamstring tearJosé Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, has refused to  rule out a move for Manchester United's Wayne Rooney, describing him as a "fast and direct" footballer who he likes very much.Mourinho, talking in Bangkok after Chelsea had arrived for their pre-season tour,  tried to play down discussion about whether the unsettled Rooney would move from Old Trafford to Stamford Bridge this summer."It's a funny, tricky question from an ethical point of view as I can't talk about players from other teams," Mourinho said."But it is not my character to speak with hypocrisy, I always tell what I see. He's a player that I like very much. Being fast and direct I like him very much, but he's a Manchester United player."Rooney flew home from United's own tour, which also started in Bangkok, after a scan revealed a hamstring tear on Thursday.Wayne RooneyJosé MourinhoManchester UnitedChelseaTransfer windowJamie Jacksonguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds  Living aboard a 100-foot boat, exploring a mostly uninhabited region spread out over 250 miles in the Andaman Sea. The federal government is exploring the possibility of using a credit rating giant like Equifax to verify the identity of American workers. After a 15-year break from recording  together can A Tribe Called Quest kick it again? Fresh from pla[...] Post Home Section staffers Jura Koncius and Terri Sapienza take questions on your decorating dilemmas, and Jura shares what she learned about design trends for 2009 at the High Point Furniture Market. In Tripoli, Moammar Gaddafi's stronghold, the real battle for Libya appears already to have been fought  and won by a regime that was willing to use live ammunition against its opponents. Ina Drew blames deception by London team for 'London Whale' trading incident, which saw company lose £4bnIna Drew, the former top banker who oversaw JP Morgan's London Whale trading losses, insisted that she was not to blame for the $6.2bn (£4.1bn) black hole that ended her 30-year career.During hostile questioning in a US Senate hearing, Drew said her oversight had been "reasonable and diligent" and blamed the problems on "deceptive conduct by members of the London team".Drew, who was one of Wall Street's highest-paid bankers, was head of the "chief investment office" that oversaw the London trading operation where the so-called London Whale trading incident took place. The incident is so called because a trader named Bruno Iksil, known as the London Whale because of the size of the positions he took, made a bad bet on derivatives positions. The Senate investigation found Iksil had objected to the directives of his bosses over the trades and called their instructions "idiotic"."Some members of the London team failed to value positions properly and in good faith, minimised reported and projected losses, and hid from me important information regarding the true risks of the book," Drew said.JP Morgan was mauled by members of the Senate subcommittee, which criticised chief executive Jamie Dimon for withholding information from regulators as the bank's London losses mounted.The bank had snubbed regulators, manipulated  documents and flouted its own risk rules as it racked up losses, senators said.The hearing, chaired by retiring Democratic senator Carl Levin, came a day after the committee published a damning 300-page report on JP Morgan's handling of the London Whale trade. "Firing a few traders and their bosses won't be enough to stanch Wall Street's insatiable appetite for risky derivative bets or stop the excesses. More control is needed," said Levin in his opening statement."The American people have already suffered one devastating economic assault rooted largely in Wall Street excess, and they cannot afford another. When Wall Street plays with fire, American families get burned. The task of federal regulators, and of this Congress, is to take away the matches. The Whale trades demonstrate that task is far from complete," he said.The committee heard that Dimon temporarily withheld key data from the regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as the bank's trading problems grew. Executives said the bank was concerned that information had been leaked in the past. "I'm not sure that there are many organisations or institutions that could tinnitus miracle download with such a thing," said Senator John McCain.Douglas Braunstein, JP Morgan's chief financial officer, said: "Senator, the report in question, I am not certain, I am not aware, if it was a report required to be sent to regulators."According to the senate committee, JP Morgan changed the model it used to measure the risks it was running shortly before the massive losses were disclosed. The change gave  the appearance of halving the risk being taken by JP Morgan even as the bank's London traders were taking ever riskier bets. Dimon dismissed press releases about the mounting losses as nothing more than a "tempest in a tea cup". Levin suggested that the bank started trying to aggressively mark down its losses.Levin  asked Braunstein whether it was appropriate for the bank to attempt to minimise its losses. Braunstein denied that they did this. Levin brought up a transcript of a conversation between Drew and Javier Martin-Artajo, who supervised the London traders."It's absolutely fine to stay conservative, but it would be helpful, if appropriate, to get … to start getting a little bit of that mark back," she said. Drew said that she was "challenging him" to show that the position was correct with data."But you used the word helpful. Right?" said Levin. "Tweaking is not a prediction or a hope, by the way – tweaking is changing something."And I hope the guidance that you would give would be against tweaking," he said. "The suggestion was that he tweak something to make the numbers look better."The Senate hearing follows JP Morgan's own investigation in January, which put the blame on Drew for failing to be sure that her team understood the traders.JP Morgan's acting chief risk officer, Ashley Bacon, said the bank had taken many actions to make sure that something like this could not happen again.What they saidFormer JP Morgan banker Ina Drew"I did not, and do not, believe I bore personal responsibility for the losses … Some members of the London team failed to value positions  properly and in good faith; minimised reported and projected losses; and hid from me important information regarding the true risks of the book."Senator Carl Levin "If derivatives books can be cooked as blatantly as they are in this case without breaking the rules, then the rules need to be revamped."Senator Levin to Drew "You said Jamie Dimon [JP Morgan's chief executive] knew about all the ... trading. Is that true?" Drew "Yes."JP MorganBankingStock marketsUS SenateUS politicsUnited StatesDominic Rusheguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Jennifer Carroll’s tenure has been marred by scandal and poor judgment, and she was increasingly  viewed as an embarrassment to Gov. Rick Scott. Throughout the animal kingdom, cells encapsulate molecules and proteins — that they move within or between — in tiny vesicles, which release their contents when they fuse with another membrane. Vesicles also package the chemical signals, or neurotransmitters, that leap from neuron to neuron in the brain’s communication network, but neurons more tightly control the release of these signals. In schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders, however, this control breaks down, which may contribute to deficits in information processing. And researchers are seeking an explanation for the loss of the normal control mechanism.Two new MIT studies now demonstrate how neurons have adapted the cell’s standard fusion machinery to regulate the release of neurotransmitters at the neuron’s chemical junctions called synapses. “We show that an interplay between two  proteins, complexin and synaptotagmin, controls the vesicle fusion machinery in neurons, and that both proteins are necessary to trigger normal information flow and prevent uncontrolled spontaneous release,†says J. Troy Littleton, who led both studies and is an investigator in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Biology and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS). The papers appear in the Dec. 2, 2012, and Jan. 2, 2013, issues of the Journal of Neuroscience.Neurons have specialized needs, and one is to release neurotransmitters when the cell receives an electrical impulse that shoots down the axon to the synapses — typically in response to some stimulation. This impulse causes calcium to rush into the cell, which triggers the release of neurotransmitters across the synaptic gap to communicate with the next neuron. This neurotransmitter release is called an evoked response, as opposed to a spontaneous release (or “miniâ€), in which a small number of vesicles occasionally fuse without stimulation.“So the first modification a neuron must make to the fusion machinery is to sense calcium,†says Jihye Lee, a postdoctoral associate in the Littleton lab and first author of the Jan. 2 paper that examines the role synaptotagmin plays in calcium sensing. Synaptotagmin is a protein localized to the neuronal vesicles, with two calcium-binding domains, C2A and C2B. Lee examined how each domain functions in this role. C2B drives the fast fusion of vesicles with the membrane, and requires C2A to dive into the membrane and activate the fusion machinery that promotes mixing of the two lipid membranes. The second major requirement for neurons is to prevent these fusion events until a calcium signal arrives. Otherwise, neuronal signals flood forex growth bot and wreak havoc, which leads to such neurological disorders as epilepsy. “We found that a protein known as complexin binds to the fusion machinery and prevents it from working until the calcium signal comes,† says MIT affiliate Ramon Jorquera, first author of the Dec. 2 paper, which examines the  interplay of complexin and synaptotagmin. Complexin functions as a fusion clamp, keeping the vesicle from fusing with the synaptic membrane until synaptotagmin senses the influx of calcium and sets the extremely quick fusion process in motion.This finding is important, Littleton says, because complexin is severely reduced in many neurological and psychological diseases,  indicating these disease states may experience too many uncontrolled spontaneous release events. This reduction itself doesn’t cause the diseases, but it may contribute to the phenotypes.The researchers conducted these  studies using the fruit fly, a valuable model organism because of the ease of doing genetic manipulations and neuronal recordings. They created flies in which they deleted or over-expressed various combinations of the genes for the complexin and synaptotagmin proteins, which determined the contribution of each to evoked and spontaneous neurotransmitter release. For example, deleting the complexin clamp caused a 100-fold increase in spontaneous minis; taking away the calcium-sensing synaptotagmin protein eliminated it all. The researchers also focused on a type of synapse that is representative of the majority of synapses in the human central nervous system — those that release the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate.“Because this same machinery appears to play a similar role in mammals, we think we can gain valuable understanding about how it is controlled in humans too,†Littleton says. “Our long-term goal is to learn how neurons normally talk to each other, and how this process goes awry during neurological and psychiatric diseases. This insight might ultimately allow us to restore proper synaptic function and brain communication in disease states.â€Sarah Huntwork-Rodriguez, Yulia Akbergenova and Richard W. Cho, all of the Picower Institute, BCS and the Department of Biology, also contributed to the Dec. 2 paper. Their work was supported by a National Institutes of Health grant and the PEW Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences. Akbergenova and Zhuo Guan, of the Picower Institute, BCS and the Department of Biology, also contributed  to the Jan. 2 paper. This work was supported by an NIH grant. Two energy analysts assess President Obama’s energy research trust fund. DALLAS - Chip maker Texas Instruments Inc. said Monday that "substantial" damage to one of  its major manufacturing plants near Tokyo in last week's earthquake will result in extra costs and lost revenue in the first half of this year. “Reality,†a film by Matteo Garrone, follows a fishmonger as he attempts to land a place on Italy’s version of “Big Brother.†Legislators will consider rates totaling up to 30 percent, hoping to pay for new laws without driving customers back to the black market. Europe should engage more firmly with Asia not only in trade but  also in foreign policy, climate issues and resource efficiency if it is to regain its powerful  role in the international arena, argue Giles Merritt and Shada Islam from Friends of Europe. More ' Federal Reserve policy isn't to blame for the steep inflation and other woes affecting developing nations, the central bank's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Friday as he tried to rebut a rising chorus of criticism of the Fed's easy-money policies from abroad. How to explain an extramarital windfall; the ‘boyfriend’ salary penalty; and germophobic travel etiquette. A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 21, 2007 (download PDF). As she waited for her flight from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to Medford, Ore., last month, Linda Morrison noticed something unusual in the waiting area. Bentley Prince Street has named Jim Harley as chief operating officer. Harley has approximately 35 years of manufacturing and operational experience and most recently spent eight years as senior vice president of manufacturing at Tandus Flooring. An impressive biography that reveals a less innocent, more robust Keats than the sickly boy of legendNicholas Roe has come in for some stick for claiming in this impressive life of the poet that "Ode to a Nightingale" is "one of the greatest recreations of a drug-inspired dream-vision in English literature", but if you find this hard to swallow, Roe's determination to make us look again at the Keats we think we know is admirable. Like Coleridge or De Quincey, Keats was an opium addict, Roe claims, because laudanum  (freely dispensed by Guy's hospital, where Keats trained as a surgeon) eased the pain of his constant sore throat, a symptom of the TB that would kill him at 25 (he also might have hastened his death by self-medicating with mercury, wrongly believing he had syphilis). Here is a less innocent, more physically robust Keats than the sickly boy of legend or Shelley's otherworldly Adonais; a pugnacious poet, who in childhood preferred fighting to reading; he was confident, sensual, sexually active, but also rootless, mercurial and morbid. Roe even makes a virtue of Keats's suburban upbringing, raised on the edgy "darkling thresholds" of London.PaperbacksBiographyJohn KeatsIan Pindarguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More |
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